The Hurt Locker - Your Thoughts

This is an open thread for your thoughts on the Cardiff sciSCREEN screening of The Hurt Locker at Chapter Arts Centre. What did you think about the film itself, and about the issues raised during the audience/panel discussion that followed?

The Hurt Locker - Thursday 27th May 2010

The next Cardiff sciSCREEN event will be a screening of the The Hurt Locker at 6pm, Thursday 27th May 2010 at Chapter Arts Centre.

Directed by Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker follows the members of an elite US bomb-disposal team. After the film there will be a wine reception and panel discussion in 'media point' (upstairs). The panel discussion will involve a former military psychiatrist, a philosopher, a naval officer, a historian of ’shell shock’, and an expert on representations of war. The discussion will use this film to explore the realities of contemporary military work and the stresses of danger and the unknown. Themes covered will include the psychological impact of conflict, the allure of war and the boundaries between bravery and recklessness.

The speakers are: Prof. Jonathan Bisson (Dept. of Psychological Medicine and Neurology), Dr Jonathan Webber (School of English, Communication and Philosophy), Dr Tracey Loughran (School of History and Archaeology), Dr David Machin (School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies) and Lt. Felix Carman.

*This event is sponsored by the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics.

Past sciSCREEN Events

Cardiff sciSCREEN is an irregular series of films and discussions.

The first event was a screening and discussion of A Single Man on March 14th 2010 at Chapter Arts Centre. 80-90 people attended a panel discussion involving academics from Cardiff University: Dr Paul Keedwell (Dept. of Psychological Medicine), Dr Iain Morland (Dept. of English, Communication and Philosophy), Dr Jonathan Scourfield (School of Social Sciences), and Susan Bisson (School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies). The panel and audience were invited to debate some of the issues raised by the film, focusing on the issues of psychological disorders, grief and bereavement, suicide, and sexuality.

The second Cardiff sciSCREEN event was a screening and discussion of The Wolfman on March 29th 2010 at Chapter Arts Centre. 70-75 people attended a panel discussion involving academics from Cardiff University and the University of Glamorgan: Dr Ian Jones (Dept. of Psychological Medicine), Dr Kier Waddington (School of History and Archaelogy), Dr Rebecca Williams (Communication, Culture and Media Studies Research Unit, University of Glamorgan), and Dr Joan Haran, (Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics [Cesagen]). The panel and audience discussed questions including, why we are so fascinated with the monstrous and the anomalous, the rise in popularity of the gothic in film, the historical treatment of madness, personal transformations, and trigger events for psychiatric disorders.

*These events were sponsored by the British Science Association as part of Science and Engineering Week 2010.

Welcome to Cardiff sciSCREEN

Welcome to the Cardiff sciSCREEN blog. Cardiff sciSCREEN uses cinema to promote the engagement of society in the complex field of biomedical science and genetics. We use films to debate the social and cultural implications of developments in biomedical science in an entertaining and enjoyable way.

At the end of each film there is a panel discussion involving three or four speakers: biomedical scientists, academics from the social sciences and humanities, bioethicists, and other experts. The audience are encouraged to participate in a lively discussion - with one another and the experts - concerning some of the important social, political and ethical issues which the audience believed were raised by the films.

the weak link

[Sorry, this video link is no longer active.]

Stathis Kouvelakis concisely lays out the situation in Greece, the stakes and choices, in the context of a new neoliberal austerity offensive in Europe and beyond.

Additional online resources:

Audio podcast of the panel "Eurozone in Crisis: Reform or Exit?" at Birkbeck, in which Costas Lapavitsas, George Irvin, Costas Douvinas, Stathis Kouvelakis and Alex Callinicos analyze the structural background and political option of exit.

RMF (Research on Money and Finance working group) Report on the Eurozone, in which Costas Lapavitsas and collaborators analyze the EU's center-periphery dynamics and the structural contradictions behind the sovereign debt crisis.

abysmal globalism

Climate, Globe, Capital:
The Science and Politics of the Abyss

by Iain Boal


“At least the war on the environment is going well”
-- North Berkeley bumper sticker 

The brief interlude between 1750 and 1950 AD - the two hundred years between Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the Teller-Ulam thermonuclear weapon – when modernity’s clerisy declared that the future lay wide open under the sign of progress, is now over. Whatever the high functionaries of state or the managers of global trade say at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP 15), their speeches will be delivered over the corpse of Enlightenment optimism. Ironically, it is the scientists who, after waging a long war against Christian catastrophism in order to establish a deep secular past and by implication an open and contingent future, will be officiating in Denmark as priests of doom. 
 
Not that for those two centuries all talk of apocalypse was confined to the pulpit. Far from it. Even in the rosy dawn of enlightened optimism, reflected in William Godwin’s anarchist utopia – he was of the generation born in the 1750s - a reactionary counter-narrative was being forged in the halls of official knowledge. Thomas Malthus, the world’s first paid economist (in the employ of the East India Company), launched a frontal attack on Godwin’s political science and his vision of an ample world adequate to human needs.

Economics, as defined by Malthus and taken as orthodoxy ever since, is the science of “choice under scarcity”. However, the primary cause of that scarcity - the brutal clearances and enclosures of land that dispossessed the commoners and cut them off from their means of subsistence - was not a topic for polite discussion either in 18th century drawing rooms or in today’s business schools.

Paradoxically, at the same time as it assumed scarcity, the science of economics also assumed infinitude, that is, the bottomlessness of nature as sink and sewer. And for most moderns and all capitalists, until very recently, a reservoir without limits, though patchy and uneven, wherein lay their opportunities and the signs reading “Development”. It is a striking fact that Thomas Huxley, a leading scientist, “Darwin’s bulldog” and no stranger to the role of scarcity, could make this statement, in a paper presented at The Great International Fishery Exhibition in London in 1884: “The cod fishery, the herring fishery, the pilchard fishery, the mackerel fishery, and probably all the great sea-fisheries, are inexhaustible; that is to say that nothing we do seriously affects the number of fish. And any attempt to regulate these fisheries seems consequently...to be useless.”

It is this fundamental contradiction that now threatens the equations of resource economists, not to mention life on earth. Endless growth may linger as an abstract ideal, but capitalism’s material waste – the ‘externalities’ dumped in land, ocean, and atmosphere – is a large turkey coming home. COP15 is the sound it makes.

What follows are some notes, composed on the eve of the climate talks in Denmark, intended as a kind of critical glossary to aid in navigating the shoals and reefs of post-Copenhagen environmental politics. It focuses first of all on the keywords “climate” and “globe” (and its congeners). “Globalization” once the chief buzzword of business schools, has passed its sell-by date, but the phenomenon itself rolls on.

This essay takes the form of a dispatch from California, not just because it was written there, but because the San Franciscso Bay Area has been, and remains, the site of key developments bearing on the current “crisis of nature” –for example, the design, development and construction of omnicidal weapons under the aegis of the University of California, the pioneering of markets in carbon and industrial pollutants, the dotcom and biotech bubbles, the headquarters of biofuels R&D, and the incubator of dreams of a new science of “synthetic biology” and its positive spin on the end of nature.

