°Household frontier
An excerpt, still in draft, of “The Household Frontier,” written with Melinda Cooper:
[…] The household was never peripheral to American imperialism. It was, on the contrary, the space through which the legal form of value was defined and imposed. After all, it is at the frontier that the boundaries of property law and its tenure unfold, that legitimate labour (the very distinction between wage labour and slavery) and authorised reproduction (as with the master’s legally recognized and bastard children) are decided. The egalitarianism of a diasporic sovereignty situated the household as the intimate sphere of a sentimental and self-managed equivalence. It is this household that would become the efflorescent machinery of that sentiment’s limits and their multiplication. With its attendant claims of inheritance, labour and right, the Jeffersonian domestic economy envisioned perfect symmetries of contractual reciprocity. Yet, in the violent positing of the frontier as a space of exploration, cultivation and the extraction of wealth – in the scarcities that are obliged as precondition and condition of a market in labour, in the criminalisation and recapture of fugitive and wayward (re)production and, not least, in the ambivalent play of the value form’s genera as simultaneously universality, hypostatization and arbitrage – there would be a periodic recourse to the naturalising magic of genealogy to settle matters of orderly progression and authenticity. The frontier furnished the household as the elaboration of an architectural and intimate dynamic through which limits were escaped and restored. Situated across the hyphen between politics and economics, as the means by which law makes makes markets, in the frontier the household attained a plasticity and portability that confound European understandings of empire and flight. Briefly put, what is at stake in financialization is the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the household as a site of legitimated (re)production. […]
