Capitalism

India Revisited

I’ve decided to take my distrust of linear narratives to heart and not care about the backlog of comments I want to transform into posts. So, I skip my follow up on Oslo waterfront development (which has the makings of a seriously juicy update), my thoughts on the recent conference of Critical Heritage, backtrack from the incredible meeting I had with Equations in Bangalore today, and revisit two days ago, when I arrived back in India after a one and half year hiatus. Forgive me as I descend into typical semi-nauseating, self-reflective travel writing and muse a bit over my reintroduction to India.

As I walked the seven kilometers to the Bangalore City Railway Station I realized just how much India had changed me, not in that om shanti kind of way, but in terms of perspective, outlooks, and, of course, urban planning. For example, it was India that taught me the pointlessness of dichotomies. Those moments walking in the street, when an ox pulling a man on a flatbed wagon overtakes you, only to be immediately eclipsed by a bloated SUV or seeing a woman bent over, sweeping the entrance to an upscale shopping mall with a broom made of panni no longer affect me as they once did. Even as I write this, I feel slightly uncomfortable articulating these descriptions; just the act of writing them encourages me to reiterate dichotomies of development. You see, they aren’t. They just are. So while these encounters still make me pause, I no longer muse over what we obsessively call developed and undeveloped. As far as I’m concerned there is no development, no advancement, only change.

Before I came to India I had very marked opinions on things, things like the informal economy and capitalism—even recycling. It was black and white in my opinion. The informal economy disfavors women (as in a woman who informally works in family shop is very unlikely to receive pay) or that capitalism exploits marginal workers. Recycling should be practiced as it is in Germany and Switzerland—organized, state regulated, three bins in all public places. Although I might still have such opinions, I recognize their limits and their flaws. The informal economy is more welcoming than the formal because jobs are created not from the top down but from the bottom up. Indeed the relationship between formal and informal is neither dichotomous nor parasitic. The informal organizes around the formal’s shortcomings, for example informal buses that provide services to people who do not live on formal transit lines.

Not having a state-structured recycling program gives way to a highly efficient informal system of recycling where the value of discarded objects is subjectively considered. It is more labor intensive which, in turn, creates more jobs.

In both these examples, it’s not a question of development that I want to consider, but a question of rights and a question respect. The problem with the informal recycling structure is that this work falls to the lowest of socio-economic classes who often have little alternative. The problem with this informal labor is that these workers have no job security, no assurance of health benefits.

Capitalism in India seems to offer more outlets for job diversity than previous models. Now, I feel like I’m about to shoot myself when I write this, but subjective experience seems to suggest that capitalism means young people have more alternatives for employment than those of their parents. Let me briefly muse over capitalism of the worst kind—multinational corporate domination. When IT software companies come to Chennai and Bangalore they often employ women who might otherwise struggle to find work outside the family business. By offering such jobs, new freedoms, such as having a personal income, are created. True, like many people in India, these women may share their salary with the family; but there is an undeniable sense of worth that comes from receiving an income. This in turn encourages women to cultivate an identity that might have otherwise been impossible. In this case I would argue that gender stereotypes are both reimagined and reaffirmed—particularly through the encouragement of consumerist behaviors. For example, public space can still be very gendered in India. Malls—the very embodiment of Western capitalism—may be the only space in which such women feel comfortable expressing their identity.

In short, India disrupted any possible conclusions I could make about the world around me. In the past, I blamed Deconstruction for making me into a frustratingly relative thinker, but my time in Chennai sent me adrift upon an expansive sea of theoretical doubt.

The second thing India taught me was to think about what the word infrastructure means, what it is and how we use it. Living in a gridded society, it is easy to take infrastructure for granted. While it’s impossible not to marvel at sights such as the Brooklyn Bridge or strain your neck as you search for the top of buildings, in cities like Chennai, thinking about infrastructure is overwhelming…where does one start? The mosquito problem in this city is so intense because of all the stagnant water. But how does one lay a drainage system in a city that is already built? Again, the temptation is to present this question of infrastructure in terms of developed/undeveloped but I think to do so is to grossly misrepresent and simplify something of almost beautiful complexity.

People are a relatively efficient species. When there is perceived to be a lack, people will compensate in some way. They will create their own sewers, their own electric grid. This is why I keep coming back to India’s urban areas. Because it challenges me to rethink process, change and human nature.

Oslo Under Construction

Europe has many crane cities (Brussels immediately comes to mind) but, as I pulled into Oslo Sentralstasjon, I wasn’t expecting to see that horizon. Yet similar to many other major cities (e.g. London, Amsterdam, New York), Oslo is focusing on waterfront redevelopment. Also similar, the city seems committed to predominate global waterfront ideologies (e.g. young, successful, urban). In London and New York this is also called gentrification, speculative real estate, gated communities…. But can I assume the same in Oslo?

It’s well known that Scandinavian countries have some of the most expensive standards of living; this is justified because it’s not only the highest standard, it’s theoretically accessible to all. At least, that’s the stereotype. But last night, as I walked out onto the balcony of my temporary apartment—a housing project in the ‘immigrant’ neighborhood of Gronland—and looked at those skeletal structures I couldn’t help but wonder if Norway’s welfaresocialistcapitalist something made this waterfront redevelopment different from, say, Williamsburg.

