Late Liberalism Research Articles

Cultural theory as Mood Work

In staging an encounter between Sedgwick’s discussion of reparation, Spivak’s analysis of translation, and critical scholarship on mood, this essay considers how we might understand contemporary cultural theory as a form of ‘mood work’ that is at once discursive and material, textual and affective, political and aesthetic. In particular, I am interested in how thinking reparation, translation and mood together might open up different ways of conceptualising and negotiating the affective ‘double binds’ central to both critical thought and socio-political relations at the current conjuncture. As Sedgwick and Spivak each show us, I will argue, tarrying with contradiction and ambivalence is the mood work that cultural theory must continue to pursue, both in order to understand the material implications of our own emotional investments in intellectual production and to appreciate the complex ways in which power operates within the structures of feeling of late liberalism.

Gay Pasts and Disability Future(s) Tense

The article examines the one-time X-rated avant-garde 1969 film release of Midnight Cowboy as a representation of the alternative lived experience of queer/crip relations in late liberalism. As an alternative to normative regimes of inclusion, this argument attempts to push all the way through the envelope of impairment to explore how disability subjectivities create new forms of embodied knowledge and collective consciousness. Queer and disabled people's interdependencies provide alternative ethical maps for living together outside of, even in opposition to, the dictates of normalcy. In Midnight Cowboy we witness the results of cordoning off policed identities such as homosexual and handicapped into zones of expendability; the enforced habitation of health-destroying conditions within spaces of neoliberal neglect.

Imagining Political Possibility in an Age of Late Liberalism and Cynical Reason

Inspired by innovative social projects and new political movements, anthropologists have turned to the study of political possibility. In looking at how people imagine and struggle for temporalities and conditions that will afford them the opportunity to exist in ways different from those they are experiencing now, cultural analysts draw on ethnography and critical political philosophy to chart new analytical trajectories and themes. By foregrounding a language of potentiality and becoming, scholars also envision new ways for looking at democracy and justice. In drawing on three contemporary ethnographies, this review traces how anthropologists examine possibilities in diverse cultural and political contexts, including some of its tenets and conjectures.

The social projects of late liberalism

The social projects of late liberalism

Globalization, Indigenous Innovation and National Strategy: Comparing China and India's Wireless Standardization

This comparative case study investigates the contrasting approaches adopted to 3G standard setting by two leading developing countries, China and India. Despite facing comparable challenges in terms of meeting consumer demand and fostering industrial development, the two countries adopted adopted sharply different standards strategies, with China investing heavily in a homegrown TD-SCDMA standard, and India allowing 3G licensees to provide service utilizing any type of international standard. In this paper, we trace the antecedents of this divergence to the different policy approaches the two countries adopted to their respective electronics industries in the early to mid-1990s. We demonstrate that the standard-setting policies of the two countries are embedded in their trade strategies, innovation policies and manufacturing sector policies. Though standards play a critical role in the development of telecommunications markets, there is no consensus in the theoretical literature or empirical literature about the most advantageous standard-setting strategies, especially in developing markets. While emerging economies have utilized indigenous standards to catch up with their more technologically advanced competitors and build their national innovation systems, national standards also run the risk of lock-in into an inferior standard, and discouraging technological innovation in the long run. Market-based standard-setting on the other hand may initially slow the growth of markets; deprive manufacturers of potential scale economies; and also disadvantage domestic firms in competition with better-established international players. Contrasting approaches to standard-setting in China and India, both striving to become the next technological powerhouse, provide an ideal case to compare different models of standard-setting and technological innovation.However, we argue in this paper that solely the merits and demerits of competing standard-setting and innovation models are insufficient to understand the contrasting paths to 3G standard-setting adopted in China and India. Instead, we also focus on the industry structure of the domestic electronics manufacturing industries in the two countries. This industry structure is the result of the liberalization process initiated in China in the 1980s, and in India roughly a decade later. These policies and subsequent growth resulted in an electronics manufacturing sector in China many times larger than in India. The Chinese sector is also more concentrated, marked by a few large manufacturing firms closely affiliated to the state through ownership, management and industrial policy. In India in contrast, late liberalization resulted in a much smaller electronics manufacturing sector composed of in general smaller firms. Also, Indian electronic firms tend to specialize in one or two electronics manufacturing sectors unlike Chinese firms with their multi-sector expertise. When mobile standardization became a policy priority in the two countries with market expansion, the choice menu in terms of standard-setting strategy was constrained by among other factors, the prevailing structure of the electronics industry. In China, we argue that the close affiliation between the dominant mobile providers and the state, as well as the presence of large manufacturing firms, made a national standard both feasible and attractive. In contrast, India’s manufacturing sector is at least a decade behind China’s, and its contract manufacturing experience is more limited than China’s. The larger number of players made standards consensus more difficult to achieve, and the limited market share provided less scope for scale economies. India decided to allow its 3G licensees to provide service by utilizing any international standard. Though theory suggests that open standards competition will give greater incentive to innovation, China appears to be winning the patents race as well, because the larger size of Chinese manufacturing firms provides greater resources for R&D investments. In conclusion, we summarize how each country’s 3G standard-setting strategy is derivative of and constrained by its past trade strategy, innovation policies, and manufacturing sector policies. Though China appears to have secured the advantage at the present time, it is possible that standards competition in India might provide greater scope for innovation going forward, provided India is able to devote greater resources to R&D. We also speculate on the relative merits of each country’s strategy to promote innovation in a fast-growing telecommunications industry.

