Logic Of Late Capitalism Research Articles

Paths of Erasure and Trails of Resistance in aNeo‐Settler‐ColonialCity

AbstractUrban displacement is receiving growing visibility within urban studies. However, most literature centres on the logic of late capitalism and tends to neglect colonial history and local resistance to displacement. This paper takes an alternative path: it relates (a) the history of colonialism and ethnic cleansing of the city of Jaffa with (b) the present‐day gentrification and displacement caused by neoliberal urbanism. To unpack this entanglement, the article focuses on political city walking tours led by Internally Displaced Palestinians in Jaffa, alongside a broader repertoire of urban subaltern tactics to reclaim it—ranging from community meetings to more overtly politicised acts of protest and initiatives to disrupt gentrification. The article therefore advances debates on urban displacement and urban citizenship mobilisation through the lens of post‐colonial theories, and by adopting a participatory interdisciplinary approach—from a novel perspective that centres local knowledge, lived experiences, and grassroots activism.

Elliptical life in (post)crisis cinema from Spain

ABSTRACT This essay tracks the long-term effects of the global financial crash of 2008 in two films produced during the so-called postcrisis period in Spain (2014–). Borrowing Lauren Berlant’s term elliptical life, I examine Adán Aliaga and David Valero’s El arca de Noé (2014) and Polo Menárguez’s El plan (2019), which center on the disorientations facing recently fired security guards who draw up blueprints or make plans for alternative imaginaries in the context of ongoing crisis. Elliptical life, as a liminal space for nonsovereign subjects and an aesthetic form that deploys a loose filmic language, captures what Berlant calls “flailing” as characters express their desire for a surrogate reality free from the constraints of biopower. Through form and content alike, elliptical life embraces negativity as a strategy for chipping away at entrenched hegemonies, welcoming encounters with estrangement and/or incoherence. It sets its sights on transformational structures, privileging states of incompletion over endgame scenarios and revolutionary triumph. In the end, as both films work through the vicissitudes of elliptical life in contemporary Spain, they contemplate failure as a mode for interrogating aspirational notions of self-legitimation and control in a reality structured by the logic of late capitalism.

Working on and at Play

As media objects, video games are imbued with values held by their makers. This is done intentionally by serious games practitioners but also occurs independently of design goals. One of the more problematic manifestations of »values at play« is playbour, a putting-to-work of play that recalls Agamben's mourning the loss of »menuchah«, an inoperativity that is more than a means to prepare one for more work. But is there a way to rescue leisure from its subservience to labour? Or, if not, is there a way to make the work done through play operate against the logics of late capitalism? To make sense of the conversations around player, game, power, and labour, I articulate two concepts: visibility, or the degree to which a system can account for the actions of those operating within it, and perception, a measure of an actor's understanding of the methods through which a system understands their movements. Through several gameplay examples, I use these concepts to lay the foundation for suggesting that play is a force for critique, for laying bare a game's operational logics so that they may be subject to our scrutiny. To conclude, the concepts of glitch and queer failure are introduced to argue for a working on and at play that interrogates not only video game machines, but the larger machines of ideology that drive them.

Vapor Memory, or, memory in the ruins of history

This article explores vaporwave’s appropriation of the past and future to constitute a (non)-site for the displacement of the present. In doing so, vaporwave – an electronic music genre that samples sights and sounds from 1980s and 1990s popular culture – masquerades itself as a radical project that decentres the subject’s location within the linear matrix of time () and houses the potential to oppose the humanistic territorializations of late capitalism (; ). I argue that these arguments focus too closely on vaporwave’s style and aesthetic dimension without considering its maintenance of various structures of oppression and appropriation indicative of globalized capitalism. The result is a misattribution of transgressive potential to vaporwave that ignores its incredibly conservative undertones. To engage with vaporwave then demands a bifurcation of its outward, rhizomatic veneer and the codes, conventions and axiomatics that underwrite it. I make this argument by drawing upon Jean , , , ) scepticism of any accelerationist and technologist politics of subversion to mount effective sociopolitical change. Additionally, I make use of many feminist and critical race approaches to highlight the affinities between vaporwave’s appropriate style and the logics of late capitalism.

“My zines, so far, aren't as political as other works I've produced”: Communicative Capitalism Among Queer Feminist Zinesters

AbstractSelf-published zines have been celebrated by some feminist communication scholars for offering an emancipatory outlet for women and queer people. But under the logics of late capitalism, zines cannot reach truly transgressive potentials. This study situates zinester politics within a framework of communicative capitalism: the current era of command individuality and “woke” representational politics. I also historicize zines’ proliferation through punk, do-it-yourself (DIY), and White, feminist communities. Using critical discourse analysis as my analytical approach, I illustrate the interpellation of capitalist ideology in online questionnaires completed by 11 queer, White, feminist zinesters from Chicago. By harnessing a DIY production model, respondents said they resisted mass-mediated expectations of normative sexuality and gender identity, but zinesters also reflect and reify the systems they attempt to transcend.