During my short, 36 hours here, I’ve come to think that just because Norway has some of the highest taxes in the world does not mean it’s any less capitalist, or any more egalitarian than the rest of the world—and the same can be said for their waterfront development projects.

I write this as roughly 30 percent of public sector employees go on strike for the first time in nearly three decades. Roads are shut down, the airport has no security, and I cannot get into the Architecture Museum. The strikes are in protest of the government’s decision to increase public sector wages by 3.75 percent. Although 3.75 percent sounds pretty good to me, union officials argue that this increase doesn’t match average private sector wage increases, which are thought to be closer to 4.3 percent.

Many people I’ve spoken to here say that Norway remains unaffected by the global economic downturn. Maybe that’s why 3.75 percent is offensive. Certainly being unaffected by the recession helps explain why these cranes are active (as opposed to Williamsburg, where they remained static for nearly two years). It also helps explain why Oslo is investing in a second major waterfront redevelopment (Akerbrygge being the first, with an expected completion in 2014)—because there’s a demand for it. Quoting the city’s Master Plan “Recent years have seen a growing preference for dwelling close to the city centre, one reason being that young adults represent a large demand group. This group has less need for large dwellings and outdoor areas than families with children,”(10).

I’m told this waterfront construction includes over 1200 new housing units (this is aside from all the housing construction in Akerbrygge). That is a huge housing increase for any redevelopment project, but particularly huge for a city whose total population is less than a million (over if one includes the metropolitan area). Population projections done by the national government anticipate Oslo’s population to grow from roughly 599,000 (2011) to 786,000 by 2030. This growth is associated with a surge of immigration and children born to immigrant parents. Now, I cannot say this with certainty, but my gut tells me these architectural marvels along the waterfront are not some kind of welcome gesture to Norway’s future citizens.

Also in the city’s Master Plan it is explained: “responsibility for meeting the housing needs of particularly vulnerable groups is delegated to the city districts,”(11). In other words, this responsibility does not fall upon the city itself. I was unable to find any documentation (I’m restricted to English) about what responsibility the waterfront district (I believe it’s Sorenga) feels toward vulnerable groups and inclusive housing policies but, based on my gut response to the aesthetic, I would say very little. Furthermore, I’m uncertain about if and how this fits into my questions about Oslo’s public sector. Do they constitute a ‘class’, a ‘vulnerable group’? If ‘they’ wanted to live along the water could they?

I’m jumping the gun here, I might be mixing my apples with oranges, but I can’t help but wonder what Oslo’s story around class and space might be. Although I just got here, it is easy to see which neighborhoods are under dynamic transition. I’m told to check out Grunerlokka, the ‘Greenwich Village’ of Oslo where ‘the working class has been replaced by people who hardly know anything about manual labour.’ Grunnerlokka is full of fabulous shops, delicious cafes, and is monitored by UNIK—a group of people dedicated to keeping the area unique.  So although every male on the street is on a skateboard, pushing a stroller, or both, it’s pointless to point the finger at the cool, the beautiful, and the hip as the source of the problem.

And the same can be said of developers. A city needs development if it’s to continue as a city. A city also needs wealth if it’s to support things like affordable housing, free school lunches, good health services. However, it’s less obvious how this plays out when each district is individually responsible for housing vulnerable groups.

Redistribution of capital and patterns of finacialization are all phenomenon that cause spatial shifts in cities throughout the world. My guess is that even in a country with a strong social support system, little if any of Oslo’s new waterfront housing construction will be below market rate. Rather, the anticipation is that as the waterfront develops, Norway’s upper crust will move in, which in turn opens housing in other areas of the city. The waterfront will never be Grunnerlokka, just as Battery Park City will never be Williamsburg. That’s okay, different people want different things regardless of being capitalist, socialist, or whatever. But what happens when someone does not have access to spaces and places because of their social, economic, racial, or ethnic position?

The concern I have can be summarized as passive aggressive exclusionary zoning. Not zoning in the sense of residential, commercial, and manufacturing. Zoning as in zoning out classes, races, and ethnicities.

For example, while on a tour through the fjords around Oslo I was continually reminded about how inaccessible the ability to ‘escape’ the city is for many residents. Most idyllic islands around Oslo are privately owned, or are a collection of privately owned summer houses that form a conglomeration of private property. Almost all of them are accessible by private boat only. With no ferries going to these locations, it is impossible to visit, to participate in the pleasures of the city’s most beautiful landscape. Here, I’m reminded of Robert Moses and the New York City beaches—by strategically limiting public transit, beaches that were technically public became private as only people with automobiles could reach them. This is an example of passive aggressive exclusionary zoning.

If a beer and falafel seem expensive to me then I’m obviously going to be a terrible judge of this city’s livability. The city’s plan, as far as urban planning documents go, seems as egalitarian and inclusive as could be. Walking around I note the diversity of the city, that it’s not as pristine as I imagined it to be (a good thing), and that, like many cities, power, money, and utopian dreams of future aesthetics are visible to the naked eye.

