Michael Verderame, The Stuplime Object of Ideology: Report from MLA

Monday, January 23, 2012

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Projected European Coastal Changes after a Rise in Sea Level
[Below Michael Verderame, a graduate student affiliate in English and recipient of a Unit for Criticism travel grant last fall, writes about his recent experience at a panel on climate change and the humanities at the 2012 Modern Language Association annual convention.]

The Stuplime Object of Ideology: Report from MLA

Written by Michael Verderame (English)

Recently I randomly came across three news stories. One, an opinion piece, lamented the (by-now predictable) failure of the international community to take meaningful action on climate change. An article on tourism pointed out that Antarctic tourism has boomed over the last 15 years as the disappearance of sea ice has enabled cruise ships to penetrate more deeply into that most forbidding of terrain than ever before. And a political article described the attacks suffered by Newt Gingrich at the hands of some of his Republican rivals, not for any of his host of reactionary and half-baked policy proposals, but for the fact that a few years ago he had sat alongside Nancy Pelosi and articulated the need for action on climate change. Like Governor Jon Huntsman, who alone among the Republican presidential candidates affirmed that he believes the earth is growing warmer as a result of human activity, Gingrich may have paid a high political price for this short-lived dissent from climate-change skepticism, which has only recently congealed into orthodoxy on the American Right.

These stories illustrate the strange status of climate change as a political and cultural subject in the U.S. today. Every year scientific projections grow more and more dire, yet each year the likelihood of meaningful, coordinated political action diminishes. After the failure of a heavily compromised energy bill last year, it seems less and less likely that the U.S., regardless of which party controls the government, will address the issue.

At a panel I participated in at this year’s Modern Language Association convention, on humanistic approaches to climate change, fellow panelist Stephen Sipirstein (Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Oregon) suggested some possible reasons for the inattention to climate change that went beyond the political and economic factors usually cited. He proposed a new theoretical frame for addressing the issue. Climate change as a cultural subject, he argued, is a textbook example of the phenomenon denoted by Sianne Ngai, as “stuplimity.” Like the sublime, the stuplime is overpoweringly vast to the point that our intellectual and sensory faculties are disoriented. Climate change occurs on a scale and timeframe that is so outside of our embodied experience as to be almost incomprehensible. Yet unlike classical formulations of the sublime by Burke and Freud as a source of energy and action, the distinctly modern phenomenon of the “stuplime” is enervating and stupefying, beating us into inaction through an accumulation of incomprehensible information. The stuplime is simultaneously shocking and boring. Each frightening new piece of data or dire prediction, each report of disappearing species or of freakish weather,vanished glaciers or rising sea levels, force us deeper and deeper into a kind of waking stupor in which we seem to lack all agency, rather than mobilizing us into action.

I found this an intriguing way of thinking about our difficulties in navigating seemingly intractable public policy problems such as climate change. Of course, there is nothing essentially “stuplime” about climate change—many people do become energized around the issue—but as a large-scale phenomenon it does seem to me to have some descriptive power, which suggests, as many humanists working on climate change have always maintained, that we need to understand climate change as a cultural subject as well as a technocratic and political problem. How we as a species navigate these treacherous waters may depend in large part on our ability to understand, diagnose, and address the unexamined structures of feeling that shape our responses.While outright climate change denialists (or skeptics, to use their preferred branding), who are marginal in the scientific community but who receive generous funding and media exposure, are usually cast as the principal villain, a recent column by Mark Hertsgaard drew attention to the perhaps more pernicious “de facto denialists”: “Serious people who actually run governments, or at least negotiate on behalf of those who do,” have negotiated an agreement that fails to meet the 2-degree Celsius target widely believed to be the absolute maximum temperature rise that can be permitted to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic climate impacts. Hertsgaard argues that we don’t need the likes of Ron Paul and Michelle Bachmann to derail meaningful action on climate change. The leaders of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful countries, all of whom affirm climate science and many of whom are aligned with center-left governments, are already doing a good job of that.

