We revisit the Marxist debate on the commodity form. By following the thought of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Slavoj Žižek, we attempt to understand the commodity form through the Kantian categories a priori. Sohn-Rethel explores the proposition that there can be no cognition independent of its historical and social conditions and puts forward the daring conclusion of an ontological unity between knowledge and commodity exchange. We suggest that Sohn-Rethel’s thought finds new relevance nowadays, under the prevalence (...) of a cognitive capitalism. We discuss the reformulation of relations of production and consumption under cognitive capitalism and show how knowledge-led immaterial and affective labour adds a higher value to the commodities into which it is embodied. Above all, the commodity form in cognitive capitalism becomes biopolitical. (shrink)

This article considers how state-mandated veiling and unveiling reinforce modern capitalism. State regulations regarding veiling incorporate the female body into the political economy of the commodity form. In addition to serving as an empty signifier to be filled with exchange value for the male observer, the veil operates as an ideological apparatus of the state. In showing through fieldwork conducted in Iran how the fault lines of political agency are inscribed into the veil, I argue that subverting its (...) commodity function radically relativises its meaning. Because the veil is an empty signifier lacking intrinsic content, its meaning must be determined contingently. By combining a critique of secular discrimination against veiling with a critique of state-mandated veiling, I show how European and Iranian societies incorporate the veil into the capitalist world-system and use it to suppress women’s agency. (shrink)

To this day, many theorists regard the commodity theory and the credit theory as the two main rival accounts of the nature of money. Yet cryptocurrency has revolutionized the institution of money in ways that most commodity and credit theorists could hardly have anticipated. Given that cryptocurrency is a new form of money, the question arises whether the commodity and credit theories can adequately account for it. I argue that they cannot. I first offer an interpretation (...) of the commodity and credit theories according to which these theories uphold differing claims about the origin of money, the ontology of money, and the function of money. I then argue that thus understood, neither theory can accommodate cryptocurrency. Finally, I develop a novel hybrid hylomorphic account of money which draws on aspects of both the commodity and credit theories, and I argue that this hybrid account can accommodate cryptocurrency. (shrink)

In the United States today, the human body defines a lucrative site of reusable parts, ranging from whole organs to minuscule and even microscopic tissues. Although the medical practices that enable the transfer of parts from one body to another most certainly relieve suffering and extend lives, they have also irrevocably altered perceptions of the cultural values assigned to the body. Organ transfer is rich terrain to investigate—especially in the American context, where sophisticated technological interventions have significantly shaped understandings of (...) health and well-being, suffering, and death. In _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_, Lesley Sharp probes the ideological assumptions underlying the transfer of body parts, the social significance of donors' deaths, and the medico-scientific desires surrounding complex forms of body repair. Sharp also considers the experimental realm, in which nonhuman species and artificial devices present further opportunities for recovery and for controversy. A compelling scientific investigation and social critique, _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_ explores the pervasive, and at times pernicious, practices shaping American biomedicine in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

In the United States today, the human body defines a lucrative site of reusable parts, ranging from whole organs to minuscule and even microscopic tissues. Although the medical practices that enable the transfer of parts from one body to another most certainly relieve suffering and extend lives, they have also irrevocably altered perceptions of the cultural values assigned to the body. Organ transfer is rich terrain to investigate—especially in the American context, where sophisticated technological interventions have significantly shaped understandings of (...) health and well-being, suffering, and death. In _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_, Lesley Sharp probes the ideological assumptions underlying the transfer of body parts, the social significance of donors' deaths, and the medico-scientific desires surrounding complex forms of body repair. Sharp also considers the experimental realm, in which nonhuman species and artificial devices present further opportunities for recovery and for controversy. A compelling scientific investigation and social critique, _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_ explores the pervasive, and at times pernicious, practices shaping American biomedicine in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This article draws on a five-year, multi-sited transnational research project on the global traffic in human organs, tissues, and body parts from the living as well as from the dead as a misrecognized form of human sacrifice. Capitalist expansion and the spread of advanced medical and surgical techniques and developments in biotechnology have incited new tastes and traffic in the skin, bones, blood, organs, tissues, marrow and reproductive and genetic marginalized other. Examples drawn from recent ethnographic research in Israel, (...) the Palestinian Authority and Turkey serve to cast light on the dark side of organs harvesting and transplantation. The article focuses on the dangers of the `fetishized kidney' for both sellers and buyers, for whom this new commodity has become an organ of opportunity and an organ of last resort. The bodily sacrifice is disguised as a donation, rendered invisible by its anonymity, and hidden under the medical rhetoric of `life saving' and `gift giving'. It suggests that the ultimate fetish as recognized long ago by Ivan Illich is the idea of `life' as object of manipulation. (shrink)

