Suchergebnisse

Drawing on a mix of political, economic, literary, and filmic texts, Crisis Cultures challenges current cultural histories of the neoliberal period by arguing that financialization, and not just neoliberalism, has been at the center of the dramatic transformations in Latin American societies in the last thirty years. Starting from political economic figures such as crisis, hyperinflation, credit, and circulation and exemplary cultural texts, Whitener traces the interactions between culture, finance, surplus populations, and racialized state violence after 1982 in Mexico and Brazil. Crisis Cultures makes sense of the emergence of new forms of exploitation and terrifying police and militarized violence by tracking the cultural and discursive forms, including real abstraction and the favela and immaterial cadavers and voided collectivities, that have emerged in the complicated aftermath of the long downturn and global turn to finance.

Perhaps no concept has shaped discussions of capitalism and its contemporary transformations more than that of ongoing primitive accumulation. This paper examines, accounts for, and unpacks how primitive accumulation came, within a certain genre of conversations, to be so central. While there have been prior critiques of its usage, notably by Robert Brenner, few have returned to the source of the modern framing of the concept, Rosa Luxemburg. Through a discussion of David Harvey's updating of primitive accumulation as accumulation by dispossession, I return to Luxemburg in order to extract two methodological principles from her work: follow the production of aspects of accumulation and think their organic link and track violence. I then deploy these methodological principles in a discussion of certain critical processes of accumulation in contemporary Mexico to demonstrate the spatialized "organic link" of Luxemburg and Harvey has been violently reconstituted.

My aim in this article is to provide a first pass at thinking the social effects of this credit expansion which I do via credit as a form of public security. In the first part of this article, I chart the expansion of personal credit as a form of financial corporativism during PT governments in Brazil since 2003. As well, I trace some of the principle cultural mediations of credit and the role of Rio de Janeiro as the site of the production of these mediations, in particular the form of financial mestizagem elaborated in the 2012 novela Cheias de Charme. In the second part, I turn my attention to the kind of subjects that credit expansion has produced. Here I argue that credit expansion has produced a form of the subject as a pass-thru where the state is less concerned with subjects' interiority and more with facilitating the seizure of assets. This seizure requires a concomitant expansion of militarization and the threat of state violence which further hollows out the subject. I conclude by returning to Rio de Janeiro to apply these insights to the post-UPP political environment. My overall argument is that credit has functioned as a form of public security in two ways: first, state-linked discourse and cultural productions concerning credit-based consumption have produced new figures of national belonging, while, second, the legal environment required for credit expansion produces subjects increasingly exposed to the threat of state violence

La reproduction fut naguère le concept de la pensée critique le plus fertile et le plus proliférant quant au plan politique. Que cela signifierait-il d'y revenir aujourd'hui, dans un monde marqué par la surveillance algorithmique, la crise environnementale, et les États bien armés pour mener les guerres sociales ?