Category Archives: Empire

The Empire and Its Gladiators

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Over the past few years, the United States government has devoted enormous attention and energy to pursuing a set of malefactors. No, not the banks and other agents of the financial crash. Some sports players who are alleged to have been “doping” to achieve their results, as if all professional sport was otherwise a fair contest. The message is clear: all of the 99% are living precariously now, and if you think that any form of achievement makes you an honorary one per center, guess again.

As most will know, the United States Anti-Doping Agency, a quasi-governmental body, published hundreds of pages yesterday, alleging a long running saga of banned drug use in Lance Armstrong’s cycling team. This follows close on the lengthy pursuit of Roger Clemens, the baseball pitcher.

It’s not like I don’t think this is probably what happened. But just look at professional sport. For example, since he was caught using banned substances Yankees baseball player Alex Rodriguez has “mysteriously” declined. Meanwhile, 40-year-old Raul Ibanez has had an “amazing” Fall, in which this .200 hitter has suddenly started hitting two home runs a game. Even an athlete that keeps to the rules is a highly produced machine, using extensive supplements and vitamins right up to the edge of the permitted, sleeping in oxygen tents, having zero body fat and so on.

In rugby, when they realized that people were always lifting each other in the lineouts (the ball is thrown in from the side and people jump to catch it), they just made it legal. But, we will be told, steroids and other banned substances are dangerous. Have you ever watched a crash in professional cycling? Or tried to ride a bike up a mountain? It’s all dangerous. And if danger were a serious category, we’d have to ban American Football at once.

So what’s happening here? In Slavoj Zizek’s interesting new book on 2011, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, he argues that well-paid people get what he calls a “surplus-wage” that has taken the place of the old surplus value:

The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers– managers who are qualified to earn more because of their competence (which is why the pseudo-scientific “evaluation” which legitimizes their higher earnings is so crucial today).

Zizek explains, in effect, why the division of 99% and one per cent seems innately right to people. The new capitalism of rent sustains even its elite class as paid workers, giving stock in companies but not ownership. Rewards for those getting the “surplus-wage” come as both money and as time. But they all come on sufferance.

Continued membership of those distinguished from the minimum-wage population, itself constantly being driven down by aggressive immiseration, is subject to constant review. From bankers to professors and nurses, continued status depends on passing what are usually called “performance reviews.” Such reviews consider all aspects of conduct at work, which is to say all conduct because work is never ending.

The working body is subject to constant self-review and assessment, indexed by obligatory gym membership and dietary modification. In this way, the performer will both be able to work longer, and require less health insurance. My employer is encouraging us to take a form of insurance with very high deductibles backed up by a Health Savings Account. In other words, I need to be able to amortize my own body.

The pro athlete is the exemplar of such self-fashioning. Their bodies are subject to review by fans and management every day. The conduct of conduct is Foucault’s definition of  governmentality. So it is too important to be left to such unpredictable entities. You can fix interest rates, share prices and mortgages with impunity, it appears. But never let a “banned substance” enter your body. It’s clear what we’re being told: these people are the gladiators of the empire. They serve at imperial pleasure and, just as in the Roman empire, the supreme power can determine (professional) life or death.

The disciplining of elite sportsmen makes it clear both that no one is above precarity but also that the decision as to who will suffer for transgressions is capricious. The bureaucratic state machine of the first era of the military-industrial complex was not concerned with the routine use of amphetamines by sports players of the period. At that time, the idea of a rebel gladiator named Spartacus became an anti-imperial theme. There’s a cable TV show called Spartacus now. Look at them:

These strange, porn actor bodies aren’t rebels, they are surrogates for empire. We can kill these curiously depilated and implanted bodies at will because no one believes that they are real. By the same token, they are no role models for rebellion.

There’s a reason the signature gesture of the global social movements has been refusal.

 

Dare to Know?

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I’m in Port Douglas, Australia. Like just about everyone else who visits here, I went today to see the Great Barrier Reef. It’s not unusual for people to finish sentences like that with the quip “while it’s still there.” Indeed, the Australian government has said that chances for coral reefs are very poor. Two hundred years ago, Westerners had no idea the Reef was even there. Now we’re exploring Mars, which is astonishing, but destroying our own habitat, which is worse. Have we dared to know too much?

