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conorreid · 5 years ago

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A Delightful Summer Afternoon

It is a delightful summer afternoon. The baking sun roasts me not, for I sit under the shade of a skyscraper. Sipping on an aperitif, I eat cacio e pepe on a tourist free Broadway, chatting happily with my beloved. Far off in the distance, near Madison Square Park, a flock of pigeons shuttle back and forth between the giants of steel, chirping away in summertime bliss. There are no car horns blaring, no hustle and bustle. A quiet street and a pleasant afternoon, while all around us the world burns.

This has overwhelmingly been my experience of pandemic. Quiet streets, slow afternoons, Zoom meetings, and the coziness of my own apartment. There are fires all around me, and from so high up I can just barely make them out. Why? Why has my covid-19 experience been one of relative bliss and leisure, as countless bodies rot in the streets?

By way of comparison, let’s look at uniquely New York City tragedy—September 11th. Almost 3,000 people lost their lives, many of whom were my friends and family. Although I was merely a child at the time, I remember the shock and the silence. The funerals, the sobs, and the quiet resolve to find whoever was responsible and “make them pay.” There was collective, worldwide mourning as country after country declared that they, too, “were New York.” I felt as if life had changed forever, and there would be no going back. The scale of the tragedy was beyond my imagination. And the government response was tremendous—trillions spent on two fruitless wars, over a million lives snuffed out and millions more forever broken.

That said, compared to 9/11, covid-19—even in just NYC alone—is unimaginably bigger. 25,000 deaths in the city, compared to just 3,000 on 9/11. That said, I don’t know anybody who has died from covid-19. There is no collective, nationwide mourning for the dead. There is no choked silence when discussing the immense toll of the disaster. There is no quiet resolve to fight and win against this pandemic. There is only the ravings of a government and a people desperate to “return to normal.” Antimaskers clamour that we need to reopen the economy, while Cuomo thinks reopening the schools is perfectly fine. Trump explains that in regards to the deaths, “it is what it is.” Nationwide, we’re looking at fifty-five 9/11s, and there is no collective mourning whatsoever. Inside the bubble of Zoom meetings, we pretend nothing is wrong. I work, day in and day out, from my sofa as if the world is not on fire. There are no memorials, no outpourings of grief on the news and on social media. Collectively, those in power and those in the media seem to be pushing a narrative that everything is fine, when in reality everything is very much not fine.

Perhaps it will be instructive to take a look at the victims of each tragedy. The victims of 9/11 worked at the World Trade Center, one of the bastions of high finance in New York City. Overwhelming white, wealthy, and male, these victims were financiers, executives, and managers.1 “The best of the best,” and the idealized version of the “winners” of American meritocracy. They were also men who had their fingers on power in the United States, with connections to Congressmen and government bureaucrats. Because of these victims, we started two wars that killed upwards of a million people.

Those dying of covid-19 could not be more different. In NYC specifically, they are primarily black and Latino2 and primarily working-class—the folks who could not afford to quarantine and work from home.3 They are inherently lesser than those who died on 9/11, despite dying in far higher numbers, for they are not those who hold power in the United States. They are not “the best of the best,” they are merely workers. They will receive no nationwide mourning, for nationwide they “do not matter.” Instructive is the idea many were once pushing on social media to create “mask free” days at stores, that way antimaskers could go without making those who wear masks feel unsafe.4 Little consideration was paid towards the fact that the workers in the store itself would still be exposed to the virus by these antimaskers, for those people “don’t count.” They’re not really people at all. They are nobodies.

I know of no people who died of covid-19, yet know many who died in 9/11, because I am an upper class white man. My experience of pandemic—and yours as well—is filtered by class. And because the class of those dying is not upper class, there will be no outpouring of grief like on 9/11. There are certain people, of a certain class, who we “should” mourn, and others we “should not.” Those in power are insulated from death, because their family and friends have the luxury of self quarantine and work from home.

Notice also the people clamouring for the reopening of the economy. Working-class families are by and large not the ones protesting against wearing masks.5 Instead, this is the petty bourgeoisie, the landlords who just want to get their nails done, the executives who just want to be able to “watch the game for god’s sake.” They protest to “go back to work,” despite being able to work from home, for they are not the ones who will be put in harm’s way. It is the nobodies of the working class who will die so that those with money and power can have a slightly more leisurely quarantine.

Of course, we are systemically unable to close down our economy for long periods to adequately deal with covid-19. It is not just that those in power do not have to deal with death day in and day out. Unlike China, Vietnam, or Cuba, we live at the whims of capital, and capital is always hungry for more bodies. Capital is value in motion, and when the motion stops capital stops accumulating. This is the equivalent of death—therefore, the motion (the economy) must never stop. Those in power care more about ensuring capital accumulation continues uninterrupted than people’s lives. Of course, they have their donors to consider. Just look at the billions of dollars spent propping up businesses, the trillions of dollars the Fed has conjured up out of the ether to pump the stock market ever higher—despite GDP contracting over 10%—and compare that to the relatively paltry sum spent on making sure people can stay home.6 $600 unemployment, a $1200 stimulus check, and a vague pledge to pay covid-19 medical costs is a pittance compared to unlimited quantitative easing, trillion dollar daytime loans, and massive stimulus. In a capitalist society, it is capital—not lives—that takes precedence.

My covid-19 days have been spent slowly, with little immediate worry, watching the world burn from my balcony. The bodies pile up, and I’m doing just fine. What a wonderful world.

https://www.gothamgazette.com/demographics/91102.shtml ↩︎

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-deaths.page ↩︎

https://covidinteractivesny.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/demographics_dashboard.html#income ↩︎

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/22/us-stores-against-face-masks ↩︎

In fact, likelihood to wear a mask correlates with income—the more you make, the more likely you are to not wear a mask. https://news.gallup.com/poll/315590/americans-face-mask-usage-varies-greatly-demographics.aspx ↩︎

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/10/economy/federal-reserve-june-meeting/index.html ↩︎

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conorreid · 5 years ago

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ACAB

The phrase that haunts America. From Seattle to New York, Minneapolis to Houston, it is the call of “All Cops Are Bastards” that is traded back and forth. Countless numbers are introduced to 1312 for the first time; with every swing of the baton and every tear gas canister fired, those numbers swell larger. Now too big to ignore, calls of “ACAB” ring out from sea to shining sea. Pursed on the lips of framers and lawyers alike, it is the call of a force just awakening from its long slumber. Here we will examine neither the material conditions that have brought such a cry to the forefront, nor the various “solutions” pedalled to those conditions. Instead, we will look at what we mean when we declare that All Cops Are Bastards, and perhaps address some of the pearl clutching surrounding the usage of the phrase.

To do so, we will be employing the device of social roles, similarly to what Karl Marx does in Capital, Vol 1. One’s social role is tied to what one is engaged in, but the key is that the roles can be entered and exited—somewhat—at will. Individuals are free to leave and engage in new roles, but the roles themselves remain relatively fixed. That is, I have a role that is not dependent on my individual nature, but my social “choice.” While in that role I complete the actions associated with it, but I am only “forced” to do those things so long as I am inside the context of that role. Leave and switch to another, and I am “free.”

By way of example, Marx offers the roles of the buyer and the seller in a marketplace. The buyer and the seller meet in the marketplace on equal footing, but each has a separate role that includes very specific actions. The social role of the seller is to offer forth a commodity for purchase. The buyer rolls up to the marketplace with money and the intent to purchase such a commodity. They agree on a price, and the transaction is complete. The seller, well, sells, and the buyer buys. Those are their roles, and to vary from the assigned actions of the role means to give it up altogether. After all, a seller is not a seller unless she sells! A seller who, in the course of negotiation, decides not to sell after all, forfeits their role as a seller and becomes merely the holder of a commodity in demand. The role requires the actions associated with that role. Fail to carry out the actions and the role itself is forfeit. Likewise, the roles can be reversed and switched by completing different actions. As Marx writes, “Being a seller and being a buyer are not fixed roles, but constantly attach themselves to different persons in the course of the accumulation of commodities.”1 Similarly, one can be both a buyer and a seller right after one another, or even at the same time—so long as one is negotiating separate transactions simultaneously. The social roles of the buyer and the seller are not fixed but fluid, and can be eschewed at will.

