gpe3

Sunday, 06 February 2005

original here

The conceptual force of Frank’s argument is in the way he both broadens and narrows the scope of his study. He feels the weight of his argument is in looking at the “world system as a whole.” Other world systems theorists, it seems, have taken the current dominant system—where the North/West is the “core” of capitalist production—and simply started their story about the world system from the origins of the development of that system. This requires a narrow view of history and of the world system itself, so that the focus is on Europe and its colonies until these become dominant in the world system itself and then Asia becomes significant.

From the “Perspective on the World” told from a Eurocentric perspective, this makes some logical sense: the global system is noteworthy when one is able to participate in it and before that time, the world market is a tabula rasa. Frank wants to make it clear that he is broadening the focus to look at Asia from well before “European Hegemony” and that what he finds is “Asian hegemony”—and one which extents well into the period usually reserved for the power of the West (he says 1800 is when the change is mostly complete.)

I can’t judge the validity of his evidence, but what is amazing to me is that in many ways it doesn’t challenge the dominant narrative in the way that one expects. That narrative could be completely true from the perspective of Europe. It is for this reason that his story doesn’t really challenge the totality of western social theory, even if it does throw it off center and give it much to account for. In many ways it just makes it look silly and provincial. How can you not realize that there is a bustling world of trade of which you only have a tiny slice? And yet, it makes complete sense that they didn’t. Frank uses the analogy of the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp “because that’s where the light is.” This is a perfect way to argue for how broadening the focus was something that always would have led us to this understanding, this global perspective, but, like dopes, we just kept looking in the same place. I can’t prove any of his analysis is correct, but I’m sure some of it is and, knowing how easy it is to make a stupid mistake—even for 200 years—I can believe it doesn’t take much to displace the center of the European narrative since it was always already centered on Europe.

But even as He widens the focus, he narrows it. For instead of considering political economy, or culture, or even society, Frank is almost solely concerned with the objects of “economics” in its most technical, monetarist mode. The data he chooses to prove his point is the kind of argument that Chicago School folks would make. Chapter 2 is on trade ratios; chapter 3 is on silver and other forms of “money” and the monetary systems that existed. Chapter 4 is about the differences in productivity, population growth, GDP growth, etc. He is so economistic that he derides others for thinking about economics in terms of “mode of production” and so focused on macro-structural causality that he sees the social formations that are formed in each country—including the mode of production—as nothing more than the likely effect of that country or regions position within the world “economic” (i.e. not capitalist) system.

I find this to be disingenuous. Despite his throwaway dismissal of anyone who tries to ask him to consider culture or society (mostly in the introduction chapter), I don’t think this is something so easily dismissed. Frank wants to say that not only has it been wrong to think of, for instance, enlightenment rationality or the capitalist mode of production, as being something that is entirely internally generated within Europe, but it is only correct to think of it as entirely a response to external pressures, i.e. that “all societies are shaped by their common participation in a single world economy” (26). Okay, fair enough. Then why are their so many variations in societies and cultures? Why are their differences between them? Why did certain countries on the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia decide to begin colonizing countries around the globe?

Though Frank addresses these in some part, he usually only does so, again, in terms of economics. For instance, on p. 54, he argues—with supporting quotes from other scholars—that part of the reason for the countries of Europe roaming around the globe, taking advantage of cheap labor and trying to find specie or other resources is to compete with and participate in the Asian dominated economy. Even if there is some sort of ideological support that could be discussed, some homegrown rationale of what they are doing, Frank, despite his holistic approach, is wholly uninterested.

Dussel, on the other hand…

gpe2

Saturday, 29 January 2005

Peter-

I am about halfway through the Frank and have a copy of the Abu-Lughod at the GMu Library I'm picking up tonight. I will give some more summative comments once I've had a chance to look over both but my sense is that the only thing Frank sees himself disagreeing with her on is the idea that there is a lapse between the "Fall of Asia" and the "Rise of Europe." He wants to prove that the world system has been in effect at least since the thirteenth century and that Asia was the most powerful force in the world system up until the beginning of the nineteenth century. This stuff may be old hat to you, but it's kind of blowing my mind. I still have problems with it (which I will write about soon) but I am really impressed with what his argument has done to my thinking about global relations and world history. Despite my years of thinking--knowing even--that "the orient" got short shrift, it is obviously something that has never really adjusted my conception of the world. it is an argument I am trying to digest as fully and quickly as possible so that I can integrate it into my teaching NOW--the course is supposed to take into account "Western Civilization" and "Global Perspective" and I feel confident that the syllabus does niether of these things according to Frank's understanding.

Below are a few initial comments I wrote after the first couple of chapters. I will post again soon with more comprehensive comments.

-s

Frank, A. G. (1998). ReOrient : global economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Intro/Chapter 1:

Frank has a few distinct points he is trying to drive home with the book

1. He wants to further advance the World System understanding of global political economic development/history. I am not familiar with this paradigm, but it is a structural theory which attributes most every local development to some connection to a global structure. Cultural and ideological issues seem to be irrelevant.

1a. Even world systems theorists have failed to make their analysis broad or deep (that is by space or time) enough to include the entire globe or the entire history of the world system. This means that even they have an incomplete understanding of the system as a whole.

2. Cultural and ideological issues are relevant only in so far as they show the way that previous analysts—including world historians, social theorists, economic historians, etc.—have been mostly blinded by Eurocentrism in their examination of the history of the world. They have failed to broaden their understanding of the economic and social development of the world to include more than Europe and America.

2a. Frank sees the lapses of these earlier analysts to be of a cultural an ideological nature in two ways. One is that they were ideologically influenced by the dominant Eurocentric view of the world that prevailed during the mid-nineteenth century when many of the foundational texts were written. The other is that they were mostly concerned with the ideological and cultural factors of this process. He cites Weber and those who came after him as being importantly wrong about what determined western development (i.e. it was really its structural position within the world system rather than its “rational” cultural products).

3. Because of the two above points, we need

-a new paradigm with a global perspective of world history

-all new social theory since all the past social theory.

Frank is not interested in soft-selling these theories. He advances them with much confidence, leaving you with little doubt that it is the most significant work of history in history. He doesn’t equivocate very often in his narrative about the superiority of his theory, trying to make clear what is at stake on the many different fronts he sees himself attacking.

I am unable to judge the validity of his claims about world history. But I did notice how much I bristled at the notion that, 1) Europe wasn’t the engine for the development of the last 500 years; 2) that this is an overblown development that only became significant in the 1800s. And because I don’t know much about this time period, and know the great history of the ideological narrative of the supremacy of the West, I am willing to believe that his evidence proves this to be the case—or at least challenges an internalist view of development that would place more of the engine within Europe rather than between every corner of the globe.

What I am less willing to concede is that this “discovery” disproves all of Western Social theory as well. This is as much because I don’t trust most totalizing theories as it is a response to his own defense of this totalizing theory. In summary, the last section of the first chapter tries to answer many of his critics before the fact. One of his defenses is that he is simply trying to shift the paradigm of thought and that he can’t possibly know all of the empirical evidence for the entire world for the entire history of the world (39). He asks people not to make “nitpicking objections” to the almost complete absence of primary sources. Yet he skewers western social theory as a whole for not understanding the “facts” of the global world system—the facts which he tells us have only recently been uncovered.

In other words, through some careful slippage, he wants to make his heterodox challenge to a variety of fields because they “have no foundation in historical reality” (15) based on his own weakly empirical theory. I am willing to consider his argument about the place of the non-European world and about the reality of a “world system” in general, but I think he will need more than 350 pages to prove to me that this challenge debunks all of western sociology and political economy. If he manages to prove the first, I have no doubt that it will require a significant re-thinking of many of these theories, but chunking them altogether seems a bit premature.

gpe1

Friday, 28 January 2005

this is the blog I am starting for a directed reading with Peter Mandaville as a portion of my field of global political economy. we are reading a variety of texts, most of which are related in one way or another to International relations (IR) theory--whether as part of the mainstream of that discipline or as heterodoxical challenges from within or without. We have succinctly (and tenatively) titled it "Globalization and IR" as the idea of "globalization" has been the greatest recent challenge to the staid state-based realism of IR. At least that's the way I'm understanding it. What do I know--I just started the Directed Reading.

