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The developed world became the overdeveloped world. Commodification ran up against the limits of what it could claim to organize efficiently or effectively. Whole chunks of social life had to be hacked off and fed into the flames to keep the steam up. Commodification moved on from land to things to…

What I find missing in Dean is the sense of a struggle over how tech and flesh were to coadapt to each other. Let’s not forget the damage done to the conversation about the politics of technology by the Cold War purge, in which not only artists and writers were blacklisted, but scientists and engin…

The connection between race and production hardly appears in Gilroy. I’m skeptical about his claim that “cars fudge any residual distinctions between material and semiotic, base and superstructure” (30). It might make more sense to think of cars à la Lazzarato as connected to an infrastructure that…

This all seems to confirm the work Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski did on how the ruling class responded to the challenge to its hegemony in the ’60s by resisting one line of attack yet incorporating the other. The line resisted was the labor critique, in the form of wildcat strikes and factory o…

Still, the neo-capitalism concept does touch on certain key features, to do with how subjectivity is machined rather than merely hailed into existence via language, as in Žižek. Lazzarato draws attention to the vacant language of org charts, graphs, budgets—one might add PowerPoints. Hierarchy is r…