PRIMAVERA REVIEW (Part Two)

Friday

Yes, Pixies. They’re about to play on the main stage and Pixies-hill is crowded. They come on stage and there’s a big cheer, and when they open with Cecilia Ann, the crowd’s even louder. They’re on form and faithful to their sound and style. They played most of their classics: 'Velouria', 'Nimrod’s Son', 'Here Comes Your Man', 'Monkey Gone to Heaven', 'Where Is My Mind?', etc. I ruined my vocal chords for a couple of days yelling with 'Debaser' and 'Broken Face'… But what an experience! I’ll never forget that concert.

Saturday

Veronika and me arrive early, for the Minimúsica session, which is about pop bands playing stuff for kids. Sweet, but we soon get tired of it and go to the Pitchfork stage to catch Real State. I don’t know them, we’re told they’re from New Jersey and they became one of my favourite acts of Primavera, very interesting guitars.
When they finish we go to a small stage facing the sea and sit down to watch Gentle Music Men, a Catalan indie band. They’re pretty good and the singer’s got a nice voice. Apparently, they’re quite known for the fact that one of them is the fattest member in an indie band…
After that, I make my way to the Auditorium where I meet Pep, to watch Roddy Frame. He plays a lovely acoustic set and charms the audience. He plays mostly stuff from his solo albums, but also includes 'Oblivious' and 'Walk Out to Winter', which, of course, get a big cheer.
We don’t wait till the end, though, we need to rush to join the others and catch The Drums at some other stage. We’re far away but we can tell they’re having fun. They display their naïve pop stuff with some energy and ‘Let’s Go Surfing’ has become one of my Primavera anthems.
So, what next? Too much takes place at the same time. We’ve already missed Michael Rother presenting Neu! Music, Van Dyke Parks, The Slits and Grizzly Bear (we only arrive in time for their last song). And now, it’s a toss-up between The Charlatans and Built to Spill. We opt for the Mancunians, with the idea of going to Built to Spill after four or five songs. In the end, we stay with The Charlatans for the whole gig. Tim Burgess must have made a pact with the devil, or maybe his long hair covering his face hides the ageing process, but it looks like they’re frozen in time. And they put on a very good show. Their songs, to me, sounded better live than on record. Really, and rather unexpectedly for myself, one of the highlights of this year’s Primavera.
Next, Gary Numan. A bit of a mistery that one, we didn’t know what to expect. After half an hour there was no mistery at all. Gary’s act was pretty boring and people were leaving. And, yes, he played that obscure B-side, ‘Cars’.
Now, another choice. Lee Perry or Pet Shop Boys. They’re so similar… My American mates, Ken and Dave, go to the Pet Shop Boys and me and Veronika go to Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, which was good. Not the most exciting of concerts, but the man is a legend and I think it’s worth watching him, in spite of some mildly irritating dancers on dope… At 1.30 in the morning, with the sea breeze, that solid dub-reggae sound somehow fits perfectly. He finishes on time and we can just catch Pet Shop Boys on the big screen, doing their last number ‘West End Girls’, with dancers wearing big square boxes for heads. It looks both silly and arty.
We all regroup and sit down to relax for a while, watching Orbital in the distance at 3 am… and then we go home. It’s been an intense Primavera!

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #2

Westland Row

The birthplace of the playwright and essayist Oscar Wilde, Westland Row is now, as you can see, much grubbier than it was in Bloom's time, both graffitoed and vandalized. Built in 1776 by Jacob Epstein, it now appears to be the permanent home of unkempt students from Trinity College who congregate in indolent clusters hereabout smoking all manner of substances, taking photos of one another, and generally being a nuisance to both the living and the dead. In Ulysses, Bloom pays a visit to Sweny's chemist at the bottom of the street, where he buys some lemon soap, presumably to remove all the lipstick, and a packet of johnnies "in case Molly fancies a tumble when I get home." This is what is generally known to literary scholars as dramatic irony: The reader, unlike Bloom, knows that, at that very moment, Molly is being taken up the shitter by Blazes Boylan, using neither soap nor johnnies.

Sweny's can still be found at its old location. It is now a secondhand bookstore, but it still stocks lemon soap. If you require johnnies, there's another pharmacy a little further up Westland Row, but if you ask the Sweny's staff politely, they are only too happy to lend you johnnies from their own personal stash. The store is under new ownership, and they're trying to oblige all customers. Just say that you always used to get your johnnies there.

Davy Byrne's Pub

Davy Byrne's. The moral pub. The moral being, don't drink in Davy Byrne's. Bloom stops off here and consumes a glass of burgundy and a Gorgonzola sandwich, even though Gorgonzola was not invented until the First World War and anyone who has visited this pub knows that burgundy is only ever drunk out of the brain cavity of the original Davy Byrne, whose skull is kept behind the bar specifically for this purpose, as requested in his will. It has been suggested that this cheese reference is in fact a tribute to Émile Zola, the chronicler of Parisian working-class life on whom Joyce closely modeled his own career. Others have said that it was simply a mistake, one of the several thousand historical inaccuracies that have been spotted in the work to date. Experts in the field are now generally of the view that Joyce was "making it up as he went along."

It is interesting that, per Joyce, nobody drinks Guinness in Davy Byrne's, since the pub featured in a recent advertising campaign celebrating the 250th anniversary of the brewery's founding. In one television advert, drinkers are seen outside the pub offering a toast "To Arthur!" a reference to brewery founder Arthur Guinness, and in a semi-humorous relay of Chinese Whispers across Dublin pubs, the toast becomes increasingly distorted: "To Martha!" "To Hearth Rugs!" "To Bath Plugs!" "To Garth Brooks!" "To Garth Crooks!" and so on, until it has done the rounds of Dublin and gets back to Davy Byrne's, by which time the drinkers have actually sampled the brew. At that point, they shout, as one, "To Lager!" and spend the rest of the night drinking Stella.

But that bit was cut.

The bat motif that you can make out on the wall is the symbol of Bacardi rum. It is often asserted, mistakenly, that the Bass triangle was the first brand logo to appear in a work of art, in Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergere, but this sculpture predates it by 12 years. The motif is also a reminder of another Irish novelist, Bram Stoker, who used to come into Davy Byrne's and drink Bacardi by the gallon. The bar staff let him sleep off his appalling hangovers during the daytime in the cool of the cellars, because the slightest glimpse of sunlight caused him immense agony. Thus was the story of Dracula born.

The National Museum

There are some artifacts behind these doors that date back to the days of pre-history, when humans were little more than grasping, instinctual, selfish, animalistic monsters. Take a contemporary Dublin citizen and hand them one of these items, and they simply wouldn't know what to make of them. There are no clues to how they should be used or, indeed, to how they were used. They belong to an era that we can barely conceptualize, and the presence of these artifacts only compound our confusion. That we should even encounter them in the midst of our own, advanced civilization seems so anachronistic that one can only wonder what purpose could lie behind the act of displaying them to us other than to confront us with the Other which we once were, to disprove Montaigne's assertion, "I am a man. Nothing human is foreign to me."

Leopold Bloom visits the National Museum principally to contemplate the arses of the statues within. There were a number of arseholes in here when we dropped by, too, but we didn't find them arousing in the way Bloom did. Autres temps, autres mœurs.

