Marks of weakness, marks of woe: "Chav" as Allegory

Daumier, The Third Class Railway Carriage (1862-64)

 

This post follows on from our review of Chavs «The Author as Sympathiser» and will make more sense if that has been read first.

Tuesday, 20 December 2011

“Every social class has its own pathology”, Marcel Proust, The Captive, p.10.

Autonomy for a ‘new world’?

OLLE NORDBERG – Coastal View

4th New World Summit, Royal Flemish Theatre, Brussels, 19-21 September 2014

E. C. Feiss

Blooming in the shadow of an austerity-era EU cultural policy dominated by ‘measurable outcomes’ that has tasked the cultural field with a plethora of social work from civic engagement, care work and alleviating unemployment to any number of regeneration-based solutions, a number of recent ‘critical’ art practices have come to articulate a politics of ‘demonstrable impact.’ [1] Putting art ‘to work’ for society must be understood in parallel here with neoliberal policies which have pushed formerly public goods and services into the ‘private sphere’.

The 15 Warnings Signs of Impending Tyranny

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Alecos Fassianos (Greek, b.1935), Reclining young man holding wheat stalks, 2002

 

robertreich:

As tyrants take control of democracies, they typically:

1.  Exaggerate their mandate to govern – claiming, for example, that they won an election by a landslide even after losing the popular vote.

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

Van Gogh, A weaver’s cottage, July 1884

 

 

George Monbiot

The Gurdian  

 

Fri 15 Apr ‘16  Last modified on Wed 29 Nov ‘17

 

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

Now a deal has been done, what lies ahead for the Greek economy?

Mykonos

Greece’s banks will reopen on Monday and the country will step back from the brink – but can the nation get back to normal or will it be permanently scarred?

Helena Smith in Athens

The Observer Saturday 18 July 2015

The end of capitalism has begun

stuartshils:  orpheus’s mood after the departure of eurydice

Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian

Toward a politics of information

Luciano Floridi, Wojciech Przybylski

A conversation with Luciano Floridi

Privacy and identity are two sides of the same coin, argues Luciano Floridi. And yet, paradoxically, western governments are now eroding privacy in the interests of their own self-preservation. However, collecting data first and asking questions later is not a policy, says Floridi; it’s an affront to one of the foundations of liberal democracy.

A brief history of the European future

Max Pechstein (German, 1881 – 1955)

 

Robert Menasse

Or, why we must earn our inheritance

The sooner we get used to a future without the nation-state, writes Robert Menasse, the better; and the faster we’ll free ourselves from the current trap, between amnesia as to what the European project meant in the first place and absence of imagination about where it is heading.

A Practical Vision of a More Equal Society

anselm kiefer

Thomas Piketty, JUNE 25, 2015 ISSUE

Inequality: What Can Be Done?

by Anthony B. Atkinson

Harvard University Press, 384 pp., $29.95

Toward a New Radical Reformism

Speed and gravity

Wolf Kahn (USA b. 1927), Green and Black (2002)

Anders Paulin

Sandra Bullock and a resurrection of the institution

Today, knowledge, aesthetics and politics are produced and consumed in cultural shopping malls in as generic forms as possible, writes Swedish theatre director Anders Paulin. High time, therefore, to rethink and reclaim the institution as a necessary mediator between society and its citizens.

Green economics versus growth economics

Alfred Sisley, Snow at Louveciennes, 1874

The case of Thomas Piketty

RP 189 (Jan/Feb 2015), Rupert Read

What would be a radical economics today? It would have two components. First, it must understand economics as necessarily political economy; as a continuous human, social creation subject to political manipulation and to new positive political vision and action. Second, it must be a Green ecological economics. That is, it must have absorbed the central ‘Copernican’ insight of the founders of ecological economics, Herman Daly and Robert Costanza: that present-day human desires must be displaced as the centre of the system of economics by the capacity of the earth (energized by the sun) to support life indefinitely into the future. And it must be a Green economics by virtue of rejecting Costanza’s absorption of the value of life into the neoclassical/ neoliberal economy, an absorption manifested for instance in the programme of the economic valuation of ‘ecosystem services’. [1 ]

A heavy prelude to chaos

Jesper Gulddal

Aspects of literary anti-Americanism in the interwar years

Despite its cultural prominence, anti-Americanism is the last European chauvinist discourse not to have fallen into general disrepute. While first emerging during the Romantic period, European anti-Americanism reached a peak during the interwar years; literature of the period represented the United States as the quintessence of a traumatic, unbridled modernity that presaged the destruction of Europe. Jesper Gulddal surveys the barely-charted territory of literary anti-Americanism.