{"id":71296,"date":"2014-12-19T12:00:23","date_gmt":"2014-12-19T12:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=71296"},"modified":"2015-01-19T23:35:01","modified_gmt":"2015-01-19T23:35:01","slug":"the-slowdown-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/the-slowdown-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"the slowdown perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Atreyee Majumder.<\/p>\n

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In James Cameron’s Avatar<\/em><\/a>, a resource is found that is crucial to the advancement of industrial modernity. It is buried under a landscape occupied by a people that are not party to the covenant of modernity. A colonial logic is activated. The peoples must be convinced of their rightful place within modernity, and thus, their obedience procured for the smooth extraction of this resource. Their resilient stance on landscape, resource and associated vantage-points on modernity translate as the need for application of force. These are recalcitrant peoples, whose wills must be bent. A multi-pronged colonizer appears. They deploy armed forces, alongside scientists, ecologists and anthropologists. Here is a colonizer already worrying about climate change, disease and economic slowdowns in the metropole – a colonizer that comes equipped with the tools that anticipate and attempt to metabolize the excesses of colonialism itself, a colonizer cut to the contours of the liberal conscience in the metropole. \u00a0The secret cultural resources of the subjugated peoples, the colonizer adjudges, must be sought in a bid to protect longterm interests of empire. These people could well be recruited into the imperial project by capitalizing on the very difference that they maintain against the mainstays of modernity. The \u2018indigene’ thus brings delightful alternative medicine, food and curative properties into the tired edifice of imperial modernity. In the process, it is hoped they will yield the crucial resource on top of which they reside. The story unfolds along the logic of inter-civilization romance. The film necessarily tells a story of primitive accumulation.<\/p>\n

Even as the description of late capitalism charts a move toward Deleuze’s theory of controlled subjects (man in debt) away from the older model of enclosed subjects (man enclosed), the film tells a story of the co-existence of models of control and discipline. We see, in the mode of imperial interaction in Avatar, that the logics of enclosure and incarceration (in paradigms of family, factory, army) are very much in co-existence and in use when it comes to empire’s motives of securing new reserves of resources and populations in these geographies. They subsist alongside control strategies, and come alive especially in the programs of control over populations connected to capital’s supply chain. The film tells a crucial story of global grids of resource extraction and exploitation through biopolitical regimes that control and conceal through supranational mechanisms of rights-monitoring and humanitarian discourse. The edifices of scientific and social scientific research, the NGO apparatuses as well as difference<\/em> as a carrier of imperial curiosity, contribute to the structuring of sovereign entities in a kind of global grid. In its operation, some sovereigns emerge more sovereign than others. The non-west emerges legible through the loci of extraction, manufacture and waste, even as the metropole dons the garb of late capitalism as slowly moving away from the frenzied activity of the Fordist productivist order. In considering the bilateral relations between movements of slowness and speed in economies of the west and the non-west, it may be said that the components of high capitalism are very much present in the time of late capitalism; what we witness is their geographic displacement. They have simply jumped terrain.<\/p>\n

The protagonist Jake Sully conquers the Na’vi princess’s heart by arduously mastering the hunting and warring methods. He learns, in the process, of an alternative ethico-political order \u2013 one that is necessarily hierarchical. One where god, king and priestess align to construct the sovereign. Necessarily a frightening thought for the custodians of liberal democracy, and associated political and economic freedoms. Jake Sully offers the voice of empire that configures conciliatory approaches into the process of induction of modernity’s others. It is a voice that anticipates solutions to problems it knows itself to be the cause of. \u00a0A lover’s enchantment across the chasm of difference emerges as his key tool. He masters the battle-techniques of the orient with humility and discipline; he brings the battlecry of the ikran<\/em> (flying monster used by the Na’vi to hunt and battle) into submission. A late modernity ensues. One that is weary of the burden of raw accumulation. Logics of fair trade, environmental repair and indigeneity are worked into the logic of capital. Jake Sully fits right into its rubric. But the logics of brute force remain intact in this theater; a population is coerced into yielding its resource and labor, and the enclosure-arm of factory, army and family subsist.<\/p>\n

There is another possibility to this story. What if the Na’vi didn’t play the role of a singular opposing force? A turn that the film cannot embrace, in order to protect its own narrative tension \u2013 what if the colonized were to respond to empire in a heterogenous, non-unitary manner? What if the Na’vi disaggregate their response as a \u2018community’? This would make empire’s motive of meting out amelioration difficult. What if the bosses of the Na’vi said \u2018dig our mountain, uproot our trees and take your minerals. Give us jobs. Give us cellphones.’ What if the Na’vi children began to tap their feet to the metropole’s new-age beats? Geographies of accumulation in the contemporary world often show such fractured entry-points along the clash of political orders. But the romantic cultural encounter such as is narrated in Avatar is necessarily hinged on a coherent carrier of otherness \u2013 \u2018community’.<\/p>\n

