Logic Of Capitalism Research Articles

The intimate politics of everyday digital practices: Entangling and disentangling

The tactical struggle to carve out space-times free from the entangling logics of digital media attempts to reassert the sovereign subject. This project of disentangling goes beyond simply turning off, rejecting, or disconnecting from digital technologies. More ambitiously it works both within and against the logic of surveillance capitalism, an emerging regime which generates habits of attention as well as psychological and social forms of media dependence, in turn supplying third-party users with a durable supply of rendered behavioral data. Semi-structured interviews conducted with a sample of 20 subjects from North America reveal an ongoing quotidian struggle to maintain freedom, power, autonomy and self-direction while carving out a sort of hybrid territory around oneself. Excerpts from the interviews reveal a context-dependent set of practices, occurring in particular ways, at particular times, for particular purposes, with particular communications before and after. In addition, they show the provisional achievement of distance from entangling systems that seem to offer freedom to do things while in fact achieving microscopically targeted control. They reveal a spatial strategy involving a range of tactics for navigating the spaces of the attention/surveillance economy, appropriating digital media, and carving out spaces for personal agency in a mediatized society.

Unveiling whiteness: an approach to expand equity and deepen Public Administration’s racial analysis

Public Administration’s attempts to understand race and racism insufficiently engage with the historical processes and legacies of White Supremacy. This paper problematizes whiteness and proposes an approach to expand social equity and deepen the field’s racial analysis. Drawing on institutional logics perspective, we identify and describe logics of whiteness, an analytic approach that reveals whiteness through the logics of racial capitalism and whiteness as property and provides entry for historical, systems-connected, multi-level analyses of race, racism, racial categorization, and racialized power. We locate whiteness in the institution of citizenship to engage these logics and interrogate how citizens and citizenship are defined by and served in the bureaucracy. Neoliberalism has allowed the administrative state to assign differential citizenship identities across groups according to the logics of whiteness, with both symbolic and material implications for individual lives and for Public Administration theory and praxis.

Rage-ography: Rigor, Anti-wokeness, and Technoviolence

Abstract: Feminist studies scholars and those in related critical studies traditions have long encountered resistance arising from STEM disciplines and capitalist logics on our campuses and in the wider public discourse. The struggles to establish and preserve feminist studies and ethnic studies programs over the past five decades remind us that the present pandemonium has historical roots that can be traced, not only to identify patterns instructive for us in this moment, but also for a visceral resonance that buoys us in this time and place. We recognize our own outrage at injustice even as we feel the rage directed at feminist studies scholars from sites of elite power, sustained through false dualisms of left and right, minority and majority, woke and anti-woke, STEM and non-STEM. This piece explores the preservation of elite power through the examination of institutions and epistemics at the heart of contemporary wage capitalism: the world of engineering education and practice, and critical resistance within that world. We analyze (ostensibly nonidentitarian) projects such as technoscientific teaching, research, and production. We choose to analyze episodes from the "before times" that reveal a sustained pattern of misogyny, white supremacy, heterosexism, and ableism pervading society and the academy prior to current enactments of that kind. In so doing, we follow an emergent line of inquiry, tracing emotion as well as argument: these dynamics are now, and have long been, fraught with rage. It is the systematic, historically robust, and selective acceptance and denial of rage that we want to explore here as a foundational feature of the present pandemonium, common to feminist studies academic contexts and to engineering, as well as interactions between the two.

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This paper aims to identify the relationship between cybernetics and the post-war French philosophies or theories known and embraced as structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. Recent research has shown that cybernetics was closely associated with Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, which was the cool of the new French theory, and that poststructuralism or postmodernism was a response to the technologies of control represented by cybernetics. From this perspective, the misconceptions and prejudices surrounding French theory must be confronted with an understanding of the historical context that gave rise to the phenomenon of postmodernism. This paper looks at French theory as an intellectual movement that emerged out of the reflection on cybernetic technologies in the post-war period centred on the Maginot Line and revisits its theoretical context through the keyword cybernetics. This new examination will allow us to rewrite the genealogy of French theories that emerged after 1950 as a response to cybernetics, whether postmodernism is interpreted as a cultural logic of late capitalism, as an extension of modernism, or as a new epistemology inevitably resulting from the decline of modernity. From this perspective, this paper argues that French theory and its effect, postmodernism, should not be buried in the annals of history as relics of a bygone era but should be recognized as a historical legacy shaping our present reality and should be re-examined.

