Saturday Morning after the floods
Yesterday I was supposed to go on a weekend trip to the country. That did not happen because of flash flooding here in Wuhan, which made travel from my house to the train station impossible. Instead of having a weekend get away I am stuck here in the heat and humidity, its feels sort of like the children`s pool in the middle of July. So without much going on, and no sections of old papers to edit and post, I am just sticking up some ideas about what I put here so far. Nobody reads my blog, it is just for me and my friends, a way to keep from going crazy when my command of Chinese is limited to one or two words...
I have been posting various bits and pieces of research I have done over the past few years, conducted to answer questiona I have about the relationship between neoliberalization, global integration and fascism in the USA. The increasing securitization of urban space, and the ever more pervasive technologies of surveillance in everyday life as well as the increasing importance of non-elected bodies setting best practices for governance forced me to consider the question of fascism s well as the problem of political agency in an ecomony where the traditional levers of mass power, the voting booth, the workplace, and mass mobilization seem to be neutralized.
The essays I have posted here are my humble attempts to answer these questions for myself but might be of interest to other people with similar questions. Fascism is a word that gets thrown around frequently but when you focus sharply on it, it tends to disappear. The touchstone and archtypical trope of jack boots and goose stepping black shirts and brown are the reference point of classical fascism, but hardly apply to fascistic political movements since the second world war.
Similarly, one party states with centrally planned economies like China resemble the classical trope in a very narrow sense but in fact allow in some instances more personal freedom than the regimented and rationalized liberal democracies.In the case of China, regardless of the contradictions inherent in capitalist style developement and a modernist vision of urban utopianism, central planning has delivered, even if the results are uneven, polarized, and subject to corruption. It does not fit the criteria outlined either by the classical Third International definition or the ideological defintion. I would also add that the liberal democracies despite the narrowing of personal freedoms cannot be considered fascist even when repressive.
Sitting here in Wuhan in linguistic isolation is an opportunity to try and bring some kind of order to my fuzzy thinking. A blog is a way to share that process with people other than my three closest friends who tolerantly put up with my preoccupations with global economic restructuring, fascism, Washington DC, and the geographies of fear.
I have a adopted an evenly suspended judgement about China, reviewing the literature, keeping field notes, collecting pictures, and writing memos. I am interested in monuments and memory. I find the red song campaign and the red programming on TV facinating as I do the spatial practices and uses of monumental space here in Wuhan. It is the 90th birthday of the Communist Party of China on July 1, being celebrated on film, on TV and in public spaces with mass sing-a-longs. Within the narrative structure of the Liberation struggle, the TV dramas show complex human relationships, character development and conflict within the movement, and outside the movement and cannot be dismissed as propaganda. This genre is like Westerns or Police dramas adhereing to particular conventions which structure creativity.
Questions that I find interesting include why are hate crimes decreasing in the US while hate groups continue to increase? Why are hate crimes concentrated into certian states in ways unrelated at the state level to increases in hate groups? Why is it that on the smaller scale of counties there are correlations between hate groups and hate crimes? Does the rise of pervasive surveillance mean that the liberal democracies have evoved into velvet fascist regimes or are policing and control strategies a persistent characteristic of all states regardless of ideology or structuring? What are the implications of an economic system based on global supply chains and flexible production on civic participation and agency?
I have lots of messy questions and not many answers.