(work in progress)
On the “Studying Globally at Bard” website, the first image the visitor is encountered with is a bird’s-eye view of the City Abroad. The densely-packed urban space is nestled around and between mountains, lit by the sun (of the southern hemisphere), extending toward the shore of a teal-blue and wavy ocean (ah, the unspoiled paradise of the 3rd world). The shot makes the earth seem round and small, though despite its familiarity to the student deeply entrenched in the global-village discourse of American liberal arts education, the view depicts something foreign, new, unfamiliar, worth zooming into. We are invited to learn more:
Why Study Abroad?
Study abroad can be a transformative experience in a student’s undergraduate education. Students return from abroad with fresh perspective on the Bard education, and other with ideas that serve as the foundation for their senior projects. Bard’s high expectations of student achievement extend to study abroad. Bard has developed a number of programs specifically designed to integrate students into foreign cultures and academic environments.
Especially when combined with related academic study and foreign language fluency, study abroad enables students to gain essential perspectives on the history, culture, and concerns of people around the globe. This includes such vital issues as globalization, democratization, human rights, development, culture, identity and the environment.
Marketed as an integral part of a Bard education, studying abroad promises a number of valuable assets to the motivated, high-achieving students and just as importantly, their primary sponsors (parents). Some obligatory/promising keywords include: perspective, integrate, culture, human rights, and globalization. Global Study is framed within the discourse of academia and educational enrichment, be it through its application in language acquisition, comparative economic and/or political systemology, or cultural fluency. These are the products being marketed, and sometimes they are also acquired. However, in mobilizing the imagination of the student of liberal arts, the experience is implicitly constructed as one that further equips him with the tools necessary to hold high-brow dinner conversation at the table with his elite cosmopolitan contemporaries.
Gayatri Spivak has enlightened students of globalization and cosmopolitanism in her articulation of the process of globality. Globality is the strategic rhetorical employment of globalization discourse that works to reaffirm and reproduce power hierarchies, be they neo-colonial, gendered, or otherwise. Spivak would urge us to re-read texts that employ the rhetorical devices of globality in order to make transparent these power structures and thus to see clearly the violent dynamics taking shape through talk of globalization. Thus, Global Study becomes less about the practical educational acquisitions it promises us and more about cultivating and enriching an elite class of globalists. Moreover, the marketing of the product only indulges in its superficiality until the moment of departure.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Cosmo-Patriotism: A Necessarily Limited Response to Immanuel Wallerstein (2.0)
by Frank Brancely
May 2009
Towards the end of the twentieth century a sickness struck the world. Not everyone died, but all suffered from it. The virus which caused the epidemic was called the “liberal virus.” This virus made its appearance around the sixteenth century within the triangle described by Paris-London-Amsterdam. The symptoms that the disease then manifested appeared harmless…But the virus traveled across the Atlantic and found a favorable place among those who, deprived of antibodies, spread it. As a result, the malady took on extreme forms.
The virus reappeared in Europe towards the end of the twentieth century, returning from America where it had mutated. Now strengthened, it came to destroy a great number of the antibodies that the Europeans had developed over the course of the three preceding centuries…
The virus caused among its victims a curious schizophrenia. Humans no longer lived as whole beings, organizing themselves to produce what is necessary to satisfy their needs (what the learned have called “economic life”) and simultaneously developing the institutions, rules, and customs that enable them to develop (what the same learned people have called “political life”), conscious that the two aspects of social life are inseparable. Henceforth, they lived sometimes as homo oeconomicus, abandoning to “the market” the responsibility to regulate their “economic life” automatically, and sometimes as “citizens,” depositing in ballot boxes their choices for those who would have responsibility to establish the rules of the game for their “political life.”
-Samir Amin. P.8 “The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World.”
What is clearer but that those living in the center, especially Americans, have difficulty imagining others as human? What then does it mean to be an American? Elaine Scarry states in her essay, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,” that the way we act toward “others” is shaped by the way we imagine them. If the states that belong to the center, following a world-systems analysis, enjoy a status that is only possible by the subordination of the periphery, which is in part an inability to see the humanity of other peoples, then what other solution is there but a global re-distribution of wealth, a global triumph of really-existing socialism? In order to resist, we must understand the system that subordinates us. How do we educate ourselves out of our condition? Wallerstein writes that from education we must not only learn that we are citizens of the world, but that we are locatable in specific “niches” in an unequal world.
"Being disinterested and global on one hand and defending one’s narrow interests on the other are not opposites but positions combined in complicated ways. Some combinations are desirable, others are not. Some are desirable, but not there, now but not then. Once we have learned this, we can begin to cope intellectually with our social reality." Wallerstein 124 (1)
What should be obvious is that education cannot be divorced from the economic or social question. In a global community, the pedagogy of education is an especially contested terrain. Educational spaces and practices in the core, in the public and private spheres, are more than ever dominated by the forces neo-liberalism. The capitalist system is blind at its center, and the methodologies and content of the classroom remain at the core of an oppressive, systemic reality. This is the problem that American youth are faced with today but are unable to see. This situation is not inevitable.
The White liberal student, such as the typical Bard student, is aloof as to precisely how and why he occupies his “niche.” The forces of capital have arranged it this way. This student enjoys an especially dominant position, politically, economically, and has the option of aggression toward the weak. He will enjoy the profit of capital made by his network, whether he realizes it or not. He might graduate with a major in “human rights” and have the capacity, according to the philosophy behind his education, to think critically about the forces that shape his present circumstances. What does this mean? If the promise is fulfilled, he can only gain a stained conscience. How could an awakening of consciousness be followed by anything but guilt for his privilege? His education, he finds, is only an additional layer of security to this promise. The exertion required to ensure his place near or among the bourgeoisie is minimal. Post an entry to the blog. One may feel sorry for his situation, but do not feel sorry for him. His ignorance, like his guilt, is built on the suffering of others. He perceives the suffering of others and assigns them either to forces beyond his agency, or he feels sorry for them and engages in “humanitarian” projects that are not only unwilling to seriously undermine the status quo, but perpetuate it by “managing the crisis.” The supremacy of the capitalist over the proletariat today is only noticed by those paying attention; built into this system are increasingly sublime and sophisticated disguises, justifications, and methods of dehumanization.
Those who do not have the forces of capital at their side may be no more or less submerged in the ideologies that envelop them but find themselves at the mercy of a corporate elite ever ready to attack and subjugate. Their education does not fail to be critical; it does not purport to be critical. “Instead of offering poor and disenfranchised youth decent schools and potential employment, the militarized state offers them the promise of incarceration” (Giroux 159). (2)
What becomes overwhelmingly necessary is a pedagogy that is impenetrable, that has yet to be penetrated by the virus of liberalism. Such a space for this certainly does not yet exist. And if it did, who could be trusted to ensure its success? Where would these new schools be located, who would be among their ranks, and what would they teach? These questions are central to the task of regaining humanity from a system that has stolen mortal life energy and with it human dignity.
"The struggle for humanization… is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny, but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed… Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both." Freire 21. (3)
The charity of a liberal institution like Bard College, in its multi-various humanitarian schemes or in the cloning and implantation of itself in spaces that are not yet thoroughly intellectually colonized, constitute the “false charity” through which “the strong” or “the oppressors” seek to perpetuate an unjust social order nourished by death, despair and poverty. Freire advises us that self-reliance, on the part of the oppressed, is needed for the oppressed themselves to realize the shackles that bind them to their oppressors, that this is an ongoing process.
The teachers, we now know, must be the oppressed themselves, or at least leaders among them who have perceived and articulated their subjective reality and are courageous enough to be self-critical in terms of their own social identity. Every oppressed man must be willing to confront the fact that, in this status quo, his sex is dominant. “Men (whom the virus struck in preference to women) not only became accustomed to it and developed the necessary antibodies, but were able to benefit from the increased energy that it elicited” (Amin 7). (4). The dominance of the White race over others, of men over women, of straightness over queerness, of the wealthy over the poor, manifests itself in explicit and not-so-explicit ways, and must be dissected and destroyed by those who seek to claim a new social order.
In his short essay “Neither Patriotism Nor Cosmopolitanism,” Wallerstein refers to the oppressed as “the weak.” (5). He insists that they will only overcome “disadvantage” if they insist on the principles of group equality. (6). To do this effectively, they may have to “stimulate group consciousness – nationalism, ethnic assertiveness, etc” (Wallerstein 122). Oppressed individuals must understand their commonality and seek to rupture the power that divides them from one another and from themselves (in a Foucauldian analysis). (7) But where to begin?
Wallerstein gives us “the concrete situation in the United States today.” The discourse turns to hegemony, which was the status it achieved by 1945 when its ideological line became supremely nationalist: America is the world’s greatest country and leader of the free world and defender of values of individual liberty (which are in fact the world’s values, i.e. Kantian categorical imperatives). The anti-systemic movements that shook the world began in the 1960/70s, and were undertaken by the oppressed. Did they succeed?
"Those who were excluded sought to be included, and those who were already included were most often inclined to keep eligibility for citizens’ rights defined narrowly, maintaining the exclusions. This meant that those who were seeking inclusion had to organize outside the parliamentary channels in order for their cause to be heard. That is, quite simply, they had to engage in demonstrative, rebellious, sometimes revolutionary activity." Wallerstein 52. (8).
(wallerstein)
Wallerstein stops short of elaborating what an “integrating patriotism” even means. We can only infer that it seeks the same ends as the anti-systemic failures, that is, integration of the oppressed and oppressor alike, their submergence in false consciousness. The difference is that this “integration patriotism” is, according to Wallerstein, a gesture that emanates from the camp of the oppressor. We might expect that the oppressed, given that the system is presenting a somewhat more visible fracture, will gradually begin to grasp the reality of their predicament.
May 2009
Towards the end of the twentieth century a sickness struck the world. Not everyone died, but all suffered from it. The virus which caused the epidemic was called the “liberal virus.” This virus made its appearance around the sixteenth century within the triangle described by Paris-London-Amsterdam. The symptoms that the disease then manifested appeared harmless…But the virus traveled across the Atlantic and found a favorable place among those who, deprived of antibodies, spread it. As a result, the malady took on extreme forms.
The virus reappeared in Europe towards the end of the twentieth century, returning from America where it had mutated. Now strengthened, it came to destroy a great number of the antibodies that the Europeans had developed over the course of the three preceding centuries…
The virus caused among its victims a curious schizophrenia. Humans no longer lived as whole beings, organizing themselves to produce what is necessary to satisfy their needs (what the learned have called “economic life”) and simultaneously developing the institutions, rules, and customs that enable them to develop (what the same learned people have called “political life”), conscious that the two aspects of social life are inseparable. Henceforth, they lived sometimes as homo oeconomicus, abandoning to “the market” the responsibility to regulate their “economic life” automatically, and sometimes as “citizens,” depositing in ballot boxes their choices for those who would have responsibility to establish the rules of the game for their “political life.”
