Diamond Mines and Appropriated Feminism

Here’s a new disturbing twist on reproduction/Production and the entanglements of feminisms in global capital. The International Women’s Health Coalition, the New York based transnational feminist NGO that was so influential in reappropriating international policy language towards feminist projects of “reproductive health and “reproductive rights” have themselves become entangled with diamond mining in South Africa, particularly De Beers Group and Anglo American.

How to make sense of this conjuncture of necropolitical accumulation of diamonds and feminist biopolitics?

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?

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 (Feb 2008) was very good for the exchange of productive ideas on technopolitics.

Notes below, posted belatedly some months later (June 2008),  rather fragmented.

THE COPY: [see French OED; "copious"] ; M-C-M

Copy as generative of value? Profit not from innovation but about imitating, copying

Innovation or copying should not be mapped onto stages of growth.

Post-industrial play of signs; Materiality of replication

The vital copy (generic living vaccines)

Generativity in a distributed ontology – allows traffic across domains to crystallize under the sign of reproduction

- what are the domains crystallizing under this sign?

What are the generative formations that are not completely subsumable under teh sign of capital? Gift/hacker? Public domain?

The opposition between Public Domain and private/capitalized domain : these markings always produce their consstitutive outside

Tim Mitchell: essay on de Soto – see Lancaster sociology site “Mystery of Capitalism”

Miranda Joseph – Against the Romance of community; new work on debt

Geeta Patel – work on credit, rish

Baudrillard; Hillel Schwartz; Walter Benjamin; Stengers; Derrida (Given Time); Natalie Zemon Davis (book on gift giving);  Mbembe (Necropolitics; superfluity)

Time and Accumulation: standard model of scientific truth (philosophy of science; recall Sandra Harding’s critique of objectivity as masculinist, what is the next round of feminist critiques of objectivity that dont take us down the standpoint road?)

Surplus, Excess: valuations of multiplicity

Death: Last chapter of Dolly book (on culling); Kathy High on lab rats

Cori: Clinical trials mobilize populations as resources; testing is crucial to figuring epidemiology