Sunday, December 10, 2006

Follow up to 12/7 post

The blog post below was originally inspired as a response to this e-mail:

>> Social Security
>>
>> My Mom (per original sender) was a homemaker and dad worked all his
>> life and paid into SS, dad has passed away and now my Mom can barely
>> make ends meet. While the possible "illegal" alien in front of her
>> at the grocery store buys the name brands, my Mom goes for the
>> generic brands, and day old breads.
>>
>> She doesn't have out of state calling on her phone, because she
>> can't afford it and shops at the thrift shops and dollar stores
>> while the "illegal" aliens go to Mace's, Gap, J.C. Penny, Banana
>> Republic, etc.
>>
>> She considers having a pizza delivered once a week "eating out". She
>> grew up during the depression, watched her husband go overseas to
>> fight in WW II a year after their marriage, and then they went on to
>> raise, feed and clothe 5 children, scrounging to pay tuition for
>> parochial schools.
>>
>> I'm sorry, but I can't see how the Senate can justify this slap in
>> the face to born and bred, or naturalized citizens.
>>
>> It is already impossible to live on Social Security alone. If they
>> give benefits to "illegal" aliens who have never contributed, where
>> does that leave us that have paid into Social Security all our
>> working lives?
>>
>> The Senate voted this week to allow "illegal" alien access to Social
>> Security benefits. Attached is an opportunity to sign a petition
>> that requires citizenship for eligibility to receive Social
>> services. If you do not wish to sign the petition yourself, please
>> forward on to anyone you think might be interested.
>>
>> PETITION FOR: President Bush Mr. President: The petition below is a
>> protest against the recent vote of the senate which was to allow
>> illegal aliens access to our social security! We demand that you and
>> all congressional representatives require citizenship for anyone to
>> be eligible for social services in the United States.


My wife got this e-mail from her aunt and as far as we can tell it is in response to a bill in congress last June, mentioned in
this snopes article. The version she got also included a list of a little over 500 names of people from roughly a third or so of the states, and not all from the border states. This was my wife's initial response, which I post here, along with the original e-mail since some of the things I say below wouldn't make sense otherwise (and because she's wittier and pithier than I.)

I will not sign, because these are not real petitions (you have to have verifiable email accounts or addresses for the petition to work) but I will comment on my opinion on this issue. If this story is really true, am sorry for this woman's mother who is struggling to make ends meat. But it isn't a problem
with so called, "illegal aliens". There is a deeper problem here. Why is our minimum wage still so low($5.15)? Why do women still get paid 80% of what men get paid?


I believe that not only do we as citizens of the United States deserve what is rightfully ours, Social Security, we also deserve to treat each and every human being with decency. I know from having friends in this "category" that if there are people who live and work here in our country,
but are not counted as citizens because of a beaurocratic governmental system that prevents immigrants from getting a speedy citizenship(takes as long as 7-14 years for working immigrants), they deserve to recieve every benefit that I might receive IF there is still enough money in Social Security funds left after the debt our country has incurred because of our war on terror and tax breaks for the rich. Don't get me started on those two issues. But most of all, we are fortunate to be living in this country, that we even might get a social security check someday, and that we get to vote (even though roughly half of us take advantaget of this).

I will not go further. But if I did, it would be this: How many people really know the story about the person standing in line with them at Macy's? Even if you don't agree, thanks for reading.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

On Social Security and immigration

NOTE: update above on 12/10

I realize that most people won't read this, but I figure anyone who feels strongly enough to put their name on a petition might be interested enough in the issue to read a few more thoughts. I even tried to make them as entertaining as the story.

First of all, I agree with everything Jill has said here (except the stuff about Macy's--what a crap hole that place is, eh?) Like her I sympathize with this story, but there is more a vague whiff of racism and xenophobia about the whole thing. Which is understandable. I teach a class on Globalization and the section on migration is by far one of the most controversial. But in reading this story, I can't help but wonder how this old lady in line behind the "illegal" knew that this immigrant was illegal? I mean, did she ask her for her papers to verify if her ire was correctly placed or did she just assume that, because these folks have a different color of skin or have a different odor or way of dress that they were "illegal" immigrants. Could they not have been legal, in the country working on a visa or green card or naturalized citizens? I'm sure she has a lot of reasons to assume they are illegal, but let's just be clear, she's just assuming it.

So let's assume that all these wealthy immigrants are able to shop at fancy stores like Macy's. It would actually be a twisted sort of justice since, depending on the country they're from, they likely have relatives, friends or at the very least fellow (former) citizens who have gotten paid next to nothing to sew those clothes--which, incidentally, is why Macy's can afford to have those sales. Retail clothing stores like Macy's and JC Penny are the main reason all of our clothing production has shifted south of the border. They lobbied congress--against domestic US *AND* domestic Mexican clothing manufacturers--to be given all sorts of trade benefits in the NAFTA and CBI policies in the 1990s and then demanded that the clothing be so cheap to make (i.e. the people who made it be paid so little and worked so hard) that they wouldn't take a hit when they drop the price on that beautiful sweater you want. So if, by chance, someone made it up here from down there and they can afford the sweater, at least someone is getting ahead.

I'll address this hypothetical "illegal" alien at the supermarket by also speaking to the claim that there was a bill to give "illegal" aliens Social Security benefits they didn't pay for. Again, assuming this alien is illegal, meeting her in a supermarket--especially a new supermarket--would be an especially significant encounter--exactly in relation to the proposed SS benefit.

In 1996 Congress passed a comprehensive immigration law that some thought was tougher than any passed up to that point. For the most part it militarized the border beyond anything previously and made it tougher for immigrants to get into the country via the mythical nighttime border crossing (most of the people in the country--and in any western country--illegally simply overstay their visas, i.e. they get here legally, get work and then simply can't afford to take the time off of work to go through the increasingly arduous process of renewing their visa). On the flip side, this bill did fail to close the border across southern Arizona because they didn't think anyone would dare try making it across the Sonora desert into the US because the harsh conditions would likely kill them along the way. It didn' t stop all the immigration (see note above about visas) illegal or otherwise, but it did manage to create a growth industry for Mexican border coyotes (smugglers) who claimed to be able to help the less connected immigrants who couldn't get visas avoid the fate of the more than 1,000 immigrants who died in the desert from thirst and exhaustion.[1]

But enough about dead Mexicans: back to the important issue of social security. Oh wait I forgot, that bill I was talking about above, it had this one provision that wasn't for the immigrants really, but for the IRS and employers who rely on (illegal) immigrant labor. It established what's called the Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN [2]. This really doesn't do a whole lot for employers (though it helps them hire people without a valid SS#) and theoretically wouldn't help legal or illegal immigrants, except that it would allow them to pay taxes into the Social Security system and then get their tax refund (as all my international student friends--here legally--have to do for their stipend money), but technically they would never be eligible for the benefits they paid into. In other words, it was a way for illegals or other non-residents to pay taxes and still work here, legally or illegally, but would never let them get the benefits.

So why would they pay this money you ask? Well there are a lot of reasons [3] but in short there was some belief that there would be another opportunity for amnesty of non-residant immigrant workers and so immigrants were encouraged to pay into the system as a show of good faith that they were contributing. So they paid into the system. So much that one study of the Arizona economy found, just through tax contribution, not through our indirect bnefit from their cheap labor, Mexican immigrants contributed $318 million more than they received in any form of benefit. [4] The bill in question isn't asking whether they would ever get a credit for the benefits they paid in if they became citizens.

In other words, the bill wanted to make sure that they would get credit for none of the years they had worked and paid taxes because, although they were working and paying taxes, they were here illegally. I'm sure we can all understand that because the law always makes sense and we always follow it. In fact, we'd probably all agree to a law that said if you ever broke the law you'd be ineligible for some of yor social security benefits.

Oh right...the grocery store, the older lady, the immigrant...that older lady in the grocery store might be getting stiffed by this immigrant woman (though, again, even if she's illegal, she's not receiving benefits yet even though it's possible she paid for them), but we would all be appalled at the price of a head of lettuce if you had to pay for the growers to hire legal workers and pay them a mimimum wage. Just about everything in the store--especially in the fresh foods aisles--would also apply as would the store itself if it was built in the last ten years: as anyone who drives near I-30 in downtown Fort Worth knows, the guys who are getting picked up to build stuff aren't exactly as white and whimpy as me.

None of this is to say that we don't have an immigration problem or that the government hasn't been colluding with business to make sure nothing really big changes [5]. This is because if they actually enforced the xenophobic laws on the books, the contry would grind to a halt. On the other hand, if they made the kind of changes necessary, it would basically mean paying everyone a minimum wage--and then, likely, having to raise that wage again. While this would inarguably be a good thing, it would also make that head of lettuce or tomato about four times as much as it costs now, if not more.

