Paul W. Posner, Viviana Patroni, and Jean François Mayer
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781683400455
- eISBN:
- 9781683400677
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9781683400455.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
Labor Politics in Latin America assesses the capacity of working-class organizations to represent and advance working people’s demands in the era of globalization and neoliberalism, in which capital ...
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Labor Politics in Latin America assesses the capacity of working-class organizations to represent and advance working people’s demands in the era of globalization and neoliberalism, in which capital has reasserted its power on a global scale. The book’s premise is that the longer-term sustainability of development strategies for the region is largely connected to the capacity of working-class organizations to secure a fairer distribution of the gains from growth through labor legislation reform. Its analysis suggests the need to take into consideration the wider structural changes that reconfigured the political maps of the countries examined (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela), for example, globalization and its impact on democratic transformation in the region, operating within longer time frames. It is precisely this wider structural analysis and historical narrative that allows the book’s case studies to show that, even in the uncovering of substantial variation, what becomes evident in the study of Latin America over the last three decades is the overwhelming reality that for most workers in the region, labor reform—or the lack thereof —in essence increased precarity and informality and weakened labor movements.Less
Labor Politics in Latin America assesses the capacity of working-class organizations to represent and advance working people’s demands in the era of globalization and neoliberalism, in which capital has reasserted its power on a global scale. The book’s premise is that the longer-term sustainability of development strategies for the region is largely connected to the capacity of working-class organizations to secure a fairer distribution of the gains from growth through labor legislation reform. Its analysis suggests the need to take into consideration the wider structural changes that reconfigured the political maps of the countries examined (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela), for example, globalization and its impact on democratic transformation in the region, operating within longer time frames. It is precisely this wider structural analysis and historical narrative that allows the book’s case studies to show that, even in the uncovering of substantial variation, what becomes evident in the study of Latin America over the last three decades is the overwhelming reality that for most workers in the region, labor reform—or the lack thereof —in essence increased precarity and informality and weakened labor movements.
Kendra Marston
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474430296
- eISBN:
- 9781474453608
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474430296.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book is the first extended study into the politics of whiteness inherent within postfeminist popular cinema. It analyses a selection of Hollywood films dating from the turn of the millennium, ...
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This book is the first extended study into the politics of whiteness inherent within postfeminist popular cinema. It analyses a selection of Hollywood films dating from the turn of the millennium, arguing that the character of the ‘melancholic white woman’ operates as a trope through which to explore the excesses of late capitalism and a crisis of faith in the American dream. Melancholia can function as a form of social capital for these characters yet betrays its proximity to a gendered history of emotion and psychopathology. This figure is alternately idealised or scapegoated depending on how well she navigates the perils of postfeminist ideology. Furthermore, the book considers how performances of melancholia and mental distress can confer benefits for Hollywood actresses and female auteurs on the labour market, which in turn has contributed to the maintenance of white hegemony within the mainstream US film industry. Case studies in the book include Black Swan (Darren Aronofksy 2010), Gone Girl (David Fincher 2014) and Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton 2010).Less
This book is the first extended study into the politics of whiteness inherent within postfeminist popular cinema. It analyses a selection of Hollywood films dating from the turn of the millennium, arguing that the character of the ‘melancholic white woman’ operates as a trope through which to explore the excesses of late capitalism and a crisis of faith in the American dream. Melancholia can function as a form of social capital for these characters yet betrays its proximity to a gendered history of emotion and psychopathology. This figure is alternately idealised or scapegoated depending on how well she navigates the perils of postfeminist ideology. Furthermore, the book considers how performances of melancholia and mental distress can confer benefits for Hollywood actresses and female auteurs on the labour market, which in turn has contributed to the maintenance of white hegemony within the mainstream US film industry. Case studies in the book include Black Swan (Darren Aronofksy 2010), Gone Girl (David Fincher 2014) and Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton 2010).
Anita Chari
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231173896
- eISBN:
- 9780231540384
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231173896.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This chapter turns to Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory of reification for a more embodied approach to critique. The chapter argues that Adorno's aesthetic theory, perhaps despite himself, provides ...
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This chapter turns to Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory of reification for a more embodied approach to critique. The chapter argues that Adorno's aesthetic theory, perhaps despite himself, provides one crucial strategy for dereified praxis, the notion of the “defetishizing fetish,” an artwork that acts a kind of Trojan Horse, a homeopathic assault upon forms of domination in neoliberal society.Less
This chapter turns to Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory of reification for a more embodied approach to critique. The chapter argues that Adorno's aesthetic theory, perhaps despite himself, provides one crucial strategy for dereified praxis, the notion of the “defetishizing fetish,” an artwork that acts a kind of Trojan Horse, a homeopathic assault upon forms of domination in neoliberal society.
Rowland Atkinson and Sarah Blandy
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781784995300
- eISBN:
- 9781526121035
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784995300.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Urban and Rural Studies
Domestic Fortress offers a critical analysis of the contemporary home and its close relationship to fear and security. It considers the important connection between the private home, political life ...
