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Totality Inside Out: Rethinking Crisis and Conflict under Capital
However divergent their analyses may be in other ways, some prominent anti-capitalist critics have remained critical of contemporary debates over reparative justice for groups historically oppressed and marginalized on the basis of race, gender, sexual identity, sexual preference, and/or ability, arguing that the most these struggles can hope to produce is a more diversity-friendly capital. Meanwhile, scholars of gender and sexuality as well as race and ethnic studies maintain that, by elevating the socioeconomic above other logics of domination, anti-capitalist thought fails to acknowledge specific forms and experiences of subjugation.
The thinkers and activists who appear in Totality Inside Out reject this divisive logic altogether. Instead, they aim for a more expansive analysis of our contemporary moment to uncover connected sites of political struggle over racial and economic justice, materialist feminist and queer critique, climate change, and aesthetic value. The re-imagined account of capitalist totality that appears in this volume illuminates the material interlinkages between discrepant social phenomena, forms of oppression, and group histories, offering multiple entry points for readers who are interested in exploring how capitalism shapes integral relations within the social whole.
Contributors : Brent Ryan Bellamy, Sarah Brouillette, Sarika Chandra, Chris Chen,
Joshua Clover, Tim Kreiner, Arthur Scarritt, Zoe Sutherland, Marina Vishmidt
The thinkers and activists who appear in Totality Inside Out reject this divisive logic altogether. Instead, they aim for a more expansive analysis of our contemporary moment to uncover connected sites of political struggle over racial and economic justice, materialist feminist and queer critique, climate change, and aesthetic value. The re-imagined account of capitalist totality that appears in this volume illuminates the material interlinkages between discrepant social phenomena, forms of oppression, and group histories, offering multiple entry points for readers who are interested in exploring how capitalism shapes integral relations within the social whole.
Contributors : Brent Ryan Bellamy, Sarah Brouillette, Sarika Chandra, Chris Chen,
Joshua Clover, Tim Kreiner, Arthur Scarritt, Zoe Sutherland, Marina Vishmidt
256 pages, Paperback
Published January 18, 2022
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November 23, 2022
Fascinating and necessary (if sometimes uneven) attempt to resurrect the marxist project of dialectical critique of totality as a way out of the organizing impasses that fracture proletarian struggle (principally) along race and gender. at the same time, a multiply useful historical perspective on *why* and *how* such divisions emerged in movements, and also in "theory." With one notable exception, the authors mostly take that kind of "Californian Marxist" approach that has emerged in recent years: a mix of anti-state marxisms and autonomisms; a reading of race and class together a la Ruth Wilson Gilmore; a focus on insurrection and riot as forms of proletariat expression. Bibliographies are scattered with references to Viewpoint Magazine, Endnotes, Postone, etc. thinking with this book (and with the reading group i participated in) has been incredibly useful for me, and i think i'll be returning to it frequently.
it appears longer than it actually is, as each chapter is exhaustively footnoted and contains its own bibliography (a strange decision by the press editors, i think). there are only six essays along with a collectively-written introduction (due, presumably, to the untimely passing of Kevin Floyd--a major goal of the book is to encourage more of us to read Floyd's work, which I plan to do). Tim Kreiner's "Let the Dead Bury the Dead: Race, Gender, and Class Composition in the U.S. after 1965" provides a historical account of the emergence and debate over normative identity politics in left US movements. It is accompanied by Sarika Chandra and Chris Chen's "Remapping the Race/Class Problematic" which examines the same problem but from the theoretical or philosophical problem of what such movements and theorists propose to do with race (i.e. eliminativist, conservationist, and abolitionist). I'm not convinced by their reading of Nancy Fraser, but aside from that this was a very strong essay. Finally, Marina Vishmidt and Zoe Sutherland's "(Un)making Value: Reading Social Reproduction through the Question of Totality" demonstrates how totality thinking can help us understand the dialectical relationship between waged and unwaged spheres of labor, and value extraction more generally, while critiquing "intersectional" approaches for avoiding the critique of totality. These three essays in particular were great.
The introduction to the book is kind of a mess, and you can read in that collaborative effort perhaps some of the fractures that appear elsewhere. Most pointedly, Arthur Scarritt's chapter "Tripartheid: How Global White Supremacy Triumphs through Neoliberalism" proposes precisely a non-totality reading of the history of racism as an extension of rentier feudalism into the present. This reading runs directly against the arguments of the three essays above--disagreement is fine, but makes the synthesis attempted very difficult as such "neofeudal" theses carry with them numerous assumptions about what purportedly isn't proper to the capitalist totality. Generally speaking, I also found this essay riddled with easily contestable historical statements (particularly concerning mining and extractive industries in settler-colonial frontiers).
