Topographies of the Sacred: Giorgio Agamben's Roman Homo Sacer. A short critique of the sources

Giorgio Agamben’s Homo sacer project has been one of the most unique and important in the last few decades of European philosophy. One of its core premises and a constant point of reference is Walter Benjamin’s lapidary statement that: “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight”(Benjamin 2007 pg248). Agamben’s project is a substantial attempt to attain such a conception and reading of history. There have been eight instalments so far including the supposedly final volume due out in translation later this year. Although the focus of each one of the series varies widely the figure of homo sacer (sacred man) is always present albeit in several different modalities. Specifically, homo sacer is a historical example taken from archaic Roman law and designates a person who cannot be sacrificed but can be killed by anyone. It is this particular iteration of homo sacer which this essay will focus on. More broadly it is the investigation into the concept of sacredness itself and its relationship to Law, sovereignty, the exception and freedom that orients much of Agamben’s research.

In the first and perhaps still most influential of the books in the series (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1998) the question regarding the sacredness of life and its relation to these other fields is only one part of a wider analysis that counterpoises the enigmatic status of the homo sacer to a complex topological and ontological analysis of the structure of sovereignty. In particular Agamben develops an understanding of the dialectic between the inside and the outside of law which he uses to draw inferences from a wide variety of historical and semantic spheres. Sovereign power, or more specifically the sovereign exception is evoked in relation to Michel Foucault's analysis of the emergence in the modern era of forms of political rationality that take natural life as its principle object; the so called development of biopolitics. Agamben's reading of this associates it strongly with a much older distinction in Aristotle's politics between zoē, the natural life common to all living things, and bios, a qualified 'form of life' specific to an individual or group.

The specifically political life of human beings is qualified and thus by this understanding constitutes a bios. Aristotle sharply distinguishes it from the life of the household (oikos) which deals with the maintenance of mere reproductive life, zoē, later to be identified by Agamben with "bare life". For Agamben then the object of biopolitcs which marks it out as a departure from juridical-institutional theories of the state and government is that rather than excluding zoē from its calculations it instead makes it the privileged focus of attention. Zoē moves so to speak from the household to the polis,where at its extreme limit it can take on the modality of homo sacer, a person from whom the Law has been withdrawn, divested of that form of political existence that distinguishes us from the beasts. The consequences of this shift are for Agamben - as they were for Foucault, crucial to the understanding of 20^th century totalitarianism. Indeed the Italian philosopher pushes Foucault’s analysis in further radical directions by arguing for the centrality of the Nazi concentration camp as a paradigm for contemporary Western politics as a whole, with the denuded and brutalised figure of homo sacer at its heart. With a project of such scope,  historical sweep and at times dark conclusions, it is all the more vital to look closely  at the specific sources and readings with which Agamben begins.

Homo Sacer in Archaic Roman law

The first thing to note is the relative obscurity of Agamben's source where homo sacer first appears in the text. It appears in the work of the 2nd century grammarian Pompeius Festus in whose epitome of the encyclopaedic work of Augustan grammarian Verrius Flaccus he finds a figure of archaic Roman law that connects sacredness to a human life in the form of the homo sacer. The following definition of the sacred man appears under the lemma sacer mons, the hill a few miles outside the ancient city of Rome where the plebs retreated during their first secession. After defining it such Festus goes on to say:

"The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunitian law, in fact, it is noted that "if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide." This is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred". (De verborum significatione quoted in Agamben 1998 pg71)

The "first tribunitarian law" is most likely the declaration by the plebs described by Livy that their representatives the tribunes were to be considered sacrosanct (Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 2.33). The fragment itself contains very little regarding the secession itself aside from the aforementioned association of the sacer mons with the event. What is significant for Agamben is the definition of the sacred man rather than the establishment of the magistracy itself. At first glance the lemma seems to contain an obvious contradiction; that the thing which is sacred can be killed with impunity. It is this part of the definition that provokes the greatest confusion in light of the well-established understanding of the Roman ius divinum whereby a thing made sacred is passed over to the property of the gods and to interfere with it was strictly prohibited.

