The historicity of subsumptions

This commentary engages Thomas Cowan's ‘Geographies of Subsumption’ through research on formalizing municipal solid waste infrastructures in India. While corroborating many of the analytical gains of anti-stagist readings of capitalist subsumption, it argues that combinatorialist approaches also carry risks. Specifically, if, in the move away from telos, they abandon conceptions of capitalist tendency and thereby flatten capitalist temporality into an ontologized field of endlessly recombining differences. Serving as both companion and counterpoint to Cowan, the commentary advances a more dialectical and historical conception of subsumption as a differentiating, directional, and contradictory process of capitalist transformation.