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Posted 31 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Asian American Politics; Politics; American Studies / 0 Comments
The 2010 midterm elections may have a critical impact on Barack Obama’s political future. What role will Asian Americans play in shaping the President Obama’s fate?
Almost twenty years ago, Don Nakanishi suggested that Asian Americans could become an important swing vote in California. More recently, S.B. Woo formed “80-20,” a group trying to get Asian Americans to vote as a bloc to increase their political influence, but the effort has had limited success so far. Do Asian American votes matter?
Some suggest that Asian Americans are too few and too diverse to make up an important voting bloc. Outside of Hawai‘i, where they are thedominant ethnoracial group, Asian Americans are usually less than 10 percent of the population. Even in California, they make up only about 13 percent of the population, and their diversity makes it doubtful that they will be a potent voting bloc even in the Golden State (AsianAmericans do hold considerable power in some local elections).
However, a recent Gallup poll suggests that Asian Americans may still wield political leverage. According to Gallup, Asian American are more likely to label themselves moderate than Americans as a whole (46 to 36percent), and more so than any of the other major ethnoracial groups. Interestingly, Gallup also reports that no other ethnoracial group except African American is as likely to identify as Democrat as Asian Americans. What can explain these findings?
It’s possible that one part ofthe explanation is religious. The Gallup report finds lower levels of religiosity among Asian Americans, although cultural differences might mean that Gallup’s measure misses some aspects of Asian American religiosity. Even so, the Gallup finding suggests that the increasing influence of Christian religious conservatives within Republican Party may not be as attractive to AsianAmericans.
If this is correct, Asian Americans might still become an important swing vote. While the Republican Party has moved to theright, the endangered species known as “moderate Republicans” might look to Asian Americans as potential supporters. Economically conservative but socially moderate candidates—characteristicof moderate Republicans—might appeal to many Asian American voters, and states with higher numbers of Asian Americans—such as California and New York—are also ones where small bands of moderate Republicans have continued to exist, and sometimes even thrive.
In addition, socially moderate candidates might be able to rally large numbers of Asian Americans in cases where immigration and immigrants are a flashpoint. Although anti-immigration voices are increasingly influential within the Republican Party, notable exceptions remain, including former President George W. Bush, and, until recently, SenatorJohn McCain.
South Carolina Tea Party favorite Nikki Haley seems to fit this description. Although Haley has apparently dropped references to her Sikh background as she has risen to favorite status in the gubernatorial campaign, her campaign has stressed economic conservatism and open government, not the social issuesof the religious right.
While Asian Americans are unlikely to represent a powerful national voting bloc, there is no such thingas a national election in the United States. As every experienced campaign manager knows,the president is elected in fifty different state campaigns, where the key challenge is to assemble enough victories to add to 270 electoral votes. Congressional campaigns are still usually dominated by local concerns, and growing numbers of Asian Americans mean an increasing number of House districts where they might wield influence. According to the 2008 American Community Survey estimates, Asian Americans make up over 30 percent of the population in four congressional districts in California (districts 12, 13, and 15, and probably also district 8).
Savvy candidates would still do well to court Asian American voters in districts where their numbers are growing. Asian Americans are growing at a faster ratethan Latinos (measured by percentage increase). Meanwhile, organizations such as APIAVote are working hard to mobilize more Asian American voters in 2010. “Raging moderates” is probably far too strong a term, but Gallup andother data suggest that Asian Americans may indeed be a force for moderation in American politics.
Posted 57 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: consumerism, consumer culture, consumption, sociology / 0 Comments
Shopping: meaningful or meaningless? It is the activity on which we in the rich nations spend most time after work and sleep, and the favourite soft target for the commentariat who regularly argue that shopping is more than emblematic of a ‘hollowed out’ society and is actually destroying the social fabric of modern ‘consumer’ societies.
Modern societies are consumer societies, as well as producer ones,and as they are also urban societies - self sufficiency is not an option.
Written against the grain of a social critique which cannot distinguish between shopping and consumerism this book shows how the activity of shopping holds us together physically, socially, psychologically, and as a community. As a ‘practice’ shopping is a mainstay of everyday life.
Shopping, the book, is essential for second and third year courses in the sociology ofeveryday life and will soon earn a place in courses in economic sociology; consumer behaviour; the life course; material culture; psycho-social studies; business studies; gender studies; cultural studies; and practical ethics.
Based on the premise that shopping is both more and less than buying, Shopping argues that to understand the activity we have to understand the meanings made and remade through it, and this can lead us to see shopping also as a‘practice’ as understood and commended by social philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.
Still, shopping is not normally seen in this way and Shopping explores why shopping has a ‘bad name’, how it ‘fell from grace’ and instead of being associated with thrift and good housekeeping became synonymous with being a spendthrift. Our attachment to shopping is not all selfishness, frivolity and indulgence,and going shopping is not how we spend most of our money.
Shopping explains why early shopping memories are so lasting, why we have a deep attachment to certain shops, what we learn from shopping, how it tracks us and nudges us along the life course, and why old people are culturally ‘absent’ from the high street.
Examining shopping is a way of examining culture, thus in how we shop, where we shop, why we shop, and whether we profess to like or dislike shopping, are part of the way we express ourselves but also our nationality, our class and our gender.
Shoppingchallenges many everyday assumptions about shopping as well as the popular discourse about it as the epitome of meaninglessness, before concluding with a bold and radical account of the meaning of shopping as based on a ‘deep structure’ formed from the unconscious meanings and processes evoked by the activity.
Perceptive and penetrating, imaginative and interdisciplinary, Shopping is not a text book, but makes its readers think. It is completely original, there is nothing else like it on the market and it will be controversial.
Posted 98 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: History; Architecture; Built Environment; Urban Planning / 0 Comments
What is Architectural History? is organized by five chapters. The first positions modern, academic architectural history (the architectural history of Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Riegl and their contemporaries) as a disciplinary inh
eritance of four traditions for knowing architecture as a past field. These are the presentation of architectural history in the architectural treatise, as part of the architect’s historical and technical patrimony; of the architect as an artist in history, in the biographical tradition consolidated by Vasari; of architecture as a fact of the past available for empirical study; and of architecture as part of culture, and therefore subject to the early study of cultural history. Of these, cultural history (or the cultural sciences) has arguably played a strong role in establishing the field’s disciplinarity.
Chapter two lays out a series of methods—soft methods—by which historians organize past time and relate it to the present: as a succession of styles, governed to a greater or lesser degree by concurrent historical events; as a succession of architects, subject to processes of influence and transferral; according to geo-political boundaries, recognizing that the historian can often find coherence in a field bounded by a political border or held together by a shared language; by type, comparing like with like in order to understand processes of change within comparable buildings; as a technique, finding a history in the arguably irreducible concerns of (what we can now call) architecture over a long period of time (planning, spatial formation, shelter, etc); and theme and analogy, where architecture can be held to index concerns that are not architecture’s own (or, which in turn help shape architecture as a field).
The next chapter draws upon a series of cases to consider the relation between forms of evidence and the kinds of architectural history they allow. It suggests that evidence can be procedural, contextual or conceptual in nature, each kind of evidence serving the historical subject to specific ends: from tying up loose ends in established knowledge to defining architecture historically on new grounds. Chapter four returns to the question of actuality, asking how involved architectural historians should be in the world of architectural practice. It sets up a conversation between three architectural historians of note—Zevi, Millon and Tafuri—to tease out a series of positions on this question, which are in turn informed by Croce, whose influence over the Italian discussion on this issue has been immense.
