Economics of Value, Cultural Endurance and Embodied Knowledge

From the Open Access Blogs.

The newsletters of Monocle, Semafor and E-Flux from May 5-7, 2024, paint a picture of a world in flux, grappling with economic uncertainties, geopolitical re-alignments, technological accelerations, and evolving cultural narratives. Across these diverse dispatches, from corporate boardrooms and international political stages to art pavilions and urban renewal projects, there is a palpable tension between established paradigms and emergent forces, prompting a deeper look at themes of corporate accountability and ethical revaluation, cultural persistence in the face of adversity, the fraught dynamics of global power and trade, the societal and ethical quandaries of technological advancement, the re-engagement with ecology and forgotten histories through art, and the critical interrogation of systemic errors and dominant narratives.

Corporate Conscience and the Economics of Value

Several snippets highlight a re-evaluation of corporate purpose and value beyond mere profit. Boeing’s appointment of a new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, who notably resides near the company’s engineering hub, signals an attempt to rebuild trust and quality by reconnecting leadership with the core production processes. This move can be seen as a practical application of creating “shared value,” where corporate success is intertwined with societal well-being and stakeholder trust, rather than solely shareholder returns (Porter & Kramer, 2011).

Gregory Scruggs’ account of Boeing’s leadership change reveals more than corporate restructuring—it reflects a latent tension in contemporary capitalism between technocratic alienation and geographic accountability. CEO Kelly Ortberg’s decision to live in Washington State rather than Virginia is symbolically potent; it suggests a re-alignment with the “techne” of production rather than with abstract financial oversight. It evokes Heidegger’s distinction between poiesis(revealing) and enframing (instrumental control), where Ortberg signals a return to production’s revealing aspect (Heidegger, 1977).

Boeing’s troubles, notably involving Spirit AeroSystems, illustrate the dangers of outsourcing in the neoliberal era. David Harvey’s (2005) analysis of “spatial fixes” is instructive here: corporations displace production for short-term profit, only to suffer systemic disintegration. The move to reinternalize supply chains suggests an effort at long-term stabilization—perhaps an instance of what Streeck (2014) calls “consolidation under pressure” in late capitalism.

Similarly, Claudio Marenzi of Herno critiques the luxury fashion industry’s overemphasis on balance sheets at the expense of customer value and artisanal quality. His call to return focus to craftsmanship and storytelling echoes a broader discontent with the perceived hollowness of hyper-consumerism and resonates with critiques of how capitalism can devalue intrinsic worth in favor of exchange value, a theme explored by thinkers from Marx to contemporary critics of neoliberalism. Max Weber’s (1905/2002) examination of the cultural roots of capitalism in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism provides a historical lens on how value systems shape economic behavior, a relevant backdrop to Marenzi’s plea for “soul” in production.

Claudio Marenzi’s critique of inflated margins in luxury fashion reveals a crisis not only of pricing but of meaning. His emphasis on value over price aligns with Georg Simmel’s (2004) understanding of fashion as both a form of individual expression and social imitation, where value is aesthetic, ethical, and relational rather than merely economic. His invocation of artisanal labor returns the focus to ergon—work as an ethical and cultural act.

His call to resist over-monetization gestures toward what Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) diagnose as the “new spirit of capitalism,” which cannibalizes creativity and autonomy for spectacle and surplus. Fashion becomes a moral site where capital either reifies or renews culture. The tension Marenzi observes is thus part of a broader dialectic between authenticity and commodification.

Revisiting Marenzi’s ethos again, we see a latent critique of “McFashion”—fast luxury as empty signifier. The invocation of artisanal practice and “irreplicability” aligns with Richard Sennett’s (2008) call for “craftsmanship” as a moral stance toward work. When Marenzi states that garments should reflect “the soul of the maker,” he is echoing a critique of alienated labor from Marx to Arendt.

