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This paper explores fatigue in today’s society by drawing on popular culture and interviews conducted as part of a doctoral research study of nine people suffering from chronic fatigue. With a focus on the ideology of late capitalism, it examines how the emergence of fatigue might be one way of unconsciously refusing the demand for constant activity and presence found therein. To this end, the paper relies on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, drawing on the concepts of anorexia (as a refusal of a demand and an embodied disappearance), the drive, desire and mourning to show how the subject’s refusal emerges at the intersection between the body and the social.

This article develops a militant teaching humility regarding the foundational aggression and violence of a neoliberal worldview within late capitalism. Mainly the article shows how such aggressions...

The paper explores the portrayal of social relations among youth in the popular Norwegian TV-series Skam and places this analysis in relation to Anne Imhof’s award-winning performance piece Faust, which received the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale for the German Pavilion. As expressions of how today’s youth experience social relations under the conditions of late capitalism, I examine the way in which the TV-series and the performance work respectively explore when and how ‘we’ is shaped. I argue that they provide particular insight into the limits and possibilities for the formation of relations of solidarity today.

O objetivo deste artigo é debater a relação entre visão profética e crítica das ideologias no pensamento do filósofo brasileiro Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Procuraremos demonstrar como a promessa messiânica estrutura a obra de Unger, e a diferencia de outros trabalhos relacionados aos Critical Legal Studies (movimento que ele ajudou a fundar). A Modernidade secularizou a Teologia da História bíblico-cristã, interpretando a si mesma como momento derradeiro da trajetória humana, nos quadros de um painel escatológico. Assim, o Apocalipse mantém-se sempre presente em nosso campo de visão – embora, diversamente das Histórias da Salvação de cunho religioso, nosso Armagedom não seja sucedido por uma utopia, um tempo de perdão e reconciliação para os justos. Ora, se as ficções distópicas e pós-apocalípticas configuram-se nas mais completas traduções do Zeitgeist, o utopismo milenarista de Unger (secularizado) impõe-se como um cânon contra-hegemônico consistente. Em um primeiro momento, trataremos do niilismo que configura o capitalismo tardio, e que engendra “falsas necessidades” (na terminologia de Unger). Após, mostraremos como os Critical Legal Studies acabaram se deixando macular como uma lógica antiutópica. Finalmente, discorreremos, tomando como referência principal o livro The religion of future, sobre as visões proféticas de/em Unger.

PurposeThe aim of this article is to analyze the trajectory of library linked data in light of the ideological machinations of late capitalism. This is accomplished in order to understand how and why its development currently occupies a place of contradiction and provide avenues for examining how this tension can be resolved.Design/methodology/approachOur approach relies on the work of Boltanski and Chiapello's “new spirit of capitalism” to understand the rise of the network and situate linked data within that history by examining various technologies, projects and agents involved in its development. We use this history to outline the growth of contradictory tensions within linked data necessitated by capitalistic growth.FindingsLibrary linked data has found itself in a contradictory position because of the nature of late capitalist expansion, but this development has been facilitated largely by hegemonic agents within libraries and related institutions. We suggest that a counter-hegemonic lens be applied to envisioning linked data's future and its infrastructures.Originality/valueTo our knowledge this article represents one of the first attempts to provide a critique of late capitalist designs on linked data with a particular emphasis on hegemonic control over library technology and infrastructures.

Emotions provoke change, yet are often discredited at best and demonized at worst in modernity and positivism. We currently face a global climate crisis – one so dangerous that biocultural diversit...

Hannibal's cheering and shouting along with his request for audience participation during the 2015 premiere of his composition One Land, One River, One People caused a stir and created discomfort among the Philadelphia Orchestra audience. I interpret his work as an example of a successful musical direct action within contemporary orchestral music. By exposing and subverting the traditions of the classical concert experience, One Land, One River, One People highlights social boundaries within the genre of classical music itself. I apply Robin James's (2015) concept of Multiracial White Supremacy, or MRWaSP, to contemporary orchestral classical music of the United States. Under late capitalism, MRWaSP helps to explain the potential appeal to an orchestra of commissioning Hannibal, who is known as a “genre-crossing” composer rooted in classical and jazz. Yet I argue that the way in which Hannibal performs his identity along with the piece's inclusion of audience participation allow the music to resist functioning as expected under MRWaSP. Rather than promoting a sense that—as one might expect from the title—we are all “one people,” I see the piece as revealing racial difference and as speaking truth to power.

This article compares Martin Crimp’s portrayal of the artist in The Country (2000) and The City (2008) to contextualize his oeuvre within late capitalism, suggesting that Crimp moves from a predominantly social critique of art as a transmitter of ruling-class ideology to a more nuanced exploration of the challenge of producing art that is not governed by dehumanizing laws of exchange. In The Country, Crimp uses pastoral imagery and the characterization of Corinne, the romantic protagonist, to espouse a social critique of art by showing how it has propped up a fundamentally conservative set of ideals and thus has preserved the status quo. The City, on the other hand, takes up an artistic critique of capitalism through metatheatre to reveal the ways in which human creativity and freedom are restrained by the logic of the market. By considering the role of the artist in these two plays, I argue that Crimp’s political aesthetic seeks to disrupt the exchange value of art and foreground the human impulse toward creativity.

