The Body Productive: Rethinking Capitalism, Work and the Body

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The Body Productive represents a new and radical approach to the relationships between capitalism, work and the body. Self-evident, natural, biological - this is how we think of the body on an everyday basis. However, this supposedly most direct aspect of our being may in fact be a primary site of socio-economic mediation and ideological reproduction. How are bodies produced under capitalism How, in turn, does capitalism make bodies productive How is the body (and knowledge of the body) shaped by demands of production, consumption and exchange, and how can these logics be resisted, challenged and overcome These are the questions at the heart of The Body Productive, a collection of original, radical new approaches to the relationships between capitalism, work and the body from an international group of scholars and activists. Taking inspiration from the neglected theoretical work of Franois Gury and Didier Deleule, and bridging Marxist and Foucauldian traditions, this book rethinks the relationships between the biological and the social; the body and the mind; power and knowledge; discipline and control.

Reviews

If Marx taught us that capitalist labour mortifies the body of the worker, this book is an urgent and critical analysis of that process of mortification. The book refocuses our attention to how the body is both produced and becomes productive under capitals strident demands upon it. But the authors urge us to consider not the passive trope of bodily resilience when it comes to the global working class, but the constant running script of bodily resistance as workers hide from, defy, or in some moments, dismantle capitalist logic. * Tithi Bhattacharya, Purdue University, USA *
This book is a bold intervention into ways of thinking about the productive body from Marx to twenty-first century digital capitalism. By encouraging us to reflect on bodies and the future of resistance, it is an essential text for anyone interested in contemporary regimes of power. * Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck, University of London, UK *
Taking Franois Gury and Didier Deleules The Productive Body as a starting point, the chapters collected in this wide-ranging and critical volume show how the dynamics of capitalist social form have shaped (and continue to shape) the practical and discursive treatment of bodies. As the editors and contributors insist, bodies are not transhistorical givens, the real or natural counterparts to capitals abstract forms. Rather, their varied uses and meanings appear in the course of those forms historical elaboration. * Seb Franklin, Kings College London, UK *

Author Bio

Steffan Blayney works for a trade union in London and is an honorary research fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK. Joey Hornsby completed her PhD in 2021. Her work was recently published in Nottingham French Studies. Savannah Whaley is a lecturer in theory and performance at King's College London, UK.