The Berkeley hills, to tighten the focus a little, was home to both J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller who was given the task in the 1940s, during the Manhattan Project, of estimating the likelihood of an atomic explosion igniting the earth’s atmosphere. The limit case of climate change, one could say.

Less than three chances in a million, said Teller. And so the Trinity ‘experiment’ went ahead. (His actual probability calculations, if they exist, remain a state secret.) He might have said, “More than a two in a million chance of igniting the earth’s atmosphere”, but didn’t. It would not have stopped Oppenheimer anyway.

It was another Berkeley Nobel physicist, Luis Alvarez, whose final task in the Manhattan Project - measuring the atomic shock waves over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a B29, “The Great Artiste” which was shadowing “Enola Gay” – prepared him to imagine the possibility of a catastrophic asteroid impact as the cause of the great extinction event at the K/T boundary 65 million years ago, the calamity that  doomed the dinosaurs. He was also aware of classified research at Berkeley going back to the 1950s into “nuclear winter” scenarios, long before Carl Sagan titillated the American public with the idea of photosynthesis shutting down all over an irradiated, dust-choked planet. Luis Alvarez and his geologist son Walter seriously proposed their neo-catastrophist hypothesis in 1980, to general amusement in professional circles. 

Is it outlandish to further suggest that being a California native may also have been a factor in Luis Alvarez’ catastrophist outlook. The history of this state, of the whole Pacific littoral, is one long series of resource strikes and plunderings and extinctions. Gold, silver, mercury, otters, seals, redwoods, bears, abalones. On and on. Almost all the songbirds in my town are gone.

A crisis of nature, indeed. Inextricable from the accompanying genocides. How much was Alvarez conscious of this geography of sacrifice, or of his own part in the atomic bombardment of the Zuni lands in New Mexico?  There are good reasons for Californians to acknowledge catastrophe. And to deny it.

Thirty years ago earth scientists were still telling their students the old gradualist story, new and revolutionary in Darwin’s day, but by 1980 hanging on as the official orthodoxy.

The gradualist, “uniformitarian” acount of the earth’s past and present – which plate tectonics in a sense supported - took climate as variable of course but essentially a stable phenomenon, and in general saw nature as a take-me-for-granted backdrop, having no dramatic role in human history. Significant change (“evolution”), on this view, was so slow as to be virtually imperceptible. In fact, for the gradualist view of things to make sense, Christian geology – positing a four thousand year old earth, once God’s smooth creation, now ravaged by floods, earthquakes, tornados, plagues, and so on, with the end of the human drama in view if not actually imminent – had to be wildly wrong, a tremendous underestimate. Natural selection required millions of years to have the observed effect. The discovery of “deep time” is perhaps the central, abiding triumph of modern science. Darwin knew he needed it and courageously stuck to his theory, even though the best contemporary estimates of the age of the earth fell far short.

The Lyell-Darwin orthodoxy – that the world is the way it is in essence because of very slow changes brought about by the action of wind, ice, rain, erosion, etc – dominated the 20th century earth sciences. It took a big hit when evidence began to accumulate that Alvarez père et fils might be right. Their hypothesis was strongly confirmed by the discovery of a massive impact crater off the coast of Mexico. At COP15 it would be fair to say that versions of a secularized neo-catastrophism will be the dominant paradigm among climate scientists and laity alike.

This is not to say that you will find a scientist at the meeting who would deny gradual change on a geological scale of the Lyellian sort, let alone defend the recency of the earth and challenge deep time. But it does mean that they entertain something until lately unimaginable, the serious possibility that major geological change is possible on a human timescale. And that kind of science implies a planetary emergency, and a politics to go with it.

For some, therefore, it means that a war on global warming must be declared, quite as draconian as the global war on terror. Are we not faced with inhabiting - once again - the rubble of a ruined world? For others, typically of a social democratic cast of mind, it means pinning hopes on human adaptability and resilience in the face of melting glaciers, the end of irrigated agriculture and a return to dry farming. For the governments, green NGOs, and those others with seats at the table hoping for a leaner, low-fat capitalism, it means negotiating some version of the neo-liberal deal. That is, haggling over the further commodification of the earth and its productions – vegetable, mineral and animal – and legislating limits and rights to pollute, to trade toxins, to crank up derivatives markets recently vilified as a sure sign of the excesses of casino capitalism. (In reality, casinos are more conservative in their risk management than your grandmother.)

Some American environmentalists, observing COP15 from a distance, are hoping that the venue itself will help mitigate the sale of what is left of the globe and its atmosphere. They fail to grasp that whatever truth there may have been – never much, actually - in the original vision of the EU as ‘more than a market’, the European Commission has for two decades been utterly wedded to wholesale privatization; the EU has been the tunnel through which the neoliberal model has been railroaded into the continent. Of course, the realities are more obvious and dismal for the new member states than for ‘old Europe’. At best, these new Europeans are but branch-plant economies serving the old:  low-wage, non-union, business-friendly, and marked by immense income inequalities.

The Commission’s form of rule is a caricature even of formal democracy, with vast distances between rulers and the ruled and an institutional structure that almost entirely insulates the Commission from the electoral demands of any of its member populations. Some acquaintances here on the Pacific coast fondly imagine that European social democracy will act as a buttress against the brute neo-liberal approach of taking fictitious commodities, as Polanyi called those parts of nature not produced by human labor, to new markets. But of course, with regard to the present and looming ecological crises, the EU and its capital clients have neatly appropriated dreams of techno-fix, production-side solutions, gladly obliging with a new suite of financial instruments (thank you, Copenhagen) and neo-colonial projects. Indeed the EU has become a brand leader in carbon trading mechanisms, outpacing California.

Within the spectacularized politics of an absolute ‘global emergency’, the EU thus stands ready to consider anything, as long as it remains within the frame of buying and selling, of tinkering with forms of consumption, and presents no serious challenge to the rule of the commodity.


Climate and globe, then, are discursively entwined. Although I earlier suggested that globalization talk is mostly over, nevertheless there are varieties of "globespeak" that are hardly in decline, and even in the ascendant. One should be no less wary of the adjective "global" than the noun "globalization".

The socio-ecologist Peter Taylor warns of the serious dangers of globalism as discourse and as political project when it comes to global environmental problems. He does so by way of a powerful thought experiment: "Consider two hypothetical countries. Country A has a relatively equal land distribution; Country B has a typical 1970s Central American land distribution: 2% of the people own 60% of the land; 70% own 2%. In other respects these countries are similar: they have the same amount of arable land, the same population, the same level of capital availability and scientific capacity, and the same population growth rate, say, 3%. If we follow through the calculations of rates of population growth, food production increase, levels of poverty, and the like, we find that five generations before anyone is malnourished in Country A, all of the poorest 70% in Country B already are." This parable highlights "the politics of inequality excluded by the science of SD [systems modeling]" and its moral and technocratic  presuppositions. (P. Taylor et al., Changing Life: Genomes-Ecologies-Bodies-Commodities, U Minnesota Press, 1997, p.155.)

The figure of the globe links many of the actors in Copenhagen, both in their language and imagery. The 60s counterculture and the various environmental movements seized eagerly on the image of the globe. It would be well, therefore, to look at globalism as a set of practices and representations, as well as conceptual and 3-D models.

