26.09.2016
14.09.2016
13.09.2016
Gens: A Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism
by Laura Bear, Karen Ho, Anna Tsing and Sylvia Yanagisako
This article is part of the series Generating Capitalism
1. What is Gens?
Our title signals a major redefinition of the multilayered historical meanings of the term gens. Gens began as the Roman concept of a family unit descended from a common male ancestor and was scaled up to social distinctions like aristocratic lineage. It was transformed by Lewis Henry Morgan to found the anthropological study of kinship and reveal the “original” matriarchal origins of community (Trautmann 1992; Feeley-Harnik 2002). Friedrich Engels then drew on Morgan to argue that the patriarchal form of gens led to the end of matriarchal systems. Gens is also, of course, the etymological root of gender, genus, genre, generations, and generate. We find this term broadly helpful because it carries a long history of the appropriation of human and non-human life-forces by social forms. Its varied usage inspires reflection on the depictions of these life-forces that in turn contribute to forms of social inequality. Moreover, it specifically refers to a history of contradictions between male authority and female kinship ties that signals the mix of capture and generativity that characterizes all social power. Finally, by adopting this term, we play with the irony that a patriarchal unit provides the root for the word gender even as we found our approach to capitalism on a more liberating (but hidden) ancestry of feminist analyses of gender, kinship, and race, as well as other forms of epistemological insights garnered from the margins.
Gens is a capacious, flexible term that references our interest in the generative powers of capitalism and the inequalities these powers create. In this sense, we are particularly focused on the generative aspect of the term that is centrally concerned with the means and mechanisms—the very processes of generation—through which systems and socialities are made.
Gens: A collective with feminist ancestry for the study of capitalist inequality.
2. Why a Feminist Manifesto?
It is through a deep engagement with feminist approaches that we recognize the need to challenge the boundedness of the domain of “the economic.” Our alternative approach focuses on the full range of productive powers and practices through which people constitute diverse livelihoods (and from which capitalist inequalities are captured and generated) as they seek to realize the potentialities of resources, money, labor, and investment. We see this conversation as revitalizing feminist substantivist approaches to “the socio-economic” (e.g., Kondo 1990; Mills 1999; Ong 1987; Rosaldo 1980; Strathern 1988; Weiner 1992; Wilson 1999; Wolf 1992). While historically, feminist substantivists recognized that the narrow domaining and disembedding of “market” and “non-market” relations were illusions and used these insights to critique dominant analyses, they did not articulate a more comprehensive approach to capitalism. Redeploying and expanding these tools of analysis not only help us displace other models in which the world of the household, kinship, and “non-capitalist” institutions are radically different in their forms of sociality from the world of the market, but also allow us to develop a “generating capitalism” approach to the inequalities of capitalist social relations.
Feminism challenges the discursive representations of “the economic” as a domain.
This article is part of the series Generating Capitalism
1. What is Gens?
Our title signals a major redefinition of the multilayered historical meanings of the term gens. Gens began as the Roman concept of a family unit descended from a common male ancestor and was scaled up to social distinctions like aristocratic lineage. It was transformed by Lewis Henry Morgan to found the anthropological study of kinship and reveal the “original” matriarchal origins of community (Trautmann 1992; Feeley-Harnik 2002). Friedrich Engels then drew on Morgan to argue that the patriarchal form of gens led to the end of matriarchal systems. Gens is also, of course, the etymological root of gender, genus, genre, generations, and generate. We find this term broadly helpful because it carries a long history of the appropriation of human and non-human life-forces by social forms. Its varied usage inspires reflection on the depictions of these life-forces that in turn contribute to forms of social inequality. Moreover, it specifically refers to a history of contradictions between male authority and female kinship ties that signals the mix of capture and generativity that characterizes all social power. Finally, by adopting this term, we play with the irony that a patriarchal unit provides the root for the word gender even as we found our approach to capitalism on a more liberating (but hidden) ancestry of feminist analyses of gender, kinship, and race, as well as other forms of epistemological insights garnered from the margins.
