I cite

Jayne Wilkinson: politics of visibility

from here

The endlessly visible glut of information online has not disciplined us. As online subjects we have not been afraid of being tracked, even as we become more aware of who and how our metadata is being collected, and this lack of fear has not produced disciplined subjects. Artist Hito Steyerl articulates with striking insight how relentless the drive towards online presence has become. As we increasingly produce endless amounts of visual and verbal statements to validate our digital existence, we are

… realized online as some sort of meta noise in which everyone is monologuing incessantly, and no one is listening. Aesthetically, one might describe this condition as opacity in broad daylight; you could see anything, but what exactly and why is quite unclear. There are a lot of brightly lit glossy surfaces, yet they don’t reveal anything but themselves as surface⁴³

It seems certain that even if it were possible for images to truly reveal something about their referents, the aspiration toward transparency is a trap. The Internet has wrought a kind of “opacity in broad daylight” as Steyerl claims, where anything we want to see is visible but meaningless. How then does such a critique of the assumed transparency of the public sphere press itself into artworks, and photographic practices specifically? The concern is not for artworks that attempt to visualize the invisible or hidden but that must address the problem that visibility itself is an ideology, one powerfully tied to the contemporary global order. A critique of transparency then seems possible only when artworks are considered beyond the formal, aesthetic frames of the image.

In the years following 9/11 questions around the limitations of visual representation have been widely addressed, and the role and power of images interrogated.⁴⁴  However, the parameters of this inquiry seem to now be shifting. As photographs are increasingly freed from their role as representational objects and are now digital processes, images have become an important component of global networks of communication and dissemination that are operative beyond vision. Image production now happens automatically, or sometimes algorithmically. Images that we might think we have ownership over are no longer truly ours; we have relinquished our rights to images for the ease of transmission and communication offered by image-based social networks. Within a hyper-visual environment, the ways in which images are used and engaged has shifted so definitively away from the tangible, material of a printed photograph that we can no longer think of the photograph as a representation, as an index of an event or place.

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Whereas Rancière’s longstanding examination of the intersection of aesthetics and politics places him within a discourse that firmly roots questions of representation within questions of political violence,⁴⁷  for Galloway the impossibility of representation is precisely that neither political nor aesthetic representation is ever possible. He identifies that “one of the key consequences of the control society is that we have moved from a condition in which singular machines produce proliferations of images, into a condition in which multitudes of machines produce singular images.”⁴⁸  One camera does not produce many images, but many cameras (or computers, or smartphones) produce one image. This is a situation where photography no longer records an event but is instead a process or accumulation of many microevents; it does not track a unified point in time, it opens onto many. Photography is not the actual or metaphorical click of the shutter but is instead the instantaneous uploading, tagging, geotagging, searching, facial recognizing, networking, sharing, and filtering of images. This networked image landscape is one where innumerable machines produce not individual, varied, differentiated images but singular images, images that conform to societal codes and conventions.⁴⁹  For Galloway this proves that “adequate visualizations of [the] control society have not happened. Representation has not happened. At least not yet.”⁵⁰

Representation has a constitutive relationship with its mode of production, and such production is no longer based on a creator–apparatus–viewer relationship. It is increasingly evident that to make something or someone visible, to produce or make public from multiple sources a singular image is not to produce or generate power. In contrast, Galloway argues, “the point of unrepresentability is the point of power. And the point of power today is not in the image. The point of power today resides in networks, computers, algorithms, information, and data.”⁵¹

This is an unusual position since historically vision has been tied to representation through the image. But Galloway’s is an argument against the possibilities of visualization full stop. Where Butler and Azoulay might argue that the signs in the image cannot be considered in isolation from each other, that is they cannot be considered free-floating or unmoored from their referents and that they must actually mean something even if they do not appear to. For Galloway the signs, symbols and imagery that we use to attempt to make data visual, to attempt to make visual sense of so much unending, infinite data, can only appear to forge a relationship with any determined meanings. For him there seems to be little or no power in images, despite their massive proliferation. The generation of power resides in the notion that the image is a screen, which is a front for real power that exists in networks, algorithms, data sets, and relationships of information. These systems of power are yet to be made visual or visible in any meaningful way, and the attempt to make visual systems of power is indeed a pressing one. The question remains not only whether representation is possible, but also whether it can locate and visualize power at all, particularly when political and visual representation is being continually denied across many discourses.

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Returning to photographic art practices, it is clear that for Simon’s and Paglen’s projects to be made comprehensible in scope, there must be a way for the images to carry signification. As such, both Paglen and Simon use extended, detailed captioning to direct viewers outside the framed image by pushing against the very limitations imposed by the frame. To see one of their images without an understanding of the context of the project would be to reduce the image to aesthetics only, since the fuller and external spaces of the image would not be legible. Is one possibility for overcoming the failures of photographic representation to navigate between images and texts? Might the use of language also help to articulate questions around data, where language is once again achieving a place of primacy as users learn increasingly various coding languages in order to access different layers of digital communication software? For both Simon and Paglen, without the grounding of extended or specific captions the viewer would be speculating at the research, labour, or people that preceded the image. With the addition of the caption, the limits of each project become less abstract and more concrete. While resisting didactic meaning, both artists are navigate a line between revelation and concealment, between opacity and transparency and it is through the caption that this negotiated border becomes most discernable. Indeed, the troubling of the relationship between image and text is one that both Paglen and Simon hinge their practices on, since without the texts or captions, it would be impossible to assign meaning to these largely abstract images.

Photographic theorist and historian Geoffrey Batchen claims that the “interactive combination of text and photograph is typical of Taryn Simon’s work; it, rather than photography, is her true medium.”⁵²

The tiny texts crafted to accompany the images are intentionally placed to be read in conjunction with the image, so that the two have equal weighting. This strategy “shifts the burden of assigning that meaning from the artist to a viewer, making us all complicit in the act of signification, and indeed in the histories we are asked to witness.”⁵³  This is no small burden for the viewer, and this is precisely the type of responsibility in viewing that Azoulay’s civil contract of photography calls upon us to acknowledge. If the viewer is, as Batchen suggests, obliged to become complicit in the act of signification, then the question of what is knowable and seeable is an urgent one. The image reveals its contingencies not because the viewer can read anything into it, but it is a contingency based in part upon an individual being able to navigate between visual and linguistic texts. What results is “a photography that proffers transparency [and the] utopian promise of liberal democracy, but then renders that transparency opaque, even reflective.”⁵⁴  Paglen and Simon may both “proffer transparency” in their working methodologies, but their highly aesthetic images hypnotize us with a luminous glow, obscuring more than they are able to reveal. It is precisely this dialectic between transparency and opacity that is operative in the negotiation of image and text. The caption must bring with it the political motivation of the image.