The history of globes as artifacts takes us back to their utility as navigational aids. Globes were also “emblems of sovereignty” (it comes into the language in this sense in 1614); they became the playthings of monarchs and navigators, familiar as props in Renaissance portraiture. It was the task of early modern cartography to project the globe into two dimensions; without the resulting maps and charts the business of empire would be literally unthinkable.

The essential work on globalism was done by the late Denis Cosgrove in Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination. He revealed how globalism's force, with roots deep in Western imperial history, "derives from the arresting concept of the earth as a single space made up of interconnected life systems and a surface over which modern technological, communications, and financial systems increasingly overcome the frictions of distance and time to achieve coodinated simultaneity."

Cosgrove concludes his study with a meditation on appropriations of the famous NASA photograph AS17–22727, taken during the final Apollo mission in 1972.   The NASA earthscape as image and icon was quickly staked out by both environmentalists (to promote Earth Day) and by capital (e.g., Mobil's well-known advertising campaign showing a miniature and vulnerable globe resting in the open hand of a white-coated scientist). Among the first to exploit this representation of globalism was  – no surprise, perhaps – an environmentalist and a capitalist both. Stewart Brand used the NASA photograph as logo for his Whole Earth Catalog, which became the bible of rusticating hippies and back-to-the-landers, who imagined an alternative green world powered by appropriate technics, available for purchase by mail order.  The Malthusian "discipline" always lurking in the rhetoric and imagery of "lifeboat Earth" is now explicit in Brand's new sado-calvinist tract, Whole Earth Discipline.

Versions of this “green” vision will be surely circulating at Copenhagen and beyond. Universalists of various stripes remain wedded to the imagery of the earthscape, which shows no borders, and for that matter no traces of humanity. Transnational corporations like it too. British Petroleum’s investment in UC Berkeley is part of their greenwashing efforts, e.g., by re-naming itself simply "BP" (standing for "Beyond Petroleum", together with a floral yellow-and-green "solar earth" logo, which matches their new interest in genetically modified organisms).

In the near term globalism is likely to be omnipresent, in the form of climate crisis talk and its associated politics of the abyss. Here is Gore again – "What we are facing is a planetary emergency. So some things you would never consider otherwise, it makes sense to consider." He is far from alone. In Britain and Germany nuclear electricity is back on the agenda. Horst Teltschik, former security adviser to Chancellor Kohl recently said: "It is a tragedy of every democracy that everyone can publicly represent their opinion.... In a dictatorship, this type of thing wouldn't happen."

The BP deal with UC Berkeley would have delighted Teltschik and was itself a double enclosure – privatization of a public institution and the patenting of lifeforms for profitable sale. In this case, the favored target happens to be a modified elephant grass that will rot more quickly for the production of alcohol for car fuel.

At the rhetorical level, declaring a global climate emergency, like communism and terrorism, is a very useful bogeyman that brooks no dissent. It facilitates backroom deals, and in the BP case  - an agreement put together, in the revealing phrase of the UC vice chancellor for research, "at warp speed" -  it obscures the risks that university administrators and scientists are prepared to take not only with our local environment in Strawberry Canyon, but with the ecosystems of the planet and the lives of small farmers everywhere who face further dispossession for the purpose of biofuel monoculture. But risk, of course, is something neoliberalism is adept at "externalizing"; after all, its other face is profit. Malthusian cataclysm now competes with the happy solicitations of the image world as the new/old spectre inviting us not to look past the screen to the common ground below. 

It is not by accident that the parties to the BP-Berkeley deal borrowed their rhetorical strategies from their counterparts in the military and nuclear fields. The UC scientists and administrators opened their bid to become the posterchild of the new green and clean energy by invoking, in the most effusive terms…the Manhattan Project. In fact, the whole initiative is modeled on the success of the Manhattan Project's "team science" approach.

More to the point, the Manhattan Project should properly be remembered for its secret, reckless decision-making. With its very first experiment, Arthur Compton, the head of the Chicago scientists involved, risked building a secret reactor in the middle of the city. Compton explained: "We did not see how a true nuclear explosion, such as that of an atomic bomb, could possibly occur"; still, as Richard Rhodes the historian of the Manhattan Project put it, he was risking "a small Chernobyl in the midst of a crowded city."

Here, then, are some questions: What is modern science that its shining hour was the Manhattan Project, a secret project to build a weapon of mass murder? What is modern science that it flourishes in secrecy? What is it that the biofuel boosters here at UC Berkeley like so much about Lawrence and the atomic bomb project?

Well, here's one possible explanation: science - and by this I mean 'actually existing' science - is capital's way of knowing the world. Ballistics and the development of weapons of mass murder are at the heart of modern physics. Now the cult of the atom is mirrored by the cult of the gene. The stakes are high in Copenhagen because global warming and oil depletion loom.

But it is also worth asking this question, on the eve of COP15: what does it mean, that the language of crisis is on so many lips? Perhaps it suggests that the financial and ecological crises are indeed closely linked? Certainly there was an air of desperation around the unseemly speed of the UC/BP affair, and the cohabitation of the Governor, the University Chancellor, and the Mayor as they sat under the yellow-green livery and logo of British Petroleum.

For a few months, remember, everyone was on board with biofuels as the answer both to global warming and the woes of the economy - scientists, environmentalists, pundits, celebrities, politicians of all stripes - the Gores and Bransons, the Blairs and the Bushes with their ethanol deal with Brazil. What does it mean that Obama chose as his Secretary of Energy the head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Steve Chu, a nuclear physicist and close colleague of the Berkeley chemical engineer, Jay Keasling, who was recently the subject of a breathless and hagiographic profile in the New Yorker?

The political class in the US was first alerted to the looming crisis of nature – if we overlook Man and Nature, the polymath George Perkins Marsh’s Victorian ode to our ecological destructiveness - by two classics of environmental literature, Silent Spring and The Closing Circle, published in the early and mid 1960s by two working scientists, Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner. Both were first serialized in the pages of the New Yorker, and have justifiably become historical landmarks in the struggles against the poisoning of the planet. It is symptomatic of this moment that on the eve of COP 15 the New Yorker offers its readers, not the considered reflections of an observant naturalist or ecologist, a latter-day Carson or Commoner, but a gullible account, by a court stenographer, of the next big thing, “synthetic biology”.

Leading the way towards this brave new science is none other than Professor Keasling, the hero of the New Yorker piece, where genetically modified organisms and biotechnology are apparently nowhere to be seen. The brief era of "biotech" is over; a new age of "synthetic biology" is dawning.

Oddly, we find ourselves back in a world of electricians, chemists and masons. Instead of living GMOs we are dealing with "DNA circuits"; instead of genes we find "biobricks". Plants no longer decompose; they undergo "depolymerization" or “deconstruction”. These linguistic constructs cannot hide the fact that the core of the project – for which BP has invested half a billion dollars in the University of California – is growing fuel instead of food and will involve the global proliferation of new, reproducing, lifeforms that contain genes transfected from distant species, with very poorly understood results.  

