Spectacular Agency - A political theory for everyone and no one

April has been a crazy month!

First I presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology's annual meeting in Merida, Mexico.
Then we headed off to Grenoble, France for our dear friends' wedding (felicitations!)
Next week I will be presenting two papers at the Southern Sociology Society's annual meeting.
Last week my best friend got hitched (congratulations, y'all!), and I presented this paper at the North Georgia Student Philosophy Conference.

Those of you that are reading my weekly popOp articles at the avant guardian will recognize some of these images. The popOp writings are my practice for preparing my thesis for The European Graduate School, and what's included here is the outline of my central hypothesis:

Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, stated that the spectacle, the idiomatic mode of human relatedness in late Western modernity, is presented as an instrument of unification, but, “the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.” This model of sociality, problematic in itself, troubles the possibility of sovereignty. Nonetheless, the works of Debord and the Situationist International have received much-deserved attention in the last decade precisely because investigating spectaclist economic relations provides an evocative analytic for palpating the contours of that new mode of agency required in the fruition of globalization. In this paper is discussed the commodification of memory by examining appropriation-based art practices (e.g. Girl Talk or Kutiman's “Thru You”) and appropriation-based activism (Anonymous) with an eye toward developing further the possibility of agency within these increasingly-isolating relations.

I am calling this mode of sovereignty "spectacular agency," and what follows are some considerations of the sites of this mode of sovereignty as well as a (brief) consideration of the possibility of political action within this mode.

Here's the slide show that went with the talk - apologies, but scribd doesn't share the animations that were present in the original so some of the comedic effect is lost.

Sites of Spectacular Agency: A political theory for everyone and no one

New Post at The Avant Guardian

Another Friday, another popOp.

This week we're looking at the beef between Fahamu Pecou and Fabian "Occasional Superstar" Williams, and also the continuing palpating of spectaclist economics.

holla!

It Costs More To Be Poor

It's true: living costs poor people more than the not poor. I bring this up because I read this headline and the supporting report today:

"Study finds median wealth for single black women at $5"

(here's the report upon which the article is based)

Here's a report from the Washington Post that discusses this counter-intuitive truth "The High Cost of Poverty"

Also, here's a report from the Brookings Institutes, almost exactly a year before the WaPo article, discussing the financial costs of being poor, "Public Policies to Alter the Use of Alternative Financial Services among Low-Income Households"

The poor pay more to have access to their income:

• for example -- if you cannot pass a Chex Systems report, then you likely cannot get a bank account, which means you will pay someone to cash your check. If you're not familiar with this concept, the poor will pay somebody money to give them access to the money they earned.

The poor have to pay in terms of housing:

• if you are poor, you likely have a poor credit history, based on this you will not qualify for standard financing for your mortgage. You might be offered a subprime loan, and since about 2006 we've seen what that leads to: massive financial hemorrhaging that can only be stopped by giving the ultra wealthy of the world all the money they want.
• Some might say, "don't buy a house if you can't get good financing." But, of course, paying rent (as everyone who tries to sell housing initiatives to the public typically brings up), means not building wealth and again, loosing that money.

The poor have to pay more for transportation:

• Not unlike financing a home, if you are poor you will likely pay a more punitive interest rate for that car loan...
• ...Unless, of course, you don't buy a car and instead use public transportation. As a regular user of the bus and train services in Atlanta, I can assure you that although our system is very efficient (despite what most white people in the metro area suspect) - public transit's real cost must also include the time spent waiting for transfers and connecting service. This is really a drag now since it seems likely that half the bus routes in the city will be cut soon.

The poor have to pay more for health care:

• The poor tend to work in industries that do not provide things like health care, but they may qualify for limited assistance from programs like Medicaid (maybe)
• The leading reason people (62% of those who filed) filed bankruptcy in 2007 because of medical debts. 92% of those who listed this as their primary reason for filing had $5000 of medical debt or more, this representing more than 10% of their gross income (from the American Journal of Medicine)

But the real cost of being poor vis-a-vis health care is more subtle - because the Federal Poverty Rate as it is, being poor is likely also going to cause a life time of health problems such as diabetes and heart disease.

The Federal poverty rate is not determined by your income, the cost of your housing, the cost of transportation; it doesn't consider medical debt, nor student loan debt, and certainly not consumer debt (credit cards or pay day loans). The Federal poverty rate is a measure of how much it costs to get a certain number of calories (not nutrients, just calories). I've talked about this before, here.

To refresh you: the Federal poverty rate seeks to find the cheapest cost for the individual to get calories. This means that the individual is encouraged to consume the foods that would have the richest calorie pay-off - since you're only given a limited amount of money to spend, you'd better buy the most food at the cheapest cost.

This is why you will see in really poor neighborhoods signs at the (freaking) convenience stores and gas stations that state "Food Stamps Accepted Here."

What foods have the best pay-off? Foods that have been heavily-processed and contain high-fructose corn syrup. They are typically foods that also have really large amounts of fat and calories from fat.

Of course, poverty doesn't fall out of the sky and like lightning strike you: you're typically born into poverty or at the threshold of being lower-middle class. This likely means also that your recipe book (as it were) is filled with foods that made sense to eat two generations ago when your forebears were working the fields and mines - more likely to die from work injuries than live long enough to develop diabetes or heart disease.

More on this later....

Rancière's "Misadventures of Universality"

Rancière's talk from the Second Moscow Biennial is available at their site, here.

The central concern in the talk is "the way in which the universality of the human rights or people's autonomy appears to be absorbed by [...] a certain idea of the universality of the commodity." To illustrate what he means by this, Rancière brings up Godard's Masculin/Feminin (view the trailer below):

the film where we are introduced to the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. He does this to point toward a newer problem, that during the 60s the protests were supposedly in solidarity and identification with the children in Vietnam, today there is no identification possible because there is only the caricature of who is exploiting whom.

