Detachments and alienations
Topics:
Keywords: alienation, work, affect, aesthetics, neoliberalism
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Leila Dawney, University of Exeter
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Abstract
By means of an introduction to the session, this paper charts some of the conceptual framings through which we can attend to the structuring of the late capitalist sensorium, and, in particular, the forms of detachments it offers to us: the modes through which we dissociate, desensitise and anaesthetise against its intensities, pressures and conflicts.
Recent shifts in the technological mediation of life the sudden changes to working life during the pandemic, and ongoing economic challenges of late capitalism have shifted the geographical gaze towards the sensory buffers created between bodies and worlds, both as a tactic of self-insulation and as a top-down strategy of depersonalisation. From Marxian alienation to the intimate bycatches of postindustrial life described by Berlant, to Puar’s theorisation of debility as biopolitical technology, this paper offers a set of tools for rethinking the politics of affect for a flattened time.
Detachments and alienations
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Paper Abstract