Mediating truAmerica

Like many New Yorkers, I’m in the middle of my summer exodus, a retreat to leafier and quiet parts of the state that many people still seem to manage for a while. It’s an unconscious homage to the former Jewish exodus to the Catskills, a legacy so apparently unappealing that the Catskills are trying to rebrand as the South Adirondacks. One of the things I do is see more broadcast media than usual. It’s not pretty. But you do get to see truAmerica, the country that brought you truTV.

Max von Sydow in Hannah and Her Sisters

In Woody Allen’s 1986 classic Hannah and Her Sisters, Max von Sydow plays Frederick a misanthropic artist. He too spends an evening watching television and describes it to Lee (Barbara Hershey): “Can you imagine the level of the mind that watches wrestling?” While funny, any good cultural studies undergrad can take this apart: wrestling is known to be “fixed,” so the pleasure for the viewer comes in a knowing engagement with the parodic violence that is not violent and so on, and so on, as Zizek would say.

There’s another form of inauthentic television now, which is what I call truAmerica. Let’s try and imagine the kind of mind that would watch golf. Yesterday at a spacious Long Island gym, I was confronted by a large flat-screen showing the British Open golf. It’s amazingly well-executed TV, with cameras tracking the tiny white balls through the air and an editor cutting live from one scene to the next so you’re always watching action. In between come repeated ads, clearly targeting middle-aged white men. There’s hair color, pills for erections and cars of course. Notably, there were also a lot of financial ads.

This one from Merrill Lynch, which you can watch in entirety on their YouTube channel, seems designed to provoke a snort of ironic scorn. Of course, it’s called “Belief,” knowing that the very last thing that anyone with actual knowledge of financial markets would have in Merrill Lynch is belief. It’s like a restaurant that indicates on its signs that it serves “Authentic Cuisine,” telling anyone with any sense that the food is utterly inauthentic and homogenized for truAmerican taste. Indeed, Merrill Lynch are forced to note at the end in a subtitle that they are now part of “Bank of America Corporation.” Perhaps the point of the ad is just to remind people that, despite all their corporate crime, Merrill Lynch did not go under.

Next up was an ad for AIG. Yes, that AIG. It was trying to sell the idea that an AIG policy was a good way to provide security for “your” family, using a graphic of a white roof over four little figures representing the traditional heteronormative family with one boy child and one girl.  Again, no-one aware of the events of the past five years would think that AIG would be a good place to get life insurance. This advertising targets people who think that they are, or hope to be, in the one percent but are not even close. The sales manager who thinks he’s getting ahead (no ads I saw were directed at women) and wants to make investments to show it but doesn’t know how. It’s malicious and deceptive advertising.

If this form tries to define the upper levels of what used to be called the middle-class, there’s far more to define the exclusion at the lower levels. Later, while scanning channels I found one called truTV. On the basis of the “authenticity” paradigm, we can say that nothing on truTV is true, as conventionally understood. Perhaps truTV is a mediated version of Colbert’s “truthiness,” showing the world the “America” that the politicians claim to believe in and speak for. The place where gun massacres are not the time for discussion of gun control is truAmerica.

I discovered here an episode of the hit reality show Hardcore Pawn, which I refer to in my debt talks but have never seen. Apparently, it just started a new series. It’s set in a big box pawn store called American Jewelry and Loan in Detroit. There are three plot scenarios used. First, staff fight among themselves or against the customers. Second, a customer tries to pawn something that is worthless. Third, someone brings in something interesting or valuable that the store wants to get. That’s about it.

The viewer is encouraged to identify with the store staff and to despise the clients, whether African American or (from the show’s truPoint-of-View) poor white “trash.” A typical segment shows a gay man trying to pawn a TV for $400 so he can move out from his violent partner’s apartment back to his mother. The store will only offer him $50. The character then acts out a parody of African American queer camp. Or a heavy-set white guy tries to pawn a much-worn computer with missing keys for $1000 and uses a tirade of obscenities at the long-suffering staff. “We” are supposed to laugh at “them” because were are in truAmerica, while they are not. The acting is transparent, the performances are wooden and the laziness ubiquituous: as is typical of the format, any quote with “bite” is seen over and over again.

Hardcore Pawn is a “breakout hit” for truTV, with 2.5 million viewers, close to the best numbers for Mad Men and many times higher than shows like Treme. The pleasure of measuring yourself against the desperate and seeing your higher status is clearly on the rise.

