Jeremy Gilbert

What does 'anticapitalism' really mean for the politics and culture of the twenty-first century?Anticapitalism is an idea which, despite going global, remains rooted in the local, persisting as a loose collection of grassroots movements and actions. Anticapitalism needs to develop a coherent and cohering philosophy, something which cultural theory and the intellectual legacy of the New Left can help to provide, notably through the work of key radical thinkers, such as Ernesto Laclau, Stuart Hall, Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze and Judith Butler. Anticapitalism and Culture argues that there is a strong relationship between the radical tradition of cultural studies and the new political movements which try to resist corporate globalization. Indeed, the two need each other: whilst theory can shape and direct the huge diversity of anticapitalist activism, the energy and sheer political engagement of the anticapitalist movement can breathe new life into cultural studies.

This article was based on a talk I gave at the launch of Stuart Hall’s collected Political Writings. It argues for a democratic cosmopolitanism in response to both neoliberal cosmopolitanism and forms of social democratic but socially conservative politics that react simplistically against it.

When Stuart Hall died in 2014, many tributes and memorial activities were planned by organisations, institutions and publications that felt they owed him a debt. New Formations was no exception, and the editorial board spent some time reflecting on an appropriate tribute. Stuart himself, as many of us knew, had little interest in seeing his work codified or memorialised for its own sake. But there was one injunction that many of us were familiar with from that work, his example, and from frequent personal and political conversations with him. The importance of thinking about 'the conjuncture', of 'getting the analysis right', was one that Stuart frequently emphasised to his students and interlocutors. The importance of mapping the specificity of the present, of situating current developments historically, of looking out for political threats and opportunities, was always at the heart of Stuart's conception both of 'cultural studies' as a specific intellec...

Here Jeremy Gilbert critically reviews the main ‘modes of anti-neoliberalism’ concluding with a presentation of the chapter author’s own commitment to a modern radical democratic alternative to neoliberalism. The counter-narratives to neoliberalism analysed are moralistic, pathologising, eco-Marxist and Marxist. ‘Moralistic’ approaches include not only religious condemnations of neoliberalism but also certain left and right wing ones based on exhortations to ‘act better’ rather than providing convincing programmes and strategies for substantial social change. Pathologising approaches –‘neoliberalism makes you ill’ – are similarly limited whereas eco-Marxist and Marxist are more comprehensive whilst reflective of an outmoded paradigm of change. The concluding sections of the chapter offer a radical democratic path allied to a modernisation ethos. This would utilise the radical potential inherent in media technologies and new organisational techniques: sophisticated tools to bring ind...

In 2021 Sage Published the monumental Sage Handbook of Marxism, to which I contributed the chapter titled ‘Culture’. This is an extended version of my original draft of that chapter. It is basically a history of Marxist cultural theory, but it sticks to the brief I was given when drafting that chapter, to focus on thinkers who are widely influential on recent and contemporary work in the English-speaking ‘cultural’ humanities and social sciences. This is a couple of thousand words longer than the version that was finally published.

If you want to cite this document then its copyright  / publication date is 2022, and you can use the URL of whatever site you pulled it from.

I don't make any claim for this being exhaustive - for that to be achieved, the document could've been over 100,000 words. But I think it should be useful to some people.

Artykuł stanowi komentarz oraz próbę rozwinięcia koncepcji kwasowego komunizmu zaproponowanego przez Marka Fishera. Autor skupia się przede wszystkim na zjawisku „podnoszenia świadomości” jako istotnego celu zarówno praktyk kontrkulturowych, jak i lewicowych działań politycznych, śledząc ich związki z m. in. praktykami medytacyjnymi, mindfulness, terapią i antyterapią.