In the 70s Martha Rosler's collages were perhaps powerful critiques, but today this technique doesn't seem to have the same force. The mode is tired. These sorts of collages seem to be just one of millions of such images. Perhaps this is because the Vietnam war was so pervasive in the American dining room - the family could be on the front lines of the jungle warfare while eating tv dinners.

Today this proximity to warfare is a primary means of providing entertainment.

ABOVE: Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).
RIGHT: Martha Rosler, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (2004).
BELOW: Martha Rosler, The Grey Drape (2008).

Today, while it might be satisfying on some level to throw a brick through a Starbucks window it just doesn't seem to convey any form of urgency to political action. Indeed, on a personal level I can relate a story of exactly this. While there was some sense of political excitement in the Battle of Seattle as the anti-globalization movement began to really ramp-up and a brick in a Starbucks while wearing a vinegar-soaked bandanna seemed a viable political action; only a few years later the gesture became impotent one night in Athens, Georgia when my friend had her store window busted-in by UGA party boys. No bandanna, not purpose other than the thrill of simple vandalism. In short, no universal principle being advocated, except that joy of being rebellious.

The result of this commensurability (you can invoke the same bandanna worn in the Battle of Seattle by purchasing it at Urban Outfitters) as Rancière states it is, "[u]ltimately terrorism and consumption, protest and spectacle are shown as part of the same process, a process governed by the law of the commodity which is the law of equivalence."

He then proceeds in the talk to outline both sides of the political spectrum, primarily focusing on the shortcomings of the contemporary left. The right he simply passes over characterizing it as full of rage at the ambivalences in today's world.

With the left there is talk of the impotence of its melancholic prediction which is, "not about verifiable facts. It is just about the lie hidden in any truth. Melancholy thus turns into a kind of cynical wisdom. It only says: things are not what you think they are." We should perhaps clarify this as, perhaps, an incomplete melancholia. As Judith Butler pointed out in her "Melancholy Gender", Freud saw an ego-accumulating aspect inherent to melancholia - an incorporative dimension in the ego's seeking the lost object. Perhaps this, too, is a universalism that Rancière would characterize as misadventure...

So on the one hand there is this "rupture predicated on the historical assimilation of a critical knowledge of the system by the powerful material collectivity," but also this rupture is the natural result of what Marx stated was capital's ability to dematerialize previous material relations by subsuming them to the demands of market exchange.

To be continued tonight at the Poncey-Highlands Reading Group...

Refund Anticipation Loans Are Killing Us

It's tax season in the U.S. again and I'm glad to be involved with a group offering VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) for low and moderate income households as a part of my internship with the International Rescue Committee. The VITA program is vital to the most successful poverty alleviation program the Fed has found so far: the Earned Income Tax Credit. When I was working with ACCIÓN USA I had the good fortune to be present at the first convening of the Atlanta Prosperity Campaign's Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) task force and I'm glad to see that the campaign is in full swing a few years later.

You might recall that we've discussed the EITC a few times here on the blog.

It's been credited as very successful in assisting those of low and moderate incomes to develop assets, that is, wealth building.  

Started in 1975, the Earned Income Tax Credit is a refundable federal tax credit designed to reduce the tax burden on low- and moderate-income workers and encourage participation in the labor force. In 2006, EITC benefited 22.4 million people with an average credit of $1,951. Research has shown that the EITC is often used to pay off debt, but it can also present an opportunity for wealth building.

I copy + pasted the last three sentences from a study recently released from the Woodstock Institute, a Chicago-based research and policy organization. They go on to point out that the "primary consumers of Refund Anticipation Loans (RALs) are recipients of the Earned Income Tax Credit. According to the National Consumer Law Center, 63 percent of the 8.67 million people who received a refund anticipation loan in 2007 also received the EITC."

RALs are those loans that tax prep sites (like H&R Block, Liberty Tax, Jackson Hewitt, etc.) offer to folks that want their tax return refunds ASAP. As they state:

While RALs give borrowers rapid access to their tax return, they do so at a significant cost to borrowers. According to a February 2009 report on the RAL industry produced by the National Consumer Law Center and the Consumer Federation of America, fees for a RAL in 2007 ranged from $104 to $111 per loan, with an average fee of $107.50. Lenders charged additional fees to borrowers who wanted their loans processed in one day. These costs are substantial when considering the size of the loan. For a refund anticipation loan of $3,000, annual percentage rates (APRs) ranged from 77 to 140 percent. On top of these RAL fees, an estimated 20 percent of RALs included additional application fees which can add another $40 to the cost of the loan. In addition, borrowers pay tax preparation fees that average as much as $183 at one nationwide vendor.

They then quote the National Consumer Law Center study that states that, "EITC recipients generated $525 million in fees for refund anticipation loans in 2002." Then citing a Brookings Institute study stating, "the complexities of the EITC qualification and application process appear to drive low-income taxpayers to use paid tax preparers. The means by which tax preparers are compensated for generating RALs rewards steering. A tax preparer is compensated for each loan they generate, and in some cases receive additional bonuses for meeting the quotas of the lender."

The Woodstock researchers point out that there is evidence for a motivation toward tax fraud present in these Refund Anticipation Loans, "In 1994, the IRS estimated that 92 percent of fraudulent returns filed electronically involved refund anticipation loans. In an effort to reduce fraud, the IRS stopped providing tax preparers with information on outstanding tax debt, a function called the Debt Indicator. Both RAL volume and RAL fraud dramatically declined after the elimination of the Debt Indicator. However, the IRS reinstated the Debt Indicator in 1999, after which RAL fraud rates increased."

So who are the folks making these RALs possible? According to the National Consumer Law Center it's: JP Morgan Chase (with 13,000 independent tax preparers), HSBC (H&R Block's RAL provider), and Pacific Capital Bancorp - the parent company of Santa Barbara Bank & Trust. According to the NCLC's recent press release, "RALs drained the refunds of about 8.4 million American taxpayers in 2008, costing them in the neighborhood of $738 million in loan fees, plus over $68 million in other fees." It's obviously popular to complain about the Wall Street Bailouts, but here is an annual bilking of Main Street.