This essay explores an increasingly popular genre of organized group travel in white mainline and emerging evangelical US Christianity I call “journeys to the margins”: trips centered on learning from marginalized persons for the traveler’s ethical formation. Drawing on ethnographic research with one case study, “Come and See Tours” to Israel/palestine, I interrogate how the commodified form of these trips shape possibilities for ethical subjectivation. First, I demonstrate ways in which journeys to the margins market ethical transformation to American (...) Christian consumers in the form of packaged moral narratives. Second, I focus on the paradoxical nature of journeys to the margins as simultaneously packaged commodities and ethical encounters. Finally, I use reformulations of freedom emerging from the anthropology of ethics to argue that possibilities for ethical subjectivation occur in moments when tour ideals come into tension with lived realities. (shrink)

The critical concept of commodity fetishism and its developed forms of money and capital fetishism ground the contemporary shape of social life under the rule of capital. This chapter offers a novel interpretation based on Marx’s Capital, elucidating the oft-overlooked interconnection of the fetishism triptych that accounts for domination, as well as the normalisation of exploitation as experienced in capitalist life. In commodity fetishism, a market-based pseudo-social ‘thing-hood’ preponderates over commodity owners and producers, concealing the double inversion (...) that constitutes the ‘world of commodities’. Money’s fetish form makes it appear as the ‘sovereign’ of the commodity world, possessing the exclusive social power to establish the value hierarchy of all persons and objects relativised in regard to it. The universal condition of monetisation of the life process in bourgeois society necessitates the adoption of the competition principle, leading to the generalised formation of a commodity self, shaped by competitive individualism. The social separation of the great mass of commodity producers from the means of production and the consequent need to sell themselves as commodities in the form of wage labour constitutes the social basis of capital fetishism, through which the process of capital ‘valorisation’ is enfolded within the process of use value production, disappearing into its socio-material character and thus naturalised. Capital fetishism dissimulates the production of surplus value by social labour and constructs the harmonised appearance of an equitable contribution of ‘factors of production’ in the sharing of the surplus product, thereby obscuring distributional struggles over it. Such antagonisms over surplus undergird the logic of neoliberal capitalism’s two-pronged strategy, pursuing ‘deregulation of labour relations’ on the one hand and dismantling the welfare state on the other. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 9, Page 1302-1328, November 2022. Robinson Crusoe is a mythic character who lives not only in the popular imaginary but through the history of political and social thought. Defoe’s protagonist lives marooned on his island, isolated and apart from society. The narrative is a perfect naturalisation of the ‘bourgeois’ world, dependent on an ontology of the self-sufficient individual. This article analyses this lineage in the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. Later, (...) Hegel used the novel to illustrate his dialectic of mastery/servitude. Challenging the atomism of the state of nature, Hegel’s theory of recognition gives an account of positive freedom, where the individual is formed in and through social interdependence. This sociality is continued by Marx, who satirises Defoe's novel in his value-form critique of political economy. The value-form provides insight into Robinson's island labour and Marx's difference with Locke's labour theory of value. For Marx, the myth of ‘natural man’ hides the domination of capitalist development and Robinson Crusoe reflects the internalisation of the abstract rationality of commodity society. However, Marx's immanent critique of the novel points to a radical idea of social life and freedom. (shrink)

Storage and Commodity Markets is primarily a work of economic theory, concerned with how the capability to store a surplus affects the prices and production of commodities. Its focus on the behaviour, over time, of aggregate stockpiles provides insights into such questions as how much a country should store out of its current supply of food considering the uncertainty in future harvests. Related topics covered include whether storage or international trade is a more effective buffer and whether stockpiles are (...) more useful in raw or processed form. Several chapters are devoted to analysing such government programmes as price bands, buffer stocks, and strategic reserves. This material is in the domain of applied welfare analysis with public finance. Because the theory presented is sufficiently general, it should be of interest to macroeconomists studying aggregate inventories or savings and to those in operations research studying inventory and pricing policies of large firms. (shrink)

