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my day gig has me watching the academic journal pipeline in close to real time: this is the basis for my saying that there's not alot of analytic responses to this yet. you see alot more activity in left political journals, but the problem in that area in general is that the fastest out of the gate are those whose positions essentially recycle premises from capital in often quite rigid ways. it's not that this offers no insight--just that the framework is a powerful element of the analyses, so often you're reading frame effects rather than pieces that are based on assessments of the new geographies of capitalism (for example).
and it is simply a fact that universities in the states are under tremendous financial pressure....and also that across the board in the humanities and social sciences there's been a significant retrenchment, a pulling back into disciplinary conservatism. but this is not a suddent development--it's been happening for quite a while, across the bush period. this is perhaps for another thread sometime, despite the fact that i doubt alot of folk would be interested.
sarkosy is basically towing the eu line, operating in lockstep with merkel, and is playing a tactical game aimed at maximizing france--and his own--influence within the reconfiguration that's taking place across this economic situation. when it comes down to it, the conflict is between nation-state based agency, which reflects a federalist understanding of the eu, and more transnational co-ordination, which the administration's plan for the imf indicates they favor another approach to co-ordination. sarkosy is a straight neoliberal whose policies have encountered a quite important level of resistance in france---so there's an extra level to the dance--and it kinda follows that eu countries which already operate within an overall co-ordinating structure would see themselves as simultaneously eager to preserve nation-state prerogatives in foreign-policy areas, and would also see in arguing this line a tactical advantage relative to the americans--because despite this emphasis on nation-state agency, they operate within an already elaborated (if barqoue and cumbersome) mechanism for economic co-ordination.
in le monde this morning, sarko's approach to such things was summed up as älot of door slamming and hot air.
so we'll see how this plays out.
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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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