Gens is a capacious, flexible term that references our interest in the generative powers of capitalism and the inequalities these powers create. In this sense, we are particularly focused on the generative aspect of the term that is centrally concerned with the means and mechanisms—the very processes of generation—through which systems and socialities are made.
Gens: A collective with feminist ancestry for the study of capitalist inequality.
2. Why a Feminist Manifesto?
It is through a deep engagement with feminist approaches that we recognize the need to challenge the boundedness of the domain of “the economic.” Our alternative approach focuses on the full range of productive powers and practices through which people constitute diverse livelihoods (and from which capitalist inequalities are captured and generated) as they seek to realize the potentialities of resources, money, labor, and investment. We see this conversation as revitalizing feminist substantivist approaches to “the socio-economic” (e.g., Kondo 1990; Mills 1999; Ong 1987; Rosaldo 1980; Strathern 1988; Weiner 1992; Wilson 1999; Wolf 1992). While historically, feminist substantivists recognized that the narrow domaining and disembedding of “market” and “non-market” relations were illusions and used these insights to critique dominant analyses, they did not articulate a more comprehensive approach to capitalism. Redeploying and expanding these tools of analysis not only help us displace other models in which the world of the household, kinship, and “non-capitalist” institutions are radically different in their forms of sociality from the world of the market, but also allow us to develop a “generating capitalism” approach to the inequalities of capitalist social relations.
Feminism challenges the discursive representations of “the economic” as a domain.
12.09.2016
compost-ist
I am a compost-ist, not a posthuman-ist: we are all compost, not posthuman. The
boundary that is the Anthropocene/Capitalocene means many things, including that immense irreversible destruction is really in train, not only for the 11 billion or so people who will be on earth near the end of the 21st century, but for myriads of other critters too. (The incomprehensible but sober number of around 11 billion will only hold if current worldwide birth rates of human babies remain low; if they rise again, all bets are off.) The edge of extinction is not just a metaphor; system collapse is not a thriller. Ask any refugee of any species.
The Chthulucene needs at least one slogan (of course, more than one); still shouting “Cyborgs for Earthly Survival,” “Run Fast, Bite Hard,” and “Shut Up and Train,” I propose “Make Kin Not Babies!” Making kin is perhaps the hardest and most urgent part. Feminists of our time have been leaders in unraveling the supposed natural necessity of ties between sex and gender, race and sex, race and nation, class and race, gender and morphology, sex and reproduction, and reproduction and composing persons (our debts here are due especially to Melanesians, in alliance with Marilyn Strathern and her ethnographer kin).12 If there is to be multispecies ecojustice, which can also embrace diverse human people, it is high time that feminists exercise leadership in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species.
boundary that is the Anthropocene/Capitalocene means many things, including that immense irreversible destruction is really in train, not only for the 11 billion or so people who will be on earth near the end of the 21st century, but for myriads of other critters too. (The incomprehensible but sober number of around 11 billion will only hold if current worldwide birth rates of human babies remain low; if they rise again, all bets are off.) The edge of extinction is not just a metaphor; system collapse is not a thriller. Ask any refugee of any species.
The Chthulucene needs at least one slogan (of course, more than one); still shouting “Cyborgs for Earthly Survival,” “Run Fast, Bite Hard,” and “Shut Up and Train,” I propose “Make Kin Not Babies!” Making kin is perhaps the hardest and most urgent part. Feminists of our time have been leaders in unraveling the supposed natural necessity of ties between sex and gender, race and sex, race and nation, class and race, gender and morphology, sex and reproduction, and reproduction and composing persons (our debts here are due especially to Melanesians, in alliance with Marilyn Strathern and her ethnographer kin).12 If there is to be multispecies ecojustice, which can also embrace diverse human people, it is high time that feminists exercise leadership in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species.
