Capitalist Commodity Research Articles

Accessing the Trail, Interpreting the Forest

The Stephen F. Austin Experimental Forest is the site of the first ADA-compliant US Forest Service project in Texas. Offering information about the history of forest management alongside information on Pineywoods ecosystems, the interpretive trail raises questions about how access is framed across “natural” and “built” environments as well as how distinctions between nature and culture operate within US environmental imaginaries. This article draws on feminist, posthumanist, and disability studies to conduct a close reading of the interpretive trail as text. It tracks the trail’s approach to disability access as well as its presentation of forest ecology, analyzing how the ableist logic of capitalist commodification underwrites the management of multispecies actants in the woods. I read against the grain of the trail in search of feminist, crip, posthumanist configurations of interdependence and more fluid human–nature boundaries. I argue that cripping the Austin requires questioning the unevenness of disability access as well as the utilitarian ideas of nature presented on the trail while also imagining how we might access and relate to this postindustrial forest otherwise.

Beware of Americans Bearing Gifts

ABSTRACT Cultural theory often celebrates gift-giving as a benevolent force opposed to the socially destructive energies of commodity capitalism. Alexandra Urakova’s Dangerous Giving challenges this utopian tradition by showing just how ambivalent nineteenth-century writers in the United States were about the potentially pernicious effects of giving gifts. Rather than locating a space outside conflict and competition, gifts and the discourse surrounding their exchange lay bare, and in some cases intensify, the many forms of inequality that structured nineteenth-century American life.

Scenographic ‘stuff’: attending to everyday objects in performance (and beyond)

ABSTRACT In part responding to our increasingly material world, this article presents scenographic strategies as a highly appropriate and effective means for cultivating an attentiveness towards everyday objects, or stuff. The centrality of physical matter within performances is garnering more credit, in correspondence with a growing critical, new materialist interest in the potential of non-human entities. In such discourse, objects usually perceived as passive or inert are instead recognised for their affectivity. This article takes a specific look at everyday objects that, caught up within capitalist commodification, are often solely valued for their ability to assist human action and yet can be seen to demonstrate aesthetic-affective potential – a potential that, as illustrated here, can be appreciated through scenography. Drawing on the philosophies of Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter, Maurizia Boscagli’s unruly stuff and Yuriko Saito’s everyday aesthetics, an original conceptual framework is developed and tested out on three examples of performance practice. This process of critical analysis foregrounds scenographic sensibilities – that orient spectators towards the latent vitalities, hybridity and ecologies of stuff – and reveals how alternative, attuned experiences, that interrupt consumer capitalist logic, can be fostered through performances as well as filtering out beyond them.

Exploring the historical roots of environmental and ecological accounting from the dawn of human consciousness

PurposeThis paper seeks to broaden the agenda for environmental and ecological accounting research across several dimensions, extending the form of accounting in this field by encouraging research into its historical roots and developing a definition of accounting that can address the severe environmental and ecological challenges of the 21st century.Design/methodology/approachThe authors explored environmental and ecological accounts from the dawn of human consciousness across a wide variety of media and in a broad range of forms. This theoretical approach reacts to the cold capitalist commodification of nature inherent in much environmental accounting practice, which documents, values and records usage of natural capital with little attempt to address depletion and loss.FindingsBy analysing the earliest ecological and environmental “accounts” recorded by humans at the dawn of human consciousness, and considering a wide array of subsequent accounts, the authors demonstrate that rather than being a secondary, relatively recent development emerging from financial accounting and reporting, environmental and ecological accounting predated financial accounting by tens of thousands of years. This research also provides a wealth of perspectives on diversity, not only in forms of account but also in the diversity of accountants, as well as the broadness of the stakeholders to whom and to which the accounts are rendered.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper can be placed at the intersection of accounting history, the alternative, interdisciplinary and critical accounts literature, and environmental and ecological accounting research.Practical implicationsPractically, the authors can draw ideas and inspiration from the historical forms and content of ecological and environmental account that can inform new forms of and approaches to accounting.Social implicationsThere are social implications including the diversity of accounts and accountants derived from studying historical ecological and environmental accounts from the dawn of human consciousness especially in the broadening out of the authors' understanding of the origins and cultural roots of accounting.Originality/valueThis study concludes with a new definition of accounting, fit for purpose in the 21st century, that integrates ecological, environmental concerns and is emancipatory, aiming to restore nature, revive biodiversity, conserve species and enhance ecosystems.

Chasing the Numinous: Hungry Ghosts in the Shadow of the Psychedelic Renaissance.