Old Enlightenment hands will recognize Kant’s challenge in What is Enlightenment?:

sapere aude/dare to know

Who should do such daring? Kant was, among other accomplishments, the first to teach a course on anthropology, although he never traveled. In his various writings on the subject, he established what I take to be a fundamental distinction of Enlightenment between the modern North and the “islands of the South,” which were not only not modern, they could  not be modern by definition. For Kant, the South was impossible, out of time, and out of place.

When his contemporary Captain Cook was here at about the same time, he sailed right into the Barrier Reef. Despite his permanent accolade as the “greatest seaman of all time,” his navigation had no concept of such obstacles. The Endeavour had to be repaired and it took over three months. Let’s note that such bricolage would be far beyond any present-day vessel but also realize how much support Cook must have had from the indigenous population to survive, even if that support was compeled, or limited to not killing them. Now the Reef is widely known, a “trip of a lifetime” destination. Judging by the array of facilities here, many people take that trip.

Without lapsing into Romantic sublime, the Reef really is amazing. If you’ve seen Northern hemisphere corals in Florida or the Caribbean, the first thing you learn is how utterly devastated they are by comparison. I’m aware there’s no science in this statement but what I’ve seen is the best local people think they can find to sell to tourists. Although you do see Crown of Thorns starfish, which were the great threat to the Reef before global warming, what remains is nonetheless dazzling. It’s not just the color and the patterns but the interactive adaptation. A fish saw me coming and descended into an anemone, which then wrapped its stinging tentacles around it. It’s that kind of balance that carbon emissions have knocked permanently out of homeostasis by increasing water temperature and acidity. Everyone knows this. No person in a position to do anything asks how they would dare to explain to their grandchildren that, yes, there were such ecosystems but we stood by and let them die.

If you’ve seen bleached coral, it looks not unlike Mars.

Curiosity descending to Mars (artist impression)

Curiosity is the Endeavour of our time: sent for science but with hopes of gain, conquest and colonization not far behind. The sad thing is that, if we want a lifeless desert to explore, we’re making lots of them all over our own planet. What would it take for us to dare to know that? How can we learn, finally, that the South is fully and integrally part of Enlightenment, the modern, knowledge, or whatever you feel inclined to call it?

Foucault Tourism

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Today to Cockatoo Island: penal colony within the convict colony, industrial reformatory, factory, shipyard, UNESCO World Heritage site and now a venue for the 18th Sydney Biennale. The extraordinary bricolage of colonial punishment, industrial production and knowledge economy cultural production makes for one of those slightly dizzying jet laggy experiences you have only while traveling.

My British forebears did know how and where to build prisons, you have to give them that. The island is isolated in the middle of Sydney harbor, with the prison itself located on top of a steep cliff. Recent excavations have uncovered minute solitary confinement cells, which have a distinctly contemporary look in this Abu Ghraib era. The officials built themselves sandstone residences with a Georgian feel but placed at the highest point to give them a panoptic viewpoint. Grain silos dug into the rock still have chain rings, to which the excavating prisoners were linked while working. The prison was created right at the end of the transportation era in 1849–convicts were not sent to New South Wales after 1850, although they went to Western Australia as late as 1868.

As has often been pointed out, these colonial punishments add a totally different complexion to the idea that European jurisprudence had moved from physical punishment to mental discipline by the early nineteenth century. My view has been that revolutionary action in Europe won workers there a certain (if limited) reprieve from punishment; but colonial punishment intensified in the later nineteenth century as imperialism abandoned all pretension of colonial self-government in favor of direct rule from the metropole. That did not preclude the disciplinary formation of colonized subjects, as the reformatories attest.

In 2000, a group of Aboriginal people occupied the island and claimed it as sovereign territory. You can still see their murals, using the Aboriginal flag as a motif. Using the colonial doctrine of terra nullius, Isabell Coe and others asserted that Britain had never formally claimed the island, a claim rejected by the courts as “inconceivable.” Really? A deserted island on the edge of the harbor? Regardless, Coe created a tent embassy on the island and asserted sovereignty. The occupation of occupied indigenous land and the counterclaim to sovereignty was a powerful performative act.

This, then, is no ordinary post-industrial site to hold an art exhibition. The artists whose work was shown here seemed to be aware of the challenges and many rose to the occasion. I liked Jonathan Jones’s simple approach:

Jones mixed typically British crockery with sea-shells that might be found in an Aboriginal midden in what is now New South Wales. The intermingling is simple but effective.

