The 21st century is defined by the epoch of the CAPITALOCENE – neoliberalism’s drive to maximize the efficiency of accumulation via the expansion of the frontier beyond human limits manifests itself in the commodification of both human and non-human forms of life and seeks to encroach upon and thus cheapen the commons

Capitalism as Affective-Rhetorical SystemMuch of the work needed to theorize capitalism as an affective-rhetorical system has already been performed in rhetorical studies. Building on rhetorical theories of capitalism as a process of affective circulation that capacitates bodies in accordance with its historically specific logics of governance (Chaput; Greene), rhetorical scholars aligned with new materialism have framed capitalism in terms of a multiplicity of infrastructures, or affective-rhetorical systems, that render “meaningless the chicken and the egg question of whether nature or culture dominates the contemporary political economic terrain” (Chaput and Hanan, “Hegemony” 354). Such scholarship conceptualizes capital as a “geontological” and “biopolitical” process that “habituate[s], regulate[s], and transform[s] . . . [its environments] according to fluctuating political economic dynamics” (Chaput and Hanan, “Hegemony” 358).Given the detail of this previous scholarship, this section will not provide a full-fledged rhetorical account of capitalism. Instead, this section will focus on the boundary-making practices and patterns of relation that characterize capitalism as an affective-rhetorical system. Most generally, we argue that capital’s boundaries are structured as frontiers that continually enfold their environments with the aim of ensuring capital’s growth. More specific to the discussion of power relations and the human we have offered so far, we argue that capital deploys a frontier between nature and society that centers humans as the “‘masters and possessors of nature’” (Descartes qtd. in Patel and Moore 51) and further empowers tendentially “white, western bourgeois cis-male” human subjects at the expense of other human and nonhuman bodies alike (Davis 196).Many historical configurations of power are characterized by boundary-drawing practices that violently dispossess the deep commons, whether territorial boundaries drawn to expel hunter- gatherers from arable agricultural land, ancient boundaries between the polis and surrounding spaces (e.g., oikos and chora) that legitimated the dispossession of “barbarians,” or the “parcelized” bound-aries of feudal ownership that underwrote relations of serfdom and tithe (Nail 22–23). However, capital as affective-rhetorical system is uniquely destructive to the deep commons because of its ability to structure its own boundaries according to a logic of frontiers. As Raj Patel and Jason Moore argue, frontiers are polymorphic, porous boundaries that transform capital’s diverse systemic environments into measurable forms that capital can appropriate to fuel a cycle of tendentially limitless growth (19). Capital’s frontiers enable it to overcome systemic crises and barriers “by siphoning life from else-where” (18),) averting tendencies that might disrupt its systemic functioning. They are also oriented toward the “cheapening” (19) of the deep commons that comprise capital’s environments: capital seeks to enfold other kinds of relation into itself, transforming “undenominated relationships” into discrete, quantified “circuits of production and consumption” (22) that generate “as much food, work, energy, and raw materials with as little disruption”—and as little investment—as possible (21). Framed as an affective-rhetorical system, capital is simultaneously reflexive about the myriad of entanglements that produce it, and, at the same time, a relatively sovereign system of power that cheapens the deep commons for the purpose of unlimited accumulation.While capital cheapens the deep commons in relation to a host of frontiers, we focus on capital’s enactment of a frontier between nature and society. As Patel and Moore argue, this frontier is central to capitalist boundary-making because it acts as a central “organizing principle” of capitalism and directly structures the boundaries between capital and its nonhuman environments (51). The nature- society frontier often takes the form of extractive practices that enfold affective-rhetorical systems at different scales into a stock of raw material resources. These practices include the harvest of precious metals that make monetary circulation (and contemporary technologies of finance and computing) possible, ecologically exhaustive industrial farming practices like genetically modified crops and the exhaustion of soil through economies of scale (which provide cheap but ultimately less nutritious food to reproduce the bodies of workers and fuel the ideologies that drive consumer capitalism), and practices like gene and seed patenting that directly commodify nonhuman forms of life. Across a vast array of material-discursive domains, these extractive practices facilitate the circulation of goods and affects through global markets as abstracted, atomized objects, generating surplus value for an ever- smaller swath of wealthy human individuals at the expense of larger ecosystems.In addition to exhausting the deep commons through extractive practices that target capitalism’s nonhuman environments, the frontier between nature and society produces a hierarchy within the social domain that forcefully “shift[s] certain humans into the category of nature” (Patel and Moore 50). This entails that “most women, Indigenous peoples, slaves, and colonized peoples” were (and continue to be) treated as “not fully human” in different yet overlapping ways, and that the labor of those peoples, as well as practices of care labor and “the work of extrahuman natures (animals, soils, forests, fuels) . . . [is] rendered largely invisible” (Patel and Moore 24–25). While the boundary between nature and society is continually renegotiated under capitalism—varying from overtly oppressive and hierarchical forms to apparently liberatory discourses of civic humanism and even transhumanism—the split between agentic, human sociality, and unagentic, nonhuman matter entails that the very figure of the human “presumes . . . violence against those who lack self-determination” or who do not fit the “overrepresented” figures of the human as “White and male” and as self-proprietary economic subject (Towns 353; see also Bost). Such violence is structurally enacted along hierarchies of racialization, hetero- and cissexism, ableism, and class domination that performatively materialize “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks) through the figure of the human.Capital’s deployment of the nature-society frontier—along with other frontier practices that produce everything from cheap food to cheap energy—has the cumulative effect of exhausting the diverse human and nonhuman affective-rhetorical systems that fall within its orbit. To be rendered legible as objects of capitalist circulation, the relational aspects of ecosystems, supply chains, and practices of living labor must be perpetually converted into “a series of inputs or hindrances to production” within a horizon of continued economic growth (Patel and Moore 23). In other words, capital’s patterns of boundary-making demonstrate a great deal of responsiveness to the polythetic, entangled ecology of potential we elaborate above, and, at the same time, deploy a formalizing, yet flexible, logic to govern entanglement in order to produce unlimited growth for capital. As an affective-rhetorical system that transforms ecologically “vulnerable complexity and diversity” (Stormer and McGreavy 19) into discrete objects of value that can be hierarchically ordered and sorted and then circulated in relation to larger systemic patterns of organization, capitalism produces stability for a small swath of humanity while unevenly redistributing precarity along racialized and gendered lines. At the same time, capital renders the environments it metabolizes increasingly unstable, resulting in the disruption of relational patterns at a variety of scales, from the global destruction wrought by climate change to more local disruptions caused by deforestation, desertifica-tion, and changes in weather patterns, which also disproportionately affect the human bodies rendered most precarious by capital.