George L. Henderson

California and the fictions of capital

Introduction: The Alchemy of Capital and Nature Why the Late Nineteenth-Century Countryside? The Discourse of Rural Realism Why Rural Realism, Why the Novel? Stalking the Interdisciplinary Wilds Reference Maps Part I: Making Geographies 1. Rural Commodity Ragtimes: A Primer The Logics and Illogics of Production: The Shift to and out of Grain The Regime of Specialty Crops A Wider Division of Labor: The Country in the City 2. Nature and Fictitious Capital: The Circulation of Money Capital Capitalism and Nature: The Agrarian Nexus Axis One: The Mann-Dickinson Thesis, Nature as Obstacle Axis Two: Exploiting the Natural Obstacle Keeping Capitalism Out or Letting Capital In? Marx on Circulation Blurred Boundaries and Fugitive Bodies Nature and Circulation Capital, Nature, and the Space-Time of Agro-Credits in the United States Capital, Nature, and the Space-Time of Agro-Credits in California Conclusion: Reading the Landscape of Fictitious Capital 3. Toward Rural Realism: Variable Capital, Variable Capitalists, and the Fictions of Capital The Way to Get Farm Labor? The Ever-New, Ever-Same, 1: Continuity of Wage Labor and Changes in the Wage Labor Market The Ever-New, Ever-Same, 2: Resistance and Reaction Racializing the Working Body and Multicultural Racism Toward Rural Realism: An Agrarianism without Illusions? Variable Capitalists All: Capitalist Laborers and the Fictions of Capital in Country and City Coda: The Labor of Fiction Part II: Excavating Geographical Imaginations Introduction Many Countrysides The Trials of Capital and Narratives of Social Space The Narrative of Social Space in Rural Realism 4. Mussel Slough and the Contradictions of Squatter Capitalism The Commodification of Mussel Slough: Railroad, Speculators, and Squatters Converge in the Tulare Basin Blood Money and the Anatomy of Development The Country and the City: From Transgression to Similitude The Octopus and the Bourgeois Sublime Bourgeois Discourse and the Uses of Nature 5. Reality Redux: Landscapes of Boom and Bust in Southern California Where Is Southern California? From Ranchos to Real Estate The Boom of the 1880s The Southern California Boom Novel Conclusion: Production, a Necessary Evil 6. Romancing the Sand: Earth-Capital and Desire in the Imperial Valley The Problem Engineers and Entrepreneurs Producing the Imperial Valley What a Difference a Flood Makes Imperial Valley Representations, 1: Promotion and Its (Dis)Contents Imperial Valley Representations, 2: The Winning of Barbara Worth and the Erotics of Western Conquest Conclusion: Engineering Rural Realism 7. Take Me to the River: Water, Metropolitan Growth, and the Countryside Designer Ducts Los Angeles and the Owens Valley San Francisco and Hetch Hetchy Valley Rural Eclipse: The Water-Bearer and The Ford Wither Rural Realism? Conclusion Notes References Index

Nature and Fictitious Capital: The Historical Geography of an Agrarian Question

Capitalism is produced in part through its own production of nature, but it has been argued that nature also poses certain obstacles to capitalist development. Political economists and rural sociologists have argued that in certain instances agriculture, as a form of production based in nature, has proven resistant to capitalist transformation. The Mann–Dickinson thesis still stands as one of the best such formulations. This essay argues for turning the Mann–Dickinson thesis on its head so as to ask how it is that an obstacle for one set of capital comprises an opportunity for other capitals. The essay therefore examines agriculture as a nexus of nature and circulating capital. It argues that what has been construed as a primary obstacle (the disunity of working and production time and the cumulative effects thereof) has been poorly appreciated as comprising a distinctive opportunity for capitalist investments and appropriations through the credit system. Credit, by no means an exogenous or anachronistic force, develops along with production and constitutes a social relation of production along with other such relations. These contentions are borne out in a critique of the nature-as-obstacle argument and then in a discussion of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century agriculture in the United States, especially in California. In the latter discussion, I focus on the role of credit as the system that mediates the relations between nature and capital in and between different space–times. Credit, I argue, was necessarily constituted spatially and was contingently tied to the rise of agrarian formations in the American West.

‘Free’ Food, the Local Production of Worth, and the Circuit of Decommodification: A Value Theory of the Surplus

“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity” [Marx, 1967 Capital, Volume 1 first paragraph (International Publishers, New York)]. As Marx moves beyond the first paragraph of Capital, he famously argues that value makes the commodity a ‘hieroglyphic’. But his own opening is also a sort of hieroglyphic: it rings true for bourgeois economy as it does for his critique of that economy, but for entirely different reasons. The purpose of Capital is to obliterate this apparent corroboration, yet a hieroglyphic quality is maintained throughout, as Marx subjects his own successive claims to iterative, immanent critique. This chain cannot be said to be indefinite for Marx, but neither is it complete. Here, I hark back to Marxs opening gambit to ask: in capitalist society, what else accumulates besides commodities proper? The paper proceeds iteratively, offering a series of revised opening claims that mimic yet spiral away from Marxs original. I argue specifically that, although devaluation (decommodification) inheres in the production and circulation of value, it has its own accumulation logic. The example is of food banking. I explore this activity as simultaneously material, representational, and political, and examine the constitutive force of each of these modalities. I treat food banking, therefore, as a form of commodity afterlife, through which devaluation becomes (imperfectly) a positivity.

