Over the last five chapters we have looked at some key features of capitalist economic systems, including: markets; commodification and enclosure; private property; the role of the state; the profit motive; work. We have also touched on the very idea of an economic system, of a separate realm of human life called ‘the economy’.
Those of thus who were brought up in capitalism often take these structures for granted. We are so used to buying and selling, owning or wanting to own property, working for a boss, dealing with police and states, that it can feel like these things were always there and always will be, and we can hardly imagine a life without them.
Imagine that, by some miracle, we woke up tomorrow morning and all the banks, police, armies, landlords, bosses, politicians, law courts, property deeds had disappeared. What would happen next?
Our guess is that, in many parts of the world, in a few weeks, months, or years people would have recreated something very similar to the current system. This is the tragic story of every ‘successful’ revolution of modern times. We are so trained and habituated in the values and practices of capitalism that we reproduce them all the time, even when no one is forcing us to do so.
To understand capitalism, and how it can be destroyed, we need to understand how this happens.
Capitalist myth 1: the eternal market
Capitalism – or its thinkers, teachers and propagandists – makes an effort to stop us doing this. Basically the whole discipline of economics, along with much of history, philosophy, sociology, psychology and more, is dedicated to reinforcing the myth that the central features of capitalism, from the market to the profit motive to the state, are timeless facts of human nature.
We can see Adam Smith as the godfather of the myth of the natural and eternal market. According to Smith, prehistoric ‘tribe[s] of hunters or shepherds’ were run on a basic form of barter economy: ‘a particular person makes bows and arrows, for example, with more readiness and dexterity than any other. He frequently exchanges them for cattle or for venison with his companions …’ (Wealth of Nations I.2.2). The invention of money made markets more efficient and powerful, but the basic set-up of commodities, private property and trade was always there.
Smith, of course, had never been anywhere near a tribe of shepherds or hunters in his life. When European anthropologists started to actually study the ‘economic systems’ of hunter gatherers and other small-scale cultures in the early 20th century, even through all their prejudice and preconceptions, it was obvious that the myth of barter was plain false.
A important early summary of this research was made by Karl Polanyi in his 1944 book The Great Transformation, building on the work of anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss. About Smith’s story of barter, Polanyi writes: ‘In retrospect it can be said that no misreading of the past ever proved more prophetic of the future’ (45). The reality is that:
‘previously to our time, no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets. […] gain and profit made on exchange never before played an important part in human economy. Though the institution of the market was fairly common since the later stone age, its role was no more than incidental to economic life.’ (45)
Polanyi listed three main kinds of pre-capitalist distribution. Reciprocal gift-giving, famously studied by Mauss, where items are passed on as gifts between individuals or groups. ‘Redistribution’ of wealth by rich leaders, for example by holding ‘potlatch’ feasts. And, most common of all, everyday sharing within groups. These three kinds of ‘economic’ practice would often co-exist in a culture, with each one being used for specific kinds of items and situations: for example, especially valued or ritual items might be passed on as gifts; basics like foods would typically be shared within groups.
Although trade happened, it was confined to very limited situations. Typically, only with distant strangers, people from other tribes living far away. It might be limited by strict rules and customs; for example, it could be seen as immoral to trade with neighbours, or to trade essentials like food.
The history of capitalism is, in part, the history of how markets have become increasingly central to more and more parts of our lives. But this is a historical development, and a line of struggle, not an inevitable fact of nature.
Three kinds of relationships.
Contemporary anthropologist David Graeber’s mammoth book Debt is helpful for further reading on economic anthropology. Close to Polanyi’s approach, Graeber also gives a useful schema of three distinct kinds of economic and, more generally, social relationships. He calls them: hierarchy; exchange; and communism – or, in Kropotkin’s term, “mutual aid”.
In exchange relations, people swap goods by calculating “equivalences” (i.e., equal values). If I give you x, sooner or later you should give me y, which is worth the same. It shouldn’t matter, in a market, who you are, or what our relationship is, just what you’ve got to trade. (Although in reality, the situation is rarely so “ideal”.)
In hierarchical relations, on the other hand, the way we relate to each other is all about who we are, our status. Kings and subjects, or teachers and pupils, or judges and accused, or parents and children, don’t exchange goods as equals: they give “tributes” or “favours”, make judgements, pay respects, etc. Ongoing relations involve patronage, support, loyalty.
