mkmk’s Reviews > The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism > Status Update

Subjectivation also has a physical aspect. Class, gender and race become – as we already indicated with reference to Pierre Bourdieu – bodies. They are inscribed into modes of movement, feeling and taste. Through this avenue, power is ‘naturalized’. It is reproduced by masking differences through consumption, by affirming one’s social position and by ‘self-actualizing’ oneself.

Thus the assurance that adhering to planetary boundaries gives humankind a ‘safe operating space’, as the subtitle of Rockström et al.’s famous article puts it, is not only not safe, it is even somewhat cynical. For there are already many victims today, all over the world, as a result of heavy rains, floods and droughts.