emerging markets: history of a buzz word

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Yves Smith:

...Participants in public policy debates are often insensitive to how much ground they cede when they embrace the nomenclature used by their opponents. My personal bete noire is "free markets" which is actually an oxymoron. Another is "entitlements" which is code for "welfare." Why don’t people who favor programs like Social Security call them “social insurance’? Or “economic stabilizers”?

Or "catch a break programs"? The above quote precedes a guest post on Smith's blog by Robin Broad delving into the history of the term "emerging markets":

Perhaps the first use of the term “emerging” was in fact a positive one (as far as I’m concerned) – coming from the 1955 Bandung Conference, best known for leading to the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement. At that point, the new “emerging” powers or nations or countries referred to former colonies gaining independence. Indonesian President Sukarno’s vision was that these “new emerging forces” would rival the colonial forces at places like the United Nations.

But what a difference almost three decades makes. Jump ahead to 1981 and the onset of the reign of free-market fundamentalism – when a man named Antoine van Agtmael coined the term “emerging market economy” as an alternative to “developing country.” And van Agtmael’s perch?: Deputy director of the capital markets department of the International Finance Corporation, the private-sector arm of the World Bank Group in Washington, D.C.

A side note: “Emerging markets” also was used by some after the collapse of the Soviet Union to refer to the “2nd world,” the former Soviet republics and satellites that were said to be “emerging” from socialism or communism to private-sector capitalism. (These are now more commonly referred to as “transition” economies.)

Back to the main plot: In the mid-1990s, van Agtmael’s “emerging markets” became even more defined and popularized – thanks to Bill Clinton’s activist Commerce Department under the leadership of Ron Brown. The term is typically associated with Jeffrey Garten, Brown’s Undersecretary of Commerce, and author of a speech (and later a book) entitled “The Big Emerging Markets.” The U.S. government’s concern wasn’t the poor and marginalized or poverty reduction in these poorer nations, but rather the roughly 10 countries “with the greatest potential for future export growth” (as Secretary Brown phrased it).

Meaning the growth of sales by US companies to various countries' former colonies. As the US gradually declines to GOP-led banana republic status, multinational capital is discovering new emerging markets in our own impoverished heartland: buyers' markets, that is, for labor, public infrastructure, coal, shale gas, student loans, foreclosed home rentals, etc. A rumored Obama pick for Commerce would certainly abet this trend.

criticismcrit

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no_dopamine

The bottom comment is based on an old '60s "head" joke that may or may not have survived but I like the idea of basing all criticism on the four criteria in the avianism tweet. "The painting had style and creativity and it might endure but for the absence of the dopamine factor." Or, "what this song lacks in originality, instant-classic appeal, and, let's face it, panache, is more than compensated by the awesome head rush it gives you."

surfing with "surfing with lacan"

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Will Neibergall quotes Slavoj Žižek on electronic storage devices that consume so we don't have to -- think unwatched movies on Tivo. You get a warm glow thinking about your library that is of equal if not superior pleasure to actually watching the films. Žižek likens this invisible body of knowledge to a Lacanian "big Other," referencing, presumably, the primal mirror that continues to define you in some way as a person.

Žižek also likens Other-influence to Mexican soap operas, where an unseen director tells actors what to do through earpieces, as they are performing. In both cases someone is affected by consensual, yet secret, knowledge: as Neibergall phrases it, "the director is the big Other, dictating the rules the actors will follow as they go about their dialogue, but at the same time the big Other only exists as the sum of the practices of its subjects, who enforce it."

Neibergall (by way of Žižek) finds this self-enforced dialogue happening on the Internet, where one participates in pseudo-debates just to be doing something (interactivity!) and each of these conversations is easily shunted aside to a bookmark or half-consumed browser tab.

a lot of the talking that goes on about how artists and others relate with the internet and how the internet is affecting our social space meets somewhere with zizek’s analysis, relegating sources of inspiration and intelligent discussion to a new tab (the VCR box) while engaging mindlessly in the present business in other, more important tabs (pseudo-activity, lazy art, mindless debates, simulated criticism and scrutiny). i guess, if this is one of the ways in which the symbolic accesses lacan’s big other, and the big other is here given by the internet, we can arrive at a precise explanation of the internet as an obstacle to change and meaningful criticism in the art communities and other communities..

Neibergall concludes:

the whole attempt to understand what the internet is doing to the people (like me) who are growing up virtually dependent on it presumes a lacanian framework of social design, in which we all participate in the internet’s dominance over our lives knowing that it’s probably pulling a significant portion of the strings.

This is a weirdly circular idea: pseudo-participation gives rise to a monolithic, illusory "Internet" that in turn governs our actions. Sounds about right. Žižek proposes to challenge such a loop by pulling out of it: "the first truly critical step is to withdraw into passivity and to refuse to participate." The danger of that -- ask any blogger who has, say, de-enabled commenting -- is that people will say "dude doesn't know how to use social." So you have to be tough.