Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

The Chair

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Today I went past a noisy and aggressive Tea Party roadside rally in Setauket, New York. The people were all white, all over 50 and all angry. In other words, they were the Clint Eastwood audience. As apparently crazy as that performance was, it articulated very clearly the vivid resentment middle-aged white people feel and direct towards the empty space they call “Obama.”

I refused to watch a moment of the Republican convention, just as I will ignore the Democrats. There was something about the stills of Eastwood’s performance that made me watch the video. Although it has suggested avant-garde performance art to some people, it was clearly designed to appeal to those with long memories. As a number of reporters have suggested, the whole chair routine was a steal from the circa-1950 comedy of Bob Newhart and Morey Amsterdam. There’s also a certain inherent period nastiness to “the chair,” evoking as it does the electric chair so favored as a method of execution in the Cold War era.

For this evocation of time and place was specifically designed to reinforce the aura of white privilege that surrounds Romney but to give it a more violent edge. Eastwood’s Gran Torino performance was remembered by the Republican audience for its initial racism not the feel-good “liberal” conclusion. Not once but twice, Eastwood ventriloquized Obama as saying “go fuck yourself” to roars of approval–clearly Obama’s refusal to play “angry person of color” nonetheless angers this kind of white person.

The moment in the video that resonated with the apparently all-white crowd was when Eastwood said

You own this country.

It’s a standard bit of political boiler-plate from a professional but from an actor associated with vigilantes and outlaw cops, it had a different affect. They heard it as saying “this is still a country for white Christians with guns as it has been since the arrival of Europeans.” So when the crowd chanted with Eastwood at the end

Go ahead, make my day

it was an enactment of an NRA fantasy moment.

The Democratic media have seen the affair as a joke. For Jon Stewart, this was the greatest gift since Dick Cheney shot a man in the face. But Stewart was not just being funny when he said

There’s a President Obama only Republicans can see

Obama serves as a screen for white people to register what they think about “race,” meaning the visible presence of any non-white person in public life. For 50s-nostalgic Republicans and reactionaries of all kinds, the proper place of the person of color is as what Ralph Ellison famously called “the invisible man.” This “Obama” knows his place, and can be put down at will if he gets “uppity.” Into his (baby) chair.

I am not particularly invested in the re-election of Obama, other than as being preferable to the alternative. The “Obama” that Eastwood and his acolytes see, however, is genuinely disturbing. It’s why Bloomberg gets away with stop-and-frisk. It’s why the economic crisis has wiped out a generation of wealth accumulation by African Americans and left them not only disadvantaged but being blamed for the crisis. It’s why police can use violence at will against Occupy and have no fear of reprisal. Oddly, we should perhaps thank Eastwood for making all this visible to us once again.

Arrest Yourself: Neocolonial Stalinism

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Police at Marikana

In South Africa, the mining crisis unfolds. What happened at Marikana, where 34 miners died at the hands of police? Prosecutors today charged all the miners arrested that day with causing their own killings, using an archaic piece of Dutch law often used under apartheid. Even the government Justice minister was taken aback and has demanded an explanation. Now the police say to us: “you have arrested yourself for failing not to see that there is nothing to see here.” It’s that absurd and authoritarian at once. Call it neocolonial Stalinism.

It’s becoming clear that controlling this narrative is about far more than the already-serious specific situation. This is about who tells the story of “globalization.” Is it about “wealth” or “life”? And whose wealth and whose lives count.

Announcing the extraordinary decision to prosecute all the miners, Frank Lesenyego, spokesman for the National Prosecuting Authority, said:

It’s the police who were shooting, but they were under attack by the protesters, who were armed, so today the 270 accused are charged with the murders.

The astonishing accusation is based on the charge of “common purpose,” a device of authority to reduce individuals to a mass. It explains why the NPA has kept the miners in jail for over two weeks without charge, against South African law. It’s sad to see the postcolonial government act so directly in the interest of the transnational mining company–and perhaps also its own client trade unions.

All of this bolsters the now-established media narrative that the miners charged police and it was in the ensuing chaos that people died. The South African government argues that the police acted in self defense, despite the fact that no police officer was injured on that day. It has also been argued that the miners were trying to evade tear gas and live ammunition fire.

Crucially, however, only ten of the 34 deaths occurred in this direct conflict. Where were the others? South Africa’s Mail and Guardian reports:

Some of the miners killed in the August 16 massacre at Marikana appear to have been shot at close range or crushed by police vehicles. They were not caught in a fusillade of gunfire from police defending themselves, as the official account would have it.