Of course, one can hold other roles outside of just buyer and seller, and can be held simultaneously. Let us take the capitalist, for example. By owning the means of production for some commodity—in this case, let us say a cotton mill—they take on the social role of a capitalist—that is, someone whose primary goal is the expansion of their own capital through the production of surplus value ad infinitum. Indeed, as Marx explains:

Only as a personification of capital is the capitalist respectable... it is not values in use and the enjoyment of them, but exchange-value and its augmentation, that spur him into action. Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake.2

A capitalist’s social role is to expand their own capital. That is, by definition, what a capitalist is compelled to do. But to do so, they also must engage in other social roles. Our capitalist must don the role of the buyer in the marketplace to secure the cotton necessary for the production of yarn in her mill. She also must become a buyer of labour power to run her mill and produce the surplus value that will lead to expanding her capital. Without workers to spin the cotton into yarn, she’ll realize no value and spurn her social role, forfeiting her claim to being a capitalist at all! And finally, she must also become a seller to realize her profits; without selling her yarn she has made nothing at all. Therefore, those who hold the social role of the capitalist must also, by definition, hold the social roles of the buyer and the seller.

Note that the social role of a capitalist is dependent on the expansion of her own capital through the extraction of surplus value from labour. To do otherwise is incompatible with the social role of the capitalist. As Marx explains:

_Apres moi le deluge!_3 is therefore the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. Its answer to the outcry about the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-work, is this: Should that pain trouble us, since it increase our pleasure (profit)? But looking at these things as a whole, it is evident that this does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him.4

That is, to be a capitalist at all, one must exploit workers for all they’re worth. To not do so is to forfeit one’s social role as a capitalist. One can be a “great” man, with strong morals, but to be a capitalist means to forego those morals in the name of the worldly god of profit. Competition, the coercive force behind the capitalist role, precludes the well being of the workers.

Let us assume, for a moment, that there does indeed exist a “good” capitalist. She pays her workers well—though not the full value of their labour, for indeed that would mean foregoing any profit at all and forfeiting the role of a capitalist—she makes sure that her cotton mill is outfitted with the latest and safest spinning wheels, she only works her staff for eight hours a day with a lunch break in between, they are provided with the best in healthcare, and by democratic process get to choose the Spotify playlist blasted throughout the mill for the day. However, a new cotton mill moves into town and pays their workers far less, drives them day and night to spin cotton into yarn, provides no healthcare, and exclusively plays “Gucci Gang” by Lil Pump on repeat throughout the factory floor. A hellish workplace to be sure, but the reserve army of labour assures that the capitalists will be able to fill their mill with souls desperate for a wage of any kind. This cotton mill will realize far higher profits than the one run by our “good” capitalist, for their margin of surplus is much larger. Pay your workers less and run them for longer, and you’ll be realizing higher profits than someone who pays workers more and only works eight hour days. Less product to sell, and at a lesser profit margin.

Therefore, we find our “good” capitalist at a crossroads. She is being driven out of business by the ruthless Gucci Gang mill next door. She cannot compete, as they can sell their goods for less while realizing more profit, leaving her out in the cold. What is she to do? She can maintain her morals, continuing treating her workers well, and find herself out of business and her workers out on the street in no time at all. Or, she can buckle down, cut her workers’ pay, and work them to the bone to bring back her profits up. Choose the former, and her “good” nature is consistent, but she has foreclosed her ability to be a capitalist. She has renounced the compulsion of the role of a capitalist, as she is seeking the wellbeing of her workers over the expansion of her own capital, and therefore the coercive nature of competition throws her out of that role. Choose the latter, and she is no longer the “good” capitalist, but at least she is still a capitalist. If her morals cannot be overwritten, she simply ceases to be a capitalist at all. The coercive force of competition, the definition of the social role of a capitalist, requires exploitations. It is the lifeblood of that role. To renounce it means to give up that role entirely.

Marx makes this point with a consortium of “twenty-six firms owning extensive potteries” who no longer wanted to employ children as labourers.5 Instead of simply not using children, they lobbied parliament to ban child labour altogether. If their competitors could still use children, it was “impossible” to both stay alive and not use child labour. As Marx explains, “Competition with other capitalists, they said, did not allow them to limit the hours worked by children voluntarily.”6 As if the bounds of capital are the bounds of the possible! A glimpse into 19th century capitalist realism. Regardless, the logic of the capitalist role dictates that one must exploit all they can, regardless of personal opinion. The role itself forces you to do so—if you cannot stand the heat, get out of the fire. Hence, ACAB; by definition, all capitalists are bastards.

But what about cops? Like capitalists, cops are a social role. But what is that role? What are the coercive forces pressing down upon them? Substantially the self professed role of the police is to “Protect and Serve,” but we must delve a bit more into that sentiment. Their social media accounts would have you believe they serve the public at large, but even a cursory glance at the myriad extrajudicial killings casts doubt on such a claim. Instead, Fredreich Engels—using the notes of Marx on Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society—asserts in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that the police exist to serve and protect the state, not the public at large. And as “the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage labour by capital,” protecting and serving the state means protecting and serving the violent rule of capital. “To keep the citizens in check, a police force was needed.”7 And that police force exists only to protect the right of private property from those who would challenge it. Law and order exists to codify some violence as legitimate while vilifying others. Therefore, we call the police standing guard outside a grocery to stop the entrance of a starving man order, while that same man stealing an europe banana is violence and disorder that must be stopped at all costs, lest our world descend into anarchy. The police are authorized to use violence by the state, and they use this violence to perpetuate the violence inherent in property ownership. Hence the reason why police killings of Eric Garner for selling loose cigarettes and George Flyod for using an alleged counterfeit twenty dollar bill are expected and habitual, while crimes like Elon Musk breaking social distancing and condemning his workers to a short life by reopening his Tesla factory in California, or Wells Fargo committing massive fraud by opening up thousands upon thousands of new credit cards for unaware customers to juke their own numbers, remain entirely unpoliced. The former “threaten” the property owning class with “disorder,” while the latter are merely part of the game. It is perhaps instructive to think of the police as a force of knights let loose upon the land by a monarch who wishes to remind his subjects to not get too uppity. The social role of the police requires them to protect one form of violence by using violence against all challengers.

So much for the theory. But what about the facts on the ground? A look at the history of policing in the United States seems to back up the idea that the police exist to uphold order and protect the status quo than to serve the public good. Below the Mason-Dixon live, the police grew out of community slave patrols. Quite literally, the role of the police in the South was to prevent property from running away and freeing themselves, upholding the “order” of violent slavery and stopping the “violence” of runaways. In the North, “police forces emerged as a response to disorder” primarily caused by massive labour unrest.8 Groups like the Pinkertons were initially hired by capitalists to break strikes and protect factories from rioting workers. In due time, they evolved into publicly funded police forces whose broad mandate was to uphold the rule of capital by any means possible.

Therefore, the social role of the police is to protect the rule of law and order from the public. A “good” cop ceases to be a cop the moment he decides the right of a starving man to live is greater than the right of a capitalist to property. By definition a cop must protect property over people, and to do otherwise is to break the role of the police. Hence, the role of the police is irredeemable. Reform cannot change the role that all cops must fulfill; they will always be against the public good, as they will always defend the state and order against the public they supposedly serve. Perhaps they can exert their monopoly of violence more “cleaning” against a starving man. You can ban tear gas, provide all the sensitivity training you’d like, but the cop will never not beat the starving man trying to eat, for that is what they are paid to do. Reform is a dead end. The only road is abolition. ACAB is not merely a slogan, it is the truth. The role of the police means they must be abolished, for to change their role is to destroy their very reason for existing.

Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, 206 ↩︎

Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, 739 ↩︎

Literally, “After me, the flood!” Traditionally attributed to Madame de Pompadour, the lover of Louis XV, after the Battle of Rossbach turned the tide against the French in the Seven Years War on the continent. In this usage, it means something to the effect of “who gives a damn what happens, so long as it’s after I’ve got mine!” ↩︎

Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, 381 ↩︎

Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 92-93 ↩︎

Gary Potter, The History of Policing in the United States, 3 ↩︎

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conorreid · 5 years ago

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To Fish in the Afternoon

In Karl Marx’s The German Ideology, he explains that communist society “makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”1 That is, he is not compelled to do any one thing as his needs—housing, food, healthcare, etc.—are already met, and therefore does not need to become a fisherman or hunter and make that the means of his livelihood, but can instead pursue those activities without care towards pursuing them professionally. This quote is indeed one of the only remarks Marx makes on post-capitalist society.2 I have known this explanation for years, as it is frequently peddled in leftist circles, but it was upon playing Nintendo’s most recent Animal Crossing that I realized the game represents a tantalizing glimpse into this future Marx imagined.

