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This guide accompanies the following article: Daniel H. Nickolai, Steve G. Hoffman, and Mary Nell Trautner. 2012. 'Can a Knowledge Sanctuary also be an Economic Engine? The Marketing of Higher Education as Institutional Boundary Work', Sociology Compass 6(3):205–18.Authors' introductionThe marketing of higher education refers to a structural trend towards the adoption of market‐oriented practices by colleges and universities. These organizational practices blur the boundary between knowledge‐driven and profit‐driven institutions, and create tensions and contradictions among the three missions of the 21st‐century university: knowledge production, student learning, and satisfying the social charter. In this article, we highlight the historical contexts that nurtured the marketing of higher education in the US and Europe and explore the dilemmas that arise when market logics and business‐oriented practices contradict traditional academic values. We demonstrate that managing these dilemmas is a contested process of policing borders as institutional actors struggle to delineate the proper role of the university in a shifting organizational climate.Authors recommendArum, Richard and Josipa Roksa. 2011. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.A book that asks a fundamental question in higher education: "How much are students actually learning?" The results do not reflect well on the institution. Arum and Roksa conduct longitudinal tests of critical thinking and analytic reasoning skills on a cohort of students at a variety of universities and colleges. They find that a majority of respondents demonstrate little to no improvement in learning outcomes. Even students who improve show modest gains. The authors' analysis of student surveys suggests that a major culprit is a combination of low rigor in the curriculum, a lack of effort among students, and the overly modest expectations of instructors.Barnett, Ronald. 2010. 'The Marketised University: Defending the Indefensible.' Pp. 39–51 in The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer, edited by M. Molesworth, R. Scullion and E. Nixon. New York: Routledge.Barnett suggests that debates about the effects of marketization on higher education often reflect pre‐existing ideologies about the nature of markets in general. He presents numerous arguments in favor of the conception of students as consumers. For example, the increased power students receive in choosing where and from who to take classes may encourage accountability and actually improve the learning experience as students take a more active role in charting their own course through their education. Barnett also reminds readers that different institutions create different contexts and the extent to which market models of higher education are applicable are largely dependent on these different contexts.Berman, Elizabeth Popp. 2012. Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.An in‐depth historical sociology of the entrepreneurial university, this book explores when and why academic science become increasingly tethered to commercial interests over the last four decades. Berman focuses primarily on patenting trends and the political history of patenting law, as well as the development of biotech entrepreneurship and the emergence of university‐industry incubators. She argues that the trend toward an entrepreneurial model were largely driven by the ideals of government officials about the importance of translating scientific and technological innovation into economic growth, along the way creating the organizational environment necessary to enable market‐oriented research to flourish.Kleinman, Daniel Lee. 2003. Impure Cultures: University Biology and the World of Commerce. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Kleinman provides an in‐depth look into the daily work culture of a plant pathology lab at the University of Wisconsin. This participant observation study includes ambitious critiques of the dominant agency‐oriented approaches within science and technology studies by focusing on issues of structural constraint and institutional power. This study is especially good at demonstrating how university biologists are deeply, athough indirectly, constrained by commercial interests. The influence is not easily found in conflicts of interest or day‐by‐day decision making of scientists, who by and large conduct themselves ethically and in the fashion predicted by Mertonian norms of science. Instead, the culture of commerce impacts an array of daily lab practices, including the baseline epistemological assumptions around what is a "significant" finding. In the world of plant pathology, a successful trial is determined in relation to the metrics established by the field's resource dependency on the agro‐chemical industry.Leslie, Larry L. and Gary P. Johnson. 1974. 'The Market Model and Higher Education.'The Journal of Higher Education 45:1–20.This landmark article is among the first to interrogate the use of a market model as it applies to higher education. The authors trace several key legislative measures that altered federal funding practices and gave students discretion in choosing which schools would receive the most funding. While the authors draw similarities between market practices and the process of funding higher education through students, they also question the extent to which a market model of higher education is applicable. Drawing a contrast between higher education funding practices and a perfectly competitive market model, they provide an important critique of a funding system still in use today.McMillan, Jill J. and George Cheney. 1996. 'The Student as Consumer: The Implications and Limitations of a Metaphor.'Communication Education 45:1–15.This article warns of the dangers involved in recasting students as consumers. McMillan and Cheney synthesize arguments about the traditional goals of education and how treating students as consumers can threaten traditional classroom relations and alienate students from the learning process. Implicit in their discussion is an argument for more traditional classroom approaches to fostering democratic citizenship skills through critical analysis and communal sharing of ideas. They explicitly reject the notion of education as a product (rather than a process) and the demand for professors to deliver the product in the most entertaining and efficient manner.Owen‐Smith, Jason and Walter W. Powell. 2002. 'Standing on Shifting Terrain: Faculty Responses to the Transformation of Knowledge and Its Uses in the Life Sciences.'Science Studies 15:3–28.An interview‐based study of 80 scientists from two university campuses, this paper provides a typology of faculty identities and research strategies at the nexus of academic and commercial research within the life sciences. The typology includes "old" and "new school" orientations to commercial research as well as hybrid categories somewhere between these two extremes, such as "engaged traditionalists" and "reluctant entrepreneurs." Eschewing simplistic analyses that either condemn or glorify the commercial engagements of academics, Owen‐Smith and Powell point out that these various positions have created both novel fault lines and innovative research within the life sciences.Radder, Hans. 2010. The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the Modern University. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.This book is an edited collection of essays on the history, extent, and contemporary impacts of commodification on academic research in the US and Europe. Most of the essays converge at the intersection of science studies and research policy, but are written by an impressively eclectic group of authors pulled from philosophy, sociology, government studies, epidemiology, genomics, and bioethics.Vallas, Steven Peter and Daniel Lee Kleinman. 2008. 'Contradiction, Convergence and the Knowledge Economy: The Confluence of Academic and Commercial Biotechnology.'Socio‐Economic Review 6:283–311.This is an interview‐based study of biotech science that develops a theory of the "asymmetrical convergence" that characterizes the two sides of the university‐industry relation. Vallas and Kleinman describe the work situations of university and commercial scientists to show that there has been a convergence of norms and practices across academic and corporate institutional domains. The authors show that the open discovery ideals of academic science have been increasingly integrated the entrepreneurial values and practices imported from the private sector. Simultaneously, commercial laboratories brought scientific practices and concepts into their workplaces. However, the convergence is asymmetrical, in the sense that both fields of practice are dominated by the profit motive and bottom‐line economic development rather than the communal norms of public science.Online materialsResearch Commercialization and SBIR Centerhttp://center.ncet2.org/This web‐based organization provides an online venue for faculty and students to take virtual workshops and webinars on how to engage in research capitalization and entrepreneurial training. The site includes a variety of resources for faculty and graduate students looking to transition into industry jobs. This site also provides researchers interested in the marketization of higher education a glimpse into a cottage industry that has emerged to provide training services for academics looking to capitalize their research and pedagogy.The Institute for Triple Helix Innovationhttp://www.triplehelixinstitute.org/thi/ithi_drupal/An organization focused on facilitating cross‐sector (academia, industry, and government) collaborations in the production and dissemination of scientific research aimed at economic growth. Another example of a cottage industry established to promote research capitalization and professional networks aimed at knowledge transfer and research capitalization.Documentary, "College Inc." (2010)http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/This 55‐minute video from PBS' Frontline series examines the emergence of, demand for, and debates surrounding the consequences of for‐profit universities such as the University of Phoenix. Available streaming online until October 19, 2012, thereafter only as DVD purchase. Supplemental materials on the College, Inc. webpage include: (1) a teaching guide with lesson plans, discussion questions, student handouts, and lesson extensions; (2) responses from the colleges and universities highlighted in the video; (3) articles, reports, and documents related to for‐profit education; (4) transcripts of interviews conducted with numerous investors, reporters, lobbyists, and college presidents; and (5) a transcript and audiocast of the full program.Documentary, "Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk" (2005)http://www.decliningbydegrees.org/This 120‐minute video from PBS examines the impact of market forces in higher education, specifically discussing factors such as declining government support for public education, changes to student loan programs, the pressure to attract students, college rankings, and college sports. The documentary shows viewpoints from administrators, students, and faculty. A companion book is available for purchase through the program's webpage.Sample syllabusThe "Marketization of Higher Education" article can be successfully incorporated in several types of undergraduate and graduate courses, including Introductory Sociology, Sociology of Education, Organizations and Institutional Change, and Science and Technology.For introductory or education‐focused courses, the article provides a succinct history of the relationship between higher education and the broader society while demonstrating how social institutions respond to social and cultural expectations/needs in different historical and national contexts. The article includes a short summary of the historical and contextual differences in the European and American models of higher education.For more advanced students of organizations, the article provides a case study demonstrating how macro level institutional changes influence organizational climate and social actors' perceptions of their own work. Further, advanced or graduate seminars in education may choose to highlight the various debates about the role of (higher) education in an increasingly knowledge‐based economy.Focus questions
 Discuss examples of how market logics may have influenced your coursework, choice of classes, or commitment to a class.
 What do you think about the informal economy and buying and selling course notes and study materials?
 Discuss examples in which you put more or less effort into a class based on your perception of the course's bottom‐line benefit to your post‐graduation career and/or income.
 How might the pressures faced by professors to bring in research funds from industry or venture capital influence their work and commitment to the classroom? In your experience, does this seem to be more common within those subject areas where knowledge capitalization is fairly common, such as biotech or computer science? Or, can we see the influence of knowledge capitalization in humanities or social sciences too?
 To the extent that students have adopted an understanding of higher education as a commercial exchange, in which they are customers who pay for grades, etc., what might be some ways in which we could change that perception? What changes would faculty need to make in order to change student attitudes? Administrators? Students themselves?
Seminar/Project ideasExploring Institutional BoundariesInterview a few other undergraduate students plus at least one faculty. Ask students questions such as why they decided to come to college, how they decided which college to attend, what they like and do not like about their college education, and what they hope to get out of their college experience. Ask faculty to provide their perspective on why they became a professor, what they like about their job and what they dislike, and what they see as the purpose of college and what students should get out of the college experience. In what ways do faculty and student perspectives converge, and how do they differ? Do any of the differences suggest blurring boundaries between missions of the university (knowledge production, student learning, and satisfying the social charter)?Marketization in Your College/UniversityDo a content analysis of official university admissions brochures, websites, and videos. What messages does the college want you to get from these materials? In what ways might the marketization of higher education be evident in such materials? If the university makes historical materials available, ask students to compare such materials over time to discern an increase in marketization, and how such processes are manifested. Do admissions materials for undergraduates and graduate students emphasize the same things? What differences do you note? Why do you think such differences do or do not exist?

