Cultures of Compensation

The current highly-advanced form of capitalism – turbocharged by the cybernetic revolution and engaging in all imaginable forms of creative destruction – provides the backdrop to many of the articles in this issue. They are broadly concerned with the question of how capitalist cultures (and their agents) retain legitimacy in an era of extreme commercialisation and insecurity. Josh Bowsher and Theo Reeves-Evison examine the politics of ecological credit schemes, that allow businesses to destroy a discrete ecosystem in return for the restoration of an ecological site elsewhere. Nancy Ettlinger situates the emergence of for-profit crowdsourcing as a key contemporary mode of value-extraction in the longer history of ‘prosumption’. Michael Symons and Marion Maddox offer a fascinating study of the mechanisms by which the explicitly commercial and profit-oriented nature of a range of social activities within advanced capitalist societies – including megachurches - come to be understood as guarantees of the legitimacy and authenticity of those activities themselves. Ella Harris’ considers ‘compensatory cultures’: cultures that are compensatory responses to crisis, but are presented and received as desirable, even preferable ways of organising life. On a somewhat different topic, but one no less relevant to the exigencies of our present moment, or less central to the core concerns of New Formations – Dhanveer Singh Brar and Ashwani Sharma’s ‘What is this ‘Black’ in Black Studies ?’maps out a new presence in race discourse in the UK arts and higher education, under the heading of ‘US Black Critical Thought’. And the issue begins with a substantial interview with the great Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller who died in 2019.