I am looking forward to it. Here is a first draft of the map of our approach to the face of the cliff we will be scaling (so many prepositions!)

Possible Syllabus:

Week 1: (Alt soc history; world systems theory)

Frank, A. G. (1998). Re-Orient : global economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Week 2 (Alt soc history; world systems theory; Regulationist economics):

Arrighi, G. (1994). The long twentieth century : money, power, and the origins of our times. London ; New York, Verso.

Week 3:

Scholte, J. A. (1993). International relations of social change. Buckingham, Open University

Week 4:

Escobar, A. (1994). Encountering development : the making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press.

Week 5:

Walker, R. B. J. (1993). Inside/outside : international relations as political theory. Cambridge [England] ; New York, Cambridge University Press.

Week 6:

Gill, S. (1993). Gramsci, historical materialism and international relations. Cambridge ; New York, Cambridge University Press

Week 7:

Fukayama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man.

Huntington, S. P. (1997). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York, Simon & Schuster.

Week 9 (skip week for spring break, after that):

Rosenberg, J. (1994). The empire of civil society : a critique of the realist theory of international relations. London; New York, Verso.

Neufeld, M. A. (1995). The restructuring of international relations theory. New York, N.Y, Cambridge University Press.

Gilpin, R. (2001). Global political economy : understanding the international economic order. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press.

Week 10

Sylvester, C. (1999). "Development studies and postcolonial studies: disparate tales of the 'Third World'." Third World Quarterly 20(4): 703 - 721.

Sen, A. K. (1999). Development as freedom. New York, Knopf

Week 11

Sassen, S. (2001). The global city : New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press.

______. (2002). Global networks, linked cities. New York, Routledge.

Week 12

Badie, B. (2000). The imported state: the westernization of the political order. Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press.

Week 13

Rupert, M. (2000). Ideologies of globalization : contending visions of a new world order. London ; New York, Routledge.

______. (2000). The follies of globalisation theory : polemical essays. London ; New York, Verso.

Week 14

Inayatullah, N. and D. L. Blaney (2004). International relations and the problem of difference. New York, Routledge.

Rosenberg, J. “Globalization Theory: A Post-Mortem.” (Forthcoming)

Week 15

Cowen, T. (2002). Creative destruction : how globalization is changing the world's cultures. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

García Canclini, N. (2001). Consumers and citizens : globalization and multicultural conflicts. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

present thoughts on the dissertation

This is my thinking on the topic of the dissertation. First off, I am sure it is either overly ambitious or redundant and contrived or both. But at this point, I think there are interesting questions to explore around the concept of culturally produced value or the question of what part does culture play in producing value.

Normally the question is considered from a more ideological inflection: what is the role that Culture plays in producing values. This is not an irrelevant question for my project, but it is a secondary one simply because it has been focused on for too long. And because it is actually probably secondary in the actual process I want to consider.

The idea of labor producing value is roundly discredited now--or at least the idea that all value is produced by labor. This is because free market notions of "circulatory" notions of value production have taken hold of even the most critical scholar's reflections on the question. Further, most cultural critics have, at least since the mid-1980s basically accepted neo-liberal explanations of material life and focused more on the possibilities of cultural forms of resistance or rearticulation. Hence the need to refocus the question, especially in light of the process of global sourcing and, as I will argue, with the emergence of intellectual property rights as a tool of the imperial elite.

Doug Henwood offers a sound skull thumping to people who propose the production of immaterial value in chapter one of After The New Economy. I heard something similar from Paul when I presented a portion of this argument at the MLG. But I should first start out by saying that I don't presume that the value is created by culture, but, as Henwood points out in his book,

"it is very expensive to create a brand [. . .] those expenses increase the urgency of cutting manufacturing costs to a minimum, which mainly means puching wages down to dime an hour. The vast gap between direct manufacturing costs of maybe a dollar or two a shoe [for Nikes] and the final selling price [of $100] goes to ad agencies and celebrity endorsers." This is basically the upshot of the account given by Jane Collins in her book Threads of Liz Claiborne--only they start their businiess roughly at the moment when this transition is taking place. The other thing, which Henwood doesn't mention here, but is implicit in his argument, is that the process of outsourcing also usually means that the company doesn't own many of its own factories. Thus if there are labor or political troubles, they can simply move on. On the other hand, the cultural side, which is where more of the investment is made, is claimed as property and defended. This, too, is the product of labor, obviously labor that is problematically overvalued. More on this in a moment. Henwood goes on to say that,

"from the point of view of the consumer, the $100 premium, say, over the price of a modest unbranded shoe is money that could have been spent on other goods or services. it seems like a massive waste of money, but any believer in freedom of religion wouldn't want to gainsay the spiritual experience of purchasing and wearing cleverly branded footwear"(19)

It goes without saying that the money spent on marketing and advertising is a premium that is spent on some labor at the expense of other and that, from the point of view of the worker, the real producers of the value (in so far as the shoe is used for walking, running and other forms of physical activity and this is, principally, where it's value resides) are not at all rewarded for the product they produce.

Here I would add an observation made about products like movies and other more traditionally "cultural" objects of media and the arts. Namely, that these objects are priced so that some small percentage of the total is able to allow the company to recoup the total investment because the market for the "blockbuster" is notoriously hard to predict. As more of the value for these products has been clouded by cultural and social productions, it has become a more precarious marketplace, such that the latest product isn't guaranteed to produce returns. I am sure that there is some way the overseeing corporation, in this case Nike, tries to also overprice the individual shoes in order to make up the bulk of its profits from a portion of the products. These overpriced items, like the price of a theatre box office tickets, can be explained in terms of cultural or social capital: the pressure to see the film now instead of waiting for the video is similar to the pressure to buy the shoes when they are first released rather than waiting for the sale or the clearance rack. Owning or possessing the knowledge about these products is said to pay off in some other way.

Nevertheless, this quasi-religious consumerism, an intriguing process for cultural critics, is only made possible by various forms of labor exploitation. And in both cases, the monopoly on the market which ensures their ability to exploit the truly productive labor (more in the case of the shoes than movies) and to restrict competition from other producers (in both) is now being buffered by the concept of intellectual property rights. Further, it is the very precariousness of the market which belies the very idea of intellectual property rights.

Most market research (at least from the effects school or Lazarsfeld) shows that advertising works best (for products not news) when the message of the advertiser is reinforced by someone in the community you trust. The whole idea of diffusion theory is based on this conception of the communication process. These theories are often critiqued for being ethnocentric or one sided, but the fact is that there is evidence to back it up. They work with this model and, for the most part it works. It doesn't work every time to deliver the message, but when the message is delivered, it often works this way. Celebrities, of course, have come to stand in for community leaders in some cases, but even then I think effects research would show that it is the work of the community in getting products accepted that really produces the desired effect.

In other words, the labor of producing commercial culture does not ensure that it will have the desired effect and the only way either the brand or the product are ever "bought" by consumers is through their integration into people's daily lives. Smythe would argue that this is a form of labor...

ipod...XXX

So I was scanning the recent torrents on The Pirate Bay and I came across something that makes absolutely no sense to me: clips from porn movies in mp4 format so that you can play them in your ipod. It should be said, for the sake of memory, that it was only a week or so ago that I heard about the possibility of playing movie files on an iPod. This is not to say that it wasn't already possible or people weren't already doing it--it I wasn't feeling lazy, I'd go figure out when this reached its tipping point.

But now it has definitely tumbled over. On the site I find files for TDS, they used to feature some smaller versions encoded in .ogm. As of two or three days ago, they dropped that format and have started using the mp4, specifically noting that it is now possible to play video in the iPod. I am very pleased to hear this, of course, and am even more excited about the possibility of owning one of these fantastic machines. Still it is amazing how fast something like this catches on. I don't think that everyone can play video files in the iPod--unless they have one of the newer ones--so it really isn't a matter of people rising to meet demand. It is, most likely, an edgy hacker thing: they now know what is cool and it doesn't matter if anyone is actually using the product as advertised. It is the kind of mutually consecrating act of social legitimacy: it makes the programmers look edgy while legitimating the use of this new file type. In the past, people would have been opposed to using it on some level; they would have talked about reduced quality or some such thing. But the iPod has now knighted the mp4: to argue with it would make you look like a luddite.

