Is the Anthropocene Conniving with Capital (original) (raw)

This essay examines the representation of water in Karen Jayes' debut novel For the Mercy of Water. It focuses on the alternative ontologies imagined as a means of engaging the commons when an essential resource of the commons, water, becomes scarce, privatized and commodified. The essay draws on Sarah Nuttall's idea of "Pluvial Time", a moment of intense rain, as a temporal marker, to plot the emergence of the dispensation in which capital extends its doctrine of privatization to water in Jayes' text. Further, it discusses how this regime of water privatization results in a confounding war that manifests in a variety of ways: the degraded body and the eroded community. The essay concludes by considering ways in which the commons might be reconstituted in response to commodified water. The word gets thrown around a lot these days, but this is what neoliberalism means: a globally applicable method for preserving the current overwhelming imbalance of