THE LOGIC OF CAPITAL AND THE POSSIBILITY OF RESISTANCE IN CHRIS ABANI’S GRACELAND

Chapter 1: The Logic of Capital and the Possibility of Resistance in Chris Abani’s GraceLand

Among its many concerns, Chris Abani’s GraceLand is particularly interested in the possibilities of resisting the forces of global capitalism in the postcolonial era. Set primarily in Lagos during the 1970s and 1980s, its narrative follows Elvis Oke, his friends, and his family as they grapple with the forces of socioeconomic oppression and military terror in postcolonial Nigeria. The political pessimism of Abani’s novel appears to be profound. The various narrative arcs almost universally lead to further degradation, flight from home, and even death. Moreover, this movement towards destruction and annihilation for many of the characters in GraceLand stems from the institution of global capital in postcolonial Nigeria, as can be seen in the novel’s depiction of Sunday Oke’s failed political career, the government-backed trafficking of human organs and human beings, and the displacement and erasure of socio-geographical communities in the name of commercialization. In this sense, GraceLand might convincingly be read as a chronicle of human impotence in the face of the dominative forces of global capital.

Yet James M. Hodapp has recently proposed a more generative reading of Abani’s novel. In “The Postcolonial Ecopolitics of Consumption: Reimagining the Kola Nut in Chris Abani’s GraceLand,” Hodapp suggests that where GraceLand’s characters struggle to survive in the wreckage of postcolonial Nigeria, GraceLand’s text itself enacts resistance against the forces of colonialism still present in postcolonial Nigeria (7).

That is, Hodapp argues that the novel’s non-diegetic descriptions of the kola nut and the rituals surrounding it in Igbo culture resist the colonial forces’s movement towards the erasure of all non-hegemonic cultures and histories and holds onto the potential for the reproduction of precolonial cultural formations. In the following, I want to supplement Hodapp’s analysis of the novel. I do this by placing Hodapp’s analysis into dialogue with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, which enacts a deconstructive close reading of Marx’s Capital. My argument is that Chakrabarty’s analytic maps a different mode of resistance occurring in both the form and the narrative of GraceLand, a resistance that exploits an alterity inhabiting the very heart of postcolonial capital.

The Logic of Capital and the Possibility of Resistance

In “The Two Histories of Capital,” the second chapter of Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty provides a framework for understanding how resistance to capital, both in its theoretical articulation and its historical instantiations, always inheres within capital’s own logical structure. Chakrabarty’s analysis begins by considering the various standard accounts of uneven development, that is, why individual, historically situated instances of capitalism around the world have common characteristics and yet also appear as though they have not all obtained uniformly. After enumerating a number of possible and common explanations for this phenomenon1, Chakrabarty suggests that capital is not a “totalizing unity[,]” that it is not a singular “force that encounters historical difference . . . as something external to its own structure” (47-8). Difference is rather intrinsic to its being. And this is evident, Chakrabarty argues, in the way that the concept of abstract labor and the history of capital’s coming into being rely upon an externality that precedes and resists assimilation to capital. Thus, insofar as capital’s logic impels it to establish both the category of abstract labor and its own version of history, then it ensures that every instance of capital remains structurally open, unique, and particular, as these concepts prevent capital from “sublat[ing] differences into itself” (50). Let us take the two categories one at a time.

As regards abstract labor, Chakrabarty asserts that Marx’s articulation of capital entails the notion of commodity and, thereby, abstract labor. In this formulation of capital, the exchange of commodities, things that are by their nature not the same thing, requires a common term by which to value or measure them (Chakrabarty 51). Marx, as Chakrabarty shows, identifies the common category by which two different commodities can be exchanged as “human labor,” or abstract labor (52). Abstract labor, then, plays a crucial role in the logic of capital, as its existence grounds the exchange of commodities.