A more complex approach was taken by Lebanese artist Khaled Sabsabi in his installation “Nonabel.” You enter a darkened air-raid shelter and see the reflection of a young boy in water projected onto the circular walls. All of a sudden, the image changes dramatically and a montage of Arabic calligraphy and sound installation made me jump, although the phrase being used in the piece apparently means: “if you destroy the image of violence, it will disappear.”

Khaled Sabsabi “Nonabel”

Finally Alec Finlay brought the location of imperial domination up to date with his sound and sculpture installation. To quote his description:

Finlay takes the fluctuations of the stock market and represents them as the ‘buzz’ of Australian honey-bees (recorded by sound-artist Chris Watson), broadcast from 10 multi-storied wooden hives. Each hive stack bears the acronym of a major stock exchange – New York, Toronto, Sao Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Sydney – and produces a stream of audio, a buzzing that varies in density and volume in accordance with economic activity.

It was a remarkable sound, rising and falling with the market activity.

Alec Finlay “Swarm ASX”

What made it all the more powerful–although I suspect unintentionally–was that I came upon this piece in the Convict Precinct, just after reading a sign placed by the Sydney Harbor Trust. It described how, when the prison was first established, the prisoners were confined in wooden boxes at night. Is this what the favorite corporate slogan “thinking outside the box” actually means? That if you don’t produce useful ideas, we’ll put you in a box? Bees are said to form colonies. Others describe them as democracies or societies. Finlay also makes nests for “unproductive” wild bees out of books about bees. It’s layered symbolism like this that does important imaginative work, as we would do well to remember in our messaging and imaging in directly political contexts.

The Fall of the Oil Empire

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We have spent much time trying create a narrative to tie together the themes of biosphere extinction, debt catastrophe and the failure of counterinsurgency. It may be as simple as this: the oil empire built by the US was undone by the unanticipated consequences of debt and climate change. There never was a grand strategy, just the application of overwhelming force that no longer holds sway. No one knows what comes next.

What do we know is that the empire doesn’t work, the debt machine has been exposed as a fake, and the biosphere is really starting to show signs of non-viability.

In no particular order: the LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) debt scandal is huge and should be the top political issue of all time. LIBOR is the means of setting global interest rates by a few men in London after polling 16 leading banks. This sets the rate for your mortgage, credit cards and student loans. And it has been systematically fixed for years. These manipulations were of the order of five or ten basis points (1%=100 basis points), which sounds negligible. But $550 trillion of credit is affected by this rate: some estimate as much as $800 trillion. Apparently tiny changes save or cost the banks billions. So far from this being a “free” market, it’s been fixed.

Not only that, it’s not just Barclays, who have paid a minimal fine of $450 million as part of their acceptance of wrong-doing. LIBOR rates automatically exclude the highest two rates and the lowest two. So to actually change LIBOR at least six, probably eight, maybe all 16 banks had to be involved. If the mafia had done this, we’d have 800 year prison sentences being handed down under RICO statutes. Don’t hold your breath to see a bankster do time. Because government must have known: or, equally scandalously, they didn’t. Either way, in a functioning political system of any kind, heads would roll. If they don’t, we’ll know that the empire has no functioning bureaucracy and that it has all been outsourced to the financial sector.

It’s been obvious for some time that global counterinsurgency has morphed into a drone-enabled assassination program, a kind of automatic merger of COINTELPRO and Murder Inc. It doesn’t work very well. Why does this matter? Because if non-US nations buy US Treasury bonds as tribute to the global empire, as David Graeber has argued, it rather makes a difference whether that empire can keep order.

Here the US has benefited from the disaster that has become the eurozone so that rumors that circulated in 2007 about oil being priced in euros have disappeared. Global liquidity has nowhere else to go except the dollar. One group of mainstream economists have described the US dollar as being on the “oil standard.” In this view, the empire kept peace in oil-producing regions and in exchange, oil was priced in dollars and not too highly. Since the invasion of Iraq, the connection that kept the dollar strong when oil prices were high has been broken.

It still makes sense to think of the dollar as a petro-currency and of its empire as being boosted by oil. In 2007, it was predicted that the US would produce about 30% of its oil needs in 2010. In fact, it currently produces about 45% of its needs, due to massive exploitation of all available resources and greater fuel efficiency. From not being in the top ten oil producers in 2005, it is now number three.

