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#373 – Indebted to the Federal Government

Monday, March 1st, 2010

when it comes to debt, the federal government remains a valued brand.

You wouldn’t think companies would want to be associated with the federal government in any way these days. But when it comes to debt, the state remains viable as a commodified brand.

Images of the White House and Capitol predominate in advertisements for private, for-profit debt settlement companies. These ads are presented in mock newscast style, as if they were public service announcements.

It’s as if the state, declared dead, cursed for its tax collecting and other infringements, now returns, like a zombie. Only now it’s a puppet government. Corporate CEOs pull the strings. Dollar signs appear in the eye holes of the masks. Interest accumulates on stage.

This phantasmagorical entity dances across the proscenium, casting a mere shadow of actual state power on the backdrop. Nonetheless, the lingering power of even the commodified image of the federal government reminds us that we may yet have witnessed the final curtain for state power.

The debt settlement companies in these advertisements imitate New Deal alphabet soup federal programs in their names. And they echo the Obamanian call for the continued role of government in their slogans. The NMHC—the National Mortgage Help Center—declares, “Let’s get through this together!” after showing an image of President Obama himself and mentioning the federal stimulus act of 2009.

Notice, though, if you log on to the group’s website, an important disclaimer: “The ‘National Mortgage Help Center’ is not affiliated in any way with any government program. The National Mortgage Help Center is a for profit business that educates the general public and works with attorneys and brokers to reduce monthly mortgage payments through loan modifications.”

How American it is, then, to see the federal government at once so trivialized and yet so crucial. The public interest, corporate interests, and plain old interest collide in debt collection.

But there remain bills to be settled yet.

Posted in Advertising Culture, Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Television Culture | No Comments »

#368 – The Idea of the Marketplace, Continued

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

grafton on distinguishing the humanities from the marketplace.

Anthony Grafton weighs in on Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas:

But thinking about the academy only, or mainly, as a market is another matter. As Menand unwittingly shows, it narrows the field of vision. The humanities need reform because their traditions are confining and their job market is a catastrophe, but reform cannot mean surrender, or dilution. It means finding out how to do what the scientists have already done: how to combine the rigor of tradition with experiment and innovation–but without replacing hordes of underpaid adjuncts with hordes of underpaid post-docs, as the scientists have. More generally, it means finding creative ways to make life instructively hard, for a few years, for the broadest range of talented people of all sorts and conditions whom we can educate and then employ productively and decently. What makes reform urgent is the passion, the erudition, and the intelligence of those whom the academy is now failing–the sheer destruction of talent and love and energy, of the traditions of deep learning, over which we humanists are presiding. The masters of the next generation are still knocking on our doors, but most of them find themselves too busy speeding down the freeway to their next campus, grading stacks of papers, and worrying about their debts to learn as they wish to learn and as we need them to learn. They are missing from Menand’s cool, lucid, and limited book, as they are from so much of what is thought and written about us humanists in these bad days.

From “Humanities and Inhumanities,” New Republic.

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover, Economic Culture | No Comments »

#357 – Doctoring the Doctor of Philosophy

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

imagining a clean bill of health for the ph.d. job market.

X-posted from HASTAC blog.

The yearly conferences in the humanities–MLA, AHA, and others–have brought an onslaught of handwringing over the purpose of graduate education in a collapsing academic job market (not that it was ever that good, even during the bubble years).

William Pannapacker, a.k.a. Thomas H. Benton, Dean Dad, Tenured Radical, and others have weighed in on what graduate students, potential graduate students, and graduate programs should do. Basic message: don’t go! Do something else!

Tenured Radical has some particulary intriguing recommendations for humanities graduate programs, her overall point being:

While I don’t think Ph.D, programs are responsible for unemployed graduates, they could do a better job of imagining what an intellectual life in the twenty-first century looks like and how the university can connect to the public sphere is more vital ways.

