One of my favourite ideas comes from the work of Brazillian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: Cosmological Perspectivism. Based on his ethnographic work, Viveiros de Castro recounts the creation mythologies of Amerindian peoples which suggest that there was a time when the earth contained only people, and that through various adventures, misadventures and encounters, these people were transformed into the flora and fauna that we know today. The quote that I love which explains this comes from a 1998 paper, Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism, but appears in different forms throughout his body of work:

“being people in their own sphere, non-humans see things as ‘people’ do. But the things that they see are different: what to us is blood, is maize beer to the jaguar; what to the souls of the dead is a rotting corpse, to us is soaking manioc; what we see as a muddy waterhole, the tapirs see as a great ceremonial house” (p.477-478)

The core idea that is being communicated here, the one that fascinates me the more that I think about it, is an absolute metaphysical relativism that challenges us to reflect that other human and non-human beings do not see the world as we do, that ‘experience’ is itself heterogenous, tout court, and the world understood thus becomes not a place of unstable signifiers but of unstable referents, one that has only difference at every level. That another being  may look at the very same thing that ‘I’ see, and see something radically different is best understood, as Latour describes it, a bomb thrown into a Western metaphysics with the potential to upend the ways in which we think about the social milieu in general and ethnographic encounters in particular.

Penny and I enjoying Royal Holloway’s beautiful campus at the Deleuze Studies Conference

I’ve written about this before on this blog and I bring it up again, because while at this years conferences I became interested in a particular and perhaps related question, namely, “How does capitalism see the world?” My paper at EGOS was at least partially about the ways in which capitalist axiomatization is complicit in the production of a perverted desire for annihilation and one audience member was, to use his term, “embarrassed” by the way in which I tend to speak of speak of “capital” as a having a coherent existence, desires, logics and so on. If I reflect on this tendency to speak sloganistically (e.g. “Capital places no extra-monetary value on human life,”) I might tease out a tendency in Deleuze and Guattari – following Marx – to do the same (indeed, other Deleuze scholars do the same thing) but more pointedly, while I might acknowledge that capital has different flows, fluxes, counterflows, resistances, schisms, and bifurcations, I genuinely ask any reader to think of the last time that they did something that was not in the service of a firm’s agenda of profit maximization. When was the last time that you acted against the best interests of capital? The absolute heterogeneity of our experiences starts to look quite perversely the same when we think about it as all being in the service of capitalist revenue maximization. Indeed, the difficulty that we all experience in answering such a question should give us pause to reflect that every potential act of rebellion, creative thought, radical offshoot and so on, creates a new market that is (with the appropriate time lag) eventually capitalized upon, everything is eventually subordinated to profitability. If this is the case, how can we ever speak of individual subjects or agentic action, given that supposedly free agents will never exercise any radical freedom, only ever serving the interests of capital to greater or lesser extents.

Studiously making notes. Penny judges my handwriting far too harshly.

As such, I have what I think is a perspectival thought. What is it like to be capital? Capital does not perceive the same reality that humans do. Capital looks at an ecological crisis that involves a warming planet, acidified oceans, drought, wildfires, more powerful hurricanes, and rising oceans and sees opportunity to maximize profits by responding to a new demand for sustainable businesses or products. What to us is a public health crisis of drug use and addiction, capital sees an opportunity to make profits by at once expanding the pharmaceutical industry in order to sell the drugs and also own the prisons and rehabilitation centres where people are sent for punishment/treatment. Where we see an expression of acceptance and love by those who have not been accepted, those whose love was once outlawed by the state, capital sees an opportunity to maximize profits by cornering the LGBTQ+ market through participation in Pride. 

What is it like to be capital? It is to be the Great Optimist, always hopefully watching out for a new opportunity. It is to see the world only in terms of possibilities for multiplication, for connection, for proliferation, to grow infinitely. Capital exists with a purely virtual ontology, a numerico-techno-potentiality, it can become any thing and has a passport to go anywhere. As the condition of axiomatization, facilitating unequal exchange, capital is itself never axiomatized. It is a flow endlessly, circum- and extraplanetary. Whereas a traditional Western metaphysic might tell us that humans see humans as humans, animals see animals as animals, and capital sees capital as capital, Capitalistic Perspectivism suggests to us that capital sees humans, animals, and capital as opportunity – as resources that can be used in order to generate more capital. Capital sees the world only in terms of possibilities for multiplication, for connection, for proliferation. Capital is in this sense the great equalizer. Its perspectivalism means that it does not see humans in the sociopolitical contexts that other humans do. Rather, it sees them as resources that it uses to further its own growth and proliferation. Capital does not care if humans are whie, black, or brown. If they are abled or disabled. If they are LGBTQ+ or straight. If they are human or non-human Indeed, capital does not even ask if they are alive or dead as both are equally resources for capital’s growth and expansion. Capital’s only question is “How can I continue to grow?” or “What assembly’s of resources will allow me to grow the most?”The ethics of capital is thus Spinozist, asking what combinations will healthily increase my body, what will decrease or harm it and since capital overs over all things, these ethics are purely immanent.

Enjoying Scottish flowers at EGOS. 

Understood in this way, the operations of the contemporary social fabric make more sense. Capital only ever sees one thing, potential for growth. That is it. Capital cares about nothing other than its own survival and in expanded size there is less of a possibility of diminution and disappearance. It is this naked and comically exaggerated self-interest that I think Hietanen et al (2019) are talking about when they talk about the capitalized subject or the “one who has completely embodied capitalism’s monstrous desire of indefinite accumulation (‘I am productivity itself!’). […] all possible subjectivation is replaced by the desire of capital itself.” While the term itself is becoming increasingly passé, this is what it means to be a good “entrepreneurial, neoliberal subject”, to be one with capital. To want what it wants. To see only from its perspective. And who among us does not?