The analysis is based on a reconstruction of the scene at a location out of view of press cameras on the day of the massacre, using forensic analysis and interviews conducted by University of Johannesburg researchers. At least 14 death sites have been identified here, and witnesses talk of armored vehicles driving over people as they lay on the ground. It is impossible, then, to sustain an accusation of common purpose that retains any logical sense.

Greg Marinovich concludes at the end of his long article that what happened was

summary and entirely arbitrary execution at the hands of a paramilitary police unit.

Why use such force? The situation in South Africa, and indeed the global South, is at the brink. Even Zwelinzima Vavi, the head of COSATU, the official trade union group that has been seen as hostile to the radical miners’ breakaway union, pointd out

We have been warning about a ticking time bomb for years, saying that if we don’t address the current levels of unemployment, poverty and inequalities at some point, the poor and those who are feeling the pinch will march to our own boardrooms to demand that we do something about their circumstances.

Yesterday, Julius Malema spoke to miners at a gold mine, partly owned by President Zuma, who have not been paid for over two years:

Our leaders have lost their way and have been co-opted by mine owners and fed profits. They don’t care about you.

His stump speech now dwells on the disappointment felt by rank-and-file ANC members and black South Africans about the lack of progress since 1994. He calls for nationalizing the mines and the establishment of a living wage for all at R12,500, about $4000. The messenger may not be well liked but the message is powerful. At the Gold Fields Mine, the world’s fourth largest, a quarter of the miners are on wildcat strike as of today. All the Gold Standard discussion so common among monetary geeks forgets the appalling labor of colonial gold mines from the Spanish empire in the “New World,” via Africa’s so-called Gold Coast to present-day “neo-colonial” transnational mining.

US readers: remember that Ohio coal miners were not only required to attend a Mitt Romney rally, they had to lose a day’s pay to do so. Going for Obama then? As Republicans sing the praises of coal, Democrats drill for oil. Ken Salazar yesterday gave Shell the go-ahead to drill in the Arctic even though its own safety vessel isn’t finished. What could go wrong with that idea?

The so-called globalization of the past thirty years has allowed the global one per cent to treat the finite human and non-human resources of the planet as its own expense account. Can a decolonial, life-first counterimaginary be created? Doing so would mean not nationalizing mines but closing them and providing a living wage for all nonetheless.

OWS and the Press

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Two new journalistic takes on OWS and the September 17 anniversary day of action are causing some waves in the movement. It’s interesting to look at them and see how two journalists can talk to much the same set of people and generate very different interpretations. It raises the question of what a social movement wants from the media, as well as the more discussed question of what it gets.

The pieces in question are in very different publications. In the Village Voice, house journal of the NYC counterculture, Nick Pinto has a long take on “Occupy Wall Street, Year Two.” Many people are greeting this as the best piece on OWS for a long time, which I take to mean closest to how OWS views itself. On the other hand, there’s Max Abelson’s piece for Bloomberg News, entitled “Occupy Sets Wall Street Tie-up as Protestors Face Burn Out.” While Abelson seems not unsympathetic to the movement, look at who he’s writing for: so it’s no surprise that the piece feels more critical. Internally, people have been disappointed because he did spend a long time talking with leading figures.

Let’s walk through the pieces quickly. Pinto begins with the standard observation that the very diversity of OWS opinion makes it hard to create and sustain consensus. However, he then suggests:

The factionalism that for so long seemed to threaten to tear the movement apart seems increasingly manageable. After a year of precisely these sorts of arguments, anarchists, liberals, and union stalwarts all know the contours of their disagreements, but they’re also better than they’ve ever been at pushing through them.

They’re also increasingly confident that whatever this thing is that binds them together, that keeps them coming back to the next meeting, the next hard-won consensus, whatever they call that shared project, it has a future beyond this first anniversary.

That’s what I meant when I said that the piece reflects the internal discourse of OWS. Pinto continues to describe the combination of police violence and the “dominant media narrative” that there’s “nothing to see here.”

Acknowledging that, for many occupiers, it’s how things get done as much as what the immediate results are that matters, Pinto talks about the projects like Strike Debt, Occupy Homes, and Foreclose the Banks that get activists excited and have emerged or grown significantly since May 1. Perhaps it’s in part because Pinto quotes a lot of people that I happen to know or have met but this piece does convey my own sense of OWS right now. The acknowledgement that May Day was not a complete success. The recognition that there won’t be another occupation. The determination to continue.

