Just doing it: enjoying commodity fetishism with Lacan

Despite prolonged resistance campaigns against what are regarded as unethical production practices of companies such as Nike, people around the world still seem to be happy to spend a lot of money buying expensive consumer products. Why is this so? In this article we discuss this question through the lens of the concept of fetishism. By discussing texts by Freud and Marx, amongst others, we first explore the genealogy of the concept of fetishism. We then develop a Lacanian reading to understand how processes of fetishization dominate today’s capitalist society, producing a modern subject that constantly desires to consume more in order to constitute itself. We argue—with Lacan—that at the heart of this process of the constitution of the subject through consumption is enjoyment or, what Lacan calls, jouissance. Capitalism—as any other socio-economic regime—can thus be understood as a system of enjoyment. </jats:p

Upsetting the offset : the political economy of carbon markets

xix, 363 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.Libro ElectrónicoUpsetting the Offset engages critically with the political economy of carbon markets. It presents a range of case studies and critiques from around the world, showing how the scam of carbon markets affects the lives of communities. But the book doesn’t stop there. It also presents a number of alternatives to carbon markets which enable communities to live in real low-carbon futures. ‘If you wondered whether capitalism could ever produce the perfect weapon of its own destruction, try this heady mix of carbon fuels, the trade in financial derivatives, and more than a dash of neo-colonialism, and boom! But this book is far from resigned to that fate. After examining the case against carbon trading… the book turns to alternatives, to hope, to sanity, and to the future.’ Professor Stefano Harney, Queen Mary, University of London, UKAlterar el desplazamiento involucra crítico con la política económica de los mercados de carbón. Se presenta una serie de estudios de caso y las críticas de todo el mundo, mostrando cómo la estafa de los mercados de carbono afecta a la vida de las comunidades. Pero el libro no se detiene allí. También presenta una serie de alternativas a los mercados de carbono que permitan a las comunidades a vivir en tiempo real de baja emisiones de carbono. "Si te has preguntado alguna vez si el capitalismo puede producir el arma perfecta de su propia destrucción, prueba esta embriagadora mezcla de combustibles de carbono, el comercio de los derivados financieros, y más de un toque de neo-colonialismo, y ¡bum! Pero este libro está muy lejos de resignarse a ese destino. Después de examinar el caso contra el comercio de carbono ... el libro se convierte en alternativas, a la esperanza, a la cordura, y para el futuro.Contributors xi Acknowledgments xix FOREWORDS The Business of Carbon is Different 1 Offsets Under Kyoto: A Dirty Deal for the South 2 Carbon Markets: A Fatal Illusion 5 INTRODUCTION 1 Upsetting the Offset: An Introduction 9 2 Neoliberalism and the Calculable World: The Rise of Carbon Trading 25 CASES 3 Double Jeopardy: Pursuing the Path of Carbon Offsets and Human Rights Abuses 41 4 How Sustainable are Small-Scale Biomass Factories? A Case Study from Thailand 57 5 Politics of Methane Abatement and CDM Projects based on Industrial Swine Production in Chile 72 6 Paying the Polluter? The Relegation of Local Community Concerns in ‘Carbon Credit’ Proposals of Oil Corporations in Nigeria 86 7 Carbon Sink Plantation in Uganda: Evicting People for Making Space for Trees 98 8 Tree Plantations, Climate Change and Women 102 9 Shall We Still Keep Our Eyes Cerrados? 112 10 Clean Conscience Mechanism: A Case from Uruguay 119 11 India’s ‘Clean Development’ 129 12 Where is Climate Justice in India’s First CDM Project? 138 13 The Jindal CDM Projects in Karnataka 148 14 The MSPL Wind Power CDM Project 153 15 The Deogad Hydroelectric CDM Project 159 16 Offsetting Lives and Livelihoods: Atmospheric Brown Cloud and the Targeting of Asia’s Rural Poor 163 CRITIQUES 17 Regulation as Corruption in the Carbon Offset Markets 175 18 The Politics of the Clean Development Mechanism: Hiding Capitalism Under the Green Rug 192 19 Rent Seeking and Corporate Lobbying in Climate Negotiations 203 20 Forests, Carbon Markets and Hot Air: Why the Carbon Stored in Forests Should not be Traded 214 21 Hegemony and Climate Justice: A Critical Analysis 230 22 Resistance Makes Carbon Markets 244 23 Green Capitalism, and the Cultural Poverty of Constructing Nature as Service Provider 255 ALTERNATIVES 24 Repaying Africa for Climate Crisis: ‘Ecological Debt’ as a Development Finance Alternative to Emissions Trading 275 25 Rethinking the Legal Regime for Climate Change: The Human Rights and Equity Imperative 292 26 Low Impact Development 307 27 Planning for Permaculture? Land-Use Planning, Sustainable Development, and ‘Ecosystem People’ 317 28 Cycles of Sustainability: From Automobility to Bicycology 322 29 Towards the Sustainable School: Social Accounts and Local Solutions 334 30 Inspiring Examples: Sustainable Living 345 AFTERWORDS On the Road to Copenhagen: Urgent Action is Required 357 Time to Breathe 36