 In Kathi Weeks' The Problem with Work she makes an argument about the way in which work produces and reproduces gender. As Weeks writes:"To say that work is organized by gender is to observe that it is a site where, at a minimum, we can find gender enforced, performed, and recreated. Workplaces are often structured in relation to gendered norms and expectations. Waged work and unwaged work alike continue to be structured by the productivity of gender-differentiated labor, including the gender division of both household roles and waged occupations...Gender is put to work when, for example, workers draw upon gendered codes and scripts as a way to negotiate relationships with bosses and co-workers, to personalize impersonal interactions, or to communicate courtesy, care, professionalism, or authority to clients, students, patients or customers."Lately I have been thinking about the way in which we could also think about the way in which work is also organized by, and organizing of, other social hierarchies including race. How is work organized by race, or how are racialized codes and scripts put to work in the workplace?This is to some extent the question of racial capitalism. It is possible to say, following Weeks, that there is an emerging awareness that capitalism was not just about the creation of the working class, a creation of a class of people with nothing but their labor to sell, but also the creation of the housewife, of unwaged labor in the home, and all of this was made possible in part by slavery, by the unwaged labor of people who were themselves commodities. Capital was born in the bloody intersections of gender, race, and class. Understanding these overlapping intersections is a matter not just of understanding the past, but of understanding the present This question is also in some sense the central question of Sylvie Laurent's Capital et Race: Histoire d'une Hydre Moderne.One way to think about the intersection of race and wage worker is to argue that the former affects the latter only in and through the racist ideas and conceptions of employers. In this conception, which is developed by Lordon, the general tendency of dependency on the wage relation is the general condition through which the specific hierarchies of race are lived. In other words, it is because one needs to sell their labor power that one is then subject to the various racist attitudes of employers. Such a dual systems account of race and capital makes the former individual, even psychological, and the latter structural. Part of the merit of Laurent's book is that she focuses on the structures of racial capitalism, seeing it not as the attitudes of individuals but as something materialized in practices and institutions. Her book is am investigation of the hydra of race and capitalism considered according to its "heads," the institutions (plantation, academy, multinational, colonial contract), stories (most notably Robinson Crusoe, but also the story of progress through the development of commercial society told by Adam Smith), and practices (primitive accumulation, colonialism, neoliberalism) that intertwine capitalism with racism. Race is not an idea, not just an idea that would reside in the heads of individuals, it is also institutionalized in different practices, or, more to the point, it is the intersection of practices and ideas. There is a lot to think comment about in Laurent's book, but I am less interested in thinking about the role that race played in the formation of capitalism. I know that a great deal has been written, and continues to be written about the intersection of slavery and the formation of modern capitalism. In a similar way there has been a lot written about the continuation of racial logics of division and hierarchy in and through the age of Jim Crow. The challenge it seems to me is to continue to think about the intersection of race and capital into the age of Charles Mills calls "de facto racism" (as opposed to de jure racism) without lapsing into seeing it as a purely individual attitude or prejudice. The contrast with gender is useful. Even after the destruction of the housewife as the personification and naturalization of unwaged work, gendered scripts continued to exist in the commodification of care work, emotional labor, and sexualized work, in the school teacher, waitress, and sex-worker. The gendered division of labor continues even within generalized wage labor. One could make an analogy of sorts with race on this point. There is a racial division of labor that we see everyday in restaurants, with a predominantly white waitstaff and largely latino and black staff bussing tables, and other industries from hotels to hospitals, in which the hierarchy of jobs often overlaps with a racial hierarchy. However, this is just an analogy, an anecdotal one at that; it is hard to say that these jobs are performing racialized scripts even if they are sometimes perceived that way for the people who consume it. I have been thinking a lot one what one could call the "mediated immediacy" of race, as a hierarchy produced and sustained by a long history that includes slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining, is perceived as a natural way of the world by a person who passes through a hotel or restaurant. One does not see the history of this production, just the hierarchy and exclusion it has made possible, and since that hierarchy corresponds with the physical appearance of race that appearance is taken as its cause and condition. Laurent draws on Moishe Postone, Hylton White, and Harry Chang, to draw a connection not between race and the everyday experience but between race and the structural conditions of capitalism. These structural conditions are the two defining abstractions, that of capital, of surplus value, and of its opposite and condition, that of the laboring body. As Laurent writes:"The black body is thus the perfect projection of an organism without capitalist labor, what Fanon rightly identified when speaking of the fetish of blackness as the embodiment of "the untamed biological."If the Jew of antisemitism is the human body of money, the Black of anti-black racism is the human representative of brute biological bodilyness. The Negro represents essentialized biological and chaotic power, demanding its domestication. Its incapacity to discipline itself by labor condemns it to be an energy without object. Objectified, it is itself reduced to exchange value, incorporated into the commodity to become one with it, just as the Jew becomes one with capital." Laurent connects race not with the apparent hierarchies of capitalism, the racial division of labor in workplaces, but with its mysteries and metaphysics, the abstraction of value and the potential of labor. Or, more to the point, race, the race that structures contemporary racism, is always both immediately apparent, and unnervingly hidden, and it is formed at the intersection of these two aspects. 

Everyday ethics – can you simply be good? is a work arising from reflection on the condition of contemporary ethical debate, as well as on the practice of morality and the policy of morality, which we observe and experience in everyday life at the beginning of the 21st century. The presented research is based on the belief that the ethical dimension of the reality in which we live and which we create remains deeply intertwined with the everyday form and practice of our life. At the same time, this position does not have to, should not and does not mean giving up the ideals born in the bosom of various cultures and minds that co-shape this everyday life. In this sense, it is also a record of the search for a path between consumerist nihilism and fundamentalist universalism, two ideologies of the modern world that dominate it and lead it in opposite directions. The work defends the thesis that every morality is a projection of a form of life, including language that creates this form and practices that embody this life. In this context, the basic research goal is the construction of a narrative that allows to ground moral beliefs in their actual place of origin – i.e. everyday life – in a way that at the same time eliminates the typical complexes of subjectivity and locality. This perspective, in turn, allows for establishing a dialogue between the authentic values present in the life of an individual with the tyranny of ethical systems claiming profundity and universality. It is therefore also an attempt to escape from the symbolic violence of the dominant 369 Roland Zarzycki ideological discourses and to restore morality to its ordinary use in accordance with Wittgenstein's postulate to return to everyday life. Among the research questions that organize the whole reflection, the most important ones concern the strict practice of life, i.e. the relationship between the local form of life and the local morality. How do life forms dictate the rules of morality games? What connection is there between the present-day form of consumerist society and its globalized reality, and the morality games that function today? How does the mystical dimension of ethics emerge in the current of everyday practice, in the mechanism of social training? How does consciousness evolve that exceeds not only the value of individual life, but also itself in the selfdestructive act of questioning the criterion of the mechanism of natural selection, of creating a value higher than the survival of the species? Are arbitrariness, egoism and the subjectivity of beliefs appropriate analytical categories for considering morality? How do fantasy and ideology penetrate the sphere of moral reflection, and in particular, is it possible to have a coherent view of morality that is free from the notions of freedom, dignity and purposefulness? Is taking into account the suffering of the Other an indispensable part of all possible morality? If so, who would the Other be? The book is also devoted to the analysis of the feedback emerging in the course of this reflection and an attempt to understand today's forms of life from the perspective of moral problems plaguing the present day. The culmination of this journey is reflection on the condition of modern man. In the background of these investigations there is a sense of a deep dissonance between the abstract sphere of declared morality and everyday practices, between the intention or appearance of intention and its everyday translation, also between moral fantasy, moral ideology and moral reality. 370 Summary The structure of the work is based on three chapters, the first of which is devoted to the reconstruction of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of morality, the second to highlighting selected aspects of the sociology of morality, including in particular Pierre Bourdieu's concept of sociology, and the third to the synthesis of the preceding considerations, the designation of new tools of description and narration as well as the analysis of practical aspects of the functioning of moral belief systems in today's world. The first chapter contains a kind of philosophical preliminaries aimed at briefly delineating and explaining those aspects of Wittgenstein's thought that will play a key role in considering ethics. In particular, therefore, it introduces the categories of language games, vision as and forms of life, central to the whole work, which at the same time constitute a peculiar conceptualization of Wittgenstein's considerations on anthropology, sociology and the history of culture. The grammatical connection of consciousness with all possible ethics is signaled in the context of the discussion on the possible understanding of the arbitrariness of morality and ethical invariants. Explaining the consubstantiality of language and human views and moral beliefs allows us to show the complementary role of everyday life and awareness for the developed ethical concept. The second chapter describes the ethics of everyday life from a sociological perspective, formulating a wide range of approaches to it, both affirmative and critical. Thanks to the coupling of these many views, a perspective is developed that allows to problematize the issues under consideration in terms of the categories of purpose, dignity and freedom. The last of these categories also opens up a wide field of reflection on the role, determinism and freedom of the cognitive models themselves. Ultimately, the key stage of this part of the discussion is the application of Pierre Bourdieu's reflective sociology and his concept of 371 Roland Zarzycki social games to formulate the concept of moral capital and further research into the ethics of everyday life. In particular, it helps to explain how, in the socio-political context, morality functions as the title commodity, weapon and distinction. An important theme is also the approach to Jeffrey Goldfarb's policy of small matters as a discourse appropriate to the ethics of everyday life. The last part contains both a summary, conclusions from previous investigations, as well as autonomous considerations aimed at a more complete conceptualization of everyday ethics and determining the place of the concept of a form of life in the practice of contemporary social sciences. The practical and theoretical conditions of the possibilities of everyday ethics as well as the mechanisms by which its authentically and immanently social and everyday character are manifested are consecutively considered. These results are a stimulus for further research into the theory of relativity of morality. Then, selected aspects of the interference of ethics and politics are outlined, crucial for understanding the phenomenon of morality, including the influence of the veils of fantasy and ideology on the very political functioning of morality. In the area of reflection on the economy of morality, moral distance, loyalty distance and the calculation of recognition are indicated as three components that define the vector of moral action. The final part of the text attempts to identify the pivotal features of contemporary life forms, which shape not only the shape of contemporary morality, but also the world: the tyranny of individualism, interpassivity, and then the resulting atrophy of trust, which in turn drives the mechanisms specific to the commodification of morality and the development of forms of hypermorality.

