Board games as social media within, against and beyond reactionary capitalism
In a world where most people feel caught in an unwinnable game, scholars should move beyond strategies of disenchantment and recognize the power of games
In a world where most people feel caught in an unwinnable game, scholars should move beyond strategies of disenchantment and recognize the power of games
In this chapter, we ask a series of speculative questions about the subterranean cultural politics of anxiety in the neoliberal university. What will, or what can, come after the ‘financialised subject’ that has been the topic of our collective inquiries now for some years? Is it possible that financialised capitalism might inadvertently be generating a countervailing force at the level of subjecthood? And, if so, then what are the prospects that such subjects might recognise their commonality and band together to challenge the conditions of their misery? Would we critical scholars, who have trained ourselves to look to a now-familiar repertoire of protest tactics and rhetoric, be able to recognise their resistance and rebellion if it took unexpected new forms? By posing these questions, we are seeking the contours of a range of emergent political subjecthoods whose imaginings are fundamentally shaped by financialisation, but that also strive to exceed it. We focus, specifically, on university students’ inchoate practices of resistance to the neoliberal university through anxious disengagement, practices that we suggest might be understood as forms of sabotage against an unacceptable future of financialised extraction and anxiety for which the university strives to prepare them. Our argument is that what appears to be ‘self-sabotaging’ behaviour can be fruitfully interpreted as a form of nascent rebellion, an expression of collective refusal of the conditions faced by students in universities today.
An edited version of this interview will appear in a future issue of Theory, Culture, and Society. It is a transcribed and edited version of … Read more
The following article has been accepted for publication in Social Text 155, due out in paper in June of 2023. Abstract The last 40 years … Read more
This article, written be me and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, has appeared in the 18th volume of the journal Cultural Politics. Financialization is transforming social subjects and … Read more
The following article will appear in the online, open-access Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry later in 2022 in a slightly different form. It stems … Read more
The following text, which has not yet been copyedited or proofed, was co-authored by Max Haiven, AT Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and is forthcoming in … Read more
An essay on racial capitalism, empire and the gory capitalist cosmology
An essay for the Routledge International Handbook for Creative Futures about how we can work with Amazon workers to envision radical alternatives
The following is the uncorrected text for a chapter in the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Failure: Critical Perspectives from Sociology and other Social Sciences, … Read more