Affective Capitalism

Drawing on Tarde's and Deleuze’s monadology, this book investigates the affective turn of contemporary capitalism. The concept of affect provides critical insight to overcome the limitations of social constructivism and cognitive capitalism. Affective capitalism transforms the population’s everyday bodily experiences into quantitative metrics that can be observed, measured, and processed on a non-conscious register, turning them into dividuals prepared to react and be affected by specific information at a given moment. In an era where social wealth increasingly relies on the 'social factory,' algorithms and big data constitute the living labor beyond employment. This book argues that affect also holds a potential for dismantling today’s real subsumption of life by capital. The network effect, mostly actualized as a company's market capitalization, is constantly traversed by the molecular becoming of affect, leading to new assemblages, such as free software movement, decentralized platforms, peer-to-peer networking, blockchain, and universal basic income. Hangwoo Lee is a Professor of Sociology at Chungbuk National University, South Korea. He is the author of Affective Capitalism and The Compensation for Free Labor (in Korean, 2017, Hanul Academy), The Conservative's Excess of Ideology, The Progressive's Paucity of Politics (in Korean, 2016, CBNU Press), and Sociology of Clicks (in Korean, 2013, Imagine).