Introduction: Markets and Machines

Abstract

This issue of New Formations covers a wide range of subjects from an international and interdisciplinary group of contributors. Their subject matter ranges across philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, cultural history, political theory, geography, radical economics and critical media studies. A number of themes resonate across them in multiple ways, however. The culture and politics of neoliberalism, its conditions of historical emergence and its multiple instantiated forms, is a concern shared by several of our contributions from very different perspectives. The politics of material culture and of the technological infrastructures of contemporary institutionalised forms of power is another. Modes of resistance, both to neoliberalism and to any form of political domination or economic exploitation, are a third area of shared concern for many of our contributions, several of which also share an interest in psychic, affective and emotional dimensions of social and political relationships. In his essay on the fantasy of neoliberal sovereignty, Peter Bloom considers the relationship between Foucauldian and Lacanian understandings of sovereignty and disciplinary power. Bloom argues that identification with a powerful sovereign provides individuals with ontological security in the face of complex micro-processes of power and broader depersonalised forms of subjection associated with neoliberalism. As such, in his account the appeal of a sovereign fantasy lies in its promise to grant individuals a sense of 'sovereign' agency which they experience as lacking in their existence as 'agency-less' disciplinary subjects of neoliberalism. Bloom argues that to truly move beyond neoliberalism it is necessary therefore to not only challenge its disciplinary body but also cut off its sovereign head. Following on from this argument, Roi Wagner asks how one might radically resist the state, when material and ideological circumstances foreclose a nonstatist horizon? To tackle this question, his paper considers points of view of communities that know no stateless world, but still reject contemporary state governmentality as such, rather than just this or that government. The paper opens by fleshing out the claim that there is no 'world' outside the state. Then it looks into Zapatista resistance, among other examples, to see how resistance to the state works where there is no independent world from which the state is to be resisted. Wagner uses the work of Pierre Clastres and liberation theology so set up a model that he calls 'transcendentalisation of the state'--a form of governmentality that retains the state as constitutive framework, but undermines its power to enforce its authority. He fleshes out this model with case studies from Israel/Palestine and the Euromed civil forum. Marisol Sandoval considers a quite different form of political resistance in her study of worker co-operatives in the cultural sector. She investigates the potential of worker co-operatives to help improve working conditions and radically reimagine cultural work in an era of growing precarity and disempowerment for cultural workers. Sandoval argues that while co-ops work to democratise ownership and decision-making, empowering workers by giving them more control over their working lives, co-ops are nonetheless constrained by competitive market pressures, creating tensions between economic necessity and political goals. Her article argues that co-ops can be understood as a radical pre-figurative political project, but can also be mobilized in a reformist attempt to create a more ethical capitalism or be integrated into neoliberal discourses of entrepreneurship and individual responsibility, but ultimately argues that radical co-ops can play an important role within a larger movement that mobilizes collectivity to confront neoliberal individualization and 'capitalist realism'. In her essay 'Markets without subjects', Morgan Adamson analyses recent discourses around financial subjectivity and debt, popularized in the wake of the 2008 crash. …