Weirdly, the IRS doesn't require any kind of regulation of tax preparers, until this year, as the NCLC reports this year, "On January 4, 2010, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced its plans to finally regulate the tax preparation industry. Currently, most tax preparers are not subject to any sort of licensing, competency or minimum educational requirements, a fact long criticized by consumer advocates and others, such as the National Taxpayer Advocate."

While it would be great if the EITC was used to build assets among those that qualify, the reality is that the recipients are often on the business end of a host of predatory lending practices (such as RALs, Title Loans, Pay Day Loans, Check Cashing services, Rent-to-Own schemes, etc.) and so the monies that are allocated with EITC are usually spent servicing debts. As the National Consumer Law Center points out, if you're considering a debt repayment program, caveat emptor (buyer beware):

[D]ebt settlement companies usually take out all of their fees, ranging from 14 to 20 percent of the total debt, within the first half of the contract. For debts totaling $20,000, a consumer could pay fees of $2,800 to $4,000.

"Debt settlement companies usually collect most or all of their fees from consumers long before they have eliminated any of their debts, and consumers pay these high fees regardless of whether their debts are settled or not," said Susan Grant, Consumer Federation of America’s Director of Consumer Protection.

"There is no guarantee that your debts will be settled," said Gail Hillebrand, Financial Services Campaign Manager at Consumers Union. "The industry’s own statistics show that debt settlement doesn’t eliminate all of the debt for most consumers. The full fee can be deducted from your savings even if you are still stuck with your debts."

The drop-out rate for debt settlement services is very high; a study of one company’s customers revealed that 60 percent had cancelled within 5 to 6 months after starting debt settlement. Claims for success rates can be very misleading because they often don’t take into consideration the cost of the fees consumer pay or the size of those debts that are never settled.

The NCLC is an excellent source for those of us that don't have much money and don't know how the credit and financial systems are set-up (and how they're predisposed to bleed us).

Who Needs Time?

There is a great article written by John Cox over at Wired's Epicenter blog.

My wife's always teasing me because I've got this blog (plus another), I've got a myspace account (what a waste - almost as bad as monster.com), facebook, twitter, linkedin, academia.edu, and then a wordpress blog and fan page on Facebook for our reading group. What's the point of all this self-promotion? Right now, really very little actually. But, as this Epicenter article points-out, understanding how these platforms work and developing attention from the right people makes all the difference. These are ways of manipulating your relationship with the world virtually to effect changes in actuality.

What the article doesn't discuss, and maybe it isn't the place of that blog, is the kind of relationships that the people who voted for Brown. Who had the time to get to know him?

In some ways I wonder if this was an exciting opportunity for many people in Massachusetts but campaigning and public service isn't something that many want to do for sustained amounts of time? Maybe not - maybe the shame would be that so many people could become involved so rapidly and decisively and then not be allowed to continue to interface with the political process. That's been my overall experience with the Obama Administration's web portal.

Rather than a means to participate in democracy, the Internet continues to be hamstrung by those in a position to do so (RIAA, NSA, AT&T, et al.) I've been told that voting is mandatory in Australia and to make sure there is compliance, people can vote very easily with a proximity to polling place that would put the U.S. to shame. The U.S., miraculously, can develop technology that allows me to do all my banking virtually (there isn't even a bank branch in my state), I can bank nearly anywhere in the world. Yet some how we can't get a little voter card that would work like an ATM card? C'mon.

Commodification of the Self

In preparation for tomorrow's essay at The Avant Guardian I'll share a little something I learned about.

Prior to the 14th century social stratification in Europe was of three forms: those who worked (the peasants), those who prayed (the clergy), and those who fought (the aristocracy). And this was all-good. For some reason I had this other image of the peasants as basically struggling for millenia just wishing they could shrug off the yoke of repression, getting burninated on by Trogdor. Now I have to revisit the image of the peasant as portrayed in Monty Python's Holy Grail.

All three categories were of a Great Chain of Being which was an attempt to understand how all the universe was, in essence, gradations of God. At the bottom of this ladder was the earth itself, which had only the property of existence, in the center was humanity (between the angels and the animals), and at the top was God. All of reality fit within a gradation of godliness. This would become undone, however, during the vicious cycle of famine, warfare, and plague that obliterated most of Western Europe. In the wake of lived apocalypse, people began seeking positive expression of God's existence, this pursuit of positive knowledge lead to the era now called the Enlightenment.

As you may recall I've been discussing the aesthetics of personhood over at TAG: that "who I am" is is an accumulation of responses to traumatic events, that "who I am" is possibly an agglomeration of pieces of other examples of who I could be, and that a central component to the currently-developing economic relationship called spectaclism is the exploitation of a sense of dissolution in celebrity and anonymity.

Tomorrow we're going to extend that conversation a bit and discuss someone in this video:

The Militarization of Intellectual Capital in Spectaclist Economics

I'm in day two of a gnarly cold and am just laying in bed. Thanks to a good friend I have a movie to watch and thanks to Hulu I watched a great documentary, RiP! A Remix Manifesto.

Also, the Pentagon released it's budget for the next year and its Black Ops budget is around $56 billion. You can read a little about that here. Also, check out Trevor Paglen's books. Paglen was recently here in Atlanta for a talk sponsored by ART PAPERS (where I am interning).

While a documentary about copyright vs. copy left and this black budget may seem unrelated, I think that if you watch RiP you'll see that they're not so far removed at all.

