Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

“The Transit of Empire”

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#BREAKING PHOTO- VENUS IS ENTIRELY IN FRONT OF THE SUN! HUMAN... on TwitpicToday for only the eighth time in the era of the telescope, Venus made a transit across the Sun that was visible from earth. This transit is, as all those since the eighteenth century have been, a “transit of empire,” to quote Jodi Byrd. For much of that time, empire has been in the ascendant. Perhaps, if we might indulge in the pathetic fallacy, today’s transit might herald the exit of empire.

The pathetic fallacy–the idea that the natural world reflects human moods–was itself the product of industrial modernity. Our own pathetic fallacy is both that humans can ignore the destruction of the natural world caused by fossil-fuel industry and that there is a modern “we,” who are not and have never been indigenous.

It had been mostly cloudy today in Manhattan but when the sun came out at 5.45, I left the gym and jogged up to Union Square to join perhaps the geekiest crowd ever seen outside. About a hundred astronomy nerds and passers-by clustered around some grad students with specially-rigged up telescopes to allow looking at the sun. At six o’clock, the clouds were thick overhead

At that point, and I am not making this up, the NYPD sent two white-shirt officers and five uniforms to investigate the crowd. Perhaps, I thought, Bloomberg has now decreed that the sun revolves around him and so this event was heretical. Luckily, they decided against the use of force and the clouds did thin for an instant. The carefully masked telescopes allowed us to briefly see the image of the sun with the tiny dot of Venus on a thick screen placed where you would normally view the image.

It was not the kind of high-resolution image we have become used to, such as this from NASA, who are live-streaming the event.

The transit seen from Mauna Kea, Hawai'i

It’s noticeable that their telescope is based in Hawai’i, an American colony, creating an echo with the first measured transit of Venus in 1769, observed from Tahiti by Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook and the crew of the Endeavor. This voyage is one of the most minutely analyzed events in colonial history, thanks to the immense data assembled by the British crew, ranging from Cook’s own journals to the drawings of Joseph Banks and the paintings of William Hodges.

Cook's diagram of the transit of Venus

In more recent years, the emphasis has rightly shifted to locating the “voice” and presence of the indigenous peoples, whose pre-contact culture can be deduced in part from these materials. This encounter inaugurated what Jodi Byrd, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and professor at U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has called:

the imperial planetarity that sparked scientific rationalism and inspired humanist articulations of freedom, sovereignty, and equality [which] touched four continents and a sea of islands in order to cohere itself.

While many of these terms were and are valued by many, this history is also one of the violent dispossession, compulsory religious conversion and eradication of indigenous cultures. For Byrd, therefore, “transit” has a double meaning, suggesting

the multiple subjectivities and subjugations put into motion and made to move through notions of injury, grievance and grievability.

What’s noticeable here is that “movement,” like our own Occupy movement, is not singular but contradictory.

Reflecting on the U.S. context, Byrd points out that one of the “grievances” in the Declaration of Independence was the British use of

merciless Indian savages.

That image persists to the present via the cowboy movie, even so-called classics like The Searchers (1956), and mediocre animated cartoons. Witness the present furore over Elizabeth Warren’s claiming of American Indian descent in the Massachusetts Senate campaign. Never mind that everyone who has ever run for anything in Massachusetts, let alone the US as a whole, always claims Irish descent on the most tenuous basis. Claiming to be Indian is somehow always wrong.

The language resists here. No one is born indigenous, they are made indigenous by the arrival of the colonizer. Indian is a misnomer, but so is Native American. The notion of the Fourth World, composed of indigenous peoples, simply raises the question as to why they are not the First World as indigeneity, if it means anything, must mean being there first.

A transit passes from one side of that which it encounters to the other. Its end its always part of its journey. The damage will have been done.

 

Debt Strike: Make Debt Public

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There’s a growing call in OWS for a debt strike. What does that mean? It means using the call to refuse debt as a means to make debt public. There should be a public discussion about how endebted we all are within the debt square that has replaced the public square. It means overcoming our shame at being locked in the debt square. And it means taking the debt public set people free. That last is not a demand because we all know no legislature at present is going to enact it. Look at Montreal, though: the government has not listened to the popular will and the people have not backed down. It’s public.

What is the debt square? It is the space defined by the four corners of modern US life:

  • student debt ($1 trillion)
  • mortgage debt ($14.6 trillion)
  • credit card debt ($800 billion)
  • medical debt (unknown)

Mortgage debt has declined slightly from $14.6 trillion in 2008 to $13.4 trillion at the end of 2011. The real change is in the amount of mortgage debt held by the federal government in various ways. From $725 billion in 2007, it’s now over $5 trillion. That means that the Feds control close to 40% of mortgage debt.