By way of laying the path for his own interpretation Agamben distinguishes two currents within the field of scholarship on the meaning of the homo sacer. The first group, including Theodor Mommsen, see in the sentence of sacratio a weakened and secularised residue of an archaic phase in which religious law was not yet distinguished from penal law and the death sentence appeared as a sacrifice to the gods (Agamben 1998, pg72). The second group he claims argue sacratio is an ancient form of consecration which is comparable to taboo. The sacred thing is both holy and an object of horror. The failure of these interpretations he claims is that neither fully accounts for both the ban on sacrifice and the unpunishability of killing the person declared homo sacer. For him this indicates that the life of homo sacer stands outside both divine and human law which in light of his arguments for the primacy of the relation of exception in Western politics, constitutes the homo sacer as a privileged historical phenomenon, one which like sovereignty stands on the extreme margins of the social order, neither fully inside nor outside. "It appears that we are confronted with a limit concept of the Roman social order that, as such, cannot be explained in a satisfying manner as long as we remain inside either the ius divinum or the ius humanum. And yet homo sacer may perhaps allow us to shed light on the reciprocal limits of these two juridical realms. ... we will try to interpret sacratio as an autonomous figure, and we will ask if this figure may allow us to uncover an originary political structure that is located in a zone prior to the distinction between sacred and profane, religious and juridical" Agamben 1998, pg74).

The intention then is clear; the homo sacer is of such interest because Agamben believes it provides a primordial historical example of the figure of bare-life / zoē which has become the principle object of modern biopolitical rationality; subject to the relation of exception; captured within the order by being excluded from it. Agamben then pushes the argument further by claiming that sacredness itself "is the originary form of the inclusion of bare life in the juridical order...Life is sacred only insofar as it is taken into the sovereign exception" (Agamben ibid pg85).  That this example seems to implicate both human and divine realms in the dialectic and may have its roots deep within archaic European history only amplifies its significance as a possible confirmation of the claim made earlier in the book that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power (Agamben ibid, pg6).These are all very big claims. That he can by this analysis implicate the plebs and their new magistracy within the functioning of the sovereign exception is also by no-means insignificant. The secessio plebis is after all one of the canonical events in the history of the development of Western popular democracy. Let us however look at some arguments against Agamben's interpretation of the sources in determining the character of homo sacer in the Roman example.

Just how much of an Exception is the homo sacer?

Agamben's reading of the sources regarding the significance of homo sacer is particular and has been challenged. In a recent paper Frederiek Depoortere has questioned whether the textural evidence supports the claim as to homo sacer's foundational political status. He cites other examples drawn from Pompeius Festus that show that the sacratio leges (sacred laws) were in force during the reign of Numa Pompilius (the legendary 2^nd King of ancient Rome) and were evoked for particular crimes such as the removal of boundary stones. The transgressor according to Festus' lemma would be devoted to Jupiter and at another point he writes "when a child hits his parent, and when this one has cried, that the child will be devoted to the gods of the parents". Similarly Depoortere highlights Livy's writing on the so called Valerio-Horatian law of the mid-5th century BCE which had any person who offered injury to the tribunes of the people should not only be devoted to the Jupiter of the infernal regions but his property should similarly be sold at the temple of Ceres, Liber, and Libera. Similar punishments were meted out to those with designs on regal authority during the early Republic (Depoortere 2012 pg156).

The person deemed homo sacer is accordingly someone who has committed a heinous crime, one that threatens the community at a fundamental level. As the author quite pertinently points out these sorts of crimes have to do with transgressing fundamental boundaries and distinctions in the community; the spatial limits of the city, familial relations, the sanctity of the magistracies, etc. We can hear an echo in this description of Agamben's claim that homo sacer exists in a zone of indistinction, blurring boundaries, though in a different key. Drawing on the work of Rene Girard, Depoortere claims that what puts homo sacer outside the community is the challenge he poses to the "regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their identity and mutual relationships" (Depoortere ibid pg158). By blurring these distinctions, by putting into question the foundations of the social order the homo sacer risks bringing violence upon the community. In every case however the author concludes that the attribution of sacratio is done in a religious context and as such the homo sacer cannot be understood in the primordially political fashion that Agamben suggests.