As one former Clinton Administration discusses it, the U.S. in the 80s and 90s made a serious movement away from domestic manufacturing initiatives and changed its focus to developing intellectual capital in the country. The thinking was that the U.S. would outsource all of these manufacturing jobs overseas (where they'd be made cheaper - a boon to the owners of manufacturing interests, but a bane to the working poor of the U.S.), and with this movement overseas the U.S. work force would be reeducated so as to create things abstractly. For this to work, the developing nations where these manufacturing jobs went would have to adopt intellectual property rights like what the U.S. has today.

This black budget is primarily accounting for the most advanced research (intellectual capital) in the world; although it also is accounting for the cost of torturing suspected people that the U.S. has kidnapped (such as Omar Deghayes) as well. The militarization of intellectual capital is becoming a reality (check it out) and I suspect it is a symptom of a structural change that is the result of that shift from capitalism the way Marx described it to spectaclism today.

Poverty in the Suburbs, Earned Income Tax Credit

According to the Institute for Financial Literacy, the average person filing for bankruptcy in 2006 was:
white, male, between the ages of 35 and 44, making less than $30,000 a year.

The official beginning of the recession was recorded in December, 2007 (although the feeling of being in recession was felt in 2006 by many); the Institute for Financial Literacy's follow-up on who filed bankruptcy in 2008 found the same group from 2006 was filing for bankruptcy - but that there has been a sharp shift into the middle class. Among the groups they found with the greatest rates of increase were the college educated, self-employed, making more than $40,000 a year.

Let's combine this with the Brookings Institute's study on the surge of poverty in the suburbs:

• 7.2 million jobs have been shed from the economy since December, 2007
• the majority of these job losses were in "decentralized" (not concentrated in industrial or city centers) i.e. real estate, construction, retail; and are part of a greater trend since the 1990s of the suburbanization of the poor
• low-density "exurbs" have been particularly hard hit because these communities don't have the same infrastructural safety nets that have become structural in the city. This can be seen in the use of food stamps: although there are more poor people living in the suburbs, only 32% of suburban families received food stamps vs. 39% in the primary cities they surround.

And, finally, lets briefly jextapose these micro-level economic indicators with what the ruling class had to say in Davos, Switzerland:

• Government debt has reached historical levels for peace time in a number of advanced economies.
• With a few exceptions, the larger advanced economies have been the most affected by fiscal crises. According to the IMF, by 2014, the average debt-to-GDP ratio of advanced economies that are members of the G20 is expected to climb from the 2007 pre-crisis level of 78% to 118%.
• According to the same IMF analysis, between 2007 and 2014 the average debt-to-GDP ratio of emerging countries that are members of the G20 will never exceed 40%.
• The U.S. will continue to experience plant foreclosures and the the bankruptcy of small and medium size enterprises, one legacy of this may be a legacy of underemployment in the U.S. as there are 9 million part-time workers today seeking full-time employment (myself included, y'all).

Since it is tax time again, I think it's appropriate to remind the readership that there is no reason to pay someone to help you prepare your taxes. This is particularly a problem for the most vulnerable section of the economy: the working poor. The Nation has a fine article discussing the problem of tax refund advance loans here.

If you are concerned that you won't be able to file your own taxes or are having a difficulty with your tax preparation, please consider using a VITA site, the Atlanta Prosperity Campaign helps working families find many sources of support.

I've discussed the Atlanta Prosperity Campaign before. A primary tool in their belt is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a refundable federal income tax credit for low to moderate income working individuals and families. The EITC is an effective tool for asset-building among the working poor:

[T]he Internal Revenue Service estimates the EITC participation rate for eligible individuals ranges from 75% to 80% Thus, increasing the EITC participation rate for Atlanta families by a mere 10% (7,934) could result in over $15 million in additional benefits.

Good luck.

Poverty Is Claiming the Suburbs

The image of the city as the place where the poor lives has to be changed because this masks the rapidly-growing poverty in the suburbs, where poverty will continue to become a pernicious problem. Over the past ten years I've said to myself that the nouveau-riche suburbs of Atlanta are going to be the Golden Ghettoes of the near future. If we're lucky we'll see more areas like the international sections of Buford Highway in Chamblee: alive with diversity (some of the best eating in the city is here), but clearly starved of critical infrastructure (this should be the most pedestrian-friendly area in the city, but it's a six-lane highway lined with apartments).

According to the new Brookings Institute report, suburban areas in the U.S. grew at a rate of 25% between 2000 and 2008, this is five times faster than the rate in primary cities. By 2008, one-third of the nation's poor lived in the suburbs.

We have to keep in mind that this is data as of 2008, we're still awaiting official unemployment data for 2009. I've written a bit about poverty in the U.S. here (a central concern for me).

Below I am embedding a video featuring David Shipler. I wanted to link to a Nightline episode (On the Edge: America's Working Poor, 2004) but I can't find a link. Their report was based on Shipler's work for the New York Times so it's like going to the source in some ways.

Something's Cookin'

I'm writing my new piece for The Avant Guardian, it will be available this Friday.

It's going to be good, I hope you like it.

It's about Lil' Wayne.

Listen up:

Poverty, Healthcare, & Agriculture

To somewhat flesh-out some of what I was saying yesterday about how the poverty level is determined, today I am sharing some great reads.

My friend from the AccionUSA days, Tina Valverde, pointed me to a great article asking, "Why are libertarian rightists defending a dysfunctional, state-engineered food system?"

While I'm not at all interested in Libertarian politics (I'm vehemently opposed often), it's a great article chock-full of excellent links to articles offering a history of food subsidies and pointing out the unintended harms of maintaining this corporate welfare.

An oldy, but goody, from the CATO Institute presents a case against Archer Daniels Midland (ack! two links to libertarian-aligned articles! what strange bedfellows).

Then there is this great article form the New Yorker from last year that discusses the intersections of health care policy and agricultural policy.

And to be fair, here's a public relations piece "a farmer in Missouri who will spend the next 6 weeks on a combine." But the piece reeks of lobbyist-talking points and slicker than subsidized-corn oil.

Responding to Thinking About Creativity

Thanks for reading, Matt.