In recent years, the public sphere, which represents a realm in civil society where people can debate and discuss a range of issues and common concerns important to them, has become a key area for research in the humanities and social sciences. Arguably, however, Marxist theory has yet to advance a theoretical account of the most abstract and simple ideological properties of the capitalist public sphere as these appear under universal commodity relationships. The paper therefore tentatively seeks to develop (...) such an account. Specifically, the paper theoretically derives a peculiar public sphere under capitalism, which is mediated between at least two commodity owners who also possess distinctive personalities driven by desires to own commodities. The paper then explains in more detail how the social form of this public sphere develops through other elements of commodity relations and their contradictions. (shrink)

The Paper is dedicated to philosophical fundamentals of the Marx’s theory of product value. The author proves that in the Marx’s theory the value of the product of labour and, correspondently, of the commodity is defined inaccurately. He thinks that the concept of labour, presented in the economic theory of K. Marx, undeservedly ignores the role of intellectual activity of an individual in production of material goods. Marx considered mental activity as integral part of physical labour. This Marx’s viewpoint (...) takes in account only the controlling mental activity of an individual in the process of labour. The author thinks that such form of labour existed only in conditions of primitive manufacture, when a worker himself invented the product of labour and then created it with the help of materialactivity. In the period of industrial production of material goods, starting from the late 18th century, the intellectual labour separated from the physical labour and by its status became a sufficient independent stage of public production process. In this connection it is necessary to reconsider a number of such important concepts of philosophical fundamentals of economics as labour, value and wealth. (shrink)

The Paper is dedicated to philosophical fundamentals of the Marx’s theory of product value. The author proves that in the Marx’s theory the value of the product of labour and, correspondently, of the commodity is defined inaccurately. He thinks that the concept of labour, presented in the economic theory of K. Marx, undeservedly ignores the role of intellectual activity of an individual in production of material goods. Marx considered mental activity as integral part of physical labour. This Marx’s viewpoint (...) takes in account only the controlling mental activity of an individual in the process of labour. The author thinks that such form of labour existed only in conditions of primitive manufacture, when a worker himself invented the product of labour and then created it with the help of materialactivity. In the period of industrial production of material goods, starting from the late 18th century, the intellectual labour separated from the physical labour and by its status became a sufficient independent stage of public production process. In this connection it is necessary to reconsider a number of such important concepts of philosophical fundamentals of economics as labour, value and wealth. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to present possible consequences caused by the development of commodity market financialization understood by the influence of financial investor’s speculation. Also the task of elaboration is to outline the existence of financial factors in the price creation process of commodities. The existing impact of financialization on the volatility of commodity prices significantly modifies the market. The results of the research and analyzes carried out indicate a similarity in the behavior of the markets (...) of commodities. The situation results from the redistribution of the risk of financial investors who having a few goods in the investment portfolio, next to large transaction volumes affect the unification of price trends. Price shaping factors are being transformed. The decrease importance of supply or consumption in the context of the commodities market changes its form. The growing influence of investors who create numerous speculations transforms the market. Trade in futures contracts affects the level of commodities prices. (shrink)

The defetishization thesis claims alternative markets can lead to a more honest, less mystified relationship with food production and, in turn, strengthen civil society. Drawing from Marxian political economic and environmental sociological theory, I make three general claims: capitalism is inherently ecologically and socially harmful; “ethical” commodities derived from alternative markets cannot fundamentally counteract the pervasiveness and scale of ; and, because of and, ethical consumerism does not defetishize the commodity form, but acts as a new layer of (...) commodity fetishism that masks the harms of capitalism by convincing society that the harms of capitalism can be rehabilitated with the commodity form itself. Prescriptively, I argue traditional, large-scale political tactics would be needed for “defetishization” to take place. (shrink)

Should media communication be left to the market, or rather (partly) removed from the market? This question is discussed by reconstructing an often-found ‘standard argument’ in the literature on the subject. This standard argument states that some form of market-independent media provision is required since markets will fail to deliver a specific kind of high-quality content conducive to the democratic process. This paper argues that the standard argument is defective in several respects. By doing so, it reevaluates the way (...) we think about the contribution of the media towards democracy and the role that the market is to play in this respect. First, the paper argues that the standard argument's normative premise should not be couched in a welfarist theory but in terms of the capabilities that the media should strive to realise. Second, it sets the normative expectations of the media's contribution towards the public sphere and democracy at too high a level. Third, the standard argument's diagnosis of the market's failure incorrectly assumes that the market can never generate the demand for high-quality content. An alternative, more circumscribed claim about the market's failure is presented, resting on two more contingent types of demand failure. (shrink)

