Fast Capitalism最新文献

{"title":"The Art of the Deal, The Arts of Democracy: Trump, Dewey, and Democracy","authors":"Nancy S. Love","doi":"10.32855/fcapital.202001.002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.202001.002","url":null,"abstract":"Donald Trump’s politics has been variously described as “neoliberal,” “nationalist,” “authoritarian,” “populist,” and even “fascist,” and all these descriptors are appropriate in some respects.  In this article, I explore the linkages between Trump, neoliberalism, and fascism through what may seem an unlikely aspect of his politics, that is, his artistry as a candidate and now the president.  In elevating deal-making to an art form, Trump is not unique.  Fascist leaders have long fancied themselves as artists and regarded politics as an art form.  I argue that Trump’s “art of the deal” materializes and normalizes the aesthetics of neoliberal capitalism; it mirrors the superficial chaos and structural inequalities of the global neoliberalism. To illustrate my argument, I consider how Trump deals in buildings, crowds, and walls.  I conclude that Trump’s presidency raises the question whether Deweyan arts of democracy can still triumph over the art of the deal.","PeriodicalId":215382,"journal":{"name":"Fast Capitalism","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114956467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Death of Neoliberal Realism?","authors":"Zachary Wheeler","doi":"10.32855/fcapital.202001.008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.202001.008","url":null,"abstract":"Post-punk theorist Mark Fisher (d. 2017) shows how neoliberalism relies on a “reflexive impudence” imposed on politics and culture by the necessity of “realism.” Neoliberalism puts fixed limits on how we can imagine the future, and what degree of deviation can be expected from participating in the political process. This paper takes seriously Fisher's perspective, analyzing recent political events in the U.S. as they relate to the use of neoliberalism as a deflationary political tactic. My analysis expands on how two different figures, Trump and Sanders, politicize discourse and develop consciousness outside of this pre-approved realism enforced by neoliberalism. Figures like Trump and Sanders represent, not a new kind of politics, but a willingness to be political—that is, they reintroduce contestability to a political discourse of disciplined rationality that prefigures policy according to a continuation of neoliberalism. This practice of \"being political\" is integral to a conceptually informed and critical understanding of neoliberalism—it is not only a political-economic project, but also an ideological and sociocultural apparatus, that relies on the dissolution of certain forms of consciousness, and the abolition of transformative thought. Foregrounding this apparatus, and its relevance to the 2016 election, can help clarify the abnormalities that have shaped political events since then. My analysis observes that the seemingly improbable political world in which we find ourselves is the result of neoliberalism’s decline (and perhaps, even dissolution) as an authoritative force for defining a clear and rational center to politics. ‘Capitalist realism’, as Fisher characterized it, is dissipating. Furthermore, I explore the great peril and promise of this moment, asserting that political actors must acknowledge these conditions and recognize that the future will ultimately be shaped by whichever forces—from the left or right—are able to take advantage of this aporia. This analysis foregrounds Trump’s victory in 2016 to show how effectively a far-right project can flourish under these conditions, especially if the opposition refuses to recognize the failures of neoliberalism and the subsequent character of our political moment.","PeriodicalId":215382,"journal":{"name":"Fast Capitalism","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123687855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Social Crises, Political Conflicts and Cultural Contradictions of “Nixonland:” Tracing Constitutional Crisis in the USA from Nixon to Trump","authors":"T. Luke","doi":"10.32855/fcapital.202001.007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.202001.007","url":null,"abstract":"Many developments, like greater domestic turmoil, economic dislocation, social immobility, and political gridlock, suggest \"the public\" and \"the private\" are different domains with the US than they were decades ago in 1969 when President Nixon entered office. The constitutional state, as a theory and set of practices in the USA in the Nixon era was put under tremendous strains, and it seems clear that those pressures fractured it. After Vietnam, stagflation, Watergate, and the transitional Ford Administration, has it ever been the same? The Reagan-Bush assault on the New Deal and Great Society as well as the essentially permanent mobilization for war in the Middle East since 1991 all should force us to conduct a radical check-up of the body politic, and ask if The Constitution is, in fact, the nation's benchmark for foundational law. This paper argues that major political and cultural shifts within the USA, as it has faced these new challenges since the 1970s that have been both domestic and global in nature, suggest that its 1787 Constitution no longer organically underpins the nation's dominant modes of the governance, principles of sovereignty, or notions of political legitimacy, as they have been expressed since 1969 or 2001 in the larger New World Order organized in Washington, D.C.","PeriodicalId":215382,"journal":{"name":"Fast Capitalism","volume":"271 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115835142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sociopoetics