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

The passion with which native intellectuals defend the existence of their national culture may be a source of amazement; but those who condemn this exaggerated passion are strangely apt to forget that their own psyche and their own selves are conveniently sheltered behind a French or German culture which has given full proof of its existence and which is uncontested. -FRANTZ FANON, "On National Culture"

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1343674.pdf

Race, Gender, and Nation in "The Color Purple"

Fantasies of Utopia in The Blithedale Romance

The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern is an anonymous collection published in 1855, whose purpose was simultaneously to capitalize on and to undercut the vast popularity of Fern's Ruth Hall. The editor of The Life and Beauties takes Fern's newspaper columns and reprints them with sarcastic commentary, and since these columns themselves were often organized as ironic exegeses of opinions published elsewhere, The Life and Beauties sets up a kind of mise-en-abyme of gendered irony, a redoubled doubleness that formally embodies the contested conditions of public enunciation under which Fern and many of her sister writers labored and profited. One such entry, on married life, addresses the views of "Sambo." Fern's column is a response to a citation whose origin is the popular lexicon of white, patriarchal America.

The Female Woman: Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment

The inaugural shot of American Hustle (dir. David O. Russell, 2013) streams an all-news-all-the-time radio broadcast announcing the onset of neoliberalism. Alliances painstakingly forged in the US postwar period are being abandoned, it reports. New York City is bankrupt and losing ground; a child’s been deserted by its mother; and police and fire unions threaten strikes against the city, which claims it’s too broke to pay decent wages for protecting property and keeping the law. As this is a film about risking property and breaking the law, we are set up to sense that we’re observing the end of many collective systems and dreams. It is 1979, and Atlantic City too seeks to stay afloat by becoming a gambling capital. American Hustle narrates the moment when a few people with power there scrambled to extend the city’s archaic promise to float all boats by selling off its resources to the highest bidder. Older practices of white crony capitalism and patronage, ritually cleansed by show trial exceptions decrying corruption, became what is now the ordinary of mass austerity and the privatization of publicly held wealth. As of 1979 the surface of postwar city life remained constant, until it didn’t. The radio’s aural tableau of the unraveling of the postwar alliance between the state and the aspirational working class fades to noise as the camera moves toward a pasty, big-bellied white man who is approaching,

Humorlessness (Three Monologues and a Hairpiece)

Alongside the O.J. Simpson trial, the affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky now stands as the seminal cultural event of the 90s. Alternatively transfixed and repelled by this sexual scandal, confusion still reigns over its meanings and implications. How are we to make sense of a tale that is often wild and bizarre, yet replete with serious political and cultural implications? Our Monica, Ourselves provides a forum for thinking through the cultural, political, and public policy issues raised by the investigation, publicity, and Congressional impeachment proceedings surrounding the affair. It pulls this spectacle out of the framework provided by the conventions of the corporate news media, with its particular notions of what constitutes a newsworthy event. Drawing from a broad range of scholars, Our Monica, Ourselves considers Monica Lewinsky's Jewishness, Linda Tripp's face, the President's penis, the role of shame in public discourse, and what it's like to have sex as the president, as well as specific legal and historical issues at stake in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Thoughtful but accessible, immediate yet far reaching, Our Monica, Ourselves will change the way we think about the Clinton affair, while helping us reimagine culture and politics writ large. Contributors include: Lauren Berlant, Eric O. Clarke, Ann Cvetkovich, Simone Weil Davis, Lisa Duggan, Jane Gallop, Marjorie Garber, Janet R. Jakobsen, James R. Kincaid, Laura Kipnis, Tomasz Kitlinski, Pawel Leszkowicz, Joe Lockard, Catharine Lumby, Toby Miller, Dana D. Nelson, Anna Marie Smith, Ellen Willis, and Eli Zaretsky.

Lauren Berlant

Papers

Race, Gender, and Nation in "The Color Purple"

Fantasies of Utopia in The Blithedale Romance

The Female Woman: Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment

Humorlessness (Three Monologues and a Hairpiece)

Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest