Showing papers in "South Atlantic Quarterly in 2019"

Platform Cooperativism: Some Notes on the Becoming “Common” of the Firm

Abstract: This paper focalizes on the economic model of digital platforms as a new method of coordinating the production of value. We suggest that the advent of “platform capitalism” is symptomatic of a crisis of the model of the firm understood as a space separated from society and based on private ownership. This crisis appears, first, as an inadequacy of the instruments of theoretical economics to take the digital platform model into account, and subsequently as a crisis concerning the ownership of the means of production: ownership seems to be split into intellectual ownership (especially algorithms) and physical ownership of the means of production (which are the prerogative of the platform’s users/producers/consumers). This new proprietary model allows us to revisit the question of the ownership of the means of production and the governance of the firm itself. In this sense, we suggest that in the claims of platform cooperativism, the platform-firm no longer appears as a group of assets that are already owned, but as an institution in which ownership corresponds to governance. In other words, ownership is understood as an institutional arrangement intended to govern the resource itself, which allows us to fully rethink the ownership of the firm according to the model of “the philosophy of the commons.”

Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Periodization and Critique

Abstract: Neoliberalism is variegated as different types of neoliberalism co-exist in a world market that is organized in the shadow of a neoliberalization process that began with neoliberal regime shifts in the USA and UK. This article provides a periodization of neoliberal regime shifts within this context, starting with their pre-history up to the point of no return and then tracing their roll-back, roll forward, blowback, ‘Third Way’, moments of financial crisis, and crisis of crisis-management phases. It argues that neoliberal regime shits were associated from their pre-history onwards with intertwined authoritarian populist and authoritarian statist discourses and practices. Nonetheless, the intensification and interaction of crisis-tendencies of different kinds in different phases and changing forms of resistance have led to an increasingly authoritarian statist form of neoliberal regime, characterized by a state of permanent austerity that requires increased surveillance and policing to maintain it. This illustrates Nicos Poulantzas’s suggestion in the 1970s that authoritarian statism is becoming the normal form of the capitalist type of state but rests on the intensification of features normally associated with exceptional regimes. This article updates Poulantzas’s argument to an era of finance-dominated accumulation and provides a new characterization of authoritarian neoliberal statism.

Neoliberalism and Embodied PrecaritySome Crip Responses

Abstract: The term neoliberalism has appeared in the policies of the Global North for several decades, with the concept of precarity in employment practices coming from the same period. In the last few years, however, precarity has been embodied and personalized, coming to signify not only an epistemological category but something more akin to an ontological state that raises complex questions of identity. My contribution uses it in that latter sense and will take the links between precarity, debility, and more specifically disability as central concerns. In feminist thought in particular, precarity mobilizes both a critical perspective on neoliberalism and a transformative prospective. It allows us to both acknowledge and go beyond a concern with inequities of power, which so strongly signal an expectation of negativity and lack of social justice, to ask how the notion of precarious bodies might already signal a potential for communality and promote the strength of relationality. Rather than following the familiar path of putting the globalization of inequality center stage and calling for new social and political rights for disabled people that take account of their asymmetric specificities, I want to disturb some of the issues—and not least the unproblematized resort to identity categories—through thinking the phenomenological implications of global intercorporeality. As one highly significant aspect of contemporary globalization, neoliberalism pursues a policy of putative self-dependency and rational self-management that seem at odds with the widely recognized capacity of globalization to undermine the certainties of spatial and temporal orientations. While the latter clearly has its own risks, it would be a mistake, I think, to equate the two movements as though both were equally damaging. Instead we should ask how new configurations of time and space are operationalized, and new flows of energy enhanced. What can be gained from the apparent precarity of disorientation, and the entry into what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call zones of proximity? For feminist and disability scholars, the task is surely to think new horizons by considering how we might multiply possibilities of revitalization.

