No Way Home: Primitive Accumulation in the Field of Vision

This article renegotiates the problem of the visibility of capital through a conceptual analogy between the concept of primitive accumulation (ursprüngliche Akkumulation) in Marx and the Lacanian account of foreclosure (forclusion). To this end, it examines the evolution of the Chinese New Year film (hesuipian), a holiday film genre in Sinophone territories, through the lens of a (trans-)national experience: the annual mass migration of workers and students trying to go home for Lunar New Year. The two films discussed in the article show that the capitalist model of development contains an irreconcilable contradiction: labor power comes from somewhere, but the human bearers of this essential commodity cannot access its point of origin. Therefore, plotting the history of the subject and the origin of capital together must inform the critical task that Frederic Jameson calls “cognitive mapping.” Through a comparison of Fan Lixin's The Last Train Home (2009) and Tsui Hark's Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014), this article argues that the vicissitudes of the homebound journey in the Chinese New Year film allegorize the impossible desire to return to the place of origin destroyed by capitalist globalization. Whereas the critical documentary makes visible the trauma of primitive accumulation, the spectacle of history in the blockbuster action film enacts a kind of foreclosure whereby the repressed economic real reappears in the register of the political imaginary.