The final chapter speculates on the impact of the ‘theory moment’ on the shape and possibilities of architectural historiography in the present moment, tracing some developments that would seem to have decisively informed the outer limits of the field, its content, and the objectives of its scholars.
I would be a fool to imagine this as a definitive answer to the question What is Architectural History?, and indeed I look forward to learning from the debate that my own views will provoke.
Posted 98 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Sociology; Disability, Disabled; Social Policy / 0 Comments
A decade ago, a socio/political or ‘social model’ of disability – inspired by an understanding of the economic, political and social deprivations encountered by people with accredited impairments and labelled ‘disabled’ – was hardly visible within mainstream sociology and related disciplines. Today it stands centre stage alongside sociological explanations of racism, sexism, heterosexism and other forms of social oppression and inequality.
The last decade has witnessed a growing number of undergraduate and post-graduate courses in the general area of ‘Disability Studies’ at both the national and international levels. This has been accompanied by the establishment of specialist centres, journals and professional chairs in disability and related fields. Globally, the rise in interest in disability has been equally phenomenal. In 2010, for example, there are international Disability Studies conferences in Honolulu, Montréal, Philadelphia, and Tokyo. The UK Disability Studies Network holds its fifth international event this September at the University of Lancaster. All of which has generated considerable debate and discussion about the relevance and utility of social-model-inspired theorizing and research for the 21st century within the academy and beyond.
At the same time, social-model-inspired insights are firmly established in government and policy circles and official documents in Britain and elsewhere. Important examples in the UK include the setting up of the ‘Disability Rights Commission’ in 2000, the Cabinet Office report Improving Life Chances for Disabled People (2005) and the setting up of the Government’s ‘Office of Disability Issues’ in 2007 and their assertion that ‘by 2025 disabled people in Britain should have full opportunities and choices to improve their quality of life and will be respected and included as equal members of society’ (Cabinet Office 2005: 5). Similar assertions are implicit at the European level (Equal Opportunities for People with Disabilities, 2003) and internationally with the United Nations Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Yet despite these initiatives, exclusion rather than inclusion into the mainstream of economic and social life remains a constant feature of the everyday lived experience of the overwhelming majority of disabled people and their families. The numbers of disabled people have increased significantly over recent years. Yet barriers to inclusion in education, employment and mainstream leisure and social activities are still prevalent. Consequently disabled people remain the ‘poorest of the poor’ in all societies. The situation is especially dire in the poorer nations of the ‘developing’ world where health and disability-related support services are almost non- existent.
Moreover, public attitudes toward the meaningful inclusion of disabled people are now seriously undermined by the recent resurgence of interest in eugenic-type solutions to the problem of disability which many claim threaten their very existence. Examples include developments in bio-medicine, prenatal screening and the growing trend toward the legalization of ‘assisted suicide’ for people with ‘serious handicaps’ and or ‘terminal illness’.
All this has created a heady mix of progress coupled with new and continuing demands for change which has inspired the new edition ten years on.
The second edition of Exploring Disability has been completely re-written and expanded to take account of these developments. As in its predecessor, the book’s 10 chapters focus on the increasingly complex relationship between theory, policy and practice and on-going struggle for meaningful change. It concludes with Chapter 9 which addresses recent ethical debates surrounding ‘Disability and the Right to Life’ and Chapter 10 which centres on global perspectives on ‘Disability and Development’. The book will prove to be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the growing controversies surrounding the struggle for human rights and equality for those sections of the population who are unfortunate enough to be labelled ‘disabled’.
Posted 133 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Philosophy, the Normative / 0 Comments
The biggest buzzword in contemporary philosophy is normativity. Volum
e after volume has been churned out defending the idea that normativity is real, indispensable, even the single metaphysical basis for everything, including nature. The past of philosophy, especially Kant and German idealism, has been reinterpreted as being about normativity. Wittgenstein has been made into a defender of normativity against naturalism. And the rejection of normativity is characterized as irrationalism because reason is a normative concept. The term has crept into social theory as well, with Habermas and his endorsement of arguments taken from Robert Brandom.
So what is normativity? The one thing it is not is the sociological fact of people behaving in a certain way, using certain terms, and believing certain things. Behavior can be contrary to the relevant norms, and beliefs can be false. Genuine, as distinct from sociological normativity is the thing that makes behavior wrong, usage genuinely meaningful, and beliefs false. Without genuine normativity, there is no meaning, no truth or falsity, no act correct or incorrect. And this has implications for Asociological accounts of the social world: without accepting the reality of genuine normativity we can't even describe the social world as we know it, because the world as we know it is constituted by these normative distinctions.
How do we know all this? Regress arguments. When we use normative language, or even reason about something, and are asked for a justification of our reasoning, we get back to a justification in the same normative language. The mere fact that people expect a promise to be fulfilled doesn't make it a promise or generate an obligation. Only a norm, one that says something like one should fulfill ones promises and justifies our saying that someone who fails to fulfil a promise has done something wrong. Merely violating our expectations is not wrong.
This, at least, is the conventional wisdom in philosophy. But philosophers ordinarily keep an eye on the shiny regress arguments and avert them from the trainwreck of the metaphysics behind it. What is this normativity that lies at the end of justification? Is there really a realm of the normative? Is it really the case that every time one uses a normative term, such as correct,and that one invokes this netherworld of normativities? Does appealing to genuine normativity actually explain anything in this world? And if so, how does this kind of explanation relate to the kinds of explanations social scientists have given of normative facts? What is the source of normativity? There seems to be little agreement, and wide variation, in answers to these questions, where there are answers at all. And when we look at the answers, they turn out to be all over the place: from a system of proprieties co-extensive with language, to presuppositions that flash into existence whenever they are needed, to the Kantian norms of reason, to the tacit rules behind the meanings of sentences, to the normativity embodied in and created by collective intentions, and on and on. This should be an embarrassment, but no one seems to be embarrassed about it.
There is also a puzzle about what exactly normativity explains. Does it explain something real that the social sciences don't explain? In the case of science, this problem has been discussed in two ways. One argues that science is a normative activity and therefore any sociology which purports to account for science must be insufficient. The other says that philosophy of science is an attempt to make normative sense of science, and that this activity does not compete with explanations of science or the course of scientific development: the project of fashioning a normative lens for science and the project of explaining what scientists believe to be true are different enterprises, that do not compete. One could extend this to other forms of normativity: there is what people say and understand, and what they believe to be correct speech; then there is what is really correct speech. Social science is concerned with the former, normativity with the latter.
Normativists say that social science explanations don't explain normativity: they are only about regularities or probabilities, expectations, perhaps, but never the normative fact, and therefore the meaning, of promising itself. Is this really true? A simple example is the explanation of Maori gift customs in Marcel Mauss's classic The Gift. The Maori think there is a spiritual substance, Hau, that attaches to a gift and must be returned by the giving of another gift. They acknowledge that hau is a mysterious thing. Nevertheless, they believe in it, and organize their social and economic life around this substance. Hau is a Good Bad Theory: good, because it co-ordinates behavior and motivates compliance; bad, because hau is an non-explanatory, false, and fails to fit into our ordinary stream of explanation, which is why the Maori treat it as a mystery.
This standard social science explanation works just fine for the Maori. It is difficult to imagine even a normativist philosopher quibbling with it. But it also raises a tough question: why don't explanations like this apply just as well to our own moral beliefs? If we think we are obligated to return a phone call, is the obligation any more real, or is our belief that this obligation is real any different than the beliefs of the Maori about hau? Isn't the whole concept of normativity suspiciously like the concept of hau, namely a false belief wrongly used to explain something that isn't there in the first place?
