Brett Neilson
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 122403 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Brett Neilson |
| PRENOMES | Brett |
| SOBRENOME | Neilson |
| ASSINATURA | NEILSON B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Western Sydney University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6958-9656 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 52 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 594 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 51 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1970 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
The logistical episteme
The concept of the ‘logistical episteme’ – the systemic organisation of practices, technologies and discourses geared toward the optimisation of efficiencies and value extraction – is crucial for understanding how contemporary capitalism reconfigures labour and geopolitics around computational power. This article explores the emergence of the logistical episteme by tracing the historical development of location theory and its integration with con…
Pandemic Adjustments and Logistical Power
Early pandemic supply chain disruptions posed unprecedented challenges for logisticians and logistical systems. This article investigates the loss prevention strategies pursued by supply chain operators in the face of these blockages. Focusing on the legal doctrine of force majeure , the redesign of supply chain models and financial risk management, I show how the adjustment of logistical rationalities to pandemic conditions involves their entang…
The capitalist virus
Borders and mobilities have played key roles in the transformations of capitalism that have accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. We attempt to distinguish novel developments in the control of movements of bodies, labour, and capital from processes of renationalisation, financialisation, and platformisation that were in train before the outbreak. Focusing on logistical techniques and technologies that govern the global circulation of people and thin…
Migrant Struggles in South Korea and Elsewhere
Bidduth, Syed, and Samar were dishonorably deported from South Korea about fifteen years ago while they were protesting for the rights of undocumented migrant workers. Since returning to their home countries, Bangladesh and Nepal, they have been practicing modes of solidarity that they learned during the years of struggle. Still, We Are Migrant Workers is a documentary film made to record their personal history, will, and current political projec…
Response to Paul Apostolidis’s review of The Politics of Operations
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The Reverse of Engineering
Insofar as planning mediates between the order of what is and the question of what might be, it is not only a matter of philosophy but also one of engineering. Particularly at a time when routines of financial speculation and pattern recognition have colonized the making of futures, planning has become a process of creating architectural opportunities from scattered corpuses of extracted data. Mindful of the importance of machine learning in such…
The Politics of Operations
Data centres as logistical facilities
Data centres mobilise server-client architectures to disperse and draw in labour from across industries and nations. In doing so, they provide an infrastructural fix for capitalist actors seeking to bypass traditional labour actions, by designing logistical routes around which to redirect production processes. In this article, we build on research that investigates the data centre industry in Singapore to consider how these facilities drive proce…
What can a thesis do
Elements of logistics
Examining the conduits of production and circulation that link the extraction of copper in Chile to its storage and use in China, this article explores the political dimensions of the logistical techniques and technologies that enable these processes. We approach copper as a material element that due to its capacity to conduct electricity provides conditions of possibility for contemporary digital capitalism. At the same time, we consider the ele…
The Academy as a Logistical Institution
Logistical Asia
Logistical Asia
Precarious in Piraeus
Examining the territorial and logistical factors surrounding the leasing of the Greek port of Piraeus to a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned enterprise COSCO, this paper responds to calls to investigate variations in experiences of precarity. The article is based on research conducted in 2014 when the container processing area at Piraeus was divided between two terminals: the first run by the Piraeus Port Authority (OLP) and the second run by…
Entre extraction et exploitation
Cet article vise un remaniement du concept d’exploitation dans le cadre d’un programme de recherche plus large sur le capitalisme contemporain, s’attachant à la centralité d’une logique « extractive » dans la mise en forme des opérations du capital dans des domaines aussi déterminants que la logistique et la finance. Prenant pour fil conducteur l’analyse des luttes sociales contemporaines, les auteurs abordent les failles, les tensions et frictio…