Don’t Fear Artificial Intelligence, Question the Business Model: How Surveillance Capitalists Use Media to Invade Privacy, Disrupt Moral Autonomy, and Harm Democracy

This paper analyzes the causes, consequences, and logic of surveillance capitalism, delineating how behavioral surplus became the latest form of accumulation and questioning its ethical, legal, and material implications. The purpose of this project is to provide a decisively human response to an otherwise reductive, totalizing political economic system that uses equally reductive technology. Using history, political economy, and media ethics, it shows how surveillance capitalists use artificial intelligence (AI) to disrupt the privacy necessary for identity work and distort the moral autonomy necessary for democratic worldmaking. Exploiting human psychology and emotional vulnerabilities, surveillance capitalists interfere with our ability to become better versions of our personal and collective selves. We must therefore reject surveillance capitalism and embrace a more inconclusive understanding of democracy informed by care. While experts and technocrats can endlessly debate the potential outcomes and possibilities, the challenges of AI and an abusive surveillance capitalist system must ultimately be answered by a caring citizenry with equally resilient social institutions.

The relevance of ableism in social (work) pedagogy

ABSTRACT Ableism, a system of thought that creates notions of normality based on abilities and ability expectations, is closely tied to capitalist logics that promote the productive citizen. While the pursuit of certain abilities is a fundamental part of any society, the individualisation of abilities and the coercive character of some ability expectations marginalise people differing from the ideal citizen as unprofitable and burdensome. Through issues of access to various social support services and through social practice within in the welfare system, the need to consider ableism and its consequences in social (work) pedagogy becomes apparent. The aim of this theoretical essay is to emphasise the relevance of ableism in social (work) pedagogy by linking ableism theory to critical debates in social pedagogy/social work. I first describe the concept of ableism and its roots in Disability Studies, but also its relevance exceeding them. Second, I argue for anti-ableism as a critical pedagogy and third, I elaborate its relevance in the context of social work by drawing on examples of structural ableism evident in youth vocational support and homeless services. Finally, I explain how anti-ableism may be anchored in social (work) pedagogy.

On the Aesthetics and Politics of Neoconservatism in Postwar Japan and America

ABSTRACT This article explores the aesthetic and political dimensions of neoconservative thought in postwar Japan and America. Although neoconservatism today is most often associated with hawkish foreign policy positions and the mythos of American hegemony, it first emerged in the realm of 1960s and post-1960s cultural criticism, much of which was composed by right-of-center literary intellectuals in particular. This article explores how in that earlier context, one of the most distinctive models for answering the cultural questions that motivated the emergence of neoconservatism as an article of global thought appeared in a body of writing centered on Japan. Putting the ideas expressed by the noted American neoconservatives Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz into dialogue with the writings of the conservative Japanese literary critic Etō Jun, the ruminations on Japanese cultural conservatism by the American scholar of Japanese literature Edward Seidensticker, the memoirs of the Sony CEO Morita Akio and the former Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzō, and the writings of the noted Japanese neoconservative novelist-turned-politician Ishihara Shintarō, the article argues that the articulation of neoconservative ideals in postwar Japan ultimately provided a model to conservative market advocates worldwide for how to integrate the seemingly incompatible logics of community and capitalism through a cultural synthesis.

Death enchanted: comparing conventional and conservation burial in the United States with a technological mediation lens

ABSTRACT Though conventional burial continues to dominate whole-body internment in the United States, natural burial practices are growing in acceptance and use. These shifting dynamics necessitate consideration of how the body’s material end shapes the actions and imaginations of the living. This paper situates conventional and conservation burial as ethically resonate technologies using the the theory of technological mediation in order to analyse and contrast the realities, ethics, and imaginations shaped by each. It argues that conventional burial is aligned with the logic of neoliberal capitalism to which conservation burial provides an alternative which fosters multispecies thriving. Additionally, it constructs two technomoral scenarios to further develop the death-imagination of conservation burial. This interdisciplinary analysis contributes to ongoing discussion around natural burial, as it considers how burial practices reciprocally shape individuals and societies and invites a novel way of reflecting on one’s material relationship to death.