I would argue that this is why people are now offering porn for your iPod--or at least in a format you could play in an iPod if you owned one. I mean why one earth would anyone walk around watching porn? The file type switch doesn't offer any reason; it doesn't say "now you can spank it anywhere you want!" it just assumes that it makes sense. Well, I don't think it does.

and here is another stain on the record of modernity

we've failed again: the genocide in Darfur is drawing to a close, but only because there aren't any more black people to kill. The first thing I wonder is how many marches I could have gone to or how many more calls I could have placed on their behalf how much more consciousness raising I could have done and if any of it would have made a difference. The sad truth is that it probably wouldn't have, but don't I still have blood on my hands for not trying? I guess this time the genocide wasn't carried out by the forces of modernity (directly anyway) so Aime Cesaere's critique doesn't fit as directly, but it is still a bloody shame we stood by again and did next to nothing. I suppose I should read Zizek's newest article "against human rights" to see just how he can say this. Though I see the way this liberal cry has been manipulated in Iraq, there seems to be something behind it to preserve.

public sphere watch: iraq's constitution

iraqi blogger Riverbend raises some very important issues for the possibilities of the development of a true public sphere developing in Iraq. Here I mean the concern for a genuine public sphere emerging in Iraq and the discussion of the constitution taking place in that context. For this to happen, according to Habermas (whom she doesn't quote or even refer to, but it is still the ideal described in his writing) two requirements would need to be met. The first is that everyone would be free to take part in this process. This is something that the media has been focusing on in particular because, for the most part, in this country, we fetishize this requirement at the expense of the second: that the discussion process take place in the context of a rational critical dialogue.

The second requirement for Habermas is a bit hazy and, ironically, a bit authoritarian. After all, it is fairly straightforward to measure who is allowed to vote or to find out who is being included in the process. But if you are trying to make a rational critical dialogue a restriction, well you are not only limiting a wide variety of possible expressions, but you are assuming that the concepts of rational and critical are transparent and universal, niether of which, as many post-structuralist critics of Habermas point out, can ever be the case.

But that is definitely not the reason that we don't focus on that aspect as much. After all, we know that this rational critical dialogue is possible because we experience it on a daily basis. It is the way our government and media function, right? So the only thing we've ever had to really worry about is who gets to vote. After all, that is the only problem we've ever had with our system: for a few dozen decades or so, we made sure a bunch of people weren't allowed to enter the polling center. But now that problem is fixed and our democracy functions just fine so it makes sense to measure it in these terms. This is also, on the other hand, the most obvious way to limit the public sphere--by literally disenfranchising people based on some legal restriction, be it land ownership, a poll tax, a gender qualification, etc. These limits are now widely seen as an ananthema to democracy. In fact, they are seen, for the most part as the only limit to democracy: so long as everyone is allowed to vote, the public sphere works fine.

The other advantage of this is that it places the problem of democracy's malfunction squarely on the individual. The Iraqi people have all been given ample time to evaluate the constitution. They have had copies made available to them in Arabic and have had the time to discuss it. When the election occurs, it won't matter whether most of them are voting without ever having read it or understood it. It won't matter that, as Riverbend tells it

most of the people who do want to vote, will vote for or against the constitution based not on personal convictions, but on the fatwas and urgings of both Sunni and Shia clerics. The Association of Muslim Scholars is encouraging people to vote against it, and SCIRI and Da’awa are declaring a vote for the constitution every Muslim’s duty.

It will simply matter that they have voted: kneel pray and you will believe. I say this not out of pity or contempt or shaking my head at their inability to do this right, but noticing that this is probably not all that different than the process through which our own constitution was ratified. The only difference is that now we have social scientists and pollsters who will tell us just how many of the people need to vote for it to be a legitimate vote, just how open the process needs for people to feel that democracy has happened.

People in Iraq have voted before, though I am not all that familiar with just how skewed those elections were (since Saddam won something like 99% it doesn't seem likely that the public sphere was actually in effect.) Still, this whole process reminds me of the wooing of a tramatized woman who has been abused her whole life, but who has always heard of the wonders of lovemaking when there is love involved. In comes her latest "suiter" to tell her that this is what love feels like, this is what it feels like when I make love to you, baby...He thinks he's got her fooled, he may even be fooling himself, but deep down, she knows he's fucking her like all the others, only this time when she tries to kick him out, he'll try to make her look like the crazy one: bitch, you never had it so good--that was love, don't you know what love feels like?

I know it's quite offensive to posit Iraq as the female in this equation. It reifies the weakness of women (though she does eventually kick him out) and reactiviates years of feminizing "the Other." But this definitely seems to be the way that democracy works. Like Mattalart and, as I discovered, Innis discuss in relation to communication and communication technology; as the muckrakers of the early twentieth century discovered, to quote the introduction to Innis' Bias of Communication

The essential tension in his work was this: that the initial result of newspapers, telegraph, and radio gave primary producers such as trappers, fishermen, farmers, access to market information, providing advantages in dealing with middlemen; however, in the long term these new media helped draw even the remotest harvester into the sphere of larger systems. What at one level provided human agents with information and a means of negotiation, bypassing barriers or inspiring alternative actions, at another level helped explain how metropolitan centres, nation-states, empires, and civilizations all use media to reproduce their influence, establishing cultural as well as economic monopolies over time and space. (xx)

or, in the words of Jack White:

The Nurse should not be the one who
Puts salt in your wounds
But it's always with trust that the posion
Is fed with a spoon

someday I'll add the mattelart and ewan quotes: they are both in the field statement and it's time for bed.

Basically, however, this is the tension that is alive in the conflict between the values of the enlightenment and of liberal modernity and the real forms of oppression that they can inflict, or, in the words of the Frankfurt School, the dialectic of enlightenment.

NOTE: it is worth noting that all of these theorists, even as they critique these values as being double edged, eventually come back to using them in order to back up their arguments. This is where I think, despite the problem of Anthony Giddens' proposition that the Consequences of Modernity lead us not to a rejection of those values but to expand them even further. Despite even the most vociferous Marxist or Post-Structuralist or Post-Modernist critique of this proposition--and there are probably plenty of those critiques that I would eventually agree with if argued well--it would be difficult to prove that they did not in some way rest on the foundations of modernity or even ask for its extension. That was certainly what Marx thought would happen and critiques of logocentrism are, unfortunately, usually based on a certain logic. I am probably screwing up all of these arguments irretrivably, but I really am tired.

Bill Bennett on race, poverty and eugenics

Bennett's remarks are obviously racist, but he is probably referring to the NYT bestseller _Freakonomics_ where the authors argue that, controlling for all other factors, the ability of women to decide if they want a child was important in reducing the number of unwanted children whom, they argue, are children more likely to commit crimes. So legalizing abortion is, according to them, the single factor that can explain the reduction of crime rates in the 1990s USA. (Notice that the very popular book's title isn't mentioned in the story nor is its author who has appeared on talk shows to explain his ideas for months.)

If the hypothesis is at all plausible (or even remotely provable) it would be a very good argument for the pro-choice movement to bring up (and maybe they have) in relation to the discussion about the general well-being of society. This is a slippery slope, though, b/c one of their arguments for keeping abortion legal is that making it illegal would limit the possibilities for women who have limited means to be able to get them safely. So the implications lead quickly to Bennett's rhetorical position: there are certain people (poor or black) who abortion is being legalized for; therefore their ability to do this is a sort of self-selected eugenics, which we should support this because it helps all of "us" since there are fewer of "them" to commit crimes. (These premises may be out of order and missing a few steps, but it won't be hard to make them seem logical, which is all that punditry requires.)

That this assumes the black and poor are the most likely to commit crimes (tacit in the original study) or that the crimes they commit are more dangerous or detrimental to society than the crimes commited in corporate boardrooms or the oval office...well these are definitely off the table for discussion. Even in the mainstream critiques of his position, these will remain unexamined. Notice that the real crime was that he said something "outrageous" and "he should know better" than to say them. What is outrageous about it will probably not get discussed since the purpose will be to make him look bad rather than challenge anyone's assumptions.

