Mama Laja, Piti Oy and the Gran Machine (Mother-Capital, Child-Profit and the Big Machine or the Order of Capital)
Creators: name: Beckett Chingono, Phoebe
Publisher: name: University of Chicago
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Creativity, Value, Power, Capital, Spontaneity, Peircian Semiotics, Market Formation, Financialisation, Economic Substantivist Anthropology, Christianity of Anthropology, Production, Black Feminist Theory, Caribbean

description: The essay starts by troubling the idea of production, conceived as a kind of unmediated transmission of substance into form, a forward moving arrow of directionality from an identifiable authorial source to an embodied thing. As my aim is to understand how value is created outside of a productivist framework, this critique is offered initially as a point of departure. Departing from production lands me at the level of market intermediation, where, we could say, nothing is made, simply gathered and reordered in form. There is a feminine gendered aspect to mediation which cannot be overlooked. I want to study how value is created through mediatory processes. But how to express this without falling back on marxist feminist and feminist substantivist approaches, which seem to counter-intuitively turn everyone into a producer while remaining ambivalent toward this strategy? I suggest that an approach to understanding value creation through mediation involves overcoming the dualism of creativity and order. This is the first tension in creativity which the essay sustains, through a critique of the spontaneity of markets. The second tension in creativity is whether making the market traders creators of value makes them creators of capital, and thus capitalist. The first tension is resolved by looking at how market values come into being through Peircian semiotics, Goodwin’s interactive turn-taking, Goffman’s performativity, and Silverstein’s improvisational modelling. The second tension is resolved by a deeper investigation of autonomy in relation to spontaneity, looking at how market orders emerge from a paradox of social creativity, which I make sense of using Jakobson’s poetics and Carlo Severi’s parallelism, to critique whilst thinking with Marx’s fetish. I see that Haitian local market operations don’t open up straightforward pathways for capitalist moves and countermoves.I explain how the market women subvert the market with a brief analysis of monopoly capitalism, offering an approach to the semiotics of capitalism in transitional or post-colonial economies. I then return to the question of whether the market traders create capital/are capitalist by engaging wider debates on monetary theory, financialisation I relate this to the ethnographic material on “pratik”, a Haitian informal credit system to develop a thesis of capital as power based in ethnographic data which expands upon Jonathan Nitzan and Simpshon Bichler, as well as David Graeber’s theory of games, play, bureaucratic rules and violence. Insights from the primary sources on the nature of capital and power allow me to reformulate my initial criticism of material-productivist ideas of capital and to offer a feminist position toward production which is cosmic more than economic. The essay recursively reflects the form of the “lakou” the traditional Haitian land tenure system to demonstrate it was a smoke-screen to go from real economy to symbolic one, labour and land too form a nomos. The lakou structure with its wild appearance embodies the tension between creativity and order which the essay tries to overcome which can help us understand the mysteries of value creation which lakous encode through “lwas”, laws and spirits.