While activists have been doing innovative, visible, energetic and, to some extent, successful work around issues such as mountaintop mining and the Keystone pipeline, well-funded denialists manage to create enough debate in the public mind about the underlying science. Many of the denialists use science to claim that the lack of empirical evidence gives enough reason to doubt arguments by environmental activists. Facing a global economic crisis, political and business leaders, and the general public, choose to avoid the significant cuts in consumption and investments in energy alternatives that climate scientists warn are necessary but which might well have devastating economic effects. And the neoliberal ideology that has so thoroughly saturated our thinking makes it easy to conceive of environmental activism individualistically: if we all just drive a little less, change our light bulbs, and unplug our cellphone chargers, maybe the worst results will be averted.

A friend recently mentioned to me that his approach on climate change at this point is simply to hope for the best; so cynical had he, and many like him, become about the possibility of political action. This very cynicism, it seems to me, might be more pernicious than the denialism of the hard Right. And yet it is something of a puzzle. Why have many of us who recognize the science of climate change come to see inaction as inevitable? “Stuplimity” is one way of understanding this puzzling phenomenon. Read more

Letter from the Director, Spring 2012

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Dear Colleagues,

As my previous mails may have already suggested, there is much good news afoot for the Unit for Criticism! Last week we launched our new Criticism & Interpretive Theory fellowship program (deadline 3/2); and our events for this semester include a February 10 winter symposium, The Ends of History, organized with the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society; as well as a faculty/grad seminar, co-organized with IPRH and faculty in Art History and Sociology (about to begin on Thursday, January 26). The seminar will meet 5 times over the course of the semester for conversations in anticipation of BEYOND UTOPIA? Art, Theory, & the Coming of “Spring,” an April 26-27 conference on aesthetics, politics, and new revolutionary movements, featuring keynote lectures from Bonnie Honig (Northwestern), Saba Mahmood (Berkeley), and Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths). On behalf of myself, Nicholson Associate Director J. B. Capino and the Unit’s research assistants, Mike Black & mc Anderson, I welcome you to take part in these events as well as to follow some of our doings on Kritik, the Unit’s weblog. I also want to mention that Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style & the 1960s, co-edited by Lilya Kaganovsky, Robert A. Rushing, and me, a project that began with a February 2010 winter symposium, is now in production with Duke University Press.

The Ends of History explores the interaction of formalism and historicism and includes papers by Srinivas Aravamudan (Duke), Stephen Best (Berkeley), Rachel Buurma (Swarthmore), Manu Goswami (NYU) , Heather Love (Penn), and Walter Benn Michaels (UIC) as well as a closing roundtable with Illinois colleagues in American Indian Studies, English, French, and History. The day before the symposium, on Thursday 2/9 at 3:30pm, Aravamudan will lead a seminar on “The Character of the University”: if you would like to register, there are still a few slots open (simply reply to this mail and we will add you on a first-come/first-serve basis). Later in the month we join the Program in Jewish Culture & Society to host a workshop with Eitan Bar Yosef (Ben Gurion) whose work-in-progress on Zionist fantasy and the modern urban landscape, is part of the semester-long BEYOND UTOPIA? series of events.

On Friday March 2, we partner with the Institute of Communications Research in welcoming Lawrence Grossberg (UNC)—one of the Unit for Criticism’s founding members—for a CAS/MillerComm lecture at the Spurlock Museum Auditorium. On Monday 3/12, Unit affiliate Maggie Flinn (French) speaks on “Banlieutopia” in 1930s cinema with a response from Tamara Chaplin (History). March closes with yet another collaboration: on 3/29 we join the Center for Middle Eastern & South Asian Studies in welcoming Joshua Landis (Oklahoma) for “Syria and the Arab Spring”—a second CAS/MillerComm-sponsored lecture at Spurlock. On April 2, Unit assistants Mike & mc host a grad student conference on “Technology in Theory & Practice”—paper proposals are welcome through 2/17.

In addition to the three keynote lectures, the BEYOND UTOPIA? conference includes papers from Mohammed Bamyeh (Pittsburgh), Romand Coles (Northern Arizona), Angelia Haro (Duke), Noha Radwan (Davis), Jeffrey Skoller (Berkeley), Phillip Wegner (Florida), and Rebecca Zorach (Chicago). The readings for the seminar, most of which are ready for downloading from the Unit’s website, include publications from all of these visiting scholars as well as selections from Fredric Jameson, Jacques Rancière, Mike Davis, Bernard Harcourt, and Slavoj Žižek. The seminar is open to all faculty and students and if you have not already “registered” I welcome you to do so by replying to this email. Along with my wonderful co-organizers, JB, Dianne Harris (IPRH/Architecture), Irene Small (Art History), Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology), and Markus Schulz (Sociology), I look forward to your joining us.

