Category What I'm reading
-
What I'm reading (foreign politics and foreign policy)
Andrew Cockburn, Like A Ball of Fire (LRB)
But when you look more closely at the history of the Cold War and its post-Soviet resurgence, you see that a very different process is at work, in which the arms lobby on each side has self-interestedly sought capital and bureaucratic advantage while enlisting its counterpart on the other side as a justification for its own ambition. In other words, they enjoy a mutually profitable partnership...
Pam Campos-Palma, November Revolution, Fellow Travelers Blog
To that end, a few things I’ve observed this cycle keep me up at night. One is the continued lack of understanding by political operatives, think tankers, and wonks of the populist moment we’re in after decades of increasing wealth inequality, systemic corruption, and institutions failing everyday people. A prime fuel for the populist turn in politics are elite, insular institutions who refuse or are very slow to acknowledge their lack of race-class-gender analysis has been a liability. Foreign policy and national security institutions embody this problem, arguably to an unparalleled extent. One of the few political articles of faith left for the mainstream foreign policy community is the arrogant and ignorant belief that everyday Americans either do not care or aren’t educated enough to grasp matters of foreign policy.
Euan Graham, The Pitfalls of Pragmatism, The Strategist
Australia’s roustabout China policy debate is intense and polarising, but largely exogenously framed. Beyond former prime minister Tony Abbott’s celebrated ‘fear and greed’ aphorism, not a lot of thought seems to be directed at why some Australians—and here I’m excluding those solely in it for the money—appear willing to resign themselves to falling within China’s orbit.
Theirs may be the more durable wisdom for all I know. But it leads me to wonder whether a predisposition towards fatalism and pragmatism may be cultural in origin—a trait shaped by Australia’s geographic isolation and colonial past...
...I suspect that the drivers behind fatalism and pragmatism go beyond Abbott’s binary reduction, tapping into deeper, historical currents running through the national psyche that also inform Australia’s ‘strategic personality’. It may be a stretch to draw a colonial connection, and as a wandering Brit who has pitched his tent here, I probably shouldn’t go there.
But my gut feeling is that there are enduring habits of deference (less kindly, the ‘cultural cringe’), and an associated tendency to ‘go with the strength’, which hark back to the early period of European settlement, when the governor was the absolute authority of all that he surveyed, and paths to opportunity meant being on good terms with the power of the day.
This jars with that more easy-going depiction of national character: the anti-authoritarian, non-rule-abiding ‘larrikin’. Yet one of Australia’s best-kept secrets is how extraordinarily rule-bound and subtly hierarchical it is as a society.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading: from ideology to knitting
William Davies reviews Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology, The Guardian.
Capital and Ideology is an astonishing experiment in social science, one that defies easy comparison. In its ambition, obsessive testimony and sheer oddness, it is closer to the spirit of Karl Ove Knausgård than of Karl Marx. It alternates between sweeping generalities about the nature of justice and the kind of wonkery that one might expect from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, often in the same paragraph. It is occasionally naive (it will bug the hell out of historians and anthropologists) but in a provocative fashion, as if to say: if inequality isn’t justified, why not change it?
Martin Filler, Trump's Towering Folly on Federal Architecture (New York Review of Books).
Because of the thoroughgoing threat to democracy signaled by the Republican Party’s abject capitulation to Trump, I’ve heretofore thought it frivolous to address the aesthetics of the current regime, mindful of that old saw about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. That was my attitude until February 4, when Architectural Record broke a news story about a proposed executive order that would make it mandatory for all new federally sponsored buildings to adhere to a Classical style. This effective ban on modern architecture commissioned by the US government is horrifyingly reminiscent of Hitler’s insistence that public buildings in the Third Reich hew to the Classical tradition (though usually a stripped-down version of it) and that modern design, except for some industrial uses, was streng verboten (strictly forbidden).
Aleesha Paz, Raise Your Needles, Public Books (originally published in the Sydney Review of Books)
Historically, knitting wasn’t linked to any particular gender. This gendering only developed in the last couple of centuries, but ever since it became a women’s activity knitting has struggled to be recognised as valuable, skilled work. To knit in public is to cast off any shame associated with the craft, and seeing other members of your community engage in this transformative process legitimises knitting for the crafty individual and also normalises its presence in public places.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading (declinism)
'"Collapsologie", constructing an idea of how things fall apart'. Harrison Stetler, New York Review of Books.
But if one delves into the texts of these writers, and listens to their castigation of the modern world, it’s hard not to get the impression that a lingering form of anticipation—not to say, outright excitement—lies beneath their prophecies of collapse...
'How "Big Law" Makes Big Money'. Adam Tooze, New York Review Of Books.
On the one hand, the law codes the original violence of enclosure, such that something that was everyone’s becomes one person’s legally protected private property in perpetuity. On the other hand, the law is the conjurer of a delusion. By creating securities out of debt, the law preys on our desire to believe that something is ours that is not real at all, that value can be created ex nihilo.
