Place Is Where the Light Comes In

Light beams onto a building and crevasses through a hole in the wall, boring into a darkened room, splaying its wave particles onto a hardened dirt floor. Ten-feet above shoed feet rustle the floorboard dirt into grooves that sift the dirt down, down, until it falls through and illuminates and scatters the light beamed into the apparent emptiness below. Various trajectories and static materiality come together; shared interpenetrations of temporal and physical space—something passes through, on, by, or over into the next realm of multiple possibilities. For any moment of time, multiple, mobile, and seemingly stationary bodies share a space pregnant with possibility in a town in the slow, continuous process of transformation. Esparto, California is becoming, as it always has been and will continue to do. The ground underneath stands as base from which this small town at the wide end of the Capay Valley currently articulates its becoming—from the psychophysical landscape of “place”.

In A Postcapitalist Politics, the writing team dubbed J.K. Gibson-Graham enumerate on the “new political imaginary” they see emerging, which “is radically altering the established spatiotemporal frame of progressive politics, reconfiguring the position and role of the subject, as well as shifting the grounds for assessing the efficacy of political movements and initiatives”[1]. For Gibson-Graham, this emerging imaginary moves from place-based globalism. Rather than thinking outside of and dismantling the capitalist system—which despite its egregious flaws actually sustains us on certain levels—Gibson-Graham focus on innovation rather than revolution; initiating from the inside and working outward. This starts at the individual level with tremendous feedback loops that expand beyond an immediate landscape into hubs of information from the global village. For Gibson-Graham, place-based globalism “constitutes a proliferative and expansive spatial imaginary for a politics that offers a compressed temporality—traversing the distance from ‘nowhere’ to ‘now here’…retheorizing capitalism and reclaiming the economy here and now in myriad projects of alternative economic activism”[2]. Within the here and now, Gibson-Graham set forth the idea that the economy is in a constant state of becoming (as people are) and thus engenders a space for intervention and transformation; the politics of possibility. With A Postcapitalist Politics, they work to develop strategies for innovation sourced from the interpolation of a base to enact an empowered and changing economy, to push back against a force that claims a determined, entropic trajectory of production.

The nowhere turning now here Esparto and Capay valley region display some of Gibson-Graham’s conceptual processes at work, specifically as a region that embodies place as central to sustainable growth. The region in many ways exemplifies the disorganized borderlands of capitalism; it remains simultaneously connected to and disconnected from the machinations of the capitalistic organism, both as source and subject. Rural areas provide urban centers with source materials, and remain subject to the flux of economic movements. As the United States emerged as a ruling world power, the Capay Valley has risen and fallen alongside. However it has always done so with a necessary attachment to the possibilities and limits of its land. Fruit production, though the initial reason for a railroad to lay track in the valley, could not be supported on a mass scale due to the valley's soil condition. The community turned to almond and walnut production as a means to bear economic fruit[3], embodied by the Esparto Almond Queen’s reign in the cultural landscape. As time passed, the valley declined in productivity, the railroad moved out, and the world outside the region expanded in complexity. The small valley dotted with arable land meagerly survived. The somewhat challenging geography of the valley may be what saved the region, as the Capay valley stands as an early locus for the organic farming movement in Northern California, which thrives under smaller scale agricultural models and is one of the sustaining threads for the region, along with its Capayan companion, gambling.

The community in this region is diverse, and uses multiple means of production that have the potential to work against each other. Alongside the organic farmers, the native Wintun tribe used the resources it has (namely sovereignty) to enact a mode of economic production that skirts ideals of ethical economic activity (thus it stands as outside “sanctioned” capitalist models) in the form of the Cache Creek Casino. The Capay Valley Vision (CVV) organization, which is comprised of representatives from the various local communities, has the goal of fostering dialogue among the comingling communities. CVV hopes to preserve the region’s historical, agricultural roots, as this production base is what formed, forms, and informs the community—it is this base that will provide a sustainable economic future. This base must also articulate with the casino and with extra-community economic progress. How can this region sustain its multi-headed self and remain connected to, but not at the whim of, the changing world economies in which it is inherently placed while enacting new modes of sustainable production?

The complexity that this seemingly simple community contains could very well be the source of its ultimate flowering. According to the Gibson-Graham model, alternative economic models that foster ethical self-cultivation and disarticulated but communicating modes of production enact the political imaginary, working on a small-scale that exists outside of large, organizational structures to produce global change. Vital to this development is the Esparto-based Rural Innovation in Social Economics (R.I.S.E.), which fosters change on the individual level in a community that is caught in a negative loop of self-denigration. By imbuing esteem at the individual level through multiple modes of self-referential “improvement” (counseling services, employment support, esteem-building activities, connection to community), R.I.S.E. is cultivating a community of empowered individuals that will extend into the community at large to enact profound change. Empowered individuals within each subsection of the community are key to new and emerging modes of sustainable production.

As the casino brings in people from outside the community (which has both positive and negative potential), the organic farms that have sprouted in the crenulations of the valley extend the valley’s products outward. Somewhere in the articulations of this inward/outward intersection are the potentialities for a postcapitalist economic model of the Gibson-Graham order. In this vein, what this region could stand to foster is a focused extension into the global communication landscape for vital, external feedback and connection to other emerging economic models.

This region is a place that is pregnant with possibility[4]. This seemingly run-down and past its prime rural community is responding to and participating in the realization of its becoming; multi-dimensional intersections of cultural and economic production converge and emerge in the place-based performance of the Capay valley.

Work Cited

1. J.K Gibson-Graham, “Introduction” in A Postcapitalist Politics, (Minnesota; University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xix-xxxvi.

2. “The Capay Valley Region” Capay Valley Vision, accessed February 12th, 2012. www.capayvalleyvision.org

3. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics, xix.

4. Gibson-Graham, <em>A Postcapitalist Politics, </em>xxi

5. http://www.capayvalleyvision.org/capayvalley.html

6. Gibson-Graham so beautifully describe possibility as “not fully yoked into a system of meaning but entirely subsumed to and defined within a (global) order; it…exists as potentiality” (A Postcapitalist Politics, xxxiii).

Place is Where the Light Comes In