Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Link to an article by Justin Fox:
“Why America’s New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same”
The claims about environmental benefits of wood (over concrete) and a few other things might be debatable.
Bonus link: “Minneapolis’ Housing Plan Rewards Developers, Punishes Working People”
Link to an anonymous article:
“McKinsey & Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners”
Bonus links: “The Sociology of C. Wright Mills” (“As modern management becomes the reigning ethos of the age, the shift from explicit authority relationships to more subtle manipulation becomes the preferred form of power. *** The goal of manipulation is to have men internalize managerial directives without knowing that these directives are not their own motives, without recognizing that they are being victimized.”) and Critique of Cynical Reason and Making Money
Link to an interview with Michael Hudson:
“Saker Interview with Michael Hudson on Venezuela”
Bonus links: “Trump’s Coup in Venezuela: The Full Story” and “The Siege of Venezuela and The Travails of Empire” and “Venezuela-Baiting: How Media Keep Anti-Imperialist Dissent in Check” and “Zero Percent of Elite Commentators Oppose Regime Change in Venezuela” and “Leaked: USA’s Feb 2018 Plan for Coup in Venezuela”
Link to an article by Daniel Lopez:
Link to an excerpt from the book Miseducating for the Global Economy: How Corporate Power Damages Education and Subverts Students’ Futures (2018) by Gerald Coles:
“Education, Jobs and Capitalism”
In Lars Lih‘s excellent biographical study of V.I. Lenin, he noted how Lenin’s parents were involved in education and were frustrated that the tsarist autocracy in Russia prevented education (and widespread literacy) in order to constrain the expectations of citizens, in order to maintain the extreme inequality that prevailed under tsarism. When Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power, reforms were swiftly instituted that resulted in historically unprecedented advances in literacy and education more generally. It was not a matter of pedagogical impediments to expanding literacy, or a lack of a notion to improve education and literacy, it was that the education system was subordinated to the maintenance of a particular socioeconomic hierarchy. What was needed was a shift in who held power, and the ideologies of those people, and Coles’ book excerpt makes that point abundantly clear. Capitalists simply disavow their real motivations.
Bonus links: “The Tech Education Con” and Pedagogy of the Oppressed and “Red Diaper Babies” and Democracy and Education and The Higher Learning in America and …And the Poor Get Prison and The Scapegoat
Link to an article by Lea Ypi:
Link to an article by Imen Neffati:
“Charlie Hebdo and the Gilets Jaunes”
Bonus links: “In the Grey Zone” and “The Specter of Democracy” and “The Left Case Against Open Borders” and “For What It’s Worth: The Yellow Vests and the Left”
Link to Ian “Marvin” Graye’s Review of Lacan and Postfeminism (2001) by Elizabeth Wright:
Review of Lacan and Postfeminism
Bonus links: The Logic of Sexuation: From Aristotle to Lacan and “About the Fate of Contemporary Girls” Excerpt and “On Sex Without Identity: Feminist Politics and Sexual Difference”
Link to an article by John Steppling:
“Communism, Fascism and Green Shaming”
Much of what Steppling discusses with regard to what he calls “green shaming” is explained succinctly here:
“The rise of the affect(s) and the sanctimony around affective intuition are very much related to some signifiers being out of our reach, and this often involves a gross ideological mystification. Valorization of affectivity and feelings appears at the precise point when some problem — injustice, say — would demand a more radical systemic revision as to its causes and perpetuation. This would also involve naming — not only some people but also social and economic inequalities that we long stopped naming and questioning.
“Social valorization of affects basically means that we pay the plaintiff with her own money: oh, but your feelings are so precious, you are so precious! The more you feel, the more precious you are. This is a typical neoliberal maneuver, which transforms even our traumatic experiences into possible social capital. If we can capitalize on our affects, we will limit out protests to declarations of these affects — say, declarations of suffering — rather than becoming active agents of social change. I’m of course not saying that suffering shouldn’t be expressed and talked about, but that this should not ‘freeze’ the subject into the figure of the victim. The revolt should be precisely about refusing to be a victim, rejecting the position of the victim on all possible levels.
***
“this bind derives precisely from the subjective gain or gratification that this positioning offers. (Moral) outrage is a particularly unproductive affect, yet it is one that offers considerable libidinal satisfaction. By ‘unproductive’ I mean this: it gives us the satisfaction of feeling morally superior, the feeling that we are in the right and others are in the wrong. Now for this to work, things must not really change. We are much less interested in changing things than in proving, again and again, that we are in the right, or on the right side, the side of the good. Hegel invented a great name for this position: the ‘beautiful soul.’ A ‘beautiful soul’ sees evil and baseness all around it but fails to see to what extent it participates in the perpetuation of that same order of things. The point of course is not that the world isn’t really evil, the point is that we are part of this evil world.”
“Too Much of Not Enough: An Interview with Alenka Zupančič”
See also Beautiful Soul Quote