The Urban Millennium, as the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA, 2007)1 terms this century's anticipated mass urbanisation, is well upon us. Yet what is this millennial thing that we enter into or that, more precisely, is settling upon us? The sheer volume of discourses seeking to account for the urban likely point to deeper cultural anxieties about the worth, utility, and even the sense of cities. Worse, the plethora of claims on the evolving value of urban place potentially operate as cover for something far more disconcerting – what Jean-Luc Nancy, recognising a lapse in world-naming and centring (as found in the perenial papal address Urbi et orbi), has referred to as a building "glomicity", a planetary urbanism without urbanity or civility (2007: 37). For Saskia Sassen, cities contribute to a "savage sorting" subsisting with the hyper-financialisation and reduction of the social and public realms worldwide (2014: 4). As such we might wonder at the sheer brutality (nevermind banality) of the commodification unfolding with the network vectors of the urban phenomenon. Further, if we follow Arjun Appadurai and James Holston (2003), cities – with their sorting out of the trustworthy from the suspicious, the haves from the have-nots and the positing of new economic and cultural elites - are at one level antithetical to national territoriality, and at another, are incubators precisely where the tumult of citizenship is worked out against a backdrop of highly contested, sometimes violently contested, identity claims. Henri Lefebvre (2003), rejecting appeals to 'the city' itself as a meaningful measure of post-industrial sociality, has asserted, as early as the 1960s, the irreversable presencing of a global, "urban phenomenon", one problematically fitting out the world according to the socioeconomic and sociopolitical fields of global capitalism. Such a phenomenon, for Lefebvre, testifies to a plethora of far from synchronous logics – of "things (objects) [,…] of play (or sports)", of capital etc. – to the point that "there are faults, voids, and lacunae everywhere" (2003: 86). Consequently, any analysis of the operational levels of the urban phenomenon and its object and spatial fields, reveal a remainder irreducable to the logistics attempting to take hold of it. If for Lefebvre something like a "differential space" - of heterogenous aggregation or accumulation (2003: 125) - defines the urban, and one only operates within it as if in a "blind field", a quest to know the urban phenomenon comes up against a "virtual object" of uncertain ontological basis. If for Lefebvre, in the previous century a metaphilosophy of the urban was demanded (2003: 64-65) , what contra-philosophy might be aposite for this urban millennium? With this in mind, we invite you to contribute your own projects and thoughts on an urban metaphilosophy in the forthcoming issue of Interstices, Journal of Architecture and Related Arts titled "The Urban Thing". For Bruno Latour (reading Martin Heidegger), the etymology of the word 'thing' reveals beneath our now routine association of it with mute objects and brute materiality, a cluster of older associations centred on public assembly and political convening. Taking things themselves to be indicative of complex assemblies, Latour calls for a substitution of a Realpolitik - itself underwritten by a human/nonhuman division - by a Dingpolitik, a new attendance on the articulatory, conjoining agency of things themselves. What might a Dingpolitik of the urban that resists or is richer in intimacy than commodity culture offer? What ontological frameworks might counter older logics of expulsion? Might the new object ontologies centred on the autonomy of things offer renewed vantage - Karen Barad's "material-discursive practices" (2007: 146), Graham Harman's (2005) "object orientated philosophy" or Katherine Hayles' (2013) speculative aesthetics for instance? Are there as yet unrecognised complexities harboured by our culture of ubiquitous things as suggested in Bill Brown's "thing theory" (2004)? Or might today's exclusionary logic directed to peoples and biosphere draw on Giorgio Agamben's (2007) thinking through of the cultic drive underwriting capitalist profanation? Do Tonino Griffero's (2014) atmospheric "quasi-objects" or Latour's "phantom public" provide better expositional tools for apprehending the urban phenomenon today? Indeed, what do we get at all by thinking about phenomena and things themselves as 'urban things'? Please submit full papers for the Interstices 16 journal issue to Dr Susan Hedges (shedges@aut.ac.nz) by 19 June 2015. Interstices accepts both academic and practice-oriented, fully written as well as visual, contributions that engage with the issue theme. For the double blind refereed section of the journal, we welcome submission of 5000 word papers and visual submissions with an accompanying text of approximately 500 words. For the non-refereed section, we welcome papers up to 2500 words and project reports and reviews of up to 1000 words. Visit our website to view the Guidelines for Submissions for details about the reviewing process, copyright issues and formatting: http://interstices.ac.nz/information-for-contributors/guidelines-for-submissions/. We look forward to your contribution! Issue Editors: Andrew Douglas & Hannah Hopewell References: Agamben, G. (2007). Profanations (J. Fort, Trans.). New York, NY: Zone Books. Appadurai, A. & Holston, J. (2003). Cities and citizenship. In N. Brenner, B. Jessop. M. Jones, G. MacLeod (Eds.), State/space: A reader (pp. 296-308). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum Physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC & London, England: Duke University Press. Brown, B. (2004). Thing theory. In Brown, B. (Ed.), Things (pp. 1-22). Chicago, Ill & London, England: The University of Chicago Press. Griffero, T. (2014). Atmospheres: Aesthetics of emotional space (S. De Sanctis, Trans.). Farnham, England & Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press. Harman, G. (2005). Guerrilla metaphysics: Phenomenology and the carpentry of things. Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing. Hayles, N. K. (2014). Speculative aesthetics and object orientated inquiry (OOI). Speculations: A journal of speculative realism, 158-179. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge, MA & London, England: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2005). From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or how to make things public. In, Making things public – atmospheres of democracy, exhibition catalogue, March-August 2005, ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karslruhe. Lefebvre, H. (2003). The urban revolution (R. Bononno, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN & London, England: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2007). Urbis et Orbi (F. Raffoul & D. Pettigrew, Trans.). In The Creation of the world or Globalization (pp. 31-56). New York, NY: Suny Press. Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA & London, England: Harvard University Press.

De la revisión bibliográfica se puede observar que existe un debate todavía abierto sobre comunidad, comunalidad, bienes comunes, gestión comunal. Numerosos autores sostienen que esta construcción social presenta potencialidades económicas, sociales y culturales que configuran formas de vida alternativas al capitalismo, mientras que otras líneas de pensamiento advierten sobre su desarticulación ante el avance de la mercantilización en las tierras comunales. Este trabajo está orientado a responder las siguientes preguntas de conocimiento: ¿Constituyen los sistemas comunales modelos alternativos de organización social bajo los cuáles es posible lograr una reproducción ampliada de la vida sin que impere la lógica capitalista como principio ordenador? ¿Bajo qué condiciones estructurales y de funcionamiento es esto posible? ¿Qué factores actúan como limitantes a la mercantilización total de la vida comunal? El trabajo se realizó a partir de un estudio de caso único que comprende la comunidad Colonia Jaime, ubicada en el departamento Robles de la provincia de Santiago del Estero. La estrategia metodológica giró alrededor de tres aspectos principales: 1) análisis de fuentes documentales; 2) entrevistas grupales e individuales y 3) observación participante. El trabajo de campo implicó estancias consecutivas en la comunidad pudiendo acceder a la biblioteca que contiene gran parte de la obra del fundador y vivenciar distintas actividades cotidianas. Tomando como referencia el enfoque de sistemas de producción y los teóricos de la comunalidad se diseñó una propuesta de abordaje de los sistemas comunales, identificando elementos estructurales y elementos de funcionamiento. A manera analítica, se expusieron estos elementos en forma separada, pero en la realidad se entremezclan manifestando la integralidad de la vida económica, social, cultural, política de los sistemas comunales. A partir de los resultados del caso se pueden extraer tres grandes reflexiones. La primera tiene que ver con la incorporación y utilización de los avances tecnológicos y del conocimiento de la sociedad moderna, pero tal adopción está subordinada a la lógica comunal que queda establecida previamente a partir de la discusión en Asamblea. La segunda reflexión se relaciona con el rol del Estado que ha venido actuando de catalizador e incluso como creador de propuestas tecnológicas que son transformadas al interior de la Colonia como alternativas contra hegemónicas. El éxito de tales alternativas se basó principalmente en la construcción en redes de colaboración y apoyo mutuo entre comuneros e instituciones del Estado, pero también en la capacidad de un sistema comunal que supo tomar ciertos aspectos de la modernización para asimilarlo a una visión comunal, donde la lógica capitalista perdió su centralidad. La tercera reflexión está en relación con el rol activo de los comuneros y su capacidad de toma de decisiones respecto a qué recibir y qué rechazar, a partir de los objetivos construidos en forma colectiva. A modo de cierre, el caso de Colonia Jaime pone en escena no solo las diversas formas de organización social que merecen ser rescatadas, sino también muestra posibilidades de generar procesos de acumulación en sistemas comunales diferentes a los históricamente conocidos. La problemática que surge al pensar en términos de aportes para las políticas públicas se refiere a su replicabilidad bajo condiciones sumamente adversas como las que caracterizan a importantes territorios rurales de América Latina y su viabilidad a más largo plazo sin un considerable apoyo externo. ; From the literature review it can be observed that there is still a debate open about community, commonality, common goods and communal management. Many authors argue that this social construction has economic, social and cultural potential life forms that make up alternatives to capitalism, while other lines of thought warn about their disarticulation before the advance of marketization on communal lands. This work is aimed at answering the following knowledge questions: Do communal systems constitute alternative models of social organization under which it is possible to achieve an enlarged reproduction of life without capitalist logic as a ruling principle? Under what structural and operational conditions is this possible? What factors act as constraints to the total commodification of communal life? The work was carried out from a single case study comprising the Colonia Jaime community, located in the Robles department of the province of Santiago del Estero. The methodological strategy revolved around three main aspects: 1) analysis of documentary sources; 2) group and individual interviews and 3) participant observation. The field work involved consecutive stays in the community, being able to access the library that contains a large part of the founder's work and experience different daily activities. Taking as a reference the approach of production systems and the communality theorists, a proposal for approaching the communal systems was designed, identifying structural elements and functioning elements. In an analytical way, these elements were exposed separately, but in reality, they intermingle, manifesting the integrality of the economic, social, cultural and political life of the communal systems. From the results of the case three great reflections can be extracted. The first has to do with the incorporation and use of technological advances and knowledge of modern society, but such adoption is subordinated to the communal logic that is previously established from the discussion in Assembly. The second reflection is related to the role of the State that has been acting as a catalyst and even as a creator of technological proposals that are transformed within the Colony as alternatives against hegemonic. The success of such alternatives was based mainly on the construction of networks of collaboration and mutual support between commoners and state institutions, but also on the capacity of a communal system that knew how to take certain aspects of modernization to assimilate it to a communal vision, where the capitalist logic lost its centrality. The third reflection is related to the active role of the commoners and their ability to make decisions about what to receive and what to reject, based on the objectives built collectively. To conclude, the case of Colonia Jaime enacts not only the various forms of social organization that deserve to be rescued, but also shows possibilities of generating processes of accumulation in various communal systems to historically known. The problem that arises when thinking in terms of contributions to public policies refers to their replicability under extremely adverse conditions such as those that characterize important rural territories in Latin America and their longer-term viability without considerable external support. ; Fil: Suarez, Maria Victoria. Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero. Facultad de Humanidades, Ciencias Sociales y de la Salud. Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo Social; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina

A critical history of the social media influencer's rise to global prominenceBefore there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that traditional media lacked. The Influencer Industry tells the story of how early digital creators scrambling for work amid the Great Recession gave rise to the multibillion-dollar industry that has fundamentally reshaped culture, the flow of information, and the way we relate to ourselves and each other.Drawing on dozens of in-depth interviews with leading social media influencers, brand executives, marketers, talent managers, trend forecasters, and others, Emily Hund shows how early industry participants focused on creating and monetizing digital personal brands as a means of exerting control over their professional destinies in a time of acute economic uncertainty. Over time, their activities coalesced into an industry whose impact has reached far beyond the dreams of its progenitors—and beyond their control. Hund illustrates how the methods they developed for creating, monetizing, and marketing social media content have permeated our lives and untangles the unforeseen cultural and economic costs.The Influencer Industry reveals how, in an increasingly fractured and profit-driven communications environment, the people we think of as "real" are merely those who have learned to exploit the industry's ever-shifting constructions of authenticity

Daniel Justice presents on the Global Native Literary Studies panel. Global Native Literary Studies: This panel provides an opportunity to reflect on Indigenous worlds and Indigenous literary worlds. Through their fiction as well as their political, institutional, scholarly and cultural work, each of the panelists has explored the range of ways and reasons for Indigenous engagement with literary arts. Chantal Spitz's character Tetiare (in English translation) "washes away… dirt by writing." Albert Wendt's character Alapati is encouraged for his ability "to story our lives history and refusal to become nothing." Daniel Justice's character Tobhi recalls Strivix counseling a Dragonfly who claims "I don't know how to be a Dragonfly" with the suggestion "All ye got to do it tell yer people's story, and ye'll figure it out." What questions, aspirations and political 'lines in the sand' have underpinned 'Global Native Literary Studies'? What lessons have been learned in Indigenous and Pacific worlds about writing, regionalism and 'the global'? What strengths and dimensions of Indigenous Studies and Pacific Studies could contribute to scholars and students grappling with the notion of 'World Literature'? What Samoan, Tahitian and Cherokee concepts could contribute to scholars and students grappling with the notion of 'World Literature'? Rather than proposing how or why Indigenous and Pacific texts might be included in a concept of (and classes about) 'World Literature' on the basis of the fact these too are 'part of the world,' the panelists will be invited to suggest how 'World Literature,' Pacific and Indigenous Literary worlds might mutually engage. Moderator: Alice Te Punga Somerville Panelists: Chantal Spitz, Daniel Justice, Albert Wendt

Every adaptation mining the vast troves of memory that we recall as our lives as readers of books and comics and watchers of film and television, but is known by its owners simply as intellectual property, always runs up against the singularity of the memory in adapting the generic nature of the property. Much of the politics of culture hinge on the conflict over the singular and generic nature of the memory. At times this politics takes the form as an attempt to retain some singular experience, a memory or attachment, against the commodification of culture  and at other times it takes the form of an attempt to insist on this singular memory or experience as the only correct one.  We are constantly trying to retain what is singular against what is interchangeable, which is, to some extent, a doomed project under capitalism. All of this is a set up of sorts to a very particular memory. I was not a huge fan of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, and to be honest I am not sure if I ever read the whole run, but I do have a very particular memory from a collected volume. In the story Dream, or Morpheus, tracks the Corinthian, the fugitive nightmare to Serial Killers convention, or as they call it, in a thinly veiled disguise a "Cereal Convention." After dispensing with the Corinthian Morpheus turns his attention to the audience of serial killers, or collectors, and offers the speech detailed in the following panels. I am not sure why this particular bit of pop culture stuck with for so many years. Maybe there is no real reason, it is baggage without inventory as Gramsci would say. However, I can offer two reasons, one old and one new. For the old I have never really found serial killers interesting. The serial killer who taunts the police through a series of clues has to be one of the most tired cliches of popular culture. Beyond the cliches I was always disgusted by the way in which actual serial killers, from Jack the Ripper to Jeffrey Dalmer, became pop culture figures in the there own right, even to the point of having their own trading cards. I just find that stuff to be distasteful to the point of offensive. In the Sandman the killers are frightening, but as the dialogue makes clear, they are nothing to look up to or emulate, just damaged people with delusions of grandeur. That is why I first liked the panel.As I have occasionally thought about this scene from time to time the way one does with the odd and accumulated bits of popular culture that make up our "tertiary retentions" (to use Stiegler's phrase) it has taken on a different meaning, one that hinges on the line "fantasies in which you are the maltreated heroes of your own stories." This formulation of a kind of day dream or, dreaming with one's eyes open, appears in Spinoza. For Spinoza the formulation is reserved specifically for those who believe that the mind controls the body. As he writes "Those...who believe that they either speak or are silent, or do anything from a free decision of the mind, dream with open eyes." One could argue that in general this formulation in which one is caught in a kind of dream in which one is at the center describes what Spinoza calls superstition, and what Althusser calls after him ideology. On this reading, and if one wanted to simplify things considerably, one could say that ideology is a matter of what the "kids today" on Tik Tok call main character syndrome, the belief that one is at the center of their own little universe, a cause and never an effect.  The idea of all of us walking around in our own little daydreams is not only an interesting way to think of a kind of spontaneous ideology, but Dream's removal of that Dream suggests ideology critique as a kind of superpower. Although to be honest, after watching the series I am a little unclear on what Dream's powers are and how they work, but as the panels above indicate I have pulled my collection out of the closet to reread it. I am not going to offer a full consideration of The Sandman series here, or talk about how it differs from the comic. I am confident it has been analyzed to death elsewhere. I will say briefly that I think that one of its strengths is that it borrows the pacing of the comic, following the arc of the first dozen or so issues. It always seems strange to me that comic books have had better success with movies when their serial form lends itself to television or streaming. Stranger still that the turn to streaming of recent MCU shows has tended to write them more like long movies than episodes of in an ongoing story. The Sandman has more of the structure of the comic in which there is an ongoing story, but there are also stories that are contained more or less within an episode. When it comes to adapting the panels in question. The dialogue is retained, albeit extended, and to some extent, as the clip below demonstrates, the scene is as well. We get to see the effects of Morpheus intervention as the collectors wrestle with their newfound conscience and consciousness of their situation. In that sense the scene is well adapted from the page to the screen. However, one cannot be struck with a certain flatness to the initial shot. In the place of the graphic play of color and line we just get a man standing in front of a curtain. I do not love the art, and there are many panels in comics that would stand out more, but the panels work better than the moving image. One of the things that I find striking in the sheer number of comic book films and television shows is not just how they fail to function as movies, that point has been made again and again, but they often fail to live up to the comics, there are striking visuals in so many different comics, and over the years there have been talented artists working on all of the different superheroes that have made it to the screen, and while these visuals are sometimes gestured to in individual scenes in the various films there is still a kind of translation problem in which the color and composition of the panel is lost when it is put into motion. In fact these visuals become one more easter egg, one more thing for fans to pick up on such as Martha Wayne's pearl necklace from The Dark Knight Returns returning again and again in nearly every filmed version of Batman's parent's death. This is an aside, but I would argue that one of the reasons that Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse stands out as a film is that its animation captures the visual sense and sensibility of comics better than CGI. I have more thoughts on The Sandman, about the representation of dreams in popular culture, but my focus here has been just on how an image from popular culture can linger like the remnant of a dream, and how that image might make it possible to think about how one's memory is shaped and formative, and what an adaptation misses. 

The struggle to belong Dealing with diversity in 21st century urban settings. Amsterdam, 7-9 July 2011 Eye contact, clientele alignment & laissez-faire: the production of public space and neighbourhood in Phnom Penh, Cambodia Thomas Kolnberger(*) Paper presented at the International RC21 conference 2011 Session: Nr. 12 – Belonging, exclusion, public and quasi-public space (*) Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Research Unit IPSE (Identité, Politiques, Sociètes, Espace) Universität Passau, BR Deutschland Southeast Asian Studies thomas.kolnberger@uni.lu Overview Private, public or quasi-public spaces are terms that seem particularly difficult to apply to non-Western societies: as in the 'West', their boundaries are fluid and routinely transgressed, but in ways that are distinctive to the local situation and history. This paper is arguing that these concepts retain practical descriptive power, particularly for the city of Phnom Penh, a case study of demographic extremes, as nearly all her inhabitants could be classified as immigrants. In deed, the Khmer Rouge had forcefully evicted the ca. two million people-strong population of the capital in 1975, virtually erasing all 'bourgeois urbanity' during Pol Pot's Cambodian 'auto-genocide'. After the fall of the regime, the new socialist government slowly repopulated the deserted metropolis with new urban dwellers. Their social and spatial belonging needed to be set up from scratch. "Who belongs to whom" (in terms of political clientelism and patronage), "who is doing what" (regarding face-to-face control and eye contact investigation), and "who owns what" (concerning redistribution and also new original accumulation of capital) were the essential questions in this 'struggle to belong'. In this urban setting, people have been employing a mixed set of strategies for implementing 'belonging' ever since. Based on empirical surveys (mapping & interviews) and research in Cambodian and French colonial archives, this paper presents the constant negotiations of private and public space in a changing economic environment from three angles: - streets, squares, and parks as spaces of interaction: the spatial inheritance of the French colonialism in a new context - the emergence of different types of gated communities since 1975: at first by spatial inclusion strategies generating patronage networks, then by urban planning separating rich from poor - the economy of espionage and imitation of Phnom Penh's retail trade: the neighbours' curious gaze Methodology - The city of Phnom Penh in Cambodia is a case study for a `rush economic evolution´ - This paper aims in one part to highlight the role and influence of place and space for a specific process: the spatial location of business sites in a unique window of opportunity as a self-organizing process `from below´. By applying spatial analysis (GPS mapping), a specific pattern of retail agglomeration and dispersion of this `atomistic´ metropolis could be identified. The analysis is based on fieldwork investigating the use of the city's space for economic ends. 1,000 kilometres of built frontage (`streetscapes´) with 14,647 cases of land use features (e.g. shops, `pavement economy´ etc.) have been surveyed and mapped. Subsequent to this quantitative part, 100 semi-structured interviews and numerous ad hoc conversations were conducted including a dozen of expert interviews (city administration, NGO, city planners). Results and Thesis - The city of Phnom Penh in Cambodia is a case study for a `subsistence urbanization´ - Much economic geography research has focused on the importance of the social context for various transactions. 