The outcomes of Biotech 2.0 – a utopia dreamed up by chemical engineers to whom the natural world is foreign territory - are set to repeat the disasters of the green revolution, since it is based on the same naïve and unidirectional reductionism that, in the words of the Harvard biologists Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, led to the expectation that:

“since grasses need nitrogen, a genotype that takes up more nitrogen would be more productive; since pesticides kill pests, their widespread use would protect crops; and since people eat food, increased yields would alleviate hunger... [Whereas what actually happened was that] the increase in wheat yield was partly achieved by breeding for dwarf plants that are more vulnerable to weeds and to flooding; the killing of pests was accompanied by the killing of their natural enemies, their replacement by other pests, and the evolution of pesticide resistance.  The successful yield increases encouraged the diversion of land from legumes.  The technical packages of fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and mechanization promoted class differentiation in the countryside and displacement of peasants.” (in Biology under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health, Monthly Review Press, 2007, p.84).

On a global scale, the consequences of the biofuels bubble were soon dramatically visible in the South – seizure of common pasture in kwaZulu turned over for biofuel crop production, accelerated deforestation in Asia, new monoculture deserts in the Mato Grosso.

It’s a story repeated wherever the commodity reigns. The extinction of the native sardine commons of Monterey Bay in the middle of the 20th century is emblematic. Knut Hovden, graduate of Norway’s National Fisheries College, devised the mechanization of the small, and sustainable, sardine industry. He immediately (in the 1920s) went about inventing new purse-bottomed nets, impounding pens, automatic cookers and can-soldering machines. In what amounted to marine strip-mining, the new extractive techniques caused, within Hovden’s own working lifetime, a holocaust of Sardinops caeruleus, the silver harvest that thrived on the plankton upwelling off Monterey Bay, whose underwater canyon walls plunge 10,000 feet. The protein-rich sardines, mass-produced in Fordist style in the early forties, went to feed the huge American armada in the Pacific theater, and their reduced entrails were trucked north to fuel the emerging poultry factories of Petaluma.

The story of Cannery Row—its birth, its mythification by Steinbeck, its death by intensive overfishing within a couple of years of the novella’s publication, and later its rebirth as a theme park—is a sad epitome of Californian environmental history, and gives the lie to Thomas Huxley’s fatal complacency. We are only now beginning to comprehend the full dimensions of the ecological and human catastrophe that followed 1849 and the invasion of the goldfields. Its effects were felt—are yet being felt—not just in the immediate hinterland of the Bay Area, but all along the Pacific littoral, home to many peoples, and as far away as Hawaii, where the sugar industry, headquartered in San Francisco, shattered the island ecosystems. In the light of such a history, and of an earth clearly struggling, what’s not to be apocalyptic about?

Yet out of the shambles of ecological disasters, failed states, IMF shock therapies, and neoliberalism's new round of global enclosures, a non-vanguardist, non-apocalyptic, movement of movements is slowly coming into being. The sites and modes of resistance are - have to be - as motley and protean as the sites and modes of the new enclosures. The time of nostalgia for the factory gate, for fetishizing the point of production, is long gone.  The urgent and necessary task is to connect the struggles at all points, north and south, in the circuits of capital - at the points of expropriation, production, reproduction, and consumption. That means, for example, perceiving and then articulating the interests linking the landless commoners of the Movimento Sem Terra in South America, the Norwegian biologists trying to insert genes not into other lifeforms but into their ecological context at different scales, and the small but growing movement here in the Bay Area that sees the Creative Commons license as conceding too much to capital and state, and is challenging the very category of "intellectual property" as a form of enclosure, the kind that is driving GM agribusiness and the biofuels fiasco. 

Quite apart from the practical problems facing horizontalist, transnational networks like the G8 resistance or the World Social Forum, there is hard theoretical work to be done. At the conceptual level, if the commodity form has its metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties, what I have called "common form" also has its philosophical conundrums, which urgently demand our attention. We need to enlist the help of anthropologists and historians of commoning, usufruct and coincident use-rights. 

One shining example, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and reported in the New Scientist of 7th October 2009), should be placed  in the plastic folders of all who are gathering in Copenhagen and still bent on commodifying the world’s woods, airs and waters. It turns out that the commoners of the earth do a better job of managing the earth’s forests than either state control or privatization. In the first study of its kind, which “tracked the fate of 80 forests worldwide in 10 countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, over 15 years and under differing models of ownership and management”, Chhatre and Agrawal of the University of Michigan conclude that “locals would also make a better job of managing common pastures, coastal fisheries and water supplies.” They further suggest that ”carbon storage potential is especially improved when community organisations and their institutions ‘incorporate local knowledge and decentralized decision making’ to ‘restrict their consumption of forest products’.” This finding is a direct rebuttal of Hardin’s notorious 1968 “Tragedy of the Commons” credo that became the fact-free, ideological cornerstone of IMF and World Bank neoliberal policies.  

Tropical forest under local management stores more carbon than government-owned forest because the local commoners have a long-term interest in ensuring the forests' survival. This may be surprising only to those who have drunk Hardin’s Kool Aid, but it crucially contradicts some key assumptions informing COP 15.

We should certainly expect the organs of capital to attempt to expropriate also the language of the commons. They already have, in fact. Capitalism requires its own perverse variety of commons, to be its sink and sewer. What else was Larry Summers talking about in his infamous leaked World Bank memo, when he – honestly – asked whether, under standard cost-benefit assumptions, the Third World wasn’t seriously underpolluted? That is, given the logic assigning inferior value to black and brown bodies under capitalist accounting. Moreover, it is a fair bet that soon enough President Obama will declare strategic minerals (inconveniently under the feet of, say, Peruvians and Congolese) “global commons”, to be administered of course by the United Nations under terms to be finalized at the sixteenth meeting.

Yet suspicion of “the global” and its dissimulation of class and gender oppression, not to say its finessing of centuries of reparations now owed the South by northern plunder and industrialism, should not throw us uncritically into the embrace of “the local”, whatever the beauties of farmers’ markets and foodsheds. Who better than the transnational corporation at thinking globally, acting locally? More importantly, the very notion of “local”, when it comes to the atmosphere, may be just as problematic as the abstraction of the “global”. The airborne particulates in my town now include measurably higher levels of coaldust from the new plants coming online in China. Is the level of production in China not therefore a “local” concern, especially for the lungs of young children in the Bay Area, many of whom are already victims of the race/class nexus that dictates a cascade of inequities. 

All the more extraordinary, then, is the horrific and inspiring news coming out of communities like Du Noon, Diepsloot, Dinokana, Khayelitsha, KwaZakhele, Masiphumelele, Lindelani, Piet Retief and Samora Machel in South Africa, places far from the suits and the suites of Copenhagen, and the courage of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack dwellers movement, insisting on becoming the authors of their own lives in an environment where they certainly have some some dirty air to trade for dignity.

No question, it is one of the really difficult challenges facing the enemies of capital, how to frame a conception of ampleness-within-finitude and an idiom in which to express it. And ultimately to live it. The first imperative, after Copenhagen, is to refuse the politics of the abyss on offer from the green capitalists barking of global catastrophe and then peddling us the kitsch science of a warmed-over biotech. It is time for commoners everywhere to hold the terrain that is yet in our hands, for pushing back against the new enclosures, and for re-making the world as we go. All without any illusions of carbon-trading our way back from the abyss, let alone engineering a biobrick road across it.

