Pam Brown's Blog l emission - control. net

The Ironic Shadow Cast by Steve Jobs' Death

The irony of Steve Jobs dying on the same day as the major Occupy Wall Street protest and march in New York City can’t be overstated, even though it has been completely overlooked by both mainstream and alternative media.  News stories celebrating Steve Jobs as the creator of a technological revolution trumped even local coverage of thousands of OWS supporters marching in the streets.  Of course, Steve Jobs' death and the occupation of Wall Street are unrelated events, yet together they represent the fundamental tension currently at play in American society today:  the crisis in our understanding of who we are as individuals and who we are as part of society. 

The underlying idea behind the OWS protest is that economic inequality, produced by the belief in the individual as able to function separately from the human collective, is misguided, unethical and unsustainable.  The cultural battle being fought at OWS seeks to reprioritize collective needs over individual desires by arguing to end the exploitation of the lower and middle classes by a small elite.  It is this exploitation that has produced economic pain in the form of lack of jobs and loss of economic resources for all but the top 1%.  It is this “failure” of capitalism to produce happiness and security for the majority, as well as its ability to camouflage the relationship between the 99% and the 1%, that calls attention to irreparable problems with the system, itself. 

Why it's Time for New Yorkers to Demand that Mayor Bloomberg to Step Down

I have started a petition demanding that "Mayor" Bloomberg resign from his position as mayor of New York City in hope of drawing attention to and remedying the fascism we are living under here in the Big Apple.  Fascism sounds like a strong word, but it is actually the most accurate description of what has happened in New York City.  We typically view fascism as a kind of nationalistic regime that happens at the point of a gun.  But in reality fascism is something that happens slowly.  Fascism can be described as a tendency toward autocratic control.  In our neoliberal capitalist world, often times guns are unnecessary to achieve control, because money can be used instead. This is what has happened in New York City.

New Yorkers had a law limiting any elected mayor to two terms.  In fact this law was voted on twice in recent elections.  Unfortunately, this law did not apply to Bloomberg.  Why not?  Because he believed he was above it, and had the money to thwart it.  Bloomberg was able to convert his billionaire level economic status to political power by influencing the City Council to change the law.  He argued that his leadership was necessary to restore economic order to the city and nation due to the economic crisis on Wall Street.  Evidently, in the minds of the individual City Council members, the consequences of resisting a change to the term limit law outweighed the consequences of going along with the billionaire Mayor.  But why was the City Council able to change a law voted on by the people of New York City?  The intellectual history of this law is actually quite fascinating.  Since the French Revolution, laws have been carried forth to prevent violent revolution except when absolutely necessary.  The law that allowed the City Council to make this change originated with the need to prevent an arrogant and powerful leader from taking over a government in a violent coup d'tat.  The calculation was that by granting an additional term, the leader might be persuaded to step down at the end of that period, and if not, then violence might be necessary to maintain democracy.

Even though he was able to thwart the two term limit, many New Yorkers were so against Bloomberg's manipulation of the system, that he was forced to spend millions of his billions of dollars in personal wealth to drown out his democratic opponent.  Not surprisingly, some of that money was spent in possible violation of campaign finance laws.  And in the end, he spent so much money that even President Obama did not bother to take a strong stand for his democratic opponent, who most certainly would have won had Bloomberg not been able to use his personal wealth to spend $102 million dollars - about $174 per voter - to win the campaign.  To put things in perspective his opponent spent less than $10 million.  In other words, Bloomberg had no problem using his economic power to change the law to enable himself to run for a third term, and also to use incredible amounts of personal wealth to further subvert the system by drowning out his opponent.

Thoughts on Representing the West

Recently, I was in Denver, Colorado for a wedding and had the opportunity to visit two museums with radically different ideological projects:  The Black American West Museum and the Denver Art Museum.  It was interesting to have the opportunity to view these museums both on the same day and also with a group of lay people (my family), who had never thought about the role of museums in constructing a particular sense of history.

The Black American West Museum was founded in 1971 by Paul Wilbur Stewart, and developed out of his personal mission to uncover the history of black cowboys.  He began simply by speaking to patrons at his Denver barbershop, who began to bring him memorabilia and family photos, which he kept on display.  Once his collection out grew his barbershop, he established the museum by fusing his project with the project of commemorating the life of the first African-American female physician licensed in Colorado, Dr. Justina Ford. 