View from the train station

View from my apartment

Second major development

View of Akerbrygge from the waterfront

Trying to get into the Architecture Museum

Information:

Oslo’s Waterfront Planning Office

Waterfront Communities Project

Norway’s Department of Statistics

Occupy Wall Street

“Che Guevara was not a communist,” a girl says without glancing up from her cell phone, nodding in the direction of a group of five people wearing occupy the hood shirts; the face of Che in between the words occupy and hood. From where I sit, it’s too loud to hear what someone might have said to provoke this comment, which seems to float upward and hover in this atmosphere of politically charged statements. But don’t get me wrong, no animosity is felt between the two groups, or any of the groups occupying Wall Street. For me, this is the basis of the occupation’s success.  I decide that the phrase–this is what democracy looks like–now a staple to the movement, is in fact incredibly apt. The whole reason this is a democratic space is because there is nothing reductionist about it. Unlike other protests that have occurred in  North America over the past decade, OWS is about inclusion; if the environment is your thing, anarchy, Jesus, well, you’re welcome into this space.  To see Zucchoti Park is to see complexity, but, in a society based on spectacle, image making, and concrete statements, the complexity is constantly being reduced, for both good and bad.

Take for example, this dichotomy of 1% and 99%. The logic behind this is inclusion, the argument that pretty much everyone is part of the 99%. But to say that that 1% (often referred to as bankers) is not concerned with the 99% is to simplify something of great complexity. How much funding for NYC arts and cultural organizations come from that 1%? You like the Bang on a Can marathon?  Did you go see The Creators Project this weekend? Stop by the IBM Think exhibition at Lincoln Center? How about Target’s free Fridays at MoMA? I’m told by an elderly man that this is class warfare. I must muse over this. I’m hearing the word working class a lot, but I’m pretty sure the working class no longer exists. All of us, even that 1% on Wall Street, work for a wage that is determined by market forces. Whether that wage is minimum or maximum it is a wage that is spent on means of consumption (food, clothing,  shelter) of many different scales. In the end, it is a wage that determines and is determined by the forces of production and reproduction.We are blaming individuals as opposed to institutional structures, and even then, I find it problematic to see our institutional structures as entirely negative. Which is why, when I go to hear Brian Holmes speak over by Mark di Suvero’s sculpture I’m both fascinated and disturbed by the whole act of repetition, the communication technique used at the General Assembly meetings.

Because loud-speaker devices cannot be used, in order to be heard throughout the Park, the  human speaker must pause after every sentence or two and let the audience repeat it so that the statement ripples through the crowd. Now here was someone who’s work and ideas I absolutely love, yet, I initially felt uncomfortable engaging in this act of repetition whose origins seemed to be somewhere between the game Telephone and famous 20th century dictators. Isn’t this form of communication just one of the many things we are standing up against? We must think before we repeat, right? Yes and no. Voices are suddenly being heard for the first time. People who wouldn’t usually listen to each other  are. Everyone has a different agenda, but, by repeating what each person says, we are acknowledging the many diverging opinions that make up this space. The General Assembly is a huge component of Zucchoti Park’s democracy. The more General Assemblies you go to, the more you understand and appreciate the structure of these meetings. There’s a vocabulary of hand gestures that allow individuals to silently express themselves, wiggling fingers for agreement, thumbs up and down…confirming that this is an ongoing process of direct democracy.

“We need to find new forms of refusal,” Holmes concludes.

The crowd repeats it, as do I, and then the moderator opens the meeting up to questions. A flabby man with grey sweats and a blue shirt that says Army in white lettering steps over the people sitting, through the people standing, and makes his way next to Holmes. He cups his hands together. “I’m doing a television show and need three volunteers.”

The crowd repeats it. “I’m doing a show and need three volunteers.”

“To be interviewed about Occupy Wall Street.”

“To be interviewed about Occupy Wall Street.”

The phrase barely reaches its second repetition before a sea of hands shoot up. An unsettling wave of skepticism momentarily washes over me as I’m reminded of Zizek’s cautionary note during a different General Assembly, “Don’t fall in love with yourselves, carnivals come cheap.”

I whole-heartily support OWS. I am proud and humbled by this collective movement and yet I cannot align myself with any one statement I hear being made. I am, in fact, so uncertain about the world  that I don’t know how to speak. But my confusion is not entirely a problem for me. As awe-struck as I am by Occupy Wall Street, I’m equally awe-struck by contemporary history, structures of powers and individuals that have brought us to this current state. It is so fascinating I risk treating it as I would a  good novel; anticipation, horror, wonder, and shock, the plot is so engaging I forget I am actually a part of it.

And this brings me back to the present. The physical place that is being occupied. This first thing I’m struck by is the high level of functionality, which seems absolutely organic, something I would have never thought possible. There’s a clothing donation and distribution box, a food area, a sanitation section. I’ve decided this is where I belong, on the logistical side of things, because at the end of the day, what draws me to OWS is it’s ability to create a working space. I’m happy to wash some dishes, to sort trash,  simple tasks that are in themselves reductions and binary but help distract me from the larger binaries that remain unanswered.

A few Saturday’s ago, I went to the Au Bon Pain nearby to get a coffee and, like the other 50 people, to use the bathroom. Since late September there’s been twice the amount of staff at this franchise, but no one is getting time and half for their extra hours. I ask the guy behind the register if it’s been annoying to have so many more clients. He shrugs his shoulders, “Nah, it’s cool.” In the 45 minutes I sit drinking my coffee, the staff empty the bathroom trash three times. As I get up to leave an elderly police officer walks in from outside and gets into the men’s line. His head is down but I can see his face which looks sad, tired or perhaps  just indifferent. He has a frail body, wiry hair, and thick glasses. Looking at him, I’m reminded of my grandfather. He waits behind two high school kids wearing classic Jordans, dark rinse jeans, and white tee shirts hand painted to say Occupy Wall Street. They’re carrying plastic H&M bags and cameras. The kids observe the cop, trying to decide if and how they should react to his presence. But the cop doesn’t even look up. He keeps staring at the ground as he walks into the stall,  confrontation has been avoided, either intentionally or unintentionally. In the end, the boy and his friend seem okay with that.

