Arianna Introna

Capitalism establishes a fundamental connection between the constitution of society and the sphere of production. Whether in the form of direct participation or indirectly through the performance of social reproduction, the working class is expected to be working. The universals of capitalist society as a work-based society revolve around the material and symbolic centrality of the working class, its struggle and its social reproduction. This association is reinforced by the othering effect that the definitional politics of the universal working class has on subjects defined by their non-relation to the sphere of production, but also by the categories we choose for thinking class struggle and antagonism. In this paper I will explore a perspective of struggle that starts from the ‘others’ of the universal working class as generative of the universalisation of class struggle and social reproduction as involving all of us, regardless of our position vis-à-vis productive labour.

I will consider this universalisation first as it emerged through the figure of the ‘universal’ pandemic lumpenproletariat that, under the impact of the biological ‘real’ of the pandemic, overspilled from an othered position to a generalised condition for the working class, necessitating an expansion and re-valuation of social reproduction beyond the confines of its subordination to the sphere of production. Secondly, I will discuss the ways in which the encounter with the biological real can be politically chosen as the ground on which to reproduce anti-capitalist dynamics of social reproduction in post-pandemic times. As a political choice, I will contend, this unfolds through the symbolic universalisation of disability and through the symbolic dismodernization of the working class, which in turn connect with a dismodernized form of social reproduction. In spaces where the lumpenproletariat and disability are universal, universal care and support replace the limited forms of capitalist social reproduction. I will conclude by suggesting that an autonomist dismodernism, as an expression of a more general autonomist disability perspective, reads this other form of social reproduction as the telos of struggle that choosing disability orients us towards.

Violet Jacob’s fiction expresses a profound and persistent interest in temporal Others; namely, in individuals or communities that are excluded
from, or are perceived to be obstacles to, historical progress. To render
the intensity of the conflict that produces, and is in turn produced by,
these processes of exclusion and rejection, Jacob repeatedly draws upon
imageries of non-normative bodies and minds, ways of looking and states
of being. These imageries invest temporal Others with non-normative
body-minded features that simultaneously accentuate the otherness they
signify and root it in dynamics of rejection and exclusion that specifically
constitute the social and cultural phenomenon of disability. Bringing
into conversation disability studies, Walter Benjamin’s conception of
history and Byung-Chul Han’s theory of the Other, this article will
delineate patterns in the entanglement of temporal and body-minded
dimensions of otherness that Jacob’s non-normative temporal Others
materialise. It will also explore Jacob’s own status as temporal Other
within the contemporary Scottish literary tradition and the potentialities attached to the re-collection of her work that derive from this
temporal otherness.

At its height, the Covid-19 pandemic dispersed across society a perception of bodyminded contingency that ushered in modes of "building community" that were unimaginable in pre-pandemic times, alongside an intensification of health and social inequalities. From the start, disabled people intervened on social media to stress the considerable extent to which the pre-pandemic knowledge derived from their lived experience, disability theory, and disability rights' organising could contribute both to the critique of how in pandemic times people were made differentially disposable and to the creation of new relationalities, mostly online, around the principle of accessibility. This article explores how a critical perspective rooted in the lived experience of disability builds on these interventions to excavate the role played by the lived experience of bodyminded contingency and vulnerability during the pandemic in generating a radical transformation of modes of living (together). First, it will suggest that this radical transformation powerfully resonated with the politics of accessibility associated with disability politics. It will do so by delineating the critical significance of commentary produced during the pandemic by disability theorists and activists, as well as the relationship between the perception of widespread bodyminded contingency and vulnerability and the development of "crip utopias of accessibility" and "dismodernist revolutions" during the pandemic. It will then locate this experiential spread of bodyminded contingency and vulnerability at the core of pandemic infrastructural sensibilities. I will conclude by reflecting on its relevance for the development of a "more-than-social" model of disability which attends to the crip world-making power of disability as fundamentally entangling the social and the biological.