If we're attached to the idea that everyone in a society should be able to voice their opinion, then it matters if they feel their voice is their own.

You ask, "if we want people to buy us...what's wrong with that; what does that really mean?" Now working with refugees I can assure you that millions of people are trafficked across the U.S. and the globe, as sex workers, as migrant workers. They are slaves by another name.

While you might be able to afford the idea that some people would want to be considered as simply a commodity to be purchased, no different from a sack of flour, I can assure you millions of people don't enjoy that luxury. Here I will quote the International Rescue Committee (where I am currently doing an internship):

Anywhere from 700,000 to 4 million persons worldwide are trafficked across or within national borders every year. Virtually every country is affected by trafficking, whether capitalized by traffickers as a source, transit or destination location. Generating roughly $7 billion to $10 billion annually, human trafficking is the fastest growing global criminal industry, with high profits, low risks, minimal capital investment, and a "commodity" that can be used over and over again.

If we're reduced to "just commodities sold in a market" then we are faced with conditions that would undermine the validity of democratic or republican representation.

And, let's face it, some sort of Libertarian utopia à la Ayn Rand would have to condone this burgeoning commodities market above described, and the existence of this market eats away at a notion of a commonwealth like an acid.

While it's true we might reduce all of life to quantiles of energy exchange, this would ignore and abnegate the other 98% of life that is qualified by how these exchanges occur. To reduce living to a quantifiable exchange is to literally live without meaning.

Why eat anything other than high-fructose corn syrup if the purpose of eating is simply to facilitate the exchange of electrons? By the way, what's been among the most subsidized industries in the U.S. for going into 40 years now? Corn. Guess how the Federal Poverty level is determined - by how much it costs to acquire calories. Guess what the poorest people eat in the U.S. That's right, food slathered in high-fructose corn syrup, because it's cheap.

This is what Marx stated; in Capital, vol. 1:
"As use-values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange-values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use-value. If we leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labor."

Why would a capitalist ever want to eradicate protections if it were possible to ensure that some portion of the population was always willing to be sold on the marketplace so as to escape the wretchedness of life unprotected by the commonwealth?

Read a lil' bit about Haiti, and how the U.S. almost got Canada

That's what I've been doing today.

It all started with Žižek's review of Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood, here.

That got me to reading a review by Michael Deibert, here. Pretty informative, but not sure that Deibert was considering Hallward's thinking (he was considering Hallward's historicizing).

I wanted to read Hallward's reply, but had a hell of a time finding it (the Monthly Review wasn't very revealing).

So I read Deibert's reply to Hallward's reply, here, hoping that would be informative. Sorta.

Then, I finally found Hallward's reply to Deibert, here. This wasn't particularly informative.

But this was - Hallward's review of Dupuy's book about Aristide.

So, now I feel like I have a sense of some of the Aristide years. I remember as a kid hearing on CNN that burning tires were employed; so I got confused when the U.S. was once again going after Aristide in Haiti. Now I get why I was confused:

Aristide was elected in 1991, a popularly elected man that seemed to juice the poor. He was deposed in a coup in 1991 by the military (backed by the West). He was reelected in 2001 and deposed in a coup d'etat during 2004. Apparently he's still very popular among the people.

This points out an important feature of Haitian politics: there are two majorities - the qualitative (intellectuals and powered elite), and the quantitative (the poor).

Haiti became independent upon a slave rebellion. This terrified the U.S. (because the U.S. had millions of slaves) and so the U.S. did not recognize Haiti until 1864 (and the Civil War).

France insisted that Haiti had to pay compensation for all the freed slaves. The last payment was in 1947 and this was made possible by loans from the U.S. that are still being paid. Hmm. Don't worry, the U.S. (officially) occupied Haiti from 1915 until 1934.

Back to the Civil War.

The last surrender of the U.S. Civil War, by the way, was in 1865. In Britain.

The CSS Shenandoah had been cruising the Pacific Ocean and sinking Union whaling ships for about a year. The U.S. sued the British for their double-crossing us, this was called the Alabama Claims.

In these claims the U.S. requested damages of $2 billion, or surrendering Canada to the U.S.

The result of this arbitration was to establish a precedent for international arbitration and the codification of public international law.

Exchange-Value in Marx's Capital, Vol. 1

Not feeling too well today and I'm not really able to think (which is an odd feeling). So, I'm posting something I started to write about in November. Just a quick note.

I'm watching and reading along with David Harvey's seminar on Karl Marx's Capital, vol. 1 and we've just come to page 127 (which is actually only at the beginning of the the book) where we are thinking through the exchange value of commodities. Harvey says something to the effect of the commodity is a bearer of value but value is not some kernel within the commodity that if we dissected the the commodity we would see why it has this value in exchange; in effect, we could keep exchanging and exchanging, and so on. This got me thinking about One Red Paperclip. Where a guy does, in fact, exchange a commodity over and over again until he gets himself a house (and a book deal).

The Commodification of Memory or Learning the Appropriate Use of Appropriation

It's a fascinating question, what are the politics of touch in spectacular economic relations? A touch here seems to mean the use of photographs of people, when we edit the photograph (to, say, make it a profile picture on Facebook), are we committing some form of violence? The Department of Biological Flow asks in the final, "dear you, did i engage this particular politics of touch based on prior flesh relation?"

I have it on good authority that a certain Edward Cullen living in the Cascadia region stated that the human memory is like a sieve. So...yeah, prior flesh arrangements have to be invoked for this sort of kinetic extension.

This is probably because we've entered a new phase of economic development, something that Michael Hardt had mentioned at his evening lecture last summer. Marx saw a shift from renting (with serfs doing the bidding of the land owner), to broad ownership/entrepreneurialism (I am Capital, and So Can You!), and now a seeming hybrid of these two modes.

