2- Just what kind of argument is it? As with all fashionable concepts, the Anthropocene has been sub- ject to a wide spectrum of interpretations.2 But one is dominant. This one tells us that the origins of modern world are to be found in England, right around the dawn of the nineteenth century (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000; Crutzen, 2002; Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill, 2007; Steffen, et al, 2011a, 2011b; Chakrabarty, 2009; The Economist, 2011a, 2011b). The motive force behind this epoch- al shift? In two words: coal and steam. The driving force behind coal and steam? Not class. Not capital. Not imperialism. Not even culture. But... you guessed it, the Anthropos: humanity as an undifferentiated whole.
The Anthropocene makes for an easy story. Easy, because it does not challenge the naturalized ine-
qualities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and produc-
tion. It is an easy story to tell because it does not ask us to think about these relations at all.The mosaic of human activity in the web of life is reduced to an abstract humanity as homogenous acting
unit.
At the same time, Anthropocene scholars cannot
escape the conclusion that humans, too, are a “geophysical force” – the singular is important here –
that operates within nature (Steffen, et al., 2011b, 741).
There are “human constructions” and “natural” constructions (Zalasiewicz, et al., 2011b: 837) – even as humans are recognized as a geophysical force.
Holism in philosophy, dualism in practice. This is the generalized condition of green thought today.
3-The two principal framing devices – consequences determine periodization, the Anthropos as the driver of these consequences – stem from a philosophical position that we may call Cartesian dualism
4- This dualism leads Anthropocene advocates to construct the historical period since 1800 on an arithmetic basis: “human activity plus significant biospheric change = the Anthro- pocene.” In this, too, the Anthropocene perspective incorporates the common sense of green arithmetic: “society plus nature equals environmental studies.”
There are “human constructions” and “natural” constructions (Zalasiewicz, et al., 2011b: 837) – even as humans are recognized as a geophysical force.
Holism in philosophy, dualism in practice. This is the generalized condition of green thought today.
3-The two principal framing devices – consequences determine periodization, the Anthropos as the driver of these consequences – stem from a philosophical position that we may call Cartesian dualism
4- This dualism leads Anthropocene advocates to construct the historical period since 1800 on an arithmetic basis: “human activity plus significant biospheric change = the Anthro- pocene.” In this, too, the Anthropocene perspective incorporates the common sense of green arithmetic: “society plus nature equals environmental studies.”
Human activity not only produces biospheric change, but relations between humans are them-
selves produced by nature.
The dominant Anthropocene argument obscures the actually existing relations through which women and men make history with the rest of nature: the relations of power, (re)production, and wealth in the web of life.
The dominant Anthropocene argument obscures the actually existing relations through which women and men make history with the rest of nature: the relations of power, (re)production, and wealth in the web of life.
If we shift our historical method from one that
unduly prioritizes environmental consequences to one that prioritizes the relational/consequential
nexus – viewing differentiated and geographically-specific “modes of humanity” as products and producers in the web of life6 – a very different view of the Anthropocene problem comes into focus.
5-To locate the origins of the modern world with the rise of capitalist civilization after 1450, with its audacious strategies of global conquest, endless commodification, and relentless rationalization, is to prioritize the transcendence of the relations of power, knowledge, and capital that have made – and are now unmaking – the modern world as we have known it.
From DG on strata > emphasize on the complexity of relation
6-Are we really living in the Anthropocene, with its return to a curiously Eurocentric vista of humanity, and its reliance on well-worn notions of resource- and technological-determinism? Or are we living in the Capitalocene, the historical era shaped by relations privileging the endless accumulation of capital?
From Guattari, 3 Ecologies > questioning the necessity of thinking in terms of the ethics-political and aesthetic
67-A new ecosophy, at once applied and theoretical, ethico- political and aesthetic, would have to move away from the old forms of political, religious and associative commitment . . . Rather than being a discipline of refolding on interiority, or a
5-To locate the origins of the modern world with the rise of capitalist civilization after 1450, with its audacious strategies of global conquest, endless commodification, and relentless rationalization, is to prioritize the transcendence of the relations of power, knowledge, and capital that have made – and are now unmaking – the modern world as we have known it.
