ABSTRACT
First, I would suggest that—far from being dead and buried—postmodernity, understood as a description of the current, neo-liberal, conjuncture, is in sickeningly rude health. Capital has not just turned much of the world into a variegated factory, via ‘real subsumption’ but has also gone on to appropriate, as well as ‘culture’, so much of subjectivity itself: desires, affects, beliefs—even the subconscious—have all become the domain of unceasing commodification. Meanwhile, as an important component of the same process, politics has been reduced, by and large, to management of the market: foundational oppositions have been marginalized, if not wholly vanquished, and the energies of progressive politics have been dispersed, if not wholly dissolved. In short, what we might term ‘postmodern capitalism’ seems utterly rampant.
