There Is No Agency

Tourism and the Capitalist Religion

2009-06-01T19:28:00.000-07:00

I would like to situate capitalism as a theological regulatory apparatus that, through its very structuring of all relations, embodies a tendency to nullify the subject while simultaneously leading it to believe in its fulfillment through its own means (i.e., agency). In its spectacular global stage, capitalism frames “the world” within certain practical and representational parameters that prohibit its conception (and conceptual deployment) as anything other than complicit with the development of capitalism. Tourism—as a kind of bourgeois ritual, a vital aspect of lifestyle indoctrination that all post-grads are encouraged to perform— is a useful phenomenon in understanding the metabolism of “the world” that is strategic to the reproduction of life here, in the center.

“Capitalism is nothing but a gigantic apparatus for capturing pure means.” This statement by Giorgio Agamben reveals, once its terminology is defined, the crux of the question of agency in late capitalism and how agency is continually sanitized in the very instance that the subjective or liberatory gesture is made. First, the definition of apparatus:
All apparatuses of power are always double: they arise, on the one hand, from an individualizing subjective behavior and, on the other, from its capture in a separate sphere. There is often nothing reprehensible about the individual behavior in itself, and it can, indeed, express a liberatory intent; it is reprehensible only if the behavior—when it has not been constrained by circumstances or by force—lets itself be captured in the apparatus.
Agamben’s notion of the apparatus is a synthesis of the Foucauldian dispositif with (less explicitly) Situationist/Debordian theories of détournement and its reenactment by capital. (For Agamben, the Situationists articulate capitalism’s theological kernel—itself a kind of universal apparatus—which is separation.) The dispositif is the positive historical instantiation of a set of strategies governing social relations and the economies of power contained therein. Capital, again, is the mammoth apparatus that has sheathed the world like duckweed across the pond’s surface; beneath its slimy opacity exist entire ecologies of apparatuses that (disjunctively and paradoxically) are continually functioning to reinscribe us within capital and transform whatever it can into capital. Apparatuses are, therefore, “heterogeneous set[s] that include virtually anything, linguistic and nonlinguistic, under the same heading.”

Capture: This is the transition undergone by objects (and activity) in the operation of sacrifice. When something is sacrificed it is rendered cursed by and removed from the profane world of human activity and enclosed within the inaccessible realm of the divine. Once given over to the sacred sphere the human hand can only contaminate the object, or make it profane. The religious apparatus functions to maintain the sacred, to maintain the separation between what is sacrificed and, in a sense, those who sacrifice it. Agency comes into play only insofar as it nullifies itself in authorizing the capture of what was once proper to it by an alien force (the religious). Ritual can be defined as the activity that completes and reenacts this alienation—thus the laboring and consumptive rituals of our stage of capitalism. The sacrificial ritual (generally and ahistorically) is the consumptive act par excellence; it is the total destruction of utility (for the human) in the object. Participation in ritual results in the paradoxical production of a subject at the moment at which it is nullified or desubjectivized by the prescriptive logic of the ritual. Agency—if it can exist—is realized in use, which is the direct, legitimate expression of the user in material form; sacrifice is the careful method of negating the possibility of use in the object.

In “Sacrifices” Bataille poetically articulates this paradox, which is at the core of late capitalist vertigo, which forces us to scramble for a concrete understanding of ourselves and our participation in capitalism. Patrick Swayze (as Bodhi) thematizes the interiority of “the tube” in Point Break as “The place where you lose yourself and find yourself.” This is the sacrificial operation endured under late capitalism, where the condition is, universally, self-sacrifice, or the division and capture of a portion of the individual and her experience.
In an ideally brilliant and empty infinity, chaos to the point of revealing the absence of chaos, the anxious loss of life opens, but life only loses itself—at the limit of the last breath—for this empty infinity. The me raises itself to the pure imperative, living-dying for an abyss without walls or floor…
The brilliance of consumption casts the human, now (self-)sacrificed, in an indeterminate zone, “living-dying.” Living-dying is the mode of being within the theological apparatus of capitalism. There is no end to the consumptive feast, for capitalism induces an extravagant celebration of itself on a daily basis. Obviously, work is no longer the sole celebratory act, for capitalism realizes its most intense phase as an apparatus governing/distributing the means by which one consumes, i.e., how one separates oneself from oneself. This is the schizophrenia of a perfected and generalized form of separation that, according to Agamben, was first instated by Christianity and secularized by capital in the form of alienation (alienated labor and alienated consumption). The etymology of the word oikonomia is bound up with maintaining the separateness of the divine through an earthly administration: Christ.

The Trinity signifies the portioning out of Providence by the Fathers of the Church in the 4th Century. Theology rooted itself in the oikos, God’s home, through the figure of Christ, the material and historical incarnation of the divine. Christ became the medium by which the theological translates the idea into material. He frames human history within an economy of redemption in the form action (politics, economics and institutions and general) but only insofar as activity separates itself from God’s ontological plane. Action is therefore reconciled with scripture and theological doctrine while, simultaneously, praxis ceases to be the foundation of being. Christ embodies this fracture, which capital adopts in the form of ideology. Ideology mediates activity, it assures historical persons that they will be redeemed for their actions, or even that they have already been! The eternal quality of ideology is found in the assurance it provides its subjects, which states, “there is no need for revising or intervening in the administration of reality, for YOU are already in the process of doing so.” However, as representation, ideology discloses the potential for human intervention in the administration of reality; like God, it is sovereign and autonomous. It is through the apparatus—ensuring the administration of the terrestrial, historical oikos—that ideology materializes.

Capitalism inherits the Church’s role of maintaining humanity’s respect for this division between material practice and the contemplative, ideational divine. Religion implicates its subjects in their own fragmentation, praxis—ritualistic scruple before the ideational. It is the expression of a deeply schizophrenic condition in which having is mistaken for being. In the consumer society praxis is valued relative only to the accumulation that follows from it; property thus becomes the illusion whereby consumers secure the unity of their being in a deontologized (and desubjectivized) social structure.

Tourism as praxis and industry is the sacrificial operation that the individual carries out upon his own body, which he forfeits to the apparatus: to transport him, feed him, provide him with a vista and a marketplace for purchasing. Souvenirs are emblematic of the deontologization of this consumer practice; tourism is a celebration of the pure mediation that stands in for the experience of the proper, of that which is immanent (and not alien). The globe will not undergo a cosmopolitical transformation so long as travel is the expression of a solipsistic desire to be thrown into the alien. In America, we tend to express this desire through varying degrees of hostility toward immigrants on the one hand and a ritual devotion to consuming museified world culture on the other. Resorts, cruises, the tour bus and adventure/ecotourism are outstanding expressions of how the tourism apparatus functions. It exhibits, through its exhibitionism, how humans desiringly sacrifice experience for total desubjectification. Tourism is the consumption of prefab experiences, events that unfold predictably, regardless of the participants. This is one legacy of colonial that continues to have a deep impact on the consumer societies.

Capital may geographically liberate its subjects, but only in order to capture this freedom in new forms of voluntary subordination.

Tourism supplies the traveler with a sacred image of the world. The figure of the traveler is defined by the mere accumulation of these images.

Shifting the Center

2009-06-01T17:29:00.000-07:00

Sobe sand advertisement

We would be hard pressed to look into the human past and find a social group, town, nation or civilization that did not identify with a particular physical place as a spiritual or at least communal center, and yet our post-modern globalized landscapes (metaphorically and physically) seem to have made no room for these spaces. The concept of the cosmic axis is found across many cultures, a spot at which the four directions intersect, the sky and earth meet and the gods descend as prayers ascend. The marker for these spots is called the omphalos, greek for navel. Often times mountains such as the Kun Lun in China or Mt. Fuji in Japan acted as omphaloses, but any place could be marked as one.

The Omphalos stone of Delphi

Omphaloses place the believer in a world with an affirmed center; once this center is established the believer imagines his physical and spiritual world around that point. As sites of spiritual epiphany as well as social exchange, the omphalos is the focal point of reference from which to judge one's closeness to god and humans, a place to either move away from or come towards. Communal purpose can often supersede spiritual, as is the case with village greens and common spaces in England, Scotland and Wales, which for hundred of years have served as spots for resource harvesting, outdoor meetings and sport events as well as holiday and religious celebrations. As locuses for collective and sacred communication, omphalic centers define the self in relation to larger human and spiritual systems.
With the advent of global trade and finance, immigration, communication, came a vision of humanity encompassing the globe, containing it. The omphalos shifted from the local and became the world itself. The globe became the center, the commons, in the eyes of some eliminating the significance of local centers altogether while to others increasing the need to keep omphalic spaces. The debate of the significance of these spaces has become increasingly relevant in the past century as all natural and cultural resources rapidly become translated into and exchanged as capital. Land, water, air space and the human genome itself are all part of a rapid bidding system for ownership while biomass appropriation begins to reach its limits and species diversity plummets in numerous regions of the world. When Teilhard spoke of the coming psychic compression, reorganization and re-emergence of man, he was also referring to the literal compression of land and space, but it is hard to see at what point humans, let alone earth itself, will be elevated by what Teilhard concisely calls our "internal tensions."
The sense of displacement and pushing outward into non-identifiable space is not only felt of course, by the increasing millions of immigrants who simultaneously move in search of capital while fleeing its effects, but by the way landscapes are modeled for the middle to upperclass. Here I will take the United States as an example. With the advent of car culture, suburbs were sculpted to accomodate these new vehicles: Streets were widened, sidewalks eliminated and central-green space ignored. Neighborhoods were designed on the presupposition that cars were the main purveyors of transportation and access to communication with others, and thus they became one of the major resources for these needs. The alternatives, of course, were technoscapes or mediascapes that the middle class urban inhabitant could access from home via internet or television. The significance of land as an anchoring site for identity was literally blacktopped.
Ironically, the most commercially controlled spaced found today are the ones that create the illusion of social space the most effectively. Recognizing our yearnings for omphalic space, malls provide central space as a celebration of the shared community built on consumption.

