Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

whether that latent revolt is there or how strong it is. On the
other hand, to insist on some sort of measurable certainty would
simply exclude the latent from consideration and condemn us
to a false enclosure in the visible.
Latency is not marginalisation. It is sometimes assumed that
to emphasise the importance of the invisible is to see struggle
as coming from the invisible margins of society.7 The argument
here is the very opposite of this: it is the creative force at the very
centre of society that is invisible. Latent is the doing that exists
in the mode of being denied, in the form of abstract labour.8
2. BEHIND THE CHARACTER MASK
STAN DS THE MULIER ABSCOND/TA.
What or who is behind the character mask? What (or who) is it
that exists in the form of being denied, as menace, as potential?
There is no pure subject, no beautiful soul, behind the mask.
The actor is damaged by the role she plays. The face that has
been forced into a character mask hides also because it has
been disfigured by the mask: take away the mask and you find
a face that has been distorted by the mask and by its resentment
of the mask.9 There is no noble savage hiding under the five
hundred years of discrimination and oppression; there is no
perfect woman waiting to be recognised once male domination
is removed; there is no pure doing hiding under abstract labour.
But that does not mean that the subject can just be reduced to the
character mask. Doing exists in the form of abstract labour, but
it exists therefore as resentment-of, tension-against, rebellionagainst
abstract labour, as menace, as potential: a shadowy
figure, but crucially, ec-statically distinct from the form in which
it exists, the character mask it wears.
This is the theoretical and practical problem: this shadowy
figure, distinct from the character mask, yet disfigured by it. The
worker is not simply a structural position, a bearer of social
relations, a seller of labour power: if she were, revolution would
be unthinkable (or perhaps just so boring that it would be not
worth thinking about). But she is also not the revolutionary
heroine breaking her chains depicted by generations of romantic
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