DC Week in Review: The Cynical Society and Beyond

By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 23rd, 2011
Jeff

In my book, The Cynical Society, published in 1991, I had a simple project. I sought to show that along with the manipulation and cynicism of contemporary politics and political reporting, there was ongoing real principled democratic debate in American society. I criticized one dimensional accounts of American society that saw the debate between Ronald Reagan and his opponents, for example, as being about his personality and theirs, the interests he served and they served, and the manipulative strategies of both sides. They didn’t recognize that fundamental issues in American public life were being debated, specifically about the role of the state in our economy. I worried that people who didn’t like the prevailing order of things confused their cynicism with criticism, and in the process resigned from offering alternatives. My posts this week were extensions of that project to our present circumstances.

I attempted to illuminate the ways in which Barack Obama’s Presidency was and still is about fundamental change in my first post, and I tried to illuminate the terrain of principled political debate in my second post, additionally accounting for Obama’s position. America is a cynical society, but it is also a democratic one. A rosy colored view is naïve, while an exclusively dark one is enervating. I insist on understanding both dimensions.

But as the host of Deliberately Considered, I am learning and expanding my understanding. My two dimensional picture is limited and conceals some important matters, specifically the emotional dimension. We should keep in mind that we don’t only act on principle and reason and pursue our interests with strategies that are sometimes manipulative. We also act out and upon our emotions, as James Jasper explored in his posts a couple of weeks ago, and Gary Alan Fine has analyzed as well. Indeed Richard Dienst’s “bonds of debt,” that Vince Carducci reports on, are more emotional than rational, highlighting the connection between attachment, indebtedness and power, making it so . . .

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April 23rd, 2011 | Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Richard Dienst’s The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good

By Vince Carducci, April 20th, 2011
The Bonds of Debt by Richard Dienst, Verso, April 1, 2011

The issue of debt, both public and private, has been a top news story ever since the financial collapse of 2008, but especially in recent weeks with all of the reporting on federal budget negotiations and the debt ceiling. (Another noteworthy item: The New York Times recently reported student loan debt has now exceeded credit card outstandings for the first time and is likely to top $1 trillion by the end of this year.) The problem cultural critic Richard Dienst claims in his new book The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good (Verso: 2011) isn’t that debt levels are too high; it’s that they aren’t high enough.

A critical and literary theorist, Dienst expands the concept of debt from its purely economic connotation to include social reciprocity broadly understood. The “magic” of debt, Dienst asserts toward the end of the book, is that it ultimately constitutes a common good by binding us inextricably to one another. Debt as conceived under the capitalist system has in the current environment been revealed as an apparatus of capture that has reached its penultimate “terminal crisis” to use Giovanni Arrighi’s term, opening the door to new world-historical possibilities of social interdependence and human understanding.

Dienst begins by reviewing the ideas of several key theorists of late capitalism. From Robert Brenner he takes the notion of global capitalism as a system in perpetual turbulence. He places Brenner alongside Arrighi’s application of the Kondratiev Curve in the modern world-system analysis of the development of capitalism since the fifteenth century, which essentially tracks that turbulence at a macrolevel. He finds further complement with David Harvey’s recent books on neoliberalism that extend the primarily economic arguments of Brenner and Arrighi into the realm of politics and ideology. And as Dienst notes, the recent financial crisis came as no surprise to any of them.

The question Dienst raises is: If we agree that these thinkers have aptly described the circumstances that have brought us to our present state, then where do we . . .

Read more: Richard Dienst’s The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good

April 20th, 2011 | Tags: , , ,