There's also a bit of an unresolved problem in the introduction as to how to spatially think "insides" and "outsides" of the totality, or that is even possible. the volume is oddly called "Totality Inside Out," but the introduction tries to think it as "totality from the outside in" (pg 12). The authors go on to describe that "capital...recreates a thoroughly racialized outside" (17), they are "external to" the totality, or its logic. I just think this topographical language is less helpful than topological, or some other spatially otherwise form of language.
More critically, Brent Ryan Bellamy's "Ecology with Totality: The Case of Morton’s Hyperobjects and Klein’s This Changes Everything" offers a lot to the book but kind of dangles as an appendage at the end. I'm not sure I would have picked these two texts/objects, but the readings of them are smart. The broader problematic in which they're situated is deeply important to think through, and Bellamy only scratches the surface of the very interesting question of how to think about the "earth system" totality alongside/as/in relation to the "capitalist totality." The essay concludes by suggesting "we cannot produce a properly dialectical account of totality without considering climate crisis and the struggles already underway against it"--and yet, none of the other essays in the volume can muster even the barest mention of climate or the environment, save for one paragraph in Chandra and Chen's chapter. What does that tell us about the limits in which the totality problem is currently being posed, or the work to still be done to pose the problem systematically? I tried to get at some of these issues in my review of Connolly in cultural critique, and am continuing to press on it via "cognitive mapping." But a lot remains to be done.
it appears longer than it actually is, as each chapter is exhaustively footnoted and contains its own bibliography (a strange decision by the press editors, i think). there are only six essays along with a collectively-written introduction (due, presumably, to the untimely passing of Kevin Floyd--a major goal of the book is to encourage more of us to read Floyd's work, which I plan to do). Tim Kreiner's "Let the Dead Bury the Dead: Race, Gender, and Class Composition in the U.S. after 1965" provides a historical account of the emergence and debate over normative identity politics in left US movements. It is accompanied by Sarika Chandra and Chris Chen's "Remapping the Race/Class Problematic" which examines the same problem but from the theoretical or philosophical problem of what such movements and theorists propose to do with race (i.e. eliminativist, conservationist, and abolitionist). I'm not convinced by their reading of Nancy Fraser, but aside from that this was a very strong essay. Finally, Marina Vishmidt and Zoe Sutherland's "(Un)making Value: Reading Social Reproduction through the Question of Totality" demonstrates how totality thinking can help us understand the dialectical relationship between waged and unwaged spheres of labor, and value extraction more generally, while critiquing "intersectional" approaches for avoiding the critique of totality. These three essays in particular were great.
The introduction to the book is kind of a mess, and you can read in that collaborative effort perhaps some of the fractures that appear elsewhere. Most pointedly, Arthur Scarritt's chapter "Tripartheid: How Global White Supremacy Triumphs through Neoliberalism" proposes precisely a non-totality reading of the history of racism as an extension of rentier feudalism into the present. This reading runs directly against the arguments of the three essays above--disagreement is fine, but makes the synthesis attempted very difficult as such "neofeudal" theses carry with them numerous assumptions about what purportedly isn't proper to the capitalist totality. Generally speaking, I also found this essay riddled with easily contestable historical statements (particularly concerning mining and extractive industries in settler-colonial frontiers).
There's also a bit of an unresolved problem in the introduction as to how to spatially think "insides" and "outsides" of the totality, or that is even possible. the volume is oddly called "Totality Inside Out," but the introduction tries to think it as "totality from the outside in" (pg 12). The authors go on to describe that "capital...recreates a thoroughly racialized outside" (17), they are "external to" the totality, or its logic. I just think this topographical language is less helpful than topological, or some other spatially otherwise form of language.
More critically, Brent Ryan Bellamy's "Ecology with Totality: The Case of Morton’s Hyperobjects and Klein’s This Changes Everything" offers a lot to the book but kind of dangles as an appendage at the end. I'm not sure I would have picked these two texts/objects, but the readings of them are smart. The broader problematic in which they're situated is deeply important to think through, and Bellamy only scratches the surface of the very interesting question of how to think about the "earth system" totality alongside/as/in relation to the "capitalist totality." The essay concludes by suggesting "we cannot produce a properly dialectical account of totality without considering climate crisis and the struggles already underway against it"--and yet, none of the other essays in the volume can muster even the barest mention of climate or the environment, save for one paragraph in Chandra and Chen's chapter. What does that tell us about the limits in which the totality problem is currently being posed, or the work to still be done to pose the problem systematically? I tried to get at some of these issues in my review of Connolly in cultural critique, and am continuing to press on it via "cognitive mapping." But a lot remains to be done.
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