Chapters 2 and 3 contain work revised from earlier publications. Thanks to Ashgate Publishing for permission to reprint “Driven Into the Public: The Psychic Constitution of Space,” in Architecture Post Mortem: The Diastolic Architecture of Decline, Dystopia, and Death, eds. Charles David Bertolini, Simone Brott, and Donald Kunze (London: Ashgate, 2013), 15–30. Thanks also to Wayne State University Press for permission to reprint “The Capitalist Gaze,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 35, no. 1: 3–23, copyright © 2013 Wayne State University Press.
More than anyone else, Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press was the engine for the publication of this book. She is an incredibly thoughtful and conscientious editor, and her efforts to sustain the publication of theoretical works today are unequalled.
I also appreciate the work that Christine Dunbar at Columbia University Press did in order to help this book to appear.
Thanks to Dashiell and Theo Neroni for their constant insights into how capitalism insinuates itself into the structure of our desire.
The students at the University of Vermont played a decisive role in helping me to think through the psychic appeal of capitalism. Ryan Engley has been especially influential on my thinking, especially concerning the theoretical underpinnings of the banal.
My film studies colleagues at the University of Vermont—Deb Ellis, Dave Jenemann, Hilary Neroni, Sarah Nilsen, and Hyon Joo Yoo—have created a stimulating environment in which to teach and write.
The Theory Reading Group—Joseph Acquisto, Bea Bookchin, Hilary Neroni, John Waldron, and Hyon Joo Yoo—have made the University of Vermont a place of respite from the demand for success.
Quentin Martin has helped to direct my thinking about capitalism through his trenchant critiques of it and has always been available to provide equally trenchant critiques of various chapters.
I appreciate Jean Wyatt’s careful readings of the first chapters of the book. Without Jean’s help, they would be twice as long and half as legible.
Thanks to Danny Cho, Joan Copjec, Anna Kornbluh, Donald Kunze, Juan Pablo Luccheli, Hugh Manon, Jonathan Mulrooney, Ken Reinhard, Frances Restuccia, Rob Rushing, Russell Sbriglia, Fabio Vighi, and Louis-Paul Willis, who have provided a theoretical milieu in which no one is content but everyone is satisfied.
Jennifer Friedlander and Henry Krips have continually nudged me to think in directions that I hadn’t foreseen, while at the same time giving me credit for the new turn.
Thanks also to Slavoj Žižek for his obscenely generous help in finding the appropriate place for this book to come out.
I would like to also thank Richard Boothby, whom I encountered while in the middle of this project. After that encounter, which I experienced as a miracle, everything was different for me because there was someone else, cut from precisely the same cloth, who could interrupt my dogmatic slumbers.
Mari Ruti provided the most thorough and thoughtful reading that anyone has ever given me. The book took a great leap forward thanks to her contribution.
Sheila Kunkle has supported this project in innumerable ways. It would be unthinkable without her existence in the world, and she remains my fundamental co-conspirator.
I owe the greatest debt to the three people who guide my thinking: Walter Davis, Paul Eisenstein, and Hilary Neroni. They are in the capitalist world but not of it.