Affective Capitalism: For a Critique of the Political Economy of Affect

Lee, Hangwoo

Drawing on Tarde's and Deleuze’s monadology, this book investigates the affective turn of contemporary capitalism. The concept of affect provides critical insight to overcome the limitations of social constructivism and cognitive capitalism. Affective capitalism transforms the population’s everyday bodily experiences into quantitative metrics that can be observed, measured, and processed on a non-conscious register, turning them into dividuals prepared to react and be affected by specific information at a given moment. In an era where social wealth increasingly relies on the 'social factory,' algorithms and big data constitute the living labor beyond employment. This book argues that affect also holds a potential for dismantling today’s real subsumption of life by capital. The network effect, mostly actualized as a company's market capitalization, is constantly traversed by the molecular becoming of affect, leading to new assemblages, such as free software movement, decentralized platforms, peer-to-peer networking, blockchain, and universal basic income.

Details

Published by: Palgrave Macmillan

Publication Date: 2023-12-27

Format: Hardcover

ISBN-13: 9789819981731

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-99-8174-8

Dimensions: 210cm x148cm

Pages: 271