Beyond the Dark Sides of the Web: For an Ethical Model of Digital Solidarity

ABSTRACT In this article, I intend to propose an ethical model for digital solidarity. On the one hand, it emphasises the importance of adopting a solidarity model to escape the logic of surveillance capitalism and the race for profits typical of the digital giants’ business model. On the other, it is intended to point out that a model of solidarity embodied in the digital network may instead offer a more universalistic alternative to the types of solidarity that have often imposed themselves in our contemporary political landscape, namely solidarity limited to groups in opposition to others. In order to show what economic and political characteristics this model should respect, two case studies will be examined, namely Wikipedia and Occupy Wall Street.

Anthropologists are Talking – About Contemporary Plantations. Technologies, Violence, and Vulnerability Across Geographies and Genealogies

ABSTRACT On the surface, plantations are vast settled spaces in which neatly aligned rows of crops and disciplined workers produce profits for corporations. Yet despite their seemingly orderly, regimented, and enduring form, many aspects of plantation life are unsettled, dynamic, and fragile. In this conversation, we discuss the practices and meanings of plantation settlements and unsettlements in Melanesia, highland South America, and Indonesia. In doing so, we explore the intrinsic coloniality and racial character of contemporary plantations and the possibilities of anthropology in this domain. We call for a critical, comparative agenda exploring ‘the plantation multiple’ as an enduring yet contingent socio-ecological, spatio-temporal, and racial-capitalist formation, enacted through contextually situated sets of practices, ideologies, and epistemologies. Such an agenda centers attention to mutually constitutive colonial and capitalist logics, relationships of force and failure, violence and care, and the multispecies nature of plantation-driven simplification, proliferation, and resistance.

The empire never ended: Hegel, postmodernism and comedy

This paper argues that Hegel?s account of modernity is already an account of postmodernity, according to Fredric Jameson?s definition of the cultural logic of globalized capitalism. First, Hegel?s account of the problematic of modernity will be sought in the Phenomenology of Spirit by considering the constellation of Athens, Rome and Christianity along with Hegel?s contrast between tragedy and comedy in the ?Religion? chapter, in order to present a philosophical account of a concrete problem connecting social, political and economic structures with their own self-representations. The core problematic will become instantiated in the legal figure of the ?person? and the social world-structure of ?empire?, associated with both Roman legality and comedy. It will be argued that Hegel?s socio-historical relevance today hinges on drawing a connection between Jameson?s periodization of Realism-Modernism-Postmodernism and Hegel?s aesthetic cultural categories of Epic-Tragedy-Comedy, and not Greece-Rome- Christianity. On this basis, the Phenomenology of Spirit stands as Hegel?s own ?cognitive map?, for which comedy designates a problematic extreme of a social regime of representation commensurate with the contemporary cultural logic of late and imperial capitalism.

Flotsam: A Theory of Waste in the Anthropocene

Abstract: In this article, I propose the concept of flotsam –waste washed-up or discarded in water –as a means of making sense of the pollution of the Anthropocene. Using examples taken from science fiction, notably that of J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drought , I suggest that flotsam (and jetsam) embody a capitalist logic in the Anthropocene in which potentially any being, human or non-human, and any thing, can become waste in a capitalist economy built on calculations of use-value, in what Marx called the “metabolic interaction” between nature and human.