Please write to me, JB, Mike, or mc if you have any questions for us or any suggestions concerning the Unit’s present or future programming. It is always a pleasure to hear from you.

Lauren Read more

09/05 Author's Roundtable 2: Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon Guest Writer: Sarah Moon Cassinelli

Friday, December 16, 2011

posted under by Unit for Criticism
[On Monday, December 5, the Unit for Criticism held the second of its Fall 2011 Author’s Roundtables. The Unit hosted Kathryn Lofton to discuss her book Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. The below contribution is from Sarah Moon Cassinelli.]

“This Oprah is maybe not your Oprah:” personal narrative and commodity in Oprah’s world-making
Written by Sarah Moon Cassinelli (English)


Kathryn Lofton
For most in attendance at Kathryn Lofton’s roundtable talk, Oprah Winfrey is a familiar subject. The talk show host’s presence filled my childhood living room each afternoon. My mother was a devotee and I would watch with her. She and, later, my friends and I, enjoyed the show for the personal stories, the guests, and for the emotional catharsis that came just before the conclusion of each episode. The consistency of the episode formula, Kathryn Lofton argues in her recent book, is a major part of the show’s success.


Lofton opened her roundtable presentation with the same question that begins her book, “What is Oprah?” There are many ways to answer that question: Oprah is undoubtedly a savvy and successful business woman, a global philanthropist; whose work is particularly geared toward women and children, and the head of multi-media brand that began as a television show and which has become a cultural force. She is also an intimate and inspiration to her viewers and fans. But by asking what, instead of who, Lofton pushes her beyond exclusively discussing Oprah the person. Lofton is not a biographer and is less interested in pursuing the “underdog” narrative that predominantly describes Oprah’s journey to the top. Instead, she is more focused on the ways Oprah strategically uses parts of her personal narrative to construct a world where transformation is possible for those who buy into the confession-conversion-transformation model that each show offers. As Lofton states, “Oprah is a noun, a subject, an object of action. Oprah is an instance of American astonishment of what can be… Of her, of you, of what you could and might become.” Although Oprah has used her influence and brand to produce and promote numerous movies, authors, books, and even other talk shows, Oprah’s personal story of uplift and success is her oldest and best-selling product.
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09/05 Author's Roundtable 2: Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon Responses from Diana Jaher, Mimi Nguyen

Friday, December 9, 2011

posted under by Unit for Criticism
[On Monday, December 5, the Unit for Criticism held the second of its Fall 2011 Author’s Roundtables. The Unit hosted Kathryn Lofton to discuss her book Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. The below contributions are from two respondents: Diana Jaher and Mimi Nguygen.]

Oprah Winfrey as Deus Ex Machina: Response 1
Written by Diana Jaher


James Frey on Oprah
When I read Kathryn Lofton’s chapter, “Diverting Conversions: The Makeover as Social Rite,” I was struck by how many theatre metaphors she uses to describe Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. She mentions the show’s “plot,” “performativity,” “script,” “stage,” “spectacle,” and “spectacular casting.” The confession motif that Lofton analyzes throughout this chapter takes dramatic form as guests such as James Frey, autobiographical self-embroiderer, divulge a closely-guarded secret or admit to some misdeed, repent, are forgiven, and then convert to the Oprah gospel-of-better-living through public penitence and moral transformation. Lofton describes this revelation as an “aha!” moment or the“climax” (another theatrical metaphor) of that day’s episode. She notes that the audience members – whether in the studio or watching at home – witnessing this moment of truth undergo a metaphorical purging of their own emotions and experience feelings of relief akin to those of the confessor who can finally let go of the burden of his or her secret.
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Claire Barber, "A Dearth of Disability…Studies"

Friday, November 11, 2011

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Tiresias, from a production of Oedipus Rex
[Claire Barber, a Unit Affiliate and PhD Candidate in English, critiques the Modernist Studies Association Conference she attended last month. To her surprise, she found a dearth of disability studies scholarship and suggests that the field of modernist studies could easily include such studies.]


