Boundlessness, Commodification, and Nature’s Metropolis

Before beginning this week’s post, I owe an apology for being a tardy or absent respondent to comments on previous posts, especially last week’s—I just realized today that I’ve left two comments hanging. I promise to do better this week!

Now, at the end of last week’s post, I began a discussion of Jeffrey Sklansky’s equation of commodification with quantification. Sklansky argued that one of the reasons why commodification has become such an important frame for new histories of capitalism is because—unlike proletarianization—it seems to have no necessary boundaries.

This boundlessness is quite different from the implicit premises of a narrative focused on proletarianization. Labor history and business history—as they were written up through, say, the 1990s—thrived on drawing distinctions, on identifying stages of development and differentia specifica. The most important distinction, perhaps, was between the human and the nonhuman: proletarianization is, after all, a human process.

Commodification, on the other hand, tends to overwhelm distinctions, starting with the human-nonhuman: while only humans can be proletarianized,[1] everything can be “priced”—placed in a relationship with other things that can be expressed in terms of a number. Even more, while the process of proletarianization seems never to engulf the whole of a person (see my argument in this post), commodification assimilates both individual humans and their internal qualities to a system of commensurable valuations: your cheerfulness as well as your blood pressure, your knowledge of Latin as well as your attention can all be denominated in dollars, no different from a television or a ticket to a concert.

In this way, the story of commodification flattens distinctions between humans and the (rest of the) natural world, demolishing proletarianization’s marked anthropocentrism. Putting a price on human lives or health or knowledge or creativity and putting a price on a chair or a car is one single continuous process; as much as labor could be abstracted as just one more input or one more production cost, the story of making humans into proletarians was always distinct from—if parallel to—the story of extracting value from the natural world.

There are various ways to account for this shift in historical narration away from proletarianization’s anthropocentrism. Certainly, the influence of environmentalism has something to do with it. While very much leftist critique descending from Marx is (still) only fitfully cognizant of ecological critiques of capitalism, some of the ontological premises of an ecological worldview have seeped into culture so generally that an older stark separation of the human and the nonhuman is no longer tenable.

Another possible explanation comes from the small explosion since the 1990s of works in the subfield of what Lorraine Daston has dubbed “historical epistemology,” which as Sklansky defines it is the study of “the invention of new kinds of fact such as employment figures and credit ratings along with the modern metrics and matrices that produced them” (Sklansky, “Elusive Sovereign,” 242). Offspring of the history of science, studies in this vein emphasize the ways that quantification and abstraction have profoundly reshaped the image of “the human,” creating what Dan Bouk has called the “statistical individual.” Incarnated in numbers, this creature can float freely as part of a universe of endlessly adaptable equations: where the human worker needs to occupy a certain place in the production process, the statistical individual can be plugged in far more flexibly at many points in a firm’s calculations and predictions.

Perhaps the most common explanation for this new approach to capitalism is the most vulgarly materialist: as the mode of production has changed, historians’ attention has shifted, following the transit of power from industry to finance. As Sklansky wrote, “The epochal transfer of profits from industry to banking over the past thirty years and the succession of escalating financial crises have focused scholarly attention on how money is made, literally and figuratively” (Sklansky “Elusive Sovereign,” 238). When the world feels like it is being controlled by bankers rather than by industrialists, historians learn to ask more questions about the history of banking the origins of securitization, the roots of financialization.

I have stressed throughout this series that I am rather skeptical of this kind of explanation—that historians tend to reorient their studies according to macroeconomic or macropolitical shifts. It is far more common for a historian, I believe, to look at a newspaper and say, “that reminds me of my dissertation!” than for one to say, “this article gives me a great idea for my next book!”

In other words, my working assumption for what an explanation of this shift in the historical study of capitalism needs to include—or to put things more boldly, for what an explanation of why there is a “new history of capitalism” needs to include—is a close examination of the intellectual currents active within the sites of instruction and practice. What is being taught, and which ideas are “hot?” Answering those questions, I think, will be more fruitful than trying to match academic trends like the rise of the new history of capitalism to particular secular changes in the global or US economy.

