On Preferring Not To

[Left: Roman Cieslewicz, Kafka, The Trial, lithograph, 1964]

It feels like this year is ending in a shuffle of paperwork. An interminable meeting.

A trial, Kafka-esque.

Maybe it's just that the intensity of direct action has subsided, that police surveillance and disciplinary dossiers have begun to weigh heavily upon the spirit, that legal procedures against my comrades and me have become suffocating.  Maybe it's the immobilizing field of endless bureaucratic negotiations, and cynical politiking in which we take action. The synchronic brick wall.

Whatever it may be, it's hard to shake the feeling that the harder we push against the increasing securitization of every aspect of our lives in California, Sussex, Puerto Rico -- like stiff-limbed, blood-drained insects trying to fight off the necrosis in our limbs by re-learning how to wiggle our antennae ever so slightly -- the more entangled we become in this spider's web of capital and its ruthless cycles of primitive accumulation. A victory for education in Sacramento turns welfare families out on the street.  Fee increases for everyone are attached to financial aid packages for a select few.  The logic is zero sum.

Maybe it's this feeling of being affectively drained at the end of a very long year that draws me to the recent media firestorm over a recent spate of suicides at the Shenzhen megafactory of Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, Foxconn. The megafactory employs and houses over 300,000 workers. The company is the exclusive contractor for key components of Apple's iPhone and iPads.  Just today, Apple made other headlines: its market cap surpassed that of Microsoft, making it the world's largest tech company and the biggest player on the NYSE after ExxonMobil.  Labor groups are calling some of Foxconn's labor practices into question, the "iron discipline" exercised over factory workers, which, among other things, prevents workers from carrying a cell phone on the job and from speaking with one another at all while working eight hour shifts on a factory line.  In order to maximize profit rates and provide cheap iPhones to consumers in advanced capitalist countries, megafactories in China cut social ties between workers while they work.  The conversation that you have with a friend on your phone today and the feeling of social connectedness that you acquire by paging through mobile updates on Facebook is directly linked to the severing of human speech and social dissolution in a factory somewhere in Shenzhen. Lest anyone feel left out of this process of mutually assured social death, LG, Samsung and Hewlett-Packard all outsource to the factory in question, and your cellphone probably contains minerals that are the product of a decades long civil war in the Congo.

In my own view, the most urgent contemporary political problem is integrating and theoretically grasping the tension between primitive accumulation and the spectacle.  The project of specifying this new strategic field of the image under-girds much of the thought that I've been trying to articulate on dystopolitik over the years. This problematic originates with Guy Debord:

"Just as the logic of the commodity reigns over the capitalists' competing ambitions, or the logic of war always dominates the frequent modifications of weaponry, so the harsh logic of the spectacle controls the abundant diversity of media extravagances." (Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, p. 7)

But far from viewing this new spectacular form of social domination as all-powerful, I tend towards the view that it is strategically quite weak and therefore vulnerable to both attack and criticism. In the succinct and insightful words of Gopal Balakrishnan, "Debord also considered the possibility that the waning of any collective experience of history might have punishing consequences for the stage managers of this new order themselves. The spectacular mediation of the political sphere has resulted in the partial de-realization of what once could be called 'objective' strategic interests" ("States of War" NLR 36, Nov-Dec 2005).

In the present instance, we are confronted by one of those purely spectacular moments in which a global corporation's success story happens to coincide with that of ten recent suicides in the factory which made that success possible.  In other words, we are confronted with a moment in which media spectacle and primitive accumulation are partially integrated.  Does such a narrative collision have the ability to move us, and if it did what would we be moved to do about it?  Is narrative and pathos even the proper register to think about strategic assaults on the overlap of spectacle and primitive accumulation?  How do most educated people understand the social totality of exploitation of all workers, everywhere in this global economy except through these spectacular sound bytes that happen to coincide for a moment on our screens? How could a boycott of any corporation (such as those being called for by activists) ever stop the systemic forces compelling global electronics manufacturers to maximize their profit?

