I am a New York City-based social researcher. I write about social theory, religion, politics, culture, books, Europe, facial hair, and other things that catch my interest.
On Twitter I am @jboy.
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“Do you have any books the faculty doesn’t particularly recommend?”
one of Flannery O’Connor’s drawings from high school or undergrad, which will be included in this forthcoming book devoted exclusively to her artwork.
y’all. Flannery O’Connor made comics. my day is awesome now.
Jamie Johnson, The One Percent (2006)
Two reactions to the film:
- I’m sure people love to hate this film for a number of reasons. What struck me is why this young man, if he’s so serious about finding answers about wealth and inequality in the U.S., never bothers to talk to any of the people who devote their lives to study these issues in a rigorous way. A considerable part of the discipline of sociology in the U.S. is dedicated to questions of class, inequality, stratification and related issues. Instead he talks to Ralph Nader (ok), Kevin Phillips (so-so), and Robert Reich (ugh!). What he gets from these eminent men, all of whom are first and foremost actors in the political system narrowly defined, are lamentations about how everything is oh so bad. What gets lost is the most crucial part of the story, which is that inequality in America isn’t just a lamentable moral shortcoming, but a social struggle. If he’d talked to somebody like Fran Piven, Johnson could have learned about the poor people’s movements that engage in this struggle. If he had talked to a scholar of class, he could have found out about the history of the movements that resisted massive inequality and exploitation—and took a pummeling by his fellow one percenters. This history absent in his story, so we are left with the bleak picture of sociopaths calling the shots.
- Wow, I did not realize that Milton Friedman was so dumb. Maybe it’s his old age at the time of the interview or the fact that he has to put up with this whippersnapper who didn’t do his homework. Even so, I thought the kneejerk equation of taxation or social policy with “socialism” was confined to bozos like Glenn Beck. I thought Friedman had a more sublimated version of ruling-class ideology. Not so. Friedman also reveals the authoritarian streak in his personality when he abruptly cuts off the interview (though again, perhaps that’s just a justified reaction to the whippersnapper).
So protestiert die Müdigkeitsgesellschaft
In my first German-language piece of writing in quite a while, I reflect on #OWS using the concept of fatigue society.
“As far as I can understand it myself, here’s why I burst into tears at the Occupy Wall Street camp. I was moved, first of all, by what everyone notices first: the variety of people involved, the range of ages, races, classes, colors, cultures. In other words, the 99 per cent. I saw conversations taking place between people and groups of people whom I’ve never seen talking with such openness and sympathy in all the years (which is to say, my entire life) I’ve spent in New York: grannies talking to goths, a biker with piercings and tattoos talking to a woman in a Hermes scarf. I was struck by how well-organized everything was, and, despite the charge of “vagueness” one keeps reading in the mainstream media, by the clarity—clarity of purpose, clarity of intention, clarity of method, clarity of understanding of the most basic social and economic realities. I kept thinking about how, since this movement started, I’ve been waking up in the morning without the dread (or at least without the total dread) with which I’ve woken every morning for so long, the vertiginous sense that we’re all falling off a cliff and no one (or almost no one) is saying anything about it. In Zuccotti Park I felt a kind of lightening of a weight, a lessening of the awful isolation and powerlessness of knowing we’re being lied to and robbed on a daily basis and that everyone knows it and keeps quiet and endures it; the terror of thinking that my own grandchildren will suffer for whatever has been paralyzing us until just now. I kept feeling these intense surges of emotion—until I saw a placard with a quote from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” And that was when I just lost it and stood there and wept.”
— Francine Prose at Occupy Writers
Paraphrasing loosely from Thomas Kern, Soziale Bewegungen: Ursachen, Wirkungen, Mechanismen (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2008), p. 155:
Most scholars of social movements agree that political demands are not central to social movements; social movements operate first and foremost by occupying public space.
Found in Flushing, Queens, September 2011.
I have difficulty expressing just how happy it made me to find this artefact. It’s too perfect to be satire.
The flier reads:
Come & experience the hottest
NEW church in NYCSeptember 18th, 2011
6:30pm
Sheraton LaGuardia East Hotel
39th Ave. btwn Main St. & Prince St.
on the 6th floor JADE ROOMappetizers & hors d’oeuvre served
w/
organic fair trade coffeefamily friendly
come hear professional musicians
&
get inspired by our pastor
America plus nothing
In my latest on The Immanent Frame, I briefly review Jeff Sharlet’s Sweet Heaven When I Die. Spoiler alert: I like it.
“Es ist dies eine konsequent ausgebaute These [dass die Erkenntnis der Welt der einheitlichen physikalischen Sprache bedarf], die sich durch immanente Kritik kaum erschüttern ließe. Man kann jedoch ihre historische Herkunft und ihre damit zusammenhängenden dogmatisch-metaphysischen Züge aufweisen.”
— Jan Patočka, Die natürliche Welt als philosophisches Problem, p. 47.