If this is the context, a self deceptive and highly mediated “middle class” that nonetheless knows that truAmerica is not real, why are we surprised when a sad, lonely man identifies himself as a superhero and acts out the Dark Knight message of one man against the world, dressed in a fantasy costume of black armor and a gas mask? Does he even understand that he’s not in truAmerica when he does this? Increasingly I think that the social movements’ mantra shouldn’t be “Another World Is Possible” so much as “You Need to Come and Live in this World, Not the One in Your Head.”

In short, the fantasy is not that there is an alternative. The fantasy is the world in which financial markets operate for the customer’s benefit, there’s a bold line between the middle class and the underclass, and it’s perfectly sensible to allow people to buy as many guns and ammunition as they want.

 

Meta

At the invitation of an interesting and impressive faculty/student discussion group calling themselves “Aesthetic Relations” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I had the slightly unnerving and very meta experience of discussing this project with real, live human beings. Although I do have interactions with readers online, this was the first time that I have talked about it with people other than friends and family. It seemed appropriate to do this in Madison, where the US wing of the global resistance first got going.

I stressed that this is not an “academic” project, or even a digital humanities project, like those I do with Media Commons or the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Such projects are on my academic CV and there is much discussion internally about credentialing and peer review. Occupy 2012 does not have these concerns. It’s a documentation of a process.

This process might be described as the way in which I have tried to measure what commitment might mean in relation to this very different movement. That is to say, if the engagé intellectual of the 1960s had to work out a relation to the “party,” at least in Europe, none of those terms quite applies here. While I’m engaged in the educational side of the movement, like the forthcoming Free University of New York City and the journal Tidal, there’s no operative activist/intellectual distinction in the movement. I do think that’s true, despite the obvious prominence of figures like David Graeber and Judith Butler in their different ways. Perhaps, as I’ve been suggesting over the past couple of days, we might now be in a position to move beyond the 60s paradigms that have dominated discussion and thought ever since.

In this sense, I was glad that the Madison group noticed how I’ve been calling this a durational writing project, a form that’s derived from durational performance art, rather than a blog pure and simple. Of course it uses blogging software and is a blog in format. But the commitment of writing every day makes it much different than the experience of blogging, which I did on and off all of last year. The blogger chooses when to write at will and can polish a post until s/he is completely satisfied with it. Writing every day drives the project in a different rhythm: sometimes I feel in control of it, sometimes it seems in control of me, and sometimes it’s plain out of control.

This stressing of terms of discipline and control comes from a theme that emerged in the discussion last night. One way to measure the present crisis in what I have called visuality, or the way that authority tries to authorize itself, is precisely as the end of a “human” that is dominated by measurement, disciplinary apparatus, techniques for the modification of population and coloniality. In this transition, whether to a new form of authority or a democratized democracy, change has very different forms. So the neoliberal hostility to state-sponsored education, welfare and health can be seen as a move away from governmentality, that concern with the conduct of conduct as registered at the level of population. The claim for autonomy within the global Occupy movement is perhaps another response to the same perceived crisis of governmentality. That leads some to think of autonomy as neoliberal, a means of trying to reassert the viability of existing forms of left critique, rather than trying to engage with what might be distinct and emergent in our own time.

This leads to a second theme of yesterday’s discussion: the question of time. I’ve written a good deal about the way in which I’m trying to stay “in the moment,” to draw out the sense that the culture is no longer stable in a set of authorized forms, and thereby to increase the possibility that such forms might change. I’ve talked also about the importance of duration and what I’ve called, after Derrida, the future present.

The group yesterday wanted to add the perspective of the reader, which entails thinking about the archive and past time. People talked about how posts might be read out of sequence, or re-read after the moment, and how the current software platform does not allow for easy searching. Generously, this difficulty was attributed to my wanting to make it not so simple to dive in and take out whatever you might need. That’s more of an accident. In fact, I’ve been constrained by the very commitment of the project to thinking of it on a day to day basis: what shall I do today? what about tomorrow? This has the intended effect for my own activism of giving me an extra motivation to go to actions, meetings and events that the force of the workday might otherwise tempt me to miss.

So I have not in fact thought about the project as an archive. I realized that there are now about 115 posts, that’s probably something like 85,000 words and a lot of visual material. So the discussion went very meta: what would be the best thing to do with all this, assuming it lasts for a while longer, or that it achieves its goal of every day in 2012? Given the short lifespan of web platforms, another more durable archive form might be needed. Some people suggested a PDF, which I think would have to be a set of PDFs so as not to be too huge:) Others were interested in a possible book, although here I have concerns–even if I donate whatever royalties there might be, is it OK to generate revenue for a publisher with OWS materials? As with all the other questions of this project, I keep this open, while welcoming your thoughts.

