Others’ Organs: South Asian Domestic Labor and the Kidney Trade

 
In the parking lot of a large shopping complex near Heathrow airport, the body of a young South Asian man was found and reported to the police in June of 2001. Upon investigation, the London police found that the body had been seen falling from the sky by a worker at Heathrow the previous day. The body turned out to be that of Mohammed Ayaz, a 21-year-old stowaway who failed in this last attempt to escape the harsh living conditions of his village on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. Almost surely unaware that he would not be able to survive the extreme cold and lack of oxygen in the undercarriage of the plane, Ayaz likely died long before his body was released by the lowering of the landing gear. His body was found in the same parking lot where five other such bodies have been found.
 
Before sprinting across the tarmac at Bahrain’s airport to climb into the wheel-well of the British Airways jet about to taxi for takeoff, Ayaz had worked as a contract laborer for seven months in Dubai. The debt his family accrued to pay for his journey from Pakistan was contracted to be repaid through two years of labor. This indenture was made unrelievable when Ayaz’s employer took his passport away and paid him less than a fourth of his promised wage, which was barely enough to pay for his own food, no less to send money to his family (Stephens, Mody, Addley and McCarthy). The mainstream British press versions of this story present Ayaz’s action in sensationalist phrases: desperate, radical, a last resort. Yet these interpretations read the story through a specific regime of value within the workings of capitalism, and imagine it to be independent of the workings of the international division of labor. Though his situation illustrates the way that the international division of labor relies on the restrictive and differential valuing of human lives as sources of labor power, or as labor-commodities, Ayaz’s recovered body figures more than a failed act of desperation. How does the role of imagination direct the migrant’s choice of last resort when he is unable to obtain visas and immobilized by untenable material circumstances?
 

 

Generating Life as Value

 
The story of Mohammed Ayaz helps us ask how value is produced and transmitted through the controlled mobility of subjects in contrast to the hyper mobility of abstracted elements of their lives, including body parts and labor. The story also forces us to think that these lives, their labor, and their value may circulate outside the logic of capital. I argue that there are alternate constructions of value within such narratives of capital that point to ways of thought that do not reproduce capitalism. This article juxtaposes two sites of the production of commodities that directly transmit human vital energy from South Asian producers to those who consume them: the sale of human kidneys for transplant and of the labor affective work, or work involved in caring for others, by migrant domestic workers. These biological and affective commodities, invested into societies apart from those of the producers, illustrate some of the capitalist processes at work between more and less wealthy populations in the global division of labor. I track the transmission of valuables out of South Asia through affective and biological commodities by re-reading recent ethnographic accounts of the sale of human kidneys by rural South Indians and of the migration of Sri Lankan domestic workers to the Persian Gulf nations. These re-readings alternate with analysis that theorizes the production and circulation of the value created by this labor. Juxtaposing the two sites of production helps get at the complexities of the cultural and economic value of the vital commodities involved in these systems. The juxtaposition of kidney selling with domestic labor migration is meant to highlight the sometimes non-intuitive yet compelling parallels between the economic processes and consequences of the transnational economy of affective and human biological commodities. Thinking about value through these juxtapositions also allows for acknowledgement of the other cultural systems-ways of knowing and evaluating-that exist alongside capitalist processes, something that is emphasized in studies of labor and migration in the field anthropology. Working from a cultural studies framework and building upon feminist and postcolonial theories of value and production, I suggest that we need to rethink the terms of Marx’s labor theory of value: our understanding of globalization and the generation of value should account for the production of life and of vital commodities through affective and biological labor from the Global South for consumption elsewhere.
 
Like the value produced by migrant labor, the value inherent in and produced by human kidneys removed from Indian people for transplant elsewhere is transmitted from these people’s original communities to recipients in wealthier nations such as the Gulf states, the US, and the UK. Beginning in the late 1970s, materialist feminism developed the idea that feminized labor, labor that is constructed so as to be gendered feminine (see the discussion of Neferti Tadiar below), which occurs in the private realm and has often been termed reproductive labor, is actually itself productive (Eisenstein, Fortunati, Mies, Hennessy and Ingraham). I pick up this argument and juxtapose kidney selling and domestic labor to show that this labor not only reproduces the conditions of capitalist production by reproducing the worker, but produces life directly. Despite many differences, the trade in Indian kidneys has much in common with the migration of South Asian laborers to work in the Gulf. Both the migrant and the organ are freed by a process that constructs them as surplus. There are also important differences between these two processes: organs, imagined as independent of the original source body, become unmarked in their mobility and can therefore be reincorporated fully into valued life. The migrant laborer, on the other hand, retains a marked body that excludes him or her from entering fully valued social existence. The organ can be understood as carrying biocapital because the human organism is a means of production for the labor of self-care and preservation. The domestic laborer, on the other hand, produces value through affective labor: the production of personality, feeling, and emotion that is consumed by and invested into the lives of those who receive her care. In both cases, other people become the sites of accumulation of the value of these commodities, value that can be marked if not quantified. Finally, I return to the story of Mohammed Ayaz, suggesting that a sympathetic imagination of subaltern spaces may gesture to systems of value that co-exist with the dominant system, even if the dominant system cannot make them completely legible.
 

Entanglements of Value in Affective and Biological Labor

 
What makes an organ or labor (a specific portion of a person’s body and life) free to travel is its initial status as being “extra” or not needed in its current location. The making of peoples’ labor and their body parts surplus relies on material and cultural understandings of what is necessary. Buying and selling human organs in the market works as both a material and metaphoric example of the way processes of capital intersect with the mobility and identity of subjects, and with their bodies as surplus. It is particularly the second kidney that illustrates these intersections. As the product of a specific idea of excess, that is, the idea that there are parts that the body doesn’t need, the kidney is “freed” to have an existence separate from the body that produced it. However, tracing the flows of capital that allow for the mobility of the kidney also reveals limitations on the mobility of bodies. These limitations are created by the same processes that free the kidney in the first place.
 
