Here my favourite banner after “Jump you fuckers” on Wall Street in November (see 6 Dec. 2008). It really needs no further comment.
Posts Tagged ‘System’
Davos: You are the Crisis
Monday, February 2nd, 2009Consuming Love – Literally
Sunday, February 1st, 2009I have again (look at my post from 7 Nov. 2008) found a heart in my fridge. Yes, it sounds funny but it again made me very happy – I like believing in signs. I started analysing what all this food coming to me in form of a heart could mean. I wished for something egoistic. But then as I was pealing the potato to make a soup, I realized that each piece of food that came from mother earth actually is a little heart. They don’t have to have a heart form. Because they are pure love – they are the signs and gifts mother nature is giving us to tell us “I love you”. Because they keep us alive. And healthy. And all it takes is some soil, sun and rain. That is all we should need to survive.
I am not joking: we should see each piece of food nature gave us as a little heart. And each time we take it into our hand we should say “Thank you”.
Our major problem as a society is that we are ungrateful.
Consuming Love, or What is Left of It
Friday, January 30th, 2009From The Vienna Review, February 2009
In two seminal books, Eva Illouz analyses the influence of modern capitalism on love and romance. A perfect topic for Valentine’s Day. Ana Tajder met Eva Illouz in Vienna.
Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism
Will you be celebrating Valentine’s Day? Will you buy roses, go for a dinner in a luxury restaurant, buy a little teddy bear with a big red heart? Or will you boycott that kitschy capitalistic product of American culture, condemning it as a crass celebration consumption?
Or will you simply be ambivalent?
Well, don’t be. As Eva Illouz shows in her two books about the impact of capitalism on romance and love, the topic is too interesting for ambivalence.
Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the Center for the Study of Rationality Eva Illouz is ready to challenge the most intrenched cynic. Her earlier book, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1997) created a milestone in research of love and romance in capitalism. Following up on the topic was the 2007 Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, a sampling of her ‘Adorno’ lectures.
Whenever you finally meet a person you had found fascinating by reputation, you will be surprised about how much bigger you often imagine them than they really are. Our brain projects the size of our fascination with the person on their physical dimensions.
When I meet Eva Illouz, this surprise stretched even further, to the nature of her personality. Her books are so well researched, so strong in their analysis, conclusions, theories and findings that you expect a very powerful, maybe even insistent personality. A rock. The reality is quite different. Eva Illouz is petite, gracious, and with the most gentle expression in her huge blue eyes. Contrary to my expectation, she does not project, in fact, at all; she absorbs. Still, the gentleness of her appearance cannot hide the immense intellectual power working in the background.
A lot has changed in the ten years between the two books, Illouz confessed, and with it, a major shift in perspective. “Choice!” she exclaimed. In her first book, she explained how the economic ideas of choice emancipated human relationships and gave them new possibilities. Commodities did not corrupt relationships and feelings, she believed but served as a way of enhancing and transmitting those feelings. But then came the Internet and a culture of choice.
“The problem is, people don’t know how to deal with choice,” she said. “Studies have shown that choice creates confusion, apathy and a shift from being a satisfier, a person who is happy with good enough, to a maximizer, a person who always wants more and better.
“The problem is that we do not have a natural mechanism to stop the processes of maximizing our life choices.”
In her lecture on Jan. 26 at the Bruno Kreisky Forum, Ambrustergasse 15, in Vienna’s 19th District, Illouz analysed the disenchantment and rationalization of love that were central to the discussion in Cold Intimacies. Three cultural phenomena are principally to blame for this, she said: The Internet technology of dating sites and social networks that has exploded choice; the emergence of popular science that influences our picture of love, and second-wave feminism that blames romantic love for deepening the divide between men and women.
“Feminism tore down male chivalry and female mystery, taking the enchantment out of love,” claimed Illouz.