The debate that overtook Scottish society in the run-up to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence featured the participation of Scottish artists, writers and literary critics in ways that stand in stark contrast to the utter cultural silence with which Brexit has been met in the Scottish literary scene. This article will seek to answer a two-fold question: what can contemporary trends in Scottish literary studies tell us about the political constitution of our discipline(s), and what can they tell us about our contemporary political conjuncture? In order to explore these issues, my investigation will map out the silences, interventions and (dis)engagements that have characterised the response to Brexit and the Indyref by Scottish literary studies and by Scottish writing. I will examine these in relation both to the politics of contextualism and the nationed disciplinary framework that define Scottish literature as a field of study, and to the post-postnational, sovereignist co...

Autonomist Narratives of Disability in Modern Scottish Writing: Crip Enchantments explores the intersection between imaginaries of disability and representations of work, welfare and the nation in twentieth and twenty-first century Scottish literature. Disorienting effects erupt when non-normative bodies and minds clash with the structures of capitalist normalcy. This book brings into conversation Scottish studies, disability studies and autonomist Marxism to trace the ways in which these ‘crip enchantments’ are imagined in modern Scottish writing, and the ‘autonomist’ narratives of disability by which they are evoked.

This article will explore how degrowth imaginaries inform the representation of social reproduction and environmental collapse in Jenni Fagan’s The Sunlight Pilgrims (2016) and John Burnside’s Havergey (2017). It will argue that the two novels deploy the trope of the end of times to frame the unravelling of the world-ecology that binds capital and nature together in the Capitalocene, according to Jason Moore. They suggest that this is what makes possible, and necessary, a re-organisation of social reproduction and of the patterns of energy consumption or generation with which this is entangled. The first part of this article will examine the metabolic rift with which The Sunlight Pilgrims and Havergey are concerned, while the second part will delineate the ways in which degrowth imaginaries frame the representation of reorganised forms of social (re-)production. Drawing on disability studies and situating The Sunlight Pilgrims and Havergey within the disciplinary framework of Scotti...

By owning up to the political constitution of Scottish literature and exploiting the heuristic potential this move affords, Hames’ study embodies a form of literary criticism that points the way forward for what might be termed “post-Indyref Scot Lit criticism.” The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution evinces the maturity of the field, in which old binaries between theoretical and contextualist or recuperative approaches, nationalist and non-nationalist perspectives may well be overcome—once their encounter is craftily staged in the way Hames does.

The debate that overtook Scottish society in the run-up to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence featured the participation of Scottish artists, writers and literary critics in ways that stand in stark contrast to the utter cultural silence with which Brexit has been met in the Scottish literary scene. This article will seek to answer a two-fold question: what can contemporary trends in Scottish literary studies tell us about the political constitution of our discipline(s), and what can they tell us about our contemporary political conjuncture? In order to explore these issues, my investigation will map out the silences, interventions and (dis)engagements that have characterised the response to Brexit and the Indyref by Scottish literary studies and by Scottish writing. I will examine these in relation both to the politics of contextualism and the nationed disciplinary framework that define Scottish literature as a field of study, and to the post-postnational, sovereignist conjuncture of which both the Indyref and Brexit are manifestations. Gauging the differential interest that the Indyref and Brexit have generated in Scottish literature on the one hand, and its relationship to the political moment we are traversing on the other, provides fundamental insights into the political constitution of the discipline.

This article will explore how degrowth imaginaries inform the representation of social reproduction and environmental collapse in Jenni Fagan's The Sunlight Pilgrims (2016) and John Burnside's Havergey (2017). It will argue that the two novels deploy the trope of the end of times to frame the unravelling of the world-ecology that binds capital and nature together in the Capitalocene, according to Jason Moore. They suggest that this is what makes possible, and necessary, a re-organisation of social reproduction and of the patterns of energy consumption or generation with which this is entangled. The first part of this article will examine the metabolic rift with which The Sunlight Pilgrims and Havergey are concerned, while the second part will delineate the ways in which degrowth imaginaries frame the representation of reorganised forms of social (re-)production. Drawing on disability studies and situating The Sunlight Pilgrims and Havergey within the disciplinary framework of Scottish literature, I will continue to consider how Burnside's and Fagan's novels feature narratives of disability and the nation. These may come across as marginal to the plot but function as the foci through which the politics of the degrowth communities represented come to the fore.