'Face-to-face contact remains central to coordination of the economy, despite the remarkable reductions in transport costs and the astonishing rise in the complexity and variety of information – verbal, visual and symbolic – which can be communicated near instantly' (Storper and Venables, 2003, p. 43 ). Visual proximity and eye-contact are particularly important in environments of imperfect information, like in Cambodia after Pol Pot. Information was scarce at this time and communication hardware rare. Thus, in Phnom Penh's initial retail business formation, an 'economy of espionage and imitation' provided the necessary information for deal-making, decisions concerning the assortments of goods, prize, and trends. The first merchants and producers were heavily dependent on visual contact 'around the corner' and close contact also proved to be beneficial to customers. This specific knowledge and information externality (an externality or transaction spillover is a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices) could only be reaped by spatial agglomerations. While screening and socialization of network members and potential partners were essential for the build-up of Cambodia's original clientele-system during the gradual resettlement, visual contact became the decisive steering mechanism for the original distribution of business agglomeration or its dispersion. For a `subsistence urbanization´, the public and quasi-public space are the most important `common-pool resource´. The influx of the population into the city produced a `non-rivalrous´ and `non-excludable´ economic good by the neighbours' curious gaze. - The city of Phnom Penh in Cambodia is a case study for a `spatial club´ - From a New Institutionalism's point of view 'City's neighbourhoods – residential, industrial and commercial clusters – are like firms, nexuses of agreements and understandings about entitlements to share and pooled resources. They differ from firms in that they are spatial clusterings and in that they cluster around resources that remain to varying extents in the public domain. They are like spatial clubs. Members co-operate by various forms of informal and formal rules and agreements in order to ensure the continued supply and enhancement of shared public domain goods. Municipal government is itself a type of club, delivering collectively consumed infrastructure and regulations from a tax on its citizens, firms and visitors. Communities, in the social sense, are also clubs – delivering collectively consumed benefits such as a sense of belonging, security and culture' (Webster and Lai 2003, p. 58). This spontaneous `neighbouring´ as 'rational herding' (Banerjee 1992; Hung and Plott 2001) helped to reduce transaction costs during the initial resettlement process (and beyond). It can be described as a continuous act of self agglomeration of business, creating bazaar-type streets over the whole of the city, which specialise in specific goods and services forming thus, from a bird's view perspective, a `mental retail map´ for the inhabitants. This is one side of building neighbourhoods in Phnom Penh. The base for this laissez-faire et laissez passer behaviorism of the government in (micro)economy was the redistribution of Phnom Penh's real estate amongst trustworthy followers. A `New property Deal´ of first in, first served allocated the built environment piecemeal. In this political economy, two steps are discernable. First, a community-building process regarding the public administration. Each ministry was assigned to a certain area of the city and in a top-down process, starting from the top echelons to the simple civil servants and officials, distributed land and housing. Initially, each responsible could pick `his´ followers and could reward him/her with the allocation of living space, a social structure, which represents a spatially bond replica of the traditional clientelism and patronage-network in Cambodia. These 'strings' (ksae) formed the first neighbourhoods as a kind of `original´ gated community because each administrative unit was planned to be self-sufficient. Each 'cité' (Carrier 2007) was thus clearly demarcated. Its decisions were autonomous, too. In certain areas of Phnom Penh, remnants of this socio-politically gathered community can be found. In a second step, and with increasing immigration, secondary ksae (the mother's cousin, the friend of a friend) proliferated and the city was being `filled up´. Today, the pattern of co-residence in technically secluded areas of Phnom Penh resembles the typical economical founded example of gated communities as neighbourhoods around the world: the rich and the better off separate from the rest. The once moral economy of the civil war and initial post-conflict years is dissolving. Regulation, commodification and the government's efforts to demarcate public and private space is replacing/reducing the common good 'public space'.

From the 1970s onwards, the development programs promoted by key global actors have gone through significant transformations. The industrial-expansion projects of the post-colonial era have been replaced with a set of actions increasingly focused on agriculture and rural areas. At the same time, the neoliberal policies carried out since the 1980s have deeply affected the global dynamics related to food production and distribution, giving rise to the birth of a new food regime that is driven by new modalities of regulation and new extractive strategies based on global value chains and transnational corporations. Despite the increases in productivity and the decline in food prices linked to these processes, the world economy has not managed to recover the levels of growth prior to the crisis of the 1970s. On the contrary, the neoliberal reaction to this crisis has generated a growing disillusionment towards development, fuelled also by the awakening of greater sensitivity to the ecological issues raised by environmental movements from as early as the 1960s. This "legitimacy crisis" of development, in turn, has led multilateral organisations to redefine their strategic objectives and to develop a new language. Thus, concepts such as "sustainable development" and "food security" have become increasingly important, until assuming the crucial role they currently play within the United Nations 2030 Agenda. The article provides a critical reading of the recent trajectories of agrarian change and rural development, as well as of the food narratives produced by the actors of global governance, particularly focusing on the "sustainability discourse" which inspired the United Nations 2030 Agenda. The authors point out the importance of analysing the dominant discourse and policies surrounding food production and distribution in the light of capitalist restructuring arising from the recurrent accumulation crises. In doing so, they put into dialogue food regimes analysis with world-ecology theory. The departing assumption is that capitalism – as a system characterised by a specific combination of class relations, territorial power and nature – has relied on the expansion and deepening of the frontier of accumulation, needing to continuously identify new effective ways to combine the exploitation of labour with the free appropriation of the work of human and extra-human nature. In this sense, "cheap nature" – following Jason Moore's definition – represents at once a prerequisite of capitalist development and a historical product of evolving strategies of accumulation reproducing a metabolic rift between humans and nature. These strategies are always based on a specific international division of labour and determined by global economic and geopolitical dynamics. At the same time, they are also characterised by changing patterns of (semi)proletarisation, as well as by ways of organizing nature whose constant renewal is crucial for the reproduction of capitalism. What truly distinguishes the current global scenario from the past is the "end of cheap nature", i. e. the exhaustion of the frontiers and the value relationships that have historically allowed for a reduction in the cost of four fundamental elements: labor, food, energy and raw materials. Against this phenomenon, by looking at the recent trajectories of the accumulation strategies underlying food production and distribution, two main dynamics emerge: the first one is hinged on a reconfiguration of extractivism based on natural resources dispossession and land concentration processes, as well as on a cost-reduction strategy based on labour exploitation; the second one can be portrayed as the reflex of a new governmental approach to development according to which the formal reunification of the producers with some basic means of production is functional to their inclusion into the global value-chains ruled by the agri-business corporations. Leveraging the neoliberal rhetoric of self-entrepreneurship, this second dynamic put into practice a sort of "indirect proletarisation", in which the incitement of the individual creative and productive capabilities accompanies the implementation of new mechanisms of control based on the provision of credit and other inputs, as well as on the proliferation of standardisation procedures, practices of patenting of nature, and technological control. Under these premises, the authors read the food security discourse embedded in the UN 2030 Agenda as an attempt to elude the socioecological contradictions inherent in capitalism, which ends up providing a sort of ideological legitimacy to the aforementioned dynamics, thereby engendering new explosive contradictions. The article is divided into three sections. The first one retraces the transformations that the capitalist world-ecology has experienced from the 1970s onwards from a food regimes approach. The second section aims to deconstruct the discursive practices underlying the United Nations 2030 Agenda, as well as to bring to light the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in development policies inspired by the concepts of 'sustainable development' and 'food security'. In the last section, the authors use the world-ecology perspective to interpret ongoing agrarian change dynamics. In seeking to revitalise the neoliberal development model, the authors argue, the dominant food narratives use scarcity as a pretext to extend and intensify the logics of the market, turning it into a universal principle for the regulation of human and extra-human nature. Dominant food policies aim to elude the problems deriving from the exhaustion of the frontier logic underlying the historical evolution of capitalism through the creation of a new spatiality and a new way of organising nature. Yet, this operation exacerbates the tension between capital's inclination towards the commodification/monetisation of ever new areas outside the sphere of production and its need to keep relying on extended sources of unpaid work of human and extra-human nature. The lack of new effective solutions to this tension is, in turn, feeding a combination of contrasting tendencies. While it produces a deepening of the mechanisms of control and exploitation driven by global market logics, it also nourishes processes of de-globalisation, along with a set of phenomena which recall the dynamics described by Karl Polanyi's theory of the "double movement". At the same time, it has also constituted a fertile ground for the emergence of new conflicts, counter-narratives and anti-systemic movements for food sovereignty and agroecology. The authors come to the conclusion that the reorganisation of the food regime in XXI century world-ecology will be highly affected by the responses provided to the ongoing pandemic crisis, thus representing an important opportunity for each of the aforementioned tendencies to gain ground over the others. ; A partir de un análisis crítico de la Agenda 2030 para el Desarrollo Sostenible, este artículo se propone evidenciar los nexos que unen los discursos dominantes sobre alimentos y agricultura con las dinámicas socioecológicas que subyacen a las transformaciones y a la crisis del capitalismo contemporáneo. El supuesto inicial es que el capitalismo —en cuanto ecología-mundo— debe su supervivencia a la posibilidad de identificar continuamente nuevas y efectivas formas de combinar la explotación del trabajo asalariado con la apropiación gratuita de la naturaleza humana y extrahumana. Esto implica que la crisis en la que el capitalismo se halla hoy en día representa también la crisis de una forma específica de organizar la naturaleza. Más precisamente, es una crisis que tiene sus raíces en el "fin de la naturaleza barata", es decir en el agotamiento de las fronteras y de las relaciones de valor que han permitido reducir periódicamente el coste del trabajo, de los alimentos, de la energía y de las materias primas. Frente a este fenómeno, las reacciones adoptadas por los principales actores de la gobernanza global han propiciado una reconfiguración general de las estrategias de acumulación vinculadas a la producción y distribución de alimentos. Como muestra el artículo, uno de los principales pivotes en torno al cual actualmente giran estas estrategias es representado por las políticas que se inspiran en los conceptos de "desarrollo sostenible" y "seguridad alimentaria", tal y como están articulados en la Agenda 2030. Nuestra tesis es que detrás de estos mismos conceptos es posible detectar una racionalidad de gobierno que pretende eludir los problemas que surgen de las contradicciones socioecológicas inherentes al capitalismo mediante el establecimiento de nuevas relaciones de valor y nuevas maneras de organizar y producir la naturaleza. Esta operación, sin embargo, exacerba la tensión entre la inclinación del capital a la mercantilización y monetización de nuevas áreas situadas al margen de la esfera productiva y su necesidad de poder seguir contando con amplias fuentes de naturaleza gratuita y trabajo no remunerado. La imposibilidad de devolver el excedente ecológico a niveles que permitan iniciar una nueva fase de expansión, por un lado, da lugar a una intensificación de los procesos de explotación impulsados por la lógica de los mercados globales y, por otro lado, hace cada vez más evidente la crisis del modelo neoliberal de desarrollo, alimentando algunas contratendencias que con la emergencia pandémica parecen destinadas a alcanzar un nivel de madurez más elevado. La primera parte del artículo reconstruye las recientes transformaciones de la economía-mundo capitalista a través de las lentes proporcionadas por el análisis de los regímenes agroalimentarios. La segunda parte se propone deconstruir las prácticas discursivas subyacentes a la Agenda 2030 y poner de relieve las ambigüedades y contradicciones inherentes a las políticas de desarrollo inspiradas en los conceptos de "desarrollo sostenible" y "seguridad alimentaria". La última parte utiliza la perspectiva de la ecología-mundo para exponer con mayor profundidad las tesis del artículo.