In recent years a renewed scientific, public and commercial interest in psychedelic medicines can be observed across the globe. As research findings have been generally promising, there is hope for new treatment possibilities for a number of difficult-to-treat mental health concerns. While honouring positive developments and therapeutic promise in relation to the medical use of psychedelics, this paper aims to shine a light on some underlying psycho-cultural shadow dynamics in the unfolding psychedelic renaissance. This paper explores whether and how the multi-layered collective fascination with psychedelics may yet be another symptom pointing towards a deeper psychological and spiritual malaise in the modern Western psyche as diagnosed by C. G. Jung. The question is posed whether the West's feverish pursuit of psychedelic medicines-from individual consumption to entheogenic tourism, from capitalist commodification of medicines and treatments to the increasing number of ethical scandals and abuse through clinicians and self-proclaimed shamans-is related to a Western cultural complex. As part of the discussion, the archetypal image of the Hungry Ghost, known across Asian cultural and religious traditions, is explored to better understand the aforementioned shadow phenomena and point towards mitigating possibilities.

Fashion of Global Warming: Between counterculture and trend, discursive translations in post-consumerism

The article reflects on the translation mechanisms operated by fashion and the transformation of countercultural discourses and practices into their mainstream versions. By exploring the recent boom of products, advertisements, and lifestyles utilising the communication of sustainability as a strategy, the work utilises Landowski’s socio-semiotic theory to analyse the absorption of post-consumerism by commodity capitalism, understanding the process of commodification as a transformation in the regimes governing interactions between subjects. Supporting the discussion with literature debating the countercultural critique—in politics, economics, and fashion—and the contemporary commentary about post-consumerism and the environmental crisis, the work concludes that fashion operates a narrative simplification of countercultural discourses, transforming its regime of risk and sense production, causing a transition from intricate webs of relations between subjects to a set of values that can be exchanged.

Who Is in and Who Is out in Ocean Economies Development?

This review engages with the ongoing blue economy debate to decipher old and emerging forms of economic, institutional, physical and social exclusions of local communities and vulnerable societies that may result from the development of ocean projects and policies across the globe. The results of this scientific and policy review show that, whereas for some traditional maritime activities such as fisheries, the drivers of exclusion are well studied and somehow addressed in policies, for other emerging sectors, such as ocean energies or deep-sea mining, there is a lack of understanding on how to recognise and prevent the different forms of exclusion. Exclusion is likely to occur when decisions are taken at the highest level of governance to achieve national or international targets of economic growth, food safety, clean energy or leisure, with little consideration of the effects on local economic, social and environmental contexts. On the other hand, when the principles of inclusiveness are given due consideration, they prove to be beneficial for the societies’ well-being, increasing the chance of long-term social acceptability. We conclude that, to embrace inclusiveness, both governments and industries have to (a) go beyond the capitalist commodification of nature and recognise benefits other than the economic ones, namely, emotional, cultural and spiritual; (b) promote initiatives that fulfil local needs in the first place and are adapted to local contexts; (c) cooperate with local institutions and stakeholders to promote the co-management of resources and adaptive development. Likewise, research institutions, funding organisations and governmental agencies have to engage in new ways to assess the effects of ocean development that go beyond the quantitative approach and seek to integrate qualitative information, traditional knowledge and local perceptions.

Wage-Earning Slaves: Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Wage-Earning Slaves: Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

The prestige economy of elite education: a Baudrillardian analysis of an aspirational English school

Academic entrepreneurial behaviours are increasingly a research field paralleling processes of capitalist commodification. We mobilise Baudrillard’s concepts to probe a school’s strategic communication methods symbolising class neoliberalism, which aspirational parents may experience as a desired habitus of ‘distinction’. We suggest their knowledge of class and education, once imported into the interpretation of this school’s web presence, will coalesce with its simulacra of elite education. Our account encourages comparisons with selective school websites and utilises the qualitative data on the public site of this school, a methodological approach that has been fruitfully utilised by scholars uncovering the ideological representations created by providers who market UK higher education. The intervention into the marketplace of the selective fee-paying English education of Independent Grammar School: Durham (IGSD) through such a penumbra of symbolic meaning forms part of its pursuit of a competitive edge. International studies of schools chasing prestige and consumer desire confirm that the policies and practices described have become widespread, as shown in the oeuvre of Stephen Ball, whose writings inform the approach of this article. The marketing of the ‘brand’ identified through our theoretically driven analysis may encourage consumers to opt out of the state sector. Neoliberal-class markers of prestige contribute to the erosion of welfare-oriented school ideals in England, and in other nations.