"A Dearth of Disability...Studies"

Written by Claire Barber (English)

Three years ago, I attended my first Modernist Studies Association (MSA) conference as a starry-eyed second-year graduate student. I was thrilled that I had found a community like the MSA, one interested in British and American literatures of modernism, their social and political contexts, and critical theory.

Fast-forward to the present day.

A month ago, I presented a paper entitled “Polychromatic Chaos: An Autistic Poetics in Modernism” at this year’s MSA conference in Buffalo. As a Ph.D. student currently working on her dissertation, I was excited to enter into dialogue with scholars working in my two primary fields (British modernism and disability studies). While perusing the conference program, however, I was surprised at the lack of attention to disability studies at the level of the panel titles. Many panels could have incorporated disability topics under their broad titles, although very few appeared to do so. Only one panel, “Modernism & Disability,” explicitly addressed questions of disability at the level of the panel title.

In the first paper, “‘Keep my mind off’: Knowledge and Deafness in ‘Sirens’,” Maren Linett focused primarily on the relationship between deafness and knowledge in James Joyce’s Ulysses. (She also looked briefly at texts by Elizabeth Bowen, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers.) In the “Sirens” episode, Linett investigated connections between Leopold Bloom and the deaf waiter, Pat. Both men wait upon others and appear not to know what they know, existing in a suspended state of knowledge. In Linett’s argument, deaf characters are perceived as having access to different orders of knowledge because they use a different language. In communities that priviledge spoken language, the deaf occupy a position similar to that of foreigners. This connection between deafness and foreignness opens exciting possibilities for the question with which Linett ended her presentation: “Is Pat ‘deaf’ in the way that Bloom is ‘Jewish’?” I will be interested to see how Linett relates the argument developing here to those from her recent book Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness.

Michael Thurston, formerly a student at Illinois, presented the second paper: “Grabbing Vision by the Balls.” In it, he forgrounds T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the context of recent disability scholarship to revalue knowledge held by disabled individuals. His primary focus was Tiresias, a blind prophet who figures importantly in the poem. Using Freud’s essay “On the Uncanny,” Thurston pointed out the link between blindness and castration to show how blindness has been read as emasculating. However, people in this poem have insight despite—or because of—their inability to see in conventional ways; Tiresias’s blindness and female form facilitate his particular way of seeing. Thus, blindness—and disability, more generally—need not deprive an individual of her voice. In the context of the poem, Thurston’s argument emphasizes the breakdown of metonymy by which the sacrifice of a part can no longer rejuvenate the whole (e.g., a tradition, culture, or poem). I look forward to seeing him further develop this argument in relation to the access that a disabled individual has to different forms of knowledge after the “sacrifice” of a body part, such as the eyes.


Fiona Shaw as Winnie in a performance of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days from Beckett on Film
Plenary speaker Michael Davidson presented the third paper, “Every Man His Specialty.” (A longer version of this paper is available in the Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry [Fall 2010].) Davidson explored what he called “the dialectics of dependency” within several works by Samuel Beckett, concentrating on Happy Days. In this context, one of the larger questions he addressed was whether we are truly as free as we assume ourselves to be. In an able-bodied society, individuals exercise power through their ability to independently control and satisfy their needs; thus, codependence gains a negative cultural connotation. According to Davidson’s argument, Beckett’s texts normalize disability and present codependent relationships that are contractual and beneficial to both parties. Davidson focused particularly on the relationship between Winnie and Willie in which Winnie depends on Willie to affirm her existence. While she becomes more and more immobile, Winnie maintains the ability to speak, a power that Willie does not seem to have. Thus, mobility and the appearance of autonomy do not necessarily convey power. With this paper, Davidson contributes to growing scholarship on disability in Beckett’s oeuvre, and I look forward to the possibility that he may expand this analysis in an upcoming book.

