Corporate control of public sphere

Anthropology courses furnish business majors with a more expansive and empathetic worldview; that in itself has immeasurable value. ROI-minded governors and college advisors – and students – should know that anthropology courses enhance graduates’ workplace value and opportunities. Students who decide to major in anthropology and/or pursue advanced degrees should be aware that the application of anthropology in business offers both intellectual and financial rewards. Is there a need for more anthropologists? There certainly is in business.

Despite the fact that only 26 percent of Americans support the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, and its increasing unpopularity among unions and activists, the best the Times could muster was self-described “soft opponent” Krugman (3/11/16), whose opposition was hyper-qualified and marked by accusations that Sanders “demagogu[es] the issue”.

“If white philosophers are required, then to teach their work from a critical viewpoint.” This suggests that not having white philosophers should be the default position. This might not quite be “students demanding white philosophers be dropped from university syllabus”, as the newspapers claimed, but it’s not that far off. “When you put it to me like that,” says Sian Hawthorne, “yes, I think that is problematic. However, I take a more generous reading of that statement as saying whomever is taught, whoever’s work is drawn on, it must always be dealt with critically. That is one of the first principles of a university education.” The students themselves told me that they had not realised what the statement actually said, and would change it.

“It’s become familiar to think of the Enlightenment as special,” Hawthorne suggests, “because it’s a constitutive narrative for how the west understands itself.” The Enlightenment, in her view, provides a myth, a creation story, that the west tells itself about what makes it more civilised and the rest of the world more barbaric.

The two Enlightenments, Israel suggests, divided on the question of whether reason reigned supreme in human affairs, as the Radicals insisted, or whether reason had to be limited by faith and tradition – the view of the mainstream. The mainstream’s intellectual timidity constrained its critique of old social forms and beliefs. By contrast, the Radical Enlightenment “rejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely”.

The Radical Enlightenment, he observes, “was condemned by all European governments and by all churches, because in principle it insisted on the universal and equal rights of men and the full emancipation of the black population”.

“Dialogue” is one of those words, like “diversity”, that can mean all things to all people. It is often used to define shallow, skating-on-the-surface conversations which give the impression of an exchange but which touch upon nothing substantive. It can also mean proper, dig-deep contestations through which we test each other’s ideas and in which we show ourselves willing to be uncomfortable as we ourselves are tested. In universities, and in society at large, there is today too little of the latter and too much of the former; too little real engagement and too great a desire to stay within our comfort zones.

Similarly to other cases which severely affected the academic environment in the college in the past few years (cases which could have become a ground for a serious discussion on matters of shared concern), Goldsmiths’ management team has chosen silence as the most suitable strategy to suppress any kind of opposition to the closing of CCS. We are aware that talks towards this so‐called “restructuring” (made necessary by the supposed economic unviability of the department) have been held for years behind closed doors, never involving any of the people who are to be directly affected by the decision.

Our experience of intellectual exchange, learning and close collaboration with academics we consider inspiring for their research subjects and methodologies cannot be quantified or translated in the language of “restructuring”, “merging” and “enhancement”.

The main clash of the first half of the 21st century will not oppose religions or civilisations. It will oppose liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism, the rule of finance and the rule of the people, humanism and nihilism.

Abetted by technological and military might, finance capital has achieved its hegemony over the world by annexing the core of human desires and, in the process, by turning itself into the first global secular theology. Fusing the attributes of a technology and a religion, it relied on uncontested dogmas modern forms of capitalism had reluctantly shared with democracy since the post-war period — individual liberty, market competition and the rule of the commodity and of property, the cult of science, technology and reason.

In this new landscape, knowledge will be defined as knowledge for the market. The market itself will be re-imagined as the primary mechanism for the validation of truth.