Neighbors and acts of silent kindness

I want to take one paragraph from the second chapter (Social debt, silent gift) from Clara Han’s compelling account of the braiding of care and violence in postPinochet neoliberal Chile and work out its implications for anthropology with regard to questions of social suffering, poverty, and how we may understand the pursuit of the good. The paragraph that occurs on page seventy-nine goes as follows: Later, when I asked Paloma who her friends were in the poblacion, she said to me, “Friends? I don’t have any friends. Susana is my friend. We share our intimacies. Friends are few, neighbors are many.” Indeed, such a sentiment was echoed to me by many women in La Pincoya. Only upon meditation upon the boundary between neighbors and friends did I begin to realize that the crucial difference between inhabiting friendship and neighborliness lay not in the perceptive ability of catching those signs of critical moments, such as the cry of Paloma’s hungry child, but in how that catching would be or could be addressed. To follow Han’s thought here it is necessary to step into the streets and houses that she describes in such depth and ask, what does she mean by “critical moments”? Understanding the critical moments in the life of a family requires that we shift scales and ask how economic precariousness is produced in the lives of the poor through the transformations in economic policy. As Han argues, the successive democratic governments in Chile continued with the “growth with equity” model of the Pinochet regime that was consistent with a neoliberal vision. This economic model had particularly perilous effects on the poor with its flexible labor regimes, shifts from permanent to temporary labor contracts, and easy availability of credit cards with high interest rates and punishing schedules of repayment. Though various successive governments recognized a social debt to the poor, welfare programs were decentralized with technologies of verification by social workers

Bio-X: Review

Adele Clarke, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Janet K. Shim's Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in U.S. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Aihwa Ong and Nancy N. Chen's Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Biosecurity. Bioinsecurity. Biorisks. Bioavailability. Bioresources. Biovalue. Biocapital. Bioindustry. Bioeconomy. Bioprospecting. Biopiracy. Bioparanoia. Bioresponsibility. Bioprotection. Biostrategies. Biomapping. Biomedia. Biocollectivism. Biosociality. Biocommunity. Biosovereignty. Bionation. In social studies of science, as in sector, which is one of field's current (pre) occupations, is viral. Working on became a widespread pursuit at end of twentieth century. New biotechnologies and medical technologies (some actual, some anticipatory) surfaced through a conjuncture of economic and technical events, for example: legal incentives to academic-industry partnership (e.g. Bayh-Doyle Act of 1980) and corresponding proliferation of pharmaceuticals; human genome project and general establishment of bioinformatics, a subfield itself indebted to new computing and Internet technologies; and for culturing stem cells and promise of regenerative medicine. More broadly, political-economic milieu of late liberalism has encouraged obsessive attention to individual embodiment, especially in forms of self-surveillance and self-maximization. Whether result of influence, confluence, or co-emergence, feminists and other critical theorists increasingly turned their focus from language to the during those same years. In past decade, as Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein observe in a review of recent work on biopolitics (Cracking Biopower), Foucauldians have moved on from knowledge/power, genealogy, and discourse to theory of biopolitics: 'Biopower,' a decade ago hardly on any scholar's lips, is today on almost everyone's. In part, this is because Foucault's takeup, and take, on only relatively recently came to general attention, and even more recently got translated into English. . . . The digestion of what he actually wrote on subject has only just begun - with something of a rush (2010, 109). Although he did not coin term, Michel Foucault defined biopower as the set of mechanisms through which basic biological features of human species became object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of (2009, 1). This form of power emerged in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, period that witnessed entrenchment of liberalism in Europe and United States, as well as entry of into history. New fields of knowledge - biology and human sciences - defined and characterized humans and other living things, and simultaneously participated in the administration of bodies and calculated management of life (1978, 140). Biopower, in form of anatomopolitics, became essential to development of capitalism, for instance abetting controlled insertion of bodies into machinery of production (141). In form of biopolitics (a term often used synonymously with by theorists today), it facilitated the control of populations. Foucault insisted that biopolitics, far from being centralized or totalitarian, operates through techniques of power present at every level of social body and utilized by very diverse institutions, right down to self-governance by individual. Can Foucault's biopolitics, rooted in an epistemic break around eighteenth century, be applied to what is otherwise declared to be a new break - very recent biomedical revolution, and biotech century it has purportedly midwifed? Two anthologies published in 2010 by Duke University Press suggest that biopolitics continues to operate, on a grand scale, even though what counts as bio has changed. …