It’s that last that Max Abelson doesn’t see. The emphasis for him is on dysfunction and burnout:

Organizers said there has been more fatigue than fresh thinking this year. Occupy’s New York City General Assembly, which oversaw planning by consensus, ceased functioning in April because of infighting, ineffectiveness and low turnout, according to organizers and minutes of meetings. The group’s funds were frozen to preserve money for bail, ending most cash distributions, they said.

While the unnamed organizers are correct, for most of us April is an age ago. It’s hard to find people who still regret the passing of the GA, although there are occasional calls for a central decision making body. As the piece continues, the emphasis remains on “burnout,” “calcification,” “ossify”–a movement past its prime.

The Abelson piece reads as if it has been edited hard from a longer essay, as quotes float in and out without discussion or context. Subheads like “Venemous Forums” or “Anarchist Core” catch the eye but aren’t the writer’s fault. He does place a lot of emphasis on what I can only think was a throw-away comment about making citizens’ arrests on September 17, which runs counter to most people’s sense of what OWS is about.

In the end, then, what we have is a nice snapshot in a friendly media outlet and a not terrible but not great, slightly sensationalist piece in a very hostile outlet. Why is that no good? Why do we so often want to have a “celebrity” endorse a cause or an action, just like every other media-directed project? In part I’m thinking back to a job search we did last year in my department for someone working on media activism. The overwhelming impression I was left with was how hard such activism is in the face of the corporate behemoths. Now that even the New York Times has taken to calling Republican media statements “lies,” perhaps the gap is closing.

If Occupy is trying to build a new world in the shell of the old, what would its media look like? Projects like Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, whose third issue is just out; or Occupy! the OWS-Inspired Gazette (new edition due September 15) are trying to do that work. It’s very hard: questions of funding, printing and distribution have to be solved by the same people doing the editing, writing and commissioning.

These publications are not, as some might say, preaching to the converted. They are given away free, often to the curious people standing on the edge of a meeting or a rally who wants to know more but isn’t ready to get involved. In a city of 19 million people, working like this takes time. That’s OK. At certain moments, like last September 17, new possibilities emerge. What we’ve all been doing ever since is to try and keep that possibility open for as long as we can.

Revenge of the Water Spirits: The Drowning of Capitalism

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There’s an amazing moment in Spike Lee’s film about Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Break. Labor organizer Fred Johnston recalls a conversation with a friend in which they agree that Katrina was caused by spirits angry about the loss of African lives during the Middle Passage. The simbi (water spirits) are getting their revenge all right: they’re going to drown capitalism.

Johnston was referring to the “many thousands gone” who died or self-killed during the hellish journey from Africa to slavery. There were infamous moments like the voyage of the Zong, during which the captain threw 138 enslaved people overboard to lighten his load during a storm. And then claimed insurance on them. Turner rendered the scene in his classic painting usually known as The Slave Ship, just after the abolition of slavery.

You can see the presence of the formerly enslaved suspended in the water in the foreground, caught between life and death, between freedom and slavery. The painting suspends realism (because a person weighted with iron thrown into the sea will sink immediately) in order to give proper weight to the moment. At the far right you can see a curious water monster approaching, Turner’s intuitive understanding of the simbi.

For African diaspora cultures have visualized the world as a cosmogram in which the living are separated from the spirits by the ocean. The ocean is a barrier we cross twice, once at birth and again at death, in a cycle that continues. Thus a child’s birth would be celebrated on the eighth day of life, once the spirit had made the decision to remain in the world of the living. For the enslaved, self-killing was a rational choice because it entailed the return of the spirit and its subsequent rebirth in Africa.

On the island of Martinique, the sculptor Laurent Valère has created a powerful monument to three hundred Africans drowned with their slave ship in a storm after they had led a successful revolt.

Laurent Valère, Monument at Anse Cafard, Martinique

The hunched figures are arranged in a triangle evoking the Atlantic triangle created by slavery, looking across the sea in the direction of Africa. They are white, the color of death and of mourning. They have not been sleeping. They have been biding their time.

Now the economic system that sent the slave ships is set to drown in its turn. It is no coincidence that the spirits sent Isaac seven years to the day after Katrina.

