[The second in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 7 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]
"The Working Day"
Written by: Corey K. Creekmur (University of Iowa)
“ … in secret as it were, the contraband of modes of behavior proper to the domain of work, which will not let people out of its power, is being smuggled into the realm of free time.”
-- Theodor W. Adorno, “Free Time”
Everyone agrees: last week’s season-launching episode, “Time Zones,” was a bummer, to use a term current in early 1969, when this final (half) season of Mad Men begins. “This is the end,” Jim Morrison was already announcing in 1967, the actual musical touchstone for the episode’s two framing songs, by the Spencer Davis Group and the Vanilla Fudge. Or at least this is the beginning of the end for Mad Men, and the rather grim episode seemed to announce that the last season would trace a downward spiral. Grounded in its historical moment by Richard Nixon’s January 20th inauguration (another beginning of the end of an era, perhaps), we might, in the time travel we conduct in the consumption of historical fictions, remember what is coming, since our past is these characters’ immediate future: not just the cultural high points of the Apollo 11 moon landing or Woodstock, but the Manson Family murders and Altamont (both in California, of course, now one of the series’ regular locations).
Among the major characters, “Time Zones” left Don Draper looking terrible and alone on his freezing New York City balcony, while simultaneously across town Peggy Olson broke down in her lonely apartment. Back at the office, an overworked and one-eyed Ken Cosgrove complained that he doesn’t even have time to take a crap, and for all of her efforts for the firm, Joan Harris is again reminded that she isn’t the boss. Only Pete Campbell in Los Angeles (feeling good vibrations, unlike everyone else) and Roger Sterling in New York seemed to be having some fun at the tail end of the 1960s, Pete by comically assimilating to a California lifestyle (Don cluelessly calls him a hippie), and Roger by fully indulging in the last gasp of the free love movement. Don – previously suave and smartly dressed – now seems fully out of time and place, arriving in LA (in an homage to Benjamin Braddock’s return home from school at the start of The Graduate [1967]) in a suit and hat (a hat! in 1969!) that now render him entirely uncool, especially in contrast to Megan’s trendy mini-dress. Perhaps the most telling evidence of a drastic shift in the energies of Mad Men’s final season is marked later in the episode when Don chooses work over sex; moreover, across the entire episode, all the characters are eating more than they are drinking, like never before.
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[On Monday, February 28, 2011, the Unit for Criticism hosted "Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Re-reading Karl Polanyi in the 21st Century," a lecture by Nancy Fraser of The New School. Fraser is a Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar.]
Nancy Fraser's "Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Re-reading Karl Polanyi in the 21st Century"
Written by Ergin Bulut (Institute of Communications Research)
Per Zsuzsa Gille's introductory remarks, Nancy Fraser proved to offer a nuanced crystallization of Marxist, Foucaultian, poststructuralist, and Habermasian perspectives, as well as an insider critique of feminist theory, especially in relation to the threat of second wave feminism's integration into the neoliberal project, given the latter’s emphasis on choice and freedom. Fraser’s guiding question asked how we understand the crisis of contemporary capitalism, and she argued that our contemporary crisis cannot be thought of in an orthodox Marxist manner. Instead, she suggested that we go back to Karl Polanyi, author of The Great Transformation, and rethink some of his concepts.
”By all means, the crisis of neoliberalism should alter critical theory,” said Fraser. Academics, she argued, have stayed away from grand social theorizing for the last couple of decades because social critique based on capitalism has been labeled reductionist. Fraser cautioned that “with current rates of unemployment and the dire circumstances of recession, the crisis is still alive,” and in this respect the economic dimension of the crisis cannot be ignored, nor can the damage to human and animal ecologies.
Nevertheless, there are other dimensions to the crisis. While Fraser explained the social dimension with reference to Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums, she vividly described its political nature by taking us to the general crisis of the territorial state, as well as referring to the contemporary crisis of the US, EU, and the institutions of global governance.
It is clear from Fraser’s talk that critical theorizing needs to understand the crisis of global capitalism—but how? Some of the productive questions raised by Fraser include: How do we overcome economistic explanations? How do we expand existing non-economistic theorizing? How do we conceptualize the current crisis by historicizing economy as mediated by culture and geography?
The answer is in rethinking Karl Polanyi's classic work. In Polanyi’s magnum opus, The Great Transformation, the crisis is less about the economy than about ruptured solidarities and degraded nature. From Polanyi’s work we can borrow key concepts and terms, including the disembedded market, the fictitious commodity (i.e., capitalism’s impact on land, labor, and money), and the double movement between marketization and social protection.
According to Polanyi, the proposition of a self-regulating market vis-à-vis a moral and ethical society is not feasible. In disembedded markets, land, labor, and money are turned into fictitious commodities, triggering crisis. As in Marx, these three commodities are crucial for livelihood. To treat them as commodities is to undermine their crucial capacity for reproduction. In other words, the commodification of these three ultimately threatens to undermine capitalism itself.
Polanyi then looks at the response of social actors to the crisis capitalism provokes. People mobilize to protect their commons (land, labor, and money). This is the double movement: the marketization of what ought to be embedded in and regulated by society mobilizes social actors. Though as Fraser made clear, these social controls were and remain potentially reactionary, while marketization has liberating aspects. Polanyi, like Marx, emphasizes struggle but he focuses on forces favoring the market, whereas Marx focuses on cross class movements. In all these respects, Fraser said, Polanyi is a promising response to 21st century capitalism.
For Fraser, neoliberalism amounts to the second coming of the faith in self-regulating markets. Today’s crisis therefore invites the coming of a second great transformation. Indeed, Polanyi is an answer to the crisis, but only, Fraser cautions, if we read him critically. The goal is a new quasi-Polanyian approach that not only rejects economism, but also rejects romanticizing society. One of the flaws of The Great Transformation is its neglect of non-market based oppression. The book mostly focuses on struggles involving the market, but not the struggles and potential harm embedded in society. Therefore we need to embrace Polanyi only cautiously.
