culture - Arabica Robusta on Diigo

The biopolitics of Baghdad

Soon after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US military began to explore culture-centric warfare as a means of finding the terms for both occupation and counterinsurgency. The power of the new doctrine is supposed to have been proved by the success of the surge in US combat troops that started in February 2007, which incorporated the new emphases on protecting the civilian population and on ‘non-kinetic’ (non-violent operations), and which has been credited with bringing about a dramatic reduction in ethno-sectarian deaths in Baghdad. This argument ignores the intensification of kinetic operations in and around the capital and the consequent spike in deaths caused by military violence, and it minimizes the role of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in eventually reducing ethno-sectarian deaths as Baghdad rapidly turned from a predominantly Sunni to an overwhelmingly Shia city. These erasures are not accidental: they are directly connected to carefully calculated political effects that result from presenting culture-centric warfare in general and the Surge in particular as intrinsically therapeutic interventions.

Tags: culture, hegemony, us, intervention, iraq, biopolitics on 2008-06-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Society and Ecology

How to live on earth

Tags: culture, ecology, housing, infrastructure, transition culture, urban on 2008-06-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Hard Power Soft Power & Structural Power - Cultural Anthropology @ KSU

Tags: power, culture, anthropology, structural on 2008-06-22 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled | Democracy and Elections | AlterNet

To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: "inverted totalitarianism," a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on "private media" than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events.

Tags: repression, us, political, democracy, wolin, totalitarianism, governmentality, hegemony, culture, media on 2008-05-25 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Many analysts, myself included, would conclude that Wolin has made a close to airtight case that the American republic's days are numbered, but Wolin himself does not agree. Toward the end of his study he produces a wish list of things that should be done to ward off the disaster of inverted totalitarianism: "rolling back the empire, rolling back the practices of managed democracy; returning to the idea and practices of international cooperation rather than the dogmas of globalization and preemptive strikes; restoring and strengthening environmental protections; reinvigorating populist politics; undoing the damage to our system of individual rights; restoring the institutions of an independent judiciary, separation of powers, and checks and balances; reinstating the integrity of the independent regulatory agencies and of scientific advisory processes; reviving representative systems responsive to popular needs for health care, education, guaranteed pensions, and an honorable minimum wage; restoring governmental regulatory authority over the economy; and rolling back the distortions of a tax code that toadies to the wealthy and corporate power."
Add Sticky Note
- What does Wolin mean by "populist"? Certainly not the populism of Dornbusch and National Endowment for Democracy theorists. See, for example, http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/7418.ctl.
  
  Certainly not the populism of an Obama or Lula, attempting to simultaneously echo the 'voice of the dispossessed' and Wall Street.
  posted by pickinjava on 2008-05-25
Unfortunately, this is more a guide to what has gone wrong than a statement of how to fix it, particularly since Wolin believes that our political system is "shot through with corruption and awash in contributions primarily from wealthy and corporate donors." It is extremely unlikely that our party apparatus will work to bring the military-industrial complex and the 16 secret intelligence agencies under democratic control. Nonetheless, once the United States has followed the classical totalitarianisms into the dustbin of history, Wolin's analysis will stand as one of the best discourses on where we went wrong.
Superpower is the sponsor, defender and manager of American imperialism and militarism, aspects of American government that have always been dominated by elites, enveloped in executive-branch secrecy, and allegedly beyond the ken of ordinary citizens to understand or oversee. Superpower is preoccupied with weapons of mass destruction, clandestine manipulation of foreign policy (sometimes domestic policy, too), military operations, and the fantastic sums of money demanded from the public by the military-industrial complex. (The U.S. military spends more than all other militaries on Earth combined. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion; the next closest national military budget is China's at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.)
One other subordinate task of managed democracy is to keep the citizenry preoccupied with peripheral and/or private conditions of human life so that they fail to focus on the widespread corruption and betrayal of the public trust. In Wolin's words, "The point about disputes on such topics as the value of sexual abstinence, the role of religious charities in state-funded activities, the question of gay marriage, and the like, is that they are not framed to be resolved. Their political function is to divide the citizenry while obscuring class differences and diverting the voters' attention from the social and economic concerns of the general populace." Prominent examples of the elite use of such incidents to divide and inflame the public are the Terri Schiavo case of 2005, in which a brain-dead woman was kept artificially alive, and the 2008 case of women and children living in a polygamous commune in Texas who were allegedly sexually mistreated.
On inverted totalitarianism's "self-pacifying" university campuses compared with the usual intellectual turmoil surrounding independent centers of learning, Wolin writes, "Through a combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation funds, joint projects involving university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system. No books burned, no refugee Einsteins. For the first time in the history of American higher education top professors are made wealthy by the system, commanding salaries and perks that a budding CEO might envy."
Among the factors that have promoted inverted totalitarianism are the practice and psychology of advertising and the rule of "market forces" in many other contexts than markets, continuous technological advances that encourage elaborate fantasies (computer games, virtual avatars, space travel), the penetration of mass media communication and propaganda into every household in the country, and the total co-optation of the universities. Among the commonplace fables of our society are hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds, and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose adepts are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge. Masters of this world are masters of images and their manipulation.
To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: "inverted totalitarianism," a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on "private media" than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events. It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison -- 751 per 100,000 people -- of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has "emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation's political traditions."
Wolin argues that to the extent the United States on occasion came close to genuine democracy, it was because its citizens struggled against and momentarily defeated the elitism that was written into the Constitution.
Wolin writes, "Our thesis is this: it is possible for a form of totalitarianism, different from the classical one, to evolve from a putatively 'strong democracy' instead of a 'failed' one." His understanding of democracy is classical but also populist, anti-elitist and only slightly represented in the Constitution of the United States. "Democracy," he writes, "is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs." It depends on the existence of a demos -- "a politically engaged and empowered citizenry, one that voted, deliberated, and occupied all branches of public office."
Given this historical backdrop, Wolin introduces three new concepts to help analyze what we have lost as a nation. His master idea is "inverted totalitarianism," which is reinforced by two subordinate notions that accompany and promote it -- "managed democracy" and "Superpower," the latter always capitalized and used without a direct article. Until the reader gets used to this particular literary tic, the term Superpower can be confusing. The author uses it as if it were an independent agent, comparable to Superman or Spiderman, and one that is inherently incompatible with constitutional government and democracy.

