The Body Productive

Book excerpt: The Body Productive represents a new and radical approach to the relationships between capitalism, work and the body. Self-evident, natural, biological - this is how we think of the body on an everyday basis. However, this supposedly most direct aspect of our being may in fact be a primary site of socio-economic mediation and ideological reproduction. How are bodies produced under capitalism? How, in turn, does capitalism make bodies productive? How is the body (and knowledge of the body) shaped by demands of production, consumption and exchange, and how can these logics be resisted, challenged and overcome? These are the questions at the heart of The Body Productive, a collection of original, radical new approaches to the relationships between capitalism, work and the body from an international group of scholars and activists. Taking inspiration from the neglected theoretical work of François Guéry and Didier Deleule, and bridging Marxist and Foucauldian traditions, this book rethinks the relationships between the biological and the social; the body and the mind; power and knowledge; discipline and control.