The article shows how philosophers’ understanding of the problem of alienation developed, reflects its role and place in the life of modern society. Based on the ideas of neo-Marxists (G.Marcuse, D.Lukacs), the author shows that the development of capitalism and the improvement of the material living conditions of people did not solve the problem of alienation, but gave rise to its new forms, such as a consumer society, one-dimensional man. Important for the article is the idea that capitalism has become more mature and sustainable due to the attractiveness of the world of consumer goods. That is, alienation has acquired an outwardly “voluntary” character. The article also discussed the problem of alienation in the context of postmodernism (J.Baudrillard, F.Jameson and others). In this vein, the question of the illusory nature of symbolic forms of practice and the role of alienation in their emergence are touched upon. Remaining on Marxist positions, the author does not share the understanding of the symbolic sphere as being exclusively independent of its reflection by a person. Simulations and simulacra are a specific feature of precisely capitalist society. But the power of simulacra over human consciousness is not absolute even under capitalism. Alienation is surmountable, but at the same time it is considered as a necessary stage in the development of social relations, important for the formation of civilization.Alienation was the reason for the atomicity of society, its inertia and the absence of its qualitative development. In turn, this has led to numerous practical consequences: poverty, social stratification, depression, a crisis of sovereignty and real democracy. The article provides a philosophical basis for solving these problems of our time.The research results lead the author to the following conclusions. Late capitalism is more stabilized and stable than the capitalism of the time of Marx, so far as alienation spread to the sphere of consumption. In these conditions, the conflict between a person and the results of his activities is not absolute, but peripheral. There is established one-dimentional thinking in consumer society, in which human practice loses its meaningful part, and the form, the outer shell, begins to prevail in it. Overcoming alienation in late capitalism is the restoration of the objective essence of concepts that have acquired a largely symbolic character: freedom, democracy, sovereignty, etc. Therefore, the author considers progressive a partial return to the classical type of alienation, in which there was an active reflection of these concepts.

YouTube polyglots are an online community whose origin can be traced to the late 2000s, when language learning forums and YouTube videos of language learning enthusiasts began appearing online. Thi...

The subject of this article is the transformation of social time in pandemic reality using the example of Poland. The situation caused by COVID-19 provided a unique opportunity to observe sudden changes in the social rhythm. This article which was conducted from the perspective of time studies, tries to specify what these changes are, additionally considering how social time was shaped in the economy of late capitalism. These observations show that changes in the organisation and experience of social time during the coronavirus pandemic were mainly shaped based on three categories: power, technology, and work.

Since 1990, northern Madagascar has been overwhelmed by successive and overlapping resource booms and busts. Erratic commodity markets—including those for gold, sapphires, vanilla, and rosewood—have sent rural Malagasy residents moving back and forth between various forms of extraction and production with unprecedented volatility. This article explores the history and lives of northern Madagascar's makeshift miners-turned-loggers-turned-cash-croppers in order to rethink small-scale resource extraction in a highly speculative, late-capitalist global economy. Resource workers in the region, we argue, have transformed from migrants who view extractive activities as temporary complements to subsistence agriculture to mobile subjects chasing one resource boom after another, often abandoning stable agrarian aspirations altogether. Although originating in the cosmopolitan global North, late-capitalist economic volatility nonetheless shapes extractive subjectivities in the global South, contributing to more flexible extraction and livelihoods. Flexible extractive subjects in northern Madagascar, we conclude, provide a rural parallel to the late-capitalist subjects of the global North. They represent a growing class of flexible labor in the global South that bears notable resemblance to the gig economy workers currently dominating discussions of precarious work in the twenty-first century.

In our era of late capitalism, we can bear witness to the ongoing creative fashioning of successful failure into a commodity which has grown in value. This article discusses two topics: firstly, attitudes towards and narratives of failure in the entrepreneurial start-up space; and secondly, how ‘successful failure’ is increasingly becoming marketised beyond the entrepreneurial start-up space, as people face the escalating power of an injunction to ‘learn from failure’, and are expected to perform accordingly, as we now live within what has been described as an entrepreneurial economy. The example that initiated this line of research has been the phenomenon of ‘Fuckup Night’ events: ‘Fuckup Nights is a global movement and event series that shares stories of professional failure. Each month, in events across the globe, we get three to four people to get up in front of a room full of strangers to share their own professional fuckup. The stories of the business that crashes and burns, the partnership deal that goes sour and the product that has to be recalled, we tell them all’. In essence, the message is as follows: ‘Yes, you should tell everyone about your failures, as the path you have trod on the route to success’. The marketisation of triumphalist narratives of failure illustrates the rise of a new ‘ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism’, calling for ‘workforce participation’ in a new way (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007 The New Spirit of Capitalism. London and New York: Verso: 8). This article examines and theorises the commoditisation of successful failure: how certain kinds of failure have been packaged and produced for impact, how – properly packaged – successful failure has become a profitable and lucrative asset and how new markets now thrive around these newly commodified narratives of failure. The article explores the context for the emergence of appropriate market conditions for the production, circulation and consumption of ‘successful failure’ as commodity.