One company has managed to fully exploit the yearning for center, sublimating its logo into an entire town. Celebration, FL was created by the Disney Company in the late 1990's as a real estate venture. Using visual and literary propaganda which provoked images of small town America, it drew in hundreds of families by emphasizing the communal atmosphere of the town center and encouraging community organizations which "each play a role in the governance of Celebration."

Downtown Celebration

Twelve years after its launching, Celebration is the model of commercialized community. Since Celebration is wholly owned by Disney, the need for the Disney logo disappears, the illusion of communal autonomy through central shared space is complete.
Our displacement from physical landscape drives us more consistently into the imagined worlds that Appadurai divides into spheres of technoscape, mediascape, financescape etc. As we make basic exchanges- from purchasing foods at a supermarket to sending e-mail we "see" our actions extending outward into a global sphere. Through a fusion of self-made and media-constructed imagery the mind's eye imagines a globe connected by light: a manifestation of the world growing ever claustrophobic and imprisoned by the enlightening beams of global transference. Our imaginations manifest and re-inforce this reality and vice versa.
If the globe is the omphalos, and the omphalos is choking on itself, how then to re-claim room? The imagination as social practice is the place to begin. The scapes we live in and make exchange through are reinforced by our very acknowledgement of them. The projected worlds produced at every level of society are what move nations to war, reinforce hierarchy, topple regimes etc. The landscapes of exchange (communal, ideological etc.) that operate within us are what maintain or disintegrate organized society. Appadurai asserts:
"An important fact about the world we live in today is that many persons on the globe live in such imagined worlds...and thus are able to contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them."
Appadurai proposes that a sort of democratization of the imagination has occured in the post-modern era, that imagination as a social practice is a new phenomenon. This assertion is altogether false. Certainly our imagined worlds are more complex and in some ways more ()pervasive than ever before, but are these worlds not monopolized, as they always have been, by certain elite groups? The access to a greater number of visions of the worlds operations are certainly available, but one must account for the cornucopia of visions that are forcibly excluded from the list of acceptable world views. When Appadurai reduces imagination's past usages to "mere fantasy," "simple escape," elite pastime," and "mere contemplation" he does not account for imagination's fundamental usage as a propagandist tool that manifests dominant landscapes first in the mind and then in reality. In doing so he is also denying the importance and vital usage of radical or alternative scapes envisioned by those who do not have a general monopoly on reality. In every era alternative landscapes have been manifested and traversed via imagination. In the 17th century the Diggers, who founded small agrarian egalitarian communities on common land (which in reality was always owned by a lord), relied upon specific visions to manifest their goals. They believed in a Golden Age of England, before the Norman invasion, at which time land was shared equally and hierarchy was non-existent. By envisioning this fantastical time period, the Diggers had a model by which to first practice in their minds and then physically produce.
Today, the imagination as a radical tool is being utilized as a way to reclaim public space and create new omphalic centers. Seeing the globe as a whole has reinvigorated the idea of the earth as a shared space, or rather has re-erected the urgent need to understand it as a limited system with a specific reproductive carrying capacity. Activist Vandana Shiva has been a vocal part of the "earth democracy" movement, which, amongst its tenets recognizes the land as commons: "All members of the earth community including all humans have the right to sustenance - to food and water, to a safe and clean habitat, to security of ecological space...These rights are natural rights...and are best protected through community rights and commons." The earth is envisioned as one active community, but one that is naturally and necessarily traversed and influenced at regional levels, thus the need for local economy, local knowledge, local understandings of self. This concept has become increasingly pervasive in any number of movements against Western economo-ideological influence. Whether in reaction to the privatization of centuries-old rice varieties in India, or to the neglect of land in England or the destruction of it on the Northwest coast of the U.S., organized groups are establishing autonomous zones for egalitarian and agrarian practice. In an era in which no call for "traditional" activity or ideology is untouched by modern influence, the degree to which these new spaces actually signify independence and resistance from oppressive spheres is questionable. The Burning Man Festival is an apt example. On its website, Burning Man's intention is stated as "to create radically-inclusive, self-supporting society that connects individuals to each other, civic life and the natural world." At the end of the week, participants ritually burn The Man, a wood model symbolizing society's oppressive ills.

The Man that resided over the 2008 event (pre-burn)

An altar at a Rainbow Gathering

While Burning Man hosts lectures on any number of social and environmental justice topics as well as practicing a "leave no trace" policy, a radically-inclusive society can only be so inclusive when it charges entrance fees upwards of hundreds of dollars. (phtotos from burning man) But what Burning Man and similar, if less capitalized festivals such as Rainbow Gathering are trying to feed are the desire for focused omphalic spiritual sites that produce fantastical landscapes to use as models for other parts of the world. The vision feeds the practice (for those who can afford it at least).
Recently the practice of autonomous space has been manifested in phenomena such as guerilla gardening. Identified by many as a revitalization of the Diggers movement, guerilla gardening is a new name for the centuries old yet increasingly important practice of populist land seizure. Individuals as well as organized teams of people choose derelict land, private and publicly owned and covertly and openly plant and tend decorative, herbal and food plants.

Guerilla gardening at night

Wider scale examples have been increasing in recent years due to the exacerbation of untenable living conditions and higher food prices. In 1995 Tacamiche banana plantation workers in Honduras illegally grew vegetables on abandoned plantation land rather than leave with the plantation's closure. In May 1996 activists affiliated with "The Land is Ours" occupied 13 acres of derelict land belonging to the Guinness Co. in the banks of River Thames in Wandsworth, South London. The action claimed to highlight what the occupiers described as "the appalling misuse of urban land, the lack of provisions for affordable housing and the deterioration of the urban environment." The community built there lasted for 5.5 months before being evicted. These acts are prompted out of desperation for survival, but on both a physical and psychic level, and imaginative practice is essential to the construction of these new environments. Through a gaze that subverts and disrupts our dominant financescapes, technoscapes and mediascapes the masked qualities of our land and our relationship to it are revealed. As post-modern subjects, we recognize everywhere as a potential site for central communal and spiritual exchange.

Cosmopolitan Tribalism

2009-06-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

the so-called democratic definition of global (pop) culture by urban youth

"Cosmopolitan Tribalism arises from the democratization of creative, experimental youth culture: a multitasking generation, attuned to the world, armed with freedom and the tools to create and mix references in its own way..."

I stumbled across the video 'Cosmopolitan Tribalism' on the blog of design agency Bola Sociology Design. From their website: "Bola is a design institute which uses behavioral research as a premise to its projects. We believe that in investigating and understanding what happens in society in order to develop ideas which are in tune with its aspirations. This is the foundation for what we call meaningful design. We work with the same research methodologies used by our sister-company, Box 1824, and with a multidisciplinary structure that includes anthropologists, semioticians, photographers and, naturally, designers."

The video begins with an Animal Collective-esque soundtrack - echoey samples in a chorus that sounds both old and new - and a man's voice transposed over a futuristic background of shifting stars.

"Looking forward to a futuristic world rooted in a primitive unity. Blurring the boundaries between irony and truth, ancient and new, the collective and the individual. This is a cultural impulse to create a new, united, global culture. We can define it as cosmopolitan tribalism," he says.

The premise behind this project - commissioned by "a group of technology and style companies"- is that the Internet and a new modern connectively has shifted modes of consumption and self-identification. "The urban world, connected and cosmopolitan, opens door for a return to the primitive, where nature worship, spiritual quests and new states of being are again in the discussion. This is how we define a new way of thinking... driving the cultural and consumer goods industry towards updating and rejuvenating its direction."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVnRzEjpUmE

The video introduces "concepts" such as celebration, dance, hedonism, tribal patterns, and sacred geometry, alongside videos and still images culled from the fashion, music, and art worlds [like clips from the "tribal" or "primitively" inspired MGMT video above.]

Of course, this representation of the "new global culture" is troubled by the homogeneity of its authors. Bolo Sociology Design say in their introduction to the project: "We see here a little of the “globalist spirit” made tangible. It does not represent most of mankind and global youth, but rather a niche of globalized young men and women living an interconnected culture in the most economically active capitals of the world. This is an inspiration video, aesthetically organizing how a culture expresses itself."

According to this interpretation, being globalized is to be in a position of luxury. This version of cosmopolitanism is not a modern trend sparked by the internet; rather it has a long history. Waldron in a response to Benhabib's essay illuminates different uses of the term: "'Cosmopolitanism,' Professor Benhabib rightly observes, 'has become one of the keywords of our times'(17). But "cosmopolitan" has a number of different meanings. For some, it is about the love of mankind, or about duties owed to every person in the world, without national or ethnic differentiation. For others, the word "cosmopolitan" connotes the fluidity and the evanescence of culture; it celebrates the compromising or evaporation of the boundaries between cultures conceived as distinct entities; and it anticipates a world of fractured and mingled identities. For still others--and this is the theme that Benhabib explores--cosmopolitanism is about order and norms, not just culture and moral sentiment. It envisages a world order..." 83, Waldron.

The cosmopolitanism we see depicted in this inspirational advertising video falls closest to Waldron's second definition. It is interesting that the agency sees the future, driven by globalization, as a single culture based on a Western interpretation of the other - other in both place and time - that they are able to come into contact with and define by virtue of their globalized privilege. It is not even a world of "fractured and mingled identities" - the modern cultural trend sees globalization as a return to a "primitive unity."

This depiction is complicated when voices selected to define these primitive, ancient, yet ultra-modern trends themselves from the location of the periphery.

http://www.miauk.com/

M.I.A. is a musical artist of Sri Lankan Tamil descent. She is quoted on the Tamil Nation website as saying, "Nobody wants to be dancing to political songs. Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing. I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked." By joining the dominant Western trend (or even by being selected or favored by the niche group of privileged, globalized, urban youth) M.I.A. gained global influence (she was recently voted by Time Magazine as one of the world's top 100 most influential people.) Her success in the Western world does not mean that diverse global culture is being built from the bottom.