You hear less now about foreclosure because banks are short-selling houses and taking a loss:

All told, 233,299 bank-owned homes or those in some stage of foreclosure sold in the first quarter, making up 26 percent of all U.S. home sales in the period

As for credit cards, it’s what you already know: debt is rising, as are interest rates. Credit card debt snuck over $800 billion last year, even as interest rates rose to over 12% on average. The average credit card in households that have them is now over $15,000. Fewer people do have cards, as credit is being denied more often, but people who have credit cards have 3.5 each on average.

Increasingly, people are using credit cards to “pay” their medical bills, which is the third corner of the debt square. One in three households are struggling with medical bills and eighty per cent of those questioned for a PBS Newshour survey were having issues with financing health care.

If that seems a little abstract, here are some hard numbers:

As of 2010, 73 million people reported problems paying their medical bills or were paying off medical debt, up from 58 million in 2005. An estimated 44 million people were paying off medical debt in 2010, up from 37 million in 2005. (Source: Press release, The Commonwealth Fund, March 16, 2011.)

The least surprising news story of June 2012 will be the Supreme Court decision to revoke the Affordable Health Care Act, setting back even those modest improvements to health care affordability. But note that the Commonwealth Fund also found that

Sixty-one percent of those with medical debt or bill problems were insured at the time care was provided.

There is little available recent data on medical debt and no collated national figure that I could find.

Student debt has been the most widely discussed form of debt here. Today NYU President John Sexton announced:

Undergraduate tuition, fees, and room and board – For the 2012-13 academic year, we have budgeted an increase of 3.8% in tuition and mandatory fees, and 3.5% in room and board; the aggregate increase in the cost of attendance will be 3.8%.

So that $1 trillion of student debt is going to keep rising beyond the rate of inflation yet again.

The debt square defines the aspirations of most citizens: health, education, shelter, consumer goods. It defines them as things you need or want but renders the means of obtaining them into an object of shame. Who hasn’t stayed awake at night worrying about one or other of these debts? The answer to that question is now simple: the one per cent.

What is the answer to the prison of the debt square? To make it public. As we can see with mortgages, the so-called free market wants to move non-prime debt to the public sector anyway. With public money so cheap, the government could take on all private debt and have us reimburse them at the one percent rate it charges banks. Or it could just abolish the debt altogether.

That government is not this government that we have now. It is the government that the students in Quebec want. It is, more exactly, not a government at all but a means of enabling the possibility of autonomous citizens. To get there, we have to imagine not just a world without student debt, but one in which you are not a loan. A life to be lived rather than a credit rating to be lived up to: debt strike!

The Whites and the Whale

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Why are there white people in the Americas? One way to answer that question would be: fish. Cod and other fish drew early visitors here, especially to Newfoundland. Later sailors reached Massachusetts, where the cod were so plentiful that to catch them you only had to throw a bucket over the side of the ship. They called the place Cape Cod. All those fish are gone.

We are now in the midst of what scientists call the sixth Great Extinction. Unlike earlier disappearances, this one has a single cause. Human actions in the pursuit of industrial capitalism have put at least 20,000 species on the high-risk “Red List” for extinction. Yet when the New York Times ran an op-ed on this today, the biologist Richard Pearson felt the need to render this as an economic problem:

the total economic value of pollination by insects worldwide was in the ballpark of $200 billion in 2005. More generally, efforts to tally the global monetary worth of the many different benefits provided by ecosystems come up with astronomically high numbers, measured in tens of trillions of dollars.

If we cannot find better ways to imagine why the total eradication of tens of thousands of living creatures should be prevented, we make the case for our own disappearance. That “we” hides something, though: those that did this from the industrialized nations, mostly “white,” are visiting this on the entire planet, mostly not “white.”

Over the course of the visual culture conference, the visualizations that stayed with me most were two videos presented by the performance artist Patty Chang. In 2011, Chang had a residency on Fogo Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, one of the most Easterly places in the Americas. It was for a long time home to a major fishing fleet but as a result of overfishing, that’s all but gone. Instead, tourism and, of all things, art are being promoted as alternatives.

Fogo is a place that is also known for its whale populations.

St Brendan saying mass on a whale near Newfoundland

On her visit, Chang walked to the far side of the island, where she encountered the beached corpse of a sperm whale. The body was white, which she later revealed was due to decomposition. Nonetheless, she went into the shallow water where it was lying and washed it, a ritual for the dead common to many religions. From the place where she shot the video the whale seemed at once whole, uncanny and spectral. The performance was riveting.

