Entangled exchange: verkehr and rhetorical capitalism

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay develops the concept of verkehr as a site of conversation between Marxian and new materialist theories of rhetoric. Marx and Engels use verkehr, conventionally translated as “intercourse,” to describe a spectrum of processes of economic, military, semantic, and sexual exchange. I place verkehr in conversation with posthumanist philosopher Karen Barad’s concept of entanglement, which describes the processes of intra-active exchange that “produce determinate boundaries and properties of entities” within a larger causal field. I use this conversation between verkehr and entanglement to facilitate a rethinking of being as a field of entangled exchanges, and of capitalism as a set of apparatuses of capture that code semantic and bodily capacities of exchange into systems of surplus value, underwriting the fantasized immortality of some with the exploitation of bodies whose sexual, geographic, racial or class position capital deems fungible. I argue that this conversation between rhetoric and new materialist thought clarifies theses about the materiality of rhetoric (and the possibilities that materiality presents for resistant rhetorics) and expands the possibilities of Marxian critique in the service of the globally feminist, queer, antiracist, and broadly intersectional project advanced by a variety of posthuman rhetorical scholars.