Beyond language and the subject: machinic enslavement in contemporary European cinema

Contemporary subjection, notes Maurizio Lazzarato, has two very different dimensions, subjectivation (our production as subjects) and machinic enslavement (the way in which sub- and supra-individual human elements are put to work as cogs in complex machineries that are never simply technical machines). Although the latter form of subjection is increasingly dominant, critical theory almost always focuses on the former. With its intrinsically machinic functioning, cinema seems ideally placed to open up our machinic subjection to scrutiny. Can it become the Vertovian self-consciousness of a collective, machinic subject, or is it simply condemned to anticipate and embody the way in which consumer capitalism puts the human psyche and affectivity to work? Suggesting that such a polarised set of alternatives is too schematic, this article probes four contemporary, and very dissimilar, European films, sounding out their capacity to bring the machinic into view and make it available for self-reflexive engagement. The article draws its main theoretical inspiration from the work of contemporary social theorist, Maurizio Lazzarato, but also draws on other thinkers where relevant. The films discussed are Ma part du gâteau (Klapisch, 2011), Abenland (Geyrhalter, 2011), Lucy (Besson, 2014) and Vers Madrid: the Burning Bright (George, 2012)

The impact of financialisation on public health in times of COVID-19 and beyond

The substantial literature in political economy and soci- ology has shown that the increasing importance of finan- cial activities (financialisation) exhibits significant effects on many socioeconomic conditions. While these condi- tions are relevant to public health, the dominant focus of the literature has been centred on the impact of financial markets on health services and health-care systems. This paper analyses how the financialisation of non-financial corporations, real estate and pensions can worsen public health through the transformation of workplace and living conditions as well as financially dependent social groups' perception of health risk. Our analysis raises several ques- tions which aim to provide the basis of a future research agenda on the effects of financialisation on public and global health

Chimera: a Bioconductor package for secondary analysis of fusion products

Chimera is a Bioconductor package that organizes, annotates, analyses and validates fusions reported by different fusion detection tools; current implementation can deal with output from bellerophontes, chimeraScan, deFuse, fusionCatcher, FusionFinder, FusionHunter, FusionMap, mapSplice, Rsubread, tophat-fusion and STAR. The core of Chimera is a fusion data structure that can store fusion events detected with any of the aforementioned tools. Fusions are then easily manipulated with standard R functions or through the set of functionalities specifically developed in Chimera with the aim of supporting the user in managing fusions and discriminating falsepositive results

Architects of time: Labouring on digital futures

Drawing on critical analyses of the internet inspired by Gilles Deleuze and the Marxist autonomia movement, this paper suggests a way of understanding the impact of the internet and digital culture on identity and social forms through a consideration of the relationship between controls exercised through the internet, new subjectivities constituted through its use and new labour practices enabled by it. Following Castells, we can see that the distinction between user, consumer and producer is becoming blurred and free labour is being provided by users to corporations. The relationship between digital technologies and sense of community, through their relationship to the future, is considered for its dangers and potentials. It is proposed that the internet may be a useful tool for highlighting and enabling social connections if certain dangers can be traversed. Notably, current remedies for the lack of trust on the internet are questioned with an alternative, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman and Georg Simmel, proposed which is built on community through a vision of a ‘shared network’

The New ‘Hidden Abode’: Reflections on Value and Labour in the New Economy

In a pivotal section of Capital, volume 1, Marx (1976: 279) notes that, in order to understand the capitalist production of value, we must descend into the ‘hidden abode of production’: the site of the labour process conducted within an employment relationship. In this paper we argue that by remaining wedded to an analysis of labour that is confined to the employment relationship, Labour Process Theory (LPT) has missed a fundamental shift in the location of value production in contemporary capitalism. We examine this shift through the work of Autonomist Marxists like Hardt and Negri, Lazaratto and Arvidsson, who offer theoretical leverage to prize open a new ‘hidden abode’ outside employment, for example in the ‘production of organization’ and in consumption. Although they can open up this new ‘hidden abode’, without LPT's fine-grained analysis of control/resistance, indeterminacy and structured antagonism, these theorists risk succumbing to empirically naive claims about the ‘new economy’. Through developing an expanded conception of a ‘new hidden abode’ of production, the paper demarcates an analytical space in which both LPT and Autonomist Marxism can expand and develop their understanding of labour and value production in today's economy. </jats:p

Improvement of conventional anti-cancer drugs as new tools against multidrug resistant tumors