In mutual aid, we give to each other when we need help, without expecting anything in return. As the old tag goes: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”
Graeber argues that cultures all over the world have always had a mixture of these different kinds of relations. “We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where people wouldn’t be both” (p114).
Capitalist myths 2: the passion of interest
Another big capitalist myth was pushed by Smith’s friend and mentor David Hume, amongst others. Like many other 18th century philosophers, Hume made a catalogue of the ‘passions’ or motivating forces of human life in his Treatise of Human Nature. He then concluded that just one basic passion is the key driving force of human history. This is the ‘passion of interest’, also called ‘avidity’, or the desire to accumulate economic goods: ‘This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal …’ (Treatise p491).
What Hume was doing here, just like Smith, was to take the capitalist values and institutions he championed himself and project them (or ‘retro-ject’ them backwards) onto all human beings throughout time. In the 18th century these writers’ theories were wild and strange; 250 years later, after being repeated and elaborated in millions of textbooks, newspapers and classrooms, they have become mainstream ‘common sense’.
As with markets, the point is not that pre-capitalist people never lusted for money and stuff, but that the desire for gain was never before put right at the heart of a culture: it was ‘incidental’, confined to a limited role. This is the question Max Weber studies in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: how did a culture develop in which ‘acquisition as the ultimate purpose of life’ (18), an idea that is ‘foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence’ (ibid), become something to celebrate, rather than some weird and dangerous disease?
As well as Weber’s famous book, which looks at the role of protestant religion, Albert Hirschman’s history of The Passions and the Interests is useful reading. In medieval Christian Europe, the aristocratic elites lived off looting, cattle rustling, and extortion of the peasants who worked the land. There were small classes of bankers and merchants who profited from markets, but they were allowed only limited power as markets were strictly controlled. Disdain for the market was built into the official ideology: the Catholic church condemned the desire for money and possessions as the sin of “avarice”. According to Saint Augustine, avarice was one of three main sinful lusts, the other two being the lusts for power and sex. Although some medieval writers did openly celebrate the aristocratic pursuit of “honour” and glory”, the bourgeois vice of avarice was roundly treated with contempt.
The idea of “interest” – as in “national interest”, “self interest”, “class interest”, or “your best interest” – comes together with the rise of capitalism. At first, for renaissance writers like Machiavelli, it meant the interest not of individuals but of rulers of states. Machiavelli, in The Prince, advised rulers to be calm and calculating rather than swayed by momentary passions. The early “mercantilist” school of economics studied how princes could modernise their government to out-compete other states and amass national wealth.
Then in early capitalist thought, for the first time, economic self-interest becomes something good. It was praised as a “calm passion”: if people focus on accumulating wealth they make calculated long term decisions, and they become predictable, stable, governable. For Hume and Smith, self-interest has positive consequences for society. By pursuing gain, individuals create wealth and prosperity that spreads. And channelling peoples’ energy into the pursuit of profit diverts them from more dangerous and violent lusts.
By the nineteenth century, interest was no longer just one “passion”, it was a fundamental assumption about human nature. Utilitarian philosophers like Bentham and Mill now saw people’s desires and pleasures as things to be calmly added up like a list of assets: calculating the “greatest happiness for the greatest number”. In fact, the idea of interest had become so powerful that even many anti-capitalists, such as Marx, now also saw everything in terms of economic interest.
Capitalism as a culture
Capitalist mythology tells us that markets, property, commodities, the pursuit of profit and self-interest, and other basic features of its economic system are eternal facts of human nature. In more or less developed forms, they have always been there, and they always will be. The point to stress is that, on the contrary, these are not necessary but contingent features of our current world. That is: things could be different.
To highlight this point we find it useful to call capitalism a culture. We use the term culture more or less in the sense of Raymond Williams, the godfather of ‘British cultural studies’. On his definition, a culture is ‘a particular way of life’ of a group of people (1976:90) existing in a particular time and place. A group’s culture includes:
** Interpretations or ‘maps of meaning’: ways in which people in a group understand the world around them, shared beliefs and meanings.
