WFHB

First corporations became people. Now people are becoming businesses. That’s the logic of the marketplace applied to employment. Tonight, the third episode in our series “The Way of Neoliberalism”: Selling Me, Inc.

In our last two episodes we spoke with Wendy Brown and Philip Mirowski to get a sense of where Neoliberal ideas came from, and how they’ve crept into our imaginations of democracy and politics.

Tonight, we move away from the abstract to take a look at neoliberalism’s transformation of a concrete subject that affects all of our lives: work.

Ilana Gershon, IU Associate Professor of Anthropology, is our guest. She has a forthcoming book of “anti-advice” for job seekers - Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today. In it she distills her interviews with jobseekers, recruitment counselors, and other cogs in the new neoliberal employment market -- where now even white collar work is temporary—to demonstrate a change in the metaphor of work, from labor as rental contract to that of the human as a business of one. In today’s economy, you can’t just be an employee looking to get hired—you have to market yourself as a business, one that can help another business achieve its goals.

SEGMENT ONE

Job seekers are told to network through social media, build and maintain a consistent personal brand, and always be on the lookout for a better gig to jump to. But in a technologically-driven market-dominated world where everyone lives in a metaphor of being their own little business and we’re supposedly freed from having a boss, what is actually gained? And more importantly, what are we losing in the process?

SEGMENT TWO

We return to questions of social media’s place in our new employment landscape, and how workers -- as CEOs of their own little businesses -- don’t actually experience the freedom and equality that a transformation of traditional employment into a business-to-business contract supposedly creates. In fact, in the desperation one often experiences looking for work, job seekers feel compelled to use social media and networking, whether they want to or not.

SEGMENT THREE

We see how the marketplace and technological logic of the new frenetic neoliberal employment model, “Selling Me, Inc.” in which everyone is an independent contractor constantly circulating through different temporary gigs, can destroy the boundary between work and life.

GUEST

Ilana Gershon, Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her work investigates how new media affects highly charged social tasks, such as breaking up or hiring in the United States. She has written about how people use new media to end romantic relationships in her book The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Her current research addresses how new media affects hiring in the contemporary US workplace and will be published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2017 as Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (Or Don’t Find) Work.

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Lived Theories: Hayek’s Neoliberalism and #Pragmatism by Ilana Gershon

THE WAY OF NEOLIBERALISM

Selling Democracy: Part One of The Way of Neoliberalism

Selling Ignorance: Part Two of the Way of Neoliberalism

MUSIC

"Get A Job" by The Silhouettes

"Opportunities" by the Pet Shop Boys

"Which is the merchant here, and which is the Jew?" Portia asks as she begins her performance as Antonio's lawyer (and as a man) in opposition to Shylock's suit for a pound of flesh. This is the soul of the play. What difference: usury or finance? What difference: Christian or Jew? How are we trapped in the ways in which we make money and the ways we value that practice? "All that glisters is not gold."

And maybe more importantly: why are all the characters, well-to-do in the society, so depressed?

We're joined by Randy White, Director, and the actresses who play Shylock and Portia (Liz Pazik and Leslie Ann Handelman) in The Cardinal Stage production of The Merchant of Venice.

Lorenzo:

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

From the Cardinal Stage website:

Artistic director Randy White takes on Shakespeare’s courtroom tour de force with an all-female cast. Marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the 500th anniversary of the establishment of the Jewish ghetto in Venice, Cardinal’s Merchant is produced in association with IU’s College of Arts and Sciences’ 2016 Themester on “Beauty.”

GUESTS

Randy White, Director

Leslie Ann Handelman (Portia)

Liz Pazik (Shylock)

The Merchant of Venice

OCT 28-NOV 13

Age Recommendation: 12+

Run Time: 2 hours and 20 minutes, including one intermission

Show Location: Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center Auditorium

MUSIC

"For the Love of Money" by the O'Jays

"Monotonous" by Eartha Kitt

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

We don’t know. In fact we can’t know. That’s a core tenet of the neoliberal project, which puts faith in markets instead of people.

