Building off of Catie’s “Branding
the School of Cinematic Arts™”, I would like to briefly examine the other
side of the brand equation, and situate donations to the School of Cinematic Arts
(and universities in general) within the ideological landscape of the contemporary
United States. One cannot help but detect a difference between these endowments
and acts of charity more closely associated with today’s ‘professional
philanthropists,’ with their focus on developing nations, poverty, and so on. The
logic of these latter targets of charity has been familiar to us for centuries:
“What about the good old Andrew Carnegie, employing a
private army to brutally suppress organized labor and then distributing large
parts of his wealth for […] humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man
of steel, he has a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal communists
give with one hand what they first took away with the other.
This is what makes a figure like Soros ethically so
problematic. His daily routine is a lie embodied: Half of his working time is
devoted to financial speculations and the other half to humanitarian activities
[…] that ultimately fight the effects of his own speculations. Likewise the two
faces of Bill Gates: a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors,
aiming at virtual monopoly, employing all the dirty tricks to achieve his goals
… and the greatest philanthropist in the history of mankind. […]
[T]he ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by
charity: Charity today is the humanitarian mask that hides the underlying
economic exploitation. In a blackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed
countries are constantly “helping” the undeveloped (with aid, credits, etc.),
thereby avoiding the key issue, namely, their complicity in and
co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the undeveloped.” (Link)
Conventional philanthropy is premised on the integration
of the impoverished and marginalized into a larger narrative of social
progress, fueled by technological innovations, (inter-)national metanarratives
of “more democracy” and “more freedom” (which often play up technological
progress within these narratives; the branding of the 2011 Egyptian overthrow
of Hosni Mubarak as the “Twitter Revolution,” or the various techno-utopian
fantasies of the internet allowing for citizens/consumers to directly interact
with governments/corporation to demand what they really want, etc.), and so on. The ultimate ideological value of
the archetypal philanthropist, a figure positioned at the front of the march of
social progress, is to produce the impression of proximity to those excluded
from it, and in doing so, obfuscating both the symbolic spatial organization of
global capitalism[1] and the systemic inequalities it relies
upon to function.
Academic donations go beyond this; they serve as a
site for manufacturing both the narrative of progress and the impression of universal
inclusion (or a movement towards universal inclusion) within it; the
philanthropist thus serves as both benefactor as driving force behind the
symbolic network constructed around progress. That Spielberg is not an alumnae
only further secures him within this logic; he is the disinterested force
guiding progress, non-pathologically doing acts of good, driving us (all) towards
ever-greater achievement.
[1] To
build on Sharalyn
Orbaugh’s observation in “Frankenstein and the Cyborg Metropolis” thatthe
symbolic organization of space in late capitalism presents the world both
horizontally and vertically: first, the familiar vertical hierarchy that
places the rich at the top of the world and the poor at the bottom(the
skyscraper being the most obvious manifestation of this, and the one that
appears most frequently on film [as in Blade
Runner, High & Low, The Matrix, etc.], though surface/subterranean
[as in Metropolis, HG Wells’ Time Machine, CHUDs, etc.] distinctions are also common). Second, and more
importantly, space is organized horizontally; the assassination of trade
unionists, sweatshops, factory run-off poisoning groundwater, etc. all occur in
a perpetual “over there,” a place so removed that one cannot imagine an ethical
relation to the other inhabiting it. When this figure (defined, in essence, as
the ‘not-neighbor’) enters proximity to the subject, something becomes amiss;
is this not the basic affective response capitalized upon by the various nativist
populisms across the United States and Europe?
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