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Domestic Fortress offers a critical analysis of the contemporary home and its close relationship to fear and security. It considers the important connection between the private home, political life and the economy that we term tessellated neoliberalism. The book considers the nucleus of the domestic home as part of a much larger archipelago frontline of homes and gated communities that appear as a new home front set against diverse sources of social anxiety. These range from questions of invasion (such as burglary or identity theft) to those of security (the home as a financial resource in retirement and as a place of refuge in an unpredictable world). A culture of fear has been responded to through increasingly emphatic retreats by homeowners into fortified dwellings, palatial houses, concealed bunker pads and gated developments. Many feature elaborate security measures; alarms, CCTV systems, motion-sensing lights and impregnable panic rooms. Domestic Fortresslocates the anxieties driving these responses to the corporate and political manufacturing of fear, the triumph of neoliberal models of homeownership and related modes of social individualisation and risk that permeate society today. Domestic Fortress draws on perspectives and research from criminology, urban studies and sociology to offer a sense of the private home as a site of wavering anxiety and security, exclusion and warmth, alongside dreams of retreat and autonomy that mesh closely with the defining principles of neoliberal governance.
Even as the home is acknowledged to play a vital role in sheltering us from the elements so it has now come to be a locus around which many anxieties are shut-out. The home allows us to lock out the daily hardships of life, but is also a site from which we witness a wide range of troubling phenomena: the insecurities of the workplace, plans for our future welfare, internationalized terror, geo-political warfare, ecological catastrophes, feelings of loss and uncertainty around identity, to say nothing of the daily risks of flood, fire and other disasters.
The home now plays a complex dual role that slips between offering us protection from these worries while also offering the nightmare of its own possible invasion, erosion or destruction. On top of these concerns entire industries have been built that sell a war against strangers, dirt and disaster. This of course includes the insurance industry itself, but also the use of technologies that both protect the home and make it effectively more impregnable to casual social contact as well as the proliferation of products devoted to domestic cleanliness. Domestic Fortress considers the fantasies and realities of dangers to the contemporary home and its inhabitants and details the wide range of actions taken in the pursuit of total safety.Less
Domestic Fortress offers a critical analysis of the contemporary home and its close relationship to fear and security. It considers the important connection between the private home, political life and the economy that we term tessellated neoliberalism. The book considers the nucleus of the domestic home as part of a much larger archipelago frontline of homes and gated communities that appear as a new home front set against diverse sources of social anxiety. These range from questions of invasion (such as burglary or identity theft) to those of security (the home as a financial resource in retirement and as a place of refuge in an unpredictable world). A culture of fear has been responded to through increasingly emphatic retreats by homeowners into fortified dwellings, palatial houses, concealed bunker pads and gated developments. Many feature elaborate security measures; alarms, CCTV systems, motion-sensing lights and impregnable panic rooms. Domestic Fortresslocates the anxieties driving these responses to the corporate and political manufacturing of fear, the triumph of neoliberal models of homeownership and related modes of social individualisation and risk that permeate society today. Domestic Fortress draws on perspectives and research from criminology, urban studies and sociology to offer a sense of the private home as a site of wavering anxiety and security, exclusion and warmth, alongside dreams of retreat and autonomy that mesh closely with the defining principles of neoliberal governance.
Even as the home is acknowledged to play a vital role in sheltering us from the elements so it has now come to be a locus around which many anxieties are shut-out. The home allows us to lock out the daily hardships of life, but is also a site from which we witness a wide range of troubling phenomena: the insecurities of the workplace, plans for our future welfare, internationalized terror, geo-political warfare, ecological catastrophes, feelings of loss and uncertainty around identity, to say nothing of the daily risks of flood, fire and other disasters.
The home now plays a complex dual role that slips between offering us protection from these worries while also offering the nightmare of its own possible invasion, erosion or destruction. On top of these concerns entire industries have been built that sell a war against strangers, dirt and disaster. This of course includes the insurance industry itself, but also the use of technologies that both protect the home and make it effectively more impregnable to casual social contact as well as the proliferation of products devoted to domestic cleanliness. Domestic Fortress considers the fantasies and realities of dangers to the contemporary home and its inhabitants and details the wide range of actions taken in the pursuit of total safety.
Lyn Tett and Mary Hamilton (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781447350057
- eISBN:
- 9781447350224
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781447350057.001.0001
- Subject:
- Education, Educational Policy and Politics
Neoliberalism has been widely criticised because of its role in prioritising ‘free markets’ as the optimum way of solving problems and organising society. In the field of education, this leads to an ...
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Neoliberalism has been widely criticised because of its role in prioritising ‘free markets’ as the optimum way of solving problems and organising society. In the field of education, this leads to an emphasis on the knowledge economy that can reduce both persons and education to economic actors and be detrimental to wider social and ethical goals.
