Gap Capitalism: Commodifying Zeno's Paradox

By Own screenshot, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26632754

I watch people on the Seoul subway playing 쿠키런 (Cookie Run) while we barrel towards Chongno. It's the successful colonization of the two minutes between stations--just one among many in regimented lives that have become moments to produce and consume.  Will capitalism ever run out of space to subsume into its extractivist logic?

Zeno's paradox of motion describes the impossibility of ever arriving; there is always infinitely divisible space remaining: first 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8. Mathematically, this isn't a paradox at all, but, really, capitalism depends on Zeno's chicanery. There's always a fraction left to exploit. And this goes in both directions. We're used to thinking about capitalism as an expansive system, constantly locating new sources of profit, but it also goes down, to the molecular level and beyond. Finally, capitalism turns to the between.

 

For Bandak and Janeja (2020: 2), this "gap" is fundamental to the social and cultural processes of waiting they document in their edited collection, "Ethnographies of Waiting": "In a modern conception of time, human beings are situated in a gap, in an interval where there is an engagement with different forces."

While undoubtedly universal, and taking its place among other temporalities (anticipation, duration, etc.), this "gap" becomes politicized under modernity, where people and ideas are oftentimes forcibly rendered between. But modern tragedy is a also a source of profit.

Driven by imperialism and colonialism, capitalism is constantly looking for new markets, new resources, new possibilities for profit. In the process transforming all that it touches in the the style of Marx, "all that is solid melts into air." But it is also true that capitalism is an uneven process, one that develops, but also under-develops, that produces workers, but also impoverishes populations.

If capitalism is predicated on spatio-temporal changes, then those shifts are hardly uniform. The distance between the the periphery ad the metropole describes one, but time and space are produced irregularly throughout human lives, like a stamping die that cuts sheet metal into parts and patterns, but that always produces leftover scrap. You can re-use some of that scrap, certainly, but there will always be scrap in the end. This is what I'm calling the ideology of "gap" capitalism. Pace Zeno, there will never be complete exploitation - there's always something left over.

Many of these "gaps" are already familiar. Think arbitrage as the exploitation of a momentary pricing difference. Or interstitial spaces where brownlands or other in-between zones await urban re-development. The exploitation of leftover space and time (Phelps and Silva 2018). 

The popularity of mobile games is an example of the proliferation of technologies of waiting. We can pick them up for moment or a minute, play in a line, a doctor's office, a subway platform. They are designed for the emptiness created by a regimented, spatio-temporal system that simultaneously generates action and inaction, vitality and passivity, attention and inattention.

Digital music is another triumph of gap capitalism, with half of people in the US wearing headphones/ earbuds for their entire day, streaming music that vacillates across layers of consciousness, filling moments between events and social encounters. Not the soundtrack of your life (i.e., music keyed to pivotal memories of events), but what exists in-between: semi-conscious musicality in the intervals.

Social media exploit the gap between stranger and acquaintance, acquaintance and friendship. That gap is simultaneously temporal. If we think of something like triadic closure, the tendency over time is for relationships to close gaps within clusters, social media are anticipatory across a relationship gap (Huang 2015). The genius of social media is in the commodification of these in-between relationships and statuses--both as something to be pursued as pleasurable by users and as a source of fungible value in its own right.

This is a brief sketch of a larger study, certainly. And one that has engaged a number of critics. Ultimately, it begs the question of limits. Where can the exploitation of the gap take us? What can be commodified? And where does commodification cease? Gaps between perception and cognition? Synaptic gaps? The space between cardiac arrest and brain death? 

Outside of undergraduates in introductory logic courses, it would be hard to find someone flummoxed by Zeno's paradoxes. That sleight-of-hand reasoning no longer works; it only does if there's an interlocutor that accepts the (false) correspondences between dissimilar units. This is the same with capitalism: only if we accept time or space in this way - as an infinitely divisible unit to be be developed - spent - then it becomes fuel for capitalist exploitation. If the factory's clock-time is revealed as a capitalist ideology, if people no longer accept land as a source of exchange value, then the artifice of "gaps" must also disappear.

References

Castree, Noel (2009). The Spatio-temporality of Capitalism. Time & Society, 18(1), 26-61.

Huang, H., J. Tang, L. Liu, J. Luo and X. Fu (2015). "Triadic Closure Pattern Analysis and Prediction in Social Networks," IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 27(12): 3374-3389. 

Janeja, Margaret and Andreas Bandak (2020). "Introduction." In Ethnographies of Waiting, ed. by Janeja and Bandak, pp. 1- 40. NY: Taylor and Francis. 

Keogh, B., & Richardson, I. (2018). Waiting to play: The labour of background games. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21(1), 13-25.

Phelps, N. A., & Silva, C. (2018). Mind the gaps! A research agenda for urban interstices. Urban Studies, 55(6), 1203-1222.

Qiao, Mina (2019). "Consumption on the Orient Express." Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 6(1): 79-94.