A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2017-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Reclaiming the Wealth of Society

Presently, knowledge is abundant without naming what that abundance might be for, other than the kind of faith in technological advancement that segregates political participation from decision‐making. When one looks at the problem of scarcity in the face of abundance from the perspective of the capacity for knowledge making, the discrepancies seem all the more perverse. If anything, there is a surfeit of specialized expertise while people are deprived health care and education, food and dwelling, sustainable community and meaningful work. At the same time, too much harm has come from the expansion of knowledge per se to sustain a conviction that it could deliver the power to make such a vision of society come to pass. Wealth derived from such knowledge and knowledge that pushes toward further wealth would both need to grasp their limit, their mutual debt, and their capacity to decolonize their own self‐interest. A derivative socialization, one which does not demand unity of interest and action, that links attributes of specific variations and differences into broadly circulating flows, might aspire to achieve just that.

Rationalization, solidarity, socialization: these three key values derived from Weber, Durkheim, and Marx, grand theorists whose grandeur has faded over the years, may begin a process of restaging an argument on behalf of what society might be and what it could become if mounting divisions and hierarchies were reappraised and traded in for other wealth logics that can be found in our midst. We need ways of taking stock of our differences and debts; we need a means to bring to notice how our volatilities and dispersions adhere and coalesce; and we need to repurpose wealth as an abundance to which all can make a claim. Derivative logics suggest a mapping and a route to transvalue scarcity as abundance, mindful this time of where the promise of enclosure, wholeness, and integration went awry. Certainly such an argument would need to be insinuated in and animate social movements; it would require political organization and a will to contestation that joins a long history of contesting and refiguring devices of partition and exclusion. That will, at least, increasingly swirls around us. Social theorizing might begin to brave that rough weather and to elaborate the significance of what we value most so that more can be made of it. Theoretical liquidity would hedge the multiple directions of thought that the present bequeaths us in the name of an uncertain future.

see CHAPTER 8 (PETROGRAD/LENINGRAD – HAVANA – BEIJING 1917–1991; OR, MARXIST THEORY AND SOCIALIST PRACTICE); CHAPTER 9 (CHILE – SEATTLE – CAIRO 1973–2017?; OR, GLOBALIZATION AND NEOLIBERALISM); CHAPTER 20 (THE EVERYDAY, TASTE, CLASS)

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