** Values: ways in which they value the world, judge things or actions as good or bad, right or wrong, etc.
** Desires: common desires and goals.
** Practices: common habits, behaviours, techniques, rules, norms and other patterns of activity.
So, in today’s consumer capitalist society we learn to see the world as made up of commodities, objects which can be owned as property and bought and sold in markets. We learn to value property rights, a comfortable life, respect for the law. We learn to desire making money, accumulating consumer goods, climbing the status ladder. We learn everyday practices and habits like getting up for work in the morning, exchanging money for food and shelter, or ‘watching ducks in the park and thinking about your holidays’ (The Jam – ‘That’s Entertainment’).
Culture assemblages
Of course, talking about ‘capitalist culture’ involves some big simplifications. It would be more accurate to say: there are many capitalist cultures. First, as we have stressed at various points in this book, there are many capitalisms, taking very different forms in different times and places. Even in today’s globalised world, there is still not one uniform ‘capitalist culture’, but many different ways of living, some more similar than others.
And of course, even in one place and time in a capitalist system, people certainly don’t share all the same values, desires, and practices. People have their own individual views and ways of life. But also, people may share ways of life depending on what groups and roles they are put in ‘within’ a culture. For example, bankers and bosses in a capitalist economy have different values and practices to their debtors and workers. In non-capitalist cultures, too, people are assigned to different genders, age-groups, castes, etc., which may have very different ways of life.
To develop this point, we can use the idea of a culture assemblage. This is a concept from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and recently elaborated by Manuel de Landa. An assemblage is any collection of different bodies or groups, which are tied together in more or less stable relationships, but still also have their own identities.
An example from biology is a symbiotic relationship between organisms: e.g., human beings have billions of bacteria in our stomachs that live off the products of our digestive systems, and which we couldn’t live without. The bacteria and the humans are different organisms with our own life cycles and identities, but we are interdependent on each other, locked together. In this case, the relationship benefits both parties. Other assemblages, though, are parasitic or one-way: the tic needs to feed off your blood, but you don’t need the tic.
To be a bit more precise, we will use the term ‘form of life‘ to mean a complex of interpretations, values, desires and practices shared by a group. For example, a group of workers in a workplace may share a form of life: some skills and habits for doing the job, some desires and frustrations, some jokes and banter routines, some tricks for outwitting the boss, etc. Of course, there is a lot more that they don’t share, too. The managers of the workplace have a different form of life. But the two groups are bound together in a relationship that lasts over time, and their forms of life are shaped by each other.
A culture-assemblage, then, is an assemblage involving many groups and sub-groups, which may have different forms of life of their own, but are interconnected and interdependent in many ways.
Capitalism through its history has involved many groupings, with many forms of life, cultures and sub-cultures, tied together in ‘symbiotic’ and ‘parasitic’ relationships. Bourgeois entrepreneurs and industrial proletarians, but also colonial adventurers, robber barons and investment bankers and pension fund managers, PR gurus, politicians, trade union bosses, career bureaucrats and soldiers, idle super-rich, cops, students, housewives, peasants, consumers, vagabonds and slum-dwellers and the unemployed, slaves and indentured labourers, etc. These and many more groupings and roles interact in multiple economic and non-economic relationships. They share some values, desires and practices. In other respects their forms of life are very different. So we use the term ‘capitalist culture’ as a shorthand: really what we are talking about is a complex culture assemblage.
Ideas of Culture.
According to Raymond Williams, ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ (Williams 1976:89). The word ‘culture’ has been used in many ways, for many purposes. Williams looked at the history of three main ones:
** ‘Culture’ comes from the Latin verb colere, meaning to grow or cultivate. In the sixteenth century, culture meant the ‘tending of crops or animals’. We still have this sense when we talk about ‘agriculture’, or bacterial cultures grown by scientists in petri dishes.
** Later, with the Romantic movements of the later 17th and early 18th centuries, this idea of culture was applied to human life. The basic idea is that, like different bacterial cultures, human societies have developed many different ways of life. The study of culture is the study of their particularities and differences, as well as what they share.
** In the nineteenth century European intellectuals started to use ‘culture’ in a narrower sense, to mean superior ‘civilisation’ or ‘high culture’. A classic case is the British Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who saw culture as ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’. Culture now meant a separate domain or sphere of literature and ‘the arts’, as opposed to the more mundane domains of politics or economy.
