[Reader-list] Narcissism / Faith / Models

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear Ravi,

I quite agree with your argument inasmuch as I do not find Jeebesh's
contention of 'model' related sensibility not entirely incorrect. A survey
of articles related to the interpretation of housing and stock bubble burst
also point fingers at people who were at the helm of affairs. For instance
articles like, 'Harvard’s masters of the apocalypse If his fellow Harvard
MBAs are all so clever, how come so many are now in disgrace?' (
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article5821706.ece ) are
now all over the place. This argument is much closer to Jeebesh's first post
in this thread which hinted at a relationship between obsession with self
and imagination of precise world views, and the legitimacy of such a
relationship in the event of a collapse of socio-economic modalities.

It seems as if the institutional media is quick to blame these Harvard types
now as it was quick to celebrate the rise of such bubbles. What makes me
wonder is how an instance like the recent stock market crash, which people
like Nasim Taleb would term as a Black Swan event, is going to have an
impact on how things are going to be run from now on. Taleb cheekily urges
us to be on an alert to en cash on these rare black swan events.

In the western press, for instance, there is a lot of talk about great
depression of the 1930's. On the cultural front too one feels a renewed
interest amongst columnists to revisit films like the Great Gatsby or
Renoir's Rules of the Game or The Sweet Smell of Success or The Night of the
Hunter. As we perhaps, all know the first two films signify the effect of
depression on 'haves', which was next to none, the last two films portray
the 'darker shades' of havenots. As if the change in status quo during the
depression was only a so called change in status quo which was restored by
assiduously thinking through the 'century of the self' and 'its happiness
machine'. Further more in terms of interpretation of human condition it
seems, writers like Moravia are back. Moravia for instance, in his novels,
particularly in Boredom and Conformist argues for a deep sense of insecurity
and skepticism in accepting the diktat of gigantic institutional mechanisms
as given. In films like Dev D too, when Chanda is sitting amidst hostile
patriarchal grandparents in punjab after mother sends her to her paternal
village, after her father commits suicide, after she is kicked out of
school, after she indulges in a 'deviatory'  act- we see her reading
Moravia's Conformist. One is not surprised to see her find comfort in
Moravia when all other social institutions around her have broken down. The
bubble in a sense have burst.

But then again all this talk at one level seems so diabolical because we
cannot really experience dejavu, can we? Can we really delude ourselves with
yet another Marshal plan or yet another set of euro centric civil wars or
yet another mass consumption explosion or another century of pumping oil for
oil's sake? The dominant ideas which to a certain extent paved the way for a
spectacular crash, still remain. Words like efficiency, average, normal,
utility etc very much determine our sensibilities. Any investigation on the
role of 'capital' as an agent of institutional and social control must also
entail an inquiry into the legitimacy of conceptual trajectories which
'capital' seems to pull...



Regards

Taha