Tackling Turbo Consumption – The People's Version of Over Consumption

I may have miscounted blogs along the way. I’m glad, because now I can dedicate my last post to discussing Juliet Schor’s take on consumption in Tackling Turbo Consumption. I liked two aspects of her approach. The first is the acknowledgement of the problem of over-consumption in a real way without pretending to know the answers, and the second is her ability to explain these concepts in an approachable manner.

Schor does an excellent job shedding light on the issues of consumption in an approachable manner. For example, she acknowledges that “’consuming is bad, don’t consume’ is a non-starter. People have to consume.” Here she legitimizes the practice of consumption itself, and instead suggests that while there is too much consumption, “it’s also the wrong kind of consumption.” This is a real and understandable concept and as such, she avoids alienating her potential audience.

So often, scholars seem to operate outside of the way the world really works—sure, it would be great to completely abolish over-consumption, neo-liberalism, capitalism and all the other ‘isms,’ but the truth is, that is not so easy and it’s not really possible, especially not in an all or nothing model. Schor acknowledges as much in her own arena: “it’s too hard to think of organizing [young people] in a way that doesn’t deal with or address consuming, because it structures people’s lives so much.” Acknowledging honestly the true state of the system is the first step to being able to change anything. That’s what Schor offers, through her above discussions and by pointing out that people are looking for emotional connections in their consuming habits.

Finally, Schor says: “One thing I have always felt very strongly about in my work is the value of expressing ideas in ‘plain’ language that larger numbers of people can read, and the power of writing books for a general audience about these issues. I see that as a political commitment; and it allows me to go around and do a lot of public speaking, and media about the books when I do them.” These aren’t big ideas locked away in a classroom, but grounded in the reality of everyday people’s lives.

In this way, one the biggest limits of Cultural Studies seems to be the tendency to lock away potentially life-changing solutions in academic jargon only accessible to the privileged who have the interest or ability to acquire that knowledge. We live in an oppressive system that won’t change under the sheer weight of academic writing or theorizing. Schor’s approach; however, has more potential because it’s something she can share with the masses, and makes a move towards action that can be shared on some level with the entire population.

Learning About the Adjunct Crisis

To be perfectly honest, I had not been aware of all the disappointments that come with being an adjunct professor at higher educational institutions today. Since a young age, I’ve been taught about the value of education, of how far it can take you and how it alone can change the course of your entire life. Those choosing to take the scholarly path of teaching or professorship have long been seen in my eyes as honorable individuals. They foster growth and knowledge into all sectors of society and seem, at least from the exterior, to maintain what constitutes as a ‘good’ stable career. Hence, Catie’s presentation on the current ‘adjunct crisis’ thoroughly surprised me-- the idea of a faculty member of any university “sleeping in a car, showering at college athletic centers and applying to food stamps” hit me with the reality of an incredibly problematic situation.

The choice of any doctoral student to continue to contribute to the educational field should be highly regarded and respected—albeit if they are on a ‘tenure track’ or not. It’s unnerving to learn that corporate universities are willing to monetize on labor in order to sustain funding for a growing list of amenities that, as The Atlantic article puts it, focuses “on enhancing the student experience outside—rather than inside—the classroom.” Looking more and more like a business in which students are the customer, universities now ‘market’ themselves to attract potential future alumni. This was especially apparent at my alma mater, Loyola Marymount University, where its reputation as one of the “most beautiful college campuses” situated near sun, sand and surf was often used as a tool to campaign for more incoming applications.

Furthermore, during my four years at LMU, there had always been a lot of hush hush talk amongst various faculty members regarding tenure, university politics, pressures to “publish publish publish” and as one individual so simply put it, “hierarchal injustices.” Often times, when various professors disagreed upon a specific course of action the University was implementing (such as changing the entire undergraduate core curriculum during my senior year), it would be my tenured professors who’d step out to challenge the status quo. There was this inside joke of how they didn’t have to ‘worry’ because, well, “I’m already tenured!”

I never fully grasped the concept of all of this until learning more about it from this course—and the articles Catie shared with us succinctly outline the harm that all of this can continue to have on society. “College is no longer creating a critically-thinking citizenry who can participate actively in a democracy,” Maria Maisto says in The Atlantic piece. Furthermore, it is, as Joe Moran puts it, “erecting barriers between teachers and students” (p. 76). As we saw even in the brief in-class Job Worksheet exercise, the goal of actually ‘teaching and working with students’ was not a top priority for any professor—associate or otherwise. In this day and age, adoption of the promotional mode has, unfortunately, “become indispensable to academic survival” (p. 74).