Here, like Williams, we are working with the second of these senses.
Incorporating cultures
A group of people who have a culture all share at least some similar ways of interpreting, valuing, desiring and acting. But individual human beings are not born with capitalist values and practices. They have to learn them. We are educated, trained, shaped into cultures. This training begins in early childhood, but goes on throughout our lives. How does this happen?
One idea we find useful here is incorporation. This concept comes from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. To incorporate something means to take it from the world around you, and then make it part of your own body. For example, when we eat we take in nutrients from food, and some of these are transformed into the cells that make up our own bodies. Similarly, when we are educated into a culture we pick up ideas, beliefs, values, practices, from other people around us, but then they become ‘our own’. Some of these are dug in very deep, becoming emotional, unconscious, instinctive and unthinking, ‘physical’ reflexes and ‘gut feelings’.
Here we will just note very briefly a few ideas about how these education and incorporation processes work.
Incorporation 1. Mimesis
Human beings seem to have a strong, and largely unconscious, tendency to imitate each other, and particularly people they identify as ‘role models’, or as members of their communities or peer groups. Some philosophers and psychologists use the ancient Greek philosophical term mimesis for this phenomenon. According to Nietzsche, this is the main way human beings develop their values: ‘moral feelings are transmitted through a process whereby children perceive strong sympathies and antipathies toward certain actions and, as born apes, imitate these inclinations and disinclinations’ (Dawn 34).
Recent psychological research shows how children start to imitate people near them even a few hours after birth, beginning with facial expressions. At a few months old, babies copy and repeat patterns of action they are shown, like moving toys around in a particular sequence. ‘Mimesis’ or embodied unconscious imitation seems to be a very early and powerful way that we start to incorporate the values, desires, and actions of people near us. Although there are even earlier ‘transmission mechanisms’: e.g., mammals start to develop ‘tastes’ for food even in the womb, absorbing food traces from our mothers.
Mimesis certainly doesn’t stop in childhood. All our lives we have this tendency to, largely unconsciously, imitate and shape our behaviour to ‘fit’ with others around us. This was part of what Nietzsche called the ‘herd instinct’. Contemporary psychologists talk about ‘chameleon effects’ and sub-conscious ‘priming’.
Incorporation 2. Performativity
One basic way that people learn and incorporate actions, and values and desires that go with them, is by repeatedly practising or performing them. When you learn a new sport, language, song, or other skill, at first the sounds and movements seem strange, alien and unnatural. Over time, as you rehearse and repeat, they may become unconscious and instinctive, they start to feel ‘natural’.
Again, philosophers right back to Aristotle observed how we pick up not just actions and skills, but also values and desires, through repeated performance. The sixteenth century French moralist Blaise Pascal gave a famous example: the way to acquire faith in God is to pray every day, go through the motions of belief until it becomes ‘real’. Recent radical writers have studied these kinds of processes in terms of the incorporation of social roles and attitudes of gender, race, or class. The feminist theorist Judith Butler writes about ‘performativity’: gender identities we are taught to see as ‘natural’ or ‘essential’ are in fact ‘produced as an effect of … performance’ (ibid:218).
Recent developmental psychology can also help here. Katherine Nelson, and colleagues, has studied how small children learn ‘scripts’, or repeated patterns of social interaction. For example, there might be scripts for ‘bedtime’ or ‘dinnertime’ or ‘going to the park’. As in theatre, a script can include a typical sequence of actions or scenes: e.g., first you wash your hands, then you sit in the chair, then you get food. And it can feature a number of characters of roles: mummy, baby, etc. Built into it are expectations of what comes next, desires and emotions about what is happening, and values including ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ actions and responses.
Nelson and other child psychologists think that basic structures of early human memory favour learning about the world in terms of scripts. Infants have little memory for particular objects or for one-off events, but have a strong memory for repeated sequences.
Small children also seem to learn scripts by ‘rehearsing’ them, as in play. In play children can try out different roles and sequences, repeat and vary rules and patterns, and perform new scripts they see in the social worlds around them.
Like mimesis, script-learning is not something that stops when we grow up. We may first learn many scripts and roles like mummies and daddies, or masters and servants, or market scripts, in early childhood. But we keep practising, refining and performing these little dramas all our lives.