Martello Tower, Sandycove

At this point in our dérive, we slipped into something long and uncomfortable, namely, the 5.13 DART from Pearse Station to Bray, alighting at Sandycove in order to visit the Martello Tower where Joyce opens his novel. The DART now runs underground, and the drivers are all French.

As you can see, Sandycove is, despite its name, one of Dublin's leafier suburbs. The Tower itself, in the distance, was built by the British to spot Napoleon's forces should he attempt anything so underhand as inciting the Irish to revolt. Joyce has Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus play his modern-day "lookouts," although they fall out over the fact that Mulligan has invited an Englishman, Haines, to stop with them, thereby illustrating the tension between Irishmen of the time over their relationship to Empire. Also, there are only two beds.

There are 365 steps to the top of the Martello Tower, which is why Mulligan complains about his tea being cold when Dedalus brings it up to him. There are several witty puns about Dedalus taking years over breakfast that will escape readers unless they know this fact. Several other puns relating to cramps, caresses, and Crete cannot be fully appreciated without a full knowledge of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, who jumped off a high tower to escape King Minos. Interestingly, Paul McCartney got the name of his band Wings from this chapter of the book. The Beatles acquired their name from the Ladybird Book of Beetles.


Part the Third suivant.

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #1

In honour of Ireland's first flâneur après la lettre, Leopold Bloom, members of the Dublin Psychogeographical Society took it upon themselves this year to re-create his dérive, as described in James Joyce's remarkable novel Ulysses, and in our usual spirit of bloody-mindedness, to do it in Paris, source originaire de la flâneuristicisme and spiritual home of the Lettrist International and Situationism. The coach from Beauvais brought us, in the first acte gratuit of the day, to the portals of the James Joyce Pub, an omen, some of us imagined, a portending portal, if you will, a benevolent Delphic, nay, Homeric, augur signifying the Immortals' blessing on our adventure. Others amongst us pointed out that the bus always stops here.

The Guinness Brewery

Not, strictly speaking, the Ulyssean starting point, and thanks to the four Thermoses of room-temperature red wine we had packed and the ready availability of imbibing establishments for which Paris is renowned, Bloom's original path as described in the book soon became more of a drunkard's stagger, although we endeavoured to reach as many points of interest as we could, regardless of their chronological order in the text. Nonetheless, in many ways the Guinness Brewery constitutes a suitable starting point for our day out. "A Visit to Guinness' Brewery" is an essay topic suggested in Finnegans Wake, and as Joyce once observed, Dubh Linn, the uncorrupted name of Ireland's capital, means "black pool," identifying a subconscious motivation for the consumption of this darkest and foulest of beers by the unsuspecting natives. The brewery is thus an oneiric spring, the city's fount from which all life and death bubbles forth, dark and laden with original sin, much like Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal. Metaphorically, then, the Brewery evokes not just Dublin's alcohol-sodden Viking past but also Holles Street Hospital, setting for Joyce's Oxen and the Sun scene in Ulysses, and the place where modern-day Dubliners give birth to their own Fleurs du mal.

The tower you see in the picture gives visitors a 360-degree view of the entire city of Dublin. It also marks the precise location of the Marquis de Sade's liberation after the Brewery was stormed in 1789. In those days, the citizens of Dublin had the wit to make former inmates members of their parliament. Today's Dubliners can't even manage to do the reverse.

We were taken on a tour of the Brewery (you can see the building behind), but we were forcibly ejected at the end of the tour when we demanded our free pints of Guinness. So much for Irish hospitality.

The Phoenix Park

Ah yes, the phoenix, mythological bird ripe for all sorts of linguistic jiggery-pokery but never much good for cooking. We were surprised upon our arrival to see how literally the parks department has taken the name, the park's fields being liberally covered over with what at first sight looked to be ashes. Closer examination revealed it to be sand, however, much to the delight of our pro-Situ members always on the lookout for the beach beneath the cobbles. A couple of the capital's young bucks were engaged in what we took to be some kind of religious rite involving clubs and a round projectile. Could this be the fabled "hurling," the Irishman's national sport? If so where was the vomit and blood? Or polo, perhaps? Our map indicated that there were polo grounds around here somewhere. Or were they simply two strapping Irish lads revelling in their own strength and vigour, frolicking gamely in the sunshine on the ersatz beach, their own Sandymount Strand, while lusty onlookers furtively masturbated behind the rocks? Who can say? More than one of us on encountering this scene thought immediately of Albert Camus and his love of outdoor life on the beaches of Algeria. A Joycean link here too: So struck was he by the structure and plot of Ulysses that Camus sketched out the plan for a novel about Bloom's mother, culminating with her death at the hands of her son on June 15th, 1904. The fact that Bloom makes no reference in Ulysses to the murder of his mother for the entirety of the next day transforms this Everyman into the archetypal modern-day psychopath, an Outsider not merely by virtue of his Jewishness, but by virtue also of his lack of fellow-feeling, the affectless, blasé personality incarnate, to use Simmel's categorisation.

Of course, we know what happened next. Bloom became Meursault, the Outsider who kills an Arab for kicks. The opening line of that book?: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."

La Peste is better, anyway.

Mountjoy Prison

To inmates, "The Joy." To the screws, "The Mount." To the locals, "Mounters," "Joyo," "Priso," "Ountjoyp." Home to de Sade in his senility and madness, to Behan in his cups, to several popes (frocked, defrocked and unfrocked), and, a surprise to many, quite a few little old ladies, some of whom just love the place and keep coming back simply because they enjoy the company and the warmth, others amongst them who cannot help but come back because they are so thoroughly institutionalized they cannot cope with life on the outside. Sartre once said, ridiculously, that every man is free, even in prison. What he forgot to add is that even outside a prison's walls, a man can carry a prison inside his head. The former inmates of this particular asylum are frequently damaged in this way. Once the madness acquired in this particular building gets under your skin, it can require decades of re-education, beatings, and waterboarding to flush it out of you.

There is no truth to the rumour, incidentally, that the cells are so crowded that inmates develop hunchbacks. Though critics are yet to determine why Behan wrote about an old triangle instead of the bells, the bells.

Holles Street Hospital

The setting of the Oxen and the Sun portion of the novel and the site of the Guillotine during the Revolution, here it is that Ireland's monstrous beauties are born. As Baudelaire, described by Walter Benjamin as the master expositor of modernity, once said, "the unique and supreme pleasure of making love lies in the certitude of doing evil." Molly Bloom's "Yes, yes, I said, yes," thus becomes an affirmation of evil, a declaration of nihilism that encapsulates the modernist spirit. It is fucking that leads to creation, to birth. Baudelaire's evil flowers are his poems, while Joyce generates Ulysses by fucking with language. The Revolution itself gave birth to Modernity, to Saint-Simonism, Comtean Positivism, the ontological rupture between subject and object, knower and known, mind and body. It is no coincidence to those astute enough to notice that the executioner's tool of choice during the Revolution was the Guillotine, not because of its purported humaneness or its symbolic representation of progress, but because it enacted the literal separation of body and mind. The Guillotine is Descartes' Cogito put to the task of social cleansing. And, in the same stroke, it is a symbol of rebirth, a cutting of the umbilical cord between parent and child, the birth of a new nation, a new society, out of the death pangs of the old.

A happy confluence of birth and death, then, echoing not just the Guinness Brewery where we began our day's outing, but also Glasnevin Cemetery, where I fear we shall all end up, whether it be by accident or design or misreading of the map while langered.

