The Limits to Capital

he global triumph of capitalism at the millennium, its Second Coming, raises a number of conundrums for our understanding of history at the end of the century. Some of its corollaries—“plagues of the ‘new world order,’” Jacques Derrida (1994: 91) calls them, unable to resist apocalyptic imagery—have been the subject of clamorous debate. Others receive less mention. Thus, for example, populist polemics have dwelt on the planetary conjuncture, for good or ill, of “homogenization and difference” (e.g., Barber 1992); on the simultaneous, synergistic spiraling of wealth and poverty; on the rise of a “new feudalism,” a phoenix disfigured, of worldwide proportions (cf. Connelly and Kennedy 1994).1 For its part, scholarly debate has focused on the confounding effects of rampant

/pdf/millennial-capitalism-first-thoughts-on-a-second-coming-523n2dqgia.pdf

Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming

This article introduces a special section concerned with precariousness and cultural work. Its aim is to bring into dialogue three bodies of ideas — the work of the autonomous Marxist `Italian laboratory'; activist writings about precariousness and precarity; and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work, at a moment when artists, designers and (new) media workers have taken centre stage as a supposed `creative class' of model entrepreneurs. The article is divided into three sections. It starts by introducing the ideas of the autonomous Marxist tradition, highlighting arguments about the autonomy of labour, informational capitalism and the `factory without walls', as well as key concepts such as multitude and immaterial labour. The impact of these ideas and of Operaismo politics more generally on the precarity movement is then considered in the second section, discussing some of the issues that have animated debate both within and outside this movement, wh...

/pdf/in-the-social-factory-immaterial-labour-precariousness-and-12zri0f8az.pdf

In the social factory? Immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work

Preface Glossary Introduction PART 1: THE PROBLEM THAT IS THE PRESENT 1. School Deform I. The Race to Nowhere II. The Less You Know III. Untimely Concepts IV. Too Little Intellect in Matters of Soul V. The School as a Business VI. The Figure of the Schoolteacher 2: From Autobiography to Allegory I. To Run the Course II. Allegories-of-the-Present III. Allegory as Montage IV. Why Weimar? PART 2: THE REGRESSIVE MOMENT: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 3. The Defeat of Democracy I. The Terrible Question II. States of Emergency III. The Highly Fissured Republic IV. The Regimented Mass V. Art as Allegory VI. Economic Crisis VII. The Great Age of Educational Reform VIII. Correctional Education 4. Mortal Educational Combat I. Gracious Submission II. The Racial Politics of Curriculum Reform III. Students and the Civil Rights Movement IV. Freedom Schools V. The Gender Politics of Curriculum Reform PART III: THE PROGRESSIVE MOMENT: THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT 5. The Dissolution of Subjectivity in Cyberculture I. Dream, Thought, Fantasy II. Let Them Eat Data III. The Death of the Subject IV. Avatars V. Breaking News VI. Intimacy and Abjection 6. The Future in the Past I. The Technology of Cultural Crisis II. The Degradation of the Present III. A Philosophy of Technology IV. Technology and Soul PART IV: THE ANALYTIC MOMENT: UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT 7. Anti-Intellectualism and Complicated Conversation I. Anti-Intellectualism II. An Unrehearsed Intellectual Adventure III. Curriculum as Complicated Conversation is Not (Only)Classroom Discourse IV. Is It Too Late? PART V: THE SYNTHETICAL MOMENT: REACTIVATING THE PAST, UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT, FINDING THE FUTURE 8. Subjective and Social Reconstruction I. A Struggle Within Each Person II. Reactivating the Past III. Understanding the Present IV. Finding the Future References Index

What Is Curriculum Theory

Students of the intersection between monetary transfers and intimate social relations face a choice among three ways of analyzing that relationship: as hostile worlds whose contact contaminates one or the other; as nothing but market transactions, cultural constructions, or coercion; or as differentiated ties, each marked by a distinctive set of monetary transfers. A review of payment practices, legal disputes, and recent legal theory illustrates the weakness of the first two views and the desirability of further pursuing the third alternative.

The Purchase of Intimacy

In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City , Lauren Berlant focuses on the need to revitalize public life and political agency in the United States. Delivering a devastating critique of contemporary discourses of American citizenship, she addresses the triumph of the idea of private life over that of public life borne in the right-wing agenda of the Reagan revolution. By beaming light onto the idealized images and narratives about sex and citizenship that now dominate the U.S. public sphere, Berlant argues that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. She asks why the contemporary ideal of citizenship is measured by personal and private acts and values rather than civic acts, and the ideal citizen has become one who, paradoxically, cannot yet act as a citizen—epitomized by the American child and the American fetus.

