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The Conspiracy of Architecture: Notes on a Modern Anxiety
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We, the residents of modernity, live in an unquiet house.
This essay examines the relationship between human subjects and their built environment, but it does so less by focusing on architecture than on what one might call ‘architecture once removed'. It is less concerned with the built environment itself than with a prevalent image of that environment in ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, in literature, in film and painting. It is my contention that a particular unsettling image of buildings has gained increasing currency in the modern epoch. I will attempt to show that such an image — and a concomitant anxiety — exists, and to offer an explanation for its provenance.
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Velocities of Change: Perry Anderson's Sense of an Ending
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In Considerations on Western Marxism, released in 1976, Perry Anderson stated and vindicated an affiliation to the Trotskyist tradition long apparent from the pages of New Left Review under his editorship. Central to this tradition, in its orthodox forms, was a historico-political perspective which regarded the Soviet Union (and cognate regimes) as ‘degenerate’ or ‘deformed’ ‘workers’ states’ – post-capitalist social formations whose complex character dictated rejection of Stalinism and anti-Sovietism alike. In Anderson's case, this orientation received a Deutscherite inflection: abroad, no less than at home, Soviet power was a contradictory phenomenon, by turns reactionary (Czechoslovakia) and progressive (Vietnam, Angola). The potential regeneration of the Russian Revolution and its sequels, whether via ‘proletarian revolution’ from below (Trotsky), or bureaucratic reformation from above (Deutscher), remained an article of faith among Marxists of this observance to the end. Accordingly, the debacle of Gorbachevite perestroika proved a profoundly disorientating experience for many who lent little or no credence to the mendacious claims of ‘actually existing socialism'. Amid capitalist euphoria at Communist collapse, what was to be said – and done? Anderson's displaced answer was forthcoming in 1992 in ‘The Ends of History’
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Recognition and Social Relations of Production
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‘Social relation of production’ is a key term in Marx's theory of history, for the social relations of production of a society give that society its fundamental character and make it, for example, a capitalist rather than some other kind of society.
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Marx and the Magic of Money: Towards an Alchemy of Capital
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We live in an age dominated by money. As capitalism has intensified and expanded as a social form, money has increasingly colonised the production and reproduction of the human condition. We live in an age of monetarism: an age in which social and political regulation are increasingly subordinate to the dictates of ‘sound money'. We live in an age of national lotteries: an age where millions attempt each week to garner enough money to ‘free’ themselves from the grinding agony of wage labour. We live in an age in which people increasingly grasp the alienation inherent in the domination of society by money and attempt to reassert a sense of human community through the introduction of local currency and barter schemes. But we also live in an age where Marxism is supposedly dead; where we can only gaze in ironic postmodern wonder at the increasing domination of the human condition by money and its social forms. In this paper we go beyond this postmodern orthodoxy to suggest that it is not only possible to develop a historically materialist analysis of money and its social forms but also that this project is essential if we are to reclaim our humanity from the deadening alienation of money and its social forms. We explore the magical qualities of money, the qualities which have enthralled and transfixed bourgeois social science from the classical economy of Adam Smith to the present day postmodernists. We argue that the lasting legacy of Marx was to uncover the historical materiality underlying the magical appearance of money: a discovery of the alchemic properties of money capital through which money becomes more money and which involves the material subordination of living labour to the valorisation of money capital.
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A Critique of Neo-Malthusian Marxism: Society, Nature, and Population
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Recent decades have seen a rethinking and renewal of Marxism on various levels, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s when New-Left movements in the developed capitalist countries combined with Maoist, Guevarist, and other Third-World liberation struggles to challenge the ossified theory and practice of Soviet-style communism and traditional social democracy. More recently, the rethinking of Marxism has been driven largely by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its official Marxist ideology, and by the movement toward neoliberal ‘free market’ policies on a global scale, which together have brought forth a tidal wave of frankly pro-capitalist as well as ‘postmodern’ left varieties of ‘end of history'-type thinking. The contemporary challenge to Marxism, however, also has a positive side in the form of popular revolts against the neoliberalisation of the global economy – the Chiapas rebellion in Mexico, the December 1995 public sector upheavals in France, and many others, not to mention the heroic struggle of the Cuban people against the threat of recolonisation by US and global capital. Here the challenge is to incorporate the changing forms of working-class movement, and their new prefigurations of post-capitalist society, into the theory and practice of Marxian communism.
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Risk Society and its Discontents
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Recent theory of ideology and art has focused on the strange phenomenon of interpassivity – a phenomenon that is the exact obverse of ‘interactivity’ in the sense of being active through another subject who does the job for me, like the Hegelian Idea manipulating human passions to achieve its goals (the ‘cunning of Reason/List der Vemunft’).
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Adorno: A Critical Introduction Simon Jarvis Cambridge
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The Debate on Popular Violence and the Popular Movement in the Russian Revolution
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Book Review
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Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference David Harvey Cambridge
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Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan Louis Althusser
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Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics Alan Freeman and Guglielmo Carchedi
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Perception and Experience in Modernity/Wahrnehmuns und Erfahrung in der Moderne
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Notes on Contributors
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