For those unfamiliar, the Animal Crossing series of games are a sort of “life simulator” that takes place in an idyllic world free from the stresses and compulsions of everyday life under late capitalism. You control a character you are free to design and have a house in a village of anthropomorphic animals. Your landlord is a talking tanuki—a Japanese raccoon dog closer to a fox than the raccoons of North America—who provides you a house through an interest free loan with zero percent down and no repayment schedule. You have no needs whatsoever, no food to eat and no rent to pay. You cannot contract disease, and outside of the occasional spider bite or wasp sting there is no danger at all. You can spend your days lazing around your house, tending to your flowers and chatting to your neighbors. There is ownership of housing, but not land: you can pick flowers, fish in the river, and collect weeds on all land, and the products of that labour are yours and yours alone. You can chop wood and craft furniture, create art and play your ocarina. You are never pestered to repay your loan, and can steer clear of the money entirely. It is a glimpse of, perhaps not a communist utopia, but an off ramp for this late capitalist hellscape.

There is still money in Animal Crossing. There is still private property, and there are still markets to buy and sell goods. But money and markets does not a capitalism make. Markets and money have existed for millenia, but capitalism has only been around for a few centuries. The difference is in how widespread those markets are and how worshiped that money is. Markets, specifically the buying and selling of goods in different places to make a profit, is the realm of merchant capital. This process of profit creation is specialized, and for most of human history only concerned luxury goods; mass market staples like food and clothing were produced close to home and often traded in kind rather than sold for money. Most humans were not compelled to sell their labour for a wage, and instead owned the means of their own production of food, clothing, and other basic needs. Capitalism is the creation of capital, or value in motion, through profit. Profit, at least under capitalism, is primarily created by the extraction of surplus value, i.e. the labour workers engage in after the value of their wages has been created during the working day. And workers are only compelled to sell this labour as a commodity if they do not own the means of their own production, and therefore must acquire food, housing, clothing, healthcare, and other needs exclusively through money. If their only method of acquiring money is through selling their labour, then everybody is compelled to work.

Because some people are better at certain tasks than others, and therefore can be more productive and create more surplus value for the owners of the means of production, the division of labour results and individuals are “locked in” to their current roles in order to survive. This is the meaning of Marx’s point cited above. He writes that, “as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.”3 In communism this means of livelihood is provided, and therefore no person is compelled to be a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or anything else. Communism “makes it possible for [them] to do one thing today and another tomorrow” rather than the same thing, day after day, merely to put food on the table and keep the lights on.

In Animal Crossing, you are free of all compulsions and needs for anything at all. You are indebted to Tom Nook—the tanuki landlord—but you have no obligation to pay it back. You do not need to eat, you can produce your own clothes, and you can indeed do anything you want. Likewise, your landlord’s loan does not accrue interest, and it seems his motivation for providing the loan is not even profit driven. In fact, Nook’s behavior is the very definition of what Marx says the traditional capitalist circuit of exchange, M-C-M’, is not! He writes, “Now it is evident that the circuit M-C-M’ would be absurd and without meaning if the intention were to exchange by this means two equal sums of money.”4 And yet, this absurdity is exactly the one Nook engages in, charging no interest for a loan that merely pays for the cost of a house and labour put into its construction.

Likewise, the labour theory of value—that is, the idea that value comes from labour upon the goods of nature—seems to be respected within the bounds of Animal Crossing. For example, selling a bag of 15 weeds will net you $150. However, bestow some labour upon those weeds and turn them into a leaf umbrella, and those 15 weeds now sell for $300, with the extra $150 being the value of your labour. And indeed, even the initial $150 results from your labour of picking the weeds and bagging them. The means of production, in this case the working bench allowing you to transform those weeds into an umbrella, is communally owned. You do not have to exchange money to create those weeds, and you are paid the full value of the labour that you engaged in.

Animal Crossing is not a communist utopia. Merchant capital still exists in the form of a shop that imports luxury goods. You do not own your own home, and cannot make upgrades to it without repaying loans to Tom Nook. The system of governance is strictly hierarchical, with little democratic process and no system of recall or feedback from the general populace. And there are those who take the ideology and compulsion of capital from our world and transfer it into the world of Animal Crossing, engaging in a mad dash of accumulation and achievement. But the ability to fish, hunt, paint, and relax all without compulsion is a blow against the chains of capitalist realism and provides a glimpse of a society beyond the grips of capital.

Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, The Germany Ideology in Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 5, 47 (also see https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm) ↩︎

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” from Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, The Germany Ideology, 49 ↩︎

Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, The Germany Ideology, 47 ↩︎

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm ↩︎

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conorreid · 5 years ago

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Intangible Forms by Shohei Fujimoto

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conorreid · 5 years ago

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Intangible Forms

“All that is solid melts into air,” Marx wrote in reference to the dizzying speed at which the material conditions of life are constantly transformed under capitalist modernity. In Shohei Fujimoto’s newest installation entitled Intangible Forms, it seems he has conjured up the opposite trick, of turning that very air into a solid mass. A cacophony of lasers, a hazy fog, and rolling drum beats, his installation manages to take the intangible form of light and portray it as if it were a solid, moving form, twisting and contorting in all sorts of fascinating ways. The way Fujimoto is able to tease physicality and texture out of light and nothing else is truly remarkable, and makes for a mesmerizing experience. I saw this light show, taking weightless and intangible light and portraying it as if it had a physical form, as an allegory for how post-industrial capitalism itself operates. Things like software engineering, advertising, finance—these are intangibles that become commodities and take on physical mass as they affect the real world. If industrial capitalism melted solids into air, late capitalism takes the air itself and makes it into commodities to sell. The intangible becomes the commodified, and takes on physical form just like Fujimoto’s lasers.

What struck me, however, more than even the lights, was the “experience” itself, an almost meta-art on the nature of art in the 2020s. Hosted in NYC’s “ARTECHOUSE,” an “innovative platform for experiential, genre-bending, one-of-a-kind multimedia art exhibitions and explorations,” upon arriving I was implored to “respect the space” and “enter with a meditative mind, as the artist intends.” The “space” I was meant to respect, however, had already been profaned by the shaking of a mocktail mixer, a crying child, and flashes of cameras going one after the other. It was then that I arrived at my interpretation of Intangible Forms as meta-art, where the interesting bit is not the form and content of the art but the nature of how that form and content is consumed. Yes, the piece itself is a rather impressive piece of light show. But that form is secondary to the total experience of consumption, and that experience includes watching how others consume that which you are experiencing.

Indeed, based on the multitude of photos and videos being snapped around me, I began to wonder if this exhibit existed for consumption’s sake or conspicuous consumption of "the gram flex." As outlined in Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, there are some goods whose entire purpose is merely to signal to others that you are of a certain class and wealth. Think of the fancy cars and private schools of the late 19th century rich—more than the thing itself, what really mattered was the ability of that thing to show others that you were wealthy. Intangible Forms reminded me of one of these Veblen goods for the modern era: an experience where the actual consumption matters far less than the signaled consumption on some form of social media.

The form and content of this exhibit indeed seem more suited to online consumption, to this signalling purpose, than it does physical consumption. The lasers can fill the entire screen, and the noises of crying babies and bored faces are filtered out by a cleverly placed shot. Intangible Forms becomes sharper the more intangible the form of consumption. In a way, this is no surprise; exhibits for spaces such as these must be consciously designed to be consumed and shared because the motive of this piece is to sell tickets for people to see it. Making it appear better on social media than in real life is conducive to this ultimate goal of profit. The drive, indeed the compulsion, for capital expansion is irresistible, even in the construction of art.

It appears that Fujimoto is in on the act, however. Off to the side, away from the main exhibit, is a smaller room with a looping video. This video clues us in on the fact that Fujimoto is aware of his creation of a piece of meta-art, for this video itself is a meta commentary on the main exhibition. The video displays diagrams of the laser light show happening, but they are melting, morphing into something broken. It is a Windows XP screensaver-like presentation, almost mocking his main exhibition. The screen flashes at random times, as if he knows the flashing of cameras will interrupt the show outside. I watch this nightmare next to a small child, who then begins to ask, “Dad can we get a snack now?” He is finished with this intangible form; time to consume something tangible.

