Beyond National Capitalism? the lecture
AND NOW: the video!! Click on Read more for a 12-part lecture and discussion lasting about an hour and a half. Continue reading ‘Beyond National Capitalism? the lecture’ »
Archive for the ‘America’ Category.
Beyond national capitalism?
My talk makes a number of points that can only be sketched briefly in twenty minutes.
1. Humanity is caught between national and world society. This is both dangerous and an opportunity for us. Yet much of what has been presented here has assumed that we can safely talk about the United States in isolation from the rest of the world.
2. Everything we have heard today has been impersonal and this will not do. People want to relate impersonal knowledge to their personal lives. And this relationship between the personal and impersonal aspects of social life is being radically changed by the digital revolution in communications, as manifested in the internet.
3. I want to offer a vision of money’s role in our lives that emphasizes its redemptive qualities as perhaps the principal means of mediating our relations with impersonal society in ways that can be personally meaningful.
4. The dominant social form over the last 150 years has been ‘national capitalism’. Any future we contemplate beyond the current crisis must take into account its history which I will present as a story of rise and fall in five stages.
5. Towards the end national capitalism resembled nothing so much an ‘Old Regime’, that arbitrary version of unequal society which was overthrown by the American and French revolutions. More accurately, I would say that the world society constituted by national capitalism as the dominant form manifested an obscene inequality and lawlessness characteristic of the Old Regime.
Continue reading ‘Beyond national capitalism?’ »
Mike Wesch: A portal to media literacy
Mike Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, won a U.S. Professor of the Year award.
I have been trying and failing to teach world history to anthropology students for 40 years. Here is a Wesch experiment to get students to condense world history into less than 5 minutes using Twitter. Let’s not be critical of the end-product. The point is to scale down the world and scale up the self so that the two can enter into a meaningful relationship.
The Trap: what happened to our dream of freedom?
Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary in three parts, ‘The Trap’, shows how ideas and methods gestated in the Second World War and developed in the Cold War led to the narrow and false notion of freedom that flourished in the neoliberal period. Brian Holmes’s brilliant essay on Adam Curtis, featuring The Trap in particular, offers a valuable summary and critique of the documentary.
The Trap Part 1 Fuck you buddy
Mike Wesch: An anthropological introduction to YouTube
A lecture at the Library of Congress on 23rd June 2008 by Mike Wesch.
Notes on the counter-revolution
The period since 1945 saw a revolution in world society which, by the 1990s, had turned into widespread popular emancipation from the repressive state controls installed during the Cold War. The world was becoming more connected and more unequal at the same time, but people in general enjoyed more freedom than ever before. Since the millennium, an attempt has been made, led by but not restricted to the United States, to screw the lid back on. The battle cry of this counter-revolution is the war against terrorism, its theme-song, security, security and yet again security. Freedoms that came to be taken for granted after the war against fascism are now being lost. The left is disoriented and impotent. Who is the enemy and what is to be done? The fragments below reflect the confusion of our era, but they do point to a possible political strategy. They were written in two places at different times, in Europe and in America. Continue reading ‘Notes on the counter-revolution’ »
James, Tocqueville and Baudrillard
C.L.R. James is one among many writers who came from Europe to America and subsequently published their commentaries on the society they found there. In American Civilization, he explicitly linked his work to a tradition established by two predecessors—the French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose famous study, Democracy in America, resulted from his travels there in the 1830s; and the English diplomat, James Bryce, who wrote The American Commonwealth half a century later. In recent years, there has been no shortage of European commentators on America, although few have established as profound a connexion with that country as Tocqueville, Bryce and James. Here we seek to place James’s American Civilization (drafted in New York in 1950 and published by Blackwell in 1993) in the ongoing history of reflection on America by outsiders. Specifically, we compare his work with that of two Frenchmen— Tocqueville, the founder of the genre, and Jean Baudrillard, whose America (1989) is one of the more notorious examples of recent postmodernist writing on the subject. Continue reading ‘James, Tocqueville and Baudrillard’ »
