Leigh Claire La Berge

I'm trying to get back to my critical sports writing practice, begun a few years ago under the auspices of Sports and Surplus Value. I wrote this piece about the 2018 Super Bowl for the Los Angeles Review of Books; full link here: http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/time-stands-still-super-bowl-trump-rules-banality-american-liberalism/

There has long been a tension in Fredric Jameson's work regarding the extent to which it is possible or warranted to develop transhistorical categories for literary interpretation across of the whole of the capitalist mode of production. In my contribution to this symposium, I take up the problem of how Jameson's Allegory and Ideology participates in such questions in its consideration of periodisation and narrativisation through the particular construction of allegory, from the early modern age to our financial present.

No observer of contemporary American economic life can overlook the fact that real wages have remained almost unchanged for over forty years.  Stagnant wages seemingly scandalize liberal platitudes of progress. As an economic matter, they limit consumption, and if productivity increases quickly while wages lag far behind, they can produce a crisis of overproduction. But while wages have remained largely stagnant, forms and modalities for thinking about labor have proliferated in critical theory and in literary and cultural studies. Over the last twenty years, scholars have developed an expansive terminology for describing labor: affective labor, cognitive labor, digital labor, gen-dered labor, feminized labor, consumer labor, intimate labor and sexual labor. Terms like "gendered labor ," "feminized labor," and "care work" (and rarely "sexual labor") have largely supplanted "house work"-a change we can attribute to the movement of more women into non-domestic workplaces and to the transformation of their formerly unwaged domestic work into the waged work of other, often non-white women. 2 Whereas Frankfurt-School "fellow traveler" Alfred Sohn-Rethel once argued that the crucial division under capitalism was between "intellectual and manual labor," and while Marx himself offered labor's basic division of "abstract labor" and "concrete labor," such terms are rarely used outside of political economy today. 3 As manufacturing has ceded the dominant share of the U.S. occupational field to service, "manual labor" has been replaced by "service work." "Mental labor" has declined in use almost to the point of obsolescence, only to be replaced by "cognitive labor," "creative labor" and in some cases "digital labor." With the attenuation of the social welfare state, "civic work" has become "vol-unteer work." "Emotional labor," a 1980s term that sought to account for a feminized formal labor, now seemingly falls under the broader rubric of "affective labor." Older distinctions such as skilled vs. unskilled or productive vs. unproductive likewise seem to have little currency today. In the proliferation of various new terminologies for naming labor, we can sometimes lose sight of the stagnant wages underpinning their emergence. I understand the proliferation of these terms as an expression of sociocultural critics' desire both to qualify how we work and to treat perceived changes in work as a means of periodization. Many of these substitutions and transformations may be traced to one of our most cited locations of contemporary economic break, namely the 1970s, as the Fordist mode of regulation and with it certain forms of Keynesian management ceded into what we now recognize as a financialized economy. With deindus-trialization in the U.S. and other developed countries, industrial wage labor ceded ground to service labor , reproductive labor, and affective labor-and it did so not only in the real economy, but in critical political economy as well. In this paper, I want to nuance this perceived relationship between changes in the way we talk about labor and changes in labor itself. Without a doubt, industrial work and wage-based Keynesianism gave way under the global economic restructuring of the 1970s. Yet instead of tautologically suggesting that a new period is defined by new labor, and that new labor inaugurates a new period, I want to understand the ways that changes in labor's organization make visible forms of labor always there but previously out of view. 4 Labor's categorical stability is more robust than the many supposed modifications of it imply. For instance, instead of arguing that women's presence in formal labor feminizes work in accordance with the parameters of a service economy, I suggest that as women enter the waged work

A RECENT SPATE of both liberal arts school and art school closings has reintroduced a sometimes dormant but never forgotten question: are the humanities entering their death throes? How do university finances both depend on and undercut the humanities, and how has the public funding of private education in the United States ensured that you no longer have truly public education?

A way to think labor after finanancialization, decommodifed labor refers to an emptying out of the same wage relation that nonetheless continues to structure our existence. In this paper, I put forth a theory of decommodified labor as one way to think labor in our present conjuncture.

At the end of his Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason (2018), Martijn Konings offers a brief reflection on the methodology of critical thought itself. " It is not possible to provide an objective set of criteria for what makes knowledge critical " , he writes. Then, turning to a problem that he has considered and rejected in his book as a possible approach to the study of finance, that of performativity, he continues: " A good critique is a performative achievement; we recognize it when we encounter it " (205). It's an odd way to end a book that, I think, in many ways does provide a model for social theory. Likewise, it seems to me that the critical operation does contain a certain positive set of features, including a self-consciousness of critical terminology and an ability to explain it in a vocabulary both endogenous to and foreign to its own origins; an awareness of the scale of abstraction at which the categories of analysis operate; and the resources to acknowledge when and why the scale of the abstraction changes, as it likely will need to in order to respond reflexively to whatever it encounters. Finally, the critical operation must distinguish its own sense of narrative – a kind of consistency of meaning over time – from argument, an assertion of why that consistency of meaning should persist in the face of difference. Another way of saying this: critique must be cognizant of its own deployment of the categories of time (argument) and space (abstraction). How, then, should this process confront an object that makes fundamentally temporal demands, namely money, and its constituents in