in the Works of Shakespeare","authors":"Thomas Bechtold","doi":"10.32855/fcapital.201902.006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.201902.006","url":null,"abstract":"This study is meant to develop an immanent critique following the dialogism of socio-poetics in the literary criticism of Mikhail Bakhtin. Socio-poetics in the reception and composition of Shakespeare’s works reflect the first intimations of social and political transformation to a modern nationalized society from a premodern feudal society. This study explores Shakespeare’s use of metaphor through his dramatizations and characterizations at the dawn of modernity and the decline of feudalism: identifying contradictions and tensions that intimate this transformation in English society and language, and, providing an approach to this globalizing language that partakes in simultaneous modes of confabulation and possible de-commodification of that language through an understanding founded in a socio-poetics. Shakespeare’s unique historical position in delimiting later formations of the English language, his composition of modes of reference and literacy, also prepares a potential critique of the contemporary use of figurative language in the present socio-political moment.","PeriodicalId":215382,"journal":{"name":"Fast Capitalism","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125837165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hamlet’s Father: Hauntology and the Roots of the Modern Self","authors":"Lukas Szrot","doi":"10.32855/fcapital.201902.008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.201902.008","url":null,"abstract":"In his 1949 work Hamlet’s Ghost , Richard Flatter wrote of the ghost of Hamlet’s father that the play ultimately belongs to him, to the ghost.  Modernity, like the play, belongs to its ghosts, to its dead fathers haunting their wayward sons, the metaphysical specters it imperfectly endeavors to exorcise. Critical theory has often focused on the possibility, and the contours, of a utopia populated by liberatory spirit and liberated persons. Less well explored, however, are the implications for tradition, religion, and the transmission of culture at a metaphorical echelon—those ostensibly “pre-modern” ideas which the broader project of Enlightenment liberalism never fully leaves behind.  Drawing upon thinkers as diverse as Marcuse, Derrida, Weber, and Nietzsche, I read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, particularly the interaction between the ghost of the father and his vacillating son, as a metaphor for the failure to achieve a sought-after post-metaphysical world, and the ominous potential that inheres in the resulting ambivalence. The implications of these philosophical and sociohistorical developments are centered around the social psychological emergence of a modern self, at once alienated from history and nature, but perhaps able to re-imagine selfhood from “outside the iron cage.”","PeriodicalId":215382,"journal":{"name":"Fast Capitalism","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125974961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ignoring Goethe’s Faust: A Critical-Theoretical Perspective on American Ideology","authors":"Harry F. Dahms","doi":"10.32855/fcapital.201902.002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.201902.002","url":null,"abstract":"The neglect of Goethe, his work in general, and Faust in particular, in English-speaking countries, is notorious.  While Shakespeare’s plays have been prominent and widely performed in German-speaking countries, the same is not true for Goethe in the English-speaking world.   Focusing non-exclusively on Faust, and cutting a link to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, I will endeavor to delineate problematic aspects of American ideology, and what it would take, within U.S. sociology, to be cognizant of the latter.  Georg Lukacs wrote about Goethe and Faust, and so did Theodor W. Adorno and Leo Loewenthal, highlighting its importance to critical theory.  The goal is to delineate a critical theory of American ideology that cannot be developed from a perspective from within the US alone, and of the role Shakespeare’s work has been playing in normalizing the prevalence and workings key aspects of this ideology.","PeriodicalId":215382,"journal":{"name":"Fast Capitalism","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132819408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shakespeare’s Plays of Deranged Authority: The King’s Three Bodies","authors":"Daniel Krier","doi":"10.32855/fcapital.201902.004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.201902.004","url":null,"abstract":"Shakespeare’s plays are situated upon the threshold of two worlds: a declining traditional order torn apart by political rivalry and ascendant early-modern capitalism. The history plays dramatize infighting among warring factions of privileged aristocrats as well as revolutionary forces propelled by the rising commons and the politics of commodity. Legitimate authority is rarely secure among the kings perched upon Shakespearean thrones. In Shakespeare’s Henriad and King John , crowns are contested from the moment they are placed upon royal heads, inspiring Kantorwicz’s political theology: the corporeal body of short-lived kings is distinct from the sovereign’s sublime body that reigns without cease. “The King is dead, long live the King!”  