Zoning the Past: Brokers, Babbitts, and the Memory Work of Commercial Real Estate

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-311
Author(s):  
JAMES S. MILLER
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Commercial Real Estate ◽  
American Business ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Commercial Development ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Development ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Modern Business

From the moment of its publication in 1922, Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt was widely hailed as a text that harnessed the tactics of literary realism to the ambitions of social science. Over the years, in fact, critics have consistently linked Lewis's dissection of a crass, puerile, and materialistic white-collar culture to a conception of the novel as barely fictionalized ethnography – a conceit that has scripted the author as the twentieth century's foremost “cartographer” of American business life. Taking this fact as its starting point, this essay shows how Lewis's efforts to create an ethnographic record of modern business life ultimately encoded an even deeper commentary on the peculiar role that industrial–commercial development played in shaping the ways white-collar Americans thought about, valued, and pursued traces of their putative “heritage.” Rather than simply depict industrial–commercial society's destruction of the past, I argue, Babbitt instead labored to create a necessary genealogy for this regime: one that provided the nation's new, forward-lurching order with the kind of temporal coherence and historical context that its own ascendance seemed most directly to expunge. In making such an argument, this essay seeks to query a long-standing presumption within public memory studies that for years has construed the idea(l)s of historical recovery and the operations of commercial capitalism as fundamentally, if not inherently, incompatible. Balefully derided for mass-producing and mass-marketing a commodified pastness, dismissed as tools for replacing authentic history with ersatz heritage, modern development practices have stood for the vast majority of critics as proof of Americans' fundamental disconnection from their common and authentic history. Seeking to complicate this view, this essay shows instead how Babbitt can be read as a powerful counterexample to such logic – one that casts modernization less as an adversary than as an adjunct to prevailing modes of public recollection.

Mapping the Boosterist Imaginary: Colonial Williamsburg, Historical Tourism, and the Construction of Managerial Memory

2006 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 51-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES S. MILLER
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Development ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Commercial Development ◽  
The Past ◽  
Colonial Williamsburg ◽  
Cultural Conservation ◽  
Collective Remembering

Abstract With very few exceptions, existing scholarship on public memory in America has tended to script commercial-industrial ““development”” as the implacable adversary of legitimate collective remembering. Indeed, it has become a virtual article of faith that any attempt at commercially underwritten historical reconstruction involves, by definition, an act of historical falsification. This essay sets about to revise this longstanding conceit by pondering some of the specific ways that industrial and commercial development practices came during the early twentieth century to be imagined as technologies for producing new and viable models of a specifically white-collar history. To make this argument, I focus on the phenomenon of historical tourism, a movement that gained popularity in the 1920s and 30s (typified by such ventures as Henry Ford's Greenfield Village and John D. Rockefeller's Colonial Williamsburg), which dedicated itself to reconstructing vestiges of America's ““bygone”” past. Using Colonial Williamsburg as my case study, I explore how the planners and promoters behind this movement forged a discourse of historical reconstruction designed to make the tactics of industrial-commercial development compatible with the vaunted ideals of historical recovery and cultural conservation. More specifically, I show how this discourse labored to imagine the past itself as a useful and fungible resource: a raw material to be taken up, managed, and improved by the agents of the modern corporate-capitalist order.

Realizing the Past: History and Spectacle in Balzac's Adieu

2002 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-99
Author(s):  
Maurice Samuels
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Past History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Revolution Of 1848

IN BALZAC'S Adieu (1830), a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars attempts to cure his lover of the madness she suffered while accompanying his regiment on the Russian campaign by reconstructing, on his estate in France, an exact replica of the battlefield on which she lost her sanity. A river is dug, peasants are costumed as soldiers, bridges are built and burned. The ex-soldier's heroic effort at historical representation succeeds, but at a price: restored to ''reality'' when confronted with the scene, the woman drops dead a moment later. Itself something of a battlefield for critics, this text has provoked numerous reflections on the nature and politics of literary ''Realism,'' most of which ignore the ways in which the text intersects with its historical context. This article shows how Balzac's novella offers a critique of the way the past was being turned into a spectacle by the new Romantic literary and visual techniques of historical representation invented in the period following the French Revolution. In such contemporary forms of historical entertainment as the panorama and the historical melodrama, realistic representations of the past were offered up as the ground on which postrevolutionary subjectivities could be formed. Balzac's Adieu exposes the threats - to subjectivity, to the notion of political progress - of just such a spectacularly authentic representation of the past. In this founding work of ''Realism,'' the era's obsession with history is shown to have dangerous - and even deadly - consequences. Balzac's text thus foreshadows the analyses made by Marx and Tocqueville of the Revolution of 1848, which describe how the revolutionaries failed because they were fixated on the spectacle of prior revolutions. Unlike Lukáács, who argued that Realism can be understood as the application of the techniques of the Romantic historical novel to the events of the present, this article argues that many of the works we think of as ''Realist'' involve a rejection of Romantic modes of looking at the past. By depicting protagonists who are themselves Romantic historians and who inevitably come to bad ends as a result of their historical obsessions, Adieu and later Realist texts at once incorporate and mark their difference from the kinds of historical narratives produced by Romanticism and its spectacular incarnations.

Holism, Chinese Medicine and Systems Ideologies: Rewriting the Past to Imagine the Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker Scheid
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Us ◽  
Shared Objective ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.

