Theories of Alienation – Seeman and Marx

This chapter examines in detail the two contrasting approaches to alienation of Seeman and Marx detailing how key concepts of Marx’s theory of humanity affects his understanding of alienation. After discussing Seeman’s more routinely-favoured perspective the chapter outlines three problems with such alternative theories of alienation: first, the shadow of Marx and the political implications of his broad view; secondly, the difficulty in undertaking measurable, quantifiable work that is demanded by dominant positivist frameworks; and lastly the problem of the vague nature of the term alienation, that it is frequently synonymised with vague feelings of unease or dissatisfaction. The relation of alienation to reification is also discussed as well as the approaches of Blauner, Wendling and autonomist Marxism. The author concludes that it is feasible to research alienation using Marx’s categories and approach to social analysis because they offer greater penetrating explanatory power than other viewpoints.

Unbegun Introductions

“Unbegun Introductions” maps the contemporary state of political theology, most significantly its engagement with postsecularism and autonomist Marxism; the contemporary fields of affect, queer temporality, and crip theories; and gives a brief introduction to process theology. This chapter maps the key fields with which the rest of the manuscript will then constructively play in order to bring to bear the significance of contemporary affect and crip theory for the doing of postmodern and political theology. Interspersed amongst this mapping are narrative scenes—personal stories that bring to the fore the way in which the moods of everyday life function as the contexts from which the assemblages of thinkers come to matter. The introductory chapter refuses to separate the personal mood from the political or philosophical one.

Snapchat’s Dialectics of Socialization: Revisiting the Theory of the Spectacle for a Critical Political Economy of Social Media

In this paper, I use the online app Snapchat as a prism through which I illustrate a “spectacular” power of current informational/communicative capitalism: the ability to subsume and integrate a broad range of practices into a holistic socialization process that operates both at the level of media platform structures and at the level of subjectivization mechanisms. I advance this argument by historicizing Guy Debord’s notion of the Spectacle via Autonomist Marxism and Voloshinov’s materialist semiotics. Shedding light on the tensions inhabiting the post-Fordist labor process its users are involved in—such as autonomy/heteronomy, sociability/alienation, and display/concealment—I show how Snapchat points to a Spectacle that consistently operates through a dialectic of socialization, which enables and compels, consorts and estranges, and deceives and exhibits.

Composing the social factory: An autonomist urban geography of Buenos Aires

Through the creation of an original theoretical framework, this paper demonstrates the value of a deeper engagement between autonomist Marxism and (urban) geography. By spatialising arguably the autonomists’ key theoretical contribution – class composition – the paper develops the ideas of technical and political spatial compositions. These dialectically intertwined concepts provide a framework with which to analyse the relationships between shifting urban spaces and struggles, and clarity is therefore added to another key autonomist concept, the evocative yet nebulous ‘social factory’. Applying these to Buenos Aires, the paper focuses on various spatial conjunctures, exploring their emergence and the immanent potentials for radical spatial politics they afford and preclude. In particular, the paper provides a detailed reading of the complex role Buenos Aires’ ‘informal’ settlements play in both perpetuating and resisting a neoliberal, financially extractive economy. The benefit of a ‘spatial composition’ framework is twofold: it provides a periodising heuristic with which to originally and usefully approach urban struggles, and, in unpacking the ‘social factory’, it can be applied widely as a form of radical geographical praxis. The paper thus makes important theoretical and empirical contributions to an exciting, emerging autonomist (urban) geography, as well as to studies of Buenos Aires.

Automatic Subjects

Critical analysis of the biotechnological reproduction of biological life increasingly emphasises the role of value-producing labour in biotechnologically reproductive processes, while also arguing that Marx’s use of the terms ‘labour’ and ‘value’ is inadequate to the critical scrutiny of these processes. Focusing especially on the reformulation of the value-labour relation in recent work in this area by Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, this paper both critiques this reformulation and questions the explanatory efficacy of the category ‘labour’ in this context. Emphasising the contemporary global expansion of capital relative to value-producing labour – specifically, the expansion of fictitious capital and debt on the one hand, and of global surplus populations on the other – it argues that this reformulation misrepresents the mediated capacities of capital as the immediate capacities of labour. This reformulation, moreover, is indicative of broader tendencies in the contemporary theorisation of labour, tendencies exemplified by autonomist Marxism.