Drawing on a range of international contexts across informal, adult, school and university settings, this book provides innovative examples that show how neoliberalism in education can be challenged and changed at the local, national and transnational levels in order to foster a more democratic culture.Less
Neoliberalism has been widely criticised because of its role in prioritising ‘free markets’ as the optimum way of solving problems and organising society. In the field of education, this leads to an emphasis on the knowledge economy that can reduce both persons and education to economic actors and be detrimental to wider social and ethical goals.
Drawing on a range of international contexts across informal, adult, school and university settings, this book provides innovative examples that show how neoliberalism in education can be challenged and changed at the local, national and transnational levels in order to foster a more democratic culture.
Kalervo N. Gulson and P. Taylor Webb
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781447320074
- eISBN:
- 9781447320098
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781447320074.001.0001
- Subject:
- Education, Educational Policy and Politics
Attempts at educational equity amount to local activities performed within unequal and disjunctive political forces. As a politics, educational equity is redolent of the conditions that produce ...
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Attempts at educational equity amount to local activities performed within unequal and disjunctive political forces. As a politics, educational equity is redolent of the conditions that produce unequal schooling in the first place. Based on a four-year multi-modal study, this book identifies the forces that produced unequal schooling opportunities for Black families in Toronto, Canada, while simultaneously identifying the conditions that generated an Africentric Alternative School for these families and the Black community.
The book identifies how the conditions that created unequal schooling were some of the very conditions that produced educational equity in the form of the school. This includes four preconditions to relay an account of the school’s origin, including biopolitics, neoliberalism, the politics of recognition, and the city and its relationships to ideologies of race and multiculturalism. Each precondition is discussed in a separate chapter and in relation to a significant policy event that precipitated the becoming of the Africentric Alternative School. The book utilises an unique feature by developing a ‘subtext’ that accompanies each chapter, whereby the authors reflect upon the theoretical and methodological choices in each corresponding chapter. The book concludes how this particular analysis of education policy can be used to map constellations of power and force that have a large degree of influence over policy subjects and policy actors, in concerted attempts to identify the important preconditions that shape recurring attempts at racial justice.Less
Attempts at educational equity amount to local activities performed within unequal and disjunctive political forces. As a politics, educational equity is redolent of the conditions that produce unequal schooling in the first place. Based on a four-year multi-modal study, this book identifies the forces that produced unequal schooling opportunities for Black families in Toronto, Canada, while simultaneously identifying the conditions that generated an Africentric Alternative School for these families and the Black community.
The book identifies how the conditions that created unequal schooling were some of the very conditions that produced educational equity in the form of the school. This includes four preconditions to relay an account of the school’s origin, including biopolitics, neoliberalism, the politics of recognition, and the city and its relationships to ideologies of race and multiculturalism. Each precondition is discussed in a separate chapter and in relation to a significant policy event that precipitated the becoming of the Africentric Alternative School. The book utilises an unique feature by developing a ‘subtext’ that accompanies each chapter, whereby the authors reflect upon the theoretical and methodological choices in each corresponding chapter. The book concludes how this particular analysis of education policy can be used to map constellations of power and force that have a large degree of influence over policy subjects and policy actors, in concerted attempts to identify the important preconditions that shape recurring attempts at racial justice.
Judah Schept
- Published in print:
- 1942
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479810710
- eISBN:
- 9781479802821
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479810710.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Law, Crime and Deviance
Progressive Punishment is an ethnographic case study of carceral expansion in Bloomington, Indiana. The book focuses primarily on the logics, discourses, spatial dimensions, and historical context of ...
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Progressive Punishment is an ethnographic case study of carceral expansion in Bloomington, Indiana. The book focuses primarily on the logics, discourses, spatial dimensions, and historical context of a proposal for a “justice campus,” a complex of facilities that would have significantly expanded local criminal justice infrastructure and scope. In centering the discourses of therapeutic justice, rehabilitation, and social justice in its critique, this book considers the role of liberal benevolence in the politics of carceral expansion. The book also examines how the carceral was constituted beyond the institutional formations of incarceration through so-called alternative sanctions that, in fact, extended carceral logics and practices into the spheres of social service and education. The book uses the empirical material to think more historically and theoretically about the rise of the carceral state and the forces that constitute the conditions of its existence as well as those might constitute the conditions of its demise. The book concerns the roots and routes of carceral logics—their origins and their circulations—as they set the conditions for and animated continued growth in Bloomington and beyond. The book critically examines how neoliberal ideology naturalizes carceral expansion into the political common sense of communities reeling from crises of deindustrialization, urban decline, and the devolution of social welfare. In addition, the book chronicles community activists’ attempts to destabilize that common sense and shake the community’s reliance on incarceration. Bloomington is simultaneously the community under study in this book and a heuristic for a broader consideration of the logics underlying and animating the carceral state.Less
Progressive Punishment is an ethnographic case study of carceral expansion in Bloomington, Indiana. The book focuses primarily on the logics, discourses, spatial dimensions, and historical context of a proposal for a “justice campus,” a complex of facilities that would have significantly expanded local criminal justice infrastructure and scope. In centering the discourses of therapeutic justice, rehabilitation, and social justice in its critique, this book considers the role of liberal benevolence in the politics of carceral expansion. The book also examines how the carceral was constituted beyond the institutional formations of incarceration through so-called alternative sanctions that, in fact, extended carceral logics and practices into the spheres of social service and education. The book uses the empirical material to think more historically and theoretically about the rise of the carceral state and the forces that constitute the conditions of its existence as well as those might constitute the conditions of its demise. The book concerns the roots and routes of carceral logics—their origins and their circulations—as they set the conditions for and animated continued growth in Bloomington and beyond. The book critically examines how neoliberal ideology naturalizes carceral expansion into the political common sense of communities reeling from crises of deindustrialization, urban decline, and the devolution of social welfare. In addition, the book chronicles community activists’ attempts to destabilize that common sense and shake the community’s reliance on incarceration. Bloomington is simultaneously the community under study in this book and a heuristic for a broader consideration of the logics underlying and animating the carceral state.