The Reconstruction of Capital Logic in the E-Commerce Era and Its Market Power

The Reconstruction of Capital Logic in the E-Commerce Era and Its Market Power

ALGORITHMS, AESTHETICS AND THE CHANGING NATURE OF CULTURAL CONSUMPTION ONLINE

This paper examines the development of digital subcultures and microtrends in a social media landscape increasingly driven by algorithms. We explore the increasing proliferation of subcultures defined by aesthetic categories which we refer to as “microtrends. In this paper we draw from a combined mixed-methods exploration– a visual discourse analysis taken in conjunction with critical technoculture analysis (CDTA) – of content shared to the popular hashtag #aesthetic across three different algorithmically driven social media platforms: TikTok, Instagram and Youtube. We aim to extend scholarship on digital subculture formation by examining the intersection of identity formation, algorithmic capitalism and user practices surrounding microtrends through the lens of user engagement and self identity guided by three central questions: (1) What tactics and practices constitute user participation in microtrends? (2) How does user engagement with microtrends function as an act of relational self expression? (3) What are user discourses surrounding microtrend participation? Three novel user practices are identified - aesthetic consistency, aesthetic anxiety, and aesthetic creation- which when taken together comprise of a process that we term “self-discretization” wherein users “do the work” of abstracting and fragmenting their identities for the sake of attaining visibility within a datafied digital environment. Ultimately this paper argues that in an increasingly algorithmic cultural landscape users begin to internalize not just the messaging, but also the logics of algorithmic capitalism and regimes of datafication.

BEHOLD THE METAVERSE: FACEBOOK’S META REVOLUTION AND THE CIRCULATION OF ELITE DISCOURSE

Despite pushback from regulatory and non-governmental entities, Meta’s control over the public narrative remains consistent. Using a method of corpus analysis, this paper investigated the company’s sociotechnical imaginary as it circulates in media artifacts (n=428) responding to Zuckerberg’s 2021 Metaverse announcement. Analysis of how these artifacts respond to issues related to identity, privacy, security, and connectivity revealed that the majority amplify Meta’s corporate messaging, empowering its elite discourse and solidifying its social power. While certain artifacts attempt to confront the prevailing narrative related to privacy, such discourse is often ineffectively rooted in cyber-libertarian ideology. In order to more effectively challenge Meta’s social power, future critical discourse should be 1) more holistically deployed and 2) cognizant of the logics of surveillance capitalism and user exploitation. Ultimately, this paper considers the rhetorical strategies and functions deployed in the circulation of elite discourse, while also acknowledging the dynamism of sociotechnical imaginaries.

Chiny w Hollywood. Wpływ wzrostu chińskiego rynku kinowego na treść współczesnych filmów hollywoodzkich

In this article I analyse the ways in which contemporary American movies are altered due to the growing influence of the emerging entertainment media market in China. For the first time in history, 2020 saw Chinese box office overtake its American counterpart in terms of yearly income. This milestone illustrates how significant the Chinese market has become. The At the same time, being an authoritarian regime, the PRC has a robust, refined and strict system of censorship at its disposal. In order for a foreign film to be admitted into the Chinese cinemas, it has to pass domestic censorship. In some decades, particularly in the 1970s, American movies were able to promote values which were not adhering to the mainstream, or were even a platform for criticism of the domestic establishment. Currently, the US film industry is predominantly driven by capitalist logic — box office appears to be the main factor dictating the content (and outlook) of fiction films. This model is exploited by China through imposition of numerous restrictions and regulations. In my analysis I show how “forbidden” topics, plots or even small details become altered in order to satisfy the regulations introduced by the Chinese government.

Interpreting the Temporal Ideas in Das Kapital and Their Contemporary Implications

In contemporary society, technological advancements have continuously enhanced social productivity. However, the progress of capital logic and the forceful competition mechanisms have imposed a severe sense of time urgency on individuals. Simultaneously, within limited leisure time, people find themselves ensnared in the consumption trap constructed by capital. Time has gradually lost its orderly rhythm and narrative tension, atomizing into scattered points without any inherent support. Once connected to nature and human essence, time has now undergone a complete rupture from these factors under the reshaping influence of capital, becoming the chain that firmly locks workers within the framework of capital production. Drawing on the rational aspects of both old materialist and idealist perspectives on time, Marx revolutionarily linked time to practice and material production activities, bringing about a transformative shift in temporal thinking. In Das Kapital utilizing time as a crucial key, he exposes the true nature of the bourgeoisie and calls upon the proletariat to embrace class consciousness, undertake their historical mission, and strive for a communist society where free time universally prevails. A thorough examination of Marx’s temporal ideas in Das Kapital and their integration with contemporary realities can provide valuable guidance for overcoming the temporal challenges faced by modern society.