Walter Mignolo's concludes his essay on border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism with a visual metaphor for a new, just, working world order: "If you can imagine Western civilization as a large circle with a series of satellite circles intersecting the larger one but disconnected from each ohter, diversality will be the project that connects the diverse subaltern satellites appropriating and transforming Western global designs. Diversality can be imagined as a new medievalism, a pluricentric world built on the ruins of ancient, non-Western cultures and civilizations with the debris of Western civilization. A cosmopolitanism that only connects from the center of the larger circle outward, and leaves the outer places disconnected from each other, would be a cosmopolitanism from above..." (Mignolo 183-184).

It is also worth commenting on the fact that this video, made for the purposes of directing and inspiring successful advertising campaigns, both justifies the cultural agenda-setting of a small privileged group of globalized urban youth and forwards the aims of capitalism.

Watch the full video for many more examples, including depictions in youth culture of "totems, idols, primitivism, neo-psychedelia, shamanism, rituals and carnival."

2009-06-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

In a globalized world-system, flows of migrant workers are essential for economic development. The constant need for affordable labor has forced countries to seek out workers beyond its own borders. Immigrants have tended to travel from poor under-developed nations to rich first-world capitalist countries in Western Europe and North America. In recent years, however, Russia has emerged as a country with one of the largest immigrant populations in the world. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was followed by the erection of new international boundaries between former Soviet republics. Over fifteen years after the collapse, the Russian Federation has emerged as the economic and financial power-house of the post-Soviet region. With its enormous revenue from gas and oil exports, Russia has undergone a rapid economic transition. By the late 90s, there was a growing economic disparity between Russia and the surrounding republics, most notably in the Caucuses and Central Asia. In the span of a decade, Russia transitioned from a migrant-exporting to an overwhelmingly migrant-importing nation. As a relatively recent phenomenon, Russia has not been able to respond to the reality of being a major destination for immigrants. Increased immigration to Russia has been the direct result of capitalist development and is therefore similar to other waves of migration experienced in the capitalist West. Nonetheless, the case of Russia is exceptional in more ways than one due in part to its historical legacy.
Throughout modern history, Central Asia and the Caucuses had been part of Russian territory, first as regions of the Russian Empire and later as socialist republics in the Soviet Union. Russian domination over neighboring ethnic and religious groups could be interpreted as being both imperialist and colonial. Yet unlike European colonialism, Russia did not annex territory for economic benefit in the forms of human labor and raw materials. The Russian Empire was, above all, a military and symbolic entity that used territory to exert geo-political pressure on its neighboring countries. Despite that fact that ethnic minorities were granted formal autonomy, the Soviet Union inherited a highly centralized state from the Russian Empire. The communist party, for example, promoted a policy of Russification throughout the Soviet republics. How is it then possible that former Soviet citizens with a common identity now regard each other as foreigners?

While the world expanded freedom of movement in order to enhance the flow of capital, the Soviet Union remained strictly speaking a police state. Mobility within the Soviet Union was extremely limited as a result of a complicated system of residency controls. Every Soviet citizen was issued an “internal” passport that had the individual’s name, address, ethnicity, marital status, and other information. In addition to this, each Soviet citizen has to possess a valid “propiska” (registration) from the local police. Any person caught by the police in the city without a valid registration was liable to imprisonment, banishment, and/or fines. Given this strict system of oversight, citizens could not simply relocate to different parts of the Soviet Union without obtaining a permit from the authorities. As a result, there was limited movement of people between the regions and republics of the country. Surprisingly, this archaic passport system is still in force in modern-day Russia, albeit in a less rigid form.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, human mobility has been greatly facilitated. Travel between Russia and other CIS republics is visa-free, open, and poorly regulated. As part of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the former Soviet republics have agreed to allow freedom of movement between member states. Unlike the European Union, however, the economic disparity between the respective countries is much greater. As is highlighted in “International Flows of Humanity”, migration is defined by the capitalist principles of supply and demand. In the case of immigration to Russia, it is important to look at the situation in terms of Bhagwati’s “push” and “pull” factors. Like with most forms of migration, economic inequality between the Central Asian republics and Russia is the main reason behind this flow of migration today. More importantly, however, than economic inequality are the cultural and historical bonds between Russia and its neighbors. As the former epicenter of the Soviet Union, Russia has retained its superiority in terms of industry, science, culture, military, and education. The geopolitical domination of Russia over this vast region has to a large extent predetermined the trajectory of migration movement because “inequality needs to be activated as a migration push factor – through organized recruitment, neocolonial bonds, etc.” (Sassen 136). This explains why Kyrghyz and Tadjik migrant workers are more likely to immigrate to Russia rather than to China or Iran. In this particular case, Russia’s relationship to its neighboring republic would be more aptly described as “neo-imperial” rather than “neo-colonial”. As far as the pull factors are concerned, the demographic crisis within Russia has left it in dire need of both skilled and unskilled workers in most sectors of the labor market. Construction firms and other private companies have been active in recruiting wage laborers from poor underdeveloped Central Asian countries. Unlike in Germany,however, the importation of migrants has developed outside of any national government programs and has remained largely unregulated.

On the surface, the immigration to Russia from Central Asia and the Caucuses seems to mirror the experience of post-World War II Western Europe. There is the post-imperial legacy, the need for cheap labor, and the concentration of capital in a single region. Generally speaking, this is a typical Center-Periphery dichotomy as is presented in word-systems analysis. Nonetheless, migrants arriving in Russia today experience an environment very different from that of Western Europe. Despite the recent economic success, Russia remains an extremely poor country, especially in its more distant regions. This situation creates conflict between the poor local ethnically Russian population and the migrant guest-workers from abroad. Whereas in Western Europe there was a “hunger for immigrants…to supplement the domestic labor force and also to ensure that the social security systems do not wind up bankrupt”, in Russia there is no functioning social system at the moment (Bhagwati 212). Guest-workers do not pay taxes in Russia, but neither do the majority of Russian citizens.

Bhagwati is naive in believing that “it is impossible to incarcerate migrants caught crossing borders illegally without raising an outcry over humane treatment” (216). Given Russia’s corrupt and undemocratic regime, the mistreatment of migrant workers hardly raises any eyebrows.

While European and North American nations are closing their borders to flows of migrant workers, Russia has left its borders open while providing a hostile environment for those workers that do migrate. Upon arrival, migrant workers encounter a complicated web of Soviet-style bureaucracy that is both confusing and frustrating. According to Russian law, migrant workers need to register at an immigration office within 3 days of their arrival in the country. According to Human Rights Watch this system is inefficient and complex:

Many migrant workers entering Russia under the non-visa regime do not have a job or a place to live when they arrive in Russia, and for most of them three days is a very short period in which to identify one or the other, unless they already have established contacts prior to their arrival (HRW 2009)

http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/02/09/are-you-happy-cheat-us

Therefore being unable to follow the official law on immigration, these migrant workers immediately become “illegal”. Here is a short advertisement produced by the Federal Migration Service warning potential immigrants of the dangers of failing to register with the authorities:

In the video a guest-worker named “Ahmet” goes to Russia and is too lazy to register legally, gets into trouble with the authorities, and is sent back to his village. The content of this video exposes the racist and discriminatory attitude of the Russian government officials towards migrant-workers. Abuse of migrant workers by police is rampant and gruesome. Anti-immigrant sentiment among the Russian population is extremely high. In the short span of time since the break-up of the Soviet Union, the “other” in the form of a guest-worker is “represented, stereotyped as from a different race and culture” (Sassin 135). In the photo below, Russian police is raiding a construction site with migrant workers. Usually, the police abuses, robs, and beats the workers before releasing them for a bribe.

Generally, most of the literature on flows of migration has focused on the immigration to capitalist democratic nations. Although Russia is indeed a capitalist nation thirsty for cheap labor, the concept of human rights is virtually non-existent within its borders. While large Western corporation have exploited cheap labor via outsourcing in Asia, immigrants within these countries borders have, to a large extent, enjoyed the same social, political, and economic rights as the local population. The European notion that “the individual is now an object of law and a site for rights regardless of whether a citizen or an alien” does not hold true in Russia (Sassen 23). Under a corrupt, semi-authoritarian regime, both the local population and guest-workers are to a certain extent limited in their political and social rights. Nonetheless the local Russian population feels threatened by its former neighbors turned foreigners. In essence, Russia is stuck in the nineteenth century with open borders, a lack of human rights, rapid capitalist development, and a need for cheap under-paid labor. At the same time, it is still attempting to maintain its influential historical and cultural role over the entire region. In the meantime, the suffering of migrant workers in Russia seems to have no end in sight.

Global Study

2009-05-31T21:31:00.000-07:00

(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.

Cosmo-Patriotism: A Necessarily Limited Response to Immanuel Wallerstein (2.0)

2009-05-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

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.

"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.

"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.

Fragments on the Globe

2009-05-29T08:43:00.000-07:00

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.

Cosmopolitanism, Authority, and Illegal Immigration

2009-05-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-26T18:07:00.000-07:00

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).

The World: A Vision Made Real

2009-05-26T12:55:00.000-07:00

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."

2009-05-22T18:19:00.000-07:00

“Cash”

The distinction between cash and capital as such in the hyper-financialized global economy is constitutive of a new economic space (in the general sense) wherein the concept of wealth becomes distorted as a mediator of social relations. In the hyper-financialized global economy money is increasingly invisible, or is only made visible vis-à-vis the exchange value of commodities where the cars, clothes, etc. signify value/wealth that cannot otherwise exist materially. In the disjuncture between hidden and visible wealth, cash emerges as a critical placeholder of materiality in a world of immaterial value.

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 19^th 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 19^th 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 City”

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.

“Progress/Utopia”

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

2009-05-22T07:39:00.000-07:00

"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

Etsy the Website

2009-05-12T02:45:00.001-07:00

Etsy is a website that acts as an online marketplace for handmade and vintage items. It began in 2005 and has grown steadily since. In 2009, the site facilitated $87.5 million worth of sales. Etsy generates revenue through 15 cent listing fees as well as a 3.5% commission on all sales.

My cousin Laura opened a virtual shop on Etsy in September 2005. With growing success, her Etsy business came to replace her other income sources.

One of my cousin's bags:

About a year ago, my mother told me that Laura had discovered that someone had copied her designs and opened a rival Etsy shop. A quick search of "hemp bag" on Etsy revealed that sure enough, a shop called EasternlyYours representing 3 young women in Thailand was selling very close replicas of my cousin's products.