Jill makes some very good points on the minimum wage, but I'd add that in this case illegal immigrants are, in part, one of the reasons that the minimum wage has been able to be held down. This is not just because is that there are still ways for employers to get around hiring legal workers--in fact, for the most part, the actual economic costs for comparable legal workers in terms of lost jobs aren't that significant. But the threat of illegal workers means there are pressures on the comparable force of workers to accept sub par wages. The focus on them by desparate Rebublican politicians mimics a long history of creating immigrant scares--first it was the Chinese...then the Germans...then the Irish...then the Polish...then the Italians...then the Japanese...now the rest of the people from Latin America, Africa and South Asia--always the claim is that, if you give labor rights to everyone, if you make it so that there isn't a legal underclass, then you might lose something: and besides aren't those immigrants dirty, scary, criminals, with loose morals, and big feet? You don't want them near your daughter do you? Better to deny yourself rights to a union or rights to a higher minimum wage: if you can't get it "they" can't get it. In fact, this is probably the biggest reason there wasn't a strong movement for socialism in the 19th century in America: "whites" refused to think of themselves as equal to the inferior races like African Americans and Chinese and the Irish. I have some nice articles about this, too, for anyone who's interested.

One last point about social security. Social Security isn't something that is just sitting there waiting for us. It is something that current workers pay into so that they can pay the benefits for the already retired workers. In other words, I'm paying for this older woman to get her benefits (and, likely, so is the immigrant woman she's so pissed at.) But here's the catch: though the Social Security system isn't in the kind of dire problem people want to make it out to be [6], in so far as it will be, it will be because we have less workers paying into the system than there are getting benefits. If this is so, immigration--and immigrants paying taxes--will be as essential to the social security system as they are to keeping our workforce complete. By this I mean that, the US, like most western, industrialized nations, doesn't have enough internal reproduction (ya know doin' it and having kids and stuff) in order to keep pace with the people who are retiring. As it stands, we have to have 250,000 people or more a year immigrate into the country just to keep the workforce at current levels. In other words, if that granny is upset about there being too many immigrants, she needs to go back to work.

The tax cuts for the rich are an even bigger scandal because they are calculated efforts by people within the neo-conservative movement to create a fiscal crisis in the US so that the government will be forced into spending cuts and (more costly) privatization schemes. One of the promonent proponents of this line of policy--called "starve the beast" [7]--is Grover Norquist who is famous for saying that he'd like to get the government down to the size where you could drown it in the bathtub [8]. A few people wondered if he had a laugh about that when New Orleans was suffering from its own lack of government funds. [9]

Okay. I'll be in enough trouble as it is for writing this. I'll go to bed now.

s


1] http://www.irc-online.org/us-mex/borderlines/2001/bl79/bl79deaths.html this is an early article on the problem and here is an interview that mentions the 1000 deaths number--that was back in June of 2001--only halfway between when the border was beefed up and today.

it's also worth noting on this point that militarizing the border further, whatever it's effect on inflow of immigrants, significantly affected their outflow. A study by a sociologist named Douglas Massey who has been looking at this for close to twenty years found that, before the 1996 act, migrant workers were much more likely to stay for a couple of years, make some money and then go home; but militarizing the border made it much more likely that, if they were able to make it here, but unable to gain or maintain legal status--which often means hiring a lawyer to handle a bunch of crap paperwork--they were more likely to stay here, even if separated from their family because they weren't sure if they'd be able to return. THe only articles I have about these studies require access through my school library but if you're interested in them, I can send them around. For a brief synopsis of his work, here is a podcast of a NYC radio show that Doug Massey was on in April. In it he discusses how his research has worked and what it proves. His interview is in the second half of the show, probably around the 30:00 mark.
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#060413


2] http://www.irs.gov/individuals/article/0,,id=96287,00.html
3] there are lots of stories like this one http://www.sptimes.com/2006/01/23/Northpinellas/Tax_IDs_give_illegals.shtml

4] "Based on the 2000 Census and the tax projections of the Mexicans in Arizona, the sales tax and federal income tax contributions from Mexican immigrants are approximately US$599 million for 2002. If we subtract the total burden costs of services for the Mexican immigrants of US$250 million and US$31 million of uncompensated health care costs of undocumented Mexicans, we still have fiscal surplus resources of US$318 million." http://www.ime.gob.mx/investigaciones/aportaciones/arizona.pdf

5] ONe article of many discussing how the Bush administration pulled the INS dog off of employers so they could get away with hiring more illiegals: in short "Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/18/AR2006061800613_pf.html

6] http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/SocialSecurityRevisited.html
7 ]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve-the-beast
8] http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010514/dreyfuss
9] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/21/18620/2000

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Adorno on the culture of administration

really from his essay on Culture and Administration in the Routledge collection The Culture Industry (it originally appeared in Telos in 1978 but I don't know if that's when it was written). I think it says a great deal about politics and culture in general. In a certain way, it is almost an argument in favor of marginality. On the other hand, it points to some of the problems with the model of democracy Fraser argues is the answer to Habermas' bourgeois :

Organizations of convenience [still trying to figure out what he means by this phrase] in an antagonistic society must necessarily pursue particular ends; they do this at the expense of the interests of other groups. Therefore obdurancy and reification necessarily result. If such organizations continue to occupy a subordinate position within which they were totally open and honest toward their membership and its direct desires, they would be incapable of any action. The more firmly integrated they are, the greater is their prospect for asserting themselves in relation to others. the advantage of totalitarian 'monolithic' nations over liberalist nations in power politics which can be internationally observed today is also applicable to the structure of organizations with a smaller format. Their external effictivity is a
function of their inner homogeneity, which in turn is dependent upon the so-called totality gaining primacy over individual interests, so that the organization is forced into independence by self-preservation: at the same time this establishment of independence leads to alienation from its purposes and from the people of whom it is composed. Finally - in order to be able to pursue its goals appropriately - it enters into a contradiction with them. (110)

And, of course, once your group is winning, the allegiance is less because of a common set of beliefs or founding goals: allegiance is mostly won because of the fact that the group is winning. Not that any of this is necessarily all that unique in terms of the points it is making (except that last little twist about getting into contradiciton with one's goals.) In fact, it is basically the argument of all movements once they become politically involved, all the way up to the nation itself, as he points out. Which leads me to wonder what can possibly be the ultimate goal of this struggle, in the end, other than pure dominance. I suppose it depends on the form of the struggle. If it is a war of words, then the dominance becomes "truth" but if it is a more conventional war than dominance means not only being right, but being stronger. But either victory can only be retained by defending some distinct difference between the "us" of the winning team and everyone else. This is much harder to do with ideological warfare because of the malleability of the meaning behind words and it's slippery grip on reality and therefore the action one takes in that reality. In the case of military dominance, the default is some form of racism or xenophobia as the securing mechanism. In either case, the dominance of a functional organizational unity may make it more likely to succeed in in a struggle, but the end result will rarely be that the opponents who faced each other can acknowledge their common humanity or rationality.

I've read many accounts of peace as being an oppressive state of being because everyone is, in some way, forced to accede to the wishes of everyone else. Most memorable of these for me is that of Robert Kaplan who says, in one of the essays collected in The Coming Anarchy,

The italian political theorist Gaetano Mosco noted in The Ruling Class (1939) that universal peace is something to be feared, because it could come about "only if all the civilized world were to belong to a single social type, to a single religion, and if there were to be an end to disagreements as to the ways in which social betterment can be attained....Even granting that such a world could be realized, it does not seem to us a desirable sort of world." OF course, there is often nothing worse than war and violent death. But a truism that bears repeating is that peace, as a primary goal, is dangerous because it implies that you will sacrifice any principle for the sake of it. A long period of peace in an advanced technological society like ours could lead to great evils, and the ideal of a world permanently at peace and governed benignly by a world organization is not an optimistic view of the future but a dark one. (169)

I can see his point here--and he makes some others I would write on if I had the opportunity. But the point I would make is that there is a big difference between having a complete lack of any type of social conflict and simply agreeing that killing each other might not solve anything.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Mandel on Market Socialism

Interesting section on markets and unpredictablity wrt auto production, near beginning of essay. I'd say this has a particular resonance based on the problems of US car manufacturers in the current moment andthe reasons given for their failures. Often the ailments of this industry are seen as being caused by excessive "entitlements" to employees (though these current commitments were basically a way of deferring commitments to higher wages earlier on so the implicit blaming of the employees for their own downfall is more than a bit unfair.)

