#and mass production and commodification has increased too

[ghostlypawn]

i cant help but feel like ppl r too defensive using that commercialisation quote by keith haring when it comes to his work being used like idk… him making shirts/posters in his self-owned shop so ppl can access his work doesnt feel the same as a big brand mass-producing his work to an unknowing audience

[fromevertonow]

This is a paper I wrote for one of my courses about media and materiality. I will use any excuse to write on The Hunger Games. My instructor actually liked it, asking why I didn't write anything on Snow lmao. Maybe for part two, David. Don't encourage me. I also want to say that the responses on my post regarding the names in THG helped so fucking much. Thank you to those people who interacted with that post!

Disclaimer: this assignment was meant to be informal for us so we wouldn't feel too overwhelmed with the studyload, so there is some non-academic register in here.

Panem et Circenses: The Forecast of a Mass Culture Storm

In a world long ago, the Roman poet Juvenal critiqued the people of Rome for discarding their responsibilities as citizens. While Sejanus tried to overthrow the Emperor Tiberius, Juvenal claimed that the people only cared to lavish in food and frivolities, saying that “the mob / That used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything, / Curtails its desires and reveals its anxiety for two things only, / Bread and circuses” (Juvenal ll. 78-81). Juvenal’s phrase “bread and circuses” is often referenced in relation to “mass culture to denote a process of social decline” (Brantlinger Bread and Circuses 22). The Roman Empire had a method of appeasing the masses to avoid uprisings: keep them fed and offer them entertainment (23). Similarly to Juvenal who disapproved of this manner of ruling, socialist scholars and avant-garde artists criticized mass culture for subjecting civilization to this numbing of critical thinking (Brantlinger “Mass Media” 99). The twentieth century knows an incredible rise of technological developments and mass production of consumer goods which has led to several social developments, e.g. the blurring of class distinctions and an increase in literacy (100, 103). Although these may seem as positive effects, mass culture threatens to silence individuals into commodification, as happened to the Romans (Dubord 14). Juvenal had forecasted the enslavement of people to mass-produced consumable goods and, looking at contemporary times, it seems we are left standing in the rain without an umbrella. Yet, this is not the worst mass culture has to offer. A flood of dystopian stories in the literary world has predicted and warned us for far crueler storms, depicting oppressive governments that have gradually dominated their citizens through bread and circuses.

            One of these stories is The Hunger Games (THG) by Suzanne Collins. Set in a futuristic United States, renamed ‘Panem,’ THG depicts a picture of mass culture at its extreme. Panem is divided into twelve districts, each responsible for the production of a specific good. These products are the sole reason the districts are still considered as relevant for the Capitol, the oppressive government. While the majority of the districts suffer from poverty, the Capitol lavishes in the districts’ importations of food and other materialities. Collins depicts the duality of abundant, capitalist consumerism with the contrast between the riches of the Capitol and the scarcity of the districts. The Capitol has managed to keep the districts sedated through fear; they are coerced into complacency through strict regulation and the annual Hunger Games. Seventy-four years before the original events of THG, the thirteen districts rebelled against the Capitol but were violently defeated. As punishment, District Thirteen was completely obliterated and the remaining twelve districts were forced to send a male and female tribute between the ages of twelve and eighteen to the Games where they would have to fight to the death in an arena as entertainment for the Capitol. The twenty-four tributes are randomly selected and can place their name in the reaping multiple times in exchange for tesserae, a year’s supply of grain and oil. Households that could not afford food could make bread from the tesserae. Collins draws a connection to ‘panem’ in Juvenal’s phrase through the tesserae system which is a method for the Capitol to keep the districts dependent on the government’s supply of basic needs, like bread.

Juvenal’s ‘circenses’ is apparent in two elements in THG. The first is the Hunger Games themselves which are meant to entertain the Capitol’s citizens. Before the Games there are interviews with the tributes and various television segments. The coverage of the tributes has two purposes: to show the Capitol’s citizens how well-fed the tributes are in the Capitol, a kindness offered to them by the very institution that places them in a position of death, and to obtain sponsors during the Games who will send necessities to the tributes in the arena, e.g. medicine or water. The second reference to ‘circenses’ is the character Peeta Mellark. Peeta is the male tribute from District Twelve and the baker’s son. His first name is a reference to pita bread, and as the baker’s son, he is also a clear connection to ‘panem.’ Moreover, he once gave bread to Katniss, the female protagonist, when she and her family were at the brink of starvation. The loaf of bread symbolized hope and sparked a new motivation in Katniss to live again (Collins THG 37). His surname is a shortened version of ‘malarkey,’ meaning “silly behaviour or nonsense” (“malarkey”), similar to the contents of circuses. Peeta is not a seasoned fighter and his chances of winning the Games are low. However, the Games can be played either through fighting or entertainment. Peeta is incredibly charismatic and uses that to his full advantage whenever the cameras are around to gain sponsors (Collins THG 158). He is, like the Capitol, both a provider of food and entertainment.

            Where the Capitol symbolizes fear, Peeta represents hope. As an oppressive government, the Capitol’s goal is to silence people into complacency so they do not rise against the authorities, as the Roman Empire. This is the opposite for Peeta who, in the sequel Catching Fire, uses his likeability among the citizens of the Capitol to defy its very government (Collins 289). Throughout the trilogy, he has consistently used his abilities to both provide and perform for noble causes that concern the people, not the government. When Peeta gave Katniss the bread, he gave her renewed hope to live again which was more sustainable than the Capitol’s tesserae supply that merely lasts a year and is only given in exchange for a bigger chance at death. Peeta’s hope was free. THG serves as a warning for a future that is ruled by mass consumption and production which blinds citizens to the dictatorship they are governed by. Juvenal’s faraway world of the Roman Empire is not so far away after all, it has always been here and is gradually taking over our future. But, we know what is coming and we can prepare for the storm and find shelter. As Peeta’s character shows, there is hope, a possibility, to provide for each other rather than depend on authorities that prefer to see us as commodities, to use the government’s very own methods against it and become individuals once more.

Works Cited

Brantlinger, Patrick. “Introduction: The Two Classicisms.” Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay. Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 17-52.

---. “Mass Media and Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Europe.” Fin-de-Siècle and Its Legacy, edited by Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 98-114.

Collins, Suzanne. Catching Fire. Scholastic Ltd, 2011.

---. The Hunger Games. Scholastic Ltd, 2011.

Debord, Guy. “The Commodity as Spectacle.” The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014, pp. 13-20.

Juvenal. “Satire X – The Vanity of Human Wishes.” Poetry in Translation, translated by A. S. Kline, 2001, https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/JuvenalSatires10.php. Accessed 14 Dec. 2023.

“malarkey.” Cambridge Dictionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/malarkey. Accessed 14 Dec. 2023.

[robhorninginternalexile]

museum minimalism

Since everyone has social media space to fill, everyone has come to operate like a museum, “curating” experiences and memories as images of their lives as deliberate, unfolding works of art. This in turn has inverted the conventional role of the art museum: It functions less as the repository of precious works meant to ground efforts to periodize and regionalize the history of cultural production and more as a place where visitors can stage their interactions with that history and appropriate it in various ways that the museum could ideally profit from. Museums have had to reorient themselves to become more photogenic, to announce themselves as iconic and immediately recognizable tourist attractions, in order to maximize the value of the images that visitors take and circulate of their visits.

But this is not some abrupt about-face trigger by phone cameras. It extends a trend that Rosalind Krauss discussed in her 1990 essay “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” when she pointed out a “bizarre Gestalt-switch from regarding the collection as a form of cultural patrimony or as specific and irreplaceable embodiments of cultural knowledge to one of eying the collection's contents as so much capital—as stocks or assets whose value is one of pure exchange and thus only truly realized when they are put in circulation.” 

Then, under “late capitalism,” “capital” was understood primarily as the works themselves as appreciating assets. Now, under what I guess must be “later capitalism,” capital takes the form of the tourist images the institutions can facilitate — the “experiences” it can commodify for the “experience economy.” But this too was incipient in the 1980s. 

Krauss cites a claim made by Ernest Mandel (if only everyone who mentioned “late capitalism” had to do this) that “overcapitalization (or noninvested surplus capital) that is the hallmark of late capitalism,” and suggests that art museums became sinks for that noninvested surplus. But the idea that there is all this surplus capital needing a harmless place to nest also explains the emergence of artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, whose main function is to make conspicuously expensive objects — under the alibi that this itself is an ironic social comment. 

But Krauss has a different kind of bloated and pretentious art in mind in her essay: Minimalism, which was being taken up as the pretense for museums’ vast expansion programs in the 1980s and 1990s. (She is writing about the genesis of MassMoCA.) Minimalism as an art movement  purportedly aimed to re-center viewing subjects in the uniqueness of their bodily perceptions of an object, yet it came to be the pretense for art museums’ conversion into massive Disneyland-like spaces devoted to art commodities. 

For Krauss, Minimalism undermines itself by using industrial processes to fabricate work that presuppose an ability to manufacture any number of pieces on the same specifications. The pieces — copies without “originals” — have no aura, which allows them to function as commodities, as tradeable assets rather than “irreplaceable embodiments of cultural knowledge.”   

But at the same time Minimalist works are announcing themselves as interchangeable, they are also taking up more and more space. Krauss cites then Guggenheim director Tom Krens, who posited that museums should cease being art historical and aim instead at inspiring the special aesthetic subjectivity in viewers:

The encyclopedic museum is intent on telling a story, by arraying before its visitor a particular version of the history of art. The synchronic museum — if we can call it that — would forego history in the name of a kind of intensity of experience, an aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is now radically spatial, the model for which, in Krens's own account, was, in fact, Minimalism.

Minimalist art, in Krauss’s account, was devoted to an “idea of a perception that would break with what it saw as the decorporealized and therefore bloodless, algebraicized condition of abstract painting.” It hoped to exist in some space beyond commodification, where the works were protected by being site-specific and devoid of semiotic content. By making viewers participants in the work, activating it by recognizing their limits in perceiving it, minimalist art supposedly restored an “immediacy of experience” in a world full of phony mass culture and programmed laugh-track responsiveness.     

This move is, we could say, compensatory, an act of reparations to a subject whose everyday experience is one of increasing isolation, reification, specialization, a subject who lives under the conditions of advanced industrial culture as an increasingly instrumentalized being.

That makes me think of this essay by Drew Austin, which argues that tech companies have succeeded in making the digital “space” we inhabit more instrumentalized, more centered on exchange rather than social reciprocity. And it makes me think of the contemporary turn to crypto-minimalism in social media that Kyle Chayka describes in The Longing for Less as a misguided attempt to mitigate that instrumentalization. Most of all, though, it is hard to read of a "subject whose everyday experience is one of increasing isolation” without thinking of quarantine conditions and our current renegotiations of space. If Minimalism was conceived as a rejection of relational aesthetics, as Krauss notes, then I can’t think of a less suitable kind of art for this moment, when people seem desperate for ways to relate to one another. 

Krauss argues how Minimalism failed in its own time; it constructed the museum as “hyperspace” and the viewer as a fragmented postmodern subject who is for some reason held to be incapable of “real” experience — they supposedly suffer from what Jameson called a “waning of affect,” the inability to maintain a sense of identity with any depth or continuity. 

The post-postmodern condition seems different. The problem is not a subject who has traded “affect” for “intensity” in a vast field of surfaces and signs. The Minimalist project hasn’t been betrayed by the decentered subject’s vertiginous fall into commodification and commercialization. It now succeeds on its own terms too well: The “perceiving subject” that Minimalism aimed to foreground has become the self-documenting subject that populates social media feeds — the viewer is not a body is space but a camera. The phone camera has given viewers the ability to reify their own gaze and circulate it as a commodity. Minimalist art has become Instagram cliche. 

In other words, the problem with postmodernism was not the decentered subject but the kinds of media that were invented to reconsolidate the subject under the sign of a rising neoliberalism, and the possibilities for image-driven “human capital.”

When Krauss’s essay ran in October, it was illustrated (presumably with a heavy dose of irony) with an image of a James Turrell light installation, the whole point of which is its experiential unphotographability. The work is not the light itself but how your eyes adjust to it and your perception of it changes over time. Now Drake can make a video inside a copy of a Turrell work, and no one can doubt that he is in earnest.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

On Sabotage as One of the Fine Arts: a contribution to the topic of the theory of the practice of Sabotage

Chapter 1

Who will revive the violent whirlpools of flame if not us and those that we consider brothers? Come! New friends: this will please you. We will never work, oh tides of flame! This world will explode. It’s the true path. Forward, on the march.

— A. Rimbaud

The spread of sabotage, its increasing practice, on a greater or lesser scale, far and wide against the domination of the market is a given fact. Burning ATM booths, disabling locks at shopping centers, smashing shop windows, setting fire to the offices of temp agencies and employment offices, the sabotage of the infrastructure of capitalism (high-speed railroads, dams, expressways, construction projects) ... are offensive practices against the colonization of our lives by the most advanced form of colonialism — the integrated spectacle.

All this is put into practice by individuals bored with survival as commodities (life reduced to economic imperatives) and disillusioned with false opposition (more false and less oppositional with each day that goes by), parties and unions that want to manage our misery and integrate us into a mode of production that prevents us from any participation in the decisions that relate directly to us and that assist in enslaving us, mutilating every gesture of negation of the existent.

The spectacle writes the scenario and distributes the roles: worker, professor, student, housewife, mother, father, son, daughter, unemployed, police, soldier, artist, humanitarian, intellectual... the majority, individuals who assume different roles in the course of 24 hours, see their existence as still more terrible, assuming this is possible. Everyone with his neurotic-schizoid viewpoint will react to the stimuli launched by power in the way that was already expected.

All social activity is planned in order to reinforce the spectacle, thus slowing down its unstoppable process of decomposition. Though we don’t want to hear the shrieking of militants of whatever organization, clearly we are not against the concept of “organization” as such, but against “organization” conceived as an end in itself , as the crystallization of any ideology, and as a separated organ, representing a class.

We are for the autonomous self-organization of the exploited. History has shown through two clear examples that the traditional form of the party (Russian revolution) and union (Spanish revolution) were nothing more than two attempts to manage capitalism and not to overcome it, and this is something that, consciously or unconsciously, everybody knows. In the seizure of power, it is not destroyed, but exercised: in the first case, the class of bureaucrats replaced the bourgeoisie, and in the other case, the anarcho-syndicalist leaders participated in bourgeois power, calling for the self-management of exploitation and alienation, while the base tried to overcome the relationships of production and social relationships in practice through the direct management of every aspect of their lives and not just work.

To be precise, both forms have the exaltation of work in common (something that they also share with national-socialism and with every political form of capitalism).

Their quantitative vision sought an increase in production, leaving aside the qualitative increase of life. This (practical and theoretical) defeat of the traditional organizations, which claim to represent us, has not been absorbed by the working class (it seems that we only know how to work), and we go along without maintaining any possibility of control over essential aspects of our lives, in a world that is developed, not only without our participation, but against us.

But, comrades, history is not cyclic; it is a cumulative process and already weighs too heavily upon our weary bodies.

Chapter 2

Never did mockers waste more idle breath.

— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The contradiction between the possibilities of the means of production (the use of a few of them for the enjoyment of all, since most of them are useless and harmful and would be destroyed) and the relations of production (waged exploitation, commodification, the exclusions of class society) has reached an insurmountable point of rupture. In the spectacle it is easier to falsify the nature of this contradiction than to increase mercantile production with increasing use value. This inertia forces it to display all of its methods for recuperating any real movement of opposition and to turn the spectacular critique of the spectacle to its advantage.

A self-critical hypocrite directed by its own police of decomposed thought (pro-situationists, cadres, non-governmental organizations, recuperators, artists, journalists... the clique of politically correct alternatives).

These toilet brushes of modernity, like good priests, hope that with their patches, the proper development of the system will lead us, hand in hand, into an ideal world planned by their false consciousness and by the putridity of their armoured brains; as if they had ever given us anything. Their social function, which has been denounced for decades already, has been worth more to them than any aggressions, beatings or assassinations, and we are sure that these will not be mere anecdotes. They deceive and manipulate us. We must not allow them ta have a single day more. They are the guardians to the keys of our informal chains. They amuse us with insignificant debates. They impose their opinions on us, avoiding questions so simple that they make them tremble with terror: How best to live? Who and what keeps us from this? Questions that immediately unmask the professionals of the lie. Critical coherence and the critique of incoherence aid this operation.

Chapter 3

Injustice is not anonymous; it has a name and an address.

— Bertold Brecht

Situationist theory, as integral critique of the totality of the conditions of survival and of the mercantile-spectacular capitalism that necessitates them, has been confirmed in events by falsification.

One cannot fight alienation by means of alienated forms. The sabotage of this world starts with the break with the roles the system imposes on us, the sabotage of our death in life and the refusal of the roles that they have allotted and appointed to us. To speak of the Revolution in these times is “to have a corpse in one’s mouth”. We only need to look around ourselves to see a scenario that constantly reminds us of the defeat. Sabotage is thus an action that serves as a propellant against the unreality that oppresses us. A practice that has not gone unnoticed by ideological recuperation, which has transformed it into “terrorism” (the professionalization of sabotage that has done no more than reinforce the system, due to its centralist, hierarchical and militarist character). Today, what is proposed is not the creation of an armed organization of this type, but widespread attack by small affinity groups, uncontrollable by any higher organization, that come together and dissolve like the lunar tides. The tides that are born of the awareness of how bad things are and of the worsening that awaits us due to events.

In the 19th century, such a practice existed that put the incipient capitalism in check. Beyond the Luddite attacks, the “proletarian rounds” rendered their repression and recuperation, in which the embryonic unions would play a role, almost impossible due to their lack of a rigid structure and their maximum flexibility in attacks. A group of people came together, struck and disappeared into the mass, while a new group came together within it. Such widespread sabotage makes it difficult for the enemy to organize repression. Thus it transforms the attack into a universe of pleasure for the enlightened hooligan, the feelings of which are impossible to describe or communicate with the poor and banal language of words.

The game of subversion, the rules of which are written by those that participate in it, becomes an effective weapon against capitalism in all its forms.

There is much more to destroy than to build.

Chapter 4

Our epoch does not need to write poetic slogans, but to realize them.

— Situationist International

It has been demonstrated that small groups that attack do more damage than large organizations that specialize in armed struggle. The Angry Brigade continued its actions when people were arrested and the English state assumed the movement had fallen apart. The Kale Borroka (street struggle) in Euskadi, which Jarrai (the youth organization of the Basque nationalist left, NDR) recently declared uncontrollable is another example. Power has difficulty repressing and eliminating little groups that with complete security do not know each other, and the only thing that unites them is the desire for the destruction of a system that prevents them from living and condemns them to survival and uncertainty. They don’t attempt exhibitionist actions in order to make propaganda as some acronym or mark of origin. In the case of the Asturias, sabotage was a class weapon used innumerable times, particularly in labor conflicts with these enterprises: Duro Felguera, Hunosa, Naval and Ciata...(Asturian businesses and mines where sabotage was determinant in the struggles going on in the 1990’s); every weary person, regardless of her or his ideology, uses it. From the clerk who steals office supplies to the worker who damages the machine to which he is chained, passing through the use of plastic explosives like the licensed professionals of Duro Felguera. Today, the example is the burning of the ETTs (temporary employment agencies). The practice of sabotage remains limited to precise and very localized conflicts, without global perspectives, simply aiming for partial solutions with economic demands that remain within imposed limits where capitalist logic unfolds. The same holds in the case of the ETTs, an attack that goes beyond the temporality of a conflict in one enterprise, but that does not place wage slavery into question. Instead it only questions its most extreme form, not aiming at putting an end to exploitation, but rather to the ETTs. Today the conflict is global and it is not resolved through partial struggles, but through total struggle and through the refusal of this society as a whole. It is necessary to put an end to the reduction of our lives to commodities and to wage labor that wears us out, not just to ETTs. We must put an end to class society and not just fascism. Misdirecting our attention toward partial objectives only benefits the managers of our misery and those who will one day lay claim to its management., and both are among the targets for sabotage.

The widespread practice of sabotage (unhindered autonomy, maximum flexibility, self-organization, minimum risk) among like-minded individuals, opens the possibility for real communication, destroying spectacular communication, smashing the apathy and impotence of the eternal revolutionist monologue. Relationships and the possibility of contact with other people in the refusal of the spectacular role, these are transient situations that in their preparation and development carry in their essence the qualities of the revolutionary situation that will not retreat and that will suppress the conditions of survival. It does not fall into the irremediable alienating hierarchization that every specialized armed group of an authoritarian and militaristic character, to which the masses delegate their participation in the attack, carries within itself

The quantitative growth of this practice does not come to us from the hands of propagandists of the spectacle, but rather by taking a walk through the scenario of capitalism, and finding in this drift the burned ATM, the ETTs with shattered windows, the smiths changing the locks of a supermarket. These visions make our complicit smiles blossom and move us to go out that very night to play with fire with the aim of making the same smiles rise on the faces of unknown accomplices through the fellowship of destruction. The number doesn’t matter, but rather the quality of the acts: sabotage, expropriation, self-reduction... they return part of the life that is denied us back to us, but we want it all.

Comrades, the game is yours and we take courage in its daily practice. Organize it yourselves with your accomplices.

Against the old world in all its expressions, in order to leave pre-history, let’s launch and multiply attacks.

FOR THE ABOLITION OF CLASS SOCIETY AGAINST THE MARKET AND WAGE LABOR FOR ANARCHY STONES AND FIRE

[jollyzinetacohorse]

Final major project blog

Final major project: blog

Day 1: For my final major project, I am considering exploring the concept of religious belief and the preservation of artefacts from history in museums and galleries. What I find interesting about these subject areas is the idea of blind belief in someone or something that has no true evidence behind it. Also, the idea of creating a story or meaning behind a group of objects or images would be very interesting, exploring the meta narrative construct and the values held by postmodernists.

Day 2: Looking into how religion has operated in the past using textbooks on Tudor history in the mid 1540s-1560s, and sociology books exploring how and what role religion plays in early to late modern society has been very impactful on my concept and the direction my artistic research is taking. Recently, I have been thinking about how future generations may look back on us and what we have preserved for them to look at. It might be interesting to create an archetype that lives 1000 years in the future and is currently looking through the archives of our actions.  I have been looking at Daniel Arshams work[1], using film to depict a future civilisation before and after earth goes through a major ecological crisis.

I think it’s vital I try to weave the importance of the environment into my final major project. Not only is it a pressing issue of my generation but also future ones too, also looking at the bigger picture of how my work has progressed and starting to develop a common theme of addressing the environmental crisis in some way, I think that’s important to keep that fuelled and able to develop.

Day 3: Starting to look into meaning behind material and presentation in an art gallery, and how smaller things that I may have previously not attached much importance to, might play a larger part in the way my work is looked at and processed by people. Having attended a talk on Materials and meaning, this had opened my eyes to new ways of displaying a message or my meaning behind a piece through lighting, position in relation to other works, and the history behind the material I am using.

Re-visiting the tree roots[2] I had used previously in a project, its interesting thinking about the age of the roots and how I grew up with them moving around underneath my garden.

Visiting the British museum[3] was useful. I was interested in the display cabinets as a way of presenting work in. I was also looking at how the artefacts are preserved and protected behind glass and security alarms, yet there’s no true way we can be sure that these weren’t faked. In a core skill project, I had constructed a large confessionary for a performance piece[4]. Currently thinking about converting it into a large display case for a museum.

Day 4: studying the space within the confessionary box, I am considering looking into what might be considered as historical in our age. Looking at cultural icons of today, and people who are idolised for their success like Kanye West, Elon Musk, Barak Obama, and Operah Winfrey.

I have started to look at what artefacts might be considered as historical in our modern world. Smart phones, Cars, and portable items of technology.

Considering the idea of brand loyalty, materialism and consumption in the economy. Looking at examples of companies who have generated a large amount of profit in a short amount of time. Generating its own separate economy where people invest in product only to resell it because of its rarity and uniqueness.  

Day 5: looking back at the British museum visit, I am thinking about experimenting on a smaller scale than I usually do in my projects. Started to look at Max Hooper’s work using containers and filling them with various pieces of greenery and lighting to combine the features of modern-day architecture with biological forms. To me what’s important here is the presentation and the forms the materials take, although he was largely influenced by his background in biology, he remains a key influence in my ideas due to the consideration of his materials and there meaning.

Day 6: I have started to look at how people place value on objects and how that may affect their belief in its background.

Interested in the gold leafing technique. Using a material that is considered extremely valuable and applying this onto things that are tossed aside in daily life. Does the value increase due to its aesthetics, or its actual material value?

Day 7: Looking at how I can weave these ideas of value and materialism into religious belief and spiritualty.

I have been re-reading some sociology textbook entries, looking at what religion meant in traditional society to what it now means. Looking at the varying levels of spirituality in Europe and America, it’s interesting to see how many new age religions have grown in America which heavily rely on material consumption by selling various consumables and artefacts. Comparing this to European society where a monopoly was in power, new age belief systems haven’t been as popular. Is religious commodification the future? Will we still believe in spirits and outer world powers 1000 years in the future?

Day 8: Taking a broader look at what religion has meant to people by looking back onto the mid Tudor crisis, where religion was a key factor of insecurity of the monarchy and control. Looking at the period where Protestantism separated itself from mainstream Catholicism, this had created huge amounts of instability.

Comparing this to what religion is now, it’s interesting how the power of religion has declined over time, yet still remains to have a small grip in modern society.

Day 9: Justine Smith[5] is a contemporary artist who creates work regarding the role of money in our society. She has taken part in an on-going exhibition about the history of the Bank of England, celebrating its 325th anniversary[6]. The exhibition consists of 325 objects from the years the Bank of England has existed. I am going to visit to gain a greater understanding of what type of objects I should be looking at to include in my project. Justine Smith used £50 notes to create a collection of delicate flowers. A very interesting way to look at money as a material to create, it’s interesting to think that if this work is to ever to be valued, would it consider how much money is physically in it, or is that part disregarded and the pieces concept is valued.

Day 10: Started experimenting with gilding on different materials, plastic, leather, metal. Very effective way of faking gold onto any surface, I will definitely continue to experiment and play with covering objects with gold, perhaps start to think about photography and if there’s any way of adding value through that medium.

Re visiting the work, I did on the core skills one with photography, where we looked at advertising, the media, and consumption.

One of our tasks was to take a mundane object and make it look a certain way, using different contexts and props to do so.

Perhaps another avenue to take on this project is to experiment with photography and look at photographers who generate photos for advertisement reasons.

Day 11: started to look into photographers and artists who look at religion in their work. David La Chapelle’s[7][8]work was very interesting as it placed a traditional religious figure into modern day setting. In one of the photos in his collection, Jesus stands in a holy light, dressed in robes, in a run-down room with grubby walls. La Chapelle’s uses iconography in a lot of his photos and reframes famous paintings from the bible. This idea of reframing or adjusting such a known part of a belief system is quite interesting.

With regards to my ideas for my project, this work has furthered my research into religion and questioning its legitimacy, and perhaps creating my own belief system based on a set of artefacts.

Weaving my ideas regarding history and preservation would be quite interesting. What I will attempt to do now is find the proper materials and techniques to embody my thoughts and findings in my final piece.

Day 12: Starting to apply this project to the wider narrative of my work. Looking back at my works, I usually attempt to address our relationship with nature in my work. Using a variety of materials and techniques, I try to juxtapose man-made objects or processes with natural forms and occurrences.

With this project, I want to diversify my skill set. Working in sculpture and installations for a lot of my projects, I think its time for me to still incorporate those elements in my work, but perhaps look into digital work or finer techniques, like gilding.

I do see some similarities to older works appearing in this project as well. For example, the tree roots I used in my third project are going to be reduced to a smaller scale and re used potentially as artefacts of the past. I do see more colourful elements of nature appearing in this project as well, like various types of natural growth e.g. moss, grass and foliage.

However, I do see some differences in this project to others; I expect myself to escape my comfort zone and work on smaller elements as well, which will rely a lot more on the finer details of the piece rather than its scale and mass. This projects also going to be a lot more conceptually driven then passed ones as well, drawing on elements from history, sociology, modern and contemporary art and day to day life.

Overall, I would say that in this project, I want to be able to work outside my comfort zone as efficiently as I do inside it, with regards to conceptuality and realising the meanings behind the finer details of the processes and techniques I work with.

[1] Collection one: see next post for reference

[2] Collection two: see next post for reference

[3] Collection three: see next post for reference

[4] Collection four: see next post for reference

[5]

https://www.justinesmith.net

[6]

[7]

[8] Collection five: See next post for reference

[moodboardinthecloud]

The anti-colonial politics of degrowth by Jason Hickel

via https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59bc0e610abd04bd1e067ccc/t/608c30d8496d9d5675f93c8b/1619800283666/Hickel+-+The+anti-colonial+politics+of+degrowth.pdf

As degrowth ideas speed their way into social movements and aca- demic research, they have encountered some interesting critiques. In a recent contribution to this Virtual Forum, Huber (2021) dismissed degrowth as a preoccupation of middle-class environmentalists in the global North who feel “anxiety” about excess consumption. Such a movement, he argues, can never hope to connect with the working class, who are struggling to get by, and certainly cannot connect with social movements in the global South, where mass poverty is widespread and where, he claims, the concept of degrowth is largely unknown. These claims constitute a significant misrepresentation of degrowth politics.

Let me begin by noting a few facts. High-income countries are the primary drivers of global ecological breakdown. The global North is responsible for 92 percent of emissions in excess of the planetary boundary (Hickel, 2020a), while the consequences of climate break- down fall disproportionately upon the global South. The South already suffers the vast majority of the damage inflicted by climate breakdown, and if temperatures exceed 1.5 degrees centigrade, much of the tropics could experience heat events that exceed the limits of human survival (Zhang, Held, & Fueglistaler, 2021). Likewise, high-income countries are responsible for the majority of excess global resource use, with an average material footprint of 28 tons per capita per year – four times over the sustainable level (Bringezu, 2015). Crucially, these high levels of consumption depend on a significant net appropriation from the global South through unequal exchange, including 10.1 billion tons of embodied raw materials and 379 billion hours of embodied labor per year (Dorninger et al., 2021).