Lots of valid points made in these critiques, reflections, and comments, but there is one thing that always bothers me about them. We seem to pretend that the job market for intellectual work in the “public sphere” is robust compared to academia. Curating? Working in a library? Not so easy to get jobs in those fields, even if you train directly for them. Journalism? Not doing so well lately. “Content providers” on the Internet? Business isn’t exactly booming like it was in ye old digital revolution days.

Perhaps the larger problem is not that the academic job market is collapsing, but that the “public sphere” of “intellectual life in the twenty-first century” itself needs reimagining.

I don’t mean that everyone should start twittering and blogging and chattering away right now. What I mean is that the problem of the academy is also an opportunity to imagine a “public sphere” and an “intellectual life” whose institutions, economies, and values are not dominated by neo-liberal ideologies of efficiency, productivity, and profit, but also thought, interaction, care, deliberation, reading, and time-consuming investigations. Less banking, more seminars!

Maybe the answer, weirdly, is not that graduate admissions should be limited, but actually that more people should be going to graduate school rather than fewer.

They should be spending more time studying, and part of this study should be about developing a robust graduate education that connects the time-honored traditions of scholasticism–specialization, mentoring, arguing, getting a bit lost in a corner of a discipline–to the reimagining of the public sphere as a place in which the peculiarities of the academia and the general good intersect.

This would mean a dramatic turn in the kind of institutional work of academics, universities, and others. It would mean building a counter-movement to the corporatization of everything that for so many people now feels like the only path. It would mean a lot of struggle. But maybe if things keep getting worse, this struggle will make more and more sense.

Instead of all the banter about how liberal-arts training is the key to finding employment, let’s start talking about how we could imagine the kind of employment that would suit people with a liberal-arts orientation.*

For intriguing takes on the Ph.D. job situation, see:

*Admittedly, this kind of talk occurs more at the undergraduate level, but it’s part of the same mindset that dismisses Ph.D. training as pointless and irrelevant.

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Intellectual Culture | 2 Comments »

#351 – Not Building a Name Brand

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

no logo, chicago-style?

Naomi Klein would probably object, but no logo has a long, if not exactly anti-capitalist history in the Chicago area, which is filled with companies that brandish (or do not brandish as the case may be) their rather nondescript brand names: General Automation, Inc.; Accurate Products, Inc.; and proudly (or reticently) standing on the shores of the Chicago River, General Growth, which is, fittingly in these times of general recession, struggling to overcome a “mammoth bankruptcy.”

Photograph: Culture Rover

Posted in Architectural Culture, Consumer Culture, Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Urban Culture, Visual Culture | No Comments »

#342 – Grow Up Government!

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

exercising the option on the social contract.

It seems unjust. But look what happened to the global economy after Lehman failed. Unemployment in the U.S. went to 9.5 per cent. It’s not just Wall Street that suffers when you ‘teach people a lesson.’ The tragedy of financial populism is that you do terrible things to innocent people. – Timothy Geithner

You can’t just go out and shoot the bankers. You can’t have an economy without a functioning credit system. People are angry. They’re furious. But you have no option but to live with these people. – Barney Frank

From James B. Stewart, A Reporter at Large, “Eight Days,” The New Yorker, 21 September 2009.

Obama will have to directly attack the fortified bastions of the newest ‘new class’—the makers of the paper economy in which he came of age—if he is to accomplish anything. These interests did not spend fifty years shipping the greatest industrial economy in the history of the world overseas only to be challenged by a newly empowered, green-economy working class. They did not spend much of the past two decades gobbling up previously public sectors such as health care, education, and transportation only to have to compete with a reinvigorated public sector. They mean, even now, to use the bailout to make the government their helpless junior partner and if they can they will devour every federal dollar available to recoup their own losses, and thereby preclude the use of any monies for the rest of Barack Obama’s splendid vision.

From Kevin Baker, Barack Hoover Obama: The Best and the Brightest Blow It Again, Harper’s Magazine, July 2009.

