Horner's Corner

Archive for January 25th, 2010

Werner Herzog Reads Curious George

by on Jan.25, 2010, under comedy

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George


Fast Tube by Casper">Werner Herzog Reads Curious George

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Herzog

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Post-Shame

by on Jan.25, 2010, under politics

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Gramsci

One of the duties of the modern nation-state is persuasion. Each state aims to keep its citizens convinced of the legitimacy of its rule. The state may be run chiefly for the enrichment of a few at the cost of the many, but the endurance of the state is widely thought to depend on its ability to sell its rule to the many as a common-sense truism. Or at least that was how it used to work. We may be entering a new era in the evolution of the state, one where the state approaches a state of utter shamelessness.

Antonio Gramsci, in his prison notebooks, called this persuasive activity ‘hegemony’. According to Gramsci, hegemony occludes the domination of the state and the classes whose interests it serves. One does not have to be an Italian communist of the 1920s to see the usefulness of Gramsci’s groundbreaking insight. Broadly speaking, all political actors pursue their agendas by trying to narrow other people’s imaginations in order to make desired outcomes seem commonsensical and undesired outcomes outside the ambit of reasonable thought.

It seems to me that over the past decade, in the United States, the state and a narrow circle of powerful interests—banks, energy companies, and private health insurers in particular—have simply given up trying to persuade the rest of us that their interests were our interests. Could we be moving in the twenty-first century to a state that practices domination without hegemony? Or, to put it in plain English, will the state shamelessly turn itself completely over to serving the interests of a powerful few without bothering to pretend that it’s not? And if it does, how should we respond?

Read more by Jeff Strabone here: 3quarksdaily.

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