SPOTLIGHTING MIGRANT AGENCY: How Migratory Movements and Temporariness Drive Peripheral Urbanization in Mumbai's Agrarian‐urban Edge

AbstractIn this article we look beyond dispossession by exclusionary urbanization to highlight the complex articulation of migration histories, speculative accumulation, translocal livelihoods and political practices that make up a mini‐city in Mumbai's periphery. We think from Mumbai's periphery as a site from where theory can be made to argue that existing frameworks of peripheral urbanization are territorially fixed, and that there is a need to expand beyond a focus on land dynamics to a discussion on migration, translocal residence and livelihoods. We propose three extensions. First, we argue that peripheral urbanization must expand to include multiple temporalities and agencies that play out in line with orientations toward permanence but also temporariness. Second, we stretch the idea of autoconstruction beyond the material realm to focus on autoconstructed alliances as a central component of participating in the capitalist commodification of land but also exceeding it. Third, in a situation where residents inhabit both temporariness and permanence, they collectively produce place as simultaneously way station and place‐in‐the‐making. We conclude the article by reflecting on what a peripheral urbanization reconfigured for mobility and temporariness means for social justice and inclusion of the (migrant) working poor in the city.

Sounding the State of the World: Interview with Karim Rafi, Summer 2021

Matthew Brauer interviews Moroccan contemporary artist Karim Rafi about postcolonial creation in the 2020s in "Sounding the State of the World.” Beginning with Rafi’s shift to remote performances during the COVID-19 pandemic, the discussion approaches confinement as just the latest in a series of crises in North Africa and the world. The repeated experience of crisis opens a conversation about the contemporary experience of time, broached in relation to modern Moroccan art history, which emerged from and against the conservative institutions of the French Protectorate (1912-1956). The interview touches on a range of distinctive concerns in Rafi’s art practice, from sound installations to gardening, which he brings together in multimedia performances and hypermedia objects that register the cultural and political forces shaping art in the 2020s, while reactivating their radical potential for relation apart from capitalist commodification.

Consumable Bodies, Consumable Self

‘Nerd’ is everywhere a lonely status, but queer identities and nonconforming gender expressions are especially socially isolating. This article examines the intersection of these two lonely identities, ‘nerd’ and ‘queer’, in Kio Shimoku’s manga Genshiken. Genshiken is a sort of roman-fleuve about a university otaku circle. One of the members, Hato, is a heterosexual male connoisseur of BL—homosexual ‘boy’s love’ amateur parody manga—who dresses as a woman. Rather than being doubly isolated for being both queer and a nerd, however, Hato finds that otaku culture is capable of accommodating his queerness. This paper argues that Genshiken proposes otaku subculture as a social space already equipped to accept nonconforming genders and sexualities due to its unique relationship with society and media. Hato represents the queer possibilities of otaku subjectivity, entangled as it is with late capitalist commodification. The aesthetic distance that—per Saitō Tamaki—otaku must maintain from the objects of their desire translates into an otaku acceptance of the aestheticisation of gender, which allows other otaku to accept Hato, alleviating rather than doubling his loneliness. Furthermore, for Hato this aesthetic distance becomes distance from his own gender and sexuality, allowing him to enjoy his own masculine body rendered into a consumable commodity in BL featuring himself.

Conceptualizing business logistics as an ‘apparatus of security’ and its implications for management and organizational inquiry

Global commodity capitalism necessitates the fast and efficient movement of all manner of entities across the globe. Importantly, this commercial flow needs to be secured against the undocumented and unregulated flow of illegitimate people, finance and information, counterfeits, drugs, terror and other undesirables. The organizational practices of business logistics are central for achieving this objective. Yet they have received little attention in management and organization studies to date. We suggest a fruitful avenue is via Foucault’s notion of ‘biopower’ – particularly his less discussed concept (in management studies, at least) of an apparatus of security. This is useful for understanding the emergent organizational/management practices of security in the border spaces in which business logistics operate. If ‘Society Must Be Defended’, as Foucault ironically notes in his famous lecture series that introduces biopower, then so too must contemporary organizations and their net-like activities within the global economy.

Conjectures on Forest literature

Abstract These conjectures on two novels about woods or forests from different points and periods in the capitalist world-system, Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016), seek to demonstrate that forests are locations saturated with histories and rival ideologies. Forests are variously godless wastes, places of worship and spiritual renewal, as well as symbols of national, cultural and even racial identity. They are also portents of liberty, the liberty of nature from plantation monocultures, and the liberty of humans from conformity to the regimenting disciplines of capital. Timber is a ubiquitous and indispensable capitalist commodity much like coal or oil. But underground seams of coal and reservoirs of unprocessed crude oil obviously do not, as forests and forest literature often do, represent utopian visions of a post-capitalist future. Much recent work in the ‘energy humanities’ and on ‘the aesthetics of commodity frontiers’ neglects this capacity of literary texts to sketch alternatives to capital’s destructive and instrumentalising logic. This article therefore uses Andreas Malm’s important work on ‘fossil capital’ and his recent speculations on ‘wilderness literature’ to show how in two works of fiction the forest provides an image of a future beyond capital.

