New Formations

In the many articles and books written in recent years on the topic of precarious labour, immaterial and affective labour, all of which are understood within the overarching frame of post-Fordist regimes of production, there is a failure to foreground gender, or indeed to knit gender and ethnicity into prevailing concerns with class and class struggle. I seek to rectify this by interrogating some of the influential work in this terrain. I draw attention to those accounts which have reflected on gender and on changes in how feminists and sociologists nowadays think about the question of women and employment. I ask the question, how integral is the participation of 'women' to the rise of post-Fordist production, and what kind of role do women, especially young women now play in the urban-based new culture industries? By prioritising gender I am also critiquing its invisibility in this current field of new radical political discourse associated with writers like Hardt and Virno (eds 1996) and Hardt and Negri (2000). I argue for a more historically informed perspective which pays attention to the microactivities of earlier generations of feminists who were at the forefront of combining forms of job creation with political activity (eg women's book stores and publishing, youth-work or 'madchenarbeit', child care and kinderladen) under the auspices of what would now be called 'social enterprise'.

However, at the same time, Cuddy's talk struck a chord. It moved us. It affected us. It resonated with what we 'know' in a profound and embodied way about being women in the world. As Sara Ahmed has recently put it 'when you lose confidence, it can feel like you are losing yourself, like you have gone into hiding from yourself'. 2 Cuddy's talk not only has an affective force which is hard to deny but it offers tangible, concrete and simple solutions, and it demonstrates that they 'work', that they have a real positive effect on people's lives, including, as she shows compellingly, her own.

This essay aims to explore the relationship between neoliberal ideologies and sexuality, by considering questions of criticality and political agency in relation to pornography. The essay identifies a trend in contemporary porn studies work towards a ‘constrained optimism’ that also expresses a wider deadlock in cultural and media studies. This arises from a need to protect the concept of individual agency against reactionary movements, alongside a tendency to elide the implications of consumerism in neoliberal cultures. Much porn studies work is critical of tendencies in altporn, most significantly around questions of labour and commodification. Yet work in this area also tends to remain invested in the promise of agency, where this agency is a function of the expansion of the technological resources available in a networked culture, the proliferation of choice, and the blurred boundary between consumer and producer. This essay seeks to move beyond this deadlock by drawing on recent work on the concept of the enterprise society, elaborated by Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics, and taken up by writers such as McNay, who have suggested that Foucault’s insight fundamentally challenges the relationship between individual autonomy and political resistance, where that autonomy guarantees not liberty but responsible self-management. The essay considers the figure of the entrepreneurial voyeur, in the light of concepts of immaterial labour offered by Lazzarato and critiqued by McRobbie, and goes on to make a sustained reading of the film Made in Secret in order to map ways in which we might be able to imagine how the affective pleasures of pornography might not simply underwrite alienated and competitive modes of being but might help us to imagine more radical forms of sociality.

Predictive policing has attracted considerably scholarly attention. Extending the promise of being able to interdict crime prior to its commission, it seemingly promised forms of anticipatory policing that had previously existed only in the realms of science fiction. The aesthetic futurism that attended predictive policing did, however, obscure the important historical vectors from which it emerged. The adulation of technology as a tool for achieving efficiencies in policing was evident from the 1920s in the United States, reaching sustained momentum in the 1960s as the methods of Systems Analysis were applied to policing. Underpinning these efforts resided an imaginary of automated patrol facilitated by computerised command and control systems. The desire to automate police work has extended into the present, and is evident in an emergent platform policing – cloud-based technological architectures that increasingly enfold police work. Policing is consequently datafied, commodified ...

In some recent writing that draws on Lacanian ideas about the structure of psychoanalysis, Slavoj Žižek opposes the common cultural vision of the analyst as confessor or priest. In this view, psychoanalysis is born out of the capitalist spirit of 'thrift', of hoarding and spending only with reluctance. Instead of the religious imagery of confession and forgiveness, or indeed a fantasy that psychoanalysis might represent a 'cure by love', Žižek alights on an anti-semitic trope that starkly pronounces on psychoanalysis as a mode of economic exchange. Miserliness is the core of this trope. Žižek writes (in The Parallax View), 'The link between psychoanalysis and capitalism is perhaps best exemplified by one of the great literary figures of the nineteenth-century novel, the Jewish moneylender, a shadowy figure to whom all the big figures of society come to borrow money, pleading with him and telling him all their dirty secrets and passions. ' This essay takes seriously the idea that, in centring on a miserly exchange mediated by money, psychoanalysis reveals the structuring power of the social order over encounters that are fantasised to be based on love or care. However, it asks why the trope has to be so explicitly anti-semitic in its formulation. It is argued that what breaks through in this and some other passages where Žižek overly exuberantly evokes anti-semitism is a continuing failure of psychoanalysis to deal with its own 'Jewish' investments.

