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Arabica Robusta

The time of the nation: negotiating global modernity | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...n-negotiating-global-modernity

neoliberalism globalization corporate-led foucault postmodernism social movements

shared by Arabica Robusta on 06 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • This depoliticised nature of the contemporary, seen as the conceptual and experiential embodiment of globalised capitalism, consequently poses problems far more significant than the mere survival of the nation-state.
  • Undoubtedly, since the demise of the postmodern epoch in the popular and academic imagination, the acceleration of technological forces in commerce and communication - that have paved the way for increased capital accumulation, exchange and crisis - have only heightened what Foucault and Jameson gesture towards as a lived sensation of pure simultaneity.
  • In opposition to the crisis of the political generated by the false amalgamation of coeval living experiences, we might propose the concept of modernity; a concept that the nation-state might be perfectly situated to help elucidate. On this model, I would argue, modernity can be seen as linked to a increased self-consciousness of a secular conception of one's individual finitude (in the form of mortality but also one's personal and societal limits), and the collective negotiation of this issue via a democratic politics.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Undoubtedly some of the impotence of movements such as Occupy can be attributed to the same false utopianism of a borderless world of cyber-communities and multinational companies, whose liberating effects have been a far cry from lived reality.
  • However, the heterotopian potential of the nation-state is vividly problematised through the realisation that twentieth or twenty-first century globalisation, divorced and independent of the influence of varying nation-states, is in fact a fallacy.
  • The question then becomes: how to conceive of the self-determining impulse of modernity - here encapsulated in nationalism - in the form of a  socio-political body that would be capable of maintaining that impulse through preserving the logic of democracy, and foster the requisite representative power in opposition to the power of transnational capitalism?
  • Borders are no longer simply dotted lines between nation-states, but often manifest themselves as ‘spontaneous’ entities such as security and health check zones all over major social and transit spaces, particularly in Europe and the West.
  • But how to conceive of a democratic entity powerful enough to appropriate the multiplicity and heterogeneity of globalised borders, that would also be able to withstand, what Balibar outlines as "the risk of being a mere arena for the unfettered domination of the private centres of power, which monopolise capital, communications and, perhaps also, arms"?
  • If this modern or modernist kernel is latent within the nation-state, then a significant reconfiguration is required since the language of nationhood and nationalism is certainly not one of contingent universality. Rather it is one of mythology: mythologies of ethnicity, of genealogy, of autochthony.
  • If we cannot do away with borders, then they must remain out of necessity. This necessity is discrimination. As Nairn rightly argues, "cultures...depend upon conflicts unsustainable without borders". Contrasts and distinctions are internal to any logic of identity, as Balibar similarly suggests; "the very representation of the border is the precondition for any definition". Once identity is philosophically understood as differential and not self-sufficient, globalisation raises a very modernist dilemma. How to make the very diversity (of choices, cultures, of the new) that modernisation and globalisation make possible, resist the paralysing repetitive logic of what Walter Benjamin terms the 'ever-same' (i.e. the temporality of the contemporary)?
  • The mythological language of nationalism asserts an enduring order, paradoxically so inasmuch as the precise origin or origins of any nationalist discourse remain a shrouded mystery. Myth, as structurally detached from historical or circumstantial origin, becomes a vehicle of interpretation and pathos, splitting into a potentially infinite number of manifestations in each 'national' subject (where each standardised narrative is appropriated as a personal one).
  • By arguing the case for global modernity in the form of the nation-state, however, one faces the immediate problem that modernity is almost unthinkable without capitalism (despite any such attempt to render modernity as a democratising force tied to a conception and experience of time).
  • Although the European tradition has established laws and institutions (including the nation-state) that remain significantly flawed, these still provide a democratic logic that guarantees the possibility of revision, of perfectibility, of the future. If the nation-state can embody a heterotopic space that permits identification through processes of willed negotiation and division, guaranteeing the possibility of the present to always be changed, then it might still serve as a tool for resistance.
tony curzon price