Attitudes to digital communication technologies since the 1990s have been characterized by waves of optimism and pessimism, as enthusiasts have highlighted their democratic and liberating potentials, while critics have pointed to the socially, politically and psychologically deleterious consequences of unchecked digital capitalism. This paper seeks to develop an analytical framework capable of appreciating and assessing the capacities of such technologies both to genuinely enhance democratic agency, and to become tools through which capitalist power is enhanced with widespread negative consequences. The paper in particular deploys my concept of ‘potent collectivity’ in order to name the type of democratic agency that such media technologies can be seen both to enable and enhance under certain circumstances, and to inhibit under others. It also considers the affective qualities of ‘potent collectivity’, and in particular the utility of a Deleuzo-Spinozan concept of ‘collective joy’ a...

The current highly-advanced form of capitalism – turbocharged by the cybernetic revolution and engaging in all imaginable forms of creative destruction – provides the backdrop to many of the articles in this issue. They are broadly concerned with the question of how capitalist cultures (and their agents) retain legitimacy in an era of extreme commercialisation and insecurity. Josh Bowsher and Theo Reeves-Evison examine the politics of ecological credit schemes, that allow businesses to destroy a discrete ecosystem in return for the restoration of an ecological site elsewhere. Nancy Ettlinger situates the emergence of for-profit crowdsourcing as a key contemporary mode of value-extraction in the longer history of ‘prosumption’. Michael Symons and Marion Maddox offer a fascinating study of the mechanisms by which the explicitly commercial and profit-oriented nature of a range of social activities within advanced capitalist societies – including megachurches - come to be understood as ...

Jeremy Gilbert’s new book is an intellectually compelling work which not only provides a detailed and rigorous account of the philosophical, cultural and historical formation of individualism in Western world and its latest developments under the aegis of neoliberal cultural hegemony, but most importantly seeks to envisage viable alternatives to both the hegemonic culture of competitive individualism and to conservative communitarianism.

oder ›Konstellationsanalyse‹ übersetzt, als ›Analyse von Konjunkturen‹, gelegentlich auch, mit einer Übersetzung, die Rainer Winter in diese Diskussion eingebracht hat, als ›konjunkturale Analyse‹. Aber: Während das deutsche Wort ›Konjunktur‹ in allererster Linie auf wirtschaftliche Zyklen relativ kurzer Dauer verweist, fehlt diese Bedeutung in der englischen Semantik fast völlig. Es geht hier – und damit auch in weiten Teilen der anglophonen Debatte – vor allem um das Zusammenkommen und Zusammenfügen von Elementen (im Sinn von to conjoin, bzw. lat. conjungere). Die Übersetzung als ›Konjunktur‹ provoziert deshalb viele Missverständnisse, da sich der Ansatz tatsächlich nicht, oder nur am Rande, mit wirtschaftlichen Zyklen beschäftigt, wie es das deutsche Wort vermuten ließe. Deshalb auch ›konjunkturale‹ und nicht ›‹konjunkturelle‹ Analyse. Diese Anmerkungen sollten im Folgenden mitgedacht werden. Allerdings wird die Lage noch einmal dadurch verkompliziert, dass die englische Formulierung auf italienische und französische Begriffe zurückgeht: ital. congiuntura und frz. conjoncture. In beiden Sprachen, also auch im Italienischen Antonio Gramscis, sind die ökonomische Bedeutung und der Aspekt des Kurzfristigen tatsächlich recht prominent, im Unterschied zum Englischen, sodass das deutsche Wort semantisch näher bei Gramsci ist als bei Hall. Die Übersetzung als ›Konstellation‹ bzw. ›Konstellationsanalyse‹ würde diese Probleme umgehen und wäre insofern auf den ersten Blick näher an einer Bedeutungsentsprechung mit dem englischen Begriff – sie hat auch, was ja durchaus erwünscht sein kann, in stärkerem Maße einen kulturwissenschaftlicheren Klang. Sie lässt aber die Vorstellung einer Aktivität, auf die das Zusammengefügt-Sein zurückgeht, vermissen, die für dieses Gedankengebäude wichtig ist. Zudem erzeugt sie für viele Leser*innen vermutlich Anklänge an Theodor W. Adornos Begrifflichkeiten, die inhaltlich nicht zwingend sind, beziehungsweise erst genauer zu durchdenken wären.