If our talking heads are dealing with this as an issue of ethical consumption, you may not be so surprised to find out that Chinese talking heads have been portraying the spate of suicides in a "tragic" register.



The video is quite dramatic, something no American or European networks would ever air. But what does this spectacular catharsis mean for those in China who may have watched it? How do we watch it?

The video contains stories of people who preferred not to continue working. Preferred not to continue consuming the spectacle. Preferred not to continue living. The reporter informs us that the 7th suicide victim, Lu Xin, liked to listen to Lady Gaga and wanted to become a pop star. The 8th victim, Zu Chengmin dreamed of becoming a supermodel. Both were 24 years old. An "investigative report" notes that "when they are controlling the machines, the machines are controlling them too: The innocence of youth is slowly ground away by the monotonous rhythms of the machines."  An understated assessment of the effects of modern life on youth if there ever was one.  These deaths could be considered a small-scale, low-level death strike, which is a constant in all modern societies.  But why are ten deaths in a factory housing over 300,000 people getting so much attention?

[Below: Drawings by F. Kafka]

Terry Guo, chairman of Foxconn had this to say about the suicides in a public statement: "I think that you should look closely into the Chinese and international rates of statistics. According to experts, once a regional GDP per capita reaches $3,000 year then these incidents tend to happen. We have 540,000 employees in our company, and according to experts, the suicidal rate is within the normal range."

Indeed, the study of suicide was one of the most important phenomena for establishing the legitimacy of sociology with the publication of Durkheim's Le suicide in 1897. Durkheim found that there were observable patterns that transcended individual psychological make ups. Today, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death around the globe. In the US, suicides outnumber homicides nearly 2 to 1. China, India and Japan account for over 40% of all suicides. Suicide is very much a measurable part of modern societies, but is no less spectacular for all that.

In my own view, Michel Foucault has the best critical gloss on the subject that I've read:

It is upon life, now and over the whole course of its sequence, that power establishes its grip. Death is, in this case, a limit, a moment which escapes this grip of power; death becomes the most secret and most "private" point of existence.  It is not so surprising that suicide -- previously a crime inasmuch as it was a way of usurping the power over death which the sovereign, whether of the here-and-now or the hereafter, had the sole right to exercise -- would become over the course of the nineteenth century one of the first conducts to enter the field of sociological analysis. Suicide demonstrates the individual and private prerogative to die on the frontiers and within the interstices of a power exercised upon life. This determination to die -- so atypical and yet so regular, so consistent in its manifestations, and by consequence, so inexplicable in terms of particularities or personal mishaps -- was one of the first wonders of societies in which political power had come to give itself the task of managing life. (Volonté de savoir, 182, translation mine).

Suicide could, in this sense, be considered one of the first spectacles -- or the primal scene -- of the era of "bio-power." For Foucault, this term marks a threshold in the history of States and capital between classical practices and notions of the sovereign right over life and death and the moment in which social and political-economic forces begin to demand that governments manage and shape a scientifically understood and demographically measurable biological life of populations and individuals.  Much ink has been spilled over this term "bio-power" not to mention the "history of sexuality" in which it is found, and I think both concepts have become mostly conceptually vacuous creatures of the publishing industry.  No one is tracing genealogies of the institutions Foucault was talking about -- elementary and secondary schools, barracks, factory floors, prisons, psychiatric institutions -- nor has anyone (with the exception of Robin Blackburn's study Banking on Death) done a comprehensive and integrative history of the political practices and economic metrics Foucault cites -- birth rates, longevity, public health, housing, migration, demography, social Darwinism and sociology more generally. These are the institutions forming the pivot of what he calls the modern dispositif of sexuality.  Foucault himself never finished the project and his remarks are suggestive at best; however, his lectures at Collège de France are a good starting place for anyone ambitious enough to pick up these tattered genealogies and make something of them. It is unfortunate that a buzzword like "Bio-power" -- like "panopticism" and "epistemological breaks" before it -- is all that anyone takes away from this period of Foucault's thought.  He is raising much more fundamental questions: how is it that at the very moment of the establishment of Western democratic states with an imperative to guarantee particular social benefits and the welfare of their populations these same states start massacring the populations of one another?  How does a welfare state rationalize nuclear weapons?  In his lectures from 1978-79, Foucault ultimately abandons the concept of "biopolitics" altogether and shifts into a genealogy of neoliberalism.  He thus concludes his attempt at providing an "analytics of power" with a return to political economy.  Subsequent lectures begin to elaborate the themes of an ethical care of the self, which would later appear in volumes II and III of History of Sexuality.