Dead whale, Fogo Island

Photographed here by the artist Tonja Torgerson, the whale was clearly decaying and Chang said in discussion that it smelled appalling. In her talk, though, she linked this white whale to Moby-Dick and Melville’s great allegory for capitalism. In the conjuncture of fishing and whaling, we might want to break this up, so it reads “the white(s) (and the) whale.” Among many references, she showed the poster for the classic film starring Gregory Peck:

There are so many odd things about this, it’s hard to know where to start. The 1950s were saw mass whale hunting for food and oil that brought many species of cetaceans close to extinction. We think of whaling as a remote form of environmental damage. Rather, it was nuclear. It was A-bomb devastated Japan that turned to whales as food and refuses to abandon them now as a mutant form of decolonial resistance. The caption appears to anticipate that audiences for the 1956 film have already seen Jaws, Stephen Spielberg’s 1975 shark movie. The White Whale is represented as a hybrid between the phallus of the male gaze and the castrating vagina dentata that haunts its dreams. At the same time it proleptically anticipates the creature in Alien (1979) as it emerges from its human host.

Here comes the creature

Alien was haunted by capital (The Company), insurgency and empire. And that form of alienation is about to return as Ridley Scott cranks up the franchise once more with Prometheus.

Chang’s performance ended with another extraordinary visualization. She took a journey across Central Asia, encountering among many other things, a legend that all Uighurs are descended from wolves, like the legend of ancient Rome. All these creatures, these compound beings, were part of Hobbes’ evidence for the representational power of the European colonial imaginary (discussed last week). It seems to have lost control (of itself).

Chang finds herself at the Aral Sea, a formerly immense inland lake that has been turned to desert by engineering projects diverting water for human needs. Just like in Newfoundland, there is symbolic death and the disappearance of a primary food source. Chang showed boats now beached on flat endless sand. Once again, in a powerful repetition, Chang set about washing the boats, mourning the loss of natural environment, human livelihood and unknowable numbers of non-human species.

In this photograph of a similar scene from the Aral Sea, the boats look the same but the sand seems slightly less flat–but you’ll get the idea:

The Russian Empire has followed its Cold War partner into a hallucinatory present that it cannot imagine to itself.

Re: verticality (and horizontality) in academia

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Verticality reverts. It revises and revisits. It is not so much tenacious as insidious. And yet what is so interesting is how the horizontal approaches resurface, refract and resist the vertical. I’m at the end of a three-day contest of the horizontal and the vertical within the frame of the academic event, in particular my Now! Visual Culture participation event. I felt at several points that vertical organization had reasserted itself, perhaps decisively. For the general will of the event pushed back against such ideas as breakout groups or time-allocated agendas, which are central to Occupy.

Yet it seemed that a reversion to the norms so carefully calibrated in the neo-liberal academy was, finally, not so simple. The insistence on practice as the means of articulating politics was resisted. But by means of a triangulation of performative art practice, new media forms of publishing and the direct evocation of Occupy and its “epistemology of anarchy” as WJT Mitchell put it, there was a sense that “make something” was the new prime imperative. As I have argued already here, the refusal to move on, the refusal to accept that there is nothing to see here, the insistence that the authority of visuality should be resisted is that anarchy.

There was old and new, a disciplining by interdisciplinarity and a setting loose by performative practice in new media and artwork. I have missed the midnight deadline for the first time but I am relying on the idea that my “day” is as long as I happen to be awake.

Twitter can act as my flickering memory here:

That was kind of what it was like. A more coherent report tomorrow will compare this event with the Occupy Theory Assembly on debt and education.

Debt, (new) media and academia

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Now! Visual Culture spent a day thinking about the intersection of debt, academic knowledge, old and new media in the anti-disciplinary frame of visual culture.

A very well-attended first session on debt and academic labor set the tone. Magda Szczesniak (University of Warsaw) told us that the corporatization of university practice is developing  in Poland but students there are not yet in debt, while not being well-funded. She noted that the university system is still in effect “feudal,” depending on personal influence and obligation. Can the so-called deficiencies of this system be made into a virtue? For example, the failure of Polish academic publishing to generate any profit might make it easier to introduce open-source publishing.

Pamela Brown from the Occupy Student Debt Campaign outlined the terrifying statistics, generating despairing laughter. She explained the corporate structures that underpin the debt machine: 94% of elected officials have won their campaigns by being the most efficient fund-raiser, mostly coming from the financial industries. No fewer than four bills reforming bankruptcy laws have failed. The current debt forgiveness proposal in Congress is rated as having a one percent chance of success.

She recalled a debt-strike in Co-Op City in the Bronx during 1976, when 15,000 people refused payment for over a year because they felt they were supporting the debt burden of the management corporation. However, there are no indexed images of the event online, indicating a structural absence in the collective image bank and the beginnings of an explanation for the insistence that debt refusal is immoral and unprecedented. It also suggests an important research opporunity.

Ashley Dawson argued that student debt is itself a crisis of visuality. It is hard to visualize, unlike foreclosure, for example. In particular, how do we visualize the underlying moral contract? There have been attempts to represent the size of the debt, or the de facto indenture of student loans, but credit itself is hard to visualize. He recalled the history of the establishment of the open admission and free tuition policy by direct action in the 1970s at CUNY, where he teaches. President Nixon was afraid of the production of an “educational proletariat” and Republicans used the bankruptcy of the city in 1977 to end free tuition. CUNY was a harbinger for the casualization of the academic workforce, which is now half the size of its 1975 benchmark. Columbia is the third largest employer in New York but is tax exempt.

