In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Tim Luke about his book Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society, recently published in a new edition by Telos Press and available for 20% off in our online store. Their discussion covers a range of topics, including the definition of informational society, the transformation of consumers into data and capital assets, the shift toward permissive individualism and consumerism, the commodification of tradition and religion by televangelism, the rise of politics as televisual spectacle, the changing character of social movements, and the role of critics and intellectuals. Listen the podcast here or through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, or your preferred podcast provider.
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The rage about corona and its consequences has evidently elicited a mental disturbance with global reach. Every insanity has now become acceptable—on the condition that the insanity claims to be of the “left,” i.e., anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, etc. Whoever wants to keep it at a distance will be silenced. This has come to be called “cancel culture.” While the loudspeakers still boom about the political correctness of variety, diversity, and multiculturalism, we are living in fact in a radically illiberal period that no longer permits discussions. Germany has become incapable of debates—this is the result of the fanatic moralization of all life questions. The reader may recall observations made in 2013 by Professor Bruno Chaouat of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities regarding the strange quotation, or misquotation, of Emmanuel Levinas by Judith Butler. In one of her recent books, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Butler quotes Levinas as having said that Palestinians are “faceless.” Such a statement was obviously pure invention on her part and in no way figures in the text she claims it comes from: “Israël, éthique et politique.” Many of her epigones jumped to her defense, hardly allowing a serious debate on methods and ethics of scholarship. |
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As has been observed about Russian and Japanese modernisms, Chinese modernism was initiated with a sense of lack: the contact with an Other civilization (e.g., that of the West) more capable of controlling reality, one more materially powerful. If revolution is a rupture with the past, the Chinese revolution constituted a rupture with a relationship to space that flowed through the subjective experience of poetry, and its replacement with an ongoing process of rationalization, mapping, understanding—one often initiated by colonizers, whether the Westerners in the treaty ports, or the Japanese in the North. In other words, a subject trained to interact with an environment on the basis of a tradition of poetry, painting, and landscape architecture, in which the self was holistically internalized into a larger built environment, was forced to confront an environment in the process of transformation: mountains became mines, forests became timber, and of course, humans became factory workers.[3] 
For the outsider, the metropolis—a visual, tangible representation of the economic activities that it sites—appears to be endlessly seductive, complicated, and enthralling. And yet, for the urbanites themselves, both the skyline and the economy that it harbors inspire tedium; when will these games terminate, these spectacles that bring us no closer to a utopian community but merely run down the clock prior to the moment of judgment? What appears superficially to be busyness (e.g., business) is in fact a gigantic conspiracy for the wasting of everybody’s time, resources, and cognitive ability. At least, that is the way that it appeared to the revolutionary urban intellectuals of East Asia’s 1930s, both those from Tokyo as well as those from Shanghai; the former group, motivated by a critique of capitalism, would be involved in the creation of much of the built structure of an East Asian modern, while the latter became architects of the Chinese Communist Revolution. The revolutionary impulse of the Japanese progressives in Manchuria was realized as technocracy; however, deeper insecurities about the nature of capitalist modernity haunted the thoughts and work of the men who, while articulating a system of modern infrastructure across the Great Northern Wasteland, simultaneously brooded upon the limited and constricting nature of the society within which they existed. 
