Capitalist Death Drives and Coin Test China High-Speed Rail Videos / DNA 15

This book considers two modalities through which vision and motion have converged against the crises of late capitalism. The first is the dashcam recording that has proliferated in recent years, as seen in the accumulation of crash footage on the internet, captured by cameras installed on dashboards. The second is the Coin Test China High-Speed Rail video, which shows a standing coin being balanced on the window ledge of one of China’s many high-speed trains to test the train’s stability. Reading these two optical-motor schemata against each other, the essay examines the means by which the discontents of late capitalism become observable, and by extension, are imagined as governable, not least with recourse to the racialization of bodies that have been set in motion by capitalism’s death drive.