Straub/Huillet—Brecht—Benjamin—Adorno

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. For the Threepenny Lawsuit, see: Brecht, Dreigroschenprozeß. For the “fundamental reproach,” see: Brecht, Arbeitsjournal. 399–400 (Vol. I. 27.3.1942). For the Hollywood poem, see Brecht, Hollywood. 2. Mummlius Spicer, for example, speaks with a “steady, deep voice … without any transition, simple, as though he were fulfilling a contract,” (16) while Afranius Carbo employs the “schooled voice of a lawyer” (26) and the Young Man himself, when reciting the Caesar anecdote, describes himself in the following manner: “When I quoted the famous anecdote, I gave my voice a little of that intonation in which I used to recite lines I had learned in front of my Greek teacher.” (44) 3. Handke feels that the quote is “moralizing-prophesying” (115) and detracts from the film, while Chevalier agrees: “It's a shame that the film ends on the Brecht-text, warning of the ever-present risk of war, as it has a reductive effect on the film's reception. It did not need this quote.” (12). 4. Tantalizingly, though, Kluge writes, “The films of Godard and some examples of the Young German Cinema made an impression on [Adorno], due to their manifest difference with Hollywood productions,” but is not more specific (Cited in: Brenez 285). 5. See: Ishaghpour, Cinéma contemporain 109–124; Byg 233–248; Brenez 283. 6. The evidence for this viewpoint is manifold. As examples: “Unending sameness also governs the relationship to the past. What is new in the phase of mass culture compared to that of late liberalism is the exclusion of the new. The machine is rotating on the spot” (Aufklärung 142). “Every film is a preview of the next, which promises yet again to unite the same heroic couple under the same exotic sun: anyone arriving late can not tell whether he is watching the trailer or the real thing” (Aufklärung 172). “The totality of the culture industry … [consists of] repetition. The fact that its characteristic innovations are in all cases mere improvements to mass production is not extraneous to the system” (Aufklärung 144). 7. As Brenez affirms: “Like many artists and theoreticians of his era, Adorno, however, accorded an almost extraterritorial status to Chaplin … The exceptional importance of Chaplin for Adorno continues to be uncovered in his analyses on the invention of the actor where he sees, inversely, the elaboration of a model of liberty” (281, 282). 8. Perez, for instance, contends: “Adorno and Greenberg were wrong in their sweeping dismissal of popular culture … their rejection of popular art in the name of high art pointed the way to the recuperation of the avant-garde as high art enshrined by the bourgeois culture it intended to contest” (277, 278). 9. “Lyotard sees the postmodern as marking the moment after one phase of modernist innovation has gained acceptance and before the next phase begins: the postmodern not as a break with the modern but as the moment between modernist breaks” (Perez 282). 10. See, for instance, the statement: “Only [the public's] deep unconscious mistrust, the last residue of the difference between art and empirical reality in the spiritual make-up of the masses explains why they have not, to a person, long since perceived and accepted the world as it is constructed for them by the culture industry.” (Kulturindustrie 344). And: “If it seeks to keep a grip on the masses, the ideology of the culture industry itself becomes as internally antagonistic as the very society which it is targeting. It contains the antidote to its own lie” (Filmtransparente 356). 11. “That artworks can make political interventions is dubious; if this does occur, then it is most often peripheral to the artworks; endeavoring to achieve this usually causes the artwork to sink under the term” (ÄT 359). Furthermore: “The political positions explicitly taken by artworks are, in contrast, epiphenomena, mostly resulting in a burden on the development of the artworks, and, in addition, the termination of their social truth content” (ÄT 344). 12. “When I read Marx's Capital, I understood my plays … This Marx was the only spectator for my plays I had ever seen.” (Zuschauer 69).