This is also a form of narrative economics (Shiller, 2019), where fashion brands must articulate a story that customers find ethically and emotionally resonant. In an age of ESG skepticism and performative capitalism, returning to tangible quality is not nostalgia—it is strategic re-enchantment.

OpenAI’s decision to abandon its for-profit conversion in favor of a public benefit corporation model, following significant pushback, underscores the growing pressure on tech giants to consider the broader societal impact of their innovations, particularly in a field as transformative as artificial intelligence. This reflects ongoing debates about AI ethics and the responsibilities of developers, as explored by scholars like Kate Crawford (2021) in Atlas of AI, who maps the hidden human and environmental costs of AI.

Cultural Endurance and the Power of Place

Amidst global turbulence, the resilience of cultural expression and the significance of place emerge as vital counterpoints. The perseverance of Beirut’s arts institutions, like Hisham Jaber’s Metro al-Madina theatre, which favors the “light-hearted and sardonic over the tragic” in a city scarred by conflict, speaks to the enduring human need for joy and communal experience, even in hostile environments. This recalls the power of art to provide solace and foster collective identity, a theme often explored in literature emerging from conflict zones.

The segment on Hisham Jaber’s Metro al-Madina illuminates the enduring capacity of performance to serve as both catharsis and critique. In a city shaped by civil war and economic collapse, the theatre becomes a heterotopia in Foucault’s sense—a real place that counters the dominant order by staging alternative temporalities (Foucault, 1986).

Jaber’s embrace of satire and joy parallels Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) notion of the carnivalesque, where laughter becomes subversive. Beirut’s “unfunded” yet resilient theatre culture shows that infrastructure is not merely physical—it is a function of collective will, memory, and imagination. Artistic institutions in fragile contexts perform an ontological labor: they declare the city still alive, still desiring.

In Buenos Aires, the “Playón Red” initiative, where design firm Región Austral collaborates with residents to revitalize their neighborhood, highlights the importance of community knowledge and the use of elements like vibrant color to reinforce local identity and a “sense of belonging”. This aligns with humanistic geography’s emphasis on “place” as space imbued with human meaning and experience, distinct from abstract “space” (Tuan, 1977).

Alan Sonfist’s Land Art, particularly “Time Landscape” in New York and the community-driven “Growth Between the Cracks” in Turin, further exemplifies this by creating living public monuments that celebrate natural ecosystems and local environmental history, often in urban settings. His approach, engaging with non-human beings and collaborating with diverse communities, expands the notion of site-specificity in art beyond the purely formal, engaging with what Miwon Kwon (2004) terms the “unstable relationship between location and identity.”

Región Austral’s Playón Red project exemplifies a movement from top-down to embedded urbanism. Its method resonates with Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) concept of the “right to the city,” wherein residents are not subjects of urban planning but co-creators of space. The use of color not merely as decor but as social technology reaffirms the idea that aesthetics can reconfigure the social contract.

This is also an exercise in “third space” formation (Soja, 1996), where liminal areas—passageways, parks, rain gardens—become vibrant nodes of communal identity. It is a hopeful counter-model to what James Holston (2008) calls “insurgent citizenship,” showing that democratic space-making is not confined to protest but can unfold through design, care, and chromatic presence.

Geopolitical Theatrics and Economic Realignments

The newsletter offers a stark view of contemporary geopolitical maneuvering. Russia’s Victory Day parade is described not as a solemn commemoration but as “militaristic posturing” and an act of “intimidation,” using historical narratives to legitimize present conflicts. This instrumentalization of memory for political ends is a timeless tactic, but its visibility in the current global climate underscores the insights of realist thinkers like John Mearsheimer (2001), who posits that great powers are perpetually engaged in a struggle for dominance.

Alexis Self’s reflection on Russia’s Victory Day parade underscores a Baudrillardian spectacle: a simulation of historical continuity deployed to legitimate present aggression. The use of Nazi analogies to justify the invasion of Ukraine is, as Self implies, an “obscene” instrumentalization of memory (Baudrillard, 1994). History here becomes a theatre of myth, not of mourning or learning.

