View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
[...] you don’t support countries which are cooperating with each other; you support ‘South–South cooperation’. An abstraction, where temporality is abolished. ‘The provision of social services and country assessments and action plans which assist in the formulation of poverty reduction policies’, writes the Report for 1990—and the five nominalizations create a sort of simultaneity among a series of actions that are in fact quite distinct from each other. Providing social services (action one) which will assist (two) in formulating policies (three) to reduce poverty (four): doing this will take a very long time. But in the language of the Report, all these steps have contracted into a single policy, which seems to come into being all at once. It’s magic.
And then—the authors of Corpus Linguistics continue—in nominalizations, actions and processes are ‘separated from human participants’: cooperation, not states which cooperate with each other. ‘Pollution, soil erosion, land degradation, deforestation and deterioration of the urban environment’, mourns another recent Report, and the absence of social actors is striking. All these ominous trends—and no one is responsible? ‘Prioritization’ enters the Reports as debt crisis looms; meaning, quite simply, that not all creditors would be treated equally: some would be reimbursed right away, others later; some in full, and others not. Of course, the criteria according to which X would be treated differently from Y had been decided by someone. But prioritization concealed that. Why X and not Y? Because of prioritization. In front of the word, one can no longer see—one can no longer even imagine—a concrete subject engaged in a decision. ‘Rendition’: an American secret agency kidnaps foreign citizens to hand them over to another secret service, in another country, that will torture them. In ‘rendition’, it’s all gone. It’s magic.
[...] Nominalizations remained unusually frequent because they ‘worked’ in so many interconnected ways: they hid the subject of decisions, eliminated alternatives, endowed the chosen policy with a halo of high principle and prompt realization. Their abstraction was the perfect echo of a capital that was itself becoming more and more deterritorialized; their impossible ugliness—‘prioritization’: come on!—lent them a certain pedantic reliability; their ambiguity allowed for the endless small adjustments that keep the peace in the world order. And so, this mass of Latin words became a key ingredient of ‘how one talks about policy’. Specific semantic fields rise and fall with their referents [...]
an unexpectedly beautiful section on nominalization, of all things
[...] All extremely uplifting—and just as unfocused: because the function of gerunds consists in leaving an action’s completion undefined, thus depriving it of any definite contour. An infinitely expanding present emerges, where policies are always in progress, but also only in progress. Many promises, and very few facts. ‘Everything has to change, in order for everything to remain the same’, wrote Lampedusa in The Leopard; and the same happens here. All change, and no achievement. All change, and no future.
the last few lines of this paper. so good
[...] I began to realize that it was globalization that formed, as it were, the substructure of postmodernity, and constituted the economic base of which, in the largest sense, postmodernity was the superstructure. The hypothesis, at that point, was that globalization was a new stage of capitalism, a third stage, which followed upon that second stage of capitalism identified by Lenin as the stage of monopoly and imperialism—and which, while remaining capitalism, had fundamental structural differences from the stage that preceded it, if only because capitalism now functioned on a global scale, unparalleled in its history. You will have understood that the culture of that earlier imperialist stage was, according to my theory, what we call modernity; and that postmodernity then becomes a kind of new global culture corresponding to globalization.
[...] political and cultural commentators have returned to the ideal of modernity as something the West can successfully offer the underdeveloped parts of the world (euphemistically called ‘the emerging markets’) at a moment when modernization itself is clearly as obsolete as the dinosaur. For modernization, offered by the Americans and the Soviets alike in their foreign aid programmes, was posited on heavy industry, and has little relevance in an era in which production, profoundly modified by information technology and relocation, has undergone its own postmodern turn.
[...] In this new configuration, even the paintings of classics like Van Gogh or Picasso regain a new lustre; not that of their origins, but rather the novelty of widely advertised brand names.
on postmodernity, and how even museums--ordinarily symbolic of high art--have become mass entertainment
you could characterise this whole passage as snobby or elitist but he does have a good point (there's probably a DFW tie-in here as well: lots of people think of DFW as more of a shibboleth than as a real author)
[...] in the modernist texts the effort is to identify form and content so completely that we cannot really distinguish the two; whereas in the postmodern ones an absolute separation must be achieved before form is folded back into content.
might be a useful distinction one day, idk
[...] no description of the postmodern can omit the centrality of the postmodern economy, which can succinctly be characterized as the displacement of old-fashioned industrial production by finance capital.
I follow Giovanni Arrighi in seeing the emergence of a stage of finance capital as a cyclical process: as Fernand Braudel memorably put it, ‘reaching the stage of financial expansion’, every capitalist development ‘in some sense announces its maturity’; finance capital ‘is a sign of autumn’. Arrighi’s three cyclical stages can then be summarized as: the implantation of capitalism in a new region; its development and the gradual saturation of the regional market; the desperate recourse of a capital that no longer finds productive investment to speculation and the ‘fictitious’ profits of the stock market. [...]
[...] at the very heart of any account of postmodernity or late capitalism, there is to be found the historically strange and unique phenomenon of a volatilization of temporality, a dissolution of past and future alike, a kind of contemporary imprisonment in the present—reduction to the body as I call it elsewhere—an existential but also collective loss of historicity in such a way that the future fades away as unthinkable or unimaginable, while the past itself turns into dusty images and Hollywood-type pictures of actors in wigs and the like. Clearly, this is a political diagnosis as well as an existential or phenomenological one, since it is intended to indict our current political paralysis and inability to imagine, let alone to organize, the future and future change.
this is great
[...] Postmodern philosophy is most generally associated with two fundamental principles, namely anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism. These may be characterized, respectively, as the repudiation of metaphysics, that is, of any ultimate system of meaning in nature or the universe; and as the struggle against any normative idea of human nature. [...] It is generally identified by its adversaries—most of them modernists, even where they have spiritualist leanings—as relativism.