From DG on strata > emphasize on the complexity of relation
49 - To begin with, a stratum does indeed have a unity of composition, which is what allows it to be called a stratum: molecular materials, substantial ele- ments, and formal relations or traits. Materials are not the same as the unformed matter of the plane of consistency; they are already stratified, and come from "substrata." But of course substrata should not be thought of only as substrata: in particular, their organization is no less complex than, nor is it inferior to, that of the strata; we should be on our guard against any kind of ridiculous cosmic evolutionism. The materials fur- nished by a substratum are no doubt simpler than the compounds of a stra- tum, but their level of organization in the substratum is no lower than that of the stratum itself. The difference between materials and substantial ele- ments is one of organization; there is a change in organization, not an augmentation. The materials furnished by the substratum constitute an exterior milieu for the elements and compounds of the stratum under consideration, but they are not exterior to the stratum. The elements and com- pounds constitute an interior of the stratum, just as the materials constitute an exterior of the stratum; both belong to the stratum, the latter because they are materials that have been furnished to the stratum and selected for it, the former because they are formed from the materials. Once again, this exterior and interior are relative; they exist only through their exchanges and therefore only by virtue of the stratum responsible for the relation between them.
6-Are we really living in the Anthropocene, with its return to a curiously Eurocentric vista of humanity, and its reliance on well-worn notions of resource- and technological-determinism? Or are we living in the Capitalocene, the historical era shaped by relations privileging the endless accumulation of capital?
From Guattari, 3 Ecologies > questioning the necessity of thinking in terms of the ethics-political and aesthetic
67-A new ecosophy, at once applied and theoretical, ethico- political and aesthetic, would have to move away from the old forms of political, religious and associative commitment . . . Rather than being a discipline of refolding on interiority, or a
68>simple renewal of
earlier forms of 'militancy', it will be a multi- faceted movement, deployïng
agencies [instances] and disposi- tives that will simultaneously analyse
and produce subjectivity. A collective and individual subjectivity that
completely exceeds the limits of individualization, stagnation, identificatory
dosure, and will instead open itself up on aIl sides to the socius, but also to
the machinic Phylum, to techno-scientific Universes of reference, to aesthetic
worlds, as weIl as to a new 'pre-personal' understanding of time, of the body,
of sexuality.
6- What the
more sophisticated versions of the “coal and capitalism” argument appreciate is that the long 19th
century transition in the relations of power and production was one that went beyond relations be-
tween humans; it also implied a transition in humanity’s relation with the rest of nature (e.g. Huber,
2008; Malm, 2013).
My position is that the critique of Nature/Society dualisms is not only relevant to historical analysis, but that the history of capitalism cannot be explained in terms of a ping-pong of nature-society interaction.
From Whitehead, Nature Alive > focusing on the necessity of getting beyond the idea of nature as "simple location"
205- The doctrine that I am maintaining is that neither physical nature nor life can be understood unless we fuse them together as essential factors in the composition of 'really real' things whose interconnections and individual characters constitute the universe.
207- It is nonsense to conceive of nature as a static fact, even for an instant devoid of duration. There is no nature apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal duration. This is the reason why the notion of an instant of time, conceived as a primary simple fact, is nonsense.
6-This coherence is realized and reproduced through definite rules of reproduction – of power, of capital, of production. For capitalist civilization, these rules embody a value relation, quite literally determining what counts as valuable and what does not.7
My position is that the critique of Nature/Society dualisms is not only relevant to historical analysis, but that the history of capitalism cannot be explained in terms of a ping-pong of nature-society interaction.
From Whitehead, Nature Alive > focusing on the necessity of getting beyond the idea of nature as "simple location"
205- The doctrine that I am maintaining is that neither physical nature nor life can be understood unless we fuse them together as essential factors in the composition of 'really real' things whose interconnections and individual characters constitute the universe.