Most people spend much of their lives working. By working, I mean "wage labor": activity undertaken in exchange for money in a society where money is necessary for survival. This has not always been the case, and it is not the case universally, in all places, or for everyone. But it is now a fact of life so foundational in most parts of the world as to seem a feature of nature rather than history. I begin with truism because I think that the fact of work, in all its bluntness, has never been accorded proper importance in literary criticism or cultural criticism in general. There is, of course, a convenient explanation for the absence: historically, art has been either the province of the leisured classes or something made and experienced outside of the bounds of the workday. Art is, therefore, an exception to the rule of work. And even Marxist critics – those whom one would expect to believe, as Marx did, that production and labor were foundational in capitalism –tend to approach the painting or the poem from the side of the market, consumption, and everyday life, for the understandable reasons outlined above. If they tell a story about capitalism's determinative effect on art, it is usually a story about the penetration of market logics into the realm of art, a story about commodification. Few ask what the work of art might share with work in general or how the constant technological and social refashioning of the workplace might affect the horizon of possibility for artworks.My dissertation, "The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization," attempts to provide one answer to these questions, a historical answer, by a reading of important literary and artistic works from the 1960s and 1970s. These are decades in which twin political and economic crises – the political militancy we associate with 1968, on the one hand, and the crisis of profitability and the dollar we associate with 1973 on the other – force a profound restructuring of capitalism and class relations. In particular, the multiple transformations of the labor process – deindustrialization, the rise of the service sector, the introduction of information technologies into the burgeoning managerial and white-collar sectors – provide a useful vantage from which to investigate the rapid changes in art and writing. Whereas the much-documented aesthetics of objects, things and facticity associated with modernism took its bearings from the factory-system (or, in a variant, anti-industrial form, from the artisanal and craft forms industrialization was in the process of destroying) such a cultural mode becomes increasingly anachronistic in the postwar era. As I argue, the productivist aesthetic of modernism gives way to an aesthetic of administration and distribution that takes signs and social relations rather than physical matter as its primary "material." Instead of the factory or workshop, such a mode draws from the routinized cognitions of office work and the forced conviviality of the service sector.The relationship between the economic and the cultural is not, as it might seem, a case of simple synchronicity or one-to-one correspondence. Experimental poetry, for example, is avant-garde in the sole sense that it is speculative, a laboratorial mode which runs ahead of the work-a-day world rather than simply reflecting it. Such experimental modes elaborated critical responses and forms of technical imagination which aimed to respond to the rigid hierarchies of 1960s society and yet, via a kind of "cunning of reason," laid some of the foundations for the new work relations which became dominant in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, part of my argument is that some of the most recognizable of avant-garde devices – erasing, replacing, counting, sorting, arranging by chance or rule – have been thoroughly integrated into the very office machinery (now generalized into the home) which writers use to produce their works.Such recuperation builds upon an uneasy affinity between left- and right-wing critiques of postwar capitalism. If leftists, countercultural figures and artists took aim at the rigid, bureaucratic and hierarchical nature of the corporate form and worklife in postwar society, targeting the managerial layer in particular, they found strange bedfellows in a class of business management theorists and economists who saw in that same layer a hindrance to profitability. In response to the artistic and countercultural critique, businesses concoct a new, flexible, "flattened" and adaptive corporate form that trims the middle-managerial layer by imposing upon workers a set of pseudo-democratic work relations under the sign of such corporate shibboleths as teamwork, flexibility, participation, creativity and self-management. Rather than the industrialization of culture that Adorno and Horkheimer famously bemoan, my dissertation describes the same operation in reverse – the "culturization" (or aestheticization) of industry, where the workday absorbs the resources, faculties and affects associated with the aesthetic. This operation is designed to produce more highly-productive, motivated workers but also to ward off and absorb the countercultural and artistic critiques that might lead to disaffection. The aesthetic, in this regard, becomes a mechanism for the establishment of a pseudo-democracy and a pseudo-autarky. If "self-management" – the ideal of labor militants, communists and anarchists since the 19th century – once meant freedom from the imperatives of the boss it now means, increasingly, in light of this reorganization, an internalization of such imperatives.My first chapter traces the thematics of "management" and "self-management" as they appear in the early poetry of John Ashbery, and in his controversial book The Tennis-Court Oath (1962) in particular. Numerous poems in this collection – developed from an earlier poem, "The Instructional Manual" – take up the position of the midlevel employee, who is both the object of commands and the producer of commands. The contradictions in this standpoint – examined in C. Wright Mills' White Collar and many subsequent studies of "the new middle class"provide insight into this transitional moment in capitalism, in which the extensive growth of deskilled white-collar work created, for large firms and the post-war bureaucracy, a crisis of management. One of the ways in which this appears in Ashbery's poetry is through a subtle and inventive play with free indirect discourse and point of view, in which individual moments and voices manifest as antagonistic fragments in an intersubjective field, requiring the "managerial" intervention of the arranging, organizing poetic voice or mind, a mind that is itself fragmented by its multiple allegiances and responsibilities. The experimental collages of The Tennis Court Oath illuminate the curious ambiguity of that special commodity, labor-power, which is at once object and subject: a thinking object, a commodity that speaks.As I discuss in my second chapter, one site where all of these meanings are contested – a site that again attracts the interest of both artists and business management theorists – is the emergent discourse of cybernetics, Through the central notion of "feedback," cybernetics presents an image of social self-regulation based upon reciprocal, horizontal relations rather than explicit hierarchies. Writers and conceptual artists borrow from this discourse to model utopian social forms, ones where form is embedded less in explicit command than in something like a changeable grammar or syntax – cybernetics calls this "information" – which can be revealed and manipulated by art. To give just two examples, both Hannah Weiner in her Code Poems and Dan Graham in his Works for Magazine Pages follow the founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, by treating information – and by extension, the formative powers of cultural labor – as a kind of anti-entropic, organizing force. Following Benjamin Buchloh, I describe this development as an "administrative aesthetic," since the cultural artifact comes to see its vocation as one of regulating social relations. Though I treat only a handful of figures in this chapter, the list of writers and artists influenced by this conception of information (and its close cousin, entropy) provides a remarkable cross-section of the period. A partial list of figures who help forge these new aesthetic values would include, in fiction, William Burroughs, William Gass, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon; in poetry, Charles Olson, John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, Hannah Weiner and Bernadette Mayer; and in art, Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham and Martha Rosler.One of the reasons why it has been difficult to approach the cultural transformations of the 1960s and 1970s from the side of labor rather than, say, consumption– from the side of the workday rather than leisure time – is that increasingly these two spheres commingle, and the values associated with leisure time are invoked to make the workday more tolerable, at the same time as the protocols and routines associated with work colonize the space of leisure time. This crossing of spheres bears in particular upon the relations between unpaid "reproductive" or domestic labor (the housework associated with women) and waged labor. The subject of my third chapter, Bernadette Mayer's project Memory (1972) – performance, installation and epic poem – investigates the crossing and blurring of these spheres, as everyday life is increasingly subsumed by the protocols of office work, and as office work is increasingly colored in the shades and hues of the street or the home. Memory models this process of merger and blurring through its incorporation of multiple media (type, photography, audio recording), artistic genres and techniques. In this sense, Mayer's elaboration of a "total" artwork which merges different technologies into one single apparatus prefigures the coming reorganization of office work around the personal computer.