-Samir Amin. P.8 “The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World.”
What is clearer but that those living in the center, especially Americans, have difficulty imagining others as human? What then does it mean to be an American? Elaine Scarry states in her essay, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,” that the way we act toward “others” is shaped by the way we imagine them. If the states that belong to the center, following a world-systems analysis, enjoy a status that is only possible by the subordination of the periphery, which is in part an inability to see the humanity of other peoples, then what other solution is there but a global re-distribution of wealth, a global triumph of really-existing socialism? In order to resist, we must understand the system that subordinates us. How do we educate ourselves out of our condition? Wallerstein writes that from education we must not only learn that we are citizens of the world, but that we are locatable in specific “niches” in an unequal world.
"Being disinterested and global on one hand and defending one’s narrow interests on the other are not opposites but positions combined in complicated ways. Some combinations are desirable, others are not. Some are desirable, but not there, now but not then. Once we have learned this, we can begin to cope intellectually with our social reality." Wallerstein 124 (1)
What should be obvious is that education cannot be divorced from the economic or social question. In a global community, the pedagogy of education is an especially contested terrain. Educational spaces and practices in the core, in the public and private spheres, are more than ever dominated by the forces neo-liberalism. The capitalist system is blind at its center, and the methodologies and content of the classroom remain at the core of an oppressive, systemic reality. This is the problem that American youth are faced with today but are unable to see. This situation is not inevitable.
The White liberal student, such as the typical Bard student, is aloof as to precisely how and why he occupies his “niche.” The forces of capital have arranged it this way. This student enjoys an especially dominant position, politically, economically, and has the option of aggression toward the weak. He will enjoy the profit of capital made by his network, whether he realizes it or not. He might graduate with a major in “human rights” and have the capacity, according to the philosophy behind his education, to think critically about the forces that shape his present circumstances. What does this mean? If the promise is fulfilled, he can only gain a stained conscience. How could an awakening of consciousness be followed by anything but guilt for his privilege? His education, he finds, is only an additional layer of security to this promise. The exertion required to ensure his place near or among the bourgeoisie is minimal. Post an entry to the blog. One may feel sorry for his situation, but do not feel sorry for him. His ignorance, like his guilt, is built on the suffering of others. He perceives the suffering of others and assigns them either to forces beyond his agency, or he feels sorry for them and engages in “humanitarian” projects that are not only unwilling to seriously undermine the status quo, but perpetuate it by “managing the crisis.” The supremacy of the capitalist over the proletariat today is only noticed by those paying attention; built into this system are increasingly sublime and sophisticated disguises, justifications, and methods of dehumanization.
Those who do not have the forces of capital at their side may be no more or less submerged in the ideologies that envelop them but find themselves at the mercy of a corporate elite ever ready to attack and subjugate. Their education does not fail to be critical; it does not purport to be critical. “Instead of offering poor and disenfranchised youth decent schools and potential employment, the militarized state offers them the promise of incarceration” (Giroux 159). (2)
What becomes overwhelmingly necessary is a pedagogy that is impenetrable, that has yet to be penetrated by the virus of liberalism. Such a space for this certainly does not yet exist. And if it did, who could be trusted to ensure its success? Where would these new schools be located, who would be among their ranks, and what would they teach? These questions are central to the task of regaining humanity from a system that has stolen mortal life energy and with it human dignity.
"The struggle for humanization… is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny, but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed… Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both." Freire 21. (3)
The charity of a liberal institution like Bard College, in its multi-various humanitarian schemes or in the cloning and implantation of itself in spaces that are not yet thoroughly intellectually colonized, constitute the “false charity” through which “the strong” or “the oppressors” seek to perpetuate an unjust social order nourished by death, despair and poverty. Freire advises us that self-reliance, on the part of the oppressed, is needed for the oppressed themselves to realize the shackles that bind them to their oppressors, that this is an ongoing process.
The teachers, we now know, must be the oppressed themselves, or at least leaders among them who have perceived and articulated their subjective reality and are courageous enough to be self-critical in terms of their own social identity. Every oppressed man must be willing to confront the fact that, in this status quo, his sex is dominant. “Men (whom the virus struck in preference to women) not only became accustomed to it and developed the necessary antibodies, but were able to benefit from the increased energy that it elicited” (Amin 7). (4). The dominance of the White race over others, of men over women, of straightness over queerness, of the wealthy over the poor, manifests itself in explicit and not-so-explicit ways, and must be dissected and destroyed by those who seek to claim a new social order.
In his short essay “Neither Patriotism Nor Cosmopolitanism,” Wallerstein refers to the oppressed as “the weak.” (5). He insists that they will only overcome “disadvantage” if they insist on the principles of group equality. (6). To do this effectively, they may have to “stimulate group consciousness – nationalism, ethnic assertiveness, etc” (Wallerstein 122). Oppressed individuals must understand their commonality and seek to rupture the power that divides them from one another and from themselves (in a Foucauldian analysis). (7) But where to begin?
Wallerstein gives us “the concrete situation in the United States today.” The discourse turns to hegemony, which was the status it achieved by 1945 when its ideological line became supremely nationalist: America is the world’s greatest country and leader of the free world and defender of values of individual liberty (which are in fact the world’s values, i.e. Kantian categorical imperatives). The anti-systemic movements that shook the world began in the 1960/70s, and were undertaken by the oppressed. Did they succeed?
"Those who were excluded sought to be included, and those who were already included were most often inclined to keep eligibility for citizens’ rights defined narrowly, maintaining the exclusions. This meant that those who were seeking inclusion had to organize outside the parliamentary channels in order for their cause to be heard. That is, quite simply, they had to engage in demonstrative, rebellious, sometimes revolutionary activity." Wallerstein 52. (8).
(wallerstein)Wallerstein stops short of elaborating what an “integrating patriotism” even means. We can only infer that it seeks the same ends as the anti-systemic failures, that is, integration of the oppressed and oppressor alike, their submergence in false consciousness. The difference is that this “integration patriotism” is, according to Wallerstein, a gesture that emanates from the camp of the oppressor. We might expect that the oppressed, given that the system is presenting a somewhat more visible fracture, will gradually begin to grasp the reality of their predicament.
"To attract the attention on the financial collapse is not enough. Behind it, a crisis of real economy is standing out, since the financial drift was continuously asphyxiating the growth of the production basis. Solutions brought to the financial crisis can just lead to a crisis of the real economy, i.e. a relative stagnation of the production with its side effects: regression of wages, growth of unemployment, growing precariousness and aggravation of poverty in the Southern countries. We must speak now about depression and no more about recession" (Amin). (9)
How long must the unemployed wait until they realize that the system does not need to be restored but disposed of? Wallerstein’s observation of a “more ethnocentric style of oppressed groups” may already be indicative of some opening of consciousness, but it is far from evident whether the decline of American empire is the root cause.
The question is whether cosmopolitanism or patriotism may serve to bring the human population to harmony, to a socio-economic equilibrium that engenders a high-intensity global democracy. He outright rejects both. “The stance of ‘world citizen’ is deeply ambiguous. It can be used just as easily to sustain privilege as to undermine it” (124). This is a lame reduction of the possibilities of cosmopolitanism. Wallerstein speaks of the need for “a far more complex stance, constantly moving toward and away from defensive assertion of the group rights of the weak as the political arena changes the parameters of the battle” (124). The fact that capitalism cannot be sustained, that its management is temporary, means that the political will be free from the clutches of the economic at some point, the effective undoing of the always-already fragile anti-systemic movements. But how are we to suppose patriotism or cosmopolitanism as separate from this unfolding phenomenon, or that they will only be able to play simple roles in the process? Surely they are integral, the complexity of their operations manifold.
The question is whether cosmopolitanism or patriotism may serve to bring the human population to harmony, to a socio-economic equilibrium that engenders a high-intensity global democracy. He outright rejects both. “The stance of ‘world citizen’ is deeply ambiguous. It can be used just as easily to sustain privilege as to undermine it” (124). This is a lame reduction of the possibilities of cosmopolitanism. Wallerstein speaks of the need for “a far more complex stance, constantly moving toward and away from defensive assertion of the group rights of the weak as the political arena changes the parameters of the battle” (124). The fact that capitalism cannot be sustained, that its management is temporary, means that the political will be free from the clutches of the economic at some point, the effective undoing of the always-already fragile anti-systemic movements. But how are we to suppose patriotism or cosmopolitanism as separate from this unfolding phenomenon, or that they will only be able to play simple roles in the process? Surely they are integral, the complexity of their operations manifold.
"Right now, for example, the United States has a nuclear policy that permits a president, acting almost alone, to authorize the firing of nuclear weapons. How should people in the United States protect other populations from the sudden use of this monarchic weapons system? Should we hope that at the moment of firing, the president will suddenly have the imaginative powers to picture other people in their full density of concerns, picture not one caricatured leader but the men of women and young people of that country?" (Scarry 108). (10).
An epihenomenon: sacred life and the imagination of man were nearly extinguished by the machismo of a new hegemony.
America needs a new imagination. The only alternative is TINA, which translates to self-destruction. The theorists at least can discern this. But neither Americans nor the theorists have an imagination that will restore humanity to either the nation or the globe.
Bibliography
[1] Nussbaum, Martha C. “For Love Of Country?” Beacon Press. Boston, MA. 2002.
[2] Giroux, Henry A. “Against the Terror of Neo-liberalism.” Paradigm, Inc. Boulder, CO. 2008
[3] Freire, Paulo. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Penguin Books. London, England. 1972.
[4] Amin, Samir. “The Liberal Virus.” Monthly Review Press. New York, NY. 2004.
[5] I doubt that Wallerstein means that the oppressed are totally incapacitated to bring about social change; therefore, I would suggest “weak” is a misleading description of a potentially powerful force.[6] Likewise, the term “disadvantage” is equally misleading because surely the periphery is not “disadvantaged” but “dominated” by the most violent means.
[7] Foucault discusses this ‘new economy’ in regards to ‘the state’ as an individualizing, totalizing power-relation that divides men from men and man from himself, a power that constitutes subjects through ‘governmentality.’ See his essay “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982). The University of Chicago.
[8] Wallerstein, Immanuel. “World-Systems Analysis.” Duke University Press. Durham, NC. 2004.