Stuart Hall had once stressed for academics to concentrate first and foremost on the students. With this ongoing ‘crisis,’ the system has obviously lost sight of education’s main mission, of what academia should really be about. That, in itself, is the most terrifying thing of all.

The Government and Intellectual Property

“…All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born….”

 

-From “Easter 1916” by W.B. Yeats

 

Yeats may have been describing his torn emotions over the events of the Easter Rising, but these infamous lines of the first stanza of “Easter 1916” were once again uttered this morning—voiced this time by Vice President Joe Biden.

Referring to the poem as an allusion to the changing global economic relations we are currently facing, Biden took a stand for intellectual property at today’s 2^nd annual Creativity Conference, organized by the MPAA in partnership with Microsoft and ABC. Given our discussions about the issue of IP over the past few weeks, I thought it was interesting (a possible sign of hope?) that the U.S. government is, along with (as Ted Striphas and Kembrew McLeod put it in the Introduction of “Strategic Improperties”) waging “a seemingly interminable global ‘war on terror,’” also attempting to “explore with a renewed vigilance” the issue of increasing protection of intellectual property in this new digital economy. 

The film industry’s battle with piracy has no doubt reached a breaking point and Biden seems to be more than willing to join Hollywood in their fight against it. Citing piracy as a “multi-billion dollar issue,” Biden focuses on the various steps policy makers should take to maintain the creative culture of our country. He credits films/motion pictures for presenting ‘America’ to the rest of the world, and without the adequate amount of protection, this country will quickly lose one of its key engines of innovation.

Notions of intellectual property are, as we’ve come to learn from the readings, another ‘crazy mosaic of an issue’--and at least for me, this is a sign of progress, a small step in the right direction. I am glad to see that at least some action in taking place from places of a higher power. Globalization has changed the film industry as a whole and it will take more officials like Biden speaking out on behalf of intellectual property to further unite and ‘alliance-build’—to not just “raise popular awareness about issues relating to [IP]” but to minimize “what’s at stake and who/what is touched by intellectual property concerns” (Striphas & McLeod).

Transnational Cultural Studies: Moving Beyond the Culture of Complaint Slideshow

Hello everyone! I just wanted to share the slideshow. It's available here on Google Drive. And again, if anyone would like to get their hands on the cited texts, just send me an email at the address included in the second slide.

The Corporate Interests Behind IP Law

 I enjoyed the intellectual property reading Mike assigned us all so much that I couldn’t help but post one last reflection. At first, what struck me most about the reading was how pervasive the issue is. Although I’m no stranger to the topic, it’s often easy for me to forget (with my attention usually so focused on media studies) that IP battles are a huge problem for the medical and pharmaceutical world.

The article's discussion regarding the availability of drugs due to pharmaceutical patents reminded me, strangely enough, of another frontier in the medical world dealing with IP: genetics. The peculiarity of this particular area is that 20% of human genes are already patentedby medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies. Think of it, 20% of you is patented by someone else who is not you. The strangeness of this only plays out further when you think about cases like the immortal (cancerous) cell line (the HeLa cell line) pulled from Henrietta Lacks. The HeLa cells helped researchers develop a vaccine for polio, and continue to aid other research around AIDs, cancer, environmental poisoning, gene mapping – everything. However, the supreme court ruled that Henrietta's “discarded” cells could not be considered her, or her family's, property: an awful irony considering the poverty that the Lacks family continues to struggle with.

All this being said, what ended up sticking with me most from this article was its description of a legal system that, although perhaps byzantine and confused, is still uncorrupted or unbiased by prevailing markets. Although the article references the complex historical nature of IP law, it attributes the backwardness of these laws to the bumbling or “haphazard” efforts of its builders. (136) Despite the article's call for “socially relevant” critiques of IP law that take into consideration its complex foundations, it fails to acknowledge the strong influence of certain copyright lobbies on these decisions. (138)

Here I will recommend Rip: A Remix Manifesto to everyone. The documentary certainly does a better job at summarizing the corporate interests behind IP law than I can.

The point is, we need to acknowledge that, at least in part, the legal system described in the article is also a system that rewards higher paying lobbies; the greater access to funds, the more time and energy devoted to a cause, the more likely there is to be a positive outcome for that lobby.