... a journalist, he has participated: Dance music is a really transient thing, and he [Kevin Saunderson, Detroit record producer] really appreciates it for what it is; whereas I'm always trying to see some meaning in it, and that's the problem with English people who like dance music ...

This issue of New Formations covers a wide range of subjects from an international and interdisciplinary group of contributors. Their subject matter ranges across philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, cultural history, political theory, geography, radical economics and critical media studies. A number of themes resonate across them in multiple ways, however. The culture and politics of neoliberalism, its conditions of historical emergence and its multiple instantiated forms, is a concern shared by several of our contributions from very different perspectives. The politics of material culture and of the technological infrastructures of contemporary institutionalised forms of power is another. Modes of resistance, both to neoliberalism and to any form of political domination or economic exploitation, are a third area of shared concern for many of our contributions, several of which also share an interest in psychic, affective and emotional dimensions of social and political relationships. In his essay on the fantasy of neoliberal sovereignty, Peter Bloom considers the relationship between Foucauldian and Lacanian understandings of sovereignty and disciplinary power. Bloom argues that identification with a powerful sovereign provides individuals with ontological security in the face of complex micro-processes of power and broader depersonalised forms of subjection associated with neoliberalism. As such, in his account the appeal of a sovereign fantasy lies in its promise to grant individuals a sense of 'sovereign' agency which they experience as lacking in their existence as 'agency-less' disciplinary subjects of neoliberalism. Bloom argues that to truly move beyond neoliberalism it is necessary therefore to not only challenge its disciplinary body but also cut off its sovereign head. Following on from this argument, Roi Wagner asks how one might radically resist the state, when material and ideological circumstances foreclose a nonstatist horizon? To tackle this question, his paper considers points of view of communities that know no stateless world, but still reject contemporary state governmentality as such, rather than just this or that government. The paper opens by fleshing out the claim that there is no 'world' outside the state. Then it looks into Zapatista resistance, among other examples, to see how resistance to the state works where there is no independent world from which the state is to be resisted. Wagner uses the work of Pierre Clastres and liberation theology so set up a model that he calls 'transcendentalisation of the state'--a form of governmentality that retains the state as constitutive framework, but undermines its power to enforce its authority. He fleshes out this model with case studies from Israel/Palestine and the Euromed civil forum. Marisol Sandoval considers a quite different form of political resistance in her study of worker co-operatives in the cultural sector. She investigates the potential of worker co-operatives to help improve working conditions and radically reimagine cultural work in an era of growing precarity and disempowerment for cultural workers. Sandoval argues that while co-ops work to democratise ownership and decision-making, empowering workers by giving them more control over their working lives, co-ops are nonetheless constrained by competitive market pressures, creating tensions between economic necessity and political goals. Her article argues that co-ops can be understood as a radical pre-figurative political project, but can also be mobilized in a reformist attempt to create a more ethical capitalism or be integrated into neoliberal discourses of entrepreneurship and individual responsibility, but ultimately argues that radical co-ops can play an important role within a larger movement that mobilizes collectivity to confront neoliberal individualization and 'capitalist realism'. In her essay 'Markets without subjects', Morgan Adamson analyses recent discourses around financial subjectivity and debt, popularized in the wake of the 2008 crash. …

T his essay constitutes an attempt to develop the concept of ‘disaffected consent’ that I first formulated in reflecting on the complex attitude to neoliberal hegemony which seemed to have typified Western European publics both before and after the 2008 financial crisis (and which I first proposed at a conference in 2009). Broadly speaking, this attitude could be characterised as follows: on the one hand, it involves a profound dissatisfaction with both the consequences and the ideological premises of the neoliberal project; on the other hand, it involves a general acquiescence with that project, a degree of deference to its relative legitimacy in the absence of any convincing alternative, and a belief that it cannot be effectively challenged. The wider context for this Western European phenomenon is a situation in which national electorates have on no occasion offered a convincing mandate to the neoliberal programme.

