Ayn Rand was on the radio this morning

Or at least archival recordings of her were. Absent context, I imagine she might well have resented such 'public' (scare quotes intentional) coverage, but as it was a piece naming her the ideological darling of conservative Congress, she might have appreciated the publicly-sponsored radio piece, if not the taxes responsible. 

What struck me, as John Boehner and Republican Congress Inc. waxed poetic about her prescient treatment of Occupy Wall Street's and others' witch hunt of the country's beset and atrociously victimized job creators in Atlas Shrugged, was how the issues of scale and agency were variously treated in The Corporation and Couldry's article. The former contends (and I think we all agree) that transnational corporations benefit from all the might associated with international scale, along with all the protections conferred upon an individual agent, minus a moral compass. Ira Jackson avers, capitalism is "amoral" (The Corporation); it is just a system. Milton Friedman asserts it makes no more sense to expect a corporation to act ethically than a building (The Corporation). Cute. Only a cursory examination of a building or a plan for a building tells us volumes about the political economy and social considerations (or lack thereof) constitutive of it, so we can rightly expect to look at corporations for cultural reflections (or lack thereof) and make normative assessments. Neither Friedman, nor any of the CEOs interviewed in the film, and certainly not any of Congress's Ayn Rand Reading Club devotees, seem the least bit preoccupied with the paradox of crying, "You hurt our corporate feelings," given the fact that the only human qualities inherent to a corporation are its individual rights and the shareholders that drive its increasingly immoral actions. 

Couldry's interest in scale is different, certainly, but he understands what the defendants of capitalism won't. "Scale is always a social construction" (28). Economic processes are not an inevitability. When we say that something is "too big to fail," we must first agree what "failure" means. Because at this point I think we can safely say that the only people in this recession that have gotten jobs are bankers. . . who have done a terrible job with their probationary extension. This is not Couldry's vantage point, but his call for "a more improvised microfocus" (28) is well-taken. The "too big" agents have obscured our possibilities for possibility, for a world where we really do look first to Sen's capability theory, knowing and not proposing that social and political values are more important than are economic ones. Moreover, and this is something I hope to speak about a bit more tomorrow, I feel as though Couldry might have written this piece with the Out the Window project in mind. (It's not my project, I'm just the researcher, so I really don't flatter myself by making this connection.) It is at once a hopeful expression of local possibilities and innovations, where people are generating "new contexts of public communication and trust, whether as frameworks primarily for consumption or for citizen participation (or both)" (26), as well as an institutional learning moment. Wuthnow's emergent "institutional frameworks" and "action sequences" abound, more successful at the grassroots level and increasingly complicated, almost stymied, as we approach the institutional scale.