Incorporation 3. Norms
Norms are practices – and also interpretations, values, desires, or even whole scripts combining a number of these – that people in a group feel to be normal or expected, and to be ‘right’. Very often, norms are supported by sanctions or punishments: if you go against a norm, you are likely to be punished in some way, whether this just means a ‘bad look’, or a serious physical attack. On the other hand, following a norm can bring acceptance and approval.
Some writers, following Weber, say that norms are unofficial rules, often unwritten, and enforced by neighbours or informal groups; as opposed to ‘laws’, which are more formal rules enforced by the state or other ‘specialist’ agents. We don’t make that distinction here: official laws can also work as norms, if they are accepted as normal and right.
But certainly many norms are implicit, rarely put into words, perhaps even entirely unconscious. Many developmental psychologists think that children begin learning and using norms before they can speak. Some primatologists think that groups of chimpanzees and other apes also use norms. As Nietzsche put it, we learn ‘moral feelings’, to sense and judge right and wrong emotionally and unconsciously, long before we develop rationalised ‘moral concepts’. We add in conscious justifications of our gut-level judgements of right and wrong ‘only later in life’, as ‘a matter of decency’ (Dawn 34).
For Nietzsche, normativity is another aspect of the ‘herd instinct’, a deeply innate feature of human life, as we have evolved to cling together in groups seeking approval and belonging. Contemporary psychologists tend to agree. Even if this is true, it’s also true that this ‘herd’ tendency can be made stronger or looser, reinforced or resisted. The traditional way of training people into a group’s norms is with humiliation and violence for norm-breakers, and rewards of status for conformity. Early training, with sanctions and rewards, builds up strong emotional associations of fear, shame and comfort that are very hard to break in later life.
It can be useful to bring together the ideas of norms and scripts. We copy and incorporate scripts. At the same time, we also learn that some scripts are normal and correct, and start to fear or hate any deviations from these scripts. Note also that a script can feature a number of people in different roles. For example, think of a script for an encounter between men and women, or bosses and workers. The norms, what you are supposed to do in these situations – and want, and value, and expect, and how you are supposed to interpret the world, etc. – will be different depending on how you are identified, what role you are expected to play.
Incorporation 4. Subjects
The process mentioned above – mimesis, performativity, and normativity – all begin in early childhood. They can all work largely unconsciously, whether or not we are aware of what is happening. Conscious awareness – and particularly self-consciousness, in which we see ourselves as individuals with a continuing identity, a past and a future – seems to develop only when we’re a few years old, and is often connected to learning to use language.
Once humans develop self-consciousness, a new kind of educating can get to work. Human beings become ‘subjects’ (to use the traditional philosophical term) who can reflect on themselves and their actions, and make conscious plans and projects over time. We can become self-governing or self-policing. For example, we measure ourselves against an idealised image of what we ‘should be’, strive to become more like the ideal, and feel inadequate or guilty when we fail.
Philosophers have often noticed a paradox of subjectivity. On the one hand, we seem ‘free’ to make and re-make ourselves in new ways, pursuing our chosen projects. But the projects we choose don’t come from any pure source ‘inside’ us: we have incorporated them, too, from cultures around us. For example, you might be a strong, committed and independent subject, but the ideal you aim for comes off the shelf of capitalist norms and stereotypes: ideal ruthless money-maker, model worker and family man, model housewife or object of desire, model gangster-consumer or vacuous playboy, etc.
The philosopher Michel Foucault is an important reference for thinking about what he called ‘process of subjectivation’, or ‘techniques of the self’. One of Foucault’s key points is to show how thinking about and working on yourself as an individual is an important form of social domination in modern life. For example, think of how we are sold ‘aspirational lifestyles’ and the need for ‘self-improvement’.
This doesn’t mean that the subject is ‘doomed’ to cultural slavery. On the contrary, we think with Foucault that ‘care of the self’ is a vital starting point for developing new ethics and freer ways of living. But just being a ‘sovereign individual’ is not all there is to being free. Self-consciousness and techniques of the self are tools that can work in many different ways. They can be used to defend and reinforce capitalist forms of life dug into our bodies, or they can be used to destroy and overcome them.