As evidence of this shifting mode, what Guy Debord called the spectaclist economy, consider the current Intellectual Property rights debacle. In part this cannot occur without the concomitant rise of multinational corporations. In order for these to promulgate there has to be the transmission of certain basic ground rules: this factory needs to be filled with employees, those employees need to use these machines with these techniques, etc. So this was a question of cultural pedagogy. You gotta teach the people that are getting there clocks cleaned how to operate within this context. To this end there has been a somewhat one-sided transmission of what is called entertainment.

That's why, when you go to the developing world, kids are wearing "Coke Is It!" t-shirts and can quote Ice-T songs, and have copies of Jungle Fever (but still on VHS). There seems to have been a slow ebbing of the hegemony of Hollywood, not to say that it's isn't still critically important in the world. But as further evidence, consider the soft power push of Japan. Over the past three decades Japan has become the second largest economy (but now China has overtaken them, last year) in the world and subsequently has the second largest entertainment industry in the world. Subsequently, Japanese entertainment has become de rigeur for the youth in a way that I think most did not anticipate in the U.S.
(By the way, the photo on the left here is from an article in Foreign Policy by Carolyn O'Hara and it's pretty amazing.)

The key moment for this "Turning Japanese" phase was the battle over VCRs. VCR technology was pioneered by the Japanese (Thomas P. Kasulis has a great story on how the Japanese engineers were able to accomplish what the U.S. could not). Broadcast television in the late 70s and early 80s did not want the VCR available to the U.S. public, (in no small part, I'm sure, enhanced with xenophobia and racism, but also) because then people would no longer be locked into leasing their attention to the tv at the times that TV advertisers have promised their sponsors. The VCR would be a serious abrogation of this power that broadcasters had (the control of the spectacular). Of course the VCR was allowed to develop in the media ecosystem, but not without being appropriated in such a way as to benefit TV as much as possible.

Today we must consider the Internet in the same manner. There is the faux-problem of piracy and similarly today we've got the faux-problem of the Great Fire Wall of China. The Olympics in Beijing in 2008 made it clear that the West was more than happy to include China in the Game (and what was that most popular trope from that most spectacular of the spectaclist economic relations that in the U.S. we call hip hop? oh yeah, "don't hate the player, hate the Game.") The real problem, as we see today with Google, was not access to information, but rather that the established Internet authorities needed to have the access to the market. It should be no surprise that at the same time when Baidu (the indigenous Google) signals the ability to overwhelm Google, the Internet is now going to be available in languages that are not based on the Roman alphabet. While there might be high-wire-type espionage involved in Google v. China; we have another example of the spectaclist economy in the acquisition of Friendster. Remember Friendster? Yeah, it's huge in Southeast Asia, apparently.

The commodification of your memory. This is the problem with piracy and with social media. As the spectaclist economy develops we will continue to delineate what is the appropriate use of appropriation. Perhaps we have a precursor in the French language and the practice of vergonha? While in France this led to near-linguicide, the same won't be true for digital piracy. The Internet requires this free transmission, not because "content is king" but because the Internet sine qua non, as Debord stated it, "The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification [....] it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness [....] the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation."

A Look at the New York Times

Tonight we had an excellent meeting of the Poncey-Highlands Readgin Group where we discussed our readings of Breton's first "Manifesto of Surrealism" as well as the first chapter of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.

We can see a moment from the Debord text played-out today in the New York Times' "Most Popular" section. In the article "Multicultural Critical Theory. At Business School?" we read that business students need

to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions. [...]Learning how to think critically — how to imaginatively frame questions and consider multiple perspectives — has historically been associated with a liberal arts education, not a business school curriculum, so this change represents something of a tectonic shift for business school leaders. Mr. Martin even describes his goal as a kind of “liberal arts M.B.A.”

Reading I can't help but think of Debord's line in §25, "The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible. " And then further in §26, "The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the world." You might have an MBA, but you're still going to have your clock cleaned by those that exploit the rest of us.

Also, I'd like to address something in another article in today's NYT, this time in another article "Race Riots Grip Italian Town, and Mafia Is Suspected."

In this article we learn that Africans are being illegally trafficked into Italy so as to work in the orchards, picking fruit. This is a job seen as beneath the average Italian today, according to the article. Apparently an undisclosable number of immigrants have been picked up by the Italian Authorities and sent to detention centers. The situation for these immigrants, according to human rights workers in Italy is not dissimilar from slavery and these Italian Authorities have been using bull dozers to raze the encampments where these "semi-slaves" lived.

The article breezily then reports, "It was not entirely clear if all the immigrants left willingly for the detention centers, or if some were forced to leave."

I can answer that for you: they were forced.

Anytime the phrase "semi-slavery" is used to describe the lives of those at the bottom of an economic system and bulldozers are employed to raze these semi-slaves' "encampments" - that means the entire society there is blatantly using coercive maneuvers to get what they want. Those Africans have the two forms of freedom Marx outlined in Capital, vol. 1: they are free to use their bodies' abilities to labor and so enter, freely, contracts to sell their labor-capacity; but, they are also free of control of the conditions under which they will labor.

Just sayin'.

Society of the Spectacle: Toward the Postmodern

My long-time buddy, Ryland Johnson, was kind enough to respond to my recent posting on Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 1 and what follows here is a reply to him.

Kudzu Kongzi is primarily a space for me to germinate my thinking. So I greatly benefit from your input on what is written as I am not an authority on any of it. Below is my reply to Ryland

Thanks for reading, Ryland.

There are some great things in your response, thanks. I'll only just briefly address only a few, not because I disagree with you, but only to kind of elaborate a little more on why I said some of these things here.

First, the blog's really just an off-the-cuff response to what I read today. The blog here serves in some capacity as a place holder for my thinking; but when folks, such as yourself, supplement this with your thinking I get greatly enriched. So thanks, again!

