Send your critical attention this way, why don't you (via Crooked Timber).
On another note, I'd just like to register a sadness that the blog, "In Writing" has become defunct. In many ways that site was, and continues to be our most kindred spirit/model. Or so it has always seemed, somewhere in the back of my mind. One wonders about potential for and nature of any sort of long-term blog memory/archival. Here's to fresh engagement, silences, turns of thought in the New Year.
Making the rounds to defend himself this morning, yet again (against what exactly remains ambiguous - certainly any real discussion of his learned unwillingness to state hard truth to power, to admit any responsibility for ideological complicity, not to mention unforgiveable self-contradictions, is not on the table), Alan Greenspan appears on NPR and (again) refrains from the speculative, informed imagining that remains our only chance for survival as a species: global recession is "much more likely" now, he admits, resorting to the tired and simplistic, not to mention falsely-naturalizing disease metaphor, "just like when the immune system is weak," etc. (As always, this metaphor demands to be complicated: our economic "immune system" being in fact at war with itself, as good Derridians everywhere note.) Long-term interest rates around the world are out of control; nothing he can do, that is ever could do, about it.
As with all fantastical conservative evasions of responsibility (read: fundamentalism), he posits a single, as-if isolated, pure Historical Event - in this case, the end of the Cold War - significantly just so long enough ago, that invariably "changed everything" - such that any assessment of his actions must of course be weighed on an equally if not more Epic, mythical and distant (hence forgiving) scale. Needless to say, it's an old rhetorical trick employed by those in power - invoking "History" when there are only ever histories, a "recourse" (as they say) made palatable by the desire and fantasy for a genuine leader on the part of a genuinely unempowered, insecure public. (Which may be the only desire more powerful than the desire to ritually condemn and profane some falsely inflated idea or image of an individual, as mimetically-charged sacrifice.) It's all meant to be reassuring: "You see," our Leader gently condescends, handing us his very own gold-rimmed goggles, "I have always had the Big Picture in mind." "Therefore, and on my stage, things were simply more complicated and out of my control than you will ever realize; here is an Event in light of which my lobbying for tax cuts for the already criminally wealthy inevitably pales."
Which is not to say there isn't truth to his observation (the end of the Cold War being in many ways worse than the Cold War) , only to note that he is deliberately changing the subject, suggesting another lens for an analysis, and for an infinitely deferred self-placement, which he then neglects to pursue. At all. Which is wise, because in the end it would hardly excuse him any further.)
Two months ago, William Greider in The Nation was even less kind, treating these self-contradictions with the contempt for which, some might say, the circumstances practically scream:
Continue reading "Alan Greenspan: Not My Fault, Entire World Simply "Out of Control"" »
Some of these may warrant commentary. Thoughts, anyone? ...
Needless to say, some are undeniably in poor taste. Many clichégenically, unapologetically, sexist. For instance, these from our very own (rabidly right-wing and very wealthy) hosting service, GoDaddy:
Why we are still hosting with these jerks, I sure dunno.
Others, largely philanthropic, fall into a different, mildly more interesting category of censorship. See for example this one or this one. These ads seem to pose an actual threat/provocation to the comfort of, you know, whatever Zizek is calling it these days.
Continue reading "World's Best Rejected/Banned Advertisements" »
Commentary on the recent Venezuelan referendum, particularly among foreign observers, has turned into a rather tiresome to and fro between self-satisfied opponents of Chávez, who like to think that the Bolivarian revolution has been stopped in its tracks, and equally self-satisfied supporters, who think they have refuted the claims of Chávez's dictatorial tendencies.
The referendum has also been interpreted as a weathervane for the region's Left Turns as a whole. With the Bolivian constitutional process also stymied, Lula quiescent, Bachelet unpopular, and the Kirchners apparently reinstating Peronist husband-and-wife politics as usual, have we reached the high water mark for Latin America's renascent left movements?
But in all this discussion, the central point has been lost: that the process of setting constitutions registers a balance of forces between constituent and constituted power.
Continue reading "The Venezuelan Referendum: an Exodus from Constituted Power" »
"Exclusive" to Long Sunday - an excerpt (courtesy of the publishers) from Kelly Oliver's recent book, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media (Columbia UP, 2007).
Ever since Eve tempted Adam with her apple, women have been regarded as a corrupting and destructive force. The very idea that women can be used as interrogation tools, as evidenced in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos, plays on age-old fears of women as sexually threatening weapons, and therefore the literal explosion of women onto the war scene should come as no surprise.