Moving Figures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey Kai Nelson Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sixth Generation ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
Raymond Williams

This book examines how the films of the Chinese Sixth Generation filmmaker Jia Zhangke evoke the affective “felt” experience of China’s contemporary social and economic transformations, by examining the class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual, and entrepreneur that are found in the films. Each chapter analyzes a figure’s socio-historical context, its filmic representation, and its recurring cinematic tropes in order to understand how they create what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling” – feelings that concretize around particular times, places, generations, and classes that are captured and evoked in art – and charts how this felt experience has changed over the past forty years of China’s economic reforms. The book argues that that Jia’s cinema should be understood not just as narratives that represent Chinese social change, but also as an effort to engage the audience’s emotional responses during this period of China’s massive and fast-paced transformation.

Cyber Peacekeeping: Critical Evaluation of Digital Blue Helmets Program

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
Fahad Nabeel
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Threat Detection ◽  
Information And Communications Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Research Article ◽  
Un Peacekeeping ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Communications Technologies ◽  
Future Potential

In 2016, the United Nations (UN) launched the Digital Blue Helmets (DBH) program under its Office of Information and Communications Technologies (OICT). The launching of DBH was a continuation of a series of steps that the UN and its related agencies and departments have undertaken over the past decade to incorporate cyberspace within their working methodologies. At the time of inception, DBH was envisioned as a team capacitated to act as a replica of a physical peacekeeping force but for the sole purpose of overseeing cyberspace(s). Several research studies have been published in the past few years, which have conceptualized cyber peacekeeping in various ways. Some scholars have mentioned DBH as a starting point of cyber peacekeeping while some have proposed models for integration of cyber peacekeeping within the current UN peacekeeping architecture. However, no significant study has attempted to look at how DBH has evolved since its inception. This research article aims to examine the progress of DBH since its formation. It argues that despite four years since its formation, DBH is still far away from materializing its declared objectives. The article also discusses the future potential roles of DBH, including its collaboration with UN Global Pulse for cyber threat detection and prevention, and embedding the team along with physical peacekeepers.

‘I AM’: Indigenous consciousness for authenticity and leadership

Leadership ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 174271502199959
Author(s):  
Chellie Spiller
Keyword(s):  
True Self ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future

This article encourages a move away from the excessively inward gaze of ‘to thine own self be true’ and explores ‘I AM’ consciousness as a starting point. An I AM approach encourages a move from the measurable self to the immeasurable expansiveness and mystery of our own becoming. It is to step beyond the lines drawn around the ‘true self’ or the lines that others would have us draw. I AM consciousness reflects an ancient Indigenous thread that echoes through millennia and reminds humans that we are a movement through time, and each person is a present link to the past and the future, woven into a fabric of belonging.

scholarly journals Dynamic Quantum Games

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vassili N. Kolokoltsov
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Repeated Games ◽  
Dynamic Games ◽  
Quantum Control ◽  
Diffusion Processes ◽  
Natural Class ◽  
Quantum Games ◽  
Technical Problems ◽  
Modern Development ◽  
Starting Point

AbstractQuantum games represent the really twenty-first century branch of game theory, tightly linked to the modern development of quantum computing and quantum technologies. The main accent in these developments so far was made on stationary or repeated games. In this paper, we aim at initiating the truly dynamic theory with strategies chosen by players in real time. Since direct continuous observations are known to destroy quantum evolutions (so-called quantum Zeno paradox), the necessary new ingredient for quantum dynamic games must be the theory of non-direct observations and the corresponding quantum filtering. Apart from the technical problems in organizing feedback quantum control in real time, the difficulty in applying this theory for obtaining mathematically amenable control systems is due partially to the fact that it leads usually to rather non-trivial jump-type Markov processes and/or degenerate diffusions on manifolds, for which the corresponding control is very difficult to handle. The starting point for the present research is the remarkable discovery (quite unexpected, at least to the author) that there exists a very natural class of homodyne detections such that the diffusion processes on projective spaces resulting by filtering under such arrangements coincide exactly with the standard Brownian motions (BM) on these spaces. In some cases, one can even reduce the process to the plain BM on Euclidean spaces or tori. The theory of such motions is well studied making it possible to develop a tractable theory of related control and games, which can be at the same time practically implemented on quantum optical devices.

scholarly journals Quality and Operations Management in Food Supply Chains: A Literature Review

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yong He ◽  
Hongfu Huang ◽  
Dong Li ◽  
Chunming Shi ◽  
Sarah J. Wu
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Supply Chains ◽  
Operations Research ◽  
Operations Management ◽  
Food Supply ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Food Supply Chains ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point

We present a literature review on quality and operations management problems in food supply chains. In food industry, the quality of the food products declines over time and should be addressed in the supply chain operations management. Managing food supply chains with operations management methods not only generates economic benefit, but also contributes to environmental and social benefits. The literature on this topic has been burgeoning in the past few years. Since 2005, more than 100 articles have been published on this topic in major operations research and management science journals. In this literature review, we concentrate on the quantitative models in this research field and classify the related articles into four categories, that is, storage problems, distribution problems, marketing problems, and food traceability and safety problems. We hope that this review serves as a reference for interested researchers and a starting point for those who wish to explore it further.

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