Baldwin

And the most serious effect of the mill you’ve been through is, again, not the catalog of disaster, the policemen, the taxi drivers, the waiters, the landlady, the landlord, the banks, the insurance companies, the millions of details, twenty four hours of every day, which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being. It is not that. It’s by that time that you’ve begun to see it happening, in your daughter or your son, or your niece or your nephew.

...nothing you have done has helped to escape the trap. But what is worse than that, is that nothing you have done, and as far as you can tell, nothing you can do, will save your son or your daughter from meeting the same disaster and coming to the same end. 

"And no amount of rhetoric and no amount of idealism...none of this reasonable talk changes the fact that you have millions of people in this country who have no jobs and no future and who are trapped in what for them is a concentration camp and who have concluded that the country intends to destroy them. I have no evidence to offer them to the contrary".

"The poverty is piled high making it...more inescapable and making it even more inescapable is how thoroughly you're despised. A high rise slum is a high crime area almost at once because, what are you going to do with all these children really, whole families condemned forever to nothing in the richest city in the world. My best friend jumped off George Washington bridge...and I was sure that I was going to be next. From despair, from rage because...you are embattled so often that that's all you can do. You've been beaten so hard your world narrows to a red circle of rage and you begin to hate everybody which means you hate yourself and when that happens, it's over for you".

"Those fears cut so deep. The fear that we’re not who we say we are. The fear that the underpinnings of our fragile experiment in democracy are rickety stilts. There’s a fear of being revealed for who we actually are. That fear is always tethered to the idea that revenge will follow—that these people must hate us. They must want to do to us what we have done to them. I think that sense of impending doom or retribution moves us about". 

"When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty?...And when I sat at Elijah’s table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God’s—or Allah’s—vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then? I could also see that the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make that vengeance inevitable—a vengeance that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance, based on the law that we recognize when we say, “Whatever goes up must come down.” And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must...insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others...If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!" 

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced".

"...if you’re trying to avoid reality, how can you face it? If you don’t know what is going on in the ghettos of this nation, in the hearts and minds of women and men you see every day, then...you don’t really know what’s going on in your own heart and mind. And you have no way of knowing what’s going on in the hearts and minds of millions of people on this globe".

"People cannot bear their reality. They prefer fantasy over a truthful recreation of their experience".

James Baldwin

Oliver

There are two fundamental points that need to be made about the individual model of disability. Firstly, it locates the 'problem' of disability within the individual and secondly it sees the causes of this problem as stemming from the functional limitations or psychological losses which are assumed to arise from disability. These two points are underpinned by what might be called 'the personal tragedy theory of disability' which suggests that disability is some terrible chance event which occurs at random to unfortunate individuals. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.  

 Mike Oliver

dpdr

 

bacchi

Foucault selects his sites—his “problematizing moments”— by identifying times and places where he detects important shifts in practices—for example from flogging to detention. As Flynn (1989a: 138) explains, for Foucault, “The problem in the case at hand is to account for the fact that from about 1791 a vast array of penal methods was replaced by one, incarceration”. In these “crisis” moments (Foucault, 1985a: Chapter 2), “givens” become questions, or problems, providing an opportunity to inquire into the emergence of what comes to appear self-evident because it is firmly in position, in this instance incarceration as a method of punishment.

As I go on to argue, “The WPR approach broadens Foucault’s agenda” 

It does not look for “crisis” points, places where practices change, stirring up debate. Rather, it suggests that all policy proposals rely on problematizations which can be opened up and studied to gain access to the “implicit system in which we find ourselves”.

Carol Bacchi

Sandel

In addition to debating the meaning of this or that good, we also need to ask a bigger question, about the kind of society in which we wish to live. As naming rights and municipal marketing appropriate the common world, they diminish its public character. Beyond the damage it does to particular goods, commercialism erodes commonality. The more things money can buy, the fewer the occasions when people from different walks of life encounter one another. We see this when we go to a baseball game and gaze up at the skyboxes, or down from them, as the case may be. The disappearance of the class-mixing experiment once found at the ballpark represents a loss not only for those looking up but also for those looking down.

Something similar has been happening throughout our society. At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools. You might call it the skyboxification of American life. It's not good for democracy, nor is it a satisfying way to live.

Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of everyday life. For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.

