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Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

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Potentiality and Impotentiality in J. K. Gibson-Graham

Scott Sharpe Published online: 17 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Scott Sharpe (2014) Potentiality and Impotentiality in J. K. GibsonGraham, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 26:1, 27-43, DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2014.857842 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2014.857842

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Rethinking Marxism, 2014 Vol. 26, No. 1, 2743, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2014.857842

Potentiality and Impotentiality in J. K. Gibson-Graham

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Scott Sharpe
Throughout their research, and most explicitly with their work on the concept of affect, J. K. Gibson-Graham think about our capacities and potentialitiesthe visceral intensities that accompany politicswithout falling into a moralistic or purist critique of limiting powers. They refuse to dismiss as trivial or marginal those everyday economic ventures that cannot be measured against the yardstick of capitalism but that nonetheless extend capacities in unpredictable ways. Through interviews conducted with both Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, this paper examines the immanence of potentiality in Gibson-Grahams theoretical arguments and research practices. It also examines a less recognized, though crucial, dimension of their work: the place of impotentiality in thinking and practice. Impotentiality is poorly understood as a merely negative incapacity. An analysis of both thinkers reflections on their own research practices demonstrates that our impotentiality enables us to live and think in ways that are more than reactive. Key Words: Affect, Giorgio Agamben, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Potentiality, Virtual

In the final chapter of The End of Capitalism, J. K. Gibson-Graham raise a question that they indicate has been central to their project as a whole up to that point: Why can feminists have a revolution now while Marxists have to wait? In responding to this question, they suggest that, whereas feminism is intimately and daily concerned with interpersonal and social transformation, Marxism has been called upon to transform something that cannot be transformed. That is, capitalism, as Marxist discourse has produced its object, is at once the founding category of a transformative class politics and a concept that operates to discourage and marginalize projects of class transformation (Gibson-Graham 1996, 252). In this paper I therefore want to analyze Gibson-Grahams theorization of a mode of potentiality that inheres in the very matter of the present so as to avoid this situation in which transformation becomes the impossible end of class politics. Certainly, Gibson-Grahams challenge to the dominant manner of analyzing capitalist power has opened them to a variety of charges from critics of diverse quarters, with many suggesting that they have substituted a trivial and overly

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localized politics for one more sensitive to macro and global forces.1 Defending Gibson-Graham against these charges, I will argue that their work clearly does not surrender claim to macropolitical significance but that it is also best understood as operating through micropolitical (and specifically affective) means. In examining their particular understanding of the problem of potentiality, my focus is on the content of their argument and also the practice of their research. Drawing on interviews conducted with both Katherine Gibson (in 1998) and Julie Graham (in 1999), I examine the immanence of potentiality in their arguments and research practices.2 While the concept of potentiality is crucial to an understanding of their work, I also suggest that the notion of impotentiality plays a very important role in GibsonGrahams thought. In presenting this argument I draw on Giorgio Agambens (2011) exploration of the relationship between potentiality and impotentiality, inflecting it toward the question of the contemporary significance of Gibson-Grahams theorizations and research practices. I will argue that the opportunity to exercise our impotentiality (our capacity to not act) is diminished in a contemporary culture in which so much weight is put on performing, meeting goals, and evaluating success. Ultimately, I argue that at issue in such a culture is a narrowing of the sense of what it is to act, and that Gibson-Grahams work may serve as a fertile response to this contemporary situation.

Potentiality
In a short but highly provocative piece, On What We Can Not Do, Agamben makes a distinction between our potentiality as human beings (our capacity for action) and our impotentiality (our capacity to not act). First, and drawing from Deleuze and his especially Spinozan understanding of power, Agamben (2011, 43; emphasis mine) notes that, in its most oppressive and brutal form, power is what separates human beings from their potentiality and, in this way, renders them impotent. In referring to this question of potentiality, Agamben evokes a Deleuzian and specifically affective approach to the question of poweran approach that has been influential in recent years in geography and that played an explicit role in the work of GibsonGraham. In their own work with the concept of affect, Gibson-Graham (2006, 2) find a way to think about our capacities and potentialitiesthe visceral intensities
1. On the subject of such misunderstandings, Gibson-Graham (2006, 2) write, With popular and academic audiences, in reviews and written rebuttals, in conversations with colleagues and friends, we confronted the same challenges over and over again. 2. These interviews were conducted for my PhD dissertation, A Geography of the Fold, which examines the research practices of academics working at the interface of political economy and a very broadly conceived new cultural geography. I have identified Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson after each of the transcripts on the suggestion made by the editors that this would add clarity. While on balance I think this is sage advice in that it does add clarity, part of me feels uncomfortable prising open the authorial subject, J. K. Gibson-Graham, which they put so much thought and effort into creating.