Futures contracts in agricultural commodities are an agreement to buy or sell a predetermined amount of agricultural commodities (such as wheat, corn, cotton, soybeans, live pork, live cattle, cocoa, etc.) at a specific price depending on the price on a specific date in the future. Futures contracts in agricultural commodities are carried out under “commodity futures contracts” on the futures exchange. These contracts are executed in two ways in terms of the delivery of the contract subject; physical delivery and (...) cash settlement. In the physical delivery, the underlying asset is physically received at the end of maturity. In our country, physical delivery method is used in futures contracts made on commodities. In the second contract method that results in cash settlement, there is no physical delivery of the underlying asset at the end of maturity. The transaction takes place over the settlement price at the end of maturity. Futures contracts in agricultural commodities can be analyzed in two categories in terms of Islamic law. First, within the scope of sales where both the goods and the price are on credit; the second is a combined contract that includes a promise to sell and a contract of sale when due. It is more convenient to analyze in the former because the agricultural commodities in the warehouse are kept ready to be delivered when due and the commodities price is also delivered on time. In this category, it resembles the sale of a credit on credit, which is prohibited in Islamic law. We can see that there are five parties within the exchange organization regarding the futures contracts in agricultural commodities; futures and options exchange, clearing house, brokerage houses, market participants, supervisory institutions. When the transactions of the related parties are examined in terms of legal capacity and power of representation; it is observed that brokerage houses transacting on behalf of sellers and customers operate by proxy. On the other hand, the Exchange, the Clearinghouse (Takasbank) and the custody warehouse within the scope of the exchange system; carries out transactions on behalf of the parties both as a proxy and a guarantor. Therefore, this futures transaction has the nature of containing more than one contract. When analyzed in terms of the establishment of the contract; if there are agricultural commodities that are considered as legitimate property of the Islamic law (mütekavvim), there is no objection regarding the parties and the offer-acceptance. In addition the delivery time of the commodity subject to the contract must be equal to the amount sold and the amount in the warehouse, which is guaranteed to be in the warehouse. In terms of invalid condition, one-sided benefit causing conflict for the parties contains something prohibited by the legal order. It is seen that it does not contain conditions contrary to the content of the contract and established practices. However, except for the condition that the collateral is retained with interest income in direct proportion to the period of stay in the Clearinghouse (Takasbank), in order to obtain the highest return. In terms of enforcement conditions, after the approval of the buyer and seller, transactions are carried out within the exchange system without asking for the right and approval of another person. Therefore, this contract can be considered as a running contract. In terms of the bindingness of this contract; at first glance, it can be seen as a mutual promise and non-obligatory promise based on the fact that the commodity and its price are not cash. But when the subject is examined in depth, it turns out to be a different situation. Because both parties are under mutual obligation by paying the guarantee stipulated by the Exchange, one party is obliged to deliver the commodity on time and the other party to deliver the price. In addition, the contract does not allow the parties to imagine the right. So, this contract can be considered as an obligatory contract. However, based on the current functioning futures contracts in agricultural commodities as a whole, it is considered unappropriate to Islamic law. In this study, first, the nature of futures contracts in agricultural commodities that are not deemed suitable for Islamic law in its current form are determined. Then, an analysis from the point of view of Islamic law was made and some offers were made for a model that was reconfigurated according to Islamic law. (shrink)

A venture in a less traversed terrain of Indian scholarship, this article looks at the transformation in the value regimes that go into the making of colours in the Indian milieu. At one level, this study traces the sacredness imbued in colours and at another level the article delves into the genealogy that gives rise to a complex where colour, colonial investment in the economy of colours, values and experiential dynamics enshrined in the imageries and practices associated with colours all (...) come together. With these entanglements, the idea is to engage with the social fabrics and the politics of colours in the Indian milieu. In this rendering, the distinction between values and forms collapses giving us in turn a field of aesthetic experience. Mobilizing a wide range of registers, this story is narrated with key rubrics, such as, ambiguous location of colour in the discourse on visuality, social and cultural life of colours and the manner in which Western science and modernity has influenced the values pertaining to colours. However, the core anxiety is parked on the relation between colour, aesthetic experience and the question of value. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the literature on Marx’s systematic-dialectical method through a critical reading and discussion of the significance and presentational ‘architecture’ of the section on commodity fetishism in the dialectical sequence of form-determinations inCapital. In order to undertake this task, the paper firstly explores the content and expositional structure of the first three sections of Chapter 1 ofCapital. This sets the stage for a methodologically-minded close examination of Marx’s presentation of the fetish character of the (...) commodity, which shows that there is a precise systematic sequence which gives unity to the flow of his argument within the section on ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret’. The conclusion is that only through a proper grasp of the dialectical method can the full systematic significance and implications of Marx’s account of commodity fetishism be uncovered. (shrink)