Michael Sandel

Bacchi excerpts

"The more general point is the need to reflect on the political implications of characterizing policy “problems” either as “wicked” or indeed as “tame” – commonly set as the counterpoint to “wicked”. Barbehön is particularly helpful on this point. In specific cases, he shows, since “wicked problems” are deemed to be naturally “complex” and “urgent”, they operate as “things” that can never be solved but only managed “in a never-ending chain of decisions” (p. 4), supporting a managerial style of governing. The “politics of urgency” can also, in specific instances, be reflected in “quick solutions”, “sometimes at the cost of democratic procedures” (p. 13). On the flip side, “problems” designated “tame” become the stuff of routine, thereby avoiding critical analysis and possible contestation.

Barbehön’s intervention – and you do not need to accept all parts of his argument to recognize the usefulness of his main contention – leads to the need to rethink current research and writing on “wicked problems”. Instead of trying to characterize “them”, to say what they are, we need to ask what they are represented to be and to consider the political implications of specific representations".

"By examining what is proposed, it is possible to grasp what is rendered problematic – what the “problem” is represented to be (Bacchi and Goodwin, p. 16). Hence it becomes possible to “read off” implicit problem representations from specific proposals.

This way of proceeding makes it possible to consider how “problems” are produced as problems of specific kinds within governing practices. There is no need to look outside the policy or other selected text to seek out starting points for analysis; these starting points (problem representations) are locatable within the material chosen for examination (hence the researcher is not imposing a schema upon the material). The argument in WPR is that, since governing takes place through these problem representations, it is important to reflect on where they come from and how they operate to shape “realities”. 

"Current concerns around evidence tend to focus on questions about “whose evidence?”, challenging for example the “hierarchy of evidence” that privileges RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials). I ask a question that precedes this concern. I ask: “evidence for what?”

Put briefly, evidence-base policy enshrines a form of applied problem solving, based on a rational policy model (see Howlett 2010, p. 19). As in this model, what goes under-examined are the “problems” that are assumed to launch both the policy making and research exercises. In evidence-based practice, the focus is on “what works”, assuming that the goals – the research “problems” – set for testing research interventions are legitimate and non-prejudicial. Given the commitment in the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach to interrogate assumed policy “problems”, my concern at the willingness to accept and work within such constraints can be anticipated".

Carol Bacchi

Cresswell Riol

I will now approach human dignity from another angle: as an “outer” sense that can be lost; that is fragile, precarious, and needs protecting. This is arguably in line with what Valentini classifies as “status” dignity, “comprising stringent normative demands,”48 Meilaender calls “personal,”49 or Gilabert refers to as “condition-dignity”: a descriptive and not necessarily universal version that concerns the extent to which an individual is able to exercise the universally shared capacities they possess through their innate dignity—what Gilabert labels “status-dignity.”50 Pogge makes the distinction between human dignity as intrinsic and inalienable, and personal dignity, as subjective and related to an individual’s sense of their own worth.51 He also points out how this form can be found in the UDHR: Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for [their] dignity and the free development of [their] personality [my italics]. As Jütten recognises, when one discusses human dignity using this framing, the focus shifts from the conceptual and ontological to the phenomenological and sociological.53 Calnan, Badcott, and Woolhead refer to this as focusing on “dignity’s existential components and their operationally relevant arena, the life world”: “the meaning of our being human within social contexts.”54 Human dignity of this kind is more easily recognised by its absence or when it is denied 55—indignity—revealing itself as feelings of shame, humiliation, embarrassment, degradation, abasement, loss of pride, or even guilt. Such emotions can lead to a negative evaluation of the self, culminating in societal withdrawal, the inability to take transformative action, and alienation.56 Hence, despite the innate and alienable nature of dignity, people live lives that are undignified. As much as the emotions listed above are very personal or self-conscious emotions, they are co-constructed with the social environment: thereby, indignity involves an internal sense of inadequacy combined with an inflicted or concocted external judgement.57 Davis argues that systematic humiliation reduces self-respect by “denying individuals membership in a community or reducing their status in a community—in their own eyes”:58 “[m]aking human dignity a central value of social-economic policy, then, means changing social institutions to eliminate humiliating institutions.”59

Katharine Cresswell Riol

Cresswell Riol

...As laid out in General Comment No. 12: The Right to Adequate Food (Art. 11),113 which has been recognised as the “most authoritative interpretation of the right to food,” 114 this human right is not a right to a minimum number of calories or nutrients: it is a right to all the nutritional components required to live a healthy and active life. It also does not equate to the right to be fed or to food aid: it is not defined by charity. It advocates the capacity to feed oneself, which includes possessing the autonomy to make choices as to what, how, and when to eat. In this respect, an approach founded on this human right “moves away from the benevolence model of food aid and instead emphasizes enabling environments that support people in feeding themselves.”115 And it is the state that is obligated to ensure such enabling environments by guaranteeing that its citizens have an adequate standard of living and public assistance when needed,116 and also that they understand that they have a right to live their lives in dignity, i.e., with autonomy, free from discrimination, and in a society in which their voice and worth are recognised. As Kent explains, “[h]uman rights are not a benevolent gift from elites, but the legal expression of every individual’s entitlement to dignity,”117and to live in dignity is a far cry from being handed a pre-packaged bag of donated goods, the contents of which one has no say.