New forms of refusal means not placing blame in obvious places. This cop, like these teenage boys helps constitute this 99% that everyone is speaking of. Class structure is just one of many structures flourishing under our present socio-economic system. As Karl Polanyi makes clear in The Great Transformation, early capitalist society was not just about an agitated working class. There was also the peasantry. Although both groups were essentially exploited under this new economic system, they were not in solidarity. For some, the question was hours in the work week, for others it was a question of land laws and agrarian tariffs. Occupy Wall Street will continue to be a success so long as it continues this pattern of inclusiveness. This inclusiveness must stretch across many spheres and must ultimately reach even that so called 1%. It’s a system, not people, that needs to be destroyed. For that to occur, 100% must understand why. Trying to include everyone is obviously messy and complex, but not anymore messy than our current system. To keep binaries such as 1% and 99% is just another way of keeping structure of “us” and “them,” structures that will inevitably retain class-based, racially based, occupation-based, gendered, religious sentiments.

One of the greatest critiques of the protest is that there is no clear objective, no singular demand,  and therefore, no way to gauge whether conditions have been satisfied. I completely disagree with this critique. I think to make change we need to get even messier, so that people no longer know who’s part of the 99% and who’s part of the 1%. Hopefully, this will become so confusing that the complexity of our current structure is weakened to the point that the only thing left to do is move forward.

Work Means Liberity!

Reading Mark Kingwell’s essay, “The Language of Work,” in last month’s Harper’s Magazine is an opportunity to break from the complexities of our current global crisis and return to a more simple argument. The purpose of his essay is to get at the essence of work, what it is, and why we should resist it.

Resist work?! That sounds a bit radical, even for us Marxists who are still preoccupied with questions of labor, production, and reproduction.

But Kingwell says forget exploitation and alienation; let’s even forget capitalism (well, for a minute). Let’s question work and its invisible pervasiveness.

“The values of work are still dominant in far too much of life,” Kingwell writes, “indeed, these values have exercised their own kind of linguistic genius, creating a host of phrases, terms, and labels that bolster, rather than challenge, the dominance of work,”(19).”

The question for Kingwell is not how to achieve labor peace but why and how such a destructive concept of labor has managed to prevail under socialism, democracy, fascism, and every other political ideology. This argument makes sense, maybe even more than most the Neo-Marxists I spend my time reading. To better illustrate his point, Kingwell revisits Bertrand Russell’s brilliantly straightforward essay, “In Praise of Idleness,” a cohesive argument against the development of modern work.

“From the beginning of civilization until the Industrial Revolution, a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family…” Now however, “Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”

For Russell, modern society is marked by the fact that while new technologies are creating efficiencies that should let us work less, most of us are working more. Furthermore: “It seems more likely that they will find continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity.”

Although Russell’s essay was written in 1932, it doesn’t take rocket science to see the contemporary validity of such a claim. Smaller computers that commute more faster, Wi-Fi on airplanes, overnight shipping…these are all schemes of productivity that allow us to overlook the disturbing reality that it is virtually impossible to be idle.

“Work hard, fly right,”(Continental); “Empowering People,”(Acer); “Long Live Dreams,”(American Express); “Choose Freedom”(Toshiba); “It’s Everywhere You Want to Be,”(Visa), all of these reflect the great achievement of modern work culture and it’s ability to disguise its essential nature.  While this is all quite clever, as Kingwell illustrates, there is a very dark reality behind such ideology.

“The grim ironists of the Third Reich were exceptionally forthright when they fixed the maxim Arbeit macht frei—Work Shall Make You Free—over the gates at Dachau and Aushwitze,”(19).

Reading this, I thought immediately of a quote from Rene Clair’s A Nous La Liberte, a hilarious but dead on representation of the irony of work as embodied in early 20th century capitalist society.

“Work is mandatory, because work means liberty” says one factory worker to Emile, an ex-convict recently freed from prison. Released in 1931, A Nous shares many similarities with Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness,” the most obvious being the resistance to work. The film opens with men seated along a conveyor belt assembling wooden toy horses. As the camera zooms out, we realize we’re not in a factory, but a prison. We hear:

Liberty is a man’s dues

He enjoys love and skies of blue

But then there are some

Who no worse crimes have done

It’s the sad story we tell

From a prison cell

The story begins here, with a friendship between two inmates, Emile and Louis. One evening, both attempt to escape but the plan is botched. As the prison guards run after the two escapees, Emile tosses the rope to Louis so that he may climb over the last prison wall and onto freedom. Using a combination of wit and resourcefulness, Louis  begins manufacturing phonographs.

Within a short period of time, Louis becomes the world’s largest phonograph manufacturer. He is now part of the industrial elite, participating in the idleness characteristic of the bourgeoisie: dinner parties, drinking, and pointless banter.