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that accompany politicswithout falling into a moralistic or purist critique of the powers that limit them. In the first section of the paper, I indicate how this particular theoretical direction of Gibson-Graham fits within their overall conceptual and practical concerns. In the second section of the paper, I argue that Gibson-Grahams work also mobilizes the concept of impotentialitythe capacity to not act. From the beginning it should be pointed out that, although he is keen to draw attention to the underplayed notion of impotentiality, Agamben is in no way arguing that potentiality is unimportant or incompatible with impotentiality. In the first instance, it can be said that, for all their reconceptualizing of the tenets of classical Marxism, Gibson-Graham remain committed Marxists. Within the frame of Marxism, of course, it is the exploitation of surplus labor that ultimately represents a separation of one class of peoplenamely, workersfrom their potentiality (Marx 1959). But it is not an absolute or quantitative sense of power that Gibson-Graham are working with; becoming empowered is not a question of winning back something taken but of exploiting potentials immanent in the present situation. J. K. GibsonGraham are thus Marxists in the sense that they embrace a hopeful, world-building sense of power inherent in the species-being of humans (and more recently, perhaps, in the relations of humans to nonhumans). Yet, in their focus on the question of how we know capitalism, Gibson-Graham indicate their deviation from a more classical essentialist Marxism in favor of a poststructuralist one; as the parenthetical addition to the main title of their first book (The End of Capitalism) indicates, it is the end of capitalism as we knew it that they are announcing. Again, this change in focus can be seen in their Resnick-and-Wolff-inspired definition of class (see Resnick and Wolff 1987), which shifts from a constative to a performative definition, understanding class less as a group of people than as a relation or processthe process of performing, appropriating and distributing surplus labor (Gibson-Graham 1996, 11). Certainly Gibson-Graham have come under critique from a number of quarters on the basis that their theorizations of life under capitalism focus on the trivial, to the detriment of theorizing the driving mechanisms and machinations of capital. Many scholars remain unconvinced of what Gibson-Grahams scholarship can achieve in light of their avoidance of what some see as the real problems of global capitalist social arrangements (see, for example, Barnes 1997). I think it would be wrong, however, to say that the work of Gibson-Graham recommends itself by its modesty. No doubt, they eschew large-scale global capital processes and tragi-heroic tales of class struggle as the only means of understanding the effects of economics on the lives of people and the planet. Grand narratives get a short shrift with GibsonGraham; the depiction of a malevolent, all-encompassing beast of capitalism is, in their view, neither empirically accurate nor politically helpful. But their fine-grained analysis of situated economic processes does not mean that they replace the beast of capitalism with gods of small things. There is an understanding, rather, that gods of either the large or the small persuasion are not the things to be created by emancipatory scholarship. This is not to say that Gibson-Graham do not, at times, champion local forms of economic activity and emphasize local geographical variation (see, for example, the

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Community Economies Collective3 and Gibson 2006). Yet their work is not a question of merely opposing to an overarching and all-powerful global capitalism the specificity of the local. Rather, Gibson-Grahams theoretical intervention takes place at a more performative level. From the earliest times of their joint authorial subjectivity and even beyond Julie Grahams death there is, in the work of Gibson-Graham, a vitality that refuses to be daunted in the face of so-called dour realities (which, they suggest, are made no more real by their dourness). What seems to both irritate and motivate their project is a refusal to finish their narrative with lessons of impotence. In trying to make thought empowering, they do not want to set up the beast of capitalism looming large before the intellectual charged with slaying it. Rather, the task as they see it is to challenge the colonization of the economic imaginary by capitalism. As Julie Graham, Stephen Healy, and Ken Byrne (2002, 567) write, Capitalism constitutes the economic imaginaryand thus the ground of fantasyfor both those who love it and those who love to hate it. That is to say, the fantasy of an independent and self-powering economy orients likewise the discourse of the champions of global capitalism and also many left anti-capitalist discourses, both of which function to fixate desire upon capitalism as that which must be promoted or opposed. In view of the predominance of this fantasy and its effect of obscuring the political character of the economy, Graham, Healy, and Byrne stress that the idea of the community economy, which is central to the work of Gibson-Graham, moves toward the performance of an alternative imaginary that could differently orient our fantasies and desires. We can see, then, a genuine commitment to the question of potentiality in GibsonGrahams work through their refusal to dismiss as trivial or marginal those everyday economic ventures that cannot be measured against the yardstick of capitalism but that nonetheless reorient desires and extend capacities in unpredictable ways. In order to avoid positing a monolithic capitalism on the one hand or opponents of capitalism forever waiting for the revolution on the other, Gibson-Graham look to everyday lives and to an already existent arsenal of activities. They thus perform a kind of audit of community resources, recognizing the important power of discourse to highlight or hide emancipatory potential: So the first phase is like the genealogy of regional economic identity. So, sort of the mainstream or key actors in the region who get to say what economic development is and what the region needs, we have focus groups for them and that opens them up to our project, we ask them whats the role of these sort of hidden and alternative economic activities in contributing to economic development in the region and presumably they wont have a very clear answer to that but thatll start opening them and then the next phase is a community economic audit, using community-based researchers, of the hidden and alternative economic activities in the region and thats
3. Many of the projects of participants in the Community Economies Collective have a localized feel since it is precisely these types of activities that become marginalized or trivialized in discourses of globalization. For the flavor of these projects, see http://www.communityeconomies. org/Home/Research-Projects.

