Jajuna

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?

More news from the “everything is falling apart in America” front. This piece below by Paul Krugman follows in the same vein as the previous articles I posted from Bob Herbert and Glenn Greenwald. Krugman suggests that “America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere”. This sense of decline particularly around issues relating to infrastructure, jobs, and austerity certainly gels with what I have experienced in the US over the summer. On a trip in early July I met with a principal at a large public high school on Chicago’s South Side. The principal, a dedicated and talented woman who is already holding the place together by a string, was deeply concerned about the coming school year because she has had to layoff so many teachers and staff. These layoffs will effect everything in the building from instruction, to morale, to safety. This is the new normal. America on the ground in 2010.

In related news, I also happened to catch the first episode of Jersey Shore Season 2 last night. What struck me last night was the excessive care and anxiety over the body that haunts the psyches of the show’s characters. At one point Snooki explains why she now uses spray on tanning instead of going to the tanning salon. She claims that it is because Obama put a 10% tax on tanning. She pouts, “McCain would never have put a tax on tanning”. Here politics boils down to the mandates of hedonistic narcissism, the aggrandizement of the body and the self. Never mind that going to tanning booths has been proven to be as dangerous as ingesting plutonium. Get the government’s hand off my freedom to choose. Allow no limits to the oblivion of my own enjoyment.

What was really noticeable, however, was just how pumped-up Pauly D and the Situation have become in the off season. Their fake-tans now barely conceal the steroidal acne. In Jersey Shore world, being a “juice-head” is the necessary step to transforming one’s body into the ideal of a  “gorilla”: essentially a grotesquely sculpted and tanned ape like beast, a walking fuck-tank.  It occurred to me that this synthetic body-care represents more than just a reversion to some sort of paleolithic mating instinct, it signals a mode of physical capital in a grab-what-you-can militarized society in decline. My friend Ken Saltman has described such body building musculature as “fleshy-slabs of amour”: hard muscle investments from which to navigate the neoliberal obliteration of the social. America may be going dark, as Paul Krugman argues, but it is doing so in the blinkered haze of b-list celebrity hot tub hook-ups, Rambo abs, and bar fights.

August 8, 2010

America Goes Dark

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.

Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.

We’re told that we have no choice, that basic government functions — essential services that have been provided for generations — are no longer affordable. And it’s true that state and local governments, hit hard by the recession, are cash-strapped. But they wouldn’t be quite as cash-strapped if their politicians were willing to consider at least some tax increases.

And the federal government, which can sell inflation-protected long-term bonds at an interest rate of only 1.04 percent, isn’t cash-strapped at all. It could and should be offering aid to local governments, to protect the future of our infrastructure and our children.

But Washington is providing only a trickle of help, and even that grudgingly. We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade.

In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.

It’s a disastrous choice in both the short run and the long run.

In the short run, those state and local cutbacks are a major drag on the economy, perpetuating devastatingly high unemployment.

It’s crucial to keep state and local government in mind when you hear people ranting about runaway government spending under President Obama. Yes, the federal government is spending more, although not as much as you might think. But state and local governments are cutting back. And if you add them together, it turns out that the only big spending increases have been in safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, which have soared in cost thanks to the severity of the slump.

That is, for all the talk of a failed stimulus, if you look at government spending as a whole you see hardly any stimulus at all. And with federal spending now trailing off, while big state and local cutbacks continue, we’re going into reverse.

But isn’t keeping taxes for the affluent low also a form of stimulus? Not so you’d notice. When we save a schoolteacher’s job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more money instead, there’s a good chance that most of that money will just sit idle.

And what about the economy’s future? Everything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.

August 6, 2010

Putting Our Brains on Hold

By BOB HERBERT

The world leadership qualities of the United States, once so prevalent, are fading faster than the polar ice caps.

We once set the standard for industrial might, for the advanced state of our physical infrastructure, and for the quality of our citizens’ lives. All are experiencing significant decline.

The latest dismal news on the leadership front comes from the College Board, which tells us that the U.S., once the world’s leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations.

At a time when a college education is needed more than ever to establish and maintain a middle-class standard of living, America’s young people are moving in exactly the wrong direction. A well-educated population also is crucially important if the U.S. is to succeed in an increasingly competitive global environment.

But instead of exercising the appropriate mental muscles, we’re allowing ourselves to become a nation of nitwits, obsessed with the comings and goings of Lindsay Lohan and increasingly oblivious to crucially important societal issues that are all but screaming for attention. What should we be doing about the legions of jobless Americans, the deteriorating public schools, the debilitating wars, the scandalous economic inequality, the corporate hold on governmental affairs, the commercialization of the arts, the deficits?

Why is there not serious and widespread public engagement with these issues — and many others that could easily come to mind? That kind of engagement would lead to creative new ideas and would serve to enrich the lives of individual Americans and the nation as a whole. But it would require a heavy social and intellectual lift.

According to a new report from the College Board, the U.S. is 12th among developed nations in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. The report said, “As America’s aging and highly educated work force moves into retirement, the nation will rely on young Americans to increase our standing in the world.”