Ordoliberal Authoritarian Governance in China since 1978: World Market, Performance Legitimacy, and Biosovereign Ordering

Abstract: My contribution has six parts. First, starting from the Harvey-Ong debate on the ‘strange case’ of neoliberalism in China, it proceeds to the wider discussion of the path-dependent, geographically-conditioned variegation of neoliberalization. Second, it suggests how a meso-level cultural political economy can mediate between abstract-simple and concrete-complex analyses. Third, it proposes making ordoliberal and authoritarian turns to examine (non-western) cases where sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical power coexist and co-evolve. Fourth, it deploys the concept of ordoliberal authoritarian governance to examine China since Deng’s opened it to the world market in 1978. Specifically, it describes a hybridized ensemble of meta-governance ground rules (e.g., GDPism), socialist statecraft, the bio-sovereign ordering of the population through hukou (household registration system) and suzhi (human quality), and the politics of desire/morality (e.g., consumption and neo-Confucianism). These governing techniques and strategies have strengthened China’s national growth and entrepreneurial potential; but they have also weakened them through exclusionary practices that generate inequalities and social unrest. Fifth, it considers the new subaltern resistance identity of Diaosi, which has emerged since 2011. Diaosi live in marginal and subaltern conditions but also aspire to gain urban hukou and embrace suzhi consumption. To re-establish control in response to these challenges, the government has intensified Internet surveillance, censorship and the use of a “social credit” system. Sixth, the article offers some conclusions on the cultural political economy perspective on variegation and heuristic potential of the ordoliberal and authoritarian turns in examining variegated neoliberalization/ordoliberalization in non-western settings.

Emergent Repertoires of Resistance and Commoning in Higher EducationThe Solidarity Academies Movement in Turkey

Abstract: The article addresses the current restructuring of academia in Turkey through the example of the Academics for Peace petition and the institutional mechanisms of repression it instigated. We focus on the Solidarity Academies as alternative spaces of education and a unique form of collective resistance against the academic purges. We provide an empirically informed analysis of Solidarity Academies as spaces of commoning, i.e., the collective production and sharing of knowledge by emergent communities of struggle.

A Theory of Microactivist AffordancesDisability, Disorientations, and Improvisations

Abstract: This article proposes a new theory of affordances that is developed through a critical disability and performance lens. Through parallels to be drawn between the creative space of aesthetic performance and the performance of everyday life lived with disability, this new theory situates affordances in the improvisatory space of performance, and introduces the notion of “micro-activist affordances” as a way to understand mundane acts of world-building that could emerge from encounters with a world of “disorienting affordances.” Experiencing disability is inherently disorienting. The environment, as years of disability activism have shown us, is built with a very limited conception of the human being in mind. But the environment can also be disorienting when experiencing bodily pain and chronic disease. I argue that disability, in all of its various manifestations, is experienced as the shrinking of the environment, and its readily available affordances. But, as I shall also argue, precisely at such moments of shrinking, something else happens. When the environment is narrowed down in its offerings, I propose that it is the creative space of performance (on or offstage) that opens up to make it afford otherwise. This very potential to invent affordances is precisely how I conceptualize everyday lives lived with disability as being analogous to the reimagined space of aesthetic performance and its reorientations.

Amplifying migrant voices and struggles at sea as a radical practice

Abstract: This article takes the encounters between migrant travelers at sea and Alarm Phone activists on land as a starting point to inquire into recent transformations in maritime migrant mobilities and EUropean and North African attempts to govern them, with a focus on the western Mediterranean Sea. The Alarm Phone, an activist hotline assisting migrants in distress at sea, has been involved in everyday struggles over movement in all three Mediterranean regions, so that tracing its interventions can provide insights into the complex interplay between enactments of the freedom of movement and the ways in which EUrope seeks to pre-empt and deter them. Situated right at the nexus of migrant movements conceived in a kinetic and a political sense, the Alarm Phone constitutes an analytic of the EUropean border regime, able to observe the interplay between disobedient movements and their policing at sea.

Neoliberalism and the Antagonisms of Authoritarian Resilience in the Middle East

Abstract: This essay examines the evolving symbiosis of authoritarian state power and neoliberal governance in the Middle East in the wake of the 2007–8 economic crisis and popular uprisings in 2011–13. I revisit the debates on “authoritarian resilience” in the region to highlight that the efforts to push through neoliberal reforms in the face of popular opposition have expanded the scope of authoritarian rule. However, the strengthening of the executive power further creates antagonisms which are bound to result in the weakening of the state’s institutional capacity and legitimacy to enforce those reforms. These considerations highlight the fissures of “authoritarian resilience” in the region and signal that state centralization and the strengthening of executive power could produce avenues for contesting both neoliberalism and authoritarianism.

Women, Reproduction, and the Commons

Abstract: The Common/s as a principle of social organization is at the center of radical political debates as an alternative to the logic of capital and the market. In her essay Silvia Federici presents a feminist perspective on the politics of the commons, with special attention to the reproductive commons women are constructing in response to the displacements caused by the new expansion of capitalist relations.