This issue of New Formations presents a range of exciting new work which spans and connects the fields of cultural studies, literary theory and radical political philosophy. Two essays in the issue are concerned with the specificities of contemporary sexual politics. David Alderson’s ‘Acting Straight’ examines the deployment of the term ‘straight acting’ to describe men who have sex with other men but are not considered effeminate: a widespread and under-analysed categorisation. His paper looks at the significance of this term in relation to an intensified social self-consciousness of gender, especially in relation to sexuality, by focusing on the reality TV series, Playing It Straight; and he discusses the cultural political dynamics of masculinity and effeminacy in relation to increasing inequality, precarity and austerity. Naomi Booth’s essay, ‘Bathetic Masochism’, examines the privileged position given to masochism in some recent critical-theoretical work and argues that the recent Fifty Shades novels romanticise masochism as a shrinking of the female subject accompanied by an increase in her orgasmic and consumer power. Three articles are concerned with relationships between writing, disclosure and interpretation. Clare Birchall’s ‘The Aesthetics of the Secret’ departs from the recent revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, positing secrets as subject to and the subject of radical politics rather than merely as appropriate objects of regulation. Birchall turns from a hermeneutics of the secret towards an aesthetics of the secret, arguing that, considered as a Rancièrean ‘distribution of the sensible’, this aesthetics can help us to imagine a politics of the secret not bound to policy and legalities. Also concerned with the politics of openness and enclosure, Sarah Kember’s ‘Why Write? Feminism, publishing and the politics of communication’ deals with the enclosure and delimitation of a politics of communication within and across the knowledge and creative sectors, showing how this enclosure is enacted by reform agendas, and specifically by the alignment of copyright and access reform in the UK. The question of writing brings philosophy to bear on policies of openness but, Kember argues, in an environment of increasingly proprietorial knowledge and of creativity as market competition, the key question to ask of writing is not the metaphysical one (what is writing?) but rather the more provisional question: why write? Elizabeth Coles’s ‘Psychoanalysis and the Poem’ continues the theme of writing and interpretation, examining how returning to the issue of interpretation in twentieth-century psychoanalysis can help us reopen the question of the discipline’s bearing on literary studies, in particular the study of poetry. Reading the work of Sándor Ferenczi and D.W. Winnicott,

