Moments of Capital by Eli Jelly-Schapiro;

Author:Eli Jelly-Schapiro;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The temporality of “impasse” is closely imbricated with, though not identical to, that of “crisis.” On the one hand, the crisis is everyday, structural, and perpetual. But as a genre, “crisis” evokes the acute, the exceptional, the ephemeral.28 The narrative disorientation that defines the time-space of crisis is, in one sense, an effect of this disconnect—which is also, paradoxically, something like a synthesis; the ubiquity and permanence of crisis is expressed by the quotidian experience of extraordinary forms of violence. And if exceptional violence works to obscure the structural constant of crisis, it is also symptomatic of it. We need, Berlant suggests, to situate our reading of the exceptional event—and its traumatic reverberations—within a broader assumption of “crisis ordinariness,” a concept that more accurately describes how people encounter, and construct narratives in relation to, the degradations of contemporary capitalism. More concretely, Berlant writes,

the current recession congeals decades of class bifurcation, downward mobility, and environmental, political, and social brittleness that have increased progressively since the Reagan era. The intensification of these processes, which reshapes conventions of racial, gendered, sexual, economic, and nation-based subordination, has also increased the probability that structural contingency will create manifest crisis situations in ordinary existence for more kinds of people.29

The instruments of synthetic dispossession intensify the conditions of insecurity and crisis, and broaden and pluralize spaces of immiseration and exclusion. The Mexican small farmer driven off her land by NAFTA migrates toward the maquiladoras of Juarez or the meatpacking plants, corporate fields, and service industries north of the border. The outsourced American worker, meanwhile, takes a job at Walmart, where she earns a fraction of her former wage selling the same commodities she used to produce. If these two subjects meet in the space and moment of synthetic dispossession, they are journeying, respectively, from the moments of primitive accumulation and expanded reproduction; and whatever language of affect or critique results from their convergence will also be informed by their disparate histories.

The crisis, and the insecurity it engenders, is general; but so too is it marked by difference and asymmetry. Social and economic vulnerability are unevenly distributed. There is, in other words, an analytic tension between the generality of crisis and, as Elizabeth Povinelli has put it, “the unequal distribution of life and death, of hope and harm, and of endurance and exhaustion.”30 In Economies of Abandonment (2011), Povinelli considers how that unequal distribution corresponds to the contemporary articulation of a series of binaries: biopolitics and necropolitics, governmentality and discipline/control, ideology and state violence. “Neoliberalism,” Povinelli writes, “has not merely mimicked the move from faire mourir ou laisser vivre to ‘faire’ vivre et ‘laisser’ mourir. It has resuscitated faire mourir into its topology of faire vivre and laisser mourir.” According to neoliberal rationality, “any form of life that could not produce values according to market logic would not merely be allowed to die, but, in situations in which the security of the market (and since the market was now the raison d’être of the state, the state) seemed at stake, ferreted out and strangled.

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