It would seem, in this case, that one of the best things for the US car industry--especially when viewed in a global context--would have been for there to be far more regulation of environmental standards. Actually, just using the regulations on the books would have been enough, disallowing the light truck loophole that became the cash cow for Detroit over the last decade or so instead of shifting their focus to the more fuel efficient vehicles that would keep them more globally competative. On the other hand, I find it sort of strange that, after building such a good market, Honda (and to a certain exent Toyota) would re-double their efforts to challenging Detroit in the light truck/SUV market. In any event, they are doing this from a position of greater strength than US manufacturers, in large part because the Japanese govt forced them to make the changes that are now making them even more competative globally.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Couldry I

Couldry's book has some good points, but, like most accounts of early CS scholarship and the way forward, it often leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I agree in principle with the value of understanding people's reading habits, but it also seems to me to be something that is hardly worth the effort--except if you are a TV producer or advertiser. My feeling here is that in some ways the corporate controlled nature of the public sphere is such that, in some ways, it doesn't really matter what people read or pay attention to or how it means for them--or at least it doesn't matter in the way that Couldry says it does.

He seems to think that the goal of cultural studies is now to see what people are making of popular culture--and in this sense it is basically mass culture. Thus we should look at the mediascape (a term he borrows from someone who borrowed it from someone) and be well versed in its limits, but we cannot assume that these limits are determining. Of course, in what has now become a classic move in these arguments, the idea of determination has moved away from material and social practices into the individual consciousness (is this a neo-liberal fetish or some holdover of Marcuse, which arguably made the neo-liberal movement possible.) In this case, therefore, determination means the determination of meaning. Obviously this is something we could, in some ways, take for granted. "The Letter Doesn't always arrive" or whatever the Derridian analogy is.


Curiously, though he pays scant attention to Hall in the book in general (he seems to have read Johnson's essay on What is Cultural Studies and a few books by Williams and left the early CS stuff at that) he doesn't even mention the encoding/decoding model of reading a media object--and, more importantly, of discerning what could be called the hegemonic interpretation of events. More to the point here is the premise on which this encoding/decoding model rests, on which basically gets left to one side with Couldry (and just about anyone who goes on and on about the need to understand audience interpretations.) That is the rather trite point that these media messages are intended for a very wide audience so they, as a rule, have limited systems of signifiers and stories that they can employ to explain things. At the same time, they are also relying on the audience to do much of the work of interpretation. Even if it is relying on a fairly rudimentary kind of experience and cultural expertise, whether it is a TV sitcom, a music video, or an independant film, the text is hoping that many of the interpretive leaps and expectations will be made by the viewer. On the other hand, since it is arranged commercially, once you've seen the media object, it hardly matters to the major producer (the media corporation) what you think it means: you've paid your money, you've put in your time in front of the TV. If you enjoyed it, great: hope you come again. The only people whose meanings and interpretations really matter are the focus groups they show the films to in the editing process. Though there might be some concern with retention and with generating word of mouth around one of these cultural objects, this, again, matters less in terms of internal individual consciusness than it does with filling seats.

In fact, in so far as this process of interpretation and audiences making meaning is important at all, it is much more a process of acquiesing to a mass media system designed to deliver a identical product to an enormous national (and possibly international) audience. If I view this more from a political economy perspective, it is not because I have a cynical view of the average audience member. They participate in the culture--and there is a culture--because there are pressures to do so and it is far easier to participate in these rituals in some form than to simply reject them wholesale. So they watch the blockbuster film--and more importantly, they pay the admission or rental fee--and I am sure that they have enormous creative potential for interpreting what it means (and/or the pleasure of "getting" the cultural references, intertextuality, etc.) makes it possible for them to feel fulfilled after this experience. If I were to go through and ask a thousand people or a million people what they would say a movie meant, I'm sure I'd get very interesting answers and understanding how those negotiations take place would be beneficial to us all. But that is a very expensive endeavor which, as I mention above, movie studios have largely already done for me. If I really wanted to find out what audience members thought of the text, I'd sneak into Warner Brothers marketing department and find out what the focus groups said it meant.

But the reason I think the focus of cultural studies should be more materialist is that this kind of iaudience consciousness oriented nformation is basically only useful for a certain branch of literary studies or, perhaps, some form of ethnography. The real end result is that mass media producers are able to sell a product that uses stereotypical understandings of the world and still sell it to a large majority of people (either as a product they actually purchase or as a cultural object that is seen as valid and normal--such as when Saturday Night Live or the Simpsons do spoofs of major Hollywood productions). In this process, the product is valorized by the viewers and by the cultural circuit in general and, as we are finding out very quickly, any of the value produced in that process is meant to stay in the hands of the owners of it as a piece of intellectual property. This means not only that the contortions of interpretations people may or may not be forced into to identify with a mass cultural object, that the work they do when they go to the movies, is appropriated; that the range of public cultural references drawn upon in order to create that object are privatized; but also that future uses of that text, future actual reinterpretations and statements about the text in the form of remakes, spoofs or simply clips in critical documentaries (all of which are becoming much more technically feasible) must be cleared with the appropriators, a fee paid and limits placed on the kinds of uses that can be made of that cultural object.

In other words, I come back to the way that, whatever space for interpretation exists for the individual, it is not just constituted by these material and ideological forces, it is determined by them and, in many ways, the people who project this force profit from this work. And I haven't even begun talking about the ideological effects of not only this practice and the limits it places on expression, but of this practice in itself. Particularly in the case of news and political commentary, where the facts are less important than the general drift of the press and powerful avoidance strategies are reinforced so that audience members are encouraged to look for the mainstream interpretation, for some false sense of balance, instead of working too hard to discern something like the truth. A hegemonic sense of realism (in the poltiical science meaning) dominates this conversation, which leads to a dismissive attitude towards most critics as being naive or overly utopian, even when, as in the case of the latest war in Iraq, it was clearly the people in power who most clearly represent that accusation.

Couldry II

Getting nearer to the end of Couldry and I am even more disappointed than before. Here is a passage I thought was insightful:

Major institutions (such as the media) focus identities and reflexivity, but at the same time disaggregate people, making it difficult for them to identify with particular others. We need, paradoxically, to think more about the reverse side [???] of culture: the “cultures” and cultural encounters we do not have. That means, in turn, thinking seriously about the processes of naturalization which protect disorder, uncertainty, and unevenness from being articulated, from being visible. How is the sense of a coherent cultural ‘inside’ created and maintained?

Cultural studies—through its engagement with the realities of mediated culture, and its historic concern with the interconnections of culture and power—is well placed to contribute to these questions, provided it maintains the two-way accountability outlined here.

I’ll come back to this last caveat in a moment. First I’d like to say that, on the whole, I think this is a pretty important set of concerns. In fact, I’d say that they are really the kind of concerns that have occupied the major Cultural Studies theorists since the beginning. They are what separates CS from the isolated ethnographies of anthropology, psychological case studies, and network TV news human interest stories. Though CS surely has a focus on finding out how people navigate this terrain and, possibly helping them do this to an extent, it has never shied away from thinking about how cultures function. This has meant thinking about the mechanisms of their reproduction, especially at the point that these mechanisms have become industrialized and the goal of reproducing a particular kind of (consuming, disciplined, what have you) subject has become a multi-billion dollar industry, global in scale.

None of this is to deny the agency that people have to make meaning, the role that they play in this process. Couldry has a nice way of speaking to this. Earlier in this chapter, he paraphrases parts of Elsbeth Probyn’s argument in Sexing the Self—the parts he approves of—as being that, “Although the self can only come into being by working through a series of practices that are socially shared (and therefore transcend the individual), there is significant causal input from the self: the self is active in that process” (121). This is what Couldry means about us having a “two-way” accountability in our method. A fairly uncontroversial statement: throughout the book he insists on us understanding these institutions as being “limiting” rather than “determining” of the selves individuals are able to realize. Again, something that has been re-hashed and insisted upon in one way or another throughout the disciplinary debates over cultural studies.

Notably, the most obvious person for him to argue with here would have been Raymond Williams, who famously defined “determination” as “never only the setting of limits, it is also the application of pressures” [1977, p87] I think it very shoddy of Couldry to have overlooked (avoided? cowered from?) dealing with this line of reasoning, but I find it fairly indicative of the general drift of CS since Williams tried to reel it back in by declaring himself a Marxist, Hall decided to give up on all that in order to have it both ways in the USA, and everyone else involved in Cultural Studies became obsessed with identity. In fact, at this point, to even hint at the fact that these institutions have a serious efficacy on people’s psyche causes quite an uproar—especially when the argument shifts into the cosmopolitan gear of globalization speak, a register that Couldry spends a good deal of his study flirting with, yet mostly to deny that the political boundaries that still divide the populations of the world have too much of an effect on people’s “culture” because they can have lots of different ideas, even if they aren’t allowed to have them on both sides of the border.