Abstract labor, however, proves to be a tricky concept to articulate. Though noting that Marx’s writings sometimes give the impression that “abstract labor” names a discrete, empirically discoverable “object” (or a unity of some kind), Chakrabarty concludes that “to conceive of [it] as a substance, as a Cartesian res extensa, to reduce it to ‘nervous and muscular energy’ is either to misread Marx . . . or to repeat a mistake of Marx’s thought” (53). Thus, abstract labor, the common term between commodities that allows the exchange between them, has a certain structural openness to it. Indeed, Chakrabarty posits that it is “a performative practical category [serving t]o organize life under the sign of capital [by acting] as if labor could indeed be abstracted from all the social tissues in which it is always embedded and which make any particular labor—even the labor of abstracting—concrete” (54). Establishing “abstract labor” enacts (in what is usually widespread, preconscious activity) an economic quantification of the labors and labor time required for the production of a given object, assuming and necessitating the particularity of the individual, concrete labors that actually produce the object2. Thus, abstract labor, one of the most important concepts for the logic of capital, cannot attain “totalization,” as that would entail the absolute elision and/or suppression of the particularities of differentiated labors that allow the concept to be established in the first place.

Indeed, one tactic capital employs to suppress the structural instability, the non-totalization, of commodity exchange is to impose abstract labor back upon the very particular labor and laborers which constitute it. Chakrabarty highlights Marx’s account of how abstract labor not only allows the exchange of commodities in capital but actually grows into a standard against which particular laborers are compared and held accountable (55-6). Capitalistic modes of production hold their workers to an “ideal” (i.e. removed from particularity or abstracted) standard of labor by translating particular, historically situated labors performed by humans into mechanical forms or processes; Chakrabarty characterizes it as “transfer[ing] the motive force of production from the human or the animal to the machine, from living to dead labor” (57). So, the performance of labor abstraction creates an “idealized” labor that, in a significant sense, removes the human life from the labor and then measures the particular, human laborer and her labors against that standard (57-8, 60-1). The laborer under the imposition of abstract labor is, then, dehumanized; she is held to the dehumanizing standard of abstract labor so that the various commodities produced by differentiated, particular labors and laborers can “justifiably” be compared to or measured against one another.

It is here, in the imposition of dehumanized and dehumanizing abstract labor back onto the particular human labor and laborers necessary for capital to be at all, that capital possesses an opportunity for resistance against itself. Chakrabarty articulates that “[r]esistance [to capital] is the Other of the [mechanistic] despotism inherent in capital’s logic” (59). For capital to exist, it must have particular labor and particular laborers from which to extract abstract labor, and these labors and laborers always proceed from and exist as more than what abstract labor attempts to reduce them to. Indeed, Chakrabarty contends that for Marx it is the very fact of the laborer’s “living,” it is “life, in all its biological/conscious capacity for willful activity, [that] is the excess that capital, for all its disciplinary procedures, always needs but can never quite control or domesticate” (60). Crucially, the labor requisite for the performance of abstracting labor is always living and therefore cannot be fully subjugated to or destroyed by the imposition of mechanistic, abstract labor upon production activities. More simply, life itself is the very thing that resists capital. Chakrabarty notes the contradiction inherent in the foregoing logic: insofar as capital actually moves toward the attainment of its “will” by eliminating the particularities of life through the translation of particular labors and laborers into a “universal,” “measurable” abstract labor, it moves towards its own dissolution (62). Thus, because capital, insofar as it exists, cannot reduce, dehumanize, and eliminate particular, living labors and laborers without imploding its own logic, capital always contains within its structure resistance to its total realization.

The second site of internal resistance to capital that Chakrabarty identifies concerns the history that capital tells about itself. Chakrabarty notes that Marx articulates the story that capital must tell about itself as one moving from “Becoming,” or “the historical process in and through which the logical presuppositions of capital are realized” to “Being,” or “the state when capital has fully come into its own[,]” when capital has reached a unity (62). The history, then, that capital tells about itself suggests that over time the logical pre-conditions of capital have become manifest and that, consequently, history moves univocally towards capital’s realization in its “pure” form. Moreover, Chakrabarty draws attention to how this historical construction, what he calls “History 1” (“a past posited by capital itself as its precondition”), aims to silence, dominate, and/or destroy “the total universe of pasts that capital encounters [which] is larger than the sum of those elements in which are worked out the logical presuppositions of capital,” i.e. “History 2” (63-4). In other words, capital must privilege some aspects of history over other aspects of the particular histories of the world, creating through suppression a version of history, a story, a fiction, that demonstrates progression towards the achievement of capital’s totalization. Yet, the movement of capital’s historicizing thrusts mirrors abstract labor in that just as capital must enact abstraction (i.e. translation or interpretation) on particular, living labors in order to derive the performative category of abstract labor necessary for its functioning, so too must it repress or eliminate the particularities of History 2s in order to arrive at the fiction of History 1. Thus, History 1, the story wherein history unambiguously moves towards the attainment of totalized capital, always presupposes the existence of History 2s3, the ways of being and living and modes of economic organization that do not always and unambiguously lead to capitalism.