07.09.2016
body without organs
The body without organs has been an object of feminist criticism. For Luce Iragaray (Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un, p.140) the notion is reminiscent of a condition of dispossession of the bodily self. She points out that the emphasis on the machinic, the inorganic, as well as the notions of loss of self, dispersion, and fluidity are all too familiar to women: Is not the body without organs women's own historical condition?
See also Alice Jardine, Gynesis.
See also Alice Jardine, Gynesis.
30.08.2016
White Innocence by Gloria Wekker
In White Innocence Gloria Wekker explores a central paradox of Dutch culture: the passionate denial of racial discrimination and colonial violence coexisting alongside aggressive racism and xenophobia. Accessing a cultural archive built over 400 years of Dutch colonial rule, Wekker fundamentally challenges Dutch racial exceptionalism by undermining the dominant narrative of the Netherlands as a "gentle" and "ethical" nation. Wekker analyzes the Dutch media's portrayal of black women and men, the failure to grasp race in the Dutch academy, contemporary conservative politics (including gay politicians espousing anti-immigrant rhetoric), and the controversy surrounding the folkloric character Black Pete, showing how the denial of racism and the expression of innocence safeguards white privilege. Wekker uncovers the postcolonial legacy of race and its role in shaping the white Dutch self, presenting the contested, persistent legacy of racism in the country.
Gloria Wekker is Professor Emeritus of Gender Studies at Utrecht University and the author of several books, including The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora.
27.08.2016
Aunt Hester
Aunt Hester is Frederick Douglass Aunt.
Her beauty attracts Captain Anthony.
According to Douglass, when Captain Anthony sees Hester talking to a male slave he gets really upset and beats her badly.
This is the first time Douglass witness slavery cruelty.
"I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine,
whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back
till she was literally covered with blood" (Douglass, 5).
“I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember any thing. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood- stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it" (Douglass, 5).
25.08.2016
[Die Farbe] tendiert dazu, eine Realität an sich zu werden
Jacques Rancière exemplifiziert das am Beispiel der Farbe: „In einem ethischen Regime wird die Farbe oft mit einem symbolischen Wert assoziiert. Im Regime der Repräsentation wird sie in der Hierarchie der Zeichnung untergeordnet. Das ästhetische Regime bricht mit dieser Unterordnung des kolorierten Stoffes unter die gezeichnete Form. Dabei modifiziert es die sinnliche Wahrnehmung der Farbe selbst … [Die Farbe] tendiert dazu, eine Realität an sich zu werden, ein Ereignis des Stoffs. Sie gilt für sich selbst …“[14] Analoges gilt natürlich auch für die Entwicklung der Musik, wie Rancière hervorhebt; auch hier entstand eine Musik, die keiner Funktion dient.
Rancière, Jacques (2008): Ist Kunst widerständig?, a.a.O., S. 44
Rancière, Jacques (2008): Ist Kunst widerständig?, a.a.O., S. 44
22.08.2016
21.08.2016
Verschränkungen: Mit Karen Barad den Messvorgang verstehen
Von
Joachim Schulz
Der Anthropozentrismus im Messprozess führt bei der Interpretation der Quantenmechanik oft zu Problemen. Wenn wir zum Beispiel davon ausgehen, dass das menschliche Bewusstsein und nicht der Messprozess bei der Schrödingerkatze zum Zusammenbruch der Wellenfunktion führt, dann sind wir nicht weit von esoterischem Unfug wie Quantenheilung und Gedankenverschränkung entfernt. (Ich muss nicht erläutern, warum es unnötig ist, Effekte zu erklären, die es nicht gibt…)
Versuchen wir uns aber daran, eine vom Menschen unabhängige Erklärung der Messung zu entwerfen, bekommen wir die Schwierigkeit, dass sich keine Grenzen ziehen lassen. Das eigentliche Problem, auf das Erwin Schrödinger mit seinem Gedankenexperiment aufmerksam machte, ist dass sich keine Grenze zwischen der klassischen Mechanik und der Quantenmechanik angeben lässt. Wenn wir die Überlagerung von Wellenfunktionen im Atom ernst nehmen, gibt es keinen Grund, die Überlagerung von tot und lebendig bei einer Katze abzulehnen.