In a way, this one has an easy answer: there is no difference. And there is nothing mysterious that is left over after the social science explanation is given. For beliefs like this, it makes sense to be a relativist. But things appear to be different for reason or rationality itself. How can we treat that as a superstition? We rely on it. It is not a good bad theory, but a good good theory, if it is a theory at all. Here, it seems, the regress arguments work: there is no denying rationality, because justifying our denial would assume rationality, the rationality of the speaker and the person persuaded. And rationality is normative.
Or is it? Do we really appeal to rationality when we try to persuade someone or communicate with them? When we try to communicate anything, we have to say something that is intelligible. And we hope that the listener will understand it and see it is true. But that is not the same as invoking a norm. But something is right in the normativist argument. What we do need, to communicate or to reason with another person, as the normativist argument suggests, is a stopping point: an end of the regress, something that is in common that the justifying can close with. The normativist thinks these stopping points must be norms because they are not causes or data.
But there is another possibility, found both in the philosophical tradition and in the social science tradition Brentano's notion of Evidenz, which appears also in Weber in relation to empathy. Evidenz is defined by Brentano as being evident to all. The things that are evident to all though the all needs to be qualified might include steps in reasoning, or ostensive definitions that were understood by others, which are the kinds of regress-stoppers that are needed. Brentano thought of Evidenz as an alternative answer to the problem of grounding mathematics, which bedeviled Frege and Husserl. The alternative was derived as Apsychologism and the concept of Evidenz as subjective. But the critics were wrong, and they misrepresented it.
Today we can construe these points of mutual obviousness in terms of cognitive science concepts. The mirroring system in humans, the basis for empathy, is a good candidate for naturalizing Evidenz, for accounting for such things as our capacity to understand others without appealing to normativities, hidden structures of norms, and the like. These systems are objective. They do much of the explanatory work that the mysterious notion of normativity is claimed to do. We can do without these mysteries.
Stephen P. Turner
Posted 133 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: sociology, Dying, Death, America / 0 Comments
As we write this blog we are coping with the aftermath of the tragedy in Haiti. The latest count is an estimated 230,000 deaths and rising. Haiti happened too late to be included in our book but it reflects its scope--trying to understand and explain who dies, how we die, what 
happens after we die, and how do we cope with death. We clearly saw the social implications of death in Haiti, as the poor died by the tens of thousands, where the medical care was makeshift and minimal, where the survivors had nowhere to find shelter and no food to eat, and the dead were buried in mass graves.
We use three central themes in this book. First, we look at death and dying at the macro level, how many people have died and the social structure in which the deaths occurred, and the micro level, the individual instances of death. Second, we relate the patters of social inequality that are institutionalized at the societal level to the corresponding patterns inequality at the individual level of dying. Third, we outline the topics of consumerism and commercialism that link life and death in late capitalist American society.
We divide the book in four parts. In Part I we examine the demographic aspects of death, who dies according to gender and race in United States and how it compares to other nations. We also examine the cultural changes in perceptions of death in the western world from the Middle Ages to the present and how death is intertwined with the nature of health care in today’s America. In Part II we discuss where death takes place, increasingly away from home and into medical establishments. We then turn to the dying itself and examine the controversial topics of euthanasia and assisted suicide. We end the section in surveying the various types of funeral practices, such as the movement away from traditional burial toward cremation and more recent green modes of burial—chemical free and in biodegradable containers. In Part III we look at the individual death of children and then review death and destruction on a large scale, from war to natural disasters such as Katrina. In the final section, Part IV, we turn to the professionals who have to tell the ‘bad news’ to the dying or the families of the dead. This topic is followed by the different ways in which we grieve when someone dies and then we move on to discuss the various beliefs (or lack thereof) from religious to philosophical in immortality. We conclude that death is a mirror of the way Americans live, increasingly highly expensive and consumeristic, continuing to privilege the rich over the poor and still trying to deny its coming by wrapping it in ribbons and glitter.
Posted 155 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Finance, economy, Regulation, globalization, Business / 0 Comments
With all the hand-wringing that goes on over financial regulation, you would think that books on the subject would be two a penny. Surprisingly, they are not. So, Howard Davies’s and David Green’s book, Global Financial Regulation, remains an essential guide.
This is despite the fact that, as they write in the Update, “Time seems to have speeded up in the world of financial regulation” since the first edition was published in spring 2008. That Update is, of course, a crucial part of the second edition, but the job is made easier by the fact that two important trends in reforming the system were recommended by the authors.
The first is that the Financial Stability Forum should be beefed up and fulfill its promise as a co-ordinating body for the world’s economic and financial regulators. Now dubbed a board, in April 2008 it set out tasks for bodies ranging from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision to the IMF and national central banks. In many cases this remains a work in progress, but profound changes in such areas as bank capital and liquidity requirements have been initiated.
The second is the expansion of the membership of international bodies to reflect the changing balance of power in the world towards emerging nations such as China. This addresses the legitimacy issue raised in the book. An obvious example is the expansion of the political hub from the G7 to the G20.
Other trends are either less clear or less appealing to the authors. The US, with its bewildering array of financial regulators has realised the need for fundamental re-engineering. But while some consolidation of banking supervision has taken place, delivery of wholesale change has run into political resistance, not least because of scepticism about giving additional power to the Federal Reserve.
In the EU, the Larosière proposals have tackled both the need for a systemic risk board and greater cross-border powers to ensure standards are applied. But, in the authors’ view dependence on co-operation between national regulators remains a second best solution in a single market.
Larosiere also left the sectoral bodies – covering banking, insurance and markets – intact. This is out of line with the book’s original theme that such divisions are out of date. The collapse of firms such as the insurer AIG through their dabbling in investment bank-style activities would seem to bear out the need for regulating according to what the institution actually does, rather than what it calls itself.
The authors’ background is at the Bank of England and the FSA, where they led the case for “one stop shop” regulation. But even though the crisis has shown little correlation between structure of regulation and good or bad outcomes, there preference for a unitary authority has been frustrated. In prudential supervision, the swing is back towards central bank authority, with new or separate bodies focusing on consumer protection. If the Conservatives win the UK general election this spring, the FSA will be dismantled.
But none of this negates the value of the original book, which is descriptive rather than opinionated. The advantage is that it does what it says on the tin. It is indeed an essential guide to the teeming bodies that feed into the “simplified” chart on page 33.
The authors conduct a first-class bluffers’ tour of differing approaches to regulation and of the surprisingly short history of cross-border bodies. The Basel Committee only dates back to 1974 and the buzzphrase “financial stability” is a juvenile apparently coined in 1994. Charles Goodhart has since pointed out how hard it is to define it, let alone measure it.
[OPT PARS] [They also point out how difficult it is for grand international initiatives to be effective. The book describes the other FSAP – not the EU’s action plan but the Financial Sector Assessment Programme of the IMF and World Bank. Launched in 1999, it has cost more than $1bn and “most major countries” have been assessed.
Exceptions are China and the US – one of many instances where the latter is a whipping boy in this book. The former is of course to be welcomed into every international forum. Yet are these two countries wrong to resist when cost-benefit analyses of this FSAP have proved inconclusive and the inspectors could not even sniff the onset of an international crisis in the Dominican Republic.
In the end regulation is a political subject and the authors do portray their prejudices: they do not like sectoral regulation, fragmented and competitive regulation, or regulation pulled in different ways by politicians.
As one would expect from powerful intellectuals, the case for a rationalised and simplified way to manage the international world of finance is strongly made.
But the practical problem of how universal regulators can develop sufficient market knowledge is skipped over; and so too is the cultural divide between prudential supervision and consumer protection.
Jane Fuller is Co-director at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation.