October 21, 2009
Berkeley

This restores integrity to an essay published in edited form in SUM Magazine, Copenhagen, December 2009, to coincide with the COP 15 climate summit. Needless to say, COP 15 in the event merely confirms the incisive critique that Iain Boal here advances.
GR

the struggle at middlesex

The Attack on the Humanities in British Universities: A Report from the Front Line.

By “Joe Jack-Toe”

Over the last couple of weeks, events in the British Higher Education sector have made me think again about the writings of Jean-François Lyotard, in whose work education was an important theme. Dense and abstract though his work is, it returns to me with a renewed and practical significance. Towards the end of his life, in the 1980s (once he had turned away from the earlier positions of, for example, his book on Libidinal Economies, which intimate that the forces of capitalism, in breaking up the old order of things, might in some ways start to allow the forces of the id to speak) Lyotard worried about the effects of the capitalist organisation of society on education, on our intellectual life, and on philosophical thought – and, of course about the effects of such a transformed world of thought on our social life. In The Inhuman and The Differend he envisioned capital as a totalising “monad in expansion,” a system which sought to extend its monological regime of discursive process throughout all spheres of human action, chaining desire, inquiry, and even the forces of anguish within a system of the production of “novelties” which can never amount to the true “event” of a radical break with what is. Such a regime of novelty echoes Benjamin’s vision of the capitalism of the Arcades – always producing new fashions, but only in order to ensure that nothing fundamentally changes. For Lyotard, such a regime, deeply entropic, involves a kind of a flattening of human potential, the death of what real “thought” might be. 

Though it will seem strange to some (especially those who are more familiar with his earlier works, or with the reputation he gained from these) to enlist Lyotard as a philosopher of “critique” in this way, such real thought, for the later Lyotard, was a matter of the agitation of that which cannot be spoken within a particular regime of discourse, the differend, that which fundamentally disagrees with the system, but which returns on it from outside, like the repressed, in the name of a certain freedom and liberation. This, argued Lyotard, was the importance of philosophy, of art and of intellectual work more generally, standing for that which has not yet been homogenised by the systems of capitalism, harnessed to its production of cheap thrills and petty innovations, and to the flattened, repetitive, and numbing spectacle of its realm of (media) representations. Thought – philosophy – was the pulse of a freedom which stood out against this realm, and which opened up the possibility of something else. The institutions of education and academic life were a vital part of what fosters such thought.

Lyotard thus bemoaned what he saw as the erosion of such a freedom of thought under the pressures of the marketisation of intellectual life. Since his death those pressures have only multiplied. He noticed the pressure, for example, on academics to continually publish in order to have their research quantified and graded by the state in order to ensure the continued influx of research funds, and noted that this leads to an impoverishment of thought where “novel” and publishable ideas are churned out rapidly, yoking thinkers to a mode of time usage which does not allow the space for properly new, radical or substantial ideas to develop. In this, he saw academia becoming a machine for churning out books and papers, and for keeping the funds flowing through Universities and publishing houses, rather than a means to think through issues of deep import. In the UK, Lyotard’s observations have been prophetic in terms of the unfolding implementation, since he wrote, of the “RAEs” (Research Assessment Exercises) which have been running periodically to assess, measure and then reward or punish Univeristy departments’ research outputs.

The discussions of education and philosophy in Lyotard’s late texts thus have a continued, and even increased significance for us today, where the logic of neoliberalism has only intensified under the regime of globalised capital, in spite of ostensibly “left-of-centre” governments such as that of the “New Labour” party which replaced the Conservatives in Britain in the 1990s. Under New Labour, and under the logic of marketisation, quite aside from the submission of research to quantifiable outcomes, the government has abolished student grants and introduced tuition fees. Universities have increasingly been asked to run as businesses rather than as public institutions, and, worse than this, such marketised education has increasingly been the object of manipulation through the ideologised manipulation by governments of the parameters within such a market is to function.

The questions of the nature of thought and education in the capitalist milieu comes back to me particularly strongly, however, in the light of current events in British education, and in particular within the University in which I work, Middlesex University. Readers of scurvy tunes may well be aware (to some extent at least) of the current controversy which has sprung up at Middlesex. On the 26th April, the University announced its perplexing decision to close its Philosophy department, a decision which shocked both staff at the University and the international philosophical community. The philosophy department at Middlesex can hardly, it would seem, be thought of as a failing department. In the recent RAE it was the department in Middlesex with the highest-rated score, and one of the top Philosophy departments in the country. Middlesex was formed in the 1970s first as a “polytechnic” institution (the Polytechnics in England were primarily vocational colleges and though they offered degrees did not have the prestige of a “University” education proper) and only in 1992 obtained the status of a University, so does not have many departments with serious academic research credentials, and Philosophy is the one beacon of real excellence which the University has. Its academics (Peter Osborne, Peter Hallward, Eric Alliez, Stella Sandford and Christian Kerslake, for example) have truly international profiles and their Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy – along with the journal Radical Philosophy which is largely produced at Middlesex – is probably the most important centre of “continental” (non-analytic) philosophy not only in Britain but in the English language. The CRMEP is also a key hub within the intellectual life of the humanities in London, with frequent and high-profile events bringing important scholars from around the world into the city. Philosophy at Middlesex has one of the largest Philosophy MA programmes in the UK and a healthy turn-through of PhD students (in fact, more PhD students complete with the Philosophy staff than the rest of Middlesex’s School of Arts and Education combined).

The closure has caused widespread protest, both within the university and also beyond it. The students on the course have occupied one of the buildings on the Trent Park campus and set up a Facebook site(now with over 11,000 members), a petition (with close on 15,000 signatures) and a campaign website. Staff in the University bombarded the School’s Dean, Ed Esche, with emails. Statements of support have come in from international intellectuals of the highest stature, such as, for example, Alain Badiou, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, and Michael Hardt. They also came from faculties across the UK and beyond, from the American Philosophical Association Executive Committee, the British Philosophical Association, and many, many other individuals and groups. Talks have been organised by the occupying students on campus, with speakers such as Tariq Ali (Sat 15th May) and Tony Benn coming up. A conference will be held at Goldsmiths, co-organised with the ICA, entitled, “Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?” on 19th May.

So why has the University decided to close this seemingly thriving department? The reply, to Philosophy staff, was that the department made no “measurable” contribution to the University. They stated, rather bizarrely, that courses at Middlesex are expected to contribute 55% of their income (beyond what they spend directly on their students) back to the centre of the University, whilst Philosophy in the coming year would only be able to contribute 53% – a shortfall of a whole 2%! Lyotard’s nightmare of what happens to thought (and education) when it is yoked to the logic of capital here is taken to its most perverse extreme.

But such University statements, of course, cannot be taken at face value. Such slim and short-sighted grounds for closing the University’s most internationally prestigious department suggest to any minimally critical spectator that there is more than meets the eye here. Understanding the decision means both understanding something about the University and its executive, but also about the wider structure of education in the UK, and more generally within the neoliberal, marketised framework within which education is increasingly asked to function for all of us in the West.