Das Beugungsbild eines HeNe-Lasers am Einzelspalt entsteht nicht durch Photonen, sondern durch einen komplexen Experimentaufbau.
Karen Barad weist in ihrem Buch Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
einen interessanten Weg aus diesem Dilemma: Probleme dieser Art
entstehen erst dadurch, dass wir künstlich Dualismen schaffen. Diese
Dualismen stellt Barad infrage. Es ist kein Wunder, dass es Probleme
gibt, wenn wir versuchen, die Grenze zwischen Naturvorgang und
Experiment, zwischen Natur und Technik, zwischen Apparatur und
Beobachtung oder eben zwischen Quantenwelt und klassischer Welt zu
finden. Diese Grenzen gibt es a priori gar nicht.
Philosophie und Physik gehören zusammen. Nicht nur
weil sie gemeinsame Wurzeln haben, sondern weil die Physik einen
gewissen Anspruch an Objektivität hat, der nicht innerhalb der Physik
geklärt werden kann. Schon öfter habe ich hier darüber geschrieben, wie
ich Physik verstehe und welche philosophischen Standpunkte ich für
nachvollziehbar, welche für eher weit hergeholt halte.
Durch die Bloggerin Khaos.kind bin ich vor einiger Zeit auf eine Philosophin aufmerksam geworden, deren Ideen ich sehr überzeugend finde. Karen Barad zieht aus den Erkenntnissen der Quantenmechanik, also aus dem Vorhandensein von Verschränkung und Unschärfe
in Messprozessen, über die Quantenmechanik hinaus anwendbare Lehren.
Ihr Programm ist es, eine Erkenntnistheorie zu schaffen, die den
Messprozess als Teil wissenschaftlicher Arbeit ernst nimmt ohne in einen
Anthropozentrismus abzugleiten, der menschlichem Bewusstsein eine besondere Bedeutung für den Messprozess zuschreibt.Der Anthropozentrismus im Messprozess führt bei der Interpretation der Quantenmechanik oft zu Problemen. Wenn wir zum Beispiel davon ausgehen, dass das menschliche Bewusstsein und nicht der Messprozess bei der Schrödingerkatze zum Zusammenbruch der Wellenfunktion führt, dann sind wir nicht weit von esoterischem Unfug wie Quantenheilung und Gedankenverschränkung entfernt. (Ich muss nicht erläutern, warum es unnötig ist, Effekte zu erklären, die es nicht gibt…)
Versuchen wir uns aber daran, eine vom Menschen unabhängige Erklärung der Messung zu entwerfen, bekommen wir die Schwierigkeit, dass sich keine Grenzen ziehen lassen. Das eigentliche Problem, auf das Erwin Schrödinger mit seinem Gedankenexperiment aufmerksam machte, ist dass sich keine Grenze zwischen der klassischen Mechanik und der Quantenmechanik angeben lässt. Wenn wir die Überlagerung von Wellenfunktionen im Atom ernst nehmen, gibt es keinen Grund, die Überlagerung von tot und lebendig bei einer Katze abzulehnen.
Das Beugungsbild eines HeNe-Lasers am Einzelspalt entsteht nicht durch Photonen, sondern durch einen komplexen Experimentaufbau.
Ob ein Quantenzustand, der in einem Experiment wie ein
Teilchen reagiert und in einem anderen wie eine Welle, in Wahrheit
Teilchen oder Welle ist, wäre nur eine sinnvolle Frage, wenn der
Quantenzustand unabhängig von seiner Messung existieren würde. Es gibt
aber keine von Messungen unabhängige Physik. Der Messvorgang ist ein
unverzichtbarer Teil des Geschehens und kann im allgemeinen nicht
ignoriert werden. Ohne Messung gäbe es vielleicht auch einen
Quantenzustand, das wäre aber nicht derselbe, wie der im Experiment.
Barad führt zur Beschreibung dieser Abhängigkeiten
den Begriff der Intraaktion im Gegensatz zur Interaktion ein. Es gibt
nicht ein Quantenobjekt und einen davon unabhängigen Experimentaufbau,
die miteinander wechselwirken also interagieren. Es gibt nur einen
Vorgang mit internen Intraaktionen. Dass wir im Doppelspaltexperiment
ohne Weginformation die Elektronen als Wellen, mit Weginformation aber
als Teilchen messen, liegt nicht daran, dass der Messaufbau die
eigentlich unabhängigen Elektronen beeinflusst. Vielmehr haben wir es
mit verschiedenen Phänomenen zu tun, die sich grundlegend in ihren
Voraussetzungen und Randbedingungen unterscheiden. Dieser Blick auf
physikalisches Experimentieren als Gesamtvorgang erscheint mir hilfreich
zum Verständnis der Quantenmechanik. Taste in High Life
Taste in High Life , Artist William Hogarth, Year c.1742, Type Oil-on-canvas (?), Dimensions 63 cm × 75 cm (25 in × 30 in) Taste in High Life is an oil-on-canvas painting (engraving seen on the right) from around 1742, by William Hogarth.[1] The version seen on the right was engraved by Samuel Phillips in 1798, under commission from John Boydell for a posthumous edition of Hogarth's works, but Phillips's final, third state was not published until 1808.[2]
The work, a forerunner of Marriage à-la-mode, was intended to satirise and poke fun at the types of dress and garbs that were in fashion at the time, and the superficiality of the tastes and nature of the aristocracy in general. Several figures are seen in the painting, all of whom are dressed in heavily caricatured renditions of the fashion that reigned in the 1740s. Most prominently exhibited is an elderly woman wearing a sacque covered with satirically overblown roses expanded by a large hoop. Standing near her is an opulently dressed man, thought to be "Beau" Colyear, 2nd Earl of Portmore (the dress he wears is said to be the very same he wore to his birthday in the year of the painting's creation)[3] The two huddle together in admiration over the minute porcelain cup held by the lady and saucer held by the lord.[4] Also part of the company is another woman clutching the chin of a black page boy wearing a turban – thought to be designed after Ignatius Sancho, an actor and writer, in his youth[3][5] – both of whom are also dressed as exquisitely as the first two. The black page, holding a type of Chinese porcelain figure, is a servant, and was painted in as an element of irony in the work; as a slave, he mocks his masters, who themselves bowed before fashions and the latest frivolities of upper-class life.[1] Even the monkey standing in the centre foreground wears a flowing, cuffed robe as he examines the list of purchases made by one of the four – it is not known whom – at a recent auction.[3][6] In the painting on the wall, the transitory nature of fashion is represented by the cupids at left, who use a bellows to blow up a fire of discarded petticoats and wigs; at right, the classical form of the female sculpture[7] is contrasted with the cutaway rear view of her enormous hoop underskirt stiffened with whalebone, "the mode 1742" as the painting's legend has it. The fashionable hoops make the seated lady's dress rise up ridiculously behind her, and in a vignette on the fire-screen at right, a lady is shown trapped in a sedan chair that is filled by her hoops—this woman appears again in the background of Hogarth's Beer Street in 1752.