In other words, economic growth in the North relies on patterns of colonization: the appropriation of atmospheric commons, and the appropriation of Southern resources and labour. In terms of both emis- sions and resource use, the global ecological crisis is playing out along colonial lines. This is often framed as a problem of “ecological debt”, but this language – while useful – hardly captures the violence at stake.

Just as Northern growth is colonial in character, so too “green growth” visions tend to presuppose the perpetuation of colonial ar- rangements. Transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy should be done as rapidly as possible, but scaling solar panels, wind turbines and batteries requires enormous material extraction, and this will come overwhelmingly from the global South. Continued growth in the North means rising final energy demand, which will in turn require rising levels of extractivism. Complicating matters further, decarbonization cannot be accomplished fast enough to respect Paris targets as long as energy use in the global North remains so high (Hickel & Kallis, 2020). To compensate for this problem, IPCC models rely heavily on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) to get us out of trouble. But deploying BECCS at scale would require land for biofuel plantations up to three times the size of India, which would almost certainly be appropriated from the South. This is not an acceptable future, and is incompatible with socialist values (Hickel, 2020b).

Degrowth calls for rich nations to scale down throughput to sus- tainable levels, reducing aggregate energy use to enable a sufficiently rapid transition to renewables, and reducing aggregate resource use to reverse ecological breakdown. This demand is not just about ecology; rather, it is rooted in anti-colonial principles. Degrowth scholars and activists explicitly recognize the reality of ecological debt and call for an end to the colonial patterns of appropriation that underpin Northern growth, in order to release the South from the grip of extractivism and a future of catastrophic climate breakdown. Degrowth is, in other words, a demand for decolonization. Southern countries should be free to orga- nize their resources and labor around meeting human needs rather than around servicing Northern growth.

Decolonization along these lines is a crucial precondition for suc- cessful development in the South. Dependency theorists have pointed out that “catch-up” development is impossible within a system predi- cated on appropriation and polarized accumulation. This is true also from an ecological perspective. The alternative is to pursue a strategy of convergence: throughput should decline in the North to get back within sustainable levels while increasing in the South to meet human needs, converging at a level consistent with ecological stability and universal human welfare.

This much is straightforward. But there are further implications of degrowth that are worth drawing out here. For degrowth, the problem is not ultimately the behavior of individual “consumers” (as in mainstream environmentalist thought) but rather the structure and logic of the un- derlying economic system, namely, capitalism. We know that capitalism is predicated on surplus extraction and accumulation; it must take more from labor and nature than it gives back. As Marxist ecologists have pointed out, such a system necessarily generates inequalities and ecological breakdown. But many economic systems have been extractive in the past; what makes capitalism distinctive, and uniquely problem- atic, is that it is organized around, and dependent on, perpetual growth. In other words, capital seeks not only surplus, but an exponentially rising surplus.

To understand why this is a problem, we have to grasp what “growth” means. People commonly assume that GDP growth is an in- crease in value (or provisioning, or well-being), when, in fact, it is pri- marily an increase in commodity production, represented in terms of price. This distinction between value and price is important. In order to realize surplus value, capital seeks to enclose and commodify free commons in order extract payment for access, or, in the realm of production,todepressthepricesofinputstobelowthevaluethatisactually derived from them. Both tendencies require appropriation from colonial or neo-colonial “frontiers”, where labor and nature can be taken for free, or close to free, and where costs can be “externalized”. In this sense, capitalist growth is intrinsically colonial in character, and has been for 500 years. Enclosure, colonization, mass enslavement, extractivism, sweatshops, ecological breakdown – all of this has been propelled by the growth imperative and its demand for cheap labor and nature.

Of course, there is nothing “naturally” cheap about labor and nature at the frontier. On the contrary, they have to be actively cheapened. To do this, European capitalists advanced a dualist ontology that cast humans as subjects with mind and agency, and nature as an object to be exploited and controlled for human ends. Into the category of “nature” they shunted not only all nonhuman beings, but also Black and Indige- nous people, and most women, all of whom were cast as not-quite-fully- human, in order to legitimize dispossession, enslavement and exploita- tion (Federici, 2004; Patel & Moore, 2017). Racist discourses were leveraged to cheapen the lives of others for the sake of growth. Similar discourses are used today to justify wages in the South that remain below the level of subsistence (Hickel, 2020d).

Degrowth, then, is not just a critique of excess throughput in the global North; it is a critique of the mechanisms of colonial appropriation, enclosure and cheapening that underpin capitalist growth itself. If growthism seeks to organize the economy around the interests of capital (exchange-value) through accumulation, enclosure, and commodifica- tion, degrowth calls for the economy to be organized instead around provisioning for human needs (use-value) through de-accumulation, de- enclosure and de-commodification. Degrowth also rejects the cheap- ening of labour and resources, and the racist ideologies that are deployed toward that end. In all of these ways, degrowth is about decolonization (Hickel, 2020b; Tyberg, 2020).

These demands align strongly with those of social movements in the global South. This is clear, for instance, in the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba, drafted in 2010 by thousands of grassroots organizations from more than 130 countries. The Cochabamba statement explicitly attacks the economics and ideology of growthism and explicitly critiques excess resource use in the global North (“hyper-consumption”) as the driver of “overexploitation and unequal appropriation of the planet’s commons” (WPCC, 2010). It calls for rich nations to address their ecological debt by reducing resource use to sustainable levels, “decolonizing” the atmosphere, and ending the exploitation of poorer countries. It also calls for a different model of development, one that is focused on human wellbeing within ecological boundaries, rather than on perpetual growth. In other words, the Cochabamba statement artic- ulated degrowth demands from the South well before the concept gained traction in the North.

These ideas have a long history in anti-colonial thought. Fanon (1963:314–315) critiqued Europe’s growthist model, lamenting that Europe had “shaken off all guidance and all reason” and was “running headlong into the abyss.” “Let us be clear”, he wrote: “what matters is to stop talking about output, and intensification ... Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation.” Gandhi (1965:51–53) noted that the industrial growth of Europe and the US depended on plundering the South. He called for Southern countries to collectively refuse this arrangement, thus forcibly reducing the “surfeit” of rich countries. He rejected growthism and argued that production should be organized instead around human needs and sufficiency, enabling people to pursue the “art of living nobly” rather than “a complicated material life based on high speed”. Julius Nyerere (1960s) and Thomas Sankara (1980s) likewise championed a sufficiency-oriented approach to devel- opment, which they saw as key to national self-reliance and thus to throwing off neo-colonial power.

The critique of growth was in large part pioneered by thinkers in the global South, including Rabindranath Tagore, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and the economists Radhakamal Mukurjee and J.C Kumarappa (Gerber & Raina, 2018). These perspectives have been developed further by figuressuchasAmin(1987),O ̈calan(2015),Shiva(2013),Shrivastava and Kothari (2012). Critiques of growth are represented in the envi- ronmental justice movement (Martinez-Alier, 2012), within movements such as the Zapatistas and in Rojava (Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019), in the buen vivir movement (Acosta, 2020), in the food sovereignty movement (e.g., Campesina, 2018), and in the broader post-development literature (e.g., Escobar, 2015; Kothari et al., 2014; Kothari et al., 2019), all of which have their roots in the global South. Degrowth scholarship and activism is aligned with these movements, with demands directed spe- cifically at the North. It is the sharp edge of anti-colonial struggle within the metropole.

So what about the class politics of degrowth in the North? How do we reconcile degrowth with the reality of working-class poverty? Degrowth scholarship points out that energy and resource use in high-income nations is vastly in excess of what is required to end poverty and to deliver high levels of wellbeing for all, including universal public healthcare, education, transportation, computing, communication, housing, and healthy food (Millward-Hopkins, Steinberger, Rao, & Oswald, 2020). In other words, high-income nations could scale down aggregate throughput while at the same time improving people’s lives by organizing the economy around human needs rather than around capital accumulation—that is, by distributing income and wealth more fairly, while decommodifying and expanding public goods (Hickel, 2020b). These are core degrowth demands. After all, degrowth is part of the broader ecosocialist movement. What degrowth adds is the assertion that growth in high-income nations is not required in order to achieve a flourishing society. What is required is justice. Recognizing this is part of building class consciousness against the ideology of capital (Hickel, 2020c). But even more importantly, what is the point of a progressive politics in the North that is not aligned with the struggle for decoloni- zation in the South? Ecosocialism without anti-imperialism is not an ecosocialism worth having. And in the face of ecological breakdown, solidarity with the South requires degrowth in the North.

References

Acosta, A. (2020). Buen Vivir. In Degrowth in movements (pp. 87–99). Winchester, UK: John Hunt Publishing.

Amin, S. (1987). A note on the concept of delinking. Review, 10(3), 435–444. Bringezu, S. (2015). Possible target corridor for sustainable use of global material resources. Resources, 4(1), 25–54. 2

Campesina, La V. (2018). Managua declaration. https://viacampesina.org/en/managua- declaration-the-meeting-of-the-broadened-international-collective-on-environme ntal-and-climate-justice/.

Dorninger, C., et al. (2021). Global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange. Ecological Economics, 179.

Escobar, A. (2015). Degrowth, postdevelopment, and transitions. Sustainability Science, 10(3), 451–462.

Fanon, F. (1963). Wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia. Gandhi, M. (1965). My picture of free India. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Gerber, J.-F., & Raina, R. S. (2018). Post-growth in the global South? Ecological

Economics, 150, 350–358. Hickel, J. (2020a). Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown. The Lancet

Planetary Health, 4(9), E399–E404. Hickel, J. (2020b). Less is more. London: Random House. Hickel, J. (2020c). What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification.

Hickel, J. (2020d). The Racist Double Standards of International Development. Al Jazeera. Hickel, J., & Kallis, G. (2020). Is green growth possible? New Political Economy, 25(4),469–486.

Huber, M. (2021). The case for socialist modernism. Political Geography. Kothari, A., et al. (2014). Buen Vivir, degrowth and ecological Swaraj: Alternatives tosustainable development and the green economy. Development, 57(3–4).

Kothari, A., et al. (2019). Pluriverse: A post-development Dictionary. New Dehli: Tulika Books.

Martinez-Alier, J. (2012). Environmental justice and economic degrowth. Capital, Nature, Socialism, 32(1), 51–73.

Millward-Hopkins, J., Steinberger, J. K., Rao, N. D., & Oswald, Y. (2020). Providing decent living with minimum energy. Global Environmental Change, 65, 102168.

Nirmal, P., & Rocheleau, D. (2019). Decolonizing degrowth in the post-development convergence. Environment and Planning E, 2(3), 465–492.

O ̈calan, A. (2015). Manifesto for a democratic civilization. Porsgrunn. Norway: New Compass.

Patel, R., & Moore, J. W. (2017). A history of the world in seven cheap things. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Shiva, V. (2013). Growth = poverty. In Festival of Dangerous Ideas. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=7M3WJQbnHKc.

Shrivastava, A., & Kothari, A. (2012). Churning the earth: The cost of India’s growth. New Delhi: Penguin.

Tyberg, J. (2020). Unlearning: From degrowth to decolonization. New York: Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung.

WPCC. (2010). People’s agreement of Cochabamba. https://www.pwccc.wordpress.com /2010/04/24/peoples-agreement.

Zhang, Y., Held, I., & Fueglistaler, S. (2021). Projections of tropical heat stress constrained by atmospheric dynamics. Nature Geoscience, 14(3), 133–137.

3

[xtruss]

Air Conditioning is One of the Greatest Inventions of the 20th Century. It’s Also Killing the 21st

— Danny Crichton | August 28, 2021 | TechCrunch.Com

Image Credits: Inna Maksimenkova / EyeEm / Getty Images

When did indoor air become cold and clean?”

Air conditioning is one of those inventions that have become so ubiquitous, that many in the developed world don’t even realize that less than a century ago, it didn’t exist. Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago that the air inside our buildings and the air outside of them were one and the same, with occupants powerless against their environment.

Eric Dean Wilson, in his just published book, “After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort,” dives deep into the history of this field. It took more than just inventing the air conditioner to make people want to buy it. In fact, whole social classes outright rejected the technology for years. It took hustle, marketing skill, and mass societal change to place air conditioning at the center of our built environment.

Wilson covers that history, but he has a more ambitious agenda: to get us to see how our everyday comforts affect other people. Our choice of frigid cooling emits flagrant quantities of greenhouse gas emissions, placing untold stress on our planet and civilization. Our pursuit of comfort ironically begets us more insecurity and ultimately, less comfort.

It’s a provocative book, and TechCrunch hosted Wilson for a discussion earlier this week on a Twitter Space. If you missed it, here are some selected highlights of our conversation.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Danny Crichton: The framing story throughout the book is about your travels with your friend Sam, who works to collect Freon and destroy it. Why did you choose that narrative arc?

Eric Dean Wilson: Sam at the time was working for this green energy company, and they were trying to find a way to take on green projects that would turn a profit. They had found that they could do this by finding used Freon, specifically what’s called CFC-12. It’s not made anymore, thank goodness, but it was responsible in part for partially destroying the ozone layer, and production of it was banned by the 90s.

But use of it, and buying and selling it on the secondary market, is totally legal. This is sort of a loophole in the legality of this refrigerant, because the United States government and the people who signed the Montreal Protocol thought that when they stopped production of it that it would pretty much get rid of Freon by the year 2000. Well, that didn’t happen, which is kind of a mystery.

So Sam was driving around the United States, finding Freon on the internet, and meeting people (often people who are auto hobbyists or mechanics or something like that) who happened to have stockpiled Freon, and he was buying it from them in order to destroy it for carbon credits on California’s cap-and-trade system. And the interesting thing about this is that he was going to basically the 48 contiguous states, and meeting people that were often global warming deniers who were often hostile to the idea of the refrigerant being destroyed at all, so he often didn’t tell them upfront that he was destroying it.

What was really interesting to me is that, aside from a cast of colorful and strange characters, and sometimes violent characters actually as well, was the fact that sometimes after establishing a business relationship first, he was able to have really frank conversations about global warming with people who were otherwise not very open to it.

In a time in which we’re told that Americans are more divided than ever politically, that we’re not speaking to each other across ideological divides, I thought this was a curious story.

Crichton: And when it comes to greenhouse gases, Freon is among the worst, right?

Wilson: I should be really clear that the main global warming gases are carbon dioxide and methane and some other ones as well. But molecule for molecule, CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) are thousands of times greater at absorbing and retaining heat, meaning that they’re just thousands of times worse for global warming, molecule for molecule. So even though there’s not that many of them in terms of parts per million in the atmosphere, there’s enough to really make a sizable contribution to global warming.

The irony is that the replacements of CFCs — HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons) — for the most part, don’t really do anything to destroy the ozone layer, which is great. But they’re also super global warming gases. So the ozone crisis was solved by replacing CFCs with refrigerant that exacerbated the global warming crisis.

Crichton: Now to get to the heart of the book, you focus on the rise of air conditioning, but you start by giving readers a wide view of what life was like before its invention. Why did you do that?

Wilson: This was a surprise — I did not go into the book thinking that I was going to find this. Before air conditioning really took off in the home, there was a really different sense of what we would call personal comfort, and something that I really argue in the book is that what we’ve come to think of as personal comfort, and specifically, thermal comfort, has changed. What I argue in the book is that it’s really in part a cultural construction.