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where the sort of political economic stuff comes in, where the class language that we were talking about where we try to in training with the community researchers, we both teach them our language and listen to their language of economic interests, the already existing language of economic interests and our language comes out of Marxian political economy but its really about giving thought to class relations that slavery and feudalism and capitalism and independent commodity production and collective but communal and communist primary production exist in our region. I mean, we already know that, but the project is to enliven those examples and make, through this community research network that will develop get a picture of it and then the third phase brings the sort of mainstream or key actors and the marginalised actors together in a community conference to talk about the ways that the linkages can be strengthened between the hidden and alternative sector and the mainstream sector. (J. Graham, pers. comm.)

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As part of Gibson-Grahams attempt to refute the colonization of the economic imaginary by capitalism, Julie Graham here draws our attention to the role played by hidden and alternative economic activities in contributing to economic development in the region. One has the sense that a process of discovery or revelation is being described. One can identify key and alternate actors while giving thought to class relations that exist in the region. From this vantage it is possible to perform an alternative economy by bringing into discourse these already existing but hidden activities, with the thought of trying to enliven those examples. The point is thus to mobilize a potential within economic life that is not currently being activated, with the hope of opening up the problem somewhat. The influence of poststructuralism is of course evident in this focus on performing a different economic imaginary. Though I have suggested that Gibson-Graham remain committed to Marxism, they are, as readers will be aware, poststructuralist Marxists, and their notion of empowerment is inseparable from a faith in the performative character of discourse. As the transcript above indicates, a discourse is already existent not only for the dominant economic narrative but also for an alternative one, though in the case of the latter it is important to enliven it. Julie Graham sees as part of her research strategy the need to both teach them our language and listen to their language of economic interests, the already existing language of economic interests. As Graham writes elsewhere in her work with Janelle Cornwell, If researchers were truly open to the radical and experimental energies of the social economy, another world could potentially arise from social economy research and the training of social activists and entrepreneurs. Actually that world is already hereits just waiting to be strengthened and enlarged (Graham and Cornwell 2009, 65). As Gibson-Graham (1996, 16) figure it, When Capitalism gives way to an array of capitalist differences, its noncapitalist other is released from singularity and subjection, becoming potentially visible as a differentiated multiplicity. Mobilizing the Althusserian concept of overdetermination (itself borrowed from psychoanalysis), Gibson-Graham insist on the irreducibly specific nature of capitalist sites in order to challenge the notion of Capitalism as an abstract generality that wields an equally abstract power.

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Does this not risk downplaying the global forces that have been the bane of the Left in recent decades? According to Jim Glassman, Gibson-Grahams attempt to employ overdetermination as an antiessentialist practice is too insensitive to the structural character of power. Glassman (2003, 678, 681) is critical of the tendency he espies in both their joint-authored and collaborative work to take a post-structuralist line on power, which for him involves a stress on the fluid and dispersed nature of power relations. Glassman makes a case for the continuing relevance of more structuralist notions of power, where the term structure is used to refer to sets of relations in which people must participate, whether they wish to (or are aware of doing so) or not and where structural power implies the forms of power that specific class or gender groups have as a result of their participation in these social processes. Glassman is keen to emphasize that he is not reducing power to domination; as he puts it, Power is not reducible to power over another, or the ability of one person or group to dominate another person or group. Such power over, Glassman insists, is itself parasitic upon a more fundamental power to. By the latter he means to imply a socially structured capacity, which enables one to act or exercise power whether or not one is aware of possessing and exercising such a capacity. In drawing out the specificity of the more affective notion of capacity made popular in geography in recent years (see McCormack 2007; Dewsbury 2003, 2009; Bissell 2009; Hynes and Sharpe 2009) and that is foregrounded in Gibson-Grahams (2006) later work, I want to outline their divergence from the more limited sense of the relationship between power and potential that we find in Glassmans work. As we can see from the definitions of structure and structural power deployed by Glassman (2003, 681), there is a sense of inevitability to the relations that, he argues, make up societal structures (sets of relations in which people must participate). In contrast, the affective notion of power that we see in Gibson-Grahams later work gives precedence to the material dimensions of reality, such as the capacitation of bodies. This focus on the capacitation of bodies represents a shift in GibsonGrahams work, not merely from an emphasis on structure but also away from the more linguistically oriented poststructuralism featured in their earlier work. In speaking of a shift, I would be reluctant to suggest that there is some kind of linear evolution in their work. Indeed, as can be seen in the following transcript from an interview with Julie Graham, both linguistic and affective approaches are evident: Were going to interview all these people and then you have this huge list of what we call contacts, its the names of the people that they suggest for our focus groups and most active people who have done a lot in the region, have had an impact, have been involved, usually in more than one phase and then who might be open to being in our focus groups. I mean, so, were becoming pretty familiar with who has been active in economic in the economic development conversation over the past 15 years but it was hard to think about first because um we had two words for it: one was key and the other was mainstream and yknow some of them, theyre not so mainstream, or not in their thinking. Theyre in a position where they have a lot of influence, but actually theyre kind of open Were trying to bring other people into that conversation so it wasnt instead of drawing a line around their ideas and saying, Well if you thought that farming was an

