Archive for the ‘Social’ Category
Jürgen Habermas Interview
A rare interview with German sociologist Jürgen Habermas makes it way onto YouTube (via SozLog). Like many, he makes the case for deliberative democracy.
Slavoj Žižek vs. Ulrich Beck on Cosmopolitanism
From Žižek’s “Against the Double Blackmail”
So the lesson is that the alternative between the New World Order and the neoracist nationalists opposing it is a false one: these are the two sides of the same coin — the New World Order itself breeds monstrosities that it fights. Which is why the protests against bombing from the reformed Communist parties all around Europe, inclusive of PDS, are totally misdirected: these false protesters against the NATO bombardment of Serbia are like the caricaturized pseudo-Leftists who oppose the trial against a drug dealer, claiming that his crime is the result of social pathology of the capitalist system. The way to fight the capitalist New World Order is not by supporting local proto-Fascist resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious question today: how to build transnationalpolitical movements and institutions strong enough to seriously constraint the unlimited rule of the capital, and to render visible and politically relevant the fact that the local fundamentalist resistances against the New World Order, from Milosevic to le Pen and the extreme Right in Europe, are part of it?
From Beck’s “Living in World Risk Society“:
In an age of global crises and risks, a politics of ‘golden handcuffs’ – the creation of a dense network of transnational interdependencies – is exactly what is needed in order to regain national autonomy, not least in relation to a highly mobile world economy. The maxims of nation-based realpolitik – that national interests must necessarily be pursued by national means – must be replaced by the maxims of cosmopolitan realpolitik. The more cosmopolitan our political structures and activities, the more successful they will be in promoting national interests and the greater our individual power in this global age will be.
It is, of course, important to look at the unwanted and unpredicted side-effects of this cosmopolitan vision: The call for justice and human rights is used to legitimate the invasion of other countries. How can one be in favour of cosmopolitan legitimacy when it leads to crises and wars and thus to the bloody refutation of the idea itself? Who will rein in the side-effects of a cosmopolitan moral principle, that speaks of peace while facilitating war? What does ‘peace’ mean when it generalises the possibility of war? It is necessary to make a clear distinction between true and false cosmopolitanism and yet such clarity is hard to achieve because it is the comparative legitimacy of cosmopolitanism that makes it so tempting to instrumentalise the latter for national-imperial purposes. Fake cosmopolitanism instrumentalises cosmopolitan rhetoric – the rhetoric of peace, of human rights, of global justice – for national-hegemonic purposes. There are numerous examples of this in history, the Iraq War is only the most recent.
Totalitarianism and Ecology – Let the epidemics run wild edition
A new category of my blog entitled “Totalitarianism and Ecology”
Anthony Paul Smith explains:
According to Neocleous “the concept ‘nature’ is, of course, deeply problematical” and “an empty vessel to be filled with whatever meaning is politically expedient”. The context for this is not nature “within fascism” but necessarily in itself. That is to say, Neocleous doesn’t see nature as a concept that can be negotiated, but that holds within it an already reactionary character. It seems the main mistake that fascism makes in regard to nature is to think of it as a subject in itself. For Neocleous nature is culturally constructed and thus a kind of artifice attached to human subjectivity. This goes so far as to cause Neocleous to take a negative view towards political ecology and one can almost say he sees being anti-ecological as being on par with an anti-fascist position. He claims that green groups and philosophies, like Deep Ecology (with which I too have issues, though in a different register), make the same mistake concerning nature (that it is a subject in itself) and even aside from that totalitarian political structures would be necessary to carry out the environmental changes necessary.
So first off, here’s this from a mailing list associated with one radical green group:
Hi All,
Reducing Greenhouse Gases
…
Step Three, reduce the World’s population, Nature is already doing this with HIV/AIDS and may be about to do more anyway
Need I say anymore?
Tyler Cowen on self-experimentation
Over at MarginalRevolution, Tyler talks up Seth Roberts and the importance of self-experimentation.