As for invocation of Dasein above: yes. I said it up there, only for the most superficial associative reason - because Dasein is an historic dasein and Debord seems to want to include some of Heidegger's thinking in §11. I agree with you, I think, that Debord, if he writes any more like this later in the book (I'm only reading Chapter 1 here), he's going to have a problem talking about Dasein in a proper way.

This should be said also, about Debord: in reading his works and what I've read about him as a person, I don't get the sense that he's a thorough scholar nor is he particularly interested in giving credit where credit is due.

As for Žižek: yes. I'm sure that there are many other people between 1967 and the rock star Žižek of the past decade, that have written about this advertisement stuff. The obvious place to start, since both Žižek and Debord are very open about their affinity for him is Lacan. I've not climbed the Mt. Doom of Lacan as yet.

At this point, with the minimal exposure to the other SI texts, and largely based on Lefebvre's account in that interview I've linked to here (from the journal October (79), Winter 1997) I'm not sure that the Situationists really had a good idea about the situations they wanted to achieve. In many ways the movement sounds like a collection of very creative, interesting, and angry people. The anger probably fueled their kinetic behavior, but it also probably contributed to the brevity of their moment.

One avenue I'd like to explore more thoroughly would be to better understand something that Ranciére was telling us this past summer: that there is a disconnect between Lyotard and (probably have to include Hal Foster, Bois, et al.) Baudrillard's account of the postmodern and the avant-garde of the early 20th century.

Ranciére seemed to be suggesting that the claims to postmodernity in Lyotard and Baudrillard are problematic in that they fail to account for the work that had been done in montage, surrealism, perhaps futurism, and so on.

So, part of my motivation to read Bréton with Debord is to consider the latter's inheritance from the former and to ask whether Debord has offered something more innovative in light of that inheritance. And also, to some extent, I want to apply what I'm learning in that Harvey lecture course on Capital. This last item is really not remarkable since nearly everyone worth reading from France during the 20th century was a (Neo)Marxist, so there is no surprise to see whole chunks of Marx inserted in sections and just presupposed as true. Were I better read in Marx I might argue some of the finer points of how Capital gets used, but I'm not an authority at all.

A place that I really should develop is at the end there, in talking about the current economic crisis. It's really too simplistic to accept the often-invoked, and largely class-war inspired, trope that it's because too many people were flipping properties that global capitalism started stuttering. That's just not true. What's seems to me more true is that most people on Wall Street don't understand what Value is.

But, beyond this intuition that Debord might be able to help us understand the moment, I'm not sure I've got more than a tenuous gleam. I'd say 30% of me suspects Debord might, but 70% of me thinks that Debord was a bad student and a loudmouth. Here's to learning that I'm wrong.

(Economic) Notes on Society of the Spectacle

So let's finish-up the first chapter, ね？

We got to §21 the other day. But I'd like to assert some things that I did not in that previous posting: Chapter 1 of Society of the Spectacle is an economic text.

1. Debord here is announcing this new term he calls "the spectacle." This is important to keep in mind because the temptation is there to misconstrue the term. Thus we would read this text as Debord as making value judgements, something to the effect of him saying contemporary society is simply being spectacular and indulgent. What he seems to be doing in this first chapter is defining terms. Thus, when he states, in §21, "The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion." he is not describing either religion as illusory in a pejorative sense nor that the process that has led to this contemporary social arrangement that he earlier defined as "the spectacle" (in §4, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. Or also in §24, "the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of 'mass media' which are its most glaring superficial manifestation....")
   
2. Debord seems to be building from the presupposition that the reader has also read Marx's Capital, vol. 1 at a minimum. Over and over again we get definitions and phrases lifted from Capital.
   

I think it's important to mention this because Marx's book was an attempt to analyze and explain a new social reality whose, though it has been developing over centuries, functioning continues to be mysterious.

In §7 we are reminded of the fundamental alienation that accompanies the mass production which capitalism requires.

With §11 we sense that Debord is attempting to unite Marx with Heidegger's Dasein, "the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught."[itals original] Or perhaps thrown?

This is a text that attempts to describe the fundamental nature of all human interactions in the late capitalist period, as such this text must discuss economics. Whereas Marx sought to explain the dialectical nature of commodity generation and defines capitalism as the movement of commodities as capitalism, Debord's spectacle (qualified in §1 by the statement, "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.") is the, "autonomous movement of the non-living" (§2). What is the spectacle? "It is no more than the economy developing for itself." (§16) It is, "the main production of present-day society." (§15) Marx saw the commodification of the proletariat's labor and the commodification of money itself; Debord attempts something similar, "The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist."

Debord gives us a brief genealogy of how we came to be in the spectaclist economy, and he does this by sketching a shift in social ontology:

The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual "having" must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. (§17)

What are the symptoms of this new arrangement of social relations? Not simply advertisements for the commodities of capitalism, but advertisements as something more than suggestions. Advertisements as rules:

I think that Žižek has spoken about this in several places, this injunction to, Enjoy!" Debord puts it this way in §25, "The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible." This echoes a theme in §6 where the we are told that the spectacle is "the affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corrolary consumption." For an elaboration on this affirmation of the choice already made, consider George Ritzer's McDonaldization of Society. Here's a great site for all your McDonaldization needs.

§26 provides a summation and reiteration of the alienation principle from Marx, but Debord extends this alienation, as nothing can escape this process, "The success of the economic system of separation is the proletariatization of the world."