All three panel participants—and also the panel chair, Janet Lyon—indicated that they were working on books about disability studies and modernism, which makes the dearth of disability at the conference that much more surprising. Given the MSA’s promotion of interdisciplinarity and interest in alternative modernities, this conference would seem like an ideal forum in which to explore the modern conditions of disability. For example, Maud Ellman’s plenary address, “The Body in Parts,” contained the possibility for a critique and expansion of disability-studies approaches to literature. While engaging and interesting, the presentation did not pursue this direction. I do not mean to criticize the conference organizers or its participants for this lack of attention; rather, I wish to bring what I perceive as a surprising gap to the attention of the larger scholarly community. The current job listings distributed by the Modern Language Association reflect this similarly minimal presence: only one position (at Wisconsin-LaCrosse) includes disability studies as a desirable professional background. I am left wondering why disability studies is so slow to catch on in literary studies?

Many of the texts that we study depict disabled characters (Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Bowen’s Eva Trout, among many others), while many authors are or may have been disabled (e.g., Milton, Nietzsche, and Woolf). These texts also reflect cultures, histories, societies, and nations with varying attitudes to disability. In Enforcing Normalcy, a canonical text for disability studies, Lennard Davis argues that the object of disability studies is not necessarily those labeled disabled but instead “the social, historical, economic, and cultural processes that regulate and control the way we think about and think through the body” (11). Thus, disability studies has much in common with other theoretical discourses of embodiment, such as phenomenology, critical race theory, and queer and feminist studies. All three papers summarized above linked their examinations of disability to concepts from these discourses. As these scholars demonstrated, embodiment affects our ways of knowing and the knowledge available to us, which consequently affects the texts that we form. Both Thurston and Linett argued that disabled individuals have access to epistemological orders that differ from those available to able-bodied individuals—what Thurston and others refer to as “cripistemologies.” These cripistemologies introduce normates or neurotypicals to unfamiliar ways of perceiving and engaging with an environment, which, in turn, affect their attitudes toward disabled individuals, the concept of disability, and their own forms of embodiment.

As this response hopes to show, disability studies has made great strides since the 1995 publication of Davis’s book. In March of 2005, PMLA presented a series of conference reports on disability (introduced by Michael Davidson) that surveyed the state of the field. The papers above show how it has progressed since that time. However, disability studies still deserves greater recognition within the academy. The title for this post points to the paradoxical position of disability studies: while disability is a constant presence and influence in our lives, disability studies has yet to become a prevalent critical discourse. I look forward to seeing an interest in scholarship of disabled writers and the conditions of disability continue to increase within fields such as modernist studies. It will happen—quite soon, I believe—just as almost all of us will find ourselves confronted with the reality of disability at one time or another.
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10/24 Christopher Newfield, "The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in the American University"
Guest Writer: Robert Mejia

Thursday, October 27, 2011

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[On Monday, October 24, the Unit for Criticism hosted “The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in The American University,” a lecture by Christopher Newfield, professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The below contribution is from Robert Mejia. The event was the third and final celebrating the Unit for Criticism’s thirtieth anniversary.]

Christopher Newfield’s "The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in the American University"
Written By Robert Mejia (Institute for Communications Research)


Though familiarity may make our walks across the quad appear to be regular and mundane, we must remember that the discourses involved in sustaining a campus like the University of Illinois are anything but. I can recall my first experience of the quad, looking over it from the Illini Union Hotel and thinking, "here is a real college." Even though the space is hardly free from the excluding effects of class and race, the relatively free flow of bodies and the spontaneous interactions that emerge as a result is symbolic of the democratic promise of a public university. And so it was fitting that Christopher Newfield described his own morning walk through the quad when he began his October 24 lecture, "The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in The American University"—the last of the Unit for Criticism’s three 30th birthday celebratory events.

Those of us familiar with the campus know that the quad is often a crowded walkway fraught with various charitable and not-so-charitable organizations vying for our attention, or at least spare change. In this regard, the quad again functions as a physical manifestation of the state's disinvestment from the University. As Newfield noted, though public investment in education has declined since the 1960s, enrollment at research institutions like the University of Illinois and the University of California has quadrupled over that same period.

Public divestment from higher education poses an ongoing threat to the ability of public universities to uphold the promise of a democratic society. However fraught the promise may be, the public university system is a more accessible site for intellectual development and the maturation of social responsibility than private alternatives. Public research universities, for instance, reach over twice the number of students as private research universities and at only half the cost per student. If we are to continue to believe that public access to education is the cornerstone of a democratic society, then public interests cannot be left to private entities.