[9]. Amin, Samir. "Financial Collapse, Systemic Crisis? Illusory Answers and Necessary Answers." Political Affairs.net<http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/7768/>
Accessed: June 01, 2009. (This paper introduced the World Forum of Alternatives, in Caracas, October 2008. Translated from French by Daniel Paquet for Investig'Action. Revised by Samir Amin).
[10]. Scarry, Elaine. "The Difficulty of Imagining Other people" in Nussbaum's "For Love of Country." Beacon Press. Boston, MA. 2002.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Fragments on the Globe
Visions of McLuhan. McLuhan did not know to what extent he was right; the “retribalizing” effects of mass media can be seen in full magnificence in the psychedelic, ethno-sploitation aesthetic of Myspace users. This particularly relevant to those using Myspace to promote their music, where people willingly ascribe tribal qualities to themselves and their digital scene.
This correspondence—between McLuhan’s term and contemporary developments in online networking—resonates far deeper than the coincidental. The use of ethnographic imagery to (over)determine the psychedelic content of one’s (mainly electronic or folk-revivalist [which is in fact a re-revitalization of the “primordial”]) music and extra-musical aesthetic considerations produces the affect of religious excesses through a semblance (without substance) of identification. This appropriation of the colonial archive is at once the senseless deployment of a tribal essence—resultant of the excess of documentation and its newfound availability outside the institution—but also a means for recognition and association within virtual communities. The malleability of the virtual identity has enclosed itself within a narrow and unidirectional colonial relationship with the image. What is the Myspace epoch “saying” about itself? The digital mirror reflects a desire to appropriate but also to return to a past free of technological fragmentation. In this sense we have entered a post-fragmentary technological epoch where every day is a festival that preserves community; after fragmentation we enter the illusory divine, the world of image and spectacle. In “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice” Bataille writes of the necessity of consumptive acts in the maintenance of survival, or the survival of community (which still amounts to survival pure and simple): “Man does not live by bread alone, but also by the comedies with which he willingly deceives himself.” Given this understanding of community as representation—a subterfuge enacted out of necessity—we can see how Myspace ethno-sploitation and retribalization is an ideological modality whose real function is concealed from the very community deploying it. Debord writes that “the spectacle erases the dividing line between self and world.” The becoming-tribal of virtual neo-primitivism is indicative of the erasure brought about by spectacular capitalism. In terms of sample-based electronic music, Debord’s statement refers to the erasure of difference between self and world music, for it is through the sampler (a device with an infinite potential for “misuse”) that the world music archive is being re-presented without a trace of dialectical intervention. This recycling of the archive amounts not to a critical or playful engagement/acknowledgement of colonialism’s role in informing aesthetic production, but is in fact the projection of empty tribal signifiers upon a flat screen. Self-proclaimed affinity with a tribal social organization is a social hallucination in which individuals radically misrecognize their own reality in a content-less primordial past.
Tourists. The tourist is the negative image of pure deterritorialization; he testifies to capital’s tendency to disperse bodies in accordance with its own prerogatives. The line of flight embarked upon by the tourist is the non-experience of museified culture.
Dragged away from home, the tourist is provided with its semblance in the form of technologized convenience (his home away from home, that is nonetheless also present in his actual home). Yet he often yearns to travel back in time, with his techno-amenities intact. He thus exists in a non-space between the technics of his lifestyle and the inaccessible, museified culture he is a spectator to. Each term has been carefully planned for him, thus precluding any possibility for experience.
Supermarkets. In the Hegelian conception of culture as Bildung work is the (creative) mechanism that puts the human into relation with universality. This universality (culture) is the product of human creative activity. How does contemporary world-financial labor reflect this quasi-religious engagement with the universal?
Global finance, as an industry, brings the human face to face with the abstract sum of all activity on the face of the earth. Capitalism did not abolish religious forms, it just secularized them. This is how the market attains its religious character; it is an alien universal that somehow encapsulates all human activity and something more. It is in the market that we see the full separation of human activity from its product. Unlike the workday, the market never ceases, it accedes the result of activity yet can account for it. It is hyperrational, always on the brink of obliterating its rational basis altogether. The “free zones” in which deregulated commerce takes place is an indication of capital’s autonomy from the human agent. Capital loses its sense of place and becomes a tourist continuously speculating its next destination.
The market is the administration of a plan that is divinely secretive. Without a home, the nomad subjects produced under late capitalism (from the tourist to the immigrant laborer) are the unknowing disciples deployed by the market on a blind quest that is directed but without end.
As a generator of fetishes, the market is itself a fetish—a dynamic object that exceeds instrumentality and rejects its subordination to the human hand. Nonetheless, speculation is now the immaterial labor demanded by the market. More to come on the affective labor done for the universal.
No Capital Investment! Capitalism’s illusory transcendence of materiality presents itself in the notion of investment which, quite obviously, implies the abstract duration of capital. Duration has become the producer of value in the autonomous framework of global finance… In Le Livre Mallarmé deploys a negative econometrics antithetical to the pseudo-production of the vulgar field. As opposed to stabilizing the market through a second-order abstraction (the market itself being a first-order abstraction), Mallarmé appropriates economic numerology and subjects the work (out of habit one is tempted to say “his work”) to the violence and a-signifying delirium/calculations of the market.
This correspondence—between McLuhan’s term and contemporary developments in online networking—resonates far deeper than the coincidental. The use of ethnographic imagery to (over)determine the psychedelic content of one’s (mainly electronic or folk-revivalist [which is in fact a re-revitalization of the “primordial”]) music and extra-musical aesthetic considerations produces the affect of religious excesses through a semblance (without substance) of identification. This appropriation of the colonial archive is at once the senseless deployment of a tribal essence—resultant of the excess of documentation and its newfound availability outside the institution—but also a means for recognition and association within virtual communities. The malleability of the virtual identity has enclosed itself within a narrow and unidirectional colonial relationship with the image. What is the Myspace epoch “saying” about itself? The digital mirror reflects a desire to appropriate but also to return to a past free of technological fragmentation. In this sense we have entered a post-fragmentary technological epoch where every day is a festival that preserves community; after fragmentation we enter the illusory divine, the world of image and spectacle. In “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice” Bataille writes of the necessity of consumptive acts in the maintenance of survival, or the survival of community (which still amounts to survival pure and simple): “Man does not live by bread alone, but also by the comedies with which he willingly deceives himself.” Given this understanding of community as representation—a subterfuge enacted out of necessity—we can see how Myspace ethno-sploitation and retribalization is an ideological modality whose real function is concealed from the very community deploying it. Debord writes that “the spectacle erases the dividing line between self and world.” The becoming-tribal of virtual neo-primitivism is indicative of the erasure brought about by spectacular capitalism. In terms of sample-based electronic music, Debord’s statement refers to the erasure of difference between self and world music, for it is through the sampler (a device with an infinite potential for “misuse”) that the world music archive is being re-presented without a trace of dialectical intervention. This recycling of the archive amounts not to a critical or playful engagement/acknowledgement of colonialism’s role in informing aesthetic production, but is in fact the projection of empty tribal signifiers upon a flat screen. Self-proclaimed affinity with a tribal social organization is a social hallucination in which individuals radically misrecognize their own reality in a content-less primordial past.
Tourists. The tourist is the negative image of pure deterritorialization; he testifies to capital’s tendency to disperse bodies in accordance with its own prerogatives. The line of flight embarked upon by the tourist is the non-experience of museified culture.
Dragged away from home, the tourist is provided with its semblance in the form of technologized convenience (his home away from home, that is nonetheless also present in his actual home). Yet he often yearns to travel back in time, with his techno-amenities intact. He thus exists in a non-space between the technics of his lifestyle and the inaccessible, museified culture he is a spectator to. Each term has been carefully planned for him, thus precluding any possibility for experience.
Supermarkets. In the Hegelian conception of culture as Bildung work is the (creative) mechanism that puts the human into relation with universality. This universality (culture) is the product of human creative activity. How does contemporary world-financial labor reflect this quasi-religious engagement with the universal?
Global finance, as an industry, brings the human face to face with the abstract sum of all activity on the face of the earth. Capitalism did not abolish religious forms, it just secularized them. This is how the market attains its religious character; it is an alien universal that somehow encapsulates all human activity and something more. It is in the market that we see the full separation of human activity from its product. Unlike the workday, the market never ceases, it accedes the result of activity yet can account for it. It is hyperrational, always on the brink of obliterating its rational basis altogether. The “free zones” in which deregulated commerce takes place is an indication of capital’s autonomy from the human agent. Capital loses its sense of place and becomes a tourist continuously speculating its next destination.
The market is the administration of a plan that is divinely secretive. Without a home, the nomad subjects produced under late capitalism (from the tourist to the immigrant laborer) are the unknowing disciples deployed by the market on a blind quest that is directed but without end.
As a generator of fetishes, the market is itself a fetish—a dynamic object that exceeds instrumentality and rejects its subordination to the human hand. Nonetheless, speculation is now the immaterial labor demanded by the market. More to come on the affective labor done for the universal.
No Capital Investment! Capitalism’s illusory transcendence of materiality presents itself in the notion of investment which, quite obviously, implies the abstract duration of capital. Duration has become the producer of value in the autonomous framework of global finance… In Le Livre Mallarmé deploys a negative econometrics antithetical to the pseudo-production of the vulgar field. As opposed to stabilizing the market through a second-order abstraction (the market itself being a first-order abstraction), Mallarmé appropriates economic numerology and subjects the work (out of habit one is tempted to say “his work”) to the violence and a-signifying delirium/calculations of the market.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Cosmopolitanism, Authority, and Illegal Immigration
Cosmopolitanism, Authority, and Illegal Immigration
We can easily begin with Kant's cosmopolitan right, he says, "Our concern here is not with philanthropy, but with right, and in this context hospitality means the right of an alien not to be treated as an enemy upon his arrival in another’s country.” (Kant 118) Kant links this with a greater cause that is implied with a movement towards a universal peace. He later describes how when people are able to move freely between states without having a fear of hostility they are more likely to grow closer together and formulate a cosmopolitan constitution. He says, “For since the earth is a globe, they cannot scatter themselves infinitely, but must, finally, tolerate living in close proximity, because originally no one had a greater right to any region of the earth than anyone else.” (Kant 118).
