Mapping precariousness
“Encoding the Law the Household and the Standardisation Of Uncertainty,” for an edited volume on mapping precariousness.
Fascism, from Fordism to Trumpism
Fascism is as American as Henry Ford. And Donald Trump.
Debt servitude, service work, oikos
Below is the bare-bones of the paper I did for the recent ASA conference on debt, oikos and service. The argument in that is drawn from C&C, but it’s an argument that I’ve become more sure of since, particularly with the recent wave of occupations at Sussex University against the privatisation of catering, and more recently the…
Abbott’s Flatland
An extract from Tony Robbin’s Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought, on Edwin Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Enjoy.
The abolition and limitation of (which and whose) work?
I had sat down to do a post on automation and the abolition/limit of work-time, but given the level of some of the discussion I’ve seen, that seems to require some preliminaries and backgrounding, so aside from these remarks below, there’s another post on the concept of ‘socially-necessary labour’ here. There’s been some renewed discussion…
Waged work, service work and ‘socially necessary labour’
The wage contract is not identical or commensurate in the sense that the labour it ‘represents’ is or can be identical to the exchange it governs.
Money
Below is the abstract I finally got around to finishing for Max Haiven’s project on money and art — on which there’s a lot of interesting material here, and an article here. As it happens, I think money has a lot to do with art, albeit assuming an expansive definition of its terms.
Zero-hour for Fordist union strategies
Zero-hour contracts have been in the news quite a bit lately. Here are some recent links:
Service Work and Servitude
This is the extended abstract for the paper I’d prepared some months back for a conference, and a clip from the occupation of Sussex University I’d planned to show
Affective labour
[This is a fragment from “Uncanny Robots and Affective Labour in the Oikonomia,” Cultural Studies Review, Vol 18, No 1 (2012), pp. 153-73. The full text can be found here.]
Infrastructure, Infra-politics
An excerpt from Contract & Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia, pp.113-18.
Proliferating Limits: Capitalist Dynamics, Oikonomia and Border Technologies
Implicit or not, there persists a view of capitalism in which the border is understood as extraneous to the inherent tendencies of capital. In this, capital and the state are regarded as distinctive logics, the first inclined to overtake limits, the second emphasising limit as such. […]