Практики та режими бачення сучасного урбаністичного простору

The article is devoted to the cultural analysis of the influence of the theory of postfordism, which considers post-Fordist production with post-industrial technology as the basis of industrial reproduction at the global level and the reproduction of capitalist social relations after the crisis of the Fordist mode of production and consumption. The abstract social space of the city is studied, which is formed by abstraction of labor and fetishization of things at the level of practice and the formation of a visually geometric representation of space with sign power repressive in relation to reality. The basis of the concept of sociality as the basis of a unified theory of space was developed by the French philosopher and sociologist A. Lefebvre and further developed by American social geography and urban studies, in particular in the works of D. Harvey, E. Soggy, D. Gottdiener and others. The followers of Lefebvre (apart from those important are F. Jameson's influence) refer in particular to the interdisciplinary trend of post-Fordism, within which postmodernism is considered in connection with the post-Fordist regime of accumulation (a concept developed by the Marxist regulatory school). S. Lesch focuses on the cultural mode of signaling. Likewise, D. Hartmann considers the influence of postmodernism on the post-Fordist regime of capitalism. Paolo True and Pascal Gillen consider within the limits of post-Fordism the existence in modern conditions of the plural. V. Martyanov examines the links between post-Fordism and the post-industrial / information society conceptualized by D. Bell, E. Toffler, M. Castels and others. The article deals with the reconstruction of the theory of social space and post-Fordism and outlines the social transformations of the twentieth century. In essence, it was a search for confirmation that the accumulation mode produces and reproduces social space. Architecture and urban space have become an important structural link through which to consider this connection and justify the invariance of the basic mode of accumulation through the reproduction of abstract social space and vice versa. The analysis of the discourse around the urban abstract space associated with the identity of the bourgeois class and the need for the formation of a hierarchized homogeneous spatial texture of production is carried out. As well as post-Fordist globalization and post-industrialization, which led to a change in the function and structure of the city with the main role of the post-modernist regime of signification as the logic of late capitalism in the context of programmed consumption.

The Postmodern Gene: Does Post-Capitalism Mean Post-Postmodernism?

The article examines a problem besetting social theory and theory of culture: the problem of using postmodernism as a language for describing the 21st century. The author resorts to the umbrella term “post-postmodernism” to indicate the more complex theories that focus mainly on the analysis of the latest forms of capitalism rather than the concepts that other themselves as direct alternatives to postmodernism even though they ignore the link between postmodernism and capitalism. The author takes up the idea, first argued for by the American Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson, that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism and then uses Jameson’s approach in an attempt to retrace the continuity of new concepts of capitalism. The discussion begins with the theory of capitalist realism developed by leftist British thinker Mark Fisher. Fisher recognizes Jameson’s merits but takes exception to the term “postmodernism,” although the entire philosophical apparatus that Fisher uses is borrowed from Jameson’s work. The article then bridges the gap between capitalist realism and the latest left-wing theories such as accelerationism and post-capitalism. After tracing the close connection between the work of Mark Fisher and Nick Land, who worked together in the 1990’s at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) and the ideas of Nick Srnicek, the author asks why Srnicek and his colleagues are put off by Fredric Jameson’s postmodern theory. The answer is that postmodernism does not permit contemporary leftists to speculate about the future. However, as the author points out, Jameson’s ideas about postmodernism at the “genetic level” are implicit in Srnicek’s concept of post-capitalism, which makes Srnicek’s theory “post-postmodernist,” although as a negative variation (in contrast to Mark Fisher’s positive one).

Postfascism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Postfascism is very much a cultural phenomenon. And the conflicts of today occur less as class struggle than as cultural battles. Why is that? I propose to use Fredric Jameson’s classic text on postmodernism (as the cultural logic of late capitalism) as a framework for considering the new postfascist tendencies that have emerged during the last few years in the USA and Europe (Trump, Brexit, Alternative for Germany, Pegida, Le Pen, Wilders’s Party for Freedom, the Danish People’s Party etc). Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism supplies us with a ‘take’ with which we can start mapping these reactionary or postfascist phenomena and embed them in an analysis of changes in late capitalism.

