Ermahgerd, where to start. How about...
The cultural, political and economic systems in place do not work for
most people. They support a privileged, international class that grows
richer while imposing increasing uncertainty on others, producing
endless wars, and enhancing the conditions of inequality, austerity,
debt, and climate change, to own everything under the rule of
neoliberalism.
It seems to me that these two sentences fall victim to exactly the thing
you're bemoaning. Under the well-established political theory of "It
Takes One to Know One," this reads like a statement from someone
belonging to the privileged, international class. (That's not as harsh
an accusation as it may sound, as it comes from someone who also belongs
to that class.)
I will happily admit that yes, the scales of wealth distribution are
significantly out of whack. So significantly that "significantly" is an
understatement.
And yet ... by nearly every agreed-upon measure, the "cultural,
political and economic systems in place" have contributed to what can be
called--with equal understatement--a significant reduction in global
poverty rates. A 74% reduction since 1990 by some estimates.
Also, those "cultural, political and economic systems in place" have
contributed to the creation of a vast ecosystem of tools and
technologies that allow people to communicate, to create, and even to
travel, across great distances and at significantly lower entry costs
than ever before. (And yes, yes, the financial/market processes around
some of these tools have also have contributed greatly to the wealth gap.)
Also, those "cultural, political and economic systems in place" have
created massive classes of people who--despite their iron cages!--have
decided that fuck it, certain work is beneath them. We've seen a fair
number of examples of this in the U.S. (and elsewhere), where the
natives (so to speak) don't want to take tough jobs in slaughterhouses
or working in the fields. The pay can be high and it doesn't matter;
it's beneath them and so they won't do it. So immigrants, legally
arrived or not, will happily take their place...
...but it hardly seems fair then to basically blame the hard-working
immigrant for creating the iron cages for all those disaffected/uppity
poor nationalist natives who don't like the jobs that the "cultural,
political and economic systems in place" are offering them, despite the
fact that they're ... jobs.
Am I saying that things are not tough for many, many people? Absolutely
not. The debt load for many people is too high. The price of higher
education is both insane and nonsensical. The climate change challenges
are broad, unresolved, and frankly, unknown (and thus terrifying).
But to pretend that despite all of that, *everything* is in the shitter,
that everyone is in a cage--or in that cage because of "neoliberalism,"
as opposed to any and every other ism that has ever been tried--is just
total balderdash.
Sascha D. Freudenheim
sas...@sascha.com
@SaschaDF
On 7/6/18 7:39 AM, marc.garrett wrote:
Hi all,
It's rare that you'll see any posts from me on this list. However, I
thought, perhaps some of you may be interested in the subject of
'Proprietorial Systems', and my take on it. As some of you may know,
I've been working with Furtherfield for over 20 years now. The context
of the paper reflects a small example of my autoethnographical PhD, at
Birkbeck, London. I am now in my write up period, and will be spending
the next 6 months in it until it's all finished.
Wishing you well.
marc
Unlocking Proprietorial Systems for Artistic Practice | By Marc Garrett.
"Proprietorial domination is the presumption of ownership not only over
our psychic states of existence but also through the material objects we
possess and use daily, and this extends into and through our use of
digital networks every day."
http://www.aprja.net/unlocking-proprietorial-systems-for-artistic-practice/
Introduction
The cultural, political and economic systems in place do not work for
most people. They support a privileged, international class that grows
richer while imposing increasing uncertainty on others, producing
endless wars, and enhancing the conditions of inequality, austerity,
debt, and climate change, to own everything under the rule of
neoliberalism. David Harvey argues that the permeation of neoliberalism
exists within every aspect of our lives, and it has been masked by a
repeated rhetoric around “individual freedom, liberty, personal
responsibility and the virtues of privatization, the free market and
free trade”. (Harvey 11) Thus; legitimizing the continuation of and
repeating of policies that consolidate capitalistic powers. Pierre
Dardot and Christian Laval in Manufacturing the Neoliberal Subject, say
we have not yet emerged from “the ‘iron cage’ of the capitalist economy
[…] everyone is enjoined to construct their own individual little ‘iron