This article explores the ways in which data centre operators are currently reconfiguring the systems of energy and heat supply in European capitals, replacing conventional forms of heating with data-driven heat production, and becoming important energy suppliers. Taking as an empirical object the heat generated from server halls, the article traces the expanding phenomenon of ‘waste heat recycling’ and charts the ways in which data centre operators in Stockholm and Paris direct waste heat through metropolitan district heating systems and urban (...) homes, and valorise it. Drawing on new materialisms, infrastructure studies and classical theory of production and destruction of value in capitalism, the article outlines two modes in which this process happens, namely infrastructural convergence and decentralisation of the data centre. These modes arguably help data centre operators convert big data from a source of value online into a raw material that needs to flow in the network irrespective of meaning. In this conversion process, the article argues, a new commodity is in a process of formation, that of computation traffic. Altogether data-driven heat production is suggested to raise the importance of certain data processing nodes in Northern Europe, simultaneously intervening in the global politics of access, while neutralising external criticism towards big data by making urban life literally dependent on power from data streams. (shrink)

In recent years regenerative agriculture has attracted growing attention as a means to improve soil health and farmer livelihoods while slowing climate change. With this attention has come increased policy support as well as the launch of private sector programs that promote regenerative agriculture as a form of carbon farming. In the United States many of these programs recruit primarily in regions where large-scale commodity production prevails, such as the Great Plains. There, a decades-old regenerative agriculture movement is (...) growing rapidly, but not due to the incentives offered by companies’ carbon programs. On the contrary, farmers are adopting regenerative practices to cut their dependence on corporate agrochemical inputs and expertise, and to thereby achieve technology sovereignty. These practice changes often strain farmers’ existing social relationships while drawing them into new and previously neglected ones, including the more-than-human relations necessary for building soil health. These new relationships and the knowledge they generate may in turn lead farmers to think differently about their own autonomy. These findings provide insight into farmers’ skepticism of private sector carbon farming programs, and highlight the value of attention to the multiple types of relationship change that accompany and facilitate regenerative transitions. (shrink)

A phenomenological account of the forms of life characteristic of late capitalism--including television, celebrity culture, and personal electronics--culminating in an ontology of the gadget-commodity that brings together Marxist theories of commodity fetishism and ideology with Heidegger's attempt to think truth as unconcealment.

Carver's interpretation of Marx's value theory (Terrell Carver, ?Marx's Commodity Fetishism?, Inquiry, Vol. 18 [1975]) is accepted, but his rejection of it criticized by explicating the reasons Marx gives for his theory after his faulty analysis of exchange-value at the very beginning of Capital. The central concept of abstract labour is shown to relate commodity exchange to other forms of distribution; by being compared to these the function of commodity exchange is recognized as the attachment of an (...) amount of abstract labour to a commodity, and exchange-value as that which determines that amount What it means to say value is thought to inhere in commodities is explicated. (shrink)

With the aim of understanding current problematizations of embryonic stem cell patenting this article rehearses the history of social entitlements related to reproductive material derived from women seeking care in institutions for reproductive health in Denmark. Our interest lies in the emergence of commercial exchange of material derived from embryos. Such exchange is characterized by contestation of the status of the embryo: is it a person or a commodity? To understand the modus operandi of the exchanges, we first explore (...) how the concepts of personhood and morality, of commodity and ownership tend to be related in the ideal type of capitalist exchange. Historical context then helps us understand the contingency of exchange systems. Historically Danish women have had much less influence on the dissemination of material derived from them than they do today. However, today their entitlements have also found their limits, in particular with respect to commercial transactions. We claim that, ironically, material derived from institutionally mediated reproduction gains unprecedented personhood from confrontation with a capitalist exchange form which potentially designates it as a mere commodity. (shrink)

