I cite

Household income plunged in 2009

Household incomes plunged for the second year in a row in 2009, as fewer families earned over $100,000 a year and the ranks of the poor rose, according to census statistics released Tuesday.

Incomes are down about four percent since the recession began in December of 2007. That year, median household income was $52,384.

Median household income last year was $50,221, down more than $1,500 from the median income of $51,726 that the Census Bureau reported for 2008.

Almost one in five households--19.7 percent--reported incomes of $100,000 or more in 2009, the census reported.

That was down almost a full percentage point from 2008. In contrast, almost one in four families earned less than $25,000, an increase of one percentage point.

via www.washingtonpost.com

Benjamin on printing ::: wood s lot :::

Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out onto the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos. This is the hard schooling of its new form. If centuries ago it began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular. And before a child of our time finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colourful, conflicting letters that the chances of his penetrating the archaic stillness of the book are slight.
  -  Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

via web.ncf.ca

Negri at the Commonalities conference

Antonio Negri conference video (English / Italian)

Posted on September 25, 2010 by commonconf

Part 1 of 4

Antonio Negri: \"The Italian Break\"

This movie requires Adobe Flash for playback.

2nd Former West Research Congress on Horizons: Art and Political Imagination

1. On Horizons: Art and Political Imagination, the second in the series of FORMER WEST Research Congresses, takes place on 4–6 November 2010 at Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul. The Congress revolves around the theoretical notion of the “horizon” and its place within artistic production and political imagination today.

   If, as it is commonly assumed, the global political and cultural changes of 1989 left the world bereft of a sense of politics as striving towards a future—a horizon as it were—then we are left with the perpetual caretaking of the existing state of things. Given this apparent endgame of liberal democracy, how can we insist that it is possible to imagine and to realize another world, to posit the horizon anew?

2. In this context, the project FORMER WEST is a proposition for speculating—in the field of contemporary art—about a possible horizon. For, can it not be argued that art works, exhibitions, and their discourses inherently set up a horizon, offering a proposal of what can and cannot be imagined? This horizon links aesthetics with politics, creates an image of possible futures, yet also marks a limit that cannot be surpassed as it recedes with each move toward it, offering a sense of both possibility and that which remains out of reach.

3. Venue: Istanbul Technical University, Taşkışla Campus, Room 109.

   Language: English (simultaneous translation into Turkish is provided).

   Admission: free (registration is required).

   Deadline for registration: 3 October 2010 (Registration is closed, all available seats have been reserved).

Rally

I've wondered why these rallies on the Washington mall are happening.

For a while, million something marches were happening. Getting permits and organizing marches is a little harder than provisioning for a large stationary crowd, particularly if the time is delimited in advance. So a shift from marches to rallies isn't strange in itself. And while I expect that anti-war marches and rallies and demonstrations will return, the so-called end of aggressive US military involvement in Iraq seems to have brought with it a bit of a down turn in anti-war events.

The current ones--Beck, Stewart, Colbert--are extensions of televisual gatherings (not events), that is, extensions of the imagined space of community of commentator and audience. The shared fiction is that he is talking to us. And this us, constituted as a collective by virtue of the fact that we are the ones he is talking to, seems now to need to be realized, made to appear as an us.

Worker oriented politics, politics centered in factories, made a lot of sense when people spent hours, days, weeks, months, years together in the workplace. Folks spent more time with their coworkers than their families. No wonder shared gripes, ideas, and alliances emerged. No wonder they were transmitted. Workers saw each face to face. They worked side by side. Even if a guy is a jerk, you feel bad when his arm is mangled because of speed ups on the line.

No wonder, then, that universities have been loci for action--lots of folks are there face to face (and it helps that their time might be flexible). Same with churches--congregations share mutual connections with one another.

Consumer spaces spread out workers, bringing them more into contact with the folks they 'serve' than with one another. No wonder they 'put customers first' (or use this ideological front)--folks who want to talk about the workplace detract from the outward focus on the customer, a focus that has detrimental effects on the capacities for workers to organize.

And the so-called 'social factory'? Perhaps easier to theorize in dense urban setting than in US sprawl.

