Monday, February 28, 2011
Krugthulu on Wisconsin
Krugman posts to his blog about the sudden striking media blackout of the ongoing urgently important pro-labor mass protests in Madison, Wisconsin, which are growing rather than shrinking all the while their media coverage is ominously shrinking. Nobody who remembers the triumphalist run-up to the illegal immoral Iraq war based on lies, and the hundreds of thousands of protestors in every city who knew better than their "betters" what was happening and likely to happen and yet were treated by the media at best as a minor irrelevance can feel particularly cheerful to find the voice of the decent sensible majority ignored by elite-incumbent forces the better to impose their disastrous anti-democratizing measures. In a recent column, Krugman also used Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" (from her book of the same name, and referring, in a nutshell, to the opportunistic recourse by incumbent elites to a self-created or exacerbated crisis situation to impose authoritarianism and loot commonwealth) in his analysis of Walker's union-busting crony-capitalistic power grab in Wisconsin. Even if I personally believe that her earlier effort No Logo is the better of her books (I teach it in every critical theory survey course to this day, right there along with Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Fanon, Benjamin, Adorno, Barthes, Debord, Arendt, Foucault, Gilroy, Haraway, Butler), I am thrilled any time a large audience is directed to Klein's work.
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3 comments:
Carrico: I personally believe that her earlier effort No Logo is the better of her books (I teach it in every critical theory survey course to this day, right there along with Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Fanon, Benjamin, Adorno, Barthes, Debord, Arendt, Foucault, Gilroy, Haraway, Butler)
Have you read Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's 2004 book Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, which provides, among others things, a critique of Klein's No Logo and the culture jamming culture it promotes?
I haven't read that piece but thanks for the tip. Of course I've read quite a few pieces that critique Klein from any number of angles, with some of which critiques I sympathize more than others.
And also of course nobody should read praise of any text as an unqualified endorsement of it.
And also of course you will notice that I have generously let slide a "comment" from you consisting of nothing but link-forwarding without any actual specification, contextualization, argumentation on your part. This is a practice all too typical of online "socially mediated" communication practices that substitute the endless circulation of superficial linkages for actual deliberation, that mistake an essentially passive consumption of a kind more typically associated with broadcast media for substantial participation/production, with the troubling consequence of evacuating these fora of too much of their criticality.
All too often this fosters a false sense of phony democratization, a "participation theater" without much in the way of the substance from which real resistance arises and behind which, even worse, corporatist marketing and promotion and self-promotional norms and forms prevail catastrophically behind which militarist surveillance no less disastrously thrives, often in utter stealth.
This sort of shallow linking is not a habit I like to encourage in you or anybody else here, as you know all too well from my incessant scolding on the subject.
Carrico: you will notice that I have generously let slide a "comment" from you consisting of nothing but link-forwarding without any actual specification, contextualization, argumentation on your part.
uh, there was no external link to an online article in my comment. I simply asked you if you read this book because I thought you, more than any other blogger I know, would find it to be an interesting critique and possibly teach it in your critical theory survey course.
So I didn't have anything to argue about having learned the hard way that arguing with you can be quite... difficult. ;)
P.S. The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves is the latest book written by the same author that you may want to check out.
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