The Body Productive represents a new and radical approach to the relationships between capitalism, work and the body. Self-evident, natural, biological - this is how we think of the body on an everyday basis. However, this supposedly most direct aspect of our being may in fact be a primary site of socio-economic mediation and ideological reproduction. How are bodies produced under capitalism? How, in turn, does capitalism make bodies productive? How is the body (and knowledge of the body) shaped by demands of production, consumption and exchange, and how can these logics be resisted, challenged and overcome?
These are the questions at the heart of The Body Productive, a collection of original, radical new approaches to the relationships between capitalism, work and the body from an international group of scholars and activists. Taking inspiration from the neglected theoretical work of François Guéry and Didier Deleule, and bridging Marxist and Foucauldian traditions, this book rethinks the relationships between the biological and the social; the body and the mind; power and knowledge; discipline and control.
Author(s): Steffan Blayney, Joey Hornsby, Savannah Whaley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 239
City: London
Cover
Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: Rethinking capitalism, work and the body Steffan Blayney, Joey Hornsby and Savannah Whaley
2 The Productive Body revisited François Guéry Translated by Philip Barnard
3 Do we still not know what a body can do? Spinoza, Arendt and The Productive Body Dan Taylor
4 Corporeal and abstract: Is there a ‘left biopolitics’ of bodies? Marina Vishmidt
5 Empty promises: The financialization of labour Phil Jones
6 The dialectical body: Bringing science back into socialism Graham Jones
7 Neither appropriated nor expropriated: Notes towards an autonomist cripistemology of the productive body Arianna Introna
8 The Quantified Self, the ideology of health and fat Dawn Woolley
9 The artefact of losing: The (bio)poetics of miscarriage Helen Charman and Christopher Law
10 (Re)productive data-bodies: Privacy, inequality and anti-abortion politics in the age of tech-capitalism Grace Tillyard
11 Algorithmic capitalism, digital machinofacture and the productive body Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard
Further reading
Index
