Skip to main content

"Face the facts...existence hurts existence in the famine asylum"

My favorite quote from this week is from "The Great Moving Nowhere Show:"
"In Fact, it's impossible to know how radical and innovative a concrete proposal is until you know which strategy it is attempting to put in place and the criteria against which its 'radicalism' is being assesed."
Like a few of the posts I've read so far for this week, I see obvious parallels between Hall's assessment of post-Thatcher, Blairite, "Third Way" neoliberalism and the current state of affairs here on the other side of the pond. I think it's interesting that (at least ca. 1998) Hall was so confronted by existing social problems that he considered it necessary to "broker a new relationship between markets and the public good." I suppose that's the voice of a pragmatist who had been watching the British Left struggle for over fifty years at that point. That said, even in 1998, I was beginning to see the cracks in the neoliberal agenda, both in theory (what truly was the moral/ethical base of those that fashioned themselves "liberals" when their champions were a serial sexual harasser in Clinton and a Religious Right stealth plant in Al Gore) and in practice (the "third way democrat" need to appeal to corporate greed, made manifest through truly evil people like Joe Lieberman and Joe Biden, paving the way for the Patriot Act's surveillance state, the Affordable Care Act's windfall of public money to private insurers, and the Democratic National Committee's manipulation of media contacts to make sure billions of free media attention was given to someone too stupid to be a fascist with any sense of nuance). My first question for the week: Are we part of a Fukuyama-esque linear endpoint to society and culture? Are the 'great moves' analyzed by Hall--Right, Nowhere--inevitable, as every effort to push the Global North to the left, politely or otherwise, is met with resistance at every turn? I continue to be amused by Hall's method of delivery--he's a master of conveying sarcasm and cynicism without the benefit of tone-of-voice or facial expression. His caustic (borrowed) description of the 1955 British General Election in "The new Conservatism and the Old" gets me, because it seems to sum up every ostensible "democracy" in the Global North since at the very least WWII: "the result would depend on how many working-class [voters], looking into their mirrors, saw middle-class faces." I guess my second question ties to the first: Is any revolution that occurs within the paradigmatic framework of a capitalist society doomed to forever be 'limited'?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Journals and Prose

My two questions from this week have emerged from the Judith Butler piece, A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back , both centered around the journal, Philosophy and Literature —which Butler describes as the self-proclaimed “arbiter of good prose.”  I agree with Butler’s staunch defense of questioning common sense and provoking “new ways of looking at a familiar world”, and was reminded of David Harvey’s quote in the introduction to his Companion to Marx’s Capital : “Real learning always entails a struggle to understand the unknown.”   Butler describes Philosophy and Literature as a “culturally conservative academic journal” which naturally led me down a longer-than-anticipated visit to the journal's website . I was greeted with a video presented by the Philosophy and Literature’s editor Garry L. Hagberg, who rails against the “jargon infested” work that litters the journal’s field, locating Philosophy and Literature in clear opposition to such bothersome clutter.  However, Hagberg...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 6 Discussion Qs

 Hall brings up the concept of interpellation as applied to social formations. (p 335) How is interpellation related to articulation? How are the two different, if at all? Must the two be discussed together? I have more difficulty conceptualizing interpellation than I do articulation. If we are to take up Hall's warning not to study racism as a set of "historically specific racisms" (336) nor as something with a "universal structure" (337). What balance can we strike today between these two approaches in our current historical moment? Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has written that certain forms of modern racism have been impacted by the prevalent ideology of "colorblindness." Are we still in this moment or are new specificities arising?
Post a Comment
Read more

Corrine's Op Ed

       Although the Grammy’s “rebranded” their “urban” music award in 2020 after being taken to task by Tyler, the Creator for using the term to cover all black artists, regardless of their chosen genre, its lingering presence can still be felt in the new “Progressive R&B” award that has taken its place. Where Tyler, the Creator and other artists argued for more diverse genres that allow for broader categorizations for “people who look like [him],” the Grammy’s simply tucked one category into the other, reflecting how “urban” and R&B are both intrinsically linked and coded to the Grammy’s board as “black music.” This neat folding away of urban back into R&B seems to be unhelpful at best and reductive at worst, and has serious repercussions for us all, artist or otherwise: the pigeonholing of black art/ ists into essentialized categories allows for only a few forms of blackness to be legitimated through the Grammy system, but it also reflects the rigid bo...
Post a Comment
Read more