207- It is nonsense to conceive of nature as a static fact, even for an instant devoid of duration. There is no nature apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal duration. This is the reason why the notion of an instant of time, conceived as a primary simple fact, is nonsense.
6-This coherence is realized and reproduced through definite rules of reproduction – of power, of capital, of production. For capitalist civilization, these rules embody a value relation, quite literally determining what counts as valuable and what does not.7
I simply wish to highlight that
capitalism’s “law of value” – understood more expansively than for Marx, but in the spirit of Marx’s
method (Marx, 1973; Hopkins, 1982; Sayer, 1987) – produced an exceedingly peculiar form of
wealth. This is of course capital as value-in-motion, whose substance is abstract social labor. Im-
portantly, abstract social labor may be accumulated only through a far-flung repertoire of imperialist
enclosure and appropriation of nature’s “free gifts” in service to commodity production (Burkett,
1999; Moore, 2011a). Capital is value-in-motion is value-in-nature. Value is a bundled relation of
human and extra-human natures (e.g. Marx, 1977: 283; Burkett, 1999).
7- The mistake is to see capitalism as defined by wage-labor, any more than it defined by the world market. Rather the crucial question turns on the historical connections between wage-work and its necessary conditions of expanded reproduction. These conditions depend on massive contributions of unpaid work, out- side the commodity system but necessary to its generalization. Sometimes this is called the domain of social reproduction (e.g. Bakker and Gill, 2003), although it is here that the adjective “social” seems especially unsuitable – where does the “social” moment of raising children end, and the “biological” moment begin?
Work, in what follows, signifies the historically-grounded forms of geo- and bio-physical activity as they “bundle” with humanity’s distinctive forms of sociality and embodied thought (e.g. White, 1995).
Recall the importance of affect (re embodied thought). From Massumi's Power at the End of the Economy.
Value operates
through a dialectic of exploitation and appropriation that illuminates capitalism’s peculiar relation
with, and within, nature.
>> this question of value and valuation is at the heart of each reading and of each film - what other forms of value can be activated, potentialized? The 3 Ecologies is an attempt to touch on this question of value, but it is also very much the force of the Whitehead.
>> this question of value and valuation is at the heart of each reading and of each film - what other forms of value can be activated, potentialized? The 3 Ecologies is an attempt to touch on this question of value, but it is also very much the force of the Whitehead.
232 Philosophy begins in wonder. And,
at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
7- The mistake is to see capitalism as defined by wage-labor, any more than it defined by the world market. Rather the crucial question turns on the historical connections between wage-work and its necessary conditions of expanded reproduction. These conditions depend on massive contributions of unpaid work, out- side the commodity system but necessary to its generalization. Sometimes this is called the domain of social reproduction (e.g. Bakker and Gill, 2003), although it is here that the adjective “social” seems especially unsuitable – where does the “social” moment of raising children end, and the “biological” moment begin?
Work, in what follows, signifies the historically-grounded forms of geo- and bio-physical activity as they “bundle” with humanity’s distinctive forms of sociality and embodied thought (e.g. White, 1995).
Recall the importance of affect (re embodied thought). From Massumi's Power at the End of the Economy.
106-The autonomy of affect is its
participation in the virtual: potential remaindered by the past, le in
reserve for the future. Its autonomy is its openness. Its openness is to the
escape hatch of its own futurity.
108-That a ective quality
is all there is to the world in that instant. It takes over life, lls the
world, for an immeasurable instant of shock. Microperception is this purely a
ective rebeginning of the world. Bare Activity. The world in which we live
is literally made of these reinau- gural microperceptions, cutting in, cueing
emergence, priming capaci- ties.
Politics, approached affectively,
is an art of emitting the interruptive signs, triggering the cues, that attune
bodies while activat- ing their capacities di erentially. A ective politics is
inductive. Bodies can be inducted into, or attuned to, certain regions of
tendency, futurity, and potential.
