Don’t Just Do Something, Talk
Slavoj Žižek in the London Review of Books:
One of the most striking things about the reaction to the current financial meltdown is that, as one of the participants put it: ‘No one really knows what to do.’ The reason is that expectations are part of the game: how the market reacts to a particular intervention depends not only on how much bankers and traders trust the interventions, but even more on how much they think others will trust them. Keynes compared the stock market to a competition in which the participants have to pick several pretty girls from a hundred photographs: ‘It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.‘ We are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’
(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
Bailout Burnout
I haven’t read through all of these yet, but Talking Points Memo has a great list of various economist’s reactions, including Paul Krugman’s, Robert Reich’s, and Nouriel Roubini’s, to the failure of the bailout plan to pass through Congress and where that leaves us. Definitely worth checking out.
“Fleecing Shareholders”
In the comments section recently a discussion erupted extending from fascism, to liberalism, to communism, and finally to the Wall Street bail-out. Yesterday Mark featured part of the discussion on the economics of fascism. Today I want to bring up this notion of “fleecing shareholders” as a form of benefiting the majority. As Ezra Klein notes in the above link
…[T]he majority of the country doesn’t own any stock. Indeed, the bottom 90 percent of us only own 20 percent of the market. The top 10 percent, by contrast, control 80 percent, with the top one percent of Americans controlling an astounding 36.9%.
You can see a graph over at The American Prospect, and the data comes from the Economic Policy Institute. So, again, the question with the bail-out is one chiefly concerning the question of who benefits, but seeing as the bail-out is in limbo at the moment there is not much else to add.
Communism
Mike Johnduff at Countermemory:
On the left, things seem just as nuts. There is no theory of this spread and the resistance to it, except those promising ones of micro-loans. This leaves them with the specter of Lenin: communism has not died out there either. The idea of mobilization (Zizek) and the general idea that social-democracy is, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, a “compromise” (“Is Everything Political?”) is flawed.
Regardless, one thing is clear from all this, Communism still remains a specter—one cannot simply, as we have been doing, forget about it. The key is to see that it does not return into our thinking as a big massive homogenous thing: we are realizing that our framework for dealing with these problems remains very locally determined by Communism and Marxism in general as a model. This is chiefly Frederic Jameson’s insight, and it is to his credit that he continually insists, against the pragmatists (and one needs to apply this critique to the Lacanians and to the Nancy-type radicals too), that this is actually the greatest unifying discourse of our time.
Who, We?
Jodi Dean:
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.
Conditions of Receptivity
Dr. Sinthome:
At what point do certain statements, certain declarations, certain assertions, take on the capacity to resonate and produce effects in a receiver? What are the conditions for the possibility of being heard? … I became capable of receiving a message where before I was not. But how and under what conditions? Likewise, under what conditions do certain political positions and declarations begin to resonate within the social field? This question is at the very heart of social change and is not secondary or ancillary to questions of critique. For without adequately answering these questions, adequate strategies of producing change cannot be formulated. However, a glance at the history of political transformations also seems to indicate that while these shifts are cultural in character, they also seem to involve material transformations that problematize the cultural sphere, calling for new institutions, new group formations, new ways of feeling, new subjectivities, and new ways of living.
Swedish Left Party Wants to Legalize Piracy
If the Internet is to remain open and file-sharing unabated, as it should, then there will be a need at some point, either now or in the near future, to mobilize and act collectively to exercise the political will needed to make the proper changes. We should not cede an inch. Let Sweden be the guiding light.
Teaching, ISA’s and the Pedagogy of Alienation
A really wonderfully insightful post over at Larval Subjects. I highly suggest anyone reading this blog to check it out. While the particular contents discussed deal with the issue of pedagogy, I think there is definitely a universal quality to the post. Here’s a short excerpt:
Back in 2002 when I was still a graduate student, I won a teaching fellowship that provided a healthy stipend and gave me additional teaching experience. Among the requirements of this fellowship, I had to attend a weekly seminar with other recipients where we discussed issues pertaining to pedagogy and the aims of teaching. We had endless discussions about the humanist tradition, the liberal arts tradition, and the aim of cultivating the person intellectually, civically, ethically, artistically, and spiritually.
Among the things I found most frustrating about these discussions was the way they seemed to disavow the institutional structure of contemporary universities, failing to acknowledge the place of the university in the contemporary capitalist world. It seemed to me that these discussions functioned as a sort of alibi, a certain willful blindness, a certain disavowal of the role universities serve vis a vis capitalism. And in being willfully blind this way, in telling ourselves nice, narcissistic stories about our aims, we perhaps end up reinforcing these very structures.