The Currency of Migration
Working from the proposition that the body of the migrant presents a new form of global currency, this article explores the nexus of finance and migration. The figure of a global currency registers tensions between circulation and territory. By examining these tensions and exploring their resonances with the dynamics of migratory movements, I ask how the practices of exclusion and differential inclusion that characterize border and migration regi…
On the multiple frontiers of extraction
Understanding the intensification and expansion of extractive industries in contemporary capitalism requires an approach attentive not only to the literal forms of extraction prevalent in mining and agribusiness but also to new fronts of extraction emerging in activities such as data mining and biocapitalism. This article introduces the concept of operations of capital to trace connections between the expansive logic of extraction and capitalist …
New Keywords
“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding author engagements with migrant movements. The paper is organized in four parts (i) Introduction, (ii) …
Operations of Capital
The article introduces a monographic issue of the Journal, edited by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, on "Extraction, Logistics, FInance". The article sets the frame of the issue, particularly elaborating the concept of operations of capital as an effective analytical tool for grasping the peculiarity of contemporary capitalism. The authors show that extraction, finance, and logistics provide strategic conduits of analysis to unearth key logics…
What is a research platform? Mapping methods, mobilities and subjectivities
This article provides an account of the question of method as it relates to collective modes of research organised, conceived and produced through the interplay between digital technologies of communication and offline strategies of investigation. It does so by exploring the orchestration of research platforms, which are mediating devices that constitute the production of knowledge across a range of geocultural settings. In the context of a proje…
The Materiality of Communism
Arguing that the actuality of communism cannot be abstracted from the materiality of politics, this article engages with the works of Bruno Bosteels and Jodi Dean by affirming the radical innovation produced by the qualification of communism as a "real movement." This entails an examination of past and present communist struggles that accounts for their irreducible differences and multiple modes of organization. We insist that the debate on commu…
Beyond Kulturkritik
Notions of Kulturkritik stemming from twentieth century accounts of mass con-sumption present culture as an effect of the mode or relations of production. Culture becomes the means by which capitalism imposes itself as an ideological system. This paper asks how Kulturkritik might be revived or revisited in the current moment of capitalist globalisation. Focusing on changes to production systems introduced by the growth of logistics and supply cha…
Né qui, né altrove
From precarity to precariousness and back again
Confini e Frontiere
In Europa, in Asia, nel Pacifico, nelle Americhe, i confini e le terre che li circondano sono oggi scenario di forti tensioni, di lotte violente e di tragedie umanitarie. Basta pensare alle morti, spesso senza nome, dei migranti che vanno in cerca di un futuro sfidando le acque del Mediterraneo o il deserto tra Messico e Stati Uniti. A dispetto dell'opinione diffusa, i moderni processi di globalizzazione non hanno affatto creato un mondo senza ba…
Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception
In 2003, the concept of precarity emerged as the central organizing platform for a series of social struggles that would spread across the space of Europe. Four years later, almost as suddenly as the precarity movement appeared, so it would enter into crisis. To understand precarity as a political concept it is necessary to go beyond economistic approaches that see social conditions as determined by the mode of production. Such a move requires us…
Between Inclusion and Exclusion
The research hypothesis that we call border as method offers a fertile ground upon which to test the potentiality and the limits of the topological approach. In this article we present our hypothesis and address three questions relevant for topology. First, we ask how the topological approach can be applied within the heterogeneous space of globalization, which we argue does not obey the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion. Second, we address th…
Five theses on understanding logistics as power
Today logistics has become central to the orchestration of globalized trade and production. Yet, despite the focus on global connections and disconnections across a range of disciplines, the material operations that enable logistical practices have gone largely unexplored in social and cultural investigations into the operative dimensions of the global. This series of five theses provides a programmatic introduction to a longer research project t…
Operations of Capital