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conorreid · 6 years ago

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Melting Ice (Part 2)

The spectre of climate crisis stalks our present, finding ways to mash and mangle our now into one that is inseparable from a myriad of doomed futures. Like the park rangers, I have found it difficult to view the present as, well, the present. It is all but impossible for me to move throughout my day without confronting the prospect of societal collapse through adverse climate change, as the reminders are all around me. A scorching summer’s day followed by unseasonable rain and cold, a sign imploring me to reduce my water usage as the world dries up, an announcement of the delay of the once-again late L train which is still undergoing repairs from damage inflicted by the climatically-charged Superstorm Sandy, an ad that tells me to buy this greenwashed swimwear as the oceans will contain more plastic than fish by 2050 I pass each day on my way to the office, a frantic check of the phone on a hot night to make sure my power will not be cut by Con-Ed just like they did the surrounding neighborhoods in an ill-fated effort to keep the New York City grid alive. And these are merely intensely personal reminders. Follow the thread long enough on a news story these days and you’ll find more often than not that it was the climate crisis that was a, if not the, primary mover.1 My present has been colonised by the futures contingent on the unfolding climate crisis; my now continues to be haunted by this unexcisable spectre of doom.

This state of affairs of doomed futures haunting a present without hope has many parallels to hauntology, a metaphor and framework first created by Jacque Derrida in his 1993 Spectres of Marx, a counterargument to the famous (and now thoroughly debunked by the climate crisis and its subsequent disasters) “end of history” thesis put forward by Fukuyama in the afterglow of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Eastern bloc states in the early 1990’s. Derrida argued that although “really existing communism” had collapsed, communism—or at least the idea of it (and what is communism if not an idea?)—would continue to haunt history again and again, as the communist ideal represents a lost and promised future that can never really be killed. In his own words:

Capitalist societies can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished since the collapse of the totalitarianism of the twentieth century and not only is it finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost. They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself: a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.2

In the years after his work, other critical theorists picked up the thread of hauntology, applying it to various other fields, but especially art criticism. As Adam Harper, a theorist who is one of the many to apply hauntology to the study and criticism of music in particular, writes:

A spectre invades the present to redress a balance there, to warn the present concerning the future. Hauntological spectres come to bother us and our images from any zone of deficit lying between things as they were / are / will be and things as they are thought or hoped to have been / be / be in the future.3

Thus, the spectre of climate crisis has floated up from the zone between the now and the promised futures of a warmer world. The crucial difference with most hauntological spectres, however, is that these futures in question are not ones anybody is hoping for. On the contrary, the futures of the climate crisis are ones we all—presumably—collectively dread. My present is not haunted by the dreams of a better world. Instead, it is haunted by a world on fire.

Another supposed difference between typical hauntological spectres and the climate crisis is the role of the past. The present is historicised and it is the past that haunts it in the form of the future-to-come. Communism is an idea from our past, and the futures that haunt our now were ones promised in the past. The communist program was always about building for future generations. To quote Lenin, “Only by radically remoulding the teaching, organisation and training of the youth shall we be able to ensure that the efforts of the younger generation will result in the creation of a society that will be unlike the old society, i.e., in the creation of a communist society.”4 Note the language he uses; the creation of the Soviet Union is not enough to create “really existing communism” on Earth. Communism is still a future-to-come. It is only the youth, those brought up in the conditions of the first truly free society in the Soviet Union, that will lay the cornerstone for communism; Lenin and his ilk are merely the gravediggers of capitalism that in turn becomes the groundwork for communism, but they are not the builders of the communist project itself. It is these futures, ones promised in the past that are still yet to come, that return to haunt the now.

At first glance, our spectre lacks this future-to-come/past component. The futures promised by the climate crisis derive from the now. They are always in flux, and our actions or lack thereof determine the course of this flux. But we must not be content to view things solely on their immediate—that is, their aesthetic—level. Context and historicization are vital in our understanding here; to view this spectre, one so intimately tied up with the past (its cause) and the future (its effect), synchronically would be to miss it entirely and treat the climate crisis as merely a flicker. In the words of Fredric Jameson, “Always historicize!”5 Our spectre is not an eternal being, existing since time immemorial. It may not be Real (what ghost is?) but it is in time just as much as it distorts it. It was summoned on a particular date by particular individuals. It was conjured here, and this conjuring was a series of physical acts we can date and comprehend and pin individuals to.

For some, this has a very specific date. “The end of the world has already occurred,” writes Timothy Morton, and “it was [in] April [of] 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine.”6 I think it unfair and naive to assign blame for the climate crisis solely on Watt, for it was not him who dictated that the steam engine be used in quantities large enough to crinkle and crack the global climate into chaos. In April of 1784, the world could have gone another way. The invention of the steam engine was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the conjuration of the climate crisis. Watt may have written the incantation, but it was not him who performed the ceremony to summon this ghost to our physical plane. It is not those who create the incantations that bear the brunt of the blame, but those who conjure. Oppenheimer et al are certainly not innocent, but the blame of killing hundreds of thousands lies with Truman and his ilk. That said, there can be no summoning without a spell.

Andres Malm pursues this line of reasoning in his 2013 monograph Fossil Capital. He writes that it was:

capitalists in a small corner of the Western world [who] invested in steam, laying the foundation of the fossil economy; at no moment did the species vote for it either with feet or ballots, or march in mechanical unison, or exercise some sort of shared authority over its own destiny and that of the earth system.7

Textile factory owners, desperate for more flexibility and control over their labour force, abandoned water wheel powered factories located far out in the British countryside and relocated to labour-filled cities, leveraging the powers of coal—which could be transported to the factory, rather than relying on hydro-power that fixes the location of a factory to a river—to generate the heat to move their new steam engines. Locating factories in urban areas meant the owners gained a crucial advantage in the battle over labour: they could now lay off striking workers and tap into a massive reserve army to replace them, rather than being at the mercy of their labourers in a deserted countryside devoid of replacements. It was this choice of coal over water, in a move to combat rising labour militancy amongst their workforce, that began the summoning ritual of the spectre of climate crisis.

The ceremony was completed by the early 20th century with the switch from coal to oil. Once again, capitalists concerned about labour’s power to disrupt production in the name of garnering increased control over their own work—this time about the ability of coal miners to strike and thereby put a stranglehold on the power of the global economy—switched to oil, which required far less labour to extract (compare oil wells to coal mines) and more importantly transport (manned train lines and the heavy infrastructure surrounding that system to unmanned oil pipelines that are often buried underground and thereby disappear from sight entirely).8 It was these twin decisions, made by an unaccountable capitalist class in their insatiable quest for control over labour, that chanted out the incantations written out by Watt that conjured the climate crisis from the spectral realm.

It is the contingent nature of the climate crisis—that the decisions of the rich and powerful long since gone ushered in the fossil economy that defines our reality today—that lends it its similarity to other hauntological spectres. The past comes to haunt the present through its stranglehold on the future. Malm describes this as “the rolling invasion of the past into the present,” the unsaid addendum being that this invasion’s mechanism of control is through controlling the present’s future.9 Our spectre indeeds fits into Harper’s definition of a hauntological one, in that it exists in the deficit between what is and what is thought to be, but it is also a historicized spectre. It is a spectre that is steeped in history, stained with the blood of the dead and the dying and the not-yet-born-but-already-dead victims of a relentless invisible hand.

It may be too strong to pin the entirety of this ghost’s strength on decisions made in the past; every time we turn on the lights or drive to work we lend it ever increasing bits of power. Every ounce of coal burned is more secession of control to the past. Fossil fuels themselves are just that—fossils. We burn the energy of the past, the energy of life long since dead, and in this Faustian bargain of temporary power we lend it permanent power over our future. But it’s not as if it’s so easy to cast away the decisions of those in the past that now shape our everyday lives. Marx wrote that:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.10

The past in a very real sense determines the bounds of possible actions in the present. Our means of dismantling the fossil economy before it dismantles the earth are scarce indeed. Through the spectre of climate crisis, the past does not just weigh on the brains of the living. It is incarnate in the very air we breathe. The carbon of years past, itself burned because of decisions made decades and centuries before its combustion, is a physical manifestation of the past that hangs around in the world around us. The sky is heavy and heaving under the weight of the past.

