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Joseph Vogl (2022), Capital and Ressentiment: A Brief Theory of the Present. Cambridge: Polity Press.

What is the relationship between information, financial capitalism, social media, and the “new” right, from Bolsonaro in Brazil to Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, from Orbánto Trump and the emerging “national conservative” movement in Britain? In this book, originally published in German in 2021, Joseph Vogl, professor of modern German literature at Humboldt University in Berlin, argues that we live in an age characterized by ressentiment, in which both Silicon Valley and liberalized financial capital play decisive roles.

Zachary Jonathan Jacobson (2023). On Nixon’s Madness: An Emotional History. Johns Hopkins University Press. https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12723/nixons-madness.

In a global system of (supposedly) rational international actors, could an irrational feint—pretending to mercuriality, slouching towards unpredictability—constitute a higher form of rationality than “pure reason” alone? In On Nixon’s Madness, the historian Zachary Jonathan Jacobson takes a closer look at the famed “madman theory,” and its apparent progenitor, President Richard Milhous Nixon.

Observers of Donald Trump’s presidency will recall similarities between DJT and Nixon’s apparent policy posture: Keep your enemies on their toes by faking a kind of absolute volatility. In Trump’s case, threatening to derail the special relationship with South Korea, or pull out of NATO (to extract concessions in defense spending from European member states), have been chalked up to the madman theory in action: Trump wouldn’t really have pulled the plug, so the conventional wisdom goes—or would he? This “X factor,” this uncertainty about the genuineness of the feint—in essence a question about authenticity, representation, and stagecraft—is what is supposed to make the madman theory’s corollaries such a powerful foreign policy instrument.

Introduction

A sociodicy is a structured attempt to justify the social order in spite of its manifold injustices. Its conceptual lineage can be traced back to the notion of theodicy, or the justification of God despite the existence of evil and suffering, a term that was appropriated and “sociologized” by Max Weber; it was the French mid-20th century sociologist Raymond Aron who expressly coined the term sociodicy, even though it was his student and collaborator Pierre Bourdieu who became its most famous and frequent exponent. On Bourdieu’s usage, sociodicies are narratives that try to shield dominant social strata from criticism over inequalities, hierarchy, domination, and social suffering (that is, pain and distress originating from the social order rather than individual pathology). To take just one example: The idea of social mobility has functioned as a powerful sociodicy in U.S. society, as Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999: 51) point out, justifying the existence of significant inequalities on the grounds that any one individual has the (theoretical) possibility of climbing up the social ladder—even if this possibility is, in reality, largely illusory.

Lionel Barber (2020). The Powerful and the Damned. London: WH Allen.

If one wants to understand power today, one could do a lot worse than reading former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber’s memoir-esque book, The Powerful and the Damned (2020). Sociologists like to think they understand power, but it is all too liable to be a power in the abstract; Barber, though writing polished prose in the retroactive style of a “diary” (he admits in the preface that he was not in the habit of keeping a diary during his 15 years’ tenure as FT editor, so the book is a backdated construction of sorts), produces a tantalizing glimpse into the personal relations and institutional fabric that undergird what we might term, following Bourdieu, the transnational field of power, a web of interconnected organizations, groups, and individuals who make up the upper echelons of financial, political, media, and even ecclesial power around the world. (Churchmen make their appearance several times throughout the book, often in unflattering proximity to the heavy-handed wielders of temporal power.) Though perhaps unsurprising to savvy social observers, Barber shows how power finally relies upon dense webs of personal relationships, constituted in the last instance by the interaction of flesh-and-blood individuals who mobilize money and words (or economic capital and symbolic power) to promote an agenda that they are not always in control nor even conscious of. And these webs of relations both enable and ensnare the operators of power, posing particular risks to journalists, who are always at risk of becoming caught up in the heady social games of the powerful, thereby forgetting their mission: the ceaseless, remorseless critique of power in the service of reducing social domination. All too often, however, Barber’s memoirs reveal how the media becomes a willing participant in relations of domination, not merely a bystander to but a willing participant in and party to the field of power, entranced by its interior privileges, spellbound by the gifts of the dominant, sometimes material, but often wholly symbolic (a gesture, a sign of deferral at the right time, a flattering invitation or visit, a sense of “belonging” to the club of the wealthy and esteemed).

OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 is one of theconsummate promulgators of apparently meaningful nonsense on the Web today. Roughly speaking, it generates output on the basis of a predictive model, where each next word is probabilistically produced on the basis of preceding words. It joins together words that seem...

[Full-text, final PDF version available here.]

ABSTRACT: Every instantiation of decommodifying welfare capitalism relies on a hinterland, an exterior space or world for which commodification remains the rule whose function is to service the interiority of social-democratic welfarism. Taking Norway as its case study, this article unfolds the notion of a protective “cupola,” following Žižek, and a “centaur state,” following Wacquant, as the preeminent political-economic innovations of late-modern social democracy. While extracting resources, cheap labor, goods, and financial profits from the global hinterland, the welfare-capitalist state privileges its national citizenry, and, despite significant neoliberal transformation, continues to protect the populace from the discomfiting effects and vagaries of the market, albeit at the expense of the world beyond its bounds. Social democracy, then, hinges on the preservation of difference, and fails to offer a truly global, universal solution to the commodifying effects of market capitalism.

The paradox of computer games is that the best of them offer a kind of limitless freedom to the player, but one which is, of course, tightly regulated by way of a predesigned architecture: all elements of subjective freedom have in fact been—in almost authoritarian, heavy-handed...

F For Fake (1973). Director: Orson Welles. Runtime: 1h 35m. [Youtube]

It is extraordinarily difficult to know what to make of Orson Welles’s F For Fake (1973), which constantly threatens to splinter, to shatter in on itself, much like the famous mirror scene in his much earlier effort, The Lady From Shanghai (1947), cutting hither and thither, never allowing the viewer to rest in anything resembling epistemic certainty. Here is Welles’s foray into the genre of the mockumentary, avant la lettre, which he must be said to have invented with Fake. It may also be considered, as some critics have postulated, an essay film (some claim Welles said so himself, though this is probably apocryphal, fittingly for a film about the uncertainty of knowing). But to place it in this category presupposes that, as in an essay, there is a clear thesis being advanced. The key to understanding the late, mature Welles, however, is to recognize his absolute lack of self-seriousness, seeming to exclude anything quite so ponderous as an argument or thesis.

From what I’ve been able to gather, Robert Mark Hargrave—his full name, so foreign to me—spent decades teaching philosophy at Oxford’s esteemed Balliol College, a cloistered environment of the British power elite that produced at once some of that country’s worst minds (Boris Johnson went there in the 1980s) and its finest (Adam Smith, Aldous Huxley; John Wycliffe was Master of Balliol way back in the 1360s; more recently, J. L. Austin, Harold Macmillan, Roy Bhaskar, Richard Dawkins…).

What books were on Foucault’s bookshelves? Thanks to the Beinecke Collection at Yale University, we can now access 1,440 records of books “from the library of Michel Foucault” Importantly, these are not all the books Foucault ever owned—they’re a subset of his library, consisting of books inscribed by their respective authors and gifted to Foucault. The Yale librarians have labeled it the “Michel Foucault Library of Inscription Copies.” It necessarily, then, skews heavily toward thinkers and writers contemporaneous with Foucault, who had some affinity for Foucault, and who for a variety of reasons wanted him to own a signed copy of their latest work.