“Hospitality” is, as Derrida says, “necessarily, a right, a duty, an obligation, the greeting (his italics) of the foreign other as a friend but on the condition that the host, the Wirt, the one who receives or gives asylum remains the patron, the master of the household, on the condition that he remains his own authority in his own home.” (Derrida, Hospitality, 4) Both host and guest are bound to specific requirements of engagement. These requirements necessitate that authority is bestowed both onto the person visiting and the person hosting. This authority grants the visitor freedoms—human rights. The interaction between host and visitor is a premise that contains two parallel clauses:
(1) The host is required to meet the foreigner with a certain level of dignity. Human dignity in this case is described as “a stranger treated as a friend or ally, as opposed to the stranger treated as an enemy (friend/enemy, hospitality/ hostility).” (Derrida 4) This dignity is met with the bestowing of authority onto the visitor. They have the right and the expectation to be greeted well.
(2) The visitor must respect the host’s rule—it’s law—in order to maintain the relationship. The visitor grants the host certain dignities in respecting the authority of the host within the host’s space. This clause also contains the conception that if the visitor violates the host’s space, the host is well in its right to remove the visitor from it’s territory.
This juxtaposes human rights over state law. Both are bestowed with a level of dignity and authority in their interactions. However, there is one flaw to the system. If the visitor violates the system, where can they go? If the host refuses to respect the authority that the visitor demands as a human being entering the host’s territory, what happens? Are there consequences? These clauses are meaningless unless an understanding is created about what the distinction between host and visitor is.
In nation-states a distinction is made regarding who is allowed citizenship. It is a conclusion that began when the nation-state came into existence. Countries created “territorial and membership organizations '"of" and "for" particular, distinctive, bounded nation' (Brubaker 1992: Chapters 1 and 2, esp. pp. 43-49)-states must be in a position to embrace or grasp their members and to distinguish them from non-member others, an aim that has typically come to be achieved through identification documents.” (Torpey 74) The citizen is the host for the non-citizen visitor. This distinction is made clear enough through bureaucratic documentation—the passport. A citizen receives all the benefits that a society is able to provide while the non-citizen does not participate in the system and therefore hasn’t earned the same ability to access the same services. “Different” people who need to access the same facilities are segregated by the merit of where they live (or are documented to live) though their need to use the same services offers no distinction. The very notion of citizenship creates a contrast as to who gains from a states existence. Balibar notes this when he says, “The law or order necessarily also represent a point of dissolution of all order and all legality, a point of exception with respect to its universality and of liberation with respect to its legal constraint.” (Balibar, 314) Law then strips the person of their fundamental rights before bestowing an order all its own. He continues to say, “universalization as such appears to be inseparable from procedures of exclusion and of inner exclusion.” Universalization for whom? When the law seeks to separate and ensure the interests and security of the state, services are universalized for those who are citizens. The law designates citizenship and as such who gets services. This places citizenship (law) above humanity. Forcing the visitor to be received with suspicion and without human dignity.
Leaving room for shifts in Authority, how people are respected, and the creation of the other. “Colonialism, decolonization, and postcoloniality involved special kinds of traffic with people deemed “other”—the familiarity of a presumed common humanity defamiliarized, as it were.” (Spivak 77) This invention has allowed people to point fingers as to who is with or against us. People who in the United states promote assimilation noting that immigrants should adapt to “our” culture, because this is “our” country. I put our in quotes, because we are a nation of immigrants and in reality that is our identity—a walk through New York can tell you that. Derrida defines identity as a “concept, which the transparent identity to itself is always dogmatically presupposed by so many debates on monoculturalism or multiculturalism, nationality, citizenship, belonging." (Derrida quoted by Spivak 82) Spivak continues, “Two kinds of points are being made in the Derrida text: first, that the enthnos is already self-divided, and second, that ipseity or self-sameness has something in common with the despot claiming power and property. Identity politics is neither smart nor good.” (Spivak 84) Another approach looks at the other and sees a right to difference. This is a hospitable approach to immigration because recognizes the other as itself, without conditions, and allows it to function alongside the citizen. Assimilation views foreign culture with a large degree of hostility.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LCL2IqgjSc
http://www.minutemanhq.com/
Excuse the profanities and the obliviously extreme example. Notice the minutemen’s argument. They make reference to defending sovereignty and refuse to recognize their own roots in immigration. Taking the argument from above, they have assimilated and refuse to see anyone else who has not been assimilated. Their hostility to the other comes from a strong association to the country which overrides their need to see a basic human dignity and to an even more basic level the right of a person to travel freely on the planet we all share. The construction of a border fence justifies the argument of the minutemen. The border fence is another example of the need to divide the planet. An object that is the physical representation of dividing us from the other.
http://www.minutemanborderfence.com/
America’s border fence has a parent, the West Bank wall. Granted Israel has been facing terrorist attack for some time, attacks that did originate from the Palestinian territories (not that this justifies the construction of the border fence), but the wall not only serves as a protective measure it is being used to keep the other away. To use the websites own examples, all border fences on the Lebanon and Syrian border, as well as Palestinian walls maintain that the other remain in their place. The same can be said for settler demonstrations in Palestinian towns, with the claim that it is their territory coinciding with the expansion of Jewish settlements into the West Bank.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU1fIIwVMck
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/fence.html
Tent City for Illegal Immigrants. An illustration of how authority is distributed and this project goes completely against the notion of hospitality.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFKloIvk-g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1tfIKUZ0fY
Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Juridical Philosophy
With people still needing to define themselves in opposition to the other it becomes hard to be able to see Kant’s cosmopolitan dream. With people taking it upon themselves to try and defend their identity from the invasion of the other, authority becomes vested in the ones who identify with a larger cause. Be it citizenship, nationality, or race. With the minutemen and groups like all over the world who identify to a larger cause and take it upon themselves to defend that identity (giving themselves authority), there can never be a cosmopolitan constitution. Where is human agency or dignity when a wall prevents people from communicating entirely?
And for a light hearted end:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7YrkpKNB7M
--Kevin Cassem
We can easily begin with Kant's cosmopolitan right, he says, "Our concern here is not with philanthropy, but with right, and in this context hospitality means the right of an alien not to be treated as an enemy upon his arrival in another’s country.” (Kant 118) Kant links this with a greater cause that is implied with a movement towards a universal peace. He later describes how when people are able to move freely between states without having a fear of hostility they are more likely to grow closer together and formulate a cosmopolitan constitution. He says, “For since the earth is a globe, they cannot scatter themselves infinitely, but must, finally, tolerate living in close proximity, because originally no one had a greater right to any region of the earth than anyone else.” (Kant 118).
“Hospitality” is, as Derrida says, “necessarily, a right, a duty, an obligation, the greeting (his italics) of the foreign other as a friend but on the condition that the host, the Wirt, the one who receives or gives asylum remains the patron, the master of the household, on the condition that he remains his own authority in his own home.” (Derrida, Hospitality, 4) Both host and guest are bound to specific requirements of engagement. These requirements necessitate that authority is bestowed both onto the person visiting and the person hosting. This authority grants the visitor freedoms—human rights. The interaction between host and visitor is a premise that contains two parallel clauses:
(1) The host is required to meet the foreigner with a certain level of dignity. Human dignity in this case is described as “a stranger treated as a friend or ally, as opposed to the stranger treated as an enemy (friend/enemy, hospitality/ hostility).” (Derrida 4) This dignity is met with the bestowing of authority onto the visitor. They have the right and the expectation to be greeted well.
(2) The visitor must respect the host’s rule—it’s law—in order to maintain the relationship. The visitor grants the host certain dignities in respecting the authority of the host within the host’s space. This clause also contains the conception that if the visitor violates the host’s space, the host is well in its right to remove the visitor from it’s territory.
This juxtaposes human rights over state law. Both are bestowed with a level of dignity and authority in their interactions. However, there is one flaw to the system. If the visitor violates the system, where can they go? If the host refuses to respect the authority that the visitor demands as a human being entering the host’s territory, what happens? Are there consequences? These clauses are meaningless unless an understanding is created about what the distinction between host and visitor is.
In nation-states a distinction is made regarding who is allowed citizenship. It is a conclusion that began when the nation-state came into existence. Countries created “territorial and membership organizations '"of" and "for" particular, distinctive, bounded nation' (Brubaker 1992: Chapters 1 and 2, esp. pp. 43-49)-states must be in a position to embrace or grasp their members and to distinguish them from non-member others, an aim that has typically come to be achieved through identification documents.” (Torpey 74) The citizen is the host for the non-citizen visitor. This distinction is made clear enough through bureaucratic documentation—the passport. A citizen receives all the benefits that a society is able to provide while the non-citizen does not participate in the system and therefore hasn’t earned the same ability to access the same services. “Different” people who need to access the same facilities are segregated by the merit of where they live (or are documented to live) though their need to use the same services offers no distinction. The very notion of citizenship creates a contrast as to who gains from a states existence. Balibar notes this when he says, “The law or order necessarily also represent a point of dissolution of all order and all legality, a point of exception with respect to its universality and of liberation with respect to its legal constraint.” (Balibar, 314) Law then strips the person of their fundamental rights before bestowing an order all its own. He continues to say, “universalization as such appears to be inseparable from procedures of exclusion and of inner exclusion.” Universalization for whom? When the law seeks to separate and ensure the interests and security of the state, services are universalized for those who are citizens. The law designates citizenship and as such who gets services. This places citizenship (law) above humanity. Forcing the visitor to be received with suspicion and without human dignity.
