For the last few weeks, we’ve learned, over and over again, why the burqa must be banned. A visible face is, apparently, central to Western modernity (which is why, one imagines, that new-fangled device known as the telephone will never catch on). Besides, outlawing the burqa is a feminist cause – to preserve women’s right to wear what they want, we must legislate so they can’t wear what they want. Or something.

You’d think that that the anti-burqa crowd would cheer the victory of Lebanese born Rima Fakih in the Miss USA contest. That pageant requires entrants to parade in swimsuits as well as evening gowns. Fakih is a Muslim woman prepared to show rather more than her face. Good news, right?

Well, not so much. Today, the wingnut blogs are abristle with outrage.

Sparrow’s whole post should be read. He’s quite correct, in my view, to be concerned about both what he calls “pathological anti-Islam” and the worrying parallels with anti-Semitic discourse in a lot of the rubbish that’s written around the place.

NB: Previous discussion of burqa ban proposals on LP here.

It would appear that the Nobel committee at least partially picked Obama for his renewed faith in public discourse to bring about peace and change in the world. Tim Rutten argues in the Los Angeles Times that the award was rightly given to the President for “words” rather than “deeds.” I would further argue the prize most appropriately went to Obama for finding a midway through Weber’s predicament in the above passage. Obama’s rhetoric has sought to enchant the political realm through sublime values that no human being can live without—for example, through the trope of “hope”. At the same time, these are values that are grounded in direct and personal human relations, or in abductive intersubjectivity rather than deductive, non-contextual assertion. There is much to critique in Obama’s administration, but it has at least evidenced an empirical concern for active listening and diplomacy as consequential in politics.

I think that’s a very consequential set of observations. It also makes me wonder if there’s not a continuity between Bush and Obama’s administration (beyond the obvious maintenance of core aspects of the US’ war-imperial machine, which is at the heart of the left objection to his acceptance of the award). Thinking back to the infamous comments from a Bush administration official about remaking reality, it strikes me that both administrations are fundamentally postmodern in their use of rhetorical discourse to reshape facts. That’s about as far as you can get from Weber’s modern government as “administration of things”.

It would seem that I’m not the only person facilitating such conversations in a university context. Melissa Gregg, from Sydney Uni, wrote a really ace post the other day about some issues which had arisen in tutorials she convened about Facebook and employers’ demands for profiles as part of the recruitment and selection process. She writes about this at home cooked theory:

…for me, the most disturbing revelation came in tutorials, when students started talking about how many employers are now asking for print-outs of Facebook profiles from job applicants. It sounded particularly common in entertainment and service industries, even though I detected some were suggesting it was commonplace in corporate interviews as well–that it should be taken for granted if you were looking to work for a significant firm.

Her remarks sparked some interesting comments, and prompted a post on the legal issues surrounding this sort of demand by Legal Eagle at Skepticlawyer. Legal Eagle’s post, as usual assured in its comprehensiveness and insight, correctly notes that the law has not kept up with technology in this domain, as in many others.

There’s another set of issues arising here about the increasing blurring of professional and personal identity. A lot has been written about emotional labour, and the breakdown of boundaries between work and personal life. There’s another angle – following Norbert Elias’ sociological thought – about informalisation as a secular process in modernity. But it would be very interesting indeed if there were to be some more research and discussion focused on the impact of social media on these broader trends, and concomitantly, on their impact on social media, privacy and subjectivity (and indeed on how human or workplace rights are affected by the distribution of personality throughout webspaces). Social media reveals the distributed nature of subjectivity and cognition and undermines the unity of the individual subject of legal rights. It strikes me that social networking is a key node accelerating, or perhaps accentuating, cultural shifts which have been on the boil for some time.

The pictures that emerge are of ambivalent participants, and clunky principles that demand attention. The winning photograph is a local solar installer in a residential project in South Africa. The photographer has tried to use an on camera fill flash, but doesn’t seem to have applied any exposure compensation, so the subject – an installer awkwardly crouching – is rather underexposed. The third placed photo, ‘Indian Sugar Power’, also feels like an uneasy moment has been captured. A boy is holding a loose sugar cane on a (presumably moving – we can’t tell because the shutterspeed is set too high) truck and glaring, unemotionally into the camera. The four placed photo, ‘Mount Bagasse’, actually shows some aesthetic effort, though it’s hardly in line with the intent of the competition – to showcase the way the CDM is ‘changing lives’. Instead, the subjects are thoroughly dominated by technology and the flattened by the landscape as if in an ironic homage to the romantic modernists.

Though the aesthetics of industrial waste gas destruction are conspicuously absent from the photo contest (they make up a disproportionate number of Certified Emissions Reductions), the GAO provides a nuanced view from experts on the issue. Some believed it a good move because it probably wouldn’t have happened anyway, and these cheap ($1, sold on for $25) offsets are finite and rapidly diminishing.