This hauntological spectre is the worst kind of ghost: the type that can modify the physical world. The climate crisis is an existential threat to the continued existence of humanity as we know it. Curiously, “humanity as we know it” seems to mean our global system of late capitalism. The forces of capital were the ones who conjured this ghost, but it appears they’ve lost control. The spectre devours its patron. “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” is the phrase that has come to dominate modern discourse on the pervasive hold our system of production and consumption has on our bounds of the possible.11 This extends not just to the practical, but even the imaginary. The grips of capitalist realism are so tight that it has become virtually impossible for us to even contemplate of alternatives to capitalism. “There is no alternative” has become a deeply felt fact of life for those of us in the Global North in the 21st century. But through the shimmers of the ghost, we catch a glimpse of something. We need no longer imagine: the end of the world stands before us, and with it the end of capitalism. But in this doom stands salvation. If we can see capitalism ending, we are no longer trapped by the bounds of capitalist realism. If we can watch it end, we can imagine other ways of capitalism’s demise. As Mark Fisher explains, “Environmental catastrophe provides what a political unconscious totally colonised by neoliberalism cannot: an image of life after capitalism.”12 Capitalism is doomed to the dustbin of history, condemned by its own hand. It will take us down with it, for it is only through the cleansing flame of collapse that capitalism ends itself. But if we excise the ghost and destroy it before capitalism can complete its destruction of earth, if we combat the past and rid ourselves of the spectre of climate collapse, if we wrestle back control of our presently-doomed future, we may yet live. Either way, capitalism is doomed. The choice left to us is whether we are, too.

For the climate crisis as the primary mover in the Syrian Civil War (and therefore the wave o immigration and anti-immigrant rhetoric and governments in Europe post-2015) see: Gleick, P.H., 2014: Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria. Wea. Climate Soc., 6, 331–340, https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-13-00059.1 For the disastrous effect the climate crisis has had on Central America, driving the same sort of immigration and anti-immigrant rhetoric in the United States see: Food Security and Emmigration: Why people flee and the impact on family members left behind in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, https://docs.wfp.org/api/documents/WFP-0000022124/download/ ↩︎

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, New York: Routledge, 2011, 123 ↩︎

Adam Harper. “Hauntology: The Past Inside The Present.” Rouge's Foam, 2009, http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/2009/10/hauntology-past-inside-present.html ↩︎

Vladimir Lenin, “The Tasks of Youth Leagues” in Collected Works, Volume 31, 1920, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/oct/02.htm ↩︎

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London: Routledge, 1989, 1 ↩︎

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, University of Minnesota Press, 2013, 7 ↩︎

Andreas, Malm, Fossil Capital: the Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, London: Verso, 2016, 267 ↩︎

Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, London: Verso, 2013 ↩︎

Malm, Fossil Capital, 10 ↩︎

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marxist Archive, 1842, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm ↩︎

The phrase itself is attributed to either Fredric Jameson or Slavoj Žižek; both claim the other said it. It was popularized as the encapsulation of capitalist realism in the Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2010 ↩︎

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 228 ↩︎

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conorreid · 6 years ago

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Melting Ice (Part 1)

Our planet is dying. Nowhere has this been made more obvious to me than in Glacier National Park, “the crown of the continent.” Located in northwestern Montana, right up against the Canadian border, Glacier is a stunning 4,000 square kilometres of Alpine terrain with an impressive array of flora, fauna, and animals. Its namesake glaciers are the source of the Mississippi, Colombia, and Saskatchewan rivers. And like the rest of our world, glacier National Park is collapsing under the weight of the Anthropocene.1

To visit Glacier is to receive a crash course in the devastating climatic changes we—or rather, capital—have wrought upon ourselves. The first, and indeed most obvious, change I noticed was in the glaciers themselves. The signage around the park was unequivocal—by 2030 all the glaciers will be gone.2 There are now just 26 glaciers in the park of the same name, down from 146 in the middle of the 19th century.3 While most of the glaciers in the park have disappeared, the ones remaining have shrank substantially; since 1850 the park’s glaciers have lost 70% of their surface area.4 These few remaining “glaciers” are truly pathetic. A few dozen metres across, nestled in the shadows of a mountainside; to call many of these snow packs “glaciers” is an insult to what they once were. All the same, watching and indeed hearing these sad husks of ice and snow melt in the summertime sun was an eerie sight to behold.

That’s not to say the other changes brought on by the climate crisis are not readily apparent from a quick drive through the park. As the glaciers melt, water table levels reduce and the risk of catastrophic forest fire goes up.5 Fire is of course a natural part of life in the American West, but in recent years climate crisis has brought a series of fires to the Glacier National Park hitherto unseen. The entire Western side of Lake MacDonald--one of the main lakes in the park and a popular tourist spot-- is nothing but burnt, black tree corpses, standing as a warning of our future. They’re from a fire (named Robert Fire) in 2003 that burned down over 50,000 acres. In that year an unprecedented 13% of the park was consumed by flame in the most destructive fire year on record.6 Just last year in 2018, another fire tore through the same region around Lake MacDonald, reburning brush already devastated from the Robert Fire a decade before.7 As the risk of fire goes up and up, the park will see more of its beloved land consumed in the fires of collapse.

Fire is not all bad. As I stated, it’s a way of life in the American West. The flames clear out old trees for new growth—like the wildflowers Glacier is famed for—to sprout up. But as the earth itself gets warmer (and Montana warmer still, as it is seeing temperature increases double that of the average8) the tree line moves even higher, meaning more and more Alpine meadow is conquered each year by trees fleeing the burning valleys.9 The plants are running higher and higher to escape a warming world. They’ll be disappointed to find that they can only run for so long.

I was around all this “change” for the course of a little more than a week. But the park rangers who have been in Glacier for decades have watched the fires, the advancing treeline, the melting glaciers first hand. Understandably, their outlook on the matter was overwhelmingly resigned. They all had a curious manner of talking about the glaciers as if they were already dead.

I took a boat tour out on the lake, and the guide was a 94 year old park ranger named Doug. He’d been working in Glacier for over half a century, and enjoyable referred to Glacier as “your park.” He implored us to go on hikes, to “make your way up to the glaciers and say goodbye.” On a separate trip, another guide explained that it was best that you saw a glacier or two now “to pay your respects” as you won’t have the chance in just a decade’s time. They also resignedly pointed out that the tiny snow patch just now visible on the mountain was called Gem Glacier, despite it being far below the size threshold for being an active glacier.10 They explained that this small size was actually a gift to the shrinking giant, as its tiny diameter and ample shade meant it would most likely be the last “glacier” left in the park before melting away. A third joyfully explained that they’d already come to a decision regarding the name of the park: a glacier-free Glacier National Park will still be called just that.11

When looking out across the landscape of the park, these rangers did not see just the now. No, they also saw the future—a parched park devoid of glaciers—and began to act as if the future were the now. The glaciers, despite still being here, were already gone. The beauty of the now had been crowded out by visions of a doomed future so striking that one felt as if that, not what could be seen in front of them, were the true now. This time distortion effect and what that means for our understanding of and adaptation to the climate crisis is what I would like to explore in this piece. In examining our aesthetic—that is, our immediate impressions—understanding of this warming world, I hope to make coping—for that is all we can do, really, short of massive global revolt in the next decade or so followed by a coordinated and democratized effort to rapidly decarbonize—with our doom a bit more palatable.