Leaving room for shifts in Authority, how people are respected, and the creation of the other. “Colonialism, decolonization, and postcoloniality involved special kinds of traffic with people deemed “other”—the familiarity of a presumed common humanity defamiliarized, as it were.” (Spivak 77) This invention has allowed people to point fingers as to who is with or against us. People who in the United states promote assimilation noting that immigrants should adapt to “our” culture, because this is “our” country. I put our in quotes, because we are a nation of immigrants and in reality that is our identity—a walk through New York can tell you that. Derrida defines identity as a “concept, which the transparent identity to itself is always dogmatically presupposed by so many debates on monoculturalism or multiculturalism, nationality, citizenship, belonging." (Derrida quoted by Spivak 82) Spivak continues, “Two kinds of points are being made in the Derrida text: first, that the enthnos is already self-divided, and second, that ipseity or self-sameness has something in common with the despot claiming power and property. Identity politics is neither smart nor good.” (Spivak 84) Another approach looks at the other and sees a right to difference. This is a hospitable approach to immigration because recognizes the other as itself, without conditions, and allows it to function alongside the citizen. Assimilation views foreign culture with a large degree of hostility.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LCL2IqgjSc
http://www.minutemanhq.com/
Excuse the profanities and the obliviously extreme example. Notice the minutemen’s argument. They make reference to defending sovereignty and refuse to recognize their own roots in immigration. Taking the argument from above, they have assimilated and refuse to see anyone else who has not been assimilated. Their hostility to the other comes from a strong association to the country which overrides their need to see a basic human dignity and to an even more basic level the right of a person to travel freely on the planet we all share. The construction of a border fence justifies the argument of the minutemen. The border fence is another example of the need to divide the planet. An object that is the physical representation of dividing us from the other.
http://www.minutemanborderfence.com/
America’s border fence has a parent, the West Bank wall. Granted Israel has been facing terrorist attack for some time, attacks that did originate from the Palestinian territories (not that this justifies the construction of the border fence), but the wall not only serves as a protective measure it is being used to keep the other away. To use the websites own examples, all border fences on the Lebanon and Syrian border, as well as Palestinian walls maintain that the other remain in their place. The same can be said for settler demonstrations in Palestinian towns, with the claim that it is their territory coinciding with the expansion of Jewish settlements into the West Bank.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU1fIIwVMck
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/fence.html
Tent City for Illegal Immigrants. An illustration of how authority is distributed and this project goes completely against the notion of hospitality.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJFKloIvk-g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1tfIKUZ0fY
Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Juridical Philosophy
With people still needing to define themselves in opposition to the other it becomes hard to be able to see Kant’s cosmopolitan dream. With people taking it upon themselves to try and defend their identity from the invasion of the other, authority becomes vested in the ones who identify with a larger cause. Be it citizenship, nationality, or race. With the minutemen and groups like all over the world who identify to a larger cause and take it upon themselves to defend that identity (giving themselves authority), there can never be a cosmopolitan constitution. Where is human agency or dignity when a wall prevents people from communicating entirely?
And for a light hearted end:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7YrkpKNB7M
--Kevin Cassem
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
On December 5, 2006 the single and video “Chacarron Macarron” was released on the noosphere and quickly caught the attention of the world, thanks primarily to the Western Internet youth culture that frequents such joke sites as ytmnd.com, and spends all day laughing at stupid shit on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvkHIZg_954&feature=related
On the comments underneath every Youtube video, as well as on countless other chat rooms and message boards, the Chacarron video is the site of clashing- "this tipe of men are the worst of the world T_T what are u doing? u can't sing! u're ...u're..a shit... arg...I really hate this type of people"- as well as shared appreciation ("i love how he has a way with words!"), a space in which to come together in laughter- "OMG. This is a joke right? ABsolutely hilarious joke that is! And if hes being serious then.. Thats even funnier!" – as well as to argue out all sorts of tangential particulars- “i don't think we should be preaching or forcing religion in youtbe. this is a happy place and people should be free to believe what they want.”
Since the beginning, this video has wedged itself into an awkward space between the most absurd self-mockery, and the most brilliant and catchy consequence of modern pop culture. Viewer responses range from the appreciative- “I like this only for the pure fact that it makes me laugh”- to the despairing- “I think my faith in humanity just died”- to the suspiciously inquisitive- “There is something hynotic about this. Maybe it's like those old metal songs that have subliminal hidden messages”; in the midst of their attempts to figure out what is going on people offer up endless interpretations of the garbled lyrics- “those who don't understand/thinks it's sttupid.... IF YOU DON'T SPEAK CHACARRON OF COURSE YOU WON'T UNDERSTAND!”- or simply respond with virtual phonetic mimesis- "Wigigowigigagawrnagagagnawrign iga!" Overall it brings laughs, but leaves questions, occupying and opening an uncomfortable and unresolved space between parody and seriousness- “uhm...well for one it's funny, but I also think to myself, what is this guy thinking????”
Thanks to the creative participatory possibilities of the modern Internet world, thousands of iterations of this original theme have proliferated, spinning off of the absurdity of the original to reflect it into new expression. One of the most fascinating and annoying is ‘batman on drugs lol’, a thankfully short version of which I will show here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBsxqQIu_5s
As we trace the proliferation of this banal manifestation of ‘stoner culture’ we are given an example, a window, an operating tool through which to view the phenomenal workings of the floating imaginary called the Internet or noosphere, which embodies, reflects and proliferates the culture in which it participates.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this video is that , like the ‘Chaccaron Macarron’ song, it, in the words of a popup found on one of its many remakes, ‘goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on’, grafting itself mercilessly into the subconscious of the capitalist cyber-imaginary. In this way it repackages into final inescapable form the useless and infinite total homogenization of Western mass-produced culture, it funnels the post-historical eternal return of the simulacrum into its own particular absurd space that trips up on its own hyperreal fetishization. As the refrain repeats over and over, the viewer is thrown back through the absurdity of his own gaze, into a creeping uncanny space that is profoundly annoying, mind-numbingly senseless, inexplicably, inexcusably empty, downright stupid and even agonizing. Uncontrollable laughter and gut-wrenching disgust represent two equally sensitive reactions to this absolutely singular, ceaselessly repeating cultural nerve. As one continues to gaze through the screen, at that disgusting gyrating schizophrenic Batman, one asks to oneself “What has happened?”, in the same vein of numb hopelessness and speechless dread that one feels driving through the same shopping center all across America, or standing in the corner of a single CVS, surrounded by tinny lite pop muzak, staring at the dusty shelf space next to the paper towels for twenty minutes. Pushed past the tipping point of its own exhaustion, the ‘batman on drugs’ video explodes through its own existence as a desired commodity to confront the banal sterility of that McEssence in which it is shown, to expose in terrifying hilarity its own glaring cold hyperreality.
Many viewer comments suggest this role as a phenomenon of modernity that seems to conclude all history that preceded it- “it doesnt matter what he saying because this is the breakdown of this genre of music that sounds the same all the time”; “This song is the bar in place that shows what music should never be”; “Postmodern”; “aahahah that's the most stupid think i have heard in my life... OMG this is the end of the world !!!!”.
This cultural icon has proliferated largely thanks to the impulse, easily satisfied by the Internet, to re-present it in a slightly new form, to use its power to animate a different video, to re-create its effect in a different setting that nonetheless slips back into the hilarious doom of the eternal refrain of the original. Here we find a clean snapshot of this metaphoric process that juxtaposes two heterogeneous elements atop the common ground of cyberspace to create a new synthetic experience- http://mindlessbatman.ytmnd.com/. Creations can be personalized for the most particular occasion, as at the end of a tiny back alleyway of the noosphere we find the haunting remainder of someone’s birthday (http://williamchac.ytmnd.com); elsewhere on Youtube an animated dog sings his version forever, echoed by a human with a backpack on in the middle of a classroom (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAulMB-pW04&feature=related); again on teen-stoner website ytmnd.com, the theme is refound in an only tangentially related light- http://batmanfreakout.ytmnd.com/. Through the re-presentation of this theme by individual viewers into many different contexts of image and sound, it seems as if the theme itself is proliferating itself throughout the Internet in a myriad of deceptive forms and guises, drawing into its grasp and revivifying a plethora of cultural artifacts and associations through which it reappears, confronts itself and evolves. Here we see a dense web of images embedded in a thick soup of context, reflecting, commenting on, embodying a fluid culture in which it participates, which meets its gaze in each online viewing.
On YouTube alone one can find countless ‘interpretations’ or ‘remixes’ of the original- if the notion of such an original still carries any meaning- in which people overlay their own slideshows, filled with images and suggestive text, atop the music, which is also sometimes altered or re-created (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_glWWusfqfU&NR=1); here any viewer can himself be the originary artist, adding his own voice to the larger wave in an interpretive spin that carries the reach of the song into expanded dimensions of suggestive associative meaning. Images of Ron Weasley, Show Boat, rope, rum, watches, the Mini, macaroni, Ghana, a waterfall- the image as the site of culture is just as free-floating as the individual as the site of agency; the latter recontextualizes the myriad former and offers his individual voice up as an expression of the larger stream of pop culture emanating from this enigmatic Chacarron. In another slideshow, the song issues from the stereotyped face of Osama bin Laden himself (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXCzmbSmDSw&feature=related); at the end of this clip we even hear the jumbled words of a Spanish broadcast in the background, as if Indian and Spanish cultures are grouped together as a single unintelligible, backwards Other. This reanimation of the exotic East occurs again in the video ‘Chacarron vs. Indian Midget’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKBNNYg3Ly8&feature=related; in both of these videos the all-too-familiar refrain casts itself as a mockery of Eastern culture, serving both as a pointing, laughing finger and as a voice emanating from the object of mockery itself.
The refrain is pointed by Western culture, however, not only at its enemies but also at its own leaders- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyXon1dswiU&feature=fvsr; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUPfPBDdtMc. The former is particularly disturbing in its convincing digital manipulation- it really looks like Obama and McCain are dancing- so that again the lines between political reality and public fantasy begin to fade as the latter subverts the former by reappropriating and re-presenting its own images, forming a shared sensitive underlying imaginary commentary on similarly imaginary electronic news events. The Chacarron song has now come to undergo a variety of self-transformations in which it fleshes out its contextual implications within the larger culture that births and nurtures it. We can conceive then of the totality of web sites, videos, images and other virtual objects which display or discuss the Chacarron song, a totality which, represented as a single object, can never be fully captured because it is always growing, in and through even the perception of the subject who views it on his browser. Individuals thus share this object repeatedly with each other 1. in the real world where it is spoken between bodies or remembered, 2. in the symbolic noosphere where it is viewed in an endless array of cultural artifacts, and 3. in the online imaginary landscape where it is discussed through text chat or where (as is described by an anonymous online commentator) “I know this! Someone in that online sim Second Life decided to create flying cubes with this animation constantly playing and sounding. The cubes chase around whoever is closest to them, and push constantly.” This Chacarron-object, in all its manifestations, can be read symptomatically to bring to light underlying cultural reflections or trends, can be viewed materially in its historical self as it appears on the web, and can also be viewed as a tool of individual self-expression, through which consumers of media culture can themselves produce their own unique objects of consumption, and add their own voice to the choir that surrounds and influences them from all sides.
Such an optimistic agency-oriented view, however, both broadens in scope and threatens to sink under the heavy feeling one gets after surveying video after video of this mind-numbing cultural vacuity. Particularly touching and disturbing here is that an animated sound byte on the imaginary internet landscape should inspire human bodies to imitate its actions in space and time, and then to project video of their bodies back out into the noosphere- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou9GvEfd8G0&feature=related; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG8R9wfn7JA&feature=related; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJPp-vsuQrI&feature=related. Here, there is no longer any meaningful distinction between imaginary icon and real event, as both alike are symbolically registered and offered up as consumable objects in the same hyper-contextualized rhizomatic Youtube signifying chain. A live acoustic rendition of the song-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0NRnWjHfWg&feature=related- is mysteriously transmutated by another user into a cartoon animation of itself- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ISxIzjYhlw&feature=related- but we cannot assume this causality (from real life into digital animation) for the rest of the plethora of images, where animated Mario sings side by side with doctored film clips and live videotaped performances. Who is acting here? What has happened? Is it ‘qwert001’ who has made this video to show to me, or is it not rather YouTube that spawns out of its own prolific depths an endless plethora of reproductive associations that flit past my specular gaze as if the latter itself were the projector that throws these images into actuality?
