Dealing with Dead Labor: Fighting Debt in C – Control

• In Event: Visualizing Labor in East Asia

Abstract

In Kenji Nakamura’s animated series C-Control, the protagonist Kimimaro makes a Faustian deal when he accepts a large sum of money in exchange for his future. In order to keep his money and his future, he must compete in weekly games, or “deals,” within an alternate reality known as the Financial District. These deals involve a form of wagering in which Kimimaro must summon his “assets,” creatures with various powers, to fight along side him against his competitors. Each hit and the damage inflicted or suffered corresponds to an increase or decrease in money. The Financial District grows and thrives on contestants’ futures, their collateral, as well as the losses of the contestants who fight within it.
Through the deal that Kimimaro makes and his battles against debt, C-Control presents in visual terms the relationship between dead and living labor central to the accumulation of capital. Kimimaro’s deal is a speculative financial transaction based on leveraging a debt in order to summon or raise assets, which ultimately leads to his further indebtedness and the growth or collapse of the Financial District. This relationship between Kimimaro and the Financial District reflects the relationship between dead and living labor under finance capitalism, a relationship in which dead labor lives, to use Marx’s metaphor, “only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Ultimately, this paper argues, C-Control dramatizes the interconnectedness between labor and the systems that exploit it in the contemporary East Asian and global economy.

Author

• Patrick Noonan, Northwestern University