Big oil is very much alive and well as a result.  The five largest oil companies made $136 billion in net profits in 2011, with no sign of decreases this year. US Representatives that receive significant campaign contributions from Big Oil get over $150,000 each: all 250 of them. Ironically, the supposed oil man, Bush, has been replaced by a far more oil friendly regime.

There are just two tiny problems. The oil is running out, one, and the biosphere is dramatically transforming, two. Which is why, three, things aren’t going so well.

The International Energy Authority, a totally pro-fossil fuel organization, has been sounding the alarm for some time. On the one hand, according to their chief economist Fatih Birol

We think that the crude oil production has already peaked in 2006, but we expect oil to come from the natural gas liquids, the type of liquid we have through the production of gas, and also a bit from the oil sands. But in any case it will be very challenging to see an increase in the production to meet the growth in the demand, and as a result of that, …the age of cheap oil is over.

Notably, even though their percentages have improved, the big five oil companies are indeed making less oil than they used to do.
And then there’s the heat.

Temperature records for June 2012 in the Midwest

Across the country, 3300 temperature records were set or tied in June. 172 new all-time temperature records were set. The climate scientists are now able to tie these weather events directly to carbon emissions, while also being able to say that events like the cold winter in the UK in 2011-12 were not so caused.

If you were, say, running for office and needed to win in the Midwest, where 600 heat records were set in June, you might make something of all this: if that is, you had any idea what to do about it. Time’s up for pretending that everything will be OK, that some invention will come along or whatever else.

So what’s left for the empire? Good question.

 

Mafia Capitalism

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During the course of some back-and-forth discussions over the past two days about the OWS messaging in relation to debt, David Graeber coined the phrase “mafia capitalism” to express the palpable element of violent coercion at the heart of financial globalization. The latter phrase sounds technical, even clean. The reality, as we see around the empire, is that the debt machine has responded to mild setbacks with a dramatic escalation of force.

In Empire, Hardt and Negri reminded us that what Marx had called “primitive accumulation” was always part of capitalism’s process. This violent disruption separated the producer and the means of production, while also accumulating basic raw materials from colonies. There is, then, a

relationship between wealth and command and between inside and outside.

That is, in the case of England, the wealth came from outside (from the empire) and the command arose internally. This process was reversed outside Europe, so that wealth was created internally and command came from the outside.

In 2000, it seemed that this model was giving way to one of immaterial production. Today we might suggest that the new form is rather one where the command is internal in order to preside over a forcible transfer of what internal wealth there is to those in command. The form of that transfer is legalized violence and the end of state concern for the welfare of its population. In short, if this trend continues, we are no longer in the period of governmentality in which the management of population was the prime concern of government, so much as in a moment of internal colonization.

The debt crisis of the 1990s was a sovereign debt crisis in which Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (as the IMF rhetoric has it) [HIPCs] were compelled to borrow in order to repay their existing loans. Today, Heavily Indebted People are being forced to borrow more and more to survive. Or not. And the difference now is that, like the Mafia, authority no longer cares what happens to you, it just wants you to pay. Or else.

In the US, the Supreme Court, having presided over an electoral coup in 2000, has now become the legislative branch. It has enabled corporations to legally buy elections in the manner of mobsters of old. Yesterday, it authorized police to become immigration officers on the basis of mere suspicion. And tomorrow it will overturn a Republican-inspired health care plan because any concession from corporations to employees is now seen as being not just unnecessary, but illegal. The radical right don’t need to win elections: it can just rely on the Court. There is no solution for this dilemma  in the present constitution, whereby the Court invalidates laws it doesn’t like, and then legislates things that it does. Here, the force of law, backed by the simple violence of its enforcers, has become whatever the Heads of the Five Families (aka the 5-4 conservative majority) says that it is.

In the UK, where the Conservative government (technically a coalition with the Liberal Democrats) has been shown to be the creature of Rupert Murdoch, it has responded not by toning down but ramping up its attacks on the welfare system. Prime Minister David Cameron proposes ending housing benefit for young people and limiting child benefit to three children. These are deliberately nasty policies, aimed at pleasing the older (and racist) voter, who believes that hordes of (non-white) benefit “scroungers” are getting away with something, just as the tabloids have claimed for years. With not inconsiderable audacity, the Old Etonians that lead the government have denounced a “culture of entitlement” in those qualifying for benefits, just after they cut taxes for the rich.

Finally, it is worth noting that Israel, so often the paradigm-shaper for its purported dominant partners, has also turned its tactics on its internal population, cutting and privatizing services, reinforced with a police force well trained in violence.