Okay, I’m starting to get snarky. The disappointing, even disgusting, part of Couldry’s argument for me was that, like Richard Johnson (who, except for a couple of sections on Williams early books, seems to be the only early Cutlural Studies scholar that Couldry paid much attention to—and even then just the one essay that everyone has read) he is really more interested in the stuff that doesn’t make him sound like a crusty Marxist. The passage above is one of only a few moments when he articulates a real need to pay attention to the material—not just with the requisite lip service, but giving a real theoretical reason to do so: it helps us to get at the question “How is a coherent cultural ‘inside’ maintained?” I intentionally left off the page number of this quote because it depresses me. He provides a clear, articulate reason to consider the original question of Cultural Studies on page 130 of a 144 page book, having spent a total of 2 pages previous to this explaining the importance of political economy. Granted, he places this centrally in his original outline of what is necessary in Cultural Studies, but then he pretty much leaves it to one side.

If he were writing this in 1972, I could understand this. If he were arguing with the hardcore political economists in the British New Left (not that there were many) or trying to redirect the hangers on of the Frankfurt School away from this emphasis, I’d understand him spending the better part of his short book on explaining how important it is that we think about the individual, that we understand the issues of hearing their voices and considering the variety of perspectives people can have about a certain mass cultural object, despite the obvious dearth of options available. It would be a cheery ray of sunshine in what was otherwise a dark landscape of the “One-Dimensional Man.” But the fact of the matter is that, if Couldry wanted to outline a methodology of Cultural Studies, something which I agree with as an absolute necessity, the last thing he needs to convince its current adherents of is the importance of the individual over the institutional, of the reality of “cultural flows” over “cultural cohesion:” it’s what they live and breath. It’s the neo-liberal creed that they have absorbed fully into their ideology of cosmopolitan culture (I’ll get to this in a second.) In effect, he’s just another little star in a field that already has, to quote a popular adherent to a similar ideology/rhetorical strategy, “a thousand points of light.[1]

If this were all that Couldry did, I could simply dismiss him as being historically unaware, like he had gone to sleep before Thatcher took office and had just woken up in the 1990s, without a whole lot of time to absorb the mountains of pabulum that had been produced in the interim. I don’t mean to be dismissive here. Certainly there were changes that needed to be made in the original thinking of Cultural Studies scholars. But what disturbs me is that Couldry seems to know full well all the crtitiques of the early CS scholarship, but seems to have no idea what they were saying or, more importantly, what was being said directly before them. This is important because, although I don’t entirely agree with the trajectory CS has taken, almost all of it was charted from the very beginning, though now it is basically just drifting since it has thrown much of the original engine overboard (again, 3 pages out of 144).

Here, I am especially drawn to Couldry’s characterization of Williams idea of community, which he then tries to make evident in early Cultural Studies scholars like Hebdige and even Hall as having an approach which “depended on seeing cultural experience and expressions as systematic unities” (46). Here he chides these scholars for having a false sense of closure about cultures that they were studying and, predictably, brings up scholars like Garcia-Canclini who talk about “hybrid-culture” and quotes approvingly people who dismiss this early work as being ignorant of “the subjective aspects of the struggle.” Ok. Fine. I haven’t read all that has been written in these early years. And certainly there was an early emphasis on communities as the objects of analysis—particularly working class communities. Hence, as Viriginia Nightingale points out in her recounting of early audience studies Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real (you gotta love the equivocation in that title!), while [I’m paraphrasing here] the first studies began with the audience and looked at their cultural consumption patterns, the items they latched onto or the way that they felt about particular popular cultural products, later studies were constituted around the objects themselves from the beginning: the study became of fans of a certain product, viewers of Dallas, for instance. No doubt as these studies branched out, the question of where you draw the line of what an audience is, of what a community is becomes fuzzy. By focusing on fans, you cut through that kind of messiness because it all becomes about self-defined communities rather than ones that the analyst has to justify as being coherent.

But the fact of the matter is that, whatever perils early CS could be accused of falling victim to—insularity in its British conception of the Nation and that nations peculiar history of class relations; elisions around gender, race, sexuality, etc.—being overly focused on the smooth operation of cultures is far from an accurate charge. Couldry goes so far as to say that early CS, “leaves little space for thinking about culture in terms of the complexity, perhaps even the resistance, involved in individuals (apparent) accession to wider cultural forms” (48). This last statement floored me because I really can’t believe someone who is obviously so smart and careful as Couldry would think that this is truly the position that CS is in. Perhaps one can abstract their work, set alongside current work, almost thirty years hence, and say that they still weren’t focused enough on conflict within the social field, but from a historical perspective, it is frankly an inexcusably a-historical argument. I daresay it is shamelessly lacking in a cultural studies perspective.

Upon reading this statement, I scrambled for the index of the book. No…no mention there. Then the bibliography—surely there: nope. No the only mention of Talcott Parsons, the theorist that Hall says early Cultural Studies and sociology of conflict scholars were pitted against, is in a parenthetically comment, again, focused on the deficiencies of a thinking about cultures as closed:

This ‘holistic’ model of culture has been extremely influential: it crosses not only anthropology but also sociology (it was at the root of functionalist models of social integration, such as that of Talcott Parsons) and cultural studies, where its influence on Raymond Williams’ early account of culture as a way of life is obvious. (95)

So the only mention of Parsons in the book is to say that he had a model of culture similar to that of early CS. Maybe I missed something, but so far as I understand it, Cultural Studies, in so far as it “rediscovered ideology” in media studies and was related to the work of Becker on deviant and outsider culture, was directly attacking this dominant paradigm of “consensus focused” sociology. Parsons theory of social action basically says that any conflicts that arise are bound to work themselves out and a new consensus is arrived at which takes that into account. More importantly, he interprets the fact that people do certain things as being evidence that they believe in what they do—and, more importantly, they believe they are doing these things in a manner identical to the dominant understanding of what they do. These are the basic presumptions of Parsons. And, moreover, Parsons was committed to figuring out a “general theory” of social action which was less concerned—and basically uninterested—in what people actually believed. The latter was for the “administrative researchers” to worry with. Notably, the administrative researchers were the survey specialists, such as Lazarsfeld, who were able to prove empirically that people at the local level have influence over mass media messages (though mostly those dealing with soap or fashion), but they were working hard with the advertisers to make that connection more direct.

In any case, they were part of the machine that tried to help build the consensus that Parsons saw as naturally occurring and it was the collective work of these two arms of the sociological institutions of the post war period—founded in the US but exported to Britain and Western Europe along with the Marshall Plan—and which Cultural Studies was on the forefront of challenging as an intellectual doctrine of the way societies worked precisely by focusing on both the conflict that existed within what appeared to be the smooth functioning of society and the mechanisms which helped to determine that appearance of consensus. In other words, as Hall put it, the “break” with Parsons and the dominant paradigm of sociology and communication studies “occurred precisely at the point where theorists asked ‘but who produces consensus?’ ‘In what interests does it function?’ ‘On what conditions does it depend?’ Here, the media and other signifying institutions came back into question—no longer as institutions which merely reflected and sustained consensus, but as institutions which helped produce consensus and which manufactured consent.” (86) Perhaps Williams wasn’t as well versed in the dominant paradigm of communications and sociological research (it could be excused since he was a literature professor, but his later books prove otherwise) and hence unwittingly reproduced it. In any case, to characterize CS as failing to account for this seems at best ignorant and at worst intellectually dishonest. I know these are tall accusations coming from someone only studying for their PhD, but I don’t know how else to characterize Couldry’s account.

It does, on the other hand, make current CS work, seem much more enlightened. And, when he gets to the part where he is making those final recommendations, wrapping it all up, it does feel so much better to be able to talk about how important it is to understand “common culture” according to the wisdom of Donna Haraway (or, presumably, the students from whom she cribbed most of the essay he draws on) who emphasizes that “common culture” does not mean closure around any one specific located “culture” but rather an aspiration towards dialogue and exchange across difference.” (135) It’s so warm and fuzzy—and with none of those closed cultures those people in the 1970s thought existed: what was up with that anyway? Oh, just one question: if there aren’t closed cultures, if there aren’t similar experiences or structures that bind people in some way, what is the meaning of “difference?” Where does this come from? How can we speak to each other across difference if we’re all just awash in the same cultural flow? As we listen to each voice and hear each individuals articulation of their experience, how do we deal with those perspectives that find immigration the greatest threat their culture? That feel homosexuality is hurting the culture of heterosexual marriage? That argue Islamic extremists are driven by a culture and religion of violence (they can’t do anything peacefully) or by a jealous rage over “our freedoms?” It seems to me that Cultural Studies is in a fantastic position to begin to unravel some of this propaganda, and honoring these individual perspectives is a place to start, but ultimately the real work will be done in taking on those big questions of power rather than being minutely concerned with the variety of interpretations people could have of the last hit movies. I’m getting tired. Hopefully I can pick this up again. Key point I want to make is that, while we’d like to have this cosmopolitan culture, it’s not everybody’s bag and, if we’re really going to respect folks, we’ve got to come up with an answer to that issue (limit of tolerance is intolerance, i.e. I’ll tolerate everything but intolerance, that I can’t tolerate—I think George Will formulated that gem at one time, not that I quote it approvingly). But the fact of the matter is that there are cultures, as ways of life, that do eventually manage to establish some sense of stability and order. Is our position the same as Tyler Cowen, that these getting transformed or destroyed is just part of the process of creation? Or is it more along the lines of Polanyi (Karl)? I realize the reactionary kernel in the latter, but I also think that there is something to be said for the way that capitalism, in particular, is fairly adept at making this sort of destruction of systems of meaning seem uncontroversial, just another kind of progress, anyone in the way is a luddite, but adopting this position seems rather unrigorous and doesn’t open the possibility that, as many critics of development have pointed out, the forces of progress might eliminate some good alternatives that could be more creatively combined or adopted, were it not for the overwhelming force of the powers of enlightenment. Here Escobar seems key, but any number of others would do.



