Knighton

Diffusion as Strategy:  The Limits of American Productivity in the
19th Century

Toward the end of Capital's first volume, Marx relays an "extremely
doleful anecdote" from E.G.  Wakefield, who complains of American
labor's unreliability, its susceptibility to the seductions of the
wageless frontier.  While the westward movement of American labor
power comes to be celebrated by Marx and others as a release valve for
unassimilable creative energies, most commentators are far less
charitable, denigrating the frontier as an "idle" space, and maligning
flight toward it as an illusory freedom.  In attempting to contain and
regulate this flight -- and to thereby stabilize its resource of labor
power -- the American state confronted anew an old problem.  My paper
seeks to demonstrate the very uniqueness of the American response to
this quandary, through comparison with English efforts to stabilize
labor power since the 16th century.  Drawing on the work of Marx,
Antonio Negri, and Gilles Deleuze, I argue that this specific
character of America's 19th-century economic landscape makes possible
the embracing of modes of activity -- autonomous, self-determined, and
transient -- exterior to the disciplinary net of the wage, and
suggestive of a still-viable political strategy.  The paper aims to
correct the reduction of frontier movement to either statist "manifest
destiny," or to what Wakefield called a "barbarizing tendency" to
evade capitalist institutions.  In lieu of these misrecognitions, I
introduce the concept of diffusion.  The concept is suggestive at once
of both decentralization, as well as wastefulness and unproductivity;
it illuminates the attempt in the 19th-century to renegotiate, through
westward movement, both spatial boundaries and those distinctions that
separate "productive activity" from purported "idleness."  The paper
further pursues the possibility of diffusion as a tool recuperable for
our present context, in which the establishing (and transcending) of
temporal boundaries has arguably supplanted the spatial frontiers once
crucial to the strategy.