How then can we visualize subjects as wide ranging as border policing, surveillance systems, drone attacks, economic inequality, environmental catastrophe, late capitalism, global finance? This is the overarching question with which Paglen and Simon concern themselves, in projects that interrogate the limits of photography and representation during a contemporary moment where the definition of photography, as a medium, a practice, and a process, is in continual flux. While the images of such subjects come to be largely symbolic, when we attend to the images in context, through language or texts that point to outside sources, we begin to address the contingency of the image without being didactic. The questions addressed throughout this paper may appear specific to photography as an aesthetic and artistic practice, but ultimately they have much broader implications in an era that privileges communicational transparency to the point where certain freedoms and values are being severely limited. As visual forms of communication become the most prevalent forms of social media–and the trend towards imagesharing sites like Instagram and Tumblr offer evidence of this shift–the currency of this form of exchange is the ability to store and manipulate data in ever expanding, seamless, and seemingly invisible sites. How information is presented, represented, and understood in a networked era are questions only beginning to be fully addressed.

 

Hito Steyerl: politics of post-representation

from here

Hito Steyerl Let me give you one example. A while ago I met an extremely interesting developer in Holland. He was working on smart phone camera technology. A representational mode of thinking photography is: there is something out there and it will be represented by means of optical technology ideally via indexical link. But the technology for the phone camera is quite different. As the lenses are tiny and basically crap, about half of the data captured by the sensor are noise. The trick is to create the algorithm to clean the picture from the noise, or rather to define the picture from within noise. But how does the camera know this? Very simple. It scans all other pictures stored on the phone or on your social media networks and sifts through your contacts. It looks through the pictures you already made, or those that are networked to you and tries to match faces and shapes. In short: it creates the picture based on earlier pictures, on your/its memory. It does not only know what you saw but also what you might like to see based on your previous choices. In other words, it speculates on your preferences and offers an interpretation of data based on affinities to other data. The link to the thing in front of the lens is still there, but there are also links to past pictures that help create the picture. You don’t really photograph the present, as the past is woven into it.

The result might be a picture that never existed in reality, but that the phone thinks you might like to see. It is a bet, a gamble, some combination between repeating those things you have already seen and coming up with new versions of these, a mixture of conservatism and fabulation. The paradigm of representation stands to the present condition as traditional lens-based photography does to an algorithmic, networked photography that works with probabilities and bets on inertia. Consequently, it makes seeing unforeseen things more difficult. The noise will increase and random interpretation too. We might think that the phone sees what we want, but actually we will see what the phone thinks it knows about us. A complicated relationship — like a very neurotic marriage. I haven’t even mentioned external interference into what your phone is recording. All sorts of applications are able to remotely shut your camera on or off: companies, governments, the military. It could be disabled for whole regions. One could, for example, disable recording functions close to military installations, or conversely, live broadcast whatever you are up to. Similarly, the phone might be programmed to auto-pixellate secret or sexual content. It might be fitted with a so-called dick algorithm to screen out NSFW content or auto-modify pubic hair, stretch or omit bodies, exchange or collage context or insert AR advertisement and pop up windows or live feeds. Now lets apply this shift to the question of representative politics or democracy. The representational paradigm assumes that you vote for someone who will represent you. Thus the interests of the population will be proportionally represented. But current democracies work rather like smartphone photography by algorithmically clearing the noise and boosting some data over other. It is a system in which the unforeseen has a hard time happening because it is not yet in the database. It is about what to define as noise — something Jacques Ranciere has defined as the crucial act in separating political subjects from domestic slaves, women and workers. Now this act is hardwired into technology, but instead of the traditional division of people and rabble, the results are post-representative militias, brands, customer loyalty schemes, open source insurgents and tumblrs.

Additionally, Ranciere’s democratic solution: there is no noise, it is all speech. Everyone has to be seen and heard, and has to be realized online as some sort of meta noise in which everyone is monologuing incessantly, and no one is listening. Aesthetically, one might describe this condition as opacity in broad daylight: you could see anything, but what exactly and why is quite unclear. There are a lot of brightly lit glossy surfaces, yet they don’t reveal anything but themselves as surface. Whatever there is — it’s all there to see but in the form of an incomprehensible, Kafkaesque glossiness, written in extraterrestrial code, perhaps subject to secret legislation. It certainly expresses something: a format, a protocol or executive order, but effectively obfuscates its meaning. This is a far cry from a situation in which something—an image, a person, a notion — stood in for another and presumably acted in its interest. Today it stands in, but its relation to whatever it stands in for is cryptic, shiny, unstable; the link flickers on and off. Art could relish in this shiny instability — it does already. It could also be less baffled and mesmerised and see it as what the gloss mostly is about – the not-so-discreet consumer friendly veneer of new and old oligarchies, and plutotechnocracies.

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MJ You have provided a compelling account of the depersonalization of the status of the image: a new process of de-identification that favors materialist participation in the circulation of images today.  Within the contemporary technological landscape, you write that “if identification is to go anywhere, it has to be with this material aspect of the image, with the image as thing, not as representation. And then it perhaps ceases to be identification, and instead becomes participation.” How does this shift from personal identification to material circulation — that is, to cybernetic participation — affect your notion of representation? If an image is merely “a thing like you and me,” does this amount to saying that identity is no more, no less than a .jpeg file?

