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If one gave way to a need to place the system of the culture industry in a wide, world-historical perspective, it would have to be defined as the systematic exploitation of the ancient fissure between men and their culture. The dual nature of progress, which always developed the potential of freedom simultaneously with the reality of oppression, gave rise to a situation where peoples were more and more inducted into the control of nature and social organization, but grew at the same time, owing to the compulsion under which culture placed them, incapable of understanding in what way culture went beyond such integration. [...]
[...] Genuine things are those to which commodities and other means of exchange can be reduced, particularly gold. But like gold, genuineness, abstracted as the proportion of fine metal, becomes a fetish. Both are treated as if they were the foundation, which in reality is a social relation, while gold and genuineness precisely express only the fungibility, the comparability of things; it is they that are not in-themselves, but for-others. The ungenuineness of the genuine stems from its need to claim, in a society dominated by exchange, to be what it stands for yet is never able to be. The apostles of genuineness, in the service of the power that now masters circulation, dignify the demise of the latter with the dance of the money-veils.
Sleepless night: so there is a formula for those tormented hours, drawn out without prospect of end or dawn, in the vain effort to forget time's empty passing. But truly terrifying are the sleepless nights when time seems to contract and run fruitlessly through our hands. We put out the light in the hope of long hours of rest that can bring succour. But as our thoughts run wild the night's healing store is squandered, and before we have banished all sights from beneath our burning lids, we know that it is too late, that we shall soon feel the rough shake of morning. [...] Man's life becomes a moment, but not suspending duration but by lapsing into nothingness, waking to its own futility in face of the bad eternity of time itself. In the clock's over-loud ticking we hear the mockery of light-years for the span of our existence. [...] In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve. He does not expect to live out his life to the end. The prospect of violent death and torture, present to everyone, is prolonged in the fear that the days are numbered, that the length of one's own life is subject to statistics; that growing old has become a kind of unfair advantage gained over the average. [...]
who hurt you (but also, yes, v relatable)
[...] The bourgeois have made of satiety, which might be akin to bliss, a term of abuse. Because others go hungry, ideology requires that the absence of hunger be thought vulgar. So the bourgeois indict the bourgeois. Their own exemption from work proscribes the praise of idleness: the latter is called boring. The hectic bustle to which Schopenhaeuer alludes springs less from the unbearableness of a privileged condition than from its ostentatious, which, according to the historical situation, is designed either to increase social distance or, by purportedly important displays, apparently to reduce it, to emphasize the usefulness of the masters. If people at the top are really bored, it is not because they suffer from too much happiness, but because they are marked by the general misery; by the commodity character that consigns amusements to idiocy, by the brutality of the command which echoes terribly in the rulers' gaiety, finally by the fear of their own superfluity. None who profit by the profit system may exist within it without shame, and this deforms even the undeformed joys [...]
incidentally, i would love to see a left cultural critique of a show like Gossip Girl, ideally from a place of something sympathy instead of merely scorn
Gramsci argued that, though the economic must never be forgotten, conjunctural crises are never solely economic, or economically-determined ‘in the last instance’. They arise when a number of contradictions at work in different key practices and sites come together - or ‘con-join’ - in the same moment and political space and, as Althusser said, ‘fuse in a ruptural unity’. Analysis here focuses on crises and breaks, and the distinctive character of the ‘historic settlements’ which follow. The condensation of forces during a period of crisis, and the new social configurations which result, mark a new ‘conjuncture’.
[...] However anachronistic it may seem, neoliberalism is grounded in the ‘free, possessive individual’, with the state cast as tyrannical and oppressive. The welfare state, in particular, is the arch enemy of freedom. The state must never govern society, dictate to free individuals how to dispose of their private property, regulate a free-market economy or interfere with the God-given right to make profits and amass personal wealth. State-led ‘social engineering’ must never prevail over corporate and private interests. It must not intervene in the ‘natural’ mechanisms of the free market, or take as its objective the amelioration of free-market capitalism’s propensity to create inequality [...]