M.-A. Hamelin’s composing and performing style in the context of postmodern aesthetics

M.-A. Hamelin’s composing and performing style in the context of postmodern aesthetics

Little Debbie, or the Logic of Late Capitalism: Consumerism, Whiteness, and Addiction in Mat Johnson's Pym

In Pym (2011), Mat Johnson focuses on the role of consumerism in producing and reproducing ideologies of race. His critique of an implicitly racialist postmodern consumerism has two main vehicles. One is an African American character's serial consumption of Little Debbie snack cakes. Whiteness, addiction to junk food, and the attempt at fulfillment through the passionate engagement with consumer culture come to be inextricably bound in the figure of Little Debbie. His other main vehicle is the "Dome of Light," a "bioDome" located in the Antarctica, which parodies the inner logic of American consumerism as a simulacrum. The owner of the "Dome of Light," Thomas Karvel, a popular, right-wing American artist, attains a sense of omnipotence as an artist and entrepreneur through the erasure of raced and gendered laboring bodies from his simulated world. Through the figure of Karvel, Johnson connects the relativism of late capitalist consumerist culture to the rejection of science and the erasure of the laboring body that centers contemporary American conservative ideology.

Visual Profiling as Biopolitics

This essay examines the crisis of American policing through a close reading and critique of the visual rhetoric that circulated in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s untimely death in Ferguson, Missouri. By drawing on recent work in visual and media criticism, Black Studies, and Foucault, we analyze and critique what we call “vernacular visuality” as a site in the unfolding politics of racial representation. Because practices of policing cannot be divided from visual culture and the politics of representation, we argue that the vernacular visuality of race can deepen our understanding of late capitalist policing because it illustrates how the racial logics of late capitalism operationalize it as a mode of biopolitical intervention on the racialized body.

The oblique art of shoes: popular culture, aesthetic pleasure, and the humanities

This article addresses popular culture and the humanities. It uses shoes as an object of analysis to interrogate the place and function of aesthetic pleasure in critical thinking and cultural practice in the age of globalization and the neoliberal university. Tracking contemporary articulations of the shoe as a popular cultural object, the discussion begins by recalibrating Judith Halberstam’s concept of the “queer art of failure” in terms of what I call an oblique art of shoes. The discussion also revisits Fredric Jameson’s footwear musings in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism to elucidate a missing link between aesthetics, affect, and materiality in the critique of popular culture. The article accordingly works with obliqueness in two ways. First, my approach is oblique in the sense that I address popular culture and the humanities indirectly via the aesthetics and materiality of the shoe. Second, like many popular objects, I find shoes themselves to have an oblique relationship with art and so-called high culture. My argument – developed in relation to examples from visual art, museum exhibitions, urban space, and advertising billboards – is that analyzing the oblique art of shoes can make newly visible the extent to which aesthetic pleasure can inform, and sometimes even constitute, critical practice.

Reimagining the Soviet Union in Contemporary Chinese Literature: Soviet Ji in Wang Meng’s In Remembrance of the Soviet Union and Feng Jicai’s Listening to Russia

An examination of Soviet nostalgia—nostalgia for the times when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had a close relationship with the Soviet Union, as it appears in contemporary discourses that reimagine the Soviet Union, is essential to understand the quotidian aspect and cultural history of the PRC in the 1950s, as well as cultural attitudes in contemporary China. Wang Meng’s In Remembrance of the Soviet Union (2007) and Feng Jicai’s Listening to Russia (2005) are characterized by nostalgia for the lost Soviet Union, which exerted a strong influence on the PRC during the 1950s. In contemporary China, where the market economy is the dominant mode of production, Wang and Feng’s Soviet nostalgia is a gesture of yearning for a type of historical temporality that has seemingly been lost. Their works express the desire to reclaim the historical past of the 1950s, which they portray as having been completely erased by the developmental logic of late-capitalism—the authentic cultural experiences in the 1950s, especially the everyday life along with the revolutionary ideals are rendered unreal within the post-revolutionary logic. The concept of Soviet “ji” (祭, “remembrance”) provides a theoretical framework through which to understand the way in which the phenomenon of Chinese nostalgia has the potential to shift contemporary social reality.

`Redundancy`, the Logic of Late Capitalism of their Social Life : The Case of the Homeless

본 논문은 노숙인의 사회적 삶을 후기자본주의적 맥락에서 재구성해보고, 그들에 대한 장치(dispositif)의 꾸준한 개입에도 불구하고 노숙인은 사라지기는커녕 정체되거나 더 늘어나는 역설을 감정사회학적으로 밝히는 데 목적을 둔다. 이를 위해 필자는 먼저 노숙인을 응시하는 사회적 시선을 감정적 분위기이라는 개념으로 전환하여 설명하고, 1990년대 중반 이전과 이후의 차이를 밝히면서 후자의 시기를 중심으로 분석하고자 했다. 둘째, 노숙인에 대한 사회적 시선이 공포감을 토대로 형성되었다는 점에서 후기자본주의체제에서 공포가 개인화되는 메커니즘을 푸코의 통치성 개념을 통해 이론화했다. 셋째, 공포를 개인에게 전가하는 방식으로 작동하는 후기자본주의 복지정책은 노숙인에게 자활과 자조를 목표로 설정하게 하고 이를 위한 핵심 자원으로 ?감정?을 끌어들인다. 그리고 감정자본을 중심으로 복지프로그램은 새롭게 재편되고 있음을 주장했다. 마지막으로 복지 장에서 노숙인은 새로운 게임에 들어서게 되는 데, 이때 감정자본은 이들이 자활에 성공하는 시민으로 거듭나느냐 아니면 계속 노숙인의 위치에 머무르게 되느냐를 결정하는 중요한 자원임을 밝히고자 했다. 이를 통해 필자는 노숙인은 사라지는 것이 아니라 감정의 위계에 따라 끊임없이 새로운 주체로 만들어지고 있다고 주장했다.