Agamben would no doubt object that this explanation does little to clarify why it is that the killing of homo sacer given the religious context is not considered nefas, a deadly crime. Certainly Depoortere's own explanation that homo sacer didn't represent a suitable sacrificial victim being "too much of an outsider and not enough of an insider" and thus available to be killed by anyone seems inadequate (Depoortere ibid pg159). Among earlier scholars who have commented on Festus' lemma Agamben associates W.Ward Fowler with the group who attribute sacer to an archaic form of consecration to the gods, analogous to taboo, but from which perspective it remains completely incomprehensible why anyone can kill homo sacer without being stained by sacrilege (Agamben 1998 pg73). While Fowler certainly does associate the homo sacer with more archaic forms of religiosity Agamben seems to pass over the account he gives of the different semantic associations of sacer in relation to the development of Roman state religion. Instead Agamben attributes to Fowler a certain "ambivalence of the sacred" which he claims has historically marked interpretations of social phenomena and in particular of the origin of sovereignty, constituting something of a scientific mythologeme (Agamben ibid, pg75). 

To simplify somewhat, the ambiguity in question here is purportedly one in which in archaic societies the concept of taboo can be attributed to both things holy or impure. Agamben particularly attributes the genesis of this ambiguity to William Robertson Smith and his famous 'Lectures on the Religion of the Semites' (1889) where he writes of the two types of taboo that "in most savage societies no sharp line seems to be drawn ... and even in more advanced nations the notions of holiness and uncleanness often seem to touch (Smith 1889 pg152-53). Whether or not such an ambiguity has had the distorting effect on scholarship Agamben claims is a question I will leave aside. In any case Fowler's arguments in 'The Original Meaning of the Word Sacer'  (1911) do not I would claim appear to depend on such an ambiguity. Of particular interest in his essay is the critical distinction he draws between "sacred to" and "devoted to" that makes a decisive difference to whether violation of the sacred thing is prohibited or not.

The distinction rests on the one hand on the better known function of sacer in the Roman ius divinum which was to indicate an object that was taken out of the profanum and passed over to that of the sacrum as property of a deity. This meaning however, as Fowler argues, is only intelligible in a definite sense in a period when there were already temples in which deities could dwell and enjoy the possession of their own property, made over to them by the state to do them honour and propitiate them (Fowler 1911, pg57). It is in this context that the term 'sacred to' is applicable, being bound up with the notion that certain objects were the explicit property of the gods and thus demanded at the very least special treatment and certainly not destruction. The question is then raised as to how such a term as sacer would function in Rome's early archaic period before there were such fixed temples and associates rites. In such circumstances Fowler speculates we might naturally look for a meaning of the same general type, but less accurately defined, and so to speak, less theological (Fowler, ibid). The meaning of sacer in this archaic period cannot he claims be associated with consecratio and the assignment of particular things to particular gods residing in particular places in the city. It would be more accurate in these circumstances to describe the homo sacer as 'devoted to' the gods. Or as Fowler put it: "accursed and left to a deity to avenge himself on if he so pleased". And as he was not in any true sense the property of the god, or valued by him as such, like objects called sacra under the religious law, anyone putting him to death would not be committing what was nefas (Fowler ibid pg58).

This distinction which does not rely on an ambivalence between the sacred and the unclean also goes some way to explaining those sources mentioned above where it appeared individuals were being "sacrificed" to particular gods in the early republican period. Since in most cases the gods evoked were those of the infernal regions which did not have their own regular ordered altar sacrifice the effect would be equivalent to the more archaic meaning cited above whereby the victim is cast out or accursed, left to their fate but certainly not made sacred to the god. While Fowler certainly raises the spectre of the tabooed man in relation to the most archaic forms of sacratio he is principally concerned with the sources that reveal its usage in the early Republic and the apparent confusion of later Roman commentators. His analysis thus puts into question Agamben's claim that sacratio represents a "double exception", both from the ius humanum and the ius divinum (Agamben 1998 pg82). Certainly the exclusion from the former seems clear but Fowler's distinction still allows that the person made sacer is in principle cast out of the human community and left to the gods i.e. handed over to their sole jurisdiction. This is however not in the sense that they are made sacred to or the property of those gods, but rather in the second meaning of devotio, devoted to and thus left at their mercy. One can see another example of this in the story of Decius in Livy (Ab urbe condita 8.9) who had himself devoted to the gods of the earth and the infernal regions before throwing himself into battle. This second reading does as we've seen admit the killing of the sacred man by anyone, clarifying Festus' lemma and putting into question whether the homo sacer is truly an example of the kind of relation of exception that Agamben argues it is.