Fraser’s revision of Polanyi involves the addition of a third prong to the double movement: in addition to marketization and social protection, she added emancipation. Emancipation is about overcoming domination both in the economy and society. To speak of emancipation, Fraser said, means to introduce something that does not appear in The Great Transformation. Theorizing emancipatory struggles such as the anti-slavery and anti-imperial movements is a step toward overcoming Polanyi’s dualistic thinking, Fraser argued. For while social protection rejects deregulated markets, emancipation rejects all relations of domination.
Toward the end of her lecture, Fraser gave two examples of triple movements: the feminist movement and anti-colonial struggles. Both of these cases illustrate how social protection can result in domination. Emancipatory social movements seek more than regulated markets; they also ask: Are the institutions providing protection oppressive? Is the mode of protection participatory or not?
Fraser also addressed Polanyi’s particular relevance to present moment of crisis and to critical theory more generally. As marketization is championed by neoliberals, protectionism is defended by such diverse groups as nationally oriented unions, religious groups, indigenous movements, and anti-immigrant parties; and emancipatory movements include gay and lesbian movements, among others. Critical theorists should look at these three terms in ambivalence, thinking about the positive and negative aspects of social developments. In other words, the conflict between marketization and protection must be mediated by emancipation, whereas the conflict between social protection and emancipation must be mediated by marketization.
Finally, Fraser underlined the need to rewrite Polanyi in the 21st century with an emphasis on what new ethical battles would look like. These battles would be for the soul of emancipation and for the soul of marketization. They would require the re-alignment of both to social protection and, by doing so, the assertion of a broader understanding of social justice.
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posted under
Brown
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capitalism
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Healey
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Marx
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religion
,
SCT
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Kevin Healey, Institute of Communications Research
“Political democracy is Christian in the sense that man, not merely one man but every man, is there considered a sovereign being, a supreme being.” - Marx, “On the Jewish Question”
For her SCT lecture, Wendy Brown aimed to address the apparent resurgence of religion today, especially as it occurs against the backdrop of neoliberal capitalism. As she pointed out in her subsequent mini-seminar, other authors such as Saba Mahmood and William Connelly have addressed the contemporary interplay between religion and capitalism from distinct perspectives (Mahmood with a concern for Western imperialism against Islamic cultures, and Connelly through a more abstract Deleuzian lens). For her part, Brown sought to defend a unique reading of Marx that could shed light on current events.
Brown insists that Marx understood capitalism to “require and entail” its own religious ethos. For Marx, Brown argues, the collapse of the sacred/profane distinction does not “overcome” but rather “rearranges” the religious. Secularism is therefore a kind of rearranged form of the religious. The more common reading of Marx is that capitalism strips away the religious, revealing an underlying reality where political economy is the ultimate determining factor. But Brown claims that there is a “second Marx” waiting to be read, in his more noted works like the Manifesto and Capital but perhaps more clearly in less-known work like “On the Jewish Question.” Brown’s Marx claims that what capitalism reveals is its own violence toward mankind and the sacred. Capitalism does not reveal humanity; rather, it reveals its own inhumanity. Rather than overcoming religion, capitalism depends on religion for its proper functioning; and at the same time, it comes to operate as religion. In this sense, Brown argues, Marx offers a political theology of the capitalist state.
Brown’s reading of Marx is certainly helpful in understanding the collusion between religion (specifically, Christianity) and capitalism from a critical perspective. What I find interesting is that these types of discussion seem to presuppose a widespread surprise that such collusion would exist in the first place. Adam Smith himself was very clear that free market principles applied equally to both economic and religious spheres. Smith devoted substantial portions of The Wealth of Nations to a defense of religious disestablishment, arguing (against Hume, specifically) that competition between religious sects would lead not to increased strife but to moderation. In this light, historians like Frank Lambert are not at all guilty of anachronism in talking about the pre- and post-Revolutionary periods in terms of “religious regulation” and “religious deregulation.” Lambert notes that the highly popular preacher George Whitefield (an itinerant evangelical in the 1740s) spoke of his own evangelism in terms that borrowed self-consciously from the discourse of free market economics.
The symbiosis between religion and free market capitalism, therefore, is nothing new: in fact it was arguably part of the logic that informed the First Amendment. (There is certainly a resonance between Smith’s discussions of religion and Madison’s arguments in the Federalist Papers, although I do not know whether Madison read Smith.) What might be new, though, are the particular brands of contemporary evangelicalism that “resonate” with neoliberal capitalism. But these new strains can only be understood properly when placed in historical perspective. This is what I found lacking from Brown’s lecture and her follow-up seminar.
Brown’s discussion raised a number of good questions, but my main concern is this: How can we address questions of religion and economics in a way that doesn’t reduce Christianity to contemporary American evangelicalism, or reduce evangelicals to a monolithic group?
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posted under
Hegel
,
Marx
,
Running
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Rhino Grubs, Department of Wildlife Studies
We are pleased to announce:
The 1st Annual Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory Road Race: The Race for Theory
#1: The "Marx"; you have nothing to lose but your love handles! A 5K run isn't easy—but it isn't that hard, either. Good for beginners who want to stay theoretically in shape.
#2: The "Hegel"; 10Ks will definitely stretch some theoretical muscles as you race toward Absolute Spirit.
#3: The "Kant+Lacan"; will 13.1 miles be long enough to synthesize the height of German idealism and French post-structuralism? Not for beginners.
Hessel Park | September 14 | 10 AM (weather permitting) | $10 fee includes complimentary Unit T-shirt
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