Part the Second to Follow.

PRIMAVERA REVIEW (Part One)

Hi all, this is my personal account of the Primavera festival in Barcelona, in two parts... Sorry about the delay.

Thursday

We arrive at 20 h, just in time for The Fall. Mark E. Smith starts mumbling ‘your future-ah is our clutter-ah…’ and there’s non-stop from then on, with the band, very solid, playing their typically repetitive but vibrant sound. They’re on the main stage and we can mostly see them on the big screen. Mark E. Smith reminds me of a guy in my local area who sleeps on a bench surrounded by cans of beer… But he’s still alive! And they’re a great act.
After that we caught The XX. I’ve heard of them but don’t know their stuff. They sound gentle and interesting, but after them, Broken Social Scene stole the show. They play quite a few songs from their last album, and, maybe it was the beers, but I can’t recall them playing a classic like ‘Anthems for a 17 year old girl’, but still, on stage they’re funny and inventive.
And after that, at 1 am, Pavement are… Pavement. Good songs and a good band… but the beers I’ve drunk are taking their toll now…

Friday

My friend Veronika and I arrive in time for A Sunny Day in Glasgow. To me, the songs are OK, pretty good, but mostly I love their live act. Too short, though, which is fine because it gives us time to go to the Auditorium to watch Low perform ‘The Great Destroyer’. The place is packed and we struggle to find seats. Well, in fact we don’t find them… We sit on the corridors and are told by security to move on somewhere else. That happened three or four times until we managed to find two seats. And as for the show… oh my god, it’s beautiful. Very moving. Definitely, one of the highlights of the festival.
When we leave the Auditorium I join my mate Pep and we both go to see Wire, whilst Veronika goes to see Here We Go Magic. They’re very noisy and mad, she tells me, but she enjoyed the show. Wire weren’t too noisy nor mad, but they were good, they played some classics (not the Elastica song, though…) and I was happy to see them live for the first time.
We join the others and make our way towards the main stage to catch a bit of Wilco. Maybe because I’ve seen them before, maybe because we were far away and I wasn’t paying attention, concentrated in getting drinks, they sounded to me a bit MOR-ish. I think really we were all geared up for the next act, the stars of this year’s Primavera, Pixies (to be continued…)

"These two need to spend six months in a third world country building schools."

Linder Sterling interviewed by Morrissey in Interview Magazine.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

John Hyatt - Boomerang Love

Cognitive Surplus

Two guys plugging their latest books can actually generate a stimulating discussion, as demonstrated by this brief conversation between Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink in the June issue of Wired magazine. Pink's book is called Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. Shirky's is called Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Excerpts that attracted my interest:

Shirky: . . . Somehow, watching television became a part-time job for every citizen in the developed world. But once we stop thinking of all that time as individual minutes to be whiled away and start thinking of it as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different. The buildup of this free time among the world’s educated population—maybe a trillion hours per year—is a new resource. It’s what I refer to as the cognitive surplus.

Pink: A surplus that post-TV media—blogs, wikis, and Twitter—can tap for other, often more valuable, uses.

Shirky: That’s what’s happening. Television was a solitary activity that crowded out other forms of social connection. But the very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.

. . .

Shirky: Right—because television crowded out other forms of social engagement. Look, behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, like with Wikipedia and whatnot, it’s very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn’t change that quickly. It’s quite likely that the opportunities have changed.

. . .

Pink: . . . Both of us cite research from University of Rochester psychologist Edward Deci showing that if you give people a contingent reward—as in “if you do this, then you’ll get that”—for something they find interesting, they can become less interested in the task. When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.

Shirky: You talk about the laws of behavioral physics working differently in practice from what we believe in theory.

Pink: Yes, often these outside motivators can give us less of what we want and more of what we don’t want. Think about that study of Israeli day care centers, which we both write about. When day care centers fined parents for being late to pick up their kids, the result was that more parents ended up coming late. People no longer felt a social obligation to behave well.

Shirky: If you assume bad faith from the average participant, you’ll probably get it. In social media, the design principle that has worked remarkably well is to treat good faith as the normal case and to regard defections from that as essentially a special case to be solved.

Pink: Same goes with organizations. We don’t realize how much our unexamined assumptions take us to radically different places. If I’m running an organization and my starting premise about human beings is that people are fundamentally passive and inert, that they won’t do a damn thing unless I threaten them with a stick or entice them with a carrot, that takes me down one road. But I think that’s the wrong premise, the wrong theory of human nature.

Shirky: The power of the default setting.

Pink: I think our nature is to be active and engaged. I’ve never seen a 2-year-old or a 4-year-old who’s not active and engaged. That’s how we are out of the box. And if you begin with this presumption, you create much more open, flexible arrangements that almost inevitably lead to greater satisfaction for individuals and great innovation for organizations.

Irish Anarchist Review

Issue 1 out now. Details and pdf here.

Always Interesting

David Graeber, that is, being interviewed here by Yiannis Aktimon of the Void network. Some highlights:

Void Network: what are the major challenges of antiauthoritarian movement of today? Is there really a revolution to be waited for, or in truth, the radical procedure of present, has to do with the ideas and forces of a general daily reformation of life?

D.G.: Globally, I think we are at a turning point, but that turning point has been, as it were, endlessly suspended. One reason the alter-globalization movement slowed down so in the second half of the '00s was not just the lingering effects of the war on terror and resultant stepping up of repression, but the fact that the other side simply couldn't get their act together. They were faced with enormous structural crises, really, the effects of the same broad diffuse popular resistance of which are movements were perhaps the most self-conscious, explicit, and articulate form. Yet all they did was bicker with each other at their summits - they didn't really seem to have a strategy, and thus, it was very hard to come up with a strategy of opposition. This might be changing now. As for the grand strategic question: well, I don't think the transformation of daily life, and the larger question of revolution, can any longer be clearly separated. How might radical transformation happen? We can't know. We're really flying blind. But I also think we've been working with a very limited set of historical analogies: the history of revolutionary movements first in Europe in the 18th and 19th century, then globally in the 20th, but that's it. It's a tiny tiny slice of human history. There have been hundreds of successful revolutions in world history we don't even know how to see. It's quite likely that many of the "primitive communists" in say, the Eastern Woodlands of North America that so inspired Engels, or in Amazonia, weren't primitive at all, but the descendants of revolutionaries, of people who had overthrown earlier centralized states. The world is much more complicated, and the history of resistance much deeper than we have been taught to imagine. Or another way of making the same point: we have come to accept, over the last couple hundred years, since the Enlightenment basically, that there is only one paradigm for fundamental social change, "the transition from feudalism to capitalism" - which must then be the model for the next one, "the transition from capitalism to socialism" (or whatever). It's becoming screamingly obvious that the transition to whatever comes next is not going to look like that. So people think no revolutionary change is possible at all. Nonsense. Capitalism is unsustainable. Something will replace it. For me, I think a more useful paradigm right now is the transition from slavery to feudalism, at least in Europe. Remember, under Rome, huge percentages of the population of the empire were outright chattel slaves (maybe a third, even, and much more if you count the coloni and debt-peons and so on who were effectively slaves). A few hundreds years later, the number of slaves in Europe was almost none. This was one of the greatest liberations in human history (and similar things did happen in India and China around the same time.) How did it happen? How were all the slaves freed? Well, since we're only used to seeing it from an elite perspective as "the decline and fall of the Roman empire" and can't see any explicit anti-slavery movements, we're unable to write the history at all, but it happened. Will wage-slavery be eliminated in a similar apparently catastrophic and confused moment? It's possible. But it could only happen the first because of pressure from below, based on certain egalitarian values that were always there, all operating below the historical radar screen. Obviously, there were also horrific thugs taking advantage of the chaos, as there will be now too. But we need to think about how to mobilize similar bottom-up alliances when things start breaking down.