The importance of the Middlesex Philosophy fiasco is thus that it is not an aberration, a special case of insanity, but rather a matter of the structural conditions of education today. To put it in a more snappy way, this horror show will be coming to a theatre (or, rather, a university or college) near you, soon! The closure of Middlesex Philosophy fits into a broader pattern of closures of humanities courses throughout the UK. It is only the exceptional prestige and success of the department that has meant that it has become a cause célèbre and as such publicly revealed the logic at work in the closure of other departments. In 2006 Middlesex, for example closed its History department, with hardly a murmur. Since then, modern  language courses, amongst other humanities subjects are being dismantled at the University. At the same time as the Middlesex Philosophy students occupy their building, there are also protests against course closures at other British Universities: at Cambridge, in response to Architecture disappearing; at Kings to the loss of Chemistry; at Durham, East Asian Studies; and at Sussex to the recent announcement of £5 million of cuts.

If the pattern (Kings aside) is that humanities bear the brunt of these cuts, this is not accidental. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) puts students into different “bands” according to the subject they study, and allocates institutions different amounts according to the band: for Band A, medical students, the Universities get the most funding from the State per student; Bands B & C are for courses with laboratory or workshop needs and thus though they are funded less generously than medical studiers, these get more than Band D, the “chalk and talk” humanities subjects, which are judged the cheapest to run. Recently, HEFCE have changed policies, capping Universities’ student numbers and thus stopping them perpetually escalating recruitment in order to grow income. In this situation, it becomes economically rational for managers (and they seem to know no other rationality but economic rationality, as the work of the University becomes entirely subservient to the bottom lines of spreadsheets, rather than vice versa) to stop recruiting Band D students so that they can recruit Band B or C students instead, and hence enhance income streams. (Forget, of course, that the Universities receive more money for these students only because their education is supposed to cost more: any University staff used to the logic of growing student numbers and escalating staff-student ratios, and without concomitant growth in facilities or resources will be familiar with the fact that this is not how things will work…) Such a logic is further fuelled by the fact that HEFCE have further “liberalised” their systems by which Universities are accountable for how they invest their money and what students they take.

In the case of Philosophy these economic rationalities are reinforced by another liberalisation in HEFCE policy. Though the official HEFCE policy is that areas of “excellence” should receive intensified funding, there is also now less accounting back to HEFCE of where within the University money goes. Added to this is the strange fact that even if a department closes, the University will continue to receive the agreed funding for that department on the basis of the last Research Assessment Exercise until the next has taken place. In such a situation, with the closure of Philosophy Middlesex will suddenly be able to liberate the research income that this department has generated and spend it elsewhere. This amounts to approximately £250,000 per anum. Of course, this means that the University will no longer have this stream of income after the next assessment (still several years away), but in the short-term scale of calculations of profit and loss, this fact will hardly show up, and for deans and other upper-level managers who are looking to go up the ladder and perhaps find a job elsewhere in the sector in the next few years, and who will personally receive generous bonuses for meeting financial targets, these things may not factor in their interests or thus interfere with what starts to look rather like asset stripping. Bizarrely, Philosophy, it seems, under this economic regime, may have become the victim of its very success.

However, this bizarre economic system of rewards and punishments for Universities does itself have a certain political – and ideological – logic in the neoliberal agendas handed down from the highest levels of government. The changing rewards for Universities regarding their intakes is a part of the marketised systems of regulation which the government has set up to implement this vision. Another way of understanding the cutting of Philosophy at Middlesex, and of other humanities courses elsewhere, is that these courses simply no longer fit into the visions of the Universities’ management for their institutions, which are, in turn based on government visions for higher education overall. This would make a certain sense of the strange, opaque and seemingly arbitrary procedures through which the cut at Middlesex happened.  Every time the philosophy staff were challenged to come up with a business plan, and to show how the course could be made sustainable – and did so – the criteria of “sustainability” were changed.

The vision of the government and of the executive officers of universities such as Middlesex is a deeply sinister one for anyone who sees education as a right, as something of social value rather than a commodity, who wishes class division to be reduced rather than enforced by education, or who fears that the Higher Education system may become for many little more than a job training system run for the benefit of business, but with the expense of these apprenticeships now born by their potential employees – who will leave university with no guarantee of a job, only a huge loan to pay back over the rest of their life. What we see emerging is the increased divide between the ex-polytechnic, “new” Universities, and their older, more elite cousins. The humanities will become the preserve of the old Universities. These, it is certain from the manifestoes and agendas of all the major British political parties, and in particular that of the Conservatives who have just taken power, will soon no longer have their fees capped, and can charge applicants pretty much what they like for an elite education. The ex-polytechnics, such as Middlesex will return (though even more so than they actually did before they became Universities) to playing the role of primarily technical and vocational educators – or, rather, what they will offer is training rather than what I would call education per se, which seems to me to involve more than the acquisition of skills for employability.

Such a skilling for employment, however, will be the “University” experience for those who cannot afford the luxury of a humanities education – the “luxury,” that is, of thought or philosophy, or of the critical relation to their lives which a true education should offer. An education in humanities will become once more that acquisition of “cultural capital” that Bourdieu recognised it to be in France in the 1960s. In this regard the admirable project of the widening of education with which the polytechnics or new Universities were once associated (however much this was always undermined by underfunding and instrumentalisation) will finally have been overtaken by its evil twin, in which a “mass” education is merely the training of the mass of the population for the workplace. The closing of History at Middlesex in 2006 should have been a sign here: its particular value was as a key centre – I think the only history degree in the UK – which allowed a specialisation in Black history, and along with the courses unique archives and educational resources on this closed. Philosophy at Middlesex, too, was perhaps unique in this country in the gender and ethnic mix of its students, and its taking on of Marxist, feminist and postcolonial thought into the philosophical curriculum. Such was the positive legacy of the “widening participation” Polytechnics and New Universities more generally, often in the forefront as they were of late-twentieth-century disciplines such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Visual Culture, or human geography and social history where critical thought about the experiences and politics of ordinary social and cultural life were enabled. Now however, in its marketised, instrumentalised form as training for employment, education would no longer  be a matter of increased freedom, as the “Enlightenment” ideal had it, but rather of increased enslavement. For me, this takes us back to Lyotard and his musings about the importance of real thought – thought which carries the stamp of heterogeneity – in the face of an increasingly monadic and monological capitalist world. The attack on Philosophy at Middlesex is clearly an attack on the possibility of such thought.

This, then, is why the fight over Philosophy at Middlesex really matters. Not just to protect an “excellent” department, but because this is part of a bigger picture and a wider struggle to protect education – and ultimately thought itself (which appears in Lyotard to be another name for freedom). The extraordinarily high profile which the campaign to save Middlesex Philosophy has taken on makes it our current best chance for a victory, but we must understand this as a first battle within a larger war. Only if there is some measure of success in the fight to save Philosophy at Middlesex will there be a chance of halting what look likes the start of a massive avalanche of further cuts in the humanities in British Universities. If they can get away easily with cutting this prestigious centre of excellence, around which an international array of thinkers and institutions has rallied, then they will feel secure in being able to get rid of other, less illustrious departments which nonetheless may in themselves be quite sustainable, offer a decent education to ordinary people, and foster in their academics important and valuable contributions to knowledge. If a stand is made about Philosophy at Middlesex, then future deans and vice-chancellors in the new universities may think twice before cutting courses or departments which simply do not fit into their sordidly economistic visions of their institutions.