Postdemocracy Reset: Brazil’s Putschist Fix in Sociospatial Perspective

Abstract: In 2016, the progressive government of the Workers’ Party in Brazil came to a halt through a highly contested impeachment process that gave way to an aggressive policy switch toward a hardline neoliberal fix. This article addresses the conjuncture of the many trajectories that led to the parliamentary coup, analyzing the imposed agenda in terms of a political economy of its regulatory aspects, in tandem with a sociospatial perspective on the right-wing turn and its implications. The major elements of the package are: the imposition of a workfare regime, the flexibilization of labor relations, a dynamic of market creation through legislative changes (especially in the domain of land and real estate markets), and a widespread withdrawal of labor and welfare rights. The results point toward an expansion of the many (territorial, social, economic) fronts on which the financialization of society and space can operate.

The Law of the Urban Common(s)

Abstract: Cities are quintessentially human and collective products. All urban space is the product of social cooperation. Therefore not just the “public” space but the metropolis as a whole must be considered as a commons. This assumption is not neutral from a legal point of view. It raises the question of whether private property of urban land is compatible with the conception of urban space as commons. The answer depends on how much we can push on the disintegration of property to expand the perspective of collective entitlements on urban resources against the commodification and new enclosures of urban space. Drawing on a legal realist approach to property, it is possible to dissolve the unitary conception of ownership into a bundle of rights. This article is a first attempt to enfranchise urban property as a legal form from its fate of being a mere boundary between the haves and the have-nots and revisit its role in the construction of social relations of production within the metropolis.

From New Institutional Economics of the Commons to the Common as a Mode of Production

Abstract: The vitality of the new field of study on the commons crosses the entire field of social sciences, and it is analyzed from very different perspectives. On the one side, the Ostromian new Institutional economics uses the term commons as plural and seeks to give an account of the variety of the institutional forms of economic regulation. On the other, some new approaches interpret commons as an element of subversion of capitalism. These authors insist on the use of the concept as singular and they interpret it as a general principle of reorganization of economy and society. This article aims at analyzing the meanings of common and commons at stake in this debate. After a critical assessment of Elinor Ostrom’s contribution, the analysis will focus on the presentation of the theories of common as singular, distinguishing two currents of thought: the political conception of Dardot and Laval and the neo-workerist thesis of common as mode of production.

After MarginalizationPixelization, Disability, and Social Difference in Digital Russia

Abstract: Contemporary social thought frequently posits sociopolitical exclusion as marginalization. This article argues that marginalization relies on a spatial metaphor that conceptualizes social exclusion as always already configured in relation to center and periphery. Suggesting that this reliance on marginalization as a way of understanding sociopolitical exclusion limits political thought, this article calls for a renewed attention to actual material configurations of social exclusion. Considering ethnographic research with adults with mobility and speech disabilities in Petrozavodsk, Russia, and representation of disability in contemporary Russian film, the concept of marginalization is demonstrated to be insufficient to analyze the actual spatial segregation of people with disabilities in contemporary Russia in the digital era. The spatial metaphor of marginalization fails to describe the way that interlocutors with mobility impairments are at once segregated and included in sociopolitical life in the digital era, when civic life unfolds in cyberspace. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and observation, this article proposes pixelization as a descriptor of the specific spatial pattern of sociopolitical exclusion of people with mobility and speech impairments in Petrozavodsk, characterized by material segregation in family apartments combined with intricate enabling connection to various publics via digital networks. Spatial metaphors for social difference matter for the kinds of alternate presents and futures that might be envisioned, challenging the presumption that ableism’s power comes from limiting political participation in public space defined by a liberal democratic agora.

Appropriation, Common Property, the Inappropriable: Notes on the Law of the Common in Platform Capitalism

Abstract: This essay will show what are some of the qualifying characteristics of the theoretical construction of the law of the common. It will be divided into two parts. In the first part, I will review some of the main structural modifications that affected modern law with the advent of cognitive capitalism and digital platforms, in particular following the creation of the Internet of Things and cloud computing. In the second part, I will consider the pars construens of the law of the common, reflecting on the possibility of giving new conceptual meaning to the logic of appropriation and common property in the sense of it being inappropriable. In the end, I will propose that the inappropriability is an alternative to the conceptual duo of sovereignty and property.