Void Network: Is there really a national and international debt? What would you like to put as a small analysis of what it seems to be the Greek paradigm in the great saga of domino financial collapse of many countries economies after the 2008 broke of international crisis?

D.G.: Money nowadays is a purely political instrument. Some people - central bankers, to some degree ordinary banks and even the financial divisions of large firms - have the right to generate it, to make up money, relatively as they wish. Banks after all don't mostly lend money they actually have, they lend money they just made up - if under certain constraints. So the rhetoric people use, that "there's only so much money" is nonsense. Money isn't like oil, it's not even like bananas, you can't actually run out of it. So the scam is to allow some people to just whisk it into existence and then, even more importantly, to say that other people can't. In a way banks' ability to make money is not so outrageous since money is basically debt, it's an IOU, a promise, and in a free society everyone should have the right to make promises. In a way that's what being "free" means. The problem is in our society, the only really important promises are financial, and some people are granted the political right to make as many of these as they like, with no little or responsibility for keeping them, and others (the politically powerless) are not, and everyone acts as if the most important moral responsibility everyone has is to pay back money that others were allowed to simply make up. This is particularly ridiculous in the case of governments, who grant the banks the right to make up the money, and then act as if they have no choice but to honor their commitments to these same people. It's all nonsense. But it's just a new variant of an age-old pattern. Conquerors, tyrants, powerful lords throughout human history have always tried to convince their subjects or those they conquer that they owe them something, at the very least, that they owe them their life, for not having massacred them all. It's basically the logic of slavery (I could have killed you, I didn't, now you owe me everything) but it's also the foundation of what we like to call "sovereignty." The unusual thing about the present day is just that this sovereignty has been transferred from states to this semi-independent financial establishment as a way of undercutting any notion that sovereignty any longer belongs with what they used to call "the people."

. . .

Void Network: Are there any values that have to be defended against the formulated extremity of extreme nihilism and elitism?

D.G.: Someone once said that the ultimate stakes of any political struggle is the ability to define what value is. Autonomy does not just mean making up one's own rules, as Castoriadis says, though that's important - it also means being free to collective establish what you think value is. In that way, any enclave that preserves a system of value even relatively autonomous from capital is a form of freedom that should be defended. One of the terrible mistakes of old-fashioned socialism was to subordinate everything to the revolution in the same way that capitalists subordinate everything to profit. It's funny because I'm often accused of criticizing anthropologists and academics for not helping radical social movements. That's not true at all. I think it's a scandal that many seem actively opposed, or pretend to be leaders when they're not, or refuse to engage with people who want their help. But I also think that it's absolutely great that there are people who get to spend their lives thinking about, I don't know, Medieval Provencal musical instruments as an end in themselves. I call this the utopian moment in academia. Don't we want people to be able to do this? Anyway, for me, a free society is one where there are endless varieties of forms of value, and people can decide for themselves which they wish to pursue. Therefore the key social question is "how do we provide people with sufficient life security, in a free society, that they are able to be as free as possible to pursue those forms of value (moral, artistic, spiritual, hedonistic, communal, etc, etc etc) they feel to be the most important - whatever these may be."

. . .

Void Network: what is your present attitude about the end of traditional labour? Would you like to give us some more analysis of your current approach?

D.G. : Well, our horizon has to be the abolition of work in its conventional form. For me, I again find myself both agreeing and disagreeing with the Italians who say the production of value is now dispersed through all forms of social life, so we need to think about a social wage. My objection is they seem to think there's something new here, that "immaterial labor" or the dominance of such is a new development. I find this racist and sexist. They seem to think that in the 19th century, value was produced exclusively by factory work, or anyway paid employment, but that now, especially since the '70s, the real cutting-edge is the production of the informational and stylistic content, and context, or commodities - "immaterial labor" (a stupid phrase, it's not immaterial in any sense). Why? Well, when looking at such analysis, the way to understand it, I always say, is to follow a simple principle: "follow the white guys." Was there no one working outside the factory on the informational or stylistic or cultural aspects of the commodity, etc.? Of course. But they were mostly women, so they say, well, who cares, that's not part of the production of value, it's all in the factories where the white guys are. Now, most factory work is being done by women and/or people of color so suddenly, factory work is unimportant and it's the white guys working on computers, etc., who are really producing value. Nonsense. What we need to start thinking about is how all these new forms of labor, and some very old ones, draw on one another. For every person who can push a button and instantaneously do a transaction with Japan that would have taken weeks in the past, there's some guy in Brazil or Pakistan who has to work twice as many hours or spend hours more on the bus just getting to work so he can do it. We need to look at the world as a whole. We also need to understand that war and imperial extraction still operate and how, which brings us back to the money system again (modern credit money is basically war debt created by governments who borrow the money to create the means of coercion, then allow the bankers to lend that debt to everyone else - and use the means of coercion to enforce the debts. This is the regime under which all labor now operates.)

Erm . . . Mirage

Peter Boone and Simon Johnson, in the New York Times last week, asking whether the Irish economic miracle was real or not.

Ireland was one of the first nations to introduce tough fiscal austerity in this cycle — in spring 2009 the government slashed public-sector spending and raised taxes. Despite the cuts, the European Commission forecasts that Ireland will have one of the highest budget deficits in the world at 11.7 percent of gross domestic product in 2010. The problem is clear: when you cut spending you also lose tax revenues from people who earned incomes from that money. Further, the newly unemployed seek benefits, so Ireland’s spending cuts in one category are partly offset by more spending in another. Without growth, the budget deficit still looms large.

Ireland’s problems are, sadly, far deeper than the need for simple fiscal austerity. The Celtic Tiger’s impressive reported growth over the past decades was in part based on its aggressive attempts to help major corporations in the United States reduce their tax bills. The Irish government set corporate taxes at just 12.5 percent of profits, thus attracting all sorts of businesses — from computer services like Google and Yahoo, to drug companies like Forest Labs — that set up corporate bases and washed profits through Ireland to keep them out of the hands of the Internal Revenue Service.

The remarkable success of this tax haven means that roughly 20 percent of Irish gross domestic product is actually “profit transfers” that raise little tax for Ireland and are owned by foreign companies. Since most of these profits are subject to the tax code, they are accounted for in Ireland where they are lightly taxed; they should not be counted as part of Ireland’s potential tax base. A more robust cross-country comparison would be to examine Ireland’s financial condition ignoring these transfers. This is easy to do: a nation’s gross national product excludes the profits of foreign residents. For most nations, gross national product and G.D.P. are nearly identical, but in Ireland they are not.