Tonight we’re speaking with Philip Mirowski, historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame, and author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste and Machine Dreams, about how the neoliberal project is founded on -- and acts upon -- the assumption that the average citizen is too confused and ignorant to really know what’s best for society or themselves.

I just want to be clear that I don’t think that many people fritter away their free time reading Hayek, Becker, Buchanan or Friedman. But the historian Jennifer Burns has this wonderful insight when she describes Ayn Rand as ‘the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right’. I think that’s exactly right, namely that a certain picture of the world is learned at a very early age, usually by teenagers reading fiction or watching movies or going online. Some of them might go on and learn a little bit more about politics and economics, but in a weird sort of way that is unnecessary. Because the current culture gives them just enough to behave in ways that the neoliberals describe as being the ideal entrepreneur of the self, confusing freedom with imaginary lack of constraint, and so on and so forth. No one has to read Foucault. Just watch The Apprentice, or spend a little time on Facebook.

SEGMENT ONE

Mirowski traces the origins of neoliberalism to Friedrich Hayek and a European thought collective called The Mont Pelerin Society, who saw markets as information processors, superior to human reason. But we soon see that when neoliberalism, as a real-world political project, expects ignorance of the masses, then spreading confusion becomes an acceptable mode of operation, and lying is not necessarily a bad thing.

SEGMENT TWO

When political disenchantment is seen as a positive effect of market societies, and while neoliberal actors say one thing and do another -- often coopting the left into their projects -- how is an alternative to neoliberalism ever to succeed? Mirowski argues the left needs to leave classical liberal ideas behind and come up with a plausible modern counterargument to the neoliberal multi-level long-game: the telos of market domination.

SEGMENT THREE

We look at sources of knowledge in the neoliberalized world, from the power of thought collectives to the faux epistemic authority of market-inspired information spaces like Wikipedia which Mirowski has called “a fetid swamp of misinformation." Finally, a look at how a Nazi theorist and the father of neoconservatism inspired the neoliberal politics of knowledge, along with the increasingly common political tactic of telling two stories -- one to the public, and one to the insider elect -- that we’ve now seen one candidate for president openly defend in the second debate.

GUEST

Philip Mirowski is the Carl E. Koch Professor of Economics and Policy Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science and the Director of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame. Among several other titles, he's the author of More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, and the forthcoming The Knowledge We have Lost in Information: A History of Information and Knowledge in Economics (with Edward Nik-Khah).

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Philip Mirowski: This is Water, or Is It the Neoliberal Thought Collective?

MUSIC

"Ignorance" by Paramore

What follows is an unedited conversation with actress Abby Lee who will be performing the role of Masha in IU Theatre’s production of the 2013 Tony Award winning play by Christopher Durang, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.

Durang’s play revolves around the relationships of three middle-aged single siblings, two of whom live together, and takes place during a visit by the third, Masha, who supports them. They discuss their lives and loves, argue, and Masha threatens to sell the house. Some of the show's elements were derived from works of Anton Chekhov, including several character names, the play's setting in a cherry orchard, and the theme of the possible loss of an ancestral home.

We begin and end with "Here Comes the Sun" by The Beatles as this is played by the characters at the close of the play.

October 21, 22, 25 - 28, 2016 @ 7:30 p.m.

October 29 @ 2:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.

Wells-Metz Theatre

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Abby Lee On Hedda Gabler

The Charm’s Wound Up: Macbeth (Abby Lee as Lady Macbeth)

MUSIC

"Here Comes the Sun" by The Beatles

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

It’s the water we swim in, the air we breathe. It’s all around us - yet we hardly it notice most of the time. It’s a matrix of ideas, incentives, and assumptions that shape our politics, our economy, and our lives.

Today we kick off the first show in a four-part series we’re calling “The Way of Neoliberalism” on the political, social, and cultural ideology of our time.

In our first episode “Selling Democracy” we survey the neoliberal project and attempt to get a handle on just how pervasive it is.

GUEST

Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Rhetoric, and where she is a core faculty member in the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. She is the author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution; Walled States, Waning Sovereignty; Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Empire and Identity; and Edgework: Essays on Knowledge and Politics among others.

