Capitalism, the mini-series

Between reading the new translation of Dany-Robert Dufour's The Art of Shrinking Heads and getting caught up in coverage of the current capitalist market kerfuffle, it's a dizzying time. More on Dufour another day.

Over at Eurhythmania, you can find posted a piece published today by the previously celebrated Australian journalist/writer (I hedge bets here, depending on your predilections) Guy Rundle. He's over in America currently, covering the election for a few Australian outlets.

Before today, I had been sceptical about the meaning of this trumpeted crisis. On one hand, it seemed like leftist pants-wetting: 'the crisis is here, the crisis is here!' On the other, it seemed like a crisis provoked, diagnosed and (in theory) cured by outsized capitalists. Dennis Kucinich suggested as much on DemocracyNow! yesterday: "It seems to me there’s a possibility that this crisis has a little bit of manufacture to it."

This disposition on my behalf was a function, I think, of distance: in the sense of being, shall we say, disembedded from the most often mentioned, most deeply effected circuits -- I have no mortgage, no shares etc -- but also in the sense of being in Australia. It just did not seem to have hit as hard over here. (I speak specifically, by the way, of the past few weeks. There has been some noticeable, earlier fallout on mortgages etc. But even that seems relatively minor compared to the US disasters.)

But now, I think, there is something afoot. And Guy Rundle's piece gets at that.

But here is what is really, really important to understand about this current event is that this is not merely a financial system crisis – that is a mere ripple of a much deeper problem. Desperate to gain some political capital out of this, the right have been suggesting that the problem is over-regulation, which is mad. But no less illusory is the centre-left assertion that the problem is simply one of lack of regulation, and that if a proper framework could be put in place everything would be all right.

For the great truth of this mess is that the folks who designed the deregulation were, in a narrow sense, right -- if their goal was to give western capitalism another lease of life. What the market faced in the US at the end of the 90s, was a crucial lack of things to invest in, for the free money sloshing around the markets. By 2001, the dotcom bubble had burst and you couldn't shove $X billion into Ewidgets.com, and so there was a desperate need for another object that would keep the circus going. Mortgage backed securities was it – bricks and mortar, which looked like the most concrete investment was actually the most abstract, the notional capacity of people with no-deposit mortgages to repay.

Crazy, but what could you do? For the bitter fact is that without these pseudo-investments, the West is running on fumes. As China and the East roars ahead in classical 19th century high capitalist mode, the West runs on financial services, and rents – such as intellectual property, and debt and debt and debt.

Thwarted thunderbolts

The even-keeled Sheila Fitzpatrick navigates 970 pages of a Solzhenitsyn biography and lives to (re)tell the tale. It's perhaps the best -- relatively short -- assessment of the Russian author.

The Soviet Union’s collapse paved the way for Solzhenitsyn’s return in 1994, which he staged with typical élan and instinct for publicity, taking a train from Vladivostok and proceeding through the length of Russia to Moscow. There isn’t a theatre director in the world who could have thought that one up, [biographer] Saraskina comments (admiringly). It was intended as the return of the Prophet Vindicated, filmed in every detail by the BBC, but it didn’t quite come off. Too late, many said; a great figure, but now irrelevant. Solzhenitsyn was equal to that, plunging again into one of his favourite roles, that of Jeremiah. The Russia he discovered in the mid-1990s was a moral sink, national consciousness and spiritual traditions lost, criminality rampant, party and Duma politics contemptible, the plight of the Russian people appalling and ignored by the new-rich rulers, privatisation a theft of public assets in broad daylight, Russia’s ‘liberal’ intellectuals as posturing and out of touch as ever, the break-up of the empire and consequent loss of Russia’s ‘iconic regions, outlets to the sea, and millions of Russian people’ a catastrophe, ‘shock therapy’ an outrage, even the Russian language corrupted. As for the free Russian press, they were a bunch of jackals, worse than the Cheka.