When we adjust Ireland’s figures accordingly, the situation is dire. The budget deficit was about 17.9 percent of G.N.P. in 2009, and based on European Commission projections (and assuming the G.N.P.-G.D.P. gap remains the same) it will be roughly 14.6 percent in 2010 and 15.1 percent in 2011, while the debt-to-G.N.P. ratio at the end of this year is expected — by our calculation — to be 97 percent, and 109 percent at the end of 2011. These numbers make Ireland look similarly troubled to Greece, with a much higher budget deficit but lower levels of public debt.

Ireland’s politicians, rather than facing up to their problems, are making things ever worse. Simply put, the Irish miracle was a mirage driven by clever use of tax-haven rules and a huge credit boom that permitted real estate prices and construction to grow quickly before declining ever more rapidly. The biggest banks grew to have assets twice the size of official G.D.P. when they essentially failed in 2008. The government has now made a fateful choice: rather than make creditors pay some part of the losses, it is taking the bank debt onto the national balance sheet, effectively ballooning its already large sovereign debt. Irish taxpayers are set to be left with the risk of very large payments to make on someone else’s real estate deals gone bad.

There is no simple escape, but if the government hopes to avoid a sovereign default, the one overriding priority should be to stop bailing out the banks. Instead, the government should wind down existing banks in a “bad bank,” while moving their deposit base and profitable businesses into new, well-capitalized banks that can function without a taxpayer burden. This will be messy, but it is far better than a sovereign default.

I guess Not.

Listen!

In Our Time: Anarchism

Persons Unknown Trial

Following on from the post below, a series from one of the jurors at the Persons Unknown trial, in which Vince Stephenson was involved. There are a couple of "anonymous" comments from Ronan Bennett, also one of the defendants, under some of the posts.

Post One

Post Two

Post Three

Post Four

Post Five

Post Six

Post Seven

Post Eight

final part (closing credits) in my post below.

While Googling, I also found a nice post at Darren's worth a look, even if you've read it before. It even manages to get Mike Leigh's High Hopes in! :-) There's a link there to an interview with Stuart Christie in 3:AM magazine.

Halcyon Daze

The Kill Your Pet Puppy website has a post about the old Autonomy Centre in Wapping. In the early 80s I used to pop down on a Friday afternoon after a visit to the Freedom Bookshop in Whitechapel, just to see what was going on. Normally nothing. Just Vince Stephenson reading a book or looking for a game of chess (I never took up the challenge. I was useless at the time . . . in so many ways). A copper strolled in on one occasion for a nose around, but he didn't stay very long.

My fellow Brummies UB40 played a benefit gig for the Autonomy Centre at Woolwich Odeon. I believe it was the first time they performed stuff from their second album, Present Arms. I still have the T-shirt. The support band was The Nervous Kind, another Brummie band.

Bizarrely/coincidentally, Paul Comaskey from Nervous Kind turns up here. His sister-in-law used to be married to Richard Buckner.

It's a very small world indeed.

How to Understand the Economy

More a bookmark for my own future reference, I think, there's a review here at the New York Review of Books, by Robert Solow, of Duncan Foley's book Adam's Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology, a book I've already read. The review itself is interesting, however, for what it has to say about theories of value. Solow for the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on economic growth. He's the author of Growth Theory: An Exposition, which should keep you going through the warm summer nights ahead.

Foley's book is a primer in economics and, as Solow observes, it has its flaws even in that regard. There are more interesting things you could be doing with your time.

How Fucked Are We?

Spotted over at Progressive Economy, this article from the Financial Times, by David Gardner.

Encouraged by venal politicians who actively discouraged regulation and provided a phenomenal array of tax breaks to builders, and in an environment of cheap money and easy credit (partly created by the lower borrowing costs brought by membership of the eurozone, partly because risk disappeared from the international financial radar), Irish banks went on a reckless lending spree. They lent, above all, to property developers. When that bubble burst – and with devaluing the currency no longer an option – it all but bankrupted the country and triggered a painful sequence of tax rises and pay, pension and public spending cuts.

When the banks started to wobble, the government, led by the populist Fianna Fáil, insisted Ireland’s economic “fundamentals” were sound and such problems as there were had blown in across the Atlantic. But when the banks inevitably crashed and the state stepped in to rescue them, every Irish citizen got saddled with many thousands of euros in debts that will weigh the country down for years to come. The current generation – the first in Ireland’s history to know real wealth and success and, with it, international admiration – is very, very angry.

Whatever politicians say, moreover, Ireland knows this was almost entirely a home-made crisis, which happened to coincide with an international credit crunch. Colm McCarthy, who teaches economics at University College Dublin, is the author of last year’s comprehensive spending review of the public sector: “300 pages, and a cut on each page”, as he genially puts it. This one-man-International Monetary Fund is no populist. But he’s clear on what brought Ireland to this pass. “This was a very old-fashioned banking collapse, nothing to do with derivatives and US toxic assets,” he says. “Until a few years ago I thought AIB [Allied Irish Bank] and Bank of Ireland were dull, ­boring banks run by granite-faced bastards who wouldn’t lend money to their own relatives. It seems we were wrong.”

In its report on Ireland last year, the IMF concluded: “The Irish economy is in the midst of an unprecedented economic correction. The stress exceeds that being faced by any other advanced economy and matches episodes of the most severe economic distress in post-World War II history.”

At the height of the lunacy, around three-quarters of the total lending by Irish banks – €420bn or about two and a half times the size of the economy – got bound up in property, construction and land speculation of one sort or another, a sector which amounted to more than a fifth of economic output. It became what Ireland did for a living. By comparison, investment in real estate in Spain peaked at about a tenth of national income – half Ireland’s level.

Morgan Kelly observes here:

Fifteen fat years allowed the Irish government to cut income taxes, increase spending and still run a budget surplus. Between 2007 and 2009 however, tax revenue fell by 20%, while expenditure rose by 9%, moving the state from a balanced budget to a deficit of 12% of GDP. In contrast to its inept handling of the banking crisis, the Irish government has moved decisively to reduce expenditure and increase tax rates, and appears on target to reduce its deficit to 3% of GDP by 2012.

Ireland’s government debt is still moderate. At the end of 2009 gross debt was 65% of GDP and, after subtracting the state pension reserve and pre-funded borrowing, net debt was 40% of GDP. Assuming that deficit targets are not missed too badly, gross debt should still be under 85% of GDP by the end of 2012.


This debt would probably be manageable, had the Irish government not casually committed itself to absorb all the gambling losses of its banking system. If we assume – optimistically, I believe – that Irish banks eventually lose one third of what they lent to property developers, and one tenth of business loans and mortgages, the net cost to the Irish taxpayer will be nearly one third of GDP.

Adding these bank losses to its national debt will leave Ireland in 2012 with a debt-GDP ratio of 115%. But if we look at the ratio in terms of GNP, which gives a more realistic picture of the Ireland’s discretionary tax base, this is a debt-GNP ratio of 140% – above the ratio that is currently sinking Greece. Even if bank losses are only half as large as we expect, Ireland is still facing a debt-GNP ratio of 125%.

Ireland is like a patient bleeding from two gunshot wounds. The Irish government has moved quickly to stanch the smaller, fiscal hole, while insisting that the litres of blood pouring unchecked through the banking hole are “manageable”. Capital markets may not continue to agree for long, triggering a borrowing crisis which will start, most probably, with a run on Irish banks in inter-bank markets.

