Capitalist Natures in Five Orientations

ABSTRACT

How do nonhuman individuals and communities come to bear capitalist value or not in contemporary social relations? The “or not” of the question is crucial. This is because our analytical approach, drawing from feminist and postcolonial theorizing, is one that keeps us focused on value’s necessary others, that is, the bodies/communities designated as waste or even superfluous. Our aim is to attend to the role that difference and hierarchies play in the production of value. Accordingly, we present a typology of five orientations – relational, patterned positions – nature can take in relation to capitalist social relations: officially valued, the reserve army, the underground, outcast surplus and threat. What our typology suggests is that to accumulate capital, capitalism needs the diverse materials and creative forces of natures ordered in a variety of positions within society, not just as commodities. No such position is without violence and exploitation. To add some specificity to our initial analysis, we consider how these nonhuman orientations are produced in part through law. We focus on the law because it comprises a prime tool for achieving social order and because the law is a crucial site in which difference is produced and the designations of valued and unvalued are formalized and consolidated.

KEYWORDS:

• Nonhumans
• law
• difference
• feminist theory
• capitalist value

Acknowledgements

Our thanks to Kelly Kay, Miles Kenney-Lazar and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro for their editorial guidance, and to Meghan Gagliardi for her research assistance. We are grateful to a team of people who weighed in on this paper in its earlier drafts with astute and generous feedback: Juliane Collard, Jody Emel, Kevin Gould, Paul Jackson, Leigh Johnson, Becky Mansfield, Sara Nelson, and Max Ritts. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful remarks.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We use nature as shorthand for nonhuman nature for the rest of the paper. We understand that human and nonhuman natures are neither external nor reducible to each other.

2 Thinking across human and nonhuman bodies and labour in this way is not straightforward or without risk. Any analysis that seeks to think about exploitation across the human-nonhuman boundary must be undertaken carefully because human exploitation so often rests to some degree on a dehumanization or animalization of the exploited humans. The risk of such analysis is that it reifies or reinforces racialized or misogynist comparisons. In our typology, we place the categories of human and nonhuman side by side not to show that they are the same but to point to the work we have learned and borrowed from to understand nonhuman orientations.

3 The idea of nonhumans being subject to norms presents tricky questions. As Srinivasan (2014, 509) writes, “subjectification and self-governance based on anthropogenic truth discourses are hard to explain in animals.” But, as she explains, subjectification does not only occur through self-governance, or at least not as a self who is strictly defined as a discrete individual. Subjectification occurs through a network of intervening actors who are themselves subject to internalized norms. So too does orientation occur this way. But we do see a difference between orientation and subjectification or, especially, interpellation, which requires the subject to self-identify as such. Orientation does not depend on this requirement, making it more helpful to understand how power is exerted over nonhumans. Orientation also calls attention to space and material effects—key dimensions in considering nonhumans, whose management is often undertaken through spatial controls, with consequences for their material existence.

4 We thank Jody Emel for this point.

5 Here we take an approach akin to Huber (2011, 34), who writes about oil that its “biophysical capacities” matter greatly, but they “are only realizable through particular uneven social relations of culture, history, and power.”

6 See https://www.cbd.int/convention/text/.

7 The preamble to the CBD states outright that “[s]tates have sovereign rights over their own biological resources.” See https://www.cbd.int/convention/text/.

8 Tadiar argues, though, that these “remaindered” lives can still be productive for capital, and she names a risk-bearing population as a basis for speculative investment as an example. Paupers or outcast surplus more generally historically became visible to capital through Anatomy Acts (such as the Anatomy Act of 1832 in England) that made any unclaimed dead bodies from workhouses and charitable hospitals legally available to undergo dissection. We thank Juliane Collard for this point.