(pic via Flickr)

North East

Photographer Eric Lafforgue: "Pyongyang view, taken from Yanggakdo hotel. You can find a famous satellite picture on the net showing a map of the Korean peninsula by night, with a huge difference between the north and south. In North Korea, there is no public lighting, and people use very low wattage bulbs in their houses. The North Korean capital is as surreal by night as it is by day. Due to the fuel crisis there's hardly any traffic to be heard after dark, and nightlife is virtually non-existent. Only monuments are lit during local festivities. Every hour, on the hour, from 6 am to midnight, loudspeakers blast out a patriotic song. Tourists are totally forbidden from leaving their hotels to walk around town, even though Pyongyang is safe, that's the rule."

This is what a feminist looks like?

More photos of North Korea at The Big Picture. This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the country.

Photos: (c) Eric Lafforgue; AP Photo/Kyodo News

Radical contingency

I miss, by a few days, the London V&A "Cold War Modern" exhibition (as reviewed in New Statesman by Owen, with characteristic insight).

This is like a sick joke, arranged by travel agents, airlines and my brother. Christ.

Soft Focus History

As mentioned previously, I've been preparing some papers—both written and spoken.

The content of this post forms part of what became my university confirmation seminar paper. It will also be published in a forthcoming journal article. It is an introductory section, concerned with getting some of these ideas around ostalgie to crack a bit under the weight of analysis, to push the "object to the point where that object destroys its own illusion," as Mr Bctzoiwp puts it. I am talking here and in the paper more broadly about the relation of nostalgia to three films—Sonnenallee, Good Bye Lenin! and The Lives of Others.

~

It's reported by Edward S Casey that there's a piece of graffiti in Paris that reads: 'Nostalgia is not what it used to be.' This says a lot and opens a few gaps for thinking about the topic. One of the questions rarely asked by cultural analysis of ostalgie is a simple one: what is nostalgia? Is it: a state of being, that is an ontological homesickness; is it a kind of pathology or recurring error; is it a form or phase of mourning; is it a transient disposition due to circumstances; is it a mere passing mood, encountered about 3pm each Sunday afternoon? The common, everyday response, of course, is pejorative. Nostalgia is a longing for the past which buffs away rough edges, a kind of soft-focus history. It's, at best, diversionary and pleasant, at worst, wrongheaded and dangerous.

To complicate this with some more precise terms and reflection, we can propose that: nostalgia is a feeling at the interface of individual and collective remembrance. It is often a personal mode of remembrance populated by items belonging to the 'collective'—that is, circulating goods and specific locations. It's often a compression of time and place, biography and history. As Casey writes, "this paradoxical interplay of the definite and the indefinite in space as well as in time…gives rise to nostalgia's baffling combination of the sweet and the bitter, the personal and the impersonal, distance and proximity, presence and absence, place and no-place, imagination and memory, memory and nonmemory." This is one of the chief reasons for its conceptual difficulty.

However, in discussing cultural forms—films or otherwise—we get access to one juncture of the individual-collective interaction, be it set up in distinction or compliance with the common understandings of particular plots of collective memory. Refining further, we could say: nostalgia represents a mode of orientation to the past, an act of remembrance calling on social cues and individual biography. To say this, though, is to open up another question elided by much discussion of ostalgie: where does nostalgia reside? Often, films and other cultural forms are invoked as 'ostalgic'—but is it possible that a reel of celluloid or a book alone can be nostalgic? I will not answer this question here, but it forms a kind of background thought throughout much of this essay. I will return to it in closing.

