What being an owner can also mean: A socio-anthropological study on the development of a forgotten relationship to objects

In a context of ecological crisis, new economic models have developed based on the replacement of ownership by access. While they have been studied at length, the very idea of ownership, which is supposed to be abandoned in this process, has rarely been questioned. This is the aim of our research, which investigates the meanings of the concept of ownership for consumers. A socio-anthropological investigation and an ethnographic study on various sharing systems (for houses, boats and clothes) reveals the development of a relationship to ownership, which differs from the one that prevails in the society. In this paradigm, which questions possessive individualism, the owner appears as the ‘custodian’ of his possessions. The identification of his expectations opens managerial and societal perspectives to build the offers that will enable him to fulfil this role.

The Thin Blue Line

Despite the emphasis on the utter ubiquity of the underworld in the syndicate picture, one of the ironies of the subgenre is a certain “surplus of the law” in the chimerical shape of the organization. From this perspective, the rogue cop film constitutes a dialectical response to the totalitarian disposition of the syndicate picture. In a prototypical rogue cop film like Where the Sidewalk Ends, the problem represented by the syndicate is located in the protagonist’s unresolved relationship to his dead father, but in The Big Heat (1953) police detective Dave Bannion must defend the family and everything it represents--the ’50s suburban American Dream--against the violence-backed interests of the mob. If other working-class cops such as Chris Carmody in Rogue Cop (1954) are driven by sex, Webb Garwood in The Prowler (1951) and Barney Nolan in Shield for Murder (1954) are motivated by the desire for sex and money. In both The Prowler and Shield for Murder, the law of capital returns with the force of the repressed, and the bad cop becomes an especially perverted instance of possessive individualism.

“Not Our Own”

Chapter 3 begins an inquiry into the constitutive role of antiblackness for the logics of scientific taxonomical species hierarchies. The chapter identifies the agentic capaciousness of embodied somatic processes and investigates how matter’s efficacies register social inscription. The chapter also provides a reading of risk, sex, and embodiment in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” a text that affirms the continued importance of risk for establishing new modes of life and worlding, despite historical violence and embodied vulnerability. “Bloodchild” is instructive for situating the racial, gendered-sexual politics of the idea of evolutionary association, or symbiogenesis, in the historical discourses of evolutionary and cell biology as well as deposing a cross-racially hegemonic conception of the autonomous, bounded body that underwrites phantasies of possessive individualism, self-ownership, and self-determination.

Recovering Personhood

Possessive individualism undermines the realization of full personhood, and it enables the capitalist firm to shed any sense of obligation to those who must rent or sell their labor power in order that they might eat. The fundamental crisis of capitalism is that the self-absorbed individual and the self-dealing capitalist firm are locked in a perverse contest in which their mutual dependence is both acknowledged and resented. Re-creating historic ideas of obligations—civic duties—seems impossible to imagine. A more plausible transition is to be found in the idea of loyalty: loyalty to others with whom we work, with whom we share social spaces, and with the community at large. Loyalty from the capitalist firm toward its workers would be a start. Loyalty from the acquisitive selfish individual would be helpful in restoring a shared and necessary sense of personhood.