Mixing and (Mis)Matching: Die Antwoord, Commercialization, and Critique

Britta’s presentation on the globalization of pop music and its dabbling in cultural appropriation was a glimpse at a fascinating world where pop music can both complicate and obscure marginal cultures. The discussion on the South African group ‘Die Antwoord’ particularly opened up a realm of fascinating questions on the nature of critique, commercialization, and the ways in which this group manages to carefully toe the line between the two, offering a complex body of work that frequently refuses straightforward and one-sided readings.

The video clip we examined, for instance, serves simultaneously as a publicity stunt for Die Antwoord’s fervent fans (particularly in terms of its scandalous mockery of Lady Gaga) and a deliberate manner of setting their work apart from the American pop mainstream. Additionally, the video’s parody of  South African tourism serves as a powerful self-reflexive critique of the exoticization of the country by foreigners seeking dramatic safaris and ‘authentic’ travel experiences. Nevertheless, one must question to what extent the group remains marginal if they are recuperated into mainstream circulation and have broken out of a strictly cult following to achieve worldwide renown. Which, naturally, begs the question: to what extent does fame or international recognition compromise critique, alternative points of view, and the expression of marginal cultures?

Die Antwoord precisely addresses this conundrum in its oscillation between boundaries: mainstream and alternative, South African and global, male and female, white and black. It plays with designations and categories in an unapologetically postmodern manner, leaving no listener unfazed and no opportunity for shock and critique (not necessarily always intersecting the two) unaccounted for. Their work does not always further political statements, but neither does it solely rely on alarming its audience with unexpected elements, and this is precisely why the group serves as such a rich source for analysis and the dissection of the global music industry.

Their music and aesthetic video and fashion style draw mainly on Zef, a South African counter-culture movement that privileges working class glamour. Not unproblematically, Zef focuses mainly on white suburban working class culture in South Africa, accentuating the renewed criticism that Die Antwoord’s racial politics are iffy. However, Die Antwoord’s emphasis on appropriating different musical and artistic influences in their memorable videos reminds us of the manner in which music itself is a process of bricolage and hybridization. As with the Brazilian tropicalist movement, this notion of a cannibalistic culture that engulfs the multitude of (often clashing) influences around it enables a new product that can productively work through a number of cultural contradictions. Indeed, this type of music generates a creative space where these intersections are brought into full view, often serving as a simultaneous celebration of diversity and critique of the inequalities that inevitably mar such a convoluted juncture. Thus, perhaps the globalization of music and the culturally provocative work that Die Antwoord engages in can serve as a useful jumping off point from which we can examine the ways in which art (and its commercialization) can embrace a self-reflexive thematic and aesthetic hybridization that furthers the process of foregrounding and exposing power structures.

Queer Adventures in Cultural Studies readings

Here is the reading for the Queer Adventures in Cultural Studies section:
Affect, Performance, and Queer Subjectivities - Blackman

Cultural Studies: Disability Readings

Hey all,

Here are the readings for my section on Disability.

Introduction: Genealogies of Disability* by Lisa Diedrich
*just focus on skimming through the highlighted sections

The Disabled Body: Genealogy and Undecidability (Excerpt) by Margrit Shildrick

Abstracts (read at least 1):*
On Becoming Disabled
Wordless Pain
No Room for Abuse
Diseased Pariahs and Difficult Patients

*You don't have to read all 4 abstracts, try to at least read 1. Feel free to read all 4 though. I just want you to have an idea of what the articles were about and think about the discourses of disability that emerge from them.

Cultural Studies & Academic Stardom - Joe Moran

Hey all,

You should have all gotten the PDF of this article in your email last Thursday, but if not, you can download it here as well. (Let me know/email me if for whatever reason the link doesn't work.)

The article if Joe Moran's "Cultural Studies & Academic Stardom." I know everyone has a lot to read this week, but it isn't too long and I really recommend it to everyone. :)

See you Thursday!
Catie

Intellectual Property Reading

The reading for my section on intellectual property can be found here:

Strategic Improprieties: Cultural Studies, the Everyday, and the Politics of Intellectual Property by Ted Striphas and Kembrew McLeod

The link should prompt you for your USC login and password.

Feel free to read it all, but focus on these sections:

"Cultural Studies Confronts the Law" - p. 126
"Interrogating and Interrupting the Law" p. 137