I don't know how calculated Bennett's remarks are, but they could easily lend creedence to a pro-life position and I wouldn't be surprised if the inevitable right-wing defense of him and his logic harps on this above all else. Their rhetorical position will be that liberals, in supporting abortion, are actually tacit supporters of a racial eugenics (something white supremacists have said for years, though from a different, less politically viable position.) Bennett's original, racist articulation will be ignored, the focus will shift to abortion (qua eugenics) advocates and he will retain his legitimacy as the arbitor of "values," one of which is the "culture of life." Again, I don't know if he's that smart, and it would be a gamble nonetheless: then again, Bennett is obviously not one to shy away from a good wager.

UPDATE:
Here's one of the first

Christian Wire Service/ -- The following is a statement from Rev. Dr. Johnny M. Hunter, DD, National Director of the Life Education and Resource Network, L.E.A.R.N., the nation's largest African-American pro-life group:

"It is absolutely hypocritical of people who call themselves pro-choice to criticize William Bennett for his comment when they have been pushing abortion down the throats of the black communities for years. If a news agency plays only a part of Bennett's speech to paint him as a racist, it is a desperate attempt to fan the flames of racial uneasiness in this nation at the expense of black children. Bennett stated that it is 'morally reprehensible' to abort black babies to reduce crime and that statement was ignored. What is also ignored is the fact that Planned Parenthood, following the agenda of its racist founder, Margaret Sanger, does consider aborting blacks to be helpful to society. Which is worse, one who talks about the wrongness of aborting black babies or the one who aborts black babies?"

two other items to remember

The death of Pat Tillman, hero of the pro-war crowd, appears to be a re-run of jessica lynch episode--only it is a bit more disgraceful because there was a lot of underhanded and illegal changing of testimony allowed to cover up the fact that he was killed by friendly fire. Also, it turns out, he was a big Chomsky fan and thought the war w/ Iraq was illegal. go figure.

Also, TPM is pursuing the Abramoff ("lobbiest" who basically, according to Josh Marshall, ran a slush fund) with really interesting results--including evidence that the US AG pulled a state attorney in Guam off his case a few years ago. Are there no depths...

re: Katrina and the media

It has been a cry of Bush supporters since the disaster of Katrina unfolded and now the LA times (and Matt Drudge) have an Army Major saying much the same thing: the national media was hyping the amounto of disaster present at place like the superdome and local politicians like Ray Nagin could have played a part. The problem was both created and exacerbated, according to the story, by the breakdown of communications in the aftermath.

This seems completely ridiculous on some level. The mass media were there reporting on national TV so someone certainly had mass communications. But there weren't reliable telephones and no way to confirm some of the more horrendous stories being told so it made accurate reporting difficult to perform. On the other hand, according to the article, race played a part in people (i.e. reporters and anchors') ability to believe and then report some of the more outstanding claims of violence.

I know that articles like this--which Matt Drudge ran with a huge photo montage on his front page today--are supposed to prove something for the right. But they don't really prove anything except that when there is a vacuum of power, leadership, and information people will make do. I know that bodies were definitely laying in the street and that some reporters saw some awful things for themselves. Though these may well have been fairly isolated incedents, they are not the kinds of incedents we are accustomed to seeing in the present day, urban united states.

In fact, if nothing else, the right should realize that this is what it looks like when the media is free to report without a government filter guiding them. It is still a filter--and its concern for property damage was just as strong as its concern for people's lives so if it is liberal, it is a very centrist sort of liberalism, quite mainstream in fact, and doing little other than holding the government accountable for the things the government said it was going to do. It is quite ideological to fault the media for expecting the government to protect its citizens. Although the right wing would like to be able to drown the government in a bathtub, this is far from being an idea that has national consensus in theory much less in practice--in other words, though people may agree, over cocktails or dessert, that the government should be very small and people should have individal initiative, when your friends, family or compatriots are drowning in toxic sludge it is a bit harder to hold to your principles--or even see how they apply.

All of us are hypocritical on some level and it is in those desparate, frightened moments that we are most willing to be so. This has been something that the Bush administration has long used to its advantage: the Patriot Act is only the most visible of this sort of policy which they have enacted in a moment of crisis which is basically contradictory to an agreed upon value - privacy and individual freedoms of movement, speech, etc. - that is overlooked in deference to what seems to be a more urgent goal. Now, ironically, instead of responding to the current crisis, exacerbated by the institutions meant to respond being crippled by previous funding cuts, Republicans in congress are using this moment to push through almost $1 trillion in cuts to the federal budget over the next ten years--all from various federal programs; none from a reduction of the next round of tax cuts to the most wealthy in the country.

I am rarely a defender of the national media because I think they are always overzealous and distracting from the real issues people should be concerned with. And I will admit that, during Katrina any hyperbole that existed went right beneath my radar: I bought all of it (except for Geraldo and his weeping for the babies). I also believe that the media likely made more out of certain stories and am very interested in the part that race played in the reporting of the aftermath: if they were more willing to believe outlandish claims simply because they were being made about poor and black people in America--two populations that (obviously) few national correspondents have much experience with in the least. That is a very important cultural problem.

But to accuse the media of a liberal bias because they got worked up when the Federal Government failed to perform what honest conservatives usually say is the most important function of government: to protect the people, this is just moronic and pedantic. When it is done at the very moment that the GOP is planning to gut the federal government further, making many other national tragedies more likely and working against that ethos that the media represented because it assumes--rightly, I think--most Americans share is, well, inexcusably hypocritical.

UPDATE: new story on this subject says that "media re[presentations may have slowed aid."

Monbiot on a "World Turned Upside Down"

Indeed...He looks at the strange phenomena of businesses begging the government to intervene and put stiffer environmental regulations in place--and of governments refucing to do it.

These corporations recognize that the human life on earth ending because of environmental devastation is really bad for business, but also know that, without some form of regulation, it will be hard to break out of that short term mindset that has been championed even more vehemently over the past two decades. The decadence of this market driven logic is beginning to show, but it isn't something the market itself has any mechanism to control. To say that it is up to consumers is ridiculous because it would take some form of earth shaking devastation (other than two consecutive hurricanes over the heated gulf) to make people willing to dish out the extra dough for greener products--and even that is assuming the market has provided these choices. Until the government intervenes and puts some sort of luxery tax on environmentally decadent practices and products, there won't be any change. It sounds like some companies recognize this and it is now that people could finally wake up and remember that, not only are we consumers, but also citizens. It would be a fairly nostalgic idea at this point, but it just might work. We've already sought protection for rock star nipples and men kissing, perhaps we could flex that muscle for something more important--like say, the future of the planet. I suppose time will tell...yes time...we'll just wait until someone decides to do something...until the time is right...yup...just until then...

another article worth reading

Lisa Randall, in this article, points to, among other things, one of the problems that has been created by "colloquial terminology" in scince. Dewey claimed, in Public and its Problems, that science was unintelligible to people because of the dense terminology they used. It seems the problem lies more in the signified than the signifier.

Scientists often employ colloquial terminology, which they then assign a specific meaning that is impossible to fathom without proper training. The term "relativity," for example, is intrinsically misleading. Many interpret the theory to mean that everything is relative and there are no absolutes. Yet although the measurements any observer makes depend on his coordinates and reference frame, the physical phenomena he measures have an invariant description that transcends that observer's particular coordinates. Einstein's theory of relativity is really about finding an invariant description of physical phenomena. Indeed, Einstein agreed with the suggestion that his theory would have been better named "Invariantentheorie." But the term "relativity" was already too entrenched at the time for him to change.

Malcolm Gladwell on the pill

well he's not on it himself, but he does talk about it...

I was visiting metafilter today and came across this article from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker a few years ago. The focus is on how the man who invented "The Pill" was a Catholic and was, therefore, keen to make the chemicals of the pill fit within those beliefs. But it is more about the changes of modernity to women's bodies based on evidence from medical anthropologists and new cross cultural studies between women in Japan and the US. The upshot is that the menstral cycle designed into the chemistry of the pill is important for preventing certain forms of cancer, but it adds to the risk of breast cancer. This is because, according to these studies, a 28-day, 12 a year, menstral cycle is relatively new and is largely the result of changes in reproductive practices. The Pill was invented with a mind to keep this 28/12 cycle going because it was assumed to be natural and, therefore, simply a chemical way of using the rhythym method of birth control. But the focus on its contraceptive capacity has overshadowed the use it can have for cancer prevention among women who aren't just baby-making machines. One of the proponents of a new drug that intends to focus on this oncological aspect of contraception has this to say about the conditions he is observing:

But the modern way of living represents an extraordinary change in female biology. Women are going out and becoming lawyers, doctors, presidents of countries. They need to understand that what we are trying to do isn't abnormal. It's just as normal as when someone hundreds of years ago had menarche at seventeen and had five babies and had three hundred fewer menstrual cycles than most women have today. The world is not the world it was. And some of the risks that go with the benefits of a woman getting educated and not getting pregnant all the time are breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and we need to deal with it. I have three daughters. The earliest grandchild I had was when one of them was thirty-one. That's the way many women are now. They ovulate from twelve or thirteen until their early thirties. Twenty years of uninterrupted ovulation before their first child! That's a brand-new phenomenon!