The dark atmospherics surrounding the word "biopolitics"is unfortunate.  Most American academics who write about the subject as some sort of nefarious exercise of power would also probably support the idea of defending the "social safety net."  All of which suggests that the term lends itself to political incoherency and might as well be abandoned altogether.

At any rate, we need to continue to think about the relationship between spectacle and primitive accumulation so as to elaborate a more sophisticated way of understanding and strategically opposing this strange new form of social power in which we find ourselves caught.  We must defend what is left of the social safety net, but this fight will fail as the threat of sovereign debt defaults and economic crises continue to shrink the tax base and provide cover for austerity measures. In an spectacle that has lost its sense of history, it may be advantageous to abandon the spatial politics of a physical strike (or occupation of University spaces) or to use these spaces as a means of elaborating forms of resistance that would take place in the register of Time.

Suicide is a symptomatic form of preferring not to. Of preferring not to have one's biological existence subject to the logics of capital accumulation.  It is perfectly incorporable into a media spectacle and not -- except perhaps in the case of self-immolating monks -- a form political resistance.  How do we elaborate different forms of "preferring not to" that aren't so escapist? How do we turn "preferring not to" into an assault manoeuvre?

Spectacle of the Moment: The Economist

Some interesting art direction and editorial decisions are going on over at The Economist. Always eye-catching and provocative, the cover art over the last few months illustrates an atmospherics of terror after the year began with a more hopeful outlook.

[Below: Left, Economist from January 30, 2010; Right, Economist from April 24, 2010]

[Below: Left, Economist cover from May 1, 2010; Right, cover from May 8, 2010]

Sure, the theological and apocalyptic tropes are heavy handed, but this mouthpiece of spectacular accumulation is also communicating another message. From hope and hype to fire and brimstone, political terror and troubled depths: a specter is clearly haunting world markets, as the Acropolis Now imagery really hammers home.  Under erasure in this image from May 1, 2010 is the Greek Communist Party's triumphant banner, replaced with the text "the horror, the horror." Angela Merkel is portrayed as an embattled captain Benjamin Willard, dispatching her shock troops to neutralize the threat of an end of the Eurozone. Interestingly, her ruling coalition is now in jeopardy and a Left-leaning coalition threatens to turn German politics a shade of red and green.

All of this renewed fear over sovereign debt is so clearly a spectacular ruse of capital.  Greece, we are told, needs a structural adjustment. Spain and Portugal must slash social spending.  And in a brilliant bit of politiking California's Gov. Schwarzenegger announced new austerity measures on Friday, which will, on the one hand, eviscerate working mothers, the poor, infirm and mentally ill, and push California inmates from over-crowded state prisons into over-crowded county jails. With the other hand the governator proposes to pump over $1B into higher education to placate the liberals in the student movement, and neutralize the more militant elements.  The apocalyptic excesses to be combated are not those of capital's ruthless new cycle of primitive accumulation, but rather the social gains which were wrested from its bloody hands over the long 20th century. 

All of this reminds me of an amazing passage in Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which roughly sketches the link between primitive accumulation, sovereign debt, and the spectacle:

the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven. The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would. But further, apart from the class of lazy annuitants thus created, and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the government and the nation – as also apart from the tax-farmers, merchants, private manufacturers, to whom a good part of every national loan renders the service of a capital fallen from heaven – the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy [...]

