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pogenic climate change) are recuperated into the circulation of fi nance capital (e.g.,
carbon credits). As Braun reads Harvey, 'the future of socio-nature is very quickly
reduced to a movement
internal
to the temporal rhythms and spatial orderings of
capitalism' (Braun, 2006, p. 213), and this despite periodic attempts by Harvey to
offer more complex accounts of produced nature. More compelling for Braun,
because they too cry out for investigation and interpretation, are the myriad social-
natures that are not accountable to capitalism as such, but have differing and highly
variable sources, be these the techno-sciences behind genetic engineering, the differ-
ent nature ideologies of, say, North America and Europe that inform differential
creations of landscape, or the geopolitical concerns over sovereignty and security
that inform new notions of biological life (see Braun, 2007; cf. Braun, 2000; What-
more, 2002; Latour, 2004).
One could respond to this critique of a too capital-centric produced-nature that
Harvey and Smith, like Marx, are at the end of the day only concerned with those
sites and situations where the capitalist mode of production prevails. But Braun
cautions that a 'value-theoretical understanding is valid in the general or universal
sense that Harvey presumes,
only so far as such conditions that make capitalist
calculation possible are extended and “hold together” over space and time'
(Braun,
2006, p. 214, emphasis in the original). These are very carefully chosen words. The
issue at stake for Braun has indeed everything to do with the conditions that make
capitalist calculation possible; it is not about replacing capitalist calculation as such.
For him, these conditions are not determined by capital alone but are instead irre-
ducibly heterogeneous. The infl uential work of Timothy Mitchell (2002) provides
him with a case in point. In Mitchell's richly detailed case study of the emergence
of 'the economy' in Egypt - the emergence, that is, of the belief in a distinct, autono-
mous sphere endowed with causative powers - a wide range of actors were actually
at work: capitalists, yes, but also (as it happens) the anopheles mosquito, the malaria
causing faciparum parasite, the chemistry of ammonium nitrate, the hydraulic force
of the river, family networks, imperial connections, and more. None of these reduce
to capital, or the economy. None were wholly determined nor incorporated within
it. Their interactions do, however, 'make possible a world that somehow seems the
outcome of human rationality and programming' (Mitchell, 2002, p. 30).
The appeal of Mitchell's account, Braun argues, is its resistance to abstraction.
Explanatory power and, no less, anti-capitalist politics, are reduced once a certain
level of abstraction is reached in the attempt to explain events. Otherwise the temp-
tation may be to attribute causal powers to the abstraction itself. To be avoided is
any trace of the idea that there are two ontologies at work: one ontology for 'prac-
tices and things', as Braun puts it (Braun 2006: 215), and another for underlying,
causative logics. One might respond that, just the same, we need accounts that spell
out why interactions come to be ordered the way they are. For Harvey, interactions
within the capitalist world are ordered by the exigencies of value, since it is value
that those who rule capitalism must tend to. It is value that rules the rulers, even.
But now we can hear the response of immanentist philosophy: value must itself be
assembled and provided a territory, and once assembled it does not fully internalise
those elements which enter into it (they remain potentials, as it were). Value, there-
fore, cannot account for itself; it must be accounted for:
If, at the dawn of the 21st century, capital has become an axiomatic it is so not because
it has magical powers, but because of the fi ne weave of practices - from the congresses