So is it back to pre-18th century mode of arranged marriages? No, modern rationality is different, Illouz said. Two hundred years ago, parents made the decisions, based on a few basic criteria: good health, social class and an ability to provide. Sentiment and reason were kept safely at arms length.
Today, this rationality comes from ourselves and hinges on a long list of criteria – including emotional compatibility, sexual compatibility and social compatibility. It is ideal that cannot be reached, one that gets us stuck in a rut of endless refinement.
“We don’t have the cultural resources to reach the ideal.” Illouz says.
The problem of choice cannot be emphasized often enough. While in pre-modern times, love was accidental and the object of love not subject to substitution, now the sheer volume of choice forces rational and analytic criteria. Choice also gives potential partners the characteristics of consumer goods and partners can always be “upgraded” for someone newer and better.
So while choice has given us freedom, especially improving the position of women in our society, now that freedom again puts women at a disadvantage. While men still have the socio-economic power and love is still the way for women to gain a piece of this power, the disadvantage lies in the dimension of time.
Men can profit from the choice their whole life long, especially if they are well situated. Women have a choice up until their early thirties. But at that point, if they want children and family, they must take the first choice that is “good enough”.
Eva Illouz is currently a researcher at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. The topic for next book is “Why love hurts.” Now that’s a perfect Valentine’s present.
“Every one belongs to everyone else”
Sunday, January 25th, 2009Here a few excerpts to illustrate how Aldous Huxley predicted a decline of monogamy in Brave New World (our world?). I believe that “How can you be stable if you are feeling strongly?” says it all:
Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
“But every one belongs to every one else,” he concluded, citing the hypnopædic proverb.
The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable.
……………………
“But after all,” Lenina was protesting, “it’s only about four months now since I’ve been having Henry.”
“Only four months! I like that. And what’s more,” Fanny went on, pointing an accusing finger, “there’s been nobody else except Henry all that time. Has there?”
Lenina blushed scarlet; but her eyes, the tone of her voice remained defiant. “No, there hasn’t been any one else,” she answered almost truculently. “And I jolly well don’t see why there should have been.”
“Oh, she jolly well doesn’t see why there should have been,” Fanny repeated, as though to an invisible listener behind Lenina’s left shoulder. Then, with a sudden change of tone, “But seriously,” she said, “I really do think you ought to be careful. It’s such horribly bad form to go on and on like this with one man. At forty, or thirty-five, it wouldn’t be so bad. But at your age, Lenina! No, it really won’t do. And you know how strongly the D.H.C. objects to anything intense or long-drawn. Four months of Henry Foster, without having another man–why, he’d be furious if he knew …”
……………………………
“Of course there’s no need to give him up. Have somebody else from time to time, that’s all. He has other girls, doesn’t he?”
Lenina admitted it.
“Of course he does. Trust Henry Foster to be the perfect gentleman–always correct. And then there’s the Director to think of. You know what a stickler …”
Nodding, “He patted me on the behind this afternoon,” said Lenina.
“There, you see!” Fanny was triumphant. “That shows what he stands for. The strictest conventionality.”
…………………….
Lenina shook her head. “Somehow,” she mused, “I hadn’t been feeling very keen on promiscuity lately. There are times when one doesn’t. Haven’t you found that too, Fanny?”
Fanny nodded her sympathy and understanding. “But one’s got to make the effort,” she said, sententiously, “one’s got to play the game. After all, every one belongs to every one else.”
“Yes, every one belongs to every one else,” Lenina repeated slowly and, sighing, was silent for a moment; then, taking Fanny’s hand, gave it a little squeeze. “You’re quite right, Fanny. As usual. I’ll make the effort.”
……………………………..
No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty–they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?
Karl Marx Manga Becomes Bestseller
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009After Europe re-discovered Karl Marx’s work, the trend is moving on: a Karl Marx manga turned into a hit in Japan, selling 70,000 copies since December.
