Intimacy can be deployed as a vocabulary for understanding the world — it exposes gendered and racialized codes produced by capitalism as a starting point to challenge it

Capitalist Publicity and the Enclosure of Intimacy Neoliberalism is often differentiated from liberalism based on the degree to which it relies on logics of marketization, debt, and austerity to discipline populations into compliance with the structural interests of capitalism. In contrast to classical liberalism (which advocated for a distinction between the state and a naturalized domain of the market beyond the state’s knowledge) and Keynesianism (which attempted to reign in the excesses of the market via state economic intervention), neoliberalism attempts to cultivate a social order where “market exchange [becomes] a guide for all human action” (Dean 48), including the actions of the state itself. Under such a regime of power, critics of neoliberalism argue, the need for disciplinary institutions to align conduct with capitalism becomes RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 395 396 M. W. BOST AND J. S. HANAN less necessary. As a biopolitical regime of power that acts immanently on “the cooperative labor of vast networks of social production” (Greene 200), while deploying logics such as incentive rhetoric to “nudge” behavior toward particular outcomes (McDonald), neoliberalism produces desiring subjects that approach all life decisions in calculative, economic terms. Critics of neoliberalism not only emphasize its novel effects on the production of subjectivity but also its corrosive effects on public life. As a regime of power that defines all “motivations and goals, such as obtaining an education or cultivating a friendship, under the singular framework of maximizing one’s competitive advantage” (Asen, “Neoliberalism” 338), neoliberalism prevents forms of public good from emerging that can provide collective solutions to matters of common concern. Against a vision of multiple public spheres that adhere to different grammars of communication based on their positionality and structural relationship to power, neoliberalism seeks to produce a uniform version of publicity that takes the market as a horizon and assumes a vision of subjects as “atomistic individual[s] motivated by their own self-interest” (Asen, “Introduction” 173). Neoliberalism thus generates a crisis of democracy, “flattening” the networks of relationally embedded communication that would enable individuals to build a world outside of the norms of market reason (Asen, “Neoliberalism” 338). The critique of neoliberalism is powerful and certainly highlights a pervasive experience of social life in various regions of the contemporary world. Yet, as Nancy Fraser argues, “[n]eoliberalism . . . represent[s] the latest chapter of a longer story, which concerns the political vicissitudes of capitalism as such” (117). Without attending to the ways that capitalism itself is “inimical to democracy” (117), we not only lose the thread of the fundamental antagonisms that define capitalism across its various historical periods, but also risk overvaluing the unique centrality of market affects and biopolitical power to neoliberalism’s mode of operation. As “an institutionalized societal order that encompasses not only ‘the economy’ but also those activities, relations, and processes, defined as non-economic” (82), capitalism—across its historical periodization—relies on a biopolitical logic that takes as its aim the cannibalization of life. When critiquing neoliberalism’s destructive relationship to publicity, then, it is crucial to appreciate the foundational capitalist logics that bound the reproductive terrain of extraeconomic life that is subsequently made the object of neoliberal control. We argue that a productive path for exploring such foundational logics can be found in commons scholarship that emphasizes the historical enclosure of noncapitalist intimacies. While in rhetorical studies the concept of the common and its enclosure has been taken up primarily in contemporary digital contexts (Boyle; Chaput and Hanan; Greene; Hartelius), for much of the broader critical humanities scholarship that engages with the common, the exploitation of informational labor and knowledge production are understood as just one layer of a broader logic of capitalism that is continually parasitic on the reproductive relations of ecology, care, and communal life. In this section, we deploy intimacy as a vocabulary for understanding this larger enclosure process and the way it conditions the terrain of extraeconomic existence that is so central to neoliberal regimes of govern- ance. As a result, our analysis here helps to clarify the racialized and gendered logics that have produced capitalist norms of public engagement. In the context of modernity, the phrase “enclosure of the common” describes the process of capital accumulation that dispossessed common lands, ways of life, and the lived environments that provided subsistence and meaning for most people who did not own land (or who existed in parts of the world not structured by logics of private land ownership). In England, where the language of enclosure is most salient, the process stretches from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries and encompasses the annexation of “about a quarter of [England’s] cultivated acreage,” turning it from collectively farmed, grazed, and foraged space to private property that could be agriculturally developed (Linebaugh 144). Enclosure produced “barriers between people and land” (145), transforming practices of exchange with the wild into a series of boundaries that delineated what was human (and owned) and what was nonhuman stock to be harvested. These develop- ments produced the material conditions for liberal and neoliberal conceptions of subjectivity and publicity through a process that was “inseparable from terror and the destruction of independence and community” (142). The “distinct epistemolog[ies]” and customs that built intimacies between commoners and the nonhuman lifeforms that coexisted on common land, and allowed com- moners to govern the provision of fuel, tools, food and water, housing, and medicines, were wiped out (150–51). This destruction of collective existence drove commoners into cities and toward the atomized relations of labor and political subjectivity that characterize capitalism, while also producing a precarious “surplus population” (Marx 797) whose labor was excluded from systems of waged work and expropriated through violence and coercion. Far from being confined to England, the enclosure of the common also describes the practices of extraction and colonialism that destroyed Indigenous ways of life that engage land, water, plants, and animals in terms of “a system of reciprocal relations and obligations” (Coulthard 78). As Walter Mignolo argues, without the “massive appropriation of lands” occupied by Indigenous peoples and the enactment of slave economies in Africa and the Americas (477), the forms of affective circulation, privacy, and publicity that ground capitalist conceptions of intimacy would not be possible. As a practice that anchors the modern global division of labor as well as the contemporary use of debt, austerity, and structural adjustment programs to maintain this division (Federici, Re-Enchanting 13), enclosure produces a split between those peoples accorded “freedom” as rights-bearing subjects who can sell their labor, and those subjects who are “marked” for violent expropriation through racializing practices (Fraser 40). This split is central to capitalism and demonstrates that the very possibility for liberal and neoliberal conceptions of subjectivity requires racialized expropriation and the enclosure of common land inhabited by Indigenous and colonized peoples. Beyond being shaped by the aforementioned enclosures, liberal and neoliberal articulations of subjectivity and publicity are structured through a further set of governing practices that enclose the common within “the intimate sphere” of the patriarchal conjugal family (Habermas 48). Jürgen Habermas traces the emergence of modern publicity to a division between the family room or salon, where “bourgeois family heads and their wives were sociable,” and the privatized space of the rest of the house (45–46). The bourgeois home became “the scene of a psychological emancipation that corresponded to the political-economic” growth of capital (46), where “privatized individuals viewed themselves . . . as persons capable of entering into ‘purely human’ relations with one another” outside of the vagaries of market competition (48). Moreover, the naturalized space of the bourgeois family “guaranteed . . . the accumulation of capital” through legally recognized lines of inheritance and also played a crucial role in the reproduction of capital by reconciling “the independence of the property owner in the market” and the authoritarian “dependence of the wife and children on the male head of the family” (47). As a site for the emergence of publicity under capital, the bourgeois household naturalized gendered and unpaid reproductive labor in the home to enable the spaces of discussion often considered as part of the public sphere. While he acknowledges their oppressive nature, for Habermas the relations of intimacy that underwrite the bourgeois public sphere “were surely more than just ideology,” fostering capacities of “freedom, love, and cultivation of the person” that allowed it to normatively function as a domain of democratic judgment and rhetorical action (48). Situated within histories of enclosure of the common, however, these qualities appear against the backdrop of the dispossession of noncapitalist intimacies that produced capacities for interdependent relation with land and with other beings, as well as forms of love and affection outside of naturalized domesticity. As Silvia Federici argues, wherever it occurs, the enclosure of the common tends to coincide with the devaluation of feminized labor, the enclosure of women in the household, and with regimes of gendered violence that enforce normative boundaries of intimacy. The dispossession of the common entailed the destruction of forms of ecological intimacy like working the fields, cultivating herbs, and tending animals on the common that had afforded women agency even in patriarchal contexts like English feudalism. Such dispossession further deva- lued domesticated care labor (washing, spinning, cooking) that came to be considered unproductive in contrast to wage labor (Federici, Caliban 25). Forms of work that had been historically open to