The political event : impossibilities of repositioning organisation theory

In this thesis I outline a political problem of positioning organisation theory. I maintain that there are projects of positioning, depositioning and repositioning, which articulate organisation in different political ways. To dialectically critique the politics of these projects I discuss the way philosophers of destruction, deconstruction and impossibility conceptualise the political event. I argue that these speculative philosophies share a political belief in the need to question and show the limits of the ways social reality is positioned in the realms of modernity, capitalism and `Empire', and explore possibilities of how the world might look different. I maintain that the politics of the positioning project is to turn organisation into the hegemony of management, which I show by engaging with the particular discourse of knowledge management. The politics of the depositioning project is to resist the hegemony of management in multiple ways; I discuss particularly how organisation theorists emphasise the precariousness, plurality and locality of processes of organising. Although the political resistances by the depositioning project are of great importance, I argue that there is a tendency to not link their politics to questions of hegemony, which I show to have certain depoliticising effects. In response to these failures, the politics of the repositioning project aims to repoliticise organisation theory by speculating about a new hegemony of social organisation. My engagement with the so-called 'anticapitalist movement' and questions of its organisation and politics shows, however, that such an attempt of repositioning is itself an impossible or undecidable event. Nevertheless, I argue that it is precisely this political event of impossibility that calls for a speculative decision to be made; a decision, however, which will always fail to fully represent social organisation

Carbon monoxide in the solar atmosphere II. Radiative cooling by CO lines

The role of carbon monoxide as a cooling agent for the thermal structure of the mid-photospheric to low-chromospheric layers of the solar atmosphere in internetwork regions is investigated. The treatment of radiative cooling via spectral lines of carbon monoxide (CO) has been added to the radiation chemo-hydrodynamics code CO5BOLD. [...] The CO opacity indeed causes additional cooling at the fronts of propagating shock waves in the chromosphere. There, the time-dependent approach results in a higher CO number density compared to the equilibrium case and hence in a larger net radiative cooling rate. The average gas temperature stratification of the model atmosphere, however, is only reduced by roughly 100 K. Also the temperature fluctuations and the CO number density are only affected to small extent. A numerical experiment without dynamics shows that the CO cooling process works in principle and drives the atmosphere to a cool radiative equilibrium state. At chromospheric heights, the radiative relaxation of the atmosphere to a cool state takes several 1000 s. The CO cooling process thus would seem to be too slow compared to atmospheric dynamics to be responsible for the very cool temperature regions observed in the solar atmosphere. The hydrodynamical timescales in our solar atmosphere model are much too short to allow for the radiative relaxation to a cool state, thus suppressing the potential thermal instability due to carbon monoxide as a cooling agent. Apparently, the thermal structure and dynamics of the outer model atmosphere are instead determined primarily by shock waves.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. A&A, accepted 06/12/200

Just Doing It. The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real in Nike's Commodity Fetish