Romancing the Sand: Constructions of Capital and Nature in Arid America

Hard upon the heels of a philosophy which glorifies success must follow a philosophy which rationalizes failure.1 Commodities borrow their aesthetic language from human courtship; but then the relationship is reversed and people borrow their aesthetic expression from the world of the commodity. 2

What was Fight Club? Theses on the value worlds of trash capitalism

Since its 1999 theatrical release, Fight Club has been a cult favorite notable for the regular punches thrown and received by its protagonists. How should we read these thrashings alongside what is arguably the film’s other great obsession, trash? I argue that Fight Club’s trash is no mere adjunct or prop for the story; it is the central value-theoretic object structuring the film. Drawing upon recent literatures that urge us to value trash, the paper has three objectives: to reevaluate Fight Club’s representation of capitalism, to develop a value-theoretic account of trash, and, by extension, to explore what that account implies for a broad conception of capitalist value and its origins in human ‘species being’ (Marx). I argue that when trash is defined not simply as the unusable remains of commodities but as matter ‘out of place’, and when any assemblage, including human species being can be shown to consist, in its being, of matter ‘out of place’, trash can be glimpsed as the condition of possibility for value. Value, however, appears otherwise, as a chain of ordered emplacements. I read Fight Club as the stage upon which these contradictory value conceptions are played out and as a provocation to consider the politics of misrecognition that result from value appearing as other than what it is.

Close Encounters: On the Significance of GeoGraphy to the New Western History

midst the ‘culture wars’ that started making headlines three or four years back, an essay appeared in the New York Times Book Review entitled ‘Dancing with professors: the trouble with academic prose’.2 As the title suggests, the purpose of the essay was to take to task the stodgy, obscure writing that too often plagues the academy and damages its public relations in these downsizing times. But the essay also stands as one of the few encounters between the frontiers (that unhappy word) of western American history and a particular brand of human geography.3 This encounter has passed by with little if any published commentary. Moreover, the ‘culture wars’ continue to flare up, making the encounter doubly worthy of critical reflection. In the following pages I examine the nature of the encounter and bring to the fore its latent implications. I suggest that insofar as the author is a new western historian, the critical position taken in the essay relates inextricably, though contingently, to that identity. I argue that, even though the author may have considered irrelevant the fact that a geographer’s work was being scorned, it is precisely the assumption of irrelevance that counts most. That is, a recognition of the work as a certain kind of geography may have led to the discovery of some common cause with ‘troubled’ academic prose as well as alternative conclusions about representation in the academy (or outside it). Finally, so as to mark the positions of the new western history and new geographics more clearly, and to move outside the passions of disciplinary interests, I read the encounter through a comparative look at one

Book Review: Handbook of cultural geography. Edited by Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift

non-word. Yet it is commonly encountered in island studies, an acknowledgement that being an island denotes shared characteristics, despite variations in forms and natures. Vanessa Agnew puts it well in a section actually entitled ‘islandness’ in her chapter on Pacific island encounters and race: ‘Notwithstanding the fact that high islands such as Tahiti differed from low islands like those in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), coral islands from those without reefs, and tropical islands from those in the temperate and frigid zones, the island itself was still a topographical constant’ (p. 83). This book takes the import of this constant, depicting its operation in islands of various sizes in locales ranging from the windy blasts of the Falklands to the warmer climes of St Lucia and Réunion. It belongs to the Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures series and emanates from a conference at the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Kent University (one editor, Edmond, is based there). Most authors are from English Departments, content to write for a book with a history title. This welcome multi-disciplinarity regarding island studies is further evidenced by authors from geography, history itself, and cultural studies. A second uniting theme is adumbrated by Agnew, though properly ascribed to another author, Greg Dening, the observation that ‘crossing the beach, that liminal space between land and sea, promoted new ways of thinking’ (p.83). Crossing thus into the ‘small continent’ of the island (the construct of Henry David Thoreau, with which Dening himself closes the book), ‘islands in history’ had their islandness—small scale, peripherality, boundedness, completeness etc.—utilised as the setting for utopian societies (Bulama, chapter by Deidre Coleman), as leper colonies (Edmond), as literary devices (Roger Moss’s deconstruction of Derek Walcott’s St Lucia and Markman Ellis’s study of 18 century poetry on islands) as well as more conventional analyses regarding economics, ethnography and politics, usually set within a postcolonial framework. Perhaps a wide readership would see the next generation of computer lexicographers remove the red wiggle beneath ‘islandness’, for—as well demonstrated again here—this is a concept that is entitled to proper recognition for its word.