Course Description


MS 9203 (Winter 2018)   The Self and Commodity

Instructor: A. Hearn

Course Description
This course will explore the intersection of the 'self' with the capitalist mode of production.  We will explore foundational work on this intersection of the self and the commodity form in the writings of Marx, Althusser, Gramsci, and Foucault.  We will also examine theories of the self and self-performance from sociology, gender studies, and history in the work of Butler, Giddens, Taylor and Goffman.  We will then examine contemporary positions and debates about the ways in which self-construction and performance have come to constitute new forms of labour under post-Fordist capital, in, what Jason Read has called, "the micropolitics of capital."  We will trace the emergence of new venues for self-commodification, self-branding and self-promotion online, on television and in the more general hyper-spectacularized image-scape, and will explore the concomitant styles, templates and modalities of selfhood propagated by them.  Contemporary theories of these transformations come from critical marketing studies, autonomist Marxist criticism, performance studies, and cultural studies and include the work of Sternberg, Virno, Lazzarato, King, Read and Hearn.

Course Syllabi for MS 9203 (Winter 2018)
The syllabi for this course is a PDF file that requires a FIMS account to view

0.5 course



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