Populism and Late Liberalism

“Populism,” a key trope of our times, is sometimes a term of analysis and critique, but more often a label of disparagement and blame. While many activists claim to be “ of the people” or “ for the people,” most would think twice about dubbing themselves “populist” as such. Yet it is precisely the slipperiness of the term that makes it so productive in political rhetoric. Why the increasing appeal of the trope? Given its widespread, contentious deployment, can it retain any usefulness as a tool of analysis—even critical engagement? Drawing on a range of current examples, the author argues (1) that populism in some form is a necessary condition of all antiestablishment movements, progressive or conservative; (2) that it is in itself never enough to fuel sustained, politically constructive mobilization; and (3) that in all these respects, populism seems to be taking on particular, disquieting features in late modern times.

AMERICAN STIOB: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West

This essay asks what the study of socialism and its legacies still offers anthropology of the contemporary world and argues that studying late-socialist aesthetics and practices can provide unexpected insight into late-liberal political culture, communication, and subjectivity. In the first half of the essay, we concentrate on a particular mode of parody (known in Russia as stiob) that imitated and inhabited the formal features of authoritative discourse to such an extent that it was often difficult to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two. In the second half of the essay, we show that what seem to be archetypically late-socialist aesthetics of parody are actually becoming significantly more familiar in places like the United States as well (e.g., The Colbert Report, the Yes Men, The Onion). Through an analysis of the institutional and ideological conditions of “hypernormalization” in late-socialist political culture that enabled the critical parodic potential of stiob, we argue that analogous trends in Western political communication and political ideology have contributed to the rising intuitiveness and popularity of stioblike interventions in late liberalism too.

The Alchemy of Modernity. Alonso Barba's Copper Cauldrons and the Independence of Bolivian Metallurgy (1790–1890)

Those natures which, when they meet, quickly lay hold on and mutually affect one another we call affined. This affinity is sufficiently striking in the case of alkalis and acids which, although they are mutually antithetical … most decidedly seek and embrace one another, modify one another, and together form a new substance … It is in just this way that truly meaningful friendships can arise among human beings: for antithetical qualities make possible a closer and more intimate union.Goethe, Elective affinities (1809)A linear mode of historical understanding relegated alchemy to a ‘pre-scientific’ era, with the enlightenment's New Chemistry creating a break between ‘empirical’ and ‘scientific’ metallurgies. Similarly, Bolivia's early Republican silver-production has been regarded as ‘stagnant’ and ‘colonial’ from the ‘modern’ perspective of late nineteenth century liberalism. This article questions both periodisations by documenting an ‘alchemical renaissance’ in Bolivian silver-refining methods during the first part of the 19th century. The relaunch of Alonso Barba's ‘hot method’ of amalgamation in copper cauldrons (1609), and its associated technical discourses, expressed a creole desire for an independent ‘modernity’. This rediscovery of a seventeenth century technology, carried out shortly before the Independence War in the Potosí provinces (Chichas), and slightly later in Oruro and Carangas, is distinguished from the version reinvented in Central Europe by Ignaz von Born (1786), as well as from two pre-Bornian experiments in Potosí and New Spain. Its nineteenth century consolidation was, in part, a little-known reaction to Nordenflicht's failure to introduce the new European method of rotating barrels to the Andes during the 1790s. The article shows that this ‘alchemy of modernity’ held its ground for several decades, suggesting a fresh approach to America's postcolonial ambiguities from the perspective of a comparative history of technology.

Family, work, and culture: Postmodern themes for catholic spirituality in transforming the crisis of modernity

This essay portrays a destructive, late‐modern cultural battle over family and work, triggered especially by the advent of television, and waged between late liberalism's right and left wings. It sees the modem crisis of family and work as flowing in part from certain strains in Western classical spirituality, which modernity then developed technologically and psychologically. By contrast, it proposes a postmodern cultural vision of regeneration, which weaves afresh and holistic synthesis of creative communion, expressed ecologically, socially, and spiritually, and is centered in the sacred lay experiences of family and work.