David Harvey talking about "The Enigma of Capital".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E11peQC0XXU&feature=player_embedded#!

Conspiracy Theories

I guess the farmer would be the interests of global capital and the sheepdog the apparatus of state security.

It's hard not to like an article that contains the line, "The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood-funnel into anything that smells like money."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405

Shame there's nothing anyone can, or is going to, do about it.

Programmed Obsolesence

A great documentary on La 2 last night about programmed obsolescence. If you suspected that stuff about lightbulbs was the paranoid imaginings of conspiracy theorists- check this out. Lightbulbs could last indefinitely, Nylon tights were originally designed to be ladder-free and as for your i-Pod...

Here's the link to the documentary (Spanish):

http://www.rtve.es/noticias/20110104/productos-consumo-duran-cada-vez-menos/392498.shtml

And here's one to a pioneer in the field, Bernard London, as early as 1932 (English):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/London_%281932%29_Ending_the_depression_through_planned_obsolescence.pdf

We don't choose the stuff we buy, the stuff we buy chooses us

Decentering of the subject

(From Firat and Venkatesh Postmodernity: The Age of Marketing; 1993)

The modernist project placed the human

being at the center, as the subject-that is,

as the agent that acts through and upon

others; nature and objects. The Cartesian

idea of the subject, as it is known, has dominated

modern thought. This subject is endowed

with the ability to act independently

and autonomously in the choice and pursuit

of one’s goals. This subject is also constituted

in terms of the separation between the body

and the mind (Rorty, 1979, pp. 142-145); a

precondition for the subject to graduate from

a state of being to a state of knowing. The

existential subject has now become the cognitive

subject. Knowledge acquisition for this

subject is possible by separating or distancing

oneself from a pure experience of being in

order to cievelop a cognitive understanding

of being; its context and conditions. Modern

society is organized to reflect and actively

promise the potential of the cognitive subject

by providing the knowledge and the means to

act through science and technology, The

products of modernity (of science) arc really

meant to serve the ‘subjects’ of modernity.

Postmodernists see this narrative of

modernity to be mythical or illusory. According

to them, there is, a confusion between

the subject and the object (products of the

market) as to who or what is in. control

(Hassan, 1987; Jameson, 1983). Rather than

the subject controlling the circumstances and

processes of life in one’s interactions with

the object, the objects are viewed as determining

the conditions and procedures of

consumption (Baudrillard, 1983b). In driving

cars, using microwave ovens, washing machines,

computers, and the like, the human

being is generally the follower of instructions,

the correct ways of doing things. One’s

actions are determined by the features and

structures of the products. One can as easily

visualize that the role of the human being is

to allow products to perform their functions

rather than products enabling the achievement

of human goals. Concerns for the health

of the economy, the market, often seem to

override the concern for the goals of individuals

in policies adopted by the state and/or

corporations.

The confusion between the subject and

the object is further reinforced by the fact

that consumers tend to perceive themselves

as marketable items. This tendency is reinforced

by the marketing system in encouraging

representations of oneself as images. The

marketing orientation dominates not only the

positioning of products in the market by organizations,

but also in positioning of the

consumer itself, say, in the social market

(Far-at, in press). As briefly discussed earlier,

consumers assume different images and personalities

in different situations to make

themselves acceptable in each case. This is

much in evidence in today’s “body” culture.

For example, many consumers, male and female,

are increasingly buying plastic surgery

and body implants to customize parts of their

bodies to cultural expectations. There is a

distancing of one’s own gaze from one’s own

body to “view” oneself and scrutinize

one’s own images, assessing each fragmented body

part in terms of its contribution to these

images. This scrutiny often occurs from the

perspective of the other; that is, not from

one’s own, autonomous perspective, but from

the perspective of cultural expectations which

are internalized by the consumer (Emberley,

1987; Kroker and Kroker, 1987). This is really

a test of how well we fit the images

required for success. In this sense, fashion

becomes the metaphor for culture (Faurschou,

1990; Sawchuk, 1987). Such objectification

of one’s own body and self allows one

to be consumed; just like a product, acting

only to fulfill a prespecified function determined

by the market system. Specifically,

consumers become products consumed for

the production of other objects, in the offices,

production lines, and elsewhere.

Churlish reflections on a heartwarming story

Amid the heartwarming scenes that have accompanied the rescue of the Chilean miners over the past couple of days, I couldn't help but be reminded of Baudrillard's stubborn refusal to countenance the reality of the 1991 gulf war, as the TV broadcast nightly images of American missiles raining down on the Iraqi desert. It first struck me when, in a "context" piece on Radio 4, we were reminded that between 10 and 20,000 miners lose their lives every year in mining accidents. Put in the context of this loss of life, the joyous escape of the Chilean miners starts to look like a decoy, a distraction from the far more significant everyday reality which does not lend itself to the event-based format of news presentation. However, I'm not sure that it is the thousands of annual deaths that we are being distracted from.

The spectacular nature of the rescues and the tidy narrative structure lends itself irresistibly to the requirements of rolling news providers who have, consequently, fashioned from what are probably rather scrappy and confused raw materials in the Chilean desert, a global media event. Thus packaged by the media, the event takes on an irresistible reality. But the reality that is triumphantly being affirmed is less that of the very personal dramas of the people involved and rather a universalist notion of human sentiment, as refracted through the global media. How could it not be real, look at the joy on the faces of the loved ones as each miner emerges safely from the capsule. So we consume the joy that other people elsewhere are experiencing and associate it vaguely with an idea of common humanity, but one that is stretched so thin across the surface of the globe that it could only ever be symbolic.

I live in Barcelona and both the Chilean desert and the events that are unfolding there are very distant. Not, however, in the specially selected and packaged world of global news events. The media has erected, and struggles to keep aloft, a fictitious globalised world stitched together from scraps and fragments that can be re-packaged to conform to the narrative requirements of that world.

The media traffics in symbols of a globalised world which is not in fact any different from the symbols that represent it. In this tenuous version of reality, the story in the Chilean desert has proved to be a gold mine.

Change of Course

I'm going to put the cycle of posts "Globalisation, space-time compression and symbolic exchange" on the back burner for the time being. This is for two reasons; first because the extended piece of writing that I was hoping to develop wasn't really taking shape, suggesting that I probably need to approach it in a different way and second, because I haven't got so much time at the moment. Instead I intend to treat this blog more like a blog and post regular self contained shorter pieces. As well as this I will post more links and the like. I will post the writing and links that relate to my academic interests on this site and more free-form pieces over at my other blog The Long-Legged Fly.