Posted 164 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Philosophy, African American Studies, Karenga / 0 Comments
Maulana Karenga is an important American cultural philosopher and one of the leading proponents of the cultural reconstruction thesis for African Americans. His key writings, based upon his studies of African cultural and philosophical history, treat the classical bases for re-interpreting the social behavior of people whose cultures have been crushed by oppression. In effect, Karenga is an ethicist, having studied ethics as one of his two doctorates, but he is also an activist who has found his intellectual and creative values in the realm of political organization. Karenga is the author of many books and monographs, but his major tome is Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt. He is also the author of scores of important articles advancing the Kawaida, traditions, thesis that creating a dignity-affirming life is a key component for fully realizing the human potential.
Karenga’s works, especially in African moral philosophy, whether Yoruba, Ancient Egyptian, or Zulu, are always grounded in his belief that Africana Studies represent the best route to a resurgence in ethical decisions in the communities broken by hegemonic racism. In recognizing the possibilities in reconstructive freedom, Karenga commits himself to serudj-ta, that is, repairing the damage that has been done to African and African American people. No contemporary African American thinker has impacted the popular culture and language of the American society as thoroughly as Karenga. Indeed, his creation of the holiday Kwanzaa, now celebrated by nearly thirty million people around the world, has made him an enormously significant cultural presence. While some authors have written about Karenga’s personal life and activist work, the book, Maulana Karenga: An Intellectual Portrait, is the first work to seriously deal with his ideas.
Posted 164 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: politics, International Relations, Power, the State, globalization, Justice / 0 Comments
Financial crisis, environmental crisis and terrorism are all taken as signs of the weakness and increasingly irrelevancy of states. C
apital, ecological disasters and terrorisms seemingly cross borders with impunity. In fact, citizenship remains one of the most important determinants of someone’s life chances. Stand at the U.S.-Mexican border, at the wall dividing Israel and the Palestinian territories, or on the beaches of the European islands in the Mediterranean to see what efforts governments make to secure their borders and the risks non-citizens take to pass through those divides. Jobs, civil rights, social benefits, physical security, and even water are kept on one side of those borders. More than thirty million humans today are refugees, fleeing from one country to another in an effort to survive.
States and their futures matter because, at the outset of the twenty-first century, they remain, by far, the most significant repositories of power and resources in the world. The vast majority of violent deaths are caused by wars between states, by states’ violence against their own subjects, and by armed attempts to seize state power.
Politics is almost entirely about states. People mobilize to influence state policies, and to gain control of states through elections or with violence. Where states are weak, as in much of Africa, citizens’ life chances and life spans are drastically reduced. Every realistic plan for economic growth, for reductions in poverty, hunger, disease, and environmental degradation, and to slow or reverse global warming depends largely on initiatives that are directed by governments alone or in concert.
Posted 172 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Empathy, Civilization, History, climate change, economics, politics / 0 Comments
The anemic global economic recovery is
beginning to stall. Unemployment is shooting up again. The housing market is threatened by a new wave of foreclosures. Tens of millions of Americans are teetering on the edge of survival. Public surveys show that people on Main Street are fast loosing trust in Wall Street and the workings of the market. What’s gone wrong?
The economists have a difficult time understanding the public reaction, in large part, because they believe the market is functioning as it should: that is, it is serving as a self regulating arena where individual material self interest can express itself under the guidance of an “invisible hand” that continually adjusts supply and demand and other market forces to ensure a proper functioning of commerce and trade. Recall, the words of Adam Smith, the great Scottish economist of the Enlightenment, who wrote in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations that
Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment to whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of society’s, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leaves him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society.
What the economists fail to grasp is that commerce and trade, and indeed, all market relations, are only made possible by a very different kind of “invisible hand”—the one that establishes social trust among people. That social trust, in turn, is created by the extension of empathic sensibility to others. This is the process that creates human culture.
Sometimes referred to as the third sector, as if to suggest that it is of less relevance than the marketplace or government, in fact, the culture or civil society is the primary sector. It’s where people create the narratives that define their lives and the life of the society. These narratives serve as the cultural common ground that allows people to create emotional bonds of affection and trust, without which commerce and trade would be impossible.
While the empathic drive is faintly acknowledged by economists, it is relegated to a secondary level in human affairs − something one engages in within the family and among friends and neighbors, but which plays no appreciable role in the economic arena. Being open, vulnerable and sensitive to the plight of others is considered detrimental to commercial relations and a prescription for failure in the marketplace.
Yet the market requires a continuous infusion of social trust to function. Indeed, the market feeds off social trust and weakens or collapses if it is withdrawn. That’s why there are no examples in history in which markets preceded culture or exist in its absence. Markets are extensions of culture and never the reverse. They have always been and will always be secondary rather than primary institutions in the affairs of humanity because culture creates the empathic cloak of sociability that allows people to confidently engage each other in the marketplace.
Only recently, in the wake of the disastrous downturn of the global economy have some economists began to turn their attention to the role social trust plays in providing the foundation for commerce and trade.
The close ties between commercial and empathic bonds might seem a bit paradoxical, but the relationship is symbiotic. Sociologist Georg Simmel, in his landmark study on The Philosophy of Money, observed that coins are promissory notes based on the assumption of an established collective trust among anonymous parties that guarantees that at some future date the token passed in an earlier exchange will be honored by a third party in a subsequent exchange.
It’s instructive to note that when anthropologists study the history of exchange, they find that social exchange virtually always precedes commercial exchange. The Trobriand Islanders engaged in an elaborate social exchange of shells, often canoeing long distances between islands to pass the tokens back and forth as a way of cementing bonds of social trust. Commercial exchange in the Trobriand Islands was always preceded by social exchange, again confirming the ancient wisdom that cultural capital precedes commercial capital and that commerce is an extension of cultural relations and, therefore, not a primary institution in the affairs of humankind.
The relationship between empathic and commercial bonds is complicated and fragile. That’s because empathic extension is always a nonconditional gift, freely given, without consideration of reciprocity on behalf of the other, either in the moment or in the future. While commercial exchange would be impossible without empathic extension first establishing bonds of social trust, its utilitarian, instrumental, and exploitive nature can and often does deplete the social capital that makes its very operations possible. That’s exactly what’s occurring now in the United States and around the world in the aftermath of the global economic meltdown.
The populist revolt that is spreading to many countries represents a profound loss of trust in the global economy and is fueled by the sense that a small elite has rigged the game in favor of a few at the expense of the general well-being of society. But below the heat and light of the populist outcry is a deeper feeling of betrayal; that is, a feeling that our business leaders no longer empathize with the plight of their fellow citizens. It is this deep sense of abandonment that is perpetuating a decline in social trust and threatening to transform America, and other nations, into social chaos.
Still, economists shake their heads and continue to hope that governments can patch together a rational, quantifiable, utilitarian set of mechanisms to regulate a global economy and jumpstart the economic engine, only to throw up their hands in despair when world trade talks breakdown. A history lesson might be instructive to help world leaders and economists get to the nub of the problem.
At the beginning of the modern market economy, Europe found itself in the throes of a great struggle between a new commercial order and an old economic regime. New technologies were radically altering spatial and temporal realities. The old medieval social economy, based on controlling production, fixing prices, and excluding competition from the outside, was too provincial to accommodate the range of new technologies that were making possible greater exchange of goods and services between more people over longer distances.
What was missing was a new, more expansive, and agile political framework that could transcend the thousands of local municipalities and force the elimination of local tolls and tariffs and countless other statutes and codes that maintained an aging medieval economy. It was this need, says Karl Polanyi, “which forced the territorial state to the fore as the instrument of the ‘nationalization’ of the market and the creator of internal commerce.”