Now, I want to be really careful that people don’t hear that I’m saying that it’s entirely a construction. Yes, when we get too hot or too cold, then we can die, for sure. But what’s really interesting to me is that there’s a lot of evidence to show that before air conditioning began at the beginning of the twentieth century, people weren’t really hungry for air conditioning.

There was this greater sense that you could deal with the heat. I put that really carefully, because I don’t want to say that they suffered through it. Certainly there were heat waves and summers that got too hot. But there was a real sense that you could manage the heat through analog ways, like sleeping outside, sleeping in parks, or designing buildings that incorporate passive cooling. The thing that really disturbed me was that through the twentieth century, we really kind of forgot all that, because we didn’t need that knowledge anymore because we had air conditioning. So modernist architecture began to kind of ignore the outside conditions, because you could construct whatever conditions you wanted inside.

I think the question that nobody really asked all along is, is this good for everyone? Should we have a homogenized standard of comfort? Nobody really asked that question. And there’s a lot of people that find that the kind of American model of an office or American model of comfort is not comfortable, both in the United States, and in other places.

Crichton: Even beyond a homogenized standard though, you want readers to understand how comfort connects all of us together.

Wilson: I think that one of the pernicious things about the American definition of comfort is that it has been defined as personal comfort. And the reason why I keep using that is because it’s defined as individual comfort. And so what would it mean to think about comfort as being always connected to somebody else, as more ethical that way? Because it’s true.

The truth is that our comfort is related to other people, and vice versa. It’s really asking us to think interdependently, instead of independently, which is how we’re often encouraged to think, and that’s a huge, huge ask. Actually, that’s a huge task and a huge paradigm shift. But I really think if we’re really trying to think ecologically, and not just sustainably, we have to think about how we’re all connected and how these infrastructures, how they influence other people in other parts of the world.

Crichton: Air conditioning didn’t take off right away. In fact, its inventors and customers really had to push hard to get people to want to use it.

Wilson: Air conditioning really got its start in the early twentieth century, in order to control the conditions in factories. I was surprised to find out that air conditioning was used in places to make things hotter, or more humid and slightly hotter in a place like a textile factory, where if it’s not humid enough, cotton threads can break.

Outside the factory, movie theaters were really the first time that thermal comfort was used as a commodity. There were all kinds of other commodifications of comfort, but this was really the first time that the public could go someplace to feel cooler. And the funny thing is is that most movie theaters in the 20s and 30s were freezing cold, they were not what I would call comfortable, because the people who were running them didn’t really understand that air conditioning works best when it’s noticed least, which is a hard sell. In the 20s, though, it was a novelty, and the way that you caught people’s attention on a summer day was to crank the AC up, which felt good for like five minutes, and then it was terribly uncomfortable and you had to shiver through an hour and a half of the rest of the movie.

Crichton: I’m jumping ahead, but what does the future look like as global warming persists and our cooling increases in line with that heat?

Wilson: In so many cooling situations, there are major alternatives, like redesigning our buildings so that they require way less energy and way less cooling. There are really amazing architects who are looking to things like termite mounds, because the colonies that they build sort of have brilliantly engineered rooms with different temperatures.

That said, I was surprised how much our opinion on comfort could change by simply understanding that it could change. I think that we have to make the world of tomorrow desirable, and we can take a nod from the commercial advertising industry. We have to sell this future as one that we actually want, not as something that we’re giving up. And I think the narrative is always like, “Oh, we have to stop doing this, we have to lower this, we have to give this up.” And that’s certainly true. But I think if we understand that as not something that we’re giving up, but actually something that we’re gaining, then it makes it a lot easier. For people, it makes it feel a lot more possible.

— After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort by Eric Dean Wilson. | Simon & Schuster, 2021, 480 pages

[horoanne]

Blog Post 4: Media Industries (Ho Roanne)

The article by Adorno and Horkheimer provides a critical view about culture industries, reflecting the commodification and homogenisation of culture today as a form of rational domination in a capitalist society (with Marxist underpinnings to it). Using the ‘lack of style’ in modern culture industries and the corporatization of media companies / cultural makers to illustrate the effects of economic coercion on a field that was previously separated from the market, Adorno and Horkheimer provoke us to think about how art and creativity have been reduced to mere objects that are subjected to logic of the market.

While I agree with how culture is increasingly being commodified, with price tags and values put on various types of cultural goods/services (and creativity tailored accordingly to suit the mass audience), I feel that Adorno and Horkheimer are too dismissive about describing how consumers are simply being passively controlled and manipulated by the market - in which culture industries are in turn dependent on. In my opinion, the increasing media literacy of the mass audience today has been undermined and underestimated in this reading. Besides the fact that not all cultural producers have economic affiliations or are incentivised to produce for money, the distinctions between ’consumers’ and ‘producers’ are also blurring. With the affordances of new media and the internet, consumers are now both producers and consumers. Exemplified in the case of ‘citizen journalism’, consumers (or the so-called ‘proletariats’ who do not own any means of production) also have the agency to collaboratively create content and influence public opinion. It is hard to ignore citizens who upload news/content with the intention of benefiting the public with their information and bringing about positive changes in society.

Hence, this goes to show that power relations are dynamic and not simply a one-direct flow from producers (those who own means of production in the capitalistic society) to consumers as Adorno and Horkheimer make it appear to be. It is definitely a more complex issue that could possibly evolve over time.

[jaymiestrecker]

"The Next American Revolution"

Some quotes from and comments on "The Next American Revolution" by Grace Lee Boggs with Scott Kurashige. I had mixed reactions to this book and wanted to sort them out.

Main points

"Revolution, as Grace emphasizes, is not a onetime, D-day event that will happen when a critical mass of forces takes the correct action at the proper time. It is a protracted process tied to slower evolutionary changes that cannot be dismissed." — Scott Kurashige in the introduction

Examples of revolutionary activities by this definition:

"Creating new forms of community-based institutions (e.g. co-ops, small business, and community development corporations)" "to produce local goods for local needs"

Growing food in community gardens on abandoned lots

"Reinventing education to include children in community building"

A theme of the book was grassroots or bottom-up change, democratically organized with shared leadership rather than under the command of a charismatic leader.

Problems

"Our representative democracy, itself a product of the first American Revolution of 1776, trains us to focus on the results of elections. Most Americans equate democracy with voting, and they expect their elected officials to do their bidding once they put them into office. But as Grace asserts, that system, while it still has room for some admirable individuals, has been thoroughly corrupted by what the Zapatistas call the 'Empire of Money.'" — Scott Kurashige in the introduction

"Still, it becomes clearer every day that organizing or joining massive protests and demanding new policies fail to sufficiently address the crisis we face. They may demonstrate that we are on the right side politically, but they are not transformative enough. They do not change the cultural images or the symbols that play such a pivotal role in molding us into who we are."

"'When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people,' [Martin Luther King, Jr.] declared, 'the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.'"

I couldn't find the quote, but I think at some point the book characterized capitalism as a system that borrows from the future to pay for the present. In the afterword, a discussion between Boggs and Immanuel Wallerstein moderated by Scott Kurashige, Wallerstein described capitalism as a system that requires endless growth, which obviously can't go on forever. He and Boggs asked us to think about what comes after capitalism collapses. They were speaking in the middle of the recession of 2009 and saw the collapse as coming within a few decades. Now, in 2021, with the US stock market surging despite all the misfortunes of the pandemic, it seems to me that capitalism is not at all in its death throes. I've been waiting for years just for Twitter to collapse, when investors finally realize that they're throwing more and more money at a company that has never turned a profit, and even that hasn't happened. The only pyramid schemes I see possibly falling apart are the social safety net programs like Social Security that rest on the assumption of capitalism: of endless growth.

Solutions

"[Paulo] Freire argued that revolutionary work must transform the oppressed from passive victims to agents of history, seeking 'the pursuit of fuller humanity.' Thus, the emphasis is on people taking control of their own destiny—'self-determination' in the truest sense of the word. Transforming relations means that revolution is not about the 'have-nots' acquiring the material possessions of the 'haves.' It is about overcoming the 'dehumanization' that has been fostered by the commodification of everything under capitalism and building more democratic, just, and nourishing modes of relating to people."

"The revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one-third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease, and early death…" — Jimmy Boggs

I agree that it would make the world better if the wealthier people in the world (including the US middle class) would reduce consumption, but how the heck do you convince them to do it? "A History of Future Cities" talked about India in post-colonial times turning inward (less trade with other countries) and turning socialist, but eventually people got tired of it for various reasons (bureaucracy, corruption, economic stagnation) and the pendulum swung to a recklessly unregulated capitalism. In an article in El País about the reunification of East and West Germany, an interviewee from socialist East Germany said that one of reasons they came to favor capitalism was that the people on their side were envious of the nice toys that the other side had.

"The problem is working out a strategy that combines a very short-run, immediate attempt to solve people's needs and a medium-run strategy of transforming the system. I think of the very short run as one of minimizing the pain." — Immanuel Wallerstein

It's unclear to me, and this book really didn't clear it up, how to tell the difference between reforms that are a step within evolutionary change and reforms that prop up a harmful system. Elsewhere in the book, Boggs even counterechoed Wallerstein's phrasing when criticizing "palliatives masked as 'reform'".

Changing one's mind

One theme I liked in this book was that people can and should change their minds, refine their thinking, over time. Boggs (who turned 96 the year the first edition of this book was published) talked about how her own thinking had changed over the years through reading, discussion, and trying to apply her ideas in practice. She talked about one writing of Karl Marx that people always quote, and how he was in his 20s when he wrote it, and how people tend to jump to conclusions a bit in their 20s when they would be more cautious later in their lives. She talked about how Martin Luther King Jr.'s thinking had become more radical in the last few years of his life. She quoted Mahatma Gandhi a lot from later in his life, but also mentioned how, as a young man living in London, he tried to assimilate into English culture by buying a silk hat and taking dance lessons.

Meaningful work

"Quoting the nineteenth-century political economist Henry George, King advocated 'work which improves the conditions of mankind'—the kind of 'work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature and elevates thought.' This kind of work 'is not done to secure a living,' King continued. 'It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by masters or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for their own sake and not that they may get more to eat or drink or wear or display. In a state of society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously increased.'"

Relatedly, from a book I just started reading, "Good Economics for Hard Times":

"Economists have a tendency to adopt of notion of well-being that is often too narrow, some version of income or material consumption. And yet all of us need much more than that to have a fulfilling life: the respect of the community, the comforts of family and friends, dignity, lightness, pleasure. The focus on income alone is not just a convenient shortcut. It is a distorting lens that often has led the smartest economists down the wrong path, policy makers to the wrong decisions, and all too many of us to the wrong obsessions. It is what persuades so many of us that the whole world is waiting at the door to take our well-paying jobs. It is what has led to a single-minded focus on restoring the Western nations to some glorious past of fast economic growth. It is what makes us simultaneously deeply suspicious of those who don't have money and terrified to find ourselves in their shoes. It is also what makes the trade-off between the growth of the economy and the survival of the planet seem so stark." — Abhijit V. Bannerjee and Esther Duflo

That all sounds good to me. I would love to get to a point where the world's surplus is used to provide a basic income for everyone, and where the tedious jobs are all automated, so that everyone has the chance to do something purposeful with their life. That requires moving forward, but the thing I disliked most about "The Next American Revolution" is it seemed to want to move backward:

"The main reason why Western civilizations lack Spirituality, or an awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and the universe, according to Gandhi, is that it has given priority to economic and technological development over human and community development. Advanced technology has made it possible for people to perform miracles, but it has impoverished us spiritually because it has made us feel that outside forces determine who and what we are. Traditional societies lacked our material comforts and conveniences, but individuals had more Soul, or a belief in the individual's power to make moral choices, because these societies valued the community relationships that they depended on for survival."

"We're having to go back to when people shared things and started taking care of each other." — Will Allen

"During the struggle for independence, Gandhi recognized that the educational system… had been designed to supply the next generation of clerks to sign, stamp, and file the paperwork to run the British Empire. As a result, most elite Indian students found manual work 'irksome.' However, he retorted, the development of a true intellect necessitated the balanced and 'harmonious growth of body, mind and soul.'"

I would counter that with a quote from "The Jungle":

"Now set aside the modern system of pneumatic house-cleaning, and the economies of co-operative cooking; and consider one single item, the washing of dishes. Surely it is moderate to say that the dish-washing for a family of five takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a day’s work, it takes, therefore, half a million able-bodied persons—mostly women—to do the dish-washing of the country. And note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children—for all of which things the community has naturally to pay." — Upton Sinclair

That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it does seem like a waste to make humans do boring chores that could be easily automated, when we only have, what, 80 or 90 years if we're lucky to try to figure out what we're supposed to do here and try to learn as much as we can and try to plant some ideas or good deeds or whatever that will live on for a while after we're gone. I don't think the question is whether we should try to preserve mind-numbing work for some reason (whether to keep people from losing their jobs or to provide some sort of moral benefit), but how much we can automate in an environmentally sustainable way, and how much we can automate without degrading the quality of the product or service, and how to provide income and education for people who will lose their jobs. How do we optimize for well-being rather than for profit?

Furthermore! What is this supposedly more virtuous, more spiritual past that Gandhi and Allen are talking about? Nostalgia for a past that never existed.

One reason I'm frustrated with this back-to-farming vision is that I feel like there's no place for me and the work that I find meaningful, i.e. software development. If I'm going to have something interesting to work on (as opposed to simple websites that don't need any programming, for example), then I really have to look beyond this town. The whole turning inward / providing local services thing doesn't work for me. I like globalization in that respect. I like how I'm building on pieces of software that are made by too many people to count in many different places, most of whom have never met.

I'm trying to imagine how Boggs would respond to this (she's dead now), if I could manage to explain it to her (disappointingly, she really didn't seem to understand science or technology at all). I suppose she would say that the farming in Detroit was just an example, not something everyone has to do. She did say at one point that she envisioned this revolution being brought about not by some vanguard of activists, but by people of many different jobs doing what they could with their skills in their realm.

The trouble with that is, I still can't figure out what I can do with the skills that I have that would actually be useful toward reform/revolution.

Soul, heart, love

Boggs talked a lot about "growing our souls". I found this frustrating on multiple levels.

I disagreed with how she placed the "soul" or "heart" in opposition to the mind. In the most egregious example, she talked about "… rejecting scientific rationalism (based on the Cartesian body-mind dichotomy), which recognizes as real only that which can be measured and therefore excludes the knowledge that comes from the heart or from relationships between people." First, I don't think that's an accurate depiction of what scientists today generally believe, or what a more modern philosophy of science would say. Second, science has shown that the body and mind are interrelated, which is why for example we treat anxiety and depression with a combination of drugs and cognitive behavioral therapy. Emotions aren't a separate system from analytical thinking.

I'm not sure how to differentiate between "growing my soul" as opposed to an individualistic and regressive approach of doing "charity" because it makes me feel like a good person.

