SHUM 4987 - Capitalism’s “New Era”? Materialism, Enclosure, and the Body Politics of the Present

(crosslisted)
(also COML 4023, ENGL 4987)

Spring. 4 credits.

Limited to 15 students.

J. Rosenberg.

How do we determine when the present has become the future? What is the relationship between the enclosures of capitalist accumulation - of land, of the working day, of the body - and recent claims about the imminent overcoming of capital’s logic? This seminar will ask how thought about the body and materiality grapples with periodizing the present. We will link theories of sexuality with theories of capital accumulation and enclosure, and will wager that conceptions of embodiment, desire, and materiality shift in relation to the changing landscape of enclosures and dispossessions wrought by capitalism. We will study two historical periods of intensified accumulation/enclosure: the early modern period described by Marx as one marked by “primitive accumulation,” and the late-20th/early 21st-century marked by what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.” Readings will include work from Adorno, Althusser, Amin, Banaji, Berlant, Butler, Deleuze, Fanon, Galloway, Hardt and Negri, Harvey, Jameson, Luxemburg, Marx.