Flooding in New Orleans

The point with these Anthropocene hurricanes is not the wind but the water. Like Katrina, Isaac is bringing huge amounts of water with it. As global warming develops, the warm air holds more water vapor. As the ice-caps melt, there is more water in the ocean. As the oceans warm, there is more energy for a storm system to draw on. Put these three together and you have the new once-a-year “storm of the century.”

By 3pm, there had already been nearly ten inches of rain in New Orleans. The storm surge was twelve and a half feet in Plaquemines Parish and some people have had to be rescued off the rooftops. In New York, half-an-inch of rain leads untreated sewage to be flushed directly into the rivers and oceans. We learned last year that a storm surge of five feet would flood much of Manhattan. When–not if–that happens, it’s not going to matter who is in charge of Zuccotti Park–it will belong to the water spirits.

Despite the levee overtoppings, the floods and the massive loss of power, New Orleans is surviving Isaac. But only because $14.5 billion was spent defending it in the last seven years, on top of a century of levee building. What will it take to defend the entire Eastern seaboard? It doesn’t matter, no one will spend it.

Capitalism has been blithely indifferent to climate change. Why? Look at this diagram. On top, the world mapped by quantity of emissions. On the bottom, the world mapped by likely consequences of climate change.

The Lancet, 2009

So it’s easy to see the calculation: the US, Europe and Japan get off lightly, Africa and Asia pay the price, who cares? Only this was made on the basis of the now evidently conservative IPCC reports. This summer has shown a far more accelerated melting of the Arctic ice than anyone has previously predicted. The total disappearance of Arctic ice in summer is now expected by 2030, far sooner than ever imagined. No one really knows what the consequences will be but they will not be good. It’s going to mean flooding becomes the new normal, rain for months on end for some, and drought for others. Just like we’ve been seeing this summer, in fact, with 63% of the U.S. in drought, while other places have flooded.

And what are our lords and masters doing? Debating how to divide the drilling rights in the Arctic. George Monbiot reports:

The companies which caused this disaster are scrambling to profit from it. On Sunday, Shell requested an extension to its exploratory drilling period in the Chukchi Sea, off the north-west coast of Alaska. This would push its operations hard against the moment when the ice re-forms and any spills they cause are locked in. The Russian oil company Gazprom is using the great melt to try to drill in the Pechora Sea, north-east of Murmansk.

The revenge of the spirits is devastating but in a certain way beautiful. Just as the enslaved were driven to choose drowning over slavery, the death of life over social death, so now capitalism is choosing to drown itself rather than die.

Unless we choose to do something about it. S17. S stands for survival. Sorry about that.

 

 

Turning the World Upside Down

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Occupy Sydney

How does Occupy look from the other side of the world? A few days ago, I walked into Gleebooks, the excellent alternative bookstore in Glebe, Sydney, and asked for books on Occupy. The well-informed staff person, who had tracked down my literary interests without difficulty, was thrown. There were some things on the American Occupy, she said, but nothing on Australia. Throughout my visit I encountered this polite bafflement.

Commonwealth Bank, Sydney, opposite Occupy Sydney

Although everyone used the past tense about Occupy, Occupy Sydney still has a street presence in Martin Place. This is a canyon of colonial era banks, like Commonwealth Bank. The Bank epitomizes the transformation of imperial capital into financial globalization. Created as a colonial government enterprise in 1911, it was privatized beginning in 1991. Commonwealth introduced credit cards to Australia and has holdings in banks all over Australasia and now China. It generated some $6 billion in profits in 2011. Despite its Harry Potter-like teller windows with brass bars, Commonwealth is an aggressive globalizing institution. Surrounding it are extensive holdings of Fairfax Media, owned by mining magnate Gina Reinhardt, Australia’s richest individual. Need I go on?

In the midst of all this was what’s left of Occupy Sydney. It’s a table with literature, sign-up sheets, and a handy on-going collection of global Occupy actions. The people staffing the Occupation appear to be homeless and with other unmet needs, which suggested why people discreetly asked me about “improving the aesthetics” of Occupy.

In a new collection of essays called Left Turn, Australian activist Jeff Sparrow summarizes what he considers to be the strengths of Occupy

In Australia, the protests expressed, more than anything, a general alienation from the political process–but they extended as far as embracing the issues of Indigenous people, for whom discussions about occupation had a particular resonance.

Note the past tense.

Perhaps the difference stems from the relative sense of prosperity (or lack of it) in Australia and the US. Australia’s mining-driven boom has sustained high property prices, a very strong exchange rate and a palpable sense of big money for the usual suspects.