Or at least, that’s where I’ve been trying to head over the past few weeks: toward an examination of some of the underlying—and perhaps not always obvious—intellectual influences on the new history of capitalism and the way those influences account for its particular emphases and fixations. In the rest of this post, I want to try out an idea which—in miniature—points toward a bigger influence that I’ll be exploring next week: the contribution of the linguistic turn to the development of the new history of capitalism.

The other week on Twitter, Eli Cook pointed out one possible source of inspiration for a generation of historians, one reason why folks who entered graduate school from at least the mid-90s through the present might have had commodities on their minds. That source is a single chapter in a single monograph: the grain chapter of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991), Chapter 3.

The key argument of that chapter was that the grain trade had transitioned over the course of the nineteenth century from a system of water and warehouses to one built on railroads and elevators, and that the shift from one to the other entailed a new kind of abstraction which severed “the link between grain as physical object and grain as salable commodity” (109). The pleasure of Cronon’s chapter is in the fine technical detail of how these two systems functioned, but the chapter more subtly also drew the reader’s attention to the chicanery of the middlemen and speculators who took full advantage of this new abstractness.

Nature’s Metropolis wasn’t the first time a historian had paid attention to these kind of figures, and to some extent Chapter 3 was a kind of gloss on Marx’s chapter on the “general formula for capital” (Chapter 4 in Capital Vol. 1). But it wasn’t the chapter’s novelty that made it so inspiring. Instead, its power came from the way Cronon turned explanation into demystification, circumscribing an almost ostentatiously dry subject with a nimbus of magic.

Part of the influence of Nature’s Metropolis comes from the elegant clarity of its organization of evidence and the lambent intelligence of its prose—no doubt it would prompt emulation under any conditions. But the historian readers of Nature’s Metropolis would also have encountered it from within an academic setting shaped profoundly by the linguistic turn, and I would hazard that its great impact on a generation or two of graduate students has something to do with the way its ideas, its method, and even its tone interact with the ideas, method, and tone of scholarship directly inspired by post-structuralism.

In other words, Eli was totally right in locating Nature’s Metropolis as the fountainhead of the new history of capitalism, but what this insight reveals is the possibility that the field took shape largely in a subliminal dialogue with the kind of cultural history that embraced the linguistic turn unambiguously.

Here’s what I mean. If they were discontented with the total surrender to the play of symbols that post-structural mavens evangelized, graduate students[2] could discover in Cronon’s book something that had the same kind of piercing thrill of demystification as deconstruction but that conspicuously lacked the terminological fustian of capital-T Theory. Moreover, where the linguistic turn pushed toward a wholesale denial of materialism and smashed binaries with the violent zeal of an iconoclast, Cronon’s story of sacks and elevators steadfastly took the irreducibility of the material world as primary and affirmed the importance of at least some binaries as a way to structure a narrative.

On the other hand, Cronon’s sophisticated understanding of what a commodity was thoroughly matched the tenor of the linguistic turn: it would take more room than I want to give it here, but his description of the historical process by which “grain as salable commodity” unmoored itself from “grain as physical object” resembled nothing so much as the deconstructionist’s analysis of the “slippage” that occurs when signifiers detach from their signifieds and flurry about. Cronon’s conceptualization of the commodity was immediately—even intuitively—legible from within the linguistic turn: the commodity was a signifier. Or to put it another way, Cronon was one of the first historians to reconfigure the plot of capitalism as a story of commodification, but he did so (perhaps unconsciously) using a readymade structure cribbed from post-structuralism.

As I hope I can show next week, the effects of this half-conscious absorption of certain ideas and rhetorical moves from the linguistic turn can be seen in the way the new history of capitalism has developed. To close for this week, though, I think we can already see how Cronon’s treatment of commodities opens itself to an unbounded flexibility that could accommodate any kind of thing, quality, or experience within its logic. For Cronon, the commodity-signifier was a flickering node in an endless procession of deferred realizations of value—the physical grain might ultimately be milled, sold, baked, and eaten, but the contracts and options that rode for a moment on top of one or another grain-filled railroad car would be turned over and over, no longer bounded by the sale and consumption of a physical product. In his ability to seize this dynamism in full flight, Cronon did more than just explain how the grain trade worked in the nineteenth-century Midwest. His analysis of the grain trade became a kind of explanation of poststructuralism itself—reading Cronon, all those theories of structure, sign, and play finally made sense.