So Many Questions
Globalization, communication, and fragmentation; plus a theory of BS jobs, and more...
February 23, 2023
This week’s issue of Public Seminar asks: As globalization gives way to local economies, what is revealed about the risks of interdependence? How does the amplification of speech acts silence some and saturate our mediascape with other voices? Whose testimony do we listen to? What role should the democratic collective play in determining the frameworks that re-appraise capitalistic labor? How do we establish common, situated knowledge of that which is unseen, forgotten, or only partially in view? When our communal speech landscape ensures that talk is cheap, who do we choose to listen to—and why?
Democracy
During wartime, “questions arise about knowledge—about what can really be known right now.” As political scientist Jessica Pisano witnesses the disembodiment of communication and fragmented understanding in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, she discovers that “connection is real, but comprehension seems beyond what is possible.” (February 22, 2023)
Economy
“As Adam Smith could have told us, trade gets tougher when the partners don’t have a shared moral framework.” In this excerpt from her 2022 book Homecoming, Rana Foroohar explores the promises and pitfalls of interdependent, global supply chains. (February 22, 2023)
To begin to answer questions of social value, we must start with “a sense of the collective, a sense of democratic decision-making, rather than a sort of profit-led one”, author Matteo Tiratelli explains to Pete Sinnott in Episode 21 of Unproductive Labor. Listen as Tiratelli and Sinnott re-examine David Graeber’s theory of Bullshit Jobs through a 2023 lens. (February 9, 2023)
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“Economists want to think that everything can be plugged into a formula and it’s all going to be fine. But in reality, that's not the case.” Benjamin Kodres-O’Brien and Rana Foroohar discuss the misappropriation of political economists, probe the “follies of abstraction in economics,” and consider the “new rules of globalization.” (February 22, 2023)
Witnessing
“With an audio artifact, we are in the realm of an interpellation or call: the sound of terror is an address.” Julie Napolin contemplates the transmission of testimony and the essential oral charge of female voices narrating, by dint of cellphone video, Black death. (February 16, 2023)
Modern culture’s fetishization of self-expression is undermining free speech. Peter Norhnberg observes the paradoxical landscape where speech is both everywhere and nowhere, and where “the public sphere is turned into a chaotic exchange of shouted assertions and weaponised symbols, amplified ad nauseum.” (February 21, 2023)