A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique

Anita Chari

Published by Columbia University Press 2015

A Political Economy of the Senses

Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique

Anita Chari

Volume 2 in the series New Directions in Critical Theory

https://doi.org/10.7312/char17388

Overview
Contents

About this book

Anita Chari revives the concept of reification from Marx and the Frankfurt School to spotlight the resistance to neoliberal capitalism now forming at the level of political economy and at the more sensate, experiential level of subjective transformation. She identifies practices through which artists and activists have challenged neoliberalism's social and political logics, exposing its inherent tensions and contradictions.

Revives the key concept of reification from Marx and the Frankfurt School to spotlight the resistance to neoliberal capitalism now forming

Author / Editor information

Anita Chari is assistant professor of political science at the University of Oregon. In addition to her work as a critical theorist, she is a creative writer, composer, and musician.

Reviews

Recommended.

Jason Lazarus, University of South Florida:
Anita Chari understands we are all performers, and the performance of critique needs new vantage points for observing and more sensitivity to embodied critique all around us. Her text aims to deconstruct the theoretical carousel. We are left with important questions: how can we materialize critique? How can we start to recognize this materialization when it is happening right in front of us? Can we all agree there is more to consider before we perform our knowledge? The risk if we don't is our inability to conceive of a transformative moment.

Albena Azmanova, University of Kent:
A Political Economy of the Senses is a brilliantly conceptualized and ambitious project. This captivating work is written with an acute sense of authorship and even a sense of mission. It articulates an experiential critique of capital, which is a noble and much needed intellectual endeavor, striking at the heart of our current predicament. Anita Chari achieves her goal with merciless, yet gracious, intellectual resolve.

Kevin Olson, University of California, Irvine:
Neoliberalism is one of the most potent phenomena of our time and one of the most strangely resistant to critique. Anita Chari takes a provocative approach in A Political Economy of the Senses, expanding our palette of critical resources with important insights about aesthetics and reification. This is a timely, creative book about some of the most urgent problems of our day.

John Bellamy Foster, editor of the Monthly Review and author of Marx's Ecology:
A Political Economy of the Senses represents the rise of a new, dynamic critical theory for the twenty-first century. It offers at once a critique of neoliberalism's inversion of the political, a renewal of the dialectical imagination of the early Frankfurt School, and an aesthetic-based re-materialization of the political subject. Occupy Wall Street emerges in these pages not as a fleeting historical event but as the signifier of a new, open-ended human potential for emancipation to be actively constructed in the social praxis of our time.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Toward the Materialization of Critique Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART 1: NEOLIBERAL SYMPTOMS
1. NEOLIBERAL SYMPTOMS: The Impasse Between Economics and Politics in Contemporary Political Theory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
2. NEOLIBERALISM AND NORMATIVE AMBIVALENCE: Third-Generation Critical Theory and the Fetish of Intersubjectivity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
PART 2. THE CRITIQUE OF REIFICATION
3. ALIENATION AND DEPOLITICIZATION: Rejoining Radical Democracy with the Critique of Capitalism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
4. LUKÁCS’S TURN TO A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SENSES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
5. THE REVERSIBILITY OF REIFICATION: Adorno from the Aesthetic to the Social Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	142
PART 3. A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SENSES
6. DEFETISHIZING FETISHES: Art and the Critique of Capital in Neoliberal Society Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
7. OCCUPY WALL STREET: Challenging Neoliberal Reification Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 280
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 15
- Other: 15 b&w illustrations

eBook

Published: October 13, 2015
ISBN: 9780231540384