Louis’s success is juxtaposed as we cut back to Emile. Finally freed from prison, he heads into a field and falls asleep, only to be woken up by an officer. “Not at work? Don’t you know that….” In a classic move, Clair makes explicit the paradox of modern society by taking us out of the plot and into the French classroom where a professor, writing on the chalkboard, announces to his pupils: “Work is mandatory. Because work means liberty.” The pupils, hunched over at their desks, diligently write and repeat, “Work is mandatory because work means liberty.”We flash forward to the factory workers, hunched over the conveyor belt of gramophones and back to Emile who is walking toward the large, industrial complex by the force of the two officers.

Emile joins the ranks of men waiting to be employed by Louis’s factory. The men march into a room, sit down, and follow the directions of a recorded voice:

Walk in formation

Will give you a job of worth

You who seek an occupation

State your name and date of birth

Leave fingerprint identification

About-face in formation

Emile’s inability to adapt to the pace and efficiency of modern work quickly gets him into trouble. Exasperated with Emile, the factory supervisors bring him to Louis. While Louis doesn’t initially recognize his old friend, Emile’s endearing incomprehension of modern work strikes Louis, who suddenly recognizes what happens to the human spirit when it succumbs to “our character as social animals forever competing for relative advantage,”(Kingwell, 20).

Louis quickly returns to his old, playful demeanor, much to the disgust of his class-hungry girlfriend. She scolds Louis, calling his behavior “inexcusable” after he and Emile ruin a dinner party. His reply is simple: “What do you want? Money, here…you bore me!”

Louis understands that this boredom, while an offshoot of idleness, is not the kind Russell propounds but the kind he is weary of: namely the repetitious passivity of material comfort, the passivity that stupefies the senses and is no more enjoyable than the mechanical repetition associated with the 10-hour factory workday.

A series of events unfold and Louis is forced to abandon the factory, which has recently undergone a new technological marvel. Louis explains to the supervisors and workers:

“In our new plant, men will have no other task other than supervising the machines. The machines will do all the work. They will manufacture our phonographs. ‘Organization and progress,’ that is our motto.’” While that is certainly a motto of modern capitalism, Clair gives it a twist. The speech continues: “While the machine has proven that it can replace the hand of men, it cannot replace his brain.”

Because the factory can do the work of humans, humans are free to be idle. In the final scene we see the workers dancing together at a picnic along the water. Emile and Louis walk down the road, without a penny in their pockets.

When all things around us operate

Friends, let us enjoy our idleness

Beneath sunny skies, what a sweet life

To laze about and sing like this

Let’s indulge in this infinite elation

We can only imagine that Russell’s prophecy of idleness come true: “Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all.”

Performing the Rehearsal: The Strip Tease of Modernity

Hegel changed the course of modern philosophy when he asserted that history, driven by changes in the ideals and values of a given people, is  contradictory by nature. Yet modernity for Hegel was characterized by a sense of universality, thus lending itself to a certain idealism which was soon shattered by Marx, who used Hegelian dialectics to illustrate why modernity’s self image of a universally free and just society was, in fact, history’s most dangerous contradiction.

 The contradiction of modernity is a reoccurring theme in the work of Francis Alÿs, who currently has a retrospective at MoMA. While watching his 2006 video, The Politics of Rehearsal, I was reminded why the image of the prostitute is such a fitting representation of modernity. Just as the strip tease is always a rehearsal (for the sexual act is never performed), modernity never actually performed the very image it had rehearsed, the image of a universally free and just society.

The film begins at The Slipper Room in the Lower East Side. Shot in black and white, it opens with a woman practicing operatic scales behind a grand piano before cutting to footage from Washington D.C., January 20th, 1949. The television presenter announces that “The life of a democracy is about to be renewed.”

In his inaugural address, Truman announces to the American republic: “We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas…Democracy alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action against their human oppressors.”

We transition from Truman to the title of the piece and are told that the Politics of Rehearsal should be considered a metaphor of Latin America’s ambiguous affair with Modernity. Forever arousing, and yet, always delaying the moment it will happen.

We return to the Slipper Room, the piano player, the soprano, and soon, a woman in a sequin dress. First we see her foot, enveloped in rocket tall heels. It emerges from the wings, and a leg follows. Without words, just a sway of her hips, she announces her presence. We are captivated. A man’s voice tells us in Spanish:

“I was rethinking the implication of the rehearsal as a comment on modernity. And what becomes immediately obvious is the notion that modernity is pornographic.”

Baudelaire, that great poet of modernity was well-known for his reoccurring image of the prostitute as the juxtaposition between Paris past and present. But it’s Benjamin who uses the work of Baudelaire to make the explicit connection between prostitution, the commodity, and commodity production. In Convolute O of The Arcades Project, Benjamin discusses the prostitute and the gambler in relation to the suspension of time. While the gambler lives in a fantasy of suspended time, the job of the stripper, as entertainer and performer, is to suspend time.

The stripper must arouse and then prolong that arousal. This is what the spectator wants, for arousal to be maintained throughout the duration of the performance. But, because arousal is suspended, the spectator forgets that the sexual act will never actually be performed. The performance is, therefore, nothing more than a rehearsal of the act.

Modernity is incredibly appealing; it is seductive (even Hegel was enraptured) but, as the narrator warns us in the film, “even as it displays itself, it’s impossible to appropriate it.”