Finally, we find another reference to the distinction between sacratio and devotio in that same work by William Robertson Smith which Agamben cites as being the source of the ambivalence mythologeme. In a passage also referred to by Agamben Smith states that in ancient Semitic communities in addition to sometimes consecrating garments, jewels or other objects, another usage "is the ban (Heb. herem) by which impious sinners, or enemies of the community and its god, were devoted to utter destruction. The ban is a form of devotion to the deity, and so the verb "to ban" is sometimes rendered "consecrate" (Micah iv.13) or "devote" (lev.xxvii. 28 sq). But in the oldest Hebrew times it involved the utter destruction, not only of the persons involved, but of their property; and only metals, after they had passed through the fire, were added to the treasure of the sanctuary (Josh. vi 24, vii. 24; 1 Sam. xv.). Even cattle were not sacrificed, but simply slain, and the devoted city must not be rebuilt (Deut. xiii. 16; Josh. vi. 26). (Smith 1927, pg 454). Here again we can see the separation between 'to devote' and 'to consecrate' - although not as well defined as they are in Fowler’s paper; they are terms that while distinct can have points of contiguity giving rise to aporias in interpretation. And while Smith does go on to draw comparison between the ban and the taboo it is not necessary to accept this ambiguous interpretation for the former distinction later developed by Fowler between sacratio and devotio to have significance. In any case it is sufficient to cast doubt on Agamben’s interpretation.

...but Sacredness Remains

In summary I believe that the confusion Agamben alludes to around the character of the homo sacer which affected both the commentators of the early empire and some modern commentators was likely down to a failure to fully take account of how the semantics of sacer had shifted during the development of the ius divinum. This is particularly understandable in the case of the ancient commentators without access to modern historical resources and hermeneutic techniques. Out of an archaic unstructured religiosity a more ordered state religion emerged involving fixed temples, rites and priests associated with particular deities to which property could be consecrated. By the end of the republican period this later development of the meaning of sacer in the ius divinum had come to prevail and coupled with the by then considerable development and secularisation of Roman law the more archaic meaning had become obscured. Thus it was opaque to a man like Macrobius writing in the early fifth century CE how a thing rendered sacer could also be despoiled by anyone (Macrobius Saturnalia 3.7.5-7).

It should be noted that even if the significance of the homo sacer as a specific historical phenomenon were to be diminished in Agamben's exposition it would not however render invalid his subsequent arguments regarding the significance of the concentration camp or other examples where the dialectic between life and law are articulated. This is because Agamben means to make the archaic Roman figure of homo sacer only one example - albeit perhaps his paradigmatic example at this point in the investigation - of the core relation between life and law, zoē and bios, the inside and the outside. One could easily imagine the gap being filled by the figure of the muselmann who in Remnants of Auschwitz (1999) represents a similarly acute intersection between sovereign power and bare-life. Such are the vicissitudes of the genealogical method which by articulating paradigms by way of moving from example to example is not as susceptible to refutation of this sort as other methods which also rely on empirical historical analysis.

If the homo sacer example from archaic Roman law is not a primordial instance of sacredness marking the concrete appearance of bare-life caught the grip of the sovereign exception, then that might well undermine some of the historiographic impact of Agamben's thesis; at least within the context of the first book of the series. But it would not go far in challenging the core topological arguments regarding the relation of sovereign power to life and Law, nor would it cast a shadow over the broader project of examining the significance of sacredness to the organisation and development of Western civilization. This becomes clearer in the later books in the series and especially in The Kingdom and the Glory (2011) where Agamben undertakes a startlingly detailed analysis of the significance of the Christian Trinitarian dogma for the development of secular notions of economy and government. In this and other volumes he argues that sacredness should be understood as a signature for a form of social ordering, one which can be traced and examined not just within religion but within the secular political and economic institutions of the West. It is this tantalizing method, which draws lines from archaic Europe to modern globalized capitalism that makes reading Giorgio Agamben such a fascinating and challenging experience.