In the quotations above, what’s so remarkable about the difference in perspective between, on the one hand, Timothy Geithner and Barney Frank, and, on the other, Kevin Baker, is their sense of possibility for anything other than neoliberal capitalism. Geithner and Frank simply cannot imagine anything outside the binary of inegalitarian “free” markets or what Geithner calls “financial populism.” It’s either give the über-rich what they want or shoot them.

Baker, thankfully, calls for government to grow up.

Part of this growing up involves imagining a new relationship between government and the financial sector, and a rethinking of assumptions about capitalism and the equitable distribution of wealth.

It means imagining government neither as witch doctor, hoodwinking the populace or conjuring up magic cures, nor as witch hunter, madly convicting the guilty and innocent alike.

Instead, the financial crisis offers a moment to rethink what should be normal in our society, what should be privileges (the privilege to be “too big to fail,” for instance) and what should be rights (health care, a good education, policy for the greater good of all). It’s a chance to reimagine what freedom is and whose freedom “free” markets and the government policies that shape them really serve. And, as Baker suggests, it’s a time to admit that there has to be a struggle—probably a nasty one—between those who reap the rewards of the current ideologies of neocapitalism and those who seek a better alternative to a jobless recovery and the suffering it causes along the way even if the economy comes booming back.

And since it was government, after all, that stepped in and saved us from a financial catastrophe wrought by anti-government free marketeers, there is a chance now to take stock of the possible positive and beneficial roles for American government all grown up. Contrary to Barney Frank (bless him), there are other options to exercise, other bonds that should reach their maturity in the coming years.

Posted in American Culture, Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Political Culture | 4 Comments »

#327 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations

Friday, August 14th, 2009

the economic democracy/cultural democracy problématique.

Lumping humanity into two categories, the noble and the rest, may seem to lend itself to anti-democratic sentiments or even to a violently reactionary form of politics. But Scialabba affirms the distinction without snobbery. Perhaps he suspects that the division runs right down the middle of most of us. Even so, it can undermine the will to egalitarianism. Economic leveling means giving more to those who have less. Cultural leveling seldom has that implication. How, then, to resolve the tension?

- Scott McLemee, “A Worried Mind,” Introduction to What Are Intellectuals Good For? Essays and Reviews by George Scialabba.

Posted in Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Intellectual Culture, Political Culture, Popular Culture, Unfamiliar Quotations | No Comments »

#310 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

a reminder from bygone days.

Commerce must serve society or it is not commerce, but piracy. – “Progress” advertisement, N. W. Ayer & Son Advertising Headquarters, circa 1900

Special thanks to Charles McGovern, Sold American.

Posted in Advertising Culture, Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Unfamiliar Quotations | No Comments »

#302 – Standing In the Shadows

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

mapping buzz but missing the quotidian?

Even though it’s like, ‘What the heck does that mean?,’ it means something.” – Elizabeth Currid

Elizabeth Currid and Sarah Williams map out the “geography of buzz” using media coverage of arts and entertainment events in New York City and Los Angeles to visualize concentrations of “buzz,” that elusive sense of public attention that seems to be such a desire in our culture. Following the work of Richard Florida, they stake a claim for the essential contributions of “creative workers” to the lives of cities economically and culturally.

0407-buzz-nyc-maps

But their work oddly seems to miss out on the lifeworld of cities, those vernacular spaces of quotidian experience in which something more than buzz — something more substantive, robust, and significant — takes place culturally but not always economically.

Williams speaks of “data shadows,” those traces we leave behind of our urban lives, but it might be worth exploring non-data shadows as well: those areas of everyday experience suffused with aesthetic and political import that lurk beyond the zones lit up by mediated buzz.

These non-data shadows lurk in plain daylight yet are oddly made darker by the glowing dots of buzz. Nonetheless, because they take place in parts of life beyond the momentary flashes of buzzing attention, they may well be more crucial to the civic health of places and peoples.