McKenzie Wark pointed out that activists often make the best researchers, citing David Graeber. He also noted that this isn’t capitalism “it’s something worse.” There is now a problem of representation in general because the mechanisms of capital are so abstract. The humanities should now be doing this kind of important work rather than sticking to the tried-and-testd because it would both make a contribution and be more likely to generate employment.

In the next session on new media publishing, Tara McPherson argued that we can’t visualize just the screen, we need to understand the machine. Databases normalize data and abstract them from that which they index. That point reflects back on the questions of economic visualization discussed earlier. For example, the graph itself was created in synchronization with the idea of the market as part of eighteenth century mercantilism. As many people observed in the debt panel, these forms don’t tend to be convincing when you’re arguing against neo-liberalism. In this context that becomes less surprising. Graphs abstract people into a positivist database. As McPherson put it, “technological systems are weighted in favor of positivism and control,” but they don’t have to be. We need to actively engage the form not just receive the content.

The insistence from the student debt campaign on naming and identifying debt as a personal and political issue rather than as an abstract data point is, then, a countervisuality to the dominance of the “market.” Talking to people about debt is in itself a form of resistance and politicization. The same point can be made in relation to digital media studies. Humanities scholars have embraced digital technology as a form of very large data analysis, a move away from affect. By contrast, Occupy Student Debt links data to narrative. Paradoxically, certain sectors of humanities new media scholarship might be as much part of the problem as part of the solution.

Deborah Levine’s extraordinary Scalar project called Demonstrating ACT UP (not yet open access) uses the affinity groups of ACT UP as an organizing strategy. By tagging individuals, the tag cloud allows you to visualize a vast database of ACT UP materials at a human and personal level. Because it relies on the affinity groups that drove the project, this organizational strategy is both horizontal and political.

In the afternoon, members of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, who made some key films for the Occupy movement in its earliest days, talked about collective film making.

This seven-minute film was edited in ten hours, moved from conception to release online in ten days–compared to the average edit of seven minutes in two weeks. It was so widely seen that it came to have a life of its own as a guide to Occupy.

BFC actively try to challenge the hierarchical structures of the industry and its mantra: FILMMAKING IS A BUSINESS, focusing instead on passion projects. “Collective” here means everything from close working together to a community of filmmakers meeting together and sharing work for collective criticism in a weekly critique workshop. Their films are very different in form, production and content.

The film Spoils deals with dumpster diving in Brooklyn, a central part of Freegan culture. Here the film was made in fairly traditional way with a director in charge.

Welcome to Pine Hill on the other hand was collectively made and produced in a non-budget context, meaning time and materials were donated. The film has won prizes all over the place, including at Sundance, so it’s no hindrance to the reception of the film. In a similar fashion, the Meerkat Media Collective work non-hierarchically, share tasks and make sure that people get experience in tasks that are new to them. They reminded me of Mosireen from Cairo, who have been working in similar ways.

Academia is still uncertain about these new ways of working. Horizontal ways of working and thinking are still emerging and still contested. As the weekend continues, it’ll be interesting to bookend conclusions tomorrow with the Occupy Theory Debt and Education Assembly in Washington Square Park on Sunday.

Now–the right to look

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Today was the opening of a conference that I helped convene in New York called Now! Visual Culture. It’s not an Occupy event as such but it takes place in the context of Occupy and many people attending are involved in the movement. It’s in my academic area, the anti-discipline of visual culture.

Now! Visual Culture

It turns out that we know a good deal about what visual culture is now. It’s a performative network, by which I mean a network created by the actions of those humans and non-humans within it. There are visual subjects and objects within a regime of visuality. The visual object, something that is looked at in all senses, has its own set of desires, powers and possibilities. The visual subject can be human, a person that looks or visualizes, or non-human, such as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or an imaging satellite. These latter devices are the agents of necropolitics, visualizing those who must die, even if a human takes the decision whether or not to fire on the visualized target– no visualization, no decision.

The interplay of visual subject and object takes place in a situation that is not of their choosing, which I call the regime of visuality. A given regime attempts to classify what there is to be seen and to separate those so classified into the groups that it creates, such as insurgents and host population; settlers and natives; black and white. At present, we can, as it were, see this regime. So when the police say to us, as they have so often in the past eight months, “move on, there’s nothing to see here,” we reply: “I would prefer not to.” It turns out, then, that visual culture has not become a discipline (with departments and so on) because it is foundationally anti-authoritarian.