The article introduces a monographic issue of the Journal, edited by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, on "Extraction, Logistics, FInance". The article sets the frame of the issue, particularly elaborating the concept of operations of capital as an effective analytical tool for grasping the peculiarity of contemporary capitalism. The authors show that extraction, finance, and logistics provide strategic conduits of analysis to unearth key logics…
Ageing, Experience, Biopolitics
In the wake of Foucault, the debate on biopolitics has focused on the tensions of bíos and zoé, community and immunity, generation and thanatopolitics. What remains obscure in these accounts is the experiential aspect of life - its unfolding and entanglement with the ageing process. This is true both of approaches that emphasize the ethical implications of the life sciences and those that explore the biopolitical workings of wider social processe…
Elements of logistics
Examining the conduits of production and circulation that link the extraction of copper in Chile to its storage and use in China, this article explores the political dimensions of the logistical techniques and technologies that enable these processes. We approach copper as a material element that due to its capacity to conduct electricity provides conditions of possibility for contemporary digital capitalism. At the same time, we consider the ele…
Globalization and the Biopolitics of Aging
AGING AND GLOBALIZATION: WITHOUT DOUBT, THESE ARE AMONGTHE PRIMARY processes of transformation in the contemporary world. Both have a long history: in the first instance dating back to the murky origins of life itself, and in the second stretching as far into the past as the large-scale movements of trade and culture recorded by the earliest chroniclers. But in the contemporary capitalist world, these processes of change have acquired a new inten…
Anti-Ageing Cultures, Biopolitics and Globalisation
In March 2004, the author attended the Inaugural International Conference on Longevity at the Sydney Exhibition and Convention Centre in Darling Harbour. As a cultural researcher interested in the interactions between demographic shifts, capitalist globalisation and changing forms of political power, the prospect of a direct encounter with the debates and practices surrounding the burgeoning field of anti-ageing medicine promised a means to obser…
Precarious in Piraeus
Examining the territorial and logistical factors surrounding the leasing of the Greek port of Piraeus to a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned enterprise COSCO, this paper responds to calls to investigate variations in experiences of precarity. The article is based on research conducted in 2014 when the container processing area at Piraeus was divided between two terminals: the first run by the Piraeus Port Authority (OLP) and the second run by…
The Currency of Migration
Working from the proposition that the body of the migrant presents a new form of global currency, this article explores the nexus of finance and migration. The figure of a global currency registers tensions between circulation and territory. By examining these tensions and exploring their resonances with the dynamics of migratory movements, I ask how the practices of exclusion and differential inclusion that characterize border and migration regi…
Introduction
Introducing a themed section entitled ‘Are We All Cultural Workers Now?’, this article explores the relation between precarity and cultural work. It argues that precarity should be understood as an experience rather than a category that allows a mapping of transformations of social class. The article also engages with current debates on cultural work and questions the proposition that changes in this area presage more general shifts in the organi…
The capitalist virus
Borders and mobilities have played key roles in the transformations of capitalism that have accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. We attempt to distinguish novel developments in the control of movements of bodies, labour, and capital from processes of renationalisation, financialisation, and platformisation that were in train before the outbreak. Focusing on logistical techniques and technologies that govern the global circulation of people and thin…
Beyond Kulturkritik
Notions of Kulturkritik stemming from twentieth century accounts of mass con-sumption present culture as an effect of the mode or relations of production. Culture becomes the means by which capitalism imposes itself as an ideological system. This paper asks how Kulturkritik might be revived or revisited in the current moment of capitalist globalisation. Focusing on changes to production systems introduced by the growth of logistics and supply cha…
The Materiality of Communism
Arguing that the actuality of communism cannot be abstracted from the materiality of politics, this article engages with the works of Bruno Bosteels and Jodi Dean by affirming the radical innovation produced by the qualification of communism as a "real movement." This entails an examination of past and present communist struggles that accounts for their irreducible differences and multiple modes of organization. We insist that the debate on commu…
Geography is not enough