'College-Educated Voters Are Ruining American Politics'. Eitan Hersh, The Atlantic.
...political hobbyists have harmed American democracy and would do better by redirecting their political energy toward serving the material and emotional needs of their neighbors. People who have a personal stake in the outcome of politics often have a better understanding of how power can and should be exercised—not just at the polls, once every four years, but person to person, day in and day out.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading (corporations)
Aaron Timms, 'Jet Age Capitalism Redux': The Baffler
In their new skins, these buildings usually see history relegated to the corner—an earnest commemorative plaque here, a terse historical recap there—if not forgotten altogether. The TWA Hotel makes the building’s history—or rather, a saccharine slice of it—a core part of the new venture’s branding. The structure is as much corporate museum as hotel. Exhibits assembled by the New-York Historical Society lovingly recount the nostalgia-drenched story of TWA—both the airline and its terminal—as a triumph of Jet Age imagination and daring. In the process, the true history of TWA, the U.S. airline industry, and the deregulatory pains that followed the 1970s is erased, even as the hotel’s exhibits strain to maintain the cheery lie of capitalism’s “good years” after World War II...
Doni Gewurtzman, 'Let Us Now Praise Corporate "Persons"': Public Books
A nuanced form of corporate humanism flows through Winkler’s and Greenfield’s timely accounts of the Constitution’s long and rocky relationship with corporate America, spotlighting the actual people that own, manage, work for, and represent corporations. Best of all, they both explore the counterintuitive idea that treating corporations as independent “persons” might, in fact, actually advance progressive ideals and make it easier to regulate corporate America.
Matthew Willis, 'The worst British aircraft company? Blackburn – a history of infamy': Hush-Kit
Blackburn seems alone in the largely awful reputation of its products. No UK aircraft manufacturer has escaped its share of unfortunate aircraft – much of the latter designs of Supermarine were clumsy, dangerous and had a loss rate that made them virtually disposable. Avro, meanwhile proved itself incapable of designing an airliner bigger than a regional feeder machine that didn’t kill frighteningly high numbers of passengers. In most cases this didn’t define the company. With Blackburn, it seems, all the mud stuck.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm Reading: 'the problem of coming up with suggestions for alternate ways to be'
On Heteropessimism, in the New Inquiry (by Indiana Seresin):
Quite often framed as an anti-capitalist position, heteropessimism could be read as a refusal of the “good life” of marital consumption and property ownership that capitalism once mandated. Yet this good life, which was always withheld from marginalized populations, is now untenable for almost everyone. If the couple was the primary consumer unit of the past, today this has collapsed, or more accurately been replaced by a new dyad, the individual consumer and her phone…
…As we are living now, when privilege unravels it goes out kicking and screaming, and people lose confidence in how to be together, uncertain about how to read each other, and incompetent about even their own desire…It seems, though unacknowledged, a companion piece to Amia Srinivasan’s Does Anyone Have The Right To Sex? in the 22 March 2018 edition of the LRB.
It is striking, though unsurprising, that while men tend to respond to sexual marginalisation with a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, women who experience sexual marginalisation typically respond with talk not of entitlement but empowerment. Or, insofar as they do speak of entitlement, it is entitlement to respect, not to other people’s bodies…
Finally, a pair of articles on Achewood, my own problematic fave, by Keith Pille (discussed in a lengthy thread at Metafilter): The Complicated, Slightly Better Manhood of Achewood, and Ray Smuckles: Nobody’s Role Model.
Hemingway’s books serve as vivid indictments of what we now frame as toxic masculinity (I think Hemingway knew that something was bad about what society expected from men, but was too trapped in his own time and culture to be able to formulate it in an explicit way, instead just sort of accidentally smearing a composite portrait through his entire body of work). The same thing is going on in Achewood, except with a touch more intentionality and with a little bit of progress on the problem of coming up with suggestions for alternate ways to be.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm Reading (late August)
THE AMERICAN AFFAIRS JOURNAL was at least until quite recently a safe haven for political ideas of the American conservative-establishment Right and was ambivalent, at best, about the election of Donald Trump. It smells of cigars, well-heated offices, and careers full of sinecures.
A pair of articles in its most recent edition, though, show the kind of sharp swing to the left normally associated with a football winger, stepping inside a defender to pass. The italics are mine:
The Financialisation Of The American Elite:
Many structural reforms are necessary to change this. With regard to education, it is time to reform the top MBA programs. These schools shape our business culture, and, in so doing, exert an outsized influence on the business practices and the career pursuits of some of our most talented young people.
The schools should begin with an explicit renunciation of shareholder capitalism. This will be the easy part.The New Gilded Age Or Old Normal:
The longer-term trend toward more inequality in capitalist economies, which prevailed before this period, has resumed after it. That leads us to conclude that there may well be no technocratic or tax policy fix for capitalism’s tendency to generate ever more inequality. This conclusion is obviously less optimistic than the one reached by Thomas Piketty in his seminal 2014 study of income inequality, which argues for ameliorating income share outcomes by raising taxes on the rich.