The term itself is under some scrutiny. While I disagree with the implication of “Anthropocene”—ie that the blame for the disastrous climate now destroying our world lies with all of humanity equally rather than a privileged few that have determined the rules and structure of the fossil economy and are responsible for the overwhelming majority of carbon emissions, something I will elaborate upon further in this essay—the name itself is in such general usage and sounds far better than alternatives like Necrocene or Capitalscene that I have defaulted to its use here. For a more robust handling of this topic see Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland (CA): PM Press, 2016 ↩︎

Myrna H. P. Hall and Daniel B. Fagre, 2003, Modeled Climate-Induced Glacier Change in Glacier National Park, 1850- 2100, BioScience 53: 131-140 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/53/2/131/254976 ↩︎

Erich Peitzsch and Lisa McKeon, “Retreat of Glaciers in Glacier National Park,” https://www.usgs.gov/centers/norock/science/retreat-glaciers-glacier-national-park ↩︎

Fagre, D.B., McKeon, L.A., Dick, K.A., and Fountain, A.G., 2017, Glacier margin time series (1966, 1998, 2005, 2015) of the named glaciers of Glacier National Park, MT, USA: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/F7P26WB1 ↩︎

Climate Change, 2019, https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/climate-change.htm ↩︎

Rolf Larson, “Glacier Park Fires of 2003,” The Fires of 2003: An Anthology, 2004, The Inside Trail Vol. XVIII, No. 1, http://www.glacierparkfoundation.org/InsideTrail/IT_2004Win.pdf ↩︎

Howe Ridge Fire Incident Overview, 2018, National Park Service Incident Information System, https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/6135/ ↩︎

Thomas Michael Power and Donovan S. Power, The Impact of Climate Change on Montana’s Outdoor Economy, 2015, Montana Wildlife Federation, http://montanawildlife.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Impact-of-Climate-Change-on-the-Montana-Outdoor-Economy-Dec-2015-Final-Report.pdf ↩︎

Climate Change, 2019, https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/climate-change.htm ↩︎

Doug Struck, “Glacier National Park’s name will outlive its glaciers,” 2019, The Christian Science Monitor, https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2019/0618/Glacier-National-Park-s-name-will-outlive-its-glaciers ↩︎

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conorreid · 6 years ago

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Ecoimperalism

As the walls of the climate crisis close in, the right is lurching towards ecofascism at breakneck speeds.1 But as the Amazon burns, a new and far more palatable ideology seems to be emerging: ecoimperialism.

The basic tenants are being laid out for a new political ideology that I predict will be adopted rather quickly by the neoliberal ruling class, and the destruction of the Amazon is an instructive test case for these architects to wade into the waters. The basic tenants are that there are some countries that are making good faith efforts towards the reduction of carbon emissions (read: The Global North sans perhaps Australia and parts of the United States) and others (read: China, India, Brazil, and much of the Global South) are not. And therefore, it is up to those who are "saving the earth" to intervene and force those who are not to change tack, using "any means necessary." There are some that are calling for an invasion of Brazil to "use any means necessary" to stop this intention destruction of "Earth's lungs."2 But this is not the only example of this emerging ideology. See one of the Economist's cover articles last week for another example of certain nations "falling behind."3 The article does not call for "any means necessary," but give it some time; it most undoubtedly will.

The problem with this ecoimperalist narrative is two fold. One, it assumes that things like military action to “save the Amazon” will help to mitigate the risk of climate crisis and that such military actions are justified against those nations that are not abiding by “common sense” measures to reduce carbon emissions. The real sticking point with carbon emissions is that the developing world produces far less per capita than the developed. Even if the Global North invaded Brazil and wrestled back the Amazon from the brink, they’d still be emitting almost ten times more carbon per person than the nation they had invaded to save from itself.4 Actions like that may make us “feel” like we’re accomplishing much, but in reality nothing will be done until we can decarbonize our own energy generation, for that’s where the overwhelming majority of carbon emissions come from.

The other problem with this narrative is that invading Brazil and other nations is the only way we can “force” them to combat climate crisis. How about instead of calling for less democracy via imperialist takeover, we call for more? Were the leading candidate of the 2018 election not languishing in prison for a farcical corruption charge, Bolsonaro would never have been elected.5 We should be calling for more democracy in these (and our own) nations, for if it were up to the direct vote of the people combating climate crisis would be a top priority around the globe.6 One need only look at Extinction Rebellion and vast protests across China that forced the Communist Party to enact carbon emission reform to see that it is the people who are in vanguard.7 The solution to climate laggards is not to rely on imperialism and intervention. Instead, it is to foster direct democracy at home and abroad to empower the public, who already recognizes the mass threat that climate crisis poses, to do what the ruling class will not.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/two-mass-murders-a-world-apart-share-a-common-theme-ecofascism/2019/08/18/0079a676-bec4-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html?noredirect=on ↩︎

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/05/who-will-invade-brazil-to-save-the-amazon/ ↩︎

https://www.economist.com/node/21770314?frsc=dg%7Ce ↩︎

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita) ↩︎

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-election-poll/brazil-poll-shows-jailed-lula-extending-lead-for-october-election-idUSKCN1L51J3 ↩︎

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/02/10/climate-change-still-seen-as-the-top-global-threat-but-cyberattacks-a-rising-concern/#table ↩︎

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/10/asia/china-wuhan-pollution-problems-intl-hnk/index.html ↩︎

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conorreid · 6 years ago

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Björk’s New Spectacle

Björk was a mortal woman. This must be remembered as she further transcends to the Godhead. Here latest performance, Cornucopia, is testament to her growing powers.

The experience begins with the a pre-show of sorts by the Hamrahlid Choir, the most prestigious children’s choir in Iceland and incidentally Björk’s alma mater—if such an idea exists for choirs. The choir was beautiful, but felt like it dragged on for just a bit too long (around half an hour). Perhaps it would’ve been better for myself to have treated them as an opening act rather than part of the show proper, for I found it hard to drown out thoughts of “where’s Björk?!” as we reached minute 20. They show up later in the show, however, and do lend some serious power to the performance, so for this they can be forgiven.

When the show does get going, however, it is a sight to behold. Björk is confident as ever and fully in control as the chaos of seven flutes, a harp, and two percussionists/DJs flows all around here. The stage was a nature-inspired treehouse of sorts (appropriately) all neon like that fit the eerie but breathtaking visuals of Björk and plants fusing into a singular being. Multiple moments of the show I felt truly enveloped in the wall of sound she’d so masterfully created. Her voice is as amazing as ever as she sang hits from Utopia (2017), Vulnicura (2015), and Vespertine (2001) amongst others.

The musical peak of the show came with the entrance of a surprise guest. serpentwithfeet, the king of the avant-garde scene pioneered by Björk, took the stage with the empress herself to sing Blissing Me in a wonderful remix (listen here). It was a moment of pure joy, as Björk looked on like any proud mom would. The energy of those two masters was almost too much for me to handle.

Thematically, the show as very explicitly about man’s relationship with nature. A video of 16 year old climate activist Greta Thunberg imploring us to replace a system that was sacrificing the futures of all so that a privileged few could live lives of luxury, coupled with Björk’s daring—and sometimes downright nightmarish—exploration of a utopian vision of humanity fused with nature made for a powerful performance. While the Great Enemy of capitalism was never named, Björk did a surprisingly good job of identifying that the system must be changed, and even effectively combated capitalist realism by forcing the audience to imagine with her an eco-feminist future free of the influence of Capital.

She closed the show by appropriately singing “tabula rosa for my children.” Unfortunately, this is an imagined future that will not come to pass. “The fuck-ups of the fathers” are made manifest in the form of carbon, and will haunt our children for centuries to come. Björk sings “you’re so strong” over and over, almost as if she wants, needs, the audience to live up to her words. If we’re to survive the trials of the years to come, we’ll need to be.

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conorreid · 6 years ago

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Reich Richter Pärt and the End Times

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conorreid · 6 years ago

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Reich Richter Pärt and the End Times

The Shed is a monster. A multi-million dollar sandcrawler-esque art complex perched atop the dystopic acropolis called Hudson Yards, it’s New York’s latest entry into its own Disneyland-ification—alongside other “landmarks” like Pier 17, 432 Park Ave, and One Vanderbilt. Naturally, I found myself enmeshed in this nightmare to watch a performance of Reich Richter Pärt, where “live music and visual art meet in an immersive performance and exhibition”.1

Before we dive into the performance, we must set the scene in Hudson Yards as—inadvertently or not—the circumstances of where the performance was added tremendously to the performance itself. Hudson Yards is a new “neighborhood” in the vein of Dubai and Brasília—that is, it is a Baudrillardian simulation of one, down to the eerie “modern” bodegas and the imposingly sleek multi-zoned skyscrapers of glass that could easily fit in to the skyline of any new-ish global city.

Walking around, one gets the sense that Hudson Yards was built only for wealthy tourists who want to shop at Neiman Marcus and stand in line to climb a staircase that goes nowhere at all. It is almost incomprehensible that any sane person would be clamoring to live in such a fabricated environment. Naturally, this “triumph” of a development received tremendous subsidies from the city of New York meant for low-income neighborhoods.2 Such is the logic of our times.

