The More-Than-Human Life of Capitalism: Assemblages, Affects and the Neoliberal Black Hole

Abstract

This paper applies a more-than-human, relational, new materialist ontology to ask the Deleuzian question: what does capitalism actually do? The transactions identified in Marx’s Capital are re-analysed as more-than-human assemblages, constituted by affective flows involving both human and non-human matter. The paper then identifies further more-than-human affects that produce the fluctuations in prices and quantities of goods sold, described in classical economics as the ‘laws of supply and demand’. Analysis reveals these affects to be associated with the affective and relational capacities of commodities. The consequences of this more-than-human ontology of capitalism are explored by means of a short case study of the digital economy. This demonstrates how more-than-human affects are responsible for many of the negative consequences of a capitalist economy, including uncertainty, waste and social inequalities. The paper suggests that capitalism is progressively becoming a ‘black hole’ from which neither workers nor capitalist enterprises can escape, and draws conclusions that diverge radically from both neoliberal and Marxist analyses of capitalism.

Reading Refugee/(Im)Migrant Education Diffractively: Transdisciplinary Exploration of Matters That Matter and Matter That Matters in Refugee/(Im)Migrant Education

“…Citing the foundational work of Espiritu (2006), Tang (2015) notes that, as an emergent field, CRS "refuses to locate the refugee as an object to be studied, a problem to be solved, or a legal classification to be dissected" (p. 5). This stands in contrast to neoliberal efforts to "pin down" refugee/(im)migrants in education as language learners, through DEI initiatives or within data sets largely focused on documenting deficits and surveilling failure as part of a larger divestment strategy in public education (e.g., Ewing 2018;Royal and Cothorne 2021;Lipman 2011;Schneider and Berkshire 2020). Still, CRS battles for definition of and stakes claims on territories that include refugee/(im)migrant education, including through a call for "refugee teaching-that is, teaching done by and for refugees" (Espiritu et al 2022, p. 105, emphasis in original).…”