What would seem to me to mark a victory in this struggle would ultimately be if the future and importance of higher education – and the humanities in the New Universities – found their place as issues within the broader realm of political discussion. In the recent elections in the UK, whilst governments talked tough about financial belt-tightening in the wake of the “credit crunch,” they were careful to distance themselves from possible unpopular cuts in defense, schools, hospitals or the police. This caution may, of course, now be left behind by a government that may not need to go to the poles again for another 5 years. Higher Education, however, was the one area where even the Labour Party was openly and enthusiastically talking about cutting before the election. In the current global economic climate, these political priorities will not just be local to the UK.

So:

•    Sign the online petition. The more signatures, the more pressure will be put on the University administration.

•    Join the facebook page.

•    If you are in London, go and visit the occupation in Trent Park. They are having an exciting series of talks and other events there, of which they give details on their website. There is also an upcoming conference at Goldsmiths.

•    Write (preferably publicly) to the various members of the executive involved in the decision to close philosophy, and/or to the University’s board of Governors (details on the Campaign website.

This matters!

Liz Ford writes about the closing of History at Middlesex in 2006 for The Guardian. 

Coverage of the current struggle  is not lacking: The Guardian (6 May, 7 May, 9 May, 9 May) . Times Higher Education (5 May, 6 May), London Review Blog (4 May), New Statesman Blog (29 April).

imprint

I started this “blog” in February 2010, after a visit to my native country – a short skip back behind the walls of Homeland Security. The face of the regime had certainly changed, but the course remains distressing. The scurvy tunes, written “through the estranged and alien optic of exile,” launched the bad notes of my distress.

Around the discordant rantings of a mask named Jehan Alonzo, I played, posting polemical ripostes and a plunder of images. In the days of Millennium Challenge and America’s Army (the Pentagon war gaming exercise and US Army’s wildly successful online “multiplayer first-person shooter,” respectively), even the subversive refuge of “serious play” can be made to generate weaponized toys for domination.

Nevertheless, my ludic mischief gave me short relief, and so I persisted. Flares, stains, ciphers, signals and tunes stacked up. From these critical and parodic figurations sobering constellations emerged. At least seven of them, circling, probing:

    the deeper meanings and legacies of Hiroshima;

    the enforcement functions of state terror since 1945;

    the dirty “war on terror” and the problems of enjoyment;

    tea partiers and American pseudo-democracy;

    the stalled project of revolution;

    the politics and blocked promise of art;

    the liberation of nature and the difficult outlines of freedom and necessity.

Those familiar with my work will recognize the problems that have concerned me for years. Playing through the disturbances of re-encountered homeland, I returned to my pack of obsessions.

And as I grappled with them yet again, the site seemed to grow on its own, tracing a reflection that edged along in several directions, archiving a process of thinking in and through images, as well as concepts and the playful stuff of language. Across posts, critical propositions and running analyses have begun to link up into sustained arguments. Along the way, some political positions were marked out and elaborated.

On this foundation, I now want to open up the project to a more collective and polyphonic participation. Let the positions so far registered be taken as editorial stance. Let the constellations indicated serve as topical problematics. All else is open. I now invite, and will solicit, contributions from friends and comrades, and their extended networks.

(I’ll continue to toy with JA, since his voice and imposture amuse me. But hereafter I’ll initial my texts, hoping thereby to reassure friends who feared I’d gone off strangely.)

Be invited then, to help me shift this thing in the direction of an online magazine – a critical commune relentlessly aimed at the given, and thinking beyond it in a spirit inclusive of serious play. It won’t be artful all the time, but neither will it count for tenure. Let these stay processural notings, given freely – short-form essays broadcast in defiance of proprietary hoarding of ideas. If the experiment fails, so be it. The struggle continues, if not by this wager, then by others.

Gene Ray (GR)

On the images: The homepage image is the originary ground zero, north of Alamogordo, New Mexico – in a barren stretch of desert the Spanish named La Jornada del Muerto, the “Journey of Death.” There, on 16 July 1945, the scientists, techno-administrators, brass and grunts of the top-secret Manhattan Project came down from Los Alamos to detonate the Trinity test shot, the first atomic explosion. The terror bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed with all haste, just as quickly as technically possible. The photo, taken by Elliott Erwitt, shows the site as it appeared in January 1965.

JA’s visage qua avatar is Seiji Fukasawa’s photo of a wristwatch pulled from the rubble of Hiroshima. Its hands, arrested by the blast, tell mutely of a passage to a new time of terror. The still unfolding meanings of that moment, both stoppage and threshold to a new mode of enforcement, are a mirror to the concept of humanity and its ruined myth of progress. In that mirror, every face is unhappily reflected and politics takes on the urgency it has never, since then, for one second relinquished or relaxed, whatever collective denials, disavowals and twisted rationalizations obscure it. In the threatened terminations of that catastrophic demonstration, however, there still pulses a latent political imperative: in ways yet to be actualized, that blasted moment of terror promises to make humans and abolitionists of us all.

another default is possible

The general strike and demonstrations protesting the misery plan masquerading as “bail-out” yesterday were massive and robust. The several hundred thousand who impressively filled the streets and Syntagma Square are constituting a political force that today is the real locus of democracy in Greece. 

Protests like these helped to bring down the dictators in the early 1970s and more of them now can topple a pseudo-democracy that has failed the country. As PASOK leads the IMF Trojan horse through the gate of Parliament, the unions and groups are gathering for renewed protests this evening.

There are many possible resolutions to this crisis. By no means is the official immiseration plan a “done deal,” as the capitalist media now acknowledges. Even the Wall Street Journal recognizes that default could follow from determined resistance.

Greece faces hard times, but who will have to bear the brunt of the pain? This is a political question that will be decided by the struggle now unfolding.

Who should pay? Whose dignity is to be sacrificed? Why should the banks and creditors, the politicians and major tax-evaders escape the plight they have dumped on the country through corruption, negligence and opportunism?

These are questions of justice and community, and the usual glib mix of lies, platitudes and neoliberal clichés is not going to satisfy a people awakened and stirred.

A real political moment has been opened in Greece.

Default would mean renegotiating everything. But who can be trusted to negotiate for Greece? Certainly not PASOK or New Democracy.

So it’s also time to question the form of democracy, and, if necessary, to change it. Not just the ruling government, then, but government as such is at issue.

Whatever Greece gained under the sign of Europe now comes at the price of immiseration, and there are no guarantees that ostensible benefits will survive the bailout – as any honest analyst admits.

If the Euro founders and the project of “Europe” breaks up, as Merkel in Berlin is whining, then junk this neoliberal, technocratic Europe and let’s see what real democracy can put in its place from below.

These are days for solidarity and focus.

In the fog and tear gas of struggle, we hope comrades will act with all possible care and compassion. We understand the rage and frustration, and the economic terrorism behind it. And we can see the everyday context of state repression and provocation, falling hardest on immigrants and autonomist young people.

The deaths of three employees at Marfin bank is a shock that hits us, too. The loss of three lives is terrible, and a real disaster for their families and loved ones. While we doubt this was intended by any comrade, we’ll also refrain from shifting all blame onto the bank’s chairman, who insisted with threats that his employees stay at their desks on the path of a massive and angry protest. The bank’s negligence was in any case well summarized by an employee, in a letter that has circulated widely.

