Micro-credit– signs of accumulation by dispossession

The Grameen Bank of Bangladesh opened up an American branch in Jackson Heights, New York.  Here’s the agencies blog: Grameen America - Blog.

This is surely a symptom of at least two things:

First, the continued, and perhaps even intensified, traffic in the articulation of neoliberal economic practices and epistemologies  between the U.S. and South Asia.    While the figuration of the Indian– U.S.  IT economy is one gradient, surely the arrival of Bangladesh microcredit in New York City is symptom of another figuration worth attending to.

Second, the extent of dispossession currently unfolding in the U.S.  in the wake of subprime mortgage crisis, the U.S. figuration of the credit card maxed indebted subject-citizen, and the financial appropriation of  State funds and intergenerational debt financing for the Iraq war.

What will be interesting to see is how the “16 decisions,”  a set of rules that guide the comportment of borrowers, is reworked.

Commons & Pirates

Peter Linebaugh (who co-authored Many-headed Hydra with Marcus Rediker) has a new book out, which reads the Magna Carta and the Forest Charter together as manifestos/ procedural mechanisms of the commons. I read one chapter (published as an essay in CNS Dec 07) which draws primarily on the work of south asian historians of forestry. First off, how weird that one of my favorite pirate-historians (and a student of E P Thompson, trained as a Europeanist) should write a chapter of a book on commons ( my current obsession) drawing from the obscure forest-historiography circuit I spent a decade in, and which I thought I had to (reluctantly) leave behind as I engaged with the twenty first century. Well actually it’s not really weird, as much as fabulous. I am excited largely because the connections I’ve been trying to make in my head (forests, nineteenth century british colonial admin, early modern science and economics, marx, material conditions, and social reproduction, commons experimental communities, the narrowing of commons under neoliberalism, the pre-figuring of this under 17th century liberalism, subjectivation under conditions of  coercion/ colonialism as well as resistance/ freedom, the lessig-type creative commons, etc etc) seem to come together in this book. I’ve only seen one chapter so far, so perhaps it is not so much the structure of the book as the fact that these themes are out in the public and it seems feasible to put them together. Some people are dismayed when their “thesis” seems “scooped” by others but I see it as a sign that there is something in the world, historically and in a lived sense, that people are picking up on (and today I am thrilled that it is a favorite historian, as opposed to a slick stanford law prof, but hey, i am happy about lessig’s work too; just amused by his a-historicity). Anyway - this post is so bloggish that i really havent advanced an argument, have I? I shall have to post again when I have actually read the book.

Labor: Immaterial, Virtual, Affective

There are some old questions in marxist theory that are getting interesting shake-outs and re-molding. Labor, Property, Value are standard analytical categories in political economy. The 1970s socialist feminist critiques of household labor (drawing on Engels) were influential in feminist economics (the gender politics of time-accounts, for example, became standard in economics of the ’90s, at least among those who acknowledged the contribution of feminism) and in some policy circles, e.g. in UN studies of gender in international development. [Note: I haven't seen a study of economics as a discipline and how the feminist influence was felt from the '70s thru '90s, but I would guess that a lot of the critiques of neo-classical modeling, such as Amartya Sen's, but even more mainstream work like Gary Becker's, was in some way influenced by - even if only to appropriate and coopt the interests of - feminist 1970s economics. But that's just a wild guess; would love to know if there is a study on this. But anyway, it seems to me that the work was less influential as the humanities side of feminist theory took the cultural turn. Political economy fell out, even though it partially  returned in cultural form, as an attention to consumption and circulation of commodities. But hard core econ seemed too dry and boring to yield exciting insights in the move to language and culture studies. 

 

So now, is there a way to keep the insights of the cultural turn, and to re-ask the tired old questions about labour and value in an interesting way? 

 

Some thoughts on the directions I want to think in :

(1) TIME : I was reading Bliss Lim's work on time and cinema (a forthcoming book), and was reminded forecefully that there is an important link between time, labor and value. (Caffentzis mentions in his book on Locke and pirated coins, that Locke was concerned with the continuous identity of the self over time, and this enduring self was key to property. I'll post on that later.) 

 

(2) Affective Labor

From intro to the Ephemera 7.1 special issue (Editorial)

"there is always an excess that labour produces in the process of reproducing capitalist

socialist relations. This is an excess whose threatening potential capital must always

work to recuperate, trapped as it is in its eternal dependence on the power of what is at

once its condition of possibility and (potentially) mortal enemy, labour." 

This excess is what interests me.

 

(3) Subjectivities and modernities

Lisa Rofel's first line of Desiring China, "... i saw a new kind of human.." [not exact quote], describes the ways in which modernities (hybrid and multiple) keep making new subjects; but also her conviction that this (now, here in china as she sits in a coffee shop talking about queer sexualities in 2004-6) is not just one in many possible new subjects that are produced daily, but a critical juncture - a rupture, to be foucauldian -  with particular histories of modernity (in her case, post-confucian, post-mao, post-’opening-up-to-global-mkts’)

Alchemical production

Like lots of writers, I often turn to the word “produced” to describe the effects of relations. I used to write “constitute” every other sentence, but rid myself of the bad habit. But “produced” is bothering me these days. As a term, it is tremendously entangled with forms of making in capital formation. Moreover, the more I pay attention to the genealogy of the term “reproduction” the more uncomfortable I become using its relative “produce” so casually. While I don’t mind the implication that capital is part of the story of “making” in the contemporary world, at the same time I think there is another implication, unthought perhaps, at least unanalyzed, that capital precedes the capacity to be made or to act (rather than territorializing capacities in a co-emergent fashion) or that capital is at stake in “the last analysis.