In the game of specular commodity fetishism, Derrida writes in Specters of Marx, the object of use value, in entering the social sphere and capitalizing on the desire inherent therein to become a commodity, “is transfigured, it becomes someone…it is metamorphosed into a supernatural thing…sensuously supersensible…what surpasses the senses still passes before us in the silhouette of the sensuous body that it nevertheless lacks or that remains inaccessible to us…[so that] one touches there on what one does not touch, one feels there where one does not feel…this haunting displaces itself like an anonymous silhouette or the figure of an extra who might be the principal or capital character. It changes places, one no longer knows exactly where it is, it turns, it invades the stage with its moves” (189). The ‘batman on drugs’ appears before us in a harsh confrontation, a specter against which we may butt our heads, but which is always repeating, waiting for us to return to it. In its organic totality the Chacarron-object reflects but is not reducible to the culture which produces and consumes it; its voice subsists in an insistent singularity, a nagging urgency that speaks through, but remains after the disappearances of the images it animates. If we approach this enigmatic voice of Chacarron and ask where it came from, it will only respond by flailing the infinite tentacles it gives to us at the push of a button. We may draw connections between its myriad parts and deconstruct each to glimpse the subtler strands of the larger web of culture, but the thing itself becomes more mysterious to us the more its voice drills on in our head, the more all songs on the radio seem to warp towards this monotonous, homogenous eternal refrain that waits as their necessary apotheosis. Though we may use it as a lens through which to view the determining forces of globalization which it reflects, and though we may see it as a site of dynamic cosmopolitan exchange, still “this Thing, which is no longer altogether a thing, here it goes and unfolds, it unfolds itself, it develops what it engenders through a quasi-spontaneous generation…a whole lineage of fantastic or prodigious creatures, whims, chimera, non-ligneous character parts, that is, the lineage of a progeniture that no longer resembles it, inventions far more bizarre or marvelous than if this mad, capricious, and untenable [thing]…started to dance on its own initiative”. Through the conduit of the modern planetary imaginary in which its spark has dispersed itself, even here in this very analytic article, “now here it is standing up, not only holding itself up but rising, getting up and lifting itself, lifting its head, redressing itself and addressing itself. Facing the others, and first of all other commodities, yes, it lifts its head” (190).
On the comments underneath every Youtube video, as well as on countless other chat rooms and message boards, the Chacarron video is the site of clashing- "this tipe of men are the worst of the world T_T what are u doing? u can't sing! u're ...u're..a shit... arg...I really hate this type of people"- as well as shared appreciation ("i love how he has a way with words!"), a space in which to come together in laughter- "OMG. This is a joke right? ABsolutely hilarious joke that is! And if hes being serious then.. Thats even funnier!" – as well as to argue out all sorts of tangential particulars- “i don't think we should be preaching or forcing religion in youtbe. this is a happy place and people should be free to believe what they want.”
Since the beginning, this video has wedged itself into an awkward space between the most absurd self-mockery, and the most brilliant and catchy consequence of modern pop culture. Viewer responses range from the appreciative- “I like this only for the pure fact that it makes me laugh”- to the despairing- “I think my faith in humanity just died”- to the suspiciously inquisitive- “There is something hynotic about this. Maybe it's like those old metal songs that have subliminal hidden messages”; in the midst of their attempts to figure out what is going on people offer up endless interpretations of the garbled lyrics- “those who don't understand/thinks it's sttupid.... IF YOU DON'T SPEAK CHACARRON OF COURSE YOU WON'T UNDERSTAND!”- or simply respond with virtual phonetic mimesis- "Wigigowigigagawrnagagagnawrign iga!" Overall it brings laughs, but leaves questions, occupying and opening an uncomfortable and unresolved space between parody and seriousness- “uhm...well for one it's funny, but I also think to myself, what is this guy thinking????”
Thanks to the creative participatory possibilities of the modern Internet world, thousands of iterations of this original theme have proliferated, spinning off of the absurdity of the original to reflect it into new expression. One of the most fascinating and annoying is ‘batman on drugs lol’, a thankfully short version of which I will show here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBsxqQIu_5s
As we trace the proliferation of this banal manifestation of ‘stoner culture’ we are given an example, a window, an operating tool through which to view the phenomenal workings of the floating imaginary called the Internet or noosphere, which embodies, reflects and proliferates the culture in which it participates.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this video is that , like the ‘Chaccaron Macarron’ song, it, in the words of a popup found on one of its many remakes, ‘goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on’, grafting itself mercilessly into the subconscious of the capitalist cyber-imaginary. In this way it repackages into final inescapable form the useless and infinite total homogenization of Western mass-produced culture, it funnels the post-historical eternal return of the simulacrum into its own particular absurd space that trips up on its own hyperreal fetishization. As the refrain repeats over and over, the viewer is thrown back through the absurdity of his own gaze, into a creeping uncanny space that is profoundly annoying, mind-numbingly senseless, inexplicably, inexcusably empty, downright stupid and even agonizing. Uncontrollable laughter and gut-wrenching disgust represent two equally sensitive reactions to this absolutely singular, ceaselessly repeating cultural nerve. As one continues to gaze through the screen, at that disgusting gyrating schizophrenic Batman, one asks to oneself “What has happened?”, in the same vein of numb hopelessness and speechless dread that one feels driving through the same shopping center all across America, or standing in the corner of a single CVS, surrounded by tinny lite pop muzak, staring at the dusty shelf space next to the paper towels for twenty minutes. Pushed past the tipping point of its own exhaustion, the ‘batman on drugs’ video explodes through its own existence as a desired commodity to confront the banal sterility of that McEssence in which it is shown, to expose in terrifying hilarity its own glaring cold hyperreality.
Many viewer comments suggest this role as a phenomenon of modernity that seems to conclude all history that preceded it- “it doesnt matter what he saying because this is the breakdown of this genre of music that sounds the same all the time”; “This song is the bar in place that shows what music should never be”; “Postmodern”; “aahahah that's the most stupid think i have heard in my life... OMG this is the end of the world !!!!”.
This cultural icon has proliferated largely thanks to the impulse, easily satisfied by the Internet, to re-present it in a slightly new form, to use its power to animate a different video, to re-create its effect in a different setting that nonetheless slips back into the hilarious doom of the eternal refrain of the original. Here we find a clean snapshot of this metaphoric process that juxtaposes two heterogeneous elements atop the common ground of cyberspace to create a new synthetic experience- http://mindlessbatman.ytmnd.com/. Creations can be personalized for the most particular occasion, as at the end of a tiny back alleyway of the noosphere we find the haunting remainder of someone’s birthday (http://williamchac.ytmnd.com); elsewhere on Youtube an animated dog sings his version forever, echoed by a human with a backpack on in the middle of a classroom (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAulMB-pW04&feature=related); again on teen-stoner website ytmnd.com, the theme is refound in an only tangentially related light- http://batmanfreakout.ytmnd.com/. Through the re-presentation of this theme by individual viewers into many different contexts of image and sound, it seems as if the theme itself is proliferating itself throughout the Internet in a myriad of deceptive forms and guises, drawing into its grasp and revivifying a plethora of cultural artifacts and associations through which it reappears, confronts itself and evolves. Here we see a dense web of images embedded in a thick soup of context, reflecting, commenting on, embodying a fluid culture in which it participates, which meets its gaze in each online viewing.
On YouTube alone one can find countless ‘interpretations’ or ‘remixes’ of the original- if the notion of such an original still carries any meaning- in which people overlay their own slideshows, filled with images and suggestive text, atop the music, which is also sometimes altered or re-created (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_glWWusfqfU&NR=1); here any viewer can himself be the originary artist, adding his own voice to the larger wave in an interpretive spin that carries the reach of the song into expanded dimensions of suggestive associative meaning. Images of Ron Weasley, Show Boat, rope, rum, watches, the Mini, macaroni, Ghana, a waterfall- the image as the site of culture is just as free-floating as the individual as the site of agency; the latter recontextualizes the myriad former and offers his individual voice up as an expression of the larger stream of pop culture emanating from this enigmatic Chacarron. In another slideshow, the song issues from the stereotyped face of Osama bin Laden himself (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXCzmbSmDSw&feature=related); at the end of this clip we even hear the jumbled words of a Spanish broadcast in the background, as if Indian and Spanish cultures are grouped together as a single unintelligible, backwards Other. This reanimation of the exotic East occurs again in the video ‘Chacarron vs. Indian Midget’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKBNNYg3Ly8&feature=related; in both of these videos the all-too-familiar refrain casts itself as a mockery of Eastern culture, serving both as a pointing, laughing finger and as a voice emanating from the object of mockery itself.
The refrain is pointed by Western culture, however, not only at its enemies but also at its own leaders- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyXon1dswiU&feature=fvsr; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUPfPBDdtMc. The former is particularly disturbing in its convincing digital manipulation- it really looks like Obama and McCain are dancing- so that again the lines between political reality and public fantasy begin to fade as the latter subverts the former by reappropriating and re-presenting its own images, forming a shared sensitive underlying imaginary commentary on similarly imaginary electronic news events. The Chacarron song has now come to undergo a variety of self-transformations in which it fleshes out its contextual implications within the larger culture that births and nurtures it. We can conceive then of the totality of web sites, videos, images and other virtual objects which display or discuss the Chacarron song, a totality which, represented as a single object, can never be fully captured because it is always growing, in and through even the perception of the subject who views it on his browser. Individuals thus share this object repeatedly with each other 1. in the real world where it is spoken between bodies or remembered, 2. in the symbolic noosphere where it is viewed in an endless array of cultural artifacts, and 3. in the online imaginary landscape where it is discussed through text chat or where (as is described by an anonymous online commentator) “I know this! Someone in that online sim Second Life decided to create flying cubes with this animation constantly playing and sounding. The cubes chase around whoever is closest to them, and push constantly.” This Chacarron-object, in all its manifestations, can be read symptomatically to bring to light underlying cultural reflections or trends, can be viewed materially in its historical self as it appears on the web, and can also be viewed as a tool of individual self-expression, through which consumers of media culture can themselves produce their own unique objects of consumption, and add their own voice to the choir that surrounds and influences them from all sides.