Tantae molis erat, to establish the “eternal laws of Nature” of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into “free labouring poor,” that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

The Modular Subject: Solipsism as a way of life

[Above: NYTimes, iPad Release at San Francisco Apple Store]

The fanfare for the iPad is over. Turns out the new electronic device is not the coming of the Internet messiah.  In retrospect, this little piece of glass and titanium now appears to have been the amulet to which the spectacle clung in order to fend off against the gloom of April, which has only begun to blossom in May.  Our diffuse attention span has drifted on to other topics.  Volcanoes. Oil spills. The 21st century human strike.  The prospect of a two day student strike is now off the table here in Santa Cruz; however, a spectre is, once again, haunting Europe. The cradle of western civilization suggests that red is the new black.

[Above: May 1, 2010, Celebration at the Parthenon in Athens, Greece]

But still, there is something profoundly unsettling about each successive new product release from Apple. What disturbs me is something far more unsettling than the slavering mobs of Mac fans, the "Hail Hosannas!" of the media, the crass idea of redemption through consumption, or the phony "anti-establishment" and "creative" schtick that has been Apple's stock and trade since their release of the first personal computer.  These are all perfectly valid criticisms, but they also threaten to flip into a sort of ressentiment which marks the person making such criticisms as a cynical counter-counter-cultural elite.  The fact remains that there is something very alluring and effective about the Apple marketing machine in an era of widespread cynicism with corporate culture and policies of planned obsolescence.
What disturbs me most is the structural similarity between this form of fanfare and the expressions of solidarity which I feel in myself and my comrades for Leftist actions around the world.  Why does the Apple fanfare seem so similar to those who, like myself, were posting these inspiring photos from the Acropolis on our Facebook pages?

Whether proliferating a mid-century sans sarif typeface like Helvetica, setting a neo-modernist design standard for negative space on the web and in print, cultivating an insatiable baroque appetite for reflective surfaces in product photography, "humanizing" the cybernetic machine, or creating an iconic set of advertising images that seem like some marriage of the 1960s, a gritty urban present and the future -- perhaps even a utopian future -- I wonder whether or not this whole period of the 2000s (Or the Naughties as they are now called) will one day be regarded as a "Mac Aesthetic," or better still, as the decade in which postmodernity was forced back into the form of high modernism. But the idea that a single corporation could exert such an enormous cultural influence is also a bit misleading because what I would like to talk about is not limited to a simple "Mac Aesthetic" nor reducible to a set of design decisions which have become cultural clichés. I will consider all this to be a symptom of something else.

The questions that nag me: What are the aesthetics of enthusiasm? How does propaganda shape particular forms of subjectivity? We could take, as a first example, the Fourth generation iPod design from 2004 with its streamlined click wheel and button design, all-white face, and modular simplicity.  It would became an ubiquitous design for millions of other products, but it distills an utterly utopian world outlook, as if presenting a blank screen for the projection of our fantasies about the absolute diversity of our music collections and expression of individuality. Why is such a standardized design aesthetic held to be the mark of absolute individuality and difference?

This paradox is really hypostatized in the commercials. [Below: Commercial featuring The Fratelli's song "Flathead"]



This commercial crystalizes the paradox of our era, which is simultaneously defined by an unprecedented rate of change at every level of social life coupled with an equally unprecedented standardization of everything that seems incongruous with such infinite flux. I will argue that the pod or "module," in Fredric Jameson's account, "would then constitute the new form of the object (the new result of reification) in an informational universe" (Seeds of Time, 16)

Jameson's argument about modularity is relevant to some of the questions I've posed above about how propaganda and design shape a new subject, which we might call a modular subject:

intensified change is enabled by standardization itself, where prefabricated modules, everywhere from the media to a henceforth standardized private life, from commodified nature to uniformity of equipment, allow miraculous rebuildings to succeed each other at will, as in fractal video...that Kantian point in which raw material is suddenly organized by categories into an appropriate unit (ibid, 15-16).