On the eve of Occupy Wall Street, the Wall Street Journal reported

The income of a household considered to be at the statistical middle fell 2.3% to an inflation-adjusted $49,445 in 2010, which is 7.1% below its 1999 peak.

In Australia, by contrast, according to a similarly one percent-oriented source:

The median or middle gross household income is about $68,600 p.a. There are only an estimated 473,200 households (or 5.6% of the population) with gross incomes in excess of $208,000 p.a.

Australia’s dollar is worth a little over one US dollar so the numerical difference is smaller than the actual one. Income disparities are less glaring than in the US (the top 10% makes four times as much as the lower 90, compared to 11 times as much in the US) but, according to government statistics, the gap is growing:

the net worth of low economic resource households had not increased significantly since 2003-04, while the average net worth across all other households had increased by 29%.

That’s 23% of the population falling behind the others. Without scoring points, it’s easy to see why the Occupy message might have resonated with those on the underside of the boom. What happens now that the mining boom is over and Chinese economy, engine of global growth, is slowing?

If you look back to last September, the suggestions being made would have been relatively easy for the neo-liberals to accept, I’ve often thought. A Presidential commission, Ad Busters wanted. Or the Glass-Steagall Act restored. So Paul Krugman, so little difference it would have made. Of course, they were too greedy, too self-satisfied. Next time, it won’t be so simple.

 

Autoimmune Climate-Changing Capitalism Syndrome: AICCCS

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How can we imagine the Anthropocene? Industrial capitalism is not simply harmful to human life, as we long knew, but has created its own geological era that affects everything from the lithosphere to the upper atmosphere and all the biota in between. Indeed, the dynamics of the Anthropocene are increasingly hostile to Holocene-era patterns of human life, a footnote to the sixth great extinction of carbon-based life.

Estimates suggest that between 17,000 and 100,000 species are becoming extinct every year. The Anthropocene is perhaps not so well named. While it is clear that humans have caused it, not all humans have done so and its consequences are far from even. What has brought about the change in planetary geology is industrial capitalism and its reliance on fossil fuels.

We now find ourselves confronting what we might call an autoimmune capitalism that seems determined to extract the last moment of circulation for itself, even at the expense of its host life-world. Like AIDS or other autoimmune disease, this capitalism has a long etiology, multiple symptoms and is resistant to cure: Autoimmune Climate-Changing Capitalism, AICs for short.

So if we concentrate on curing one symptom, like carbon emissions, the complaint goes up that we are attacking the “Western way of life.” Attack the over-consumption of Western life directly, as the global social movements have done since 2011, and you find the full force of the military-industrial police complex directed at you.

To put this more abstractly: coming to terms with AICs is a political problem that is also always and already an aesthetic one. Aesthetics here means the ability to feel or perceive and I am suggesting in the manner of Jacques Rancière that no politics that is not an aesthetics (and vice versa) can have purchase on the supplementary, non-linear and networked forms of AICs. In short it takes a supplement to interact with a deconstructed form. Luckily, we already have that supplement in the form of direct democracy, which is my update to Rancière’s notion of the an-arche of the demos.

This is usually the place for lamentations about the difficulty of doing anything against the modern Leviathans of multinational corporations, consumerism and the fossil fuel industry. I do not underestimate these forces. However, I do not participate in their visualization of the planet as a battlefield and presume that in order to return the world “upside down,” they must somehow be defeated. Rather I think that the reclaiming of the imagination entails an undoing of their authority, which they themselves literally cannot conceive. It may come from the Digger Gerrard Winstanley’s evocation of the “earth as a common treasury for all.”

A Digger Manifesto from 1649

I have long said that the most radical gesture would be if all living people were considered fully human. That could be taken further to include all non-human actors. It has been estimated that some 90% of the DNA in our bodies is not “ours” but microbial. “Our” DNA is the result of a long sharing between generations. We also now know that certain “switches” in the genome are turned on by experience—diet, toxicity, age, and so on.

Taking this for the metaphor that it clearly already is, we might say that there is a “switch” for the common. Much of the past five hundred years has been devoted to imagining ways to turn it off or even make it invisible. In the brief time since Mohammed Bou’azizi shocked Tunisia into taking action by his self-immolation, that switch has proved remarkably easy to find from Egypt to Montreal by way of Madrid, Athens, New York, London and so on. We have in effect always known how to do this. Authority has invested enormous amounts of energy, time and money to convince us otherwise.