Shannon Winnubst
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231172950
- eISBN:
- 9780231539883
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231172950.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of cool have informed the American ethos since at least the 1970s. Whether we strive for it in politics or fashion, cool is big business for those who can sell it ...
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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of cool have informed the American ethos since at least the 1970s. Whether we strive for it in politics or fashion, cool is big business for those who can sell it across a range of markets and media. Yet the concept wasn’t always a popular commodity. Cool began as a potent aesthetic of post-World War II black culture, embodying a very specific, highly charged method of resistance to white supremacy and the globalized exploitation of capital. Way Too Cool follows the hollowing-out of “coolness” in modern American culture and its reflection of a larger evasion of race, racism, and ethics now common in neoliberal society. It revisits such watershed events as the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism, the emergence of identity politics, 1980s multiculturalism, 1990s rhetorics of diversity and colorblindness, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, as well as the contemporaneous developments of rising mass incarceration and legalized same-sex marriage. It pairs the perversion of cool with the slow erasure of racial and ethical issues from our social consciousness, which effectively quashes our desire to act ethically and resist abuses of power. The cooler we become, the more indifferent we grow to the question of values, particularly inquiry that spurs protest and conflict. This book sounds an alarm for those who care about preserving our ties to an American tradition of resistance.Less
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of cool have informed the American ethos since at least the 1970s. Whether we strive for it in politics or fashion, cool is big business for those who can sell it across a range of markets and media. Yet the concept wasn’t always a popular commodity. Cool began as a potent aesthetic of post-World War II black culture, embodying a very specific, highly charged method of resistance to white supremacy and the globalized exploitation of capital. Way Too Cool follows the hollowing-out of “coolness” in modern American culture and its reflection of a larger evasion of race, racism, and ethics now common in neoliberal society. It revisits such watershed events as the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism, the emergence of identity politics, 1980s multiculturalism, 1990s rhetorics of diversity and colorblindness, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, as well as the contemporaneous developments of rising mass incarceration and legalized same-sex marriage. It pairs the perversion of cool with the slow erasure of racial and ethical issues from our social consciousness, which effectively quashes our desire to act ethically and resist abuses of power. The cooler we become, the more indifferent we grow to the question of values, particularly inquiry that spurs protest and conflict. This book sounds an alarm for those who care about preserving our ties to an American tradition of resistance.
Mayumo Inoue and Steve Choe (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9789888455874
- eISBN:
- 9789882204294
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888455874.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between "the West" and "Asia," the authors ...
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Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between "the West" and "Asia," the authors of this volume reexamine art and aesthetics to challenge these oppositions in order to reconceptualize politics and knowledge production in East Asia. Current understandings of fundamental ideas like race, nation, colonizer and the colonized, and the concept of Asia in the region are seeped with imperial aesthetics that originated from competing imperialisms operating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such aesthetics has sustained both colonial and local modes of perception in the formation of nation-states and expanded the reach of regulatory powers in East Asia since 1945. The twelve thought-provoking essays in thiscollectiontackle the problematics that arise at the nexus of aesthetics and politics in four areas: theoretical issues of aesthetics and politics in East Asia, aesthetics of affect and sexuality, the productive tension between critical aesthetics and political movements, and aesthetic critiques of sovereignty and neoliberalism in East Asia today.
If the seemingly universal operation of capital and militarism in East Asia requires locally specific definitions of biopolitical concepts to function smoothly, this book critiques the circuit of power between the universalism of capital and particularism of nation and culture. Treating aesthetic experiences in art at large as the bases for going beyond imperial categories, the contributors present new modes of sensing, thinking, and living that have been unimaginable within the mainstream modality of Asian studies, a discipline that has reproduced the colonial regime of knowledge production.Less
Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between "the West" and "Asia," the authors of this volume reexamine art and aesthetics to challenge these oppositions in order to reconceptualize politics and knowledge production in East Asia. Current understandings of fundamental ideas like race, nation, colonizer and the colonized, and the concept of Asia in the region are seeped with imperial aesthetics that originated from competing imperialisms operating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such aesthetics has sustained both colonial and local modes of perception in the formation of nation-states and expanded the reach of regulatory powers in East Asia since 1945. The twelve thought-provoking essays in thiscollectiontackle the problematics that arise at the nexus of aesthetics and politics in four areas: theoretical issues of aesthetics and politics in East Asia, aesthetics of affect and sexuality, the productive tension between critical aesthetics and political movements, and aesthetic critiques of sovereignty and neoliberalism in East Asia today.