A bag made by EasternlyYours:

Etsy's main rule is that no new, mass-produced things can be sold on the site. This is a confusing rule though. Things that are not handmade, but rather "recycled" are allowed (meaning lots and lots of vintage clothing). But how does a re-sale differ from recycling? The skirt I bought at J.Crew last month isn't vintage, but if I were to decide I didn't want it and tried to sell it on Etsy, my account may be terminated. From Esty’s website: “We created Etsy to reconnect producer and consumer, and swing the pendulum back to a time when we bought our bread from the baker, food from the farmer, and shoes from the cobbler.” In employing an idea of regression in time as political agenda, Etsy situates its politics within its aesthetic. Politics = nostalgia = vintage clothing = politics.

A look into Etsy's inventory is telling.2* The highlights are that candles is its own category, that there is more jewelry for sale on Etsy than almost all other categories combined, and jewelry's closest rival (but lagging by almost 500,000 items) is the "Supplies" category which sells mainly jewelry making supplies.

Most of Etsy's political rhetoric centers on reuniting consumers with the producers of the things they buy. But who is being reunited with who? This logic of reunion depends on a purchase through Etsy replacing a transaction that would otherwise have happened with a corporation. Rather than buying a purse at a chain store, someone will buy one from my cousin. In actuality, Etsy's total embrace of a pop-punk/indie aesthetic (a component of Etsy marketing is the company logo screenprinted onto bandanas) positions it not as a substitute, but as an addition.

In a 2007 article for the New York Times, Rob Walker writes: “Kalin [the company founder] seems flabbergasted that anyone would shop at Walmart to save 12 cents on a peach instead of supporting a local farmer. Buying something from the person who made it is ‘the opposite of what Wal-Mart is right now: just the massively impersonal experience,’ he told me earlier. ‘When you get something from Etsy, there's this whole history behind it. There's a person there.’ I asked whether Wal-Mart was really the right comparison, given Etsy's eclectic, artistic merchandise, and the more workaday product mix of a big-box discounter. He brushed that aside, noting that Etsy sells clothes, which everyone needs."

Kalin is persistent in contrasting Etsy and Walmart. Etsy has next to no literature available on the site about the company's philosophy, yet a sundry of videos. Quoted from the site’s main introductory video: "Etsy was born out of the time I was spending in Upstate New York where I saw all these Walmarts. You go in and you're just shopping with this anonymous shelf of products and I wanted the marketplace itself to be community that I'd seen growing up and traveling around in Europe. And the idea that you could do it on the web and have it be this glocal community that's talking to eachother and buying and selling handmade goods."

In fact, Etsy practices a kind of covert "lobal" philosophy. Although it has a shop-local function, the site generally touts that it can connect you with wares are from all over the world. Etsy successfully conflates the quality of being handmade with its being local. Buying something from the person who made the thing herself induces a kind of general nostalgia of shopping experiences one has "seen growing up and traveling around Europe." Etsy operates by giving consumers the feeling of the local, while making possible the revenue of the global for both its crafters and founders.

Walker writes: "Some point out that for all the talk of consumers wanting to escape the mall-fueled conformity, Etsy's online mall format amplifies market driven trends. (Images of birds, especially owls, are inexplicably popular. (One crafter told me she was sick of making the same owl over and over again--but that's what her customers wanted.)” This crafter’s experience suggests that rather than replace Kalin's despised "anonymous shelf of products" with diverse handmade crafts, Etsy has worked to codify the DIY, handcrafted aesthetic into something like an anonymous shelf of its own. Recall the plethora of home accessories sold by Urban Outfitters in the early 2000's printed with sketchy outlines of owls, which had themselves been designed to look hand-drawn. Are Etsy crafters really making chain store forgeries?1

The site doesn't make many claims to supporting creativity and diversity, but the implication is strong. In differentiating its wares from mass-produced ones, Etsy depends on variety as evidence of its many individual producers. Etsy currently advertises over 250,000 sellers. This would seem to guarantee diversity in its products, and yet there are 150 knit hats designed to resemble cupcakes for sale on the site. A consumer's feeling of local is doubly false. Within Etsy, the quality of a thing being handmade connotes, and in so can replace, its being local and its being unique.

A selection of cupcake hats from Etsy:

How do my cousin and her Thai rival fit into Kalin's idea of a "glocal marketplace" and Etsy's homogenizing tendency? Etsy encourages its sellers to market themselves through frequent online activity: "Utilize the Internet to get the word out about your Etsy shop. Shop promotion can be easy when done on a blog or social networking site - these sites are made for you to talk about yourself! Like Andrea Salmon (Etsy shop SamAndrea) says, “Toot your own horn! Because if you don’t do it, no one else will either!”

My cousin and EasternlyYours toot different aspects of thier horns though.

This is my cousin's profile:
"I love all things natural :)

My goal is to create durable and long lasting items that are both functional and beautiful. I use natural, organic, sustainable and recycled fibers and fabrics. In my own life, I make every effort to reduce the toxic load and lighten my footstep on the earth. I am attracted to what appeals to my body as the life form that it is.

Nature is Life.
Life is natural.
Natural is beautiful."

My cousin has followed Etsy's advice and has a blog and Flickr account in which she seamlessly mixes shop info, production anecdotes, and personal news and observations. In sequence, her Flickr account shows a photo of the Oregon shoreline outside her house, a bowl of steamed quinoa, new fabric she got, a sliced grapefruit, and a new blouse she just finished. A customer who buys her bag can feel like they know her personally. They are buying an aquaintance, and one who is romantic, healthy, and natural.

This is a selection of EasternlyYours's profile:
"There is nothing more fun than going to the Jatujak Weekend Market (biggest weekend market in the country) together to look for nice lovely materials to create our masterpieces. We have bought a number of distictively beautiful fabrics locally made here in Thailand and in the region such as in India, Nepal, China, and Japan.

A lot of thoughts have been given to the design of each product with focus on functionality and Eastern beauty. Some background of the design or inspiration is included in each product’s description."

EaternlyYours does not link to any other sites, however the trio recently wrote an article for the official Etsy blog about celebrating Thai New Years. As introduced by Etsy: "With Thailand in the news right now, we turned to EasternlyYours an Etsy shop run by three Thai women. During this time of protest and unrest, the Thai are still celebrating their New Year holiday."

Piecing together identities for their Etsy shops, my cousin, a white American, focuses on small but palatable particularities. She likes textures, she shares her feelings about the weather, her eco-passion. EasternlyYours uses their Thai identity to attract consumers. They describe going to the local market to get fabrics with traditional Asian prints and their bags follow my cousin’s plans, but with Asian patterns and sometimes dangling Thai accessories.

In differentiating themselves to Western consumers, EasternlyYours does not exceed a pleasant exoticism, while my cousin, given her fundamental racial similarity and geographic closeness to her consumers (mostly wealthy white American women), is afforded personality, however market-driven her environmental concern may be.

So is there really a difference between choosing the indie owls, sparrows, and skulls, the natural-dyed hemp my cousin uses, and EasternlyYours’s Thai-patterned hemp?

My cousin and EasternlyYours together mimic the transfer of factory production from the West to the East and South. EaternlyYours not only makes similar bags, they sell them for cheaper. Diyscene.com has a fragment of a post about Etsy kicking off a seller who it found out was operating a sweatshop in Thailand and selling its sweatshop-produced goods through the site. If more Etsy shops open in countries with a lot of existing factory production, Etsy may be forced to refine its definition of “handmade” when confronted with the fact that a lot of the things on the “anonymous shelf of products” at Walmart were made by someone’s hands, albeit really far away from craft classes at company headquarters in Brooklyn.

2009-04-25T21:51:00.000-07:00

1. 1.Analysis of the super-structure is in dire need of a “localization.” The standardization of globe viewed as a purely antiseptic process—dissolving the mythological fertility of natural, indigenous territories beyond capital’s “synthetic” reach—has worn itself out. This is evident in the overly “utilitarian” works in cultural/globalization studies that recycle the same facts that forbid new interpretations while simultaneously pleading for now-time employment of information in politics. Most of this fact-driven work draws its source-data from the most abstract, cosmological of registers that can nonetheless pass as “empirical.” The statisticization of indigenous communities, for instance, basically re-articulates the role standard-of-living indexes have in producing an image of the world via a content-less McWeltanschauung. We need to turn the globe in on ourselves, not seek it out in the peripheries.

2. 2. Lukács reifies reification when he affirms Taylorism and takes it as truth when it claims to penetrate into the worker’s soul. Critiques of globalization fall into a similar trap when they confirm that transnational corporations have homogenized the globe. That capitalism hinges itself on standardization is nothing new. And, “a mode of thought completely anchored in an awestruck repulsion of the existing system, crudely reduces all reality to the existence of that system.” This quote, Thesis 202 of The Society of the Spectacle slightly altered to read repulsion instead of celebration, articulates the pseudo-critical distance observed in pop-leftism today.

3. 3. A kind of textual and performative repulsion of the system amounts to the denial that states that their desire somehow escapes capital; and this is what grounds their epistemological claims and the practicality of their solutions. (In high school, I remember making silk-screened patches proclaiming “Trust Your Desire” or something like that take from a book published by the anarcho Crimethink collective.) Desire is not a primal current immanent to the globe but not to capital; it is not to be trusted because, like the effects of capital, its effects are inascribable to a rational, willful agent.

4. 4. Observing the detours of our own desires within global capitalism would bring a specificity to critique that is lacking in the kind of negative hagiography of the other as the apogee of a flat, capitalist despair.

Here’s a nugget of rich corporate-theologico televangellism brought to you by the local superstructure.

