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Dear Colleagues - members may be interested in this event:
Media Discourse Group, De Montfort University
(Leicester Media School)
Aesthetics and the Spirits of Capitalism:
ideology, discourse and stylistic recuperation
in responses to ecological protest and anti-capitalism
Wednesday 18th March, 4pm, Clephan Building, 3.01 - Bonners Lane, Leicester
Chris Land (Leicester) & Scott Taylor (Birmingham)
ABSTRACT
In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) develop the Weberian idea of a ‘spirit’ of capitalism that motivates engagement with this system of social and economic production. Without a spirit, they argue, capitalism is meaningless: nothing more than the mindless pursuit of profit for its own sake. At the very least, managers require some kind of reason to engage with this system and work in the service of unending accumulation. What drives changes in the spirit of capitalism is resistance. In their 2005 book, the focus was on managerial responses to the ‘artistic’ criticism of capitalism articulated in the 1960. By the 1990s this had given rise to the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ grounded in creativity, autonomy and entrepreneurialism. By the late 1990s, however, ‘even newer social movements’ (Crossley, 2003) were articulating new criticisms, most notably ‘anti-capitalism’ itself as a movement grounded in anarchist organizing principles (Maeckelbergh, 2009) and the ‘ecological criticism’ of capitalism on the basis of its lack of environmental sustainability (Chiapello, 2013).
In this paper Chris Land and Scott Taylor examine an instance of the formation of an ‘even newer spirit of capitalism’ (Land and Taylor, 2014) in action. Here they depart from Boltanski and Chiapello’s methodology, which was based on an analysis of an established, published body of managerial writing. Focusing on an established corpus like this is only possible once a spirit of capitalism is already sedimented and stabilised. This misses the more immediate process of articulating and contesting a response to criticism as key actors struggle to negotiate between the demands of a particular critique and the underlying structures of capitalist business and economic reality (cf. Fisher, 2009). To research this process of ‘discourse in action’, the authors chose to focus on the ‘Do Lectures’, an environmental and corporate social responsibility (CSR) focussed series of lectures held annually in Wales since 2008. More recently the ‘Do Lectures’ have gone global and talks have been established in North America.
The study combined an analysis of on-line documents, including video lectures, blogs, and regular email newsletters called ‘Kindling: Ideas to fire you up’, with an intensive, five day period of participant observation in the talks held in Wales in September 2011. Adopting an ethnographic approach, the researchers supplemented field notes with photographic documentation and analysis of the on-line corpus that the lectures have produced. The initial focus was on the problems being discussed, the solutions offered in the talks, and responses to those solutions in questions and subsequent discussion, as well as the motivations of those participating in the talks. During the research, however, the authors became interested in the staging of the event: its aesthetic style and the cultural codes that this tapped into.