The Presence of Postmodernism in Contemporary American Literature

The year 2014 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Fredric Jameson’s seminal essays “Periodizing the 60s” and “Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” and the twenty-fifth anniversary of David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity. More generally, the works that form the cornerstones of our understanding of postmodernism and its periodization, including seminal works by Linda Hutcheon, Ihab Hassan, Andreas Huyssen, John Barth, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, are by now on average 30–40 years old. Most of these macrotheoretical models of postmodernism that continue to influence analyses of contemporary literature mainly base their insights on cultural artifacts dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. Given the changes American literature has undergone over the course of the past five decades or so, this begs the question: can the term postmodernism and its associated concepts and debates offer us a relevant set of tools for the analysis of recent literary production? What might we stand to gain from talking about postmodernism now? Or, to put this question more awkwardly (though fittingly, as will become clear, for this essay will deal with a range of awkward terms and temporal and logical propositions): what is the time of postmodernism’s presence? Already in 1993 Raymond Federman proclaimed the end of postmodernism in his book Critifiction, and since the 1990s discussions of postmodernism’s possible exhaustion and its aftermath have become increasingly frequent. Still, as Andrew Hoberek argues, citing Jeremy Green, in his introduction to the 2007 special issue of

The Pedagogy and Politics of Art in Postmodernity: Cognitive Mapping and The Bothersome Man

This essay inquires into the pedagogical and political dimensions of art in the contemporary moment. Specifically, it seeks to reanimate Fredric Jameson's notion of “cognitive mapping,” which he introduced as a response to the postmodern problem of representing the social totality. To that end, the essay begins by explicating the twin impulses of cognitive mapping. It, then, undertakes a sustained rhetorical analysis of Jens Lien's award-winning 2006 Norwegian film, The Bothersome Man, demonstrating how the film employs entropic satire to, at once, map and critique the cultural logic of late capitalism. The essay concludes by reflecting on the important contributions rhetorical scholars can make to a renewed interest in cognitive mapping.

Community as context: EastEnders, public service and neoliberal ideology

This article uses 21 in-depth interviews with viewers of the British soap opera EastEnders to investigate the extent to which it can be described, in particular through its handling of social issues, as a site of cultural citizenship and, via the concept of public service, of resistance to the current neoliberal hegemony. The article’s analysis of viewers’ talk confirms previous claims that EastEnders mobilises a nostalgic sense of community with which viewers identify, and goes on to argue that this is in fact a cultural expression of a social-democratic worldview which has lost its once-hegemonic position. Following a comparison of the British and the highly commercialised Spanish media ecosystems and their corresponding popular public spheres, the article concludes that a commitment to public service ideals contributes to sustaining spaces which, like EastEnders, can work as counter-hegemonic sites to the cultural logic of late capitalism.

Educação e competências para o SUS: é possível pensar alternativas à(s) lógica(s) do capitalismo tardio?

The transformations that have revolutionized the labor market in contemporary society make it necessary to think of new alternatives for training health care professionals, thereby establishing a new approach to the health problems of individuals and collectives. Based on these considerations, this paper sets out to discuss training in health--based on the concept of competence--with a focus on education for the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS), using attempts to analyze and propose an alternative to the system entrenched in the logic of late capitalism as a theoretical benchmark. It is thus a reflection on the subject, correlating theory and praxis, in constant and relentless movement of construction, deconstruction and (re)construction of propositions.

“Leisure” and “working time”: the disappearance of temporal frontiers

The passage from a working society, centred in an productive ethic, gives way to a consuming and hedonist society in which leisure time is consumed like a merchandise instrumentalized by the Culture Industry (Adorno). In this article we defend the thesis that the prominence of leisure over working time is possible because the former became a productive time by means of the new technologies, the Culture Industry and the consumerism. The analytical categories of both temporalities become even more undistinguishable in a economic and social system dominated by the uniformities of a time which is a sub-product of the merchandising. Making usage of the Frankfurt critic of the culture, the sociological concepts of liquid society (Bauman) and flexi-time (Sennet), this article analyses the invasion of leisure by working time which makes impossible the distinction between them as opposite categories and makes us considering both as part of the same productive logic of late capitalism.

Oh Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree: Coffee in Popular Music

Oh Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree: Coffee in Popular Music