The simultaneous atomisation and massification of neoliberal reason


 Neoliberal reason is often defended for its supposed radical individualism. While critics of neoliberalism are right to problematise the atomising effects of this sort of individualism, an immanent critique of neoliberalism helps us to see that this atomisation does not necessarily lead to the development of individuality. That is, I will suggest that neoliberal individualism does not make room for individuality at all. I will focus on the neoliberal tendency to constrain human activity to the ends of the firm and argue that because of this, neoliberal reason cannot create the conditions for subjects to act on their potentiality. Rather than allowing for individuality, I will suggest that the neoliberal proliferation of the logic of the firm has an effect that is instead massifying. Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of capitalism in their chapter on the culture industry helps us to understand and critique capitalist massification by offering the notion of pseudoindividuation. I will argue that the massification of people occurs when they are subjected to some end outside themselves, such as participation in the maximisation of capital. When we turn to a discussion on neoliberal reason, drawing on Foucault and Brown, we are interested in how a kind of capitalist logic comes to dominate every aspect of our lives. While the concepts seem to be at odds with one another, I will read Foucault and Brown to suggest that neoliberalism is both atomising and massifying. That is, the neoliberal goal of maximising capital puts subjects in competition with one another while simultaneously subjecting them all to the same end outside of themselves. Yet, capital maximisation is not a substantive end in itself, since capital is, by definition, only a means to some other end. Neoliberal reason thus leaves subjects in a state of discontent that is brought about by the constant striving toward a goal which can never be met – more capital can always be had. Capital, by definition, cannot be understood as an end, but can only be understood as a means. That is, the neoliberal subject is not only socially alienated (atomised) but is also constrained in the potentiality for participating its own ends, and thus has no real opportunities for individuality.

Invisible Extinction: Fragility and the Extinction of the Self in Neoliberal Societies

Understanding capitalism as a system that inherently triggers extinction, this article portrays how the self and its character have been modified within neoliberalism to a point in which it has lost its subjectivity and it is bound to the laws and logic of capitalism. By looking at necropolitics and psychopolitics from a critical neo-Marxist lens, this article puts external biopolitics at stake while connecting them with different ways capitalism has to alienate subjects that are victims and, at the same time, vassals of this extinctive ideology. In addition, this theoretical framework will be analysed in a more tangible way by close-reading some sections of Black Mirror’s episode “Nosedive” as an example of a dystopia that is not that far away from our reality, where value and morality depend on the superficial image and extreme individuality of the subjects that belong to and perpetuate the ideology and dynamics of internal control, extinguishing their own existence as subjects. Finally, this article interrogates present times attempting to understand whether we are living in the Necrocene, the age of extinction due to capitalist logic, and whether this extinction of the self and its subjectivity might be symptoms of it.

Hybridity and the Unifying Space of Painting: Larry Abramson in Conversation with Theolonius Marx

Abstract While the drive toward homogeneous and pure visual languages was at the foundation of early twentieth-century utopian modernist art systems, the Dadaist and Surrealist reaction to this utopianism took the form of extreme and often violent hybridity. Marcel Duchamp's 1913 “readymade” of a bicycle wheel placed atop a kitchen stool is a paradigmatic manifestation of the linguistic hybridity characteristic of post-utopian twentieth-century art. In the 1920s Francis Picabia made paintings constructed of separate and discrete layers of images, which, when viewed together, produced an unsettling visual “monster.” Picabia's practice of superimposition was a significant forerunner of prevailing contemporary practices in postmodern painting. In his essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” philosopher Fredric Jameson (1991) identifies pastiche as one of the main characteristics of cultural production in the age of postmodernism. Pastiche is defined as a work of art consisting of motifs borrowed from one or more sources, an incongruous hodgepodge of materials, forms, and images. In this age of pastiche, what are the options open to artists—to endlessly quote, imitate, or parody existing images and styles, or to construct a new and significant system of meaning? To discuss the centrality of the principle of hybridity in postmodern art—and in my own artistic practice of the past fifty years—I summoned Theolonius Marx, a fiction of my imagination who helped me handle the dilemmas of conceptual art in the 1970s. In this “conversation,” Theolonius and I ponder how hybridity has placed a challenge to utopian modernist concepts, and what the conditions are for it to thrive today as a relevant and sustainable medium.