Why should contemporary aesthetic production be concerned with making time, rather than history, appear? Vincent Adiutori argues that contemporary aesthetic production’s imperative is to produce rather than resolve contradiction. At a time when making history appear would seem the political task par excellence, to make time appear—as he argues Cormac McCarthy’s The Road does—is the negative task of aesthetics read politically. In short, irony is to time as allegory is to history.

Historically, Spinoza has tended to be considered as something of an anomaly within European modernity, a fascinating exception within the Western philosophical canon but one who has largely remained on the margins. More recently, however, there has been a significant revival of interest in Spinoza, a ‘turn’ to Spinoza which has had major impact on leftist philosophical- political thought. This thesis traces some of the history of this turn, and seeks to determine the nature of this impact. It ranges critically (...) over the readings of Spinoza produced by Louis Althusser and by Etienne Balibar, by Gilles Deleuze and by Antonio Negri, and by Alain Badiou. As the conjuncts and the commas here suggest, these readings are grouped within two broad ‘lines of descent’ from Spinoza: Line 1 comprising Althusser and Balibar, and sharing among other things a problematics of ideology and of the subject in which the influence of Lacan becomes apparent, Line 2 comprising Deleuze and Negri and sharing a certain qualified naturalism. Badiou, while exhibiting connections with Line 1, at the same time produces his own distinctive reading of Spinoza, one which turns on the status of the subject within Spinoza’s ontology, and on what Badiou alleges is a suppression of ‘ the place of the subject’, and therefore of the negative, within it. Several broad lines of enquiry run through the thesis. The first of these concerns the relationship between ontology and the ethical-political, between what Balibar terms ‘first’ and ‘second’ philosophy. The second concerns the function of the negative within these various readings, and what I argue is its persistence within an otherwise apparently positive ontology. The third, however, an overarching theme, concerns the ways in which Spinoza is deployed by these various thinkers as a philosophical and political antidote to Hegelian idealism within Marx, and above all to Hegelian teleology. In connection with this, the thesis therefore moves towards an examination of the ways in which these various readings of Spinoza have in turn fed into renewed readings of Marx, and considers this both in connection with a preoccupation with primitive accumulation shared by Althusser, Deleuze and Negri, and in relation to the readings of Marx produced by the Italian Marxist traditions of operaismo and autonomia. The thesis concludes that the turn to Spinoza has had a positive and enriching effect on Marxist thought, and outlines both some of the new dimensions which it has allowed to be developed, and some new lines of investigation which it has opened up within Marxism. (shrink)

Davis A. Smith-Brecheisen reviews Diane Coyle's GDP: A Brief but Affectionate Historyand Zachary Karabell's The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers that Rule Our World.

Jeff Diamanti offers a new reading of Renzo Piano’s 1970s retrofit of the FIAT car company’s marquee factory in Lingotto-Turin in relation to current debates about the cultural, political, and economic content of postindustrial value. In addition to arguing that theories of immaterial production have missed something fundamental about the function material assets serve in the postindustrial economy, Diamanti also insists that a Marxist exegesis appropriate to today’s political-economic relations is one that attends not just to the distribution of value, (...) but to its representability as well. This means checking in on the accountants in order to better grasp what architects have been up to. (shrink)

While the concept of hegemony had a central place in the crystallization of 1980s cultural studies, recent developments in cultural economy, information and communication technologies, and globalization suggest a decline in the utility of the frameworks of democracy and the 'logic of equivalence' that lie at the heart of the hegemony thesis and its conception of the social. This article considers how cultural studies is engaging with this situation by arguing that a set of themes can be seen that approach (...) power and culture through an expanded understanding of production, a production considered as the patterning – or mobilization, arrangement and distribution – of rich social, technical, economic and affective relations. The perspective of production does not carry the unifying project that hegemony and democracy gave to an earlier cultural studies, but is instead composed of diverse problematics that suggest heterogeneous sites of critical intervention and politicization. Situating the discussion in the frame of Deleuze's figure of 'control society', the article explores the overlapping themes of communication, affect, fear, work, class and war. (shrink)

So much of what we experience in neoliberal capitalism resembles the operation of the camp. How then can we understand the camp as a political technology of labour control recurrent in historical capitalism, and why would we want to? Driven by the perennial imperatives to govern and to accumulate, the camp as a modulation of social control allows us to explore the role of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique in the ‘real subsumption of labour’. The aims here are to question the sanguine expectations (...) of a liberal pastorate that is inextricable from the needs of capital; to articulate the ‘techniques of domination’ experienced in the idiom of neoliberal capitalism; and to find inspiration for corresponding counter-conducts and ‘techniques of the self’. This article offers a kind of historical archaeology of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique by resuscitating Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a surprisingly rich source of insight into the operations of the camp modulation and the counter-conducts it engenders. The analysis to follow works in the space between Marxian and Foucauldian political thought opened up by the new materialisms, and draws upon the recent works of Lordon, Lazzarato, Negri, inter alia, that are currently enriching critical theory. (shrink)

This article takes the suggestions by Jameson and Žižek that Hardt and Negri's recent Empire is an important `new theoretical synthesis' and a challenge to a politically complacent Cultural Studies as its starting point to explore Negri's understanding of `production'. It opens out Negri's apparent synthesis to consider the formative elements of his work: operaismo's `social factory', Marx's `Fragment on Machines' and Deleuze's figure of `control society'. The article argues that whilst Negri develops the important analytic categories of socialized and (...) affective labour, he breaks with operaismo's and Deleuze's `cramped' and `minor' interrogation of the intricacies of capitalized production to develop a problematic understanding of an emerging autonomy-in-production. In this Negri makes a strange return to the orthodox Marxian and - in an inverted way - neo-Gramscian positions which operaismo had sought to undermine; so making Empire less a synthesis of, than a break with some of the core theoretical principles of operaismo, Marx and Deleuze. (shrink)

This paper reviews the recent writing of Sergio Bologna and Carlo Formenti. These authors are proposed as post-workerist dissenters with respect to Hardt and Negri’s conceptualisation of contemporary capitalism. Therefore, while the latter has risen to prominence within Anglo-American academia astheradical account of the political economy of the knowledge economy, the work of Bologna and Formenti is here presented as providing alternative accounts of contemporary capitalism and its dynamics. In doing so, this work challenges the Anglo-American reception of post-operaismo. However, (...) these analyses are also assessed by showing the many similarities they share with Hardt and Negri’s account. These similarities are argued to pose immanent limits, impeding this post-workerist dissent’s ability to carryoperaismobeyond Hardt and Negri. (shrink)