The paper examines Stiegler' use of psychoanalytic concepts, focusing on how the proletarianised or blissfully numb mind may begin to work its way towards 'a life worth living'. The emphasis is on the process rather than the final outcome. Winnicott's concept of relationality and Lacan's concept of time in analysis can be aligned to the concept of pharmakon. Stiegler's autobiographical account How I Became a Philosopher (2009) and the initially 'stupid' hero of the Lego Movie (2014) are used as examples.

Any ethical treatment of liberal eugenics and of biotechnology in general must presuppose, if not explicitly expose, an understanding of biology in general and of human biology in particular. Critical Theory distinguished itself as, amongst other things, a philosophically ...

Empathy is a young word: it first arrived in English in 1909 as a translation of the German term Einfühlung, 'feeling into', in a text by the American psychologist Edward Titchener. 1 Einfühlung itself was a technical neologism, coined earlier by Robert Vischer in his 1873 discussion of the psychological dimension of aesthetics, and then expanded upon by the psychologist Theodor Lipps. 2 It is to this German tradition and its Anglophone proponents that Vernon Lee refers when she makes empathy the crucial component of her psychological aesthetics in her co-authored book of 1912, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. 3 From these specialised and technical beginnings in a branch of German-inflected thinking that combined ideas from psychology and aesthetics to discover how we relate to artworks, empathy has since migrated to name interpersonal states and affects which align closely with non-aesthetic terms, especially its more ancient cousin, sympathy, the rather later psychoanalytic concept, identification, and more recent theories from psychology such as Theory of Mind. In what follows, I examine literary and critical theory accounts of empathy and read two poems to question the usual assumption that empathy is benign. Rob Halpern's Common Place has a surprising alignment with Lee's earlier aesthetic theory of empathy I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this article and Jill Richards for their illuminating comments upon the first draft.

New forms, subjects and strategies of resistance have emerged in recent mass protests and insurrections, from the Arab Spring to Spain, Greece, Turkey and Brazil. Insurrections, exodus and democratic experimentation respond to the economic and social landscape of neoliberal capitalism and the biopolitical operation of power. Using historical and recent examples, this essay proposes seven theses on the philosophy of resistance. We have entered a new age of resistance and potentially radical change after fifty years of failures and defeats of the left.

This essay considers the significance of Rosa Luxemburg's thought in relation to discourses on the materialist conception of history. Luxemburg engaged extensively with Marx's method in order to understand the consequences of capitalism and socialism as a concrete possibility. In The Accumulation of Capital (1913), she deals with the problem of economic reproduction and the material conditions for the global expansion of capital. Yet, her writings have sparked a long tradition of debate concerning her contribution to Marxist theory. Within this tradition, Michael Löwy and Norman Geras have discussed Luxemburg's idea of history, giving divergent interpretations of her influential phrase, 'socialism or barbarism'. Building on the key terms of their argument, this essay proposes to read The Accumulation of Capital as a compelling reflection on the contingency of capitalism. Luxemburg's analysis of the drive to accumulation shows capitalism's manipulation of ...

Time is extraordinarily labile and yet constantly called back to its ubiquitous task of inventing a now and a then, or a now and before. Even within a project of thinking about an order of sensation that exceeds or undermines teleological time, for example, scholars will deploy findings from biology that purport to measure the time between the moments of sensory memory and when memory proper (that, which can be recalled) is laid down. It is said to be two seconds. Two seconds of non-representational time? This slippage becomes even more overt when we begin to organise vast tracts of cultural phenomena through ideas like 'modern' and 'postmodern'. The brilliance of this book lies in its dogged capacity to keep showing the ways in which each conceptualisation of time, no matter how anti-teleological, becomes tied through its claim to a larger typology (e.g. modernity and postmodernity) to a politics of sexuality, and that those politics produce an often-overlooked variety in how temporality works in film, books, and museums, and as evocations of 'our' time.

Time is extraordinarily labile and yet constantly called back to its ubiquitous task of inventing a now and a then, or a now and before. Even within a project of thinking about an order of sensation that exceeds or undermines teleological time, for example, scholars will deploy findings from biology that purport to measure the time between the moments of sensory memory and when memory proper (that, which can be recalled) is laid down. It is said to be two seconds. Two seconds of non-representational time? This slippage becomes even more overt when we begin to organise vast tracts of cultural phenomena through ideas like 'modern' and 'postmodern'. The brilliance of this book lies in its dogged capacity to keep showing the ways in which each conceptualisation of time, no matter how anti-teleological, becomes tied through its claim to a larger typology (e.g. modernity and postmodernity) to a politics of sexuality, and that those politics produce an often-overlooked variety in how temporality works in film, books, and museums, and as evocations of 'our' time.