If the seemingly universal operation of capital and militarism in East Asia requires locally specific definitions of biopolitical concepts to function smoothly, this book critiques the circuit of power between the universalism of capital and particularism of nation and culture. Treating aesthetic experiences in art at large as the bases for going beyond imperial categories, the contributors present new modes of sensing, thinking, and living that have been unimaginable within the mainstream modality of Asian studies, a discipline that has reproduced the colonial regime of knowledge production.
J. Paul Narkunas
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823280308
- eISBN:
- 9780823281534
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823280308.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
Reified Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition addresses the most pressing political question of the 21st century: what forms of life are free and what forms are perceived legally and ...
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Reified Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition addresses the most pressing political question of the 21st century: what forms of life are free and what forms are perceived legally and economically as surplus or expendable, human and otherwise. Reified Life theorizes the dangerous social implications of a posthuman future, whereby human agency is secondary to algorithmic processes, digital protocols, speculative financial instruments, and nonhuman market and technological forces. Narkunas contends that it is premature to speak of a posthuman or inhuman future, or employ an ‘ism, given how dynamic and contingent human practices and their material figurations can be. Over several chapters he diagnoses the rise of “market humans,” the instrumentalization of culture to decide the life worth living along utilitarian categories, and the varied ways human rights and humanitarianism actually throw members of the species like refugees outside the human order. Reified Life argues against posthumanist calls to abandon the human and humanism, and instead proposes the ahuman to think alongside the human. Reified Life elaborates speculative fictions as critical mechanisms for envisioning alternative futures and freedoms from the domineering forces of speculative capital, whose fictions have become our realities. Narkunas offers, to that end, a novel interpretation of the post-anthropocentric turn in the humanities by linking the diminished centrality of humanism to the waning dominion of nation-states over their populations and the intensification of financial capitalism, which reconfigures politics along economic categories of risk management.Less
Reified Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition addresses the most pressing political question of the 21st century: what forms of life are free and what forms are perceived legally and economically as surplus or expendable, human and otherwise. Reified Life theorizes the dangerous social implications of a posthuman future, whereby human agency is secondary to algorithmic processes, digital protocols, speculative financial instruments, and nonhuman market and technological forces. Narkunas contends that it is premature to speak of a posthuman or inhuman future, or employ an ‘ism, given how dynamic and contingent human practices and their material figurations can be. Over several chapters he diagnoses the rise of “market humans,” the instrumentalization of culture to decide the life worth living along utilitarian categories, and the varied ways human rights and humanitarianism actually throw members of the species like refugees outside the human order. Reified Life argues against posthumanist calls to abandon the human and humanism, and instead proposes the ahuman to think alongside the human. Reified Life elaborates speculative fictions as critical mechanisms for envisioning alternative futures and freedoms from the domineering forces of speculative capital, whose fictions have become our realities. Narkunas offers, to that end, a novel interpretation of the post-anthropocentric turn in the humanities by linking the diminished centrality of humanism to the waning dominion of nation-states over their populations and the intensification of financial capitalism, which reconfigures politics along economic categories of risk management.
Shannon Winnubst
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231172950
- eISBN:
- 9780231539883
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231172950.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
The chapter introduces the stakes of studying cool as exemplifying the dehistoricizing, formalizing effects of neoliberal social rationalities. It then explains key terms in the manuscript: social ...
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The chapter introduces the stakes of studying cool as exemplifying the dehistoricizing, formalizing effects of neoliberal social rationalities. It then explains key terms in the manuscript: social cathexis, interpellation, neoliberalism as an episteme, and the occlusion of both race and ethics. The chpater locates the book in several scholarly debates (about neoliberalism, race, gender, sexuality, intersectionality, and ethics).Less
The chapter introduces the stakes of studying cool as exemplifying the dehistoricizing, formalizing effects of neoliberal social rationalities. It then explains key terms in the manuscript: social cathexis, interpellation, neoliberalism as an episteme, and the occlusion of both race and ethics. The chpater locates the book in several scholarly debates (about neoliberalism, race, gender, sexuality, intersectionality, and ethics).
Shannon Winnubst
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231172950
- eISBN:
- 9780231539883
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231172950.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
Through a close reading of Foucault's 1979 lectures on neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics, I explore the implications of a non-ideological approach to neoliberalism. More specifically, I ...
