@article{FactoriesofModernity:Labor:2090,
      recid = {2090},
      author = {Guimarães Pinheiro, Lucas},
      title = {Factories of Modernity: Labor, Aesthetics, and the Racial  Politics of Historical Capitalism},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2019-12},
      pages = {443},
      abstract = {This dissertation argues that factories acted as decisive  yet under-recognized stages for political thought and  practice in the Atlantic world from 1688 to 1807. From this  historical study, I develop a new conceptual framework for  understanding contemporary capitalism and confronting its  longstanding structures of political domination, especially  as these relate to transformations in the categories of  labor, aesthetics, and race. My project challenges two  significant paradigms through which a range of critical  theorists and historians of political thought tend to  interpret capitalism. First, it questions the accepted view  that advanced capitalist societies have entered a  “postindustrial” phase in which the factory system has been  displaced by automated technologies. Second, it contests  prevalent formulations of the capitalist economy as a  detached and discrete market system, showing on the  contrary that it was historically enmeshed in shifting,  historical ideologies of labor, aesthetics, and race. In  order to address these shortcomings, I turn to the texts  and spaces in which capitalism was originally articulated  and practiced, both by modern political thinkers and a  range of political actors in the long eighteenth  century.

I organize my argument around four spaces of  capitalist production as well as the discourses, practices,  and ideas in their orbit. Each of these workplaces are an  expression of what I call “factories of modernity”: the  data center, the workhouse, the manufactory, and the  colony. The rich reflections on the world economy and felt  experiences of menial labor laid bare in these factories  reveal that capitalism was and continues to be deeply  imbricated in the development of discourses on aesthetics  and race that propelled capitalist expansion by  reconfiguring norms of artistic production and racial  difference. By learning from these historical factories, I  argue that contemporary critical theories of capitalist  society can be made more responsive to the salient yet  understudied sites, discourses, and mechanisms of  capitalist exploitation in our present.

I open in Chapter  1 by situating my study in the context of twentieth-century  discourses about postindustrial society, automation, and  technological progress that frame the factory as an  obsolete space of production. Against these accounts,  Chapter 2 brings to light the covert ways in which data  centers in Silicon Valley rely on the political cycles and  technical systems of production characteristic of the  factory system to discipline, coerce, and control unskilled  data workers. The ensuing chapters combine archival  research with close textual readings to challenge standard  narratives of capitalist society and offer an alternative  understanding and critique of historical capitalism from a  genealogy of the factory system across the Atlantic world  in the long eighteenth century. In Chapter 3, I offer a new  interpretation of the relationship between John Locke’s  late economic thought and the nascent capitalist economy of  his day. Drawing on an array of sources from social,  economic, and intellectual history, I situate Locke’s  theoretical positions on industry, labor, production, and  economic growth in the context of export-oriented cycles of  commodity manufacturing in the English countryside. I  interpret Locke as an early theorist of the political  regimes of labor discipline, capital accumulation, and  imperial commerce that incited and sustained the workhouse  system. In Chapter 4, I explore the factory’s relationship  to aesthetics by looking to England’s manufactories of  luxury goods as a way of reinterpreting debates on luxury  and political economy from 1752 to 1795. I argue that David  Hume conceived luxury as a link between two seemingly  irreconcilable worlds: the economic realm of the factory  and the aesthetic domain of sentimentality, beauty, and  art. Chapter 5 explores the historical entanglement of the  factory, the colony, and the plantation in Africa in order  to rethink the conceptual relationship between race,  capitalism, and empire. The chapter focuses on a project by  British abolitionists and industrialists to end slavery by  colonizing Sierra Leone with free black setters from 1787  to 1807, which I interpret as a test-case for novel  arrangements of racialized wage-labor and liberal models of  imperial rule. I conclude by bringing the project back to  the present moment in order to reflect on how my historical  narrative of capitalist modernity is vital to our  understanding of global patterns of racial exploitation  today, patterns reproduced in Amazon’s giant fulfillment  centers, or what I call “factories of fulfillment.”},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2090},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.2090},
}