Image: Maps by Sarah Williams and Minna Ninova, Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University

Posted in Arts Culture, Civic Culture, Consumer Culture, Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Urban Culture | No Comments »

#301 – Buying Into It By Buying Out of It

Saturday, April 4th, 2009

advertising the recession.

Remarkable to see how quickly the current recession is surfacing in television advertising.

Perhaps it marks how much of a challenge the economic crisis is to the existing order of things. Where once advertisers urged us to spend conspicuously, since happiness was “priceless,” now ads caution us against profligacy. Turns out there is a price tag. The debt is coming due.

But, these ads insist, just because we misled you before does not mean that you should question the larger logic and system of consumerism. Instead, these ads seek to contain the new mood of thrift and anxiety within the old consumer order.

Various fast food commercials, car rebate ads, and other ephemera from the consumer spectacle interpellate us: “Quick! You, Consumer, you can buy your way out of this mess by buying into it even more!”

At this juncture, there is no space within the ads to address the deeper problems and issues we now confront. All they do is associate (brilliantly) their products with the new desires, regrets, and urges of our times. The affective economy of consumerism remains intact even as the affect changes.

Yet, it remains to be seen where these new emotions, desires, angers, loathings, and worries will carry us. Can we see glimpses of alternative worldviews and ideologies through the cracks of the consumer dream machine? Or just new ways of authorizing the same old orders and charges?

Most stunning of these ads is Fidelity’s “Turn Here” campaign, which urges us — against all other evidence — to trust our money to the very financial system that screwed things up so badly in the first place.

Addendum: “The Hard Sell: How Mad Men Spin the Recession,” Mother Jones

Posted in Advertising Culture, American Culture, Consumer Culture, Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Political Culture, Popular Culture, Television Culture | No Comments »

#299 – Credit Default Swap

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

swapping neoliberalism for neosocialism?

…there’s some people who think the problem is so bad, that if you actually recognize the losses, that it’s akin to smashing the equipment in the factory. – Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, September 2008, N+1

Continuing to take stock, in various rhetorics, of the current financial crisis:

N+1 magazine’s latest, typically-sharp issue juxtaposes an interview with an anonymous hedge fund manager (who as each interview takes us deeper into the crisis, grows less sanguine) and David Harvey’s Marxist perspective. Most of the time, these two residents of New York City seem to live on different planets. As one would expect, the hedge fund manager perceives things from within the neoliberal framework. He knows that something has gone wrong, but turns to the same tools and ideas of financialization for the fix. Harvey crashes the party (or better said, crashes the financial crash) with the language of Marxism, which allows him to view the crisis through the lens of political economy. This gives him the ability to see the problems of credit, debt, and asset management as linked to deeper structural and political problems of production, housing, ideology, and class warfare. What is astonishing is to read the hedge fund manager move closer and closer, dimly but inexorably, to Harvey’s way of thinking.

Speaking of class warfare, Washington Monthly featured this nice anecdote about why there is such a swell of populist rage at Wall Street. It’s a seamy example, but part of why the Obama administration should fear this populist rage too. After all, it’s essentially the very same Wall Street neoliberals — Tim Geithner, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers — in charge of economic policy within the White House. Thus far, their use of government power seems to sacrifice the interests of the broader populace to guarantee that this class of financiers remains in power.

Back to David Harvey. He has been out in public more often of late as neoliberal frameworks seem increasingly incapable of explaining what is happening. Here he is on Laura Flanders’s Grit TV in a good discussion with the always-rambling-but-also-entertaining Alexander Cockburn. “Does the left have a plan?” they ask, unsure as to whether the United States in particular can get outside neoliberalism at all.

It would seem that developing alternatives to neoliberalism is becoming increasingly essential. If, as Naomi Klein has argued, neoliberals used crises — or even manufactured them — to remake economic relationships, then maybe this crisis of neoliberalism provides the opportunity to remake the world too, but this time in a more just and democratic way.

Posted in Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Marxist Culture, Political Culture | No Comments »

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