DELEUZIAN POLITICS? Gilles Deleuze famously described his work with Felix Guattari as 'political philosophy'.1 And yet, the first and most explicitly revolutionary volume of their jointly-authored ouevre also insists that 'no political programme will be elaborated within the framework of schizoanalysis'.2 From the outset, then, even the most apparently 'political' element of Deleuze's work contains an apparent ambiguity: is this is a political project or not? Could there be a 'Deleuzian politics' at all? Any thorough engagement with the totality of Deleuze's work is only likely to leave the inquirer more perplexed than ever as to how to answer this question, as both political and dramatically anti-political gestures proliferate throughout that work from beginning to end.3 At least two major studies of Deleuze's work - one in English, the other in French - have, within the past five years, concluded that the answer to these questions is simply 'no': Deleuze is a mystic, a nostalgist for elitist modes of avant-gardism which have no purchase on the present, at best an implicit conservative whose romanticism leaves no scope for rational calculation or collective action.4 If they are to remain credible, it is important that such studies refrain from placing simplistic and inappropriate demands on any given philosophical system. After all, why should such a system generate a singular and determinate 'polities'? Even Marx and Engels' work did not do so, as is attested by the disparate range of political theories to which their historical, philosophical, social and economic analyses gave rise, from Lenin to Bernstein to Luxemburg to Gramsci to Mao and beyond. So another way of posing the question of 'Deleuzian politics' might be to ask whether there is any form of political action or expression which could not find some justification in the broad metaphysical and analytical framework elaborated by Deleuze (with and without Guattari). Does this 'system' set any limits at all to its possible forms of political expression? Part of the value of the studies by Peter Hallward and Phillipe Mengue is that they try to address this question, although their conclusions are different and in both cases contentious. For Mengue, Deleuze's anti-populist distaste for democracy, debate and the free play of opinions proves an irreducible obstacle to the realisation of the radical/liberal democratic position that he sees as the only logical implication of Deleuze's most fundamental ethical and aesthetic priorities:5 so Deleuze cannot embrace democracy, with its pluralistic production of what Mengue calls 'the doxic plane of immanence'0 - the domain of the endless creation, contestation, emergence and dissipation of opinion - even though his philosophical points of reference ought to lead him towards a radical liberal embrace of just this phenomenon. For Hallward, Deleuze's emphasis on the value of the singular and the virtual - of becoming and 'creatings' over being and 'creatures' - ultimately forecloses the possibility of any thought of relationality, and as such of any thought of politics at all.7 From this perspective, what is excluded from Deleuze's system is the possibility of any determinate political decision whatsoever.8 However, despite the persuasiveness and scholarship which characterises both of these books, they do both tend to deploy a radier narrow understanding of what 'Deleuzian politics' might mean in order to criticise this hypothetical entity. In addressing themselves to Deleuze's work rather as if it could be expected to deliver up a coherent system of values, consequent aims, and appropriate strategies - and in emphasising the distinctive normative preferences expressed in Deleuze's writing - they both tend to downplay the aspect of Deleuze's thought which has most excited those commentators who have seen in it a rich source of analytical concepts for twenty-first century political tiieory. For such commentators, it has been Deleuze's capacity to shed new light on contemporary relations of power - irrespective of any inferences that can be made about his own political perspectives - which is of the greatest importance. …

tAlthough this is officially an 'unthemed' issue of New Formations - collecting simply the best unsolicited submissions received by the journal over the past two years - the resonances and convergence between its various contributions are remarkable. Every article here is concerned in one way or another with issues around the theorisation of experience, affect, and temporality: with the technologically, temporally and socially distributed nature of experience. Several essays concern themselves in novel ways with the unstable relationship between the interior self and the surfaces on which it is reflected or expressed, and whose interrelationships are its condition of im/possibility. The irreducibly social and technological character of existence is a key theme which runs across several contributions. The historical specificity and/or the conceptual insufficiency of orthodox psychoanalytic doctrines is a recurring theme, explored here in an array of polemical and analytic contexts. The importance of the early twentieth century as a key point of historical and intellectual reference comes up in several different ways, even while other key moments - from the moment of Kant's formulation of the modern subject to the events of 1968 to the present day - are crucial as well.Lisa Baraitser's essay considers the return of the 'peace camp' form of protest which has characterised recent pro-democracy uprisings, and re-reads Luisa Passerini's classic 1988 study, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, as a way of understanding the intergenerational dynamics of protest. Baraitser argues that through an engagement with the psychoanalytic tropes of rememoration and delayed action, we can see how this text both engages and reverses the classic feminist slogan, 'the personal is political', showing that it is through a capacity to attach to one's own generation and to establish retroactively the lateral relations of 'my time', that the work of psychoanalysis can take place. Drawing on Bracha Ettinger's notion of the matrixial, the paper further proposes that this capacity for attachment to 'my time', is linked to what it is not possible to separate from, lose, or abject, which Ettinger traces as an alternative substrata to psychic life, marked in the feminine as a form of positive difference. Baraitser reads the matrixial in political rather than personal terms, linking it to a return to the aesthetics of communal living proposed by the 'peace camp'. The paper concludes by tying together the double meaning of generation: generation as the collective time-frame of the political with generation as the matrixial substratum of psychic life.Victoria Coulson makes a comparably radical engagement with psychoanalytic theory, contending that contemporary practices of literary criticism continue to reproduce and reiterate idealist propositions about the nature of subjectivity and the mind/body split. To explore this claim, her essay examines the reception by late twentieth- and early twenty-first century Anglophone scholarship of Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault's work on shoplifting in fin-de-siecle Parisian department stores. The essay demonstrates that recent scholarship on de Clerambault reproduces the idealist assumptions that informed critical accounts of his work in the early 1990s, and locates these philosophical postulates within two interrelated poststructuralist interventions that enjoyed significant intellectual prestige in the 1980s and 1990s: the critique of the 'culture of consumption,' and the feminist deployment of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. The article proposes that a new interpretation of de Clerambault's work may challenge the sexual politics of the philosophical idealism that structured some of the most influential feminist scholarship of the poststructuralist era, and that continues to shape critical thinking today.Rex Ferguson's essay covers adjacent ground, examining the emergence of new conceptions of selfhood, memoration, depth and surface around the turn of the twentieth century. …