There might be a certain schadenfreude for Palestinians and their allies in watching (presumably) Jewish Israelis complaining about police violence. This is an old lesson: colonial authority will always use the force it develops in the colony, or occupied territory, at “home.”

Just as it has done since the 1970s, neo-liberalism responds to a crisis by intensifying its operations, as Gilles Deleuze would have put it. Indeed, the Israeli Defence Force now read Deleuze as a tactical guide to defeating Palestinian resistance. This resort to force is, then, not in fact a sign of strength but of the continued inability of capitalism to match its rhetoric of wealth creation with the reality of internal wealth transfer. Welcome to mafia capitalism.

“The Transit of Empire”

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#BREAKING PHOTO- VENUS IS ENTIRELY IN FRONT OF THE SUN! HUMAN... on TwitpicToday for only the eighth time in the era of the telescope, Venus made a transit across the Sun that was visible from earth. This transit is, as all those since the eighteenth century have been, a “transit of empire,” to quote Jodi Byrd. For much of that time, empire has been in the ascendant. Perhaps, if we might indulge in the pathetic fallacy, today’s transit might herald the exit of empire.

The pathetic fallacy–the idea that the natural world reflects human moods–was itself the product of industrial modernity. Our own pathetic fallacy is both that humans can ignore the destruction of the natural world caused by fossil-fuel industry and that there is a modern “we,” who are not and have never been indigenous.

It had been mostly cloudy today in Manhattan but when the sun came out at 5.45, I left the gym and jogged up to Union Square to join perhaps the geekiest crowd ever seen outside. About a hundred astronomy nerds and passers-by clustered around some grad students with specially-rigged up telescopes to allow looking at the sun. At six o’clock, the clouds were thick overhead

At that point, and I am not making this up, the NYPD sent two white-shirt officers and five uniforms to investigate the crowd. Perhaps, I thought, Bloomberg has now decreed that the sun revolves around him and so this event was heretical. Luckily, they decided against the use of force and the clouds did thin for an instant. The carefully masked telescopes allowed us to briefly see the image of the sun with the tiny dot of Venus on a thick screen placed where you would normally view the image.

It was not the kind of high-resolution image we have become used to, such as this from NASA, who are live-streaming the event.

The transit seen from Mauna Kea, Hawai'i

It’s noticeable that their telescope is based in Hawai’i, an American colony, creating an echo with the first measured transit of Venus in 1769, observed from Tahiti by Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook and the crew of the Endeavor. This voyage is one of the most minutely analyzed events in colonial history, thanks to the immense data assembled by the British crew, ranging from Cook’s own journals to the drawings of Joseph Banks and the paintings of William Hodges.

Cook's diagram of the transit of Venus

In more recent years, the emphasis has rightly shifted to locating the “voice” and presence of the indigenous peoples, whose pre-contact culture can be deduced in part from these materials. This encounter inaugurated what Jodi Byrd, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and professor at U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has called:

the imperial planetarity that sparked scientific rationalism and inspired humanist articulations of freedom, sovereignty, and equality [which] touched four continents and a sea of islands in order to cohere itself.

While many of these terms were and are valued by many, this history is also one of the violent dispossession, compulsory religious conversion and eradication of indigenous cultures. For Byrd, therefore, “transit” has a double meaning, suggesting

the multiple subjectivities and subjugations put into motion and made to move through notions of injury, grievance and grievability.

What’s noticeable here is that “movement,” like our own Occupy movement, is not singular but contradictory.

Reflecting on the U.S. context, Byrd points out that one of the “grievances” in the Declaration of Independence was the British use of

merciless Indian savages.

That image persists to the present via the cowboy movie, even so-called classics like The Searchers (1956), and mediocre animated cartoons. Witness the present furore over Elizabeth Warren’s claiming of American Indian descent in the Massachusetts Senate campaign. Never mind that everyone who has ever run for anything in Massachusetts, let alone the US as a whole, always claims Irish descent on the most tenuous basis. Claiming to be Indian is somehow always wrong.

The language resists here. No one is born indigenous, they are made indigenous by the arrival of the colonizer. Indian is a misnomer, but so is Native American. The notion of the Fourth World, composed of indigenous peoples, simply raises the question as to why they are not the First World as indigeneity, if it means anything, must mean being there first.