As Berlant traces the guiding images of U.S. citizenship through the process of privatization, she discusses the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture. From the fantasy of the American dream to the lessons of Forrest Gump, Lisa Simpson to Queer Nation, the reactionary culture of imperilled privilege to the testimony of Anita Hill, Berlant charts the landscape of American politics and culture. She examines the consequences of a shrinking and privatized concept of citizenship on increasing class, racial, sexual, and gender animosity and explores the contradictions of a conservative politics that maintains the sacredness of privacy, the virtue of the free market, and the immorality of state overregulation—except when it comes to issues of intimacy.

Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City is a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. As it opens a critical space for new theory of agency, its narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be American and to seek salvation in its promise.

The queen of America goes to Washington city : essays on sex and citizenship

A paper titled "Sex in Public" teases with the obscurity of its object and the twisted aim of its narrative. In this paper we will be talking not about the sex people already have clarity about, nor identities and acts, nor a wildness in need of derepression; but rather about sex as it is mediated by publics.' Some of these publics have an obvious relation to sex: pornographic cinema, phone sex, "adult" markets for print, lap dancing. Others are organized around sex, but not necessarily sex acts in the usual sense: queer zones and other worlds estranged from heterosexual culture, but also more tacit scenes of sexuality like official national culture, which depends on a notion of privacy to cloak its sexualization of national membership.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1344178.pdf

Sex in Public

The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant’s groundbreaking “national sentimentality” project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural “intimate public” in the United States, a “women’s culture” distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, “women’s” books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman’s life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as “chick lit,” circulate among strangers, enabling insider self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public. Sentimentality and complaint are central to this commercial convention of critique; their relation to the political realm is ambivalent, as politics seems both to threaten sentimental values and to provide certain opportunities for their extension.

Pairing literary criticism and historical analysis, Berlant explores the territory of this intimate public sphere through close readings of U.S. women’s literary works and their stage and film adaptations. Her interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its literary descendants reaches from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison’s Beloved , touching on Shirley Temple, James Baldwin, and The Bridges of Madison County along the way. Berlant illuminates different permutations of the women’s intimate public through her readings of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat ; Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life ; Olive Higgins Prouty’s feminist melodrama Now, Voyager ; Dorothy Parker’s poetry, prose, and Academy Award–winning screenplay for A Star Is Born ; the Fay Weldon novel and Roseanne Barr film The Life and Loves of a She-Devil ; and the queer, avant-garde film Showboat 1988–The Remake . The Female Complaint is a major contribution from a leading Americanist.

The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

754 Many thanks to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Geoff Eley, Dana Luciano, Nasser Hussain, Roger Rouse, Adam Thurschwell, and Martha Umphrey for their meticulous engagements, as well as to audiences at Amherst, Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Chicago, American Political Science Association, American Studies Association, and Cleveland State. Special nostalgic thanks to Virginia Chang, my original collaborator in the Obesity and Poverty conference (2002). 1. See David Harvey, “The Body as Accumulation Strategy,” Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, 2000), pp. 97–116. To call Harvey polemical is not to devalue his profound contributions to understanding the productive destructiveness of capital; in his work, a polemic is a call for precision, not a way of drowning it out. Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/521568

Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)

"I didn't think it would turn out this way" is the secret epitaph of intimacy. To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity. But intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way. Usually, this story is set within zones of familiarity and comfort: friendship, the couple, and the family form, animated by expressive and emancipating kinds of love. Yet the inwardness of the intimate is met by a corresponding publicness. People consent to trust their desire for "a life" to institutions of intimacy; and it is hoped that the relations formed within those frames will turn out beautifully, lasting over the long duration, perhaps across generations. This view of "a life" that unfolds intact within the intimate sphere represses, of course, another fact about it: the unavoidable troubles, the distractions and disruptions that make things turn out in unpredicted scenarios. Romance and friendship inevitably meet the instabilities of sexuality, money, expectation, and exhaustion, producing, at the extreme, moral dramas of estrangement and betrayal, along with terrible spectacles of neglect and violence even where desire, perhaps, endures. Since the early twentieth century these strong ambivalences within the intimate sphere have been recorded by proliferating forms of therapeutic publicity. At present, in the U.S., therapy saturates the scene of intimacy, from

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/448875

Lauren Berlant

Papers

The queen of America goes to Washington city : essays on sex and citizenship

Sex in Public

The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)

Intimacy: A Special Issue