Summary
We’ve introduced a lot of philosophical and psychological ideas in a couple of pages. There are some suggestions for further investigation at the end of the book. For now, here are some key points to take from this discussion:
** We incorporate values, desires and practices of the cultures around us through a range of processes.
** Some of these processes are deeply unconscious, they work on us even if we’re not aware of them, and without any conscious effort on our part.
** These unconscious incorporation processes start in early childhood, but they keep on working throughout our lives.
** But this doesn’t mean that we are just unthinking slaves of the cultures we grow up and live in. We can learn to understand the processes that shape us, and use our self-consciousness to help transform our ways of life.
Further Reading
On anthropological approaches to capitalism, here again are the references for Chapter 1:
Karl Polanyi – The Great Transformation. Polanyi’s book was the first to bring new insights from anthropology to bear on the history of European capitalism. It’s an interesting read, but you might also skip to more recent studies which update this approach. Of which we’ll mention two:
Keith Hart – The Memory Bank – Money in an Unequal World. Is a helpful clear exposition of some basic themes in the history and anthropology of capitalism, and brings in Hart’s research on how different forms of capitalism have emerged in their own ways in Africa and other parts of the world.
David Graeber – Debt: the first 5000 years. A big book, with a wealth of information and further reading suggestions in the anthropology and history of capital, debt and money.
The section on self-interest is largely based on Albert Hirschman – The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph. We think this is a very important book for understanding the development of liberal capitalist ideology.
Michel Foucault’s lecture course on The Birth of Biopoliticsis also fascinating on liberalism, neoliberalism, “homo economicus” and the idea of human beings as “subjects of interest”. Though perhaps not the easiest reading.
Theories of Culture
A nice starting point for ‘British Cultural Theory’, and a key text on working class youth sub-cultures is:
Dick Hebdige – Subculture: the meaning of style.
Hebdige and other ‘British cultural theorists’ are following a line started by Raymond Williams in the 1960s. His historical look at definitions of culture in his book Keywords is a good quick introduction. He goes into much more depth in The Long Century and his later textbook Culture.
E.P. Thompson makes a Marxist critique of Williams’ view of culture in his review of The Long Century (also called ‘The Long Century’, published in issues 9 and 10 of the journal New Left Review). Thompson argues that we need to distinguish ‘culture’ from the ‘material life’ of groups and classes: people develop values and ‘maps of meaning’ in response to their ‘material conditions’. We are with Williams on this, but Thompson raises some interesting questions.
The collection Resistance Through Rituals edited by John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson & Brian Roberts develops the ideas of both Williams and Thompson with a theoretical introduction and then lots of essays applying these ideas to the study of subcultures.
The idea of assemblages is developed by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their A Thousand Plateaus.But maybe an easier starting point is Manuel De Landa – A New Theory of Society. Delanda simplifies their account and language, and specifically applies the assemblage idea to thinking about social structures.
Philosophy and psychology
Nietzsche developed his main psychological ideas, and the theory of ‘incorporation’ and the ‘herd, in his three ‘middle period’ or ‘free spirit’ books: Human, All Too Human; Dawn; and The Gay Science. His ideas are scattered around these books in short ‘aphoristic’ sections. The first two books of Dawn are probably a good starting point.
On developmental psychology, here we largely follow, and recommend:
Katherine Nelson – Young Minds in Social Worlds.
Nelson is working in a tradition of embodied and socio-cultural approaches to child psychology which owes a lot to the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. This is an alternative to the more orthodox ‘cognitive’ approach pioneered by Jean Piaget, which like most psychology and cognitive science has a strong universalist bias, believing that human beings develop on the same basic patterns across times and cultures.
A compilation of some of Vygotsky’s writings, heavily edited but a very useful introduction is:
Lev Vygotsky – Mind in Society
On recent psychological research on imitation, this 2 volume compilation contains many key papers:
Hurley, Susan and Nick Chater – Perspectives on imitation: from neuroscience to social science.
John Protevi – Political Affect develops a philosophical approach similar to the one we are taking here, bringing Deleuze and Guattari together with recent psychological research to think about how political power and domination works through our psychology and physiology.
Judith Butler – Gender Trouble is a classic text in feminist philosophy and develops her idea of performativity. Though her writing style is famously difficult.