And so we occupy, physically and mentally. In so doing, we find each other. We invent each other. We claim the right to look. We have now seen each other face to face, on livestream, on Twitter, on Facebook, on social media and in hearing the call of the other, in its murmuring, its casseroles, its chants. And now the question becomes, what should we do with that right to look?

We began to address that question today with 15 five minute presentations, or lightning talks, a format I borrowed from new media conferences. People from France, Norway, Mexico, Iraq, Nigeria, the UK, Canada, Hong Kong, Germany and the US presented. Presenters ranged from graduate students to professors, artists, and new media practitioners. They were more or less self-selected people who had asked to present. Yet four clear themes emerged

  • Now: Occupy from the US to Canada and Nigeria
  • Why: War, trauma and memory
  • Where: Interfaces in digital and analog culture
  • Here: Segregation and the (trans/post)national

I hate to single out any one moment but the image that stays with me in the context of this project was this extraordinary photograph taken in Lagos when the entire city of 14 million people rose up to Occupy Nigeria in protest against IMF/World Bank inspired gas price rises.

Lagos, Nigeria. Courtesy Awam Amkpa.

I had heard of Occupy Nigeria via Twitter but I had no idea what it had really been. Even Montreal seems “small” by comparison.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the horizontalism that I first experienced at unconferences organized by hackers, and is now the process of Occupy, was well received by the people at the event. What was pleasantly surprising was the large turn-out, requiring people to stand and sit on the floor in the largest auditorium we have available. More exciting than that was the positive atmosphere, the sense of excitement that I have felt so missing in academic life. Perhaps, as horizontalism disseminates away from the sites of occupation into the disciplinary institutions it can work a form of internal revolution by anti-discipline.

More follows.

How to do horizontal learning: two projects

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Sometimes I feel that it would be useful to be an anthropologist. I’ve spent the past day oscillating between organizing two different kinds of horizontal learning projects, one with Occupy, the other in academia. It would be great to be able to analyze why and how the projects get constrained. So here’s my amateur take. Both are trying to work horizontally with different sets of constraints. In academia, there are some financial resources but a lot of vertical bureaucracy. In Occupy, there is the possibility to do whatever we want but it all must be done in the gaps of people’s personal and professional lives. It’s not as simple as Occupy: good/Academia: bad. The question in both instances is really: why do we do all this anyway?

Yesterday was the beginning of OWS Summer Reboot. If that sounds a little familiar, there was indeed a similar process back in January. If the sense then was that different groups needed more autonomy within the architecture of the movement, now people are concerned that we lack co-ordination. Without a GA or spokescouncil, and with announcements of events coming over Facebook and other social media to which not everyone has access, it can be hard to determine what’s going on–as we shall see!

There was an impressive run-down of all the activities people are involved in now. OWS may not have the mass movement of Quebec but there is so much interesting work happening. Facilitation broke these activities down into breakouts and there was one on education and the student movements that I attended. While some of us had been involved for a long time, there were also people from Occupy Latin America (yes, I know it’s already been occupied but these people are from there, can we move on?) and Canadian students brought in by the recent events.

The result was a great meeting in which we talked about connecting all the different actions going on around our areas by means of a hemispheric emphasis and talking about education as a whole from K-21 (ie kindergarten to grad school). In practical terms, we discussed an aggregating website to pull together all the different threads of education activity, and it turns out OWS Tech Ops has already made tools we can use. We decided to hold assemblies to begin a discussion as to what values we place on learning as we go forward. There’s been so much negative talk about debt and unemployment that it sometimes can feel unclear why we do this at all. And then we want to start planning for September so that when the school year begins we have plans in place.

Everyone left with great enthusiasm for the new project. I had a flashback to the moment when back in September I went to the Liberty Plaza information tent–there was one! next to the Red Thing–and asked where the Education meeting was, and the slightly scary looking person gave me excellent directions to 60 Wall Street. Only eight months ago, it feels a lot longer. Anyway. We all then went off and organized three separate events for this Sunday in Washington Square Park. A mad round of emails and calls later, the assemblies were consolidated for 12pm Sunday and it’s going to be very interesting. There’s some serious co-ordinating and web work to be done to prevent this kind of organizing chaos from recurring–it was not a disaster but it took a lot of time, which is a resource most of us don’t really have.

My academic project on the current state of visual culture is a participation event, meaning a conference that emphasizes participation over papers, no keynotes, lots of short presentations, workshops and discussions. There are sessions on debt and academic labor and a general assembly, none of which would  have happened before the Occupy movement. There’s training in digital skills, which, as we can see, we definitely need.

The real question hovering over us is more substantial. For a long time we got credit, or gave ourselves credit, for being “interdisciplinary,” which is not that hard to do, and even more so for being “political.” This usually meant saying things hostile to the Bush administration that troubled them not very much at all–again, this is self-criticism, yes.

