Kiron Skinner is a Telos Editorial Associate. The following post originally appeared on the Hoover Institution’s Advancing a Free Society blog.
Success in Iowa is no guarantee of subsequent victories, but candidates and their advisers who dismiss the importance of the caucuses do so at their own peril. The first nominating contest of the presidential election year may give momentum to the victor and those candidates who perform above expectations. The caucuses also have important lessons for the candidates, whose challenge is to discern those lessons and make course corrections in time for the primaries that quickly follow.
The political disorder grows ever thicker. As of this writing, the European financial crisis seems as far away from resolution as ever, although the same complaint might have pertained three months ago nor is the diagnosis likely to lose its validity three months hence. The eurozone insists on tumbling toward an economic catastrophe that may drag the rest of the world down as well. Meanwhile prospects for a liberalizing democracy in the former Communist empire have largely vanished from living (or incarcerated) memory, and the trajectory of the Arab Spring poses more questions than answers. To be sure, things may still take a turn for the good, and the ignominious ends of some of the dictators merit celebration. Yet deserving candidates for violent overthrow and execution remain in power, in Damascus and Tehran, terrorizing their populations, amidst a larger civil war throughout the Middle East. Much of this disorder has profound local roots, stemming from competition among alternative religious traditions, political models, and economic agenda. But some of the instability results as well from the loss of ballast in the wake of the American retreat, itself a symptom of the chaos of American politics. The pre-primary period optimizes neither political virtue nor sober leadership, but even with that qualification, this lead-up to the 2012 electoral season stands out for its chilling hopelessness. It is hard to imagine a happy end to the story. The power of the state continues to expand, which undermines the integrity of individuals, but its capacity to influence the economy nonetheless diminishes. Disorder surrounds us, and the center gives way. Is there room for civic virtue? 
Academic discourse in the twenty-first century has undergone profound transformations. With new methods of knowledge production and consumption brought about by an increase in electronic resources and databases as well as the advent of social networking, there have been widespread changes in scholarly publishing, centers of knowledge, and knowledge communities. In his article “Performing Knowledge: Cultural Discourses, Knowledge Communities, and Youth Culture,” Mark W. Rectanus provides a compelling look at the shift in the significance and acquisition of knowledge resulting from changes in the publishing industry, literary reception, and access to different kinds of information as they stand in relation to a new “pedagogy of media”—a new way of teaching and learning in our technologically advanced age. Rectanus asserts that such developments require a revised conception of what it means to acquire knowledge as well as what constitutes scholarly knowledge. 
Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project is likely the most jarring and ambitious work of cultural history of the twentieth century. Breathtaking in its scope, brilliant in its insight, and stamped throughout with his inimitable style, it is the unfinished, thirteen-year project Benjamin attempted as an encyclopedic capture of the emergence of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century. Touching on everything from urban development to literary analysis and revolutionary consciousness, it presents a vast palimpsest of quotations, theoretical reflections, and minutiae taken from the most quotidian aspects of Parisian life. In a recent Telos article, Howard Eiland, one of the translators responsible for bringing the Passagenwerk into English, offers a compelling overview of Benjamin’s text and a stable set of theoretical coordinates with which to navigate it. His essay, “Superimposition in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project,” does this by putting forth the figure of the flâneur as the organizing locus of the book and by developing his unique experience of the world as central not only to the text but also to Benjamin’s theoretical project as a whole. By elaborating this through the notion of “superimposition,” Eiland outlines the singular experience of the flâneur and connects it with the broader historical and political dimensions to which it opens. 