Chakrabarty describes the phenomenon of capital’s projection of History 1 upon History 2s as attempts to “subjugate or destroy the multiple possibilities that belong to History 2[s]” so that History 1 can appear to be a totalized unity (65). Once again, however, capital cannot complete the subjugation and destruction of History 2s and attain totality, but, insofar as historical capital is at all, it is always “not yet” (65). Chakrabarty summarizes this reality of capital as follows:

History 2[s do] not spell out a program of writing histories that are alternatives to the narratives of capital. That is, History 2s do not constitute a dialectical Other of the necessary logic of History 1. To think thus would be to subsume History 2[s] to History 1. History 2 is better thought of as a category charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1. (66)

Historical capital, for Chakrabarty, contains within its own structure that which prevents it from obtaining as a totalized unity; History 1 cannot fully subjugate and destroy History 2s because History 2s are requisite to the instantiation of historical capital at all. Indeed, insofar as History 1 works to diminish or externalize those History 2s that are necessary for History 1 to be at all, then it functions analogously with abstract labor, which seeks to quantify labor time but must assume concrete particular labors in order to do so. Thus, History 2s not only sustain but also threaten capital; History 2s, necessary to the logic of capital, always exceed the story that capital must tell about itself.

For Chakrabarty, the result of this structural openness of History 1 to the resistance of History 2s is that “historical difference is not external to [capital] but is rather constitutive of it” (70). Capital, then, will never reach a state where it is entirely homogeneous and whole because it is structured upon historical difference. Returning to the question of why individual instances of capital are all different, Chakrabarty asserts that the “globalization of capital is not the same as capital’s universalization[, because globalization does not mean that History 1, the universal and necessary logic of capital so essential to Marx’s critique, has been realized” (71). For Chakrabarty, capital will never progress to totality even in its globalized form; every individual instance of global capital will always contain within it the life and the History 2s, that resist its absolute obtainment. Resistance against capital, then, occurs within capital, both in the life of the particular individual whose lived reality fails to fully conform to the demands that capital imposes on the laborer and also in the histories incompletely expunged by the dominative narrative that capital seeks to establish. It is with this analytic that I will augment Hodapp’s argument concerning GraceLand’s capacity to resist capital, first by demonstrating how the form of its text interrupts History 1 and second (occuring much later in the argument) by exploring how the life and labors of at least one of its characters are not fully circumscribed and destroyed by the the impositions of abstract labor.

The History of Capital and GraceLand

As I noted earlier, Hodapp argues that GraceLand’s paratextual materials resist the totalizing drive of colonialism that remains in the postcolonial world. His argument highlights the seemingly hopeless situation depicted in the novel’s narrative but suggests that the inclusion of non-diegetic descriptions of the kola nut counters the narrative’s bleak vision and suggests the possibility of reproducing precolonial cultures. Though Hodapp’s argument does not explicitly engage with Chakrabarty, I contend that mapping his argument onto the logical structure of capital outlined in “The Two Histories of Capital” (that is, treating the kola as a Chakrabartian History 2 interrupting the narrative, i.e. the History 1) extends and augments Hodapp’s argument, allowing me to attend to how the structuring of the diegetic and non-diegetic texts in GraceLand offers some potential for resistance to capitalism.