Based on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts written by and for slavers, this article investigates the provisioning of the French Middle Passage. As the transatlantic trade in African captives developed, foodstuffs for the feeding of both Europeans and Africans figured prominently in a specifically Atlantic system of commodity exchanges. The trade in foodstuffs depended most heavily on African subsistence systems encountered along the coasts of West Africa, but a surprising quantity of French and other European foodstuffs were embarked specifically for (...) the Middle Passage, revealing, I argue, the precariousness of conditions of trade and of European slaving factories. As a key element of Atlantic political economy, the study of food and its transatlantic provisioning networks sheds light not only on the governance and regulation of the networks themselves, but also on the ability of early modern states to establish and maintain metropolitan control, on the growth of local, colonial forms of autonomy and authority, and on the complex systems of ‘national’ and colonial interdependence that lay behind the expansion of every Atlantic colony. I conclude that this study of provisioning demonstrates that however fractured and differentiated, imperial power was an irrefutable aspect of colonial continuity. (shrink)

This article examines the different approaches to the relation between law, state and economy in the works of Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt and Evgeny Pashukanis. It begins with Kelsen’s depiction of law as a dynamic and ‘self-regulating’ system of norms, founded on his rejection of ‘dualist’ separations of state and law, before turning to Schmitt and Pashukanis’s respective critiques. For all their differences, both agree Kelsen ignores the historical basis of the law – for Schmitt, the sovereign power of ‘the (...) political’, for Pashukanis, the social relations of commodity exchange. The article responds to these criticisms in a most un-Kelsenian manner, drawing upon historical sociological literature on early modern state formation to cast doubt on both Schmitt and Pashukanis’s historical accounts. It argues that the forms of political power and commodity exchange upon which Schmitt and Pashukanis’s theories rely were historically specific possibilities opened up by the same process of generalisation and depersonalisation of power relations that allowed for an autonomous ‘public’ system of legal norms. Thus, rather than the fixed causal ground for the development of modern law, ‘the political’ and exchange between equals exist in a relation of ‘difference-in-unity’ with the law. The article concludes that Kelsen’s notion of the Grundnorm is best explained as an attempt to capture the new possibilities and responsibilities opened up a normative system whose ultimate justification now lies only within itself. (shrink)

This paper examines two practices — the Roman Catholic Practice of Eucharist and the game Dungeons and Dragons — to show how social critique can be mounted from within a practice. It begins by relating Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of tradition to his earlier analysis of ideology and to the notion of ideology in general. The paper then tackles two dominant forms of ideology — Commodity Fetishism and Scientism — and shows how both Eucharist and Dungeons and Dragons promote critical (...) thinking to resist those ideologies. In the process, it denies the Althusserian-Foucauldian analysis of ideology as mere materiality and defends a conception of ideology as material and ideal. (shrink)

In this interview, Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre introduce their book Enrichment and core concepts for the analysis of new developments in contemporary capitalism. The study focuses the analysis of the enrichment economy, which is grasped as a new form to explore and exploit ‘the past’ as a source for capitalist profits. The interview presents forms of valuation, which are more general principles of how value and prices can be ascribed to goods. The approach of Boltanski and Esquerre assumes (...) an organized plurality of such forms of valuation. Also, the two sociologists stress the importance of discourses of valuation, which bring these forms of valuation into operation. As the interview makes evident, one major aim is to present a new perspective on the relationship between values, prices, and practices how prices are legitimatized or criticized on the basis of discourses of valuation. The interview situates Enrichment in the context of other contemporary sociological works, which focus on the economic core issue of value and valuation. The book can also be recognized as a proposal to reconcile structuralism and pragmatism in sociology. At the end of the interview, the more recent outcomes of the continuing collaborative work of Boltanski and Esquerre after Enrichment are discussed. (shrink)