This phenomenon is inseparable from Carl Schmitt’s theory of political theology, where sovereign power defines exceptions and re-enchants the state through ritual. In Putin’s Russia, the parade is not just pageantry—it is sovereign self-assertion through aesthetic violence, aligning the sacred (memory) with the profane (intimidation).

The numerous reports on trade wars, from US-China tensions and the new India-UK trade deal aimed at insulating economies from US tariffs, to proposed US tariffs on Hollywood films, illustrate the “globalization paradox” described by Dani Rodrik (2011): the inherent tension between national sovereignty, democracy, and deep economic integration. These snippets reveal a world actively seeking to recalibrate economic dependencies and forge new alliances in response to protectionist pressures and the “ripple effects” of major power rivalries. The perceived decline in US global leadership, hinted at in discussions of its tourism and the weakening dollar, alongside China’s efforts to deepen ties in Latin America and its influence in the Vatican, paints a picture of a shifting global order.

The Double-Edged Sword of Technological Progress

Technology, particularly AI, figures prominently as both a source of immense potential and profound concern. The rapid increase in computing power for training AI models, potentially leading to “artificial general intelligence” within five years, excites and alarms in equal measure. This echoes the central concerns of Nick Bostrom’s (2014) Superintelligence, which outlines the potential existential risks. The “Creative Days Vienna” event, exploring the intersection of digital technologies with culture, and China’s narrowing tech gap with the US, fueled by “unprecedented state funding”, illustrate the global race for technological supremacy and its integration into all aspects of life.

The Uzbekistan Pavilion’s focus on the Sun Institute of Material Science, a Soviet-era solar furnace, offers a more nuanced perspective. It explores the “dual narratives” of modernist scientific heritage and future sustainable potential, using art to interrogate technology’s capacity to “change or adapt its meaning over time”. This project, alongside Alan Sonfist’s ecological art and the “Becoming Ocean” exhibition, emphasizes a critical yet hopeful engagement with science and technology in pursuit of ecological resilience.

Sonfist’s Seeds of Time project offers a profound ecological ontology. His use of soil, cracks, and native flora to map time and place evokes what Donna Haraway (2016) calls “staying with the trouble”—dwelling with the non-human and non-linear to recompose futures.

Time Landscape is not simply environmental art; it is a temporal commons that inscribes vegetal history into urban fabric. Like Anna Tsing’s (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World, Sonfist’s work values precarity as a condition of emergence. It suggests that art can act as ecological archive, resisting the speed and fungibility of capitalist temporality.

Art as Inquiry: Error, Ecology, and Embodied Knowledge

A striking thread across the artistic endeavors highlighted is the role of art as a mode of critical inquiry and a catalyst for rethinking established norms. The Croatian Pavilion’s “Intelligence of Errors” project, which treats errors in design and policy not as problems to be fixed but as “resources for learning and making new worlds”, champions a Popperean approach to knowledge growth through conjecture and refutation (Popper, 2002). This challenges conventional, often inflexible, urban planning practices by harvesting the “ingenuity of illegal vacation settlements” or reimagining brownfield sites.

The Croatian Pavilion’s “Intelligence of Errors” reframes error not as failure but as epistemic resource. This resonates with feminist and decolonial science studies, such as Haraway’s “situated knowledges” (1988), which stress the partiality and contingency of all knowledge. Here, spatial missteps—illegal buildings, brownfields, surpluses—become sites of design speculation and civic learning.

It is a vivid iteration of what Bruno Latour (1993) would call “reassembling the social”: treating technical and spatial failures as invitations to renegotiate our collective scripts. By inviting engagement with “Imaginariums,” the project aligns with speculative design thinking (Dunne & Raby, 2013), turning systemic breakdowns into prototypes for post-anthropocentric futures.