HS Social media makes the shift from representation to participation very clear: people participate in the launch and life span of images, and indeed their life span, spread and potential is defined by participation. Think of the image not as surface but as all the tiny light impulses running through fiber at any one point in time. Some images will look like deep sea swarms, some like cities from space, some are utter darkness. We could see the energy imparted to images by capital or quantified participation very literally, we could probably measure its popular energy in lumen. By partaking in circulation, people participate in this energy and create it.
What this means is a different question though — by now this type of circulation seems a little like the petting zoo of plutotechnocracies. It’s where kids are allowed to make a mess — but just a little one — and if anyone organizes serious dissent, the seemingly anarchic sphere of circulation quickly reveals itself as a pedantic police apparatus aggregating relational metadata. It turns out to be an almost Althusserian ISA (Internet State Apparatus), hardwired behind a surface of ‘kawaii’ apps and online malls. As to identity, Heartbleed and more deliberate governmental hacking exploits certainly showed that identity goes far beyond a relationship with images: it entails a set of private keys, passwords, etc., that can be expropriated and detourned. More generally, identity is the name of the battlefield over your code — be it genetic, informational, pictorial. It is also an option that might provide protection if you fall beyond any sort of modernist infrastructure. It might offer sustenance, food banks, medical service, where common services either fail or don’t exist. If the Hezbollah paradigm is so successful it is because it provides an infrastructure to go with the Twitter handle, and as long as there is no alternative many people need this kind of container for material survival. Huge religious and quasi-religious structures have sprung up in recent decades to take up the tasks abandoned by states, providing protection and survival in a reversal of the move described in Leviathan. Identity happens when the Leviathan falls apart and nothing is left of the commons but a set of policed relational metadata, Emoji and hijacked hashtags. This is the reason why the gay AKP pornstar bots are desperately quoting Hobbes’ book: they are already sick of the war of Robbie Williams (Israel Defense Forces) against Robbie Williams (Electronic Syrian Army) against Robbie Williams (PRI/AAP) and are hoping for just any entity to organize day care and affordable dentistry.

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But beyond all the portentous vocabulary relating to identity, I believe that a widespread standard of the contemporary condition is exhaustion. The interesting thing about Heartbleed — to come back to one of the current threats to identity (as privacy) — is that it is produced by exhaustion and not effort. It is a bug introduced by open source developers not being paid for something that is used by software giants worldwide. Nor were there apparently enough resources to audit the code in the big corporations that just copy-pasted it into their applications and passed on the bug, fully relying on free volunteer labour to produce their proprietary products. Heartbleed records exhaustion by trying to stay true to an ethics of commonality and exchange that has long since been exploited and privatized. So, that exhaustion found its way back into systems. For many people and for many reasons — and on many levels — identity is just that: shared exhaustion.

MJ This is an opportune moment to address the labor conditions of social media practice in the context of the art space. You write that “an art space is a factory, which is simultaneously a supermarket — a casino and a place of worship whose reproductive work is performed by cleaning ladies and cellphone-video bloggers alike.” Incidentally, DIS launched a website called ArtSelfie just over a year ago, which encourages social media users to participate quite literally in “cellphone-video blogging” by aggregating their Instagram #artselfies in a separately integrated web archive. Given our uncanny coincidence, how can we grasp the relationship between social media blogging and the possibility of participatory co-curating on equal terms? Is there an irreconcilable antagonism between exploited affective labor and a genuinely networked art practice? Or can we move beyond — to use a phrase of yours — a museum crowd “struggling between passivity and overstimulation?”

HS I wrote this in relation to something my friend Carles Guerra noticed already around early 2009; big museums like the Tate were actively expanding their online marketing tools, encouraging people to basically build the museum experience for them by sharing, etc. It was clear to us that audience participation on this level was a tool of extraction and outsourcing, following a logic that has turned online consumers into involuntary data providers overall. Like in the previous example – Heartbleed – the paradigm of participation and generous contribution towards a commons tilts quickly into an asymmetrical relation, where only a minority of participants benefits from everyone’s input, the digital 1 percent reaping the attention value generated by the 99 percent rest.

Brian Kuan Wood put it very beautifully recently: Love is debt, an economy of love and sharing is what you end up with when left to your own devices. However, an economy based on love ends up being an economy of exhaustion – after all, love is utterly exhausting — of deregulation, extraction and lawlessness. And I don’t even want to mention likes, notes and shares, which are the child-friendly, sanitized versions of affect as currency.
All is fair in love and war. It doesn’t mean that love isn’t true or passionate, but just that love is usually uneven, utterly unfair and asymmetric, just as capital tends to be distributed nowadays. It would be great to have a little bit less love, a little more infrastructure.

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Essentially I think it makes sense to compare our moment with the end of the twenties in the Soviet Union, when euphoria about electrification, NEP (New Economic Policy), and montage gives way to bureaucracy, secret directives and paranoia. Today this corresponds to the sheer exhilaration of having a World Wide Web being replaced by the drudgery of corporate apps, waterboarding, and “normcore”. I am not trying to say that Stalinism might happen again – this would be plain silly – but trying to acknowledge emerging authoritarian paradigms, some forms of algorithmic consensual governance techniques developed within neoliberal authoritarianism, heavily relying on conformism, “family” values and positive feedback, and backed up by all-out torture and secret legislation if necessary. On the other hand things are also falling apart into uncontrollable love. One also has to remember that people did really love Stalin. People love algorithmic governance too, if it comes with watching unlimited amounts of Game of Thrones. But anyone slightly interested in digital politics and technology is by now acquiring at least basic skills in disappearance and subterfuge.

 

Tsipras on austerity and the oxi vote

from here:

Why did you decide to hold a referendum?

I had no choice. You have to look at what I and the Greek government were facing on June 25, at the agreement they were giving us. I have to admit that it was a very risky decision. Not only did the will of the Greek government go against the demands of the creditors; it collided with the international financial system, with Greece’s political and media system. They were all against us.

The likelihood of our losing the referendum was so great that our European partners bet on it with their decision to close the banks. But for us it was the only way since they were offering us an agreement with very difficult measures, somewhat like those we have in the present agreement, though slightly worse, but at any event difficult measures and also ineffective ones in my opinion.

At the same time, they offered no possibility of survival. For, in exchange for these measures, they offered 10.6 billion euros over five months. They wanted Greece, once it fulfilled its commitments, to take what remained of the previous program in terms of finance, without one euro more, because this is what the Netherlands, Finland, and Germany demanded.

The main political problem of the northern governments was that at all cost they wanted to avoid going before their parliaments to give even a single "fresh" euro to Greece, because they were trapped by the populist climate they had fomented, in which their populations were led to think that they were paying for the lazy Greeks. This is naturally completely false because they are paying for their banks, not for the Greeks.