Since the mid-1990s Nike has been in the 'bad books' of left-leaning commentators, anti-capitalist movements and other protesters and academics alike because of its production practices in 'third world' sweatshops. The term 'sweatshop' was at some stage so tightly connected to the brand Nike, that it was entirely conceivable that this huge, now 30 billion Dollars worth, company could be brought to its knees. It wasn't to be. Despite a worldwide campaign against Nike (and other sweatshop operating companies), the company responded by introducing 'strict' codes and conducts for outsourcing factories and workers to follow, which, it was hoped, would address and deal with at least the more serious allegations of terrible sweatshop working conditions and child labour in many of the 'third world' factories where Nike products are made. Although at first slow to respond to the massive anti-sweatshop campaign, Nike has learned its lesson fast and it can now proudly say that it takes its 'responsibility' very seriously – at least the company says so on its sleek website http://nikeresponsibility.com (note that NikeResponsibility itself seems to have become a brand). But this paper is not proposing to revisit 'old news'. Rather, the starting point for our investigation is our claim that part of the failure of the anti-sweatshop campaign was its inability to conceptualize and understand the concrete workings of the Nike commodity fetish. And to be sure, this failure is ongoing. Recently, War on Want, a UK-based charity that is playing a very active part in exposing the malpractices of multinational companies in the 'third world', has been running a campaign 'Let's clean up Fashion' , to fight against low-price fashion items sold by UK chains such as ASDA, Primark, Tesco, and others. While we very much support this campaign in general, we fear that it doesn't deal with the workings of the commodity fetish head-on. That is, campaigns like this are well intended – they appeal to consumers' hearts and minds, to their compassion – but what they do not manage to do is to put forward a rigorous analysis of how the commodity fetish works, and how it could be disrupted. In our view, only a rupture of the workings of the commodity fetish – the act – would achieve real improvements. That is, campaigns like the anti-sweatshop movement, are well intended, but their compassionate pleas are just that: well intended. Žižek (1997) might go further and say that it is campaigns like these that are actually the kernel of today's ideological cover up. The anti-sweatshop campaign is not fighting the commodity fetish, but enabling it to continue its destructive work precisely through its work of 'transparency'. We will show in the paper how this double-whammy might work in practice, using the case of Nike. But we are jumping ahead of ourselves. Our paper, then, is a discussion of the workings of commodity fetishism. At work with us is not only Lacan, who will primarily provide input into the workings of enjoyment in today's consumer culture, but also Marx and Freud who were the early champions of conceptualising fetishism. In Capital, Marx (1976) discusses commodity fetishism as the main ideological structure that keeps capital moving. Freud (1977), in contrast, wasn't interested in capital but the workings of the human mind, and he saw in fetishism a displacement activity that would enable young boys to get to grips with the apparent castration of their mothers (i.e. the lack of a penis) and the possibilities of their own castration. Although Freud wasn't a reader of Marx, as far as we know, there have been many attempts to read across Marx's and Freud's conceptions of fetishism and somehow integrate their different approaches – we could name Benjamin's Arcades Project here. Our paper will review such attempts to integrate Marx and Freud, but will then apply these readings to the burning question of: What actually gets people into NikeTown, and what lets us enjoy our visit to the temple of the commodity? In other words, how is it possible that despite the tremendously bad press Nike has had over the past decade, the company is turning out record profit after record profit, as millions flock to the shops to buy its trainers and T-shirts, i.e. they are enjoying the Nike commodity. Here we will make use of Lacan's (1977, 1998) analysis of enjoyment and jouissance in order to understand the workings of the Nike commodity. This record was migrated from the OpenDepot repository service in June, 2017 before shutting down

Design and construction of a scintillating fibre tracker for measuring hard exclusive reactions at HERMES

This thesis describes design and construction of the SFT. The first section gives a comprehensive overview of the experimental set-up of HERMES and its components relevant for DVCS analysis. The second section introduces the Recoil Detector and Monte Carlo (MC) studies performed to evaluate the requirements for the individual detector parts. In the third section a detailed description of the design parameters and constraints is given and the chosen materials and assembling methods are discussed. This section is complemented by reporting results of the performance of SFT prototype modules from a test experiment conducted at GSI. Finally, an introduction into the GPD formalism and its application to nuclei is given in the fourth section and pioneering results of DVCS off nuclei are presented in the fifth section.Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wird die Planung und der Bau eines Spurrekonstruktionsdetektors aus szintillierenden Fasern (SFT) für den HERMES Recoil-Detektor beschrieben. Dies umfaßt die Festlegung der Entwurfsziele, Entwicklung von Herstellungverfahren, Auswahl der Detektorbestandteile sowie die Durchführung und Auswertung von Komponententests. Abschließend wird eine Einführung in den Generalised Parton Distribution-Formalismus (GPD) zur Beschreibung der nicht-perturbativen Nukleonstruktur gegeben. Dieser Formalismus kann auch auf Atomkerne angewendet werden und zu neuen Einsichten in die Kernstruktur und partonische Freiheitsgrade im Kern führen. Anschließend wird die Analyse tief-virtueller Compton-Streuereignisse an verschiedenen Kernen beschrieben