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Through a close reading of Foucault's 1979 lectures on neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics, I explore the implications of a non-ideological approach to neoliberalism. More specifically, I excavate the central categorical and epistemological transformations that Foucault argues occur in the shifts from classical liberalism to neoliberalism: the sites and mechanisms of truth (from the contract to the market; from the protection of ownership to the expansion of maximizing interests); dominant social values (from utility to human capital); concepts of freedom (from Rights of Man to subjects of interests); concepts of subjectivity (from “citizen” to “entrepreneur”); and modes of rationality (from juridical to calculative).Less
Through a close reading of Foucault's 1979 lectures on neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics, I explore the implications of a non-ideological approach to neoliberalism. More specifically, I excavate the central categorical and epistemological transformations that Foucault argues occur in the shifts from classical liberalism to neoliberalism: the sites and mechanisms of truth (from the contract to the market; from the protection of ownership to the expansion of maximizing interests); dominant social values (from utility to human capital); concepts of freedom (from Rights of Man to subjects of interests); concepts of subjectivity (from “citizen” to “entrepreneur”); and modes of rationality (from juridical to calculative).
Anita Chari
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231173896
- eISBN:
- 9780231540384
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231173896.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This chapter explores debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats as an important feature of the ideological structure of neoliberal societies. This chapter argues that the impasse created ...
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This chapter explores debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats as an important feature of the ideological structure of neoliberal societies. This chapter argues that the impasse created between the economic and the political in debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats is a symptom of the ambivalent relationship between the neoliberal State and the economy.Less
This chapter explores debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats as an important feature of the ideological structure of neoliberal societies. This chapter argues that the impasse created between the economic and the political in debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats is a symptom of the ambivalent relationship between the neoliberal State and the economy.
Jonathan Pattenden
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719089145
- eISBN:
- 9781526109583
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089145.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Economic Sociology
Intended for researchers, students, policymakers and practitioners, this book draws on detailed longitudinal fieldwork in rural south India to analyse the conditions of the rural poor and their ...
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Intended for researchers, students, policymakers and practitioners, this book draws on detailed longitudinal fieldwork in rural south India to analyse the conditions of the rural poor and their patterns of change. Focusing on the three interrelated arenas of production, state, and civil society, it argues for a class-relational approach focused on forms of exploitation, domination and accumulation. The book focuses on class relations, how they are mediated by state institutions and civil society organisations, and how they vary within the countryside, when rural-based labour migrates to the city, and according to patterns of accumulation, caste dynamics, and villages’ levels of irrigation and degrees of remoteness. More specifically it analyses class relations in the agriculture and construction sectors, and among local government institutions, social movements, community-based organisations and NGOs. It shows how the dominant class reproduces its control over labour by shaping the activities of increasingly prominent local government institutions, and by exerting influence over the mass of new community-based organisations whose formation has been fostered by neoliberal policy. The book is centrally concerned with countervailing moves to improve the position of classes of labour. Increasingly informalised and segmented across multiple occupations in multiple locations, India’s ‘classes of labour’ are far from passive in the face of ongoing processes of exploitation and domination. Forms of labouring class organisation are often small-scale and tend to be oriented around the state and social policy. Despite their limitations, the book argues that such forms of contestation of government policy currently play a significant role in strategies for redistributing power and resources towards the labouring class, and suggests that they can help to clear the way for more broad-based and fundamental social change.Less
Intended for researchers, students, policymakers and practitioners, this book draws on detailed longitudinal fieldwork in rural south India to analyse the conditions of the rural poor and their patterns of change. Focusing on the three interrelated arenas of production, state, and civil society, it argues for a class-relational approach focused on forms of exploitation, domination and accumulation. The book focuses on class relations, how they are mediated by state institutions and civil society organisations, and how they vary within the countryside, when rural-based labour migrates to the city, and according to patterns of accumulation, caste dynamics, and villages’ levels of irrigation and degrees of remoteness. More specifically it analyses class relations in the agriculture and construction sectors, and among local government institutions, social movements, community-based organisations and NGOs. It shows how the dominant class reproduces its control over labour by shaping the activities of increasingly prominent local government institutions, and by exerting influence over the mass of new community-based organisations whose formation has been fostered by neoliberal policy. The book is centrally concerned with countervailing moves to improve the position of classes of labour. Increasingly informalised and segmented across multiple occupations in multiple locations, India’s ‘classes of labour’ are far from passive in the face of ongoing processes of exploitation and domination. Forms of labouring class organisation are often small-scale and tend to be oriented around the state and social policy. Despite their limitations, the book argues that such forms of contestation of government policy currently play a significant role in strategies for redistributing power and resources towards the labouring class, and suggests that they can help to clear the way for more broad-based and fundamental social change.
Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195329117
- eISBN:
- 9780199949496
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195329117.003.0008
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
The Epilogue contends that this history has no neat ending. To rethink home care, it takes a hard look at the promises of carework unionism, the dangers of its welfare location, and the pitfalls of ...