SEGMENT ONE

An examination of the origins of neoliberalism through the lens of Michel Foucault. According to Brown, Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics (lectures he delivered in 1978 and 1979) presciently described the outlines of neoliberalism back when it was still in its early stages.

SEGMENT TWO

Even as it presents inherent inequality and substitutes democratic values with pure market competition, we find ourselves driven to think of our lives, even our most quotidian decisions, in terms of human capital. A special emphasis on the ways we "drug" ourselves with anti-anxiety meds and antidepressants; and "child doping" with Adderall to give little Jack and Jill a head start in the world.

SEGMENT THREE

We look at the cost of neoliberalism’s stealth revolution: Economizing our values into language that sounds progressive, but replaces deeper concepts like the good life and the common good. We also dive into a couple of real-world examples of neoliberalism’s corrosive and sometimes absurd effects: like when Indiana national guardsmen find themselves in Iraq, supposedly teaching the people who live at the site of civilization’s ancient agricultural revolution how to farm wheat.

MUSIC

"The Waters to Swim In" by NYCYPCD

“Lost in the Supermarket” by The Clash

"False Advertising" by Bright Eyes

“Love for Sale” by Ahmad Jamal

NEXT TIME

Part Two in our series, The Way of Neoliberalism: Selling Ignorance, with Philip Mirowski. Mirowski is Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Nortre Dame. His most recent book is Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Step one in constructing the neoliberal world order is to create confusion. Ignorance is a "good" to be fostered among the teeming masses. Of course this is the exact opposite of what a democracy needs to survive.

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

"Doing no violence to living things, not even a single one of them, wander alone like a rhinoceros."*

All of our songs tonight feature the whirlwind as a kind of tribute to a central essay called "The Vortex," written by our guest Eliot Weinberger and found in his serial essay begun in 2007 called An Elemental Thing. That work continues through the book Oranges & Peanuts for Sale and on into the essay collection that comes out today, The Ghosts of Birds, all from New Directions.

This is from the publisher description:

The Ghosts of Birds offers thirty-five essays by Eliot Weinberger: the first section of the book continues his linked serial-essay, An Elemental Thing, which pulls the reader into “a vortex for the entire universe” (Boston Review). Here, Weinberger chronicles a nineteenth-century journey down the Colorado River, records the dreams of people named Chang, and shares other factually verifiable discoveries that seem too fabulous to possibly be true. The second section collects Weinberger’s essays on a wide range of subjects―some of which have been published in Harper’s, New York Review of Books, and London Review of Books―including his notorious review of George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points and writings about Mongolian art and poetry, different versions of the Buddha, American Indophilia (“There is a line, however jagged, from pseudo-Hinduism to Malcolm X”), Béla Balázs, Herbert Read, and Charles Reznikoff.

We’ll also take this opportunity to talk about his master course on the art of translation, 19 ways of looking at Wang Wei, first published in 1987 and now updated with "More Ways" and published by New Directions also.

Eliot Weinberger joins us by phone from New York City. 

It's hard to know exactly how to focus the program, and I thought to call it "The Vortices of Eliot Weinberger" and just let ‘er rip and see what fell out, but calling it "The World At Large" (while refraining from playing the Modest Mouse song of the same name) seemed even more appropriate and comes from the brief Preface written for an edited collection of International poetry called World Beat.  

All translation sends the essential message that one’s own culture is not enough, and that the way to avoid intellectual stagnation is to learn from other ways of thinking about, perceiving, luxuriating and despairing in, the world. This book appears at a moment when the United States is particularly self-absorbed. Less than a fifth of its citizens have passports; a third of its high school students cannot find the Pacific Ocean on a world map; its rulers dream without embarrassment of global empire. Poetry, though not the salvation of the world, presents a small alternate model: an endless net of individual dialogues between writers, and between writers and readers, regardless of governments, nations, and communal identities. Its books are a way out of one’s world and a way into the world at large.