When Oh When will people appreciate how deep Seth Roberts’s self-experimentation concept runs? Descartes started with the idea that we know only ourselves, Seth realizes that the self is often the last thing we know and discovering the self is the highest stage of science not to mention performance art. The innovation of hermeneutics (as found say, in Paul Riceour) was to set the self apart from the social world and trace the implications of a dualistic and indeed interpretative social science. Seth reestablishes methodological monism by turning the world-self distinction on its head, relocating the self in the world of science. Add to that mix a working knowledge of experimental psychology, insights from neurodiversity (the meticulous recording of self, the focus on detail, plus the deeply autistic speak of the self in the third person as an external object to be observed; are they so wrong?), and sugared water, for a potent mix.
Increasingly, I think that self-experimentation and ethnography have a lot in common. There is just so much we can learn from anthropology.
Ulrich Beck’s theological project
On Wednesday, I had the great privilege of getting a few moments of time to speak with the great man himself. I want to leave what we talked about for later though. On Monday, I saw Saba Mahmood give her Milliband lecture on Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation. Her thesis is that the social sciences in general have avoided treating secularism as an object of study in itself. She asserts that are assumption up to now is that secularisation always follows the pattern experienced in Europe, but that this doesn’t necessarily hold true in all circumstances. In the Q&A that followed, she gave two examples. Egypt – authoritarian, secular, state replacing civil society services that were provided by religious institutions, but yet a deeply religious society. Lebanon – a state system founded upon religion, but one of the most secular cultures in the Middle East. This is exactly the kind of work expected in Beck’s call for methodological cosmopolitanism. However, as a side effect, this opens a critique in Beck’s work itself. Mahmood also claims that attempts by Western institutions to modernise Islam necessarily involves a certain amount of theological and hermeneutic (re)invention. So when Beck asserts the need for negative freedoms that everyone can agree upon (something that is problematic in other ways), does this not imply that Beck’s cosmopolitanism also involves a certain theological project? Read the rest of this entry »
Beyond "or" & towards "And": A response to the Commission on Integration and Cohesion
There is a long running discussion between K-Punk, Foucault is Dead and Amish Lovelock over the media’s response to Jade Goody’s outbursts during Big Brother. Whilst I generally agree with the conclusions reached by all parties, I do take issue with Foucault is Dead’s opinion that saying ‘I’m not a racist, but I think the logic of multiculturalism prevents us from treating people as individuals’ really is a racist statement. That statement is the position that both me and Ulrich Beck share. To make it clear, I post the more interesting points of my response to the Commission on Integration and Cohesion consultation: Read the rest of this entry »
Best genuine excuse for not having homework
My house has no power, and the electricity company can’t be bothered to fix it.
A date for your diary (14th February 2007)
Ulrich Beck is lecturing at LSE next month on “A Cosmopolitan Perspective on the Sociology of Generations” (iCal available at link). Read the rest of this entry »
Alan Partridge Edition
Adam Kotsko rightly takes me to task for misusing Lacanian terminology on my earlier Saddam posting. However, I think I was making sense in my mind. In that to everyone outside, the US appears as this paternal figure who we’re always trying to impress. I’ll shut up now.
In related news, Slavoj writes in the Guardian on the blogosphere, and for full ironic effect, Comment Is Free stick it on their blog:
And the same goes for my partners in cyberspace communication. I can never be sure who they are: are they really the way they describe themselves, is there a “real” person at all behind a screen persona, is the screen persona a mask for a multiplicity of people, or am I simply dealing with a digitised entity which does not stand for any “real” person?
Favelas, populism and a Stanford law professor: Reforming the public sphere through participatory culture
Last week I visited the ICA in order to catch Academy Award-nominated documentary,Favela Rising. Having witnessed the murder of his brother, one time low level drug pusher, Anderson Sa, formed a new cultural movement in his home Favela, Vigario Giral – AfroReggae. Starting off a newspaper, it grew into a youth programme teaching kids music and dance, with its leaders forming Banda AfroReggae, eventually signing a deal with Universal Music and using all the money to fund their programmes. All of this takes place against a backdrop of a drugs war involving multiple cartels and brutal military police. The results have been impressive, as Jose Junior points out: “If you compare the Vigario Geral of today with what it used to be, there is less suffering. There are fewer killings, more jobs, more happiness. And most importantly, there is hope.” The documentary’s is definitely well worth watching. There’s no voiceover, letting the participants speak for themselves, and little of the “oh look, isn’t it terrible” pandering we sometimes get when the North looks at the South.