The examination of commodities that are produced by an individual body without additional “means of production,” like affective commodities and human biological materials such as kidneys, provokes questions about the value carried by such commodities, and about the nature of what is expended in its production. Marx’s labor theory of value understands all value to derive from human labor, mediated by instruments that are also human-made and whose value also contributes to the objects they help produce. There are a number of other ways in which value can be imparted to a commodity (the training and education of the person performing the labor, the labor entailed in converting natural resources into the materials used in production, etc.), but all of this value derives from human labor. For Marx, value in its multiple forms can be quantified through labor time, or time spent expending the energy of the body and mind in producing an object, which under capitalist production becomes a commodity. He argues that at the level of the commodity, value can exist as both exchange value and use-value, but these are ultimately different moments in the life of value produced by labor.
 
The gendering of specific tasks, bodies, labor markets, and nations, particularly as it intersects with racial formations, is an important aspect of the division of labor that escapes geographical and class analysis. For example, a focus on the role of class that does not account for gender erases the feminized labor in households and across the global labor spectrum. This feminized labor produces life, but has not been part of the way that labor is theorized because of political economic theory’s focus on public labor that yields a physical commodity.¹ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have begun to address this lack with the formulation of “immaterial labor,” but they do not fully address the erasure that has occurred and continues to occur through feminization (Hardt, Hardt and Negri).² The processes behind the commodification of affective and biological labor and of the production of life are not vastly different from the selling of labor power for a wage identified by Marx, but the dominant currencies and epistemic understandings that shape this articulation of capitalism are different. A Marxist framework that accounts for the role of representation and the productivity of labor whose value accumulates in human lives allows for an analysis of new commodity forms while identifying the expansion of commodification into further reaches of the body and subject as in fact continuing and extending the logic of capitalism.
 
In order to conceptualize affective labor, it is useful to engage it in a way made possible by postcolonial theory. One cannot separate an understanding of how specific bodies are seen to be useful from how capitalist forces already use these bodies as labor and materials. For example, Gayatri Spivak argues that because human relations are made abstract under capital, exploitation-the extraction of value-is a process of signification, assigning meaning to what has been abstracted. She identifies the complicity of two senses of “representation” in Marx: portrayal/signification (darstellen) can simultaneously be speaking for/standing in for (vertreten) (“Can the Subaltern Speak”). If representation is a way that value comes into being, then dominant portrayals of bodies and populations, for example, as structured by racialized and gendered norms, can stand in for other meanings those subjects once had. Once such representations become naturalized as part of a shared “common sense” knowledge, they constitute specific labor markets by marking bodies as appropriate for some kinds of labor and not others. In this sense, to know something or someone is already to understand them within a capitalist system of representation, so that value as a labor-commodity is tied up with the ability to command access to the material means of securing a good life. Such an understanding provides a way to view cultural struggles over representation, often occurring in arenas such as popular culture that seem removed from the international division of labor, as simultaneously economic and political. Thus value has both cultural and economic consequences, though dominant capitalist processes are never all-encompassing. For example, I recognize the labor theory of value advanced in Marx’s Capital as the dominant logic of the way new forms of commodities and commodified labor forms behave under capital, but at the same time, as subaltern historiographies and feminist materialist scholarship have established, I suggest that other economies are made illegible within the dominant logic. These other articulations of value establish multiple meanings of commodities and labor, and therefore the lives and bodies entangled in systems of value.³
 
Globalization, intimately involved in the international division of labor, is defined and defended on the basis of processes and modes of understanding that contain their own justification within their very conceptualization. Tautologies around which these mainstream discussions of globalization are organized can be found in the discourses of supply and demand, modernization, and development. Economic rationality as an approach tends to see globalization so conceived as inevitable and homogenous, neglecting the ways in which global economies take advantage of pre-existing and idiomatic structures of value, power, and meaning. At the same time, one cannot simply say that there exists a separate realm, apart from the idiomatic or the dominant, in which cultures always find a way to survive. Recent challenges to the rationality and tautologies of globalization discourse propose new modes of thinking through global processes and their interfaces with specific social and individual bodies. Some examples include the notion of friction and global connection and the situated articulation of neoliberalism (Tsing, Ong). For the purposes of thinking about the global tendencies of capitalism in tandem with the failure of these tendencies to adequately represent the full range of possible relationships between culture and economics, it is useful to think of globalizing forces as producing places and bodies with new meanings that accord with a dominant logic, as territorializing and coding in addition to translating or hybridizing them. Most importantly, none of these explanations of the ways globalizing forces work must be understood as a comprehensive model, for as a number of postcolonial and subaltern theorists point out, there will always be systems of value that are illegible from within the dominant system. It is only from within this dominant system that one can even imagine that one is analyzing an entire system. For this reason, methods, like juxtaposition, through which one tries to discern or at least to gesture to such systems must themselves be somewhat experimental.
 

The Repression and Recognition of Difference in the Generation of Surplus

 
The idea that a second kidney is excessive is one example of a new mode of abstraction allowed for by the expanding commodification of human biological materials. Scholars in Science and Technology Studies have referred to the way that the sciences of life construct and articulate new historical modes of capitalism as “biocapitalism.” Lawrence Cohen, in his ethnography on South Indian kidney sellers, sees the second kidney become excessive as the result of biotechnological knowledge and of the market’s ability to capitalize on this knowledge. Organ sellers do not sell a life (the correlation in terms of labor would then be slavery), but rather an extra life that is deemed not necessary. In order to understand the connection between the migrant laborer and the commodified kidney, we must understand the link between the construction of surplus labor and surplus body parts, as well as capitalism’s dependence on this surplus.
 