 Sometime awhile ago I came up with the idea of doing a trilogy of posts on conspiracy theory, or modern conspiracy thought, read through Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx. I am not exactly sure why the idea appealed to me, in part because I increasingly consider Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx to be the cornerstones of my philosophical thought, even if these cornerstones come through the mediations of Tosel, Jameson, and Althusser (to name a few), but in this case, more specifically it seemed worth asking what would three critics of the mystifications of their day make of our modern mystifications.After writing the pieces on Spinoza and Hegel it took me a long time to even consider writing a piece on Marx. The intersection of Marx and conspiracy theory just seems too big to take on in a blogpost. This is  in part because for many in the US, Marxism is both the name of an actual conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. It has become increasingly so in terms of the former, the right has dealt with decline of the Soviet Union not by giving up on red scares, but by making the object of such ghost stories more and more diffuse and conspiratorial.  Marxism, or communism, are not to just to be found in open appeals to revolution, or organizing workers instead everything from Critical Race Theory to the casting of a Disney film can now be seen to be the work of Marxism in its more diffuse cultural form, a plot that becomes more insidious the more indirect its connection discernible political goals become. At the same time that Marxism is seen as conspiracy it is argued that its understanding of history and politics which sees the interest of the ruling class behind everything is fundamentally a conspiracy theory, if not the fundamental conspiracy theory. As is often the case, I would argue that this idea that Marxism is a conspiracy theory gets things wrong and upside down. To gesture to a much larger argument, I would argue that Marx's fundamental theoretical innovation is to present an understanding of economic, social, and political relations that breaks with every conspiracy theory in that its primary mode of explanation is not individual intentions, or collective strategies, but the economic and social conditions that exceed any intention or conspiracy. The actions of capitalist with respect to wages and working conditions are, to use the parlance of our times, dictated by the demands of the market, by the demand to be competitive, etc., what Marx would perhaps more simply call the extraction of surplus value. Marx stresses that this structure is absolutely indifferent to the conscious intentions of not only the workers, who must conform to it in selling their labor or risk losing their jobs, but to the capitalist as well. As Marx puts it, in the mouth of the worker addressing the capitalist,  "You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the R.S.P.C.A. [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals], and you may be in the odour of sanctity as well; but the thing you represent when you come face to face with me has no heart in its breast." As I argued with respect to Spinoza (see the link above), if the defining characteristic of most conspiracy theories is understanding the world in terms of ends, of deducing the conspiracy from effects, (if talking about race makes white people feel bad that must be the reason behind such teaching, and so on, Marx's fundamental argument is how little ends and intentions mean in understanding social and political life. Marx's criticism is not one of "capitalist greed" as a moral failing, but of the structural conditions that cause capitalists to seek cheaper workers, to demand more of workers, and so on regardless of their moral character. This is the real meaning of Marx's invocation of vampires and werewolves, not to call the capitalist a monster, but to claim that there is something monstrous in capital that exceeds intentions and is found not in the hearts of human beings but in the social relations that produce and reproduce them. As something of an aside, I will suggest that part of Marx's legacy on critical theory, for lack of a better term, is this demand to think in terms of structures that exceed and situate consciousness, this, as I have argued awhile ago, is partly what is at stake in the concept of the mode of production. This legacy goes beyond those who are explicitly Marxist. What Foucault called a dispositif, or apparatus, what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as assemblages or machines, were also an attempt to think the structural over and above the intentional. They are in some sense an attempt to articulate a concept that could displace the mode of production understood as the articulation of material practices and ideas, what Marx called base and superstructure. In Foucault this becomes the relation of power and knowledge, while in Deleuze and Guattari it becomes that of machinic assemblages of bodies and collective assemblages of enunciation. Both of which could be understood as an attempt to expand the explanatory framework beyond the putatively economic to encompass the production of knowledge and desire.  Closer to home, the insistence on the term "structural" in "structural racism," as well as similar attempts to think patriarchy as a social and political structure, are all attempts to theorize racism, sexism, or misogyny without reducing it to individual prejudices, biases, or attitudes. I would then say, summing this up all too quickly, not only is Marx's thought not a conspiracy theory, Marx's fundamental move of thinking relations, structures, and institution in excess of intentions and understandings is the antechamber or all theories that want to be more than conspiracy theories that want to understand the structural conditions and not the individual attitudes as the basis for exploitation and domination. Such a point is beyond the focus of a blogpost, and, moreover, it was not what I intend to get at here. My question is what does Marx offer for thinking the conspiratorial turn in contemporary politics. The first point, which I have already more or less uttered, is that a great deal of what we call conspiracy theories are really just anti-communism, and that these theories have become more baroque and oblique as communism as a political force retreats into historical memory. They are in some sense a kind of anti-communism without communism, as Seymour argues. It is the decline of Marxism as a political force that leads to the demand to find it everywhere; everything that challenges the existing order, not just the economic order but its racial and gender aspects as well, from teaching about the history of slavery to non-binary gender identity can be labelled "Marxist." (The irony of this is that actually existing Marxism, especially in its more official state varieties, has had a spotty at best record when it comes to understanding race and gender as sites of domination and exploitation. Many Marxists of an old school variety are perhaps surprised to learn that anti-racist education is secretly Marxist and that Marxists are behind the demand to respect individual's choice of pronouns). Second, Marxism is integral to understanding the real conditions of social and political life which are in some sense experienced as a vast conspiracy. As I have alluded to above, Marx explains, better than any conspiracy theory the way in which prevailing economic and political relations produce the feeling of helplessness and lack of control that is, as Marcus Gilroy-Ware argues, the raw material for most conspiracy theories. Of course the fundamental question is if it is in some sense the relations of capitalism that create the conditions of alienation and powerlessness which in turn create the condition for conspiracy theorizing, why do such theories name everything but capital, or the ruling class, as the agent of this conspiracy. This is part because the demands of capital are too open, too disclosed to be the object of a conspiracy theory. There is no riddle to solve in saying that capital is driven by the extraction of surplus value, or, as they say, the pursuit of profit. It is openly declared in every newspaper, website, and news broadcast. Without a secret, without the ability to be in the know, there is no affective appeal to a conspiracy theory. We are stuck in a kind of perpetual purloined letter situation in which it is because the existing goals of the ruling class are so out in the open that there is a need to create a kind of bizarro world inversion of this world in order to believe in the conspiracy that must exist. While it is fairly clear to anyone paying attention that the established position on COVID for example is to declare it over again and again in order to be able to get people back to work and to end any state spending on aid, testing, or vaccines, such a goal is too open to muster any theorizing, too public to generate any critique, so we get a bizarro inversion where the powers want to keep the pandemic going, want lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines for some vague reason of control. At the same time, it could be argued that the fact that conspiracy theories generally leave capitalism untouched, approaching it only obliquely through the antisemitic fear of global elites, demonstrates to what extent the demands of capitalism have become, as Marx writes, self-evident natural laws, wage labor as a mode of existence and commodification as the realization of pleasures remain unexamined by conspiracy theories. Thus to butcher a phrase, is easier to imagine the world controlled by lizard people than it is to question the existence of wage labor and the commodity form. 

In this article I provide a contribution to the ongoing discussion on the approach developed by Jason W. Moore in the field of International Relations, known as "World-Ecology". Through this perspective I analyze the agreements that are negotiated between core and semi-periphery states, and the periphery states in the African continent in the field of trade, migration, security and employment.Recent studies analysed the agreements negotiated between the core, semi-periphery and periphery states from very different perspectives. For example, from an economic point of view, previous research has highlighted the link between migration and development or analysed the increasing dependence on the migrant workforce in some specific sectors in the global center. Other studies opted for a more "social" standpoint and analysed the process of integration of migrant-origin workforce from periphery states in the socio-economic fabric of core states. A third group of studies focused on the repercussions that security agreements have on regular and irregular migrants coming from periphery states. Other scholars have investigated the environmental impact of the appropriation of raw materials and energy following (dis)agreements between core, semi-periphery, and periphery states.All these contributions help to shed light on the core-periphery relations from different angles. Yet, Moore's World-Ecology perspective can help us go beyond the intrinsic limitations of these "compartmentalised" approaches and activate a holistic re-reading of these core-periphery relations in the field of migration, trade, security and employment. In this article, I focus on these agreements to demonstrate how this perspective can be used to theorise those strategic and dialectical bundles of human and extra-human relations that are at the foundation of the global capitalist civilisation.As I will show, core-periphery state agreements provide the structure through which patterns and relationships of power and production within nature can be co-produced, exerting continuous pressure on human and extra-human nature to keep it cheap. Moore refers in this regard to the "Four Cheaps": labour, food, energy, and raw materials, and the tendency of capitalism to appropriate them with as little capital as possible, or even better free of charge in order to generate surplus value and an ecological surplus. Core-periphery state agreements serve to extend the zone of appropriation and set up new streams of the Four Cheaps. Core-periphery state agreements are the Janus face of capitalism: if on the one hand they exert pressure to keep nature cheap, on the other hand, the same dynamics of negotiation inherent in these agreements progressively leads to the exhaustion of capitalism's Cheap Nature strategy.Core-periphery state agreements include, for example, the temporal migration programs signed between the European Union and the periphery states in Africa with the explicit aim of providing cheap labour to specific sectors (e.g. social care) in the global centre that would otherwise need higher remuneration and much better working conditions to motivate core states' autochthonous labour power. These programs also result in promoting a specific type of migrant-origin labour force: temporal, circular, vulnerable, and therefore cheap. In turn, the promotion of this type of migration solidifies hierarchical and dualistic constructions within the labour market. Moore's World-Ecology perspective can also be used to place emphasis on the link between migration, cheap labour, and the production of cheap food. The function of labour reserves, which in the past was covered by slaves and colonized labour, is today entrusted to migrants from the global periphery.This article also analyses the trade agreements between core, semi-periphery and periphery states for their role in securing cheap energy and raw materials. Core-periphery trade (dis)agreements are primarily power relations that mobilize and recombine human and extra-human natures, and that have as their purpose the endless accumulation and production of global spaces of appropriation. The packages of trade agreements signed between the core, semi-periphery and periphery states are also closely linked to security measures. Security is not a by-product of these agreements, but rather a constitutive element of the negotiations, through which interlocking agencies of capital, science, and political power together release new sources of free or low-cost human and extra-human natures for capital accumulation. Going beyond the consideration that the proliferation of fences of razor wire and walls around the globe is a valid indicator of the flourishing state experienced by the security industry in the current phase of capitalism, once we embrace the World-Ecology perspective we can see how the security agreements between core, semi-periphery and periphery state alter extra-human and human nature. In fact, securitarian measures are inserted in pre-existing geographical patterns and social structures (re)producing clusters of nature hierarchized according to historical-geographical specificities, and patterns of race, gender, and class. Here I think for example about the categories of Arabised North Africa (e.g. the Maghreb) vs the rest of "Black" Africa or the category of "illegal" migrant vs "legal" migrant, which are solidified through the security "deals" struck between core, semi-periphery states and periphery states. In addition to its introduction and conclusions, this article has three sections. The first section establishes the main features of Moore's World-Ecology perspective that will be developed throughout the article. In the second section, the article isolates four broad reasons that help us understand how and why agreements between core, semi-periphery and periphery countries can accelerate the decline of the ecological surplus and presents the main argument around which the article revolves: while in the past, appropriation practices combined with the global market and technological innovations ensured rapid global expansions, based on the identification, codification, and rationalization of the Cheap Natures, notably through the practices of colonisation and slavery,today this "advantage" is no longer available. Moreover, the identification, appropriation and mobilization of uncapitalised nature must undergo long, tedious, and above all expensive core-periphery negotiations, which ultimately take the form of agreement packages that include measures in the field of trade, migration, security, and employment. The third section further develops this argument by applying it to the concrete case of the African periphery countries. In the concluding remarks, the article highlights the dual characters of the core, semi-periphery and periphery state agreements and reflects on the nature of the ongoing crisis.The core-periphery agreements analysed in this article are certainly a display of capitalism's adaptive power, yet at the same time core-(semi)periphery negotiations accelerate the crisis of modernity-in-nature by exhausting the Cheap Nature, making everything less cheap, and at fast speed, as evidenced by the last commodity supercycle and the one on the horizon. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the fragilities of the global capitalist economy and woken up post-capitalist imaginaries. However, as of today it is an open question as to whether we are facing a developmental crisis of capitalism, which can be solved within the boundaries of the neoliberal order through new rounds of accumulation and commodification, or we are witnessing instead the beginning of an epochal crisis marked by an irreversible decline of capitalism's capacity to restructure itself as the mode of organisation of human and extra-human nature. ; El artículo busca tres objetivos: 1) contribuir al debate en curso en el marco de la propuesta de la ecología-mundo, centrándose en el caso de los acuerdos suscritos entre los estados del centro global, de la semiperiferia y los estados de la periferia; 2) proporcionar una visión de cómo y por qué los acuerdos en las áreas de comercio, migración, seguridad y empleo que se suscriben entre los estados del centro, de la semiperiferia y los estados de la periferia global contribuyen a acelerar la caída del excedente ecológico; y por último, 3) volver a centrar la atención en el continente africano, haciendo hincapié en su papel central en el desarrollo y crisis de la economía capitalista global. La perspectiva desarrollada por Moore rechaza el dualismo cartesiano de "Naturaleza" y "Sociedad" y, por tanto, trasciende la narrativa del capitalismo y el medio ambiente tan predominante en la actualidad, proponiendo en su lugar una relación creativa y dialéctica de unidad fundamental entre la naturaleza humana y la extrahumana, oikeios. De ello se desprende que la crisis del capitalismo, ya sea evolutiva o epocal, no se origina en la convergencia de crisis ontológicamente distintas e independientes, la económica (sociedad) y la medioambiental (naturaleza), sino que expresa la esencia misma del capitalismo. En este sentido, los acuerdos comerciales, de inmigración, de seguridad y de empleo entre los estados del centro, las semiperiferias y los estados de la periferia encarnan la misma esencia antagonista del capitalismo: la tendencia a la acumulación incesante de capital y la caída del excedente ecológico. En este artículo exploramos que si, por un lado, los acuerdos estipulados entre los estados del centro, las semiperiferias y los estados de la periferia representan una forma de apropiarse del "trabajo" barato y gratuito de naturalezas humanas y extrahumanas para ponerlos al servicio del proceso de acumulación capitalista, estos acuerdos, por su propia construcción y sus dinámicas de negociación, aceleran, por otro lado, la caída del excedente ecológico, lo que se hace visible en el aumento de los precios de los bienes primarios a través del continuo agotamiento de las naturalezas humanas y extrahumanas no capitalizadas o infracapitalizadas. El texto, además de introducción y conclusiones, consta de tres apartados. En el primero se establecen las principales características de la perspectiva de la ecología-mundo de Moore, que se desarrollarán a lo largo del artículo. En el segundo apartado se aíslan las cuatro grandes razones que nos ayudan a entender cómo y por qué los acuerdos entre estados del centro, de la semiperiferia y los estados de la periferia pueden acelerar la caída del excedente ecológico. En el tercero se desarrolla el argumento principal del artículo, aplicándolo al caso concreto de los acuerdos estipulados entre algunos estados del centro, de la semiperiferia y los estados de la periferia africana.