Sheer Commodification

2009-04-23T14:04:00.000-07:00

Some interesting things happening here involving bio-energetics, sex and commodity aesthetics. In the erogenous zone of the airline, the "Sheer Energy by L' Eggs" product gives a little something extra, facilitating that 110% service-industry spunk. A hidden implication of this commercial is a libidinal investment in the everyday via the commodity, which is part of an entire milieu of commodifications present in the sexuality of service-industrial relations. The excruciating boredom of airline travel culminates in a performance of pure service--featuring Sheer Energy-- that evokes the type-cast sexualized aesthetic of the female flight attendant. Being served becomes a service in itself; service is the service provided. Prior to the diversification--but not elimination-- of airline hiring practices in regards to appearance and gender, inflight experience resembled a kind of perverse sexual utopia that centered on masculine consumer desire coupled with company attempts to maintain a nostalgic image of travel luxury, all subsumed under a scripted role-play.

Sheer Energy corresponds to needs directly posited by the service industry-- which is part anatomical and part mystical. The latter element is seen in the energized super-humanity of the flight attendant, an occupation often associated with a paradoxically sleep-deprived, maniacal gusto. Flight attendants figure in many ways to be the transcendent super-(hu)man of late capitalism,with a bubbling energetic reserve to invest not only in the service provided to flyers but also in a spectacular love for providing that service. Super-humanity exhibits itself in this--albeit put-on-- ebullient personality that situates itself in the context of inflight despair (the claustrophobia, the air, the technologically-provoked anxiety); service is valued on the basis of its ability to obscure the horrifying, banal and inhuman tendencies of micro-managed consumer experiences. In this light, the flight attendant is the apogee of service industry valorization.

The commodity becomes a source of abstract, post-caloric energy that fuels postindustrial labor. The wear-and-tear of the workday is placed under erasure by this magical product. The product itself makes her feel like dancing, even after standing for six hours.

Sheer Energy also informs a feminine commodity aesthetic that can be procured through consumption. 70's and 80's advertisements exhibit similar tropes to the ones displayed by Sheer Energy--mainly that of securing a place as an object of desire by relating it to male preference. "Men prefer Hane's pantyhose"; "Tab [cola] can help you stay in his mind"; the concept of Virginia Slims; etc. Consuming becomes not only a way to reproduce the worker but also to more fluidly reproduce, capitalize and hyperbolize existing tendencies in the field of desire. Products who, at least in their ads, evoke the body are instrumentalized in commodity-hermeneutics in which the maintenance and care of the consumer is the objective; the result is the commodification of the consumer body itself (as well as, more residually and less violently, a commodification of hetero-male desire).

DIY @ Target: A Shabby-Chic Dialectic

2009-04-16T01:17:00.000-07:00

In light of its recession downsizing and mega-corporate sublation, I thought I would post some poetic (and tragic) reflections on grass-roots capitalism from the blog of Shabby Chic founder Rachel Ashwell.

“Shabby Chic on-line has had to close its doors.

But Simply Shabby Chic continues in Target stores.

Enjoy the treasures that you have bought over the years.

Hopefully bringing more smiles than tears.”

“Being an artist, a romantic, and a dreamer, I find it very easy to reflect on my life experiences in a storybook setting.”

“This past week my manufacturing plant has been selling off fabrics,  much of it of course is plain white. Some are Rachel Ashwell Shabby Chic floral prints. Most of the buyers coming through have been sympathetic and nostalgic. However some attempted to steal Rachel Ashwell Shabby Chic tags and  labels so they can sell them an authentic Shabby Chic product. This was disappointing to me. This feels dirty…”

“While the fabric is of course Rachel Ashwell Shabby Chic,  the products that they will be made into are not. So for any of you who care whether you are buying authentic  Rachel Ashwell Shabby Chic products, there will be some impostors for a while.  I have always wondered what if feels like being in the head of person  that copies. To me that is life as a destination without a journey. Why would anyone want to create something that wasn’t their own heart  and soul? Just for money I suppose. That’s something I don’t understand…” 

“REM ’Everybody hurts’ (And yes it hurts... it hurts because I love my stores,  I love my employees, I love my artisan vendors, I love my customers,  and things are broken for the time being.)” 

“The jewels sit safetly on a solid gold band .....for I have the knowledge  that my childrens character has been forever changed. They have never experienced the world without Shabby. Its a beauty  and strength they assumed came with breathing. They have learnt the  fragility of everything. Consequently they understand life,  just a little bit more…” 

Grass-roots entrepreneurship is a permutation of capitalism at odds with principles of rationalization, thus the subsumption of DIY-home décor-come small-time industry by Target. Note how Rachel desperately clings to the concept of “the original." Creative/local/DIY/etc. capitalism gains its nostalgic quality from this emphatic copyright privatization of the concept and product, which allows consumers to indulge in the commodity’s mythic tale of origin in the authoritative hand of a human. Our epoch is that of craftsmanship’s fetishization, the aesthetics of craft connote personality while erasing the real relations of production.

Photography, Universality, Profit

2009-04-13T11:45:00.000-07:00

In 1986, United Colors of Benetton launched an advertising campaign on "themes of difference." UCB commissioned designer Oliviero Toscani to create images of "couples" to both illustrate the realities of certain conflicts and to posit a peaceful solution to those conflicts. Perhaps, however, that is already giving the company too much credit. The ad campaign was extremely controversial due to the extreme ambiguity of its imagery.
One image, for example, shows two children embracing. One is the veritable symbol of a curly haired, Anglo cherubim, the other is a child of African descent with hair modeled to resemble devil horns. What is most obvious is the depiction of certain dichotomies Westerners are familiar with (good/evil, white/black) but what the viewer is supposed to do with these materialized binaries, no one knows. The embrace between the children is at best confusing: What does it mean for stereotypes to hold and cherish each other? The humanity of the children cannot be fully separated from their symbolic representation, and so any clear humanist interpretation is lost. I have posted several more images below.

Other images in the campaign were taken from actual current socio-political events, but were absent of any explanatory literature about said events. Literally, the only literature present in all the ads was the words "United Colors of Benetton."

On its website, UCB characterizes itself as "a brand that has aimed, for over 20 years, to create “value” by capitalizing on an image." It goes on to say, "A company that emphasizes value and chooses to create value is no longer communicating with the consumer but with the individual. Actual consumption is repositioned within the overall context of life. By entering the universe of values, the brand frees the product from the world of merchandise and manufacturing and makes it a social being of its own."

Benetton believes that through its imagery, its products transcend the world of capital and are recontextualized somehow as social and ethical objects. Benetton is literally trying to sell social consciousness.

Can a photograph, with its multilayered gaze between subject, camera and photographer treat the subject with respect while simultaneously re-presenting the subject to the world? Can images similar to the Benetton ads actually speak to some kind of universal humanity, if the processes by which they are produced and presented are altered?

I present case two: The art of JR and the communities who work with him. The anonymous artist JR has been doing photography work globally for at least ten years. He began his work in Paris and has more recently done projects in Brazil, Kenya and Palestine/Israel. He establishes ties with various communities, lives with and works with them and produces large scale photo projects. His work appeals to what one could argue are the most universally recognizable images for humans: the face and the eyes. He juxtaposes these images on to the sides of buildings, walls, stairs and rooftops. His most well known project "Face2Face" invites the viewer to re-examine the conflict between Israel and Palestine by appealing to our recognition of facial expressions. JR collaborated with both Palestinians and Israelis to produce a series of funny faces, including what he calls the "HolyTrinity" (seen below) and had crews of volunteers paste the images on the dividing wall as well as local marketplaces and courtyards. What is striking about these photographs is that they don’t invite the viewer to interpret them inasmuch as the faces declare their own opinions. Their placement on the dividing wall is a critique of the wall as absurd, innocuous, ridiculous.

The Benetton ads seek to create a sense of hope or outrage and then use the Benetton name to direct the consumer to action through the purchase of merchandise. But JR’s usage of photo and edifice offer familiar visages that transform their locations as sites for action and change. JR’s work, if I may be so bold to say it, offers the idea that there can be a universal value, emphasizing that which humans will always recognize and feel bonded to in a globalized world.

For more of JR's work check out www.jr-art.net

Globalized Resistance

2009-04-12T09:20:00.000-07:00

The model of the World Social Forum is that “another world is possible”. One free of globalization and capitalist exploitation, free of a racist and gendered society, a place we can all live in without the fear that we are destroying our environment. For many the World Social Forum is a joke, it presents no reasonable effort to change the system we are living in and it is primarily a gathering for activists and radicals to commiserate together. However, considering the advent of globalized resistance it is an interesting phenomenon. Furthermore, there is the question of what strategies to use against a system that is growing ever more solidified outside the bounds of nation-states, where people cannot get to the mechanisms of the system to try and change its course. Examples of the issues concerning strategy and isolated resistance are prevalent since the beginning of the economic crisis on the right and left. What the World Social Forum has been unable to achieve since TINA (This is no alternative) the economic crisis has aided in.

The spark—Greece

Greece has been the catalyst for social movements all over the world. After the shooting of a 15 year-old boy in Athens, the country went into chaos. Reacting to years of economic inequalities, police brutality, and governmental disillusionment. On December 6th the riots began and they would last for the entire month of December. These events consisted in sustained rioting in almost every major municipality in Greece and two separate two and three day General Strikes. The government did not step down and the riots were a failure in their goals, but a success in that they managed to spark scenes of outrage around the world.

Subsequently, the end of January would see general strikes, lock-outs, and riots in countries all over the world, not marching in solidarity with Greece, but working for their own rights. After Two weeks of protests, riots, and strikes Iceland collapsed and a new leftist government was elected. The same would occur in Latvia, where a month of strikes and riots, would bring the government down in February. Even in the authoritarian society of China there have been revolts against the government with people fighting for workers rights and benefits.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5627687.ece
www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aeUDEk2WjWRQ&refer=europe
www.fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/economics-and-demography/latvias-government-resigns/

In France general strikes have been occurring once every other month since the beginning of the crisis. They have drawn out people to march in the millions. However, a general strike is not effective if it doesn’t last for a few days. At this point, their movements have only been able to stay intact for two to three days.

http://www.guerrillanews.com/headlines/20011/General_Strike_in_France
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13334113&fsrc=nwl
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/4394671/French-strikes-Violence-erupts-as-thousands-gather-to-protest-on-Black-Thursday.html

These sites’ articles describe the January general strikes and the most recent ones that happened on March 19th. The interesting thing about the French general strikes is that resistance is hardening, with unions and students aligning resistance against the status quo. For France, the result has been tumultuous, despite protests en masse and a vote of no confidence France still rejoined NATO and isn’t responding to the people’s demands. However, the events in France spilled over to its overseas territories (colonies), Guadeloupe and Martinique. Both of these islands have been on general strike for weeks. Recently both won negotiations with France and France gave in to their demands.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/788/40587
http://www.workers.org/2009/world/guadeloupe_0319/

There have been riots, strikes and lockouts in countries all over the world in response to the collapse of the globalized system.

http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSLB96103520090312?sp=true
http://www.reuters.com/article/gc06/idUSTRE52F3PB20090316
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/afx/2009/03/27/afx6223702.html

With rises in unemployment, inflation, and the prices of food, gas, and most other basic commodities around the world, people are beginning to take notice and stand up. The fascinating thing about this is that after Greece activity around the world has skyrocketed. An economic disaster that may have remained localized in one nation in different time period has spread all over the world in a globalized system. Therefore the reaction has also been a global one. The interconnectedness of the human population (or our ability to interact in the noosphere) has precipitated the spread of subversive or radical activity. In this light it is arguable that as much as the Trans-national Corporation or the global Bourgeois have learned how to exploit the world, people are learning how to use the same system to communicate a message of resistance. However, I would argue that though the resources are available for a globalized resistance, people are unorganized and lack vision and strategy; therefore any action is petty and fruitless, leaving the people who know how to use the same globalized system to exploit unchallenged. This problem leaves a vacuum from which people like Skylar write in an optimistic light, explaining a systematic vision for how to fix this issue. When in reality they merely restate the obvious and provide no substantive stratagem. A globalized reaction exists, fervor exists, room for people to critique the status quo exists, but there is no cohesive alternative being presented. While we study globalization and wonder what we can do there are thousands marching towards some unknown end. The question remains as students in a high level institution safe from the problems of the world, shouldn’t we being reacting by trying to develop the very Stratagem that the entire planet lacks?

-Kevin C.

FETISHISM OF THE CONSUMER

2009-04-09T07:41:00.000-07:00

Appadurai writes on page 42, "the consumer has been transformed through commodity flows (and the mediascapes, especially of advertising, that accompany them) into a sign, both in

1. Baudrillard's sense of a simulacrum that only asymptotically approaches the form of a real social agent

and in

2. The sense of a mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer but \the producer/ and the (many forces) that (constitute production).

This second principle is related precisely to Sweezy's Marxian conception of consumer (p222), when he discusses those forces that serve to stave off prices by raising levels of consumption, the movement into a consumer-oriented arrangement of social life, raising the question of WHEN, the moment where, human beings become homo consumins, when consumption becomes the principle indicator, when the worker is no longer held to work and labor in the interests of limitless accumulation of wealth in the hands of capitalists but is allowed to ensure the re-generation of the capitalist scheme through the extension of his work as CONSUMER, a kind of double compulsion. Marx found the consumer not-so-interesting since it did nothing exceptional, only starting the process anew.

Simulacrum

"It is the fantasy of seizing reality live that continues - ever since Narcissus bent over his spring. Surprising the real in order to immobilize it, suspending the real in the expiration of its double. You bend over the hologram like God over his creature: only God has this power of passing through walls, through people, and finding Himself immaterially in the beyond. We dream of passing through ourselves and of finding ourselves in the beyond: the day when your holographic double will be there in space, eventually moving and talking, you will have realized this miracle. Of course, it will no longer be a dream, so its charm will be lost." -Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations."

[Copyright © 1997–2008. European Graduate School EGS. The URL is http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-simulacra-and-simulation-11-holograms.html.]

Asymptote

As one moves along the graph of f(x) in some direction, the distance between it and the asymptote eventually becomes smaller than any distance that one may specify.

If a curve A has the curve B as an asymptote, one says that A is asymptotic to B. Similarly B is asymptotic to A, so A and B are called asymptotic.

[Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia!]

The consumer, through this enchantingly complex commodity flow, and the mediascape attached to/derived from/apart of, it, has been transformed into something beyond a consuming mouth and defecating anus. The consumers holographic double appears, like a phantom, out of this commodity flow/media-scape. The double is a real social agent, but now and infinitely a shadow of the consumer, never to be embodied in/by the consumer self.

AND (according to Appadurai) there is also a sense in this 'fetishism of the consumer,' that the consumer has been transformed into a sign in another sense - as a mask

for the REAL SEAT OF AGENCY, which is not the consumer, (but his double, his holographic other), "the producer, and the many forces that constitute production."

Global advertising is the KEY technology for the global dissemination of all these carefully selected ideas of consumer agency.

1). These images are increasingly distortions.
2). Very subtle
3). Consumer thinks of self as actor
4). Consumer is at BEST a chooser

Q) Choosers have no agency?
A) No real agency.

Q) Is there not something in Baudrillard's sense of a simulacrum (that only asymptotically approaches the form of a real social agent) that might possibly be opposed to this notion of a mask for the real agency in the producer??

If there are only distortions and fantasies of agency, then why extend the sign to the idea that agency might then exist in the producer? Why this opposition between producer/consumer where agency is located in one besides the other? This is the idea behind the simulacrum. They are both implicated in a mediascape that has loosed havoc upon any location of so-called real agency thereof.

There IS "No Agency"

2009-04-08T13:16:00.000-07:00

In Marx’s model, humans perform acts of labor on nature to create commodities, which they bring to market to exchange with each other. An interaction of use values thus gives rise to their general determination as exchange values, but the latter requires a collectively agreed upon unit; thus appears money, “the absolutely alienable commodity, because it is all other commodities divested of their shape, the product of their universal alienation. It reads all prices backwards, and thus as it were mirrors itself in the bodies of all other commodities, which provide the material through which it can come into being as a commodity. At the same time the prices, those wooing glances cast at money by the commodities, define the limit of its convertibility, namely its own quantity” (Capital Volume One, 252). Money and commodity first exist in mutual interdependence, and the former, a single unit of exchange value as such, exists only for the sake of and as a means to commodities, pure potential in itself, manifest only in particular exchange values in the monetary form, for the sake of consumption of commodities. This money becomes capital, however, when individuals do not merely sell a commodity for money to buy another commodity (C-M-C), but rather reverse the process, and buy a commodity for the sake of re-selling it (M-C-M), focusing on the means as an end in itself; money feeds on itself as an end in itself to create more money, and commodities serve only as vehicles of money for the purpose of its growth. This growth is limitless because it is simply the pure law of more, of surplus value. Value “suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms…instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself…it differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value, just as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although both are of the same age and form, in fact one single person” in a perpetual process of “self-valorization [which] brings forth living offspring” (263), throws a plethora of commodities off of itself to further profit. Just as a commodity is recognized as embodied money, so is money recognized as a commodity, an end, a thing which, in essence, can be bought or sold. From this point on, it is money which is buying and selling itself through the cycle of production, consumption, exchange. This infinite feedback loop erases all fixed reference points, all difference between means and ends, and the system becomes even more circular and rhizomatic in the global market, when different monies come together as so many commodities and reflect each other in the relational scrambling of value, so that in the end the process can only be defined as “money which is worth more money, value which is greater than itself” (264).
The process is pulled along from beginning to end by the same desire. Humans are driven to the market by the social impulse, by desire, by labor; use-value, and with it exchange value, are reflections of individual and collective desire; finally, money symbolizes desire-in-itself as a fluid potentiality capable of desiring itself, stirring its own effulgence through and beyond the symbolic market. Money is the desire of the market as an autonomous entity that breathes through supply and demand, wriggles its limbs through the proliferation of commodities, constantly wavers and flickers with a pulse of its own in the fluctuating values of each commodity, as the market becomes attuned to, sensitive of itself; at the heart of this beast is the pyre of desire on which the material commodity is sacrificed, transubstantiated up to capital, and reborn again as more commodities in a limitless regenerative process. Just as a single human is a desiring-machine, so is the market a desiring-machine, and both throw off “the useless and infinite fulfillment of the universe” (Bataille, 21).
Bataille envisions an ever-growing surplus of burnoff, Marx sees the mechanism of this glow in the self-consuming and –transcending value, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin likewise describes how “at each further degree of combination something which is irreducible to isolated elements emerges in a new order” (The Phenomenon of Man, 268). The pivot of globalization hinges, in Teilhard’s words, on the question “how, without being impeded or deformed, can the innumerable particular curves be inscribed or even prolonged in their common envelope?” (260). His Omega is not the erasure of difference in homogenous singularity but rather “the exaltation, not merely the conservation, of elements by convergence” in which “union differentiates…the Universal and Personal (that is to say, the ‘centred’) grow in the same direction and culminate simultaneously in each other…[heterogeneous elements] do not tend to lose their outlines and blend, but, on the contrary, accentuate the depth and incommunicability of their egos…[so that] the more ‘other’ they become in conjunction, the more they find themselves as ‘self’” (262). It would be mistaken, then, “to represent Omega to ourselves simply as a centre born of the fusion of elements which it collects, or annihilating them in itself”, a homogenizing signifier. Rather “by its structure Omega, in its ultimate principle, can only be a distinct Centre radiating at the core of a system of centres; a grouping in which personalization of the All and personalizations of the elements reach their maximum, simultaneously and without merging, under the influence of a supremely autonomous focus of union” (262). It would manifest as a sharpening of the entire global picture, a universal Democratic-Socialist localization founded on a mutual respect of difference upon a ground of unity that grows more firm as each part solidifies itself as irreducibly heterogeneous. Such is the dream of the immanent synthesis of global government and market, where the former emerges as a reflection of the latter; Pierre’s twist is that this self-sufficient global network is founded in reference to a transcendent Other, the above-mentioned force of surplus desire pointed to (reified?) as the true site of agency.
Global capitalism has achieved a perverted immanence wherein the desire of the market spills over into the governance of the people, a governance which rather than emanating from a transcendent ruler (often equally unbalanced) is diffused throughout the self-transcending productive and consumptive flows of cultural-ideological brainwashing; this unbridled proliferation of semiotic capital-desire is overcathected, neurotically imbalanced in the capitalist repression of the proletariat. Unification exists “at the top among the few, the very few”, while fragmentation rules “at the bottom among the many, the very many” that, in reaction to the former, cling to a disappearing individuality (Hetata, 283). The corporations control the nation-states and the people, but the corporations, like commodities, are ripples on the surface of the organism of capital that transcends and creates us, and ignorance of this fact “causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way” (Bataille, 23). The exponential surge of capital has carried along with it a noosphere of, in the words of Donna Haraway, “distributed, heterogeneous, linked, sociotechnical circulations that craft the world as a net called the global…[in a] historically specific technoscientific womb” from which spring forth “cyborg life forms that inhabit the recently congealed planet Earth… imploded germinal entities, densely packed condensations of worlds, shocked into being from the force of the implosion of the natural and the artificial, nature and culture, subject and object, machine and organic body, money and lives, narrative and reality. Cyborgs are the stem cells in the marrow of the technoscientific body; they differentiate into the subjects and objects at stake in the contested zones of technoscientific culture” (ModestWitness@SecondMillenium, 14). This is Teilhard’s vision of a heterogeneous bioecotechnoscientific body evolving from, in Haraway’s words, “the domain of ‘life’, with its developmental and organic temporalities…[into that] of ‘life itself’, with its temporalities embedded in communications enhancement and system redesign…life enterprised up, where…the species becomes the brand name and the figure becomes the price” (12). To surrender autonomy to the capital Other does not mean homogeneous takeover, rather in the force which transcends us is found the ground of our unity, wherein a unified world government can cradle and channel the diffuse world market towards this Other before whom can be displayed the full depth of heterogeneous waste.

The Miracle

2009-04-08T10:48:00.000-07:00

This is the miracle. Look closely at it. It happened on March 28, 1992:

Sports, one might say, games played by young men and women, hold the viewer in rapture because of the ever-present chance of witnessing a miracle. When Christian Laettner (aptly named) hit this fadeaway jumpshot to win the East Regional Final in the 1992 NCAA Tournament, and we, the crowd, erupted, when we cried or tore our hair out, there was grace in the air - a feeling that something had passed, and it was something. So, please, this is the miracle. Look closely at it.

But what are we to do, we believers, when the miracle has grown old? Can we relive our ecstatic moment?

But are we tired of Christian's miracle? Are we ready for something new? Are we looking for a new way to reach this euphoric state?

One element that is oddly not featured in the internet version of this commercial is a moment that occurs at the end of the TV spot. I will let Todd Zeigler of the Bivings Report explain:

"What was interesting wasn’t the commercial itself, but the call to action at the end. Where most commercials insert a logo and URL in the last frame, Vitamin Water included a link to their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/vitaminwater. I’m no expert on TV commercials, but this is not a strategy I recall seeing before and it caught my attention... Advertising the Facebook page will catch the attention of people like me by jarring us out of our slumber by doing something unexpected. It is new and different. In addition, unlike Vitamin Water’s regular site the Facebook page actually gives me something to do - I can become a fan and connect/interact with other Vitamin Water lovers. By becoming a fan, I am essentially endorsing Vitamin Water to my network on Facebook, who will find out about my new relationship with Vitamin Water via their Facebook news feed. I’m telling the world that I think enough of Vitamin Water to associate my brand (meaning my Facebook persona) with theirs."

Todd Zeigler was formerly an intern in the press office of Senator Fred Thompson. He is currently vice-president of The Bivings Group and writer for the Bivings Report. "The Bivings Group’s sole focus," as their website (bivings.com) states, "is on helping our clients use technology to converse and communicate with the audiences that matter to them. In everything it does, The Bivings Group believes the power of the Internet lies not in the technology, but in it its strategic use." Zeigler believes that Vitamin Water's use of Facebook in their commercial is: (1) a call to action; (2) something to jar us out of our slumber; (3) a way to connect and interact with other "lovers"; (4) a way to be a fan; (5) an opportunity to make an endorsement; (6) an invitation to tell the world; and (7) a reaffirmation of one's brand, and thus, one's self.

Perhaps Vitamin Water has not only relived the miracle, perhaps it has transformed it. Now the miracle doesn't merely make us smile, cry, or scream. The miracle now becomes a "call to action!" and "something to jar us out of our slumber!" Christian's shot becomes the first act in our potential relationship with this miracle. We, the believer, can now interact with the Vitamin Water bottle which - as pictured on the Facebook page - is conflated as both equal to the basketball itself and the player (who one could imagine pictured in the foreground of promotional picture with the b-ball behind.) In this way, the bottle is both the actor and reification of the miracle. We, the believer, are now able to take part in this holy experience. There is hope for us yet.

Through Facebook we join an community in celebration. Much like we become fans of athletes or teams or sports, Vitamin Water collects our adoration. Through an invitation, the believer is allowed to praise his idol as well as connect with other believers. Rather than sitting on one's couch doing nothing, one sits on one's couch actively - the believer becomes responsible for his cause, his belief, his Vitamin Water. Through this network of action, Vitamin Water becomes even more powerful, but so do we. Our miracle (the one we have shared) becomes legitimized through this collective action. I have created a graph to show exactly how this process unfolds:

While there can be only one in the end, our messianic urge is fulfilled. While we cannot be the object we so desire, it could not exist without us. We remain a member of the bracket or network. We do not disappear once the end is reached. Through our action, we are forever a part of the experience.

The messianic figure of the present, our President Barack Obama, makes sure to remind us of our importance each day. As the living miracle, it is his duty. He has set up a network-based website, similar to Facebook, that allows us, the believer, to speak to our government each day. We cannot know who above reads our words, but the fellow believers (the ones left behind) are sure to. In Obama's victory, the world finds new ways to grapple with the miracle - this time in the sport of politics. But it is Obama's genuine love for the sport of basketball (a love that started in Hawaii with) that brings us back to the miracle - to the moment (as CNN so daringly calls it).

In taking part of the bracket system, Obama is both submitting himself and submitting the game to a greater power. By making his "picks," Obama is becoming a believer - just another fan waiting for the miracle. But filling out the bracket (much like filling in a blank space on Facebook) also allows the fan (in this case Obama) to take part and be responsible for the potential miracle. The recent craze for fantasy sports attests to this fact. The believer is no longer content to merely watch the miracle pass by. He must, in some way, take part in it, and so, know better than it. But while the believer plays the omniscient "maker" of the bracket, he is also subject to it. Its weight - both a collective (through the network) and singular (through the miracle at its end) - is an oppressive freedom, religious almost. The believer watches the game knowing that he knows best, but that everyone else does too.

The transformation the miracle has undergone has been from "beyond man" to "of man." The believer has, in a sense, learned to create his miracle.

melika08 writes on caloriecount.com: "So I was at the grocery store today and I saw a huge display of vitamin water. Usually, I don't pay attention because I try to stay away from beverages. It's just extra calories that I'd rather eat! But then I realized these were different! They are sweetened with Stevia extract thats all natural. I really like vitamin water lemonade flavor so that's the one I tried! It's reallly yummy and honestly it tastes exactly the same! Ahh I'm happy!!! Don't get me wrong I love water, but this is a nice change."

It seems that the miracle that fills us and replenishes us - water - has been transformed. Today Vitamin Water fills our shelves, our bodies, and our souls. For years, health nuts have struggled to get stevia (a plant that can be turned into a healthy sugar alternative) FDA approved. But the FDA came up with excuse after excuse as to why this would not happen. Several months ago, Coca-cola (owner of Vitamin Water) patented and got FDA-approved an extract of stevia, which they named Truvia. Cocacola speaks louder, truly.

And now, as of a few days ago, Vitamin Water 10 is on the market - 10 calories, that's all. As their label says: "Naturally sweet... supernaturally tasty." But Vitamin Water 10 is not just a man-made treat, nor is it straight from the earth. Rather, through a combination of man's power and nature's resources, it has transcended what we know - it is supernatural, a new miracle. It knows better, and so we can we. It is up to us. As its new commercial states: "Vitamin Water 10: It's one-upped nature." In this commercial, an imaginary company called Water Inc. is featured. The chief executive is named Mother Nature. She complains that Vitamin Water 10 is "cutting into our market share... We need to take back our competitive edge!" But can she? Should she? The believer must decide.

He clicks on a link. Vitamin Water has 269,779 fans. He reads. Geoff Smith, who has no profile picture, says yesterday, at 6:02 am: "Vitamin Water go global!" Is Vitamin Water not global? the believer asks. Is the miracle not eternal?

Intolerant Globalization

2009-04-07T10:35:00.000-07:00

In the last decade, Russia has seen a capitalist boom that has changed the skyline of its two capitals - Moscow and St.Petersburg - to a flashing, pulsating sea of advertisement. To proponents of developmental theories of democracy, this is an obvious sign of a positive change in the country. After all, the famous opening of the first McDonald's in Moscow in 1988 was meant to be a sign of things to come. The McDonald's corporation even planned to train Soviet managers "in McDonald's tradition...at one of the company's 'hamburger universities' in Illinois, London, Munich, and Toronto". Over twenty years down the road, Russians have definitely mastered all the necessary skills related to fast-food, albeit with a local flavor.

An interesting example of a new restaurant chain is "Yaposhka" (which literally translates to little Jap) a joint catering Japanese-Russian cuisine to several cities across Russia. Its logo shows a caricature of a Japanese man holding a hot bowl of noodles. The chain tries to differentiate itself from other Japanese restaurants by offering a split menu featuring sushi and "anti-sushi". By "anti-sushi" they mean traditional Russian cuisine in the form of pickled fish and vegetables, potatoes, and dumplings called pelemeni. Even the dinning area is divided along this ethno-culinary divide. With the proliferation of foreign restaurants around Russia's big cities, "Yaposhka" wanted to stand out as being more Russian than its competitors. Xenophobia, a relatively new phenomenon in Russian history, is firmly taking hold over the minds of the population. Within the last five years, a wave of racially-motivated killings of Chinese migrants, African students, and Central Asian guest workers has become an epidemic according to Human Rights Watch. Russian society has tended to turn a blind eye to the violence, as anti-foreign sentiment prevails among the masses.
"Yaposhka" attempted to tap into people's xenophobia to market their product in Western capitalist fashion. Everything from its slick design, classy website, costumed personnel, flashy logo, and quick service has been directly inherited from the capitalist West. With the help of the the latest marketing technologies, consumer research, and branding this Russian chain, like many others, is going after the desire of consumers. Using these very successful advertisement strategies, learned from the West, this restaurant chain marketed its blatantly racist brand to the Russian market. As it turns out, capitalism does not, however, make societies more tolerant.

Recently, due to pressure from the Japanese Embassy, the restaurant chain was forced to change its name to simply "Yaposha" thereby getting rid of the Russian diminutive ending -ka. Getting rid of the "little" did nothing to change the xenophobic nature of the chain's name. The company attributes its success to its "democratic style":

The concept behind our cafés is based on a sense of democracy. It is present in everything here: the restaurant's location, interior design, menu options, pricing, and the type of service we offer to a wide spectrum of consumers. And as they say, as long as there is demand - there will be a supply for it.

In a country where the consumer is becoming king, no one seems to care.

They even sponsor various children events. Here's the"draw your own Jap" contest:

And here's their lovely mascot giving out prizes:

Sources: www.yaposha.com,
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/30/business/mcdonald-s-in-moscow-a-bolshoi-mak.html

Obey Your Thirst

2009-04-05T23:51:00.000-07:00

The various international manifestations of the global “cola wars” sees mega-corporations PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Company engaging in bitter fights over market access, branding rights, natural resources, etc. in every nation on the planet. A quick, media-saturated tour of a few of these manifestations provides some insight into the socio-economic, politico-libidinal manipulation characteristic of modern globalized capital…
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Most soda is branded under the parent company of either PepsiCo or Coca-Cola Company and typically each company offers a competing brand in the same “flavor market”. In the case of lemon-lime flavored soft drinks, however, there are three popular brands available to American consumers—Sprite, 7-Up, and Sierra Mist. This begs the following question: How can there be a lemon-lime soft drink option outside the PepsiCo/Coca-Cola dichotomy?

Of course, there cannot be. Coca-Cola Company owns Sprite and the lesser, third-party Dr. Pepper-Snapple Group owns the 7-Up brand in America—PepsiCo, however, owns the 7-Up brand in every other country in the world. PepsiCo, lacking an alternative to pit against cola-war arch-enemy Coke, introduced the Sierra Mist lemon-lime brand exclusively in US markets to go head to head with 7-Up and Sprite. Thus the transnational corporate battle for lemon-lime supremacy unfolds like this: PepsiCo, owner and distributor of 7-Up across the globe, created the Sierra Mist brand specifically to compete against 7-Up—one of its own products—in the domestic American market alone. The incestuous, homogenized lemon-lime soft-drink options articulates a particularly bleak, if not comic picture of the state of consumer society where quality and any actual difference between products is subordinated to a business model which manipulates consumer desire and has no inherent logic or goal other than turning pure profit.
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A quick detour—a recent 2006 marketing campaign for Coca-Cola brand lemon-lime soft drink Sprite shows a level of straightforward honesty in their intentions that is rare even in the realm of brutally manipulative corporate ad campaigns. The traditional “Obey Your Thirst” motto of Sprite was foregone for the more succinct “OBEY”, which began to appear on all Sprite cans and bottles, as well as a series of billboard and magazine ads in which an all too appropriate theme of subliminal messaging was used. The ads were shockingly similar to those that appeared in John Carpenter’s 1988 film “They Live”—a movie where “the ruling class within the monied elite are in fact aliens managing human social affairs through the use of subliminal media advertising and the control of economic opportunity”[1], which of course was a biting commentary on the deep culture of conspicious consumption in 1980s America.

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Another striking example of the conflation of political, economic, social and libidinal spheres in the globalized cola-economy is the manner in which the two major soft-drink corporations also find themselves wrapped up in the politics of the Middle East and their relationship to the state of Israel. Historically, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola have refused to set up bottling plants and sell their products in Israel out of fear that a boycott by the Arab world would result in a crushing loss of market dominance that could tip the scales in one direction or the other in the global “cola-wars”. However, under pressure from American pro-Israeli lobbying groups who threatened boycott in the even more invaluable American market in the mid-1960s, Coca-Cola began producing and selling soft drinks in

Israel

. Pepsi, on the other hand remained firm in their refusal to set up bottling plants or sell their products in Israel, resulting in a carving up of the Middle East along cola-company lines—Arab nations boycotted Coca-Cola and almost exclusively drank Pepsi products, and Israel and its American lobbying allies put intense pressure on Pepsi to introduce its products to their country, which eventually happened in the early 1990s.[2]

As the cola-war raged on in the Middle East, alternative cola companies began to emerge in the region with specific political agendas set against the corporate policy of the big two. Mecca-Cola, for example, reappropriates the iconic logo of Coca-Cola in a project that the BBC describes as “designed to cash in on anti-American sentiment around the world” with the goal of becoming the “drink of choice for Muslims everywhere” in order to “push out the icon of American capitalism.”[3] Tawfik Mathlouthi, CEO of Mecca Cola, explains their mission statement as combating “America's imperialism and Zionism by providing a substitute for American goods and increasing the blockade of countries boycotting American goods.”[4] 10% of Mecca Cola profits go to charities in the Palestinian territories, specifically “associations who work towards peace in the world and especially for peace in the conflict between Palestinians and fascist Zionist apartheid.”[5] Similar products have emerged in the Arab world that are worth checking out: Zam Zam Cola, named after the Well of Zamzam in Mecca, an important stop on the Hajj, whose director Ahmad-Haddad Moghaddam hopes “the faithful will refresh themselves” with Zam Zam during the annual pilgrimage.[6] Quibla Cola, who donate 10% of their profits to humanitarian causes in the Muslim world, also reappropriate the iconic Coca-Cola imagery, and encourage drinkers to “liberate your taste.” All of this resistance, of course, is inscribed within an established international capitalist business culture and economic discourse, even with the appeals to political and ethical ideals.

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In concluding, check out these classic cola commercials--

Right now change is loose on the planet.

This one speaks for itself.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live
[2] http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/israel.asp
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2640259.stm
[4] Ibid.
[5] http://mecca-cola.com/
[6] http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2002-08/27/article07.shtml

Cheating Hubby, UFOs, Black Sites

2009-03-31T20:00:00.000-07:00

CHEATER

I came across this little gem this morning. The Sun reports a scandal in Britain involving a nosy woman's recent discovery of her husband's car outside the home of a new female acquaintance. The cheating hubby just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when Google's Street View Mobile rolled by taking snap shots for the new internet program launched last year.

Aside from the obvious infringement on privacy rights this scandal so brilliantly illustrates, I'm interested in how Google Streetview opens up a whole lot of new possibilities for consumerism, blackmail, advertising, and other forms of accumulation. Are we going to have to start Google Streetviewing all of the possible locations we've been to in every city around the world to make sure we're not spotted doing anything shady? Are we then going to have to contact Google begging for them to remove our images? At what cost? It's already pretty crazy that Google has access to most of my e-mails, this blog, all of my gChats, the documents I've backed up for my senior project, and is also working on compiling a comprehensive collection of printed matter.

I wonder if there are any Google Streetview watchdog teams out there who alert others that the van is rolling through to take some photos. I also wonder if any businesses have tried to exploit Google Streetview for advertising their products and services.

Also on the Sun website and linked with this article is an entry on an alleged UFO sighting in East London on Streetview. Here's the link JIC:

ALIENS

***

Another piece that might interest some of you is Mark Danner's recent piece in the New York Review on secret prisons and torture. It's very very disturbing and extremely well-written. I highly recommend it. In certain parts of the piece he cites interviews with ex-inmates who spent months and in some cases years not knowing which country they were in. I think it's pretty wild to try to conceptualize being in a place that you think might be Afghanistan, Poland or Cuba and just not having any idea.

Hyperopia/Hysteria

2009-03-30T15:00:00.000-07:00

"We interrupt this recession to bring you news of another crisis that is much more pleasant to deal with. Now that shoppers have sworn off credit cards , we’re risking an epidemic of a hitherto neglected affliction: saver’s remorse. "

image and excerpt from: "Oversaving, a Burden for our Times,"
NYTimes Science section / John Tierney, March 23rd, 2009

I encourage everyone to examine this article, along with the "further readings" enlisted by the Times. The "empirical research"* carried out by these Harvard and Columbia consumer-psycho-analysts could not be clearer: in order to survive the recession we must pathologize conscientious consumer practices ("saving") as "hyperopic" (and from the image, hysteric) paranoid delusions carried out by hoarders of labor and reserve-capital...

More in-depth conspiracy-theory critique on the coalescence of consumer-market analysts, cognitive psychological research practices, and mass consumption after my senior project is due.

* "He and Dr. Keinan managed to change consumers’ behavior simply by asking a few questions to bus riders going to outlet stores and to other shoppers shortly before Black Friday."
--Is this what the professor of marketing at the Columbia Business School considers a controlled experiment?

thanks rj

2009-03-29T00:50:00.000-07:00

every 4 years marks that special time in global consumer consciousness when nationalist-masculinist impulses step to the forefront of the world scene. yes.. the world cup.

i think i remember gasping out loud the first time i saw the german police logo from the 2006 world cup. could that black patch be more strategically placed in order to *not* reproduce a fascist aesthetic?

as for the other one... its a caricature i saw on some guy's flickr account. also by a german guy.

Welcome, Bienvenus, Willkommen, Benvenuti, Bienvenidos!

2009-03-29T00:10:00.000-07:00

Dear 'comrades,'

I hope everyone had a nice spring break. Once you all respond and join the blog, I will change the 'permissions' so that everyone can edit the format and layout in the spirit of democracy.

Below is a striking piece of advertising I found in the Frankfurt airport last summer.

I also added some links to some websites relevant to our project. The Anti-Advertising Agency has some really great stuff (including the image I took for the top of the blog). People should feel free to change the header, the layout, or the title of the blog.