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By popular request, it’s the Ordinary Unhappiness Severance episode! Abby, Patrick, and Dan reflect on the hit show from the perspectives of political economy and libidinal economy, from Adam Smith to Adam Scott to Karl Marx to Mark S and beyond (with plenty of Freud and workplace war stories along the way). What ensues is less about answering plot mysteries (although spoilers abound) than it is about exploring how the show poses questions about repression, the division of labor, alienation, and more. What does working do to us as individuals, as co-workers, and as political subjects? How do our workplaces and their rituals channel our desires and our anxieties, shape our personas, and even divvy up our basic experiences of space and time? What are the psychic wages of maintaining “work-life balance” and what interventions – technological, chemical, and ideological – do we rely on to “make it work”? Does living under capitalism mean that we have always already been severed, and what should we expect about the limits, and the possibilities, of prestige television when it comes to representing the paradoxes and foreclosures of capitalism itself? 

Selected texts cited:

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300

Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (editors), Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development: https://www.pennpress.org/9780812224177/slaverys-capitalism/ 

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