Global Cultural Flows

Funded by an SSHRC Research Development Initiative with additional support from Canadian Heritage, the aim of this project is to determine the role of global cultural flows in the formation of identity in 21st century Canada. The concept of “global cultural flows” refers to intense international movements of people, cultures and commodities that have restructured the means by which individuals establish personal and collective identities.

Tags: culture, identity, social, movements, globalization, global, canada, collective on 2008-05-04 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Resistance in the News

Culture has and continues to be fertile terrain in the ongoing struggle for a more just, equitable, and sustainable society and planet. This blog serves to highlight some of the most inspiring examples of cultural resistance around the world, and is by no means as exhaustive as it could be. If you know about other exciting stories that need to be shared, particularely those that highlight the intersection of culture and political and social engagement, please bring them to our attention!

Tags: social, movements, culture on 2008-05-03 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action

Affinities is a web-based journal that focuses on groups, movements, and communities that set out to construct sustainable alternatives to the racist, hetero-sexist system of liberal-capitalist nation-states.

Tags: svarteper, culture, activism, anarchism, autonomy, identity, social, movements on 2008-03-29 -All Annotations (0) -About

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nthposition online magazine

Google search revealed that "all elements in front of the nth position are less than or equal to this element, and all elements that follow are greater than or equal to it"...no better or worse than any other site...preference...good, interesting writing

Tags: art, blog, culture, literature, politics on 2008-03-27 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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The economics and culture of financialisation

Tags: finance, capitalism, economics, theory, BCC, culture, critical on 2008-03-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Empirical Studies and Conceptual Dilemmas: A Reply to Janet Roitman

Tags: roitman, geschiere, konings, africa, culture, power, legitimacy, chad, cameroon, foucault, discourse, theory, academic on 2008-03-22 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Bruno Latour: Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social

Tags: latour, tarde, svarteper, actornetwork, space, culture, politics on 2008-03-21 -All Annotations (0) -About

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"Postcolonial" Futures in a Not Yet Postcolonial World: Locating the Intersections of Ethnic, Indigenous and Postcolonial Studies

Tags: postcolonialism, ethnicity, indigenous, academic, academia, borders, transnationalism, culture, criticalspatialpractice on 2008-03-20 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Ethan Zuckerman

My main affiliation is with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

Tags: ethanz, activism, africa, culture, global, web2.0, internet on 2008-03-15 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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…My heart’s in Accra » The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech

With web 2.0, we’ve embarced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. as a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists.

Tags: web2.0, ethanz, blog, activism, censorship, china, culture, global on 2008-03-15 and saved by11 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Arabica Robusta's Bookmarks tagged culture → View Popular

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