What was the result of the Greek people’s strong position, against all odds, in the referendum? It was able to internationalise the problem, to make it spread beyond its borders, to unmask the image of the European partners and creditors. It was able to show international opinion the image not of a lazy people but of a people who are resisting and demanding justice and a future. We tested the limits of resistance of the euro zone.

We had an impact on the relation of forces. France, Italy and the northern countries all had very different positions. The result, certainly, is very difficult, but, on the other hand, the euro zone had been brought to the limits of its resistance and cohesion. The next six months will be critical, and the relation of forces that will be built in this period are just as crucial.

At this moment, the destiny and the strategy of the euro zone have been called into question. There are several possibilities. Those who said "not a single euro more" have in the end decided not on just one euro but 83 billion. Therefore, from 10.6 billion over five months we’ve gone to 83 billion over three years, with the additional crucial feature of the commitment around debt reduction, to be discussed in November. This is a key issue, determining whether Greece can enter on a path that gets it out of the crisis.

We have to put an end to the tales told by Messrs Samaras and Venizelos, who claimed they were getting out of the Memoranda. The reality is that there was a hole in this tale, and that hole is the debt. With a debt at 180-200 per cent of GDP you cannot have a stable economy. The only path that we could take is that of debt reduction, cancellation and relief. The condition for the country being able to gain some financial margin is that it no longer be obliged to run huge budget surpluses intended for a debt that is unpayable.  

The referendum’s’no’ was a ‘no’ to austerity …

The referendum question had two parts. There was part A, which involved the measures previously required, and part B, which involved the financing timetable. To be completely honest, without embellishing anything, the agreement that followed the referendum is, in terms of part A, similar to the one that the Greek people rejected. On the other hand, in terms of part B, we also have to be honest, and in this respect there is a day-and-night difference.

Before, we had five months, 10.6 billion, five months [in which our public expenditures were particularly closely] scrutinised. Now, we have 83 billion – which means a total coverage for medium-term (2015–2018) financial needs, of which 47 billion are for foreign payments, 4.5 billion for public sector arrears, and 20 billion for the recapitalisation of the banks, and, finally, there is the crucial commitment on the question of debt.

Thus, in terms of part A there’s a retreat on the part of the Greek government, but for part B there’s an improvement: the referendum performed a function.

On the Wednesday evening before the vote, certain milieus were laying the basis for a coup d’état in the country, proclaiming the need to storm the prime minister’s headquarters, that the government was leading the country toward a terrible economic catastrophe, pointing to the queues at banks.

I have to say that the Greek people were able to keep their cool to such an extent that television news channels had a hard time finding people to complain about the situation – the population was really incredible.

That evening, I addressed the Greek population and I told the truth. I didn’t say: "I’m holding a referendum to exit the euro." I said: "I’m holding a referendum to give us a negotiating dynamic." The "no" to the bad agreement was not a "no" to the euro, a "yes" to the drachma. People can accuse me of poor calculations, of having had illusions, but at every moment I said things clearly; I informed parliament twice; I told the Greek people the truth.

With 61.2% [support] in your hands that the Greek people gave you, what would have been the agreement that would have satisfied you on your return from Brussels?

On the morning of Friday, June 25, the day of the ultimatum, during a meeting we had in Brussels, with prospects of humiliation without any way out, we decided to go ahead with the referendum. For them it was take it or leave it. "The game is over" is what Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council repeatedly said. They made no bones about it; they wanted a political change in Greece.

We had no choice; we chose the path of democracy, giving the word to the Greek people.

Returning to Greece that evening I convened the government council and we took the decision. I interrupted the meeting to communicate with Angela Merkel and François Hollande. I told them of my decision; that very morning I had explained to them that what they were proposing was not an honest solution. They asked me what I would advise the Greek people, and I answered that I would advise them to vote "no", not in the sense of a confrontation but as a choice to strengthen Greece’s negotiating position.

And I asked them to help me in completing this process successfully and calmly, to help me in getting the Eurogroup, which was to meet 48 hours later, to agree on a one-week extension of the program so that the referendum would take place under conditions of security and not of asphyxiation, with banks closed.

At that moment, both of them assured me that they would do everything possible to that end. Only the chancellor [of Germany Merkel] warned me that she would make a public statement on the referendum, but representing it as an issue of whether Greece wanted to remain in the euro. I told her that I absolutely disagreed with this, that the question was not the euro or the drachma but that she was free to say what she wanted. That’s where the conversation stopped.

This promise was not kept. 48 hours later, the Eurogroup made a very different decision. Their decision was made at the moment when the Greek parliament was voting to approve the referendum. In 24 hours the decision of the Eurogroup led to the ECB’s decision not to increase the ELA ceiling [Editor’s note: the mechanism for emergency liquidity assistance on which Greek banks depend], which forced us to establish capital controls to head off the collapse of the banking system. The decision to close the banks was, I believe, a vengeful decision against the choice of a government to defer to its people.

Did you expect this result?

I confess that up to Wednesday [before the referendum] I had the impression that the results would be indecisive. By Thursday I began to realise that the "no" would win, and by Friday I was convinced of it.

In this victory, the promise I made to the Greek people to not gamble with a humanitarian catastrophe was brought to bear. I didn’t gamble with the survival of the country and its popular strata.

After this, in Brussels several terrifying scenarios were put on the table. I knew that during the 17 hours in which I had to wage this struggle, alone, under difficult conditions, if I did what my heart wanted to do – to get up, bang my fist on the table and leave – the foreign branches of Greek banks would collapse on that very day. In 48 hours the liquidity that allowed €60 daily withdrawals would dry up and, worse, the ECB would decide on a reduction of the Greek banks’ collateral and would even demand repayments that would have led to the collapse of the whole banking system. In that case, a collapse would have meant not a reduction of savings but their disappearance.

Despite all, I waged this struggle trying to reconcile logic and passion. I knew that if I got up and left I would probably have to return under still more disadvantageous conditions. I was facing a dilemma. World public opinion was proclaiming "#ThisIsaCoup", to the point that it became the leading hashtag on Twitter worldwide that night. On the one hand, there was logic; on the other hand, political sensibility. On reflection, I remain convinced that the right decision was to opt for the protection of the popular classes. Otherwise, harsh reprisals could have destroyed the country. I made a responsible choice.