Ireland may therefore present an early test of the EU bailout fund. However, in contrast to Greece, Ireland’s woes stem almost entirely from its banking system, and could be swiftly and permanently cured by a resolution which shares the losses of Irish banks with the holders of their €115 billion of bonds through a partial debt for equity swap.

I may consider emigrating. Greece looks nice.

It's Friday. Let's Do Some Filing!

I,Ludicrous - Clerking Til I Die

(For Kathy)

Naming Names

Just spotted this interesting diagram over at the WSM Web site, taken from the TASC report Mapping the Golden Circle.

Together, these companies employed 310,000 people and had a combined turnover (or equivalent) of nearly €80 billion. They included both private companies and state-owned bodies.

The 40 companies studied in this report are household names and include Bord Gáis, the Central Bank, AIB, Smurfit, Anglo Irish Bank, Ryanair and Aer Lingus. The total number of directors involved in managing these companies was 572.


In the period 2005-2007, a network of 39 people held positions in 33 of the 40 top private companies and state-owned bodies. Between them, these 39 – referred to as the Director Network in TASC’s report – held a total of 93 directorships.


Mapping the Golden Circle also provides evidence that there was a trend of “excessive remuneration” for the CEOs of both state-owned and private companies. On average, their pay rose by over 40% between 2005 and 2007, while combined inflation for these two years ran at just over 9%.

You can download the full report here.

David Harvey: Gentrification in Baltimore and Barcelona

Just received a link to this on Facebook from AK Press.

It’s urban sociologist and Marxist geographer David Harvey in dialogue with our friend Marina, an activist and documentary videographer from Barcelona. In the video, David talks about the history of urban development and gentrification in Baltimore, and in Barcelona. It’s an interesting conversation, and a useful one, especially for those of us who are thinking hard about the nature of urban development in the United States and how that affects the work we do as activists and organizers. It’s a reminder that we need to look both inside the U.S. and outside of it to really understand how development happens, and to find models for how we can work to shape the social, political, and geographical worlds we live in.

There's also a link to Chris Ealham's book Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937, which, as you can see from the sidebar to this blog, is the book I just finished reading, and a mighty good read it is too.

. . . in some ways, the struggle for control of the city’s spaces that Ealham discusses in the context of the early industrial period before the Spanish Civil War are still going on today. A friend of mine, one of the most brilliant folks I know, and an urban activist herself, told me recently that she thought that Chris’s book was the best analysis Barcelona she’d read to date, which I take as very, very high praise.

It also points to a deeper relevance of a book like Anarchism and the City than we might realize at first glance. When I talked to Chris about promoting his book, really early on, he talked about it as not just a history, but as a blueprint for contemporary action. He told me a story about a talk he gave in Barcelona, at the end of which an activist working in one of the city’s old industrial neighborhoods came up to him, and told him that their group was using Anarchism and the City as a “manual de lucha,” a fighting manual. How many historians can say that? So watch the video, and then check out Chris’s book for some historical context.

For those who watch the video to the end, there's a site here for the Hotel Vela in Barcelona that actually uses Harvey's quote!

It's Friday. Let's Ninja!

The New Pornographers- Your Hands (Together)

Revolutionary Playbook Out Now!!*

We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008

*At least if that idiot Glenn Beck is to be believed. I think he must be a Friend of AK Press.

The Pleasure of the Text

Only just noticed this interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Raoul Vaneigem, courtesy of Wiki, from the May 2009 e-flux. Highlights:

HUO: You have written a lot on life, not survival. What is the difference?

RV: Survival is budgeted life. The system of exploitation of nature and man, starting in the Middle Neolithic with intensive farming, caused an involution in which creativity—a quality specific to humans—was supplanted by work, by the production of a covetous power. Creative life, as had begun to unfold during the Paleolithic, declined and gave way to a brutish struggle for subsistence. From then on, predation, which defines animal behavior, became the generator of all economic mechanisms.

HUO: Today, more than forty years after May ‘68, how do you feel life and society have evolved?

RV: We are witnessing the collapse of financial capitalism. This was easily predictable. Even among economists, where one finds even more idiots than in the political sphere, a number had been sounding the alarm for a decade or so. Our situation is paradoxical: never in Europe have the forces of repression been so weakened, yet never have the exploited masses been so passive. Still, insurrectional consciousness always sleeps with one eye open. The arrogance, incompetence, and powerlessness of the governing classes will eventually rouse it from its slumber, as will the progression in hearts and minds of what was most radical about May 1968.

HUO: Your new book takes us on a trip “between mourning the world and exuberant life.” You revisit May ‘68. What is left of May ‘68? Has it all been appropriated?

RV: Even if we are today seeing recycled ideologies and old religious infirmities being patched up in a hurry and tossed out to feed a general despair, which our ruling wheelers and dealers cash in on, they cannot conceal for long the shift in civilization revealed by May 1968. The break with patriarchal values is final. We are moving toward the end of the exploitation of nature, of work, of trade, of predation, of separation from the self, of sacrifice, of guilt, of the forsaking of happiness, of the fetishizing of money, of power, of hierarchy, of contempt for and fear of women, of the misleading of children, of intellectual dominion, of military and police despotism, of religions, of ideologies, of repression and the deadly resolutions of psychic tensions. This is not a fact I am describing, but an ongoing process that simply requires from us increased vigilance, awareness, and solidarity with life. We have to reground ourselves in order to rebuild—on human foundations—a world that has been ruined by the inhumanity of the cult of the commodity.

HUO: What do you think of the current moment, in 2009? Jean-Pierre Page has just published Penser l'après crise [Thinking the After-Crisis]. For him, everything must be reinvented. He says that a new world is emerging now in which the attempt to establish a US-led globalization has been aborted.

RV: The agrarian economy of the Ancien Régime was a fossilized form that was shattered by the emerging free-trade economy, from the 1789 revolution on. Similarly, the stock-dabbling speculative capitalism whose debacle we now witness is about to give way to a capitalism reenergized by the production of non-polluting natural power, the return to use value, organic farming, a hastily patched-up public sector, and a hypocritical moralization of trade. The future belongs to self-managed communities that produce indispensable goods and services for all (natural power, biodiversity, education, health centers, transport, metal and textile production . . .). The idea is to produce for us, for our own use—that is to say, no longer in order to sell them—goods that we are currently forced to buy at market prices even though they were conceived and manufactured by workers. It is time to break with the laws of a political racketeering that is designing, together with its own bankruptcy, that of our existence.

HUO: Is this a war of a new kind, as Page claims? An economic Third World War?

RV: We are at war, yes, but this is not an economic war. It is a world war against the economy. Against the economy that for thousands of years has been based on the exploitation of nature and man. And against a patched-up capitalism that will try to save its skin by investing in natural power and making us pay the high price for that which—once the new means of production are created—will be free as the wind, the sun, and the energy of plants and soil. If we do not exit economic reality and create a human reality in its place, we will once again allow market barbarism to live on.

HUO: In his book Making Globalization Work, Joseph Stiglitz argues for a reorganization of globalization along the lines of greater justice, in order to shrink global imbalances. What do you think of globalization? How does one get rid of profit as motive and pursue well-being instead? How does one escape from the growth imperative?

