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The starting-point for the book is its chapter on methodology. Found here are not only critiques of conventional Soviet Marxism-Leninism and post-modernism, but also a new rethinking of the classic dialectic. For the most part, however, the book focuses on revealing the new quality now assumed by commodities, money, and capital within the global economy. The market has become not only global, but a totalitarian force that is not a ‘socially neutral mechanism of coordination’. It is now a product of the hegemony of corporate capital, featuring the growth of new types of commodity: information, simulacra, and so forth. The book demonstrates the new qualities acquired by value, use value, price, and commodity fetishism within this new market, while exploring the contradictions of non-limited resources (such as knowledge) and the commodity form of their existence.
Money is now a virtual product of fictitious financial capital, possessing a new nature, contradictions, and functions. This analysis of the new nature of money helps to reveal the essence of so-called financialisation.
Capital has become the result of a complex system of exploitation. In the twenty-first-century context this exploitation includes the ‘classic’ extraction of surplus value from industrial workers combined with internal corporate redistribution of income by ‘insiders’; international exploitation; and the exploitation of creative labour through the expropriation of intellectual rent.
This article reveals how screenwriter Stephen Volk‘s idea for a sequel to The Innocents (1961, Jack Clayton) became, over the course of fifteen years, the British horror film The Awakening (2011, Nick Murphy). It examines practitioner interviews to reflect on creative labour in the British film industry, while also reorientating the analysis of British horror film to the practices of pre-production, specifically development. The research reveals that female protagonist Florence Cathcart was a major problem for the project and demonstrates how the Florence character changed throughout the development process. Repeatedly rewritten and ultimately restrained by successive male personnel, her character reveals persistent, problematic perceptions of gender in British horror filmmaking.
.serpicanaro.com/serpica-story/serpica-naro-il-media-sociale). Taken together, the eight outfits make visible the less than satisfying work conditions in the fashion supply chain, and disrupt the narrative of blissful, autonomous self-actualisation that is a core trope of creative labour. Arvidsson, Malossi and Naro carried out in-depth research among fashion workers in Milan, unveiling their everyday reality and forms of exploitation.72 The findings of this research reveal precarious (short-term, flexible, casual) employment; hierarchical work structures, with the possibility of accessing and exercising creativity only at the
Chapter 4 debates the decline in worker voice. It reviews different forms of voice: ‘institutional’ (e.g. works councils); ‘union participation’; ‘collective bargaining’; ‘non-union voice’; and ‘external actors’ (e.g. civil society groups and associations). It argues that while employee voices are increasingly fragmented and fractured, there are shades of light and hope in terms of new forms of creative labour mobilising and social engagement.
capitalism. Commenting on this topic, Bruno Gulli advocates for creative labour to be considered as an expression of a living labour, a human force uncoupled from capital (Gullì 2005 ). Such labour is neither productive nor unproductive for capital, as its ontology is unbound from the constraints of capitalist accumulation. Creative labour is an expression of this general capacity of living labour, even though, in order to become truly unbound, artists have to question the constraints and ossifications of the institution of art, especially when, as Kerstin Stakemeier and
capital. Modern-day capital produces not only classical industrial output but also that of creative activity, in which the ‘creative class’ is engaged. It is here that new forms of capitalist exploitation are arising since, as will be shown below, modern capital appropriates part of the wealth that comes into being through universal creative labour. (Creative labour is necessarily universal in that it relies on the universal intellectual heritage of humankind.) The areas of activity in which creative components play a significant role (we have termed
maintenance. Similar exercises in institutional transformation were undertaken by the team at the CASCO Art Institute in Utrecht. Engaging in a long action research process with artist-researcher Annette Krauss, they transformed the internal division of labour to bridge the gap between highly regarded creative labour and the usually disregarded labour of maintenance, trying to share even such menial tasks as cleaning the office and involving everyone in the programmatic activities of CASCO (CASCO 2018 ). In the process, they actualised the legacy of
Precarious objects is a book about activism and design. The context is the changes in work and employment from permanent to precarious arrangements in the twenty-first century in Italy. The book presents design interventions that address precarity as a defuturing force affecting political, social and material conditions. Precarious objects shows how design objects, called here ‘orientation devices’, recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life. Three microhistories illustrate activist repertoires that bring into play design, and design practices that are grounded in activism. While the vitality, experimental nature and traffic between theory and praxis of social movements in Italy have consistently attracted the interest of activists, students and researchers in diverse fields, there exists little in the area of design research. This is a study of design activism at the intersection of design theory and cultural research for researchers and students interested in design studies, cultural studies, social movements and Italian studies.
to demonstrate that although unpaid work has been the subject of high-profile campaigning 4 and attempts at regulation, 5 it remains an important part of how creative labour markets function. Our data echoes the existing research suggesting working for free is a dominant and inescapable experience for our creative workers. At the same time, we are going to build on an idea we introduced in Chapter 5 . Even where the same conditions confront all cultural workers, they are experienced very differently across key demographic groups. Working for free is not
This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.