Following on from Mark's previous post, it seems the new dictatorship of mega-corporations is finally putting the nation-state, explicitly, in its proper place:
Now, Starbucks has begun to pursue trademark rights for its Ethiopian coffees – Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Harrar – despite those names describing geographic regions of Ethiopia that have been producing coffee for hundreds of years. The Ethiopian government has objected to this...
Reading back over the previous thread, "visible statement of separation and of difference"
The other night I attended a lecture given by David Held, who is apparently a rather large figure in something called the "new political economy" or "international political economy." I'm not a political scientist and I'm a pretty bad sociologist - for a lack of time and interest, I pay little attention to the more "politicy" or "practically" oriented scholarship in either discipline. This was, quite frankly, my introduction into what passes for liberal or left scholarship in the academy from an empirical perspective or approach.
I must say, I was rather dismayed. Admittedly, I was not expecting much from the lecture. A quick perusal of his publications indicated that his interests largely did not overlap with mine. He's written on "cosmopolitan democracy," "cosmopolitan law," "governance," "globalization" and "social democracy." These interests seem comparatively recent as his early work was on critical theory, having written books on "Horkheimer to Habermas" and an introductory text on critical theory in the early eighties. He also seemed to participate in the late seventies/early eighties renewal of interest in state theory. Thus, his earlier interests resemble more closely my own, even if, with him being a Habermasian of sorts, I expected significant theoretical differences.
At any rate, the following is a brief summary of his lecture, the text of which is available here. He opens, "The paradox of our modern times can be stated simply: the collective issues we must grapple with are of growing extensity and intensity and, yet, the means for addressing these are weak and incomplete." The rest of the lecture is an attempt, as one might expect, to grapple with, if not resolve, this paradox. Consequently, he first lays out the "collective issues" before moving on to "the means for addressing these." Clearly, this is a man pushing a particular political programme. (I'd point out at this point that my relunctance to accept his position does not require that I advance a better one - no blackmail of the status quo, as it were, will be accepted.)
Continue reading "David Held: "Reframing Global Governance"" »
Spike Lee’s Inside Man is about a bank robbery, and one of the many twists in the film is that the
chairman of the bank being robbed, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) derived his initial wealth from collaboration with the Nazis during the war. These tainted beginnings are ones which apparently continue to haunt him throughout his life—leading him, on the one hand, to devote himself to philanthropy and humanitarianism in an attempt to assuage his guilt and, on the other hand, to keep the physical evidence of his wartime complicity locked away in a secret safe deposit box in the main branch of the bank. The contents of that safe deposit box, in turn, become a crucial fulcrum point around which revolve questions of the legitimacy of each of the principle players in the drama—including not only bank chairman Case and the head robber (Clive Owen), but also the principle detective (Denzel Washington) assigned to negotiate with the bank robbers, as well as the mysterious power broker (Jodie Foster) hired by Case to try to protect his interests.
The central question posed by Spike Lee’s film, therefore, is an ethical one—in effect, the film asks whether there are situations in which the ethics of robbing a bank might supercede those of founding and running the bank in the first place. In framing in the film in this way, Lee (or script-writer Russell Gewirtz) may have been inspired by Brecht’s famous rhetorical question in The Three-Penny Opera: “What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”
Spurred in part by a passage from On the Natural History of Destruction posted at The Weblog and a recent re-reading of Arendt's The Human Condition and Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, that latter of which inspired in part by recent discussions of Marx on the occasion of his birthday (Angela, Shaviro, Nate).
Despicable socialist fantasies, or dedications to the memory of "political surrealism" in literary rag, n+1 (perhaps even those without subscriptions could, you know, opine about it). Anyway it reminded me of this. And there's some Hegel in the monster's tail. Mark Greif:
One of the lessons of starting a magazine today is that if you pay any attention to politics you will collect a class of detractors, who demand immediately to know What and Wherefore and Whether and How...Is it possible you have not endorsed a candidate, or adopted a party? Within the party, a position? If not a position, an issue? The notion that politics could be served by thinking about problems and principles, rather than rehearsing strategy, leaves them not so much bemused as furious.
Continue reading "He may as well be talking about weblogs" »
The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, blogger at the irregular Life During Wartime.
1. ‘Triumphant global finance capital/world trade can only be resisted with irony.’ I am simultaneously drawn and worried by this claim from Spivak’s 2000 essay ‘From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory.’ Perhaps this is because the work of irony is never done. Reaching on the one hand toward insubordinate refusal and on the other toward an unbearable ontological lightness, irony holds forth a promise it cannot keep. As such, it provides no chart of programmatic action--no twelve steps for overcoming global capitalism. Its tactics are inevitably polluted with ideological longings that, as Spivak’s teacher Paul de Man points out, it can know but never quite overcome.
Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world
Is this precisely the impossibility that drives Spivak to rewrite her observations on reading Marx after Derrida so many times?
Normally I do not use Long Sunday as a site to share my personal 
travel escapades. They are rather uninteresting and uninspired. But I have recently returned from a week long stay in Florida and I thought some of my experiences well suited for a post or two. I saw and heard a good many things that reflect obscene amounts of real estate development and generally meaningless but profitable hyperactivity. So the following is really more about economic development than my vacation.
You see, we Americans are very industrious. We build and destroy constantly (I think they call it “creative destruction“), Florida being an extreme microcosm of what is generally taking place through out the country.
Radical politics and neo-liberalism most fully interpenetrate one another in the figures of Ernesto Laclau and Margaret Thatcher. (One shudders at the thought of their bastard offspring -- and rightly so, do we not find that figure in Tony Blair's ideologue, Anthony Giddens?) Making parallel but inverse claims, both Laclau and Thatcher assert the death of the social in their aphoristic philosophy. On the one hand, Laclau proudly informs us that "society is impossible" and, on the other hand, Thatcher smugly proclaims "there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families". While their politics, presumably, do not coincide, the basis of their politics do. According to Laclau, "'Society' is not a valid object of discourse". This is to say that the referrent of 'society' cannot be 'fixed' and any attempt to 'fix' the meaning of 'society' is an instance of 'hegemony' -- the imposition of a false universal. For Laclau to claim that society is impossible is to claim that demands cannot be made in the name of society or against society. Thatcher fully agrees with this analysis. Asserting that there are, on one hand, individuals and, on the other hand, families, Thatcher is arguing for a stringent division between the public and the private. Thus, publically, people interact as individuals on the market and, privately, people interact intimately in morality. Morality, 'Victorian values', and 'family values' are equivalent: moral demands can only be made against intimates. All other demands -- those that occur in public -- take on a market form and are thus most fully resolved through tort law. Either way, society as a moral domain, one able to make demands on individuals and groups and one subject to demands by individuals and groups does not exist; indeed, it cannot.
Consequently, making demands in the name of the social; that is, asserting the priority of the social over other forms of organization, especially the economy, is, from this perspective, both the most criminal and the most naive thing one could say. To assert the social is to destroy neo-liberalism.
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