[1] Maybe a bit unfair as a comparison, but it felt right rhetorically. Obviously I’m really talking about the conventionality of his argument rather than his being necessarily analogous to this Conventional phrase—delivered by Bush Sr.’s at the Republican National Convention of 1988, in the New Orleans, LA Superdome, where, 17 years later, his son would also be committed to the philosophy that the president “must see to it that government intrudes as little as possible in the lives of the people.” That is totally an aside—but such a rich one.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

On the US troops picture responding to the controversy over Kerry's remarks



Using your hard won moral authority to discredit any attempt at opposition to the architects of the above situation and poke fun at a dufus politician who couldn't make a joke unless it came with detailed instructions:

Priceless

or

Jeez why aren't these troops working: we aren't paying $195 million a day for them to goof off.


PS: Don't forget to vote for the status quo next tuesday; it'd be a shame if any balance was restored to the checks on power or anything ever changed...except of course for defining marriage: that's the really important stuff. Every morning I wake up worried that my marriage will be ruined by gays who cohabitate and want civil rights. Luckily Viginia is trying to clear this up and make us safe again. I'll sleep much better then. Speaking of that, I think it's time for bed. Wake me up when the Enlightenment begins again.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Derrida on his photo being taken--and a lot of reflections on authorship and IPR

I'll paraphrase (though it feels wrong to do so for someone who puts so much stock in the precision of his phrases) from the extra features on the DVD for the movie /Derrida/. He is asked why he forbade public photos of himself. He says that he felt the writing that he had been doing, the ideas he had been mediating, was focused on destroying the idea of the author as the locus of creativity. He felt that the photographic conventions of the time--which would usually include the author in a head shot or pictured in a library of some kind--reified this notion of the author and thus tried to restrict the publication of photos of himself. (He also confesses a personal "narcissitic anxiety" about seeing his image.) In any case, he never really stopped having this interdiction, but after a public appearance (in 1969, at some sort of conference on the state of philosophy which, at the time, was meant to be a political intervention of sorts) he realized it was impossible to control his image, or to enforce this rule, so he became more passive.

I don't know what I have to say about this, but I find it odd that this wasn't in the main text of the film since it seems rather relevant to it.

UPDATE
I watched the deleted scenes and this was actually included in one of the early versions of the opening credits. Some of the other deleted scenes--and even some of the clips used in conjunction with this one in the deleted opening--made it back into the film at other points, so the question still remains, but it is even more interesting to me that the filmmakers thought this was so central but ultimately left it out completely. I'm sure there was some aesthetic choice here--or theoretical--but it reminds me of the way many filmmakers end up cutting what they feel to be some of the most important or touching scenes of a film because it ultimately doesn't work. Though they are the ones making this judgement (in conjunction with their colleagues) it is perhaps poignant that this circumstance is represented in a film whose subject meditates on just this question of authorship. This question, it seems, is even more relevant to the question of the auteur of film than to the author of a written text, but perhaps this is just an assumption--one which the film of Derrida helps us to think about in the text.

The common discussion in this subject is that the text itself is not determined by the author, but exists in a sort of vibrating conversation between author and text and text and reader. This has often been extended to discuss the decentered subject as well, such that the authorial voice is always fragmented in itself. But this moment of editing that I note in the film points to another aspect, which I confess could be meditated on for hundreds of pages by these theorists and I'd be none the wiser since I have participated in this transaction with their works only a few times. Basically, it is this process of editing in time wherein the message one wants to protray, even the idea of truth that one has, changes from day to day. Certainly once the text is out there, in the world, one can't change it (except of course in blogging, where it becomes nearly impossible for earlier versions to not vanish down the memory hole) but it can be changed through the process of its interpretation. But even the text itself is, in my experience, a series of fragments pasted together by a series of authors who are also a series of critics of the earlier authorial iterations. (of course this is the kind of navel gazing that I completely despise even when I find it intriguing.) I suppose this is obvious to people who do the archival kinds of research on authors texts to see the earlier deleted versions--and one could say that it is the latter practice that makes the practice of having the deleted scenes and behind the scenes featurettes on DVDs sensible, that it is a form of making this kind of critical review possible for the average viewer.

I think I am talking about something more than this, however, in that even these point to a coherent authentic author--separated in time perhaps from these earlier versions, but, in the final cut, making a choice of what will be put in the final version. The deleted scenes are then justified, after the fact, from the perspective of this authorial voice (on the DVD in the form of director commentary) even if the individual speaking for that authorial voice doesn't necessarily agree with the choice or the justification. On the other hand, this isn't entirely true and is, perhaps, what I am getting at. We often hear this kind of disagreement such as when these filmmakers lament that a scene couldn't be included, but even though it was a choice they made, themselves, at a point in time (whether we consider them coherent, transhistorical subjects or not) the compulsion for this choice is often given to an outside entitity: an abstract notion of the aesthetic flow of the film; a higher ethic of how to represent the character or situation; a political decision for what the ultimate message should be; or even the disagreement among the filmmakers about the final document produced.

But though the filmmakers (or authors) might feel these outside compulsions, it is they themselves who are ultimately mediating them, interpreting them, screening them onto the film or text. And whatever we may say about the coherence of either the author or the text in philosophical terms, one must admit that, on some level, there is a text that is produced and which circulates: ultimately there must be someone who can take responsibility for this text, in legalistic terms. This is really the area that I am most concerned to reflect on, and in particular, the way that the notion of copyright or other forms of intellectual property also include the notion of responsibility alongside the already considered discussion of ownership.

On the latter topic, and in an almost absolute tangent, the first thought that comes to mind is the notion of taking hold of this ownership precisely to take the object out of circulation, such that the responsibility of the owner is both erased and is of erasure: in other words, that the owner (not, in this case, the author) has no responsibility for the effect of the property except for the responsibility of erasing its existence (or at least its legal circulation). This is most feared in the US context (perhaps overzealously) in terms of freedom of speech: once this kind of exclusive right is granted, can it be used to stifle not only present speech or the speech of the author by the author, but of past forms of speech which would be valuable to the public sphere and the present discussions going on within it. And certainly the possibility exists. But on the other hand, the fact that this happens in an era of almost complete mechanical and digital reproducability makes this less of a material concern and more of an ethical/political concern with how to legitimate the copy (or, more importantly, the information contained within it.) So, to go back to the case of the possibility of digital texts being altered or erased, one of the key tools used in making this less possible is the "screenshot," whereby the user takes an image of the hypertext page so that an unaltered copy exists. However, since it is a digital copy, and can be altered at will, the question will not be if one has a copy (though this will be important) but whether this image of the page ever existed or is in fact a falsified production motivated by some other agenda, a kind of black propaganda which can do little more than raise doubts.

Of course this is spilling over into the notion of how digital technology has little way of authorizing an original (a problem that seems to undermine my earlier statement that there has to be a coherent text created at some point. Obviously, I'm still thinking this through.) The problem that this poses for the public sphere is real, but it is one that the intellectual property owner is as concerned with since the depend upon the notion of a unique object in order to justify its sale--and to secure that, as it circulates, the value of that product flows back to the individual corporate owner. Dirivitive copies (which, I'll note here Coombe relies upon without a clear notion of there being an original) not only represent a loss in sales, but, in so far as they don't control the circulation, if a dirivitive copy enters circulation in the guise of an original, it alters the public perception of the original.