And yet, this is precisely what is happening. Universities, according to Newfield, are caught within the "death spiral" of an "innovation conspiracy." The conspiracy does not indict innovation itself, but rather the pretense that innovation is antithetical to collective modes of existence and vice versa—particularly the assumption that bureaucratic institutions like government and the research university resist innovation. Newfield's ideas on the individualist character of innovation are modeled on the legacy of Joseph Schumpeter. He notes that even though universities invest millions of dollars in innovation—wired and wireless campuses, for example—the notion that innovation must be foisted on them by outside entrepreneurial forces persists.

The key steps of Newfield's "cycle of decline" show how loss of public funding leads to privately funded initiatives that, while often good in themselves, do not serve the core educational mission—even though the result of sustaining them is typically increased tuition. As the public finds itself paying more for less, the result is a new cycle of public defunding.

To elaborate just one point in the cycle, universities raise tuition for multiple reasons one of which was the subject of Newfield's 2009 article in the journal Profession. The scenario Newfield describes is one in which universities lack the support to cover the overhead of grants. At the University of California, for example, the difference between net research funds and the total costs of research is a gap of 720 million dollars. (Grant recipients who hand over money for overheads to the university do not always realize that these overheads are insufficient to cover costs.) These uncovered costs must be covered from state funds or, failing that, student fees and tuition. This occurs at the same time that state funding is declining and private fundraising cannot be used for core operations. The examples of rising tuition Newfield cited showed increase of as much as 400% in the last two decades, compared to 250% for healthcare costs.

Though the solution is complex, Newfield suggested that a good starting point is transparency. Budget transparency is a crucial part of the picture, but it is not the only one. Another goal is to rearticulate education as a public good—an idea Newfield believes enjoys public support despite the increasing privatization of public education through high tuition and, thus, decreased access. In a less predictable light, Newfield urges teachers to make educational labor (their own and that of their students’) more transparent. This includes teaching as well as research. As Newfield drew a picture of pedagogy as a kind of professional craft, using the example of his own teaching and advice in a teaching abroad program, I was reminded again of the Illinois campus. At various spots along the engineering and main quads, placards can be found documenting the social contribution made from individuals and/or departments, such as Wilbur Schramm’s contribution to the establishment of NPR and PBS, or John Bardeen’s contribution to the invention of the transistor. These placards, as we know, are not enough.

How does one enact Newfield’s recommendation that we make our pedagogical practices visible? He argues that this can begin with the simple practice of documenting the learning process that transpires within the community of a public university. In the teaching abroad program in France, Newfield asked each student a question to help him or her formulate a research goal. Most students, he reported, had never been asked to describe the kind of research that might appeal to them—much less to create a research project springing out of these interests. When students are encouraged to think of themselves as scholars, and not as students taking one more step toward their ticket to a profession, the potential for making the collective gains of education visible becomes apparent. Teaching (and research) should be practiced as a form of education labor guided by a craft ethos. The benefits of education can be articulated beyond the acquisition of career credentials: as laying the foundations for a more democratic society. Read more

10/3 Mark Weisbrot, "The Ignorant Elite: Neoliberalism and Its Consequences"
Guest writer: Arnaud Pascal Perret

Friday, October 7, 2011

posted under , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[On Monday, October 3, the Unit for Criticism hosted "The Ignorant Elite: Neoliberalism and Its Consequences," a lecture by Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. The below contributions is from Arnaud Pascal Perret. The event was the second of three celebrating the Unit for Criticism's thirtieth anniversary.]

"The Ignorant Elite: Neoliberalism and Its Consequences"
By Arnaud Pascal Perret

Most politicians and media analysts who discuss the troubled global economy focus on high national debt, prescribing reductions in government spending and fiscal austerity overseen by policy experts like those at the International Monetary Fund. However, Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a recent Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar for the Unit for Criticism, rejects this mainstream approach to current problems. In his October 3 lecture, “The Ignorant Elite: Neoliberalism & Its Consequences,” Weisbrot demonstrated a sharp decrease in economic growth during the period of neoliberalism’s economic heyday, 1980-2000. This pattern continues to affect the richest part of the world. Weisbrot’s October 4 seminar on US foreign policy in Latin America also illustrated the problems of right-wing ideology and its influence on Washington.

