One covers the organs of production and reproduction. Why? In the course of sexual relations we have this tendency to swing from sensations of extreme desire to extreme repulsion depending on the observer and the object of observation in question, sensations which are modulated and transformed through our social relations, and so we cover up various portions of the body to avoid these disruptive oscillations altogether.
This isn't to say everyone has this reaction, but that a vast majority of the population (as constituted culturally at this particular historical juncture) behaves this way, and so in the interest of a wide social stability we choose to keep certain areas covered, though we may allow skin to show here and there, to skillfully open the valves of desire so to speak - but not too much!
I began the discussion like this because of this odd analogous tendency in our industrial nature to commit a similar behavior repeatedly, a behavior which isn't always easy to pin down.
Built within the industrial nature of capital is a fundamental contradiction, perhaps grasped by many, but not always explicitly stated. The primary animating ethos, the primary motivation driving the head of capital and all of those who serve capital, is to expand and accumulate as an individual, unique and distinguished from the productive masses.
But through these powerful motivational forces of production, capital achieves its desired aim: expansion and amplification, a growing human body whose demands grow with its power. If one gazes over the architecture, the productive institutions, the political regulatory apparatus, mass distributed goods, one finds that everything is built to handle volume.
The shape that a good or service must take to be mass distributed reflects the dictates set by volume: goods and services must be stripped of all personalized idiosyncrasies, streamlined, standardized, to be accepted by the greatest mass possible. Like the classic popular student archetype: an object or individual must take on the traits required at the necessary times to appeal to as great a number as possible, so that the individual is obliterated. That is besides the fact that production at high volume requires this streamlining, for reasons of production cost and process.
A very strange thing happens: a great population explosion paradoxically shrinks from itself. Its constituents refuse to acknowledge themselves as numerous and interchangeable, as their motivational ideations posit themselves as unique and irreplaceable. Life in its abundance becomes cheap and disposable: whole swaths of life can be tossed aside if they fail to fulfill the narrow, selfish aims of the ruling class. Life can be picked through, like one searching for the better apples in a pile.
Whole cities rise through the dictates of production, and then are abandoned to languish.
This is a nature that induces great horror, so that it must conceal itself with relentless, vivid imagery. The productive body becomes compartmentalized, within which function fields of manipulation to conceal the productive regions of the body from itself, and even from its relations to the outer world. Fearing the loss of productive power when the body realizes it is but dust, the ruling class peppers the populace with propagandistic, individualistic imagery: one is unique, one is a self, one stands apart, powerful! Powerful as long as one consumes, and produces.
And what of the organs of production themselves? What of the transportation networks that feed and are fed by them? Where they are not concealed by simply living within them, breathing through them, they are to be sheathed and hidden away. One cannot see the systems of mass production, ever more so the more they bend towards organic life. Here we have that partial glimpse mentioned above: we are given brief views of the manufacturing apparatus as it produces widgets and other lifeless things. We see the machines working and we remark, "Ah! What a powerful industrial nature we have!"
But the closer the machines approach living systems, the more rigorously they are concealed. We must not see the industrial food systems, and to witness factory farming is to see horrific things. And we must not see the workers themselves and the way they live, or if we are one of them, we do our business and then retreat home, the workday a blur, and become immersed in images that celebrate our selves. One must believe one is living a unique and spectacular life with this speedy, shiny new car, and not simply another cell swimming down vast, vein-like transportation networks. One is to navigate traffic grids with personal skill: one is not sucked through as the grid valves open and move traffic streams. And so on. The engines of production must not falter!
How exactly does capital take this shape? One thinks of the tremendous social pressures associated with an expanding universal mass; one pictures a great thunderhead erupting into the sky, exploding, forced upwards, eventually to discharge itself through a physical transformation and fall back to the earth.
