Critical Gibson-Graham: Reading Capitalocentrism for Trouble

Abstract

J. K. Gibson-Graham’s postcapitalist approach to diverse economies has unleashed a flourishing of research and activism for other worlds. One reason for its successes is found in the intricate links between a feminist and antiessentialist critique of political economy and an experimental, enabling, and affirmative practice of economy. While initially powered by explicitly critical and negating energies, diverse-economies scholars have increasingly accentuated an affirmative, “post/critical” register. This essay explores what has happened to “capitalocentrism” in this process. Initially an invitation to consider our performative complicity with the seeming inescapability of capitalism, capitalocentrism has lately been positioned as an already established theoretical object and a problem already settled. Returning to Gibson-Graham’s affinities with deconstruction, this essay seeks to reproblematize capitalocentrism through a thinking strategy called “reading for trouble.” Insisting on the theoretical and political potentials that capitalocentrism opens for critical and deconstructive practice, the notion becomes a key word for troublesome work ahead.

Key Words:

• Capitalocentrism
• Deconstruction
• Diverse Economies
• Postcritique
• Reading for Trouble

Acknowledgments

This essay benefited from the insightful readership of Pieta Hyvärinen, Ville Kellokumpu, Outi Kulusjärvi, Ethan Miller, Anssi Paasi, Aron Sandell, and Heikki Sirviö. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as Nate Gabriel, Ceren Özselçuk, Eric Sarmiento, and Boone Shear for their critical insights and encouragement. Finally, thank you Katherine Gibson for all this trouble. All remaining problems in thought and argumentation are, of course, my sole responsibility.

Notes

1 There is also a prehistory of capitalocentrism worthy of note. The earliest mention I have found is in the work of French historian René Gallissot (1983). Gallissot is concerned with the effects of a teleological Marxist conceptualization of space and time in which “the key to the understanding of all anterior societies is that all of history and space are put in gravitation around a kernel that is less Europocentric and more capitalocentric” (206–7; my translation).

2 I’m thinking here of Heather Love’s (2010, 239) brilliant guide for reading Sedgwick without dismissing the aggression and negativity of her thinking: “We do Sedgwick a disservice when we read her solely through a reparative mode. A reading of her work as all about love suggests that we are not listening to her, nor watching how she moves.”

3 Although my diagnosis of the post/critical is indebted to debates surrounding Sedgwick’s work and the wider phenomenon of “postcritique” (see Anker and Felski 2017), the term (with a slash) is here reserved to indicate a practice that seeks to move “beyond” critique in a one-way trajectory rather than to denote a complex rearticulation of critique.

4 The prevalence of this setting is an interesting question that I consider necessary to keep open. Again, the point is not to make a definite argument about how capitalocentrism is supposedly understood everywhere, “today.” My intentions are more modest, and I am conscious of the contradictorily performative work done in naming the “post/critical.” For empirical illustration, though, it is worth visiting the Handbook of Diverse Economies (Gibson-Graham and Dombroski 2020). In the more than seventy varieties of capitalocentrism in the book (including my own two essays), I find practically no sign of other-than-post/critical takes on the term.

5 My argument relies on an alliance if not similarity between deconstruction and critique. Although this relationship has been and still is hotly debated, let us contend, for now, with Gaon’s (2018, 209) understanding of deconstruction “as a form of ‘critique’ insofar as it allows us not only to see but to intervene in what in particular is harmed by or closed off from a specific prescription or norm or ethical good, in a specific case, and in a particular social, political and historical context.” Among other things, this means that the critical force of deconstruction, insofar as there is one, here must attend to the specificities of heterogeneous capitalocentrisms in whatever the situation in order “to bear against the dogmatisms, chauvinisms, racisms (and so on) that constitute the social order” (209).

6 As for Miller (2019, 27), such a paranoid strategy should be coupled with “an explicit acknowledgment of the dangers of such a move.” The irony is, of course, that no paranoia thinks of itself as other than “strategic.” It is, after all, just about to reveal how everyone (else) is being tricked into believing X while in reality Y (Sedgwick 2003). To read here for capitalocentric troubles no doubt risks performative tautologies—“unearthing” capitalocentrism as a “real cause” behind X all the while (re)producing it—in ways that need to be carefully judged.

7 Or perhaps capitalocentrism consists of periperformatives around periperformatives, a rendering more in line with Gibson-Graham’s (2006a) “overdetermination.” For it may be that everything points at simple things, say a hedge or a paywall, but beyond “simple things” these are also social relations (of value). What is (at) the center of capitalocentering? A real abstraction, perhaps, or an abyss—an atopological place. Whatever capitalocentrism is, it is also a mode of periperformative literacy vis-à-vis whatever is written and archived “on” the hedge or the paywall, and this is what thus makes it legible and present: a simple thing, performative of capital(ism).

8 How are we to archive “the diversity we are given” (Rose 2018) if not in ways tragically/ironically insufficient for the task? Consider, for example, the genre of acknowledgments at the end of essays such as this one. What else is this than a calculated, restricted economy of a debt that is incalculable? This is not to argue there are no better and worse calculations, of course. To begin with, I wish I could acknowledge every meal I have eaten while writing this essay and every cook who has prepared those meals, every plant and earthworm and drop of oil involved—a (very) diverse economy, if there ever was one. While such calculations would no doubt make much more sense than the genre usually known as acknowledgments, they can, by default, be just the tip of the iceberg. Our being is too finite, the debt is incalculable. As always, I will only be able to center attention on a few heads (capitas) that have helped my writing in some calculable way. This act of gratitude, however honest and indispensable, is also hilariously and/or tragically deficient—capitalocentric from the start.

9 Harvey’s (2014, 10) point, here, follows from his earlier critique of Gibson-Graham (without citing them): “In certain circles it is fashionable to derogatorily dismiss studies such as this [i.e., Harvey’s] as ‘capitalo-centric.’” Against such dismissals, he accentuates the “imperative” need for “much more sophisticated and profound capitalo-centric studies to hand to facilitate a better understanding of the recent problems that capital accumulation has encountered” (10). I have a hard time seeing how understanding “capitalo-centrism” as a “derogatory dismiss[al]” might result from anything other than an active and perennial evasion of Gibson-Graham's arguments. This said, Harvey does have a point in that the risk of capitalocentrism must be borne. However, this “must” and the necessity of such studies do not make these studies any less problematic.