Posts Tagged ‘political economy’
Monday Morning Links!
* Permanent addition to the sidebar: Resources for planning a trip to the Octavia E. Butler Archives at the Huntington. Send me anything I’ve missed!
* CFPs I have going: Women and Science Fiction Media (SFFTV Special Issue). Buffy at 20 (April conference at Marquette).
* My friend and colleague Dan Hassler-Forest has been composing a Trump Film Studies Syllabus: 1, 2, 3, 4.
* Political Economy of Fascism Syllabus.
* So you think you elected an autocrat.
* Dr. Strange and the Trump Presidency.
* Trump poised to violate Constitution his first day in office. Not even the same scandal: Donald Trump Pauses Transition Work to Meet with Indian Business Partners.
* Electoral College fan fiction getting good now.
* This seems fine. Disabled People Will Die Under Trump. Trumpwatch. Trump’s big infrastructure plan? It’s a trap. Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi Have a Plan to Make President Trump Popular. @EveryTrumpDonor. Trump vs. neoliberalism, #whoeverwinswelose. Racism with No Racists. Garbage In, Garbage Out. The Man in the High Castle. After Trump. Being Mike Pence.
* It can’t happen here. It probably can’t happen here. It probably won’t happen here. Okay but that was a long time ago. George Takei.
* Successful propaganda, O’Shaughnessy argues, does not traffic in outright falsehoods, but trades on half-truths and innuendos and depends on “people’s ability to perform a great deal of selective perception, and to edit out the unpleasant.” So propaganda is bullshit — in the philosophical sense.
* Don’t normalize this. Don’t ever, ever normalize this.
* We’ll be talking about this question for a long time, whether we like it or not: The End of Identity Liberalism. Why Social Media Is Terrible for Multiethnic Democracies. And yet: Blame Trump’s Victory on College-Educated Whites, Not the Working Class.
* Close Reading Hamilton: “What’d I Miss?” I only did two days on Hamilton in my class this time around and wound up focusing a lot on these two songs myself.
* Abolish Chuck Schumer. Abolish the Presidency.
* More than 100 campus leaders urge Trump to take more forceful stand against “harassment, hate and acts of violence.” Campuses Confront Hostile Acts Against Minorities After Donald Trump’s Election. Wesleyan declared sanctuary campus.
* It doesn’t matter how effective a deterrent it is — it’s cruel and unusual and we need to act.
* Only the superrich can save us… oh forget it.
* Meet the Professor Who’s Trying to Help You Steer Clear of Clickbait.
* Michigan fights court order to give Flint residents bottled water.
* Keep an eye on North Carolina.
* A Brief History of Fascism in the Pacific Northwest.
* When a Sibling Goes to Prison.
* The Limits of Gossip: Informal system of warning colleagues about senior scholars who engage in inappropriate behavior doesn’t really protect anyone, study finds.
* The Alphabet That Will Save a People From Disappearing.
* A Mere 12,000 US Schools Are Within a Mile of a Hazardous Chemical Facility.
* Science proves the rich really are different.
* We might be done with climate change, but climate change is not done with us.
* It’s official: NASA’s peer-reviewed EM Drive paper has finally been published.
* The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.
Though sports culture continues to be a domain of intense patriarchal production and violence — rape jokes are just locker room talk, after all — these days jocks in the news are just as likely to be taking a knee against American racism in the image of Colin Kaepernick. The nerds, on the other hand, are shit-posting for a new American Reich. The nerd/jock distinction has always been a myth designed to hide social conflict and culturally re-center white male subjectivity. Now that the nerds have fully arrived, their revenge looks uglier than anything the jocks ever dreamed.
* And because you demanded it…
‘The Need for Dissatisfaction Is Implicitly Recognized by Keynesian Economics, Which Sees the Capitalist System as Threatened by the Possibility of Individual or Collective Satisfaction, Manifest as a Demand Shortfall’
Depression is the iconic illness in this respect. Indeed, we might say that if ‘immaterial’ labour is now the hegemonic form of production, depression is the hegemonic form of incapacity. Typically, depression is characterized by a lack of any clear clinical definition; indeed it is often defined as anything that can be treated with anti-depressants. [5] Depression is just sheer incapacity, a distinctly neo-liberal form of psychological deficiency, representing the flipside of an ethos that implores individuals to act, enjoy, perform, create, achieve and maximize. In an economy based in large part on services, enthusiasm, dynamism and optimism are vital workplace resources. The depressed employee is stricken by a chronic deflation of these psycho-economic capacities, which can lead him or her to feel economically useless, and consequently more depressed. The workplace therefore acquires a therapeutic function, for if people can somehow be persuaded to remain in work despite mental or physical illness, then their self-esteem will be prevented from falling too low, and their bio-psycho-economic potential might be rescued. Many of the UK government’s strategies for reducing incapacity-benefit claims and health-related absence focus on reorienting the Human Resources profession, such that managers become better able to recognize and support depressed and anxious employees. Lifting the taboo surrounding mental illness, so as to address it better, has become an economic-policy priority.
William Davies, “The Political Economy of Unhappiness.” Via Marc Bousquet.
Optimistic theorists of cognitive capitalism, such as Hardt and Negri, believe that the positive externalities or spill-over effects associated with immaterial production create the conditions for a new commons. Efforts to measure and privatize human, intellectual and cultural resources must ultimately fail; the hegemonic character of immaterial labour means that the most valuable economic resources are becoming socialized, despite the best efforts of capital to prevent this. The proposition I wish to investigate here is in some ways the inverse: while policy-makers, doctors and economists seek to contain the negative externality of unhappiness as a measurable psychological deficiency and economic cost, it has inherently political and sociological qualities that lend it critical potential. One contradiction of neo-liberalism is that it demands levels of enthusiasm, energy and hope whose conditions it destroys through insecurity, powerlessness and the valorization of unattainable ego ideals via advertising. What is most intriguing about the turn towards happiness amongst political elites and orthodox economists is that it is bringing this truth to the fore, and granting it official statistical endorsement. Even a cursory examination of the evidence on unhappiness in neo-liberal societies draws the observer beyond the limits of psychology, and into questions of political economy.
Gerry Canavan 