However, I first heard of favelas and barrios from the Camp for Climate Action in Leeds earlier this year, as it was proposed that each regional group formed their own “barrio” on the site. This leaves a somewhat bitter taste in my mouth. Should we emulate slums created by people with no money, land and hope in England, to be inhabited by white hippies? It seems somewhat similar to the argument by Tyler Cowen that “shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio.” As Anderson Sa rightly says, the AfroReggae model can’t be applied everywhere; otherwise it ends up as packaged as McDonalds. This recourse to “shanty culture” or “anarchist solidarity” hides a number of features of their history (thanks to Space & Culture) and economy (from Marginal Revolution).
Rents are a factor driving people to participate in land invasions. Only 2% of the Brazilian population can afford to own their own apartments or houses (Relat rio Global sobre Assentamentos Urbanos 2005). Typically, rent requires half of a ‘good’ wage of around USD200 per month. Others rent a single room and bathroom at around USD30.
Poverty drives land invasions, not a vague notion of anarchist syndicalism.
The vigilante militias are made up of off-duty police officers and former police officers. They work to expel drug traffickers and other criminals from favelas, known as Brazil’s poorest and roughest neighborhoods, to set up protection rackets themselves. According to Rio De Janeiro’s public security department, 92 favelas are now controlled by militias, up from 42 in April 2005. They take over a new neighborhood at an average of 12 days. Sociologist Ignacio Cano, who works for the Rio de Janeiro State University, said that the root of the phenomenon is a quest by corrupt police officers for more money, against the backdrop of falling drug profits and a drop in bribery. These officers have decided to take direct control of the areas and seek other ways to extract cash from Rio’s poorest, he said. Militias then demand protection money from the neighborhood they have captured: taxing residents five to seven U.S. dollars per head for living in the area; demanding two dollars for each tank of natural gas, the most common source of heat for cooking; and charging local taxis for entering the area.
I fail to see how this is preferable to living in a city with decent state infrastructure.
The cost of threading services through informal neighbourhoods is much higher than laying services into undeveloped land (Gordilho, Conder). Municipal authorities – to whom development funds only trickle down in minor quantities – struggle to replace latrines and open sewers with municipal services and to install lighting and staircases to navigate the city’s steep slopes. Drinking water and gas cannisters are delivered by hand (there are no gas mains as far as I can tell, gas is delivered everywhere in cylinders and most apartment buildings do not have gas lines). These services are topped off by the mobile phone network
Rob Shields concludes “Favellas are less alternative “counterspaces” to capitalism and more a product of global flows of capital and neocolonial relations of ruling.” This history is largely missing from the romanticised notions held by Europeans. However, if there’s something positive we can take from the favelas, it is everything that AfroReggae stands for: A participatory culture. Do Anderson Sa and his movement offer us a glimpse of what is possible if we publicly apply our private minds as Habermas wishes us to? Almost certainly. But the means for us are going to be different. In this case, the work of people like Lawrence Lessig and the Creative Commons is going to be instrumental in how we reform our conception of what we can and can’t do with already existing popular culture. Additionally, Peter Levine’s assertion that
Populism is not only about laws and policies, but also a way of representing ourselves. In a populist culture, many people are involved in celebrating, memorializing, and debating their common values and hopes through cultural products such as music, graphic arts, folklore, historical narratives, and videos. The results are diverse but serious; people use the arts to define and address public problems. Today, in my opinion, the biggest obstacle to cultural populism is mass culture (which is popular but not participatory), and the greatest hope lies in collective voluntary work.
The problem for us Greens is that we need to envisage what form this collective voluntary work will take and how we can institute it into the fabric of civil society. Reworking our Intellectual Property schemes along the lines that Lessig proposes in his 23C3 talk seems like a good start for us.
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