Another recurring word was "love" (and King's "beloved community"). As an extreme introvert and an atheist, I felt kind of left out by all this talk of "souls" and "love". So I was relieved to come across this passage:

"Shea Howell, Oakland University rhetoric professor and former director of Detroit Summer, has helped hundred of students and community organizers appreciate what Jimmy meant: Love isn't just something you feel. It's something you do every day when you go out and pick up the papers and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe with whoever will listen, when you call a friend to see how they're doing, when you write a letter to the newspaper, when you give a speech and give 'em hell, when you never stop believing that we can all be more than we are. In other words, Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after."

Phew, some of those things seem doable. I'm still not sure what I personally can do that would actually be effective toward reform/revolution, but at least I don't feel like I should just give up.

[theteenagetrickster]

All That Is Sound Merges Business Techno

Picture from Twitter

"The idea of development have to be grounded in the tip of catastrophe. That factors are actually 'status quo' is actually the catastrophe."-- Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Venture

Keep an eye out over any type of big city's sky line and also an uniform certainty is actually made crystal clear. Mies vehicle der Rohe skyscrapers or even duplicates are universal, defending city room along with Norman Foster's unusually formed, reflective symbols to global funding. IKEA's striped tackle mid-century present day furniture is the de facto internal style for the young expert collection, while the clean line and also low-key color-driven layout of the Swedish furniture corporation is common in chain restaurants, website design, as well as every little thing in between.

The promethean, optimistic innovation of the 20th century has mostly atrophied under 40+ years of neoliberal order, now resigned to art publications and also culture web sites. Aptly laid out by architecture as well as lifestyle movie critic Owen Hatherley, innovation is actually right now specified due to the "proximity in between on its own and also the everyday." Hatherley's as well as , posted in 2009 as well as 2015 respectively, functionality as earnest and sincere examinations into the makeup of the modernisms of the final century. Probing the design, literature, film, movie theater and also national politics of the very early innovative Soviet Union, commercial England, Weimar Germany and extra, each amounts recover pieces of understanding from past forms.

An earlier amount, Marshall Berman's , released in 1982, carries out a comparable job, probing right into modernism's genesis instants (Goethe, Baudelaire, the development of St. Petersburg) to extend the oppositions and also breakdowns of uneven advancement in Russia, mid-twentieth century Nyc, as well as a burgeoning austerity condition under Reagan. Berman comprehends originality as a "maelstrom of continuous dissolutions and revitalization," and also only with interaction, discussion, and dialectic thinking can easily the goal where "the complimentary growth of each is the ailment of the cost-free growth of all" end up being fact.

Adhering to the growth of international financing and its ensuant postmodern social logic, Hatherley and also Berman's systems are essential pointers of what was the moment feasible: a craft that really did not do without the day-to-day, politics in the street, and a concept for a planet after commercialism. Numerous of the innovations contacted by each-- Brechtian idea, early Russian constructivist architecture, Marx's "complimentary development of bodily as well as religious energies"-- still really feel incomparably to life today and are actually worth digging deep into for their importance to present-day life, in addition to analyzing in their own right. That stated, innovation's vigor comes from its connection to the here and now, to humanity's "capability for reoccurring self-critique as well as self-renewal" and with a readiness to "wake up out of this goal, along with its spreading of phantasmagorical items, right into a totally new globe."

Electronic songs, being a much a lot more recent social progression than the artforms discussed above, possesses a much shorter and much more laden arc via modernity. Relying on your vantage, digital music's contemporary time period either began or ended with the rise of residence music as well as techno in the 1980s, came to a halt in the mid 2000s along with the abating of UK hardcore continuum appears, or even is going solid in to the 2020s. It is actually also a form linked totally to the technological progressions of the final fifty years-- the Internet, economical hardware, program, increased ease of access of air trip-- installing it as a vital motorist and also individual in the nutrition of a swiftly transforming social garden.

Also when considering its broadscale connect technological universality, it is actually easier to pinpoint localized minutes or movements of modernist powers-- Chicago's assemblage of dancefloor action coming from home to footwork, gqom quickly transmitted over Bluetooth and also sloppy report discussing technology in Durban, jungle's proliferation through pirate broadcast in London-- than it is actually to connect it to greater, trans-continental sonic movements. Despite this slipshod developmental style, the rhythmical and building progression changed recent many years has actually led in an astonishing summation of sonic street talks.

In spite of this conflagration of modernist powers, a specific pop or even calcified innovation- more similar to a coffee table publication rendition of a very early 20th century futurist action than the motion itself- is actually dominant in dancing songs today. In a handful of way too pricey urban areas, dancing songs's unit of currency is actually all very usually spent in retro consumerism, nostalgia and also pastiche, while a consensus-making values that stresses elegance over all else powers supreme. The consistent pattern of category fads, undergirded through a rotten facility of industrial residence as well as techno, is actually the absolute most illustrative element of this malaise: an online carousel of one of the most dehydrated top qualities of the moment radical popular music coming from 10, twenty or even thirty years back.

That's not to say that festivals, report tags, as well as publications don't focus on powerful songs: merely that addition usually happens at the rear side of a consensus-making task that sublimates progressive performers into the much more retrogressive mass. Steps have been actually made in the direction of and also historic awareness of dance popular music's , yet equity for those communities hardly complies with. When equity is given, it includes disorders of dishing out creative liberty to organizations who have actually consistently been on the wrong side of past.

In the situation of marvelous historic narratives, a lot of this discordance could be connected to the movement of modernist powers. Simply put, advancements in rhythm, sound layout, as well as dance are much more very likely to happen away from the traditional centers of Berlin, Greater London as well as New York. That those urban areas are actually still residence to the large majority of dance popular music's companies causes both intended as well as accidental rubbing. On the nastier side of that sphere, you possess club nights paid attention to African songs with no African musicians on the costs, or document labels that make use of the absence of popular music sector know-how on the part of performers who haven't been actually supplied the appropriate sources.

Even more typical, and also perhaps even more damaging, you have a hype pattern that switches its concentrate on a scene, whether it be baile funk, gqom, or singeli, for a quick time period before discarding it entirely. This is certainly not a grand conspiracy, however an inescapable consequence of a market important to sustain existing companies and gather capital. It takes some time and also cash to assist in the facility of a healthy and balanced performance, but it is actually relatively simple to assign a few longform features, a club night or 2, and also probably a BBC or NPR focus hr. Just as long as tickets as well as drink purchases proceed in Berlin, London and New York City, there is actually no reason that the market would certainly treat developing performances as everything yet a novelty.

The market logic that drives this reality is actually neither outstanding, neither unexpected. It likewise seems to become growing and also prospering as business end of dancing songs increases in freedom as well as self-confidence. DeForrest Brown, Jr. a piece detailing the changes in the popular music economic situation far from album purchases and also towards a version of as placed out by Nick Srnicek. A lot more specifically, Brown, Jr. suggests the consolidation of a dance songs customer market, serviced directly via streaming products, nightclub evenings and also magazines, but likewise offered to marketers as a secure market per se.

Deindustrialization of sector and the financialization of the economy has actually led to the massing of youthful folks in city facilities as tasks completely dry up elsewhere. Dancing popular music's increase in attraction has actually exemplified that post-recession populace inflow, ending up being the soundtrack for a gentrified night life in the process. Along with the market consolidated, branded "experiences" and also nightclubs that use a classy, easily accessible choice to bottle service surplus are actually right now located together with getaway spaces, breweries and also red wine tastings as a risk-free, alternative activity. Much more alarming, those without the product resources to access a warm night life funds are actually more probable to 1st involve with dance popular music by means of a delibidinized, and also , system like Central heating boiler Room.

In the After that to Militant Innovation, Hatherley turns down a "trip by means of the stunning ruins" and the tip that "having the right garments as well as the ideal manuals" equals a fealty to as well as an interaction with the innovations of the 20th century. His unyielding examine the commodification of the moment extreme cosmetic as well as political movements is actually additionally extremely relevant to contemporary dancing music, where all also typically the right documents, samples, and also graphic design pinch hit a real interaction with the past times as well as a determination to push via it to something brand-new, tough as well as likely terrifying.

The lesson obtained from reading The only thing that Is Actually Strong Melts Into Sky And also Militant Innovation is actually certainly not that the optimistic 20th century movements were actually rashness. In these myriad tries, several of which fell short wonderfully, to come to be both the subjects and items of innovation, mankind has generated brand new etymological codes, visual languages and city configurations. Especially, craft that does certainly not avoid the quotidian as well as welcomes the contradictions of contemporary lifestyle is actually required to combat spiritlessness as well as withdrawal.

New modernist formulas are needed to have and also dance songs is swarming along with potential. In an essay released a couple of weeks back, I outlined examples of current launches that exemplify what Fredric Jameson described as intellectual applying. In the upcoming component of this essay, I would love to plunge even more into songs that exemplifies a brand new, plentiful modernism. All over many essays, the overdue Mark Fisher, clarified a conception of a pulp modernism that accepts the grotesque, the odd as well as a "heteroglossic confusion of designs as well as moods." Fisherman's authentic essay described The Fall, yet the concepts within could be applied to a much more powerful assortment of modern music. Extra about that tomorrow.

This content was originally published here.

[buttonholedlife]

All That Is Solid Melts Into Business Techno

Image from Twitter

“The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe.” – Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Look out over any large city’s skyline and a homogeneous certainty is made clear. Mies van der Rohe skyscrapers or knockoffs are omnipresent, fighting for urban space with Norman Foster’s oddly shaped, reflective totems to multinational capital. IKEA’s denuded take on mid-century modern furniture is the de facto interior decor for the young professional set, while the clean line and muted color-driven design of the Swedish furniture conglomerate is ubiquitous in chain restaurants, web design, and everything in between.

The promethean, utopian modernism of the 20th century has largely atrophied under 40+ years of neoliberal order, now resigned to art books and heritage sites. Aptly laid out by architecture and culture critic Owen Hatherley, modernism is now defined by the “distance between itself and the everyday.” Hatherley’s and , published in 2009 and 2015 respectively, function as earnest and honest investigations into the makeup of the modernisms of the last century. Probing the architecture, literature, film, theater and politics of the early revolutionary Soviet Union, industrial England, Weimar Germany and more, both volumes salvage kernels of wisdom from past forms.

An earlier volume, Marshall Berman’s , published in 1982, performs a similar task, delving into modernism’s genesis moments (Goethe, Baudelaire, the construction of St. Petersburg) to draw out the contradictions and failures of uneven development in Russia, mid-twentieth century New York, and a burgeoning austerity state under Reagan. Berman understands modernity as a “maelstrom of perpetual disintegrations and renewal,” and that only through communication, dialogue, and dialectical thinking can the dream where “the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all” become reality.

Following the rise of multinational capital and its ensuant postmodern cultural logic, Hatherley and Berman’s tracts are important reminders of what was once possible: an art that didn’t dispense with the everyday, politics in the street, and a vision for a world after capitalism. Many of the modernisms called on by both — Brechtian theory, early Russian constructivist architecture, Marx’s “free development of physical and spiritual energies” — still feel eminently alive today and are worth excavating for their relevance to contemporary life, as well as  studying in their own right. That said, modernism’s vitality comes from its relationship to the present, to humanity’s “capacity for perpetual self-critique and self-renewal” and through a willingness to “wake up out of this dream, with its proliferation of phantasmagorical commodities, into an entirely new world.”

Electronic music, being a far more recent cultural development than the artforms mentioned above, has a shorter and more fraught arc through modernity. Depending on your vantage, electronic music’s modern period either started or ended with the rise of house music and techno in the 1980s, came to a halt in the mid 2000s with the petering out of UK hardcore continuum sounds, or is going strong into the 2020s. It is also a form tied inextricably to the technological developments of the last fifty years — the Internet, cheap hardware, software, increased accessibility of air travel — positioning it as a key driver and participant in the shaping of a rapidly changing cultural landscape.

Even when considering its broadscale tie in with technological ubiquity, it’s easier to pinpoint localized moments or passages of modernist energies — Chicago’s confluence of dancefloor movement from house to footwork, gqom rapidly transmitted over Bluetooth and shoddy file sharing technology in Durban, jungle’s proliferation via pirate radio in London — than it is to connect it to wider, trans-continental sonic movements. Despite this haphazard developmental pattern, the rhythmic and structural progress made over the past several decades has resulted in a staggering compendium of sonic vernaculars.

In spite of this conflagration of modernist energies, a certain pop or calcified modernism- more akin to a coffee table book rendition of an early 20th century futurist movement than the movement itself- is dominant in dance music today. Centered in a handful of prohibitively expensive cities, dance music’s currency is all too often invested in retro consumerism, nostalgia and pastiche, while a consensus-making ethos that emphasizes tastefulness over all else reigns supreme. The constant cycle of genre trends, undergirded by a rotten center of commercial house and techno, is the most illustrative component of this malaise: a virtual carousel of the most dehydrated qualities of once radical music from 10, 20 or 30 years ago.

That’s not to say that festivals, record labels, and publications don’t emphasize dynamic music: just that that inclusion often comes at the tail end of a consensus-making project that sublimates progressive artists into the more regressive mass. Steps have been made towards and historical consciousness of dance music’s , but equity for those communities rarely follows. When equity is offered, it comes with conditions of forking over creative autonomy to institutions who have repeatedly been on the wrong side of history.

In the context of grand historical narratives, much of this discordance can be attributed to the movement of modernist energies. Simply put, developments in rhythm, sound design, and dance are far more likely to occur outside of the traditional hubs of Berlin, London and New York. That those cities are still home to the large majority of dance music’s institutions results in both intentional and unintentional friction. On the nastier end of that spectrum, you have club nights focused on African music with no African artists on the bill, or record labels that exploit the lack of music industry knowledge on the part of artists who haven’t been provided the proper resources.

More common, and arguably more damaging, you have a hype cycle that turns its focus on a scene, whether it be baile funk, gqom, or singeli, for a brief period of time before discarding it entirely. This is not a grand conspiracy, but an inevitable byproduct of a market imperative to perpetuate existing institutions and accumulate capital. It takes time and money to facilitate the establishment of a healthy scene, but it’s fairly easy to allocate a few longform features, a club night or two, and perhaps a BBC or NPR focus hour. As long as tickets and drink sales continue in Berlin, London and New York, there’s no reason why the market would treat emerging scenes as anything but a novelty.

The market logic that drives this reality is neither remarkable, nor surprising. It also seems to be expanding and thriving as the business end of dance music gains in autonomy and confidence. DeForrest Brown, Jr. a piece detailing the shifts in the music economy away from album sales and towards a model of as laid out by Nick Srnicek. More specifically, Brown, Jr. points to the consolidation of a dance music consumer market, serviced directly through streaming products, club nights and magazines, but also sold to advertisers as a stable market in and of itself.

Meanwhile, deindustrialization of industry and the financialization of the economy has led to the massing of young people in urban centers as jobs dry up elsewhere. Dance music’s rise in popularity has mirrored that post-recession population inflow, becoming the soundtrack for a gentrified nightlife in the process. With the market consolidated, branded “experiences” and clubs that offer a tasteful, accessible alternative to bottle service excesses are now positioned alongside escape rooms, breweries and wine tastings as a safe, alternative activity. Even more dire, those without the material resources to access a hot nightlife capital are more likely to first engage with dance music via a delibidinized, not to mention , platform like Boiler Room.