Some proposals for an agenda:

1) Life

The right to existence was the fundamental claim of all anti-slavery movement. It is the first claim in the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth made at Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2008 by the World People’s Conference on Climate Change as part of their claim for the “decolonization of the atmosphere.”

2) The Land

Policy specialists have began recommending small-scale collaborative cultivation as a solution to developing countries economic needs. Local food movements suggest the same for developed nations. The Cochabamba accords recommend such cultivation as the key to both sustaining indigenous cultures worldwide and decolonizing the atmosphere. With the agribusiness GMO corn crop set to fail in the U. S., we can see that chemical cultivation is no guarantee of food supply in the climate-changed era. Land is a way to consider the abstractions of the global in local contexts, as it has been for centuries.

3) Democracy

The greatest myth of the climate denial movement is that we can’t do anything about this anyway, so why try? I earlier suggested in this project that if each of 400 global cities consensed on the measures taken by Beijing during its Olympics we could in fact meet the target for climate emissions reduction that would limit temperature rise to two degrees Celsius. There are other possible ways to do this of course. In other words, the choices are there in front of us and it is up to us in each of our localities to keep putting them to our local assemblies.

[a condensed version of my contribution to the Sense of the Planet symposium yesterday in Sydney]

Sense of Planet/Planet Sensing

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What are the possibilities of imagining and knowing the planet? A symposium in Sydney addressed this question today at what it called “earth magnitude.” Can the planet be “sensed’? How do the new dynamics of human and non-human within globalized networks of communication change our understandings of life itself?

Ursula Heise drew on legends like Gilgamesh to show that we have always have been haunted by fears of mass extinction. She has developed the concept of “sense of planet” to supplement the better known assumption of “sense of place.” She has less interest in concepts of place, not least because as a German she is suspicious of the Nazi rhetoric of soil and locality. Her project promotes by contrast a concept of “eco-cosmopolitanism” in which our responsibility is to learn more about the way that others envisage place rather than cultivate our own gardens.

Her new project interestingly suggests that planetary awareness stems from databases. She argues that the database is the “primary planetary sense organ,” building on Lev Manovich’s ideas that the database is “a cultural form of its own.” In this context, the database is a paradigm that generates narratives.

Such databases as the Census of Marine Life, the Catalogue of Life, the Encyclopedia of Life, and the Consortium for the Barcode of Life allow us a new means to create a planetary paradigm of life. Heise showed how artists like Maya Lin have created database-generated projects, like her What Is Missing? (Click the link to play). Indeed, the Taronga Zoo at Sydney that I visited yesterday is a form of living taxonomy of scarcity, in which the wall text next to animal enclosures highlights the extent to which the species is threatened.

Such archives oscillate between minimalist and sublime aesthetics. As an example of the former, Joel Satore photographs and displays endangered and extinct species in distinctly anti-romantic form. By contrast, the TV generated ARKive featuring David Attenborough uses a familiar info-tainment sublime by generating high-resolution full color images of rare animals with an aesthetic of imminent disappearance. For Heise, such projects are modern epics that acknowledge an inevitable shortfall in their efforts to capture the world-system. Such work sees itself as part of an epic struggle to preserve life itself, a recuperation of the heroic out of the horizontal. Here then we find the “great man” theory of history re-entering the database as an organizing principle.

The eye of Avatar

Tim Morton talked about Avatar in the frame of his dark ecology. He stressed the way in which it addressed the need for an environmental politics without satisfying it. The Anthropocene provides a precision of dating that is uncanny in relation to geological time. Avatar is a fantasy of an organic Internet, an embodiment into the planet, which Morton calls “planet sense.” Ironically, present-day environmentalism shows precisely how we are necessarily always interactive with the planet. It’s worth remembering that the film centers on the desire for colonial mining, a representation of the existing global South. Avatar centers around such binaries, epitomized by Jake who is human and Navi at once.

For Morton, Avatar is an object in the sense of Object-Oriented Ontology, an animist vision making the film into a person. OOO places things at the center of its attention, a set whose members are not identical to themselves. Reality is, in this view, “profoundly disjointed.” It moves past the logic of non-contradiction. There is no vantage point outside the set, reality cannot be peeled away. Morton has a dense philosophical analysis that is hard to summarize, it must be said.