During the last decades in Brazil there has been a significant increase in hydrosocial conflicts due to the construction of large hydroelectric complexes, which involve qualitative and quantitative changes regarding access and ownership of water. It has opened a new period of accumulation and transformation of production relations through the commodification of this important resource. This extension of large projects of an extractivist nature in the Amazon region, especially from the end of the eighties from the last century, after the settlement of the so-called Washington consensus. This phenomenon led to a whole series of transformations in productive, reproductive and social relations, in order to provide mechanisms for regional and national integration, as well as for overcoming accumulation crises which came from the global scale. In the Brazilian case, these reforms undertaken in recent decades in the political, social, environmental, economic and legislative realms, have not meant a major change in the productive level of the world-economy scale, since the peripheral role in the country, initiated during the colonial period, continues to be maintained. But they have deepened their dependence through the extractivist development model, highlighting among other practices (such as the advance of the agricultural frontier, large soybean crops, the deployment of fracking to increase rents derived from the hydrocarbons, etc…) the large hydroelectric complexes located throughout the country's vast hydrographic basin. The main goal of this kind of new structures is to produce higher levels of energy, largely dedicated to the processing of aluminum, whose demand has increased exponentially in recent years in states such as China, among other BRICS. From all these hydroelectric structures, due to their importance and expansion over time, probably the one that stands out the most is the Belo Monte dam on the Xingú river, near to the city of Altamira. A multiplicity of actors are involved in this one (indigenous communities, fishing farmers, the State, Eletrobras, non-governmental organizations, indigenous confederations, construction companies, supranational institutions, etc.) whose dispute over access to water resources implies a modification of the configuration of the power relations that take place in the territory. Although it is true that its planning began in 1975, within the framework of the search for a better use of the country's hydroelectric potential, to boost economic development and energy sovereignty; the advances and setbacks in the settlement of the operation of the infrastructure have been delayed until today and probably will continue in the near future. This paper not only aims to analyze the spatio-temporal path of this controversial conflict. Furthermore, it proposes two additional objectives. On the one hand, the elaboration of a theoretical framework that combines the perspectives of the production of nature, the production of space and the construction of scale, which could be applied to the analysis of other environmental conflicts that take place in the global south. On the other hand, and consequently, through its use in the study of this particular case, it seeks to determine the strengths and weaknesses that it shows for its use in future similar works. Hitherto the most part of the works and papers related with this case study are focused in the contentious politics of social movements and communities to stop the development of the project. As well as a significant number of them mainly analyze the contradictions of PT through the Brazilian state regarding to the different social impacts of the dam. This article aims to go beyond and provide tools and categories to explain the practices, relations and structures which are involved this process. In view of this, a methodology based on bibliographic review and the use of both primary and secondary sources is proposed. Through this method, it is possible to obtain the set of practices, representations and relationships that shape the conflict itself. In turn, to achieve this end, the article is divided into four main parts. In the first one, it is exposed the articulation approach between the different categories and aspects of the theoretical gazes for their uses in the case study. In relation with the perspective of the production of nature, originally developed by Neil Smith, the categories of use value and exchange value are fundamental. These ones, through their dialectic within the production relations, modify through the pass of time the metabolism that takes place between nature and society itself, generating conflicts where these changes imply a clash between two modes of production. With this fact different values prevail over the environmental resources, whose access is sought to continue the process of social reproduction. In addition to this, the proposed framework take in count the categories of spatial practices, representations of space and spaces of representation, formulated by Henri Lefebvre, in order to explain how changes in power relations involve changes in the space in which they are inserted and vice versa. Furthermore, with the interscalar perspective proposed by several scholars that are mentioned, the possibility of explaining how phenomena and actors from different scales influence the local one during the long development of the conflict. Subsequently, in the second section of the paper, the analysis of the spatio-temporal development of the conflict is carried out, from the beginning of project planning, through the modifications carried out by the different governments, the changes in the positions of the actors, the different law resolutions, the granting of licenses and so on, until today. Thirdly, the role of hegemonic actors in advancing the construction of the hydroelectric complex is explained and detailed, for which it is not only important to analyze the different representations and narratives carried out by different governments with respect to the project of Belo Monte, but also how state hydroelectric companies (Eletrobras and Eletronorte) are affected by the entrance of foreign capital, changing over time the spatial practices that are carried out, as well as the different positions of the institution responsible for the granting of environmental licenses to allow the dam activity (IBAMA). At the end, in the last part, the same operation is made but with the subordinate actors involved, which basically would be the local and foreign non-governmental organizations, as well as the communities of indigenous, peasant and fishermen of the locality. For them, the river fundamentally supposes a use value insofar as it is used as a source of resources and transportation to maintain pre-capitalist production relations on which they are sustained. Obviously, these activities have a low exchange value produced through its limited technology to harvesting and fishing, that finally are destined for local trade. The main results which can be highlighted are related with how this dam in particular, and the different hydroelectric projects in general along the region, allow to extend spatially an economic integration through the deployment of new relations of production and mechanisms for accumulation. These ones suppose an appearance of new use values, exchange values and values that clash against the previous ones thus producing the social struggle in the local scale around the dam. Furthermore, the frameworks of the scale and the production of social space show as useful theories for its application to future cases of environmental conflicts, meanwhile the production of nature framework shows some difficulties in order to use some of its categories for the case study. ; Durante las últimas décadas en Brasil se ha producido un incremento significativo de los conflictos hidrosociales a causa de la construcción de grandes complejos hidroeléctricos. Esta extensión de grandes proyectos de carácter extractivista en la región amazónica, sobre todo a partir de finales de la década de los años ochenta del siglo pasado, han conllevado todo un conjunto de transformaciones en las relaciones sociales, productivas y reproductivas, de cara avanzar en mecanismos para la integración regional y nacional, así como para la superación de crisis de acumulación propias de la escala global. Entre todos, por su trascendencia y dilatación en el tiempo, probablemente el que más destaca es el de la represa de Belo Monte en el río Xingú, próximo a la ciudad de Altamira. En él se ven involucrados una multiplicidad de actores (comunidades indígenas, campesinos, pescadores, el estado, Eletrobras, constructoras, instituciones supranacionales, etc) cuya disputa por el acceso a los recursos hídricos supone una modificación de la configuración de las relaciones de poder que se dan en el territorio. Este artículo, además de analizar el recorrido espacio-temporal de dicho conflicto, se propone dos objetivos adicionales. Por un lado la elaboración de un marco teórico, que conjugue las perspectivas de la producción de la naturaleza, la producción del espacio y la construcción de la escala, que pueda ser aplicado al análisis de conflictos ambientales que tienen lugar en el Sur Global. Por otro lado, y en consecuencia, a través de su empleo en el estudio de este caso particular, determinar las fortalezas y debilidades que presenta para su uso en futuros trabajos similares. De cara a ello se plantea una metodología basada en la revisión bibliográfica y el uso tanto de fuentes primarias como secundarias, mediante las cuales se puedan extraer y analizar el conjunto de prácticas, representaciones y relaciones que dan forma al conflicto en sí mismo. A su vez, el artículo se divide en cuatro partes principales: el planteamiento de articulación entre las distintas categorías y aspectos de los planteamientos teóricos para su uso en el estudio de caso; el análisis del desarrollo espacio-temporal del conflicto, desde el inicio de la planificación del proyecto hasta día de hoy; en tercer lugar se explica y detalla el papel de los actores hegemónicos en el avance de la construcción del complejo hidroeléctrico; y en última instancia se lleva a cabo la misma operación pero con los actores subalternos implicados. De entre los resultados obtenidos, destaca cómo este proyecto a nivel particular, y los macroproyectos hidroeléctricos en general en la región, han sido fundamentales para la integración económica en el marco de la extensión de las relaciones de producción capitalistas y los mecanismos para la acumulación a través de la realización del plusvalor, derivando resistencias ante este proceso de extracción. Así mismo, la perspectiva interescalar y la de la producción del espacio muestran potencialidades como marco para el estudio de conflictos ambientales, mientras que el de la producción de la naturaleza lo hace de manera parcial.

The military profession needs to be redefined by examination of its expertise and jurisdictions of practice, whereas previously the focus was on securing its professional identity. Twenty years ago, the original Future of the Army Profession research project responded to growing concerns among officers that the Army was no longer a profession in light of the post–Cold War drawdown and the onset of global operations including Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, the profession faces recurrent challenges raised by the changing character of war, the renewal of great-power competition, crises surrounding issues of sexual harassment and assault, the effects of a major global pandemic and associated social and political unrest, and the growing societal distrust toward professions in general. Richard Lacquement and Thomas Galvin propose that the questions of professional identity, while still important, are now less salient than those about the professions' jurisdictions of practice and domains of expert knowledge. Clarifying them will help better prepare US military professionals to exercise discretionary judgment effectively. They also propose a new Future of the US Military Profession research effort that addresses these jurisdictions across service, joint, and defense enterprises to clarify the divisions of professional work and responsibilities. This is a must-read for any steward of the military profession. ; https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1941/thumbnail.jpg