The profound engagement with ecology is evident in the “Planetary Peasants” exhibition, linking the 16th-century Peasants’ War to contemporary struggles for climate justice and the commons. It posits that “the Earth is not inhabited or even made by humans alone” and questions if agriculture can again become a “breeding ground for social change”. This aligns with Timothy Morton’s (2013) concept of “hyperobjects” like climate change, which force a radical rethinking of our interconnectedness, and Donna Haraway’s (2016) call for “staying with the trouble” by making “oddkin” in unexpected collaborations across species. The “Becoming Ocean” exhibition similarly uses artistic expression to foster a collective conversation about oceanic challenges and rethink human-nature relationships from a perspective of interdependence. Luxembourg’s “Sonic Investigations” pavilion explicitly aims to shift focus from the visual to the sonic, giving voice to “more-than-human agencies” and exploring “ecotones” – transitional spaces between ecosystems.

Artists like Simnikiwe Buhlungu, with her installations tracing “overlooked or invisible systems” through water, language, and time, and Ola Hassanain, questioning the “politics of inhabiting” and how power materializes spatially in sites of climate precarity and displacement, use art to make palpable the often-abstract forces shaping our world. This resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/1962) emphasis on the primacy of perception and the body as our fundamental means of being-in-the-world.

Challenging Representation and Rehearsing Refusal

The critique of representation and the assertion of agency are central to several artistic practices. The Ballroom Marfa exhibition “Los Encuentros” features Latinx artists dedicated to community collaboration and the “representation of Latinx culture to confront the accessibility of art spaces, colonial art histories, [and] the conditions of labor”. This work actively challenges who gets to tell stories and whose experiences are validated within art institutions, echoing postcolonial critiques like Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) seminal question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.

Paul Pfeiffer’s survey exhibition explores how media manipulation shapes our understanding of spectacle and celebrity, implicating the audience in processes of adoration and objectification. This critical look at media consumption aligns with Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) foundational insight that “the medium is the message,” where the form of communication itself shapes consciousness. Will Rawls’ performance and installation “[siccer]” directly engages with the politics of Black visibility and erasure, using voice, body, and chroma key staging to “explore how Blackness resists capture in spaces historically designed to erase it”.

Referencing Black performance theorists like Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman, Rawls stages the “economy of hypervisibility” while simultaneously enacting fugitivity and a “rehearsal of refusal”. This act of “insistently in process” work, which evades fixed meaning, can be seen as a performative strategy of resistance against oppressive representational regimes, perhaps echoing Judith Butler’s (1990) theories on the performativity of identity and the potential for subversive repetition.

Conclusion: The Polyphonic Present

In sum, these newsletters reflects a world grappling with profound structural shifts and ethical dilemmas. From corporate soul-searching and geopolitical posturing to artistic interventions that probe ecological crises and entrenched power dynamics, these snippets reveal a collective striving for new modes of understanding, operating, and coexisting. The emphasis on learning from error, valuing the local and the artisanal, fostering ecological consciousness, and challenging dominant narratives suggests a multifaceted search for resilience and meaning in an era defined by turbulence and transformation.

Taken together, these newsletter segments illuminate a world grappling with plural crises and responses—corporate realignment, artistic resilience, ecological repair, and geopolitical mythology. They reflect what Zygmunt Bauman (2000) calls “liquid modernity,” where institutions are fluid and precarious but still capable of reconstituting meaning through narrative, design, or resistance.

What is striking across domains—from fashion to urbanism, theatre to aerospace—is the recurring motif of re-rooting: in place, in history, in community. These are not nostalgic retreats but ethical reorientations. They suggest that amid fragmentation, there remain seams where the world might be stitched anew.

References

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[Written, Researched, and Edited by Pablo Markin. Some parts of the text have been produced with the aid of ChatGPT, OpenAI, and Gemini, Google, Alphabet, tools (May 8, 2025). The featured image is generated in Canva (May 8, 2025).]

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