RV: The moralization of profit is an illusion and a fraud. There must be a decisive break with an economic system that has consistently spread ruin and destruction while pretending, amidst constant destitution, to deliver a most hypothetical well-being. Human relations must supersede and cancel out commercial relations. Civil disobedience means disregarding the decisions of a government that embezzles from its citizens to support the embezzlements of financial capitalism. Why pay taxes to the bankster-state, taxes vainly used to try to plug the sinkhole of corruption, when we could allocate them instead to the self-management of free power networks in every local community? The direct democracy of self-managed councils has every right to ignore the decrees of corrupt parliamentary democracy. Civil disobedience towards a state that is plundering us is a right. It is up to us to capitalize on this epochal shift to create communities where desire for life overwhelms the tyranny of money and power. We need concern ourselves neither with government debt, which covers up a massive defrauding of the public interest, nor with that contrivance of profit they call “growth.” From now on, the aim of local communities should be to produce for themselves and by themselves all goods of social value, meeting the needs of all—authentic needs, that is, not needs prefabricated by consumerist propaganda.

HUO: Edouard Glissant distinguishes between globality and globalization. Globalization eradicates differences and homogenizes, while globality is a global dialogue that produces differences. What do you think of his notion of globality?

RV: For me, it should mean acting locally and globally through a federation of communities in which our pork-barreling, corrupt parliamentary democracy is made obsolete by direct democracy. Local councils will be set up to take measures in favor of the environment and the daily lives of everyone. The situationists have called this “creating situations that rule out any backtracking.”

HUO: Might the current miscarriages of globalization have the same dangerous effects as the miscarriages of the previous globalization from the ‘30s? You have written that what was already intolerable in ‘68 when the economy was booming is even more intolerable today. Do you think the current economic despair might push the new generations to rebel?

RV: The crisis of the ‘30s was an economic crisis. What we are facing today is an implosion of the economy as a management system. It is the collapse of market civilization and the emergence of human civilization. The current turmoil signals a deep shift: the reference points of the old patriarchal world are vanishing. Percolating instead, still just barely and confusedly, are the early markers of a lifestyle that is genuinely human, an alliance with nature that puts an end to its exploitation, rape, and plundering. The worst would be the unawareness of life, the absence of sentient intelligence, violence without conscience. Nothing is more profitable to the racketeering mafias than chaos, despair, suicidal rebellion, and the nihilism that is spread by mercenary greed, in which money, even devalued in a panic, remains the only value.

HUO: In his book Utopistics, Immanuel Wallerstein claims that our world system is undergoing a structural crisis. He predicts it will take another twenty to fifty years for a more democratic and egalitarian system to replace it. He believes that the future belongs to “demarketized,” free-of-charge institutions (on the model, say, of public libraries). So we must oppose the marketization of water and air. What is your view?

RV: I do not know how long the current transformation will take (hopefully not too long, as I would like to witness it). But I have no doubt that this new alliance with the forces of life and nature will disseminate equality and freeness. We must go beyond our natural indignation at profit’s appropriation of our water, air, soil, environment, plants, animals. We must establish collectives that are capable of managing natural resources for the benefit of human interests, not market interests. This process of reappropriation that I foresee has a name: self-management, an experience attempted many times in hostile historical contexts. At this point, given the implosion of consumer society, it appears to be the only solution from both an individual and social point of view.

HUO: In your writing you have described the work imperative as an inhuman, almost animal condition. Do you consider market society to be a regression?

RV: As I mentioned above, evolution in the Paleolithic age meant the development of creativity—the distinctive trait of the human species as it breaks free from its original animality. But during the Neolithic, the osmotic relationship to nature loosened progressively, as intensive agriculture became based on looting and the exploitation of natural resources. It was also then that religion surfaced as an institution, society stratified, the reign of patriarchy began, of contempt for women, and of priests and kings with their stream of wars, destitution, and violence. Creation gave way to work, life to survival, jouissance to the animal predation that the appropriation economy confiscates, transcends, and spiritualizes. In this sense market civilization is indeed a regression in which technical progress supersedes human progress.

HUO: For you, what is a life in progress?

RV: Advancing from survival, the struggle for subsistence and predation to a new art of living, by recreating the world for the benefit of all.

A Nice Turn of Phrase

Dave Zirin in the April issue of The Progressive waxes sceptical about the Vancouver Olympics and the International Olympic Committee, our bête noire for this month:

The International Olympic Committee—that sewing circle of monarchists, extortionists, and absolved fascists—likes to hide behind the pretense of nobility. It claims to care not for profit or personal gain. Just the glory of “Olympism” as represented in its Magna Carta: “the Olympic Charter.” That charter states: “The mission of the IOC is to promote Olympism throughout the world and to lead the Olympic Movement. This includes upholding ethics in sports.” On the IOC’s website, there is a quiz: “The Ultimate goal of Olympism is to a) Organize the Olympic Games, b) encourage new world records, c) build a peaceful and better world through sport. It’s perfectly understandable if you needed three tries to answer that correctly. The answer is, of course, c—although that would certainly be news to the family of Nodar Kumaritashvili.

Shortest Book Review of the Year

American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, by Kevin Phillips

Read it.

Anyone who says this crisis was unforeseeable is either ignorant or lying. Phillips, a former Republican, wrote this book in 2006 and forecast exactly the catastrophe we're currently experiencing. The only thing he gets wrong is the date.

He predicted it would start in 2010.

Hyatt Art & Music

Stop Press News from John Hyatt

Please come and join me as I’ve got two exhibitions opening in one night in Manchester on Friday! I’m going to play some songs there too.



The Free Creation of Beautiful Things

Friday 30th April 5.30 – 7.30 p.m

Holden Gallery, Grosvenor Building (School of Art), Manchester Metropolitan University, All Saints Square, Cavendish Street, Manchester, M15 6BR

The work for this exhibition finds beauty in the everyday, the habitual and the overlooked. Refresh your relationship with the universe from the stars above to the gnats in the garden through my digital photo works. Sound and video show what wonder can be still had with a child’s kaleidoscope.

Exhibition runs until 14 May


Me and the Avatars

Friday 30th April 7.00 – 9.00 p.m.

Rogue Studios, 66-72 Chapeltown Street, Piccadilly, Manchester, M1 2WH

Exhibition runs till 6 May

These are all new works too. Photographic works bring my Second Life avatars out to explore an Indian Sun Temple and a Step Well, accompanied by a multitude of sculpted Hindi gods and my human form joins in too.

To accompany these new artworks and celebrate the two exhibitions, I have produced a new album of music, ‘Do What You Wanna Do’, in a limited edition. The album will be available at the shows and in May as a CD from my website:

http://www.hyattartandlife.com

Title track, Do What You Wanna Do, is up on Youtube with a little animation at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2VxKfM0sSA



Bring a smile. Be there or do the square thing!

Soon You'll All Be Doing It

Dublin Opinion shows how it's done.

Khmer Rouge Strippergram is just plain creepy.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

Cabaret Voltaire - Nag Nag Nag

No Shoes

Thanks to Aileen, I've been having a bit of pseudo-situ fun over at Xtranormal.

The New Proletarians

Matthew Crawford is the author of Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. It is being published in the U.K. as The Case for Working with Your Hands and appears to be in the same mould as Richard Sennett's The Craftsman, although hopefully not as long winded and obtuse.

An article by Crawford appeared in last week's Sunday Times magazine, but you know by now our aversion to that particular product and its owner. Fortunately, a version of the same article previously appeared in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago. And here it is.