However the sense that the CDM, in a Frankenstein-esque move has overtaken its original role as provider of, well, finance for some clean development projects and devoured other development pathways (such as direct legislation) is perhaps the most notable punchline of the GAO report, which notes that

… using the CDM to involve developing nations in efforts to address climate change may not always have positive effects. For example, some experts said the mechanism encourages host countries to rely on external funding from industrialized nations. Others went further, saying the CDM can dampen or delay efforts by host countries to reduce emissions on their own. The CDM does not credit emission reductions that result from newly imposed policies or standards, in part because it would be difficult to demonstrate that emission reductions were a direct result of the law. This may pose a dilemma for host countries that want to implement low-carbon policies but also want to attract investment through the CDM. Given these considerations, many experts and researchers have said the CDM would best be used as a temporary tool to help transition countries toward broader commitments (p.38).

Which isn’t to say that policy insiders are aware of this problem. Flows through the CDM will almost certainly be explicitly pulled if developing countries don’t signal an intent to get on board an international mitigation effort down the track. Perhaps the most telling data from the work of the auditors was this graph which shows the inherent ambiguities in the notion of ‘additionality’:

The CDM isn’t just asphyxiating alternative technological development, but propping up industries that were well on their way too:

According to a review of available research, between one-third and one-half of CDM projects involve some type of technology transfer. Such transfer is much more common in certain types of projects, such as industrial gas projects that utilize “end-of-pipe” technologies developed in Europe and Japan. Apart from industrial gas destruction, the project types most likely to involve technology transfer appear to be wind power, landfill gas capture, and agriculture (biogas). However, one expert pointed out that most of the wind power capacity represented in the CDM project pipeline is sited in India and China, countries that have supported domestic wind industries prior to the CDM (p.44).

In Australia, of course, has devised its own solution to the question concerning technology. Cars in, wind out. One might be forgiven for thinking that our debate is completely arse backwards if we can’t even figure out how to transition away from fossil fuel dependent stationery energy, let alone what some abstract carbon target should be. Howard was a denialist through and through, but at least he put his priorities on the table – like looking after Australia’s natural advantages. Like having babies. and digging things up.

On a more positive – if entirely unrelated – note, get your daily does of hope and the sublime in one hit from Sarah Wilson’s extraordinary documentary slideshow of Texas School for the Blind prom.

Update: Point Carbon is reporting that a ruling on whether to include new HFC-23 production in the CDM has been delayed until June. Looks like it’s part of a broader trend of delays to hit the process.

Elsewhere: Kevin Smith in New Matilda: Money Can Save the World:

The winners are energy intensive companies, whose profit margins have benefited enormously in the short term through the lucrative trade in the credits themselves. Because of fundamental flaws in the design of the CDM, industry has been able to buy cheap carbon credits to meet their emissions commitments and avoid the cost of shifting to low carbon technologies. Add these savings to potential windfalls from new trading options in derivatives and other exotic financial services and it’s no surprise there is such a gold rush for this lucrative market.

Conversely, Southern countries have lost out enormously. Many projects, such as the waste incinerator in India, have been imposed on communities without their prior, informed consent…

Political will must instead be directed at ensuring that Northern countries meet their commitment to providing finance to the South that isn’t tied to undemocratic institutions like the World Bank and that doesn’t lock those countries further into the spiral of debt.

In 1999, the celebrated historian Eric Hobsbawm participated in a range of conversations with Italian writer Antonio Polito, subsequently published as On The Edge of The New Century. One of the most striking points Hobsbawm made was that the secular trend of the increasing ability of states to prevent non-state violence on their own territory went into reverse in the 1970s. That’s not the sort of declining power of the state that globalists normally talk of (preferring to see the state as losing power to the market), but it’s at the centre of a lot of what is happening in today’s world, and what is happening to make it a far less safe place. One could hardly imagine that a hypothetical Indian victory in war over Pakistan would render either that territory governable or India’s less violent. As well as assymetry in warfare, we’re also seeing the fruits of a deterritorialisation of identifications which can be pushed to the ultimate limit of death, and the state is also presenting itself as something far more akin to what “public” authority was in pre-modern history – a competing power centre among many. These shifts demand far more thinking through – because in many respects far too many of our political and social currents are still shaped by the concepts of a modernity now partially in ruins. One sociological thinker who’s been doing this hard work is Saskia Sassen, long one of the most interesting writers on globalisation, and she has an important article in Open Democracy on the implications of warfare over the space of the city, prompted by the Mumbai terror attacks.

There is a deeper transformation afoot. It is still rare but it is more frequently becoming visible. It is as if the centre no longer holds. Cities seem to be losing the capacity they have long had to triage conflict – through commerce, through civic activity. The national state, confronted with a similar conflict, has historically chosen to go to war. In my new research project – on cities and war – I am studying whether cities are losing this capacity and are becoming sites for a range of new types of violence.

Further, the new asymmetric wars have the effect of urbanising war. This brings with it a nasty twist: when national states go to war in the name of national security, nowadays major cities are likely to become a key frontline space. In older conventional wars, large armies needed large open fields or oceans to meet and fight, and these were the frontline spaces.

Today the search for national security may well become a source for urban insecurity.

The whole article can be read here.

Elsewhere: At the Global Sociology Blog, there’s a complementary post from SocProf where she also takes a look at Sassen’s work in the context of Mumbai as a space of globalisation.