Katharine Cresswell Riol

Cresswell Riol

Within the marketplace, food has even been repackaged as a “want” as opposed to a fundamental human need, thereby disregarding human dignity further, as described by O’Boyle: Setting aside need and focusing instead on wants allow mainstream economists to side step the intellectual biases regarding the use of value-laden concepts such as need, to cast consumer behavior in a value-free analytical mold and to represent economics as an exact, value-free science.

Not being able to feed oneself (properly) or requiring assistance as an adult to achieve this is reported as being particularly degrading for people,163 and this has been shown to be in part due to the responsibilisation of food security:164 the neoliberal narrative of hunger has rebranded the structural issue of hunger as a problem of “the hungry” through the process of subjectification.165 Hunger is thereby a character flaw, and such “framing, blaming and shaming” casts “suspicion on the motives, intentions, and moral character of Others and in doing so silences them.”166 Following on from this, research has shown how “neoliberally approved” solutions of small-scale and short-sighted informative and therapeutic solutions in the form of increased health awareness and developing food skills have placed the onus on the individual and taken responsibility away from the state and corporations...As explained by Mayes, there has been a focus on lifestyle health strategies, supporting a shift from socialised to individualised welfare: Lifestyle works as a network that enables the isolation of the bodies and choices of individuals and governs them in relation to the population. If the individual is able to adopt and develop a “healthy lifestyle” they remain inconspicuously nestled within the secured population. However, when the bodies and choices of individuals deviate from norms associated with the health of the population, they become exposed to disciplinary practices of exclusion and marginalization.

Katharine Cresswell Riol

Hermeneutics is “the art and science of interpretation and thus also of meaning.”32 It advocates appreciation of an experience holistically by analysing it both as a whole and as parts, and by understanding the whole in relation to its parts and vice versa. In other words, you read the interview and appreciate it for its complete content, then perceive how it is also composed of different sections. Known as the hermeneutic circle, this...dynamic process appreciates that the whole experience is composed of different parts; analysis in this vein reflects this, involving multiple levels and the scrutiny of different perspectives that relate and cohere into the whole. Hermeneutical phenomenology relies on both interpretation and description of the lived experience. It is the study of lived experience—the “lifeworld”33 or our “being-in-theworld”34—and its meanings: It is a descriptive (phenomenological) methodology because it wants to be attentive to how things appear, it wants to let things speak for themselves; it is an interpretive (hermeneutic) methodology because it claims that there are no such things as uninterpreted phenomena.35 However, personal experiences of the participants are not removed from the social and historical context: they are indivisible. Hermeneutical phenomenology situates the meaning of a human within the world, what Heidegger coined “Dasein”: meaning is related to social, cultural, and historical contexts. There is an “indissoluble unity” between an individual and the experience—the world;36 they constitute the experience, the world, and are constituted by it.37 Similarly, the researcher—with their social, cultural, and historical baggage—is not removed from the context. Humans are sense-making animals. Giving accounts of experiences are ways in which we attempt to make sense of them. How one person accesses the experiences of another depends on what they are told: the researcher is trying to make sense of the participant trying to make sense of their experience. The reader is then an additional level of sense making. The researcher holds a dual role, both similar to and dissimilar to the participant: they are both human beings, making sense of the world through human resources; but the researcher is not the participant and thereby can only access the experience of the participant through their reporting of it, and then process it through their own lens. 

Katharine Cresswell Riol

 

Galeano

I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. 

