Thursday, May 24, 2007
(8:51 AM) | Amish Lovelock:
Rant of the Prude
VOL - a rather trendy looking A4 size intellectual magazine published here in Tokyo has just published its second issue. It's generally regarded to be a magazine run by a new young generation (most born in the late 60s and early 70s) of non-tenured professors; their big enemy: neoliberalism. The last issue contained translations from Ranciere, Zourabichvili, David Graber and others. Most of the contributors are up on their Deleuze, Foucault, Zizek and Badiou and have translated their work into Japanese. Mainly Deleuze though.They seem to be picking two themes an issue. The last one was: What is the Political? and, Avant-Gardening (the, mostly guys, seem to like New York). This issue is: Basic Income and Deleuze's Cinema (just translated). Here comes the question. Is Basic Income, or for that matter any of the other currency based political options being thrown around at present, such as LETS etc... anything more than a call back to the era we can now set as starting around the 1920s/30s and ending in the 1970s/80s which was characterized by the advanced industrial nations forming heavily rationalized, mobilized societies with high levels of social integration and control? Ok, Basic Income may not have been introduced but on a theoretical level...
Isn't this just the kids mourning something the parents caught the tail-end of? Why can't the critique of neoliberalism go beyond harking back to the welfare state on the one hand - however "realistic" that option might argued to be - and on the other hand not form a critique of liberalism, or democracy for that matter? Answers on a postcard (...or in the comments)