For this proletariatization to be possible, the consummation of the process of rationalization must occur. Once every task had been made automated and efficiency achieved, the worker would be liberated from the workplace, free from toiling in exploitative environments. With no employees to exploit, the managers would be liberated as well. Lefebvre, in an excellent interview discussing the origins of the Situationists, states that his Critique of Everyday Life was inspired by a science-fiction story wherein all the humans have killed themselves because they have nothing to do after the robots took over their work, leaving dogs to exploit the robots. Debord finds this liberation from work suspect:

[T]his inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself a product of its rationality. [...] Thus the present "liberation from
labor," the increase of leisure, is in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result. §27

§s29-34 reiterate, once more, the alienation inherent in capitalist production. But where Marx saw it as perverse, this freeing of the serfs to enter contracts, but free from the ability to control the means of production; Debord repeatedly emphasizes that today nobody is free from the spectaclist economy:

The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of "lonely crowds." The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely. §26

Further still, "The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion is mainly the expansion of this specific industrial production." §32 The chapter ends with simple statement, "The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image." §34 

(remember this show on A&E? Oh, yeah there was that show on Discovery also) 

Is this how we arrived at the current economic crisis? One of the principle causes of the current meltdown of global capital is that the American real estate market tanked. This, then meant that all that value that Wall Street had created in the last few years immediately evaporated. How? Value, as Marx stated in Capital (1867), is manifested socially-necessary labor-time. You get enough of these suburbanites buying these properties and mistaking the menu for the meal, and, poof....

Reading Society of the Spectacle

I'm preparing for next Monday, when the Poncey-Highland(s) Reading Group is meeting to discuss Andre Breton's (First) "Manifesto of Surrealism" (1924) as well as Chapter 1 from Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967).

In my reading I am coming across some ideas that I want to put out to the internetz as well as keep me in the practice of daily writing:

In Debord's watershed treatise we read, "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles."(§1) Okay, so keep in mind that modern conditions of production must prevail in order for spectacles to exist. First and foremost we read this and have to recognize that Marx and Weber have offered authoritative analyses of the capitalist mode of production, which is the dominant mode of production over the past 400-500 years. The worker in the factory is doubly alienated: first, because the worker is no longer a craftsman (building an entire cabinet, say) but one worker on an assembly line and so makes only one section of a product - the worker is alienated from the very thing that is made all day at the factory; second, in order for the factory to operate it must attract workers from far away to come work there and so there is a rise in urban living (where, contrary to Cheers, nobody knows your name) rather than the previous mode of living in small towns where everyone knows everybody else. As Marx points out in Capital, vol.1, (Ben Fowkes translation, Penguin Classics, 280) the worker is doubly free as well: 1) he freely owns his body and so can enter labor contracts, and 2) he is free of control of the means of producing. He is free to slave-away at that factory.

Debord goes on to say, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." (§4) He further clarifies in the next section that the spectacle is a Weltanschauung, a comprehensive world view(ing). Leo Apostel has said that a world view should have seven elements (thanks, wikipedia!):

1. ontology - a descriptive model of the world
2. an explanation of the world
3. a futurology - answering the question, "where are we going?"
4. Values, answers to ethical quetions
5. A theory of action, answering the question, "How do we attain our goals?"
6. An epistemology - what is true/false
7. An etiology - the building blocks that then answer the question, "What are our origins?"

Then, in section 7, he reiterates that the spectacle that he is defining in this text is not a decoration or a phantasm, it, "is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption....The spectacle is also the permanent presence...since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside modern production." That is, since the mode of production today requires a long supply chain involving supplies and people from all over the globe interacting in a ballet that they are not even aware of on a daily basis (I don't have any clue who is the exploited worker in the Hanes factory in Cambodia that made my hooded sweatshirt, or who drove the truck that delivered it to the Target store down the street, nor do I know the person that acted as the cashier when I bought it, let alone who is responsible for making sure that the debited amount comes from my bank account and not someone else's).

This leads him to say that "Separation is itself part of the unity of the world..." (§7) Which is not too controversial a hypothesis today to say about the State since we've got Althusser discussing it at the same time as Debord in his "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", but shortly after Philip Abrams, in his essay "Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State" states it so:

It is first and foremost an exercise in legitimation - and what is being legitimated is, we may assume, something which if seen directly and as itself would be illegitimate, an unacceptable domination. Why else all the legitimation-work? The state, in sum, is a bid to elicit support for or tolerance of the insupportable and intolerable by presenting them as something other than themselves, namely, legitimate, disinterested domination. (1988) Journal of Historical Sociology. (1)1. 76.

It would seem fair to paraphrase Debord here such, "the spectacle is an ideological activity in the same sense that the State is." But of course Debord is talking about something bigger than just the State and politics, he's trying to put his hands around the whole magilla. "Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides." (§8) This is exactly how reality tv works, isn't it? The people on the show are fully aware that they are being recorded, we are fully aware that they are aware.

We've come to see these last 10-20 years as an age of irony, but perhaps the real irony has escaped us, as Debord states, "This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society." Thus, no matter how skeezy we might think the people on these shows are, we are complicit in maintaining and facilitating these conditions that produce these shows. "The spectacle presents itself as something... indisputable and inaccessible. [...] The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply..." (§12) And then further still, "all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it." (§17)

This spectacular production that society has become is, again, all encompassing, including the overcoding of the religious. "The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base." While this may not serve as proof of his theorizing, we certainly can't help but nod when reading the science-fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law of Prediction, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Now imagine having an iPhone 40 years ago ans ask yourself if it wouldn't seem to be, effectively, magic.

Now here's what really got me writing today:

"To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep." (§21) This section has two items that got me excited: first is the phrasing of social necessity (because this is a key phrase in Marx's Capital, vol.1) and, second because this seems to be a critique of Breton's "Manifesto of Surrealism":

[D]reams give every evidence of being continuous and show signs of organization. Memory alone arrogates to itself the right to excerpt from dreams, to ignore the transitions, and to depict for us rather a series of dreams than the dream itself. [...] When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers? I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers[....] Can't the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life? (4)

Is Debord pointing-out that what Breton failed to appreciate in his revolutionary writing was a proper economic understanding? I've fixated on this social necessity phrasing because Marx claims that Value is the coming together of use-value and exchange-value in the form of socially-necessary labor time. It is in this way that commodities are at all possible. Without this socially-decided necessity commodities are only products, and without commodities there is no capitalism.