CFI 5 Human Body Frontiers

Commodity Frontiers Initiative explores the history and present of capitalism, contestation, and ecological transformation in the global countryside. Each themed issue includes articles and interviews with experts about studying and teaching commodity frontiers in theory and in practice. The Journal features reflections and reviews on the dynamics of capitalist expansion, social change, and ecological transformation on global as well local scales, in the past and at the present.

This issue of Commodity Frontiers is about our collective backs and what human bodies can tell us about commodity frontiers. It’s about the regimented bodies that sustain capitalism, and the (same) unruly bodies that challenge its smooth development. The issue is about labor, sex, blood, reproduction, racialization, decarceration, community, metabolism, and memory. It’s about what bodies do, how they are unevenly incorporated into capitalist economies, and how they resist or contest incorporation. We start from a simple premise: disciplined human bodies sustain capitalism. They do so through labor and social reproduction, in vastly uneven ways, across intersectional social categories, histories, and geographies. As sites and processes of the incorporation (and creation) of “resources” into the expanding capitalist world economy, commodity frontiers are also sites and processes of incorporating human bodies. Today and in the past, the extraction, production, and circulation of goods and services require human bodies that work, think, and remember.

Issue 5 features many contributions, including a conversation between neuroscientist, André Fenton and CF editor, Maarten Vanden Eynde, in which they consider memory as a possibly emerging frontier. Their discussion ranges from what, actually, memory is and where it resides, to if and how AI (artificial intelligence) can duplicate it. Fenton helps us see bodies (and memory) as dynamic systems, full of complex and only partially understood relationships, comprised of individual and impermanent pieces that constitute networked and enduring wholes. To this reader, the parallels between what neuroscientists study inside of our skin, and what historians and social scientists study outside of it are exciting. The conversation also offers some clues for how we might connect these inner and outer realms.

Abstract: With the increasing availability of memory devices that supplement or in many cases surpass our biological memory, the question of where the body ends and the rest of the world begins becomes impossible to answer. With current AI technology able to retrieve text from brain scans of thinking (or transmitting?) people, are we slowly becoming part of a massive mind of many, rather than a collection of individual brains full of interacting neurons? And what concepts or language will we use to describe memory features in this transhumanist future? This article is an edited transcript of a conversation between Commodity Frontiers editor, Maarten Vanden Eynde, and neuroscientist, André Fenton, in April 2023.