Eduardo Galeano

Poppendieck

“Emergency food has become very useful indeed, and to a very large assortment of people and institutions. The United States Department of Agriculture uses it to reduce the accumulation of embarrassing agricultural surpluses. Business uses it to dispose of nonstandard or unwanted product, to protect employee morale and avoid dump fees, and, of course, to accrue tax savings. Celebrities use it for exposure. Universities and hospitals, as well as caterers and restaurants, use it to absorb leftovers. Private schools use it to teach ethics, and public schools use it to instill a sense of civic responsibility. Churches use it to express their concern for the least of their brethren, and synagogues use it to be faithful to the tradition of including the poor at the table. Courts use it to avoid incarcerating people arrested for Driving While Intoxicated and a host of other offense. Environmentalists use it to reduce the solid waste stream. Penal institutions use it to create constructive outlets for the energies of their inmates, and youth-serving agencies of all sorts use it to provide service opportunities for young people. Both profit-making and nonprofit organizations use it to absorb unneeded kitchen and office equipment. A wide array of groups, organizations, and institutions benefits from the halo effect of 'feeding the hungry,' and this list does not even include the many functions for ordinary individuals - companionship, exercise, meaning, and purpose. . .If we didn't have hunger, we'd have to invent it.”

Janet Poppendieck

Cvetkovich

Epidemics of depression can be related (both as symptom and as obfuscation) to long-term histories of violence that have ongoing impacts at the level of everyday emotional experience…What gets called depression in the domestic sphere is one affective register of these social problems and one that often keeps people silent, weary, and too numb to really notice the sources of their unhappiness (or in a state of low-level chronic grief — or depression of another kind — if they do).

Ann Cvetkovich

Friedli

Mental health is produced socially: the presence or absence of mental health is above all a social indicator and therefore requires social, as well as individual solutions. A focus on collective efficacy, as well as personal efficacy is required. A preoccupation with individual symptoms may lead to a ‘disembodied psychology’ which separates what goes on inside people’s heads from social structure and context. How things are done (values and culture) and how things are distributed (economic and fiscal policy) are the key domains that influence and are influenced by how people think, feel and relate. Mental health promotion has made and continues to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the wider determinants of health and the crucial relationship between social position and emotion, cognition and social function or relatedness. What difference does it make if discomfort and difficulties are shared by everyone? These questions lie at the heart of current debates about the social determinants of health, the relative contribution of material, psycho-social and biological factors and the effects of inequalities.5

Dr Lynne Friedli

Depression

“Sign One: Pointless (No Passion or Motivation). Everything has lost its meaning. If this all ended tomorrow, you wouldn’t care. Sign Two: Pressure In The Head. It feels as if you have a cat sitting on your head. It makes you want to curl up and sleep. Sign Three: Avoidance and Isolation (Withdrawing) Nobody understands what you’re going through – how much better it is to be alone through all this pain. Sign Four: The Cage (Can’t Express Yourself). You are trapped inside of yourself now and have forgotten how to show the real you from within the bars this prison. Sign Five: You Disgust Me (Self-Hate) You look in the mirror and see an ugly, pathetic creature staring back at you. Sign Six: Self-Destructive Rituals. You know if you do that that you will feel like shit after…But you can’t stop yourself. Sign Seven: Dicing With Death. You act recklessly now, inviting death to put you out of your misery. Sign Eight: Life’s A Bitch (Being A Victim). It’s like the universe has got a personal vendetta against you, and is doing everything in its power to break you. Sign Nine: Unreality (Dissociation). You’re nothing more than a character in a film going through the motions of life but without believing in any of it. You want the film to end. Sign Ten: Words Won’t Come (Blocked). You can’t put this dark place into words. Sign Eleven: Numb (Can’t Feel Feelings). You’re a hollow man trying to feel but nothing comes".

depression

My depression had grown on me as that vine had conquered the oak; it had been a sucking thing that wrapped itself around me, ugly and grotesque and more alive than I. It had had a life of its own that bit by bit asphyxiated all of my life out of me. At the worst stage of major depression, I had moods that I knew were not my moods: they belonged to the depression, as surely as the leaves on that tree's high branches belonged to the vine.

When I tried to think clearly about this, I felt that my mind was immured, that it couldn't expand in any direction. I knew that the sun was rising and setting, but very little of its light reached me. I felt myself sagging under what was much stronger than I; first I could not use my ankles, and then I could not control my knees, and then my waist began to break under the strain, and then my shoulders turned in, and in the end I was compacted and fetal, depleted by this thing that was crushing me without holding me. Its tendrils threatened to pulverize my mind and my courage and my stomach, and crack my bones and desiccate my body. It went on glutting itself on me when there seemed nothing left to feed it.

