In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, particularly the giant February 15, 2003 demonstrations, there seemed a great deal of energy in opposition to Bush's war. As the war continued, so did the protests, from the marches in the streets, to the reading of the names of the American soldiers who were killed, to the marking of significant counts--1000 dead, 2000 dead. There has been attention to the troops' lack of adequate provisions, the horrors at Walter Reed hospital, the cuts in funds for veterans. Just a few days ago I heard on the radio about activists arrested at a port in WA for placing an antiwar banner. And it made me wonder: how is it that a war that arose coterminously with its own opposition has continued for over five years?
Is it the case that the anti-war movement is more visible in more urban settings than the places I've spent most of my time the past six months? Or has it been assimilated into the media stream, just another current of upheaval and opposition within a large flow of entertainment and outrage? A year or so ago I started to get the impression that anti-war had morphed into a generic 'peace' and that this diluted its focus, message, and outrage.
Did a large segment of the anti-war crowd blend in with the Obama campaign such that electing him is now their primary objective? Did the surge and the production of a fantasy of success around it coat war discussions in an ooze so that it's increasingly difficult for the anti-war movement to retain a grip or gain a toehold?
What's particularly odd: over 80% of the country agrees we are on the wrong track. 62% disapprove of Bush's handling of the war in Iraq. On the one hand, it appears that the anti-war movement has been successful in turning opinion against the war. On the other, it appears that the movement is a miserable failure in that the administration and the congress continue to fund and fight the war despite public opposition to it. Differently put, it appears that the movement doesn't matter because public opinion doesn't matter. The Democrats have been quite clear that public opinion doesn't matter: they continue to roll over and do the bidding of a president with the smallest approval rating in US history (and, let's not forget, Congress's approval rating is even lower--could it be because they fail at every step to impeach the bad guys, tax the rich, provide health care, restore the infrastructure, protect the poor from evil finance capital, cap gas prices and oil profits, etc. The Democrats compromise and give in when they don't need to--unless they realize that voters don't matter. They appeal to unity and moving beyond partisanship--as if the problem were not the astoundingly corrupt Republican party.
Could it be that we are in a post-movement situation? One where pressures on elected officials from 'civil society' are so ineffective that the only opposition is forcibly removing these officials?
Link: In a Perfect Storm of Economic Stagflation, the Yachting Set Says: "Let Them Eat Pizza" (this is an excerpt; read the whole thing):
Newsweek tells us that "the situation we're in is nowhere near stagflation." After all, "the Consumer Price Index is rising at a 3 percent annual rate, compared with 13 percent in 1979."
What Newsweek doesn't mention is that the measures of inflation commonly discussed today bear little resemblance to the stats used in the 1970s.
In large part, that's because the Consumer Price Index (CPI) -- the most frequently cited measure of inflation in media reports -- is used to determine government benefits like Social Security, federal and state pensions and Medicare payments. Until the late 1970s, the index was based on a relatively simple formula. Officials took a theoretical "basket of goods" that "typical" consumers required and averaged their current prices. But, as economist John Williams, author of the Shadow Government Statistics newsletter, explains, "miscreant politicians, who were and are intent upon stealing income from social security recipients," made dramatic changes to the way CPI is calculated in the 1980s and 1990s, resulting in a drop in the official inflation rate made with a stroke of the pen and with little fuss from the public.
To gauge what most of us are really experiencing on a day-to-day basis, one might imagine economic reporters relying on a monthly "pizza index" instead of the Consumer Price Index. According to a February report by Al Olson of MSNBC, "Pizza makers have seen their cheese costs soar this year from $1.30 a pound to $1.76 a pound. Even worse, the flour used to make the dough has gone from $3 to $7 a bushel to $25 a bushel in less than a year." Between the second quarters of 2007 and 2008, even the paperboard used to make pizza boxes increased by 8 percent. (Several years of inflation in tomato prices -- for the sauce -- have been blunted by the recent salmonella scare.)