You don’t believe in this agreement and yet you asked the deputies to vote for it. What do you have in mind?

I think, and I told parliament this, that what our European partners and creditors wrested is a Pyrrhic victory, but that at the same time it represents a great moral victory for Greece and its left government. It’s a painful compromise, both on the economic and the political level.

You know, compromise is an element of political reality and an element of revolutionary tactics. Lenin is the first to speak of compromise in his book Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, where he devotes several pages to explaining that compromise is part of revolutionary tactics.

In one passage, he gives the example of a bandit pointing a pistol at you and saying "your money or your life". What is a revolutionary supposed to do? Give his life? No, he has to give the money in order to claim his right to live and continue the struggle.

We’ve been facing a coercive dilemma. Today, the opposition parties and the establishment media are making a tremendous noise, to the point even of demanding criminal proceedings against Yanis Varoufakis. We are completely aware that we are risking our heads in waging a struggle at the political level. But we are waging it with the overwhelming majority of the Greek people at our side.

This is what gives us strength.

Tsipras: For Whom the Bell Tolls

excerpted from here:

My conclusion, therefore, is that the issue of Greece does not only concern Greece; rather, it is the very epicentre of conflict between two diametrically opposing strategies concerning the future of European unification.

The first strategy aims to deepen European unification in the context of equality and solidarity between its people and citizens.

The proponents of this strategy begin with the assumption that it is not possible to demand that the new Greek government follows the course of the previous one – which, we must not forget, failed miserably. This assumption is the starting point, because otherwise, elections would need to be abolished in those countries that are in a program. Namely, we would have to accept that the institutions should appoint the ministers and prime ministers, and that citizens should be deprived of the right to vote until the completion of the Program.

In other words, this means the complete abolition of democracy in Europe, the end of every pretext of democracy, and the beginning of disintegration and of an unacceptable division of United Europe.

This means the beginning of the creation of a technocratic monstrosity that will lead to a Europe entirely alien to its founding principles.

The second strategy seeks precisely this: The split and the division of the Eurozone, and consequently of the EU.

The first step to accomplishing this is to create a two-speed Eurozone where the “core” will set tough rules regarding austerity and adaptation and will appoint a “super” finance minister of the Eurozone with unlimited power, and with the ability to even reject budgets of sovereign states that are not aligned with the doctrines of extreme neoliberalism.

For those countries that refuse to bow to the new authority, the solution will be simple: Harsh punishment. Mandatory austerity. And even worse, more restrictions on the movement of capital, disciplinary sanctions, fines and even a parallel currency.

Judging from the present circumstances, it appears that this new European power is being constructed, with Greece being the first victim. To some, this represents a golden opportunity to make an example out of Greece for other countries that might be thinking of not following this new line of discipline.

What is not being taken into account is the high amount of risk and the enormous dangers involved in this second strategy. This strategy not only risks the beginning of the end for the European unification project by shifting the Eurozone from a monetary union to an exchange rate zone, but it also triggers economic and political uncertainty, which is likely to entirely transform the economic and political balances throughout the West.

NY Civil Liberties Union calls out irregularities in Reading Town Court

On January 21, 2015 the New York Civil Liberties Union wrote Justice Berry, Town Supervisor Switzer, and Councilmembers to ask that the Town of Reading facilitate public access to court proceedings. The NYCLU addresses the chilling effect of denying observers and supporters access to the court during the hearings of We Are Seneca Lake defenders arrested for trespass. Here is a link to the letter.

Wage, Tax, Debt

I've been thinking a little bit about the different financial figures for contemporary class war.

There's the struggle to increase the minimum wage. 

There are discussions of taxes -- taxing corporations (or ending their tax breaks), taking the rich, taxing inheritance, etc.

And there is debt -- particularly individual and household debt linked to student loans and medical expenses. The anti-foreclosure movement would fit in this category insofar as foreclosures are effects of mortgage defaults.

The struggle over the wage resonates with historical working class struggles. It's basically a struggle for consumption, for the capacity to consume more. Perhaps it thereby aligns with claims for bread or battles around bread prices.

Taxes, historically, have been instruments by which the wealthy try to prevent the state from taking their assets. Most working class people don't pay much of their income in taxes. The success of the capitalist class in cutting their taxes over the last thirty years is one of the reasons education and infrastructure have taken such a hit. The rich don't want to pay for them anymore.

Debt has not been as central to struggles in the US during this century. For the most part, it has affiliations with farmers forced off their farms during periods of depression, recession, and decline. Only recently, thanks to the efforts of activists such as those in Strike Debt, has debt become more central. It is still relatively unstable as an issue, still too associated with individual failures -- fortunately this is changing as activists make clear the connections between debt and the collapse of public infrastructures, like schools and hospitals, as well as the connections between debt and wage suppression.

At any rate, I wonder if there is a parallel between wage, tax, and debt and the class claims of proletariat, bourgeoisie, and proletariat. If so, does it make sense (is it useful) to try to articulate them together?

Or, is the case that one or the other is too much implicated in politics of maintenance? And, if so which one? 

Three economies

Lately I've been thinking that there are three "ideal types" of production, that is, three basic models of producing the material condition of social life.

1.  Command

2.  Market

3. Democratic (whether in workplaces or communities)

In history, these are always mixed. For example, market societies rely on command relations in the domestic sphere to reproduce the labor force. Some command economies have tolerated small local markets and even democratic forms of decision making in workplace councils or communes. Sustenance economies can be thought of as a combined form, where units domestic command (patriarchy) link up with other similar units for exchanges (which may be organized as gifts or markets). All three can also be combined with distribution on command (seizure, expropriation, tribute, taxation). 

Further, in history and in principle each of these arrangements can be and has been built on a set of suppositions, a kind of dictatorship (ala DeBois in Black Reconstruction in America) that establishes the limits and values of the system (for example, animal rights advocates reject the speciesist suppositions of US capitalism; we could call that a dictatorship of the human). Command economies have been built on the dictatorship of the proletariat. They've also been built on the dictatorship of military-industrial elites. Likewise, markets have been structured for the sake of competition as well as for the sake of imperialism. Democratic arrangements of production (whether directly within workplaces, mediated through laws, or part of local or tribal customs) can be and have been limited by hierarchies within the demos that establish the parameters of what can be done, not to mention modes of inclusion and exclusion.

