Verticals

Last week Johanna Oksala asked is capitalism good for women? And if it is not, are there reforms that can make capitalism good for women? Rather than rehearse her complex and fascinating answers to these questions, let me rather interrogate the assumptions that underlie them. One, of course, is that we know what capitalism is, but I won’t go into that just yet. Another is that we can consider women as a social and historical totality — a “gender” — that is oppressed as a whole, and that can seek remediation as a whole. Of course, there are differences among women — rich and poor, gay and straight, young and old and so forth. Nonetheless, women as a whole are oppressed and can seek remedies that apply to all women.

It is quite scandalous how much theory-talk still retails metaphors based on 19^th century worldviews. As if what we can know about the world had not undergone several revolutions since. Hence if one were to look for a #Theory21c it would have to start with people who at least engage with technical scientific languages of our times. One example of which would be Tiziana Terranova’s Network Culture (Pluto Press 2004). I looked back over the bulk of the book in a previous post. This one takes up her engagement with the theories and sciences of biological computing.

No one can escape discussions about the state of “the economy.” They inform political campaigns in the U.S., debt and austerity battles in the Eurozone, and development efforts in the poorest countries in the world. Our ideas about “the economy” — how it works, what it involves, and how it is measured — provide the departure point for our debates over inequality, unemployment, wages and a host of other hot topics. And no metric for describing and assessing national economic health is used more frequently today than Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Sanjay Ruparella’s lucid and compelling talk on the global South can help us to clarify what we mean by capitalism. If the “global South” implies a global capitalist system or project, what was that project? We can think of it as unfolding in two waves: the first began with the discovery of America in 1492 and took the form of the great trading empires; the second began with industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century and continues today. In the first wave, specialization, the division of labor and trade are crucial; in the second, the capital labor relation per se. To be sure, we can think of the two waves as continuous, building on one another. In both cases, capitalism implies increased productivity and growth, as well as increasing inequality.

The impressive victory of Syriza in the January 25th Greek elections was the direct result of increasing popular discontent with the Greek political elites and years of self-defeating austerity. The party, which symbolized a break with the past, ran on a platform based on hope, in contrast to the campaign of fear waged by the center-right government of New Democracy. “Hope is under way” was the main slogan, reverberating the famous Chilean “La alegria ya viene” from the referendum on Pinochet in the mid-1980s. Syriza played well on that terrain, promising to the people radical change, including the drastic restructuring of the debt through a 1953-style international conference, and the rejection of the memorandum of agreement with the “troika” of bailout monitors.

The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility hosted a lecture by Nando Sigona entitled “The Camp as a Space of Political Membership,” with discussion from professor Michel Agier on February 17, 2015, in the Klein Conference Room at 66 W. 12th Street. Included is a video of that event.

Contrary to the suggestion of my informal title, I did not study with Hannah Arendt, nor were we ever colleagues, although I missed both experiences only by a bit. I was a graduate student in the early 1970s in one of the universities where she last taught, the University of Chicago, and my first and only long term position, at the New School for Social Research, was her primary American academic home.

According to Arendt’s emphatic and paradoxical thesis, [Eichmann] was an enemy of humanity from “thoughtlessness.” “It was a sheer thoughtlessness — something by no means identical with stupidity — that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period” (285; G: 57).* This (and only this) is what the phrase regarding the “banality of evil” was meant to capture.