Dwelling in the Proper : May 68, political economy, and identity politics

This paper focuses on a specific strain of thought that has emerged in the post-68 critiques of economism, workerism, and productivity: the logic of the proper, property, and ownership. I outline in very broad strokes the genealogy and political operations of a distinctively modern dispositif that I call the "dispositif of the proper." The May 68 uprisings and the subsequent political movements and theories that have been formulated in their wake mark a significant turning point in the genealogy of this dispositif. Post-May 68, the dispositif of the proper has expanded at an accelerated rate to the point that today it is now a fully matured and comprehensive dispositif that has engulfed our world. Everything is modulated and articulated through its operations from material structures, institutions, relations, and individuals up to our ways of thinking, doing, and being. Even our politics, from left to right, are articulated in and through this dispositif. I provide an alternative perspective by showing how the role played by the dispositif of the proper in the collapsing of our traditional categories. In the first section, I provide a brief overview of the paradigm of political economy. In the second section, I describe some of the main operations of the dispositif of the proper. In the final section, I provide a brief example of how this dispositif operates in contemporary identity politics by looking at the debate about gender neutral pronouns. If we want to work through the impolitical nature of neoliberal politics – of the mixing of the political, economic, and social – it is imperative that we start to address the significance of the dispositif of the proper in our world.