Andrew Solomon 

Taussig-Rubbo

Rather than examine sacrifice as a category that pertains only to the barbaric other - such as the suicide bomber - I assume that it has been central to the critical moments of founding, maintenance, and transformation of the U.S. political and legal order. I do not undertake a deconstruction of social contract theory, in which the preservation of the individual's life is the purpose of the covenant, or liberal political thought, for which death is nothing but negation...Paul Kahn, in his book Putting Liberalism in Its Place, has already done this in a profound way; he has urged that sacrifice and sovereignty must be considered together and that sacrifice and not contract is the most accurate way of framing the political relationship as it has been experienced. I take as a point of departure that the U.S. government pursues not only a monopoly of violence but also a monopoly of sacrifice - that is, control over sacralized, transcendent loss.

Mateo Taussig-Rubbo

Aciksoz

There is nothing sacred about the sacred man, he suggests, because homo sacer is a product of “an originary political structure that is located in a zone prior to the distinction between sacred and profane.”28 In order to bolster this argument, Agamben goes to great lengths to debunk anthropological notions of sacrifice and the sacred as misunderstandings and myths that have nothing to offer for our understanding of sovereign violence. In so doing, his theory leaves no room for grasping sovereignty’s dependence on sacrifice in the production of homo sacer.  Sacrificial Limbs makes two interventions into Agamben’s homo sacer paradigm. First, it places sacrifice at the center of understanding sovereign power. Especially in times of political violence and crisis, struggles over the meaning of violence and violently altered bodies become a key component of claims to sovereignty, which involve contestations not only over the monopoly of violence, but also over the “monopoly of sacrifice—that is, control over sacralized, transcendental loss.”29 Sovereignty claims embody presumptions about the meaning (or meaninglessness) of violent loss, assertions about whether violent loss has a transcendental dimension, and pronouncements about whether injured or dead bodies have some sort of worldly or otherworldly political and symbolic value beyond their immediate materiality. Sovereignty is the alchemy of making bodies sacred through the logic of sacrifice, as illustrated by the ways in which the socially abjected bodies of disabled veterans were officially rendered sacred in Turkey. And here we arrive at my second intervention into Agamben’s antisacrificial theory of sovereignty: The production of some bodies as homo sacer always depends on the sacralization of others in the name of whom the former can be rendered killable.

Salih Can Aciksoz

Henri Stiker

Charity, the founding principle of ethical and social order for centuries, endures but becomes tangled among other ideas issuing either from the struggle of the exploited classes or from economic and technical development...To the extent that the idea of charity persists, it directs a series of practices, such as the appeal to a philanthropic attitude, devotion to an almost spiritual mission, fear of opposition to government power. In the disinterested service of a form of poverty the worker at rehabilitation institutions had the dominant characteristic of being an “apostle” before being a professional, of being generous before being salaried, a kind of lay brother or sister, marked in the first hand by a sense of vocation. And this corps of social workers, in all logic, could not make claims against a government that was itself viewed in “charitable” optics (by citizens as intermediaries) and never critically seen as a manipulator of economic or ideological interests. Thus, the institutions were content with weak resources, very loose coordination, and minimal rationality.

Stiker, Henri-Jacques

Spade

"Nonprofitization has reproduced antidemocratic, racist and colonial relationships between the winners and losers of extractive, exploitative economic arrangements."

"The cultural narrative about social justice entrepreneurship suggests that people who want change should not fight for justice but should invent new ways of managing poor people and social problems. This raises the question, how do mutual aid projects remain threatening and oppositional to the status quo and cultivate resistance, rather than becoming complementary to abandonment and privatization?"

"Mutual aid projects emerge because public services are exclusive, insufficient, or exacerbate state violence. Neoliberals take aim at public services in order to further concentrate wealth and in doing so exacerbate material inequality and violence."

"Often, charismatic leaders are people who are not the most vulnerable inside the participant group, because being regarded as charismatic, persuasive, important, or authoritative relates to hierarchies of valuation and devaluation that also determine vulnerability. As a result, a single individual or small group running a project may not be the same people who would have the most to lose if the project veers toward elite interests. It is the most vulnerable  participants who are most likely to have objections to the shifts that come with co-optation, such as new eligibility requirements that cut out stigmatized groups".

Dean Spade

 

 

 

Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.

In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance.

A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (I) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.

The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.

Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky

Mill

“The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.”

John Stuart Mill

Sandel

 “Aristotle taught that virtue is something we cultivate with practice: “we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”50 Rousseau held a similar view. The more a country asks of its citizens, the greater their devotion to it. “In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies.” Under a bad government, no one participates in public life “because no one is interested in what happens there” and “domestic cares are all-absorbing.” Civic virtue is built up, not spent down, by strenuous citizenship. Use it or lose it, Rousseau says, in effect. “As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the state is not far from its fall.”51”

Michael J. Sandel

“Altruism, generosity, solidarity and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise. One of the defects of a market-driven society is that it lets these virtues languish. To renew our public life we need to exercise them more strenuously.”