Moving from the contemporary transformations of labor as form of production, this dissertation tries to question the role that 'knowledge' has, both as element of capitalist production and as its subverting tool. By setting a parallelism between Capital's mechanism and the workings of the Imagination, this study tracks the genealogy of 'Immaterial labor', main figure of this transformation, back to Marx's notion of phantasmagoria and to the reading that Walter Benjamin gave of it . It develops a path still (...) latent in Benjamin's work but already by him indicated---whose importance has been neglected by the critical work of the last twenty years---, of a positive role of the image within the event of phantasmagoria. Such positive role of the image is detected by this study as knowledge that occurs, in contemporaneity, mainly through images. It is so defined a first feature of this knowledge, common to both capital and imagination. By inserting itself within the contemporary attention to the productive aspect of Imagination and its influence on economy ; this study conjugates this 'knowledge in images'--- with the 'creative, materialistic' role of the image in contemporary theories of knowledge . A powerful figure comes out of this reflection: sense , which this study proposes as materialist Concept and opposes to the aconceptual relations established by capital. Product of phantasmagoria and opening to poetics, sense is the concept able to function as bridge to the possibility of a 'practical knowledge'. With these elements, this study proposes to add to the contemporary notion of 'cognitive capitalism' , a notion of 'cognitive materialism' which, by giving justice to a material side of immaterial labor, chooses to give back to poverty the force of potentia, of affirmative activity. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of speculative motives in the determination of commodity prices and specifically food related commodity prices. The motivation for this study is the considerable flow of funds into commodities, the widespread view that the process of financialization has led to greater levels of speculation and that speculation is the primary cause of regular spikes in food prices since the turn of the century. We consider two forms of short-term trading, a biasing influence and a (...) correcting influence, relative to the fundamental price. While both forms of short-term trading are relevant, they are small in terms of their influence on overall prices. We do however find some evidence of an increased role being played by Manipulators during the period most associated with financialization. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage se situe dans l’une des quatre grandes traditions contemporaines d’interprétation de Platon qui peuvent servir d’étiquettes commodes pour regrouper un certain nombre de travaux: la tradition analytique de l’École d’Oxford-Cambridge illustrée par les travaux de G. E. L. Owen et G. Vlastos, la tradition ésotériste de l’École de Tübingen-Milan représentée dans les travaux de K. Gaiser, H. J. Krämer, Th. A. Szlezák et G. Reale, la tradition historique de l’École de Paris représentée par les travaux de L. Brisson, (...) de M. Narcy, de M. Canto-Sperber, de L.-N. Cordero, de M.-O. Goulet et de R. Goulet, et la tradition littéraire de l’École de Chicago représentée par les disciples de L. Strauss, en particulier dans les travaux de J. Klein, S. Rosen, Ch. Griswold, L. Rossetti et de R. Brague. La tradition littéraire, à laquelle appartiennent les études réunies dans cet ouvrage, peut remonter, dans les temps modernes, jusqu’à F. Schleiermacher qui, dans sa traduction des dialogues de Platon, présentait le dialogue platonicien comme un drame philosophique, et Platon comme un philosophe-artiste. C’est donc à une réflexion sur la forme du dialogue que nous convie l’ensemble de ces études. Nous essaierons d’en dégager les points saillants, sans tenir compte de l’ordre des contributions dans le collectif. (shrink)

This article examines two interrelated themes in the scholarship categorized as ‘new materialism’: first, the aim to undermine the subject/object distinction; second, the proposition that agency exists across the material world. While new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, conceive of their approach as an intervention against the injurious effects of capitalism, I argue that destabilizing the object/subject binary and endowing inanimate objects with vitality and agency is actually a constitutive feature of capitalism itself. To illustrate this point, I turn to (...) Marx’s analysis, providing a queer reading of his theorization of commodities. Revisting Marx’s account of commodity fetishism in tandem with new materialism yields fresh insights into the logics of capitalism, specifically, the manner in which it thrives on concurrently producing and erasing subjectivities, thereby distorting social materiality and material sociality. (shrink)

The contemporary architectural rendering, digitally engineered and published in advance of construction, has come to resemble an image of an existing building so closely that it is hard to tell future from past. In constructing an appearance of an existing lived reality, which previously arose from the camera's re-presentation of the trace of past circumstances, has it now become possible to speak of the trace of future events? With regard to property as commodity, the more believable these projected forms, (...) the more capital may be invested, and the more likely it is that the depicted building will be constructed. Notwithstanding the possibly deceptive intentions of the image-maker, excess of signification becomes directly linked to the eventual existence of the building in that the more realistic it appears, the more likely it is to become reality. (shrink)

