Embodying (anti-)capitalism: An autotheory utilizing critical somatics and perpetual motion / Mia Schmidt (2022)

My project is an autotheoretical (see Glossary, below, for definition of autotheory) practice-as-research that seeks (i) to find methods of documenting how the rhythms and demands of the current stage of capitalism relate to and interact with my body and how it moves, and (ii) to expropriate my personal behavioural data for the hybrid purpose of creating works of art and spurring further analysis of how capitalism functions in my life. My process combines sousveillance with critical somatics (see Glossary for sousveillance and critical somatics) to create documents of my embodied practice of reflecting on the laws of motion of capital through utilization of moving image capture technology (primarily Go Pro footage), hand and digitally written streams-of-consciousness, and audio files recorded on my cellphone. In addition to these processes, I reflect on my experience as a multidisciplinary labourer in two of the world’s largest centres of capital accumulation (New York City (“NYC”) and London) through an anticapitalist lens. I used moving image documents from my process of expropriation of my everyday life in an installation, and one of my aims is for this process that I would like to call “creative expropriation” to serve both as an inversion of a method used by capitalism to create surplus-value in the post-Fordist realm of production, and a way of developing an embodied understanding of how capitalism functions by requiring that commodities and people be in states of perpetual motion. Rather than seeking to propose alternatives to capitalism and how we may get there, my research steers my creative practice towards an approach that looks at the issues caused by the contradictions inherent in the capitalist system through an embodied, experiential, critically somatic lens. This document considers a particular iteration of my selfexpropriation-turned-creative-production, titled Leitmotivs of capitalism, a multi-channel video installation comprised of pieces of my self-mined personal behavioural data in the forms of video footage and audio recordings, combined with textual quotations from Karl Marx’s Capital (2013) that speak to capital’s laws of motion and the resulting expansion of the working day into every moment.