Michael J. Sandel

Adorno and Horkheimer

“For the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect.” 

Adorno and Horkheimer

Conway

"Power is redefined in the pastoral context. “The shepherd wields power over the flock rather than over the land” (Foucault 2001, 301). Pastoral power sits at the connecting roots of the administration of population and the regulation of life, it has a small but informative role to play in the development of biopolitics. The pastor concerns themselves with the conduct of both individual members of the flock, but also the general community of the flock. Its divine purpose, the solemn responsibility God bestows upon the pastor, is to ensure the salvation of the flock in its entirety. However, with pastoral power comes a paradox, one that is not unlike the paradox of the biopolitical administrating of life. “The sheep that is a cause of scandal, or whose corruption is in danger of corrupting the whole flock, must be abandoned” (Foucault 2007, 169). This paradox is the violent sovereign kernel in the pastoral. If the flock is to be saved, it must be pure. The good shepherd must keep their senses tuned to the possibility of any corruption which may desecrate the flock with its profane presence. This is the primary modality of the “sacral prohibition” (Stiker 1999, 26).

However, salvation takes on a new orientation in the era of the birth of the modern state. No longer is there a closed salvation history, one where empires and kingdoms, “at a certain moment, had to become unified as the universal time of an Empire in which all differences would be effaced […] and this would be the time of Christ’s return” (Foucault 2007, 260). The indefinite deferral of the return of Christ pulls the worries of the pastoral back to the secular game of pure immediate governance. This new salvation will take the form of the maximization of state forces, which will be achieved through policing. “The police must ensure the state’s splendor” (Foucault 2007, 313). At the center of these series of practices that constitute the state, the police, and strategies of population and security, is development and productivity. Salvation becomes biopolitical. And with productivity as its criterion, the problem of abnormality becomes a problem of social order and of deliverance".

"Lombroso describes revolutionaries such as Marx and Charlotte Corday as possessing “wonderfully harmonious physiognomies”. Contrarily, in his analysis of a photo of forty-one anarchists arrested in Paris, “31 percent of them had serious physical defects. Of one hundred anarchists arrested in Turin, thirty-four lacked the wonderfully harmonious figure of Charlotte Corday or Karl Marx” (Foucault 2003, 154)."

"Giorgio Agamben, calling upon the work Walter Benjamin, attests that “the state of exception turned into rule signals law’s fulfillment and its becoming indistinguishable from life” (Agamben 1998, 53). The law as indistinguishable from life, that is the horror at the core of the lingering state of exception. One could say the same of the biopolitical apparatus; that its perfect functioning is found when one’s life, its motions, habits, and behaviors become indistinguishable from the processes that “ensure the state’s splendor” (Foucault 2007, 313). The terror of the norm reigns everywhere life and policing enter a zone of indiscernibility. Biopolitical circuitry functions seamlessly when one can no longer identify its content. The means of control become so vast, and so precise, one no longer notices them".

"Giorgio Agamben, in his genealogical treatment of the term dispositif, explicitly includes the discipline and literature of philosophy as an apparatus. To Agamben, an apparatus is that which has “the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure, the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (Agamben 2009, 14). The dogmatic image of thought which upholds the validity of a particular mode of being and the validity of a particular form-of-life coincides directly with both Agamben’s and Foucault’s utilization of this term."

"Biopolitics and the image of thought, especially as it pertains to the immunopolitics of the sovereign right to life, come to a critical interaction. A terror must be made to reign, a “terror of straying too far from the norm” (Tiqqun 2011, 162). We will have to, once again, return to Peter Singer".

"The image of thought is a mechanism of domination because the chasm between thought and practice collapses. One may recall Foucault’s statement about thought itself. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate or enslave.”

"Governing structures have the moral mission of ensuring their population’s utility, however, that righteous obligation was dispersed across the horizon, permeating and redefining the power relation between the state and citizen. Usefulness is virtue, incapacity—burden—is its corresponding vice. The relation between community and individual, between state and body, between, even, labor and capital, is governed by this doctrine of utility".

