World-making,desire,and the future

Abstract

In this commentary responding to Sutherland's paper, I insist that human geographers must be explicit about the geographies we theorize from so as to avoid universalizing narratives. Engaging the work of Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betsamosake Simpson, I consider what forms of world-making are unaccounted for when post-capitalism is the sole analytic employed to envision the future. Then, I engage with Sutherland's explorations of hauntology and the atmospheric to consider how capitalism is haunted by colonial histories and how social movements evolve over time. Lastly, I respond to Sutherland's attention to desire, culture, and capitalism in his piece, drawing on the work of Brandi Summers to illustrate how capitalism's reliance on the ‘fungibility of people/place’ is also a deeply racialized logic. In sum, I question if post-capitalism is expansive enough to hold our collective imaginings of the future.

Prior to engaging with this piece, I had not heard of Mark Fisher. I was intrigued by the layered renderings of hauntology, spatial imaginaries, and culture that Sutherland (2023) wove into the abstract, as well as the title's gesturing towards ‘reimagining postcapitalist geographies’. These are analytics that figure into my scholarship, as a cultural and urban geographer, and my work is guided by the pursuit of futures beyond the injustices of the present world we reside within. After reading this piece, I am struck by how in the same discipline or even sub-discipline of geography, we can use the same language and yet our theorizations can be markedly different. It is possible that these differences are dependent on the geographies we as scholars emerge from.

As human geographers, we teach our students that ‘place matters’, and how we need to attend to the particular geographies and empirical contexts we theorize from. Therefore as I read Sutherland's piece, I found myself questioning, where are we situated in this analysis? What geographies is the author and Fisher operating from? I had a difficult time grounding my thinking in the piece, for the tone often spoke in presumed universals. Humans, place, and their interrelationships were framed in generics, capitalism depicted as the only structure scaffolding space. Yet in the genealogies I operate from, which inform how I do geography, space is always imbued with many axes of power (Daigle and Ramírez, 2021). The overemphasis on capitalism, without an attention to race, gender, or sexuality, perpetuates a white, euro-centric, hetero-patriarchal spatial imaginary that limits an understanding of the multitude of ways that people resist power formations and imagine futures beyond the crises of the present (Farrales et al., 2021; Nagar et al., 2002; Oswin, 2020; Vasudevan et al., 2022; Werner et al., 2017).

World-ending and world-making

Sutherland's analysis of (counter) cultures and capitalism, vis a vis Fisher, contends that ‘capitalism no longer must incorporate or recuperate alternative cultures’ for the public consciousness along with cultural production in ‘the West’ at present ‘has been shaped by an acquiescence to capitalism from the start’. Drawing on Fisher's texts, Sutherland frames capitalism and its (counter)cultures within Fordist/Post-Fordist terms, speaking to the stunted imaginaries of the neoliberal era where the ‘cultural malaise – of being unable to imagine and desire “the new”’ is a major obstacle in ‘imagining postcapitalist geographies’. While the co-optation of alternative political movements under neoliberalism is something that carries resonance within the frames of my own work, I struggle with the temporal framing of Sutherland and Fishers’ arguments. To offer this critique of countercultures’ ‘cultural malaise’ within the frame of the last century alone, dislodges capitalism from its entangled development with colonialism (Davis et al., 2019) – with all of its attendant logics that continue to shape current capitalist relations – and negates the existence of future-oriented ontologies that extend beyond capitalism's authority. Who is the subject unable to imagine and desire ‘the new’? Again, the lack of grounding in the particular geographies this critique emerges from, and the limited temporal frame through which post-capitalist futures can be envisioned, presumes a shared subject positioning of cultural producers in ‘the West’. This framing thus forecloses the possibility that imaginings of a world beyond capitalism could exist in the current moment, imaginings that are not merely the ‘lost futures’ of previous iterations of countercultural desire.