ames Kelman's 'Third' of Lean Tales Republished: An Unfinished Novel and An Insurgent Afterword in The Drouth, Issue 51 (2015)

James Kelman’s contribution to Lean Tales, a short story collection he published in 1985 with Alasdair Gray and Agnes Owens, is a section of an unfinished, untitled novel. This is what Kelman tells us in the ‘Afterword’  to the 2014 re-publication of his ‘third’ of short stories, under the title A Lean Third. In the ‘Afterword’, Kelman situates these storiesin relation to the circumstances of their production and tothe larger corpus of his writing. The final words of the ‘Afterword’ capture theconsiderable lapse of time between the two publications: referring to the narrator of the story ‘Are you drinking sir?’, in his 60s, Kelman comments ‘I used to think of him as “elderly”; now that I am into my 60s I see he is not so elderly after all, he might even be “youngish”’. However, it is not only years that separate the two editions; in fact, it is the account of the process and politics of composition behind the stories contained in the ‘Afterword’ that(re-)frames the collection in ways that demand a revised engagement. The ‘Afterword’ affords Kelman a position from which to shape such engagement, and he does so by shifting the balance between a ‘view of the work of art as object and the alternative view of art as a practice’  in favour of the latter...

Arianna Introna, 'On Crip Voluntary Inservitudes: Notes Towards a Crip Anarchist Perspective', presentation delivered as part of the Inclusion in Anarchist Studies Seminar Series (15 December 2021)

In this paper I explore the concept of 'crip voluntary inservitudes' as a providing a possible angle from which to engage the entanglements that connect, or may connect, anarchist and disability politics and theory. I delineate ways in which the resistances that non-normative bodyminds present to the life-denying forces of interlocking systems of domination call for and enable a cripping of class anarchism, resistance to bureaucratic definition, anarchist prefiguration, mutual recognition and mutual aid - where by cripping I intend the centering of a disability perspective in a space or discussion. In so doing, I  argue that the conscious cripping of anarchist theory and praxis is fundamental for realising the revolutionary potential that we all possess as irreducible others of normalcy, capital and the state.

Arianna Introna, ‘New Horizons of Possibility for Class Struggle: Organising for Social Reproduction in (Post-)Pandemic Times’, paper presented at the Historical Materialism Conference 2021: The Return of the State? Anticapitalist Politics in a New Ecological Landscape (13 November 2021)

Under capitalism, as Martha Gimenez contends, ‘production determines reproduction’ (2018, p.24); namely, the exigencies of the market, not people’s needs, determine the ways in which populations are biologically and socially reproduced. The pandemic has mainstreamed the possibility to think and organise for social reproduction in ways that have inverted the primacy assigned to production by the structures of capitalist social reproduction. My paper will explore two possible legacies of this inversion for the development of Marxist theory and organising in the mature stage of the pandemic we are inhabiting. First of all, the development of mutual aid, welfare rights and disability movements before, during and after lockdown foregrounds the need to appreciate the ways in which the horizon of possibility of class struggle in (post-)pandemic times has been re-framed around social reproduction issues. Asserting the primacy of social reproduction means to organise to collectivize, and render permanent, the social reproduction of our communities as the focus of our struggles, against and beyond the productivist framework that both positions workplace struggles as defining the horizons and strategies of class struggle, and shapes the delivery of social welfare.
Secondly, our developing (post-)pandemic conjuncture invites us to ponder about the social and institutional forces which inhabited the space of social reproduction at the height of lockdown. The second part of my paper will probe the tension between the creation of ‘concrete utopias’ of social reproduction in the form of grassroots initiatives of mutual aid that materialised the priority of life over capitalist accumulation (Dinerstein 2021, p.142), and governmental intervention in the sphere of social security as well as lockdown measures. I will argue that the ‘transformative alternative’ that mutual aid and social reproduction struggles embody (Spade 2020, p.131) are fundamental for upending the imagination of the capitalist (nation-)state as the caretaker of our social reproduction, which the pandemic popularised through the dispersal of governmental authority and presence across society as the guarantor of responsible behavior (Sotiris 2020).