These three types cut across the binaries of top-down v. bottom-up, especially by resisting the normative value given to bottom-up. Markets can be thought about in both ways (especially when one thinks about US free market fetishism as it rests on suppositions of states' rights and their legacy of slavery and patriarchy). A more benign example would be the romance of the entreprenuer, the small businessman, the do-it-yourselfer. The point here is that even in these bottom-up versions, markets exert a force 'behind the backs' of sellers and buyers. Another way to make the same claim is to say that there is no innocent or free market. Even if a market without a state were possible, the market is not a realm of freedom. Or, "bottom-up" cannot describe an ideal arrangement of a system of production.

Somewhere Zizek notes how bourgeois society represses the relations of domination and servitude that are expressed directly in feudalism. These social relations, then, are expressed as relations between things. We enjoy capitalism, then, in part because we prefer the fantasy of freedom it allows. We fetishize commodities not because of the things (any old thing can be a commodity)  but because of the way they enable us to disavow social relations, disavow hierarchy and exploitation.

How many leftists do you know with iproducts? I confess to owning an iphone (and old one) and to buying them for my kids (new ones). I confess to having purchased more than one ipod. I confess to falling in love with idesigns and the aesthetic features of these objects. And, all this knowing the conditions under which they are made. Most of those in my circles who have ithings know that they are made in FoxConn factories where the workers try to and sometimes succeed in commiting suicide.

But this isn't a piece about the horrors of Apple (maybe this is now the moment of disavowal). It's about what non-market economies for us can mean. Can there be economies that produce food, housing, medical care, energy, and transportation, that provide roads and railways, airplanes and flights, that have reliable sewage systems, clean water, and trash collection, that enable and distribute fast and reliable communication, that care for the very young and the very old, that enable a quality of life for people of differing abilities and capacities and that do this directly rather than without the mediation of commodities (not to mention wages or similar such modes of accounting for work input)?

I tend to think that the answer is yes and that a basic structure would involve some kind of complex set of collectives for organizing commons. These collectives would combine in various layers and networks that would enable connections based on locale as well as industry/sector. But even this schematic and idealized first step opens up problems. For example, every locale needs clear water and a good sewage system. So, every locale would need engineers who could evaluate, run, and repair the systems. They would also need pipes and different kinds of hardware, most likely that they would not be able to make themselves but would get from another locale. But what if that locale didn't want to make pipes anymore? What if all the young people moved someplace else to develop software or dance? It's hard for me to imagine what it would mean to handle this democratically: how would it scale? It's less hard to imagine how to deal with it via command.

Extreme capitalism deals with this in two ways. People either move to where the jobs are or they are too poor (or have too many other obligations) to move and so do the work others don't want to do. 

Another way I try to think about this is in terms of Detroit: if communists took over the city, dissolved private property and debt, what would the next step be? How would we get through the winter?

At any rate, humanists imply that we can answer these questions with respect: if pay and regard don't result from a higher regard for mental labor, then physical labor won't be onerous. And then what? What decides the distribution of work or tasks? It's one thing to disconnect work from food, housing, health (which is what I take the axiom "from each according to ability, to each according to need" to entail). It's another altogether to proceed as if this disconnection at the same time entailed a kind of freedom from work (that is, from compulsion whether commanded, normative, or by necessity).

I think that the elements of command and chance are unavoidable. Liberalism combines the two in meritocracy/equality of opportunity. But this simply displaces the question of command and contingency onto education and its hierarchies, luck of birth and parentage, the contingencies of life. And communism? At a minimum it has to make command and contingency collective matters. This doesn't eliminate or resolve them. But it means that they are not forces the individual encounters alone or for which the individual is deemed responsible (in terms of award or punishment).

Split consciousness

The present left is becoming more self-conscious as a left.

Occupy changed the terrain of struggle, making opposition appear in class terms in a way that had been repressed in the US for decades. Multiple lefts came together in occupation, not only sharing a project but also struggling over its meaning. In Europe, the deadly impact of austerity measures and growing opposition to them (not to mention the ongoing effects of the financial crisis of 2008), has made capitalism visible as a problem again (most explicit indication: polls reporting that the majority of Americans think the division between rich and poor is the most fundamental division in the country). For over thirty years, the preoccupation of a left that has been practically and theoretically active in a variety of specific movements and causes, as well as in multiple groups and locations, opposition to capitalism is growing, covered now in the mainstream media and a matter of governmental concern. That concern is generally exhibited via quick repression and aggressive policing (surveillance, intimidation, arrests, out-numbering, tasers, teargas, etc). 

The growing self-consciousness is at the same time, and necessarily, a time of division. As we emerge, we fight over who we are, over our name and names, over our principles and tactics, over whether we can even be said to exist. At the very least, our infighting lets us know we are here.

There are fights and there are fights. Some we shouldn't have to fight. We shouldn't have to fight over whether rape is wrong, over whether rape should be covered up. We shouldn't have to fight over whether the genocide of Native Americans was wrong, over whether Palestinians should be able to live and work and flourish. Fighting those fights, even though it remains necessary, doesn't strengthen us. We are already know what the answers are. Having to fight for them again and again doesn't let us advance theoretically or practically. It mires us in defensive maneuvers.

There are also useful fights, the kinds that sharpen thinking, clarify stakes. In the thick of things, it can be hard to know which kind of fight one is in. Which ideas are innovations? Which tactical repetitions further the struggle and which are but tributaries into circuits of drive (whether as media stunt, fetishized process, or perpetual self-criticism)?

This is a particularly tough challenge for communists insofar as the very opportunity presented by the collapse of socialism (the dissolution of the USSR and the Chinese capitalist turn) ushers in a generative chaos such that previously clear and distinct tendencies engage one another once again. An advantage is that ideas suppressed by the too tight link between communism and Stalinism, intransigence of Trotskyist parties, and reduction of debates into pointless repetitions of Marx and Bakunin have room to breathe. A disadvantage is the absence of learning or advancement (old lessons in a new time, one step forward and two steps back), lack of clarity about the stakes of debate insofar as the repetition of old themes in a new context can displace attention from present issues, and the undeniable fact of increasing inequality and immiseration in the wake of 1989.