There are in fact many activists, thinkers and cultural producers who are actively weaving futures everyday. As Robyn Maynard writes to Leanne Betsamosake Simpson in their collection, Rehearsals for Living (2022):

World-ending and world-making can occur, are occurring, have always occurred, simultaneously. Given that racial and ecological violence are interwoven and inextricable from one another, more now than ever, Black and Indigenous communities – who are globally positioned as ‘first to die’ within the climate crisis – are also on the front lines of world making practices that threaten to overthrow the current (death-making) order of things….understanding the contemporary catastrophe as the longue durée of slavery, colonialism, and (ongoing) settler colonialism also has the ability to shape, and re-shape, our world-making (26–27)

The death-making order of things is (colonial-racial) capitalism, and as Simpson replies to Maynard, ‘imperialism and ongoing colonialism have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence’ (2022: 44), capitalism extracting value from these world endings time and time again over the centuries. Yet, ‘Indigenous and Black peoples have been…relentlessly building worlds through unspeakable violence and loss’ (44) amid the death-making order of slavery, genocide, and its afterlives. I do not believe that the post-capitalist futures conjured by Fisher account for the plurality of spatial imaginaries and world-making methods that Maynard and Simpson, among others, point to (Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Yazzie and Baldy, 2018).

Haunting and the spirit of movements

Sutherland's incorporation of the atmospheric and the hauntological offer a means of understanding the more ephemeral workings of capitalism and resistance. Outlining the atmospheric affect of capitalism, Sutherland writes how ‘affective resistances of capitalism might be in suspension; denoting both a sense of stalling (of something interrupted but with a possibility of future movement) and something ‘hanging in the air’, something not yet grounded’. Here, I see resonance in how haunting, as a temporal and spatial method with genealogies in Black and Indigenous studies, attends to the specters of colonialism, and how haunting too is a form of stalling, of refusal to let colonial histories be buried (Best and Ramírez, 2021; Gordon, 2008; Heron, 2022; McKittrick, 2013; Roberts, 2020). Haunting is a spatially ephemeral form of ‘remembering and reminding’ (Tuck and Ree, 2013: 642) that refuses the colonial-capitalist (death-making) order, operationalized by particular Black and Indigenous art forms. These forms hold power in their presence, world-making in the shadow of violence and what has been lost.

Sutherland goes on to write that ‘new commons and worlds must be built, but they also must have an atmosphere from – and into which – they can precipitate and proliferate if they are to become a rival to capitalism. They need a surrounding culture of postcapitalist desire’. I appreciate this gesture towards the spirit of movements, the intangible mechanisms that allow them to take shape and emerge. I wonder, however, if these ‘ghosts of lost futures’ are indeed lost. With any movement, even if its end goals were not fully achieved due to its dissolution either explicitly or covertly by the colonial-capitalist state, its members continue to build relations and create change in organized and everyday ways. The ghosts of movements’ pasts live on, evolve, and take new forms over time. So perhaps it is not about lacking a culture of desire, so much as tending to the ebbs and flows of world-making, and understanding that movements can take a multitude of forms.

Desire, race, and place

Lastly, I wanted to touch upon how desire, culture, and capitalism are framed in relation to place in this piece. As I read through Sutherland's analysis of Fisher's texts, and how Fisher saw capitalism turning places into ‘frictionless surfaces for the technologies and signs of capitalism’ where ‘urban landscapes are homogenised so as to look like anywhere…[while] paradoxically engendering the feeling of being nowhere’, I kept thinking of the work of Brandi Summers. In her book Black in Place, Summers draws from her research in Washington DC to reveal how ‘culture and authenticity work as instruments of redevelopment’ and how a sense of ‘authenticity’ in the DC context has been manufactured through Black aesthetic emplacement (2019: 18). In Summers’ analysis, she demonstrates how blackness is utilized to increase the desirability of a place and to generate capital, while capitalism simultaneously ‘devalorizes the neighborhoods it seeks to overhaul’ (2019: 62). By framing places (re)developed in recent years under the frame of neoliberal capitalism alone, without attending to longer histories and scales of colonialism and empire, we lose the broader context of who lives where and why, and how the redevelopment of neighbourhoods in the pursuit of ‘authenticity’ often means displacing particular populations to make way for others. Summers’ work offers an analytic for thinking through the relationship between cultural production, race, desire, and capitalism, building a more robust understanding of how capitalism's reliance on the ‘fungibility of people/place’ is also a deeply racialized logic.

Overall, my commentary insists that we, too, exist in the future. The ontologies of Black, Indigenous, and other formerly colonized peoples are conspicuously absent from Sutherland and Fisher's spatial imaginings. We don't need to exist in your imaginings, we exist in our own. The future will be post-capitalist, but this alone is not sufficient: there is much more that needs to be undone to make it a future worthy of our collective desire.