I’m reading J. K. Gibson-Graham’s The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. J. K. Gibson-Graham is the pen name for Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson, and despite the single name on the book’s spine, the two authors who constitute the persona of Gibson-Graham consistently refer to themselves as “we”. All this means is that I may be inconsistent in occasionally referring to the apparently singular name of the author-function Gibson-Graham using the third-person plural and occasionally using the third-person singular, as the whim strikes me. My apologies in advance to those whom this may disturb.
The book sets up a problem of which my past references to the all-consuming market are one symptom: people who talk about capitalism talk about it as monolithic and overpowering. As Gibson-Graham puts it, “the book selectively traces the discursive origins of a widespread understanding: that capitalism is the hegemonic, or even the only, present form of economy and that it will continue to be so in the proximate future” (2).
Gibson-Graham admits, however, that she is “loath to define it,” but nonetheless offers the “famiiliar Marxist definition” of “a system of generalized commodity production structured by (industrial) forces of production and exploitative production relations between capital and labor” (3). There are reasons for their hesitation at defining their terms. They draw an analogy to feminism’s difficulties in “attempting to reconceptualize binary gender” (13), in that “If Man is singular, if he is a self-identical and definite figure, then non-man becomes his negative, or functions as an indefinite and homogenous ground against which Man’s definite outlines may be seen” (14), and this is the sort of thinking that contributes to “a binary hierarchy in which one term is deprived of positive being” (14). In our conventional logic, there is no thinking of not-capitalism as anything other than not-capitalism, to which Gibson-Graham offer the anti-essentialist possibilities that “Theorizing capitalism as different from itself — as having, in other words, no essential or coherent identity — multiplies (infinitely) the possibilities of alterity” and that “recontextualizing capitalism in a discourse of economic plurality destabilizes its presumptive hegemony” (15).
Gibson-Graham relies on the same concepts of overdetermination that Wolff and Resnick borrowed from Althusser, and in fact does some heavy theoretical work with Althusser and his inheritors, particularly Laclau and Mouffe, from whom they take the insight that “there is practically no domain of individual or collective life that escapes capitalist relations” (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy 161, qtd. in Gibson-Graham 39) only to problematize it: “Unless the economy is explicitly written out, or until it is deconstructively or positively rewritten, it will write itself into every text of social theory, in familiar and powerful ways. When it is not overtly theorized, it defines itself as capitalism because it lacks another name” (39). Gibson-Graham here again shows me another side of an issue I’ve been struggling with: I keep coming back to money as such a profound and influential marker of class, and then sort of translating “money” for myself as “money in a capitalist economy” without ever going any further with my thinking. So I’m hoping that the rest of the book may present some interesting alternative and productive possibilities. On the other hand, I realize that constructing class as a “marker” lines up with those static, synchronic understandings of class as a single frozen moment for a student in the wired writing classroom, either pre- or post-college in relation to that student’s class identity while she’s in the classroom. My recent discussions with Charlie and Donna have shown me that I’m more interested in an understanding of class as process, although I still reject Resnick and Wolff’s concept of class as exploitative process (the appropriation and distribution of surplus labor) as too reductive and oversimplifying for my purposes. (Gibson-Graham give a nod to this concept of class, as well, though I won’t get to their chapter on class until tomorrow.) Rather, I think I’m interested in putting Bourdieu’s concept of class as a field of relational multiplicity into motion and understanding that field of relational multiplicity as always in process and enacted through difference.
And that seems like a good insight on which to close for tonight.
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