Contemporary communist theoretical engagements draw on differing textual traditions and histories of struggle. They also unfold in the context of ongoing movement and protest. Absent a common language or common commitments, discerning what is at stake in any disagreement, beyond, say, the performance of a revolutionary identity insistent on the purity of its difference, at times seems impossible. Which views are anarchist, libertarian communist, autonomist, communist, or socialist? What is the difference between the ultra left and the anti-left? Where are the points of alliance that are useful and to what end?

Labels distort. But the critique of labels, the rejection of 'isms', leads to the cultivation of specificities that hinder debate and prevent thinking. Rather than building a common analysis and movement, we are pushed into esoteric analyses of multiple, specific, texts. Rather than debating what to do, we argue over what did so-and-so mean, which texts matter and why. Do these arguments derail the very possibilities that the current chaos opens up? Do they lead it to dead ends when they could insight new questions and approaches?

There's an irony, though, in these questions insofar as all they do is reiterate the split. Those who oppose organizing in common would likely take this reiteration as affirmation of their point that the Party is impossible now. I take it as an indication that it's necessary because disconnected and multiple loci of opposition is the form of our current defeat.

There are, though, points of convergence, ideas irreducible to generic anti-capitalism.

1.  Today the working class is not revolutionary.

2.  Our modes of opposition strengthen and reproduce what they attempt to destroy or overthow.

There are various explanations for the first point, including the insight into the role of unions in facilitating compromise with and acquiescence to capitalist demands, the decline of unions, the limit of proletarian identity as an identity within capitalism, the fragmentation of the working class in the wake of the rise of identity politics, the technological changes associated with digitalization, the outsourcing and off-shoring of industrial production from the US, EU, and UK to China, South Korea, and the Philippines, and the decline of confidence in metanarratives assigning historical purpose to specific agents (no big Other of history). How the fact of the absence of a revolutionary working class is explained and interpreted affects the conclusions that are drawn. Should efforts be made to raise class consciousness? strengthen unions? Or, alternatively, find another revolutionary agent, whether that is a different social group or capitalism's own crisis tendencies?

The explanation one find most convincing has repercussions. My approach is to emphasize the people as the rest of us and the process of proletarianization as fundamental to capitalism. An effect of this emphasis is that politics matters -- the people are divided, differentiated, dissagreeable. Even as capitalism involves never ending crisis (whether structural or local), creating another world requires work and organization. Communism doesn't just flow out of capitalism's self-destruction -- there are more potentials here (pick your favorite post-apocalyptic scenario: climate disaster, nuclear disaster, global pandemic, peak oil, enclaved super rich funding aggressive police state to oppress the increasingly immiserated ... oh, wait, we have that one already).

The second point also admits of variation. The critique of reformism points out that parliamentary efforts to build socialism prevent it, strengthening instead bourgeois capitalism institutions. The ultra left critique of bolshevism, premised on viewing the USSR as a capitalist state (which I find a point too crude to be useful, basically a variant of the notion of totalitarianism), argues that it strengthened the proletariat instead of dissolving it. A psychoanalytically inflected critique of some forms of direct action (particularly those that emphasize getting arrested) observes that demonstrations (like terrorism) call out and enhance state power. And, my own account of communicative capitalism criticizes media oriented activism --particularly but not exclusively in networked social emdia-- for intensifying communicative capitalism, providing media content to be circulated, adding to noise and hindering action, displacing focus from creating organizations with duration and commitment, and affirming liberal democracy's claims to legitimacy.

In my view, the only way to address to address the problem is via an analysis of the present (which is what I've tried to do in my communicative capitalism research). When we look at the present in terms of what is missing--and in terms of what everyone acknowledges is missing--it's an organized left, a Party, an alliance to which we have a degree of commitment. 

We have riots, insurrections, demonstrations, gardens, chickens, blogs, NGOs, networks, newspapers, lectures, fora, conventions, meetings, assemblies. But we do not have them in common. We do not associate them under a common idea. This was part of the event of Occupy -- that for a time, at least, the left was visible to itself as a common struggle. And, we knew it even as we knew that we disagreed, that some of us wanted to spend our time talking about how to arrange our everyday life, others wanted to  draft banking legislation, others wanted to block the ports, and others wanted to bring down the stock exchange. What was remarkable with Occupy is that these different actions, in different places, happened under the same name. They were consciously part of one struggle.

Notice as well: in this struggle, the 99% were not acting as a class. But they were acting like a class insofar as they were opposed to another class. Their affirmation of themselves declared the incompatibility between capitalism and the people, entirely circumventing the problem addressed in some ultra left theory in terms of the dilemma of proletarian affirmation (for example: 'The central theoretical question thus becomes: how can the proletariat, acting strictly as a class of this mode of production, in its contradiction with capital within the capitalist mode of production, abolish classes, and therefore itself, that is to say: produce communism?') Of course, this in no way means that Occupy produced or prefigured communism. It's contribution was more modest: breaking a hole in our setting, making the gap between capitalism and the people (in other words, class struggle) apparent as a gap. And more: Occupy made real and new the challenges of mobilizing, organizing, and enduring. Against the fantasy of an immediate communism (as compelling as it might be for a quick fix generation), it posed the ongoing and unavoidable questions of infrastructure, self-governance, problem-solving, provisioning, and mutual care that are themselves inseparable from communism as a self conscious mode of emancipatory egalitarian production and reproduction.

Keep Calm and Carry On

I ventured from my small declining city in farmland to the cheerless suburbs for some Christmas shopping. I wasn't immune to the consumerist spirit of Barnes and Noble. Items that I would typically ignore or mock were oddly appealing. They were potential gifts. As gifts they promised  a momentary escape from profit and loss, supply and demand. Even though they lied, I couldn't help but believe them. The day after Christmas, they will have lost their potential as gifts. Sinking back down into the swamp of over-production, they will have become bargains. So much extra and unwanted stuff, they will slide into overstock and only a week or two after the New Year turn into trash.

One series of such items features the motto from WWII Britain, "Keep calm and carry on." There is a "keep calm" calendar. There are mugs, tshirts, shopping bags, refrigerator magnents, and mobile phone cases repeating the injunction. Why are we so enjoined?

