Paraniod nationalism --a review of Ghassan Hage's Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking by Peta Stephenson. Stephenson says:
If there is one common theme that underpins this rather disparate collection, it is that White Australians are now in a state of worry about the nation more than caring about it and their fellow citizens. Hage describes societies as mechanisms for the production and distribution of hope. In the Australian case, years of neo-liberalist policies combined with the globalisation of capital have meant that the majority of White Australians have lost any sense of hope they once held of achieving a better life for themselves and their children. Instead of being hopeful, Anglo-Celtic Australians are now anxious, suspicious and ungenerous. White Australia is currently experiencing an acute obsession with border control and with paranoid fantasies about the ability of internal and external 'Others' to seize control of the country. In short, worrying has become the dominant White Australian mode of expressing attachment to the nation.
Hage's argument the white Australian paranoia that resurfaced in response to Paul Keating's promotion of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and greater cultural and economic engagement with 'Asia'. HoweverHage's argument that Keating's advocacy of reconciliation rested on a necessarily Anglo-centric version of historical events. Stephenson says:
Unlike most cultural critics who have praised Keating's Redfern Speech - in which he located the responsibility for the atrocities of colonisation firmly with White Australians - Hage asks us to take a closer look at the implications of such an act, especially in terms of migrant agency in the reconciliation process. It is Keating's usage of the pronoun 'we' in the guise of a national imaginary that Hage finds most objectionable. Decrying what he calls the 'undeconstructed effect of Keating's "we"' (90), Hage shows that Keating ends up reducing the multiplicity of pasts and historical memories to a single White Australian national memory. It is clearly nonsensical to expect Indigenous Australians or more recent migrants to be interpellated by this 'we'.
in Australia's colonial history Aborigines and Asians have long existed in the Anglo-Celtic imaginary as the two markers of absolute racial 'Otherness' that have both constituted and delimited national identity and membership. It is hardly surprising that White Australians reacted so violently against those racial minorities that have long existed in the White consciousness as posing the greatest threat to white exclusive possession of the nation.
Rhizomes 10 (2005) is on Foucault and more particularly on Neo-Liberal Governmentality: Technologies of the Self & Government Conduct. The Introduction says that neo-liberalism reflects the changing relationship between institutions of power (especially the state and the market) and the governance of political subjects (people and multitude). Contemporary neo-liberal capitalism operates not merely through neo-liberal modes of governance but also through other modes, including police (coercive) and liberal modes.
This raises the issue of the relationship between neo-liberal governmentality and neo-liberal capitalism.The Introduction says that the articles in the issue:
as a whole do suggest three general points. First, the development of neo-liberal capitalism has been based on certain historical and structural conditions such as the end of the Cold War, the reflexive mode of accumulation, and the domination of the United States as the only super power in the world. Next, both liberal and neo-liberal modes of governmentality are based on the development of governmental discourses on the lived experiences of ordinary people, industrial masses, subalterns, minorities, and other marginalized populations. That is, liberal and neo-liberal modes of governance operate alongside coercive or police modes of governance. Finally, neo-liberal subjects are more than just economic subjects since the economic order tends to operate in connection with many others: for example, through uses of multimedia and digital technologies, lifetime education, active participation in consumption, and engagement in conducting life as an enterprise.
Art is the promise of happiness says Adorno in Aesthetic Theory.
In The Work of Art and the Promise of Happiness in Adorno in World Picture 3 James Gordon Finlayson unpacks this pithy aphorisms. He says that in the lectures post-humously published as Problems of Moral Philosophy Adorno suggests that, under current conditions, Sittlichkeit, or the morality of custom, rather than Moralität, the morality of principle, presents the immediate danger. The former, with its pressure towards group adaptation and conformity, is far less likely to be a source of possible resistance and criticism and more likely to harden into totalitarianism than the latter. Finlayson then adds:
The peculiar difficulty Adorno faces, given his diagnosis of social conditions, is to reliably locate and make This is the problem that lies behind one of his most memorable and most difficult aphorisms: “Es gibt keinen richten Leben im falschen.” What makes this sentence is so difficult to interpret, also makes it difficult to translate. Literally it means that there is no right living in the false life. A good, idiomatic translation of this crucial sentence into English would be something like: “The false life cannot be rightly lived.”available to critical theory something like happiness or the good life.
The first idea is that happiness can be found only in fragments of reality that bear no significant relation to the structure of social reality. The second idea is that there is literally no happiness in the world, and that nothing within the world can help us to picture happiness, or even so much as to form an idea of it. I call this second idea austere negativism. Austere negativism is consistent with Adorno’s thought in Negative Dialectics that philosophy’s true interest lies in what is non-conceptual and non-identical to thinking. Finlayson adds:
There can be no doubt that Adorno endorses now one, now the other of these discrepant conceptions of negativism—incomplete and austere negativism. There can be no doubt also that Adorno does not much mind about discrepancy, or—which comes to the same thing—care much for consistency, the preoccupation with which he believes to be a major fault of contemporary forms of philosophy. He far is more concerned with the depth of insight his thought affords.