Many on the right will try to make this about the women's movement or about women's lib. But as bell hooks and others have noted, the problem with seeing women at work as an issue of the women's movement is heavily influenced by a white, middle class perception of women's existence--at least in regard to labor. Minority and working class women had been laboring outside the home or for some form of wages inside the home for the better part of the last century. What began to happen in the 1970s wasn't that women were empowered to go to work, or that they were encouraged to see that they could work on their own and become the kinds of professionals only their husbands could be--or, more importantly, that they didn't need a husband to be successful--though it seems that all these things happened; it was also that more middle class families, like the one I grew up in, needed two incomes just to make it possible to have that three bedroom, two car, one vacation lifestyle that they had been promised and were expected to perform.

To say that women's place is in the home is a laughable anachronism in social and economic terms and its focus on political or cultural changes, while entirely accurate on some level, does little to focus its lens on the reason those changes stuck. It is further hypocritical for the very people who deride female welfare recipients for having too many children or for failing to work while they have children to also refuse to endorse methods that might help them have control over their own bodies. Of course endorsing them too strongly would be equally abhorrent. I remember a program in Fort Worth that offered that five-year birth control method (probably a result of this study) to women who were on drugs and would even pay them to submit to it. In terms of public health, I guess it is hard to argue with, but it just sounds so much like the forced sterilization of the mentally retarded in Virginia to make it palatable as a state program. Perhaps that's why the Fort Worth program was private.

profile photo

This was actually taken in June, many moons ago, in Lewes, Delaware. But I have been informed I need a picture for my profile so I chose this one. I think it is indicative of how things are now: we're both happy and Carlos sits peacefully in the background. Actually he's on the bookshelf, but that's an absurdity for another time. For now, just the memories of his last trip to the beach and one of his last excursions without all that hideous gear. Here, he was just a happy dog and we were blissfully ignorant--except that he did try to attack the guy next door...Still, it was a good evening. We walked down the beach with Carlos and he chased Horseshoe crabs. Then as we were coming back, Jill sent me up to the house to get the camera so we could take pictures. I'm really glad I did. I'm happy to have any pictures of him, sentimental bastard that I am, and I especially like the way we look in this one.

Stiglitz on NO--quoting Sen

Stiglitz has a piece in Tom Paine today (could have appeared elsewhere) which is just one of many that I could be reading around the situation in New Orleans. It has definitely blown up into a national crisis and has created a lot of questions that seem to have answers that become political quite quickly. His basic argument--and one that will be repeatedly made, with good reason, is that, "Markets, for all their virtues, often do not work well in a crisis." This is an important point since it seems that it defines the Bush administration's approach to government, which is to say, that for all their propaganda about the importance of markets, they have also created one of the largest government bureaucracies in American history. That they were completely inept at it probably says more about how crippling their worldview is--i.e. they have no idea how to run something that isn't for a profit.

Along these lines (I'll get there in a second), Stiglitz brings up Amartya Sen:

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has emphasized that most famines are associated not with a shortage of food, but the failure to get food to the people who need it, largely because they lack purchasing power

He is right about the failure Sen speaks of but the lack of purchasing power, at least in Development as Freedom, isn't nearly as important in these situations than the lack of democratic accountability. He points to the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s (and others) and says that things like this wouldn't happen if the leaders of these countries were more beholden to their people, if their power relied on a democratic mandate. I don't know enough about the history of famines to judge how correct his argument is, but it does seem to follow that political power is as important in these situations as economic power.

On the other hand, NO and the gulf coast are an important area in the economic and social life of the country so it seems like even the economic motive for saving the gulf or NO wasn't enough. And the powerful people in that city--and powerful oil and chemical companies in that part of the country weren't able--or maybe willing?--to stop the flood. Certainly the slow response is indicative of a lack of concern for a poor and, probably self-disenfranchised, minority. I say self-disenfranchised to indicate that, while the poor and black have been able to vote, it is often noted that many abstain because there is no one who speaks to their interests. The time is, therefore, ripe for someone like Hughy Long to take over in some populist revival. Likewise, the current Republican fascism, gaining its power from fear of a military (or at least physical) threat, could likely be replaced by a more "democrat" fascism like we saw during the New Deal.
As I write that, I notice the nuances of what Polanyi means by fascism. I am not going to attempt to define it, but the important thing is that for him--and for the early twentieth century elites afraid of it--the idea of fascism is related to democracy run amok. Lippmann was afraid, long before Hayek, of the problems of the government intervening in the functioning of society. But he also recognized the alternative as being one less favorable to people who didn't already have opportunity and success on their side and who had little ability to contest monopoly corporate power except through the government. At first, in books like Mastery and Drift, he basically tells the big industries they should just get over it, but by the late 20s, when things start looking more dire and pressing, he begins to think that there could be danger. This danger is at least two fold: on the one hand there is the fear that the masses will rise up and ask for things that are detrimental to the functioning of society; on the other hand, there is the danger that once this request has been made (or even before) someone will arise that will claim they can give it to them.

Polanyi talks about this as fascism, but his object is the functioning of the free market. Certainly there will be an effect on the efficiency of the market--as libertarians say--if this fascism is focused on some form of wealth distribution or increasing corporate oversight, but even this is only interfering with the market as it functioned before the intervention. It is only in relative terms not in absolute. If the market was already a stratified oligopoly, if most of the economic descisions were made not by people in elected office but in corporate boardrooms, if there was no real functioning mechanism of supply and demand, then the market was already ineffecient in absolute terms, right? We might be able to assume or hope or have some sort of blind faith that, someday, down the line, things would change to fix the inefficient aspects: companies would be bought and sold, get started or go broke; new innovations would give an advantage to people who didn't have to retrofit already existing equipment or re-train workers. This is the idea of Schumpeter's creative destruction and it assumes a role in clearing the blockages to this ineffecient market in the same way that we could discuss the possibility that silt would have replaced the disappearing wetlands around New Orleans if we hadn't built levees and that this silt would have helped to absorb some of the flooding waters.

We have perfect vision in hindsight and can try to predict what would or would not have happened in retrospect, but the problem is when we assume extreme positions beforehand and say that there is only one absolute way of doing things. In this way, the earlier understanding of the market, before the new deal, was equally fascist if we define this as being in relation to the unilateral intervention in the relationship of market to society on the part of the government.

...student advisee incoming, will have to pick up later...

...no time today...but wrote a longer discussion of this question of political vs. economic fascism as well as a consideration of the similarities in Freidman and Marcuse, at least in a sketchy way, in the GPE I field notebook...sorry if someone is reading this. It's mostly for me at this point. I don't think I make enough sense to have any regular readers. Someday, perhaps.

mondovino: il mondo

I write you today acknowledging my self-indulgence. The gist of this is inspired by having just finished watching the documentary Mondovino and finished reading the opening sections of Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy as well as a recent book by a prominent libertarian economist (Tyler Cowen) at George Mason called Creative Destruction. It is these moments of synergy in ideas--probably like a rare mix of flavors and aromas in a bouquet--which excite me as a fledgling academic, but I am fully aware of how subjective this excitement is, hence my sharing this with you is, in many ways, quite self indulgent. So, being the busy person that you are, I would understand if you feigned interest and let me ramble on without reading this in full--I say this at the beginning of this letter, because I know full well the kind of rambling that may well ensue. In that case, please just consider this a personal greeting and a touching base after a long absence. I should, indeed, be saying hello after so long.