This sense that “we are not the world” troubles the relation between foreground and background: how can we bring together beings that cannot be reduced? There is no “world” in this view. So: doom. Doom is fate and a judgement, but it is also justice, the figure of deconstruction. Humans’s doom is to recognize the presence of the non-human.

Jennifer Gabrys talked about planet sensing in fieldwork she carried out in Lapland. Environmental monitoring takes place in the far North using computational sensors, where it is a key scientific activity. This sensing creates a database, rather than recording “how things really are.” She argues that there are many forms of sensing, quoting Alfred Whitehead

We are in the world and the world is in us.

The subject emerges from the world and vice-versa. Objects like rocks have experience insofar as they are affected by the world, and says Steven Shaviro

this being affected is its experience.

From this background, Gabrys argued for “citizen sensing” as a form of environmental monitoring and participation, using open-source software like Arduino. For example, Beatriz da Costa has used pigeons to monitor air quality in Los Angeles. Such projects questions who or what counts as a citizen, a question that resonates within the Occupy movement. Perhaps such environmental action might constitute citizenship, or becoming a sensing citizen?

Finally, Marco Peljhan presented his Arctic Perspective Initiative (together with many others) as a Constructivist Engagement. He noted that satellite sensing and its massive data sets are largely open source. He has used such data in the Makrolab projects that detailed migrations of capital and climate. Working with Inuit partners in the Arctic, however, it became clear that a longer-term approach was necessary. Under Stalin, the Arctic was part of the Gulag and subject to an “accidental” genocide. In Canada, major dislocation was common and culturally destructive. The theme became one of resilience, a key theme for life in the Arctic.

The Initiative created renewable and sustainable digital labs for the Arctic, including hydroponic gardens. The group offered local Inuit film makers courses in video editing using open source software, aerial maps, The current project is called Sinuni, a climate/weather and land recording device, using satellite imagery. This interface between indigenous oral knowledge and globalized digital military-industrial technology provides a means to repurpose military visualization for autonomous purposes.

Reflections to follow tomorrow with my own contribution.

[ps written on the fly so apologies for typos etc]

 

Debt, Mining and the Global Reconquest

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From the perspective of the global South, the primary extraction of raw materials like coal, the subjugation of popular autonomy, the implementation of debt as a form of social control and the continued expansion of climate change are clearly intertwined. The repression of the miners’ strike in South Africa is part and parcel of mineral policy in Australia, oriented as both are to the expanding Chinese market. The intended consequences include ruinous African debt and the inevitable by-product is constantly accelerating climate change.

This interface has been perfectly visible from the South for some considerable time. In 1987, Thomas Sankara, then president of Burkina Faso spoke to the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) in Addis Ababa. Sankara called for the creation of a United Front Against Debt:

We think that debt has to be seen from the standpoint of its origins. Debt’s origins come from colonialism’s origins. Those who lend us money are those who had colonized us before. Under its current form, that is imperialism-controlled, debt is a cleverly managed re-conquest of Africa, aiming at subjugating its growth and development through foreign rules. Thus, each one of us becomes the financial slave, which is to say a true slave.

Sakara was assassinated a few months after making this call. His policies had also included the nationalization of the country’s mineral wealth. If Sarkana’s warnings had been heeded two decades ago, perhaps Africa would not be in its present crisis, forced to generate materials to produce foreign exchange revenues to pay down its debt.

Speaking at the memorial service for the miners killed by South African police (above), Julius Malema reprised these themes on Thursday, calling again for nationalization of the mines:

The democratically elected government has turned on its people. This marquee we are gathered under, the Friends of the Youth League paid for this. The government did nothing for you, we are helping you. Government ministers are just here to pose for pictures. We are here with you, you must soldier on – never listen to cowards. We mustn’t stop until the whites agree to give us some of the money in these mines.

The crowd responded by storming the stage, causing the rapid exit of government ministers and politicians. Police were barred from attending. As the national week of mourning continues, church leaders have spoken out against Lonmin and students at Wits University in Johannesburg are set to march. A national inquiry into the events has already been established but it is not clear if the ANC can contain the wave of radical protest the massacre has set in motion. Malema may be an opportunist, as some charge, but the grievances he articulates are all too real.

Here in Australia, mining companies are retrenching. Australia has done remarkably well out of the commodities boom, servicing the exploding Chinese economy. While officials continue to forecast a renewed peak in two years, hard-line mining executives have declared Australian coal “non-cash generative.” The blame is placed on the carbon tax introduced at enormous political cost by the current government. No credit is given in Australian media for the climate-positive aspects of the tax. The implication is clear: mining will relocate to countries with a less “burdensome” tax structure–like South Africa.

