Jajuna

I have been following the Rod Blagojevich circus for some months now. It is impossible to be in Chicago for any length of time and not somehow be contaminated by this spectacle. The guy was even awarded his own morning talk show on AM890 post-impeachment, where he shamelessly peddled his innocence while chiming in on current events and political affairs.  For a time my sister and I actually lived across Western Avenue from Blago’s relatively humble single brick bungalow in Lincoln Square. He used to jog by sometimes with a couple of uniformed and non-uniformed officers trailing behind him and his signature bouffant. The perplexing thing about Blagojevich is that despite the knowledge that he is an utterly cynical and pathological criminal, he is still somehow able to remain perversely sympathetic, almost to the point where you kind of want to root for the guy. This is why the news today that the jury in his corruption trial only found him guilty on 1 of the 24 counts was so unsurprising.

As I am reading a bit of Zizek at the moment, it struck me that the figure of Rod Blagojevich is somewhat similar to that of Silvio Berlusconi. For those not familiar, Zizek argues that Berlusconi’s vulgarity and clownishness, TV confessions, and private corruptions are precisely what grants him the power to act with such ruthless impunity. He also argues that Berlusconi may well represent the future of liberal democratic political leadership.

What makes Berlusconi so interesting as a political phenomenon is the fact that he, as the most powerful politician in his country, acts more and more shamelessly: he not only ignores or neutralizes any legal investigation into the criminal activity that has allegedly supported his private business interests, he also systematically undermines the basic dignity associated with being head of state. The dignity of classical politics is grounded in its elevation above the play of the particular interests in civil society: politics is “alienated” from civil society, it presents itself as the ideal sphere of the citoyen in contrast to the conflict of selfish interests that characterize the bourgeois. Berlusconi has effectively abolished this alienation.

While obviously Blago has never held the kind of power or influence of Berlusconi, the collapse of public dignity into naked narcissism and cynical political spectacle seems analogous. It is also certainly not isolated as it has come to permeate the entire right-wing movement in the United States.  One can imagine a Sarah Palin presidency as perhaps the ultimate nightmarish expression of this phenomenon. The “momma grizzly” shtick is representative. The clip’s affect laden anti-intellectualism and strangely inverted feminism is at the very core of what makes Palin so appealing and potentially powerful.

I am reading Zizek’s Living in the End Times at the moment. In the first few pages he succinctly articulates the crisis of liberal democratic politics as a confrontation between: 1) a technocratic liberal center that has largely abandoned social democratic principles and political commitments in favor of free market administration and appeals to multiculturalist human rights and tolerance; 2) ascendant right-wing nationalist populism and racism. In other words, the center “left” has adopted a supposedly ideologically neutral post-political “pragmatism,” while the right engages in open and uncompromising political struggle. With the ever darkening horizon of economic and ecological crisis, the tepid liberal post-politics stands as an empty formalism, both a symptom and a cause of our current predicament, that the right-wing skillfully exploits for its own advantage largely by channeling rising discontent with the systemic violence of late capitalism onto ethnic, sexual, and religious minorities.

The “big task for the left”, according to Zizek, is to discredit and abandon post-political “pragmatism,” as a first step toward the re-politicization of the economy and the necessity of taking responsibility for power. Perhaps nowhere has post-politics been a bigger failure than in the Obama presidency. Elected largely through charismatic appeals to political possibility, Obama has governed largely as an impassionate and distant gatekeeper for the status quos. If there were any more lingering doubts about the white house’s commitments, they were dashed this week with the statements made by white house press secretary Robert Gibbs who petulantly attacked the “left” for demanding more from the Obama administration. As Moreen Dowd relays “he said the president’s lefty critics “ought to be drug-tested,” would only “be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon,” and “wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president”. The underlying assumption is that anyone on the left who makes political demands on the leader that they elected is not fully connected to “reality”. This, of course, represents fatal political cynicism.The problem more directly, as we are painfully learning, is that the centrist liberal democrats do not actually have any beliefs other than this kind of banal “realist” position. This has enabled the right to have free reign to define the terrain of politics. This is how we can have a situation where Rand Paul can openly discuss repealing the Civil Rights Act, or where disgraced serial philanderer and potential GOP presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, can claim that the Islamic center and Mosque proposed four blocks away from the World Trade Center site was akin to “putting a Nazi sign next to a Holocaust Museum”.   As the left continues to refuse to take responsibility for power, to assert their beliefs, and to engage in ideological struggle, the widely celebrated “center” increasingly resembles nothing of the sort. It is given over bit by bit to the right-wing fundamentalists and populist fanatics.