To say that the slogan traveled from the UK where it was an ironic and affectionate nod to the Queen and British resolve mistakes geneaology for explanation. Lots of things travel through communicative capitalism's meme flows. Not all of them get their own mugs and calendars.

I think the call to "keep calm" is everywhere because we are in a crisis, over the edge, living the end and one step from total panic and chaos (for a slightly different demographic the analogous meme is YOLO). It repeats a British slogan because the British handled their decline much better than we are. They offered a kind of social welfare--national health, housing, education--that eased the pain a bit. 

I started thinking about the demand for calm down during my yoga class today. The instructor mentioned the Connecticutt shootings and then told people to focus on the positive. She advised the class not to turn on the news and to be mindful of our breathing.

I don't think the instructor is an idiot, bless her heart. She's just repeating what she's heard over and over and over again for a decade, since the world ended and instead of joining the rest of the world as one of many facing common problems the US suffered a psychotic break.

For some, this psychosis manifests itself via an intransigent attachment to the power the country no longer has, except for its nuclear arsenal which gives it its remaining power, the power to destroy. For others it manifests itself via the delusion that we can go back, become Keynesians again, return to the social democratic road we didn't take. For still others it's in the desperate hope that they can seize enough--money, weapons, things--to keep the rest of us so far away that we can't do any damage (I talk more systematically about US psychosis in the last chapter of Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies). 

The mistake of zombie movies and Mayan calender fans is that they think of the apocalypse as happening relatively quickly -- although it's worth noting that a zombie apocalypse takes longer than an asteroid, so maybe there is some cultural learning here. The apocalypse isn't fast --it's slow, perpetually and momentarily displaced like so many chemo treatments or anti-aging creams, Snow Crash not Omega Man, Feed not Dr. Strangeglove, Super Sad Really True Love Story not 2012.

Do we really expect the areas of New York demolished by hurricane Sandy to be rebuilt in a way that can provide something like a quality of life for poor and working class people, for people who were living in public housing or other low income areas? Or is it more likely that the city will use the disaster as an opportunity to continue its steady banishment of low net worth individuals in the name of development? If we keep calm, they will keep on, keep on expropriating and exploiting because nothing is stopping them.

Do we accept that the families of those slaughtered at Sandy Hook elementary school will recover, will come back stronger and better than ever? I don't and I think that suggestions of healing and recovery and celebration and moving on and requiring a waiting period for the purchase of semi-automatic weapons perpetuate the fantasy that everything is basically okay, that the system is sound, that if we remain calm and soldier on we will get through this thing together. That's the biggest lie of all because we are not together and we have not been together. We persist in a lie that violence is freedom and inequality is freedom and the unrestrained exercise of financial power is freedom. We even have a motto for this persistence.

Keep calm and carry on.

Screwing working people

(now posted at Counterpunch)

A friend of mine dropped out of high school in the mid-70s. She went to work cleaning at a college in her town. She worked at this college for about 30 years.

Apparently, she didn't work for the college, though. She worked for three or four (it's hard to tell) different companies, companies contracted to do the cleaning. 

Now she is ready to get her pension. She went to human resources at the college. But they said she didn't work for them. They sent her to the company currently responsible for housekeeping. That company sent her to the company that manages the union's pension fund.

The union told her to fill out a form. It seemed to her like they wanted her to say that she worked at the college for fourteen years. That's all they had on record. Apparently, some time (when?) the union's pension fund was in trouble so it merged into another pension fund. All the records from the early time were transferred to the new fund managers.

The new fund managers seem to be saying that they have records for my friend's years of work and that they don't have records for her years of work. They also seem to be saying that she needs to go to the social security office to get a bunch of detailed records of her hours. This will cost $47.50. It's hard to know why this is necessary if they already have records of her work. But maybe they don't. 

Meanwhile, the office managing the fund changed addresses on August 1.

I can't quite get why they were telling my friend that she had to go get all these records. And this is after having spoken this morning to four people at three offices (college, current company, and union fund) two or three times each. 

After two hours, though, something else emerged. It now seems like there was no pension fund until 1991. That is, it appears like the local only established a pension fund for the workers in 1991. And it also looks like the employer's contribution during that period was only five cents an hour. It's strange that no one mentioned this to my friend when she was first attempting to get her pension. It is also strange that it took so many phone calls to establish this. Is it even true? That's not what my friend remembers. She remembers a union being there from the beginning, but it's been a long time and this stuff is complicated and confusing.

On the surface, my friend's experience is that of working in the same place, in the same union, in the same buildings, for nearly 30 years. Below the surface: three (or four) companies, only one of which currently exists and two (or three) pension funds, only one of which currently exists.

Because of capital, her world is not what it seems. Her basic experience of work (which also sucks) is fundamentally different from capital's managing of her remuneration for her work. The effect is that she worked for 30 years and her pension will only cover 14 years. And, it isn't clear why: no union contract? a mismanaged pension fund? a loss of records as ownership changed? The complications benefit capital and screw her. She's being exploited through the mechanisms of a process that was supposed to provide her with a benefit. She doesn't understand a lot of it (and neither do I). But she gets the basic point: "they expect me to die so that they won't have to give me my money."

But this story is incomplete because I've left out or underplayed another key aspect of the situation--how the people who work in offices treat my friend. She's in her sixties, black, and without a high school degree. When she got to my house this morning, she understood the primary issue to be that she needed to get information from social security that would tell the pension fund people how long she had worked for the college (which, technically, was zero years since she was employed by a private contractor). Her concern was with filling out a form properly and needing some white-out to fix some information that was misrepresented. When I made the phone calls, people talked to me, answered my questions, tranferred me to others higher on the food chain, and began doing the research on the employers and union contracts. I'm a 50 year old white woman, a full professor with a Ph.D. I found it all extraordinarily difficult to understand and only began getting things sorted by asking a lot of questions. The bureaucrats only divulged information when asked and spoke as if all of their terms were clear and obvious. They were brusk and confident, off-putting if you aren't privileged enough or socialized to question and push back. After I hung up from the last call, my friend looked at my across the table, shaking her head in a combination of disgust, fury, and resignation, "they wouldn't tell me none of that."

As it looks right now, she will get $70.70 a month. She worked as a cleaner for thirty years.