References

Agamben,Giorgio 1998 - Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, Stanford, California)

Agamben,Giorgio 1999 - Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (London, MIT Press)

Benjamin,Walter 2007 - Reflections (New York, Schocken Books)

Depoortere, Frederiek 2012-Reading Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer with René Girard,Philosophy Today, Vol. 56, No. 2, pg154-163

Fowler,W.Warde 1911 - The Original Meaning of the Word Sacer, The Journal of Roman Studies Vol 1 pg57-63

Smith,W.Robertson 1927 - The Religion of the Semites (London, A.& C. Black)

The Labours of Love: Against the Workerisation of Sex

 

1.

Over the last couple of weeks to switch on the news would lead one to believe that half of Britain had gone out and "nonced" the other half. These kind of weeks are sadly becoming more common as operation Yewtree continues its bonfire of 70s pinups and more cases of gang abuse emerge from sleepy provincial towns. The far Left which has always had an ambiguous relationship with these issues has over the last year had to confront its own abuse scandal and engage in much soul searching. A curious contribution to this ongoing dialogue has come via the International Socialist Network (ISN), a group formed from those who fled the disintegration of the Socialist Workers Party. Mistress Magpie in the second of two articles makes the case for sex-work to be treated as any other kind of work. This intervention was elicited by the advertising of  an escorting position on the government run Universal Jobmatch site. The ad was later taken down after it was reported on by the Sunday Mirror. Magpie then popped up in the Guardian making a similar case for her role as a "professional dominatrix" continuing the theme that it is a culture of "capitalist moralism" that causes the stigmatisation of her trade in satisfying what are basic human needs.

While she identifies herself as a sex worker she is at pains to point out that she does not sell sex, only BDSM. As she says in the January piece:
“ I am well aware that as sex workers go, I am extremely lucky; I was raised an upper middle class Jew in Midwestern America and have a good education. Moved by nothing worse than a wish to be the author of my own life, I left an interesting office job and a blossoming career to pursue hedonism and kink. I am not trafficked or coerced, and my earnings, after tax, are enough to pay the bills. I’m also lucky to live in the south west of England, a region that is home to a vibrant kink scene. Living and working here, I’ve made friends who step into and out of sex work as casually as they might pick up a second job as a barista.”

The first and perhaps most obvious question to raise is whether such an esoteric and exceptional background is really an appropriate position to make generalisations about the realities of sex-work including those who have to sell sex more by necessity rather than a desire to be the authors of their own lives. Since her activities don't include intercourse but merely the laying on of hands (cuffs, or whips as well I suppose) would she not be better off making common cause with physiotherapists and masseuses? Perhaps the problem here is the governments own guidance which defines sex-work as anything involving "sexual stimulation"; a definition that hardly seems practicable and certainly not enough to rule out including masseuses and lord knows whatever imaginative simulative strategies Magpie's "kink" community might come up with. But in any case let us take it as given that the claim being made is that the sale of intercourse is work like any other. Given the recent arguments over government workfare programmes is such a conflation really desirable? Could we not imagine a situation where accepting such work becomes compulsory and linked to the provision of benefits? The only thing preventing this might be singling out this work as a special case that jobseekers are permitted to refuse. But that would hardly be consistent with treating the provision of sex as just another kind of work. Since the government seems to have no problems coercing jobseekers into the most unpleasant roles, often on minimum wage with no thought to the persons skills or ambitions I see no reason once the distinction is removed that sex-work would not be used in a similar way. The rosy picture of carnal entrepreneurialism that the author paints would surely not materialise for the majority of working people whose situation would no doubt be more precarious than those with the privilege to "step into and out of sex work as casually as they might pick up a second job as a barista".

Perhaps then I'm looking at this the wrong way. The point of the author's intervention has been to make a case against the moralism around different sexual lifestyles. The normalising of sex-work into work in general is then a possible strategy by which those lifestyles might themselves be drawn into the norm. By norm I mean simply that they would be less likely to be singled out for discrimination. I am dubious however about the claim that the mainstreaming of alternative sexual lifestyles would really have any effect on harassment particularly of women. As Magpie herself says "Sex work can certainly be full of harassment, stereotyping and objectification. Unfortunately, so can being a till clerk at Tesco." Here's another equivalence; life is full of harassment, why single out sex workers experiences as being particularly worse than any other, this is just moralism. Although in the August article she is more specific and seems to make a distinction  "I've worked in offices, kitchens and shops, and have encountered my share of sexism in the workplace. In my experience, none of these jobs can compare remotely to the barrage of sexist garbage I encounter daily when I do my job".