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important activity then you couldnt be in our group it was we just decided OK, get more of the people who are already involved in that conversation even if they had some weird ideas. (J. Graham, pers. comm.)

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Julie Graham speaks quite directly here about the importance of discourse to Gibson-Grahams work. The fact that they have become experts in the economic development conversation over the last 15 years and the corresponding fact that they have felt their thought restricted by having too few terms for some of the major players in the conversation (key and mainstream) shows their sensitivity to the power of language. Gibson-Graham recognize that language is important in shaping both their thought and the possibilities that can be derived from it. But Graham also alludes to an important affective dimension of what they are doing. Although this interview was conducted prior to the so-called affective turn in the social sciences, Gibson-Graham clearly speak to many of the preoccupations of that theoretical turn. Most notably, the mainstream or key actors are not dismissed as antithetical to the project of performing an alternative economic discourse, despite many of them being in a position where they have a lot of influence. Gibson-Graham want to keep these actors in the conversation because of their realization that actually they are kind of open and not so mainstream or not in their thinking. It has been important, then, not to see these actors as some kind of constative enemy in class warfare. There is on the part of Gibson-Graham a corresponding openness because they realize that power and freedom are often not so much opposed as they are proximal. Part of slaying the beast of capitalism has, of course, involved addressing ones own role in creating that monster, and this undoubtedly means being open to nuances in the core and on the margins. Returning to the notion of power to, to which Glassman refers, one can see that the structuralist view of power to necessarily represents a subtraction of capacities, as well as mechanisms of control, from the myriad potentialities on offer. To the extent that Glassman defines power to as a socially structured capacity enabling actions by groups or individuals by virtue of their location within a web of social relations, his sense of capacitation is determined by the social, which is itself seen as a determining factor. The posthumanist dimension of an affective approach, in contrast, consists in the refusal to reduce the myriad forces of transformation to the social, which effectively opens the social field to a multitude of material relations. The affective sense of potential alerts us to those potentials that may not yet be expressed or actualized but that make individual and collective potential (power to) much more indeterminate. When Spinoza raises the provocation (much cited in Deleuzian-inspired philosophy) that we do not even know what a body can do, he hints at the open-endedness of this potentiality. To put it another way, Glassmans structuralist version of power to focuses only on specific actualizations of power, to the detriment of the virtual (not yet actual) potential that inheres in all bodies and social relations. Certainly, one might read Gibson-Grahams focus on existing but hidden economic alternatives as an emphasis on being as it is actually manifested, and there is no doubt that a key element of their project is to performatively produce an alternative