So we get imagined, mediated, cinematic, televisual communities. And then social networks. We get community lite, thin connections, disposable friends (they don't even have to know when  you've moved on!).

Rallies might be symptoms of too much virtuality, attempts to make real what we imagine we are part of, but can't be sure about.

Communicative capitalism and the commons

(Below is an excerpt from some comments I'll make at tomorrow's conference on contemporary Italian thought at Cornell).   

        For Cesare Casarino, the common is another name for the self-reproducing excess that is capitalism. It is another name, but it is not the same exactly the same thing. The common is not a thing or an attribute; it is a dynamic process. It is production. Glossing Hardt and Negri, Casarino writes, “nowadays the common is virtually indistinguishable from that which continually captures it, namely, capital understood as a fully—that is, intensively and extensively—global network of social relations” (25).

            The idea becomes clearer in contradistinction to the commons. Both common and commons are material and immaterial, natural and historical. Although the common indicates language, affect, thought, and knowledge, that is, communication, it should not be and cannot be detached from its materiality and historicity. I’ll add that this is a crucial point today, an advance over emphases on immaterial labor. Communication depends on a complex assemblage—satellites, fiber-optic cables, broad spectrum bandwidth, cellular networks, SIM cards, laptops, mobile phones, personal media devices, screens, protocols, code, software, search engines, radio signals, blogs, images, emotions, catch phrases, jingles, jargon, citations, archives, fears, omissions, comfort, denial. Installing breaks in the assemblage on the basis of an always questionable materiality closes off what the present opens, namely, the fecundity of communicative substance.

            Casarino’s insight into the difference between commons and the common is that the commons is finite and characterized by scarcity. In contrast, the common is infinite and characterized by surplus. The common thus designates and takes the place of labor power (Marx’s source of surplus value), now reconceived in the broadest possible terms of the potential of creativity, thought, knowledge, and communication as themselves always plural, open, and productive.

            How does the move from commons to common help our ability to understand exploitation and expropriation in contemporary capitalism? Well, at least one of the problems with the expropriation of the commons is that a few get a lot and some are left with nothing, thus having to sell their labor power. Privatization leaves them deprived of what they had. The widespread extension of credit—whether in the form of high interest credit cards, mortgage refinancing, or leverage in investment banking—is a kind of privatization of the future as it deprives the indebted of what they will have (more about this in a minute). The situation with the common is different. There is expropriation, but an expropriation that does not appear to leave many with little.  There is more than enough, perhaps even too much. A question for the capture of the common in capitalism, then, is the crime or harm: if there is abundance or surplus why is expropriation a problem? Or is the problem some kind of exploitation and if so what kind?

Chicago residents occupy public school field house

Since September 15, parents and students and residents of the Pilsen neighborhood on Chicago’s south side have occupied a field house at Whittier Elementary School.

The building currently houses after-school programs and is the neighborhood’s community center. It is targeted for immediate demolition by the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) administration. CPS plans to raze the building and has said it will fill the space with a soccer field.

Residents are demanding that the building be renovated as a library, something Whittier sorely needs. Their action is a courageous step forward in defense of the public school system in the city and deserves the broadest support of the working class.

via www.wsws.org

Zizek: Permanent Economic Emergency

This is an excerpt from "A Permanent Economic Emergency" in New Left Review (thanks to Bob for the heads up and the terrific passage he cited in his comments)

From the radical-emancipatory perspective, one should turn it around: for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate—since their very status is the result of violence—but never necessary: it is always a matter of strategic consideration whether to use force against the enemy or not.

In short, the topic of violence should be demystified. What was wrong with 20th-century Communism was not its resort to violence per se— the seizure of state power, the Civil War to maintain it—but the larger mode of functioning, which made this kind of resort to violence inevita- ble and legitimized: the Party as the instrument of historical necessity, and so on. In a note to thecia, advising them on how to undermine the Allende government, Henry Kissinger wrote succinctly: ‘Make the economy scream’. Formerus officials are openly admitting today that the same strategy is applied in Venezuela: formerus Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said of the Venezuelan economy on Fox News: ‘It’s the one weapon we have against [Chavez] to begin with, and which we should be using, namely the economic tools of trying to make the economy even worse, so that his appeal in the country and the region goes down’. In the current economic emergency, too, we are clearly not dealing with blind market processes but with highly organized, strategic interventions by states and financial institutions, intent on resolving the crisis on their own terms—and in such conditions, are not defensive counter-measures in order?