"To many, it emits a very distinct signal. Disabled bodies are a social indication of a cure not yet found, of a fetal screening process not yet perfected, of an imminent antiquity, or, worse, of a problem that will eventually be solved. Just as the king was the physical embodiment of the power and laws of the Ancien Régime or the criminal’s twisted tortured body carried the truth of his delinquency, the disabled possess a signifying element of abandonment.[1] For Gilles Deleuze, disability acts as the “model” for the institutionalization of abandonment...

"The disabled are often not classified as adherents to the “great ethical pact” of usefulness. They are not always observants of the doctrine of utility. The fate of the disabled throughout the ages is defined by indirect, but perpetual, dehumanization.

This literary history of disability is an oeuvre of what is unwritten; it is a library of assumption. The disabled exist at the margins of the social body because the essence of their bodies is constructed and simultaneously repudiated in the margins of philosophical works that ground and maintain our social orders through time.

Socrates and Plato established the virtue of the aesthetical unity of bodies, a unity disabled bodies despoil. The body’s “harmony” reflects the functionality of the society it exists within. The disabled, or those who are not “sound” in mind or body, disrupt the harmony of society. “Those who are diseased in their bodies they will leave to die, and the corrupt and incurable souls they will put an end to themselves” (Book III, Republic). It is worth noting that passive, almost completely fluid, shift from the pathological to the moral". 

Will Conway

Foucault

 “Goya’s Idiot who shrieks and twists his shoulder to escape from the nothingness that imprisons him—is this the birth of the first man and his first movement toward liberty, or the last convulsion of the last dying man?”

Anderson (On Sandel)

The top tier of workers has turned itself into a self-reproducing elite, flattering itself as a natural aristocracy superior to the losers in the race to succeed. And it has recruited the institutions of higher education—especially elite colleges and universities—to perform the task of sorting, ranking, and credentialing individuals to feed the meritocratic job-allocation machine.

The results have been disastrous. By turning colleges and universities into the gatekeepers to jobs that offer dignity, security, and a decent standard of living, meritocracy has not remedied inequality; as Sandel argues, it has entrenched and justified it. He presents devastating statistics that show how selective schools do much less to promote social mobility than to consolidate privilege. The most elite schools enroll more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the bottom 50 percent. And their gatekeeping hardly stops at the admissions office. Colleges and universities erect additional hoops through which students must jump in an endless meritocratic arms race, as they compete for selection in elite extracurricular clubs, internships, academic honors, professional schools, and corporate jobs.

Elizabeth Anderson

Michael J. Sandel

“The wealthy and powerful have rigged the system to perpetuate their privilege; the professional classes have figured out how to pass their advantages on to their children, converting the meritocracy into a hereditary aristocracy; colleges that claim to select students on merit give an edge to the sons and daughters of the wealthy and the well-connected. According to this complaint, meritocracy is a myth, a distant promise yet to be redeemed.”

Michael J. Sandel

“Social well-being…depends upon cohesion and solidarity. It implies the existence, not merely of opportunities to ascend, but of a high level of general culture, and a strong sense of common interests...Individual happiness does not only require that men should be free to rise to new positions of comfort and distinction; it also requires that they should be able to lead a life of dignity and culture, whether they rise or not.4”

Michael J. Sandel

“In short, Hegel argued that the capitalist organization of work emerging in his time could be ethically justified only on two conditions, described succinctly by Honneth: “first, it must provide a minimum wage; second, it must give all work activities a shape that reveals them to be a contribution to the common good.”

Michael J. Sandel

“For Calvin and the Puritans, “everyone was equally base in the sight of God.” Since no one was deserving, salvation had to depend on God’s grace.”

Michael J. Sandel

According to republican political theory, however, sharing in self-rule involves something more. It means deliberating with fellow citizens about the common good and helping to shape the destiny of the political community. But to deliberate well about the common good requires more than the capacity to choose one's ends and to respect others' rights to do the same. It requires a knowledge of public affairs and also a sense of belonging, a concern for the whole, a moral bond with the community whose fate is at stake.

Michael J. Sandel

A market economy is a tool - a valuable and effective tool - for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavour. It's a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.

Michael J. Sandel

"There’s no necessary connection between maximizing social utility or economic wealth and creating a flourishing democracy. The first does not guarantee the second. The only way to create a flourishing democracy is to find ways to reason together about the big questions, including hard questions about justice and the common good, to reason together about these questions so that we as citizens can decide how to shape the forces that govern our lives. This I think was Louis Brandeis’s idea of democracy."

Michael J. Sandel

Eboo Patel (On Sandel)

It is a classic case of “pointing to the mote in your brother’s eye while ignoring the beam in your own.” Except other people are not ignoring the beam in our eye -- they can see it, and it enrages them.