A re-reading of Shakespeare’s plays of deranged authority reveals, as Lacan would predict, that his kings possess three bodies: corpo-“real,” imaginary, and symbolic. When fractured and animated by different characters, the king’s three bodies map onto Weber’s three modes of legitimate domination. In King John , the “imaginary” body of the king – the character most capable of acting with noble warrior honor expected of Kings – is the charismatic “Bastard” who can never ascend to symbolic legitimacy. The article ends with an analysis of the three bodies of sovereignty in the contemporary moment of deranged authority: Trumpism.","PeriodicalId":215382,"journal":{"name":"Fast Capitalism","volume":"171 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133686167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Twilight of Automation","authors":"Mario Khreiche","doi":"10.32855/fcapital.201902.011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.201902.011","url":null,"abstract":"The future of work has come under renewed scrutiny amidst growing concerns about automation threatening widespread joblessness and precarity. While some researchers rush to declare new machine ages and industrial revolutions, others proceed with business as usual, suggesting that specialized job training and prudent reform will sufficiently equip workers for future employment. Among the points of contention are the scope and rate whereby human labor will be replaced by machines. Inflated predictions in this regard not only entice certified technologists and neoclassical economists, but also increasingly sway leftist commentators who echo the experts’ cases for ramping up the proliferation of network technologies and accelerating the rate of automation in anticipation of a postcapitalist society. In this essay, however, I caution that under the current cultural dictate of relentless self-optimization, ubiquitous economic imperatives to liquidate personal assets, and nearly unbridled corporate ownership of key infrastructures in communication, mobility, and, importantly, labor itself, an unchecked project of automation is both ill-conceived and ill fated. Instead, the task at hand is to provide a more detailed account on the nexus of work, automation, and futurizing, to formulate a challenge to the dominance of techno-utopian narratives and intervene in programs that too readily endorse the premises and promises of fully automated futures.","PeriodicalId":215382,"journal":{"name":"Fast Capitalism","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114747920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Minding Machines: A Note on Alienation","authors":"Sascha Engel","doi":"10.32855/fcapital.201902.012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.201902.012","url":null,"abstract":"This paper discusses an underrepresented dimension of contemporary alienation: that of machines, and particularly of computing machines. The term ‘machine’ is understood here in the broadest sense, spanning anything from agricultural harvesters to cars and planes. Likewise, 'computing machine' is understood broadly, from homeostatic machines, such as thermostats, to algorithmic universal machines, such as smartphones. I suggest that a form of alienation manifests in the functionalist use and description of machines in general; that is, in descriptions of machines as mere tools or testaments to human ingenuity. Such descriptions ignore the real and often capricious existence of machines as everyday material entities. To restore this dimension, I first suggest an analytics of alienating machines – machines contributing to human alienation – and then an analytics of alienated machines – machinic alienation in its own right. From the latter, I derive some possible approaches for reducing machinic alienation. I conclude with some thoughts on its benefits in the context of so-called ‘Artificial Intelligence’.","PeriodicalId":215382,"journal":{"name":"Fast Capitalism","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125950072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Divining Domination: Steve Bannon as a Political Mystagogue","authors":"T. Feldmann","doi":"10.32855/fcapital.201902.007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.201902.007","url":null,"abstract":"Right-wing commentators (on tv, radio, newspapers, documentaries, or the internet) are often considered a source of misinformation and radicalization in American politics. Understanding the role of such commentators in the political sphere has taken on new significance since the election of Trump, who regularly takes talking points as well as political advice from prominent figures in right-wing media. The purpose of these political “shock jocks” also extends beyond mere political commentary: They offer their audience a framework for understanding the world. This framework contains certain reified perceptions of society and history. Durkheim and those working in his tradition have long recognized that the reification of social forces forms the basis for religious, magical, and mystical beliefs and practices. Therefore, these hosts offer their audience a form of political mysticism. In this article I will discuss a Durkheimian perspective religion and magic, and I will show how it can be productively applied to Steve Bannon’s political ideology. I argue that from a Durkheimian perspective Steve Bannon is a mystagogue, a modern diviner and diviner of the modern, who, to varying degrees, offers his followers a mystical worldview. I also argue that a central part of the dynamic between host and listener is the same as what O’Keefe argued is the core dynamic of magic: the defense of the self against society. This theoretical perspective opens up a new way of understanding certain political movements while shedding light on the dangerous phenomena of personalization.","PeriodicalId":215382,"journal":{"name":"Fast Capitalism","volume":"82 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130122174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}