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The financial world is typically seen as a miasma of numbers, which help to make it abstract and opaque. This essay argues that the forms and techniques of the financial world have a strong literary and linguistic dimension. This dimension can be seen in the form of the derivative, whose workings show how traders, central bankers, and analysts rely centrally on the written, spoken, and narrated word and its performative powers.
Two internationally renowned thinkers and globalization experts meet for this Berlin Correspondence: anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, critical visionary of globalization, and Marcel Fratzscher, director of the German Institute for Economic Research. Focusing on the challenges we face in a globalized world, such as struggles for resources, inequality, and social classes, they raise the question of the »regulatory hand«.
Who or what in fact creates our social order? And what about the idea of the self-regulating power of free markets or the reallocation of resources? Part 4 of the Berlin Correspondence series will investigate these issues.
Berlin Correspondence is a Matinée-Series of the Gorki Forum and the Humboldt University Berlin in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Kämpfe für eine gerechte Gesellschaft werden heute von einem sehr heterogenen Spektrum von durch neoliberale Austeritätspolitiken betroffenen Akteurinnen und Akteuren getragen. Zu ihnen gehören MigrantInnen, undokumentierte ArbeiterInnen, Arbeitslose und Obdachlose sowie Teile der Mittelschicht, deren Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen prekär wurden. Das Konzept der Würde gewinnt im streit- politischen Diskurs zunehmend an Bedeutung. Vor diesem Hintergrund spüren die Beiträge des Bandes den Wechselbeziehungen zwischen unterschiedlichen Bewegungen der Streitpolitik im städtischen Raum nach und diskutieren die aus ihnen resultieren- den Herausforderungen und Chancen für Politik und Demokratie.
This chapter explores the deep role of what the author calls ‘trajectorism’ in European thought, the tendency to always see its history as some sort of predetermined journey to a desirable destination. Trajectorism is a deeper epistemological and ontological habit that always assumes there is a cumulative journey from here to there, or more exactly from now to then, in human affairs. The chapter argues that trajectorism is the great narrative trap of the west and is also, like all great myths, the secret of its successes in industry, empire and world conquest. One must recognize that contrary to the dominant meta-narrative of western modernity, it is not itself a cumulative, predictable or inevitable outcome of any discernable history. This meta-narrative is itself an expression of a trajectorist ideology, which tends to see Europe itself as a logical outcome of ideas that led from one phase or idea to the next, in some sort of destined manner. The chapter uses this point of view to propose a new angle on the deep contradiction between the ethical goals of the Enlightenment (including its central emphasis on the universality of human reason) and its imperial project, which required the enslavement and exploitation of much of the non-European world.
Failure
(2019)
Wall Street and Silicon Valley - the two worlds this book examines - promote the illusion that scarcity can and should be eliminated in the age of seamless "flow." Instead, Appadurai and Alexander propose a theory of habitual and strategic failure by exploring debt, crisis, digital divides, and (dis)connectivity. Moving between the planned obsolescence and deliberate precariousness of digital technologies and the "too big to fail" logic of the Great Recession, they argue that the sense of failure is real in that it produces disappointment and pain. Yet, failure is not a self-evident quality of projects, institutions, technologies, or lives. It requires a new and urgent understanding of the conditions under which repeated breakdowns and collapses are quickly forgotten.
By looking at such moments of forgetfulness, this highly original book offers a multilayered account of failure and a general theory of denial, memory, and nascent systems of control.
The argument of this essay is that migrants, especially refugees, in the contemporary globalized world are inevitably second-class citizens because their stories do not fit the narrative requirements of modern nation-states. As a result, there is no easy way for them to fit either their memories or their aspirations into acceptable forms that fit the criteria for full citizenship in most states. This essay argues for renewed attention to the relationship between migrants and mediation, especially based on the idea that archives are not only records of the past but are also maps for the future.
This essay argues that the phenomenon of repeat viewing of films by Bollywood audiences is worthy of being treated as an unusual cultural practice in which repetition and difference support and reinforce each other in the manner suggested by Gilles Deleuze. This relationship is particularly enabled by the relationship of music to plot in these films, in which song sequences provide a repetitive or percussive element that deepens the melodic and innovative element provided by the story. Not all films are able to attract repeat viewers, which raises a question about the role of the "formula" in the Hindi film industry. Further, the pleasures of repetition in this domain offer a suggestive perspective on India's larger political dilemma, which is to combine the repetition of Western modernity with the unique developmental signature of Indian culture.