Archiv der Kategorie: Macht

Theökonomie II

Ein Interview mit dem kritischen Ökonomen Michael Hudson.

The purpose of economic education is not to explain how the world works, but to give a vocabulary that will confuse people into believing that the world has to be the way it is, so that there is no alternative, instead of thinking about possible reforms.

Witness the fitness

Gestern die Performance My Body is the Field for Tomorrow’s Battles gesehen.

Aktuelle Fitness-Bewegungen kombinieren unterschiedlichste Körperpraktiken, um nicht weniger als folgendes Ziel zu erreichen: Auf alles vorbereitet zu sein. Welche Zukunftsvisionen, Ideologien und Rollenbilder verstecken sich hinter diesem Anspruch? Eine Armee durchtrainierter Frauen, die bereit sind, ihre Körper einzusetzen, aber nicht genau wissen wofür, wird auf der Bühne um die Antwort auf diese Fragen kämpfen.

Zufällig gleichzeitig diesen Text über den Befehl zum Genießen in der Postmoderne gelesen. Dort wird Zygmunt Baumanns Konzept von Fitness erwähnt.

Bauman describes fitness as being even more oppressive than health when it comes to social standards for compliance, as Žižek describes the maternal superego as being even more oppressive than the paternal superego. This is because fitness is problematic in three ways: there is no upper limit to fitness (thus its status as an ever-receding horizon), fitness can be neither objectively measured nor effectively communicated, and finally the subject assumes the individual responsibility for playing both the role of he who experiences sensations and he who measures sensations, paradoxically requiring that the subject experience sensation from both a subjective position and from the objective position of an external observer. Given this state of affairs, Bauman provides a grim prognosis: “Added to the two previously signaled troubles, that additional worry makes the plight of the fitness-seeker an agony of which our health-conscious ancestors had no inkling. All three troubles daily generate a great deal of anxiety; what is more, however, that anxiety – the specifically postmodern affliction – is unlikely ever to be cured and stopped.” Here, Bauman explicitly links anxiety to fitness and postmodern technologies of seduction; anxiety is the result of the postmodern subject’s inevitable inability to live up to the hedonistic social demands for enjoyment. The postmodern subject continuously suffers from the “fear that some precious kinds of sensation have been missed and the pleasure-giving potential of the body has not been squeezed to the last drop.”

Grüne Revolution

Neulich hatte ich es schon vom Weizen und Ägypten. Hier ein Artikel über Weizenanbau in Indien und Mexiko vor dem historischen Hintergrund der „Grünen Revolution“.

There may be a mountain of food available, but access to food is only based on the entitlements that people have, to be able to exchange for food. This is one of the reasons, among others, that explains the bitter irony that Indians have remained food insecure despite all this bumper wheat production. Malnutrition levels in 2005 continued to remain horrific – three out of five children under five, or nearly 60%, were found to be chronically malnourished (two standard deviations below normal) by the National Family Health Survey.

 

utopia of rules

One of the central arguments of this essay so far is that structural violence creates lopsided structures of the imagination. Those on the bottom of the heap have to spend a great deal of imaginative energy trying to understand the social dynamics that surround them – including having to imagine the perspectives of those on top – while the latter can wander about largely oblivious to much of what is going on around them. That is, the powerless not only end up doing most of the actual, physical labour required to keep society running, they also do most of the interpretive labor as well.

David Graeber, Utopia of Rules