If it is the case that harassment, stereotyping and objectification are rife in the workplace, and indeed they are certainly rife in the mainstream use of sex in its white, heterosexual guise then why would normalising sex-work which by the author's estimation is the locus of even more abuse have a net positive effect on the experience of women and "sexual minorities"? Can we not imagine that normalising the idea that an exchange of cash entitles a person to the direct use of another person's body might serve to reinforce exploitation rather than combat it? It would only be a very vulgar Marxist who could fail to see the distinction between selling ones labour time and selling one's body. Choice, a deeply loaded term is the unstated presupposition behind Magpie's arguments. She is a person who clearly has a lot of choice; she could have done a regular job, indeed she had a blossoming career, but gave it up to provide services to the BDSM community. She is in short someone with power over her life, and, I expect, a fairly strong safety net to fall back on. What she fails to recognise is that despite what the neo-liberal rhetoric of choice would have you believe, the experience of work for the most poorest, for the young desperate for any chance of a job, and indeed for an increasing proportion of the middle class, is one of precariousness and distinct lack of choice.

Why then would the Guardian see fit to give time to these arguments? Why has sex as work become a viable equation despite the reality of work in post crash Britain? Perhaps the fact that sex-work appears “as a way to make ends meet", and a “way to avoid the degradation and harsh conditions of today’s zero-hours contracts wasteland” is not because young people have suddenly discovered a hitherto untapped world of freelance employment previously obscured by bourgeois moralism; but rather due to the desperate situation of a generation denied access to even the most menial positions in the regular economy, thrown on the scrapheap, and led into the waiting arms of the sex industry.

2.
There are I think broader issues raised by these three articles that deserve some attention. The question we should perhaps be asking is not what are the benefits of treating sex as work but rather what ensemble of conditions obtain such that sexual relations are increasingly being situated within a codified field of exchange? You might think that the good old Marxist criticism of relations between people becoming relations between things, and of the profanation and commodification of human experience might give the Mistress and her ISN supporters pause. But instead this basic component of the traditional Marxist ethos has entirely passed them by. Instead they seem content to endorse elements lifted straight from the neo-liberal mindset in the vague hope that it might improve the lot of a minority of sex workers, or at least render middle class fetishes (including those that deploy racial stereotypes, see here.) more socially acceptable.

Marx's view on the effects of the exchange relation are clear. In an early work critiquing James Mill's Elements of Political Economy he takes aim at the classical economic view of human nature as homo economicus, the rational self-interested actor for whom relations of exchange are a true realisation of social existence. As is well known Marx takes these relations not as natural or immutable but rather only one stage in a historical process of socio-economic development leading to an eventual reconciliation with humanity's true 'species being'. Indeed he argues such relations rather than bringing people into a true community serve to reinforce forms of sociality based on deception, mistrust and exploitation as each party is forced to alienate their private property for the benefit of receiving an equivalent amount (goods or money) for the satisfaction of a necessity or need. "Thus exchange or barter is the social species activity, the community, social commerce and integration of man within private property, and for that reason it is the external, alienated species activity. It appears as barter just because of this. By the same token it is the very antithesis of a social relationship" (Marx Early Writings, Penguin edition 1992, p267).