Constructing Memory in the Absence of History: Embodying Conflicting Narratives at Historic Brattonsville

The distinction between memory and history is subtle, often ephemeral, and rarely considered except at the moments when their invisible forms collide in material representation.  Conflict over representation is nothing new, but almost always seems to occur when collective memories come into contact, calling a present vision of the past into question in a way that makes obvious that it is the future that is somehow at stake.  No cultural form seems immune to questions about content and ideology, but museums seem particularly ripe for the picking.  Unlike films, novels, and artwork, for example, museums carry with them the expectation of historical accuracy, the belief that truthful representation of “reality” is possible.  As the postmodern realization that it is the present that contains both past and future has sunk in, claims on knowledge associated with museums have been called into question.  As Pierre Nora proposes, with the loss of history, we have only memory left.  This memory, like history, is collective in its nature, yet replaces tradition and ritual with representation in all its varied forms.  In this context, it seems only natural that conflicts over representation frequently have as subtext questions about power, ideology and group identity.  Further, it seems only natural that these conflicts tend to play out as struggles for control of and access to narratives.

The Beautiful Social Life of Non-Duality

Recently, I heard on TV that by the time you’re five years old you’ve already decided where you stand in relation to art. The source and surety of this statement may be suspect, but the general idea may actually hold true. It does appear that for some art occurs as an elixir; while for others, art is something to be pushed aside in favor of science, possibly admired, but nevertheless subjugated. Ultimately, this existential choice is really not a stance on art at all, but rather a stance on our human relationship to the realm of knowledge. Is knowing an individual activity or is it inherently a collective process? Does objectivity exist in “reality” or does it just appear that way due to the subtle workings of hegemony? Is it possible that knowledge is to be found in connecting, intersecting, overlapping subjectivities? This questioning is really about the essence of the social bond: is it found in reasoned organization or organic interconnectivity? The proposition that I want to make and observe through my reading of Eiko Ikegami’s Bonds of Civility is that duality is mediated through the arts, and artistic beauty occurs when duality is mediated. It is inside of the artistic act of pure subjectivity, that the object, and thus the other, disappears and we experience oneness. It is this sensibility that we refer to as beauty. It is this striving to express the beauty of this oneness on the part of the Japanese people that is the true subject of Bonds of Civility.

Download The Beautiful Social Life of Non-Duality

Hiding Subjectivity in Narrative’s Shadow

In Coercion, Capital and European States, Charles Tilly takes on a twofold challenge: to understand why European states reached the same destination of “national state” form via distinctly different paths, and to validate his anti-narrative, “mechanistic” methodology for the social sciences. The wide scope of the book, both in terms of its thousand year span and its examination of numerous European countries, regions and colonies, provides a synthesized but detailed analysis, and substantial contribution toward understanding the European historical process. In the context of the intellectual tradition of which Tilly was a part, the work provides an alternate account of the dynamics of modernization, perceiving deeply historic roots that unintentionally led to current international power dynamics between states, as well as current citizen relationships to states. The work also stands as “a proposal of how to move ‘beyond the cultural turn,’” as well as a critique of the “big case comparisons” method of historical sociology (Norkus, 2007: 165). The book provides a challenge to understandings of what satisfies the requirements for sociological knowledge, proposing the detailed study of historical phenomenon coupled with a sociological stance that resists the creation of narrative links at the expense of accuracy. In this memo, I want to argue that in spite of the enormous contribution of the book, Tilly fails to satisfy his own objective of elucidating the “why” of European state formation, due to his failure to perceive the interconnectedness of narrative, time, memory, and thus, history. Ironically, although Tilly perceives the embeddedness of story in our social world, even calling for a study of the sociology of story, he does not perceive the futility of attempting to remove narrative, and its subjectivity from his analysis.

Download Hiding Subjectivity in Narrative’s Shadow

 

 

Resonance: Neoliberal Ideology in an Attention Economy

I am working on a book based on my master's work in sociology of media that explores the reasons some ideas resonate in the current media environment and others do not.  The project seeks to incorporate theoretical ideas about media with practical political realities.

Abstract:

Over recent years, the American conversation has shifted from concern over equality to concern over freedom.  The turn toward ideals of freedom and individualism has been termed “neoliberalism.” Most research on this transition focuses on the political and economic conditions associated with neoliberalism, and not on the relationship between this transition and the revolutionary change our media environment has undergone simultaneously. The paper argues that although accounts that seek to understand neoliberalism as a part of an ongoing ideological debate between conservatives and liberals are partially true, these accounts fail to provide a satisfying explanation of why these ideas have resonated so strongly at this time. By perceiving the moving image as the foundation of a fundamentally different mode of production, and by perceiving neoliberalism as an outgrowth of the breakdown of the historic relationship between labor and capital, we can understand neoliberalism as a change to social ethic associated with new technology.