The political event : impossibilities of repositioning organisation theory

In this thesis I outline a political problem of positioning organisation theory. I maintain that there are projects of positioning, depositioning and repositioning, which articulate organisation in different political ways. To dialectically critique the politics of these projects I discuss the way philosophers of destruction, deconstruction and impossibility conceptualise the political event. I argue that these speculative philosophies share a political belief in the need to question and show the limits of the ways social reality is positioned in the realms of modernity, capitalism and `Empire', and explore possibilities of how the world might look different. I maintain that the politics of the positioning project is to turn organisation into the hegemony of management, which I show by engaging with the particular discourse of knowledge management. The politics of the depositioning project is to resist the hegemony of management in multiple ways; I discuss particularly how organisation theorists emphasise the precariousness, plurality and locality of processes of organising. Although the political resistances by the depositioning project are of great importance, I argue that there is a tendency to not link their politics to questions of hegemony, which I show to have certain depoliticising effects. In response to these failures, the politics of the repositioning project aims to repoliticise organisation theory by speculating about a new hegemony of social organisation. My engagement with the so-called 'anticapitalist movement' and questions of its organisation and politics shows, however, that such an attempt of repositioning is itself an impossible or undecidable event. Nevertheless, I argue that it is precisely this political event of impossibility that calls for a speculative decision to be made; a decision, however, which will always fail to fully represent social organisation.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Adeus Lênin! De dreamworlds, catástrofes e impérios, agora e então

This paper deals with a symptom: that of an ideological change, a historical break in the fantasmatic production of social organization – the transition from East to West. Following Žižek’s recommendation to ‘enjoy your symptom’, I explore my own historical experience of the Eastern European ‘Wende’ from ‘realexisting socialism’ to ‘real-existing capitalism’. This exploration is done through a variety of different images, the most recognizable being perhaps the well-known film Good Bye Lenin, which deals with the complexities of the transitions of not only political and economic regimes but their implications for the make up of subjectivities. The paper ends with an affi rmative outlook, as it claims that history has not ended, and that breaks in the ideological and fantasmatic production of society are still possible today.Este artigo trata de um sintoma: o de uma mudança ideológica, uma fratura histórica na produção fantasmática da organização social - a transição de Leste para Oeste. Ao seguir a recomendação de Žižek para “usufruir do sintoma”, exploro minha própria experiência histórica do “Wende” europeu Oriental de “socialismo real existente” para “capitalismo real existente”. Esta exploração é feita através de uma variedade de imagens diferentes, sendo, talvez, o famoso filme Adeus, Lênin! a mais reconhecida, que lida não apenas com as complexidades das transições de regimes políticos e econômicos, mas também das suas implicações na construção de subjetividades. O artigo é concluído com perspectiva afirmativa, enquanto reinvindica que a história não terminou e que fraturas na fantasmática e ideológica produção da sociedade são possíveis ainda hoje

A NOVEL BCG SENSOR-ARRAY FOR UNOBTRUSIVE CARDIAC MONITORING

Unobtrusive heart rate monitoring is a popular research topic in biomedical engineering. The reason is that convential methods, e.g. the clinical gold standard electrocardiography, require conductive contact to the human body. Other methods such as ballistocardiography try to record these vital signs without electrodes that are attached to the body. So far, these systems cannot replace routine procedures. Most systems have some drawbacks that cannot be compensated, such as aging of the sensor materials or movement artifacts. In addition, the signal form differs greatly from an ECG, which is an electrical signal. The ballistocardiogram has a mechanical source, which makes it harder to evaluate. We have developed a new sensor array made of near-IR-LEDs to record BCGs. IR-sensors do not age in relevant time scales. Analog filtering was neccesary, because the signal amplitude was very small. The digitized data was then processed by various algorithms to extract beat-to-beat or breath-to-breath intervals. The redundancy of multiple BCG channels was used to provide a robust estimation of beat-to-beat intervals and heart rate. We installed the system beneath a mattress topper of a hospital bed, but any other bed would have been sufficient. The validation of this measurement system shows that it is well suited for BCG recordings. The use of multiple channels has proven to be superior to relying on a single BCG channel