Commodification Archives - Public Seminar

Economy

You Are Entitled to Live Your Own Life—If Your Employer Allows It

How the business of cobbling together a living became a new form of unpaid labor

October 17, 2024 • by Phyllis Jeffrey

I know someone, a nurse, who doesn’t have health insurance. His employer, a staffing agency, bounces him from assignment to assignment—sometimes with only a day’s notice. Engaged in skilled care work that is profoundly dependent on the ability to maintain human relationships, he often finds himself treated more like a ...

You Are Entitled to Live Your Own Life—If Your Employer Allows It

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The search for authenticity in consumer culture

October 21, 2014 • by Jeremy Safran

Milan Kundera begins his novel Immortality with a description of a gesture made by a woman he is observing at a swimming pool. This woman, who we will come to know as Agnes in the story, smiles and waves at the lifeguard who has just been giving her ...

Theory & Practice

The Capitalism of Affects

August 25, 2014 • by Cinzia Arruzza

In her groundbreaking book about emotional labor, The Managed Heart, Arlie Russell Hochshild suggests that emotions are not simply stored in us waiting to be expressed: they are also produced and managed. The notion and practice of affects management, both privately and socially, are not specific to ...

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McMindfulness

The marketing of well-being

June 13, 2014 • by Jeremy Safran

“McMindfulness.” I came across this term for the first time today. I wish I had coined it. It would be nice to be able to make a claim to originality. But coming across the term is almost good enough. It provides a name for a phenomenon that I didn’t even ...

Theory & Practice

Consumption and the Social Condition

June 6, 2014 • by Tim Rosenkranz

"In a series of posts, Jeff Goldfarb and I [Iddo Tavory] have been sketching an outline for the study of the social condition — the predictable dilemmas that haunt social life. We argue that one of the core intellectual missions of sociology is to account for the ways in ...

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The Forces of Reproduction

Testo Junkie, by Paul Préciado

December 7, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

“Humanity does not exist under the sign of the divine… but of the monstrous.” -- Paul Préciado “Read, this!,” he said, thrusting a soiled photocopy of a typescript into my hands. “It will change your life!” Then he disappeared back into the public toilet he was cruising. This was my introduction to ...
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Accelerationism

November 18, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

There’s a lively debate going on about ‘accelerationism’. As Reza Negarastani has suggested, it might be a way in which big picture speculative thought about historical circumstances has returned after the decline of Marxism. It began with the somewhat hallucinated texts of Nick Land, which saw capitalism as a sort ...
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The (Sad) Story of (Banksy’s) Beaver

October 18, 2013 • by Cinzia Arruzza

You may not be aware that the beaver, this unlucky, little, cute rodent, has suffered a long history of oppression and exploitation. On the American continent, the beaver, a traditional source of clothing and food for native people, became soon after the arrival of the European colonizers a main object ...
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