The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism

What is an operation? Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson probe this question to investigate the nexus of capitalism and politics. Working through and beyond current preoccupations with data and algorithms, The Politics of Operations explores capital’s relation to its multiple outsides in order to provide new ways of interpreting the past and to locate a specifically extractive dynamic in contemporary capitalism. Mezzadra and Neilson present a wide-ranging analysis, confronting problems and predicaments such as the changing role of territory, the convergence of neoliberalism and nationalism, the shifting relations between exploitation and social cooperation, and the centrality of extraction, logistics, and finance to the global economy. By isolating and analyzing what they call operations of capital, Mezzadra and Neilson examine not only the material effects of capital hitting the ground but also the concatenations and connections that compose capitalism in its moments of crisis and transition, variegation and abstraction. This careful analysis allows them to ask how capital and capitalism reshape their relation with politics in the current global conjuncture. They interrogate the mutations of state and empire as well as the struggles of subjects who contest and exceed formations of capital and governance. Mezzadra and Neilson test the limits of contemporary state theory and provide a challenging assessment of the current intertwining between capital and state. Not constraining its analysis to capital’s generation of political forms, The Politics of Operations stakes out a grammar and imagination adequate to a politics beyond capital.