But I couldn't help but write to you because you are so close to an industry which I had never dreamed was a part of the processes I am working through in my projects. I also recall you asking me at some point to share my thoughts on my work, though this probably isn't what you had in mind. Still the film has exemplified in a mere two hours the awesome terror that capitalism promises right alongside its hope of something better. It is in this that I see what Immanuel Kant called the "sublime." To be perfectly frank, I know very little about Kant, and if you happened to take an Intro to Ethics class in college and paid attention, you are probably way ahead of me on that front. Still, the idea of the sublime has a lot of resonance for people who are watching the progress of global capitalism--and I say "progress" in the sense of a conquering army, trampling forward over everything in its path rather than in the Enlightenment sense that we often use it in the USA--though in truth they are both a part of the same concept and it is usually the case that you can't have one without the other.

The sublime is relevant to this process because Kant meant for it to relate a sense of both awe and horror as well as a feeling of totally overwhelming insignificance and impotence. This is, of course, the feeling that we are supposed to have when we look at capitalism, even as we stand on the threshold of striking out to make our fortune or wait on our rooftops for the help to arrive. Kant's idea was appropriated by Edmund Burke who discussed the sublime in terms of looking at a landscape that was bigger and more beautiful than one could ever imagine, of feeling it overpower you and suffocate you with its sheer bigness. It makes you feel you can do nothing but watch. To compare a social system to this, is far from the truth--especially in a democratic, consumer driven society where protests and boycotts have real implications; but both of these practices are shadows of what they used to be in the public consciousness, even if more people participate in them than ever before. The point is to feel there is nothing to do but get on with one's day.

A few years ago, I stood in my father-in-law's kitchen and he told me about a friend of his who was a furniture builder--redwood patio furniture. He had won a big contract to make this furniture from Wal-Mart and had expanded his enterprise, invested in a new factory and hired workers--all with the intention of making the money back through this lucrative contract. He filled his first order for them, packed it up, and sent it on a truck to their distribution warehouse. Soon after he got the manifest back from the shipment and noticed that just about every third item had been crossed off: the person at Wal-Mart's receiving center said those items simply weren't on the truck.

But they were on the truck. He knew that because he had watched them being loaded. He also knew the game that Wal-Mart was playing. He had invested in this enterprise and there was no way for him to make this enterprise profitable except through working with Wal-Mart (known as a monopsony--when the market is controlled by one large buyer.) Therefore his choice was to either take whatever they would give him--or, in this case, give them whatever they would take--or to make some noise about it and risk losing the contract. My father-in-law told this story with awe and amazement, ending it with the statement: "That's just the way capitalism works: it's ruthless." He was stating it in terms of the sublime: it is horrifying, and in its own, craven way, beautiful--and there is nothing anyone can do about it. It is just Ruthless.

Of course he's right: it is ruthless. But if you're a Black citizen of New Orleans, and you did anything remotely resembling what Wal-Mart did--that is, go in and take what you think is your share, muchless what you need to survive--then it is known as looting. The difference, of course, is who is sanctioned by the state to commit theft.

But I am digressing and sounding even more like a crazy Marxist than I ever do. This is capitalism at only its purely economic worst. Mondovino shows the fill spectrum of this system and makes one feel dirty with the ambivalence of its implications. I will assume that you have seen the film. Moreover, I assume you are familiar with this fascinating social, cultural, political and economic totality that is this globalized wine industry.

What is fascinating about this is that we are seeing a snapshot of it at a moment before it becomes totally dominant. In most other areas of culture, American supremacy (imperialism?) is a foregone conclusion. But here there is this little niche where traditional culture is still alive and we are almost certain to get to watch its destruction. In this the concept of creative destruction is apt. The terms are Joseph Schumpeter's. He was talking about it as a process that would effect capitalists themselves, facing competition from an innovative new producer which would make them obsolete. But this obsolescence of old businesses, this destruction was, in Schumpeter's opinion, necessary for the economy as a whole to continue its dynamic march. Tyler Cowen applies it to culture in a way that only a libertarian can, which is that he give no emotion or value to the fact that this means "while some sectors expand extremely rapidly, others shrink or whither away." That these "sectors" are often connected with people's livelihoods, communities and identities is brushed aside as a romantic notion that doesn't understand "progress."

Schumpeter wasn't the first to recognize this as a part of the process of Capitalism. In fact Marx saw it and Lenin even more--and all three saw it as one of the beneficial aspects of capitalist modernization: it destroyed the old, feudal ways of life and brought in modern ideas such as the elimination of patriarchy. It is the reason that Lenin led the Bolsheviks into power in Russia even though it had a very undeveloped system of capitalism and a weak middle class. He believed in the teleology of Marx's theory of history--which was, sorry to geek out, reminiscent of Hegel in its understanding of their being an end toward which history was striving. The idea inspired Lenin to force the country to modernize in order to bring about a proletarian class that would complete the revolution. Of course the idea was supposed to be that the advance of this socializing, modernizing force of capitalism would eventually lead to a type of society that would share equally in the amazing fruits of this productive engine. Needless to say that hasn't happened yet, though the destruction of cultures seems to have become a fairly popular sport in the meantime.

All of this is fairly banal and taken for granted in twentieth century history, but the point is that it is an essential element of capitalism that we see unfolding as we watch these people in France and Italy who are fighting for their traditional way of life against this ideology of "modernization" via the cultural and economic pressures of the international wine market. In this little drama that the early scenes of the movie capture, we see several important characters that act as metonyms for the social pressures capitalism places on people and for institutions that, especially in the last 60 years, have been given the authority to determine the paths of just about every post-colonial and developing country on the planet. They represent, in their seemingly innocuous imperialism, all the contradictions of the post-war US position in the world, all at once, and with only a single communist mayor and a few "backwards" villagers standing in their way.

The film first introduces us to this wine consultant Michel Rolland. Rolland has an idea about what a wine should taste like and imposes that idea on vineyards across the world, advising them to use certain scientific procedures to make their wines palatable for a "global taste." His comparison with the IMF and World Bank couldn't be more easy to make. They enter countries--sometimes for mere hours--and re-arrange entire economies in order to fit a pre-existing idea of what makes a good economy. Like the IMF and World Bank, he holds the promise of wealth and development, of becoming a player on the world stage: in the 50s, the program was to use expensive chemical fertilizers and high tech equipment, to industrialize national industries and substitute imported products with domestically produced goods. This was, of course, entirely reversed in the late 1970s when the clarion became the importance of free markets and reduced government intervention.

At the moment, Rolland says the only way to do it is to use new oak and to micro-oxygenate. Who knows for how long this will be the trend or how many of these vineyards will be left behind when the taste suddenly changes. Either way, someone like Rolland will be there to explain what needs to be done and expect full compliance.

And also like the IMF and World Bank, he has a seemingly independent accomplice in the Maryland based wine critic Robert Parker whose scores make or break a wine--and seem to be up for sale in a certain way. This is like credit rating agencies on a global scale--such as the S&P 500 and Moody's--who give countries a rating on how much they qualify to receive in private financing. This rating is supposedly separate from their ability to finance projects through the IMF or World Bank--just as Robert Parker's rating is supposedly based on some objective taste rather than a strict adherence to Rollins' or Mondovi's philosophy and methods. This is basically the same thing as a credit rating you or I have and determines how much credit a private financier would want--or even be allowed--to extend to us. In theory, this gives countries another option for raising funds if they don't meet the standards of the IMF/WB. But in practice there is no alternative: the credit rating agencies, like Robert Parker (and to a more ambiguous extent, the Wine Spectator), have a definition of what a country with good potential for investment is and it is basically the same thing that the IMF/WB claim is what makes a good country for investment--or, to complete the analogy, what Michel Rolland says is the final result of his recommendation, i.e. a high quality wine.

Entering into this, of course, is the international corporation: Robert Mondavi. Here the analogy falters some and it is because we are dealing so centrally with questions of culture rather than pure economics. The force of change works in the same way, but with different initial intentions. Certainly the global sourcing of this company is analogous to the way that corporations work now--they are diversified and have divisions or subcontractors throughout the world. Though they appear to produce some products, what they really produce are dividends for their shareholders: the latter, despite the PR or naive beliefs of their managers are ultimately all that matters. On the other hand, Mondavi does have its image to protect

So the question of taste enters into the equation, which is a question of the sociology of culture and best left to someone like Pierre Bourdieu, who was a French sociologist who died just a few years ago. In short, Bourdieu looked at a variety of social processes, but one was to look at the world of art and the way that prestige and consecration was acquired in this system. He has a fairly economistic understanding of the players in a field, but in his description, the economic capital remains unsettled. Not only are people competing with each other for symbolic capital--which would be power of some sort in the field--they are also struggling with the ability to define what tht capital is. The coin of the realm is unsettled, which is precisely the reason for the struggle.