One matter which recurs in the broader literature on nostalgia is the feeling of a deepening in its presence over the past thirty years in the West. To provide only a quick catalogue of the reasons given for this: we are embedded an overarching 'postmodern' epoch; we have seen the rise of visual, screen culture; the decline of long-running personal and institutional attachments through the individuation of 'second modernity'; an amnesia in contemporary culture, despite ever greater digital archives. In many senses, then, according to these accounts, all three of the films analysed here are films of their time. For one, they fit within a broader movement of nostalgia films seen over the past three decades, a cultural mood about which Pam Cook's writings on British and Hollywood nostalgia films makes us aware. And all three are undeniably postmodern nostalgia films in Jameson's sense, rendering the past in a 'consumable set of images,' ticking all the boxes he offers: 'music, fashion, hairstyles and vehicles'. They carry within them an inventory not of 'facts or historical realities (although [such a film's] items are not invented and are in some sense 'authentic'), but rather a list of stereotypes, of ideas of facts
and historical realities.' In Jameson, of course, this links up to a broader denigration of postmodern nostalgia culture—denigrated for its purported lack of depth and its association with a crass commercial culture—a position which I do not wish to take up and which has already been widely critiqued. I would briefly note here, though, that both Sonnenallee and Good Bye Lenin! derive much of their comic value from dealing ironically and subversively with the very stereotypes they show on screen.

Thus if Jameson's description of the 'nostalgia film' on one level rings true but can be seen as problematised by at least two of the films discussed here, those films also underscore a problem with the negative cast nostalgia generally receives in the critical corpus. For one, these po-faced theories are inadequate in the face of comedic and ironic deployments of nostalgia. Yet perhaps the bigger problem with the dominant denigration is its paralysis on questions of the losses to which nostalgia may be a response—even as it's laughing. At its worst, such a negative characterisation of nostalgia does not admit of the pleasures nostalgia can offer—therein foreclosing a genuine understanding of the feeling, disregarding the phenomenology of the nostalgic. This confusion is understandable, as I have noted. Nostalgia is notoriously hard to pin down: 'nostalgia remains unsystematic and unsynthesizable,' Boym writes, 'it seduces rather than convinces.' Across the diversity of understandings and interpretations, across its manifold attachments to the present and politics, nostalgia culture is saddled with a paradox, as Radstone has outlined: "While [on the one hand] nostalgia is criticised for its commodification of the past—for its transforming of the past into a publicly traded commodity—it is also [on the other] conversely criticised for turning social change into private affect."

So if nostalgia is thus swatted every which way it turns, how can we turn it into a productive concept? A number of theorists—from Linda Hutcheon to Foucault to a handful of lesser known psychoanalysts—have offered relatively nuanced takes on the phenomenon. Psychoanalysis directs us to the essential basis of nostalgia: another version of the 'grass is always greener' modality, nostalgia functions as a necessary psychic buttress, a sunny counterpart to the ongoing disappointments in failing to achieve contentment. This is psychoanalysis in its anti-utopian mode. Beyond such a psychoanalytic account, Russian-born US-based academic Svetlana Boym has given us a useful schematic for post-communist nostalgia in the characterisation offered in her book The Future of Nostalgia. This dyadic scheme disarticulates divergent responses to the same impulse, to the seeking of comfort in the past—one of them unaware of its nostalgic gloss, one playfully aware of its daydreaming. Such a characterisation fits with the two dominant yet divergent critical accounts of nostalgia, but Boym valorises them in a way different from other writers: at one end, the consumerist and playful version of nostalgia, usually derided, is offered as a positive, or at least amiable and harmless, style of remembrance; at the other, a bracingly serious, politically valenced embrace of what we might sometimes call 'invented traditions,' is held to be dangerous. To explain this distinction further: Restorative nostalgia, for Boym, defies a linear conception of history in the quest to reconstruct a lost home, understanding itself as seeking truth and tradition. Dead serious, it reconstructs 'emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialise time.' This is the type of nostalgia at the heart of much nationalism. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, circles the past in a wistful and ironic fashion. It dwells, ambivalently, on longing and belonging. It has no singular plot, ranging across dispersed places at once; ensconced in details, not symbols. Reflective nostalgia in this mode is 'not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias'—it is more creative and useful than the common caricature of nostalgia would allow.