Although never intended, the emergence of the territorial nation state had a collateral effect that proved to be every bit as important as acclimating large populations of previously disparate people to national markets. Nationalism extended the empathic impulse to the new expansive borders of the nation itself.
Today, the new technologies of Third Industrial Revolution − distributed communications and distributed renewable energies − are taking us to a new biosphere economy. The human race is becoming technologically interdependent and interconnected. What is sorely missing, however, is a leap in human empathy, beyond national boundaries to biosphere boundaries. We need to create social trust on a global scale if we are to create a seamless, integrated, just, and sustainable planetary economy.
We can no longer afford to limit our notion of extended family to national boundaries, with Americans empathizing with fellow Americans, Chinese with Chinese, and the like. A truly global biosphere economy will require a global empathic embrace. We will need to think as a species − as homo empathicus − and prepare the groundwork for an empathic civilization imbedded in a shared biosphere.
Jeremy's new book, The Empathic Civilization is now available from polity.
Posted 185 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: sociology, globalization, climate change, Copenhagen / 0 Comments
The Sociology of Globalization discusses dimensions of globalization from media and identity to migration and social movements, from history to theories. It also argues that environment, economics and politics are things that any sociologist who aspires to understand society needs to pay attention to. These dimensions affect society. They are not outside it.
Recent developments such as the Copenhagen climate talks and the financial crisis raise possible conclusions about globalization: 1) they appear to demonstrate the reality of global interdependency; 2) they suggest a crisis for the neoliberal type of globalization that seems to have been behind such problems; and 3) they show the need for global governance to tackle climate change and regulate the economy.
Interdependency – global but uneven
It’s true that climate change and financial crisis demonstrate global interdependency. But they also involve great unevenness. The financial crisis was global. Events in one small part of the world had global repercussions. But how global was it? It had origins at a local level, in the US sub-prime mortgage market and in irresponsibility and lack of political regulation in US lending. Some countries have been more affected and taken longer to come out of recession, like the UK and Spain because of their financial bias or housing markets. Other parts of the world were less affected. China and Brazil are two significant economies that experienced less upheaval. Or areas have been affected differently - for instance through the impact being on exports or aid rather than finance. Countries also responded differently. Some like the US and UK poured money into their economies. Others, like Germany, were more cautious.
So, global interdependency has been shown in the economic crisis - but with local differences in its origins and effects, more than homogenisation or evenness. Similarly climate change has effects across the world. But these are greater in some areas, such as African countries and low-lying islands, whose carbon emissions are often quite low. At the same time, out of nearly 200 countries in the world just two – the USA and China - produce 40% of the world’s carbon emissions. The effects and origins of climate change are also uneven.
A crisis for neoliberal globalization?
Has the credibility of neoliberal globalization been damaged by climate change and the financial crisis? Many say these were caused by individualism, lack of regulation, short-termism and risk – all characteristics of neoliberal types of capitalism in the Anglo-American world. During the economic crisis, economies that are more regulated, state-interventionist and social, of a German or Japanese type, gained the edge in arguments about how organise capitalism. For some, globalization is the spread of neoliberalism. So if the credibility of neoliberalism is damaged this also means that globalization is under threat.
Opinion polls show that the public is appalled by the greed and irresponsibility of bankers, and to be paying the price for this with cuts to their jobs and public services. If neoliberalism is to be challenged in favour of more social and regulated types of capitalism there is no better chance than in the context of climate change and financial crisis. However public criticism has been personalised, aimed at greedy bankers, irresponsible borrowers and weak politicians rather than structures or systems. Politically there has been no systematic attempt to shift away from neoliberalism. Governments have bailed out capitalism with big injections of finance, rather than reconstructing it. Banks are determined to continue paying bonuses that encourage risky and individualistic behaviour. There was no greater opportunity to challenge neoliberal capitalism than the financial crisis, but it has survived intact.
Towards global governance?
Both climate change and the financial crisis appear to have shown the need for global governance. They are global problems, which require the combined action of many governments rather than just national solutions. However this hasn’t happened. The financial crisis was tackled by reflation at a national level, rather than regulation globally. And this was effective, bolstering the credibility of nation-state politics.
The crisis was linked to the irresponsibility of finance and deregulation. Common taxes and regulations on finance could have been introduced across nations by global agreements, but governments didn’t pursue this. If this crisis didn’t provide a basis for more global governance, in pursuit of the responsibility of capital to society, it’s difficult to see what will.
The failure of global agreement at Copenhagen, meanwhile, has been blamed on weak-willed leaders. But it was caused by structures as much as personnel. One typical problem in global governance is that it involves many actors with conflicting interests. At Copenhagen 195 countries seated round a table couldn’t find a common position. Another problem is that powerful actors can wreck the whole thing by their recalcitrance. In the past on climate change this has been the USA. We are told that this time it was China. These problems are as much to do with this kind of structure as with individual leaders.
Before Copenhagen countries like Australia said there was more chance of national governments finding solutions and enforcing them than of this happening globally. National levels are where agreements can be made and sanctions are enforceable. At the same time, agreements on economic issues, carbon emissions, and disarmament, for instance, need to be made above national levels. But the lack of a basis for this in global governance, means that above-national but below-global arrangements may have to be where this happens
Pre-Copenhagen President Obama sought bilateral agreements on climate change with countries like China and India. After Copenhagen commentators argued that solutions need to start at local and national levels, where there are people pursuing carbon reductions, or with enough in common with others to make agreements with them. Such below-global attempts to pursue alternatives nationally and in international alliances have also been pursued by politicians like President Chavez of Venezuela.
So, in the case of two major crises that seem to call out for global regulation, below-global and bottom-up seem as effective approaches as global and top-down. Copenhagen and the economic crisis have left us with an unevenly globalised world, with neoliberalism over a crisis which it seemed could have defeated it, and with national and bilateral government as important as global governance.
Posted 185 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Peace, Conflict Resolution, sociology, globalization / 0 Comments
Over fifty people were killed in the Johannesburg area in 2009. This seems unsurprising given that it considered the murder capital of the world. The fifty or so people to whom I refer, however, are different: they were economic migrants from neighbouring states, drawn to South Africa by its status as rainbow nation and by the prospect of work. The display of very magnanimous forgiveness South Africans showed each other after the collapse of apartheid and the evident stability of its new non-racial political system makes it appear odd that strangers should be viciously attacked. South Africa’s peace process has been universalised and its processes of reconciliation, truth recovery and memory management have been championed as examples for other societies undergoing a democratic transition to peace. A sociological approach to peace processes, however, identifies the weaknesses in South Africa’s transition. The peace process was an elite compromise at the top, in which Black people felt everything would change because they now held political power and Whites felt nothing would change because they retained control of the economy. This is no conundrum. South Africa’s peace process has essentially been about the introduction of good governance structures to deliver institutional reform. This approach to peace processes is the dominant one in the West and argues that the introduction of democratic politics, human rights law and free market economics is the way either to eliminate conflict or allow its reproduction in non-violent ways. We might call this a political approach to peace processes. It is based on the naïve assumption that once problematic politics are resolved, social healing, reconciliation and restoration follow on naturally. South Africa – and all other political peace processes – illustrate that they do not. Underlying the political peace process is a social one; the social peace process is about societal healing, forgiveness, the restoration of social relationship and the like. Good governance approaches neglect the social peace process or take it for granted. A sociological approach to peace processes, however, prioritises it, taking for granted that institutional reform is essential and must proceed in parallel. For all the institutional reform in South Africa, there has been very little societal healing. Frustrated economic expectations, fierce competition for economic resources and huge unemployment spilled over into attacks on strangers. The incidents offer no better demonstration of the need for a sociological approach to peace processes: of the need to address issues of justice, fairness and social redistribution in addition to ending the killings; of the need for good governance institutional reform to be introduced in a context in which issues of victimhood are also dealt with, where public policies are forged to manage the problem of social reintegration for ex-combatants or assist with the empowerment of women, the deconstruction of violent masculinities amongst ex-combatants, or which deal with the management of emotions, introduce spaces for hoping and forgiving, assist in bottom-up truth recovery and forms of memory work that help in the re-remembering and re-memorialisation of the past. These are the topics that go to define the sociology of peace processes.
