Notable Reviews

John Gray on Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism:

Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neo-liberal cult of the free market. Soviet-style economies left an inheritance of human and ecological devastation, while neo-liberal policies have had results that are not radically dissimilar in many countries. Yet, while the Marxist faith in central planning is now confined to a few dingy sects, a quasi-religious belief in free markets continues to shape the policies of governments. . .

. . .Klein believes that neo-liberalism belongs among "the closed, fundamentalist doctrines that cannot co-exist with other belief-systems. . .The world as it is must be erased to make way for their purist invention. Rooted in biblical fantasies of great floods and great fires, it is a logic that leads ineluctably towards violence." As Klein sees it, the social breakdowns that have accompanied neo-liberal economic policies are not the result of incompetence or mismanagement. They are integral to the free-market project, which can only advance against a background of disasters.

Paul Duguid, in a review of Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur:

If debates about the internet are turning to examinations of our culture, this is to be welcomed. The turn may reflect an exasperation with the way economic concepts have come to dominate such discussions. Even the New Yorker, the stately home of cultural debate in America, now feels obliged to provide room for a “financial” page. Changes that fall under the heading Web 2.0 do have cultural implications. For example, collectively produced and dynamically changing pages, like those of Wikipedia, unsettle implicit notions about what a page is and how it might be understood, notions that extend back at least to the rise of print culture, if not to the appearance of the codex. The end of the page as we knew it will be unsettling not only for bibliophiles, but even for such Web 2.0 businesses as Google, whose empire depends on its ability to rank pages, and the inherent assumption that with these there is something relatively constant and coherent to rank.

Richard Harries on Peter Conrad's Creation: Artists, Gods & Origins:

For most of Western history, God has been regarded as creator in a unique sense, for he alone is capable of bringing things into existence ex nihilo. Artists have been thought of as creative only in a secondary manner, reflecting in their work the divine creativity, and imitating the divine workmanship shown in nature. Peter Conrad's theme is that in some of the seminal works of Western culture, God has been edged out and artists have come to see themselves as prime creators, bringing things into being out of nothing. Poets are able with a single word to make our tired eyes see the world in a totally new way. Playwrights such as Shakespeare summon other worlds into existence and novelists like Dickens give birth to a multiplicity of rich characters.

But when God appears in a work of art, the result is not impressive. Conrad's remark about Michelangelo's creation of Eve is typical of all his comments: 'Hunched and withdrawn, the creator looks as if he might regret the whole enterprise, which has already escaped from his control.' At the same time, the old myths of creation have lost all credibility.

Comments

[bdr]

I'm halfway through the Klein, and I'm jangly. Read it.