Sandel is not afraid to name the problem. It’s hubris, he says, pure and simple. People who think they have earned their place of success and authority tend to believe they are paragons of virtue, even as their arrogant ways are causing division and destruction.

The institution that is most responsible for this is one that many of us deeply love and believe in: higher education. Sandel writes, “Higher education has become a sorting machine that promises mobility on the basis of merit but entrenches privilege and promotes attitudes toward success corrosive of the commonality democracy requires.”

The hard truth is that, even as colleges critique other forms of privilege, they do everything in their power to advertise the massive advantages graduates of their institution enjoy. College equals privilege. It’s part of the brand, a feature, not a bug.

I’m trying to find a kinder word for this than hypocrisy, but if we look at this situation from the perspective of those who do not have college degrees, how would we characterize it? So many people learn in college that privilege is nefarious, and yet they are part of a system whose goal is to confer advantage.

Eboo Patel 

Foucault

Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual way, etc.

James Baldwin

“Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason: As long as my children face the future they face, and come to the ruin that they come to, your children are very greatly in danger, too. They are endangered above all by the moral apathy that pretends it isn’t happening. This does something terrible to us.” 

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”

"For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop, and the sheriff and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some junkies, the eyes of some preachers, the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in my mirror. It is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself".

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”

"Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we've used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are.”

“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”

"A great deal of what I say just leaves me open, I suppose, to a vast amount of misunderstanding. A great deal of what I say is based on an assumption which I hold and don’t always state. You know my fury about people is based precisely on the fact that I consider them to be responsible, moral creatures who so often do not act that way. But I am not surprised when they do. I am not that wretched a pessimist, and I wouldn’t sound the way I sound if I did not expect what I expect from human beings, if I didn’t have some ultimate faith and love, faith in them and love for them. You see, I am a human being too, and I have no right to stand in judgment of the world as though I am not a part of it. What I am demanding of other people is what I am demanding of myself."

“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”

“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”

“Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.”

James Baldwin

Malatesta

 

Whoever has power over things has power over men; whoever governs production also governs the producers; who determines consumption is master over the consumer. This is the question; either things are administered on the basis of free agreement among the interested parties, and this is anarchy; or they are administered according to laws made by administrators and this is government, it is the State, and inevitably it turns out to be tyrannical.[4]

Progress must advance contemporaneously and along parallel lines between men and their environment...we must use all advance in human consciences to induce them to claim and to impose those major social transformations which are possible and which effectively serve to open the way to further advances later.

Between man and his social environment there is a reciprocal action. Men make society what it is and society makes men what they are, and the result is therefore a kind of vicious circle.

We believe that most of the ills that afflict mankind stem from a bad social organisation; and that Man could destroy them if he wished and knew how.

Present society is the result of age-long struggles of man against man. Not understanding the advantages that could accrue for all by cooperation and solidarity; seeing in every other man (with the possible exception of those closest to them by blood ties) a competitor and an enemy, each one of them sought to secure for himself, the greatest number of advantages possible without giving a thought to the interests of others.

In such a struggle, obviously the strongest or more fortunate were bound to win, and in one way or another subject and oppress the losers.

So long as Man was unable to produce more than was strictly needed to keep alive, the conquerors could do no more than put to flight or massacre their victims, and seize the food they had gathered.

Then when with the discovery of grazing and agriculture a man could produce more than what he needed to live, the conquerors found it more profitable to reduce the conquered to a state of slavery, and put them to work for their advantage.

Later, the conquerors realised that it was more convenient, more profitable and certain to exploit the labour of others by other means: to retain for themselves the exclusive right to the land and working implements, and set free the disinherited who, finding themselves without the means of life, were obliged to have recourse to the landowners and work for them, on their terms.

Thus, step by step through a most complicated series of struggles of every description, of invasions, wars, rebellions, repressions, concessions won by struggle, associations of the oppressed united for defence, and of the conquerors for attack, we have arrived at the present state of society, in which some have inherited the land and all social wealth, while the mass of the people, disinherited in all respects, is exploited and oppressed by a small possessing class.

From all this stems the misery in which most workers live today, and which in turn creates the evils such as ignorance, crime, prostitution, diseases due to malnutrition, mental depression, and premature death. From all this arises a special class (government) which, provided with the necessary means of repression, exists to legalise and protect the owning class from the demands of the workers; and then it uses the powers at its disposal to create privileges for itself and to subject, if it can, the owning class itself as well.