O presente trabalho foi construído tendo a relação de torcedores de futebol no estádio como ponto principal. Na esteira do chamado “futebol moderno”, aquele atingido diretamente pelos processos de globalização e mercantilização dos bens culturais, pretendemos identificar determinados processos e possíveis fenômenos capazes de afetar o modus torcedor. Uma das maneiras está diretamente ligada às modificações do espaço – do urbano ao lócus esportivo – propiciadas e incentivadas a partir dos grandes eventos. Sendo assim, nos concentramos em entender as lógicas teóricas e práticas no capitalismo tardio da modernização tanto dos espaços físicos, estruturas, como das relações do público com o esporte. A pesquisa de campo, etnografia, se aliou à teoria e também aos documentos e fontes escritas para a análise final, ao menos em relação à conclusão deste trabalho, pois em se tratando de futebol, a volatilidade do tema faz com que a bola não pare de rolar.

RESUMO Com o intuito de contribuir para o debate sobre a intersecção entre linguagem, economia política e migração transnacional sul-coreana, este artigo tem por objetivo compreender o valor da língua coreana em famílias transnacionais residentes no Brasil. Partindo de entrevistas realizadas com quatro mães pertencentes a uma comunidade sul-coreana no interior de São Paulo, é focalizado o modo como as entrevistadas avaliam (a) as práticas linguísticas em coreano de seus filhos e (b) as estratégias por elas adotadas para o fortalecimento e ensino da língua coreana no ambiente familiar durante a residência no Brasil. A análise explora ideologias pós-nacionalistas (HELLER; DUCHÊNE, 2012) implicadas no valor que as mães atribuem ao coreano, o que aponta para possíveis relações de pertencimento no capitalismo recente. Além disso, na discussão, são assinaladas as ideologias de linguagem nacionalistas que atravessaram as práticas da pesquisadora, com a expectativa de que essa reflexão possa ampliar debates sobre ideologia linguística no campo aplicado de estudos da linguagem. ABSTRACT In order to contribute to the debate about the intersection of language, political economy and South Korean transnational migration, this article aims to understand the value of Korean language in transnational families living in Brazil. The discussion is based on the analysis of interviews conducted with four mothers of a South Korean community in São Paulo State. The article focuses (a) the evaluation of children language practices in Korean (b) the strategies used to promote and teach Korean language in the family context during the residence in Brazil. The analysis explores post-nationalist ideologies (HELLER; DUCHÊNE, 2012) involved in the way Korean language is valued by the mothers which might demonstrate reshaped ways of belonging in late capitalism. In addition, the discussion underlines nationalist language ideologies in the researcher practices in an attempt to enhance debates on language ideologies in the field of Applied Linguistics.

This paper grapples with scholarly debates at the intersection of environmental degradation and capitalist accumulation. We review recent literature engaging with nature and value theory to show ho...

In the first part of this article on Žižek's recent book Pandemic! I show how he develops a political theology of the spirit through a discussion of social distancing. In this argument Žižek connects the idea of physical distance to the biblical story of the resurrection, in which Jesus says to Mary Magdalene “noli me tangere” (“touch me not”), in order to imagine the emergence of a community of spirit from the social, political, and economic ruin caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Contrasting this community of spirit to the Chinese Communist Party's Foucauldian response to the outbreak of the virus, Žižek suggests a turn away from Prometheanism and the logic of domination toward a new posthuman humanitarianism based on a recognition of human weakness, vulnerability, and fragility. In Žižek's view, this turn toward a new form of humility would emerge from the final disenchantment of the spirit of capitalism and a recognition of the difference between human work, which contributes to a meaningful world, and bestial labor that dehumanizes and means nothing. Thus, the article shows how Žižek thinks about the pandemic in terms of a crisis of late capitalism and the possibility of a new spirit of communism. While the presexual nonlife of the virus is comparable to the drive of capitalism in respect of its unthinking will to replication and reproduction, Žižek founds the basis of humanity in our (human) mortality and being toward death that open out onto a new horizon of releasement (Gelassenheit) beyond biotechnoeconomic nihilism. The conclusion of the article, therefore, shows how Žižek imagines that the pandemic presents humanity with an existential choice about the way we organize social life. This choice is between the biopolitical domination of Chinese authoritarianism that seeks to control every aspect of life, American disaster capitalism that accepts the brutality of the state of nature, and finally Žižek's utopian spirit of communism based on a recognition of human and planetary finitude.