Posted 196 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: media, Technology, Digital Culture, Music / 0 Comments
More than ten years have passed since Shawn Fanning and friends released the file-sharing software "Napster" to the world and thereby kick-started one of the most radical transformations of the multinational music industry.
Today, young music listeners no longer put on a CD then they party and it is actually also becoming less common that they play MP3s from their computers or iPods. Rather, the young audience of today listen to music from YouTube, last.fm, Lala, Spotify, or some other Web-based music service. Music is no longer something the mainstream audience owns and collects - Music has moved
into the Cloud.
*'The Cloud' has been used as a metaphor for the Internet since the early 1970s when the technologies behind the network of networks were invented. A cloud was considered to be a useful and vague enough symbol which could be used to summarize all the resources, cables and gadgets which connected the computers at the nodes of the network.
*During less than a decade, the music industry has completely shifted from the physical to the virtual - from the Disk to the Cloud. The Disk-based music industry was all about control and a music firm's top priority was to maximize the revenues from each individual piece of intellectual property and to minimize unauthorized use. In a Cloud-based music industry, it is
still important to know how one's intellectual property is used by the
audience but it is more or less impossible to control that use. In a
Cloud-based music industry, music firms must embrace the enhanced connectivity between fans and build their businesses on an assumption that their recordings are universally available.
The relationship between connectivity and control is fundamental to all cultural and media industries, and as the connectivity increases and the ability to control the flow of information decreases, the logic of these industries is radically altered. In the old music industry, the content(music) and the medium (disk) were inseparable, and the music industry was focused on music products as a physical goods which were shipped and sold all over the world. In the Cloud-based music industry where information is more or less impossible to control, it becomes increasingly difficult to charge a premium for discrete chunks of information. As soon as some kind of information is uploaded to the Cloud, it is instantly universally accessible which makes the commercial value of providing basic access to an individual track or album very close to zero. But there are other things which remain chargeable. In a world where information is abundant, people may not be willing to pay a premium for basic access to that information, but they are most likely willing to pay for services which help them to conveniently navigate through the vast amounts of information. Such services, such as the currently much-hyped European based service Spotify, is an example of how the industry may be able to survive even without the ability to control.
Further, the increased connectivity combined with various kinds of music production tools enable 'non-professionals' to create, remix and publish content online. The making of mashups and remixes based on well-established musics seems to be a thriving mode of consumption in the Cloud-based music industry. Many music firms respond to this user behavior by arguing that this is copyright infringement which should be policed and ceased as soon as
possible. However, it is not entirely unrealistic to assume that those fans who create, remix and upload content to the Cloud also are the most dedicated and loyal. It is also quite likely that they are the ones who spend the most on concerts, merchandise etc. Based on those two assumptions, it makes sense for music firms to secure a good relationship with these fans, encourage their creative desires and do their best not to push them away.
Posted 199 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: social policy, happiness, politics, society, economics, halpern / 0 Comments
For this blog post, I thought I’d set out the bones of the argument in my new book The Hidden Wealth of Nations. I certainly found it interesting to revisit some of the big questions that in government there’s rarely the luxury of time to examine very deeply, rolling up my statistical sleeves to wade into data sets and literatures around public concerns, well-being, social policy, inequality and developments in government itself. I should stress that this has been a personal project done alongside the set-up of the Institute for Government, but I have nonetheless been grateful to my colleagues for indulging intermittent and excited reflections on my latest analysis. It is also, as the title implies, ultimately an optimistic vision.
Prosperity and well-being. The book starts by revisiting Easterlin’s famous paradox – that wealthy nations are much happier than poor nations, and yet decades of growth do not seem to have boosted the happiness within them. I argue that this occurs because a bundle of deeply rooted social characteristics of countries – values, institutions and ways of relating to each other – independently drive both the ability of countries to take advantage of new economic opportunities (hence economic growth) and their citizens’ happiness. This gives us important insights into how we can both boost growth and increase well-being – and strongly implies that they are not incompatible. In many areas, the implications of the well-being literature simply confirm existing lines of policy, but there are some areas where it pulls you in a different direction. I also suggest one or two areas where economic policy has missed important tricks, such as the promotion of information as a public good.
Not getting along. The focus of the book then shifts to rising public fears in the UK and a clutch of other countries of other people in recent years – concerns around crime, immigration and terror. There is a detailed analysis of the empirical roots of these concerns, including why they only seem to have affected a minority of countries, and an examination of what evidence-based policy responses might look like. The evidence base is, in many areas, in great tension with the media headlines and public instincts, at least within theAnglo-Saxon world.
Virtue. These public concerns form the background to the pivotal argument of the book: how can societies, communities and policymakers support ‘virtue’ in their citizens, as opposed to simply stamping out bads? Across nations, while traditional religious beliefs have only marginally altered, their influence on our other attitudes has waned dramatically – though with the notable exception of North America. Yet there’s little evidence for ‘moral decline’. And within nations moral and social attitudes have become more nationally distinctive. Drawing heavily on studies of how citizens spend their time, the book concludes that policy has systematically underestimated the importance of what Offer calls the‘economy of regard’ – the parallel economy of everyday life within which we help each other acts of consideration, care and reciprocity, and a key part ofthe Hidden Wealth of Nations. Echoing the analysis on prosperity and well-being, the policy implications are drawn out, including the intriguing case for community-backed complementary currencies to oil the works of the economy of regard just as conventional dollars and pounds oil the ‘real economy’.
Inequality and fairness. Levels of poverty, fairness and inequality are defining characteristics of many nations, often representing the darker side of Hidden Wealth with major consequences for citizens. Reducing poverty and inequality was a major ambition of the Labour project, and though the growth of inequality was halted it was not reversed despite twelve years of effort. One reason is that inequality has its roots in a far wider range of factors than income or education. At the same time, though the public does not like inequality, there is little appetite for more conventional policy responses and most countries are broadly accepting of their situation, whatever their absolute level of inequality. It is suggested that, in the long-term, inequality can be reduced with the help of ‘affiliative welfare’ - an attack on a broader range of capital inequalities harnessing the desire to help those close to us.
Power and governance. The last chapter seeks to bust a number of common myths about shifts in political trust and confidence, but suggests that there are other underlying trends that are a source of deeper concern. It then offers thoughts and cross-national evidence on how governance will need to evolve in relation to the division of power, the practical provision of public services, and its re-emerging role in relation to behaviour change in the decade to come.
The book finally concludes with a suggested top-10 list of policy proposals for current, or future, Prime Ministers.
Posted 199 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Spielberg, film studies, cinema, media, politics, film, Wasser / 0 Comments
Is Steven Spielberg a better political filmmaker than his peers?
Surprisingly, yes.