The same is true for a host of items that working America buys every day. Olson wrote, "If you're looking for a sure sign the U.S. economy is headed in the wrong direction, all you need to do is look at the skyrocketing price of 'recession-proof' foods: pizza, hot dogs, bagels and beer." But those items, and other costs that impact ordinary people significantly, are under-counted in the consumer price index.
Beginning in the early 1990s, conservative economists were unhappy that high inflation kept increasing entitlement payments to government employees, vets and the elderly -- whiners and greedy gray-hairs -- and, through some impressive intellectual contortionism, began making adjustments to the way the "official" rate of inflation is measured. They began "weighting" items in the basket differently.
Today I came across a tirade against someone's use of the word 'we' in a piece of academic critical media theory writing. The upshot: to use 'we' is to suggest proud egoistic self-mastery as well as hypocritical participation in the social order. Now, I didn't read the essay being criticized. I'm taking up the attack on 'we,' then, not as a discussion of specific criticism but because the attack is a commonplace among left theorists. I've been seeing it rather frequently in graduate student papers, a critique wielded with intense sincerity, as if the person who used the term were singularly responsible for the invasion of Iraq or the genocide against Native Americans (a horrible term itself, but I'll save discussion of it for later). Attacking 'we' is a cheap shot that substitutes for engaging someone's argument. It's one of those pc monkey-tricks along the lines of "you erase difference in a logic of the same" and "what do you mean by 'women' given that there are differences between and among women?"
"We" can be annoying when the author is referring to herself in the first-person plural, like the Queen. "We think that set theory radically subverts biopolitics." But, although annoying, this assertion of 'we' is neither more nor less an indication of self-mastery than the assertion of an "I." Both designate the speaking position of the author. In English, they are grammatically pretty useful, enabling the avoidance of unwieldy passive voice constructions. They also render the author accountable for a position. For example, the issue isn't whether torture may be considered a lawful interrogation technique; the issue is whether the Bush administration viewed it and authorized it as a lawful interrogation technique. And,insofar as we speak in first person constructions, "I'll have cheese, please," aware that we split subjects, subjects who err, subjects who are spoken through, subjects who are uncertain and in flux, no pronoun, plural or otherwise, can install an already impossible mastery. This is the challenge of responsibility: taking it even when mastery is impossible.
Some of us write with 'we' as a way of including ourselves in the group being criticized: "as bloggers we waste way too much time." This kind of writing is sometimes difficult in feminist classrooms where women students are pulled between referring to women as 'they' or as 'we'. The inclusive 'we' can also be useful in attempts to interpellate a collective, to call into being a 'we' where there might not have been one before. Politicians also use this version of 'we'. For critical theorists, this 'we' strikes me as crucial: no one is outside ideology.
One of the trickiest "we's" comes in when the author is trying to speak of and to a discipline or movement, for example, where 'we' refers to political theorists in general or the left in general. So the writer might say something like "political theorists have ignored the emotions; we need to take emotions into account." And the critical response is--whom do you have in mind? Can't be Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, or Hume, for a start. This is the easiest use of 'we' to avoid, primarily because it isn't necessary for the point.
Ultimately, what bugs me the most about critiques of 'we' is the way that they mobilize a suspicion toward collectivity and privilege individualism. To this extent, they are little machines or engines of neoliberalism, neoliberal-bots that drive writers and thinkers to dismantle any collective sense or feeling of solidarity in advance, to suspect such sentiments rather than be responsible to them. Most of us who write in contemporary left political and media theory have been reading and writing about difference for a long time now. It's time that we redirect the suspicions leveled toward collectivity toward suppositions of individuality and autonomy.
In First Monday Kylie Jarrett provides an interesting account (and critique of Andrew Barry) of the ways participatory media discipline: Jarrett. Here's an excerpt:
Participatory media can thus be associated with the production of flexible subjectivities, aligned with the needs of the culturally intensive capitalist industries associated with neoliberalism or advanced liberal economies. Interactivity therefore, is a technology which enables the reproduction of neoliberal regimes of power by producing subjects fit for the continuation of that system of power and its particular regimes of control. The interactive Web 2.0 consumer is, therefore, not only the subject of advanced liberal government as previously argued, but is also subject to that particular form of governance.