The latter problem is something I've witnessed first hand in the legal offices of Dickies. According to Dad, who works there, the concern there, while certainly with the actual lost sales, is also with the potential of further lost sales: if someone buys a cheap knockoff of substandard quality with the impression that they have bought an original pair of Dickies pants, their understanding of the brand is altered: they think that Dickies makes crappy pants. Thus, as I understand it, for the consumer who buys the knockoff and sends it in with a complaint about quality, the company will often supply them with an original in hopes that they will remain loyal. From this perspective, I can see the importance for both the consumer and the producer, that there be some form of responsibility for and method of authenticating the original product. On the other hand, the other thing that this office does is to police trademark infringement, again which I can see some reason for from the perspective of the original producer if the infringement is seen as an unsavory one; but on the other hand, it is something that is almost impossible to control and, in any case, is part of a cultural process wherein the fact of infringement is actually a sign of popularity and acceptance which can be of benefit to the brand identity (a point also made by Coombe and, incidentally, by the author of the book on Brand Hijacking, though Coombe makes the further point that the other author seems content to ignore, which is that, whatever the positive or negative connotations and values that get attached here, there is ultimately a corporate owner of this brand).

But both of these concerns are less a cause for stronger intellectual property rights than their result. For example, in either case of trademark infringement (where a knockoff product is sold under the corporate logo or when the corporate logo is altered in an unauthorized manner) it is unlikely that the average consumer will actually mistake the object for an original. Likewise, people who buy knockoff CDs or DVDs are unlikely to go to the copyright owner to complain or to think that any lack of quality is the result or fault of the legal owner. This is, for most cases, even more of a non-problem if the practice of infringement becomes widespread. In fact, it becomes much more of a problem for the consumer than the producer--a possibility that is highlighted in the corporate produced anxiety about re-importing prescription drugs from Canada (a practice which really should have the Canadians more upset than us since, as I understand it, the cheaper prices aren't because of the sale of generic or unauthorized knockoffs of the pills but because they are subsidized by the Canadian govt.) The idea that the clear property rights of the corporate owner are also the only form of responsiblity that they hold to the consumer is written into this anxiety (though I suppose it would be important to understand what the legal ramifications of this are: I often think it is a lot of extra work for the IPR owner to police these things, and that they would be better off if they just left it alone and concentrated on working in the context of widespread illicit duplication. But I am sure there is some provision in the law that makes them responsible for this police action, if only in an ideological fashion which would make it obvious that customers should channel their transactions through official formal channels rather than the unguarded informal channels where these illicit materials could possibly proliferate.

In these cases, the problem of the legitimate, authorized edition of the text, the pants, the pill, seems to make the strengthening of IPR important for both consumer and producer. But in the cases I was hinting at above--where the legal fact of these rights removes the object from legitimate circulation--the problems produced for the consumer (and for the non-economic citizen, subject, human, etc.) by these rights is much more dire. It is a possibility that, even in the age of digital reproduction, that it could have this effect in the areas of culture mentioned by most US critics, specifically the mass media. Most recently, this possibility was considered in terms of orphan works (where rights are unclear so films or media remain unpreserved for future generations) or works like "Eyes on the Prize" where the clearance for this becomes prohibitively expensive and thus the legal circulation is threatened. I experience this often on my searches in Amazon, where the fact of there having been a clear original text is of little value to me or the author since I can't obtain it: it's gone out of print and no one has renewed the copyright or reissued it. Thus I have to rely on the used versions, which I don't mind all that much, but it certainly belies the idea that clear property rights and a large mass market help to facilitate niche markets. When I have to pay through the nose for a used copy of a book that could be profitably published for much less by an enterprising press, the material foundations of this virtual market come back to the fore and the limits of clear almost perpetual property rights are revealed. In some ways I can understand it as the material requirements of printing a book are probably much larger. But the same thing happens with CDs which are no longer available.

I find this completely ridiculous and think it the ultimate argument against the notion that the free market relies on and functions best with strong property rights. This is even more the case for properties that would obviously have a market, but it is often the defense given of trading systems like the early Napster. Though these obviously traded in viable properties that are also avialable from the publishers, it is often claimed by the people who used these services the most, that much of the content traded, while it often had very clear property rights, was no longer available through a legal means.

In thinking about trading circles like this from a social perspective it also makes sense that this is the direction in which these kinds of circles would have developed. Though the record industry wants to make it seem like they have an infinite number of properties circulating which are all equally valuable, this is never the case. They are very focused on the moment and, though there are obviously exceptions and niche markets from which they try to mop up a few more profits, they are mainly focused on having the "next big thing" which also means that they have as limited an attention span as their ideal consumer. They produce a great deal of products in limited runs and concentrate on a few properties with the greatest potential for a strong performance. Even this isn't guaranteed, but it is predictable within a range that, for instance, a recent record by Janet Jackson or Brittany (sp?) Spears will sell well. After that limited moment, there is less belief in the existence of effective demand. The possibility that important cultural objects will simply disappear from the legal marketplace is even greater as the existing media conglomerates are basically piecemeal affairs, wherein the legal rights to huge swathes of properties are the result of mergers and buyouts and the legal corporate owner (in so far as this can be referred to with a singular subject) has absolutely no idea what they own, literally and more figuratively in terms of what exists as a potential market for a product. Thus the possibility that there is a significant, if not enormous, range of products these conglomerates own which are completely out of print and unavailable in any form--even works produced after the advent of digital technology, is completely logical.

If we add to this possibility the social economy of the music connoisseur the claims of Napster’s major users seem completely believable, even if they are legally inadmissible. For to be a true music fan it is necessary to not like what is popular at the current moment, or at the very least, to prove an awareness of a range of material that is somehow outside of the mainstream. Surely Napster and forums like this traded in these kinds of properties, but this activity was likely only a fraction of the infractions being committed. In so far as it was a community of music fans, the point would be to make available works that not everyone had heard or that weren't widely known or available through legal channels. In this case, part of what made it work was the process of valorization within the community which would make it most socially advantageous to offer up access to some of the most inaccessible of texts (both in the commercial and aesthetic senses). Thus the social process of legitimation for the traders would be based on who could produce (in the sense of the finding or making available of an existing text) these marginal texts. However, since it was technically free, there was both less risk involved for the potential tradee and more of a possibility that the advice would be taken. I can afford the very small risk of downloading the possibly marginally good song or album because all it is costing me is time. And because of this, I am more likely to hear more things and judge which of the critics I agree with the most in terms of their argument of quality. Thus, not only am I not having to simply take your advice about what you say is good, but, as if we were sitting in your home and you were offering up the song to me as something I might enjoy, I am taking little risk in listening, I don't have to pay you anything for this. As certain members became more likely to produce marginal texts which I enjoy and which we all agree are of good quality, a new economy of cultural legitimation emerges out of the fact that I am able to have that experience of sitting with the trendy friend whom I feel has outstanding taste in formerly inaccessible music or movies, but I am able to engage with those texts on my own and, potentially, to share them with others hoping that I will garner that social cache of the music connoisseur for others. To reiterate, many of these properties being traded, simply because of their marginal status, are likely of little profitable value for their corporate owners, evidenced by the lack of marketing dollars put towards creating the cultural value for a legally available property or, in some cases, the lack of the property's existence at all in the legal marketplace.

That this shows Napster (in its pre-trial iteration) represents a clear case of Market failure (i.e. where there could be potential demand for a wide range of products no longer legally available) is only half the story, and that it makes it more likely that the attempt by record companies to make a legal version of this will also remain unprofitable and never be able to match the popularity or cultural relevance of the illicit version. This has to do with the assumption that one can take this process of the social production of value and simply add commodification to it in order to create a profit. But since much of the value of this depended, for the consumer, on there not being the risk involved in spending money on something that s/he ultimately didn’t like. Also, in so far as it was possible to trade in works that were technically unofficial in any way—such as music one made in the garage or mash-ups and mixes of popular songs—a whole range of possibilities is removed for not only the social economy of distribution, but for the potential producer who must now still traffic in a separate channel. (I’ll admit here that I haven’t explored the new Napster enough and this second point may be irrelevant if it is still possible to upload your own works for free through the network. However, judging from the fact that this would require an almost impossible kind of policing in order to prevent possible infringement, I doubt it is an option.)
Thus it points to the impossible correlation of the actual desires of the corporate owner of intellectual property and the actual social network of cultural legitimation. In many ways, what it does—though far from completely—is to begin to reverse some of the trend Habermas notes in the Structural Transformation, namely, the transformation of the ideal subject of the public sphere being one of the consumer of culture rather than the producer of individual arguments and works. Though the Frankfurt School put most of their emphasis on the role of production, and many political economy of communication people tend to agree, the fact of the dominance of the industrial production of culture is hardly the source of the problem—or, if it was, it is hardly the problem any longer. It is mostly the monopoly of distribution networks that helped to catapult the corporations with proprietary access to these networks into the role of the gatekeepers of culture. And once they owned these, or were given government sanctioned monopoly licenses and, often, subsidies, it wasn’t all that important what they distributed and, in fact, they had a motivation to produce as generic and easily reproducible product as possible in order to ensure that the ownership of these networks produced the greatest possible profit (necessarily at the least cost.) The argument that this also produces the possibility of niche markets may be somewhat correct, but, like most of the possible benefits of the monopoly version of the US free market, this is largely an externality. For even though the possibility of gaining massive profits from a few blockbusters frees up some resources for taking some risks on the niche, the resources allowed for this will always be very limited and, almost by definition, the system will depend on this remaining only a niche. And, either way, this monopoly, industrial system of production and distribution makes it certain that the consumer finds the niche product in as great a proportion as the system itself finds it to be risky.

