Cultural Studies as Political Quietism?

No, Higher Consciousness Won’t Save Us

by Norman Solomon

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/23-5

"At the time, I scarcely picked up on the fact that "The Greening of America" was purposely nonpolitical. Its crux was personal and cultural liberation -- in a word, "consciousness," which "plays the key role in the shaping of society." And so, "The revolution must be cultural. For culture controls the economic and political machine, not vice versa." In effect, the author maintained, culture would be a silver bullet, able to bring down the otherwise intractable death machine.

...

n 1995, the same Charles Reich was out with another book -- "Opposing the System" -- his first in two decades. Gone were the claims that meaningful structural change would come only as a final step after people got their heads and culture together. Instead, the book focused on the melded power of huge corporations and the U.S. government.
Reich's new book was as ignored as "The Greening of America" had been ballyhooed; no high-profile excerpt in The New Yorker or any other magazine, scant publicity, and not even faint controversy. Few media outlets bothered to review "Opposing the System." A notable exception, the New York Times, trashed the book."

A View from a Front Line in the Drug War

This new movie looks very interesting: Humboldt County. A review to follow... (as soon as I can get to a theater showing it... funny how much trouble movies lacking a talking Chuwawa have with distribution...)

Hawks Ascendant

Stephen Zunes takes Obama to task for failing to challenge the reckless and irresponsible foreign policies of McCain and the neocons. Zunes lays out point by point, where Obama could have and should have called McCain's bluster. A language of dissent exists, there are alternative visions of America's role in the world and in history out there. Why won't Obama listen, and lend his voice to chorus? Why must he insist on clinging to a sinking ship?

Fri could have been an important moment in making the discursive shift to a new America. But alas, it was yet another missed opportunity- it was yet another moment in which the cultural, intellectual, and political hegemony of the neoconservative vision/nightmare of American power was discursively reproduced.

Rebert Dreyfuss makes many of the same points.

A Consumers' Republic

Here Joe Bageant, a RedState Rebel, offers what may be the most brilliant political analysis I've read all season. He explains the Obama phenomenon in terms of the dual, and interrelated, ascendances of the cultural left and the economic right. We've entered into a new "post-partisan" age in which politics are totally devoid of meaning. All that matters is style and branding. We live in a Consumers' Republic. We choose presidents the way we choose cans of soda pop.  

NetRoots, NetPower

This one got me:

"Move Over MoveOn.org"

as did this one:

"Netroots Nation, or Nation of Sheep"

I signed up

Note to Sheep: Beware of Wolves

Discourse on Obama

Here is a discourse on Obama with my dear friend and co-conspirator in "animating the global awakening." The post is his. To which I have offered a few comments in the spirit of upmost respect and admiration. 

the other 4th

Somehow the 4th makes me want to watch old videos of interviews with Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia. 

Hunter S. Thompson: "Having a favorite baseball team is like having a favorite oil company." On Govt LSD: "Your attributing too much strength and mystery to the enemy." HST on Kesey: "Ken Kesey said to me sometime around 1967 that he was never going to write again, he thought it was a bad way to communicate... it looks like he carried out his threat." But he goes on to say that "very few writers have ever produced two books as good as cuckoo and notion."

Tim Russert interrogates a broken and shattered man on his death bed for his lack of patriotism on the eve of war. but even in his broken and shattered state, HST manages to assert that Collin Powell was full of shit and that "this is a war that we will be bogged down in for a generation." 

John Cusack remembers HST. 

Johnny Depp channels HST in all of his brilliant madness, pt1, pt2,and pt3.

Its rather remarkable that there is no biography of Kesey. A social biography of this fascinating, heroic figure could be a tremendous entree into some of the most important developments of our time. Sometimes I think I am just passing through academia, and writing that biography is my true calling.

Kesey's last words were an essay in Rolling Stone calling for peace in aftermath of 911. He died on Nov 10, 2001. Obit in the Independent, and NYT Obit

Net Power

Obama's id: "Doh! I knew I shouldn't have let that internet cat out of the bag!"

The Iraqi Front in the Vietnam War

I love the idea of a "post-partisan" politics as much as the next guy, but what if there were  partisan battles still raging whose outcome was not yet determined? What if the Vietnam War (within American society) was still going on, and the main front had just shifted a few thousand miles East? Then what good would a post-partisan politics do us? 

As Dr. King said in speech that got him shot, there is  a deep sickness within American society that leads us to perpetuate gross violence on distant (and some not so distant) societies. If we don't confront that sickness right here and right now, it will simply re-percolate over and over again.  We can't move on from the Vietnam War, because it is still with us. we need leadership. We need to drag these monsters out from under the bed where they can be grappled with honestly. We need someone who can compel us to do what we know we need to do, but are afraid to. We don't want to be told what we want to hear, we want to be told what we don't want to hear, but know we must. This is no time to live like mice. 

The Question of Nationalism

On declaring independence from Nationalism (that is unless your Palestinian and facing dispossession in the face of Zionist colonization (Angry Arab seems to assert this about once a week), or Iraqi and facing dispossession in the face of rapacious global capitalists allied to ethno-separatist in the north and south.) I'm not so sure that the issue of nationalism is as black and white as much of the post-colonial tradition would have us believe. 

Thoroughly unsorted thoughts in my own mind- but I can recognize the contradictions in my own mental processes between believing that nationalism is a totalizing an homogenizing discourse that obliterates all difference, and my sympathy for nationalist movements in opposition to to imperialism. And in the history of Iraq, the big ideological contest has been between the "Iraqists" and the Pan-Arabists. The Iraqist were inclusive of Shi'is and Kurds in their conception of national identity, whereas the pan-Arab national socialism of the Ba'th closely resembles other "national socialisms" we have known.

Its seems that nationalism is malleable enough to be defined in all sorts of ways, including ways that respect labor and the environment.   

Perhaps redefining the meaning of national symbols to meet contemporary needs is the more efficacious political strategy than a frontal assault on something that enjoys as much cultural hegemony as modern nationalism. Perhaps not. I don't know.

EMPIRE, Hardt and Negri

Epigraph to Hardt and Negri's  Empire:

"Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and then it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name." 

William Morris

Hardt and Negri's book is available for free online.

Here is a concise and insightful review by Gopal Balakrishnan.

Negritude

Robin D.G. Kelly reflects on the life and times of Aime Cesaire, 1913-2008

Make the Shift

Kiki and Bubu: The Labor Theory of Value and the New Economy (w/ sock puppets and in 4 minutes, good for kids and their parents)

Flobots

A critique of contemporary techno-politics, and good music to boot:

The Flobots, "Handlebars"