In the Afterwards to Militant Modernism, Hatherley rejects a “journey through the picturesque ruins” and the idea that “possessing the right clothes and the right books” equals a fealty to and an engagement with the modernisms of the 20th century. His unflinching look at the commodification of once radical aesthetic and political movements is also decidedly relevant to contemporary dance music, where all too often the right records, samples, and graphic design stand in for a genuine engagement with the past and a willingness to push through it to something new, challenging and potentially scary.

The lesson gleaned from reading All That Is Solid Melts Into Air and Militant Modernism is not that the idealistic 20th century movements were folly, though. In these myriad attempts, many of which failed spectacularly, to become both the subjects and objects of modernization, humankind has created new linguistic codes, visual languages and urban configurations. More than ever, art that does not shy away from the quotidian and embraces the contradictions of modern life is needed to fight apathy and alienation.

New modernist formulations are needed and dance music is rife with potential. In an essay published a few weeks ago, I laid out examples of recent releases that exemplify what Fredric Jameson referred to as cognitive mapping. In the next part of this essay, I’d like to dive further into music that represents a new, capacious modernism. Across several essays, the late Mark Fisher, elucidated a conception of a pulp modernism that embraces the grotesque, the weird and a “heteroglossic riot of styles and tones.” Fisher’s original essay referred to The Fall, but the ideas within can be applied to a far more dynamic range of contemporary music. More on that tomorrow.

This content was originally published here.

[connectingbridges]

The Unbound Prometheus by David Landes – Synopsis

Stealing fire from gods for the mortals brought the wily, intelligent Greek titan Prometheus endless punishment and suffering. In ‘The Unbound Prometheus’, the factors responsible for rapid industrialization in Western Europe brought about abundance, health and the promise of unlimited growth. However, just as Prometheus paid dearly for his actions, societies did not arrive at the abundance without making sacrifices and suffering permanent damages as critiques would also point out when pitted against Landes’ work alongside his own acknowledgement of an uneven timing and distribution of power during the World War I. This symbolism itself may be an expression of the truth in that society does not have enough foresight to see how it suffers from technology. There are two ways to look at this. While one could argue that technology comes at a responsibility or price and one could also argue that technology is rife with evils, such single-issue arguments might dangerously get placed in causal reduction. This author carefully avoids the fallacy with ample supporting evidence.

Nevertheless, the questions of causes, geographic dispositions and timing of the industrial revolution have been addressed manifold by several authors. Landes in this 1969 publication portrays the industrial revolution as the turning point of a bigger play called modernization. He argues that the composition, growth and attitudes in Britain gave paved a favorable way forward for the inventions and innovations it produced, starting from the cotton textiles industry. Modernization theory as it is today involves the interplay of industrialization, urbanization, rationalization, bureaucracy, mass consumption and democracy.

The author attempts to examine the industrial revolution by first deliberating its pre-conditions. He acknowledges that technological paradigm departures are not automatic (thereby avoiding reification) and that two conditions are needed before setting out to organize the arguments for the departure displayed during the industrial revolution - a known inadequacy or scope of improvement and an assurance of the return on transition to new technologies. Purely from factors of production point of view, Western Europe has been at an advantage, claims Landes. Europe was richer than other areas of Europe primarily due to slow accumulation of wealth over long periods of time by establishing an empire with colonies in distant corners of the world providing a generous capital as well as propitious access to raw materials and markets. Competition between various European nations, full ownership of property and favorable religious attitudes towards new technologies were contributing factors to the rise of private enterprises, even as the French tried hard to keep pace with Britain. Private enterprises were simply in a better position to efficiently allocate resources in Europe.

Britain out of all places in Europe, had even easier access to raw materials than competing nations. There was relative lack of restrictions and barriers to trade, higher wages, social mobility and growing demands bringing the concerns of scarcity of resources that drove Britain to put productivity (hence innovation) on a higher priority in the first wind of industrial revolution. While the cottage industries for textiles were well developed across the continent and even in India, the British cotton textiles had shown by far the fastest, farthest and most promising growth curves in mass scale production based on the data available during the time this book was written. Methodologically, Landes looks for combinative (shifting relative factors) as well as temporal (relational similar changes) dependency in factors.

The cotton thread bottleneck from a manual, house-to-house cleaning, yarning and spinning system set the stage for the defining innovations of that industry and is used even to date in various forms. The cotton jenny by James Hargreaves around 1765 and the water frame by James Arkwright made cotton spinning nearly ten times as faster. However, here is where Landes claims, “In the eighteenth century, a series of inventions transformed the manufacture of cotton in England and gave rise to a new mode or production -- the factory system….other branches of industry effected comparable advances, and all these together, mutually reinforcing one another, made possible further gains on an ever-widening front”. The iron and coal industry, also one of the main drivers of the industrial revolution resulted in pig iron outputs from 12000 metric tons in 1700 to over 2 million metric tons in 1850 in a mechanized with cursory labor fashion. Three basic principles guided this culmination of innovations – machines replacing human labour, inanimate sources of power (James Watt’s steam engine around 1760 for example) and the use of raw materials like minerals which were significantly more abundant than vegetables or animal products. These principles gave rise to the ‘workshop of the world’ status that Britain proclaimed itself to be until well into the eighteenth century using the factory system as means.

Continental emulation occurred to copy the industrial revolution in Britain. However, there were many political boundaries and lower social mobility in rest of Europe despite local innovations. After 1840, the French, German and Belgian railroads, iron and coal industries were growing between 5 and 10% a year with a massive decrease in economic duties in these societies combined with a high diffusion of cross-industry technologies. Banking reforms in Europe began to aid industrial growth and by 1870, these nations were closing the gap against Britain. In the second wind of industrial revolution, i.e., the last decades of nineteenth and the earlier twentieth century saw a growing importance of steel with Germany surpassing Britain for the very first time in steel production and chemical innovations. The earlier efforts in France and Germany to set up institutions for research and development started paying dividends in the second wind of industrial revolution when the importance of science was more widely recognized in developing technologies. During this time Britain suffered from amateurism and complacency having taken its first wind success for granted, paving way for Germany to take the lead in many of the key industries. The World War I and World War II saw resentment and mistrust across Europe and hence technologies had little leeway to diffuse geographically. Inflation, unemployment and bank failures were commonplace but this pressure was relatively less in Britain. Radio, electric power and automobiles were the key inventions of this period while the British textile prowess shrunk over half its value in the first wind, saving synthetic fibers. Partition of Germany, isolation of the USSR and formation of post war unions in Europe were the beacons of post war economic recovery.

Industrial revolution did not just give rise to technological dominance at work but also created new social relationships resulting in the ‘working class’ that Karl Marx would later worry about commodification of. However, the social relationship aspect does not seem to get effective treatment in Landes’ work due to his rationality and urbanization argument. Large changes in the structure and composition of industrial output and employment are observed in the 1962 publication of Dean and Cole’s ‘British Economic Growth’ statistics. Landes warns that macro-economic indicators might mask the shifts that micro-economic indicators could bring out. He traces the trickle of rising per capita incomes and higher living standards by simply following the consumption of white bread, one of the best signs of comfort according to him in those times. Stripping down all economic and political systems away too, he claims rationality, ideology and openness to change are the ‘human’ factors which also would yield best results only if they in combination, seek to maximize returns from choices and sacrifices. The extent of demographic change and urbanization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries even threatened Western Europe on resources but he claims it was not the major agricultural transformations that stopped these societies from a slippery slope, it was the surplus of manufacturers to trade against with the outside world that did. He emphasizes the increasing need for division of labour using general education systems, efficient selection and recruitment of talent, government intervention and ideological advancements by showing that those trying to emulate Britain’s success would also need these conditions to facilitate innovation, especially Japan and Russia.

He presents the case of a worker (a prisoner in some sense) and an entrepreneur (a jailor) to prove only the strongest of incentives could make them work together under a hierarchy in a monetary or physical compulsion and supervised in the moral prison. However, the incentives were provided aplenty. Sitting in a factory this worker could know the needs of distant consumers, the entrepreneur could employ additional or specialized labour if necessary, newer tools became easier to procure. The urban merchants capitalized on cheap countryside labour thereby moving entire families to the production circuit. A limitation was that this prisoner was not able to control the nature of outputs due to its scale and hence production technique thus allowing little leeway for regional variations of the product.

David Landes wrote for The Economic History Review, a paper titled, ‘What Room for Accident in History? Explaining Big Changes by Small Events’ among his many other works. This piece passionately rebuts 2-3 decades wide critiques (specifically ‘Industrial revolution in Britain and France: some thoughts on the question "Why was England first?”’ by Crafts, N.F.R in 1977) of the modernization theory on Britain by claiming that even though Europe was perhaps weaker in wealth and certain technologies against China, it was peripheral to the centers of civilization of that time and a leader to several colonies, the industrial revolution was neither an accident (flow of innovation is not a stochastic process), nor did the rest of the world pay a painful price for its success. Rather, it was the high factor costs (China), closed governance mindset, ‘plunder enterprises’ that lay open to invasions and elasticity of labour (India), driven by religion and incomplete learning (Ottoman/Turkey), dated and incorrect records of evidence that could defy prima facie improbability (France) of industrialization that pulled the rest of the world back.

[jakegrxz]

Struggling in the neoliberal university

How has the broader socio-economic process of neoliberalism restructured higher education in the UK? What are the everyday, human implications of this? What form should resistance to it - from students, workers, and academics - take? [See the print edition here.]

Editor's note, 20th June 2018: This piece was originally written in February 2017 as the feature of Issue 9 of Incite, the political magazine I was Editor of while completing my undergraduate degree. As a piece published for a campus magazine at the University of Surrey, it was originally intended for Surrey students to read, and some of the language (e.g.: 'our Students' Union') reflects this. I have left this in tact rather than amending it.

In the wake of exam season, one wonders what exactly the point of the whole exercise was. At best, the experience feels meaningless and frustrating, if manageable. At worst, it can be anxiety-inducing and sleep-depriving, making us question our own abilities and feel wholly out of control. And yet, despite this, it all feels natural at this point. We have been examined in education for years now; this is how it is.

Perhaps it is just us, too, inside our minds. As the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote, who devastatingly took his own life last month, stress in our society has been ‘privatised’. In tracing the roots of our unhappiness, instead of looking outward to deteriorating social and political conditions, we are increasingly inclined to look inward, towards brain chemistry or personal history. The deteriorating conditions we operate under, which may include precarious work, constant monitoring (via workplace appraisals, target setting, or university examinations) are deemed unfortunate yet ‘natural’, depoliticised.

Fisher’s analysis is no doubt pertinent in reference to the university. Our very own Students’ Union has not agitated for less assessments or a less intensive exam season, but rather released a saccharine Facebook video entitled ‘You Can Do It Surrey!’, aiming to motivate students to put themselves through “late nights and early mornings” with the promise that it “will definitely be worth it”. Simultaneously, it has offered events to help exam stress such as “Therapy Dog Session” and “Happiness Café”. The message is clear — exams are natural, unavoidable and worth it. Either distract yourself from them or look inwards, in futility. Structural change is unimaginable.

But contra the Students’ Union, we should resist such narratives, and connect our distresses to the broader structures of neoliberalism. Indeed, the pressure, stress and general malaise of exam season functions as a highly visual spectacle of how neoliberalism, mediated by the institution of the university, is oppressing students. For what fuels such anxiety in exam season is the fear of failure, precisely constituted by a fear of becoming less ‘employable’. During exam season, our relationship to the labour market as students is even more exposed than usual. Most (but not all) students come to university to help with their future careers in some way; the expectation is that, devoid of much other choice, getting a degree will secure a certain level of income, security and perhaps ‘success’. Exam season pushes this logic to the limit, as exams are the very conditionalities we need to meet in order to pass our degree, and thus achieve that certain level of income, security and ‘success’. Exams thus come to function as unnaturally distilled and measurable indicators of our future income, security and status. With such distillation and measurability comes heightened anxiety for all, to varying degrees. A lot comes to depend on very little.

I should note that I am not arguing for the removal of assessment in education. Assessment, reducing it to the very verb to assess, is an integral part of social life. We assess when we debate with a friend, relative or coworker — we judge their arguments against what we know of the subject under discussion, retort accordingly, and then they repeat the same process themselves. Knowledge is exchanged; education takes place. Hence, what I am arguing instead is that the particular form of assessment we are exposed to as students operates under a neoliberal framework that, through commodification and grading, serves to create unnecessary stress and divisions, as well as undermine the value of education as an end in itself. For assessments do not have to come in the form of time-restricted exams in silent teaching rooms that take place in an intense two-week period. Nor do they need to be numerically reduced to certain grades that hierarchically rank students and implicitly ascribe higher scoring students higher value. Rather, one can imagine education as radically egalitarian and cooperative — we may write essays, and then discuss them with our tutors, without the need for arbitrary grading, ranking or disciplining. Students of the natural sciences may be numerically tested, but not have their degree depend upon passing, nor be tested in the form of hours-long examinations that occur twice a year. Education need not be given a ‘score’ that inevitably becomes a symbol for our ‘value’, understood in terms of ‘employability’ or market viability.

The focus of this essay is not, however, solely on assessments. Rather, they serve as a portal into a wider topic of discussion: the neoliberal university. If exam season is noticeably distressing in part because of neoliberal logic, what other parts of university life in 2017 are too, perhaps less noticeably? How else is market logic corrupting education? And more broadly, what purpose have universities come to serve under neoliberalism? Assessing these questions, and the interplay between them, requires us first to trace the history of the institution of the university and neoliberalism.

The Road to the Neoliberal University

Universities have always served certain purposes in society, with these purposes shifting as other factors in society, such as class relations or the dominant modes of production, have shifted. This point may seem abstract, or irrelevant, but it is vital. It reveals how the university has always been situated within a particular social, political and economic context which has shaped its functions. Understanding the university, therefore, requires contextual understanding. This can be appreciated historically.

Regarding the UK, before the nineteenth century, universities primarily served as important sites for the socialisation of elites from the ruling classes, immersing them in a certain kind of knowledge and ‘high culture’. For example, late medieval and early modern universities such as Oxford and Cambridge served to educate members of the ruling classes for high positions in the church, the law and government. Thus, as Michael Rustin notes, “their primary function was more to provide a cultural and social formation for elites than to produce useful knowledge”. This function was enlarged with the onset of industrialisation in the early 1800s, when the rising bourgeoisie of industrial manufacturers contributed to the formation of great city universities such as Leeds and Sheffield which specialised in engineering and science, and the expanding bureaucratic arm of government led to modernisations in university curricula. The influence of dominant modes of production and the market on the university become clearer at this stage — as mass capitalist industrial production spread, so did the imperative for technical university education in subjects such as engineering, for example.

The context of the aftermath of World War Two saw the next big institutional changes of the university. With the rise of welfare states and new class compromises across Europe, the university came to expand into a ‘mass institution’, emblematic of enhanced opportunities and shared entitlements. Universities no longer came to be seen as primarily the home of the ruling class but became open to all those with the adequate academic qualification, reflecting new class settlements. In the UK this was expressed via the 1963 Robbins Report, whose reforms began a gradual increase in young people attending university; before then the rates had been stuck at 4–5% — now nearly 50% of the 18+ age group attend university. This period saw the university, at least within the UK, at perhaps its most decommodified and egalitarian — grants were issued to all students, and the 1960s-1980s oversaw the birth of exciting, radical new academic disciplines such as sociology and cultural studies.