Irving Kristol, the neoconservative, famously described the turn of his intellectual life as that of a ‘liberal mugged by reality’. Read closely and there’s a lot more mugging going on.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading (August)
HERE IS A PAIR of articles by Will Davies, both on Brexit, but both also on a broader sense in which negotiation and politics are now strangers to each other.
England’s new rentier alliance
This suggests that Johnson/Farage is a symptom of prolonged financialisation, in which capital pulls increasingly towards unproductive investments, relying on balance sheet manipulation, negative interest rates and liquidity for its returns (aided substantially by quantitative easing over the past decade). To put that more starkly, these are seriously morbid symptoms, in which all productive opportunities have already been seized, no new ideas or technologies are likely, and no new spheres of social or environmental life are left to exploit and commodify.
For the time being, Britain appears to be heading towards one of two negatives: ‘no deal’ or ‘no Brexit’. The inability to convert Brexit into an agreed set of tolerable policies tells us something crucial about what sort of thing Brexit is: an ideal of withdrawal that is at odds with basic realities of government and politics.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading
A City Plans For War (Emma Shaw Crane, Public Books):
Urban planning’s promise of an improved city of the future is especially bright in postconflict cities, where planning is expected to bring not only the usual modernist improvements—development, growth—but also peace. Yet in postconflict Beirut, planners, developers, and architects, instead of designing for a peaceful city, plan for the war yet to come.
It's time to let Canberra picturesquely decay (Ian Warden, Canberra Times):
When Australians, in their endearingly muddleheaded and inarticulate way, complain that there is something “artificial” about their nation’s capital, one of the things they mean (without being able to put a muddleheaded finger on it) is that Canberra has no ruins.
Conspiracy Theories (David Runciman, TLS):
...for the conspiracy theorist the absence of truth can only be explained by some sinister forces having decided to conceal it. And of course that is a conspiracy theory that many liberals find hard to resist. Why did people vote for Brexit? Because the ignorant voters were misled by nefarious forces. The same with the election of Trump. What are those forces? Take your pick...
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading
Thea Riofrancos: Populism Without The People
POPULISM IS THE SHADOW of representative democracy. Again and again, populist movements emerge and come to thrive in the gap between the promise of collective sovereignty and the disappointing experience of politics as usual.
The Last Psychiatrist: The Maintenance of Certification Exam as Fetish
Last year there was a large cheating scandal at Harvard, over a hundred students were accused of plagiarism in a government class, and amidst the usual self-aggrandizing criticisms of the college kids as entitled, lazy, or stupid, what no one wondered is why, in an introductory survey course predicated on institutionalized grade inflation and no wrong answers, did the students feel compelled to cheat when they were all going to get As anyway? The terrifying answer is that they weren’t cheating to get the right answer, there was no right answer, they were forced to cheat to concoct the answer the professor wanted— because that’s the system. Meanwhile, while they were spending their time “cheating”, what real learning could be done? None. So—- why bother with an exam at all? Why not just offer the course and give everyone an A anyway? Because the purpose of the test is to say a test was given, to prove to some hypothetically gullible entity that learning occurred— and to prove it to ourselves. Which is why our reflex was to criticize the kids, not the system: we are products of that system, to criticize the reliability, let alone validity, of that system would be to open ourselves to scrutiny, to deprive us of a core part of our own identity. “Things were a lot more rigorous when I went to college.” First of all, they weren’t. Second, even if they were, why, when you got to be in charge, did you change the system to this?
David Roth: This is all Donald Trump has left, (thanks to @hamonryen on twitter)
Like many in his generation, Trump has mistaken the end of his life for the end of the world.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
-
What I'm reading
Catherine Zimmer: THE BINGEWATCH: “WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF DYNASTIES”
Despite its internal incoherence, Dynasty is part of a narrative that, no matter how ridiculous the premise, has the vicious coherence of history. Connecting the dots leads right to here and now, where virtually no one wants to be.
Nicolas Hausdorf: The decline of the Imperial Aesthetic
With the territorialization of the future by techno-deterministic dystopia, of the countryside by suburban sprawl, of imagination by social networked quantifiable mimetic desire, the past becomes the only available outlet, a promise of infinite space to be selectively appropriated and colonized as a retreat from the ugliness of the present.
Jacobite magazine really runs the gamut from broadly trad-reactionary, to accelerationist, to impenetrable right-critical philsophy, and I honestly don't know which one this fits into. From a heritage perspective, you'd respond to it by saying yeah, the reason modernist architecture is culturally significant is precisely because of these social effects, and de gustibus non est disputandum, anyway; 'taste is not a matter of deliberation'? As the famous wordsmith said, Explain yourself dopey.
Matthew Walther: Principles for Dummies
Probably you can imagine what it does for the reader’s expectations when he discovers less than a tenth of the way through a book called Principles that its author has no principles, not even ones governing the use of the word.
Every now and then it's refreshing to read a review article so damning that it leaves scorch marks on the wall behind you. This one is spectacular.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan