Though Benjamin and Adorno’s various engagements with mass media suggest many possibilities for constructing approaches to descriptive and prescriptive critique, they have remained underexplored in media theory. Taken together, Adorno and Benjamin’s often incompatible views on the social significance of technological mediation offer a powerful framework for critical analysis of the political economies of contemporary socio-technological systems and practices, including mass online education, and for addressing persistent forms of technological determinism.

At the beginning of the third section of Book II of Capital, Marx distinguishes between the direct process of the production of capital and the total process of its reproduction. The former includes both the work process as well as the value-creating process. As we shall see, the latter includes both the process of consumption mediated by circulation, as well as the process of reproduction of capital itself. In the different forms assumed by capital within its cycle, and even more (...) in the different forms assumed by this cycle, the movement of individual capital turns out to be a part of the total movement of social capital. (shrink)

[This is a translation of ‘Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft?’ in vol. 8 of Adorno’s Gesammelte Schriften).].

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)

Occupy Wall Street uprooted the vacant ambivalence not only of our parks and squares but our frustrated hearts and minds. “Occupy Nothing” is an inquiry into the logic of OWS’s formal emergence through the aesthetics of tent-city and its images of abjection. Beginning with a discussion of Fredric Jameson’s theorizations of “utopian impulse,” this essay argues that a dark way lies forward for a politics aesthetically committed to a spectacular generalization of crisis and poverty.

Marija Cetinic looks to instances of aesthetic figurations of saturation that formalize overaccumulation, indexing the form of our contemporary conditions as well as opening a field of abstraction within which new ruptures might be figured. Unemployment is such a site of saturation when understood not just as a reserve army of labor, but as a political strategy to unemploy constitutive elements or materials of surplus-value from a system of circulation—that is, unemployment as dense blockage, as the inoperative, as “dead capital.".

Joshua Clover reviews Anna Kornbluh's Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form.

Oded Nir reviews Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland and Eyal Weizman's The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza.

Taking the lead from Raymond Williams’ study of the Bloomsbury group, Maria Elisa Cevasco aims at presenting a group of Brazilian Leftist intellectuals whose output has created a new interpretation of Brazilian social reality.

Frederic Jameson writes an afterword to Time and the Labor of the Negative.

What if we looked at the notion of the end of literature as a truism, only lacking in plurality and logical rigor? Nicholas Brown explains that one of these “ends” can be regarded as internal to the functioning of literature itself, and as such, the point of departure for a more complete formulation of a Marxist literary criticism. For Brown, this formulation reveals that both literary criticism and Marxism are to be regarded as what he calls “formal materialisms,” a mode (...) of analysis that must be completed and revised every time in light of an object it cannot posit beforehand. What this means for a Marxist literary-critical project subsequently becomes all the more apparent in Brown’s reading of another end of literature – postmodernism. (shrink)

In the late 1960s to early 1970s, when hopes for social and economic equality in the U.S. raised by the Civil Rights movement remained unsatisfied, a burst of African American novels responded by narrating apocalyptic race war. John Williams’s Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light; Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door; and Chester Himes’s Plan B imagine attempts to use national information and distribution networks to foment black revolt. Their catastrophic outcomes are narrated through a formal shift (...) from an initial framework of thriller, spy fiction, or detective fiction to apocalyptic fiction, which entails the destruction of urban and national space. Ending with apocalyptic race war in progress, these novels reveal the constraints and contradictions of the binary logic of 1960s racial discourses. (shrink)