In October 2002, an article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on the economic and health consequences of selling one’s kidney in India. Reports of problems with kidney transplants in several journals (Scheper-Hughes, “Commodity Fetishism” 44) led to the discovery by the international medical community of the surprisingly large number of impoverished Indians who, for more than a decade, had been selling their kidneys (Goyal et al.). The authors of the JAMA study concluded that payment for kidneys did not help the poor overcome poverty, and that in fact family income declined by one-third when a family member sold a kidney. Almost one hundred percent of sellers cited debt as the primary reason for the decision to sell a kidney, and this debt was acquired primarily to cover food/household expense and rent. Most sellers stayed in debt after the sale. The authors cite data that seventy-nine percent of sellers would not recommend that someone else sell a kidney, which they argue implies that potential donors would be less likely to sell a kidney if they were better informed of likely outcomes (1591). The article argues for the right of everyone to make informed decisions about their bodies (1593). The question of choice and what constitutes an “informed decision” is not raised, nor do the authors say how a situation would come about in which one would have to or even could sell a kidney in order to live.
 
The JAMA study is one of the first in mainstream medicine to recognize the phenomenon of the organ trade. Popular knowledge of the global trade in organs has circulated primarily in the form of rumor (Scheper-Hughes, “Global Traffic”). The critical discourse about the organ trade focuses on ethics, values, and human rights as they allow for and can potentially limit the exploitation that occurs through the market in human organs. For example, the Bellagio task force, a small international group of transplant surgeons, organ procurement specialists, social scientists, and human rights activists, was organized by social historian David Rothman to address the “urgent need for new international ethical standards for human transplant surgery in light of reports of abuses against the bodies of some of the most socially disadvantaged members of society” (Scheper-Hughes, “Global Traffic” 191). Nancy Scheper-Hughes describes the task force as “examining the ethical, social and medical effects of human rights abuses regarding the procurement and distribution of organs to supply a growing market” (ibid.). This work within the discourses of rights and ethics is necessary, utilizing as it does already existing modes and institutions to address the trade in organs. These discourses also provide a language with which to communicate the depth of the problem to a wide audience. However, an understanding of the global economy that explains how subjects become the appropriate source of different kinds of labor and vital commodities casts a large shadow of doubt on the ability of discourses such as those of rights and ethics to control practices of organ commodification and extraction. It can be argued that the very values to which these rights and ethics refer are implicated in the international division of labor itself, as examples of forms of thought inherent in processes of capital. Such forms of thought, for example the question of who is represented by the “human” in “human rights,” rely at least partially on common-sense conceptions that are already constructed by the interests of capital. The practice of kidney selling demonstrates how processes of material abstraction lead to abstraction in understanding. An example For example, Lawrence Cohen’s study of the village of Villivakkam in South India, nicknamed “Kidneyvakkam” because so many of its residents have undergone the operation to sell a kidney, uses the notion of “the other kidney” to approach the complicity between the global market and lived hierarchies of power and value (“The Other Kidney”). Cohen argues that the development of cyclosporine, an immunosuppressant drug that allows the transplanting of organs between increasingly distant biological matches, precipitated a shift in biomedicine from a politics of recognition to a politics of suppression. Instead of searching for the closest biological match for organ donation, surgeons using cyclosporine can use more distant matches for transplant. Cohen elaborates on this shift in biomedicine to describe a multiple biopolitics of suppression that allows for the development of new markets for organ sellers and recipients.
 
The suppression of difference enabled by the technology of cyclosporine occurs at once on the biological level and on the socio-structural level. Cohen argues that “cyclosporine globalizes, creating myriad biopolitical fields where donor populations are differentially and flexibly materialized” (“The Other Kidney” 11-12). In this process, difference is “selectively suppressed,” allowing specific subpopulations of others to become “same enough” for their members to be fragmented and their parts to be reincorporated (ibid.). For example, Cohen mentions one woman’s response to his questions about her decision to use a kidney broker to find an organ for an ailing family member instead of searching among biological relatives: “Why should I put a family member at risk when I can just buy a kidney?” (“The Other Kidney” 19). One can spare blood kin from the sacrifice of donating an organ because the “other kidney” is not recognized as a sacrifice. In the respondent’s statement, “a kidney” does not come from a life that is like the ones she values-that of her family members. The suppression of difference as a biotechnology of transplant allows a kidney to shed its mark of difference while the body from which it originated remains marked or coded.
 
Like labor power, the second kidney’s value comes from its positioning as partially excessive to life or living. In Capital, Marx describes the separation of workers from common land used for agriculture and grazing livestock. Once disenfranchised, or “freed” from the means of production, the laborer was also free to sell his labor in the market. Because this subject can provide more labor than covers the cost of keeping herself alive, there is a surplus of labor possible in labor power. This surplus is the origin of capitalization, and it is labor power’s use-value to capital. The “freeing” of the subject as labor power, the event that for Marx defines the relationship between the laborer and capitalist production, is parallel in some ways to the “freeing” of the kidney for circulation. Once the kidney is constructed as surplus, debt structures shift so that the kidney as collateral is taken into account by money lending at the village level, and so the “need” to sell a kidney is created as labor becomes devalued to the point that it cannot even provide minimal subsistence. When one cannot subsist by labor, then the individual on the losing side of the international division of labor must get the means of survival from the other side. Suddenly the idea of the extra kidney, the broker, the lender who knows that the sale is possible, and the system that will rapidly get the kidney to someone on the other side all fall into place. The bodies having “commodity candidacy” (Appadurai 13-14) are determined by cultural systems of value that pre-date their incorporation into the global market as commodities-though Appadurai’s concept of “regimes of value” is meant to account for the “transcendence of cultural boundaries by the flow of commodities”-systems already incorporated into local divisions of labor, and it is onto these that capital maps its forms of meaning and value.
 