Seizing the Means of Circulation: Choke Points and Logistical Resistance in Coco Solo, Panama

AbstractRecent studies of logistics have embraced the “choke point” thesis: the notion that a strategically positioned group of workers or insurgents can exercise outsize power by disrupting the circulation of goods through the supply chain. This article examines this proposition through the case of Coco Solo, Panama, an informal community situated at the epicentre of Panama’s transit economy but persistently excluded from its benefits. Between 2001 and 2014, as part of a protracted struggle over housing, Coco Solo residents repeatedly blockaded key ports and logistics facilities. Despite their location at a critical node in global capitalist commodity circuits, the community’s actions met with limited success. I draw on the case to refine existing theorisations of logistical resistance, emphasising the contingent factors that influence the effectiveness of such tactics, the diverse contexts in which they are mobilised, and the value of going beyond workerist and insurrectionist accounts of supply chain disruption.

Disassembling and Re-membering Self: Opaquing an Enlightened Taxonomy

Abstract For some, “You bring the spices” may be an innocent statement. For me, it was not. Triggered by this racialized and sexualized statement, I created Taxonomía of a Spicy Espécimen, a performance art piece as well as public pedagogy that utilizes a multimodal reflection accompanied by aesthetic moving actions. Since taxonomy has been a Eurocentric enactment through which Otherness has been constructed, this public art pedagogy cooperates with its spect-actors to challenge the learned habits of hierarchizing, categorizing, and naming Otherness. As a critical self-reflective commentary for this journal, I intend to write a textual and visual description that at moments becomes storytelling vignettes about Taxonomía. At the same time, this autoethnographic account examines Taxonomía as an intersection between performance art and public pedagogy—a decolonial tactic to denounce and disrupt capitalist commodities of Black, Brown, and Caribbean Otherness for marketable consumption.

‘The great unequivocal International Gestures’: Benjaminian Gestus in Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man

ABSTRACT Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man, a novel that is saturated in pop-cultural signifiers, has often been read as complicit with the system of commodity capitalism it seeks to oppose. The article responds to this charge by building on convergences between the debate over Smith’s novel and discussions among members of the early Frankfurt School to develop an alternative to the purist stance on popular culture by some of Smith’s critics. Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin, the article fills a gap in Smith scholarship by reading the ‘International Gestures’ that are strewn throughout the book as instances of gestus. Benjamin’s concept of gestus, which he developed in an analysis of Kafka’s stories, thus serves as a hermeneutic for The Autograph Man to indicate the revolutionary potential of Smith’s study of gestures, which the article associates with the revelation of an ‘optical unconscious’ that affords opportunities for wonder. Such wonder is a ‘saving power’ amidst the novel’s saturation in pop-culture that offers occasions for transcending our customs and habits. The article concludes by showing how the novel’s structural implementation of gestus is carried out in a tragi-comic voice familiar from Kafka, making it a ‘Frankfurt School comedy’ with a Kafkaesque spin.

Financial professionals and the formation of proprietarian ideology

Financial professionals and the formation of proprietarian ideology

Energy States

Abstract This article works with a comparative, hemispheric approach to address potential sites, propositions, and sources for postextractive energy transitions. Specifically, the focus is on case studies from within the United States and Latin America to consider energy paradigms and their future in relation to the “energy state,” or the centralized governance apparatus that has historically organized power infrastructures. Like the physics term that references any discrete value of total energy that remains fixed, but that is potentially mutable because of its transitive properties, the modern energy state is addressed as an entity that has the capacity to undergo massive reconfiguration and transition. The energy state is not discrete, however, and is embedded within a global infrastructure of capitalist dominance, power inequalities, and commodity contingencies. Despite its current imbrication with the colonial/modern infrastructures of petrol extraction, the energy state, it is argued here, has the capacity to be reimagined and remade. By focusing on popular movements within the western hemisphere, and by learning from the lessons of energy pasts, presents, and futures, the article proposes the move to radical interdependency, which could be legislated by a substantially altered state apparatus during the implementation of a new energy paradigm. Unsurprisingly, land rights, social and multispecies justice, and antiracist social movements are central to enlivening the new energy state.

Travelling Noodles and Migrating Pieces of Raw Fish

Travelling Noodles and Migrating Pieces of Raw Fish