If there is ever an African form of metropolitan modernity, then Johannesburg will have been its classical location. The idea of the metropolis in European thought has always been linked to that of “civilization” (a form of existence as well as a structure of time) and capitalist rationalization. Indeed, the Western imagination defines the metropolis as the general form assumed by the rationalization of relations of production (the increasing prevalence of the commodity system) and the rationalization of the social sphere (human relations) that follows it. A defining moment of metropolitan modernity is realized when the two spheres rely upon purely functional relations among people and things and subjectivity takes the form of calculation and abstraction. One such moment is epitomized by the instrumentality that labor acquires in

Aesthetics of Superfluity

Theories of the good and proper self (the governmental normative subject, be it a reflexive, enterprising, individualising, rational, prosthetic, possessed self) or even the self produced in conditions not of its own making, such as Bourdieu’s habitus, all rely on ideas about self-interest, investment and/or ‘playing the game’. As people are increasingly expected to publicly legitimate themselves as good and worthy subjects and as capital increasingly enters the spaces of intimacy and bio-politics, we need to consider the limits of our theoretical imaginaries for understanding the value production necessary to the performance of personhood. Specifically, most of the theories we have for understanding the connections between personhood and value reproduce and legitimate the normative, hinging our theoretical imaginary to the dominant symbolic, making proper personhood an exclusive resource predicated on constitution by exclusion; where limits define the norm, the margins the centre and the improper the proper. How then can we understand how people who are excluded from the possibilities of accruing and attaching value to themselves, who are positioned outside of the dominant symbolic as the constitutional limit for the proper self or as the zero limit to culture, develop value/s? Drawing upon three different empirical research projects the paper builds on my previous critique of the self as a classed concept to develop a different perspective on value. It argues that an analysis of autonomist working class sociality offers us ways to imagine personhood and person value that are often imperceptible to the bourgeois gaze.

Imagining personhood differently: person value and autonomist working-class value practices

Since the mid-1990s, ‘neoliberalism’ has grown in importance as an explanatory trope for socio-cultural anthropologists. This article seeks to unravel the various strands of neoliberalism's anthropological meaning and demonstrate the blind spots of using neoliberalism as an overarching trope. I begin by analysing the contradictions between two common forms of theorizing neoliberalism. The remainder of the article then focuses the initial discussion by examining a particular case: suzhi discourse in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Suzhi may be glossed as human quality, and suzhi discourse refers to the myriad ways in which this notion of human quality is used in processes of governing contemporary China. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments of those who explain suzhi discourse in terms of neoliberalism and suggest ways in which this discourse might be contextualized more fruitfully than as a form of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism reified: suzhi discourse and tropes of neoliberalism in the People's Republic of China

International Student Migration and Social Stratification in China.

Other Modernities: tendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. LISA ROFEL. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; 330 pp. Lisa Rofel's Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism explores the processes by which three cohorts of women working in a silk factory in the city of Hangzhou have crafted memories and narratives of their lives. Drawing on factory floor discussions, interviews, and personal conversations, Rofel focuses on the constitution of gendered identities as a means of probing aspects of modernity inflected with power. The result is a theoretically sophisticated yet broadly accessible account which combines an analysis of narrative based on cultural and historical specificities, and on the politics of representation, with a reflexive interrogation of western representations of Chinese women and China, beginning with views formerly held by Rofel herself. Rofel begins by problematizing modernity as something imagined, a discourse that the west subscribes to as opposed to an essence or a state of being. She challenges western assumptions of modernity as a monolithic category-sort of an endpoint in a teleological tale in which the United States and Europe are exemplary models. Non-western constructions of modernity are neither simply part of a universal phenomenon (that is, essentially the same beast as western modernity), nor can they be explained as an entirely different animal, a phenomenon unique to its cultural or local context. Rofel criticizes the former view as omitting culture and the latter as omitting power. Her alternative framing pluralizes modernity and then anchors "modernities" in particular historical moments. For Rofel, modernity is a process that when scrutinized reveals how local and global configurations of power have been "knit together." Divergent constructions of modernity shape the gendered identities of the three cohorts who are the subjects of this book. These cohorts are comprised of women who came of age roughly during the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution, and the postMao era. The women in the oldest cohort construct identity in terms of their work performance and portray themselves as having been liberated by the revolution which enabled them to work. Prior to the revolution the cultural arena was characterized by a gendered distinction between "inside" and "outside." China scholars have long identified "inside" activities with femaleness and the family, and "outside" activities with maleness and the public domain. Due to this spatial designation working class women employed as factory laborers were suspected of having questionable morality, not on account of their actions but because of the "outside" location of their labor. Rofel points out that it was largely working women, formerly tainted by the inside/outside distinction, who found the new socialist state's framings a meaningful medium for crafting new gender identities through "labor" and for representing pasts that were once culturally problematic. This form of agency was shaped by Chinese Marxist discourse, which held that "work" meant activities in the public domain outside of the home. However, she argues that this framing resulted in an erasure of other forms of agency. For urban entrepreneurial families the "inside" was actually a hetero-gendered space where women interacted with male kin and engaged in labor. Thus, after the revolution women who had worked in household silk weaving workshops during the pre-revolutionary era were denied histories as workers, while women who had labored in factories could re-cast themselves as incipient feminists and revolutionaries. Rofel argues that these erasures and forms of agency were given credence by Marxist and international feminist binaries that erroneously identified women who were confined to "inside" activities with feudalism/tradition and those engaged in "outside" activities with productive labor/liberation. She accuses such binaries of replacing history with teleology and of assuming "women workers" could constitute a homogeneous subject as opposed to several situated positionalities differentially shaped by power. …

Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism

The phantom-like nature of value—what could be a more compelling topic in the wake of the bursting of the 1990s economic bubble, when the value of the new economy seemed suddenly to dissipate overnight? Where did value go? And how can it be that, in the midst of a global restructuring of capitalism, certain things that formerly seemed to have so much value are now deemed to be what society (or something called that) can no longer afford? The topic of value is particularly compelling in light of the momentous social transformations taking place in China during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In the movement from a planned to a market economy, the representation of value has undergone a reorganization in the realm of the biopolitical in which human life becomes a new frontier for capital accumulation. This changing rela-

https://courses.washington.edu/globfut/PCAnagnostFinal.pdf

Ann Anagnost

Papers

The Corporeal Politics of Quality ( Suzhi )