Hodapp’s argument about the kola begins with his identifying the kola as a signifier of precolonial West African culture in general and then demonstrates how this signifer of precolonial West African culture interrupts and resists the colonial forces depicted in the novel’s narrative. Though noting that the kola mainly serves as a signifer within certain Igbo cultural conventions, Hodapp argues that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart not only “emphasized the centrality of kola to traditional Igbo life, as well as its importance as a site of meaning making in social transaction[,]” but in its “use of the kola nut as integral to Igbo cultural identity[, it also] initiated an important literary trope in West African fiction” (1-2). For Hodapp, Things Fall Apart charges the kola with the significance of the particular histories of precolonial Ibgo culture as well as West African cultures in general. Establishing the kola as signifier both within and of precolonial Igbo (and, more generally, West African) culture allows Hodapp to contend that its inclusion in the novel interrupts and resists the colonial drive to eliminate precolonial culture that is in evidence in the novel’s narrative. To demonstrate how the kola accomplishes this resistance, he notes how the kola is absent from the narrative of the novel, appearing only as paratextual, or non-diegetic, descriptions between each of the chapters (5). Accounting for this, he suggests that “European colonialism [as well as the postcolonial power structures] disrupted . . . established trade routes, undermin[ed] traditional religions, and urbanis[ed] populations to partially rupture the connective tissue of Igbo cultural tradition” (7). In short, by the late twentieth century, colonial and postcolonial power structures in Nigeria effectively removed the kola, a signifier of precolonial West African cultures, from Nigeria; it is nowhere to be seen in the narrative of GraceLand.

Yet, the kola is still present in the novel’s paratextual, non-diegetic materials, and Hodapp suggests that this presence entails two things: the interruption of the postcolonial by the precolonial and the possibility of the regeneration of the precolonial. Regarding the first consequence of the paratextual kola, Hodapp characterizes kola sections as “defamiliarizing breaks [that] consistently remove readers from Elvis’ hyper-violent story and make them focus on traditional Igbo food and rituals in an effort to let them know that the horrendous events of the narrative are not the only version of Nigeria and Lagos”(8). Said another way, the kola interrupts the narrative of the novel with signifiers of the precolonial past. Moreover, these signifiers of the precolonial past, for Hodapp, possess the potential to instigate a revival of traditional Igbo culture. He asserts that GraceLand “emphasi[zes the kola’s] importance as a potential site of traditional cultural production in the context of social deterioration in the slums of Lagos” (3). Hodapp claims here that GraceLand’s deployment of kola actually opens up the possibility for reproducing Igbo culture. Indeed, in the conclusion of the argument, Hodapp suggests that though the setting of GraceLand (postcolonial Nigeria) does not provide the proper grounds for the revival of Igbo culture, the kola’s survival as paratext portends the possibility of a moment in which precolonial history might re-emerge: “Igbo culture . . . is not an impotent ruin, as one might presume from reading Elvis’ story in isolation without the Igbo register, but [it] persists as a system that can produce substantial meaning again because its core structure, constituted by kola, is intact though in need of transformation for contemporary circumstances” (12). Over and above the kola’s ability to resist colonial power structures, the kola’ survival in the text promises the possibility of re-instantiating precolonial Igbo culture when (and if) the circumstances in Nigeria become something other than the postcolonial wreckage of global capital that GraceLand depicts.

Now, notably, although Hodapp never explicitly interacts with or references Chakrabarty in his article, reading his argument through Chakrabarty’s analytic proves to be not only rather intuitive but also strikingly productive. The way that Hodapp pivots from establishing the kola as a signifier both in and of Igbo culture to suggesting that GraceLand mobilizes its survival (as a signifier) as a way to remind the reader that colonial forces have not fully eradicated the possibility of the regeneration of precolonial cultures and traditions maps perfectly onto the History 1 and History 2 apparatus of Chakrabarty. The postcolonial, politico-economic moment of Nigeria depicted in GraceLand’s narrative might best be characterized as a repetition of the kleptocratic system of capital instituted first by colonial powers and then perpetuated by the endemic military forces that took root in the wake of Nigeria’s achieving “independence.”4 From this vantage, the kola’s paratextual repetitions act as History 2s to the narrative’s History 1 in that the kola as a (signifier of a) History 2 serves as a continuous reminder both of that which History 1 must try to excise and also of that which History 1 can never fully eliminate. Moreover, as a paratextual element occuring between chapters, the kola repeatedly interrupts the smooth deployment of History 1 (in this case the narrative of the novel) and its movement to suppress and eliminate those elements of history that do not always and unambiguously point towards capital’s progress towards “being.” In what follows, I will demonstrate how mapping Hodapp’s argument onto Chakrabarty’s deconstructive reading of Capital extends and augments Hodapp’s conclusions.