The importance of the collective management of immaterial resources is a key variable in the valorisation of products in a post-industrial economy. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how, in post-industrial economies, it is possible to devise alternative forms of mediation between producers and consumers, such as organic farmers' markets, to curb the appropriation of rent by transnational and/or local business elites from the value created by immaterial resources. More specifically, we analyse those aspects of the collective management (...) of ethical values that, in the case of organic farmers' markets, can be a strategic source of competitive advantage for local producers. In this paper, the Ecomercado de Granada is studied as an example of mediation between production and consumption in a post-industrial economy. (shrink)

How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects, who may be united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own oppression? To address this question I trace the dissonance between the approaches of Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze back to their divergent mobilizations of Spinoza’s affect and the role it plays in the ungrounding and reconstitution of the social (...) body. This dissonance reveals a divergence in their projects, the way these political projects emerge as counter-actualizations, the means by which they are expressed, and the necessity of a particular kind of historical subject to their realization. Most significantly, it speaks to how we might engage difference and alterity within our own political projects, our collective creations. I conclude with a focus on the productive possibilities provided by Deleuze’s writings on the scream, as a vehicle to uncover new terrains of struggle and new possibilities for collectivity. (shrink)

Drawing from the writings of Deleuze and Foucault, various forms of political vitalism have emerged as one of the most dominant approaches to radical politics today. However, there has been considerable disagreement over the terms on which a debate over vitalism’s perceived utility should be carried out. This has allowed for a great confusion over what is at stake in the vitalist controversy. This article argues that an analysis of the most recent works of Maurizio Lazzarato, one of the most (...) prominent contemporary political vitalists, assists in clarifying the terms of the debate and provides a rebuttal of several of the most common criticisms of political vitalist thought. Through his engagement with the work of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, Lazzarato has developed a distinct variety of neo-monadology that analyses the world in terms of micro-psychic forces. On the basis of this ontology, Lazzarato constructs a politics of multiplicity consisting of open strategies of experimentation and creation, which he argues offers the best form of resistance to neo-liberal capitalism. It is argued that Lazzarato is able to provide an answer to the three common charges that vitalism is a mysticism, suffers from a lack of normative foundations, and has an incoherent political programme. The article concludes with a reflection on the extent to which political vitalism is still haunted by a failure to give an account of and come to terms with the role of negativity in politics. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the relationship between body, image and affect within consumer culture. Body image is generally understood as a mental image of the body as it appears to others. It is often assumed in consumer culture that people attend to their body image in an instrumental manner, as status and social acceptability depend on how a person looks. This view is based on popular physiognomic assumptions that the body, especially the face, is a reflection of the self: (...) that a person’s inner character or personality will shine through the outer appearance. The modification and cosmetic enhancement of the body through a range of regimes and technologies can be used to construct a beautiful appearance and thereby a beautiful self. The article begins by examining body images in consumer culture and their relation to photography and moving images. This is followed by an examination of the consumer culture transformative process through a discussion of cosmetic surgery. The article then questions the over-simplistic logic that assumes that transformative techniques will automatically result in a more positive and acceptable body image. The new body and face may encourage people to look at the transformed person in a new way. But the moving body, the body without image, which communicates through proprioceptive senses and intensities of affect, can override the perception of the transformed appearance. A discussion of the affective body follows, via a closer examination of the body without image, the opening of the body to greater affect and indeterminacy. The affective body image and its potential greater visibility through new media technologies are then discussed through some examples taken from digital video art. The article concludes by examining some of the implications of these shifts within consumer culture and new media technologies. (shrink)

As an intellectual, economic, political and legal project, neoliberalism is not directed towards the rolling back of the state as an aim in itself. While its deregulatory tendencies, its commodification of public services and the undermining of systems of social welfare superficially suggest a generalised reduction in state power, it has been clear from the early 1980s that one of neoliberalism’s primary concerns has been the authoritarian reshaping of state power to engineer particular social outcomes, whether in criminal justice, the (...) disciplining of organised labour, the militarisation of national territory and migration, or the extension and deepening of regimes of austerity. This article introduces the recent work of Maurizio Lazzarato, who has argued that the asymmetrical creditor-debtor relationship is now the archetype of contemporary, neoliberal social relations. Ultimately, Lazzarato’s perspective tends to exaggerate the totalising powers of finance capital and leads him to endorse a form of political voluntarism, which fails to address the role of the neoliberal state as a site for forms of authoritarianism which are not solely generated by the debt relation. As a response, it will be suggested that aspects of Nicos Poulantzas’s concept of ‘authoritarian statism’ can be used to both strengthen our understanding of the authoritarian characteristics of the neoliberal state, and to imagine possibilities for resisting its expressions of power. (shrink)

Postmodernism is a variety of meanings and definitions, is used to refer to many aspects of social life from musical forms and styles, literature and fine art through to philosophy, history and especially the mass media and consumer culture. Post modernism is a slippery term that is used by writers to refer to several different things. Featherstone points out the term has been used to refer to new developments in intellectual and cultural theory. The suggestion that our subjective experience of (...) everyday life and our sense of identity has somehow changed significantly in recent years. The view that capitalist or industrial societies have reached new and important stages in their development, the shift from modernity to post-modernity. Consumer culture is also play a vital role in the society, consumer culture may be defined as a day to day change in the taste of consumer behaviour. The term “consumer culture” refers to cultures in which mass consumption and production both fuel the economy and shape perceptions, values, desires, and constructions of personal identity. Economic developments, demographic trends, and new technologies profoundly influence the scope and scale of consumer culture. Social class, gender, ethnicity, region, and age all affect definitions of consumer identity and attitudes about the legitimacy of consumer centred lifestyle. (shrink)

Suicides among marginalised groups are one of the few occasions in which self-harm and suicide are framed as having cultural, social, environental, historical or structural causes. Suicidology, psychology and public discourse typically understand suicide causality to be grounded in individualised psychic pain and pathology, disavowing the social, cultural, environmental and linguistic contexts. However, public discourse on suicides of ‘marginalised’ groups such as asylum seekers, Indigenous persons and queer/LGBT youth are ‘authorised’ to be discussed from social perspectives, informing opportunities to re-think (...) suicidality, identity and liveability. Building on recent critical challenges to dominant theories, this article examines some of the ways in which the suicides of marginalised groups are described in social terms, demonstrating how cultural approaches to relationality, aspiration, performativity and mobility can expand current thinking on suicide cause and prevention. (shrink)