My supervisor has suggested, and I find myself agreeing, that I need to become more autocritical in my writing. So what does autocritical mean? The first thing that I think of are critiques of Foucault particularly the early work where he develops his archeological method for analyzing the production of knowledge within contextually specific relations of force. For Foucault, “truth” is always relative to a discontinuous time-space and set of given social coordinates and conditions as opposed to a linear progressive development of knowledge over time. The problem Foucault runs into here is he forwards a particular anti-foundational empirical schema and set of propositions without being able to account for his own position within it. This gets picked up and modified within feminist and poststructuralist critiques of science and in efforts to develop standpoint epistemologies that recognize not only postfoundational conditions of validity but the role of the subject within knowledge production. Foucault gets caught out a little too easily because of what Nancy Fraser has referred to as his “normative confusions”: his simultaneous rupturing of processes of normalization and his not so subtle judgments on these processes. This is what Habermas has referred to as a “performative contradiction” that also gets the Frankfurt School into trouble: if reason has collapsed into irrationality how can we account for our own critical propositions?

My problem is perhaps more straightforward than all this, I am just not very good at incorporating my own positionality into the theoretical observations I make. I do not especially want to get lost in the weeds of poststructural validity nor in a kind of ultimately self-serving naval gazing concerning my raced and classed subject position.  The primary problem is that I do not do enough work for the reader–asking questions, contextualizing arguments, personalizing observations.

Is it considered procrastination if I am working on my acknowledgment’s section even though I am nowhere near completing my thesis?

I have been reading David Harvey’s book The Condition of Postmodernity. It is probably best known for Harvey’s theory of time-space compression. In short, time-space compression describes how information driven capitalism conjoined with advanced communication systems have eliminated or rendered obsolete modern temporal and spatial barriers for the transference of financial flows, labor, and knowledge and in the process have produced new kinds of limits and crisis conditions for global capital.

The best part of the book though, I think, is really the first half where Harvey discusses modernism and postmodernism from the standpoint of political economy, culture, and urbanization. Harvey’s take on modernity stems from a brief quotation by Baudelaire: “modernity…is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one half of art, the other the eternal and the immutable”. Using this as a heuristic device, Harvey situates the modern project as a form of creative destruction, the aim of ordering the world, generating cultural grammars and ideations of progress, and the taming of nature all rest on the erasure of traditions as well as given material and social formations. This is where cultural modernism enters the picture for Harvey. It represents the attempt to construct something permanent through representation and myth-making that can anchor experience within the chaotic and destructive tendencies inherent in modern society.

Harvey is particularly interesting when he is discussing postwar urban development on the model of large scale rational planning as embodied in the architecture of Mies van der Rohe and Les Corbusier. What emerges here is an interesting defense of Fordist urbanism which has been almost universally derided for its austere and alienating tendencies. While Harvey would agree in part with Jane Jacob’s analysis of the deadening aspects of such forms of built space, perhaps best represented by public housing projects like Stuyvesant in New York or the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, he also recognizes that given the historical conditions, Fordist urban planning was able to accomplish a great deal in the public interest and promote, through broad-based projects of rationalized design, equality of opportunity, social welfare, and economic growth. Writing of the European context he states:

It would, I think, be erroneous and unjust to depict these ‘modernist’ solutions to the dilemma of postwar urban development and redevelopment as unalloyed failures. War-torn cities were rapidly reconstructed, and populations housed under much better conditions than was the case in the interwar years. Given the technologies available at the time and the obvious scarcity of resources, it is hard to see how much of that could have been achieved except through some variant of what was actually done.

Jane Jabcob’s famous critique in Life and Death of American Cities was leveled at how postwar urban planners and architects like Howard Moses, Le Corbusier, and Ebenezar Howard, ignored the organic complexity and self-diversification of urban life, viewing it as just so much chaos to be tamed through centralized instrumental design and short-sighted technocratic dreams of auto-centric progress. The usefulness of Harvey’s account is that he splits the difference in these positions. He does so by demonstrating how post-Fordist or postmodern schemas of urban planning and design celebrate just the kind of mixed and diversified development that Jacobs supported. However, he shows that the guiding mechanism and normative basis behind this type of urban renewal over the last thirty years or so has been the market as opposed to either the organic self-diversification that Jacob’s advocated or the large-scale social planning of Fordist development. While in some cases neoliberal-postmodern urban development has led to the renewal some urban spaces it has done so at the expense of producing new forms of alienation and social deprivation. For instance, regional cultures are too often buried amidst the proliferation of corporate franchises and sterile mass market condominiums. It has also contributed to intensified spatial-polarization and social inequality within the city.

The lesson that Harvey offers here is this, rationalized planning in the public interest is a necessity, however, the underlying logic of such projects has to be attentive to organic complexity, cultural diversity, and democratic social life. Neither the market nor blind technocratic omniscience can promote sustainable democratic development .However it is foolish to abandon large-scale social planning particularly in light of advancing economic instability and environmental crisis. I think the question becomes what types of economic, cultural, and architectural grammars and forms of representation might be suitable to ground such projects and/or make such projects possible given our current historical conditions and limitations?