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economy by uncovering the plurality of existing economic forms. Yet there is also evidence of a much more virtually inspired perspective in their work. This can be simply demonstrated through an examination of their analysis of the affective dimensions and political productivity of the film The Full Monty, which they contrast to a superficially similar film, Brassed Off. Gibson-Graham (1999) see in The Full Monty a filmic representation of their argument in The End of Capitalism, insofar as the film opens possibilities in both economic and social life by escaping the tragicheroic modernist tale of economic decline and by gesturing toward the potential for new forms of subjectivity. I would like to emphasize in their analysis of the affective potentials of The Full Monty the role of the virtual, which was perhaps less visible in their more discursively oriented work, The End of Capitalism. In referring to the virtual, I am drawing on the distinction that Henri Bergson makes (famously explicated by Deleuze) between two quite distinct ways of approaching the question of potential. Bergson notes that our Western tradition has tended to understand potential in terms of a process of realizing pregiven possibilities. As an example, we can think of various forms of idealist politics that seek to realize preexisting ideals in practice, as when a struggle for justice attempts to transform empirical reality to make it better conform to what ought to be the case. In contrast to this way of thinking about potential, Bergson posits a process whereby virtual forces, which are real though not yet actual, are actualized (see Deleuze 1988). The key distinction is between referring reality back to a pregiven set of possibilities (in the case of the possible/real opposition) and attributing reality to forces and processes of becoming (in the case of the virtual/ actual opposition). Gibson-Graham (2006, 23) write that their preeminent question is How might the potentiality for becoming arise out of the experience of subjection? In this they immediately indicate the political potential of a becoming that arises out of existing conditions. They do not compare the existing state of affairs to a preexisting ideal that they wish to see realized. Rather, they ask about the conditions under which a more open-ended process of transformation might be possible. They do this, not out of some naive celebration of indeterminacy, but because they recognize the costs of seeking to realize change from the point of view of an empirically inaccurate and politically limiting diagnosis of the present. In her work with the concept of the virtual found in Bergson, Elizabeth Grosz (2004, 261) highlights well what is at stake here: [But] even with careful planning and preparation, the political alternatives to domination are not there, simply waiting to be chosen, possible but not yet real. These alternatives, as Bergson recognized, are not alternatives, not possibilities, until they are brought into existence. At stake is the knowledge that, when idealism guides our attempts to realize change, we are working with only one particular (though no doubt historically dominant) understanding of potential and of its relationship to reality. The idea of affect, associated as it is with the virtual, is becoming so important today because it represents a refusal to deny reality to potential. Put differently, it insists on attributing reality to the forces for transformation inherent in every moment. As Grosz also recognizes, an altered understanding of the present and the future is required. For its part (and as Gibson-Graham are all too aware), the present must become more than an object of critiquesomething that needs to be corrected

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because not in conformity with our ideals. Rather, only if the present presents itself as fractured, cracked by the interventions of the past and the promise of the future, can the new be invented, welcomed and affirmed (Grosz 2004, 260; see also Sharpe and Hynes 2012). For its part, the future must be recognized as irreducible to the present; it has a constitutive openness that means it will always be other than our ideals would make it.

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Impotentiality
I have argued that Gibson-Graham recognize that there is potential immanent in existing economic activities. Since this potential may not yet be actualized, or expressed, it requires descriptionwhich is never, then, a mere documentation but has effects that are more performative. I opened the paper by referring to the distinction that Agamben draws between potentiality, understood as our capacity for action, and impotentiality, referring to our capacity to not act. In discussing the imbrication of impotentiality with the problem of power, Agamben writes the following: There is, nevertheless, another and more insidious operation of power that does not immediately affect what humans can dotheir potentialitybut rather their impotentiality, that is, what they cannot do, or better, can not do (Agamben 2011, 43). I want now to examine this less recognized but crucial dimension of the work of Gibson-Graham: namely, the place of impotentiality in thinking and practice. I will argue that impotentiality is poorly understood as a merely negative incapacity. Rather, as I demonstrate through an analysis of Gibson-Grahams reflections on their research practices, our impotentiality is what enables us to live and think in ways that are more than reactive. Finally, I indicate why their sensitivity to this problem of impotentiality is so important in our contemporary context. While recognizing that power may operate by separating us from our potentiality, rendering us impotent, Agamben sees as an even more insidious operation of power our being separated from our impotentiality. To speak of impotentiality is not to speak of impotence, which involves a deprivation of ones capacity to act. Impotentiality, in contrast, involves the capacity to not act, and Agamben raises the issue of the modes of power that affect what humans cannot do, or better, can not do. Suggesting that the capacity to not exercise ones potentiality is internal to the very nature of potentiality, Agamben (2011, 43) writes, That potentiality is always also constitutively an impotentiality, that every ability to do is also always already an ability to not do, is the decisive point of the theory of potentiality developed by Aristotle in the ninth book of the Metaphysics. Impotentiality [adynamia], he writes, is a privation contrary to potentiality [dynamis]. Every potentiality is impotentiality of the same [potentiality] and with respect to the same [potentiality]. Impotentiality does not mean here only absence of potentiality, not being able to do, but also and above all being able to not do, being able to not exercise ones own potentiality.