Multidrug resistance (MDR) is the dominant cause of the failure of cancer chemotherapy. The design of antitumor drugs that are able to evade MDR is rapidly evolving, showing that this area of biomedical research attracts great interest in the scientific community. The current review explores promising recent approaches that have been developed with the aim of circumventing or overcoming MDR. Encouraging results have been obtained in the investigation of the MDR-modulating properties of various classes of natural compounds and their analogues. Inhibition of P-gp or downregulation of its expression have proven to be the main mechanisms by which MDR can be surmounted. The use of hybrid molecules that are able to simultaneously interact with two or more cancer cell targets is currently being explored as a means to circumvent drug resistance. This strategy is based on the design of hybrid compounds that are obtained either by merging the structural features of separate drugs, or by conjugating two drugs or pharmacophores via cleavable/non-cleavable linkers. The approach is highly promising due to the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic advantages that can be achieved over the independent administration of the two individual components. However, it should be stressed that the task of obtaining successful multivalent drugs is a very challenging one. The conjugation of anticancer agents with nitric oxide (NO) donors has recently been developed, creating a particular class of hybrid that can combat tumor drug resistance. Appropriate NO donors have been shown to reverse drug resistance via nitration of ABC transporters and by interfering with a number of metabolic enzymes and signaling pathways. In fact, hybrid compounds that are produced by covalently attaching NO-donors and antitumor drugs have been shown to elicit a synergistic cytotoxic effect in a variety of drug resistant cancer cell lines. Another strategy to circumvent MDR is based on nanocarrier-mediated transport and the controlled release of chemotherapeutic drugs and P-gp inhibitors. Their pharmacokinetics are governed by the nanoparticle or polymer carrier and make use of the enhanced permeation and retention (EPR) effect, which can increase selective delivery to cancer cells. These systems are usually internalized by cancer cells via endocytosis and accumulate in endosomes and lysosomes, thus preventing rapid efflux. Other modalities to combat MDR are described in this review, including the pharmaco-modulation of acridine, which is a well-known scaffold in the development of bioactive compounds, the use of natural compounds as means to reverse MDR, and the conjugation of anticancer drugs with carriers that target specific tumor-cell components. Finally, the outstanding potential of in silico structure-based methods as a means to evaluate the ability of antitumor drugs to interact with drug transporters is also highlighted in this review. Structure-based design methods, which utilize 3D structural data of proteins and their complexes with ligands, are the most effective of the in silico methods available, as they provide a prediction regarding the interaction between transport proteins and their substrates and inhibitors. The recently resolved X-ray structure of human P-gp can help predict the interaction sites of designed compounds, providing insight into their binding mode and directing possible rational modifications to prevent them from becoming P-gp drug substrates. In summary, although major efforts were invested in the search for new tools to combat drug resistant tumors, they all require further implementation and methodological development. Further investigation and progress in the abovementioned strategies will provide significant advances in the rational combat against cancer MDR

Introduction to Eurocrisis, Neoliberalism and the Common

This introduction frames the articles collected in the special section as the outcome of a process of ‘self-education’ taking place in the Italian free university network UniNomade 2.0 between 2010 and 2013. The open seminars and conferences orga- nized by UniNomade 2.0 took as their object of inquiry the concept of the Common, while the articles selected focus in particular on the sovereign debt crisis of the European Union (Eurocrisis) following the global financial crisis of 2008. The intro- duction thus summarizes the overall approach of contemporary ‘post-operaist’ authors such as Toni Negri, Christian Marazzi, Maurizio Lazzarato, Andrea Fumagalli and Stefano Lucarelli, and Carlo Vercellone to the new role of financial capital, the transformation of money, the material constitution of Europe, the role played by the relationship between debtors and creditors, and the possibilities opened by the concept of Commonfare for struggles against austerity

No measure for culture? Value in the new economy

This paper explores articulations of the value of investment in culture and the arts through a critical discourse analysis of policy documents, reports and academic commentary since 1997. It argues that in this period, discourses around the value of culture have moved from a focus on the direct economic contributions of the culture industries to their indirect economic benefits. These indirect benefits are discussed here under three main headings: creativity and innovation, employability, and social inclusion. These are in turn analysed in terms of three forms of capital: human, social and cultural. The paper concludes with an analysis of this discursive shift through the lens of autonomist Marxist concerns with the labour of social reproduction. It is our argument that, in contemporary policy discourses on culture and the arts, the government in the UK is increasingly concerned with the use of culture to form the social in the image of capital. As such, we must turn our attention beyond the walls of the factory in order to understand the contemporary capitalist production of value and resistance to it. </jats:p