While helpfully moving us away from commonplaces about nostalgia, this bifurcated scheme is limited in what it can proffer for the analysis of Ostalgie. Boym is upfront in admitting that these two forms are endpoints on a continuum of nostalgia types. She also offers some illuminating examples of cases she sees fitting these types of nostalgia. Nevertheless, such clear-cut binary categories ultimately offer an all-too-easy checklist, a kind of shortcut to analysis. If we follow her model, the meanings and significance of these nostalgias—what might be called their politics—go unnoticed. As Radstone reminds us, "debates concerning the politics of nostalgia require analyses of nostalgia culture that differentiate between its varieties, and that attend to the specificities of nostalgia culture's representations of the past, its strategies of address and its appeal." That is to say, an analysis that merely noticed ostalgic phenomenon and shifted them into one of Boym's two categories would be deeply flawed—one must draw apart this simplistic 'ostalgie' concept, to name its parts, to precisely call it by different names, to notice different species, different attenuations, different imperatives. The journalistic tendency to conflate ostalgie pays little attention to these qualitative differences. German reportage on this score does, of course, vary from the warmly dismissive to the tabloid panic styles, but in some ways this just alerts us to the need to avoid the temptation to come up with similarly neat categorisations in an academic context. This requires reflection on the very status of nostalgia. One of the questions we should ask of these films, for example, is a complex one: what makes a film about memory and not history? These two terms—memory and history—form a binary which has structured much recent academic analysis. This is literature which I do not wish to navigate here, but the distinction remains worth keeping in mind: why have these films been classified as nostalgic? Are the films—as texts—nostalgic? Or do they merely depict nostalgia? Are they not just more in a line of German historical dramas? If not, how are they different?

As I have already implied, ostalgie could be both of Boym's forms at the same time. It can be: postmodern capitalism's 'playful reappropriation of the everyday objects of East German culture,' be it the market in GDR pedestrian traffic lights or the Trabant car; or Ostalgie 'may be a reclamation of one's own biography, recalling happy times that are excluded from those discourses that reduce life in the GDR to the experience of oppression'; or, perhaps in a more fundamentally political way, it can represent 'an insistence upon a distinct set of East German values born out of the GDR past, such as a solidarity that challenges the supposed 'Ellbogenmentalität' [elbowing-out mentality—i.e. single minded pursuit of one's own interests] of Western capitalism.' These three types—and there are more—interleave in manifold ways. Radstone alerts us to this complicated tenor of any nostalgia—the manner in which affect, politics, biography and time blur in a text or set of texts that might all too easily be cast as nostalgic. The question must always be, nostalgic for what, for when, for whom—and, if it seems relevant, to what end. In analysing these films, then, we need to be awake, all at once, to the textual specificities of film—that is, its address, its appeal, its narrative choices—as well as to the historical and political specificities of production and reception.

Image taken from German Propaganda Archive.

The Healthy Body

This will all be wildly off topic, so apologies for those expecting commie kitsch, thoughts on Tacheles closing or a devastating analysis of the rise and rise of Die Linke! There are some nice ironic pictures about halfway through, so they're worth sticking around for....

I'm currently doing some research work for an academic looking at the water bottle as a modern thing, what it represents -- there's Latour, biopolitics, risk, neoliberal privatisation and many other theoretical bits floating around in the framing of the project. I don't get to touch most of that. I am just researching one specific campaign. I have managed, though, to spend a day or two reading Feher and Heller's 1994 slim book on biopolitics. (If you can't turn academic research jobs into explorations of pet topics/ideas/authors, what's the goddamn point?)

There's a clear sense in which this is a book written by people spooked by a far-reaching state. Presumably if you were in communist Hungary, saw 1956, had hopes crushed, academic positings withdrawn etc etc, this is something you'd be fairly careful about.

Nevertheless, they do a good job here of taking their longer view -- a fairly worked-through set of ideas about modernity's genesis and meanings (for them, in this context, it's an ongoing debate of life versus liberty) -- and marrying it to some contemporary analysis. So you get your Kant with some Rodney King race riots, your Hegel with some Andrea Dworkin and your Weber with anti-smoking campaigns.

It's this last point where we start to get crossover with the marketing of water bottles. I don't always fully agree with their positions, but they get in some cracking lines, paragraphs and, well, whole pages of analysis. Below is one of my favourites.