A transit passes from one side of that which it encounters to the other. Its end its always part of its journey. The damage will have been done.

 

Occupy the Global (Cold War) Imaginary

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One of the most resistant spaces to the global Occupy movement is the global imaginary, by which I mean the way in which we imagine the planet. While the push-back against financial inequality has been very successful, with the 99% vs. one per cent divide now part of the global political vocabulary, we have not succeeded in framing an alternative means of visualizing the planet. That space remains occupied by the Cold War imaginary of binary divides between hostile camps, all underpinned by the threat of nuclear war.

The Nagasaki bomb, 1945

What sets the Occupy way of visualizing against neoliberal financial globalization is its willingness to bring issues together, to embrace complexity and to see patterns of relation. Yet in the case of the largest system of all, Earth, we have failed to shift attention towards the reckless destruction of liveable space in the name of profit. Strikingly, any effort to discuss the degradation of the Earth-system is designated even by radicals as a depressing subject–this from people who love nothing more than to read long essays describing how capitalism is collapsing, poverty increasing, employment disappearing.

So it’s not the depressing nature of the subject as such. It’s the sense that this subject is itself, as it were, futile because the imagined destruction of the planet is already occupied by nuclear weapons and the world they have produced. In this view, the military are the indispensable key to continued safety and it has been an article of neoliberal faith to maintain massive military budgets, while cutting all other areas of government. Thus we imagine we are “safe.” We have to expose this old idea for the peculiar hodgepodge of 1950s militarism and 1980s economics that it is, while espousing the new synthesis of science, anti-poverty, pro-diversity that has emerged in the past decade as a path to a real security that does not depend on world-ending weapons.

The Cold War spectres continue to haunt the earth. Consider how Romney has cited Russia as the greatest enemy of the U. S. More saliently, reflect how overwhelming the transnational governing consensus that Iran must not be “allowed” to acquire nuclear weapons has remained. This is old-fashioned Cold War doctrine: nuclear proliferation is bad, not because nuclear weapons are bad, but because it undermines the deterrence of the superpowers. In short, if “small” nuclear powers might actually use their weapons, then the deterrence of massive arsenals counts for nothing. How that works in the post-Soviet era no one seems to have tried to work out.

The evocation of the nuclear activates a form of pre-emptive dread, in which many of us have literally been schooled. It has been visualized many times but perhaps the 1964 “Daisy” ad for President Johnson did it best.

“Daisy” reminds us of “s/he loves me, s/he loves me not” and all the other binary games that you can play like this. The choice here is simple: to die or not to die. The ad mobilizes a fantasy that by voting we can affect our own destiny in the geopolitics of nuclear weapons. For many, the current crisis in the Earth-system lacks such a vision of solution and so it’s “depressing.” Now the International Council for Science has issued a “State of the Planet Declaration” that allows for us to imagine a different geo-politics. Here are its opening three clauses:

1. Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it has supported the well-being of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk. Without urgent action, we could face threats to water, food, biodiversity and other critical resources: these threats risk intensifying economic, ecological and social crises…
2. In one lifetime our increasingly interconnected and interdependent economic, social, cultural and political systems have come to place pressures on the environment that may cause fundamental changes in the Earth system and move us beyond safe natural boundaries. But the same interconnectedness provides the potential for solutions… required for a truly sustainable planet.
3. The defining challenge of our age is to safeguard Earth’s natural processes to ensure the well-being of civilization while eradicating poverty, reducing conflict over resources, and supporting human and ecosystem health.

“Saving civilization” can now be presented as practical the task of ending poverty and the conceptual work of thinking human and non-human systems as being so intertwined as to form one co-dependent network.

You can’t vote for this. You can’t expect the United Nations to enact it. You have to perform this set of changes and it begins very simply by refusing the global and imagining the Earth-system.

The Empire of No Signs

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In moments of radical transformation, words lose old meanings. New events struggle to be represented and have to be experienced. In the Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes used an avowedly Orientalist fantasy of Japan to generate a sense of the “emptiness of language.” Now we can just look around us. The disconnect between how the world is represented in what we now call the “culture,” and the unfolding realities since 2008, is palpable.

There are a variety of indicators we might notice from “high” and “low” culture alike. This past Friday, the HBO comedian Bill Maher did not need to satirize the remarks of Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh so much as simply repeat them. The Right now inhabits a cultural universe that is laughably unrecognizable to mainstream liberals, let alone radicals.

