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Life as Surplus

Author: Melinda E. Cooper

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2011-02-01

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0295990317

Focusing on the period between the 1970s and the present, Life as Surplus is a pointed and important study of the relationship between politics, economics, science, and cultural values in the United States today. Melinda Cooper demonstrates that the history of biotechnology cannot be understood without taking into account the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism as a political force and an economic policy. From the development of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s to the second Bush administration's policies on stem cell research, Cooper connects the utopian polemic of free-market capitalism with growing internal contradictions of the commercialized life sciences. The biotech revolution relocated economic production at the genetic, microbial, and cellular level. Taking as her point of departure the assumption that life has been drawn into the circuits of value creation, Cooper underscores the relations between scientific, economic, political, and social practices. In penetrating analyses of Reagan-era science policy, the militarization of the life sciences, HIV politics, pharmaceutical imperialism, tissue engineering, stem cell science, and the pro-life movement, the author examines the speculative impulses that have animated the growth of the bioeconomy. At the very core of the new post-industrial economy is the transformation of biological life into surplus value. Life as Surplus offers a clear assessment of both the transformative, therapeutic dimensions of the contemporary life sciences and the violence, obligation, and debt servitude crystallizing around the emerging bioeconomy.

Cognitive Surplus

Author: Clay Shirky

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2010-06-10

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1101434724

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The author of the breakout hit Here Comes Everybody reveals how new technology is changing us for the better. In his bestselling Here Comes Everybody, Internet guru Clay Shirky provided readers with a much-needed primer for the digital age. Now, with Cognitive Surplus, he reveals how new digital technology is unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world. For the first time, people are embracing new media that allow them to pool their efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind-expanding reference tools like Wikipedia to life-saving Web sites like Ushahidi.com, which allows Kenyans to report acts of violence in real time. Cognitive Surplus explores what's possible when people unite to use their intellect, energy, and time for the greater good.

Populating the Novel

Author: Emily Steinlight

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1501710710

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From the teeming streets of Dickens's London to the households of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers constructed worlds crammed beyond capacity with human life. In Populating the Novel, Emily Steinlight contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. She shows how the nineteenth-century novel in particular claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics. In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad that link fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground. In so doing, she transforms the subject and political stakes of the Victorian novel, dislodging the longstanding idea that its central category is the individual by demonstrating how fiction is altered by its emerging concern with population. By overpopulating narrative space and imagining the human species perpetually in excess of the existing social order, she shows, fiction made it necessary to radically reimagine life in the aggregate.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Author: Shoshana Zuboff

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 658

ISBN-13: 1610395700

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The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

Urban Displacements

Author: Susanne Soederberg

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-31

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1000327515

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With an eye to further our understanding of everyday life in global capitalism, Urban Displacements provides the first systemic critical political economy analysis of low-income rental housing and social dislocations, combining both theoretical advancements and detailed empirical studies, centering on Berlin, Dublin and Vienna. Soederberg pushes beyond dominant debates by treating low-rent housing as a unique commodity that provides a necessary place for the societal reproduction of labour power whilst being integrated into the global dynamics of capitalism. She argues that historical and geographical configurations of monetized governance, including landlords, employers and inter-scalar state practices, have served to reproduce urban displacements and obfuscate their gendered, class and racialized underpinnings. The outcome is the everyday facilitation and normalization of urban poverty and social marginalization on one side, and capital accumulation on the other. Building on Soederberg’s previous book Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry, this accessible and interdisciplinary text will be useful to academics and students in political science, sociology, geography, urban studies, labour studies, European studies and gender studies.

A Surplus of Memory

Author: Yitzhak ("Antek") Zuckerman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-09-01

Total Pages: 669

ISBN-13: 0520912594

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In 1943, against utterly hopeless odds, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up to defy the Nazi horror machine that had set out to exterminate them. One of the leaders of the Jewish Fighting Organization, which led the uprisings, was Yitzhak Zuckerman, known by his underground pseudonym, Antek. Decades later, living in Israel, Antek dictated his memoirs. The Hebrew publication of Those Seven Years: 1939-1946 was a major event in the historiography of the Holocaust, and now Antek's memoirs are available in English. Unlike Holocaust books that focus on the annihilation of European Jews, Antek's account is of the daily struggle to maintain human dignity under the most dreadful conditions. His passionate, involved testimony, which combines detail, authenticity, and gripping immediacy, has unique historical importance. The memoirs situate the ghetto and the resistance in the social and political context that preceded them, when prewar Zionist and Socialist youth movements were gradually forged into what became the first significant armed resistance against the Nazis in all of occupied Europe. Antek also describes the activities of the resistance after the destruction of the ghetto, when 20,000 Jews hid in "Aryan" Warsaw and then participated in illegal immigration to Palestine after the war. The only extensive document by any Jewish resistance leader in Europe, Antek's book is central to understanding ghetto life and underground activities, Jewish resistance under the Nazis, and Polish-Jewish relations during and after the war. This extraordinary work is a fitting monument to the heroism of a people.

Chinese Surplus

Author: Ari Larissa Heinrich

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780822370536

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Ari Larissa Heinrich examines transnational Chinese aesthetic production--from the earliest appearance of Frankenstein in China to the more recent phenomenon of "cadaver art"-- to demonstrate how representations of the medically commodified body can illuminate the effects of biopolitical violence and postcolonialism in contemporary life.