This reminds me of a comment made by Jeff Tweedy in the “Who Owns Culture” session he had with Lawrence Lessig and (I think) Steven Johnson. Tweedy said that the corporate control over intellectual property was predicated on them preventing us from knowing how bad the mainstream products are.

57:00 Tweedy: “I don’t think it is ironic at all that we are sitting in a library talking about this because it a library was a new concept, being developed today, you would lose everything in this library except for the books that were in print to sell. [in other words you could only have access to materials that were available on the market.] And that’s basically what these laws are trying to do and that’s, I think the collateral damage you’re talking about, [. . . ] To get rid of the peer-to-peer sites would mean to get rid of access to tons and tons of material that most people can’t get to. That is devastating to culture. And, also, it’s kind of asking artists to do something that’s impossible.” {here there is an extended and very quotable section on the process of culture as building on the past and—to come back to the point at the beginning on authorship—the point that Tweedy made often, which was that art is the process that happens between the artist }

Note from that recording: Lessig says 6th circuit appeals says you can’t sample even a millisecond of music @ 42:00

@1:18 Lessig: The United States has used its power to push extremely rigid IP laws on the rest of the world and they, for this reason and a hundred others, are beginning to feel an anger against us that I don’t think we can imagine disappearing in the next 28 years [not sure why this is the length of time but I think it has to do with the most recent extension of copyright protection which Lessig was discussing earlier in the program.] The Brazilian government describes the problem of proprietary software in this way: they say, [paraphrasing, but I’ll put in quote since it will make it more grammatically legible] “The United States says that we pirate over US$1 billion in intellectual property every year and we complain because we send over US$1 billion in licensing fees for proprietary software that we use. So we think it is a bad deal all the way around and our solution is to use free software. There won’t be piracy anymore since we’ll be using free software…
Finally the point I was getting to, Tweedy answering a question about distributing the band’s music via the web: “We’d rather have people hear our music: that’s the whole point. The whole point in making music is to have someone hear it. And I’d rather have someone hear it and decide they don’t like it than decide they can’t afford it. I think this brings up a good point. I think one of the reasons it doesn’t happen more often is because there’s lots of great music out there and there’s lots of bad music and I think a lot of the industry is really afraid of you figuring that out.” At about 1:24


On the other hand, the removal of these objects from circulation (an idea I was trying very hard to make in this, but which I’ve obviously missed completely here) is even direr in the possible appropriation of previously free forms of culture in one of its first meanings: that of the cultivation in the ground. Namely, this is the fear that the possibility of patenting the genetic material of seeds will make it possible for corporate agricultural owners to lock down the use of these materials. Of course even this fear is overblown by the mere fact that it is almost impossible to imagine the kind of state apparatus necessary to enforce such a ludicrous form of property rights, but the idea that it could be possible isn’t encouraging. I’ve rambled on enough for one afternoon.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Economist magazine to potential subscribers: "never lose your place in the world"

The catchy phrase comes to me on an Economist advertisement on a bookmark included in a recent shipment from Amazon. Thus the pun/analogy is supposed to be that, like a bookmark, which keeps you from losing your place in the book, The Economist keeps you from losing your place in terms of understanding what is going on in the world. In terms of the homology between these terms, the pun is meant to be about orienting yourself within a given space (that of the book or of the news of the world). Still, I find it sort of telling that they use this phrase because it also has multiple other meanings in this context, primarily because it is obviously focused on a certain clientele.

I am sure that the reporting done by the Economist is very good. And I am sure, in terms of the global coverage, it is much better than a popular weekly newsmagazine like Newsweek or Time. But the cost of a subscription to the Economist is far above any of these, on par with some minor academic journals. (Newsstand cost is US$254.49 and the discount of 61% makes the magazine about $100 a year.) But it is still basically just a news magazine, just focused towards people who have more of a concern with international politics, economics, trade and finance than with the basic news peppered with occasional celebrity profile or info-mercials about the must have products of the season.

Thus when I see the phrase, "Never lose your place in the world" I can't help but think of it in political/ideological terms as well. In this way, the Economist is basically just he messenger to the global upper middle class, delivering a warning/reminder that one's place (and the larger space of one's class) is never completely secure, that it must be renewed constantly. This is an important signifier, therefore, of the signified of the class conflict on a global scale and, in particular, of the especially important ideological component, of which the Economist is positioned as a key resource. Not only is it important and good to keep one's place (and the general order of places) but reading the Economist, with its neo-liberal economic, Political Realist, common sense is one practise that will help you shore this up for yourself on a weekly basis. For that, $100 seems like small potatoes (assuming of course that you already have plenty of potatoes to eat and aren't counting on using the burlap from the sack to cloth your children or provide some kind of shelter.)

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Iraq war dead: 655,000

Washington Post - October 11, 2006

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000
By David Brown

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet.



The most disgusting thing about this study is that the war's supporters will not be willing to acknowledge its findings. It will be a biased study or it will include too many deaths caused by insurgents or it will be something that Saddam brought on them: none of it will be admitted as our responsiblity in anything but the most glowing of terms. On the other hand, even the senators and congresspeople who claim we need to get out are disingenous since we've already built one of our largest bases on the planet there. No, the 655,000 will be many times that when we are done with Iraq. And I don't think they'll be a whole lot better off. Maybe the fairies of freedom and democracy are just standing by to sprinkle their magic dust and make it all better.

On the other hand, the economic policies we're imposing alongside the military campiagn will likely gut whatever domestic middle class there was and this will leave little social buffer between a new, repressive central regime (likely of Islamicist bent) and rest of the coutnry, newly terrorized into submission. In other words, we'll have definitely created regime change, but not in the direction the moronic neo-cons throught we would. I have plenty of bad things to say about people who feel there are clearly defined, definite paths to economic and political development, but I'm beginning to think that people who think it just happens spontaneously are even more dangerous--particularly when they are handed the joystick of a hegemon and given free reign.

Infuriating and sad.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Guatemala's T&R commission and elephant in the room


Exhuming the Past In a Painful QuestGuatemalan Victims' Families Seek Closure, Justice

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post
Foreign Service
Thursday, September 28, 2006; A01

NEBAJ, Guatemala -- A decade after the conclusion of the long civil war that ravaged this Central American nation, Guatemalans are literally trying to dig up their past. Spurred by a surge of requests from victims' families this year, dozens of forensic anthropologists have been fanning out across the countryside to search for remains of the 200,000 people -- most of them Mayan Indian civilians -- who were killed or abducted during the 36-year conflict. Many were massacred by military forces and dumped into mass graves. Others were buried hurriedly in unmarked, secret locations by relatives anxious to avoid rampaging troops. About 40,000 victims simply disappeared after being seized by government operatives.

[snip]

But the slaughter reached its peak in the early 1980s, when the military launched a scorched-earth campaign through the countryside to eliminate any potential support for the guerrillas from the long-oppressed Mayan Indians. Hundreds of villages were burned, livestock destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed.


[Golly, this sounds real bad. I wonder who would have supported such horrible activities? Oh yeah, now I remember. Too bad the author couldn't remember. Here's a few gems from the NYT from the first few years of the 1980s, just for the sake of posterity, and, of course, to notice parallels to current events:

January 30, 1984,
Section A; Page 1, Column 1;
Foreign Desk


U.S. AGREES TO SELL HELICOPTER PARTS TO GUATEMALANS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 The Reagan Administration has agreed to sell Guatemala $2 million worth of spare parts for its aging fleet of United States-made military helicopters, the State Department said today. It would be the first official sale of military equipment to Guatemala since 1977, when the military Government refused assistance after the Carter Administration strongly criticized it for human rights abuses.

.....

The New York Times
September 18, 1983,
Section 4; Page 2, Column 1

Getting Tough With Congress on Central America

BYLINE: By Henry Giniger and Mill Freudenheim

If the United States fails to achieve peace and democracy in Central America, it will be largely the fault of Congress.

[Sounds familiar: how'd that work out? continuing...]