Such an optimistic agency-oriented view, however, both broadens in scope and threatens to sink under the heavy feeling one gets after surveying video after video of this mind-numbing cultural vacuity. Particularly touching and disturbing here is that an animated sound byte on the imaginary internet landscape should inspire human bodies to imitate its actions in space and time, and then to project video of their bodies back out into the noosphere- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou9GvEfd8G0&feature=related; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG8R9wfn7JA&feature=related; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJPp-vsuQrI&feature=related. Here, there is no longer any meaningful distinction between imaginary icon and real event, as both alike are symbolically registered and offered up as consumable objects in the same hyper-contextualized rhizomatic Youtube signifying chain. A live acoustic rendition of the song-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0NRnWjHfWg&feature=related- is mysteriously transmutated by another user into a cartoon animation of itself- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ISxIzjYhlw&feature=related- but we cannot assume this causality (from real life into digital animation) for the rest of the plethora of images, where animated Mario sings side by side with doctored film clips and live videotaped performances. Who is acting here? What has happened? Is it ‘qwert001’ who has made this video to show to me, or is it not rather YouTube that spawns out of its own prolific depths an endless plethora of reproductive associations that flit past my specular gaze as if the latter itself were the projector that throws these images into actuality?
In the game of specular commodity fetishism, Derrida writes in Specters of Marx, the object of use value, in entering the social sphere and capitalizing on the desire inherent therein to become a commodity, “is transfigured, it becomes someone…it is metamorphosed into a supernatural thing…sensuously supersensible…what surpasses the senses still passes before us in the silhouette of the sensuous body that it nevertheless lacks or that remains inaccessible to us…[so that] one touches there on what one does not touch, one feels there where one does not feel…this haunting displaces itself like an anonymous silhouette or the figure of an extra who might be the principal or capital character. It changes places, one no longer knows exactly where it is, it turns, it invades the stage with its moves” (189). The ‘batman on drugs’ appears before us in a harsh confrontation, a specter against which we may butt our heads, but which is always repeating, waiting for us to return to it. In its organic totality the Chacarron-object reflects but is not reducible to the culture which produces and consumes it; its voice subsists in an insistent singularity, a nagging urgency that speaks through, but remains after the disappearances of the images it animates. If we approach this enigmatic voice of Chacarron and ask where it came from, it will only respond by flailing the infinite tentacles it gives to us at the push of a button. We may draw connections between its myriad parts and deconstruct each to glimpse the subtler strands of the larger web of culture, but the thing itself becomes more mysterious to us the more its voice drills on in our head, the more all songs on the radio seem to warp towards this monotonous, homogenous eternal refrain that waits as their necessary apotheosis. Though we may use it as a lens through which to view the determining forces of globalization which it reflects, and though we may see it as a site of dynamic cosmopolitan exchange, still “this Thing, which is no longer altogether a thing, here it goes and unfolds, it unfolds itself, it develops what it engenders through a quasi-spontaneous generation…a whole lineage of fantastic or prodigious creatures, whims, chimera, non-ligneous character parts, that is, the lineage of a progeniture that no longer resembles it, inventions far more bizarre or marvelous than if this mad, capricious, and untenable [thing]…started to dance on its own initiative”. Through the conduit of the modern planetary imaginary in which its spark has dispersed itself, even here in this very analytic article, “now here it is standing up, not only holding itself up but rising, getting up and lifting itself, lifting its head, redressing itself and addressing itself. Facing the others, and first of all other commodities, yes, it lifts its head” (190).
The World: A Vision Made Real
The World is today’s greatest development epic. An engineering odyssey to create an island paradise of sea, sand, and sky, a destination has arrived that allows investors to chart their own course and make the world their own.
The World offers “A Vision Made Real.” This vision, and the image it provokes, is now offered as the world itself. It is a world we can observe from afar – through speculation (luck), through development (progress), through our ability and creativity (genius). It is this world, we hope, that can supersede the old, decrepit world, offering us a venue (the world) for our creative potential, our humanity. It is this world that could very well solve the world’s difficulties by remaking the world as image.
This new world is guided by principles – “principles that define what development means today and in the future, and how the ideas and initiative of a select few will architect a destination whose allure will attract the attention of millions.”
By defining what development means today and in the future, we will be better able to avoid any risks or misunderstandings that might arise between ourselves and our image. Our image, of course, is our destination – always far-off, always a world becoming (and never become). By keeping a distance between ourselves and our destination we are able to enlarge our bodies while shrinking the surface between us. Those who refuse to acknowledge our future of perpetual development, of a future totality that is undoubtedly inherent in our evolution, those people who cry wolf every time an iceberg sinks or a body vanishes, are simply missing the bigger picture. They are not the select; they are not the world class. These naysayers need to stand back and look again. For it is in looking, envisioning, that the disbeliever will turn into the believer. His attention and adoration is necessary for our world to be made as we would like it to be made. As the principles propose, attention must be attracted. And we will shape this attraction.
“In an era of multiplicity and me-too, it’s hard to standout. But in times like these, it’s still possible to be the sun in your own universe. Welcome to your very own blank canvas in the azure waters of the Arabian Gulf. Where orchestrating your own version of paradise – whether it’s a resort hotel or condominium communities – is a much needed inoculation against the ordinary, and where you’ll discover that The World really can revolve around you.”
The World is now the "spectacular collective expenditure" of the elite social class. (It has perhaps always been.) The World includes only those worthy of it, only those who seek the extra-ordinary. These World citizens have created their World out of their collective "extra" - that which they not only can spare, but look to spare and expend. To fully claim the world for oneself, the "me-too" must rid itself of the "too." In this way, the world is truly mine. By this, I mean, the universe truly revolves around me. I am the sun and I will shine upon myself.
We came to The World because life should be easy. We were promised the ocean, the sun, the beach. But now we are told to stay inside. The water, they say, is polluted. It cannot be, I think. My internet connection (The World online) shows me a world of "flourishing marine life." I am offered a video and an image gallery. Each fish is a beautiful thing.
Dubai's motto is "Open doors, open minds." Everything is possible in Dubai. Only the extraordinary man can know this. I know this. There are no boundaries here: I continue to grow. I will extend my body and have my vision too. Our motion will not cease.
The water quality got worse and worse. The guests started to spot raw sewage, condoms, and used sanitary towels floating in the sea. So the hotel ordered its own water analyses from a professional company. 'They told us it was full of fecal matter and bacteria "too numerous to count". I had to start telling guests not to go in the water, and since they'd come on a beach holiday, as you can imagine, they were pretty pissed off.' She began to make angry posts on the expat discussion forums – and people began to figure out what was happening. Dubai had expanded so fast its sewage treatment facilities couldn't keep up. The sewage disposal trucks had to queue for three or four days at the treatment plants – so instead, they were simply drilling open the manholes and dumping the untreated sewage down them, so it flowed straight to the sea. (Johann Hari, The Independent)
The Sun is too much for The World. The earth is a desert and there is not enough drinking water. Because of this, we must pay exorbitant prices to have the ocean unsalted. In Dubai, we have the world's biggest carbon footprint. That is called a solar no-no. The carbon footprint stomps on the sun so that it spews out more heat while the Earth cannot help but refuse its excess waste. The elite among us consume more to save themselves from the overbearing heat, from desert life. The sun gets hotter and the shit gets bigger. The world-class citizen cannot be dirtied by this process, so he grows more and more inward. He looks for dwelling elsewhere - within. He does this by constructing his cities indoors. The walls provide a new layer of thick skin. We will have none of this outdoor shit. "Blame the shit," we say. We must expend our expenditure! We must shit away our shit! We have grown too expansive. But how do we do accomplish this next level of expenditure?
By containing our shit. By refusing refuse. By turning our shit into pearls.
"Burj Dubai: Monument, Jewel, Icon." Still unfinished, it is already the tallest building on Earth.
It is the latest development in the war on shit.
"The rich man consumes the poor man's losses, creating for him a category of degradation and abjection that leads to slavery" (Bataille, The Notion of Expenditure). The World and its surrounding worlds have been built through slave labor. Having arrived in Dubai, these men and women's passports are taken from them, and they are forced to live in disgusting conditions, working fifteen hour days out in the hot, disasterous sun. They build our expenditures, and in the process lose any power over their own.
You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. (Sahinal Monir, as quoted by Johann Hari)
Having lost any power over their expenditures, their waste, the workers become slaves, and so, become expendible themselves. To be blunt: those who have lost the power to expend become our waste.
Living in my very own jewel, I rarely notice the worker-slave. He is like the desert to me: part of the dying world. Inside, I am cool. I sit comfortably, unaware of the pressures I am releasing upon the walls that contain me. Inside, everything is pristine. I am unaware that I am sitting in the pit of an erupting volcano - though I surely know.
The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus. Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails. Those contents shoot out with a racket and fall back, streaming down the sides of the Jesuve, spreading death and terror everywhere. (Bataille, The Solar Anus)
Simply: those who cannot enter the volcano will waste away in the desert. We will no longer see our shit, but it will pile up.
And so will the volcanoes.
X Seed 4000 - 4000 m. tall
Sky City 1000 - 1000 m. tall
The Pentominium - 618 m. tall
Crystal Island - 450 m. tall - 2,500,000 sq. m. of floor space.This movement inwards, this "accumulation of organized energy concentrated in so small a volume" (Teilhard), is what Paolo Soleri would label the movement of "miniaturization." If a man is the center of the universe (as some would have it, as I might) then this miniaturization is the perpetual development of The World - in its most perfect and imagined state.
Each Volcano is, in fact, a potential high-density city of cleanliness, beauty, and development. Over the last several decades, the architect Paolo Soleri has constructed a theory of "arcology" - the fusion of architecture and ecology - that calls for such immense and complex structures to deal with the growing immensity and complexity of Man:
...at a certain point in bigness, the architecture itself becomes a positive environmental or ecological factor, shaping man’s sociological identity. An arcology illustrates the premise that man must define his corporate image in finite, perceivable terms if a sense of place, belonging, and identity is to be fostered. Each arcology is a particular instance in how man might wish to live. (Donald Wall)
Miniaturization creates mega-structures.
…Embryonically advanced in the ‘cosmic potentials’ …the idea of high density was carried to its ultimate logical conclusion when Soleri advocated the use of vertical structures of such an immense size that they would incorporate all aspects of life (work, education, health, and recreation) for as many as a million people per cubic mile in cities conceived as single buildings. (Donald Wall)
The evolving complexity of man, Soleri argues, "demands a corresponding effort toward miniaturization." He argues against the sprawl of the laissez-faire utopia. He believes that man must learn how to contain himself.