He has three concepts that are important here: field, capital and habitus. The field is somewhat defined by the context but is basically a social plane of different "positions and dispositions" that are defined in relation to each other and in relation to the source of authority in the field. (Hopefully this will make more sense in just a second.) The capital is, roughly, the coin of the realm and it is aquired by the people who do the thing that is valued by the field the most, who have the most authority in the field and are therefore able to define the source of capital within the field--typically the thing they make, think or do.

This may seem confusing, but basically, both the definition of what makes an authority and the authority themselves rise to promience as the result of some social struggle. So if a social player within the field is able to win the greatest authority in the field, they also win the ability to define what makes someone authoritative in the field. It is in relation to this authority that the different positions are given different values and powers; but it is also in relation to this field that individuals, occupying positions, take on certain "dispositions" or what Bourdieu calls the "habitus." In this Bourdieu is trying to describe how the social force of legitimation of power is able to instill in each of us an understanding of what we are supposed to do, how we are supposed to act. We may not do it because we want to or we like to, but because, in order to be successful, that's what we have to do. But as we do those things, we end up further constituting and reinforcing the definition and the authorities who proffer it, as authoritative. That is, of course, unless we want to try our hand at challenging this authority and its constitutive definitions.

Importantly, the authority and success--called symbolic or cultural capital--in one field is often able to be exchanged for other forms of capital in another. Ironically for this context, Bourdieu referred to the cultural field of production as being one in which "the economic world was reversed." He was writing about French culture--mostly different forms of painting and literature--and noted that the closer a work seemed to an appeal to commercial success, the less able it was to gain cultural capital. In laymen's terms, the more it looked like a piece of art or artist "sold out," the less it was seen by the artistic community as being artistic. Instead, a good piece of art was one that was seen as shunning the market. However, the distributer of this product had a longer view, which is that it would aquire its cultural capital over time--being worth a lot of money at some point in the future based on its cultural value as an elite aesthetic production. This is, almost to a point, the way the traditional French and a few of the Italian winemakers discuss their wine--and the changes that they see happening.

Here, I hope, the relation to this film and the wine industry as a field has become clearer. The field has been caputured by a couple of people who are able to define what the authority--the capital--of the field is: Rolland and Parker agree here and have, through some mysterious historical, social, and political process the film doesn't really discuss, become the arbiters of taste. They are able to command this field and, for both the producers and consumers, to define what a good bottle of wine tastes like. And the power to define this--and to effectively reverse the value system of wine taste--is what they see as just a legitimate social role they've been given: Parker himself attributes this to the kind of hard work and perseverance in a way that only an American can with a straight face. He also discusses it in terms of a democratizing mission.

To bring this back round to economics, this is Robert Mondavi's stake in both the cultural and economic fields of wine production. Unlike other corporations--who benefit from the definition of their institutional partners like the IMF/WB and the credit rating agencies by getting countries forced into opening their markets to foreign goods, allowing the privitization of their water or oil or natural resources, and reducing the amount of government oversight and social safety nets, Robert Mondavi benefits more from the cultural capital that it gets from making--or owning the companies that make--the wine that get defined as the best in the world by its friends who help to define this.

The part played by the Italian state or by the local governments in France are more ambiguous, but they correspond roughly to the same positions of states and governments in developing countries are given. They are put in the position to reap some sort of windfall from these arrangements--often through an undemocratic or untransparent process--and thus are often corrupted in their decisions in one way or another. Likewise, the role of the consumers in perpetuating all of this is only a background, but in our day the people who buy the products of globalized corporations often have even more power than the producers to make or break the system--though unless we are to de-link ourselves completely, some form of complicity is almost inevitable and unavoidable. It is here that the horror is mixed with the awe.

And actually, speaking of awe, unlike the global institutions I've mentioned above, the authorities in the wine industry have one thing going for them: they appear to be right. Their recommendations for how to make a wine more palatable and profitable seem to get gulped down by the expanding market for wine around the world. Your thoughts on this process--as a person who, unlike myself, understands the quality that wine can have--would certainly be interesting.

The contradiction emerges with the brief moments in the film where we see the people who are being helped by these processes--and by the sort of pro-democracy argument that Parker presents: he is bringing quality wine out of its elitism and helping to valorize the wines that "the people" will appreciate them, as barbaric as their palates may be. This is, in part, where the awe is created. Though we don't see much of it in the film, the meteoric rise of Mondavi as a brand--and of the branding movement in wines in general--is certainly something that must have upset the wine industry and to witness this kind of power is always something, regardless of what you think of it, that is hard not to respect--sort of like fascism (something the film makes a point of nudging the wine producers about.)

This recalls a variety of arguments, mentioned briefly above, about the relationship of culture to a commercial system and the way that the free market has the tendency to destroy the older, traditional ways and replace it with what is seen as progressive. When you hear these farmers and villagers talk with such deep passion about something so embedded in their social, cultural and environmental history, it is difficult not to feel their pain. It is also difficult not to long to taste something as beautiful, and to understand it so essentially; to wish you could rush over to Italy or France and to sip on this complex liquid that has been made for centuries but may be fundamentally altered or entirely destroyed within mere years.

But when the film ends in Argentina with the indigenous wine producer, forced to work at other things just to keep his land, you also wonder how much better his life could be if he could benefit from the touch of Parker and Rollins. This is, finally, where the feeling of complete insignificance and impotence in the face of this force. To modernize is to destroy everything that made one's culture unique; but to neglect to modernize in the face of these foreign authorities may be ultimately result in a more empirical destruction: that of the inability to feed one's people or one's family, to keep one's land or to stay alive at all. It is hard to remain steadfast in one's culture when the choices are to sell out or whither away. Given these choices, however, it is no wonder that the communist mayor gets elected, even if the success seems short lived. Just when you think you've won, in walks Gerard Depardeu. Here, perhaps, we see the outline of a challenge to the current cultural definition, something which might salvage some of these terroir focused wines, but ultimately, it will only complement the economic system that will always threaten it with destruction even as it promises the world.

If I knew more about it, and maybe you do, it would also be interesting to look to the latest struggle over intellectual property rights like trademarks and geographic indicators since the latter directly affect the wine industry. All I can say about these is that they are some of the more hypocritical kinds of measures that are being taken, especially since it seems like it is originating mostly in California. In this they are acting like most of the companies from here in the heart of Empire: they hopscotch around the globe, celebrating this new borderless world of fluid markets and mobile capital, claiming to be producing, on balance, producer wealth and consumer choice. This is ultimately what the upside to the creative destruction is supposed to be. If local villagers appeal for protection, they are called hicks or Luddites. But then when these global wine branders are threatened by these same forces, they cry foul and ask for the government to step in and protect them from the scary people who threaten their monopoly. Dutifully, the US government is doing just that.

I am sure you have a much more interesting take on this film and if you've read this far, I hope it has at least made sense, and maybe been somewhat interesting. The takeaway for me is that these forces do have real consequences and that our actions here cannot be severed from the interconnection we have around the world any more than we are able to have complete free will in choosing what those actions might be. In watching the film, I speculated that you would be someone who would appreciate these small vineyards, who would be able to understand the wines they produced and stand in solidarity in their cause on both political and cultural levels. But when double checking your e-mail address, I re-read your last e-mail about your new job, and realized that, as a buyer for a supermarket, you probably had to stock far more of the wines consecrated by people like Parker and the Wine Spectator, created by Rollins and owned by Mondovi. Even if you disagreed with it, you would be required, in order to keep your own job, to sully certain values you might have--or that, in this case, I have projected upon you--and to make these wines available to your customers. You would likely steer them away from these wines if they asked and try to introduce them to the more complex varietels, but at the end of the week you'd probably end up putting in another order with more of those vanilla (great description) new oak wines.