The problem is that today’s young Americans are not coming close to acquiring the education and training needed to carry out that mission. They’re not even in the ballpark. In that key group, 25- to 34-year-olds with a college degree, the U.S. ranks behind Canada, South Korea, Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Israel, France, Belgium and Australia. That is beyond pathetic.

“While the nation struggles to strengthen the economy,” the report said, “the educational capacity of our country continues to decline.”

Everybody is to blame — parents, students, the educational establishment, government leaders, the news media and on and on. A society that closes its eyes to the most important issues of the day, that often holds intellectual achievement in contempt, that is more interested in hip-hop and Lady Gaga than educating its young is all but guaranteed to spiral into a decline.

Speaking this week about the shortage of degrees in the 25- to 34-year-old demographic, Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board and a former governor of West Virginia, said, “When I was in school, we were No. 1 in the world in college graduations. When I was governor, we were third, and I was surprised by that drop. Now we’re 12th at a time when a good education is critically important to getting a decent job.”

Among other things, he called on educators to develop curricula that are more “interesting and inspiring.” And he said it is essential for students to work harder.

These are gloomy times in the United States. A child drops out of high school every 26 seconds. As incredible as it seems from the perspective of 2010, the report from the College Board tells us that “it is expected that the educational level of the younger generation of Americans will not approach their parents’ level of education.”

What is the matter with us? Have we been drinking? Whatever happened to that vaunted American dream? In Hawaii, the public schools were closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year for budget reasons.

When this is the educational environment, you can say goodbye to the kind of cultural, scientific and economic achievements that combine to make a great nation. We no longer know how to put our people to work. We read less and less and write like barbarians. We’ve increasingly turned our backs on the very idea of hard-won excellence while flinging open the doors to decadence and decline. No wonder Lady Gaga and Snooki from “Jersey Shore” are cultural heroes.

In their important book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz pointed out that educational attainment in the U.S. “was exceptionally rapid and continuous for the first three-quarters of the 20th century.”

Then, foolishly, we applied the brakes. All that’s at stake is our future.

I’m not sure I completely agree with Glenn Greenwald here, are not these various austerity measures precisely enacting the kind of stripped down neo-feudal society the market fundamentalists and neocons have been dreaming about? After all, they have wanted to do away with the board of education, social security, and every other public service for decades. In other words, this is the empire they have been dreaming about, one built on militarism and savage social Darwinism.

Published on Saturday, August 7, 2010 by Salon

What Collapsing Empire Looks Like

by Glenn Greenwald

As we enter our ninth year of the War in Afghanistan with an escalated force, and continue to occupy Iraq indefinitely, and feed an endlessly growing Surveillance State, reports are emerging of the Deficit Commission hard at work planning how to cut Social Security, Medicare, and now even to freeze military pay.  But a new New York Times article today illustrates as vividly as anything else what a collapsing empire looks like, as it profiles just a few of the budget cuts which cities around the country are being forced to make.  This is a sampling of what one finds:

Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further — it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation.

Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.

Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.

There are some lovely photos accompanying the article, including one showing what a darkened street in Colorado looks like as a result of not being able to afford street lights.  Read the article to revel in the details of this widespread misery.  Meanwhile, the tiniest sliver of the wealthiest — the ones who caused these problems in the first place — continues to thrive.  Let’s recall what former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson said last year in The Atlantic about what happens in under-developed and developing countries when an elite-caused financial crises ensues:

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or — here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique — the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk — at least until the riots grow too large.

The real question is whether the American public is too apathetic and trained into submission for that to ever happen.

UPDATE:  It’s probably also worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month — with a subheadline warning:  ”Back to Stone Age“ – which describes how “paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue.”  Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional.  And it was announced this week that “Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free.”

Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights — or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State — that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?  Anyway, I just wanted to leave everyone with some light and cheerful thoughts as we head into the weekend

The US congress was apparently hard at work this week. I just saw a clip from the Daily Show (which I cant post here due to Canadian internet restrictions) that featured a story about a recent effort to pass health care for 9/11 emergency workers suffering from chronic illness. The republicans blocked the bill because they said it would create “new taxes”. One of these wing-nuts actually stood on the floor and said something to the effect of: “these emergency workers risked their lives to protect our freedom not to raise taxes”.The republicans were also apparently concerned that some of the workers were “illegal aliens” therefore rendering their sacrifice undeserving of health care benefits. It turns out that the bill would not have raised taxes as the republicans claimed (which is of course beside the point), but close a corporate offshore tax loophole which would force certain industries to start paying what they owe for money earned in the US. After stopping this bill dead in its tracks, the republicans then led a bill to protect gun owners from losing their arsenal during bankruptcy proceedings. It is actually rare to see Jon Stewart get upset, but this really burned him. To me its just more evidence of the complete unraveling of any semblance of the public good in the US. Just another day at the office for the fearless leaders as they shamelessly protect corporate power, issue death sentences for sick people, and pander to the worst elements of US culture.