From the female soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib to Palestinian women suicide bombers, women and their bodies have become powerful weapons in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In Women as Weapons of War, Kelly Oliver reveals how the media and the administration frequently use metaphors of weaponry to describe women and female sexuality and forge a deliberate link between notions of vulnerability and images of violence. Focusing specifically on the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Oliver analyzes contemporary discourse surrounding women, sex, and gender and the use of women to justify America's decision to go to war. For example, the administration's call to liberate "women of cover," suggesting a woman's right to bare arms is a sign of freedom and progress.
Oliver also considers what forms of cultural meaning, or lack of meaning, could cause both the guiltlessness demonstrated by female soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the profound commitment to death made by suicide bombers. She examines the pleasure taken in violence and the passion for death exhibited by these women and what kind of contexts created them. In conclusion, Oliver diagnoses our cultural fascination with sex, violence, and death and its relationship with live news coverage and embedded reporting, which naturalizes horrific events and stymies critical reflection. This process, she argues, further compromises the borders between fantasy and reality, fueling a kind of paranoid patriotism that results in extreme forms of violence.
Read an interview with Kelly Oliver here. A PDF version of the excerpt can be found on Columbia UP's site for the book here. The publicity page for the book can be found here.
In "The Failure of Political Theology", a review essay for Mute of Forrest Hylton's Evil Hour in Colombia and Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony, Angela Mitropoulos (aka s0metim3s of the archive) skewers the assumptions of "failed state" theory.
She points out, on the one hand, that the notion of "failed states" presupposes the norm of the "successful" state as a more or less harmonious instance of the social contract at work. This is a presupposition shared by liberalism and by Gramscian hegemony theory alike. And obviously enough I thoroughly agree with her assessment of hegemony theory as no more than "a variant of social contract theory with Marxian pretensions." Indeed, as Mitropoulos's reading of Hylton's book shows, if anything so-called progressives are more wedded to the social contract (and so to the repression of the state's founding and ongoing violences) than are liberals. The (populist) demand to refound the state by means of an organic representation of subaltern classes is a ruse of the state's feigned self-cancellation.
Hopefully not too cynical (via), or redundant. Of literary note there was Josipovici on Modernism. Also new issues of Borderlands (new home, plus see this take) and Collapse, are out. And don't miss the perennial yet necessary reminder: on dogma and being polite.
For those with more time still, one wonders if these (relatively) old articles from PMC: How to Read Adorno on How to Read Hegel, and After Reading After Postructuralism have received proper attention. From the latter:
Those that try to criticize theory as "Theory" with a capital "t" create a strawman argument, in that poststructuralist philosophy has never been about creating the ultimate frame of reference, but wanted to open up philopsophy to other questions. It's the opponents of theory--to varying degrees Picard, Sokal, and Habermas--who end up trying to create a definitive "scientific" platform from which to prosecute theory for foreclosing the Enlightenment project of modernity. Davis reminds us that poststructuralism doesn't spell the death of philosophy or of Western civilization; rather, poststructuralism holds the door open to allow new questions to enter the unfinished project of modernity.
And has anyone read Iranian Truth lately? For those yet still bored, plenty more free learning here!
And finally, last but certainly not least Ulrich Beck has a new article on cosmopolitanism, worth noting:
The nationalist perspective - which equates society with the society of the nation state - blinds us to the world in which we live. In order to perceive the interrelatedness of people and of populations around the globe in the first place, we need a cosmopolitan perspective. The common terminological denominator of our densely populated world is "cosmopolitanisation", which means the erosion of distinct boundaries dividing markets, states, civilizations, cultures, and not least of all the lifeworlds of different peoples. The world has not certainly not become borderless, but the boundaries are becoming blurred and indistinct, becoming permeable to flows of information and capital. Less so, on the other hand, to flows of people: tourists yes, migrants no. Taking place in national and local lifeworlds and institutions is a process of internal globalisation. This alters the conditions for the construction of social identity, which need no longer be impressed by the negative juxtaposition of "us" and "them". For me, it is important that cosmopolitanisation does not occur somewhere in abstraction or on a global scale, somewhere above people's heads, but that it takes place in the everyday lives of individuals ("mundane cosmopolitanisation"). The same is true for the internal operations of politics, which have become global on all levels, even that of domestic politics, because they must take account of the global dimension of mutual interdependencies, flows, networks, threats, and so on ("global domestic politics"). We must ask, for example: How does our understanding of power and control become altered from a cosmopolitan perspective? By way of an answer, I offer seven theses.
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