I have to do basically the same thing in my classes, having to tone down my messages because to get to radical will offend my student consumers, being responsible to their learning by presenting them with different points of view and insisting they think as critically about my own views as the ones they have been taught by their parents, churches, schools, the media, and the other laws of the land. And as I teach them more about the way that advertisers manipulate images or thoughts and prey upon our subconscious desires, I know that somewhere around half of them are advertising majors, which means I am basically training the next generation to be better than this one at that job. My hands are dirty, too.

Feds were in charge--or they were supposed to be

The absurd attempts by Bush administration officials--including Chartoff and Brown--and his supporters in the press and right wing blogosphere to pin the blame for the Katrina disaster on local officials should get messy if the mainstream press is as vigilant as the bloggers who are critical of the government on this one--and that isn't at all limited to the left wing or liberal side. In fact, as I mentioned Sunday, there have been quite a few people who are fairly well respected on the right that are calling this a government's flub. The defense of the administration is not strong. In their own documents, the plan for action by the Homeland Security says that the Federal government is supposed to take the lead on these issues.

The more ignorant tack seems to be to blame the chaos on looters, etc. and to trace this back to some sort of moral vacuity on the part of New Orleans or the "Family" or American Culture. This is a laughable tack in its surface manifestations, though I am sure many people who already talk about the problems of "the family" (what does that mean anyway?) will buy it hook, line...but it is so strange to see the way these arguments have to manuever their way around talking about social responsibility while excusing our largest social institutions of any responsibility at all. I just wonder how quickly they are able to generate this chum for their hungry minions. It seems like it would take a couple of editors to make sure they don't make any ideological gaffes.

This is piece in the Chicago Sun Times which was then picked up on Little Green Footballs because it fits with their understanding of the events. It mentions a brief quote from Robert Kaplan's collection of essays The Coming Anarchy in which he mentions the "re-primitivized man" as he's witnessed it in failed states in Africa. Of course both the author of the Sun-Times piece and the clueless dittoheads at LGF interpret this through their ideological worldview that is basically a warmed over version of late nineteenth century race science tempered with an understanding of this being not the result of social Darwinism but of liberals.

The problem with both of these is that niether of them seem to have a clue what Kaplan is actually writing about or what he is pointing to in his collection of essays or in the Atlantic Monthly piece that is often cited. For one thing, if it happens that we are seeing this in New Orleans, no one is being smart or witty by saying it is like the Third World being transplanted to the First World. That was exactly what Kaplan was predicting, hence the title "the COMING anarchy." Kaplan is really a fairly conservative writer in terms of international politics, but he is also halfway intelligent: but they aren't citing him for his intelligence. That is not a priority in these arguments.

The more important insight, which none of these folks are capable of making because they are too screwed up by their fanatic right wing ideology, is one that even Kaplan isn't all that interested in making, but which I would say the conservative "american culture's rotting from the core" family values folks are actually right about but they, again blinded by ideology, can't admit or maybe even recognize. Kaplan is discussing, in the late nineties, when it was very fashionable, the "retreat of the state" but he is doing it, on the ground, in the places where the postcolonial struggle for power, exacerbated by various forms of resource scarcity and prolonged by the desire of international aid and trade organizations to have governments so small that you could drown several of them in a single bathtub. In other words, he is discussing the retreat of the state in areas where, for the past twenty years, the objective has been to whittle the state away and hand more functions over to private industry.

Of course the basic functions of a post-war welfare state aren't for them: no civil service, no education, no health care. NGOs may pick up this slack, but the private industry is mainly concerned with resource extraction. And instead of worrying too much about spreading that national wealth around, they deal mostly with the Kakistocrats in charge, the undemocratically, unelected leaders who the champions of globalization blame for bringing misery to their "citizens." Or, sometimes more problematically, the leaders of a country with all of these characteristics but which has only recently, at the hands of those same aid organizations, been thrust into democracy from above, with no other institutions or history, throwing the legitimacy of the state into question and sparking internal struggles for the few means of making a living--mostly the control over the resources that are shipped off to western countries via western corporations. So yes, the state is weakend and the people are desparate and uncontrolled, but it isn't some natural progression: it is the result of exposing a society to the bare force of market competition with nothing to protect itself; of giving people a partial glimpse of modern industry, medicine, education and society, of telling them "modernization" is the way to go and then tearing it out from under them by changing course and forcing them into a new path. It makes the current class and racial relations permanent and even Kaplan talks about the divisions between rich and poor becoming so stark that they turn into a fortress society. I think the analogy that he uses is the bulletproof limousine: the rich and privileged will have no choice but to wall themselves into it and hope to keep their oasis of safety because there is no other option (Certainly not sharing the wealth and working for a broad, stable society.) This is the explanation the Kaplan gives for the Coming Anarchy (it was the only clip I could finf online:)

Future wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity. These wars will be subnational, meaning that it will be hard for states and local governments to protect their own citizens physically. This is how many states will ultimately die. As state power fades-and with it the state's ability to help weaker groups within society, not to mention other states-peoples and cultures around the world will be thrown back upon their own strengths and weaknesses, with fewer equalizing mechanisms to protect them.

A stark and scary prediction. It is too bad there are no agents in this change, that globalization is an inevitable process and the privitazation of everything existing will continue apace without any direction or intervention from anyone. Then we could discuss it as something that someone were doing and we could suggest to that someone that, perhaps, we wanted a bit more protection. Unfortunately, the state is not powerful anymore except in matters of the already powerful. This is ultimately what more academic ideologues like Hernando de Soto (so aptly named I really thought it was a joke for a while) argue: that increased property rights would help development. It seems that most countries already have a problem with property rights--that is too many of them are in the hands of the powerful. Luckily, we can rest assured that eventually everything will even out, the market and globalization will give rise to a new human being, an Ubermensch-ish fellow capable of dealing with this terror (now we're back to social darwinism--though now with Adam Smith)

Whereas the distant future will probably see the emergence of a racially hybrid, globalized man, the coming decades will see us more aware of our differences than of our similarities. To the average person, political values will mean less, personal security more. The belief that we are all equal is liable to be replaced by the overriding obsession of the ancient Greek travelers: Why the differences between peoples?

So we land up with the "Clash of Civilizations" argument of Huntington, which is grist for a whole other post.

The point to end on here is that, the LGF folks are certainly right that we may be realizing the "third world in the first" as Ankie Hoogvelt calls it, but it isn't due to some impulse that has been taught by rap music or the end result of seeing too many strippers or gambling too much. Certainly all of the social ills of New Orleans society--including its corrupt police force--have played out over the last week. But what we have seen is the rotting of American Culture that has been perpetrated by the blind faith in the market as the most efficient and benevolent institution of society. The truth of the matter is that, in addition to this privatized, stateless vision of society being the one that has resulted in the gutting of the Army Corps of Engineers Budget and crippling FEMA, it is also one that had created a highly stratified society in New Orleans with, evidently, little local concern for the poorest and most needy. On even a local level, this most assuredly resulted from a focus on the joys that the truly free market can bring--that is a market for music, sex, drugs, and pleasures of all kinds. It was virtually the only way that New Orleans was making any money at all and that was spread fairly thinly throught the society.

So yes, it is a problem with American Culture but it is something that moralizing and finger wagging will do little to solve and for which even the staunchest faith in the purest vision of Christ almighty can be little more than a placation.

collapse

I am a little upset that I am not more eloquent. It really can't be traced to my upbringing, but I simply can't not curse when I'm angry. Obviously, my career as a pundit or public speaker is going to be a limited one. oh well. I feel better...

One other thought and then I must retire (I can practice, can't I?)...

A while back I was thinking through Jarrod Diamond's new book Collapse...I don't really have time to read what I wrote then, but I have read a good many reviews of it since then and it seems that the major argument people advance against him is that the societies he looks at are too removed from modernity to be compelling examples of his thesis. The latter is, basically, that we will ignore impending environmental peril which will result in the collapse of our society and ecosystem, even if it could be halted, if it isn't in the immediate self interest of the elites of the society. After reading all the reports about how certain it was that New Orleans would be destroyed if a fairly statistically probable weather event occurred, it seems clear that Diamond has his best example for the intro to the paperback. This one even has a gut wrenching aftermath.

There are some times when it really sucks to be right.