Use-value and Commodity Candidacy

 
The bodies and subjects that emerge as sources of organs are found in places that have been prefigured, both in the sense of their cultural signification and of their material circumstances, for heightened commodity candidacy. Racialization is a primary factor in this prefiguring, in the investment of norms that position bodies in relation to limitations on mobility in global labor markets. In her work on organ harvesting in Brazil and South Africa, Nancy Scheper-Hughes gives the example of Mrs. Sitsheshe in South Africa, whose son had been killed in gang warfare. Her son’s body was subsequently mutilated and mined for organs in a police morgue (“Commodity Fetishism” 39). As a black South African situated in a geography of violence pre-determined by the remaining structures of Apartheid, Mrs. Sitsheshe’s son’s body was multiply determined as abject, as outside of socially valued life. The overlap and complicity of this cultural and structural determination with the cultural values and structures of the immediate market account for the ease and speed with which this nineteen year old was literally broken into pieces. Scheper-Hughes refers to this multiple-determination as the “excess mortality” of young black bodies in South Africa. Excess mortality appears to go hand-in-hand with the organ-as-surplus life, as both are held in the balance of biopower and capitalist production. In both South Africa and India, organs from these bodies travel up the hierarchy of power and production for transplant. Foucault’s reading of race through biopower, where racism determines who must live and who can die, is revealed to be relevant simultaneously on multiple levels of power (Foucault 241-52).
 
As we can be see from the ways that certain bodies are determined to be suitable kidney sellers, and certain laborers suitable for export to the Gulf, processes of commodification follow extant social hierarchies and incorporate idiomatic, situated sets of power relations into the process of exploitation. Racialization is only the most widespread example of a system of cultural values, or a threshold of exception, that masks the valuing of subjects as labor-commodities and as the source of biological commodities such as organs. Robin Monroe’s work on the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners in China reveals that the number of crimes designated as capital crimes-and hence the number of executions-is increasing, and that a systematic relationship exists between the hospital’s preparation of the transplant recipient while the matched “donor” prisoner is prepared for an execution (“Global Traffic” 196). Scheper-Hughes also discovered that at one mental institution in Buenos Aires, organs were harvested from inmates without even the pretense of consent. She has referred to the kidney as “the last commodity,” representing as it often does the final option for disenfranchised people to survive, and perhaps the furthest extreme of commodification (“Commodity Fetishism” 42). Even in the relatively wealthy and privileged centers of capital, some citizens are marginalized to the point of approaching the threshold of exception. In one example, a California man without dental insurance offered to sell “non-essential” organs in order to obtain money for dentures (ibid.). A 2003 article in the San Francisco Chronicle tells the story of a British man selling his kidney on eBay to finance medical treatment for his six-year-old daughter. The offer ran for a week with no bids before eBay shut it down, stating: “Humans, the human body or any human body parts may not be listed on eBay or included as a gift, prize or in connection with a giveaway or charity” (Associated Press). “Unnecessary” body parts have become potential surplus that can be sold as an action of last resort for those who are too disenfranchised to have other options.
 

Necessity, the Good Life, and the Usefulness of Labor

 
The privileging of the language of supply and demand within economic analyses of migration to explain how certain people become the appropriate sources of specific labor and commodities over other economies-social, cultural, political, and so on-conceals the relationship between the division of labor and the ways that subjects are valued in relation to one another. This relative valuing happens in ways that are often explained as cultural but that reflect the relative value of subjects as labor-commodities and as the source of biological and affective commodities. As Fredric Jameson explains, not only ideology as recognized “ideas” but as our very forms of thought/perception is at work in the processes of capital. In Capital, Marx argues that by laboring in capitalist production, the worker is made abstract. He or she becomes the producer of a certain number of units of abstract labor, where abstract labor is defined as the averaged labor of a society overall (128). In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkeimer and Adorno argue that the first violence of abstraction is in forgetting the specificity of bodies and the specificity of the context of those bodies. The meaning attributed to abstracted bodies, their resignification, is arbitrary in the sense that it cannot be explained when removed from systems of value within capitalism. However, their meaning as objects and what they signify then becomes a form of thought embodied in capital itself (173). In other words, the way that a subject is understood as useful, or for what purpose valuable, depends on how that body is read within a system of coding that is incorporated into an understanding of reality that resides in the way that capitalism functions. This understanding of a subject’s value in turn becomes part of a structure of values, or common sense understandings, that exist within the predominant tendencies of global capitalism.
 
Conceptual violence, the understanding or reading of some people as less human or not human at all, has implications that are simultaneously naturalized, systemic, economic, and ‘logical.’ For example, we can identify the way that India’s colonial history, a history of British resource extraction without the building of a social and material infrastructure, has contributed to India’s post-independence economic history. The resulting material poverty of many of India’s inhabitants could then help explain the sale of kidneys by the rural poor in South India. However, if we ask simply why the rural poor everywhere aren’t succumbing to the same process at the same rate, we see that there is more than the economics of supply and demand at work. A similar argument can be made for the relative cheapness of products in specific labor markets in different parts of the world. The perception that these particular subjects are somehow appropriate sources of organs for those who can afford them plays an important role in their exploitation. This perception works along with a set of other conditions, including relevant technologies and other infrastructures, but these infrastructural elements can also materialize on demand, as in the case of kidney brokers and lenders in India. One of the arguments made by those who want to let the market control the selling of human organs is that there are people who “need” to sell their organs, and people who need to be able to buy them, so those who need the resources gained by selling an organ are appropriate sources (Scheper-Hughes, “The Ends of the Body”). However, the market logic of this explanation doesn’t address the way such a need comes about, how market logic itself reinforces culturally understood structures of power already in place, nor the necessary dehumanizing of specific populations. We cannot separate an understanding of the way specific bodies are recognized as useful, or seen to have a particular use-value, from the way they are already understood to be “useful” within production processes. Someone is seen as useful to dominant society because of feedback between the labor he does and the types of labor for which he is seen as appropriate.
 