Now we face a dual challenge. On the one hand, conservatives have started open calls to shut down departments that don’t send students into well-paid jobs. This is close to government policy in the UK. At the same time, debt model of financing has become unsustainable and immoral. On the other hand, we need to be taking part in the messy, horizontal discussion of what we now mean by politics and by education, a conversation in which our hard won credentials don’t count for much. We’re going to need some humility and openness, qualities not often associated with academia. Nonetheless, the thousands that are demonstrating across the hemisphere believe in the value of what we do, and it’s time to reclaim that from the bureaucrats.

Will either of these projects work? Watch this space over the next couple of days.

Never Mind the B@#$%^&*, Here’s the Real Jubilee

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My country of origin, the UK, is about to make a global fool of itself over the monarch’s so-called diamond jubilee, commemorating the apparently endless “reign” of Elizabeth Windsor. Altogether forgotten in all this noise has been the devastating report of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which shows the much better side of the country. Established in 2000, the campaign has had some success in debt cancellation. Now it reports that things are getting worse.

Once again, then: No to a royal jubilee and yes to a global debt jubilee.

The key facts from the report make the case for debt abolition in themselves:

In the 1950s and 1960s the number of governments defaulting on their debts averaged four every twenty years. Since the 1970s this has risen to four every year….

 

The current First World Debt Crisis has led to debts in impoverished countries increasing. Their government foreign debt payments will increase by one-third over the next few years.

 

The Mozambique, Ethiopia and Niger governments could be spending as much on foreign debt payments in a few years as they were before debt relief.

These are countries where the Gross National Income–which is not what the average person earns but an estimate based on all final goods and services–is less than $1005 per person per annum. Even a High Income country averages only $12,276 or more. Compare that to the high-rollers on Wall Street.

A 2011 research paper for that well-known left organization the Bank of England demonstrated that, compared to the Bretton Woods system:

The current system has coexisted, on average, with: slower, more volatile, global growth; more frequent economic downturns; higher inflation and inflation volatility, larger current account imbalances; and more frequent banking crises, currency crises and external defaults.

In short: neo-liberalism is a disaster for everyone except creditors. The rhetoric of the one percent used by Occupy is more or less accurate in fact as well as emotional force.

Debts need to be cancelled. The Jubilee campaign has some practical suggestions to this end. They call for a system of debt audit and an international debt court with powers to arbitrate between creditors and debtors and/or cancel debt as they see fit.

However, in 2011 the IMF and the World Bank brought to an end the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative, the sole international system for dealing with debt crisis, having given “aid” to only 32 countries in 17 years. Some countries ended up spending more on debt repayment after involvement in the process than they were before. On the other hand, Jamaica is considered too “rich” for debt relief due to its GNI of about $6500, which, if you’ve ever seen anything of the country outside the resorts, beggars belief. In 2011-12, one-quarter of government revenues were spent on foreign debt payments. There has been a 20% drop in the number of children completing elementary school in Jamaica since 1990 down to 73% from a former 95%.

This is the pattern for the global majority: increased debt, increased poverty, declining services. The IMF and World Bank themselves reported in March that of 68 low and middle income countries (GNI of $12,275 or less):

  • 5 are in default on at least some of their debt payments
  • 15 are at high risk of not being able to pay their debts
  • 23 are at moderate risk of not being able to pay their debt
  • 25 are at low risk of not being able to pay their debts

So there are no countries not at risk of default in the world’s poorest nations. Loans are increasing, often to repay earlier loans. Speculative loans are widespread.

The Jubilee campaign does not report on high income nations so here’s some data from a random search of today’s financial media:

  • Germany sold bonds for 0.07% annual interest last week. Spain, however, has to pay 6% and is insisting that this is intolerable. Italy sold bonds at 6.504% today. The bonds in my retirement account are making 1.76%.
  • Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, pays no tax on her salary of $467,940 and has a built-in pay rise every year of her contract. Sporting a deep tan, Lagarde last week told Greece “it’s payback time,” arguing that all Greeks had to pay their taxes.
  • Facebook founder Eduardo Saverin took citizenship in Singapore to avoid $67 million in capital gains tax, because paying 15% tax is too much for the one per cent.
  • Meanwhile law professor Alex Tsesis is quoted in the Times as being “skeptical about the ability of a retail purchaser to be able to play on a level field in the market.” The poor chap lost $2200 on Facebook shares rather than making the instant cash-in “investors” feel entitled to get.
  • Told that New Jersey faces a $1.3bn budget deficit thanks to his tax cuts for the rich, Gov. Chris Christie called the auditor the “Dr Kevorkian of the numbers.”
  • Russian oil magnate Mikhail Fridman has taken his TNK corporation out of  BP: it generated $19bn in dividends to its UK parent since it was created in 2003. Steal oil in Russia, spill it in the Gulf: BP.
  • When shareholders vote on executive pay, companies used their block votes so that “less than 3 per ended up losing the votes.”
  • Retail sales in Spain are down 11% on the year and a staggering 25% over a five-year period–since the end of the housing boom in other words.