Yesterday, human sociality consisted of keeping tabs on the unconscious. For the social to thrive meant exercising vigilance on ourselves, or delegating to specific authorities the right to enforce such vigilance. This was called repression. Repression’s main function was to set the conditions for sublimation. Not all desires could be fulfilled. Not everything could be said or enacted. The capacity to limit oneself was the essence of one’s freedom and the freedom of all. Partly thanks to new media forms and the post-repressive era it has unleashed, the unconscious can now roam free. Sublimation is no longer necessary. Language has been dislocated. The content is in the form and the form is beyond, or in excess of, the content. We are now led to believe that mediation is no longer necessary. This explains the growing anti-humanist stance that now goes hand in hand with a general contempt for democracy.  Calling this phase of our history fascist might be misleading unless by fascism we mean the normalisation of a social state of warfare.  Such a state would in itself be a paradox because, if anything, warfare leads to the dissolution of the social. And yet under conditions of neoliberal capitalism, politics will become a barely sublimated warfare. This will be a class warfare that denies its very nature — a war against the poor, a race war against minorities, a gender war against women, a religious war against Muslims, a war against the disabled.

Neoliberal capitalism has left in its wake a multitude of destroyed subjects, many of whom are deeply convinced that their immediate future will be one of continuous exposure to violence and existential threat. They genuinely long for a return to some sense of certainty, the sacred, hierarchy, religion and tradition. They believe that nations have become akin to swamps that need to be drained and the world as it is should be brought to an end. For this to happen, everything should be cleansed off. They are convinced that they can only be saved in a violent struggle to restore their masculinity, the loss of which they attribute to the weaker among them, the weak they do not want to become.

In the street fight politics will become, reason will not matter. Nor will facts. Politics will revert into brutal survivalism in an ultracompetitive environment. Under such conditions, the future of progressive and future-oriented mass politics of the left is very uncertain.

Social media relies on intense statements of personal feeling. It thrives on the circulation of affect. Outrage gets more shares and likes than nuance.

The complex array of factors that figure into political choices, the myriad ways such choices are not determined by an essence designated by and captured within demographic terms, the fact that political identities have to be constructed rather than assumed; all this was submerged under an ever-amplified insistence on a direct connection between identity categories and political commitment.

The blend of identity politics and commanded individuality was a hallmark of the Clinton campaign, from its opportunistic tweets on intersectionality, to its misrepresentations of Bernie Sanders, to its excoriation of left critics in personal terms — childish, purist, naïve, irresponsible.

As I detail in Crowds and Party, recent work by sociologists Jennifer Silva and Carrie Lane sets out the material conditions that have given rise to the intense attachment to individual identity. Mistrusting institutions, many people today believe that they can only rely on themselves. Their sense of dignity and self-worth comes from being self-sufficient. Skeptical of experts, they speak from their own experience, drawing legitimacy from the identity that makes them who they are. The more they have to combat, to overcome, the more valuable their identity. Solidarity feels like a demand to sacrifice one’s own best thing, yet again, and for nothing.

The added bonus of this weaponized identity politics is how the privileged can use it against each other even as they leave communicative capitalism’s basic structure intact. We see this when we look at the arsenal of identities — sex, race, gender, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, religion, citizenship — and recognize what is missing: class.

The identities from which one can speak rely on the exclusion of class. On the one hand, the assumption is that class means white. Yet prevalent within the discourse of identity politics are accounts of the racialization of poverty, the feminization of work, important accounts that recognize and analyze the fact that class in the contemporary United States does not mean or signify white at all.

Suppressing the history and present of radical black anti-capitalist struggle, of communist feminism, of the leading role of people of color in working class movements, the politics of identity functioned in the 2016 election to demolish rather than build solidarity.

The investment in identity is intense. It shores up a fragile individuality. It provides a location for political righteousness. It prevents the formation of the solidarities opposition to capitalism requires.

This Trump-washing will make regular Republicans look reasonable and Democrats look like champions of equality and diversity. The hatred the Trump candidacy legitimized will take on a liberal form of hatred for working class white people, in the name of a multiculturalism that erases the fact of a multiracial working class.