The solipsism of this standardization enabled change is astounding. The iPod is the latest instantiation of a relation to the modular world which is in reality a relation to an increasingly standardized subjectivity. The material world of a walk across campus on a sunny spring day is organized into a unitary experience by the soundtrack piped through one's headphones.  Our social worlds are organized by a series of web pages into a unitary "friend network" which can be contemplated and worried over on Facebook. Amazon organizes our intellectual interests into a set of preferences which are measured against those of others to accurately predict other books which we are likely to purchase.  Google makes the web searchable by aggregating and standardizing keyword searches and web behaviors.  If the module is the form of this new reification of self and world then the algorithm is its underlying logic.

This modular form is most notable in architectural organizations of space. Hence the Apple Store.

This 21st century aesthetic strikingly resembles that of the popular architecture of 20th century totalitarianism.

[Screenshots from Triumph of the Will]

If totalitarianism, aside from its garish neo-classical architectural aesthetic, mobilized any sort of ornament it was that of the mass, the people. The crowd was disciplined through a standardization of gesture and movement in order to popularly legitimize the exercise of power. This massified subject must be distinguished from the modular subject of postmodernity where this form of ornamentation is stripped away and replaced by an individuated unitary experience.

A cultural product like Internet pornography is another example of this shift, where millions of people participate in an image through technologies which have an individuating and isolating function.  In fact, this mass participation through alienating technologies props up the voyeuristic fantasy of porn, where we imagine ourselves to be the only one to have caught this glimpse and this singular fantasy is not threatened by mass participation.

But there are clearly forms of mass participation today that are not necessarily mediated through alienating technologies.  The most hegemonic experience is that of fanfare.  To return to the example of the iPad release -- but we could consider anything from cult films to blockbuster releases, concerts and sports games  -- all of these modes are characterized by a manic enthusiasm, a hyperbolic intensification of affect. It is as if postmodern emotional life is colonized by an endless succession of viral memes which briefly whip us into a frenzy until the effect wears off and we are left with a feeling of empty depression.

I don't think we've reached the point where this modular subjectivity can be mobilized in a mass revolutionary project.  The solipsistic tendency of our way of life may be too strong to judge whether or not our radical ideas and politics are transmissible outside particular milieus. It will be interesting to watch the general strikes in Greece unfold, and to see whether or not the model spreads to other areas with sovereign debt crises (perhaps California?!)

Metropolitan Petri-Dishes

As I've mentioned in a previous post. The "art theme" of this year's burning man is Metropolis: The Life of Cities.

A part of the project involves a large discussion on urban planning, experiments in the interaction of ideal designs and the chaos of social life, models of social integration and disintegration and reflections on how particular organizations of space create forms of life. As a part of this larger project, the Burning Man project has started a blog, Metropol. The initial posts give a nice birds-eye-view of the history of the planning and development of Black Rock City across the nearly two decades of its existence. It will be interesting to see how that conversation develops.

The art theme calls attention to some of the things that I find most interesting about the Burning Man Project.  Most people consider the city exclusively in terms of the sort of Bachannalian narratives that they have heard about it, where the project is equated with that of a "red light district." But this is a fairly uncritical account of the Project, and I am more interested in the history of BRC and its planning as the elaboration of an ongoing experiment in constructing a Temporary Autonomous Zone.  Sure, there is now a ticket price to participate in this TAZ and it isn't cheap to make the journey to the middle of the desert. But these criticisms don't really take into account that any experiment in urban forms and social life requires material resources. The point isn't that BRC and its "gift economy" is some sort of post-capitalist utopia, but that it is a petri dish for experimentation in the material construction of another world.  It produces a sort of technical knowledge which could be generalized under certain conditions.