Weisbrot used a macro-economic perspective to show that despite much talk of an international debt crisis, economic growth is in actuality being hindered by implementation of neoliberal economic policies, especially in Europe. According to Weisbrot, the high unemployment and economic collapse of Greece, for example, is only worsened by the austerity approach of European authorities. The imperatives put forth by a “Troika” that includes the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund, have created a vicious cycle in which fiscal retrenchment decreases revenues and thus makes necessary even more fiscal retrenchment—turning a once manageable debt-to-GDP ratio into a veritable crisis. At best, the elites recommending these policies are “ignorant”; at worst they are flacking for the interests of creditors who do not like alternatives such as money creation, slightly higher inflation, and currency devaluation which decrease the value of what they are ostensibly owed.

Weisbrot argued that neoliberalism should not be confused with a doctrine, an ideology, or a school of thought. It represents a “set of policies or reforms” that were implemented initially in the late seventies and with increased frequency during the eighties and the nineties. These reforms deal predominantly with fiscal and monetary policies as well as the exchange rate. In most cases, neoliberalism recommends tight fiscal policies and discourages budget deficits, even when they are necessary to counter recession, and is obsessively concerned with minimizing inflation. For example, the treaty of the Euro-zone allowed for deficits of no more than 3% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product). In regard to monetary policy, the goals are to keep very low inflation even at the cost of high unemployment. Under neoliberalism more independence has been granted to the Central Banks—undermining democracy since elected representatives do not control the activities of these relatively autonomous financial institutions.

Weisbrot looked at macro-economic data for a set of 191 countries across a fifty year period divided into three distinct phases. Although he focused on one particular metric, economic growth measured as per capita income, he also described the many social indicators that correlate with economic growth. There was a sharp downturn in economic growth in the vast majority of countries from 1980-2000, during and after the period of neoliberal reforms. In the past decade, growth rebounded, but this was mostly because of the rapid growth of China and its demand for imports from many developing countries. His analysis led him to conclude that the exceptional growth of China has depended on statist economic policies including state-ownership of four major banks—this in contrast to a neoliberal prescription that curbs state interference except to preserve elite property rights such as patents.

Likewise, Weisbrot linked South Korea’s dramatic economic growth over the last half-century to the country’s use of non-neoliberal policies, and argued that Argentina’s default on its debts led to growth, not disaster. Ironically, Europe itself has suffered the worst results because it has adhered the most closely to neoliberal orthodoxy (in contrast to the US where the Federal Reserve has done what it can by keeping interest rates low and creating more than two trillion dollars since the 2008 economic crisis began).

In the seminar on recent US foreign policy in Latin America Weisbrot took a more political approach, albeit one focused on the Obama administration’s continuance and sometimes exacerbation of the Bush White House’s anti-democratic policies. Here Weisbrot followed the lines of his paper on the topic by describing US support of the coup in Honduras on June 28th, 2009. According to Weisbrot, while Latin American leaders saw Obama’s election as marking a progressive change in US foreign policy, they were soon disappointed. Indeed, Weisbrot’s study of US political discourse (in, for example, the Wikileak cables) suggests consistent support for military control of Latin America when it aligns with perceived US interests, along with a near total disregard for democracy and human rights violations.

Weisbrot believes that there is simply not enough political capital to be gained from a more progressive foreign policy while there remain certain risks. Only concerted grassroots lobbying of individual members of Congress, he believes, can help to reverse Washington’s tendency to continue its reactionary influence over the region. Nonetheless, many Latin American countries have become more independent form the US while strengthening relations among themselves. While a certain delinking can be seen in the adoption of economic policies that diverge from the neoliberal model, political independence shows up in the refusal, for example, to comply with US desires such as the recognition of the coup government in Honduras.

Weisbrot’s counter-perspective on economic and foreign policies certainly reveals a wide range of failures on the part of the US and Europe, such as the policies implemented by the governments of wealthier countries for the last thirty years, the elite that disregards the needs of the people, and also the failure of the media to challenge the opinion of economic and foreign policy elites. In furtherance of his belief that it is important for actual citizens to lobby their lawmakers he is involved in a blog, "Just Foreign Policy," devoted to informing the demos of what kinds of activities are being undertake for their supposed good
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