In short, we all need a Jubilee: not a grey-haired German lady taking a ride in a horse-drawn carriage with an irascible Greek aristocrat, but a debt jubilee that returns the financial system to a level of decency. That would be the sensible, NGO-style demand that could be made. But the Jubilee Debt Campaign has been making this case brilliantly for years and the situation just gets worse. No demands. No royals. But I think a quick listen to the Sex Pistols might be in order.

Decolonizing the Imagination

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How can we develop David Graeber’s insights into the importance of the imagination as a tool of resistance? Regular readers with good memories may recall a discussion about the Charter of the Forest (1217) that came out of my reading of Hardt and Negri’s Declaration. What gives me some pause about this intersection is that, while the Charter did inscribe some freedoms, it does so in the context of feudalism. While that might ironically be congenial to the present-day neo-feudalism of rents and debts, it’s not a platform for the current global social movement.

On the other hand, I have long thought, in the tradition of Tony Benn and Christopher Hill, that the Diggers do have something to offer here. So on a quiet day, I thought I might develop the thought for what it’s worth. It turns out to pose some interesting questions about the tension between the direct and the representation.

During the English Revolution (1642-49), a range of radical sects saw the end of Charles I’s monarchy as the beginning of new era and the end of slavery. Their goals were exemplified by the Diggers, inspired and led by Gerrard Winstanley (1609-76), a sometime Baptist and itinerant preacher. Winstanley was working as a cow-hand when he felt himself called upon:

As I was in a trance not long since, divers matters were present to my sight, which must not here be related. Likewise I heard these words, Worke together. Eat bread together; declare all this abroad.

If Winstanley understood this as inspiration, it is also what we would now call imagination, a vision of collectivity at a time of social, economic and political crisis, following the execution of the king. He was inspired to send a letter to General Fairfax, the army commander, asking

Whether all Lawes that are not grounded upon equity and reason, not giving a universal freedom to all, but respecting persons, ought not to be cut off with the King’s head? We affirm they ought.

This remarkable radicality was typical of his style, which insisted on following through first principles, all of which can be derived from the first sentence of his first pamphlet, written as his small group were beginning to reclaim the common and waste land on St George’s Hill, Surrey:

In the beginning of time, the great creator Reason made the earth to be a common treasury for all.

It’s worth looking closely at this sentence. Divinity was expressed as rationality, present in each individual, not as an external deity, as the forces of “vision, voice and revelation,” a trinity of the imagination. “Earth,” or land, is assumed to be the common property of all, the treasury of a land without a state. Notably, Winstanley wrote “common” not “the commons.” Having experienced the Absolutist monarchy of Charles I, he would have been very aware of the hierarchical ordering of feudalism and the setting aside of certain spaces as “the commons” did not satisfy his understanding of all land as common.

His vision was a relay of divine inspiration, internal rights, and righteousness to be grounded in a common sense of equality. Although the Diggers claimed to be restoring justice to its condition before the Fall of Man, their actions were practical and modern. By cultivating land on an equal basis and denying the possibility of exclusive ownership of the land, Winstanley envisaged sustainable small-scale cultivation as the basis of social life. His non-violent form of resistance was to advocate that workers refuse to labor for others, a refusal of the wage system at its beginnings. Historian Christopher Hill called this action the first general strike. Indeed, in a manner familiar to present-day social movements, Winstanley declared: “Action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.”

It was in response to such theories of radical direct democracy that Thomas Hobbes defined the state as Leviathan (1651). The Leviathan was the figure of the commonwealth, the social contract by which individuals arrogate their right of governance to the sovereign. Of the three possible modes of commonwealth—monarchy, aristocracy and democracy—Hobbes was convinced that monarchy was by far the most effective.

Frontispiece to Leviathan

So the figure seen in the famous frontispiece to his book represents the monarchy as a living form of the social contract. The body of the King is composed of hundreds of other bodies, his subjects, combined to make the whole known as Leviathan. Hobbes imagined the Leviathan as a demi-god, like Hercules and other creatures of legend. He was interested in such “compound creatures” as he called them, as a special instance of the power of imagination, or Fancy. This was not simply an artistic or creative attribute:

whatsoever distinguisheth the civility of Europe, from the Barbarity of the American savages, is the workmanship of Fancy.

Representational images are created by this “fancy” meaning:

 any representation of one thing by another.

So for all the fact that his Leviathan was filled with little people, Hobbes was civilized because he adhered to the principles of representation, whereas the “savage” believes in the direct, whether in democracy or image making. So Hobbes places a challenge: all representation is colonial.

So we might want to look into “direct” forms of acting and making, as we have of course been doing, “Direct” imaging might include photography, video, performance and other media where there has been a question about whether it is “mechanical,” or “simply” imitative or other phrases that tend in the direction of the colonial critique like “slavish” (as in imitation) or “apeing” as in copying but also as in simians.

