Hypercapitalism:Political economy, electric identity, and authorial alienation

Hypercapitalism, with its "knowledge economy", is the form of capitalism under which thought itself is produced, commodified, and exchanged within the globally integrated system of communication technologies. As such, hypercapitalism may be seen as not so much a revolution, but rather an evolution: the progressively thorough, inexorable totalisation of social relations by Capital. The study on which this paper is based synthesises the sociological perspectives of Marx (1970, 1844/1975, 1846/1972, 1976, 1978, 1981) and Adorno (1951/1974, 1991; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944/1998), and the Critical Discourse perspectives of Fairclough (1989, 1992) and Lemke (1995) to argue that alienated thought and language are the fundamental, irreducible commodity-forms of Cybersociety’s knowledge economy.

Skydweller and representations of the adolescent crisis : group identity versus alienation

This document contains a creative work – the text of a young adult novel, Skydweller – and an exegesis discussing the ways in which identity and the adolescent crisis of group identity versus alienation are represented in young adult science fiction/fantasy novels.

Charity law review and civil society : paving the way from alienation to social inclusion in Northern Ireland ; the resonance with experience in Australia

This paper considers the opportunity, presented by the forthcoming charity law review in Northern Ireland, for adjusting the charity law framework so as to focus charitable activity on the circumstances typical of societies in conflict or experiencing transition. This opportunity is one for broadening the definition of 'charitable purpose' to include activities directed towards forestalling alienation and facilitating social inclusion. It would include rehabilitating the victims of social confrontation and developing related services of advocacy, mediation and reconciliation. It argues that a creative response to this opportunity could address the current social inclusion agenda and thereby contribute to the consolidation of civil society in this jurisdiction. It suggests that the experience in Northern Ireland, as an exemplar of a society in transition, has a resonance with the experience in Australia. It further suggests that it could also have a relevance for approaching the management of tensions within or between nations where people may otherwise come to perceive themselves as alienated...

‘My people right here…’ Indigenous young people, alienation and paint sniffing in inner Brisbane

This paper describes and explains the social worlds of a group of young Murris who are engaged in chroming (paint sniffing) and who sleep rough in inner Brisbane. In particular, the paper considers the ways young Indigenous drug users describe their marginalisation from wider society and its structures of opportunity, but it also includes some reflections from their youth worker and a young man who frequents the young people’s squat. The paper demonstrates the centrality of racism and material disadvantage to the experience of a group of young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sniffers, a perspective largely unreflected in the literature on Indigenous volatile substance misuse. Further, the young people’s ways of interacting with the broader society are described to explain the ways their rejection of mainstream norms form a significant political response to their marginality and reflect, at least in part, the wider Indigenous historical experience. The work draws on theories of alienation and subculture to analyse the young people’s descriptions of their social estrangement and the formation of the ‘paint sniffer group’. It is concluded that paint sniffing among urban Indigenous youth is, at least in part, an obnoxious and encoded distillation of a wider Indigenous rebuttal of broader societal norms, and that the dominant — normalising — modes of treatment risk further alienating an already oppositional group of young people.

Non-domination, non-alienation and social equality: towards a republican understanding of equality

The republican idea of non-domination stresses the importance of certain social relationships for a person’s freedom, showing that freedom is a social-relational state. While the idea of freedom as non-domination receives a lot of attention in the literature, republican theorists say surprisingly little about equality. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to carve out the contours of a republican conception of equality.. In so doing, I will argue that republican accounts of equality share a significant normative overlap with the idea of social equality. However, closer analysis of Philip Pettit’s account of ‘expressive egalitarianism’ (which Pettit sees as inherently connected to non-domination) and recent theories of social equality shows that republican non-domination – in contrast to what Pettit seems to claim – is not sufficient for securing (republican) social equality. In order to secure social equality for all, republicans would have to go beyond non-domination.

Alienation and Digital Labour – a Depth-Hermeneutic Inquiry into Online Commodification and the Unconscious

At the core of this paper is a psychosocial inquiry into the Marxist concept of alienation and its applications to the field of digital labour. Following a brief review of different theoretical works on alienation, it looks into its recent conceptualisations and applications to the study of online social networking sites. Finally, the authors offer suggestions on how to extend and render more complex these recent approaches through in-depth analyses of Facebook posts that exemplify how alienation is experienced, articulated, and expressed online. For this perspective, the article draws on Rahel Jaeggi’s (2005) reassessment of alienation, as well as the depth-hermeneutic method of “scenic understanding” developed by Alfred Lorenzer (e.g. 1970; 1986).

Bringing Zombies Back to Life: An Autoethnographical Exploration of Alienation and Political Dis/Engagement in Emerging Adulthood Within Late-Stage Capitalism

In this thesis, by employing an autoethnographic methodology, I am exploring why certain understandings, or assemblages, of political engagement come to have greater meaning in my life and why other assemblages may be more hidden and thus fail to contribute substantially to the meaning of political in my life. Using immanent, Marxist and post-Marxist theories, as well as a zombie narrative, the study will contextualize the movement of assemblages in my life within late-stage capitalism which is juxtaposed with the zombie apocalypse. The placement and displacement of certain understandings of the political within my life will be theorized within the crisis of constituent power that is revealed in an immanent framework. Furthermore, the crisis of the constituent in late-stage capitalism creates new forms of radical alienation which will also be examined. By exploring my own struggles in becoming political I will theorize why political disengagement in emerging adulthood appears to be increasing, as well as possibilities for new forms of political engagement in a late-stage capitalist context.