Steven Spielberg has managed to show that the most successful film director in the history of popular culture is capable of engaging history - but not quite as he pleases. He has done so to a greater degree than his fellow film entertainers. Scorsese, the “thoughtful” American director, has not been as political as Spielberg, nor has Soderbergh or Coppola or other “auteurish” directors. Because Spielberg is the great mass entertainer his engagement is richer than more overtly committed filmmakers. His sincerity brings the audience along but the blockbuster apparatus of distracting visual thrillsleads to contradictions.
Spielberg has made a great deal out of his balancing act between serious and “popcorn” (entertaining) movies. In 1993 he shot the serious Schindler’s List while finishing up on the popcorn Jurassic Park. Other pairs include Lost World(popcorn) and Amistad (serious); Munich (serious) was released within the same year as War of the Worlds (popcorn). But to present this as a balancing act between two opposing poles is deliberately misleading. The “serious” films are not that different from the entertaining ones. He does not switch crews, cameras, and distributors when going from one to the other (he barely scales back the budget). This fact alone shows Spielberg believes the blockbuster style is capable of engaging politics and history.
The critics have not accepted this and from the mid-1970s both academics and journalists have bemoaned the rise of the blockbuster and the corresponding decline of more artistic and, by implication, political filmmaking. Many have written some version of this critique of the blockbuster. Pauline Kael’s take on it was perhaps the most intriguing, since she praised his filmmaking skills in his first feature film but nonetheless came to bemoan the overwhelming dominance of the Spielbergian vision in the film industry of the 1980s. It was a vision limited to the American suburbs, the family, and the eternal wish-fulfillment of popular culture.
Spielberg and his fellow blockbuster creator George Lucas drew such negative reactions because their films reversed the direction all thoughtful people were hoping that American filmmaking was going before Jaws broke box office records in 1975. The previous direction has been labeled “new Hollywood” and was ushered in with the release of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde. It reached a high-water mark when Midnight Cowboy won the1969 Academy Award for best picture. These films emulated the various foreign films that emphasized artistic autonomy. They were not overtly political but everyone understood how their themes of alienation and dissatisfaction resonated with the political strugglesto implement a new era of civil rights and limit the U.S. imperial project.
This personal-expression trend faded whenthe studios realized that the thrills and spills of Jaws and StarWars had revitalized a formula for attracting the huge audience. As artistic autonomy faded so did any kind of political overtones in the movie plotlines themselves. Indeed, part of the blockbuster formula for attracting a huge audience was to paper over the cultural and political divisions of the 1960s. Lucas had stumbled upon it in American Graffiti and Spielberg came to it in Jaws after the relative disappointment of The Sugarland Express. The blockbusters flattered the “hipness” of one side of the cultural wars while giving the other side old-time movie thrills.
This papering over of the political divisions coincided with the Reagan turn in American politics. The 1960s leftwingers were often anti-government because government was not doing enough to fulfill New Deal promises of social justice. The Reaganites took over the anti-government ideology and attracted many former countercultural adherents. On both sides of the Atlantic neo-liberals worked to delegitimize all domestic government activities and knocked out the props supporting labor unions. Instead they established the idea that the marketplace could deliver public benefits more efficiently than the government. Few places in the cultural sphere, certainly not the Hollywood blockbuster, resisted this rapid ideological transition.
American filmmakers are not deep political thinkers, which is perhaps why the best political films are those that are not the product of overt reasoning, but in their naiveté reflect the contradictions of American politics itself. The most fruitful contradiction comes from sincerity. All too often there is cynicism either from the right (Milius, the various makers of the Rambo series and vigilante films) or the left (Oliver Stone) that reduces the story in order to eliminate contradiction. From the beginning, Spielberg’s sincerity stood in contrast to his fellow directors. He loves American popular culture and he unashamedly wants to please all audiences. He emphasizes giving the viewers not only a story but an experience. The narratives of Close Encounters and E.T. do allude to bitter social isolation but watching these films overwhelms the viewer with the pleasurable experience of sentimental fulfillment.
This desire to please is at odds with the desire to engage history as politics. Yet unlike other filmmakers of his generation, Spielberg has been drawn to history and politics. Increasingly,in the last decade with Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, and Munich, but starting even earlier with Saving Private Ryan and Amistad, audiences can find a politically liberal motivation behind Spielberg’s choice of scripts. Given the original blockbuster formula of papering over political divisions, this motivation should alienate parts of the blockbuster audience. The American audience rarely gives a Spielberg film its profits anymore. For example, Amistad was a box office failure and prominent American pundits attacked Munich. In compensation the foreign audience has made several Spielberg political movies successes, such as Munich and Minority Report. Why does such an inveterate crowd-pleaser jeopardize his domestic audience to embrace these libera lthemes? Perhaps because his artistic soul is reacting to the darkening American climate today and on a more conscious level he wants to share the populism of classic Hollywood with his various global audiences.
The 1930s Hollywood populism, however, was never dominant and like a regressive gene shows up as a contradiction in Spielberg. This is perhaps most evident in Saving Private Ryan, which is not a hawkish call to arms but an examination of the paradoxical duties of the citizen-soldier (something that became so paradoxical that the United States eliminated the citizen army as it used volunteer soldiers to pursue police actions around the world after the loss of the Vietnam war). During the Bush years Spielberg kept leading his audiences back to old-fashioned issues of trust, community and law versus security. Yet both he and the audience share a disdain for public life that works against old-fashioned populist resolutions. Sometimes he distracts the audience from the contradiction with “you are there” camera work. Other times he retreats behind the claim of being merely an entertainer. At all times his work at pleasing international audiences reveals political dilemmas that tell us more about our collective selves than does the work of other more cerebral filmmakers.
Frederick Wasser's new book, Steven Spielberg's America, is available now.
Posted 247 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Molly Rothenburg, The Excessive Subject, Polity / 0 Comments
On the Edge
Edged in: I decided to write this book when it became clear to me that a new theory of the social subject, with some powerful advantages for social change theory, had become sequestered within a small area in the academy simply because it was associated with psychoanalysis. It turns out that the theory of the excessive subject, as I term it, depends on developments in the fields of symbolic logic, topology, and set theory that can be applied to the question of how to model causality in the social field. Lacan was instrumental in bringing these developments into the discourse of the humanities, but they are not psychoanalytic per se. Lacan picks up these developments because they enabled him to articulate a causal logic necessary for his sense of the way the subject emerges. That logic, which I refer to as “extimate causality,” offers a significant alternative to the causal logics of Marxism and Foucaultianism, but the alternative became quarantined on account of attacks on psychoanalysis by prominent theorists in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. I want to make this alternative available to a wider audience, especially to students.
Backing away from the edge: The book tells the story of a number of theoretical attempts to find an alternative causal model of social effects in order to grapple with the fundamental problem of how subjects conditioned by ideology and cultural practices could become change agents. This problem is the common link among a number of theorists who otherwise don’t seem to have much in common. It is the central focus of Pierre Bourdieu’s efforts to split the difference between subjectivist and objectivist accounts of the subject, and it shapes Michel de Certeau’s response to Bourdieu. Judith Butler has her own way of intervening in that discussion, by trying to cobble together a model from Bourdieu, Derrida, and Lacan. Ernesto Laclau encounters this problem as he seeks to articulate a theory of the formation of politically effective groups from the concept of the split subject. Slavoj Žižek takes it up in his accounts of revolutionary violence. I follow this thread through these thinkers in some detail to develop a history of approaches to the problem and to highlight the ways that each thinker both relies on some version of extimate causality and then repudiates it when it compromises, or seems to compromise, some cherished political tenet.