women became gendered (Federici mentions ale-brewing, work in textiles, baking, and smithing among other examples) and still other professions like midwifery became criminalized entirely (Federici, Caliban RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 397 398 M. W. BOST AND J. S. HANAN 31, 92). Moreover, as scholars of Indigenous sexualities have pointed out, the colonial enclosure of the common violently reduced a wide array of kinship relations to the “biologically reproductive mono- gamous white marriage and family,” securing the patriarchal relations Habermas traces against other, more mutually supportive forms of intimacy (Tallbear 147). In addition to their entanglement with enclosures of land and social reproduction, liberal and neoliberal articulations of subjectivity and publicity can be detected in the valorization of intimacies associated with communicative norms of deliberation, as well as the enclosure of political life within ideals of citizenship. This enclosure of political horizons is evidenced in normative theories influenced by Habermas and John Rawls, which manage collective antagon- ism by distinguishing open deliberation from the confrontational affects associated with radical social movements (Asen, “Neoliberalism” 335–36). It appears in a milder form in the distinction between dialogue and propaganda on which many theories of public deliberation rest, as well as in rhetorical theories of social change that see recognition by the state or inclusion in dominant publics as the horizon for political action (Chávez; Coulthard; Mack and Na’puti). Finally, it appears in a broader imaginary of citizenship that has achieved wide purchase in rhetorical studies. As Karma Chávez notes, even scholars invested in critiquing norms of citizenship through an activist lens often “talk about all modes of belonging through the language and logic of citizenship,” constraining possibilities of collective agency that work outside that language (13). Considering these horizons through the enclosure of the common makes clear that the figure of the rights-bearing, self-proprietary citizen-subject that is central to liberal and neoliberal articulations of intimacy emerges through affective enclosures that are deeply inter- twined with patriarchy and “conditions of settler dispossession, slavery, and indentureship” (Lowe 39; see also Mack and Na’puti). Norms of publicity that arise from these articulations work to manage the antagonisms constitutive of capitalism, cultivating atomized affects of “freedom” and “rational choice” that only exist in a context of ecological and reproductive expropriation. The patterns of dispossession that have structured dominant logics of publicity continue in the present historical moment. While digital communication technologies and socially mediated plat- forms have arguably fragmented publicity and rendered capitalism’s forms of social control more flexible, quantifiable, and less tied to stable identity positions (Boyle; Pfister and Yang), enclosures of intimacy persist throughout contemporary life. Contemporary moments of intimacy’s enclosure include the hyperexploitation of human sociality, along with capital’s increasing reliance on care and service work, and the widespread privatization of public infrastructures, natural resources, and spaces of social contact based on the notion that the market is the only horizon for collective existence. Such enclosures are also legible at the level of the contemporary household. While not as naturalized as in earlier forms of modernity, the household remains a key vehicle for reproducing capital, as neoliberal discourses of domestic fiscal responsibility and risk management often take the place of overt patriarchy, and as gentrification becomes a new strategy of enclosure that displaces populations along lines of race and class, making the security of home ownership increasingly out of reach for people without preexisting access to capital (Hanan). Moreover, the naturalization of intimacy described by Habermas persists in contemporary gendered inequalities related to wages and labor compensation, as well as “family values” rhetorics, which frame familial childrearing as key to the reproduction of nation and economy and frequently connect proper family management to economic wealth (Cooper). Contemporary publics scholarship in rhetorical studies has emphasized many of these shifting cultural practices and has also brought to light the continuity in oppression between liberal models of bourgeois publicity and late capitalist configurations of power (Asen, “Neoliberalism”; Pfister and Yang). Our project augments existing work in its emphasis on common intimacy as a site of enclosure that enables the production and reproduction of normative intimacies conducive to capitalist social relations. If it is the case that the enclosure of the common grounds both liberal and neoliberal articulations of publicity, then contemporary practices of publicity are needed that can repattern the way intimacy has been written into modernity by reclaiming the common as a horizon for worlding otherwise. In the next section, we explore pathways for enacting such a horizon by linking the concept of counterintimacies to commoning practices that take as their aim the contestation of capitalist forms of intimacy.