Although belief in the separation of political economy from the cultural realm is part of a dominant capitalist ideology, I argue that the connection between the signification of subjects and capitalist economics is vital to understanding the value assigned to people as labor-commodities and as the source of bodily commodities. Traditional economic logic allows us to see labor migration and the creation of labor markets only in terms of labor supply and demand, or in terms of cultural diaspora. Figuring affect and desire into economics becomes impossible because of this division, as does seeing the distinction between types of labor as a distinction of degrees of human-ness. Examining the limitations on bodies and the constraints on different lives reveals that the nature of economic value is also implicated in how we assess the humanity of laboring human beings, and that the process of valorization, of assigning value, is a process of figuration, of decoding and translating someone into comprehensibility.
 
Though exchange value, which is the most obviously economic value form, comes to dominate our thinking about the way commodities and labor circulate, for Marx and Marxist theorists like Spivak it is just one face of value. Without an already existing concept of something’s usefulness, it cannot have exchange value; hence the latter is a parasite of use-value. Because of this relationship, something or someone deemed by society to be not useful, or useful in limited ways, also loses its exchange value, its ability to command monetary compensation for its value. This begins to explain both how some lives become more constrained than others, and how some lives are seen as more appropriate sources of organs or of specific types of labor than others. The quality of the material conditions under which different people live indicates differences in the perception of the appropriateness of some subjects over others for the investment of vital energy into those lives. At the same time, the amount of value, defined as human vital energy, invested into lives has immediate bearing on the quality of those lives. It is this investment of vital energy through affective and biological commodities that I refer to when speaking of the work of producing life. A process that transmits the product of labor directly from one life to another, mediated by commodities that aren’t physical objects yet carry value all the same, cannot be quantified through labor time. For this reason, looking at a given person or society and analyzing the conditions and quality of life (where quality marks the ability to meet perceived needs) is a way to at least track and evaluate this labor.
 
While ideas about what makes a good life differ, they all require a balance of needs and the ability to fill those needs in a way that minimizes suffering. Analysis of domestic workers in the affective labor market (those who produce affective commodities for export or investment abroad) has shown that those workers cannot always fill their needs (on class distinctions between migrants and non-migrant families, see Parreñas 575). As the example of the created need to buy and sell kidneys demonstrates, needs are not stable; in fact, the generation of always new necessities is at the core of the operation of capitalist accumulation. The denial of needs works to maintain the relative cheapness of some laboring populations in relation to others. The cheapness of someone’s labor and life therefore reflects only the “outlawed necessities” that maintain this cheapness (Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure 228). For example, the communities of those who sell their kidneys almost never have access to transplants themselves. Thinking from within a space already organized by capitalism, Marx imagines the good life against the nature of life under capitalism: Under capitalism “life appears only as a means to life.” This is opposed to Marx’s imagination of directly “being”: the impact of this form of alienation, where life is a means to living instead of “being,” upon lived experience is that once we become aware that our life does not fully belong to us, we suffer (Marx and Engels 76-7). If part of the drive of capitalist cultures is to increase the numbers of hours a day that human activity is spent doing labor that produces capitalist value, it is important to identify value produced by affective and biological labor, often performed in non-public spaces and accomplishing ends that do not reveal themselves in objects or other quantifiable entities, and to distinguish this as additional to the value produced by more visible wage work. It is also important to establish the necessity of such labor and commodities for material existence, which can be less obvious than the traditional measure of quality of life as access to food, shelter, and safety, among others.
 
The way that feminized bodies and labor are represented within the common sense of the global market complicates the already strained separation of labor from the actual physical body of the worker and from the life she lives. As Marx’s analysis explains, the usefulness of labor is the way it can produce more than it costs to maintain. For Marx there is a distinction between productive labor that results in commodities with exchange value, and reproductive labor. Any type of energy expended to preserve the worker and his future replacement qualifies as reproductive labor. However, the increasingly common phenomenon of the commodification and sale of domestic labor, a form of what Marx calls reproductive labor, belies this division. In addition, because of the ways bodies that perform domestic labor are marked by race and gender, the commodification of the worker’s body itself must be addressed in discussing this form of labor. Neferti Tadiar explains that because domestic helpers are paid not for a specific skill, but for their gendered and raced bodies, they are labor-commodities. Unlike men, who sell their labor power as a commodity, women’s labor is appropriated with their bodies and sexuality. Tadiar notes that under the conditions of slavery often imposed upon Filipina domestic workers-rape and other forms of sexual assault, beating, near-confinement, non-payment of salary, passport deprivation, and indefinite labor-time-one of the largest Filipino diaspora populations is in some ways immobile. Not only does this labor condition rely on structures of racialization and gendering in both the sending and receiving societies but, as Tadiar argues, it is a component of the conditions of globalization that rely upon the dehumanization of bodies and subjects (145-146).
 

Affective Labor and the Production of Value

 
Paid domestic work, such as the work done by South Asian women in the Gulf states, requires not only the performance of tasks that invest labor into a product, but also the repetitive performance of a certain persona and the complicated category of “care” labor, all of which makes distinguishing labor power from personhood problematic. While the employer of a migrant domestic laborer acquires time and needs to perform fewer duties, the migrant’s domestic responsibilities “at home” must be covered by unpaid female relatives or poorly compensated local domestic help (Parreñas). When one identifies this hierarchy, one can see how the value of the migrant domestic worker as a human being with human needs, that when denied entail suffering, becomes inseparable from shifting relations between states, from the state and society, and from notions of morality that entail particular family relations and labor relations.
 