So, I’ve been playing with the idea of drawing on terms for “making” from the days before industrial capitalism. Reproduction is preceded by terms like “generation” which in turn were accompanied by such actions as “fermenting” and “concocting.” I REALLY like “ferment” given its double meaning of making and insurgence.

I’m already very fond of “conjuring” and look forward to the day when I might use the term “miraculate.”

In a more chemical domain, “bind” and “affinity.”

Other possibilities: evoke and invoke, ripen, sympathies, amalgamation, circulation, coagulation, combustion, composition, concoction, corrosion, crystallization, dessication, detonation, digestion, disintegration, distillation, evaporation, extraction, fermentation, filtration, fixation, granulation, ignition, incineration, melting, precipitation, preparation, separation, sublimation, and vitrification.

Thoughts?

Working with affect?

Typing here, now, is a moment of immaterial labor in an economy of affects. so, the conversations around affective labor would say. I’ve been reading some of this work, and wanted to try out some thoughts about affect. But by affect, here, I do not mean emotion, nor even a property particular to bodies or living being, but more abstractly as the “power to act”. Moreover, this “power to act” is not a given property, but is emergent and evoked in complex, dynamic, historically specific assemblages/relations. The affect, as the power to act, is the power to respond to power. Or put slightly differently, the capacity to respond to capacity.

Human Capital gets a Journal

The first issue of this journal is out. It will be interesting to track and see what happens to the concept in light of potential upcoming shifts in U.S. imperialism. No surprise that it comes from Chicago UP, since the term is vintage Chicago school of economics.

For a quick and dirty definition, Gary Becker, one of the Chicago fathers of the term, defines it as the “knowledge, skills, health, or values” invested in and inseparable from humans that makes them productive. As “human capital” has, during Bush’s presidency, become integrated into the development regime of the World Bank, each of the attributes — knowledge, health, values– becomes targets.

Unsurprisingly, the opening issue has an overview of the concept’s history, confirming that “human capital” emerged in relation to two problematics: 1) rural development (via Theodore Shultz) and 2) fertility (via Gary Becker, who has worked in the Bush administration with Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board). Both won Nobel Prizes.

Chewing over what is different about the way “human capital” helps to reassemble production and reproduction (compared to, for example, demography) I’m trying to think through the way it shifts how “quality” matters.

Notes: Heredity as Epistemic Space

I’ve been reading the edited collection by Staffan Muller-Wille and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger called Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics and Culture, 1500-1870. It has been tremendously suggestive, particularly in terms of adding the axis of heredity to the project of historicizing the reproduction/production juncture. In my own research on the process , which I am call the “economization of life,” I’ve been looking at how economic value begins to substitute for “race” as the primary axis for calibrating differential human worth in the era of eugenics, coming to culmination in the era of population control. The multiple genealogies of heredity in Heredity Produced (particularly the introduction) suggest a re-opening of questions about heredity and capital formations, questions which are importantly varied from that of commodified life and biomedical sex reassemblies.

calculative formations of reproduction

I’m not sure if this is the precise phrasing, but taking seriously the claim that reproduction has an ontological purchase in its economized form — as a demographic and economic aggregation, measured and brought into recognition through quantitative practices– it seems to follow that one might speak of a calculative ontology within reproduction’s multiple and distributed formation.

This point perhaps provides some opportunity to find other traffic between organic and non organic (production) domains of repro: questions about kinds of “many,” governing of unruly mulitplication, etc.

Another thought too is to think more about the work of substitution that forms of capital, and the performance of substitution in quantitative measures of aggregation. Opening up questions about kinds and forms and sites of substitutions and “exchange” and translation.

distributed reproduction

Starting with the premise of a distributed ontology of reproduction, mapping such a distributed ontology evokes multiple domains that crisscross between organic and technical registers. Thinking about “reproduction” simultaneously from the vantage points of 1) population and aggregate life, often in relation to managing “economy” as an epistemic figure and target of governmentality, 2) digital copying, reassembly, and piracy, and 3) chemical copying, generics, similars in pharmaceutical production.

Reproduction is about multiplications and new designations of legitimate, illegal, or dangerous creations.

Thinking then about reproduction as exceeding its organismic formation and extended into capital formations, I am beginning to question my presumption that “reproduction” necessary best names the object of inquiry. here, a tag cloud comes to mind– a cluster of tightly bound, closely related terms.

Notes on Working Group meeting

Tartine Bakery was very good for the exchange of productive ideas on technopolitics. Where are my notes?? Upload them here so we can build on that productive afternoon rather than, as I seem to have done, lose it.