This particular institutional formation, however, soon began to break down. Although more democratic and egalitarian than previous formations, it was also, unsurprisingly, far more expensive. Removing tuition fees and paying for increasing numbers of young people to study at university, in the name of equal opportunities, was not — and never will be — cheap. Consequently, as the post-war class settlement lost legitimacy amidst the worldwide economic troubles of the 1970s, the university began to be gradually integrated into the emerging dominant political and economic order — neoliberalism.

One may then fairly question at this point: what exactly is neoliberalism? There is no concrete definition, but the term generally describes a set of political and economic ideas and policies that emerged internationally (led by states such as the UK, the US and Chile) from the 1980s onwards, influenced by classical liberal economics. Policies related to privatisation, reduced public spending and free trade are all classic examples of neoliberalism in action, all tied together by an unconditional veneration of the market and ethics of individualism and individual choice. A central component of neoliberalism is market creation, in all areas of life. The state’s role, then, thus becomes to create, uphold and ‘regulate’ such markets, rather than provide services. Early UK examples of market creation were in the energy and telecommunications sector under Thatcher, where state owned enterprises were sold off in order to build a market of private providers, following the logic that entrepreneurial competition would drive down prices, increase efficiency and offer consumers more choice. In the UK, neoliberal market-making has gradually ‘spilled over’ into more and more sectors — the Major government oversaw the privatisation of the railways in a crooked attempt to create a transport provider market, reforms under the New Labour and Coalition governments created internal markets inside the NHS, and — most related to this piece — the Blair and Cameron years were instrumental in the creation of markets within the education sector.

The Neoliberal University

Finally, then, we arrive at the concept of the neoliberal university, the current institutional formation of the university under neoliberalism. What does the neoliberal university look like, and what environment does it operate in? As with other historical formations, the answers to these questions can be found by looking at contemporary class relations and dominant modes of production. As multinational companies have come to dominate the sphere of production in evermore areas of the economy, the neoliberal university has come to be an institution that places more emphasis on ‘profitable’ subjects over less profitable, even so-called ‘mickey mouse’ ones. Indeed, the fastest growing subjects by student numbers are universally from the natural sciences (biological sciences, veterinary sciences and mathematics in particular) while the slowest growing or even shrinking subjects tend to be related to history, philosophy and languages. The reasons for this general trend are twofold. First, in the UK, the government has actively discouraged additional funding for subjects deemed antithetical to ‘enterprise culture’, such as the humanities and social sciences. The Browne Report of 2010 (which raised tuition fees to £9000 — yes, that one), for example, completely removed the teaching grant for arts, humanities and social science subjects, a grant that remains in place for STEM subjects. Secondly, the logic of neoliberalism makes it more rational for many applicants to choose more ‘scientific’ or ‘proper’ subjects, because the financial burden of tuition fee debt increases the incentive to seek substantial financial return upon graduation. Neoliberalism turns academic degrees into financial investments, and one can hardly blame growing numbers of students for seeking some kind of return on it, however sorry that situation may be. Thus, through this double bind, the neoliberal university represses ‘subversive’ or ‘less profitable’ academic disciplines while encouraging the growth of subjects deemed useful to big business.

Another key feature of the neoliberal university is how it operates within an artificial and manufactured higher education market. This is most pronounced in countries such as the US, but successive governments in the UK have made creeping reforms (amidst huge resistance) that are gradually constructing a ‘free market’ of higher education. The logic behind these reforms is based upon an erosion of the traditional class settlement in the UK, at least with regards to higher education. No longer is higher education understood in terms of class compromise, where the higher classes primarily fund a higher education system free and open to all; rather, class is factored out of the equation almost completely. Society is instead understood as a collection of atomised individual consumers, and consequently higher education becomes not a universal right based upon dominant notions of equality of opportunity, but a commodity to be purchased. All this was made ever more clear when the responsibility for universities moved from the Department of Education to the Department of Business, Industry and Skills in 2009.

Upon these underlying assumptions, markets are being built. The latest attempt at this is the government’s Higher Education and Research Bill, which is slowly making its way through Parliament against various currents of opposition. The 2016 White Paper on higher education preceding the Bill makes it very clear that the government ultimately seeks to create a differentiated, deregulated and competitive market in higher education, and outlines policy proposals to reach this goal. For example, the White Paper proposes streamlining bureaucratic structures to make it easier for new higher education providers to enter the ‘market’, and provides provisions for so-called ‘market exit’, where under-performing universities cease to exist. Additionally, the Paper allows better performing universities (as so judged under the controversial Teaching Excellence Framework) to charge slightly higher fees than lesser ones from the 2018–19 year onward. These are gradual reforms, and we have not seen the creation of a fully unleashed market as of yet. Most significantly, the maximum tuition fee cap remains in the Bill (although it now increases with inflation). Nonetheless, the reforms reflect the continuation of a 25-year old trend in British higher education towards markets and away from good quality higher education for all.

The Human Cost

The commodifying effects of these market-making reforms may appear abstract or distant, but they have very real consequences. For the transformation of higher education into a commodity bought on a market is not simply a theoretical point — it affects the everyday lives of students, professors, and university administrators. Regarding students, a key way to appreciate this is to think back to the example of exam season I used to open this piece. As noted, exams are so stressful because they reveal in stark terms how exposed our higher education is to the labour market under the neoliberal university. Higher education becomes a means to escape the precarious, low-wage labour market neoliberalism has created — but only if we do well in our exams. We are thus always under the watchful gaze of ‘employability’ while at university, exposed, and this damaging exposure manifests itself in numerous ways. The inadequacy of maintenance loans/grants for many students is one such way, forcing many students to take up part time casual work in order to keep themselves financially afloat at university. This takes time away from students to properly focus themselves on their degree (causing additional pressures when examinations or assessments are present), and transforms students into a useful pool of casual labour that neoliberalism thrives on. As Jeremy Gilbert notes, exposure in this sense acts to discipline students towards a certain kind of behaviour, making it harder for students to question their place in the world at the exact time they have historically done so. Furthermore, a reliance on part-time work at university pushes students towards the mould of passive consumer, who ‘purchases’ their education through ‘proper’ work. Critical thought is side-lined in the process.

What is less apparent to students is how academics, too, are struggling in the neoliberal university. Much of this stems from the erosion of academic freedom that neoliberalism has brought about, as universities in the UK have increasingly come to be managed like businesses or brands. Since the 1988 Education Reform Act universities are a form of ‘corporation’ legally, and governed increasingly hierarchically, marginalising formerly collegial and relatively democratic forms of internal governance. Accordingly, the power of academics over university decision-making has generally decreased, and this goes hand in hand with the growth of managerial roles within university governance. As neoliberalism has submitted the university increasingly to market logic, occupations with expertise in markets and regulation have blossomed within it — accountants, public relations and human resource practitioners, administrators, and so on. With these reforms the university increasingly follows a corporate model, embedded within business culture, creating various pressures and incentives for academics. Research begins to be subtly influenced by business interests in order to bring in funding, ‘customer satisfaction’ becomes paramount with academics subject to new regimes of monitoring and assessment, and ultimately academic autonomy suffers. With these pressures, it comes as little surprise mental illness is an increasing problem among academics, as a 2013 University and College Union report found.

Pressures come not just from the content and high expectations of academics’ employment, but also the terms of it. Part-time, fixed term, and zero-hours contracts are on the rise in academia as universities seek to minimise costs and squeeze as much productivity out of their workers as possible. As a Guardian investigation revealed last November, more than half of all academic staff working in UK universities are on insecure ‘atypical’ contracts, with more prestigious Russell Group universities being particularly guilty of this. The results are as you’d expect — low pay, for long hours, on insecure terms. A number interviewed for The Guardian noted yearly pay as often around the extremely low mark of £6000 a year, despite academic success (by contrast, the average yearly wage is £26,500). This is the human cost of the neoliberal university; when education becomes a commodity, so do the teachers. The result is dehumanising practices of poor pay, overwork, and insecure employment.

Conclusion: What Next?

The picture, then, seems bleak. Not only are academics and students suffering under the neoliberal university, but there seems little we can do to change it; as shown, the shift to neoliberalism is a global and historical one, infiltrating and feeding off of every aspect of our lives. What then can we as students do to resist? Is it even possible?

The answer is: of course, provided we are pragmatic, organised, well-informed and realistic. While we may not be able to overthrow global neoliberalism by ourselves, what we can do is resist it locally, at every point it impinges upon our lives. The NUS is doing this right now with its boycott of the National Student Survey (NSS), and it is a struggle we should wholeheartedly get behind, unlike our Students’ Union which has disgracefully opposed it. From next year, the NSS will be used by the government as part of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) to grade universities, allowing higher TEF-scoring universities to charge higher fees. The intention behind this, as I wrote above, is to create an artificial higher education market in the UK, and as such the NSS functions as a locality where the marketisation of higher education collides directly with students. A co-ordinated national boycott, then, could hugely complicate the government’s neoliberal higher education plans, which we as students should be 100% opposed to in every way.

For we should never underestimate the strength of mass collective action, well informed by a broad historical understanding of neoliberalism, in effecting change. Just last year, 1000 UCL students held a rent strike in protest against poor living conditions in expensive student accommodation, and won a rent cut worth £850,000 and a £350,000 bursary for students from low-income backgrounds. Their demands were carefully linked to an understanding of the neoliberal university, noting how UCL profited £16 million per year from student rent, and student ‘Cut the Rent’ groups are now spreading across the country, aided by the NUS. We should take these rent strikes as inspiration — one thousand coordinated students at UCL have started a national movement and achieved real successes. Think of what one thousand coordinated students at Surrey could do: not just rent strikes, but also exam strikes, assessment strikes, campus boycotts. So often we are demoralised and apathetic about our struggles when in reality, with organisation and conviction, together we have power. And when we resist, exercising that power, we plant the seeds for a new, better, post-neoliberal future. Only then can we begin to escape the neoliberal university, and all its oppression.

[logothanatos]

Is There Really Such a Thing as a "Communist"?

While I still share dank commie memes or I sometimes use the term "communism" with a positive valence, substantively I'm not exactly a communist, at least in no traditional sense. I am only a "communist" in the same sense Zizek speaks of being a communist: our political aspirations involve prioritizing the problems that arise from our relationship to the commons, and involve determining what the commons can have a claim to in the face of a normative dogma of individual exclusivity in appropriation.

I think traditional communist discourse is often stuck in a private v. public property false dichotomy, and also seems to understand "private property" in either vague terms, or in a sort of composite way which conflates various different rights claims, treats the problem of ownership norms primarily in terms of rights, and treats private property's existence as inseparable from the institutional practices around the management of both labor and the means of production (which makes some amount of intuitive sense if ownership is conceived only in the former two ways). This mirrors the same sort of approach to property as pro-capitalists who hole to liberal political philosophy. Even vaguer is perhaps the boundary, institutionally, between public and private property when public property is taken as synonymous to State property with "public" access (which is not at all times strictly enforced)--except perhaps in the method of acquisition (funded by tax, acquired through eminent domain, etc.) and in its societal justification (representation of the people, a proviso logic to seizing perfectly legal property, etc.). In any case it would still seem that the use, acquisition, and proper justification of either of those, by the State, are, under Statist ideology, fully under the prerogative of the State (whether or not it has obligations to the people, such as democratic representation or republican constitutionalism).

That is, after all, what the political notion of sovereignty recognizes abstractly, in which case "public property" simply seems to be a notion of private property proffered as appropriate at the scale or level of the political society, wherein its proper use is defined based on political morality or social purposes. That this property relies on giving legitimacy to the particular notion of political society at hand that places limits on sovereignty (namely territorial limits, which is akin to limits based on property), is a superficial difference insofar as the norms and conception of ownership is the same: the right to some territory, by some peaceful means of acquisition, and with a right to abandonment, and with delegation of some of these rights to others in smaller parcels via title. That States are non-ideal and may violate legitimate acquisition or fail to recognize illegitimate abandonment is a matter of practical history, and has little baring on the theoretical notion of what constitutes a State. If anything, private property as oft understood is also affected by non-ideal histories. So if the only difference between private property and public property is the subject who owns--in this case the political society whose ownership is thereby characterized as jurisdiction over a territory--then the issues and implications surrounding a theory of property are equivalent for both of them.

That there are contradictions herein whereupon homesteading private owners have full rights to their property but, by virtue of the political society, have those rights on offer by the State, is no surprise, as it is the sort of thing one can expect from a labor theory of property that dodges solving the problem of criteria for abandonment and scope of acquisition by positing a largely ad hoc utilitarian proviso. But this is ultimately to cede ground to an ultimate arbiter of what is owned as opposed to building an actual theory of property, as neither abandonment nor acquisition are merely marginal concerns in a theory of property. The supposed utility of this approach, in other words, is a contingency brought about by the weakness of the underlying theory of property. When Locke, for example, like some other political thinkers (e.g. Rousseau), speaks of the gap between rights without societal recognition and rights with societal recognition, he immediately hopes to close the gap through God and, his subsidiary, the State.

But the gap is not really closed in this manner--rather, the State is simply another agency of its own within the particular society, whose interests do not manifestly reflect those of its subjects even under democratic governance. If recognition of one's property cannot be acquired from others in the society, one would expect this to be even less so from those who wish to represent or exceed society. A theory of property must determine both a means of property, and a means to that means--it must determine a "final cause," e.g. that final thing for which acquisition is no longer a question but rather is its basis. For Locke the connection between the self's ownership of land and products and the labor made possible by these and the body was God's grace and dominion over the rewards of self and his original gift to self via endowment of the body, and for most liberals it was the State (through legal title), which merely acted as a subsidiary to God in this respect. The more intelligent anarcho-capitalists recognize the problem with these, at the least, although they pretended to solve the problem with "self-ownership," in which the subject and object of ownership are the same but the scope and criteria of such ownership is still indeterminate given the indeterminacy of the subject-object, and its powers, through which it is thought acquisition and abandonment are initiated. Western thought is thereby stuck within a monotheistic or anthropocentric notion of dominion and stewardship, with a Great Chain of Being that puts humanity closer to the substance of things and thereby to the purely creative power of God. The evidence of this fixation is precisely the way theories of property are provided and structured. It is no wonder that the practical implications have been Western imperialism, whether or not this fixation could be enumerated as any significant or primary cause rather than a rationalization. There is of course something to this idea of purely creative power, but so far it doesn't seem particularly useful on the subject of ownership insofar as it precisely proceeds from something which must already lack creation (in the case of ownership, acquisition), and thereby something which creation cannot affect (in the case of ownership, thereby something that cannot be acquired).

Not to digress, but rather to return to the traditional communist engagement with issues of property, when public (or, in this case, common) property is conceived without the State the notion is inadequate--it gives us scant information on how the negotiation of use among participants take place, let alone what ideal "public" management would look like. And this is crucial from even differentiating it from private property, to the extent that such negotiations are precisely what determines publicly recognized claims individuals have for use (and, thereby in retroactive fashion, "acquisition" and "abandonment") of a certain scope or aspect of the so-called "public property." In such a case it seems that the communist is looking at the State as a model for the practice of ownership (even as it advocates a "stateless society," which would then simply seem to mean a society without State enforcement of, or protection of, a "private sector"), while the anarcho-capitalist is looking at the private sector as a model for the practice of ownership (even as it advocates a "stateless society," which would then simply seem to mean a society of private fiefdoms, rent-based proprietary communities, and more fragmented sovereignties, effective through absolute control over access--not something too different from the State, except ideally constrained in its territory by base rules of acquisition correspondent to its outer interactions [no war of conquest, etc.]).

