Landscape and Surplus Value: The Making of the Ordinary in Brentwood, CA

In this paper I argue for a morphological perspective on landscape that takes seriously social intentionality and the complexity of struggles over production and reproduction. I develop an example from California's agricultural labor history to show the processes through which the landscape is constructed, Further, I show that the production of landscape is an important moment in the production of surplus value under capitalism, In turn, I use insights from social studies of science to suggest how, as the landscape becomes stabilized, its very ordinariness tends to mask the struggles that constituted its form.

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