This paper starts from the observation that the very concept ‘social forum’ is to some extent predicated on a distinction between the market – the primary organisational model of neo-liberalism – and the forum, conceived as a different kind of model. It explores the different logics of social organisation implied by the competing concepts of the forum and the market, taking off from Arendt’s assertion that the transformation of the former into the latter was always the project of the tyrants of ancient Greece. It explores the complex political logics by which the collectivism and partial homogeneity required by any democratic situation have increasingly been undermined by the socio-economic processes of liberalisation and marketisation typical of post-modern capitalist societies. It goes on to explore different ways of understanding human collectivity in the light of the ‘democratic paradox’ by which individualism and egalitarianism are, at a certain level, logically incompatible. I...

Mike Rustin discusses his lifelong involvement in the New Left, which began when he was still at school. He describes the history of the First New Left, including the role played within it by figures such as Stuart Hall, Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams, and the role of the New Left in student politics in Oxford University, where Michael was a student and a leading member of the Labour club. He looks at the changing relationships between the New Left and the Labour Party in the 1960s and the publication of the May Day Manifesto in 1967. He also discusses the founding of the New Left Review and the transition from the time of its first editor, Stuart Hall, to that of its second, Perry Anderson, as well his two terms as a member of its editorial board, and his continuing disagreements and agreements with its editorial direction. His reflections on contemporary politics include a discussion of the relationship of New Left ideas to current movements and the Labour Party, a critique ...

Abstract: A discussion on Deleuze and politics with topics covered including: Deleuze's relationship to Marxism and capitalism; the political valency of the concept of deterritorialisation; the implications of Deleuzian thought for theorisations of collectivity and identity; its implications for thinking about revolution, universality and the party form; the problems of desire and the decision; issues of ecology and the implications of vitalism for them; problems of political strategy and organisation; the legacy of the invasion of Iraq.

... or the super-subject, and hence to the logics which govern the ideal of nationhood ... as SimonCritchley points out,21 against something and for something; usefully, Critchley reads Derrida's ... hostility to all forms of nationalism: a universal right to global citizenship; the abolition of ...

... A Certain Ethics of Openness: Radical ... the de facto post-Marxism of Stuart Hall, along with all of those for whom “cultural studies” only ever came into existence as a critique of Marxist economism, and the (closely related) official “post-Marxism” of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal ...

Common Ground explores the philosophical relationship between collectivity, individuality, affect and agency in the neoliberal era. Jeremy Gilbert argues that individualism is forced upon us by neoliberal culture, fatally limiting our capacity to escape the current crisis of democratic politics.

The book asks how forces and ideas opposed to neoliberal hegemony, and to the individualist tradition in Western thought, might serve to protect some form of communality, and how far we must accept assumptions about the nature of individuality and collectivity which are the legacy of an elitist tradition. Along the way it examines different ideas and practices of collectivity, from conservative notions of hierarchical and patriarchal communities to the politics of ‘horizontality’ and ‘the commons’ which are at the heart of radical movements today.

Exploring this fundamental faultline in contemporary political struggle, Common Ground proposes a radically non-individualist mode of imagining social life, collective creativity and democratic possibility.