Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood

by Bill Maurer, Gabriele Schwab

Overview

Accelerating Possession is a groundbreaking collection of essays that examines how recent economic movements have revolutionized the relationship between property and personhood. These prominent scholars argue that in our present age, globalization, rampant privatization, and biotechnology have irrevocably changed traditional ideas of property and the self. Definitions of property no longer correspond to the configurations of the person who owns or is subjected to property. Self and ownership have a whole new arithmetic.In these essays, privatization is understood as an array of interconnected processes and relationships through which the capitalist marketplace controls, among other things, the political rights, social membership, and knowledge production that constitute personhood. The contributors believe such processes are accelerating profoundly, and they examine the effects via a range of topics, including the invention of property rights in U.S.-occupied Iraq, the work of John Locke, the art of Jenny Holzer, and the writing of Octavia Butler and Stanislaw Lem. They explore the synergy and dissonance between conceptions of the private as marketable and the private as inalienable, and consider how the contemporary transformations and futures of property and personhood relate to concepts of citizenship, state, culture, and education.These essays were all written with the guiding belief that the evolving relationship between ownership and the self has a fundamental effect on debates in critical theory. The essays are methodologically linked through their emphasis on the linguistic and rhetorical, as well as the philosophical and epistemological. Their focus on reflections of property and personhood in literary, textual, or artistic objects makes this collection a vital cross-disciplinary tool.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231137843
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	04/04/2006
Series:	A Critical Theory Institute Book
Edition description:	ANN
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Bill Maurer is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of three books, including Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason.

Gabriele Schwab is Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, and faculty associate in anthropology. She is the author of four books, including Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction and The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction. The Political and Psychic Economies of Accelerating Possession, by Bill Maurer and Gabriele Schwab
Part I. Histories, Nations, Institutions
1. "My Self and My Own: One and the Same?," by Etienne Balibar
2. "The Future of Nationalist Appropriation," by Pheng Cheah
3. "Transnational Topographies of Power: Beyond 'The State' and 'Civil Society' in the Study of African Politics," by James G. Ferguson
4. "Mercantilism," by Federalism
Part II. Posthuman Futures: Literature, Art, and the Politics of Personhood
5. "Divided Origins and the Arithmetic of Ownership," by Marilyn Strathern
6. "One Two Three: The Psychic Economy of Multiplicity, by Akira Mizuta Lippit
7. Language of Order(s): Jenny Holzer in the Public Sphere," by Alexander Gelley
8. "Ethnographies of the Future: Personhood, Agency, and Power in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis," by Gabriele Schwab
9. "(Un)masking the Agent: Distributed Cognition in Stanislaw Lem's 'The Mask'," by N. Katherine Hayles
List of Contributors
Index

What People are Saying About This

George E. Marcus

With a keen sensitivity to changing practices of property under globalizing neoliberal capitalism, this volume offers a penetrating critique of the deep ideology of the autonomous individual that has long permeated the operation of Euro-American institutions.

— George E. Marcus, Rice University, author of Ethnography through Thick and Thin

Bruce Robbins

A brilliant and attractive collection, offering stunning syntheses on some of today's hottest interdisciplinary topics.

— Bruce Robbins, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress