The World: A Vision Made Real

The World is today’s greatest development epic. An engineering odyssey to create an island paradise of sea, sand, and sky, a destination has arrived that allows investors to chart their own course and make the world their own.

The World offers “A Vision Made Real.” This vision, and the image it provokes, is now offered as the world itself. It is a world we can observe from afar – through speculation (luck), through development (progress), through our ability and creativity (genius). It is this world, we hope, that can supersede the old, decrepit world, offering us a venue (the world) for our creative potential, our humanity. It is this world that could very well solve the world’s difficulties by remaking the world as image.

This new world is guided by principles – “principles that define what development means today and in the future, and how the ideas and initiative of a select few will architect a destination whose allure will attract the attention of millions.”

By defining what development means today and in the future, we will be better able to avoid any risks or misunderstandings that might arise between ourselves and our image. Our image, of course, is our destination – always far-off, always a world becoming (and never become). By keeping a distance between ourselves and our destination we are able to enlarge our bodies while shrinking the surface between us. Those who refuse to acknowledge our future of perpetual development, of a future totality that is undoubtedly inherent in our evolution, those people who cry wolf every time an iceberg sinks or a body vanishes, are simply missing the bigger picture. They are not the select; they are not the world class. These naysayers need to stand back and look again. For it is in looking, envisioning, that the disbeliever will turn into the believer. His attention and adoration is necessary for our world to be made as we would like it to be made. As the principles propose, attention must be attracted. And we will shape this attraction.

“In an era of multiplicity and me-too, it’s hard to standout. But in times like these, it’s still possible to be the sun in your own universe. Welcome to your very own blank canvas in the azure waters of the Arabian Gulf. Where orchestrating your own version of paradise – whether it’s a resort hotel or condominium communities – is a much needed inoculation against the ordinary, and where you’ll discover that The World really can revolve around you.”

The World is now the "spectacular collective expenditure" of the elite social class. (It has perhaps always been.) The World includes only those worthy of it, only those who seek the extra-ordinary. These World citizens have created their World out of their collective "extra" - that which they not only can spare, but look to spare and expend. To fully claim the world for oneself, the "me-too" must rid itself of the "too." In this way, the world is truly mine. By this, I mean, the universe truly revolves around me. I am the sun and I will shine upon myself.

We came to The World because life should be easy. We were promised the ocean, the sun, the beach. But now we are told to stay inside. The water, they say, is polluted. It cannot be, I think. My internet connection (The World online) shows me a world of "flourishing marine life." I am offered a video and an image gallery. Each fish is a beautiful thing.

Dubai's motto is "Open doors, open minds." Everything is possible in Dubai. Only the extraordinary man can know this. I know this. There are no boundaries here: I continue to grow. I will extend my body and have my vision too. Our motion will not cease.

The water quality got worse and worse. The guests started to spot raw sewage, condoms, and used sanitary towels floating in the sea. So the hotel ordered its own water analyses from a professional company. 'They told us it was full of fecal matter and bacteria "too numerous to count". I had to start telling guests not to go in the water, and since they'd come on a beach holiday, as you can imagine, they were pretty pissed off.' She began to make angry posts on the expat discussion forums – and people began to figure out what was happening. Dubai had expanded so fast its sewage treatment facilities couldn't keep up. The sewage disposal trucks had to queue for three or four days at the treatment plants – so instead, they were simply drilling open the manholes and dumping the untreated sewage down them, so it flowed straight to the sea. (Johann Hari, The Independent)

The Sun is too much for The World. The earth is a desert and there is not enough drinking water. Because of this, we must pay exorbitant prices to have the ocean unsalted. In Dubai, we have the world's biggest carbon footprint. That is called a solar no-no. The carbon footprint stomps on the sun so that it spews out more heat while the Earth cannot help but refuse its excess waste. The elite among us consume more to save themselves from the overbearing heat, from desert life. The sun gets hotter and the shit gets bigger. The world-class citizen cannot be dirtied by this process, so he grows more and more inward. He looks for dwelling elsewhere - within. He does this by constructing his cities indoors. The walls provide a new layer of thick skin. We will have none of this outdoor shit. "Blame the shit," we say. We must expend our expenditure! We must shit away our shit! We have grown too expansive. But how do we do accomplish this next level of expenditure?

By containing our shit. By refusing refuse. By turning our shit into pearls.




"Burj Dubai: Monument, Jewel, Icon." Still unfinished, it is already the tallest building on Earth.
It is the latest development in the war on shit.

"The rich man consumes the poor man's losses, creating for him a category of degradation and abjection that leads to slavery" (Bataille, The Notion of Expenditure). The World and its surrounding worlds have been built through slave labor. Having arrived in Dubai, these men and women's passports are taken from them, and they are forced to live in disgusting conditions, working fifteen hour days out in the hot, disasterous sun. They build our expenditures, and in the process lose any power over their own.

You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. (Sahinal Monir, as quoted by Johann Hari)

Having lost any power over their expenditures, their waste, the workers become slaves, and so, become expendible themselves. To be blunt: those who have lost the power to expend become our waste.

Living in my very own jewel, I rarely notice the worker-slave. He is like the desert to me: part of the dying world. Inside, I am cool. I sit comfortably, unaware of the pressures I am releasing upon the walls that contain me. Inside, everything is pristine. I am unaware that I am sitting in the pit of an erupting volcano - though I surely know.

The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus. Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails. Those contents shoot out with a racket and fall back, streaming down the sides of the Jesuve, spreading death and terror everywhere. (Bataille, The Solar Anus)

Simply: those who cannot enter the volcano will waste away in the desert. We will no longer see our shit, but it will pile up.

And so will the volcanoes.




X Seed 4000 - 4000 m. tall

Sky City 1000 - 1000 m. tall

The Pentominium - 618 m. tall

Crystal Island - 450 m. tall - 2,500,000 sq. m. of floor space.

This movement inwards, this "accumulation of organized energy concentrated in so small a volume" (Teilhard), is what Paolo Soleri would label the movement of "miniaturization." If a man is the center of the universe (as some would have it, as I might) then this miniaturization is the perpetual development of The World - in its most perfect and imagined state.

Each Volcano is, in fact, a potential high-density city of cleanliness, beauty, and development. Over the last several decades, the architect Paolo Soleri has constructed a theory of "arcology" - the fusion of architecture and ecology - that calls for such immense and complex structures to deal with the growing immensity and complexity of Man:

...at a certain point in bigness, the architecture itself becomes a positive environmental or ecological factor, shaping man’s sociological identity. An arcology illustrates the premise that man must define his corporate image in finite, perceivable terms if a sense of place, belonging, and identity is to be fostered. Each arcology is a particular instance in how man might wish to live. (Donald Wall)

Miniaturization creates mega-structures.

…Embryonically advanced in the ‘cosmic potentials’ …the idea of high density was carried to its ultimate logical conclusion when Soleri advocated the use of vertical structures of such an immense size that they would incorporate all aspects of life (work, education, health, and recreation) for as many as a million people per cubic mile in cities conceived as single buildings. (Donald Wall)

The evolving complexity of man, Soleri argues, "demands a corresponding effort toward miniaturization." He argues against the sprawl of the laissez-faire utopia. He believes that man must learn how to contain himself.

Man shall have to put order to his own layer; to structuralize his environment... the ultra-structure he will create out of such an environment and himself. To put structure in his environment he must define a neo-nature, a physicomineral sub-layer apt, as nature is not, to render him specific and solely human services. This neo-nature, necessarily rooted into the geological and puncturing through the biological (biosphere), must be congruous with the general swill of evolution so as to be one of its makers. It must then be, by necessity, of a miniaturizing character. (Soleri)

Soleri speaks of his future building in evolutionary terms. If we take his form of Environmentalism (a purely aesthetic environmentalism that celebrates man's genius over man) to its potential end, we can imagine a world free of the unclean. We can imagine a world that separates the inside from the outside - an inside where dirt and shit are unseen, though surrounding. To save the Earth, Soleri wisely looks to forego the Earth - to give up the world for the world in a final sacrifice and final expenditure.

But of course, this loss cannot be final. We will continue (some of us) to live in the pit of the volcano. We will not need much, but we will have everything. We - the complexifiers of the world, we who understand miniaturization, we who are moving towards Teilhard's Omega Point or Soleri's Omega Seed - will undoubtedly have the noosphere under our control. Today, as I write, cyberspace has miniaturized the world while making it infinitely larger - for me.

A follower of Soleri, who was himself a follower of Teilhard, writes of "liquid architecture"...

whose form is contingent on the interests of the beholder; it is an architecture that opens to welcome you and closes to defend you; it is an architecture without doors and hallways, where the next room is always where it needs to be and what it needs to be. It is an architecture that dances or pulsates, becomes tranquil or agitated. Liquid architecture makes liquid cities, cities that change at the shift of a value, where visitors with different backgrounds see different landmarks, where neighbors vary with ideas held in common, and evolve as the ideas mature or dissolve. (Marcos Novak)

In Dubai, we stand indoors staring at the ocean. It is clean. It opens up to me. It is my ocean, and mine to lose.

I dream of a future destination where my interests are met, where I am welcomed, where things are where they need to be. "Open doors, Open minds," Dubai suggests. This World might exist on a computer screen. The privileged, packed densely in their chosen World, will stare at The World - their destination close. The volcano will erupt with excitement, and we - on the inside - will be filled, finally, with a "vision made real."

“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

"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

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.

 

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

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

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.