109-The event can’t be
fully predetermined. It will be as it happens. For there to be uniformity of
response, other fac- tors must have been active to prechannel tendencies.
This means that there are
potential alter-politics at the collectively in- braced heart of every
situation, even the most successfully conformist in its mode of attunement. You
can return to that reservoir of real but un- expressed potential, and recue it.
This would be a politics of microperception: a micropolitics.
7- These broadly-entropic transitions allow us to highlight the self-
consuming character of the capital relation, which in any given historical configuration tends to burn
through its necessary biophysical conditions (included workers) and in so doing jack up the organic
composition of capital (Marx, 1977: 377-380; Luxemburg, 1913: 328-427).
8-Such post-Cartesian readings of capitalism’s “general laws” – or other propositions regarding the longue durée movements and moments of the capitalist world-ecology – opens up the possibility of moving from the “environmental” consequences of “social” processes to the socio-ecological con- stitution of Anthropogenic drivers themselves.
>> recall Lyell here on deep time.
8- Too often, the environment leads an unduly narrow existence, as a zone of consequences, impacts, and conditions.
Green scholars study the metabolism of globalization, industrialization, and agrarian change, rather than studying globalization, industrialization and agrarian change as metabolisms, as ways of organizing nature.
>> think of the subtle ways in which each of the films we watched challenges this "green" approach
8- From this standpoint, the Anthropocene argument is not only philosophically and theoretically problematic – viewing humans as separate from nature and erasing capitalism from the equation – it also offers an unduly narrow conceptualization of historical time. This plays out at two levels. One is an awkward conflation of geological notions of time with the periodization of historical change. The other is the Anthropocene’s recuperation of an older historiographical vista which saw the “real” changes of “real” modernity beginning in the later 18th century.
11-This means that capital and power – and countless other strategic relations – do not act upon nature, but develop through the web of life. Crises are turning points of world-historical processes – accumulation, imperialism, industrialization, and so forth – that are neither social nor environmental in the usual sense, but rather bundles of human and extra-human natures, materially practiced and symbolically enabled. In world-ecological perspective, nature stands as the relation of the whole. Humans live as one specifically-endowed (but not special) environment-making species within the web of life.
Consider the more-than human. Think through Whitehead again.
(207) But even yet we have not exhausted the notion of creation which is essential to the understanding of nature. We must add yet another character to our description of life. This missing characteristic is 'aim'. By this term 'aim' is meant the exclusion of the boundless wealth of alternative
11- The challenges involved in translating the philosophical premise of humanity-in-nature into historical methods and narrative strategies are considerable.Certainly, a core problem has been the difficulty in forging a conceptual vocabulary that grasps “society” and “nature” as a singular ontological
domain, such that all human activity is simultaneously producer and product of the web of life.
Guattari's project as a counter to this statement.
12-Capitalism, as project, emerges through a world-praxis that creates external natures as objects to be mapped, quantified, and regulated so that they may service capital’s insatiable demands for cheap nature. At the same time, as process, capitalism emerges and develops through the web of life; nature is at once internal and external.
8-Such post-Cartesian readings of capitalism’s “general laws” – or other propositions regarding the longue durée movements and moments of the capitalist world-ecology – opens up the possibility of moving from the “environmental” consequences of “social” processes to the socio-ecological con- stitution of Anthropogenic drivers themselves.
>> recall Lyell here on deep time.
8- Too often, the environment leads an unduly narrow existence, as a zone of consequences, impacts, and conditions.
Green scholars study the metabolism of globalization, industrialization, and agrarian change, rather than studying globalization, industrialization and agrarian change as metabolisms, as ways of organizing nature.
>> think of the subtle ways in which each of the films we watched challenges this "green" approach
8- From this standpoint, the Anthropocene argument is not only philosophically and theoretically problematic – viewing humans as separate from nature and erasing capitalism from the equation – it also offers an unduly narrow conceptualization of historical time. This plays out at two levels. One is an awkward conflation of geological notions of time with the periodization of historical change. The other is the Anthropocene’s recuperation of an older historiographical vista which saw the “real” changes of “real” modernity beginning in the later 18th century.