Munira Ismail’s fieldwork interviewing domestic labor migrants in transit between Sri Lanka and the Gulf states also shows how the commodification of domestic labor creates a shift in necessity and makes other adjustments in the local economy, wherein that which is made surplus becomes essential to sell. In the early 1980s, many infrastructural projects in the Middle East that had been funded by high oil prices in the previous decade and that used migrant construction labor were completed, leading to a lower demand for imported skilled workers. Meanwhile, a growing middle class needed domestic workers, resulting in the feminization of expatriate labor in the Middle East. National economic policies in Sri Lanka were liberalizing the import of commodities formerly produced by handloom and textile industries which employed primarily female laborers. The Sri Lankan government created an infrastructure to facilitate the export of this “surplus” labor to the Middle East, in contrast with other South Asian countries, which had curtailed female migration to the Middle East in response to reports of abuse and harassment of maids (Ismail 224-225). The women who had the means to take advantage of this infrastructure, however, were not the unemployed Sri Lankan industrial laborers. They were middle class women from families that could support the cost of travel to the Middle East. Ismail reports that all of the women she interviewed claimed to have never worked outside their own homes before migrating and had been entirely dependent on their husbands’ earnings. Once their wives secured work in the Middle East and began sending remittances to their families, these men tended to give up their jobs, and the mothers of the migrant women tended to take over their childcare and household management. Its economic reorganization led the family to depend on the migrant’s income, meaning that after the migrant returned home, she usually needed to return to work in the Middle East (Ismail 231-232). Scholarship on domestic labor migration attends not only to the constraints it places upon migrants, but also to the spaces of opportunity it opens up for them. Michele Gamburd notes that within limits, housemaids in the Middle East who played their cards right could achieve a degree of power and autonomy in the homes where they worked (102-3). In eighteen months spent interviewing returned migrants and the families of current migrants in one Sri Lankan village, she also found that for some women, the only way to escape abusive or otherwise unpleasant conditions in their home or village was to migrate to the Middle East and become a maid. Both Ismail and Gamburd acknowledge a certain expansion of options for Sri Lankan migrants provided by their jobs-a recognition of the agency of these individuals and their families. However, this recognition of agency does not address the choices involved in these options, specifically why certain groups of people find themselves in situations with extraordinarily and specifically limited options. As with the situation of kidney sellers in South India, supply and demand, individual agency, and the strategies involved in remittance economies apply here. What is not accounted for in either this understanding of the laborer’s agency or in that of the kidney seller is the dehumanizing force of capitalist logic within the international division of labor. This force devalues these women’s labor and bodies as surplus, indicating the non-essential nature of this labor and of these parts to their lives. This becomes problematic when these situations are compared to others within the division of labor where these elements of life are understood and valued as essential.
 
The costs to the migrant, aside from those recognizable as economic, do not figure into the equation of supply and demand, or into the role of the female worker as extra and therefore exportable labor. Gamburd explains that in their places of work in the Gulf, domestic laborers are often told what to wear and where to worship (regardless of religion). The material control of the employer over sleeping space, food, and hygiene may be meant to protect employees, but is also symbolically charged (see Moors 390). Commensality, the sharing of food and drink that often also has cultural connotations of shared community, is an example of control that can signify belonging and status or their lack. Gamburd explains that Sri Lankan live-in care workers are both insiders and outsiders in the households where they work, experiencing great intimacy but also loneliness. Most are confined to the house or proximate neighborhood and denied a social space of their own, yet are kept on the margins of family life (Gamburd 109). The process of accepting the labor of migrants but not their lives operates like the politics of suppression and recognition that Lawrence Cohen identifies in the circulation of kidneys. Both the commodified kidney and the migrant laborer shift location to support the lives of those fully “inside” socially valued existence. The migrant domestic laborer is like an organ of her home that has been made excessive by the international division of care work. Unlike the kidney, however, the body of the migrant does not shed its coding in transit. There remains a sphere of valorization from which migrants are excluded, and it is this exclusion that helps define what is included as relatively more valuable, in both a cultural sense and in the sense of the value of subjects as labor-commodities.
 
Situating the female Sri Lankan laborer as extra and exportable not only denies her a realm of choice that would be considered by most people to be humanly necessary-for example, the choice of whether or not to live in one’s home with one’s social and kin groups-it also denies her full participation in socially valued existence, whether she chooses to remain in Sri Lanka or to work elsewhere. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas explains that the choice to maximize earnings as transnational low-wage workers denies the workers the intimacy of the family, thus making care-giving more painful. This cost has material implications yet is not quantifiable by traditional measures of labor. The nature of this labor in particular adds to the problem, because it encompasses every waking hour of life and operates in the realm of emotion. Accounting for the labor of care and the value of the commodities it produces becomes extraordinarily difficult in terms of labor-time. It is for this reason that thinking about the production of life through the investment of human vital energy into other people and communities is useful to indicate both the difficulty of compartmentalizing domestic labor and the violence inherent in the international division of labor’s impact on the movement of these women to devalued spheres of existence.
 