 

Americans struggle to regain their shrunken wealth - Yahoo! Finance

Households failed even to run in place during the April-June quarter as sinking stock prices eroded wealth. Stocks have since recovered about two-thirds of those losses. But based on last quarter's data, household net worth would have to surge 23 percent to reach its pre-recession peak.

Net worth -- the value of assets like homes and investments, minus debts like mortgages and credit cards -- fell 2.7 percent last quarter, or $1.5 trillion, the Federal Reserve said Friday. It now stands at $53.5 trillion.

That's above the bottom hit during the recession, $48.8 trillion in the first quarter of 2009. But it's far below the pre-recession peak in wealth of $65.8 trillion.

The drop from April to June was the first quarterly decline in Americans' wealth since early 2009. Before then, net worth had risen slowly for four straight quarters.

Economists generally think household wealth has ticked up in the July-to-September quarter so far, because of higher stock prices. Yet given last quarter's setback and expectations of scant gains ahead, some economists have pushed back their forecast for when Americans will regain all their lost wealth: Not until the middle of this decade.

Their stagnant wealth will likely keep Americans from spending freely -- and the struggling economy from picking up strength. Consumers tend to spend according to how wealthy they feel. And their spending accounts for about 70 percent of the economy. In the meantime, people are saving more and paring debt, Friday's data showed.

The decline in net worth from April to June amounted to an average drop of $12,941 per household. Average household wealth now amounts to $455,173. That's up from $415,185 during the recession. But it's down from a peak of $563,438 in 2007.

via finance.yahoo.com

Museum of Contemporary Art, LA: Writing the Future

Writing the Future: A Symposium on The Future of Writing

Saturday October 2^nd

THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART,  LOS ANGELES

Discussing the political, ethical, communal, institutional and aesthetic futures of writing, and how these may affect what our futures will become.  

Schedule:

1.00- Introductory Address

1.15 – 3.00         Institutions, Communities, Genres and the Avantgarde (or not)

                          John Keene, Mark McGurl, Juliana Spahr –   Moderator: Matias Viegener

3.00 – 3.45           Coffee Break (coffee available at MOCA Café)

3.45- 5.05          Politics, Ethics and Writing

                         Jodi Dean and Heriberto Yépez – Moderator: Christine Wertheim

 

The symposium is presented by the MFA Writing Program and the MA in Aesthetics and Politics at the California Institute of the Arts, in the Auditorium at  

 MOCA THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES  

tel 213/ 621-1729                                  Organized by Christine Wertheim.

The event is free. Please collect entry tickets from the foyer downstairs upon arrival.

 

Participants

Jodi Dean teaches contemporary political theory and new media. She has authored or edited ten books, the most recent of which are Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke University Press 2009) and Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Polity Press 2010).
She is co-editor of the journal Theory & Event.

 

**John Keene - is a writer, artist and translator, and author most recently of Annotations (New Directions) and, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, of Seismosis (1913 Press). A longtime member of the Dark Room Writers Collective, and Fellow of Cave Canem, his awards include a 2005 Whiting Foundation Fellowship. He is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University.

 

**Mark McGurl is Professor of English at UCLA, where he teaches classes in 20th and 21st-century American literature. His most recent book is The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing.

 

**Heriberto Yepez is a writer, psychotherapist, and professor at the Art School in the Autonomous University of Baja California. In Spanish he has authored more than a dozen books of poetry, fiction, theory and criticism. His English books include, Here is Tijuana!, a collaboration with anthropologist Fiamma Montezemolo and architect Rene Peralta, Babellebab: Non-Poetry on the End of Translation, and Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers. He lives in Tijuana.

**Juliana Spahr is currently working on a slightly paranoid critical book about the literature of the 1990s. She co-edits Chain Links with Jena Osman, and often writes essays with Stephanie Young. She is currently co-writing a book with David Buuck, and last summer co-organized the 95 cent Skool with Joshua Clover. She admits she has trouble getting things done by herself.