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Gibson-Grahams awareness of the importance of impotentiality to any act of potentialization comes out in a number of ways: specifically, through their refusal to wander down well-worn habitual paths of perception and through the heed they pay to the importance of hesitancy when thinking. First, there is Gibson-Grahams well-known strategy of highlighting some narratives of possibility over others. Indeed, this has been a source of frustration for some of their critics, but it indicates an appreciation for the richness of reality and a sensitivity to virtuality. Having recognized that there are potentials in economic life that are not yet actualized, Gibson-Graham make ethico-political decisions about which possibilities they want to bring into being. As Katherine Gibson relates, One thing is I think theres a realisation that you can tap and play up, which is that economic growth doesnt necessarily lead to economic and social well-being because its all from high-tech, high value-added stuff that doesnt produce that many jobs or other things. This came through both groups, they both had the sense that weve been good kids, weve done what was expected of us, weve pulled our belts in, weve accepted wage cuts, weve done the rationalizations, but look at us now, weve still got problems, weve got all these greater disparities in our communities And blah, blah, blah, blah so I think theres a reality there, theres something there I personally, and thats my old Marxist view that, that capitalist economic growth doesnt lead to the greater good I mean I dont know whether it doesnt necessarily I mean the way weve got it at the moment doesnt always lead to the greater good anyway and Im not interested in necessarily making capitalism more healthy, but talking about other ways that we might deal with these questions so I can hear that in what people are saying, in their ways of understanding, but I think theres also something else, which is a group dynamic, the dynamic of the research, and the dynamic of social interactions which are, that Im increasingly aware that so many of our social interactions, whether just on a one-to-one basis or in a group like that, do focus on whats bad and whats wrong. (K. Gibson, pers. comm.) Clearly, it is not a question of being blind to other ways of reading economic landscapes but is rather one of avoiding the impulse to affirm the conventional, the easily recognizable, and (often) the negative story. To focus on what is bad and wrong is too often confused with gritty realism, when in fact it is sheer pessimism. Certainly, Katherine Gibson is aware that there is a negative dimension to the deindustrializing stories of the areas that they research. It would also be a mistake to think that Gibson-Graham are providing an optimistic (and potentially naive) alternative to the pessimistic story. Optimism and pessimism are not as opposed as either proponent (the optimist or the pessimist) might hope. Indeed, both optimism and pessimism involve a denial of the present, where conditions are controlled by either illusion or paranoia, respectively. When pushed for reasons as to why there exists this focus on what is bad and what is wrong, Katherine Gibson replied:

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Well, I dont know, I mean I just talked to my friend on the weekend on the telephone and were just complaining and we get into this whole thing of who can complain more yknow [laughs]. I think its just a mode of casual interaction that ah its very non-Zen [peal of laughter], its all it is. I dont think its very helpful but it is in a way it is consistent with Wendy Brown did that great book, States of Injury. I mean, so much of our political subjectivity is around complaint and moral outrage and victimhood and injury and so on because what it is to be active is to claim injury it certainly comes out in groups and it leads to a certain empowerment of outrage on a personal basis or on a group basis and that is exactly the sort of political affect that Im not int I dont really Im not drawn to anymore and, the Left, Im turned off by it. (K. Gibson, pers. comm.)

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Here the language of affect is being developed to explain both the attraction of certain forms of political subjectivation and also the repulsion of others. Without psychologizing too heavily, I think it is important to note the hesitancy that Katherine Gibson demonstrates when she says that she is not drawn anymore to the political affect of the empowerment of outrage: Im not int[erested] I dont really Im not drawn to. Her reluctance to be drawn into this affect is not something that seems to come lightly to her, although it might lead to lightness. Elsewhere, I have argued that lightness is not without its political significance (see Sharpe and Hynes 2012; Hynes and Sharpe 2010; Hynes, Sharpe, and Fagan 2007; Sharpe, Hynes, and Fagan 2005). Although the Western philosophical tradition has tended to equate thought with weightiness, I have argued that a certain lightness is crucial to attempts both to potentialize the matter of the world and also to recognize the impotentiality that constitutes our being in that world (Sharpe and Hynes 2012). Gibson-Grahams sensitivity to the impotentiality at the heart of any potentialization does not only reside in decisions around what to perceive or what to highlight in ones observations, but it also extends to the process of articulation. Given the importance of poststructural philosophy to their work, and particularly the realization of the performative nature of discourse, it is not surprising that they would take extreme care in attempting to understand the function of their own discourse: Ive really had intellectual revolutions through my life and those are when I went from the sort of feminist framework I was working in as an activist to grad when I went to grad school I was 32 and became a Marxist, I left behind all the relativism I had learned really from my readings in history of science and the history of thought in the years after I graduated from college and went into Marxism and it was not relativistic, yknow and um, see that was like that was a whole new area, so I was like silent in a way for I had nothing to say because I was just learning it, and left everything else behind and when I left my realist, my essentialist Marxism behind and moved into this other kind of Marxism, that was another period where I was just into confusion! I could, I was, yknow reminded of Buckminster Fuller,
4. Those familiar with Julie Graham will know that this was a reasonably common refrain. I heard it, for example, after the work had been done for A Post-Capitalist Politics, but I believe it occurred several times during her career.

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when he was in his early 20s he didnt talk for 2 years because he had nothing to say, yknow what I mean, he had he didnt know what he thought and he wasnt going to say anything until he knew. (J. Graham, pers. comm.)