According to the neoliberal narrative, the welfare state (propelled by workingclass reaction to the Depression of the 1930s and the popular mobilisation of World War Two) mistakenly saw its task as intervening in the economy, redistributing wealth, universalising life-chances, attacking unemployment, protecting the socially vulnerable, ameliorating the condition of oppressed or marginalised groups and addressing social injustice. It tried to break the ‘natural’ (sic) link between social needs and the individual’s capacity to pay. But its dogooding, utopian sentimentality enervated the nation’s moral fibre, and eroded personal responsibility and the over-riding duty of the poor to work. It imposed social purposes on an economy rooted in individual greed and self interest. State intervention must never compromise the right of private capital to ‘grow the business’, improve share value, pay dividends and reward its agents with enormous salaries, benefits and bonuses. The function of the liberal state should be limited to safeguarding the conditions in which profitable competition can be pursued without engendering Hobbes’s ‘war of all against all’.
It should be noted, of course, that neoliberalism has many variants. There are critical differences, for example, between American, British and European ‘social market’ versions; South East Asian state-supported growth and Chinese ‘state capitalism’; Russia’s oligarchic/kleptomanic state and the monetarist ‘experiments’ in Latin America. Neoliberalism is not one thing. It evolves and diversifies. Nevertheless, geopolitically, neoliberal ideas, policies and strategies are incrementally gaining ground, re-defining the political, social and economic model, governing the strategies and setting the pace.
Still, the old had to be destroyed before the new could take its place. Margaret Thatcher conspired in a ruthless war against the cabinet ‘wets’ and simultaneously plotted to break trade union power - ‘the enemy within’. She impelled people towards new, individualised, competitive solutions: ‘get on your bike’, become self-employed or a share-holder, buy your council house, invest in the property-owning democracy. She coined a homespun equivalent for the key neoliberal ideas behind the sea-change she was imposing on society: value for money, managing your own budget, fiscal restraint, the money supply and the virtues of competition. There was anger, protest, resistance - but also a surge of populist support for the ruthless exercise of strong leadership.
Thatcherism mobilised widespread but unfocused anxiety about social change,
engineering populist calls from ‘below’ to the state ‘above’ to save the country by
imposing social order. [...]
Ideology is always contradictory. There is no single, integrated ‘ruling ideology’ - a mistake we repeat again now in failing to distinguish between conservative and neoliberal repertoires. Ideology works best by suturing together contradictory lines of argument and emotional investments - finding what Laclau called ‘systems of equivalence’ between them. Contradiction is its metier. Andrew Gamble characterised Thatcherism as combining ‘free market’/‘strong state’. Many believed this contradiction would be Thatcherism’s undoing. But, though not logical, few strategies are so successful at winning consent as those which root themselves in the contradictory elements of common sense, popular life and consciousness. Even today, the market/free enterprise/private property discourse persists cheek by jowl with older conservative attachments to nation, racial homogeneity, Empire, tradition. ‘Market forces’ is good for restoring the power of capital and destroying the redistributivist illusion. But in moments of difficulty one can trust ‘the Empire’ to strike back. [...]
New Labour believed that the old route to government was permanently barred. It was converted, Damascus-like, to neoliberalism and the market. And, buying in to the new managerial doctrine of pubic choice theory taught by the US Business Schools, New Labour finally understood that there was no need for the political hassle to privatise. You could simply burrow underneath the distinction between state and market. Out-sourcing, value-for-money and contract-contestability criteria opened one door after another through which private capital could slip into the public sector and hollow it out from within. This meant New Labour adopting market strategies, submitting to competitive disciplines, espousing entrepreneurial values and constructing new entrepreneurial subjects. [...]
New Labour thus embraced ‘managerial marketisation’. The economy was actively ‘liberalised’ (with disastrous consequence for the coming crisis), while society was boxed in by legislation, regulation, monitoring, surveillance and the ambiguous ‘target’ and ‘control’ cultures. It adopted ‘light-touch’ regulation. But its ‘regulators’ lacked teeth, political courage, leverage or an alternative social philosophy, and were often playing on both sides of the street. [...]