Marx’s original formulation in Capital defines reproductive labor against productive labor. If productive labor was understood as the investment of socially averaged labor time into an object for exchange, reproductive labor was the energy put into making sure the person doing productive labor could return to work each day. It recreated or replenished the labor power of “he” who worked outside the home in the public sphere by supporting the biological reproduction of the worker’s body and strength, as well as a replacement worker in the form of child-rearing (270-80). In the form of care, love, and nurture, it also reassured the worker of his humanity, allowing him to continue to participate in his own commodification as labor. Contemporary feminists and queer theorists have extended this analysis by redefining such labor as productive in itself, producing immediate life and not just supporting the (male) worker who earned the means to immediate life.⁴
 
In the work of maids, nannies, and other domestic service workers, the provision of comfort through smiling, soothing remarks, or the meeting of subtle wishes and desires of the client often requires the person providing such commodities to evoke the actual feelings of indulgence, care, worry, and concern behind such actions.⁵ Paid childcare, for example, illustrates how such intimate expression, requiring the production of genuine feelings, can then be completely alienated from the producer. The state of living in alienation from the physical products of one’s labor is a kind of loneliness, even in the traditional understanding of productive labor found in Marx’s work. In The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx explains the difference between working to live when selling labor-power for a wage is the only means of subsistence, and working in a way that is integrated in a good life. The alienation of self and of individual vitality that results from the necessity of working to live is not “the good life” Marx imagines. The more hours spent in such labor, the less time there is for what Marx calls “human use” (Marx and Engels 87) and Neferti Tadiar calls “human potential” (131). I read the question of the good life, and the potential for a future good life, as an expression of a person’s ability to accumulate the investment of value into that life. For this reason, I argue that if human lives are becoming a site for the accumulation of capital transmitted by biological and affective commodities, and a place where value is carried by non-object commodities from producers and invested directly into an individual or community’s life in a way that leads to increased potential future life, we can describe this process as biocapital.
 

Imagination and Value Revisited

 
The connection between the signification of subjects and capitalist economic processes is necessary for understanding how the accumulation of value functions. Figuring affect into economics becomes very difficult because of this division, as does seeing the distinction between types of labor as one of degrees of human-ness. What is revealed when one examines the limitations on bodies and the constraints on different lives is that social acts and economic acts can be simultaneous and sometimes indistinguishable, for example in the process of representation described above (vertreten/darstellen), and that these are also always acts of figuration. How then can we think about the importance of use-value outside of capital? As Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Spivak have argued, the heterogeneity of use-value is a “private grammar” (Spivak, “Scattered Speculations” 119), having meaning outside the dominant system of coding. In these other logics or systems of meaning we may find alternate ways to think about bodies and lives even as they remain limited and undervalued by market processes.
 
The vitality of living labor yields both the recognizable historical archive and other histories that do not get represented in that archive. Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that living labor necessarily exceeds what capital can subsume, which is both its use-value to capital and uncontrollable excess as the capacity for human living (Provincializing Europe 60). He explains that the temporality of what is legible from within the dominant system of capitalism constitutes the linear narrative of canonical history in Western culture. This history is posited retroactively as everything leading up to the “now” of capital. Until it is clear that they have reached this “now,” capitalists and workers do not belong to the “being” of capital. They are “becoming,” a category that organizes all temporalities either as in the “now” of capital or as moving towards it. Reading Marx, Chakrabarty refers to this history of capital as History 1. To approach spaces and times in the past without seeing them only as “becoming” in this way, Chakrabarty describes History 2s. These alternative narratives are antecedents of capital in that “capital encounters them as antecedents” but “not as antecedents established by itself, not as forms of its own life-processes” (64). For this reason, History 2s can be said not to contribute to the reproduction of capital, though they are coextensive with those that do, interrupting and punctuating capital’s logic. This reading of history allows Chakrabarty to conclude that difference is not something external to capital, nor simply subsumed into it, but rather something that lives in “intimate and plural relationships to [it], ranging from opposition to neutrality” (66). It also marks the multiple systems of meaning that create use-value in circulation with and against the flows of capital.
 
For Spivak, “time” refers to the singular temporality and history of capital, but there are still temporalities that have not been subsumed by capital’s history. Spivak refers to this indeterminacy in temporality as “timing” (Spivak, Critique 38). There is room for “timing” and alternate spaces in Spivak’s reading of use-value, though she does not try to represent a subject that would exist in such time and spaces. Similarly, Chakrabarty describes the excess of living labor, upon which capital relies yet which it fails to ever entirely control, as becoming imbued in the commodity itself (“Marx After Marxism” 1096). Just as the labor invested in the production of the commodity cannot be contained or mapped entirely, the nature of the commodity is similarly indeterminate. The nature of the commodity and therefore its use-value, upon which exchange value is again a parasite, is not fixed or stable. As Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star point out, each standard and each category of classification valorizes some point of view and silences another, a process which they deem not inherently bad, but as requiring “an ethical choice” (5). For example, we can ask who benefits at whose expense from a given system of classification and understanding. They also point out that classifications and standards are related in ways that impact one’s membership in different social worlds or communities of practice as well as the “taken-for-grantedness of objects” within these spaces (15).
 
These complications of the production and bearers of value also implicate the spaces of life, allowing us to think through imaginative practices occurring among Sri Lankan domestic labor migrants or Indian kidney sellers that aren’t necessarily legible in the terms of capital. For example, if life becomes legible to capital only as the source of labor power, perhaps the best way to approach what falls outside of discussions focusing on coercion and agency in relation to domestic labor migrants is to think about illegible areas of life to which Chakrabarty and Spivak direct our attention. For example, how do pleasure and other meaning-making practices involved in labor, and particularly care labor, complicate our understanding of the lives of workers? In her examination of Filipina domestic helpers working in the Gulf, Neferti Tadiar points to the subjective sense of living that remains present within the concept of living labor. She recognizes a creative capacity and potential political power in this space of life that is also a space of self-production for workers. Though these elements of life may be excluded from socially valued life, and therefore remain in many ways invisible, their existence continues to escape capital’s system of value and hence its imagination.
 
The act of Mohammed Ayaz with which we opened takes on a different meaning when put in the context of his having been made surplus, and of the denial of value to him as a migrant worker. Described in mainstream press as an act of desperation or radical migration, Ayaz’s seemingly hopeless attempt to travel towards a center of value ended in his death. In the media portrayal, his body became testament to this death, described as it was found on the pavement near Heathrow. Ayaz’s body was freed as the kidney is freed. However, whereas the kidney is allowed to become a new part of someone’s socially valued life, the migrant’s habitation of fully valued existence is suppressed. Can we read Ayaz’s imagination as something other than an irrational hope or an ill-advised act of desperation? Achille Mbembe finds that even the slave is able to use the very body that has been commodified as an instrument for his or her own expression: “Breaking with uprootedness and the pure world of things of which he or she is but a fragment, the slave is able to demonstrate the protean capabilities of the human bond through music and the very body that was supposedly possessed by another” (36). In a political and economic system that needs to determine who may live and who must die, can Ayaz’s trip to his death be seen as excessive to that system?⁶ If we approach Ayaz’s action as the result of a refusal to reside where his life was unrecognized, his story seems to be a testimony to the excess life of the migrant that is not allowed recognition along with his or her commodified body. By refusing to stay in Dubai, where the limits on his mobility made possible his exploitation, Ayaz rejects his exclusion from socially valued existence. Though we cannot know exactly why Ayaz took his journey, and though it may have made no noticeable changes in the world, we begin to see why the undertaking of this journey had more to do with life than with death.
 

Accumulation of Capital: Vital Energy and the Good Life

 
Given the availability of English in South Asia, the lingering of postcolonial fantasies that sustain continuing connections with and interdependence on Europe and America, diasporic networks and their economies tied into the region, and the span of life conditions on the subcontinent, India’s labor populations yield a particular picture of value as the infusion of vital energy into the future life chances of a given body. Focusing on other populations would inflect this analysis in useful and meaningful ways. For this reason, I am not trying to produce a theory of value as much as to supplement the labor theory of value by thinking through bodily and historical difference as mediated by contemporary tendencies in capitalism represented in the production of biological and affective commodities. Dwelling on these contexts as they are implicated in the production and commodification of life through affective and biological labor bears upon some of the terms of Marx’s labor theory of value in useful ways I briefly overview here.
 
Use-value can only be observed once it has entered a system of legibility. The dominant concepts of mainstream capitalist common sense, including usefulness, constitute the most obvious system of legibility. Through this system, markers of bodily difference (class, race, gender, sexuality, ability) become markers of appropriateness for certain places in the work of production and consumption, rather than others. However, if we examine the life-cycle of value in current capitalist practices, the moments of transition between the manifestations of different facets of value, or between positions in the chain of value, act as moments of transmission or communication (Spivak, “Scattered Speculations”). Thinking of value in this way points to the necessity of acknowledging the other systems of knowing, reality, and value that exist as intertwined with capitalist processes, though they may not always be communicated.
 
Use-values that do not “make sense” within a capitalist logic may become illegible as exchange values, but that does not mean that they no longer characterize a given commodity, be this an object, non-object, or a subject as labor-commodity. Exchange value relies on dominant concepts of use and travels via currencies to which many have limited access, for example programming code or the English language. At the same time, those without access to these currencies, such as rural agriculturalists in South India, are left with choices of last resort that do not require the mediation of labor to carry the physical vitality of their bodies to another. This is one way to explain the shift from selling the labor that a sound body can perform to selling a part of that body itself, which is then invested as value in another’s life. The problem of measuring value in traditional political economic terms, resulting from increasingly complex production and the non-quantifiable nature of value carried by affective and biological commodities, necessitates a non-positivist mode of analyzing value. If value is always simultaneously socio-cultural (some lives and spheres of existence are valorized at the expense of others, and are produced and enhanced by dominant modes of understanding) and economic (there is a cost of imagining one’s life through others’ modes of understanding in terms of comfort, satisfaction, meaning, and in terms of what conditions of living can be produced by the work designated as appropriate to one worker over another), it makes little sense to calculate it only in terms of labor time. I argue that accumulated value manifests as the quality of vitality in a given human’s or human population’s current life and potential for future life. Labor power as Marx defines it has been the most obviously commodified form of this vitality. However, labor power as a commodity must be able to reach the consumer, and as the work of consumption expands in both breadth and depth, those who do not have access to technologies of travel and to ways of transmitting labor power to consumers have few options besides expending the actual energy. I see this shift as also being behind what social scientists such as Sarah Franklin, Donna Haraway, Kaushik Sundar Rajan, and Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell have observed as a growing trend for capitalist processes to be organized around life in the form of biotechnology and bioinformatics.
 
Class alone does not tell us about the relative value that has been invested in a given person’s life through his or her ability to consume objects and affects produced by others. This investment of the vital energy originating from the lives of others is at the heart of Marx’s labor theory of value, so in a sense, all labor operates like biocapital, where the product of human vital energy is consumed to promote the well-being and future life of someone else. One important difference, however, is that in Marx’s analysis, exchange is mediated by the embodiment of that energy in a physical commodity. The work of care, attention, and service produce commodities like comfort, security, and self-worth that confirm one’s humanity-commodities that are not physical objects yet that when consumed can make one feel better and more valuable. These feelings turn out to be essential to human life and to the ability to imagine oneself or one’s community as having a viable future. This is at the heart of an understanding of value that takes into account the direct relationship between the balance of production and of consumption in a given individual or social body, and the future life of that body.
 
The differential value invested into the lives of people in the US and South Asia provides a starting point for thinking about how value is transmitted by the non-physical commodities exported by South Asia’s service, human biologicals, and care industries. While measuring this value quantitatively is not my objective, I suggest that one way to think about value is in the obvious differential allocation of quality of life between those who are free to consume these commodities and those who must only produce them.