In the current publish or perish academic context, though the necessity of these moments of inaction is discernible, such an eschewal of productivity might strike the reader as maverick.4 But do we only see the advantage of these breaks in the productivity that they offer afterward? I dont know if Julie Graham saw them thus, and one can see in this resignation that she literally had nothing to say, an opening to something that cannot be recouped into the logics of productivity. So rather than merely seeing these breaks as a sort of halftime in the game of production, I think the case can be made for seeing them as a break in the very logic of productivity. Thus, while the temptation is to see these spaces outside productivity as failings or as useful or recoupable pauses, I am suggesting that they can be seen in a quite different way, in order to highlight the political importance of a potentiality that is not actualized or put to work. In his analysis of Imre Kertszs novel, Fatelessness, Paul Harrison shows how it is possible, through waiting, to create tension at an affective level in which Harrison espies the conditions for politics. In this I would like to suggest that Buckminster Fuller is analogous to the figure of Kves, the hero of Fatelessness, at least in the manner in which Harrison presents him. Both are caught in a kind of hiatus where talk becomes incoherent, and this is expressed as a reticence to assert or disclose (see Harrison 2011, 221). Harrison likens this to a nonaction rather than an action or inaction. It deliberately takes leave of the discourse or logic of immediate action. But for what reason or purpose? Harrisons work gives primacy to waiting for its own sake, which will not be sorted by being recouped into a waiting for. Another indication of the importance of impotentiality to Gibson-Grahams work is raised by Julie Graham around the closely related issue of silence. Silence can be a way of not becoming a slave to ones actions and self-representations, of not being captured by them in the fantasy of a consistent subjectivity. Impotentiality in this context is a sort of freedom to not course down a path of action. Lest silence be seen as a form of nonaction or withholding, I indicate in the conclusion that this will depend on the characterization of action to which we subscribe. I suggest that Gibson-Grahams sensitivity to impotentiality is important because it draws our attention to the richness of the concept of action, which aspects of our contemporary culture occlude. In interviews with both Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson there is an evident faith in the process of nonproductionnot that it will right itself but that such is crucial to problematizing and questioning, which require experimentation. As Julie Graham describes, So Ive had a number of periods like that, but then in terms of the intellectual question-seeking, which does also come in bursts but the minute I have any downtime, when Im not pushing, when Im not just having to get up every day, just the minute I have any downtime when Im starting,

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I start to have ideas and thats why Kath and I, the minute we talk to each other, they just start to come out, and thats part of our process what getting together does for us, yknow, but youre right its not a constant thing. (J. Graham, pers. comm.)

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In speaking about not pushing the process too hard but rather recognizing its own rhythms, Graham draws attention to those microinclinations, or barely perceptible forces for change, that do not necessarily lead to something bigger or more productive but that have their own affective and micropolitical significance (McKim and Massumi 2009; Hynes and Sharpe 2009). Yet I would be loath to suggest that there is nothing of macropolitical significance in their work, and this is not because I value the macro- above the micropolitical but rather because I think their work operates on both levels. In concluding, then, it is to this question of Gibson-Grahams macropolitical import that I now want to turn, before going on to offer some tentative suggestions as to how the micropolitical and macropolitical dimensions of their research relate to each other around the question of action.

Conclusion
In considering the macropolitical significance of the hesitance that I espy in the above transcripts and in Gibson-Grahams work more generally, I would like to reflect on the democratizing capacities of Gibson-Grahams work and, specifically, of their participatory action research. In speaking of such democratizing capacities, I would like to differentiate between two senses of democracy, as rehearsed by Agamben. In his reflections on the nature of contemporary articulations of democracy, Agamben (2010, 1) suggests that we today are witness to a narrowing of the potentials of democracy as a mode of political action and that within the history of thinking about democracy there is a preliminary ambiguity. While our current usage tends to confuse two distinct senses of the term, Agamben indicates that a slightly more attentive observation would show that those who discuss democracy today understand this term sometimes as a form of the body politics constitution, sometimes as a technique of government. The term thus refers both to the conceptuality of public law and to that of administrative practice: it designates powers form of legitimation as well as the modalities of its exercise. Agamben is distinguishing here between the more constitutional sense of democracy, on the one hand, and its executive operation, on the other. Where the former sense is concerned with the juridico-political exercise of democracy, the latter focuses on its more economic-managerial expressions (Agamben 2010, 2). In contemporary political discourse, Agamben argues, it is the second sense that dominates, insofar as democratic discourse is already determined by an understanding of democracy as a question of governance, of the techniques and modalities of management. Today, Agamben writes, we behold the overwhelming preponderance of the government and the economy over anything you could call popular sovereigntyan expression now drained of all meaning (4).