Cutting edge: The story’s central figure is the subject in its social dimension as excessive to itself. I explain how the social subject comes to acquire this excess by giving my readers an accessible account of set theoretic principles and fundamental concepts from nonclassical logic that converge with Alain Badiou’s philosophical writings as well as Lacan’s theories. I discuss the Möbius topology of the social field in terms that link up with Felix Guattari’s early work and Giorgio Agamben’s current investigations. I explore the utility of the excessive subject for thinking politics and ethics that spotlights features of Jacques Rancière’s, Walter Benjamin’s, Theodor Adorno’s, and Emmanuel Levinas’s writings. The excessive subject turns out to provide a means for assessing the degree to which a given theorist has an adequate model of social interaction to ground political and ethical proscriptions. I argue that the model of the excessive subject is crucial for the most innovative work being done today in political and ethical philosophy.
The disappearing edge: The Möbius strip, with its paradoxical two-in-one-sidedness—its edge between two sides that mysteriously disappear as you trace a path along one side only to find yourself on the other—serves as a useful analogue to the excess of the social subject. The excess of the social subject both separates it from its fellow subject and links it to them: the excess of the subject, which is a function of the subject’s emergence by way of the addition of a negation to its initial state of being, is irremediable and essential. I argue that we must understand that this excess is not the impediment to the social field but rather the means of producing and sustaining the social field. As Jean-Luc Nancy points out, dreams of absolute comm-unity or comm-union fantasize that the excess of the social subject can be eradicated, a fantasy that predominates in the literature on political and ethical theory. Theories of ethical action, for example, that rely on the subsumption of one subject to the demands of a radical other, fantasy the erasure of the excess requisite for the social/ethical relation in the first place. But, in fact, attempts to eradicate excess risk the collapse of the social field itself and set in motion catastrophic pathological defenses to protect the social field, examples of which tragically abound in modern history. The book explains the generation of this excess, how the excessive subject functions in the social field, and how the circulation of affect in the social field promotes or impedes political and ethical activity.
Gaining an edge: I wrote this book for students and for others who wish to understand why social change theory has taken certain paths and ignored others. I want them to know that many of the most significant thinkers of our day have been using the model of the excessive subject without making it explicit. I want to see what happens when that model becomes more widely available. I want students to acquire an advantage by learning a new set of tools with which to think. My hope is that this book provides the means for a new appraisal of the possibilities for social change. I look forward to the work that will be done with these new tools.
Posted 247 days ago by Polity Blogger / Tags: Oliver Leaman, Islamic Philosophy / 0 Comments
When I was asked to prepare a second edition of my Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy I wondered what needed to be added to the existing text. When I looked at the book again it seemed strange that although I emphasized that Islamic philosophy is a living part of world philosophy, I only dealt with earlier aspects of Islamic philosophy, so I thought it would not be a bad idea to have a chapter on some more modern thinkers in the discipline. I wrote such a chapter, and I think it gives a broad view of where Islamic philosophy is today, with the views of a range of contemporary thinkers and the sorts of issues that have become part of the modern curriculum. One of the unusual features of Islamic philosophy is that there has been a protracted debate on what it is throughout the tradition, and that debate persists today. The controversy brings in interesting features of how Islamic culture differs from other cultures.
The other chapter I added deals with a related issue, something that people constantly say to me, that Islam has yet to experience an enlightenment, and that it needs to go through such an event in its cultural history. As a result, they suggest, Islamic philosophy is too limited in its scope and cannot really take on the challenge of modernity and a commitment to reason. I argue against this approach, and compare and contrast the ways in which Jews and Muslims reacted to the Enlightenment. There is no right or wrong way of dealing with modernity, and different communities will react differently, and there is nothing problematic about that. In any case, it just is not true that Islamic philosophy has not taken the Enlightenment seriously, and the idea that there is something very different about Islamic culture on this and related topics should be questioned. This brings us back to the essentially contested concept of a philosophy being Islamic. All religious philosophy contains within itself a struggle between the traditional rules of religion and the rational principles of philosophy, and how that struggle plays out defines the nature of the religious philosophy. My book tries to sharpen how this plays out in the case of Islamic philosophy.
Oliver Leaman
Posted 247 days ago by Polity Blogger / Tags: Ellis Cashmore, Martin Scorsese, America, Polity / 0 Comments
“In this country, it doesn’t add inches to your dick to get a life sentence” Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) in The Departed
America is a country where success is measured by how long you have to wait in line to get served. The shorter the wait, the more successful you are. This is one of the lessons Martin Scorsese teaches us.
In his new book Martin Scorsese’s America, Ellis Cashmore has anatomized Scorsese’s film, not just his dramas, like GoodFellas and Raging Bull, but his documentaries like No Direction Home (about Bob Dylan) and his television program “Mirror, Mirror,” which he directed for Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. This is the first comprehensive examination of Scorsese’s entire oeuvre and the first attempt to explain the clasp Scorsese has had on the hearts and minds of filmgoers.
“This city doesn’t discriminate: it gets everybody ”
Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) in Bringing Out the Dead
Cashmore, author of Tyson: Nurture of the Beast and Beckham (now in its second edition), begins from the understanding that films have no power to entertain us unless they educate us too. In his own fashion Scorsese has taught us more about America than any living filmmaker. Indisputably one of the greatest living directors, Scorsese has, over four decades, provided us with a body of work that reveals the story of America.
“We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges … we were treated like movie stars — with muscle … we had it all ”
Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in GoodFellas
“What give Scorsese’s film reverb is their sense of engagement with American issues. His themes are big and resonant. The manic pursuit of the American Dream of success, the moral and cultural decline of the cities, the hopelessness of romantic love, what it means to be a man – these are the kinds of issues that pulse through Scorsese’s films.
And, yet Cashmore asks whether, for all his daring and ingenuity as a director, if Scorsese is a conservative filmmaker: there are traditional values and attitudes that go unchallenged, and cautiousness about radical change, especially in relation to gender, politics and religion. Women are frequently compliant doormats who give men license to philander just as long as their credit card bills are settled every month.
“All the animals come out at night: whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies”
Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) Taxi Driver
Martin Scorsese’s America is a place where everyone obsesses over something, where lives collapse and are rebuilt, where women willingly submit to being doormats and license their man to philander.
“American culture, for Scorsese, is a proving ground for manhood: in every movie, he makes his audience familiar with the brutality of manhood, not always in a physical sense either. Scorsese’s anti-heroes can be smooth-talking charmers one second, blood-curdling fiends the next.”
“Should I fuck him, or fight him?”
Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) in Raging Bull
Yet for all his daring and imagination, Scorsese is, on Cashmore’s account, a conservative filmmaker. “He respects the nuclear family, never challenges the preeminence of men and seems to admire the maneuvers of career criminals, who exploit the weak for their own gain.”
In Scorsese’s America, there are no moral signposts signaling the roads to redemption or damnation. The police are criminals in uniforms and criminals seldom taste the costs of their behavior. Yet, somehow, Scorsese has held his finger to the pulse of the nation in a way that arguably no other director has managed.
“How could he write ‘how many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man’? This is what my father went through: he was the one who wasn’t called a man.” Mavis Staples [on Bob Dylan], in No Direction Home
Cashmore argues that Scorsese has produced a comprehensive portrait of America. “No living filmmaker can boast such a range of subjects and such historical depth,” says the author. “Scorsese’s America starts in the 1860s and brings us right up to date, examining what Scorsese sees as a society that continually rips itself apart then repairs itself.”
For Cashmore, Scorsese’s epic tales warrant comparison with Tolstoy, his explorations of the city are worthy successors to those of Dickens and his sympathetic yet authentic portrayals of disillusionment rank with those of Steinbeck. And yet, the nagging doubt remains: is Scorsese a reliable chronicler of America, or merely a visionary filmmaker?