I don't particularly want to get into a debate here about petty-bourgeois artisanship and the social and technological step backward implied by the retreat to small-scale production. What interested me more, and for obvious reasons, was the second part of the article:

After earning a master’s degree in the early 1990s, I had a hard time finding work but eventually landed a job in the Bay Area writing brief summaries of academic journal articles, which were then sold on CD-ROMs to subscribing libraries. When I got the phone call offering me the job, I was excited. I felt I had grabbed hold of the passing world — miraculously, through the mere filament of a classified ad — and reeled myself into its current. My new bosses immediately took up residence in my imagination, where I often surprised them with my hidden depths. As I was shown to my cubicle, I felt a real sense of being honored. It seemed more than spacious enough. It was my desk, where I would think my thoughts — my unique contribution to a common enterprise, in a real company with hundreds of employees. The regularity of the cubicles made me feel I had found a place in the order of things. I was to be a knowledge worker.

But the feel of the job changed on my first day. The company had gotten its start by providing libraries with a subject index of popular magazines like Sports Illustrated. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, it now found itself offering not just indexes but also abstracts (that is, summaries), and of a very different kind of material: scholarly works in the physical and biological sciences, humanities, social sciences and law. Some of this stuff was simply incomprehensible to anyone but an expert in the particular field covered by the journal. I was reading articles in Classical Philology where practically every other word was in Greek. Some of the scientific journals were no less mysterious. Yet the categorical difference between, say, Sports Illustrated and Nature Genetics seemed not to have impressed itself on the company’s decision makers. In some of the titles I was assigned, articles began with an abstract written by the author. But even in such cases I was to write my own. The reason offered was that unless I did so, there would be no “value added” by our product. It was hard to believe I was going to add anything other than error and confusion to such material. But then, I hadn’t yet been trained.

My job was structured on the supposition that in writing an abstract of an article there is a method that merely needs to be applied, and that this can be done without understanding the text. I was actually told this by the trainer, Monica, as she stood before a whiteboard, diagramming an abstract. Monica seemed a perfectly sensible person and gave no outward signs of suffering delusions. She didn’t insist too much on what she was telling us, and it became clear she was in a position similar to that of a veteran Soviet bureaucrat who must work on two levels at once: reality and official ideology. The official ideology was a bit like the factory service manuals I mentioned before, the ones that offer procedures that mechanics often have to ignore in order to do their jobs.

My starting quota, after finishing a week of training, was 15 articles per day. By my 11th month at the company, my quota was up to 28 articles per day (this was the normal, scheduled increase). I was always sleepy while at work, and I think this exhaustion was because I felt trapped in a contradiction: the fast pace demanded complete focus on the task, yet that pace also made any real concentration impossible. I had to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down. To not do justice to an author who had poured himself into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.

The quota demanded, then, not just dumbing down but also a bit of moral re-education, the opposite of the kind that occurs in the heedful absorption of mechanical work. I had to suppress my sense of responsibility to the article itself, and to others — to the author, to begin with, as well as to the hapless users of the database, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflected the author’s work. Such detachment was made easy by the fact there was no immediate consequence for me; I could write any nonsense whatever.

Crawford goes on to wonder:

How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up among these walking wounded, a “knowledge worker” at a salary of $23,000? I had a master’s degree, and it needed to be used. The escalating demand for academic credentials in the job market gives the impression of an ever-more-knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of. On paper, my abstracting job, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet my M.A. obscures a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. When I first got the degree, I felt as if I had been inducted to a certain order of society. But despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as an electrician. In that job I had made quite a bit more money. I also felt free and active, rather than confined and stultified.

Proletarian indeed, but to imagine that there's no active engagement by workers on an intellectual production line such as this is reinforces the stereotype of mass worker as passive victim. Just as Socialism or Barbarism pointed out back in the 50s and 60s, factories require the active participation of their workers in order to function properly. And that still applies today. Every abstract writer knows dozens of short-cuts and ways to get round problematic articles that will make the job easier, get it done quicker without loss of accuracy or quality, and which he or she will be tempted to keep from editors or management because once management find out they'll likely change the targets. This is partly why management actually don't know how to do the workers' jobs much of the time. It's in the workers' interests to keep management out of the loop and to conserve knowledge for their own protection, something I don't recall Bourdieu ever noticing, although I'm sure someone can correct me on that. What's interesting is that it is the the nature of hierarchy itself that requires the worker to engage with the task in this way, regardless of whether or not he or she has any pride in the job. Indeed, the chance to skive can be part of the motivation.

And 28 articles a day, by the way, is piss.

Evidence of Evolution at Maclean's?

Not exactly Canada's most enlightened or intellectually challenging magazine, Maclean's tackles the hefty subject of evolution in the only way it knows how:

What might our granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter look like? Shorter and stouter, says a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If current trends continue, its authors predict, then by 2409 descendants of the women in the study will have evolved to be one kilogram heavier and two centimetres shorter than their 2010 foremothers.

For years, some scientists heralded the end of human evolution. The post-industrial homo sapiens, they argued, was free of the kinds of “survival-of-the-fittest” pressures that could drive large-scale genetic change. In 2008, Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, gave a much-hyped lecture entitled “Human Evolution is Over.” “Not so,” says Stephen Stearns, co-author of this latest study, professor of evolutionary biology at Yale University, and founding editor of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. “The basic take-home is that humans continue to evolve,” Stearns told Maclean’s.

You see, survival fitness has become less of an issue for humans. What matters more is reproductive fitness. However:

The hitch, Stearns warns, is that predicted changes might not materialize. For instance: while evolution is literally pushing women down and out, environmental factors, like better nutrition, allow them to grow taller and stronger. The result of these battling influences is impossible to predict.

Got that? Impossible to predict. Well done, Maclean's.

And Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation

Or possibly not, but here's an interesting article from yesterday's New York Times by David Brooks, in which he discusses research by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business into purported ideological separation online.

Gentzkow and Shapiro found that the Internet is actually more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face association — like meeting people at work, at church or through community groups. You’re more likely to overlap with political opponents online than in your own neighborhood.

This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal. This does not mean they are not polarized. Looking at a site says nothing about how you process it or the character of attention you bring to it. It could be people spend a lot of time at their home sites and then go off on forays looking for things to hate. But it probably does mean they are not insecure and they are not sheltered.

If this study is correct, the Internet will not produce a cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max public square. The study also suggests that if there is increased polarization (and there is), it’s probably not the Internet that’s causing it.

Of course, you've got to get online first.

So, Where's Doofus?

courtesy of MM.

3, 8, 4, 6, 6

Can you complete the sequence?

The Adventures of Flannery

The Adventures of Flannery from Jessica Fuller on Vimeo.

A very enjoyable profile of the wonderful Cathal Coughlan, former frontman of Microdisney and Fatima Mansions, as he goes about constructing the show Flannery's Mounted Head (which draws on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project) for Cork's year as the European Capital of Culture in 2005.

Revenge is Sweet

A sample reel of footage from the forthcoming feature-length documentary by Joe Angio, Revenge of the Mekons.

Agent Little Goes Undercover

Colin Little,probably the best footballer I've played against (present company and Danny Higginbotham included),has joined the coaching staff of Man Utd. What they don't mention here is that he's a massive City fan.

It's Good Friday. Let's Boogie!

The Antlers - Bear