Television nonetheless continues to represent a world in which comedy means perky young people living in vast apartments, untroubled by debt or unemployment. The dramascape is all cops all the time. In order to even make reference to the Occupy movement, writers have had to resort to bizarre stratagems, such as the recent random insertion into the CBS lawyer soap The Good Wife of a judge being pepper sprayed at an Occupy site (–viewer alert: there’s a tedious 30 second ad before the judge makes his random remark about a minute in).

You might remember that last December Law and Order did build a fake Occupy site in Foley Square for a set, only three weeks after the eviction of Zuccotti/Liberty. Occupy activists quickly installed themselves– and were as quickly re-evicted by the police, leading in turn to a rewrite of the episode, such that Occupy was a brief moment rather than the theme of the episode. The empire now fears even its own simulacra.

Perhaps this what is to be expected of a ratings-obsessed advertising-driven medium like network TV but there isn’t even a cable show that I can imagine taking on the questions posed by Occupy. All the shows that people discuss like Mad Men, Treme, Luck or Boardwalk Empire are set in the past anyway–Shameless might be the only possibility, except that its characters live so deep in the informal economy that crisis is their everyday.

We already had a go at Hollywood cinema–what about “high” culture? In the US, literature has been the site of engagement with the “national question,” especially since the Second World War. California novelist Steve Erickson’s recent These Dreams of You has tried to rework the Great American Novel trope for the Obama years.

It describes how Zan, a former novelist-turned-academic, loses his teaching job, putting his family on the path to foreclosure. The book drifts away from this all-too-realistic scenario into a complex narrative on multicultural adoption, race, history, empire and the legacies of the 1960s that is engaging without sustaining the compelling force of the opening. It’s usually not a good idea, for example, to have David Bowie as a significant fictional character;)

Interestingly, though, Erickson seems to acknowledge the impossibility of what he’s attempted. Towards the end, Zan gives a lecture on the novel in London:

“Maybe this has been going on a while,” says Zan, “but now the arc of the imagination bends back to history because it can’t compete with history.” A black Hawaiian with a swahili name? It’s the sort of history that puts novelists out of business.

Calling that quote out makes the book seem still further from accomplishing its ambitions than I thought it was as I read it, but that’s not my point here. Erickson worries that Obama allowed us to hear the “song” of what he calls America again and

should it fade and be silent, it will never again quite be possible to believe in it….But without such faith, the country–this country in particular–is nothing.

And that is, in my view, probably a good thing. The “song” of “America” is past representing, past meaning–an empire of no signs.

I find myself drawing a parallel with the tension in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time between meaning, memory and forgetting in the political. While one reading of the novel might stress personal involuntary memory (madeleines and all that), another sees the ways in which meaning becomes undone in a stratified, class-ridden, wealth-dominated society by the intrusion of the necessity of political affirmation. That is to say, the snobbish salons frequented by the Narrator fall apart over the Dreyfus Affair.

While aristocratic elitism sides with the Army, using Dreyfus’s jewishness as the index of his guilt, their dominance of language is irretrievably fractured by this assertion. While the Guermantes for the most part remain anti-Dreyfusard, not even all the anti-semitic aristocrats can be convinced by their own argument as it is presented in the Dreyfus Case. For all the drama of these conversions, by the time Dreyfus is exonerated in 1906, society has contrived to forget what it once found so shocking and it requires Proust’s exhaustive hermeneutic investigation to reveal the interwoven layers of anti-semitism, homophobia, nationalism and snobbery that constitute the French empire.

The potential ludicrousness of blogging about Proust will not have escaped you. I have on my shelf the four gilded volumes of the Pléiade edition, bought as part of the whole mid-life crisis thing for a “year of reading Proust.” The volumes are themselves masterpieces of a careful annotated scholarship that is perhaps the polar opposite of this project. And perhaps not.

In a wonderful parenthesis in his short book Proust and Signs, Deleuze remarks

Few texts constitute a better commentary on Lenin’s remark as to a society’s capacity to replace “the corrupt old prejudices” by new prejudices even more infamous or more stupid.

That’s where Occupy is now (bet you didn’t think I could make a paragraph that included Proust, Lenin, Deleuze and Occupy). The “corrupt old prejudices” in the empire of no signs are now those reformed around the First World War period–anti-communist nationalism, the American century, global capitalism. The new prejudices are those being circulated by the Santorums and Romneys as “culture wars” in the neo-liberal empire of no signs.

