Commodification

The New Parapolice: Risk Markets and Commodified Social Control. BY George Rigakos

by George S. Rigakos

Reading fair trade: political ecological imaginary and the moral economy of fair trade foods

by Michael Goodman

This paper begins to explore the changing political geographies of alternative development as practiced and envisioned... more This paper begins to explore the changing political geographies of alternative development as practiced and envisioned in the global South. Looking specifically at the growing movement and market for fair trade foods, this form of alternative development has become the moral business of latte drinkers and other reflexive consumers in Europe and the US. Fair trade attempts to reconnect producers and consumers economically, politically, and psychologically through the creation of a transnational moral economy. This re-connection is accomplished through material and semiotic commoditization processes that produce fair trade commodities. The semiotic production of these commodities and their traffic in particular ‘political ecological imaginaries’ is essential to the formation of ethical production-consumption links, acting to also politicize consumption and fair trade eaters. Fair trade’s moral economy rides the tension between the ethical relationships it fosters and the need for the wily characteristics of enterprise in the construction of transnational trade networks. Bringing recent work on moral geography to bear, constructing this moral economy is an attempt to facilitate a sense of ‘solidarity in difference’ in the experiences of global economic inequalities between North and South and growers and eaters. At the same time, fair trade networks look to produce an expansive ‘spatial dynamics of concern’ in the fashioning of ethical places of production and consumption. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the continuing dilemmas critical for fair trade and suggestions for further empirical study of fair trade provisioning and alternative development networks.

Stocks and Human Bondage: Fantasy Football and the Perception of Player as Point Total

by Mackenzie Ryan

As with all my works, this is not a final draft. Please feel free to provide feedback, corrections, comments, and etc.

Enformasyonun Metalaşması Üzerine

by Behlül Çalışkan

(2009, Temmuz). Marmara İletişim Dergisi, 23-46.

Enformasyonun düzenli olarak saklanması ve işlenmesi faaliyetinin artanönemi ile artık ekonominin motor gü-cünün ve... more Enformasyonun düzenli olarak saklanması ve işlenmesi faaliyetinin artanönemi ile artık ekonominin motor gü-cünün ve sermayenin kaynağının enformasyon olduğu belirtilerek, günü-müz toplumunun bilişim toplumu olduğu iddia edilmektedir. İletişim veelektronik teknolojilerindeki gelişmelere bağlı olarak enformasyonun üretimve dağıtımındaki hızın artması ve dahaönemlisi enformasyonun bir meta niteliğine bürünmesi “bilişim toplumu” kavramını yaratan temel gelişmelerdir. Buçalışmada, bilişim toplumu kavramsallaştırılmasında enformasyona atfedilen önemin, onun bir metaya dönüş-müş olduğu görüşünden yola çıkarakmeta ve enformasyonun tanımı yapı-lacak; enformasyonun günümüz ekonomisindeki rolü açıklanacak; sonrasında ise enformasyonu neden ve nasıl metalaştığı konusu tartışılacak, metaolarak enformasyonun Türkiye ekonomisindeki yeri hakkında yapılan araştırmanın sonuçları ortaya konacaktır.

Realizing carbon's value: discourse and calculation in the production of carbon forestry offsets in Costa Rica.

by David Lansing

Lansing DM. 2011. Realizing carbon's value: discourse and calculation in the production of carbon forestry offsets in Costa Rica. Antipode 43(3): 731-753.

This article examines the relation between discourse and value in the production of a carbon forestry offset project... more This article examines the relation between discourse and value in the production of a carbon forestry offset project among indigenous smallholders in Costa Rica. By analyzing a pivotal cost–benefit calculation that changed the trajectory of the project, this article makes two principal claims. First, the intelligibility of the calculation is grounded in a discursive formation that is emergent from a history of development projects in the region, where particular ways of speaking about the relation between indigenous bodies and agriculture have allowed carbon's commodification to emerge as a desirable project. Second, the calculations resulted in quantified representations of space that were necessary for the offset to become useful within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol. In this case, the forestry offset's use value derived from quantified representations of agricultural space; a process that opened some forms of land use for receiving carbon while foreclosing on others.

Music and Media

by Laurie Spiegel

On freeing art from objects, and the economics of art and music as information. An exploration of the implications and likely consequences of the digital distribution of music, written in 1981-2, well ahead of its times.

Original publication: Ear Magazine East, Vol. VII, #2, Feb-March, 1982
Republication: Medialine, June 2000

The political economy of news value and the commodification of the general intellect

by Claes Thorén

To be presented at NFF 2011, august 2011.

Online, globalized commerce is fundamentally changing the dynamics of physical space and social space, opening up the... more Online, globalized commerce is fundamentally changing the dynamics of physical space and social space, opening up the market outside the enclosed area of focused marketing. Low distribution costs, and the ability to cast off the inherent limitations in stock and selection has become a lesser concern, allowing for digitally virtualized industries to focus on a global audience at a global scale. Today, in 2011, we can see this change transforming the market for online news in the post-industrial society. This transformation constitutes one part of the larger transformation from manual labour to intellectual labour that began in the early 1970’s. From the perspective of the newspaper industry, many scholars agree that this on-going transformation offers many opportunities that may even enhance the relevance of newspapers.

This paper applies Italian neo-Marxist thought and more specifically the concept of immaterial labour to online news in order to reconceptualise the relationship between news production and consumption. Using these theories, this paper offers a comprehensive way of theorizing the commodification of user-generated content and the role of the consumer in news production and news value. Previous research has emphasized news value from the newspaper organization’s perspective as news criteria; this paper instead emphasizes the reader as instrumental in the construction of news value, and furthermore how a social exchange process such as reader’s attention and user generated content brings about a new kind of immaterial labour.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework for critically examining the commodification of online news. Online news commodification is approached as the result of a continuous, emergent reproduction of public discourse where value is determined by the amount of remediation cycles a piece of news is subject to during its lifespan, and how much subsequent public attention is generated. In order to improve understanding how the commodity of attention is constructed and sold, the framework emphasizes the differences between print and online news commodification.

The result is a new theoretical framework which outlines a) how the concept of news value has evolved into digital news value; b) what factors dictate online value; c) the role of immaterial labour and user generated content in the production of that value.

The Commodification of Water Prospective Developments in the Marxist Class Analysis

by Uğur Bahadır Bayraktar

Paper prepared for the course ATA 507 Historiography, Spring 2008

What is Reification? A Critique of Axel Honneth

by Timo Jütten

Published in Inquiry 53:3 (2010): 235-56

In this paper I criticise Axel Honneth's reactualization of reification as a concept in critical theory in his 2005... more In this paper I criticise Axel Honneth's reactualization of reification as a concept in critical theory in his 2005 Tanner Lectures and argue that he ultimately fails on his own terms. His account is based on two premises: (1) reification is to be taken literally rather than metaphorically, and (2) it is not conceived of as a moral injury but as a social pathology. Honneth concludes that reification is “forgetfulness of recognition”, more specifically, of antecedent recognition, an emphatic and engaged relationship with oneself, others and the world, which precedes any more concrete relationship both genetically and categorially. I argue against this conception of reification on two grounds. (1) The two premises of Honneth's account cannot be squared with one another. It is not possible to literally take a person as a thing without this being a recognisable moral injury, and, therefore, I suggest that there are no cases of literal reification. (2) Honneth's account is essentially ahistorical, because it is based on an anthropological model of recognition that tacitly equates reification with autism. In conclusion, I suggest that any successful account of reification must (i) take reification metaphorically and (ii) offer a social-historical account of the origin(s) of reification.