I haven't started doing much work yet, mostly odds and ends as I fight the anxiety of not having my book orders in yet for this fall's courses. Since I'm not working much, I don't have many thoughts. I have consumed media (hours and hours of the Tour de France). Here's my two cents on the movies:
Wanted: not wanted at all. Just say no to exploding rats. Still, some cool images and ideas. Weird how the whole doesn't work.
Walle: wonderful, exquisite, heart-breaking. I want so see the first 30 minutes again and again. I loved the way that the ordinaries of everyday commercial objects, in all their mass productiveness, became enchanting. The difference between garbage and a cherished object of desire is that it is desired. Pixar as Lacan.
The Dark Knight: amazing. I want to see the last 90 minutes again and again. My preference would be to see just all the scenes with Heath Ledger.
Read the whole thing. Here's an excerpt: America's Middle Class Can't Take Much More Punishment | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet.
Our economic reality is as brutal as it is for a simple reason: whether we like it or not, we are in the midst of revolutionary economic changes. In the kind of breathtakingly ironic development that only real life can imagine, the collapse of the Soviet Union has allowed global capitalism to get into the political unfreedom business, turning China and the various impoverished dictatorships and semi-dictatorships of the third world into the sweatshop of the earth. This development has cut the balls out of American civil society by forcing the export abroad of our manufacturing economy, leaving us with a service/managerial economy that simply cannot support the vast, healthy middle class our government used to work very hard to both foster and protect. The Democratic party that was once the impetus behind much of these changes, that argued so eloquently in the New Deal era that our society would be richer and more powerful overall if the spoils were split up enough to create a strong base of middle class consumers -- that party panicked in the years since Nixon and elected to pay for its continued relevance with corporate money. As a result the entire debate between the two major political parties in our country has devolved into an argument over just how quickly to dismantle the few remaining benefits of American middle-class existence -- immediately, if you ask the Republicans, and only slightly less than immediately, if you ask the Democrats.
Link: On Potentiality, #1 « . . . . . . . Supervalent Thought.
I think I think that there is no politics without loss, without a serious shifting of the terms of living of the sort that produces incompetence at life, an incompetence we can look forward to if we can bear it but that has to be lived at best awkwardly, at worst, dramatically. Potentiality discourse feels too sunny to me. There, we are already all potential. Our solidarity is structural and comes from a thing we cannot be rid of: the vital right to belonging as such. At the same time, though, the work of solidarity, the activity of being not just in existence but in desire together, requires being in the room with the possibility that people don’t share your objects or your imaginaries, and that people will have to give up different things to get to the place of the better good life that you’re risking making imaginable, let alone available.
Among some intellectuals, leftists, and remaining holdouts in the middle class, tourism is nothing to be proud of. We don't want to look like tourists. We want to blend in, to seem like locals. Oddly, we might consult our Rough Guides to know what's off the beaten track, only to find other members of our tribe of tourists similarly off the beaten track. We eschew tourist traps, gift shops with souvenirs, attractions clearly created just for us. We want what's authetic, what's real.
But we should know better. The critique of authenticity has been around a while now. If the authentic weren't constructed as such, how would we recognize it? The very attribution of authenticity is already dependent on a referential structure. Assuming we know, then, that authenticity is a construct, what's the matter with tourism?
Is the problem that we are visitors, those who are not actual participants in a way of life? No. The critique of failures of participation, of disconnection and political alienation, operates just fine without the premise of tourism. We fail as participants before we ever leave home.
Is the problem that of hierarchy, of interacting with others as if they were there to serve us, wait on us, cater to our whims? No. Again, hierarchies and the service sector are already part of local experience, part of everyday suburban life.