11-This means that capital and power – and countless other strategic relations – do not act upon nature, but develop through the web of life. Crises are turning points of world-historical processes – accumulation, imperialism, industrialization, and so forth – that are neither social nor environmental in the usual sense, but rather bundles of human and extra-human natures, materially practiced and symbolically enabled. In world-ecological perspective, nature stands as the relation of the whole. Humans live as one specifically-endowed (but not special) environment-making species within the web of life.
Consider the more-than human. Think through Whitehead again.
(207) But even yet we have not exhausted the notion of creation which is essential to the understanding of nature. We must add yet another character to our description of life. This missing characteristic is 'aim'. By this term 'aim' is meant the exclusion of the boundless wealth of alternative
(208) potentiality, and the inclusion of that
definite factor of novelty which constitutes the selected way of entertaining
those data in that process of unification. The aim is at that complex of
feeling which is the enjoyment of those data in that way. 'That way of
enjoyment' is selected from the boundless wealth of alternatives. It has been
aimed at for actualization in that process.
227- We are in the world and the world
is in us. Our immediate occasion is in the society of occasions forming the
soul, and our soul is in our present occasion. The body is ours, and we are an
activity within our body. This fact of observation, vague but imperative, is
the foundation of the connexity of the world, and of the transmission of its
types of order.
228- I find myself as essentially a unity of
emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives,
decisions—all of them subjective reactions to the environment as active in my
nature. My unity—which is Descartes' 'I am'—is my process of shaping this welter
of material into a consistent pattern of feelings. The individual enjoyment is
what I am in my role of a natural activity, as I shape the activities of the
environment into a new creation, which is myself at this moment; and yet, as
being myself, it is a continuation of the antecedent world. If we stress the
role of the environment, this process is causation. If we stress the role of my
immediate pattern of active enjoyment, this process is self-creation. If we
stress the role of the conceptual anticipation of the future whose existence is
a necessity in the nature of the present, this process is the teleological aim
at some ideal in the future. This aim, however, is not really beyond the
present process. For the aim at the future is an enjoyment in the present. It
thus effectively conditions the immediate self-creation of the new creature.
Guattari's project as a counter to this statement.
49- It is to be
hoped that the development of the three types of ecological praxis
outlined here willlead to a reframing and a recomposition of the goals of the
emancipatory struggles. And let us hope that, in the context of the new 'deal'
of the relation between capital and human activity, ecologists, feminists,
antiracists, etc., will make it an immediate major objective to target the
modes of production of subjectivity, that is, of knowledge, culture,
sensibility and sociability that come under an incorporeal value system at the
root of the new productive assemblages.
Social ecology will have
to work towards rebuilding human relations at every level of the socius. It
should never lose sight of the fact that capitalist power has become
delocalized and
50>deterritorilized,
both in extension, by extending its influence over the whole social, economic
and culturallife of the planet, and in 'intension', by infiltrating the most
unconscious subjec- tive strata. In doing
this it is no longer possible to daim to be opposed to capitalist power only
from the outside, through trade unions and traditional politics. It
is equally imperative to confront capitalism's effects in the domain of
mental ecology in everyday life: individual, domestic, material, neighbourly,
creative or one's personal ethics. Rather than looking for a stupefying and
infantalizing consensus, it will be a question in the future of cultivating a dissensus
and the singular production of existence.
11- Elsewhere, I have tackled the problem with the concept of the oikeios, signifying the
creative, generative, and multi-layered relation of species and environment (2011a). The oikeios provides a way to move beyond the narrative trope of “the” environment (as object) in favor of environment-making (as process), at all turns a co-production of specifically bundled human and extra-human
natures (Moore, 2013a).
12-Capitalism, as project, emerges through a world-praxis that creates external natures as objects to be mapped, quantified, and regulated so that they may service capital’s insatiable demands for cheap nature. At the same time, as process, capitalism emerges and develops through the web of life; nature is at once internal and external.