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The Epilogue contends that this history has no neat ending. To rethink home care, it takes a hard look at the promises of carework unionism, the dangers of its welfare location, and the pitfalls of relying on political unionism after the Great Recession of 2008 and Republican victories in 2010. It considers the failure to lift the exclusion of home care from the labor law. It then looks at the fate of the unions and workers whose history the book recounts, including the fierce battle over organizing strategy and union democracy that wracked SEIU in California and the impact of budget cutbacks on political deals at the top without sustained grassroots participation. In this global neoliberal moment, the U.S. became the vanguard for other welfare states when it comes to privatizing and individualizing home support for elderly and disabled people. It considers new forms of organizing as exemplified by a renewed domestic worker movement and ends by reaffirming not only the right to care but its value for the economy as well as society.Less
The Epilogue contends that this history has no neat ending. To rethink home care, it takes a hard look at the promises of carework unionism, the dangers of its welfare location, and the pitfalls of relying on political unionism after the Great Recession of 2008 and Republican victories in 2010. It considers the failure to lift the exclusion of home care from the labor law. It then looks at the fate of the unions and workers whose history the book recounts, including the fierce battle over organizing strategy and union democracy that wracked SEIU in California and the impact of budget cutbacks on political deals at the top without sustained grassroots participation. In this global neoliberal moment, the U.S. became the vanguard for other welfare states when it comes to privatizing and individualizing home support for elderly and disabled people. It considers new forms of organizing as exemplified by a renewed domestic worker movement and ends by reaffirming not only the right to care but its value for the economy as well as society.
Dotan Leshem
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231177764
- eISBN:
- 9780231541749
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231177764.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
Dotan Leshem recasts the history of the West from an economic perspective, bringing politics, philosophy, and the economy closer together and revealing the significant role of Christian theology in ...
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Dotan Leshem recasts the history of the West from an economic perspective, bringing politics, philosophy, and the economy closer together and revealing the significant role of Christian theology in shaping economic and political thought. He begins with early Christian treatment of economic knowledge and the effect of this interaction on ancient politics and philosophy. He then follows the secularization of the economy in liberal and neoliberal theory. Leshem draws on Hannah Arendt’s history of politics and Michel Foucault’s genealogy of economy and philosophy. He consults exegetical and apologetic tracts, homilies and eulogies, manuals and correspondence, and Church canons and creeds to trace the influence of the economy on Christian orthodoxy. Only by relocating the origins of modernity in Late Antiquity, Leshem argues, can we confront the full effect of the neoliberal marketized economy on contemporary societies. Then, he proposes, a new political philosophy that re-secularizes the economy will take shape and transform the human condition.Less
Dotan Leshem recasts the history of the West from an economic perspective, bringing politics, philosophy, and the economy closer together and revealing the significant role of Christian theology in shaping economic and political thought. He begins with early Christian treatment of economic knowledge and the effect of this interaction on ancient politics and philosophy. He then follows the secularization of the economy in liberal and neoliberal theory. Leshem draws on Hannah Arendt’s history of politics and Michel Foucault’s genealogy of economy and philosophy. He consults exegetical and apologetic tracts, homilies and eulogies, manuals and correspondence, and Church canons and creeds to trace the influence of the economy on Christian orthodoxy. Only by relocating the origins of modernity in Late Antiquity, Leshem argues, can we confront the full effect of the neoliberal marketized economy on contemporary societies. Then, he proposes, a new political philosophy that re-secularizes the economy will take shape and transform the human condition.
Helena Liu
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781529200041
- eISBN:
- 9781529200096
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781529200041.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
Following from the collective wisdoms of anti-racist feminisms, this chapter discusses the ways leadership may be theorised and practised beyond the reinforcement of imperialist, white supremacist, ...
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Following from the collective wisdoms of anti-racist feminisms, this chapter discusses the ways leadership may be theorised and practised beyond the reinforcement of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal violence. In particular, it explores three ways to ‘do’ leadership theorising and practice differently: decolonising our minds; relating with others; and reimagining leadership. These are not discreet domains of activity, but interconnected processes of social transformation; so that in relating with others, we can collaboratively reimagine leadership, and by reimagining dominant constructions of leadership, it will more readily enable us to decolonise our minds.Less
Following from the collective wisdoms of anti-racist feminisms, this chapter discusses the ways leadership may be theorised and practised beyond the reinforcement of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal violence. In particular, it explores three ways to ‘do’ leadership theorising and practice differently: decolonising our minds; relating with others; and reimagining leadership. These are not discreet domains of activity, but interconnected processes of social transformation; so that in relating with others, we can collaboratively reimagine leadership, and by reimagining dominant constructions of leadership, it will more readily enable us to decolonise our minds.
Emma Craddock
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781529205701
- eISBN:
- 9781529205749
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781529205701.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
This chapter provides an overview of the political context, with a focus on austerity and how this forms part of the wider neoliberal project. The chapter establishes the ways in which austerity is ...