Since health politics demands that we force our sense of mortality into oblivion and continually remain fit labour machines, an odd version of the age-old dream of eternal youth also becomes one of ‘health’s’ metaphoric meanings. The politics of health runs a desperate race with time. It wants to bring time to a halt in order to raise the bodily state of the adolescent boy and girl to the pedestal of the ideal. The alliance of health politics with health industry makes this feature even more explicit.… Theoretically, one could expect at least an aesthetic yield from this exaggerated cult of youth, a new adoration of beauty. But the standards of youthfulness are technologically set; they aim at mass production. In the pursuit of health, biopolitics becomes unfaithful to the spirit of the post-modern. Instead of promoting ‘difference’—beauty as the mark of individuality—it promotes the production of ‘the healthy body’ en masse.

And just before this passage, they make a nice series of linkages between the stigma of being unhealthy, utilitarianism and the Protestant ethic.

He who commits ‘health crimes’ is ‘unreconstructed’ (a term of the re-education camps) and ‘contaminated’. Above all, he causes public expenditure (by the implied crime of eventually falling ill, being hospitalised, and perhaps even buried at public expense). Those who waste too much time discussing ‘progress,’ should rather compare the stone-hearted utilitarianism of health politics with medieval caritas. But the reference to ‘public expenditure,’ more than anything else, betrays that one of the major objectives of health politics is to restore the shattered Protestant work ethic to its abandoned central position, by reviving its neurotic self-discipline; its imperative to subject the individual to ‘public goals’ and the world of labour, as well as to Protestant work ethic’s inherent miserliness.

So the body -- our 'health' -- must be disciplined and punished. Health as a political metaphor can be seen, for them, in the various exhortations for the individual. Health, in such a setting

cannot be pursued without the binary of ‘friend and foe’. It is for this reason that the concept of ‘secondary smoking’ was created. It is not the general pollution of cities and the industrial environment, not AIDS, drugs, alcohol, the creeping back of tuberculosis (as well as other diseases which have never been mastered) that will cause our premature deaths but the results of Secondary Smoking. It is useless to waste time considering the ‘scientific basis’ of this inquisitorial concept. More important is to recognise its function. Our needs and habits no longer have a private character; we are directly responsible from them in front of the ‘public eye’. ‘Science’ has to be mobilised to ‘prove’ that in indulging in our particular health crime we endanger our fellow citizens, pollute (and thus abuse) our children, upset the mental peace of our neighbours, and contaminate the moral atmosphere. The conclusion is self-evident: either submit to the norm, or pay the penalty, perhaps la mort civile. This is what justifies sniffing the ‘secret smoker’ out of the toilet booth (as once the secret masturbator was sniffed out) and denouncing him without further delay or calling the guard to remove the perpetrator from the premises.…By and large the politics of health is successful insofar as it transplants a massive guilt feeling, the prerequisite for the victory of the course of ‘discipline and punish’, into the psyche of the individual. One sees on the same TV-set a host of young men and women who tell you that because they lost x pounds or kilos in their last diet, they no longer feel guilty.

In matters of water bottles and marketing, these healthy bodies are linked to healthy Nature. Drinking from those bottles, we undertake an ethic of care for the self/body -- health politics -- and for Nature -- environmental politics. We forego the less healthy choice -- sugary soft drinks, fattening milk, stimulant coffee -- in order to move closer to nature and purity, away from contamination and stigma/shame/guilt.

Following a kind of Weberian line, I wonder if this didn't represent re-enchantment of the water bottle: its messages and attachments are to connect [re-connect?] the consumer-as-body to nature, purity, clarity, a kind of singularity of nature, both universal (nature, the earth, the body) and particular (my body, my environment, my world). The tap is non-unique, anonymous, tracked by bureaucracy and water bills, immobile because owned by all. The bottle is unique, specific, instantly locatable and mobile.

(Pics via Flickr and Healthy Living Tip [?])

Polska posters

As if in some visual exercise of dialectics, Polish artists seem to take a Polish appreciation of illustration play it off against Hollywood film and come out with some genius synthesis. This Well Medicated post attests to as much, fifty times over. A Polish aesthetics for Hollywood?