To understand this, you need to know that before 2005, coal sold for about A$30 a ton. At the height of the boom, it reached A$140. Paul Cleary, a journalist for the right-of-center Australian, writes:

Mining dominates our society, our economy, and even our political system.

Now it sells for “only” A$90, a 300% increase on the price seven years ago, which is apparently not enough. The business pages are awash with articles about the end of the mining boom.

Let’s be under no illusions as to who dominates the agenda in the U. S. The oil giant Shell has been reported to be determined to begin drilling in the Arctic this summer, even though its own safety procedures in case of a blowout are not finished. If this was a movie, you know what would happen: there’d be a blowout, only for the maverick hero to return and cap the well. There are no heroes any more. The drilling has to begin to make sure that, if Obama happens to be re-elected, he does not renege on his sell-out.

Sarkana was right, only he did not go far enough. The reconquest forced by the combination of debt and mining was not just of Africa: it was planetary. So are the consequences. Let’s hope that his heirs in South Africa can begin the resistance.

 

 

 

In Search of Wilderness

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The Three Sisters, Blue Mountains National Park. Credit: WikiCommons

A thousand feet down, a flight of cockatoos makes its way across the green canopy, clearly visible through the bright mountain air. Loud calls of unseen birds echo across the forest. The sandstone cliffs are steep and challenging, plunging the walker from time to time into rainforest, where the footing is damp and muddy, only for the trail to then climb almost vertically.

I’m a city boy, born and bred, and I’ve lived in London or New York for the greater part of my life. So why do I find such moments so appealing? Even though I know that they are fake? There’s a learned urban desire for mental renewal by being outside, a middle-class Disneyland.

In the past year, those of us in the Occupy movement have spent a great deal of time outdoors. Radical politics in eighteenth century Britain was known as “out-of-doors.” So if the presumed “public sphere” is in fact largely indoors, in coffee houses, theatres, meeting halls, and the like, its radical supplement is often outdoors. We’ve drawn much energy from being outside in the urban interior–for cities, as Benjamin taught us, are all interior.

For the most part, however, conservation has been, as the name suggests, a conservative movement. It was tied to the sense of nation as the land and a particular kind of embodiment that resulted from having been born on that land. The obvious contradictions in such views, such as the exclusion of indigenous peoples from that nationhood, never troubled conservationist nationalism.

It is perhaps, then, no coincidence that the realignment of the environment as a “left” issue was contemporary with the Civil Rights Movement. In the U. S., the 1964 Wilderness Act, defined the condition poetically rather than quantitatively and to the exclusion of questions of belonging:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.

Is there such a place? The Blue Mountains have been lived in by the Gundungurra, Darug, and Wiradjuri people for over 20,000 years. But when the British arrived in Australia, they declared the entire continent terra nullius, unclaimed or empty land–wilderness.

In 1813, a British surveyor noted coal in the region. Two years later, a group of convicts were compeled to build a road into the area. Actual mining began in the 1870s and continued until the end of the Second World War. The traces of mining are not apparent to the untrained eye but the shale oil formations give shape, I learned, to some of the distinctive topography. It was not until 1967 that the modern Aboriginal peoples gained full citizenship in what has become Australia around them.

Indeed, the walk that I took in the Blue Mountains was made possible by the Herculean construction of steps and paths in the cliffs, beginning with the Federal Pass walk created in 1900 to celebrate Australian Federation. While the Federal Pass is still celebrated, the “White Australia” policy that went along with it has been omitted from the story. Now the presence of the indigenous is well acknowledged and their account of the region’s history is presented to all visitors.

Like so many hilltops in colonized nations, the Blue Mountains were once a retreat for colonial administrators away from the summer heat of their domains. Recast as wilderness for tourism, the mountains still tell useful and important stories. Even the clear water that rushes past and falls so dramatically down waterfalls is, despite appearances, polluted with urban run-off and you are warned not to drink it.

Wilderness was a modernist fiction designed to create set-aside regions of physical space to provide mental contrast for urban workers. The very fact of its palpable “contamination,” its complex and challenging histories and consequent impossibility makes for a different kind of appeal. There’s no reason not to go, enjoy a walk or a climb. It’s just not “wilderness.” It’s outdoor Disneyland.