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This chapter provides an overview of the political context, with a focus on austerity and how this forms part of the wider neoliberal project. The chapter establishes the ways in which austerity is gendered, classed and racialised, themes that will be drawn on throughout the book when exploring resistance to austerity. It moves from setting this wider context to an in-depth description of the specific anti-austerity activist culture that is explored in this book. This involves identifying the key movements and groups in the local context, as well as key features of these movements, such as their positioning as a ‘new’ form of politics that is outside the system and the centrality of social media to political organising in this context.Less
This chapter provides an overview of the political context, with a focus on austerity and how this forms part of the wider neoliberal project. The chapter establishes the ways in which austerity is gendered, classed and racialised, themes that will be drawn on throughout the book when exploring resistance to austerity. It moves from setting this wider context to an in-depth description of the specific anti-austerity activist culture that is explored in this book. This involves identifying the key movements and groups in the local context, as well as key features of these movements, such as their positioning as a ‘new’ form of politics that is outside the system and the centrality of social media to political organising in this context.
Emma Craddock
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781529205701
- eISBN:
- 9781529205749
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781529205701.003.0008
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
This chapter concludes the book by discussing the ambivalence and complexity of anti-austerity activist culture and the difficulty of resisting a force that is as pervasive as neoliberal capitalism, ...
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This chapter concludes the book by discussing the ambivalence and complexity of anti-austerity activist culture and the difficulty of resisting a force that is as pervasive as neoliberal capitalism, raising questions about how this can be more effectively achieved and asserting the importance of paying attention to the messy reality of social movement activism. It suggests that, moving forwards, there is a need for further in-depth ‘thick description’ of the complex processes of activist cultures that reveal the contradictions, tensions, and advantages of the internal dynamics and how they interact with the wider political context. It reminds us that resistance does not exist within a vacuum and that it is important to consider the multiple facets of political participation, and the implicit power relations that exist, in order to both better understand and change future political intervention. Finally, it considers limitations of the research this book draws on and suggests future directions for research.Less
This chapter concludes the book by discussing the ambivalence and complexity of anti-austerity activist culture and the difficulty of resisting a force that is as pervasive as neoliberal capitalism, raising questions about how this can be more effectively achieved and asserting the importance of paying attention to the messy reality of social movement activism. It suggests that, moving forwards, there is a need for further in-depth ‘thick description’ of the complex processes of activist cultures that reveal the contradictions, tensions, and advantages of the internal dynamics and how they interact with the wider political context. It reminds us that resistance does not exist within a vacuum and that it is important to consider the multiple facets of political participation, and the implicit power relations that exist, in order to both better understand and change future political intervention. Finally, it considers limitations of the research this book draws on and suggests future directions for research.
Myka Tucker-Abramson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823282708
- eISBN:
- 9780823286195
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Novel Shocks argues that the political and cultural origins of neoliberalism lie in the battles over suburban and urban space in the 1950s and early 1960s. At the end of World War II, Harry Truman’s ...
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Novel Shocks argues that the political and cultural origins of neoliberalism lie in the battles over suburban and urban space in the 1950s and early 1960s. At the end of World War II, Harry Truman’s administration launched a national program of urban renewal that sought to create a new and distinctly American modernity, which would underpin US global hegemony. The program’s effects in Manhattan were particularly notable: throughout the 1950s and 1960s, New York bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, medical centers, skyscrapers, and even the new United Nations headquarters. Taken together, these processes dramatically transformed New York’s metropolitan region, creating the segregated landscape of prosperous white suburbs and poor black cities, and with it new cultural forms and subjectivities. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, novelists such as Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all depicted and responded to these new urban spaces as forms of traumatic “shock” that required new aesthetic forms and political structures. These novels rejected older shock-based modernisms such as Surrealism and naturalism and, like the urbanization projects they depicted, forged a new kind of modernism, one that transformed shock from a traumatic and disruptive effect of urban modernity into a therapeutic force that helps strengthen and shape a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject that would nourish the roots of neoliberalism.Less
Novel Shocks argues that the political and cultural origins of neoliberalism lie in the battles over suburban and urban space in the 1950s and early 1960s. At the end of World War II, Harry Truman’s administration launched a national program of urban renewal that sought to create a new and distinctly American modernity, which would underpin US global hegemony. The program’s effects in Manhattan were particularly notable: throughout the 1950s and 1960s, New York bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, medical centers, skyscrapers, and even the new United Nations headquarters. Taken together, these processes dramatically transformed New York’s metropolitan region, creating the segregated landscape of prosperous white suburbs and poor black cities, and with it new cultural forms and subjectivities. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, novelists such as Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all depicted and responded to these new urban spaces as forms of traumatic “shock” that required new aesthetic forms and political structures. These novels rejected older shock-based modernisms such as Surrealism and naturalism and, like the urbanization projects they depicted, forged a new kind of modernism, one that transformed shock from a traumatic and disruptive effect of urban modernity into a therapeutic force that helps strengthen and shape a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject that would nourish the roots of neoliberalism.