There is, always, an ethics of struggle, and we hope there will be searching reflections and discussions of appropriate tactics and strategy in this one. We also hope solidarity and realism will keep those debates, when they happen, from becoming divisive.

As far as we can see, this is above all a struggle for dignity and the meaning of democracy. Dignity and real democracy are worthy aims that are not beyond reach in Greece. In the context of Europe, no struggle now is more important, and the hype and spin of mediatized wedges driven from above should not be allowed to distract or divide it.

AP/GR 

Letter from a Marfin Bank employee, in Greek original on Indymedia Athens and translated on Occupied London.

watching greece

Watching, observing from abroad – these “posts” issue from the wordy distance of this position and have often underscored it – one is staggered by the crudity of European hypocrisy regarding Greece.

Greece: one in five Greeks already lives below the poverty line, and yet the Greeks as a whole work more and longer than their European neighbors, the fabled Germans included. Now these same people are routinely and thoughtlessly blamed for their collapsing economy – their plight attributed to, among other chauvinist clichés, a purely fictional laziness undeserving of European “rescue.”

What garbage! This national economy was ruined not by “the Greeks” – the men and women who live and work there – but by the corrupt political class that administrates it and the tax-evading Greek ruling class that, along with the raiders of international capital, have plundered it for decades.

In this tired trope of “blame the victim,” we should be scandalized by the two extra months per year that public sector workers earn, thanks to the struggles of their unions, etcetera, etcetera.

To save the Euro, if this grace in the end is extended, those lazy Greeks will have to break their unions and lower the cost of their labor-power – and should be grateful to their masters and administrators for the opportunity to do so. Tame and demoralize those working people! Austerity, and more of it, quickly!! 

Hearing and reading what, obviously and crudely, is being said and written between the lines, addressed to, directed at, “the Greeks” and their “self-made crisis,” by the amplified voices of “Europe,” by the very voice of arrogant administration, of managers, custodians and mouthpieces of exploitation, the neoliberal technocracy that deems itself qualified to issue directives from above and is shocked if obedience does not immediately follow – hearing and reading and watching, one knows whose side to take.

But where is the international solidarity with the Greek men and women on whom a fraudulent austerity is being foisted and forced, as if it were natural necessity?

What to say, what can be said, by an outsider, observing? I admire and am inspired by Greek resistance, by this determined, visible refusal to accept administered fiat. Too bad others elsewhere don’t follow their example; if more of us did, the rule of pseudo-democracy could begin to open up and change.

There is evidently no solution for Greece within the constraining logic of the EU and Euro, other than the neocolonial dependency of the IMF debtors prison. Such is the global power of capital, against which other logics are necessary.

It’s for the Greeks and no one else to decide if this “Europe” is worth the misery that is its price – or whether, relying on their own impressive inventive resources, they might not instead rethink and reorganize the bases of their collective autonomy. For the others, for the rest of us, isn’t it time to remake “Europe” and everything else, from below?

Another general strike and day of protest has been called for May 5...

Here's the EU’s own statistics on working hours and work intensification in Greece.

on enjoyment and enforcement

In the police states of “actually existing socialism,” security agencies infamously kept files on everyone, cradle to grave. Blackmail and banal corruption were systematically insinuated into everyday life by the state, in order to produce informers – compromised, pliable individuals caught in webs of dependency, suspicion and impotence. A particular form of prohibitive control: a specific social relation and its corresponding subjectivity.

In contemporary capitalism (Todd McGowan, Yannis Stavrakakis and others propose), such old-school prohibition societies have been transformed into societies of “commanded enjoyment.” Enjoy! is the new directive. Discover and express yourself, by freely spending your money! No money? No problem, buy on credit! This command seems to reverse the basic bourgeois values of personal self-discipline, of saving and delayed satisfaction, of not spending what you don't have.

But in fact, even in economies of relaxed credit, the imperatives of lifelong commodity consumption – of the restless exploration of identity through the purchase of products and the auratic fantasies that surround them – demand the internalization of work discipline and all the integrations it implies. Overall, avid consumers have to work longer to earn more, and the crisis that reasserts this rule only proves it. (Think Greece, right now.)

Accommodation and resignation are thus the price of interpellation into the commodity world. To enjoy what feels like freedom, we structure obligatory social constraints on the inside of our subjectivity, as the new forms of dependency, discipline and limit. It works, because our commodity fantasies do deliver a partial enjoyment that keeps us seeking and buying, and therefore accommodated. The given doesn’t give all it promises, but it apparently gives more than anything else on offer.

Yes, enjoyment seems to be one key to our social reality. But, as this singer of scurvy tunes keeps insisting, enforcement is its necessary shadow: state terror takes new forms today. Moreover, these forms are vastly more powerful than the crude forms of old.

Online social networking suffices to make the point. Through the games of self-display played on Facebook and blogs (this one not excluded), we compile archives that are probably more revealing than the Stasi files of the East German police state. We enthusiastically publish our desires and fantasies, in words and images that always say more than we intend.

We hardly think about this organized indiscretion, this voluntary abandonment of inhibitions, which we moreover perform for free. But in fact, our habitual self-exhibitions and our interactions with other self-exhibitors silently accumulate in digital form, on distant servers we are hardly aware of.

There, they merge with the other accumulated traces of our movements and purchases, now become objects of data miners and hackers, actual and potential. In the first instance, of course, we are induced to profile ourselves for the attentions of marketers. But the state – and let’s not forget that the Internet originated as a project of the US Department of Defense – has access to all of it, as the “war on terror” has taught us.

So, yes, enjoy! And in so doing, archive your history, memory, and fantasy life. It’s fun! This is the carrot of late capitalist governmentality and industrialized virtual culture, and Lacan and Foucault, as well as Adorno, can help us to grasp it.

But don’t forget the stick! Powers of terror and enforcement have not withdrawn from the scene – they have expanded in unprecedented and qualitative ways. In the nuclear global regime of national security-surveillance states, techno-power overwhelms politics and ethics through the fatal knotting of war machine, science and state.

For enjoyment and enforcement go together. Integration and administration are increasingly internalized into the forms and structures of contemporary subjectivity: by enjoying in the approved ways, we largely police ourselves.

But no system attains the totalization it aims for. At all the points where the repressed returns, where the real exposes the failure of systematic enjoyment to deliver what it promises, rebellious subjectivities and uprisings incessantly break out.

We’ve already imagined, in film and fiction, where these developments tend: our self-compiled archives will be linked to terminator robotics. Nano killer-drones will be dispatched to eliminate subjects in revolt – eventually, for this is the immanent logic of exceptional security, preemptively.

If we know this, and keep mouse-clicking anyway, is this form of disavowal an aspect of our enjoyment? Probably. The forms of our sociability expose us, and silence doesn’t get us out of this circle.

Enforcement, at bottom, is necessary because the current system of enjoyment is antagonistic in specific and unsustainable ways: socially and ecologically, the limits of capital accumulation loom.

The radical response, faithful to “what is still now and then called humanity,” is to politicize these erotics.