Now Marx wasn't talking here about sex-work but I think we can certainly see how the basic premise of bringing the satisfaction of needs into equivalence through exchange of private property might apply to it. The punter (for this is the correct term) exchanges money for the provision of services, services which before they were brought into the field of exchange had no exchange value at all. What price on a caress, a kiss, or any other act? But once these activities are brought into a market with others who also seek to exchange their services for money a basic price is soon established "by social configurations alien to the worker". Here we can I think see how Marx's idea about the alienation of our activity might apply to sex work. In the exchange relation my activity is given a value external to my determination by forces beyond my control. And my needs, insofar as they appear as having a certain monetary value compel me to sell my activity to a certain degree and according to another's demand. For sex-work this implies an even more alienated existence than Marx could imagine, for in this activity my own body appears as exchange value and the access I afford the punter for a certain length of time to perform particular acts appears as the condition for my continued survival. In a very literal sense I have self ownership only insofar as I sell myself as property. Both for the punter and the service provider (more on this term later), money as universal equivalent thus comes to represent the material reality of our most intimate human experiences. "Money represents a total indifference both to the nature of the material, to the specific nature of private property and the personality of the owner of private property". Activity that would otherwise occur in a relation of open, sensuous, albeit awkward interaction is now mediated thoroughly through the universal equivalent. "In money the unfettered dominion of the estranged thing over man becomes manifest" (Ibid p270).

We can see here how the codification of sexuality into neatly priced units plays into the hands of neo-liberal theories of human capital and entrepreneurial society . Monetize your hotness! is the clarion call I have heard from these quarters, and even sections nominally on the left. Take the references to sex-work out of Mistress Magpie's articles and they could well be a paean to the ethos of the modern entrepreneur, negotiating the world of precarious work and uncertain futures with a combination of pragmatism and pioneering spirit.

Her use of terms such as fetish and "kink" as if they were natural and immutable categories of human experience is similarly problematic. She appears oblivious to their legacy as products of late 19th and early 20th century psychopathology; the same psychopathology that is which while diagnosing the pervert and sexual deviant simultaneously served to raised other practices to the status of the norm. Liberalised under our regime of permissiveness these categories maintain their function of normalising, distinguishing, and ossifying sexual experiences into useful demarcations for professionals, experts and industries of all kinds. It is worth noting that the alternative status of some lifestyles which constitutes the need for niche service providers like the author are only sustained by the notion that there is a "vanilla" sex world against which it sets itself as "alternative". If the "moralistic" world of sexual relations were to be rendered inoperative and people able to negotiate their way more or less autonomously sans readymade notions of mainstream and alternative practices, then the Mistress may find herself out of a job.

Her arguments also exhibit a modern commonplace in conflating identity and lifestyle. To do or at least to desire a thing is to be a thing. That our desires and thus the identity that we are encouraged to take up may be open to external influence and coercion never occurs to the author. Despite the reams of literature on how capitalist consumer society functions through the excitation and manipulation of desires she talks about "kink" and BDSM as if they were imprinted on our DNA. Capitalism's drive to continual expansion elicits daily the production of new commodities and concomitant consumer subjectivities to buy them up. The increasing expansion of capitalism into supplying products aimed at our sexuality, from the alternative shops of Camden and Soho, to high street chains like Ann Summers, to say nothing of the trade done on the internet is testament to this fact. In all cases the advertising mantra is the same, that the market will supply you with tailor made satisfaction to your very singular and authentic desires. However, like anything at the frontline of consumerism the market does more to create rather than satisfy those desires. Capitalism never ceases to supply new product, new experiences, new potential subjectivities, and pass them off as "basic human needs". But here the author reveals another contradiction in her position. Despite her equating desire and identity she argues for a split between the subject of desire and the political subject.

" Your sexual desires need not reflect your politics, certainly not in a crude or unmediated way. You can be the most effective, learned, dedicated socialist and campaigner in the world, and get turned on by the idea of dominating someone, getting dominated, watching giant women step on helium balloons, etc. You can even have a violent rape fantasy, or be into getting humiliated and being called names that, outside a context of conscious, negotiated and ongoing consent, would be completely unacceptable."

Surely though if we are to believe that our desires represent an authentic truth of our identity, then the person paying to have their violent rape fantasy safely satisfied by experienced professionals like the Mistress is just as they appear, a potential rapist. The degree of double think then required to square the circle of a group that ostensibly owe their existence to resisting "rape culture" now excusing the existence and satisfaction of rape fantasy within a form of mutual exchange is staggering. Are we to understand then that if the SWP member accused of rape had instead just been found to be visiting sex workers for the satisfaction of his rape fantasies then his feminist credentials would have remained intact? Witness also the liberal commonplace that consent is sufficient to neutralise otherwise deleterious social ills. The logic of choice and consent is ruthlessly criticised by the left when it comes to the labour market. Why then in the case of sexual relations does it take on a virtuous character, especially when the author is arguing for subsuming sexual relations into work relations?