Does this mean we must jettison all media that represent? Certainly not–but we do have to think about how to decolonize them, to disadhere them from the elite privilege they have long held, and, yes, I am thinking about painting here.

For the state colonized the land but also the faculty of imagination itself as representation. It designated sovereignty and colonial authority in and as the power to represent. Representation was a matter of sign formation, for Hobbes distinguished the mark, which is recognizable only to its maker, and the sign, which is legible to others. The opposite of authority was not, then, the primitive pre-social contract condition of the fictional “war of all against all” but the opposite of representation, which is to say, direct democracy. These ideas became equated with madness, which Michel Foucault called the “colonizing reason” of the West. By 1660 the British monarchy was restored and the first law code for the enslaved was published in the British colony of Barbados in 1661. Winstanley had called the revolution, the “world turned upside down.” Plantation monarchy restored it. Nonetheless, the common had preceded it.

In search of protest past

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So I had this idea for Memorial Day weekend that it would be interesting to look back at past protest literature from the New York area and see what could be learned, in the manner of all those op-eds about nineteenth-century presidents and Greek wars. I looked again at Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities. For all the obvious differences, there’s one clear similarity: the NYPD were awful even then.

Carson’s very title depends on a conceit that I don’t think still works very much. It comes from the idea that because of bird death resulting from the use of the pesticide DDT, there might be a spring without bird song. Although I did have a friend go back to England because he missed the song of the thrushes (a small brown bird), I’m not sure that most of us would register the difference now. I rarely notice birds singing, except when starlings are massing for migration. As we now mostly travel in sealed vehicles, more often than not with ear-buds in place, that interface is less vital than it once was.

DDY being sprayed in 1948

On the other hand, Carson mentions that after the village of Setauket on the north shore of Long Island was sprayed with DDT, a horse drank from a trough in the high street–and died immediately. The toxicity of DDT was its selling point and Long Island was doused with it to try and eradicate the gypsy moth to no avail. In the years since there has been a notorious breast cancer hotspot on the Island. DDT is said not to be a carcinogen and all the studies made have failed to show a link between pesticide use and cancer–except it might be said for the one in real women’s bodies in real space. Rachel Carson died of breast cancer shortly after her book was published in 1962.

But if you Google Carson and DDT, half the entries you will see accuse her of being a murderer. The bizarre conceit is that malaria in the dominated world could be more effectively eradicated with widespread use of DDT and the fact that is not is Carson’s fault. There is a perfectly effective way to prevent malaria, which is to give people treated mosquito nets. It works, it’s cheap and it has no side-effects. But giving money for that would not have the fun of “demolishing” an environmental pioneer.

Jane Jacobs (center) in The White Horse, Hudson St

The New York City described by Jane Jacobs is perhaps even more remote than the world of horse troughs and bird song in Carson’s book. It’s a place where you can leave a key for a visiting friend at the local deli and everyone has an eye out for the kid in the street. In fact, this culture of what she directly calls “surveillance” is a bit creepy: when people encircle a man who is trying to get a child to follow him, it turns out he is her father. She talks off-handedly of a neglected park in Philadelphia becoming a “pervert park,” meaning a place for same-sex assignations in the era of the closet. There’s no street politics in this book, rather a permanent watchfulness that takes its pleasure in seeing that “all is well.”

Jacobs’ view of the mixed use, high density urban space has become canonical now, even if her follow-up thought that “slums” should be left alone has not. Much of her argument against the Le Corbusier influenced city planner now seems a bit slow-going, so thoroughly has the view reversed. On the other hand, she’s completely right when she says:

that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact – they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated.

You could apply this insight to see why Bloomberg et al. originally left Zuccotti alone to transform itself into Liberty Plaze: because it simply never occurred to them that anyone would be interested, still less want to join in or follow the Occupiers’ example.

Jacobs waged her campaigns by local petitions that she would then take to the Board of Estimate, a land-use body composed of the Mayor, the Comptroller, the Council President and the Borough Presidents. It met once a week and could be petitioned by citizens, until the Supreme Court abolished it in 1989. If this sounds like a democracy gone by, that’s certainly the case. On the other hand, look what happened to Jacobs in 1968:

Jane Jacobs, a nationally known writer on urban problems, was arraigned in Criminal Court yesterday and charged with second-degree riot, inciting to riot and criminal mischief. The police had originally charged that Mrs. Jacobs tried to disrupt a public meeting on the controversial Lower Manhattan Expressway. ‘The inference seems to be,’ Mrs. Jacobs said, ‘that anybody who criticizes a state program is going to get it in the neck.’”

— The New York Times, April 18, 1968

Now that sounds familiar enough: being charged with rioting for trying to express an opinion at a public meeting. So it turns out that some things never change.