Truman’s speech is a rehearsal for modernity. The words behind his monotone voice arouse and seduce the listener. Like the order in which the stripper removes her clothes, the argument for democracy unfolds sequentially, (“First, we will continue to give unfaltering support to the United Nations…Second, we will continue our programs for world economic recovery…Third, we will strengthen freedom-loving nations against the dangers of aggression…”)

But,  in the decades that followed, the act of democracy was never actually performed; only rehearsed. Like the stripper, the role of the politician and his or her political ideology is to keep us in a constant state of arousal. The final act, the “What we have achieved in liberty, we will surpass in greater liberty,” will never be delivered. To satiate that arousal would put the stripper out of her job, the President out of power.

This means that stripper and the audience are not on the same time. She keeps it moving (she’s clocked in after all) while ensuring it never goes anywhere (stay aroused by my liberty and you will come to surpass it).

The stripper in the video removes one pair of underwear, only to present us with another smaller, sexier pair. Our eyes work hard to imagine what is behind that underwear, but, no matter how hard we try, only she, the performer, can remove them. And, when she finally does, time is up.

The strip tease of democratic fair dealing is a very nice display, but touching is forbidden. The spectator, believing it  possible to eventually overcome this small detail, repeats and repeats until there is no money left to pay for the show. We realize arousal costs a fortune and modernity never comes.

In the Domain of Body Culture

The image of the crowd belongs to the domain of body culture. It’s unquestionable powerful lies in momentum, where the body—as mass—replaces the singular mind. Last month, as crowds proliferated across the Middle East, there was a brief interlude here in the US in form of the Super bowl and its halftime show. The extreme juxtaposition between the two events left me contemplating the meaning of crowds, democracy, and whether or not the domain of body culture here in the US will ever move beyond the singular mind of capitalism.

“The Mass Ornament” is Kracauer’s famous essay on the crowd as an emotionless replication of the capitalist system of reproduction. Kracauer’s vessel for discussion is the Tiller Girls, a troop of women most akin to the Rockettes, known for their ability to use body parts to achieve interesting visual ornamentation. Calling them “products of American distraction factories,” Kracauer states: “The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires,”(79).

This seems an apt description of the spectacle, from the Black Eyed Peas conscious aesthetic of multi-cultural bling, the meddly of American classics that relied on visual prompts encouraging the crowd to Pump It Up! and the cheap imitation of Daft Punk androgyny in the form of LED-clad background dancers. With the exception of Usher (who is dismissed from this discussion) the whole thing fit Kracauer’s Mass Ornament: it was a crowd, it had momentum and it even had power but, it was ambivalent and thus an end in and of itself.

“The commodities that it spews forth are not actually produced to be possessed; rather, they are made for the sake of a profit that knows no limit…value is not produced for the sake of value,”(78).

If this wasn’t clear from the beginning, then consider the media’s post-performance debate on the monetary figure Slash got to emerge from the ground.

Kracauer is often criticized for his failure to fact check the origins of the Tiller Girls, they were British, thus making his connection between Fordism and the mechanical formations of female legs less relevant. But maybe that connection was never meant to be. Perhaps the art of scientific management died with Detroit. For all the commonalities between the half-time show and the Tiller Girls, precision is not one of them.

I was reminded of this while watching the LED dancers. One arm was up, and one row over it was to the side. There was movement, energy was expended, but the robot dance was not mechanical enough and the pump it up failed to pump. The performance reflects the prevailing American mentality that impressions are best made through size and scale. With so much to look at, no one would notice all the mistakes–like the failure for the V in LOVE to light up.

To me, that seems an accurate description of our prevailing economic system.

The show concluded with confetti of the red, white, and blue variety, suggesting the event could be connected to a broader sense of nationalism.

“Fairy tales can become reality only on the ruins of natural unities,”(81) Kracauer concludes. American democracy might have once been a reality but it seems it have joined Sleeping Beauty in her 100 year slumber. Vapid spectacle is how the American crowd achieves its happily ever after, it’s time we look elsewhere for the power of the crowd and new fairy tales of democracy.

My Graduate Record Exam or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ideological State Apparatuses

"The doomsday machine is terrifying and simple to understand."

I can no longer hate the Graduate Record Exam. Any feeling of animosity has been replaced by a respect culled through fear and awe for the ideology of higher education. I bombed the test. Or, should I say the test bombed me.

After three hours of biting my lips and twitching my legs the computer flashed my score like an afterthought to a brief conversation. “By the way,” it seemed to say, “this is now over and with that score, I suggest you rethink applying to MIT.”

It wasn’t just the reality that I’d done poorly. It was the cold, graphical user interface of that emotionless computer and the way it flashed PRESS ESC TO END THIS TEST in big black letters. But we had just shared so much! I was invited to argue whether or not communities should emphasize short over long term environmental needs and the benefits of artistic license. I had to choose a set of words that helped describe Foucault’s oeuvre and answer questions pertaining to a brief essay on Robert Mapplethorpe. Even the quantitative section was captivating. Which of the following CANNOT be an integer if the integer K is a multiple of 12 but not a multiple of 9? Wow! I’d love to think about that for more than 60 seconds.

It was like the test knew me. It was so stimulating I was tempted to put down my pencil and ask the computer if it wanted to find a more intimate environment and share a drink.

It didn’t.