The entire facility feels like a dream scape. It is literally on a hill overlooking the rest of the city, looming over the commons like a man so sure of himself that he can paradoxically think of nothing else. All this feeling swirled around my head as I entered The Shed, and it was hard for it not to color my experiences of everything inside.

The first part of the performance, the Arvo Pärt piece, is the one that I thought reached closest to the sublime. We entered into a white room with colored tapestries—painted by Gerhard Richter—on the wall and dozens of concert goers mulling about.3 Then suddenly, there were voices around me. The singers were in the mass, also milling about! The music was breathtaking4 and totally enveloped me. It felt as if I was surrounded by it—perhaps because I was!—and when the singers started moving about, the effect was even more jaw dropping. The experience is worth the price of admission for Pärt’s artistry alone.

When the song finished, we were led into another white room, this time with an orchestra. We were invited to grab chairs, and the crowd dutifully went about it.5 Facing the orchestra, there was quite a jumble when we realized there was a screen in the opposite direction. The visuals were oppressive, and the piece a typical driving Steve Reich song, with its wonderful turns and xylophones and repetition. The piece seemed to lose itself in the middle, but started and ended strong while providing a wonderful backdrop to the Richter-created visuals, which evoked a sense of dread.

Coupled with the aforementioned feelings about Hudson Yards, the experience made a powerful case for this being the end times. All that’s left is for us to listen and watch as it all falls apart, and that’s exactly what it felt like we were doing at Reich Richter Pärt.

https://theshed.org/program/2-reich-richter-part ↩︎

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/hudson-yards-financing-eb5-investor-visa-program-immigration/586897/?utm_content=edit-promo&utm_term=2019-04-19T20%3A51%3A50&utm_campaign=citylab&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social ↩︎

It’s worth noting that about 95% of these concert goers, myself included, were white. At one of the nights of Steve McQueen’s Soundtrack of America series at The Shed, Quincy Jones shouted that this was “New York’s center for the arts. This is your center for the arts!” It certainly felt like my center for the arts, but based on this crowd it did not feel like the center for the arts in New York City. ↩︎

Think a vocal only David Lang piece like this. ↩︎

Watching a group organically assemble a fair and orderly seating arrangement is proof some form of anarchy is a legitimate political system. ↩︎

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conorreid · 6 years ago

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Life Without Place

So much of our life takes place on the internet. Conversations, news, games, music, television, learning: these all exist “online.” I owe much of my own intellectual heritage to the internet. Wikipedia and the conversations I had on Twitter were instrumental in my formative years in helping me to develop my own understanding of the world. How am I, a physical person in “meatspace,” to classify these experiences in my mind. More specifically, where did these experiences take place?

For instance, I had many a friend on Twitter from the UK. Where did my conversations with them take place? Was it in the server farms in Northern Virginia? My own bedroom? Theirs? The undersea cable that connected us? The point is that it’s murky. There is no one place my mind can associate where this experience happened, and I posit that this uncertainty is, at least in part, responsible for the overwhelming sense of unease that seems to cloud our everyday reality.

There is, of course, an easy retort to these allegations against our sense of space. Mainly, how did folks for millenia conceptualize the location of the written word in texts? We’ve been writing from quite a long while. Why then did this unease only come about in “modernity?”

Unlike the writings that exist “online,” the written word in printed texts does in fact inhabit a physical vessel.The ideas contained within a book do not “exist” anywhere but our own minds. That said, the text that constitutes that book physically exists on a surface. It lives in the same world as you and I. This is a profoundly different experience that that of the written word online (and one that is backed by research).

Let us take the example of an encyclopedia, specifically the entry of “bicycle.” The 1952 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica that you hold in front of you has this entry on page 382. You can touch the words. You can conceptualize that this passage was written by another person contracted for this work. It was written on paper, probably through a typewriter which physically stamped ink on page as the author typed out her thoughts.

This was then delivered through the mail or delivered in person to her editor. Either way, this editor then sent this draft off the the printer which copied it, put it in their type press, and pressed this page 382 onto thousands upon thousands of copies.

You went to the bookstore to purchase this item, which made its way from the printer through the aforementioned mail system. Taking this edition home, you can point to the page where you read about bicycles, and return to it at your leisure. As far as you’re aware, it exists in your world. You can move it, mark it, rip it up, etc. More importantly, you can understand the physical processes by which this tome arrived in your possession.

Compare this experience to reading the entry for bicycles on Wikipedia. First, this page was written and edited by a consortium of anonymous individuals separated by decades in time and thousands of miles in space. The page itself exists nowhere in particular yet also everywhere. Your phone, your tablet, your TV, your computer, even your watch can all access this same entry simultaneously, yet can also destroy it. There is not “it” at all, for most disconcertingly you can return to this page mere hours later only to find that it’s entirely different!

As for the physical mechanisms by which this page appeared in front of you, well, good luck. Even if we’re to retain a high level of abstraction, the story involves a myriad of physical infrastructure mixed with spooky network packets and the uncertainty baked into the nature of wifi connections. Delve deeper and you encounter the transistor, governed by the nonsensical world of quantum mechanics. As Feynman famously stated, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.”

In both theory and practice, it is beyond any of us to grasp in totality the processes that brought something as simple as a Wikipedia article to a single person. We cannot conceptualize where this article exists in our own physical understanding of our world, either. So where does that leave us?

In a profound sense of unease. The more we “advance,” the more it seems the world slips beyond our grasp. Every step “forward” is a step backwards for understanding the totality of our existences. We exist in a murky, gery zone, living lives with mechanisms we cannot possibly comprehend. We stumble through life, blindly reaching out for that which we already know is beyond us. It is no surprise that unease, dread even, is a defining feature of our “modern” life.

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conorreid · 6 years ago

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A Life

Marx, in his magisterial account of the tumult in mid-19th century France, writes “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” In recent years, I’ve begun to understand that it is not just tradition that weighs down the living. The ground we walk upon, the buildings we inhabit, the very air we breathe is thick with the sins of our ancestors. The screams of the untold thousands killed in injustices gone by and still to come drowns out the comings and goings of everyday life. Every breath we take comes laden thick with the embodiment of sin in the form of carbon. Every bite we eat was forged at the expense of another, human or otherwise. Every moment we spend alive, anywhere on the planet, is violence against those who are living and those yet-to-be born.

It is this reality in which I now write. I cannot hope to quiet the screams, nor would I want to. “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” Our lives are imbued with so much sin that they might as well not exist at all. I have no answers for you. We’re far past saving. I have felt for quite a while that there is something wrong with the way we live our lives. It is here that I will attempt to survey the damage.

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conorreid · 8 years ago

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Syria and the United States

I remember six years ago the joy of Tahrir. Watching the Arab Spring unfold was an electrifying shock to my apolitical sixteen-year-old brain. One revolt after the other popped up across the region, and I followed each with bated breath. I remember the Battle of the Camel, the pain of Bahrain, the optimism across Libya. But most of all, I remember despair over Syria. Its descent into civil war and destitution was long. Each step of the way, I remember crying out, “why do we stand by and do nothing?” As the Syrian people called out for a no-fly zone to stop Assad from the butchery, we did nothing. When the FSA disintegrated into jihadist groups and warlords, we did nothing. When ISIS emerged from the quagmire and waved its black flag, still we did nothing. And each time, it hurt. Today, that cry still lurks in my heart. How can the world stand by and watch Syria devour itself? But today, as the United States mulls broad intervention, my head knows better. Humanitarian intervention in principal is something I support wholeheartedly. It is immoral to do nothing when we have the means to stop a tyrant like Assad from destroying the lives of his own people. This holds in almost all cases. The North Korean regime should be removed from power and their labor camps dismantled. The slaughter of the Rohingya should be ended with the utmost urgency and force. The oppressive regimes of the Gulf States should be smashed and the slaves from Bangladesh and elsewhere set free. The list goes on. These, however, are wish statements. They are not practical policy proposals. The United States, an immoral actor in an immoral world with humanitarian concerns far down on its list of priorities, could not realistically engage in any of these actions without, for the lack of a better description, fucking things up.