Of course it all began with coal, says the
Anthropocene argument, because the consequences are measurable, and this is, after all, what
counts. The consequences of this approach – green thought’s consequentialist bias – are more sig-
nificant than commonly recognized. Kingsnorth puts this well:
My feeling is that the green movement has torpedoed itself with numbers. Its single-minded obsession with climate change, and its insistence on seeing this as an engineering challenge
My feeling is that the green movement has torpedoed itself with numbers. Its single-minded obsession with climate change, and its insistence on seeing this as an engineering challenge
13> must be overcome with technological solutions guided by the neutral gaze of Science,
has forced it into a ghetto from which it may never escape. Most greens in the mainstream
now spend their time arguing about whether they prefer windfarms to wave machines or nu-
clear power to carbon sequestration. They offer up remarkably confident predictions of what
will happen if we do or don’t do this or that, all based on mind-numbing numbers cherry-
picked from this or that ‘study’ as if the world were a giant spreadsheet which only needs to
be balanced correctly (2011).16
13-“Capital,” in these accounts, forms inde- pendently of the web of life, and intervenes in “nature” as an exogenous force, variously intruding in, and interrupting, a pre-given “traditional balance between humanity and nature” (Foster, 1994: 40). This view of capitalism as an exogenous rather than endogenous actor in relation to the web of life has the paradoxical effect of reducing nature to a substance that can be variously protected or destroyed (e.g. Martinez-Alier, 2002).
13-“Capital,” in these accounts, forms inde- pendently of the web of life, and intervenes in “nature” as an exogenous force, variously intruding in, and interrupting, a pre-given “traditional balance between humanity and nature” (Foster, 1994: 40). This view of capitalism as an exogenous rather than endogenous actor in relation to the web of life has the paradoxical effect of reducing nature to a substance that can be variously protected or destroyed (e.g. Martinez-Alier, 2002).
When push comes to shove, the philosophy of
humanity-in-nature gets pushed aside in favor of analytical practicality (compare Harvey, 1993 with
Harvey, 2003, 2005).17
14-It turns out that, as with pregnancy, one cannot be a little bit Cartesian. For nature is either abstract and external or historical and immanent to everything that humans do, including those large-scale and long-run patterns of power and production that we call civilizations, world-systems, modes of production, and so forth.
Return to the necessity of thinking through the associated milieu in DG
Let us be clear that the call for the relationality of humanity-in-nature does not deny the materiality of resources. (Moore, 2011a, 2011b). Far from it! The world-ecology alter- native argues that resources are relational and therefore historical.
14-It turns out that, as with pregnancy, one cannot be a little bit Cartesian. For nature is either abstract and external or historical and immanent to everything that humans do, including those large-scale and long-run patterns of power and production that we call civilizations, world-systems, modes of production, and so forth.
Return to the necessity of thinking through the associated milieu in DG
50-It would be a mistake to believe that
it is possible to isolate this unitary, central layer of the stratum, or to
grasp it in itself, by regression. In the first place, a stratum necessarily
goes from layer to layer, and from the very beginning. It already has several
layers. It goes from a center to a periphery, at the same time as the periphery
reacts back upon the center to form a new center in relation to a new
periphery. Flows constantly radiate outward, then turn back. There is an
outgrowth and multiplication of intermediate states, and this process is one of
the local conditions of the central ring (different concentrations, variations
that are tolerated below a certain threshold of identity). These intermediate
states present new figures of milieus or materials, as well as of elements and
compounds. They are inter- mediaries between the exterior milieu and the
interior element, substantial elements and their compounds, compounds and
substances, and between the different formed substances (substances of content
and substances of expression). We will use the term epistrata
for
these intermediaries and superpositions, these outgrowths, these levels.
14- Capitalism as a whole, I
wish to emphasize does not have an ecological regime, but is in its most fundamental historical a
sense a way of organizing nature. But this merely established a new set of questions around how
these specific regimes mark specific crystallizations of nature and wealth, tools and power.Let us be clear that the call for the relationality of humanity-in-nature does not deny the materiality of resources. (Moore, 2011a, 2011b). Far from it! The world-ecology alter- native argues that resources are relational and therefore historical.