Brown is transforming the meaning of citizenship « OurKingdom - 0 views

ourkingdom.opendemocracy.net/...ing-the-meaning-of-citizenship

montpelerin

shared by tony curzon price on 07 Nov 07 - Cached
  • Transformational Government, dressed in the language of consumerism, is what NO2ID calls “the database state” – management of citizens’ lives through centralised computer systems; pooling and cross-referencing information about people gathered on any pretext for any purpose, amounting to mass surveillance. Once your relations with the state preserved your privacy, being limited to relationships with bodies that were separate from each other. A single department was powerful, but it did not judge you on your whole life. Transformational Government changes that. You will have a single permanent record, and your identity managed (or determined) by the state. That will be held together by cross-referencing databases – which is what a National Identity Register is needed for. ‘ID cards’ are the concrete expression of this register, but strictly speaking are not necessary: numbering you and making constant reference to the central file will do.
  • tony curzon price on 07 Nov 07
     
    UK ID database
tony curzon price

Multiculturalism's civic future: a response | openDemocracy - 0 views

opendemocracy.net/...multiculturalism_future

multiculturalism

shared by tony curzon price on 22 Jun 07 - Cached
  • Nick Pearce objects to my joining those who deny the possibility of state neutrality in relation to culture and identity. He says that I thereby regrettably place myself outside the liberal egalitarian tradition, but then adds that "in reality few believe that the state can or should embody one version of the good life". So, it is unclear to me what the objection about neutrality is.
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 22 Jun 07
       
      Pearce want liberal "state neutrality to identity" - in other words, no preferences for this or that group based just on who they happen to be, where they come from historically or geographically or ethnically etc. Modood goes on to point out that Pearce says that "no one really believes that the state can embody one version of the good life", and Modood thinks this lets him off the first objection. I don't get the argument: a state could be set up to make some types of lives easier than others (eg secular consumerist versus religious) and yet not "embody one version"... of the good life. If there are 2 types of lives possible under a state, one slightly harder to pursue, does that mena the state "embodies the easier version?" And is the answer to this a function of the degree of cost?
  • Some critics of multiculturalism worry about "where it will all end", and so deny that multiculturalism is compatible with individual rights, with equality before the law, with civic belonging.
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 22 Jun 07
       
      this seems to me to be the sort of argument: imagine a case where multiculturalism allows something _incompatible_ with individual rights - as in the clitoridectomy example. Then individual rights should trump "culural rights". Now imagine the alternative case where multiculturalism allows something that can co-exist with individual rights. Why is there anything now for the state to do? In other words, where does it ever bite? This must go back to the original question about the _neutrality_ of the state. Only if neutrality is impossible, then there is room for multiculturalism as an organising principle.
tony curzon price

Mozilla Firefox - 0 views

informationweek.com/...printableArticle.jhtml

social-networking

shared by tony curzon price on 29 Nov 07 - Cached
  • It's not just Facebook and it's not just me. Every "social networking service" has had this problem and every user I've spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that's why these services are so volatile: why we're so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace's loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who'll groan and wonder why we're dumb enough to think that we're pals). That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net.
  • tony curzon price on 29 Nov 07
     
    coryD on why facebook will go the way of other networking sites --- but will there always be one on the go?
tony curzon price

New Scientist Technology Blog: Don't flame me, bro' - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...dont-flame-me-bro.html

macarthur trolling

shared by tony curzon price on 20 Nov 07 - Cached
  • Social psychologists have known for decades that, if we reduce our sense of our own identity – a process called deindividuation – we are less likely to stick to social norms. For example, in the 1960s Leon Mann studied a nasty phenomenon called "suicide baiting" – when someone threatening to jump from a high building is encouraged to do so by bystanders. Mann found that people were more likely to do this if they were part of a large crowd, if the jumper was above the 7th floor, and if it was dark. These are all factors that allowed the observers to lose their own individuality.
    • tony curzon price
      tony curzon price on 20 Nov 07
       
      psychology of trolling
tony curzon price

Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier - 0 views

www.edge.org/...lanier06_index.html

identity populism wikipedia

shared by tony curzon price on 08 Apr 07 - Cached
  • The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?
  • tony curzon price on 08 Apr 07
     
    destruction of the author
    unaccountability of wikipedia

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