The dramatic shift to the left in Japanese literary tastes has even revived domestic socialist tracts of the 1930s: one of the strongest selling books of the year, at nearly half a million copies, is Kanikosen – a savagely bleak, novel depicting violence, exploitation and revolution aboard a crabmeat canning ship.
It seems that we all had enough…..
That was 2008: pffffffffffff
Sunday, December 28th, 2008I just read a fantastic description for year 2008:
This was a year with a never-ending “Pffffffffffffff” sound.
(by Christoph Winder in Der Standard)
Although this was an exciting year, with my book and my articles coming out and this unexpected (and bombastic) proof that the system is not healthy and needs to be changed – I didn’t like it. I am happy that it is almost over and am looking forward to a brilliant 2009. I’ll just ignore the speculations about the recession….. It all virtual, anyway.
Off shore journalism?
Friday, December 19th, 2008Hmmm, now that every single object we are using in our everyday life, from toothbrush to underpants is produced somewhere “off shore” resulting in hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, how about this idea: Indians writing local US newspapers – thousand words for only $7.50!
For more (amusing but scary) information, see Maureen Dowd’s last Op-Ed:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/opinion/30dowd.html?_r=1
My dad was right when he said that instead of exporting wealth, we really managed to do the opposite: import poverty.
Thank God for German language – I will have to start polishing it!
Women simply are mamas (but what about the minorities?)
Monday, December 15th, 2008From NY Times (thank you Oliver!):
Two British academics took 83 businesspeople — roughly half of them women — and described to them two companies, one that was steadily improving in profitability and an-other that was steadily declining. The subjects were told to pick a new financial director for the firm and were presented with three candidates: a man and a woman who were identical in experience and a lesser-qualified male. The subjects were slightly more likely to pick a man to lead the successful firm but were far more likely to pick the woman to lead the failing one. Two other experiments with similar designs yielded the same result: When presented with men and women to lead a company that’s going down the tubes, people pick the woman…… The theory has some historical evidence to back it up too. When the academics examined the performance of the 100 biggest firms in Britain, they found that women were disproportionately hired as C.E.O.’s only after their firms had been struggling for years. When firms were doing well, they rarely appointed women to lead. Ryan and Haslam say the data also suggest the glass cliff applies to minorities. When you consider this year’s American presidential election, the glass-cliff theory becomes particularly tantalizing — because it might neatly explain the rise of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Perhaps it was only during extremely hard times that America would finally consider a woman and a black man for the highest office.
New Men?
Monday, December 15th, 2008Poor men, it seems that they became victims of the same beauty-dictatorship women were suffering under for so long. And we LIKE it! Am I just lucky or do young successful men take more and more care of their bodies? I must admit that I became seriously addicted to “accidentally clapping” a man’s shoulder while talking to him. Because lately, my hand always landed on an iron-like muscle. And my hands (and not only mine) like iron-like muscles.
Keep up, boys!
Oprah is fat! Let’s give her more money!
Sunday, January 11th, 2009Woow, this is fantastic! Oprah Winfrey is fat again! (And I am embarrassed because I can spell her name).
Normally, being fat is a sign of weakness and lack of discipline. But this woman magically managed to turn this weakness into her strength. She is using the fact that she blew herself into a size of a meteorological balloon to promote and position herself even more as a people’s person – and earn a few hundreds of millions more. Only few moments ago, I turned CNN on and thought I was dreaming: Larry King was seriously discussing Oprah Winfrey’s fat with 5 other guests! And then she comes on with an atypically tiny voice saying how embarrassed she is and how she’s eating a bag of potato chips a day and then continues with some spiritual shit and victims of Katrina. I am sure next comes “Diet with Oprah/If she can You can” show/book/CD/fitness DVD.
The story reminds me a bit of Robert Misik’s book “Genial Dagegen” in which he shows how this system magically manages to turn its every weakness, and other’s critique, into its favour. Here’s the secret to survival…..
Tags: Commentary, Consumerism, Media, System
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