This is our response to a "review forum" organized by the journal on our book "Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor" (Duke University Press, 2013)
Bodies of Protest
The Reverse of Engineering
Insofar as planning mediates between the order of what is and the question of what might be, it is not only a matter of philosophy but also one of engineering. Particularly at a time when routines of financial speculation and pattern recognition have colonized the making of futures, planning has become a process of creating architectural opportunities from scattered corpuses of extracted data. Mindful of the importance of machine learning in such…
Entre extraction et exploitation
Cet article vise un remaniement du concept d’exploitation dans le cadre d’un programme de recherche plus large sur le capitalisme contemporain, s’attachant à la centralité d’une logique « extractive » dans la mise en forme des opérations du capital dans des domaines aussi déterminants que la logistique et la finance. Prenant pour fil conducteur l’analyse des luttes sociales contemporaines, les auteurs abordent les failles, les tensions et frictio…
Provincialising the Italian Effect
What happens when radical Italian thought is uprooted from its initial context of formation and put to work in other contexts? Must this involve an objectification of the subjective processes of thought, their reification into theory? Or is the network of brains and bodies by now so globally extensive that the necessary translations can be accomplished notwithstanding the local specificity of experiences and cultures
Ageing and globalisation in a moment of so-called crisis
The global economic turmoil that has unfolded since August 2007 promises to change methods for the governance of ageing in ways yet unknown. Against this background, this paper asks how the demographic shifts associated with population ageing interact with other aspects of globalisation: the financialisation of economic systems, changing patterns of migration and transformations to health provision. The emphasis is on understanding the complex in…
Inside Shangri-La/Outside Globalisation
The paper studies the vexed geopolitical situation surrounding the Chinese 'occupation' of Tibet in the context of the myth of Shangri-La. According to popular legend, Shangri-La is a hidden city in Central Asia where social and cultural conflict does not exist and the inhabitants enjoy prolonged youth. I argue that this myth represents the possibility of an 'outside' to globalisation, a standpoint from which to question the processes of integrat…
Institution, Time-lag, Globality
Threshold Procedures
Anti-Ageing Cultures, Biopolitics and Globalisation
In March 2004, the author attended the Inaugural International Conference on Longevity at the Sydney Exhibition and Convention Centre in Darling Harbour. As a cultural researcher interested in the interactions between demographic shifts, capitalist globalisation and changing forms of political power, the prospect of a direct encounter with the debates and practices surrounding the burgeoning field of anti-ageing medicine promised a means to obser…
Radiodermatitis in Physicians
The chapter discusses recent debates on justice in political philosophy from the point of view of the new salience and multiplication of borders in the global present. The authors approach the question of justice, its excesses, and its governmentalized or distributed forms with respect to the richly implicated but not entirely philosophically reconcilable theories of the production of subjectivity offered by Marx and Foucault. Borders and boundar…
Threshold Procedures
Institution, Time-lag, Globality
Inside Shangri-La/Outside Globalisation
The paper studies the vexed geopolitical situation surrounding the Chinese 'occupation' of Tibet in the context of the myth of Shangri-La. According to popular legend, Shangri-La is a hidden city in Central Asia where social and cultural conflict does not exist and the inhabitants enjoy prolonged youth. I argue that this myth represents the possibility of an 'outside' to globalisation, a standpoint from which to question the processes of integrat…
Bodies of Protest
Globalization and the Biopolitics of Aging
AGING AND GLOBALIZATION: WITHOUT DOUBT, THESE ARE AMONGTHE PRIMARY processes of transformation in the contemporary world. Both have a long history: in the first instance dating back to the murky origins of life itself, and in the second stretching as far into the past as the large-scale movements of trade and culture recorded by the earliest chroniclers. But in the contemporary capitalist world, these processes of change have acquired a new inten…
Cultural Studies and Giorgio Agamben
Translating Signs, Producing Subjects
This paper moves between two streets: Liverpool Road in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield and Via Sarpi in the Italian city of Milan. What connects these streets is that both have become important sites for businesses in the Chinese diaspora. Moreover, both are streets on which locals have expressed desires for Chinese signs to be translated into the national lingua franca. The paper argues that the cultural politics inherent in this demand for trans…
Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception
In 2003, the concept of precarity emerged as the central organizing platform for a series of social struggles that would spread across the space of Europe. Four years later, almost as suddenly as the precarity movement appeared, so it would enter into crisis. To understand precarity as a political concept it is necessary to go beyond economistic approaches that see social conditions as determined by the mode of production. Such a move requires us…
The world seen from a taxi
Ageing and globalisation in a moment of so-called crisis
The global economic turmoil that has unfolded since August 2007 promises to change methods for the governance of ageing in ways yet unknown. Against this background, this paper asks how the demographic shifts associated with population ageing interact with other aspects of globalisation: the financialisation of economic systems, changing patterns of migration and transformations to health provision. The emphasis is on understanding the complex in…
Ageing, anti-ageing and globalisation
"Ageing, anti-ageing and globalisation: Transitions and limits in the governance of ageing." Health Sociology Review, 18(4), pp. 347–348
Climate Crisis and the Actuarial Imaginary
Has there ever been a climate crisis? Or an economic crisis? Did these ever happen? Are they happening? 'Merry crisis and a happy new fear' - these words, spray painted outside the Bank of Greece in Athens, as that country erupted in riots in December 2008, seemed to say it so well. There is always another crisis, a new crisis. Enjoy your crisis. But also be scared. Since the crisis perpetuates fear. In this paper we want to critically interrogat…
Frontières et inclusion différentielle
Politics without Action, Economy without Labor
Politics without Action, Economy without Labor Brett Neilson (bio) 1. The bipolar machine Politics and economy, sovereignty and governance, Father and Son, law and order: this is the series of binaries along which Giorgio Agamben, in Il regno e la gloria, strings his analysis of the current dominance of management over all aspects of social life.1 By seeking to demonstrate how the paradigm of oikonomia, particularly as developed in arguments abou…
Borderscapes of Differential Inclusion
The logics of human growth hormone and the predicaments of old age
Trepidation towards old age has been singled out as the main driving force behind the consumption of anti-ageing products such as human growth hormone (HGH). The rationality imposed by statements suggesting a linear relationship between the uptake of HGH and ‘middle men trying to look younger’ diverts attention from multiple convergences and divergences taking place across areas such as medicine, global health markets, economic agendas, demograph…
Five theses on understanding logistics as power
Today logistics has become central to the orchestration of globalized trade and production. Yet, despite the focus on global connections and disconnections across a range of disciplines, the material operations that enable logistical practices have gone largely unexplored in social and cultural investigations into the operative dimensions of the global. This series of five theses provides a programmatic introduction to a longer research project t…
Ageing, Experience, Biopolitics
In the wake of Foucault, the debate on biopolitics has focused on the tensions of bíos and zoé, community and immunity, generation and thanatopolitics. What remains obscure in these accounts is the experiential aspect of life - its unfolding and entanglement with the ageing process. This is true both of approaches that emphasize the ethical implications of the life sciences and those that explore the biopolitical workings of wider social processe…
Between Inclusion and Exclusion
The research hypothesis that we call border as method offers a fertile ground upon which to test the potentiality and the limits of the topological approach. In this article we present our hypothesis and address three questions relevant for topology. First, we ask how the topological approach can be applied within the heterogeneous space of globalization, which we argue does not obey the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion. Second, we address th…
Cultural Studies in the Future Tense
Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, Durham, Duke University Press, 2010, 384 pp., £70.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9780822348443, £16.99 (paperback), ISBN: 9780822348306 Lawrence Gros
Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor
Il testo può essere consultato on line all'indirizzo http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en
Geography is not enough
This is our response to a "review forum" organized by the journal on our book "Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor" (Duke University Press, 2013)
Border As Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor
Political science (38 obras) · Sociology (34 obras) · Law (30 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · Economics (19 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Epistemology (11 obras) · Philosophy (10 obras) · Computer Science (9 obras) · History (9 obras)