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As long as social organization runs in its ruts, no individual economic motives need come into play; no shirking of personal effort need be feared; division of labor will automatically be ensured; economic obligations will be duly discharged; and, above all, the material means for an exuberant display of abundance at all public festivals will be provided. In such a community the idea of profit is barred; higgling and haggling is decried; giving freely is acclaimed as a virtue; the supposed propensity to barter, truck, and exchange does not appear. The economic system is, in effect, a mere function of social organization. --Karl Polanyi, This is a methodological essay on the different ways of theorizing the set of activities that can be captured by neither the price mechanism of the markets nor by governmental [...]

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This essay is a productive engagement with some of the themes brought forward by Carole Biewener and David Ruccio in their respective comments on Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian (MIT Press, 2012). This effort elucidates further some scattered discussions on subjectivity implicit throughout the book, arguing that inscribed in the very structure of the book itself are the contours of a nonreductionist, nonessentialist theory of subjectivity that escapes the pitfalls of both choice-based theoretical humanisms and mechanistic structuralisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a historically contextualised intellectual history of the entangled development of three competing post-war economic approaches, viz the Austrian, Chicago and post-Walrasian schools, as three forms of neoliberalism. Taking our cue from Foucault's reading of neoliberalism as a mode of governmentality under which the social is organised through 'economic incentives', we engage with the recent discussions of neoliberal theory on three accounts: neoliberalism is read as an epistemic horizon including not only 'pro-' but also 'post-market' positions articulated by post-Walrasian economists who claim that market failures necessitate the design of 'incentive-compatible' remedial mechanisms; the Austrian tradition is distinguished from the Chicago-style pro-marketism; and the implications of the differences among the three approaches on economic as well as socio-political life are discussed. The paper maintains that all three approaches promote the de-politicisation of the social through its economisation albeit by way of different theories and policies. © 2013 The Author. Antipode © 2013 Antipode Foundation Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years a growing literature on biopolitical governmentality, prompted by the work of Michel Foucault, presents subjectivity as the decisive locus of both the rule of neoliberal capitalism and the production of the common. While sharing its central focus of subjectivity, we are concerned with what this literature leaves out (due to what we discern to be certain implicit tendencies of behaviorism): the constitutive role that subjective investments and “enjoyment” (jouissance) play in the crisis-ridden formations of capitalism and in the constructive turns to communism. We proceed from the premise that there is no balanced relation to jouissance and that class antagonism is irreducible. From this perspective, we propose to approach capitalist and communist subjectivities in terms of two different “forms of the commune”: that is, as two distinct subjective orientations toward enjoying the impossibility of instituting the common once and for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is both a critique and an affirmation of the “postmodern” Marxist debates on communism. It claims that any serious discussion of ethico-political concepts, such as exploitation and class justice, should include how subjectivity animates class. In particular, it insists that communism is predicated upon a shift at the level of subjectivity, in the very ideological coordinates that define what is just and what is unjust. Rethinking class analysis by locating the question of sexual difference at the ethico-political and theoretical core of class analysis makes it possible to differentiate exploitative class structures and communist class structures as two distinct modes in which communities fail to domesticate the Real of class antagonism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the ideological distortions and manipulations of real images in conceptual art. Computer-generated manipulations of images; Paradoxical definition of the real; Concept of sublimation; De-contextualization of gestures.