Weinberger is probably best known for being unknown as an aspect of his work--a translator of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges (I think Borges was my first introduction to his work via Seven Nights), Bei Dao, Vincente Huidobro, Homero Aridjis, Cecilia Vicuña, and Xavier Villaurrutia.

*From section V of "The Rhinoceros" in An Elemental Thing

GUEST

Eliot Weinberger is an essayist and translator, the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, and the series editor of Calligrams: Writings from and on China (New York Review Books and Chinese University of Hong Kong Press). He lives in New York City.

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We're joined in the studio by Jon Kay to discuss his recent book Folk Art & Aging: Life-Story Objects and Their Makers.

Kay makes the strong point that

Growing old doesn’t have to be seen as an eventual failure but rather as an important developmental stage of creativity. Offering an absorbing and fresh perspective on aging and crafts, Jon Kay explores how elders choose to tap into their creative and personal potential through making life-story objects. Carving, painting, and rug hooking not only help seniors to cope with the ailments of aging and loneliness but also to achieve greater satisfaction with their lives. Whether revived from childhood memories or inspired by their capacity to connect to others, meaningful memory projects serve as a lens for focusing on, remaking, and sharing the long-ago. These activities often help elders productively fill the hours after they have raised their children, retired from their jobs, and/or lost a loved one. These individuals forge new identities for themselves that do not erase their earlier lives but build on them and new lives that include sharing scenes and stories from their memories.

GUEST

Jon Kay is IU Professor of Practice and Director of Traditional Arts Indiana in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology.

ARTISTS

Bob Taylor, Gustav Potthoff, Marian Sykes, John Schoolman, Milan Opacich

CLIPS

Marian Sykes (Fairfield Arts)

Milan Opacich (Building a Prima with Milan/Tamburitza All-Stars)

"Little Italy" rug by Marian Sykes. Image courtesy of Traditional Arts Indiana.

RELATED

Traditiona Arts Indiana

Jon Kay's YouTube Channel

Gustav Potthoff: "Lest We Forget" Film Production Project

The Colorful Canes of John Schoolman

MUSIC

"Grandma's Hands" by Merry Clayton

"Rockin' Chair" by Mildred Bailey

"Old and In the Way" by Hazel Dickens

"September Song" by Sarah Vaughan

NEXT TIME

Eliot Weinberger's The Ghosts of Birds and a reissue of 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (with More Ways).

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

A better title for this show might be “Screening Women,” suggested by tonight’s guest, Janet Bergstrom, in an essay on Akerman for Sight and Sound. Or perhaps we might call it “Look what I’ve done with your name” a response by Akerman to her father’s disappointment that she had no children. This comes directly from Akerman during an interview conducted in 2011 while discussing a kind of loss or erasure of the religious and community traditions of her Jewish father and mother. Her mother survived Auschwitz as a young girl, but lost her parents in the Nazi death camp, something she never spoke of with Akerman.

Exile and loss of “home” are major themes in her work to set alongside those of the status of woman in society. As Bergstrom writes:

The films of Chantal Akerman demonstrate a motivating interest in the status of the representation of woman – her desire, her self-image, the image others create of and for her. Akerman’s films have shown different solutions to the question “who speaks?”, and it may well be that any given answers will always be reductive. But were the questions about the representational status of women, so urgently posed during the 70s, ever resolved? I think not, because I still hear them asked by successive generations of students.

We’ll take a look 4 films (while possibly touching on some others): Saute Ma Ville; Jeanne Dielman; From the Other Side; and her last film, No Home Movie. When there are over 40 films on the books with much more other work, I know that’s going to limit us.

GUEST

Janet Bergstrom is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA who has followed Chantal Akerman’s work closely since 1976. She is working on an archivally-based study of F. W. Murnau’s career and a visual essay for the DVD of Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunters (Edition filmmuseum 2016).