So contended a ''fed- up'' Reagan Administration last week as it appeared to drop its efforts at persuasion and geared to battle for the appropriations to support military and covert operations the Administration says are essential to American aims. As delivered by Under Secretary of Defense Fred C. Ikle, the fighting words to Congress also sounded to Democrats like preparation for the Republican election campaign next year.

.......


The New York Times
August 3, 1983,
Section A; Page 23, Column 5;
Editorial Desk

REAGAN'S PATH TO WAR

By John B. Oakes; John Oakes is former Senior Editor of The New York Times.

Unless he is stopped by Congress - and only Congress and the force of public opinion can stop him - Ronald Reagan could plunge this country into the most unwanted, unconscionable, unnecessary and unwinnable war in its history, not excepting Vietnam. Mr. Reagan sees ''the trouble'' in Central America as coming ''from outside the area,'' as ''revolution exported from the Soviet Union and Cuba' [definitely heard that before]' His response is to dispatch huge naval and air armadas to the waters off the Nicaraguan coasts and thousands of American troops to the ranchlands and jungles of neighboring Honduras.


.......

The New York Times
June 13, 1983,
Section A; Page 10

SPECIAL ENVOY PRAISES GUATEMALA

GUATEMALA, President Reagan's special envoy to Central America, Richard B. Stone, today praised ''positive changes'' in the Guatemalan military Government of President Efrain Rios Montt. Mr. Stone told reporters at the airport here that his 24-hour visit to Guatemala had been ''the most productive'' stop on his 10-nation mission to assess peace possibilities in the region. He then left for a brief stop in Belize before going on to Mexico for the final visit of his tour. Relations between the United States and Guatemala have been strengthened under the Reagan Administration, which ended a six-year embargo on arms sales and military aid imposed by the Carter Administration because of the Government's alleged human rights violations. Mr. Reagan has praised President Rios Montt as ''a man of great personal integrity.'' General Rios Montt seized power in a coup in March 1982 and imposed a state of siege.


[Rios Montt was one hell of a brutal dictator (see CSM below): but he was our son of a bitch.]

.......

The New York Times
January 8, 1983,
Saturday, Section 1; Page 1, Column 1;
Foreign Desk

U.S. LIFTS EMBARGO ON MILITARY SALES TO GUATEMALANS

By BERNARD GWERTZMAN, Special to the New York Times

The Reagan Administration today lifted the five-year-old embargo on arms sales to Guatemala because of what it said were ''significant steps'' taken by the Government to end human rights abuses. The State Department announcement allows Guatemala to buy from the Defense Department $6.3 million worth of spare parts and other equipment for its air force, mostly to rehabilitate American-made helicopters for use against guerrillas. The move, while small in military terms, was viewed by the Administration and its critics as an important symbolic step signifying support for the Government of Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, who overthrew Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia and seized power last March.

[nothing like selling arms to a dictator to further the cause of democracy: way to go US State Department!]
.....

Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA)

January 6, 1983,
Thursday, Opinion and Commentary; Pg. 23

Guatemala's 'bum rap'?


BYLINE: By Corinne B. Johnson; Corinne B. Johnson of the American Friends Service Committee was a member of a four-person team of inquiry, organized by the National Council of Churches of Christ, in Guatemala Nov. 7-12.

In the wake of his brief visit with President Rios Montt of Guatemala, Ronald Reagan has concluded that Guatemala has gotten a ''bum rap'' on its human rights performance. The United States President has a responsibility to certify to the Congress that there are not ''gross and consistent'' violations of human rights in any country to receive military assistance. Based on his comment and on human rights reports by the State Department, it appears that the President will certify Guatemala as free of gross and consistent violations and recommend arms aid and military training.

As recently as November Joseph Moran, of the North Carolina State Conference of Churches, and I went to Santa Anita las Canoas, a village of the municipality of San Martin Jilotepeque, Chimaltenango, Guatemala, to investigate a report of violence against civilians. We met an army patrol ordered there by radio. In conversation, the captain in charge said that things had been calm in the area for three to four months, and he summoned a villager to verify his statement. The villager first reiterated the captain's view; after further discussion he told us in detail of events on Oct. 18, three weeks earlier.

On that day, an army unit had required the village residents - men, women, and children - to assemble in the chapel. The unit brought in hooded informers who identified 18 village men as guerrilla collaborators; an army captain came and ordered the 18 executed. They were killed that evening in the chapel yard and their bodies buried in a cornfield just below. As this story was told, the army captain stood silent, his head bowed. We were stunned, by the story itself and that it had been told in the presence of army personnel.

Our team of inquiry was organized in response to an invitation from President Rios Montt to visit to see the human rights situation for ourselves. We held more than 40 interviews with individuals and groups in Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. The story of Santa Anita may have been the most dramatic that we heard, but it was not exceptional, and it and many others led us to conclude that the government and army of Guatemala are indeed engaged in gross and consistent violations of human rights, especially in rural areas, especially against indigenous people.

In the face of these findings, it is disturbing to realize that the US Embassy describes the human rights situation in Guatemala as improved, without gross and consistent violations. A church team, known to be traveling with a presidential invitation and with army credentials, in Guatemala for only five days, was able to gather substantial information concerning violations by the army. The State Department has numerous staff in the country on a permanent basis but does little independent investigating. The question arises whether human rights information is gathered to assist policy formulation, or whether policy considerations shape the human rights ''information'' gathered by State Department personnel.

Perhaps Congress should make specific appropriations to insure independent, objective investigation. The present system of human rights reporting from Guatemala is worse than nothing; many more innocent people will suffer death and injury if the ''information'' produced by this system is used to justify increased arms shipments or military training for the Guatemalan Army.


.....

NYT, December 5, 1982,
Sunday, Late City Final Edition

Section 4; Page 1, Column 3

LATIN REALITY INTRUDES ON REAGAN'S DREAM OF UNITY

BYLINE: By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

AN PEDRO SULA, Honduras IT was to have been a relatively uneventful trip a simple chance for President Reagan to travel to Latin America to preach his familiar gospel of democracy, vigilance and free enterprise. But well before it was over, Mr. Reagan's 11,000-mile journey became a lesson in what President Belisario Betancur of Colombia called ''the reality of the continent as it really is.''

The ''reality'' appeared mostly as a pervasive determination by less developed countries in the hemisphere to maintain a view of the world independent of that of the United States. Mr. Reagan's first trip to the third world thus marked a significant chapter in his Presidency. It was a test of whether he and his aides were ready to learn the lessons of the region's complexity, and a test of the marketability of the Reagan message and personality in not always welcome settings.


[snip]


From the time of his Presidential campaign in 1980, Mr. Reagan has spoken of his ''dream'' of a unified Western Hemisphere tapping its natural resources and growing economically by relying on free trade and free enterprise. But the worldwide recession has at least deferred that dream by throwing the hemisphere into its most severe economic crisis in a generation.
Throughout the region, countries are being strangled by high interest rates and the drop in export prices for coffee, sugar and other commodities. Mr. Reagan's recent emergency package of $350 million in aid under the Caribbean Basin Initiative, for example, did little more than bring Costa Rica, El Salvador and other countries back from the brink of bankruptcy. In his weekly radio address to the American people yesterday, the President said final passage this year of the Caribbean legislation was ''a top priority.'' Mr. Reagan and his aides seem to realize that the whole area is vulnerable and unstable.

Strains between the United States and Latin America were aggravated this year by the Falkland war.

[snip]

Inevitably, Mr. Reagan's visit to Central America underscored the difficulties facing him. A meeting late yesterday with Gen. Efrain Rios Montt of Guatemala, for example, had to be scheduled at the airport here because Costa Rica did not want him in San Jose. While the Administration considers the sale of helicopter and communications equipment to Guatemala because of its feeling that the human rights situation is improving, reports grow of massacres of Indian peasants. Meanwhile, in a surprise statement, Mr. Reagan told reporters that he was prepared to seek a renewal of aid to El Salvador because of the improvement in the human rights situation there. His comment came only a month after Ambassador Dean R. Hinton threatened to cut off aid unless more action on human rights was taken. Administration officials maintain that progress has been achieved in more areas than just human rights -land reform, control of the military and the holding of elections, for instance. But Mr. Reagan's gestures in favor of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were bound to distress those who feel that the United States could do more to encourage genuine reconciliation.

A trip intended to sound a call for democracy and independence took on toward the end a somewhat ambiguous note. Because of increased clandestine activity of the Central Intelligence Agency in that country - which the President refused to confirm - there are reports that the United States is behind a covert effort to topple the leftist Government in Nicaragua. The risk in the Presidential visit seemed to be that the United States might emerge identified more than ever with violence, and not with the economic progress Mr. Reagan seeks.