Is the problem the consumerism of tourism? No. If consumerism is a problem, we don't have to go out of town to consume. That, too, is part of home life.
Carbon emissions and the environmental impact? Somewhat--particularly with respect to flying and parking lots. But, again, these are also already problems with work and living in contemporary neoliberal capital.
Why, then, do we feel ashamed to be tourists? Why do we feel ashamed for tourists when we see them?
Before answering the question, keep in mind the fact that tourism is a mass phenomenon, although it is rapidly returning to its former status as a practice of the privileged. Tourism is not simply traveling or taking a vacation. We don't consider visiting relatives or camping particularly touristic activities. Nor is lying around at the beach exactly tourism--it's relaxation, a break from work, a replenishing.
I think we are ashamed of tourism because it exposes our relinquishment of our enjoyment to commodification, our naked pursuit of this commodified enjoyment in its impossibility, and our subsequent guilt as we are trapped in the circuits of competitive tourism--did you see? did you eat? did you smoke and dance and have the mystical experience necessarily beyond the grasp of what appears as westernized modernism or the modernized west? We are ashamed of tourism because it is completely detached from our work and provisioning. It appears as dedication to pursuing the unique that is impossible, pathetic in its massness. We see others enjoying our illusion of being on a unique, personal adventure.
And once there is the option of tourism, traveling otherwise is difficult if not impossible. The non-tourist works and stays home. The business traveler is another version of the catered to tourist. The one who stays home is provincial, unworldly.
What are other ways to see the world?
Americans are given two messages: go shopping and spend responsibly. Measures of economic well-being include indexes of consumer confidence, consumer spending, housing starts, etc. At the same time, we read reports of out of control spending, outrageous credit card balances, the lowest levels of household saving in a hundred years. The American consumer is out of control and the American consumer is the lynchpin of the global economy.
The political form that these messages typically, but not necessarily, take in the US is that the right places all responsibility for the situation with individuals while the left blames capital. The conflict over the state is a conflict over the ways to direct policy, to regulate the behavior of individuals or to regulate corporations. This summer, beginning, though, in presidential primaries, there has been increasing commentary on the ways that the left and right are blurred, and blurred to favor finance capital: finance is bailed out and taxpayers (not to mention future generations) are posting the bail. Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" seems appropriate: the US as a whole is encountering the shock effects of neoliberalism's transfer of wealth from public funds and the work and savings of people to the pockets of the .001 percent, who continue to get richer and richer. It's what has been going in the former socialist countries, Latin America, and much of Africa. Now it's happening to us.
I don't know of much theory on the left that is helpful here. Think, for a start, of the messages of consumerism: go shopping and spend responsibly. Are these messages simple reflections of the contradictions of capital? Ideology's distorted image of a fundamental incompatibility? And, is a better approach one that emphasizes abundance, infinite productivity, the productive desire of the multitude (even considered in terms of the symbolic labor of hackers as a class ala Wark)? For me, these approaches are ever less convincing.
Americans produce debt. The capitalization of debt has been at the core of the economy for over 20 years. It is parasitic on consumerism, but requires much more than that. An article in the NYT today describes the ways that credit today is no longer based on the assumption that loans will be repaid. Rather, loans pay. From the fees for administering them, the penalties attached to them, the costs in refinancing them, to their repackaging in complex debt structures, debt is the primary US asset. It's what "foreigners" buy, what we export and they invest in. It's not an economy of abundance but an economy based on a hole or absence. It circulates around this absence and is premised on buying it, selling it, betting on it--or against it (selling short).
Some have seen this consuming for a long time: corporate "mergers" and the buying of companies only to strip them of their assets, fire their workers, take on their debt, and sell that as well. Commentators have been telling us for a long time that manufacturing has declined. There have been major layoffs in white collar idea-based industries (advertising, dot coms) as well. The economy runs on debt. That's what we make now.
So the idea of the consumer as producer so prominent in net critique isn't wrong. It just hasn't named what consumers produce. Consumers produce debt.