The clash itself is broken down into an alliance at certain points of friction. Someone gets an NGO job. Someone walks into a sweatshop and out of a violent marriage. A disgruntled priest of the traditional order finds new windows for thwarted ambition and invites the inroad. A mineral churns up new relationships and vantage-points. New centers are created out of peripheries. New peripheries face centers with fresh ambition. The colonizer and colonized morph into new entities. The purchase of cultural capital, such as indigenous medicine, offers yet new doors into industrial modernity. The extension of the project of late capitalism comes to ride on the shifting positionalities and strategic moves of those that carry such cultural capital.<\/p>\n

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Capital’s Struggle Against Itself<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is here that we can learn a crucial edict of capital from David Harvey’s Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism<\/em>.<\/a> A primary contradiction of capital, Harvey points out, is in capital’s propensity for circulation, while constantly churning out physical wherewithal (roads, factory, technologies) to lock itself down. From time to time, its move is organized through crises and overhaul patterns, movements to different spaces, new loci of technology and finance, leaving behind the debris of its previous physical arrangements. Harvey writes (2014: 73):<\/p>\n

“Capital exists as a continuous flow of value through the different physical states we have identified (along with others yet to be considered). The continuity of the flow is a primary condition of capital’s existence. Capital must circulate continuously or die. The speed of its circulation is also important. If I can circulate my capital faster than you, then I have a certain competitive advantage. There is considerable competitive pressure, therefore, to accelerate the turnover time of capital. The tendency towards speed-up is easily identifiable in capital’s history. The list of technological and organizational innovations designed to speed things up and to reduce the barriers posed by physical distance is very long.”<\/em><\/p>\n

The virility of speed and movement shape capital’s violence as it jerks itself out of Fordist models into the loosely conjoined post-Fordist ones. The imperative of speed has a crucial role in the edifices of speculative finance. But speed and its twists and turns are not new to capital’s mode of operation. The processes of circulation plays out vividly on space. Capital has always left scars on space and material environment that it injects itself into and uproots itself out of. Capital spatializes its damage, because it cannot entirely metabolize it. \u00a0It churns space up in its move, gets locked in the space that obliterates its circulation, and jerks itself free of such spatial arrangements. Every outburst of consumption is coupled with a related yet spatially removed hideout of waste, damage and accumulation. Each churn yields built environments, spaces, infrastructures and labor irrelevant to the motors of the next turn or phase. Thus the logic of its movement is intimately tied to the logic of waste or displacement or rendering of irrelevant materials. When the geographic properties offering fodder for the motor of accumulation is satisfied in Bangladesh, the motor moves to the Philippines, and then onto somewhere else. Jake Sully plays an ameliorative role in the movement of this motor. Capital functions on \u2018contradictory unity with nature’, as Harvey reminds us. Nature turned into resource is its primary act of accumulation. \u00a0 Each eruption of accumulative possibility shares simultaneity with other geographies which move into zones of \u2018abandonment’, zones that Elizabeth Povinelli shows are a necessary feature of \u2018late liberalism’. Capital, thus does not only attack a virgin geography in each wave, but necessarily, geographies that it leaves behind, pulls out of, in sharp jerks. Thus, postindustrial geographies grow coeval with geographies of new accumulation.<\/p>\n

Ethnography of Capital’s Move <\/strong><\/p>\n

Now we take the ethnographic lens to the sites of capital’s movement \u2013 at least, perceptible movement. We find then, it disaggregates the dyadic view of capital and its future receiver. Myriad points of friction arise, as Anna Tsing shows, as these mammoth edifices break into several simultaneous sites of encounter. A middleman of a company takes a cut. An environmentalist arrives at a site of potential danger. An indigenous leader plays up \u2018indigeneity’ to participate in the politics of international aid. Tsing interrogates, in her book Friction <\/em>(<\/a>2005),<\/em> this particular, connected face of the \u2018local’. She takes the \u2018global’ question to the most unlikely geography – that of indigenous communities and threatened forest lands of Kalimantan, Indonesia. On the one hand, the \u2018local’ gets stamped, circulated and reproduced as pristine and mystical \u2013 the abode of salvaging mysticality and indigenous knowledge, and on the other hand, turns into frontier landscape of capital’s scramble over new dispensers of resource. This struggle takes place primarily through the points of contact between various actors of the \u2018global’ and \u2018local’ maps. At each point between varied interpretations of the same \u2018universal’ category, and its appropriation and adaptation, the \u2018global’ is produced across a range of frontier zones. Each actor interprets the \u2018global’ (be it human rights, global finance capital, environmental values and norms, nature loving fashions, NGO-funding support) in their own situation and uses it to further what they perceive to be their valued ends. The developing nation-state turns into a franchisee crony as it deploys its muscle-power to secure and aid the interest of investors and industrial players that will help push up its economic indicators. In different situations, transactions or negotiations surrounding such a \u2018global’ category have given rise to connections, that Tsing calls \u2018friction’.<\/p>\n