This book shows that art involves an aesthetics of self-becoming, wherein we do not simply consume artistic meaning, but become empowered--by adapting ourselves to what creation in the different art forms makes possible. Paul Crowther argues that the great political task in aesthetics is no longer the creation of political art as such, but rather the winning back of art and aesthetics as central societal concerns. This involves the overcoming of neo-liberal treatments of art as mere commodity and misguided (...) attitudes that dismiss it as the product of dead white European males. The book begins with a theory of self-consciousness which reveals the necessary role played by the aesthetic in personal identity. It then emphasises how art forms empower through processes of making and aesthetic effects that are unique to them individually. To show this, he considers the ontology of pictorial art, sculpture, installation and assemblage works, architecture, literature, cinema, and music. His arguments concerning these are supported, throughout, by in-depth discussions of specific artworks. The book's effect, overall is to reorientate aesthetics by showing how art empowers through its revelation of new possibilities of experience. The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming will appeal to philosophers of art and aesthetics, as well as scholars in art history, literary studies, film studies, and music theory who are interested in the book's central concerns. (shrink)

The article provides an analysis of one problem related to the discussion of the ontologi­cal status of virtual reality. The author proposes to discuss the problem of the reality of virtual worlds in terms of transformed forms. In this regard, an analysis is given of how this concept was introduced by K. Marx and how it was discussed further in the scientific literature. It is proposed to perceive the transformed form not as a perverted or false real­ity, but as (...) a separate form of life presented in its transformation. An example is the meta­morphosis of the cost of labor into the monetary form of a commodity, as was shown in Capital. On this example, a proposal is made, according to which virtual reality is the same transformed form of reality, and not an illusion of consciousness, and not an imaginary world. The qualities of the transformed form of reality are introduced: 1) a separate, but not independent form of life; 2) playing a role in the process of trans­formation as an indirect form; 3) representation in the form of a copy of the original; 4) sign-symbolic mode of existence; 5) dependence on the original, generic form of real­ity, not independence. It is shown that virtual reality is, as it were, an unembodied form of reality, existence in its potency. Such a representation was presented in the history of philosophy in the form of the idea of potential being. But this idea did not subse­quently become the basis for the development of an independent ontology of virtual real­ity. A distinction is made between the concept of virtual reality as a reality, not an illusion (the reality of digital objects) in the concept of D. Chalmers, and reality in the form of its transformed form. It is shown that virtual reality is not reduced only to the reality of imaginary worlds, to the reality of consciousness, the reality of special psychological states. The rationale is given that virtual reality is the continuation of a natural-artificial process of metamorphosis of human activity, only embodied in its transformed form. In this regard, the author proposes to interpret virtual reality as a form of life in its trans­formation and non-incarnation, which a person must use as a new resource for their de­velopment in order to overcome alienation from themselves. (shrink)

This article views capitalism not only as a mode of production, but also as a mediation of the reproduction of life, following the concept of ‘social metabolism’ that Marx employs to analyze the interaction between the individuals composing a society and their natural environment. Insofar as the ‘value-form’ is the distinctive social relation of capitalism, it appears necessary to ask whether the metabolic process of reproduction can be fully subsumed under this form. Marx takes for granted the idea (...) that the reproduction of labor-power consists only in the consumption of commodities resulting from abstract labor, thus omitting the appropriation of unpaid domestic work, mostly performed by women. Feminist criticism clarifies how capitalism always depends on some reproductive work being appropriated for the accumulation of surplus-value without being integrated in the value-form. Following Jason W. Moore, I attempt to indicate that the same logic is at work for the reproduction... (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between Marx’s Capital, Georg Lukács and Critical Theory through the prism of value-form theory. Marx’s theorisation of value understands commodities as expressions of the historical form of social relations defined by capital. Products of human labour become values in capitalist production, defined by the abstract quality of undifferentiated quantities of labour-power, exchangeable through the universal character of the market. The social form of this process, Marx identifies as processing a fetish quality, where (...) humans take on the thing-like character of commodities. The impact of this theorisation on Critical Theory has been considerable, beginning with Lukács’ concept of reification. In Part I, I examine the challenge to Lukács’ interpretation of Marx’s Capital made by Gillian Rose. She draws attention to a misidentification of reification in Marx, suggesting a strong conceptual distinction between commodity-fetishism and reification. In their conceptual flattening, Rose contends that Lukács and Critical Theory generalised Marx’s value-form theory, losing its speculative character. I argue that despite Rose’s suggestion remaining unfulfilled, she helps illuminate important tensions between Marx’s value theory and Critical Theory. This comparison allows in Part II for the beginning level of a speculative approach to Marx’s Capital to be advanced. (shrink)