It wanted $160 dollars and hours of my life. It wanted me to carry a stack of flash cards at all times, break into a cold sweat every time I thought about it, and develop a habit of  swallowing four melatonine every night so I could stop thinking about it.

After walking out of the test room, some nice woman in a uniform searched my pockets, took my photo, and had me resign the form certifying my identity. She then gave me back my ID which I used to buy a six-pack of Asahi. That helped. As the edge of failure softened I began to see the GRE for what it really was, an Ideological State Apparatus.

Continue reading →

Flirting with Capitalism: Shopping at Trader Joes

I’m pretty sure I was just flirting at Trader Joe’s.

It happened in the dried fruit and nut section. I was on my tip toes trying to see if they’d stocked more medjool dates. They hadn’t. Never again would I assume that because I loved  something, Trader Joe’s would have it. My disappointment was immeasurable.

To compensate, I adapted a buying technique akin to the Michigan Militia shopping at Costco and placed five packages of uncrystallized ginger, the next best thing after medjool dates, into my shopping basket.

I nearly jumped when a voice out of nowhere said:

“Do you recommend the ginger? I’ve been eying it for a while.”

There he was. A guy with bigger hair than mine and a declared love for ginger.

I was dumbfounded. Had he really been eying the ginger, or just me clear the shelf of it?”If you’re into ginger,” I said, “then you’d like it. It doesn’t have all the sugar on it, so it’s less candied.”

“Yeah, I noticed that!” He said with excitement that blew me out of the water. “I mean, that it doesn’t have all the sugar. It’s like, the perfect snack” He paused and then, gazing into my eyes, he asked, “How else do you like your ginger? Do you ever cook with it?”

I was smitten.

As young, urban hipsters with big hair, our conversation subtly switched from ginger to socio-cultural things people do in the city. He liked stuff. And going out and doing stuff.  My evolving fantasy was difficult to maintain among the chaos of shoppers. We had to reposition ourselves and constantly apologize for being stationary in the sea of movement. It was absolutely impossible to gauge how much ginger I could eventually fit inside his mouth, if given the opportunity.

The diminishing romanticism culminated when out of the blue he announced with pride, “This is my first time ever at Trader Joe’s. I can’t believe what I’ve walked into. All my favorite items are here and they’re soo much cheaper!”

I took a step back and almost crashed into a pregnant woman reaching for walnuts.  His  innocent statement was akin to sleeping with a virgin. How should I react? Should I try to keep the myth of Trader Joe’s alive? Didn’t he know that we were participating in the post-advanced capitalist experience of consumer mythology? True, I was also shopping there, but I was already corrupt.

The moment faded. I concluded our conversation by mentioning that uncrystalized ginger was considered too ‘spicy’ by some, wished him well on his shopping journey, and made a move toward the coffee and vitamin aisle.

Here in New York, most people I know are over the allure of Trader Joe’s. Although we still succumb to the  slogan that “The line,” which usually snakes down the aisles and out to 14th street, “is worth the savings,” most of us do so begrudgingly.

It had been many months since I had shopped at Trader Joe’s. But, a few weeks ago, I received a $100 dollar gift card for Trader Joe’s, because I got a real job. Both the job and the gift card were pretty cool. $100 doesn’t go far in New York, but it does at Trader Joe’s. Before I knew it, I was back in line.

Waiting 30 minutes to buy twelve or less items of real inconsequential nutritional value may seem absurd in the moment. But the obnoxious cow bell that rings incessantly at the check out, the uncomfortably close contact with OPSB (Other People’s Shopping Baskets), and aggressive spatial behavior required to get your products all dissipates as soon as you get home and have a pound of Dark Sumatra, organic Greek-style yogurt, and matcha-covered almonds sitting comfortably on the shelf.

Everything about Trader Joe’s, from the free samples, ridiculous cheap prices, disturbingly friendly staff, and self-branded ‘neighborhood grocery store’ is in fact capitalism at it’s best. Calling TJ’s a grocery store is somewhat misleading. Like capitalism, it has a lot of choice but no real sustenance. Shopping there does not necessarily add up to a complete meal.

The capitalist beauty of Trader Joe’s is the wide range of products that help build up a culinary identity. Flax seed tortilla chips and guacamole for a casual rooftop party, prepackaged lox, plain cream cheese (note bagels and chives are nowhere to be found), and sparkling grapefruit Italian soda for a lovely Sunday Brunch.

The overall identity is akin to an old-time General Store. The brown paper grocery bag alludes to a pastoral pre-industrial nostalgia. We look at the boy and girl in their jumpers and pantaloons, remember all that French cheese we just bought and conclude, hey, I could go on a picnic too!

However, the reality of TJ’s is neither pastoral nor industrial–it is the beauty of post-Fordist retail systems, a time where people are less concerned with ‘keeping up with the Joneses” and more concerned with being different from the Joneses’. We engage in democracy through consumption, and the ability to choose what we consume.

With their high level computerized stock-taking systems, supermarkets represent one of the key institutions of post-Fordist democratic consumption. Murray describes it as an emphasis that shifts away from a manufacturers’ economy of scale to a retailers’ economy of scope (1989, 43). The result is, according to cultural studies professor Jim McGuigan, a discriminating consumer (1996, 89). We feel both entitled to and empowered by the choices we make.

