Thursday, April 17, 2014

Occupation: Philanthropist- Charitable Brand Identities & “Frictionless Capitalism”



                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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