14-Geology, in other words, co-produces power and production as it bundles
with (equally co-producing) human patterns of power and production – hence the re-bundling of
capitalist relations across the later 18th century North Atlantic as the energy regime shifted from
charcoal and peat to coal. Specific geological formations, under definite historical circumstances, can
become once object of human activity and subject of historical change. This allows us to see civiliza-
tions moving through, not around, the rest of nature.
From DG:
From DG:
55-Territorialities, then, are shot through with
lines of flight testifying to the presence within them of movements of
deterritorialization and reterritorialization.
14-Geology becomes geo-history through definite relations of power and production; these definite rela-
tions are geographical, which is to say they are not relations between humans alone. (Any geograph-
ical point of view unfolds from the premise that human activity is never ontologically prior to its
geographical conditions and consequences.)
From DG
15-Articulations of production and reproduction are mediated through the oikeios, especially its dialectic of organic life and inorganic environments (Birch and Cobb, 1981; Moore, 2013a).19
we can say that geology co-produces energy regimes as historically-specific bundles of relations; geology in this view, is at once subject and object.
But Nature plus Society does not add up. Perhaps most significantly, environmental determinisms, however partial or sophisticated they may be, leave intact the Cartesian order of things, in which society (humans without nature) and nature (environments without humans) interact rather than interpenetrate. The alternative, to see geology co-producing historical change through the oikeios, allows us to see energy regimes – even whole civilizations – moving through, not around, the rest of nature.
Material flows and their particularities do matter. But their historical significance is best understood through a relational rather than substantialist view of materiality, one in which the flows of resources, circuits of capital, and the struggles of classes and states form a dialectical whole.
DG on form:
21-In sum, because early capitalism’s technics – its crystalli- zation of tools and power, knowledge and production – were specifically organized to treat the appro- priation of global space as the basis for the accumulation of wealth in its specifically modern form: capital, the substance of which is abstract social labor.
The three revolutions we have identified – of landscape transformation, of labor productivity, of the technics of global ap- propriation – suggest a revision of thinking the law of value in ways both orthodox and revolution- ary. Crudely put, I think Marxists have understated the significance of value relations in the modern world-system.
From DG on machinic assemblages and relationally
From DG
55-The strata are con- tinually being shaken
by phenomena of cracking and rupture, either at the level of the substrata that
furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a prechemical soup ...), at the level
of the accumulating epistrata, or at the level of the abutting parastrata:
everywhere there arise simultaneous accel- erations and blockages, comparative
speeds, differences in deterrito- rialization creating relative fields of
reterritorialization.
15-Articulations of production and reproduction are mediated through the oikeios, especially its dialectic of organic life and inorganic environments (Birch and Cobb, 1981; Moore, 2013a).19
we can say that geology co-produces energy regimes as historically-specific bundles of relations; geology in this view, is at once subject and object.
But Nature plus Society does not add up. Perhaps most significantly, environmental determinisms, however partial or sophisticated they may be, leave intact the Cartesian order of things, in which society (humans without nature) and nature (environments without humans) interact rather than interpenetrate. The alternative, to see geology co-producing historical change through the oikeios, allows us to see energy regimes – even whole civilizations – moving through, not around, the rest of nature.
Material flows and their particularities do matter. But their historical significance is best understood through a relational rather than substantialist view of materiality, one in which the flows of resources, circuits of capital, and the struggles of classes and states form a dialectical whole.
DG on form:
54-As long as preestablished forms were compared to predetermined degrees, all one could do was affirm their irreducibility, and there was no way of judging possible communication between the two factors. But we see now that forms depend on codes in the parastrata and plunge into pro- cesses of decoding or drift and that degrees themselves are caught up in movements of intensive territorialization and reterritorialization. There is no simple correspondence between codes and territorialities on the one hand and decodings and deterritorialization on the other: on the contrary, a code may be a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization a decoding. Wide gaps separate code and territoriality. The two factors nevertheless have the same "subject" in a stratum: it is populations that are deter- ritorialized and reterritorialized, and also coded and decoded. In addition, these factors communicate or interlace in the milieus.