Commissioning: The work was commissioned by Mary Edwards of Kensington,[8] a consistent patron of Hogarth's.[9] Miss Edwards, who had inherited a sum of more than £50,000 pounds a year at the age of twenty-four, was considered eccentric,[6][10] having married a son of the fourth Duke of Hamilton, whom she discarded when he turned out to be profligate. On this occasion she engaged the services of Hogarth with the specific intent of commissioning a painting that would humorously mock what she considered to be the ridiculous fashions and indulgences of the upper class of the time, and "female adornment".[11] It is reported that she did this as an act of vengeance, as she had been ridiculed by the type of people scoffed at in the painting.[12] For a price of sixty guineas, Hogarth agreed to fulfil her request, but it is known that he was not particularly fond of his work; Hogarth often felt less enthusiastic about productions for which a specific commission was made, that were executed to order.[6]
Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme Artist William Hogarth
Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme, Year 172, Engraving
Dimensions 22.2 cm × 31.8 cm (8.8 in × 12.5 in)
Hogarthian image of the 1720 "South Sea Bubble" from the mid-19th century, by Edward Matthew Ward, Tate Gallery
Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme (also known as The South Sea Scheme) is an early print by William Hogarth, created in 1721 and widely published from 1724. It caricatures the financial speculation, corruption and credulity that caused the South Sea Bubble in England in 1720–1.
The South Sea Company was a British joint stock company founded in 1711. It was granted a monopoly to trade with Spain's South American colonies as part of a treaty during the War of Spanish Succession, in return for the company's assumption of the national debt run up by England during the war. Speculation in the company's stock led to a great economic bubble in 1720, with company's shares rising rapidly in price from around £100 to over £1,000. Many investors were ruined when the bubble burst and the value of stock in the South Sea Company crashed. Political scandal ensued when fraud among the company's directors and corruption of cabinet ministers became clear.
The event triggered several satirical engravings by foreign artists that were widely published in English newspapers, including in particular a version of A Monument Dedicated to Posterity by Bernard Picart adapted by Bernard Baron,[1] which depicted Folly drawing Fortune in a cart while she showered a crowd of hopeful investors with bubbles of air and worthless shreds of paper rather than with the riches for which they hoped. Hogarth's print was created in 1721 as a response to the foreign engravings. The events had personal piquancy for Hogarth, given his father's detention as a debtor in Fleet Prison from 1707–12 and his early death in 1718. The South Sea Scheme is an early essay in engraving by Hogarth, who had set up on his own as a copperplate artist and painter after his apprenticeship with silver engraver Ellis Gamble came to an early end in 1720.
Description
The print shows a London scene, with the Guildhall and its monumental statue of the giant Gog (or Magog) to the left, a classical column based on The Monument to the Great Fire of London to the right, and the dome of St Paul's Cathedral rising behind the buildings in the background. The base of the column bears an inscription which states: "This monument was erected in memory of the destruction of the city by the South Sea in 1720", while foxes fight above.[2] It is no coincidence that in Hogarth's scene the monument, a symbol of the City's greed, dwarfs St Paul's, a symbol of Christian charity.
The Miseries and Misfortunes of War
The centre of the print is occupied by a financial wheel of fortune or merry-go-round ridden by figures representative of the broad section of society taken in by the scheme, including a whore and a clergyman on the left,[3] then a boot black and a hag, and a Scottish nobleman to the right, on a fat-faced horse. The ride is surmounted by a goat and the slogan "Who'l Ride" and surrounded by a jostling crowd below. To the front of the crowd, a short pickpocket rifles through the pockets of a larger gentleman. Paulson identifies the first as a caricature of Alexander Pope, who profited from the South Sea Scheme; and speculates that the other is John Gay, who, refusing to cash in enough of his stock to enable himself to have "a clean shirt and a shoulder of mutton every day for life", lost his investment and all his imagined profits.[4] The image of the wheel is a parody of Jacques Callot's La Pendaison from the series The Miseries and Misfortunes of War, and the crowd has elements taken from his La Roue. Women line a balcony to the upper left, queuing to enter a building surmounted by stag's antlers, under a sign which offers "Raffleing for Husbands with Lottery Fortunes in Here".
20.08.2016
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