By the time a twelve-volume assessment emerges from today’s Ivy League equivalent of the cork-lined room, it will have been too late to have prevented them–although by the same token I do see how I might finally write about Proust. Maybe the Internet is just the place to move away from songs of the nation, or hymns to empire, and consider again the prose of the world.

Banks, Steel and Empire

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In what has become a sorry tale of repetition with the closure of Occupy sites, today we had a first: an Occupy encampment shut down by direct order of a bank.

Occupy Pittsburgh--rally against eviction

Since October 15, Occupy Pittsburgh has had a permanent presence in People’s Park formerly Mellon Park. The space is located downtown in front of BNY Mellon’s towering skyscraper, testament to its $25.9 trillion (yes, trillion) in assets. It is leased from the city on conditions that are in dispute. Investment bank BNY Mellon claims that it is a three season park, closed in the winter, and that they comply with the regulation that at least 20% of the space must be open at all times by making the sidewalk available. Clearly people in Pittsburgh treat the park as open space, as they were using it today for access and a place to smoke even though being there was legally trespassing.

For on February 2, BNY Mellon persuaded the usual compliant judge that they had the right to reclaim the space, remove all the structures and tents, and declare anyone present to be trespassing. That order went into effect today. Posted signs around the park announced that BNY Mellon had declared it illegal to set foot in the space. No mention was made of any other form of state authority.

Indeed BNY Mellon like to make fun of the whole Occupy thing, in the manner of London stockbrokers waving wedges of cash at Occupy London. Here’s their “hilarious” ad for the Financial Follies last year:

Occupying Wall St for 227 years: BNY Mellon

If you can’t read that, it says “We don’t mean to brag but we’ve been Occupying Wall Street for 227 years.”

So, perhaps it’s not so surprising that, unlike in New York or Oakland, there was an apparent reluctance on the part of law enforcement to get involved. Pittsburgh Occupiers I talked to today described how Pittsburgh police had helped them organize marches and had turned on their flashing lights to attract attention to the Occupiers. The reasons for this sympathy are obvious. I took the bus from the University area of Oakland where I’m staying to downtown. You pass one abandoned or derelict building after another with the only visible businesses being bars and gas stations, while the sole sign of life was outside a soup kitchen.

There’s a sense of absence throughout the city from the moment you arrive at the enormous airport, designed by US Air as a hub and now abandoned by them. People even lament losing the US Air call center where 50 people were employed, so tough is it to find a job. And then there are only 800 police in Pittsburgh, compared to the 30,000 in New York. I can’t move in New York without seeing the NYPD but I’ve been here two days without seeing the police although I spent all morning at Occupy.

This is still a steel town. BNY Mellon occupy a skyscraper once owned by the giant US Steel. The United Steel Workers union have an impressive building downtown that has been an important resource for Occupy Pittsburgh.

United Steel Workers Local 3657 in support of Occupy Pittsburgh

And then there are the nineteen steel bridges across the rivers here. From Occupy, I walked across the spectacular Seventh Street Bridge, now renamed the Andy Warhol Bridge, to visit the Andy Warhol Museum.

Outside, the streetscape is bleak and empty with no one passing by. Inside there’s lots of life and energy. I had Campbell’s Tomato Soup for lunch and thus fortified spent some time in the galleries. The Race Riot and Electric Chair series made it clear that Warhol was always aware of politics. The cold reality of the electric chair is difficult to confront even in a screen print. It was Empire that really caught my attention today, though.

Andy Warhol, "Empire"

I came into the screening of Warhol’s eight-hour film of the Empire State Building at a point where it was completely dark. The lights at the top of the building were the only point of illumination and they flared in the lens, giving the illusion of a fire. Thus Empire regards us. It would have us believe that it is a burning bush that never consumes itself but will scorch us should we try to touch, let alone extinguish it.

As I stood in the dark watching Empire burn, uncomfortable questions kept surfacing in my mind. Many of us in the humanities, very much including myself, are direct or indirect beneficiaries of the Mellon empire. Indeed, it seems that almost all new initiatives in the field are funded by the Mellon Foundation. In the face of today’s quasi-legal provocation what should we do? Move on, say nothing, and take the money because it is a repurposing of it for better things? Or try and use our place on the inside to somehow influence BNY Mellon? Or consider whether it might not be better to refuse to collaborate with them? What do you think?