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Slowing of the motor<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this scenario, we find spatial simultaneity playing out between economic recessions kicking in western economies (not least of which is the Wall Street crash-initiated American slowdown) and the feverish accumulative and productive geographies in many non-western, especially Asian countries. The slowing of the growth-motor in advanced capitalist economies is addressed by Thomas Piketty in the recent treatise, Capital in the Twenty-first Century <\/em>(2014), where he compares large data aggregates over a century to study the persistence of income inequality in the nationally guarded economies of a number of (mostly Western) countries. There are two things to remember about this work \u2013 (1) that it examines inequality within actors bound together in the national boundaries of a nation-state; it does not consider how inequalities would look if the nation-state boundaries were lifted (that the highest person in the ladder of one country may still be in the middle or low range of income vis-\u00c3\u00a0-vis another country), (2) it compares the trends in slowdowns on the graphs of economies (in response to changing ratio of capital ownership and the rate of growth) after the economies have proceeded along the path of industrial modernity and gone far beyond the takeoff stage. In the long term, Piketty posits, as growth explores new sectors and new methods of exploiting and accumulating capital, the ratio rate of private savings and the rate of growth tends to equal the capital-income ratio. During the war boom of the first half of the twentieth century, Piketty shows a certain burst of economic energy in Europe which comes to settle on stagnating graphs in the middle of the century. It is this observation of Piketty that speaks to economic concerns of many western economies in the current day \u2013 a slowdown observed and felt along the tropes of deindustrialization, busts in housing markets, cutdowns in health budgets and other key areas of welfare spending. What Piketty’s account takes feeble notice of is that these national graphs are globally linked to produce a simultaneity that explains capital’s global travels. As new geographies of capital’s injection are opened up, crony governments relax labor laws to connect with the activities of powerful corporations, capital’s hunger for circulation finds cumbersome that elaborate architecture that it had built for itself in the western economies across the twentieth century. The slowdowns of the advanced stages thus emerge in simultaneity with the relentless movement of capital across accumulative geographies and the opening of new frontiers. The perception of slowdown is from the vantage-point of a geography that has been on capital’s trajectory and provided relevant wherewithal for its operations. Outmanoeuvering from capital’s route is indexed in economic indicators that show slowdown or contraction in the volume of activity. Concerns over sustaining primacy on capital’s functioning gives rise to the slowdown perspective \u2013 the disappearance of jobs which were hitherto present, the disappearance of robust circulation of capital which was hitherto present, are all tropes of concern that rise from a certain location on capital’s graph. It is at this vantage-point that Piketty steps in to show his data on growth and inequality patterns. It is a perch at the point of shift from high capitalism to late capitalism.<\/p>\n

Back in Jake Sully’s world, the pressing concern for an ameliorative approach towards the colonized emerges from the realization that it may help in addressing the metropole’s internal argument with capital. Environmental damage, health crises and effects of over-mechanisation may be effectively addressed by adopting the ameliorative approach to accumulation. Much of the globalized forms of \u2018alternative’ culture speak to the Jake Sully gaze. Jake Sully spells out the metropole’s strategy of ameliorative domination, as its own edifices of capital begin to tire. It is a route for new connections with the colonized, as it seeks to derive cures for current stagnation while securing sovereign power over these communities or polities. The search for curative powers of the \u2018east’ is not new. It is the easy route of the \u2018eastern’ medicinal properties into the commodity fold of the promise of recuperation for western economies that is brought in focus by the travails of Jake Sully.<\/p>\n

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Atreyee Majumder<\/strong> has recently finished a PhD dissertation at the Department of Anthropology, Yale University. Her dissertation, concerns the historical present created by the longterm exposure to many iterations of colonial and postcolonial manufacture. She is centrally concerned with elements of ethical and political life, especially the urban condition, that derive from familiarity with the logics of capitalist manufacture. Her larger interests lie in historical and political anthropology, anthropology of capital, anthropology of time and history, theories of space and place. In a different life, she has worked as a lawyer and activist in the domain of resource justice, land laws and indigenous rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

New centers are created out of peripheries. New peripheries face centers with fresh ambition. The colonizer and colonized morph into new entities. The purchase of cultural capital, such as indigenous medicine, offers yet new doors into industrial modernity. The extension of the project of late capitalism comes to ride on the shifting position-alities and strategic moves of those that carry such cultural capital.<\/p>\n

Atreyee Majumder<\/b> analyses the representations of postcolonial capital accumulation in James Cameron’s<\/b> Avatar.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}