Man shall have to put order to his own layer; to structuralize his environment... the ultra-structure he will create out of such an environment and himself. To put structure in his environment he must define a neo-nature, a physicomineral sub-layer apt, as nature is not, to render him specific and solely human services. This neo-nature, necessarily rooted into the geological and puncturing through the biological (biosphere), must be congruous with the general swill of evolution so as to be one of its makers. It must then be, by necessity, of a miniaturizing character. (Soleri)
Soleri speaks of his future building in evolutionary terms. If we take his form of Environmentalism (a purely aesthetic environmentalism that celebrates man's genius over man) to its potential end, we can imagine a world free of the unclean. We can imagine a world that separates the inside from the outside - an inside where dirt and shit are unseen, though surrounding. To save the Earth, Soleri wisely looks to forego the Earth - to give up the world for the world in a final sacrifice and final expenditure.
But of course, this loss cannot be final. We will continue (some of us) to live in the pit of the volcano. We will not need much, but we will have everything. We - the complexifiers of the world, we who understand miniaturization, we who are moving towards Teilhard's Omega Point or Soleri's Omega Seed - will undoubtedly have the noosphere under our control. Today, as I write, cyberspace has miniaturized the world while making it infinitely larger - for me.
A follower of Soleri, who was himself a follower of Teilhard, writes of "liquid architecture"...
whose form is contingent on the interests of the beholder; it is an architecture that opens to welcome you and closes to defend you; it is an architecture without doors and hallways, where the next room is always where it needs to be and what it needs to be. It is an architecture that dances or pulsates, becomes tranquil or agitated. Liquid architecture makes liquid cities, cities that change at the shift of a value, where visitors with different backgrounds see different landmarks, where neighbors vary with ideas held in common, and evolve as the ideas mature or dissolve. (Marcos Novak)
In Dubai, we stand indoors staring at the ocean. It is clean. It opens up to me. It is my ocean, and mine to lose.
I dream of a future destination where my interests are met, where I am welcomed, where things are where they need to be. "Open doors, Open minds," Dubai suggests. This World might exist on a computer screen. The privileged, packed densely in their chosen World, will stare at The World - their destination close. The volcano will erupt with excitement, and we - on the inside - will be filled, finally, with a "vision made real."
Friday, May 22, 2009
“Cash”
Cash economies, as a representation of the last stand of “real” money, demarcate a realm of radical expenditure outside of the logic of savings, credit, and investment (though this logic does have its own particular role for spending). In Appadurai’s meditations on Mumbai-as-Cosmopolis he speaks of the “gray area of speculation, solicitation, risk, and violence”[1] surrounding the cash-dominated Hindi film industry—the realm in wish wads of cash are king. Here, a shadow economy of materiality emerges where the “real economy” has made wealth invisible. When all wealth has become invisible, cash becomes an “anchor of materiality”[2] mediating sociability.
In this space, exchange is not mediated through the state, the banks, the insurance companies, the investment firms, etc. but instead exists in real time with a physical representability. Appadurai speaks of the “sensuous appeal of cash”[3]—real bills flying from one person to the next, “racing from pocket to pocket without the logistical drag of conversion, storage, restriction, accounting, and dematerialization to slow the fuel of consumption”[4]. This is consumption—it is immediate and joyous expenditure.
Shades of Bataille: here we see an infiltration of general economics in this byproduct of the hyper-financialized global economy—“the expenditure (the consumption) of wealth, rather than the production, is the primary object”[5] of the phenomenon described above. Utility is subordinated, if only momentarily, to the actual exchange of the physical bills. The wild exuberance of the cash transaction as a kind of ceremonial event is indicative of a particular manifestation of economic sociability which attempts to cement the materiality of wealth in the new invisible economy that has banished materiality to history.
“Trains”
The commuter rail serves a critical role in post-Fordist city as a means of transporting working bodies from distant sprawling suburbs to a variety of work places situated (geographically/socially) throughout the metropolis. During the rail voyage many riders undergo “complex transformations…turning from oppressed dwellers in shantytowns, slums, and disposable housing into well-dressed clerks, nurses, postmen, bank tellers, and secretaries”[6] Historically, the train has been a transformative machine, altering space, time, consciousness, perception, social relations, work, etc. The first rail journeys at the beginning of the 19th century represented “the annihilation of space and time…a given spatial distance, traditionally covered in a fixed amount of travel time, could suddenly be dealt with in a fraction of that time.”[7] Of course, new technologies have managed to annihilate space even more radically, but the train still has a function within this context, crushing the space of modern mega-cities in a way which facilitates the flow of bodies to and from particular spaces as inscribed within the geography of the service-economic city. The “two hours and fifty miles” of daily rail commute redefines the space of the city dramatically.[8]
“The mode of human perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well” [9]
- Walter Benjamin
The transformation of individual workers during the trip from the outlaying shantytown to their places of work in the city center is similarly indicative of the psychologically transformative quality of the train and has a particular historical legacy. The train is a signifier of a modern crisis of perception where technology distorts and at times eradicates distinctions of space, time, wealth, and class. The commuter rail confuses class and social distinctions in much the same way it distorted space and time in the 19th century. This distortion is imperative to the maintenance of the service-industrial economy—the individual with no wealth, no home, and no recognition, living in poverty in the outskirts of the city, must assume a very different identity (Appadurai’s well-dressed clerk, nurse, postmen, bank teller, secretary, etc) to integrate into the functioning of the center-city economy, lest the reality of suffering that this economy is predicated on be revealed.
Excursus—Witness the phenomenon of the railway bringing distant bodies/commodities together in this wonderful Oreo commercial:
The post-Fordist city of the hyper-financialized global economy has a particular geography that is a product of the transition to service/finance at the expense of manufacturing. The dying or dead factory rotting behind monolithic compound walls is “at its heart”[10] Appadurai identifies this as the “master specter” in his exploration of Mumbai-as-Cosmopolis—the memory of the giant industrial complex plays a pivotal role in a “new imagery—where thousands of acres of factory space are rumored to be lying idle behind the high walls that conceal dying factories”[11] For the transitory/homeless poor in this context, this is a particularly cruel phenomenon. The very factory that has been crushed under the weight of the neo-liberal economic agenda is transformed via collective imagination into a space of hope—but this is a false hope, a “fantasy”, a “specter”. The “feast of hidden real estate just beyond the famine of the streets” is just a rotting factory, the product of global urban deindustrialization and capital flight.
The supposed inevitability of the global economic order to which “there is no alternative” reeks of a false eschatology of progress. Here Benjamin’s angel of history resides—with “face…turned toward the past” and the catastrophe of time “piling wreckage upon wreckage” at his feet, a storm “irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”[12]
Appadurai identifies works of “the imagination… as constitutive of modern subjectivity” and posits “self-imagining as an everyday social project” vis-à-vis the hyper-connected, space-time crushing, mass-mediated social reality of this progress. In this context imagination is “neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern.”[13] Here, individual agency returns to contest the legacy of TINA. The consumption of globally dispersed mass media/commodities is a grounds for (re)appropriation—the total corporate homogenization of the globe is a falsehood perpetuated by ideologues on the right and activists on the left. This, however, should not be taken as a provocation to forgive the crimes of the neo-TINA agenda, nor should it serve as justification to herald total freedom via consumer choice. That too, would be a falsehood.
[1] Appadurai “Spectral Housing” 60
[2] Appadurai 61
[3] Appadurai 61
[4] Appadurai 61
[5] Bataille “Accursed Share” 9
[6] Appadurai “Spectral Housing” 63
[7] Schivelbush “Railway Journey” 33
[8] Appadurai “Spectral Housing” 63
[9] Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 222
[10] Appadurai “Spectral Housing” 69
[11] Appadurai “Spectral Housing” 70
[12] Benjamin “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 257
[13] Appadurai “Here and Now” 3,4
Dora
"Marshall Mcluhan, among others, sought to theorize about this world as a 'global village,' but theories such as Mcluhan's appear to have overestimated the communitarian implications of the new media order (Mcluhan and Powers 1989). We are now aware that with media, each time we are tempted to speak of the global village, we must be reminded that media create communities with 'no sense of place' (Meyerowitz 1985)." -Appadurai
The Hudson Valley Wood Carvers club was founded in 1974. It is a response to, or a seizing of, the Hudson Valley’s craft legacy. The members are almost all retired men; they carve mostly animals, mostly in independent wood shops in their homes. In a time when communities have "no sense of place," the club defines, formalizes, and promotes an aspect of the imagined local/bygone imagined local.
“The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. A vast array of empirical facts could be brought to bear on the side of the homogenization argument…and some from other perspectives… What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science, terrorism, and constitutions.” -Appadurai
Dora the Explorer:
Dora by Clayton "Clay" Brooks
from the website of the Hudson Valley Wood Carvers club:
All of Clay Brooks' other sculptures documented on the Hudson Valley Wood Carvers club website are in the round. They are heavily shellacked, three dimensional, life-size animals, mostly ducks (in line with the trends of the rest of the carvings on the site). Dora is the only relief sculpture. While staying true to Dora's design (and even television scale?--its hard to tell), he gives her depth, takes her out of her image, but just barely.
"There may be redemptive nostalgia in a distinction between the (active) production of 'country crafts' and their (mere) consumption of their (passive) reproduction as empty styles. But it is certainly not the ideology itself that makes the difference but the social situations to which it attaches. The practice of making 'traditional' country objects through the learned techniques of stenciling, tin-smithin, applique, quilting, refinishing etc. will only enclose the self in a self-conscious image and wrap 'the folk' and 'history' in a primitivist cloak if the interpretive practice is one of reading action and events and products as symbolic examples or manifestations of an already fixed (symbolized) structure or time." –Kathleen Stewart
Brooks's relief sculpture of Dora positions carving as his practice divorced from any certain subject. It is a nostalgic "learned" technique, but his subject is globalized and contemporary (Dora the Explorer the television show is translated into 22 other languages and broadcast around the world). Brooks's Dora is marketing suicide.
For a tourist to the Hudson Valley, Dora is a kind of toxic contamination of the desire for an untouched, pre-industrial rural space.
"As far as the United States is concerned, one might suggest that the issue is no longer one of nostalgia but of a social imaginaire built largely around reruns. Jameson was bold to link the politics of nostalgia to the postmodern commodity sensibility, surely he was right...If your present is their future (as in much modernization theory and in many self-satisfied tourist fantasies), and their future is your past (as in the case of the Filipino virtuosos of American popular music), then your own past can be made to appear as simply a normalized modality of your present." -Appadurai
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