Really, stop and think for a moment when “humanitarian intervention” by the United States in its role as the world superpower after World War II ever worked. The Korean War turned into a mess that resulted in an oppressive communist state in the north and a fascist capitalist state in the south that has only recently, and only through vast violence and civil disobedience, begun the transition to democracy. The entry of the United States into Vietnam and the propping up of the oppressive South Vietnamese state caused untold suffering and resulted in mass bombings across Southeast Asia that cost millions of lives. The Gulf War led to a failed coup and mass purges in Iraq that only tightened Saddam’s regime. US intervention in the Balkans led to the failed Dayton Agreement, which created the quasi-state of Bosnia and Herzegovina that still feels like three separate countries and is ready to erupt in conflict at any moment. Afghanistan has resulted in a continual failed state ruled by a corrupt government in Kabul and shared with ruthless warlords that divvy up the rest of the land. Iraq led to the rise of ISIS and rampant sectarianism that keeps the nation divided. Libya has been in a state of constant civil war since US intervention, and does not look like a nation by any stretch of the imagination. Time and time again, US intervention has brought only pain, suffering, and failure to those involved.

We were to get involved militarily in Syria today, the same outcome would result. Syria as it stands is divided into countless factions that rule various parts of the country. Were Assad to die tomorrow, and his regime dismantled, Syria would still be in the grips of endless civil war. US military intervention can do little to change these circumstances. That said, there are things the United States and others can do to help. Chief amongst them is adequately dealing with the millions of refugees pouring from Syria’s borders. The United States should set up safe corridors to safe zones set up on Syria’s borders where internal refugees can travel to and congregate in. It should open its arms to Syria’s refugees, and offer them asylum in the United States in their millions. Action like that would help to alleviate their suffering, as well as provide a boost to the United States’ ailing domestic economy. The voice inside my heart still cries out in agony that the world has done little to help Syria in its suffering. But military intervention will only result in more suffering and pain. There is much we can and should do outside of military intervention, that I’m positive we will not do.

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conorreid · 9 years ago

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Our Post-Brexit World

By now I’m sure you’ve read quite a bit about the reasons for and the implications of Brexit. I don’t want to retread broken ground, so instead I’m going to talk about the long term trend that Brexit illustrates, and what it means for the world. Brexit brings into focus the historical trend that will come to dominate the first quarter of the 21st century: the working class revolt against unfettered free trade.

Since the early 1970’s, with the dismantling of the Bretton Woods international system established at the end of World War II and the march of neoliberal economics led by Milton Freidman, financiers and governments of the developed world have pursued a policy of opening up all nations to unperturbed inflows and outflows of capital without the commiserate free movement of labor. What later became known as the Washington Consensus—trade liberalization, deregulation, and privatization—has morphed the world into the one we know today.

Free trade is on the whole a net positive. Free movement of capital allows companies in developed nations to invest in factories in developing nations, providing better paying jobs for residents than any domestic companies. Whatever your feelings on sweatshops and cheap labor, it is unquestionable that oft times industrialization and the employment of labor in factories is an effective method of lifting a country out of poverty. The examples of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China speak to this fact.

Free trade also provides cheaper goods for all those involved, the benefits of which we all benefit from. No matter how you’re reading this, I can assure you that the device you’re using would be fabulously expensive without free trade. And certain individuals, mainly those already wealthy, have reaped outsized rewards, seeing their wealth balloon tremendously since the 1970’s compared to the rest of the global population.

The positives of free trade are very real, and very worth the trouble. But there are costs. Basic economic theory states that as nations specialize in the areas they have a competitive advantage in, jobs in those same sectors in other nations will disappear. Indeed, this has happened across the developed world, as stable middle class factory jobs have largely vanished. This, at least the theory predicts, is not so bad as those who lost jobs will find new ones in other industries. However, this has not panned out. Entering a different industry involves vast amount of training and developing new skillsets, things that the unemployed working class has little time our resources to do without assistance. And labor is far more inflexible in moving locations than the theory would expect, especially among the poor who have little resources to facilitate a move.

In short, the march of free trade has created an unemployed and disillusioned mass of middle class workers across the developed world. This cost can and should be prevented, through government training programs for those put out of work by the closure of factories, generous welfare programs to support the unemployed, and relocation efforts and subsidies to ensure that labor moves to areas where it can be used effectively.

The rise of the far right across the developed world represents the failure of liberal governments to provide such solutions to the upfront costs of free trade. The neoliberal governments of the Global North tried to have their cake and eat it too; they wanted the benefits of free trade without addressing any of the costs. This has created a clearly untenable situation.

Open borders, immigration, multiculturalism—all linked with free trade—have become suspect. Voters, as seen in Donald Trump, Brexit, and the narrow defeat of Norbert Hofer in Austria, are turning their backs on free trade and all the values linked with it because it has been a net loss for many. The individuals who voted to leave the EU were not voting “against their own interests,” as the snobbish Remain side likes to put it. They were voting against free trade, a policy which has demonstrably lowered their own incomes as an austerity-obsessed government has done little to alleviate the short term costs.

Saying that Leave voters, or Trump supporters, or anybody supporting the far right across the developed world, are merely xenophobes beyond hope ignores the very real grievances these voters have against a global system stacked against them. By ignoring these grievances rather than attempting to address them, as I suspect liberal democrats who lament that they don’t understand why stupid poor people would vote against their own interest will, the trend against free trade and all its benefits will continue. The rise of the far right, and voters’ revulsion against multiculturalism, economic unions, and free trade, is a direct response to the failure of developed governments to alleviate the short terms costs of the free trade policies they have pursued for decades. To stop this rise, these problems need to be addressed and solved. Without such actions, I fear things will only get worse.

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conorreid · 9 years ago

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A Response to the Isha

The Upanishads are what many consider the spiritual heart of India. The basis, at least in spiritual terms, of Hinduism, the Upanishads for the philosophies of Buddha. Snippets of wisdom by forest sages passed down through the centuries, the Upanishads are precious and enlightening works. I have studied many of the Upanishads intently, and found my life greatly enriched by the experience. That said, I have always found a sort of “anit-materialism” inherent in the beliefs of Brahmanic Hinduism. Of course, materialism alone is dangerous and leads to misery for all. Materialism implies scarcity and therefore geed. Happiness may not be a zero-sum game, but materialism certainly is. There is more to life than physical reality. However, many of the Upanishads, at least from how I understand them, remain convinced that the veil of Maya (read: physical reality) remains between us and the truth of the Oneness of Self. This I find untenable in the face of the rest of the beliefs outlined in the Upanishads.

To demonstrate, I will analyze one of the principle Upanishads, the Isha. The Isha is beloved by many for outlining the basic spiritual dimensions of Hinduism in wonderful poetics, despite being only eighteen verses. The Indian statesman Mahatma Gandhi famously stated that, “if all the Upanishads and all the other scriptures happened all of a sudden to be reduced to ashes, and if only the first verse in the Ishopanishad were left in the memory of the Hindus, Hinduism, would live forever.” I’ve put Eknath Easwaram’s wonderful translation online for you to read here. It’s fairly short—three pages of verse in physical terms—and worth getting familiar with for the rest of this post.

Assuming you’ve read the text, the main takeaway is a life of moderation, filled with meditation and conscious action, leads to the ultimate realization that the Self is all things and everywhere. “The Self is everywhere.” The Self “is within all, and he transcends all.” In this view, all things are part of the Godhead, the Supreme Lord. You are the universe itself, and everything around you. “All belongs to the Lord.” Understanding this supreme truth is integral to the Hindu experience. All things are one and the same, and this is the Ultimate Reality.

Blocking this reality from view, however, is what, in Hindu tradition, is called the veil of Maya, or Prakrti. While not exactly the idea that the physical world is an illusion, this idea should be more subtly thought of the physical world being deceiving, and not exactly showing how things really are. Many of the Upanishads have to do with being able to see past Maya and perceive the true reality, the Ultimate Self, the Brahman-Atman. Line 15 in the Isha demonstrates this concept well. It reads, “The face of truth is hidden by your orb of gold, O sun. May you remove your orb so that I, who adore the true, may see the glory of truth.” The sun, behind the veil of physical reality, must move past this veil to show the ultimate reality.

Here is where my misgivings creep in. How can the orb of the sun obscure the ultimate reality if it is itself part of that ultimate reality? Assuming that “all belongs to the Lord,” this veil of Maya, Prakrti itself, is the Self and indeed the ultimate reality. The orb of the sun cannot block “the glory of truth” because it itself is “the glory of truth.” Physical reality, and all the deceptions that come with it, is indeed part of the Self, the Ultimate Reality. Praktri is Brahman-Atman.

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