Download Chapter 1

Exposing American Power in a Networked World

If nothing else, the ongoing Wikileaks event has certainly been fascinating.  The recent event highlights the dynamics of power in a networked world, from the inside look at the arrogant manner in which our diplomats perceive their colleagues in other nations, to the exposure of corporate influence on state business such as in the case of Mastercard and Visa in Russia, and Shell in Nigeria, to the manner in which the US government has used its influence to persuade "independent" corporations throughout the world to deny access to services including commerce and web hosting to Wikileaks.  Following are my preliminary thoughts on the essence of the events unfolding around the release of Wikileaks from the perspective of changes we are seeing globally as network society grows.

The Corporate State

In the case of Russia, we can observe the infiltration of the corporate into state functions, where President Obama has intervened on behalf of Mastercard and Visa in an attempt to thwart the creation of a Russian owned credit processing agency.  The potential loss of business for globally dominant credit card processing agencies was not only a matter for the state, but for the president, himself.  In the case of Nigeria, which happens to be the 8th largest supplier of oil internationally, Nigerian government interests (which at least claim to operate on behalf of its people) are shown to have been subverted by the installation of Shell executives at all levels of governance. 

And the reverse operation, using state power to influence corporate actions, is also in full operation.  Senator Lieberman brashly intervened with Amazon such that they have refused to host the Wikileaks website, a Swiss Bank is pursuaded to close the Wikileaks account, apparently for legitimate reasons that may or may not have been exposed without US state intervention, Visa and Mastercard are likely encouraged to refuse service to Wikileaks, while continuing to allow donations to organizations such as the KKK, and PayPal openly admits that they were caused, via a letter they received from the US State Department, to view Wikileaks actions as illegal, and thus, in violation of their service agreement, in spite of the fact that there are still no charges against the organization.

Whatever Happened to Free Speech?

It's hard for me to understand the argument against net neutrality regulation.  It seems so obvious that restrictions on communication impinge on the "free speech" our democracy was based on.  The media corporations that control access to the internet have stated clearly that they intend to control traffic online, allowing some communication to move faster based on how much one is paying.  So many on the Republican side don't seem to appreciate that if money allows one voice to be heard (and causes another to be squelched), there is no freedom of speech in any practical sense in spite of us all having the ability to speak.  This is, of course, the same problem we're dealing with due to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.  The fact that the FCC has not taken strong and bold actions to protect the vast majority of "the people" from corporate domination online is a symbolic of where we are really at in the the United States. 

Chris Hedges says it best quoting Hannah Arendt:

“For a considerable length of time the normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. “Normal men don’t know that everything is possible, refuse to believe their eyes and ears in the face of the monstrous. ... The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside non-totalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity. ...”

How Democracy Dies: Lessons From a Master

The time for compromise has passed on net neutrality

The Feeling of Fascism

I don't watch late night TV, but I saw the clip of David Letterman commenting to Bloomberg that he must be embarrassed to have appeared on the famous Forbes list as the 10th richest man in the world.  But Bloomberg stole the joke by saying that he wasn't embarrassed at all.  This actually stumped Letterman.  I don't know how rich David Letterman is, but I'm betting he's in the top 1%.  But even for someone with that kind of wealth, Bloomberg's unabashed greed was stunning.  Yes, Dave, he really is "laughing all the way to the bank".  What would he have responded if he were asked how he felt about being in a group that made 1.13 TRILLION dollars the same year that 10 million more Americans lost their health coverage and that 1 in 7 were classified as below the poverty line.  I think he probably would have said the same thing - after all his unique qualities as a human being got him there.  This is why he should be a third term mayor of New York, in spite of the fact that a two term limit was voted on by the actual people of this city.  Yet, anytime I use the "f-word" (fascism) people seem stunned - as if that's an extreme statement, when in reality it simply describes exactly what's happening.

I'm reading Paul D'Amato's The Meaning of Marxism and thinking a lot about the way that American society is today.  Has it really changed?  Has it really changed so much that there's cause for alarm?  When work was more plentiful and the stock market going up up up, were things really any different - in reality?  Or did they just feel different, like the way you feel different like after eating too big of a meal. The hunger is gone - replaced by a feeling of fullness that makes it seem like you'll never be hungry again.

It seems to me that many of the ideas about how the world we live in works are not really connected to reality.  I grew up at a time when the ideals of class mobility and meritocracy were hammered home in middle class families.  But there's no denying that those with a leg up, regardless of merit, fared better.  Have things really changed?  Or were these just a convenient beliefs we clung to?  Who was it really convenient for?  Ridding myself of these ideas, is like jumping into a bathtub filled with ice - it's hard, and painful, but the kind of sobering truth that the doctor ordered.  So, the question becomes what to do next?  What to do when we face that American fascism feels just like democracy and capitalism does...that in reality, they are actually the same.