3.
In fact sex-work is already taking on many characteristics of the regular market economy. Websites like ukpunting.com offer a space for men to share experiences, rate women, and discuss the state of punting (the male use of prostitutes) in the UK and other countries. While sites such as Adultwork provide searchable listings for prostitutes which include rates, services offered and contact details as if you were looking for a plumber on Yell.com.  If you can bring yourself to wade through a few threads from the former you will notice that many of the patrons refer to "service providers" and discuss their transactions in a way one might talk about visiting any other independent trader. The attitudes however towards the women involved is more often than not totally contemptuous, bordering on the cruel. Variations on “I’ve paid my money, she should do what I want the stupid cunt” appear frequently as well as the general premise that only stupid poor girls end up in the business of selling their bodies, and as such deserve the treatment they get. Indeed it is the contractual aspect of the interaction that forms the background to much of the abusive rhetoric. The exchange of cash in contradiction to the old Lockean dictum on self-ownership is sufficient to form a claim over the person body and soul. From this perspective a demand for professionalism amounts to complying with all requests no matter how degrading; the customer is always right. In another form the proliferation of professional sugar daddy services further normalises the idea of women’s bodies as sources of "erotic capital" to sell to the highest bidder. Again it is the same entrepreneurial ideology that animates the justifications, sometimes offset with talk of funding education or other venerable work on the self.

None of this can be disengaged from the paradigm of sex as work presented by the pornographic industry and the continual inroads it is making into mainstream media. Only this week were members of that same ISN which published Mistress Magpie's writing promoting a guide to sexual ethics and consent (again!) written by porn performer Stoya in the New Statesman thus further re-enforcing the idea that the life of the professional provider of sexual services to the market is the appropriate model from which to formulate the norm for all humanity. All this taken together is sufficient to illustrate that the conditions for legitimating sex into the regular economy are multiple and ongoing, and that Magpie's intervention is only one rather late and isolated symptom of this more general trend.

Perhaps it is the Marxist left's fetishisation of organised labour as a panacea for all ills which is at fault here. Not from labour but through labour must sex workers be liberated! But I rather think that along with the more general trends in society mentioned above this strange combination of liberation and regulation which is animating the ever more clamorous discussions in some section of the left is a symptom of their own recent scandals. Perhaps the notion of a transparent, codified, and regulated form of sexual relations, subsumed into labour, and which like other forms of work might have the edge taken off by a bit of collective bargaining and proper HR procedures seems attractive to a group of activists stung by the effects of wild and unregulated sexual relations on their former parties. Perhaps also they suffer from being in the unenviable position of trying to oppose "moralism" while simultaneously trying to defend the position that people have obligations in their conduct towards each other in what should otherwise be private life. Could it thus be that in opposing the “moralists” they have aligned themselves unwittingly with some of the darkest forces of late capitalism, and in doing so abandoned resistance to the commodification of everyday life?

Let's finish by considering the picture of self authorship presented by Mistress Magpie. If in the field of exchange the product of my labour becomes an alien thing for anothers use, and in the paradigm of sex as work that same product is simultaneously myself as service provider and liberated sexual entrepreneur, producing myself in the act of selling myself, then the only result can be a thoroughly depleted subjectivity dissolved into the desires of others, or as Marx put it more precisely: "In the object I produce my labour can only become manifest as what it is. It cannot appear to be what it is not. It therefore becomes manifest only as the objective, sensuous, perceived and hence quite indubitable expression of my self-loss and my impotence". (Ibid p278)

Perhaps then "capitalist moralism" (another confabulated monster?) is less of a danger than the acceptance of capitalist permissiveness, even if it is motivated by a desire to reduce harm.

(Addendum)
As I write it turns out that the controversy generated by Magpie's articles has yielded a micro split from the above mentioned ISN with the author followed by her main supporter Richard Seymour and a few others picking up their ball (and chain) and going home. Quite possibly one of the most silly splits in the increasingly pantomime recent history of the British left. Reports are that they had planned to form a "platform" in order to argue their position on alternative sexual practices (including a defence of the above mentioned "race play") but turns out that their comrades had rather had their fill of the whole thing. No sects please we're British!