For, it then becomes clear that it is hierarchy as such--albeit a democratic one (collective over individual) for the communist, and an autocratic/dictatorial one for the anarchocapitalist (individual over collective)--that is given as a basis for the claim a property. This is why, for the communist, the administrative use of a good must be specified prior to the existence of any level of individual ownership, whereas for the anarchocapitalist the right must be specified prior to the use and defended through market services. That is, for the communist, the dominant collective power must decide whether the ownership claim would be justified, and it can do this not through a notion of rights (as rights are precisely distributed by the collective according to its prerogatives), but on the basis of what it sees as a potential valid use for the goods in question. For the anarchocapitalist, no such justification to society is necessary, except insofar as one has a right which pre-exists society and must be fought for and defended against encroachment (through market services), and whose existence must be rationally demonstrated to other individuals. It's no wonder then that while communists were required to be anarchist, their treatment of property and sovereignty fetishized the liberal State to such an extent that it would be seen as a means towards statelessness (the famous "self-abolition" theory). This theory of self-abolition is not entirely absurd, as the proliferation of the State form across society would also be equally experienced as the swallowing up of the State into the private sector as a key actor or asset for the market, precisely in its defense of transaction costs through legal property titles and thereby its indirect enforcement of traditional management through its enforcement of contracts. But it does not guarantee statelessness--rather, it can mean mercenary warlordism, embroiled elites, and extremely unstable and erratic, yet versatile, legal systems. An extensive war economy and commodification of death/outrage, rather than statelessness.

And there is more than one way for the State to expand--the State can expand without the State form expanding. We see inklings of the aforementioned symptoms, for example, in big-C Communist countries, although the hierarchical structure makes sure that this potential is stymied into, precisely, an extensive centralized war economy with versatile legal systems that seem less unstable or erratic due to cultural hegemony expressed in the form of propaganda and political paranoia. While there is no commodification of death or outrage, the ominpresence of propaganda is a redirection of that energy into State-sanctioned messages that at least promise outrage--against Western capitalist imperialists, for example. This is an expansion of the State, though not of the State form. Also notice that the contrast between the communist and anarcho-capitalist has nothing to do with markets. That communists seem vehemently anti-market means nothing, insofar as this anti-market stance is merely a function of this more central valuing of public/common property over private property. But precisely this, practically speaking, fails to preclude the forces of the market, insofar as the notion of "public/common property" is always haunted by that of private property. This is clearly the case in the big-C Communist countries insofar as they had black markets, and it is also visible in the post-Maoist, state capitalist PRC.

This is why my approach is not traditionally "communist"--rather, it involves an intersubjective theory of property which dissolves even the need to solve the problems posed by other sorts of property theories, and consequently is not dogmatically against individuals owning some means of production. In fact, if communists wish to ride the coat tails of automation and post-industrial production, they must recognize that the low costs of both acquiring and producing machinery for mass production of intricate, detail-oriented products means that some forms of production not traditionally done in a decentralized, private or individualized manner, will now be done precisely in this way. This is especially so when the boundary between production and consumption are institutionally blurred by the increased importance of the possession and distribution of information in production--communication itself, in other words, has become a form of production or a power for material production. The means of production is not a monolith, and this is the sort of nuance one must introduce when talking about Marx's notion of collective seizure of the means of production. Marx's blanket call for collectively seizing the means of production also suffered from the same ailments as the notion of "public" or "collective" property aforementioned: Does this mean democratic management of the means of production? Where does one practically draw the line between a means of production and those things which merely produce--is drawing a clear line concretely possible, although some technology or other is seen as key to productivity in relation to key products, to the accumulation of wealth, etc. (as capitalism can make evident)? Does "collective seizure" mean adequate mechanisms of distribution of the means of production to individuals in society (such distribution mechanism collectively managed)? Does it merely mean distribution of the surplus to society as a whole, equally or proportionately (as understood by the Communist economies)? Does it mean central planning by democratic representatives of the people (as it at least nominally meant to the Communist states)? Would some things be outside of democratic management? Etc. Straightforward answers to any of these are likely to be unsatisfactory if they do not sufficiently address the problems which may arise, or diminish the extent of adverse effects which may arise, due to a poverty in property theory, in moral, political and economic terms.

Nonetheless, the blanket call for collective or social seizure of the means of production makes sense historically--in Marx's time, massively productive machinery were almost exclusively huge and highly costly, as well as being less informationally rich in their production process, and less computationally involved. Landlord-merchants could afford to both acquire and store these machines in mass over time as well as patronize their development and had exclusive easy access to infrastructure by which to distribute any resulting surplus so that they may be able to take advantage of the machinery's productivity. And of course, between the landlords and the merchants there was a battle for a beneficial arrangement, leading to the restructuring of land ownership (the English Enclosures). This state of affairs thereby allowed merchants to leverage management power through both contract and initial familiarity with the workings of the machines. They were also machines with highly specialized parts that correlated with different steps in the process of production in a single, unitary product, requiring coordination among the machines that was deliberate, attentive, and careful, or more generally calculated when it came time to exchange any surplus. The landlord-merchants who owned or gave space to these masses of giant and interdependent machinery required manpower for use, surveillance and maintenance. The combined result was the eventual purchasing of labor-power and integration of the peasantry into the market-place, leading to rapid urbanization. Ergo, technology in this form during the process of industrialization was necessary to seize collectively because they could only be used, surveilled and maintained collectively. And in a sense, despite exploitation and employment management hierarchy, they indeed were used, surveilled, and managed collectively (making it ambiguous what is meant by "seize collectively," beyond its reductive negative goals under Marxism [e.g., abolishing wage-labor]). Information and computation-based machinery for production, even the larger, interdependent, costly ones, are much easier to surveil and use, though maintenance is still a huge cost given their need for storage space and the need to navigate that space when dealing with technical trouble-shooting. And these are the sorts of massive machines we are now left to deal with, though their markets have narrowed in tandem with the automation, downscaling and simplification of the production process.

Nonetheless, the nuance needed when understanding what it means to "seize the means of production" is why "communism" actually has some tension with Marxist theory. This tension is between the goal of Marxist communism and the goal's theoretical poverty, the latter of which naturally results from the fact that "communism" wasn't concretely understood in Marxism and also from the fact that Marx's theory of politics, culture, etc., suffered from economic reductionism (which is not the same as historical materialist thought--politics, culture, etc., can still be looked at materially without reducing them to those features salient to the methods of labor and exchange of its products in that society, although they must be looked at as things which are at the very least also produced [even if incidentally] and which may contribute to exchange [even if incidentally]). But perhaps its this fact--communism's theoretical poverty relative to Marxism--that makes communism "the real movement of society," rather than the movement produced by, or constitutive of, the ideology of communism. There is then really no such thing as a communist, except as someone with a series of libidinal historical attachments, who thereby tends towards the rehabilitation and fetishization of the big-c "Communist" countries of the U.S.S.R., Maoist PRC, etc., or otherwise tends towards a largely negative project that makes them indistinguishable from any other anarchist except in their privileging of Marxist critique of capitalism or their rejection of common anarchist principles and praxis. And then there is the bare-bones anarchist who is also a communist, in their sharing of oppositions and in the poverty of that anarchism. And then there is the sense of "communist" mentioned in the opening of this post: characterized by focusing on problems related to the need of, and encroachment on, the commons. And this is the sort that most captures all these other sorts, although it may also include those whose views are not canonically seen as "communist." It is also the sort that seems most relevant today. But to call oneself "communist" under this definition is to enumerate no solution--"communism" is not really a solution, given what has been said and what the psychology seems to involve.

[researchdevelopmentbyzoe]

Reclaiming Urbanity: Indeterminate Spaces, Informal Actors and Urban Agenda Setting

Groth and Corijn introduced me to some key terms which have been vital in finding and developing my search for literature and scholars. They discuss ‘informal actors’ and how they influence the agenda of urban politics by means of temporary reappropriation of indeterminate spaces. They also gave me insight to the ‘post Fordist city’ and how inner-city areas are increasingly focused on a uni-dimensional logic of commodification, monofunctionality and control. Indeterminate spaces are difficult to corporate into these planning procedures, thus often get pushed to the margins. The key concern of Groth and Corijn which really resonated with me and actually sparked my main idea is the question of how new forms of urbanism can be given place in city planning in order to pay more justice to the social and cultural complexity (as opposed to economic) that constitutes contemporary urbanity.

The Fordist city produced a state-led managerial system of a city where the production of space catered for a relatively uniform society in a system of mass production and mass consumption. Urban politics have to respond to cultural and social change; the urban realm is no longer marked by homogenous life patterns, but by a pronounced plurality in lifestyles.

The post-Fordist city has an urban policy now that seems to subordinate social to economic priorities. Entrepeneurial approaches in city planning all too often tend to homogenise space on consumerist and aestheticised grounds. Swyngedouw (2003) calls it the “re-conquest of the city by commodity and capital” which sparked discussion of the ‘end of public space’ and its increasing commodification, sanitisation and surveillance.

Groth and Corijn are calling for a new urban program, pushing for the need for uncontrolled, non-commodified places that are socially sustainable and capable of integrating a mix of socio-cultural activities, which they labelled as ‘free zones’. They boast the need for ‘differential space’ - a space created and dominated by its users. This reading entirely evoked my interest in giving power to the people and breaking free from commodified and controlled public space.

Quotes that resonated with me: 

“Post modern-urbanism conceives of a multiplicity of diverse and reverberating life-worlds, ‘a plurality of full valid voices’ whose combination moves towards an unknown city” (Donald, 1999, p. 138)

In their essesnce [spontaneous organic evolutions of space] they thus testify to an ideology which is “libertarian, marginal, deviant, and certainly disrespectful of the traditional codes of the city” (Borret, 1999, p. 242)

“Offered opportunities to reveal existing representations of space, the dominant space of the city authorities, planners, police etc. and question this order by carnivalesque ambivalence” (Cantell, 1999, p. 257)

[fe1ixzuo-blog]

Postmodernism

One can distinguish postmodernism by master narratives questioning that people embraced in the modern time. The most important among the master narratives is the saying that all progress-particularly technological-is positive (Ward 92). Through the rejection of such narratives, many people reject the sense that history or knowledge can be entailed in totalizing theories. Postmodernists embrace instead the contingent, the temporary as well as the local. Postmodernists also reject other narratives such as the idea that only a man can be an artistic genius, the colonialist notion that every nonwhite person is inferior as well as the assumption of artistic development as goal oriented. Therefore, the minority art and the feminist art challenging the colonial thinking ways are often enlisted under the postmodernism rubric or assumed as its representations.

Through postmodernism, the idea of having one inherent definition to the artwork was overturned. Instead, the viewer greatly determined the meaning, even allowed by many artists to take part in the work similar to the case of performance pieces. Some artists created works requiring viewer intervention to complete or create the work. This can be seen in the movie “The Tenth Kingdom.” The tenth Kingdom is a marginally more established TV miniseries that many people observing now will consider as dated and poor, however, its utilization of intertextuality and reference to writing (prevalently children's stories) is a case of how other media writings can be reused to have a radical new significance (Ward 111).

 Postmodernism reflects a broad disillusionment with life. It as well reflects the existing technology and value-system power of affecting the beneficial change. Due to this, eminence, authority, knowledge, and expertise of achievement have been discredited. Nearly all artists are now much more worrying about big ideas such as all progress ought to be positive. Pursuing this further, modernism was seen as elitist, uninterested in the minority white and male dominated. This explains the reason why postmodernism overthrows the art by minority and feminist artists. Nevertheless, irrespective of its supposed big ideas rejection, the movement of the postmodern appears to have many big ideas of its type such as anything can be used to make art.

Through postmodernism, many educational priorities changed at various art school. In the 1970s, the painting art was termed as outdated. In fact, working for four years to gain the traditional fine arts skills was termed as retrogressive. It was believed art must be liberated from the “white” and released to the public. Therefore, art colleges started to turn out another graduate type-one familiar with instant forms of postmodernist style and general techniques of production. Individual creativity was termed to be of more significance that craftsman-like skills accumulation.

It is a coincidence of the postmodernist art era and the arrival of various audiovisual technologies and has great benefits to them. The new range of photographic imagery and video has minimized the significance of the skills of drawing. On the same note, through the manipulation of the new technology, artists can short-cut the old process of art making while still creating something new.

“High culture” is a term often applied by art critics when distinguishing the sculpture and painting “high culture” from popular culture of pulp fiction, television, magazines, and other mass-made products. Modernists assumed high culture as superior to low culture. Postmodernists favoring a more democratic art idea view high culture as elitist.

The instant gratification and consumerism growth in the 20th century has also greatly affected the visual art. Most consumers desire novelty. They too need spectacle and entertainment. Many postmodernist curators, artists, and other experts, in response, have turned art into a product of entertainment. The arrival of new art types, for example like installations performance and happening as well as building appearing to be moving, have offered consumers with a variety of shocking and new encounters and experiences.

No more faded painting of oil that depicts obscure occasions from Greek mythology raising a knowing smile from cultivated consumers. Postmodernist sculpture and painting, from its start in the movement of the pop-art, was instantly recognizable, bright and bold. Images and themes were borrowed often from high profile magazines, consumer goods, as well as comic books. Everyone could now the art on the screen. Irrespective of the evolution of postmodernism, a major aim remains instant recognition.

In other words, one can understand the best postmodernism through the definition of modernist ethos it replaced. Many artists in the modern era were driven by a forward and radical thinking approach, grand narratives of the western progress and domination. The arrival of Pop art and Neo-Dada in the after-war America signified the start of a reaction against the assumption coming to be referred to as postmodernism.

As a result of institutionalization of “high modernism” as well as the increasing commercial commodification and appropriation of artworks, the idea of the modernist became increasingly obsolete. Postmodernist art was inherently political as well as commercial mass culture critical. Such movements are associated with the multimedia conceptual art and performance art development. This leaves art as neither sculpture nor painting, the mind art instead of the eye art. Logically, nearly anything well designated or framed as such might be termed as art. Among the most distinctive features of the postmodernist art is the absorption of traditional art and artworks categories. Another major distinction is the proliferation of hybrid and new forms broadening such categories to an unprecedented degree, even greater that experienced in literature.

Despite the fact that not cutting edge now, when it first turned out in 2001 The tenth Kingdom was an advanced reconsidering of numerous old fables, breathing new life into them (which is something Hollywood has done innumerable circumstances with movies like Maleficent and Snow White and the Huntsman). A lady and her dad are transported into an entire other world and must discover their way through nine unique kingdoms looking for an enchantment mirror that will transport them home once more. Every kingdom is constructed freely in light of an alternate children's story with smart little references to the stories and characters inside them (Ward 77).

    Works cited

Ward, Glenn. 

Postmodernism

. 1st ed. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2003. Print.