Browsing by Subject "Marx"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Containing the Ship of State: Managing Mobility in an Age of Logistics
    (2018-07) Chua, Charmaine
    This dissertation argues that global logistical circulation, although often taken for granted as a banal economic process, is a political project central to the making of world order. To make this argument, it examines the social and political economic impacts of the concomitant rise of logistical management and shipping containerization as twin operations intensifying the global circulation of commercial capital. Since the 1960s, businesses have increasingly experimented with just-in-time logistical techniques to speed the realization of surplus value, leading to the rise of global transoceanic networks of distribution that reorganize commercial circulation across distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies. As logistical management systems have sought to regularize, standardize, and create flexible networks for circulating goods across vast distances around the world, they have become crucial to the expanded reproduction of capital. Accordingly, states have also adopted logistics-oriented growth strategies, investing in organizing and securing a socio-spatial order that produces a world safe for the movement of commercial capital, often in ways that inhibit the social and spatial mobility of vulnerable populations that live and work along global supply chains. The empirical focus of the dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic study of the Trans-Pacific shipping passage between the US and China. Understanding logistics as both a material practice and calculative rationality, this dissertation employs an ethnographic approach to interrogate the effects of logistics’ global rise through four cuts: 1) A theoretical and historical analysis of the rise of logistics management and shipping containerization in the 1960s, 2) the securitization of goods movement in US maritime cargo policy, 3) the expansion of logistical infrastructure across the world’s oceans and in Los Angeles and Singapore, and 4) the seafaring labor process. My overarching claim is that logistical practices and rationalities exacerbate growing and often contradictory tensions between the mobility of capital and the containment of people and infrastructure that facilitate global circulation. Rather than understand containment as a static process of sequestration or enclosure that impedes the ability for capital and people to circulate, processes of containment have gained fundamentally productive functions that intensify and facilitate, rather than prevent or deter the long-distance expansion of capitalist networks. In this way, logistics produces a set of relations in which moving the world’s goods across space comes to be understood as normative and desirable, while containing the human lives that do this work is seen as necessary and productive.
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    “Journaling into the void”: TikTok’s eudaimonic “web-weaving” and its digital practices
    (2024-06) Moger, Rhys
    This thesis uses a mixed-methods qualitative approach to analyze TikTok “web-weaving” (WW) slideshows and the user practices that go into their curation. WW slideshows include a collection of images such as Tumblr blog posts, illustrations, book quotes, and poems that are eudaimonic (i.e., emotionally poignant, existential, or vulnerable) set to music with a caption. Study 1 employs a textual analysis of 100 slideshows, totalling to 1,321 slides, to discover their eudaimonic themes and how such topics are discussed. Drawing upon Marx’s theory of alienation and humanistic psychology, I analyze how WW slideshows promote personal growth (as defined by Maurer et al., 2023) and counter-hegemonic sentiments that challenge what psychologist Stephen Joseph (2021) calls “the demands of conservative ideologies” (p. 7) such as individualism, productivity, and capitalist realism (Fisher, 2009). WW slideshows highlight the necessity of community, resting, engaging in creative activities outside of capitalist labor relations, and maintaining hope for imagined better futures (Grant, 2005). Study 2a explores seven interviewees’ eudaimonic motives for using TikTok and curating slideshows and what the multi-platform slideshow curation process entails. Study 2b details the same interviewees’ eudaimonic gratifications of WW: increased self-connection, a psychologically safe environment, and social connectedness. Together, these studies bring attention to online self-disclosure practices related to mental health and personal growth within current Western capitalistic culture via an interdisciplinary critical media effects framework (Ramasubramanian & Banjo, 2020).
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    The riddle of the Commune: subjectivity and style in Karl Marx's The Civil War in France
    (2013-07) Bost, Matthew Wesley
    This project reads Karl Marx's The Civil War in France, a speech and pamphlet in which Marx treats the political experience of the Paris Commune. Reading the pamphlet through literature on rhetoric and aesthetics, I argue that Marx's speech performs a political style--a set of tropes which structure thought, political responses, and collective desires--that stands in productive tension with many of the ways his work has been taken up by scholars and activists alike. Over the course of my dissertation I highlight three key concepts in The Civil War in France--debt, history, and community--which, I argue, are both central to the speech's address of its own historical context and useful resources for those seeking to make Marx's work productive in the present. First, Marx highlights the degree to which punitive debt policies directed by the French government at France's poor and disenfranchised contributed to the violence of the Commune and its aftermath, while also asserting a "debt of gratitude" to the Commune that he argues should lead a diversity of French political constituencies to support it. Engaging with Andrew King's research on the rhetoric of power maintenance and with contemporary scholarship on the politics of debt, I argue that Marx's address responds to the propaganda leveled against the Commune by the French national government of the period, while also constituting a set of tropes that are useful for analyzing discussions of debt by regulators and activists in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Second, reading Marx's eulogy of the Commune's failure alongside his attempt to draw lessons from it for future political practice, I argue that The Civil War in France provides a compelling case study for scholars concerned with how "failed" social movements may become subject to a type of collective memory work that primes them to be rescued as impetuses for future political action. I argue that Marx develops a rhetoric of history that enables a productive rethinking of the current political moment in light of past revolutionary experiences. Finally, engaging with recent debates in rhetorical studies and in the critical humanities on the concept of community, I argue that Marx's speech proleptically critiques the politics of community that goes by the name of neoliberalism, and provides an alternative ethics of community, of which the Commune is a central example. Taken together, I show that these concepts provide a useful set of tools for thinking the economic and political crises attendant on current global capitalism.
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    This is not my body: alienated corporeality and Brechtian critical theatre practices
    (2014-12) Majzels, Ashley
    My dissertation advances a historical materialist understanding of alienated corporeality meant to inform Brechtian critical theatre practices. In the first half of my project, I draw on Marx's account of commodity fetishism and industrial labour to frame a discussion of Brecht's Mann ist Mann. In the second half, I revise my account of alienated corporeality in the light of Guy Debord's account of spectacular society. I then use this spectacular corporeality as a means to address Canadian inter-media artist Freya Olafson's recent works, AVATAR and HYPER_, as well as her critical engagement with social media as labour, consumption, and ontology.