Oh yeah, also, most political economists don't know squat about culture or the psychic life of power, and are often hostile to the effort of understanding it, denouncing it as mystical or decadent. And most cultural radicals, Marxist or not, don't know squat about political economy - the name Jameson comes quickly to mind. One of the reasons I started this list was to get these two groups to talk to each other, since I think this mutually reinforcing ignorance is bad for intellectual and political life.
Doug
But what was really at stake for Sears (and other mall owners, particularly large dept. stores) was not the comfort or protection of their customers *or* mere desire to exclude radicals. They wanted to keep possible union pickets and leafletters at a distance. At least at the beginning stages, it could be much more difficult to organize union drive at a dept. store in the center of a privatized mall than one with an outlet on a public sidewalk.
Carrol
So, as young turks fresh out of Harvard, we adopted a strategy of excelling in the then new discipline of Urban Design, which focuses on the social and esthetic relationship between buildings in urban settings rather than on the buildings themselves as traditional architecture does. Harvard pioneered the discipline but the entrenched faculty opposed it. And within 4 years, we made UCLA into a leading institution of that new discipline and our graduates and faculty members were sought after by government and the private sector, and even Harvard itself, and many went on to achieve great things. I am sure this happened to many other disciplines in many other institutions.
Henry Liu
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Doug wants to find the 'moment' where political economy, society, and culture intersect. Think about the next two quotes. Carrol gripping about malls, and Henry celebrating urban design. This is such a potential intersection--the mall vs. public space.
Commercial development interests discovered in the concepts of urban design in the Seventies a perfect answer for how to focus commerce in suburban areas that had no focused or central business district. Mall development coupled with national franchises as their primary tenants was specifically undertaken as a way to focus commercial activity in a space that was nothing more than a homogenous carpet of housing and apartment tracks criss-crossed by six lane feeder boulevards.
As a result of more than three decades of urban flight, suburban development, decline of small towns, and inner city decay we now have a socio-cultural space that resembles its own living space--a homogenous carpet intersected by feeders that in turn lead off to somewhere else. Not only is it next to impossible to organize tight, coherent, and powerful unions in such a diffused sprawl of small businesses, but it is also next to impossible to put together any kind of social or political organization from effective TA unions on suburban campuses to PTA meetings or student protests--even families barely exist as anything more than temporary evening gatherings in these bedroom communities. All of these forms dissolve in the horizontal homogeneity of nothingness.
So, considering this landscape, this kind of living space, it is little wonder we postulate a poly-focal dispersal of power. In a related co-evolution, a corporation can distribute its material base across the globe in a horizontal format, which is made possible by the technology of communication, transportation, and information exchange. These are the same broad technological influences that make suburban sprawl possible, which in turn makes centralization and focused commercial activity irrelevant and perhaps not possible--replaced instead by poly-focal centers, laced together through transportation, communication and digital information networks.
Along with these extremely general developments, there is the severing of corporations from any serious interest in their own manufacturing or material base, and any identification with the products they are supposed to 'make'. Thus they have become extremely attenuated entities, sewn together through contracts and subcontractors, and temporarily cemented together by the concept of their own imagined identity--which is held to be 'real' only in the minds of stock brokers and shareholders. And that 'reality' is embodied as a single old white guy and his court on the one hand, and a mystical icon--the corporate logo--the cartouche of Pharaoh on the other. Then turning downward into the distributed networks of divisions into the offices and whatever production facilities that are still state-side, within these there is a strange sort of dis-embodiment where it is assumed that somewhere in the great out there, the big guys are really running the show. Decisions seem to diffuse downward from the clouds with no rhyme or reason, that is with no apparent connection to the concrete or rational needs of either the people or the facilities effected. So, working in a corporation becomes a surreal experience. Benefits and punishments manifest themselves without respect to the what or why of people or place. The reality is that these decisions and their effects are all determined by market considerations and have nothing to do with the more physical world of production, efficiency, or tangible value.
These are the concrete expressions of a so-called post-modern or post-structural society. None the less, while this conceptual frame exists as a sort of universal design signature, there still exists the same ugly old hierarchical manufacturing and production base, removed to horizontally isolated centers either amid the ringed urban decay of US cities, out in the middle of nowhere in former agricultural areas, or off in Asia or Latin America. While most of the same familiar hierachical systems exist in isolation, just as oppressive as always, and just as vulnerable to local efforts of revolt, because of their isolation, any result positve or negative has no effect in the networks or horizontal webs beyond. On the other hand, such hierarchical centers, can be dismantled and move elsewhere to further minimize local efforts. These fast pace moves of whole manufacturing hierarchies, resemble the technological and organizational techniques of off-shore oil drilling and pumbing rigs, as manufacturing facilites pick and move to new contexts of more easily exploitable labor and its socio-cultural matrix.
The resulting socio-economic texture is much more complex and seems to build in, by design an automatic defeat of any rational centralized effort at both reform or modification. Since the flow of capital seems to be the only connection, the only form that a will to change (power?) can take, that also produces concrete results, then it appears to be the heyday of Capitalism, because it is--but only in this particular sense.
So, that seems to me to be the common ground where theories of political economy, society and culture can meet--in the very living space we mutually inhabit. Within such a horizontally diffused space which is both a physical reality and a socio-cultural envelop it seems little wonder to me, there appears to be no coherent hierarchy of organization, value, thought, or judgment. I find nothing mystical about these socio-cultural, that is historical developments since they seem to merely reflect the concrete circumstances of daily living.
When I say mystical, of course I am referring to the idea that there is a theoretical reason beyond concrete circumstance. To a large extent, I am convinced that whole great swaths of theory from various fields have completely dis-dissociated themselves from any connection to the very worlds they are supposed to articulate. That impression ranges from the physical sciences all the way through to social sciences, culture and the arts. The net effect is to create a world of theories that seems to exist on its own as a sort new life form, a meta-culture beyond mere practice. There in the meta-cultural domain, ideas, styles, fads, percolate through just as in mass media to the point that the world of theory is essentially nothing more than an extension of mass media and subject to all the same dynamic forces, in particular the dictates of capital investment. So, it is hardly surprising that the meta-culture of theory is in no serious position to mount a concretely meaningful critic of the very system that brings it into existence. Quibblings over morality, values, and the authenticity of one encampment over another is not my idea of serious intellectual business. At the same time, it is entertaining. But like entertainment as opposed to art, the very stuff that makes theory a meaningful threat to an established order, is diffused into a sea of chattering complaints, and mere postures of rebellion, the manque of revolt.
While there are various camps who want to maintain that the abstraction of financial capitalism and its globalization has driven the development of this increased abstraction in socio-cultural domains, it can be argued the otherway. In either case, it seems they co-evolved with their mutually shared technological support and constitute at this point a contravening force, more often than not, pulling or pushing against a more concrete world of work and culture.
Chuck Grimes