The ability to bridge the gap between the fiction of Trader Joe’s as a neighborhood grocery store  and the reality of a massive global operation lies in the magic of the TJ’s associates. These men and women are trained to be incredibly friendly, helpful, and personable, just like your old fashion general store owner, you know, the man or woman who always pre-ordered you a shovel and knew the type of calico you preferred.

TJ’s is most akin to the general store in the way that stock selection is unpredictable and fluctuates according to market demand. Like all good 21st century shoppers, most TJ’s customers have specific items they come in for. It’s easy to become frustrated when half your food items are not available. A fellow classmate of mine has a noticable difficulty pulling marathon sessions in the computer lab when Trader Joe’s is out of their low-salt trail mix.

Legend has it that the Manhattan branch Trader Joe’s hires only actors and actresses. These associates, in their red tropical shirts, do a wonderful job pacifying irate customers. They’ve developed an uncanny ability to take one look at a shopper’s baskets,  summarize his or her personality, and direct the topic away from the missing food item. They talk about films, make some self-deprecating yet humanizing comment, suggest another food item, and then subtly direct the customer to the check out.

In short, they work magic.

Less than a block is Whole Foods, which has far more selection but equally long lines, pistachios that cost three times more, and unsympathetic associates.

A few years ago, Whole Foods earned the nickname “Whole Paycheck” for their posh identity.  Although the company has worked hard to change this, their self-branding is significantly different from TJ’s.

Trader Joe’s success lies in the company’s suspension of disbelief. Our shopping experience is somewhere between the elitism of Whole Foods and the proletariat savings of Walmart, Farmer Jack’s, Associates, C-Town, or Food Bazaar. Feeling empowered by choice allows us to flirt with capitalism and causes us to ignore the underlying hegemonic systems of reproduction.

Further Reading:

McGuigan, J. (1996). Culture and the Public Sphere. London: Routledge.

Murray, R. (1989) New Times-The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

The (Vulgar) Global Subject

“Imperialist expansion is not just differentiated but differentiating; the calculation of “difference” is part and parcel of the strategies of imperial expansion.”

In his chapter on “Toward a Vulgar Theory of Imperialism,” architectural historian Arindam Dutta examines the various spokes that comprised Britain’s wheel of imperialism. His argument: nothing is inconsequential. Even the simple act of taking tea potentially sequesters an attempt at anti-colonial insurgency (or instigates colonial insurgency for that matter). The lesson: there is nothing innocent about the everyday mundane.

Dutta’s quote, which falls on the last page of the chapter, is an interesting conclusion to a fascinating topic; the reader is left wondering whether imperialism may be substituted with globalization. More specifically, what is the relationship between 19th century imperialism, “difference,” and 21st century globalization? The “difference” Dutta alludes to, and I’m blatantly referring to is the difference of Derrida, as it applies to the time and space of what I will call the global everyday.

Both imperialism and globalization are acts of expansion, precariously balancing ideological differentiation, homogenization, and the politics of the mundane.

Imperial Britain in India expanded through a central government (to be discussed in later entries) that advocated policies of both integration and perpetual deferral. The result is, as Dutta states, “the native can ‘not yet’ represent itself as subject.”

In his recent essay, “Variations of Urban Environmental Transitions,” author Peter Marcotullio uses the idea of time-space telescoping to discuss urban environments. While ‘development’ in Europe and North America has followed a historically linear pattern, the same cannot be said of many post-colonial countries. Changes in speed and efficiency of human activity means technological development is occurring simultaneously with environmental (and thus social) degradation.

Might we use the idea of time-space telescoping to look at the post-colonial Indian citizen/subject and the crises of representation in relation to variations of urban globalization?

In the developed world, globalization expands through symbolic capital—the art of differentiating par excellence. We purchase products that help defer homogenization by defining our individuality. Yet,  within the ideology of ‘free choice,’ people largely define themselves not through what they are but through what they are not. Williamsburg, Brooklyn is one example of the endless chain of signifiers. The irony of 21st century globalization is that differentiation through the individualization of the everyday products we consume, in fact make us more homogenous.

But can the same be said about the cultural context within the post-colonial developing world? Imperialism works under the guise of homogenization but promotes differentiation. Globalization works under the guise of differentiation but promotes homogenization. Both have the ability to make a certain vulgarity out of our everyday practices. Did Barthes’s Death of the Author come too soon or too late for Dutta’s native?

Returning now to that mundane cup of tea I will soon fix for myself.  Having a cup of tea allows me to punctuate my act of moving through the temporal linearity of the day. However, my tea, imported from China, also speaks to the vulgarity of global time, global space, and the continual indeterminacy of the subject.

Dutta, Atrindam. 2007. The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility. New York: Routledge.

Things are Getting Heteronormative

Dark lit interiors, little black dress, jewlery that doubles as bondage. Classier drinks means non-butch lesbians, threesomes, wild orgies and a morning free of hangovers and STDs. Remy Martin’s latest NYC ad, “Things are getting interesting” tells us nothing we don’t already know. The equation between expensive drinks and better sexual encounters is as classically capitalist as a blond-haired, blue-eyed Playboy Bunny. Where things are perhaps interesting is the campaign’s use of  mixed-race models to undermine (what is often white) heteronormative capitalist propaganda. This was done in the early 90’s with the Benetton ads which not only promoted the “world of united colors” but also lean production systems and just-in-time retail, trademarks of globalization and neoliberal economic policies.

The comparison is neither here nor there, just interesting.