21-In sum, because early capitalism’s technics – its crystalli- zation of tools and power, knowledge and production – were specifically organized to treat the appro- priation of global space as the basis for the accumulation of wealth in its specifically modern form: capital, the substance of which is abstract social labor.
The three revolutions we have identified – of landscape transformation, of labor productivity, of the technics of global ap- propriation – suggest a revision of thinking the law of value in ways both orthodox and revolution- ary. Crudely put, I think Marxists have understated the significance of value relations in the modern world-system.
From DG on machinic assemblages and relationally
68-In any case, content and expression are never
reducible to signified-signifier. And (this is the second problem) neither are
they reducible to base-superstructure. One can no more posit a primacy of
content as the determining factor than a primacy of expression as a signifying
system. Expression can never be made into a form reflecting content, even if
one endows it with a "certain" amount of independence and a certain
potential for reacting, if only because so-called economic content already has
a form and even forms of expression that are specific to it. Form of content
and form of expression involve two parallel formalizations in presupposition:
it is obvious that their segments constantly intertwine, embed themselves in
one another; but this is accomplished by the abstract machine from which the
two forms derive, and by machinic assemblages that regulate their relations.
21-In this, value-relations have been defined as
a phenomenon reducible to the “economic” form of abstract social labor. But such an interpretation
significantly understates the epoch-making influence of value relations. The law of value – under-
stood as a gravitational field exerting durable influence over the long-run and large-scale patterns of
the capitalist world-ecology – is not an economic phenomenon alone, but a systemic process with a piv-
otal and decisive economic moment (abstract social labor).
22-The decisive historical expression of Cheap Nature in the modern era is the Four Cheaps of labor- power, food, energy, and raw materials. These Four Cheaps are the major way that capital prevents the mass of capital from rising too fast in relation to the mass of appropriated cheap nature – when the delivery of such cheap natures approaches the average value composition of world commodity production, the world-ecological surplus falls and the pace of accumulation slackens.
22-The decisive historical expression of Cheap Nature in the modern era is the Four Cheaps of labor- power, food, energy, and raw materials. These Four Cheaps are the major way that capital prevents the mass of capital from rising too fast in relation to the mass of appropriated cheap nature – when the delivery of such cheap natures approaches the average value composition of world commodity production, the world-ecological surplus falls and the pace of accumulation slackens.
The present argument, then, is a brief for such a post-Cartesian – I would call it
world-ecological – reading of value. The goal is to focus our attention on the relations of the oikeios
that form and re-form capitalism’s successive contradictory unities of the exploitation of labor-
power (paid work) and the appropriation of a global zone of reproduction (unpaid work) from the
family to the biosphere.
This line of thinking and investigation led me to an unexpected argument. I cannot help but see a
new law of value in formation in these centuries, expressed by two epoch-making movements.29 One
was the proliferation of knowledges and symbolic regimes that constructed nature as external, space
as flat and geometrical, and time as linear (the field of abstract social nature). The other was a new
configuration of exploitation (within commodification) and appropriation (outside commodification
but in servitude to it).
On the one hand, capitalism is a civilization that turns on the zone of commodification and the exploitation of labor-power within it. On the other hand, strategies of commodification and ex- ploitation can work only to the extent that uncommodified natures are somehow put to work, for free or very low cost. In sum, capitalism must commodify life/work but depends upon the “free ride” of uncommodified life/work to do so.
On the one hand, capitalism is a civilization that turns on the zone of commodification and the exploitation of labor-power within it. On the other hand, strategies of commodification and ex- ploitation can work only to the extent that uncommodified natures are somehow put to work, for free or very low cost. In sum, capitalism must commodify life/work but depends upon the “free ride” of uncommodified life/work to do so.
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