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I would like to suggest that Gibson-Grahams participatory action research constitutes an exercise in democracy that, while not a strictly juridico-political gesture in its narrowest sense, certainly mobilizes a form of popular sovereignty that is not emptied of all content by the collapse of democracy into its technical and executive functions. By performing diverse economies, Gibson-Graham refuse to allow governance and bureaucracy to monopolize the field of democratic action. In this same move, they reject the reduction of the economy to that form of management that we associate with the executive operation of democracy. Importantly, Gibson-Graham do not regard their practice as a sharing among equals, which would be presumptive at best and colonizing at worst. Rather, they see it as a harnessing of the differentials of power (see Gibson-Graham 2006). This means that they do not flatten the composite of elements that they encounter into a pregiven ideal; rather, they maximize the capacities of these differential potentials. For example, and to return to an earlier transcript, the insights brought by diverse players in the economic game are not flattened out by being drawn into an ideal model, but all are recognized as potentially, if differentially, valuable participants in the economic development conversation. I would thus stress that Gibson-Graham, in pointing to particular instances of economic difference, do not do so in order to make a model but rather to use these instances as inspiration, with the point being to harness the affective energy of a project or situation rather than harnessing its representational capacities. Here the micropolitics of affect and the macropolitics of a democratic intervention meet in a way that, as I shall suggest, makes GibsonGrahams contribution to the contemporary scene an especially important one. In his efforts to show how labor is tied with our essence as human beings, Marx (1976, 284) famously distinguishes between the worst architect and the best of bees. He writes, We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. Here Marx makes the capacity of human beings to transform nature central to his delineation of the human essence. I have indicated that Gibson-Graham retain a commitment to certain Marxist aims and concepts, despite the imaginative directions that they have taken their refiguring of the economy. Yet by underlining the more virtual dimensions of Gibson-Grahams thought, Marxs understanding of the human and of the politics with which it is associated is subject to a degree of problematizing. For to the extent that Marxist materialist thought focuses principally on the historical conditions of material production and the political processes by which they

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might be transformed in the attempt to realize a more equal society, the political is defined by the transcendence of matter, broadly conceived. Put differently, when politics is determined by an attempt to realize an ideal, the present matter of the world is always what we must go beyond. If the notion of the virtual has been associated with the so-called new materialism (Coole and Frost 2010), it is because the virtual seeks to describe the potential that is immanent to matter, a potential that already inheres in the here and now, though the here and now can never be captured as a hard empirical reality. As Gibson-Graham (1996) insist, we do not have to wait for the revolution since the conditions for it already exist, though thinking has an important role to play in actualizing potentials that might otherwise go unnoticed. Yet if I am suggesting that Gibson-Graham locate a potential for transformation within the matter of our own present, I have also indicated that the impulse to transform or intervene in the name of action is one that they do not approach reactively or compulsively. While I would be reluctant to replace one understanding of the human essence with another (Gibson-Grahams work surely problematizes this very search for essence), I would highlight the importance of Agambens insistence that being human might also (and crucially) involve a capacity to not act. I would also stress, with Agamben (2011, 44), that this capacity might be especially important in contemporary conditions. He writes, Separated from his impotentiality, deprived of the experience of what he can not do, todays man believes himself capable of everything, and so he repeats his jovial no problem and his irresponsible I can do it, precisely when he should instead realize that he has been consigned in unheard of measure to forces and processes over which he has lost all control. He has become blind not to his capacities but to his incapacities, not to what he can do but to what he cannot, or can not, do. In a culture in which the pressure is to performto direct our action toward identifiable and evaluable goalsthe present finds itself converted into a time of decisions (Murphie 2011). In such a culture of performance, our understanding of what it is to act narrows so that to not act implies a passive nondecision or apathy. Acting, then, is taken to imply doing something decisive oras is the case in much leftist politicsdoing something that is recognizably politically significant. In closing, I would like to highlight the significance of Hannah Arendts insistence that this particular understanding of action as goal oriented is a peculiarly historical one, representing an atrophy of the potentials of the concept of action. In her thesis on the nature of human action, Arendt (1958) argues that such an understanding of what it means to act (and by implication, to not act) is premised on a confusion of action with fabrication, where the latter refers to the process of following a model in order to realize a predetermined idea. What befits politics, however, is not the attempt to realize in action a plan already formed in imagination, and I have been suggesting that Gibson-Grahams work provides a real challenge to this instrumentalist and idealist mode of politics. Theirs is rather a question of actualizing as yet unthought potentials and thus maximizing our own potentiality as actors. It is only when we are prepared to exercise our impotentiality (our capacity to not act) that we

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can bring this potentiality into being. We can thus espy in Gibson-Grahams work the sense that there is something politically and ethically significant in the nonimmediacy of the duration of thinking practices, and this represents an opening to a much richer sense of human action.

Acknowledgments
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I am grateful for the careful reading and insightful comments provided by Maria Hynes and the two anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to Esra Erdem for inviting this submission and to both Esra and Katherine Gibson for their encouragement of this paper.

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