FILMS DISCUSSED

Saute Ma Ville

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

From the Other Side

No Home Movie

RELATED

"Chantal Akerman: Heartfelt" by Janet Bergstrom

The Innovators 1970-1980: Keeping a distance, by Janet Bergstrom

Saute Ma Ville, Akerman's first film (age 18)

Clip of Akerman and Delphine Seyrig during filming of Jeanne Dielman

5 Lessons Rogue Indie Director Chantal Akerman Can Teach You About Filmmaking

MUSIC

All songs off of Little Girl Blue, from Nina Simone by Sonia Wieder-Atherton

"Little Girl Blue"

"Black Swann"

"I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free"

"Return Home"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

1976, the Bicentennial year of The United States of America. What else?

Apple Computer Company is formed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; NASA Unviels first space shuttle, the Enterprise; It's reported that CFCs, or Chlorofluorocarbons, used in aerosol cans damage the ozone layer; The Olympics, broadcast from Montreal, Canada, draw an estimated one billion viewers worldwide. Nadia Comaneci, a 14 year-old Romanian, is awarded the first ever "perfect 10" on a gymnastics routine (and 6 more in the same games); Landing vehicles from the US spacecraft Viking I and Viking II set down safely on Mars.

The top movies probably tell us a little more than we want to know about the soul of the nation:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

All the President's Men

The Omen

Taxi Driver

The Outlaw Josey Wales

Rocky

Peter Frampton is unleashed on the public never to relinquish his place in radio rotation. And Jackie and Jack fall in love in the midst of labor and civil rights activism in Andy Piascik's new book, In Motion.

Paul Buhle writes of the novel,

Piascik...has a fine eye for the detail and ear for the dialogue between the lovers and also various family members. The talk around the sex action, in particular, seems to hit the right notes (and places), both realistic and sensitive. The two are definitely more mature or worldly than my peers (just a generation older) at their age, and I first imagined them readily overcoming their fears and the personal complications—but of course they do not. There are no easy resolutions here, but the figures are drawn to the life, the story well told.

GUEST

Andy Piascik is a radical activist and author who’s written for many publications including Jacobin, Counterpunch, and ZMagazine. He is the author of Gridiron Gauntlet: the Story of the Men Who Integrated Pro-Football, in Their Own Words, and a novel titled In Motion (2016, Sunshine Publishing, 298 pages).

RELATED

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Good Summer Reading on the Left by Paul Buhle

AUDIO CLIPS

Queen Elizabeth II Arrives at the White House - July 7, 1976 (AP Archives on YouTube)

Mashed audio from YouTube of Nadia Comaneci's uneven bars routine at the '76 Olympics and an interview for OWN's (Oprah Winfrey Network) "Where Are They Now."

MUSIC

"Baby I Love Your Way" by Peter Frampton

"Love Hangover" by Diana Ross

"I Want You" by Marvin Gaye

"Afro-Blue" by John Coltrane

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Amy Rose Spiegel joins us to talk about talking about sex, Helen Gurley Brown, and her favorite episode of The Golden Girls.

Marvin Gaye writes in the liner notes to his 1973 classic Let's Get It On:

I can't see anything wrong with sex between consenting anybodies. I think we make far too much of it. After all, one's genitals are just one important part of the magnificent human body ... I contend that SEX IS SEX and LOVE IS LOVE. When combined, they work well together, if two people are of about the same mind. But they are really two discrete needs and should be treated as such….I don't believe in overly moralistic philosophies. Have your sex, it can be exciting, if you're lucky.

This is a sentiment that our guest tonight, Amy Rose Spiegel, would heartily endorse. But "luck" is only a part of the equation, a maybe a small part: one really ought to be prepared. And part of that preparation is being able to talk about sex. That's what we'll do in this episode, getting it on with Amy Rose Spiegel.

GUESTS:

Amy Rose Spiegel is the author of Action: A Book About Sex (Grand Central Publishing). She is an editor and freelance writer whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, and many other publications.

Jennifer Maher is Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington.

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AUDIO CLIP

From Helen Gurley Brown's Lessons in Love, released on Crescendo Records, track 11, "How to Talk to a Man in Bed."

From The Golden Girls, "Adult Education" (Season One)

MUSIC

"Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye

"Darling Nikki" by Prince

"Dirty Mind" by Jeff Beck, featuring Imogen Heap

"You Got to Give Me Some" by Bessie Smith (1928)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford