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sometimes i think i shouldn't post while i'm at work...wedging them in between either doing or, more often, pretending to do other things leads to slips.
i didn't mean to imply that these are coping mechanisms in a psychological sense---though i more or less said as much---it's more geared around information and interpretation. my general way of filtering alot of this is as performances of an ideological Problem--frame of reference problem---so the assumptions that came with the language of cowboy capitalism, the washington consensus, neoliberalism inter alia have come undone for alot of political actors---far from all of them--but there's no clear alternate language. politicos have to communicate with their publics, and it's really difficult i would imagine to tool effective communication if you cant really assume that the framework that was dominant six months ago is adequate to the situation being described on the one hand, and if you also have little or no way of knowing whether or how the frames may have shifted at the reciever level---you have the major media outlets, but for the most part---especially television---is stuck in the same problem. and you see versions of this problem in a host of less prominent analyses
if this is accurate then what this information tracks is movement through a giant muddle. and maybe perversely, i'm interested in both the muddle as the space through which policy actions are being floated and presumably fashioned, based on analyses of the situations that are not free of the muddle by any means--and i'm interested in the muddle itself. it's not that often you get to move through an ideological breakdown like this. it's interesting. but it also, from time to time, scares the hell out of me. and i expect it scares alot of people, for different reasons maybe.
thing is that this muddle is not universal, in that it doesn't effect everyone the same way, so here and there you find very lucid analyses--i like that paul krugman has a column in the ny times, but find it strage the extent to which academics seem to be hiding--maybe this situation would have to go on longer and things become clearer in order to reduce the possibility of being wrong by taking interpretive risks--maybe it's the myriad funding problems universities are experiencing---maybe economists think the best thing to do right now is shut up---it's hard to say. it's a bizarre time.
there are a bunch of problems this raises for how you or i might go about processing information, deciding which interpretations seem more or less accurate. insofar as that goes, is this the same old same old, so that nothing moves in how you or i or anyone else thinks really, so that what you read you think more or less accurate because the language feels right and the data conforms with what you think you already know?
it's probably better to be mobile, try out different takes, gather information about different areas---this is why the collective here is great to have active, because folk don't think the same way---but i find that there's a tendency toward keeping things stable that ends up building on itself and conversation gets bogged down in exchanges that amount to reassuring repeats of positions we already know.
this is an interesting time. might as well take advantage of it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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