And here, gentle reader, a message from the Madison group to you: there was a hope that people might share their comments and ideas using the commenting function on the blog, rather than posting them to Facebook or elsewhere. In other words, Facebook is privatizing the Internet and is about to do so with a spectacular creation of profit on all of our labor. The Madison group of readers would like to hear what you’re thinking: so a comment could be thought of as addressing the readership, rather than the writer. There are quite a few of you now–such commenting could form a community of sorts that would give a new impetus to the project. I for one would welcome such a turn.

Sketches of Spain: From the Everyday to Every Day

So I decided to step back for the weekend, meaning that I missed the visit of the Spanish activist Amador Fernández-Savater from the May 15 movement to OWS. As I read the wonderful materials provided, I found that in January Fernández-Savater had suggested that there were fewer people attending M-15 events because “people have returned to making their lives.” I want to explore what this phrase might mean.

If the encampments (whether in Spain or New York) were an exception to the crisis, it is nonetheless “difficult to live in an exception,” if you cannot devote your life to it as an activist. At the same time, Fernández-Savater follows the thought through to a consideration of how the crisis “forces us to constantly make and remake everything.” I think we can see a periodization emerge here: out the crisis of the 1970s emerged both neo-liberalism and its everyday ideology, and the counterpointed politics of the everyday. The present crisis has transformed neo-liberalism into an ideology of inequality and calls for politics every day in response.

Fernández-Savater locates the formation of a consensus in Spain to the Moncloa Agreements of 1977, two years after the end of the forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco:

the culture that was imposed on the defeat of the dreams of emancipation and communism in the 1970s. Culture in the strong sense of the word: a configuration of sensitivity that decisively structures the play of politics, universities, the media, the production of work and our very perception of things.

I’ve recently been re-reading an evocation of that defeat in the detective novel by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Murder in the Central Committee, originally published in 1981. By means of an investigation into a classic “closed room” murder mystery, Montalbán was able to create a portrait of the PCE, the Spanish Communist Party. As befits the noir genre, there’s a certain romantic nostalgia–together with, it has to be said, some sad sexism and homophobia.

In one passage, however, Carmela, a PCE cadre, complains precisely of the difficulties of reconciling activism and making a life in terms that are familiar to many of us:

“In the end I’ve got to work, function in the Party, do the shopping, keep house and be a mother–which is the least of my worries. And if you complain some old comrades come round and tell you a life-story that makes your hair stand on end….There are more and more who cook in order to forget.”

When the detective Carvalho asks her what she’s trying to forget, Carmela answers: “That there’s been reform but no political break.”

In this period, a new activism of the everyday chose to celebrate such activities as cooking as in themselves a form of resistance. So de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, with his emphasis on cooking as one element of that practice, was formed in the aftermath of May 68, while British cultural studies were part of the response to what Stuart Hall called “the great moving right show.”

The neo-liberal consensus on everyday life is familiar to us all as the boilerplate of every mainstream politician: work, homeowning, health care, college and pension provision. Within that consensus the technocratic discussion has been about the allocation of state and so-called “market” provision. It need hardly be pointed out that all these aspects of the everyday (aka the “American dream”) are rapidly moving out of reach. Further, the current Troika and market consensus is that people don’t deserve these things unless they can afford them.

So we find ourselves in the situation of “precariousness,” an awkward word for an awkward situation. It means finding that even if you have health insurance, your plan no longer covers a drug you use and the cost is $248, as recently happened to me. It means that if you did what the consensus told you to do and “saved” for college tuition, the amount saved has reduced in absolute terms and the costs are anyway so far higher than predicted that it is pointless to try and catch up. It means discovering that as people live longer, there is a new duty of care for elders to which the state is indifferent because these people are no longer economically active. And so on.

Living precariously is a struggle every day, and it is not in the least everyday. Although I did not know this when I started, it is why I do this project every day. It is part of the collective struggle to find a way to combat inequality every day.

The Empire of No Signs

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.

Seeds of Democracy and the Smog of Law

Today was the inaugural Liberty Plaza/Zuccotti Park seed swap and seed library. Just to be sure we got the point, a federal judge rejected a class action lawsuit by organic farmers against Monsanto. Chemical culture got a boost from the UK government who decided that their own Parliamentary recommendations on clean air are too expensive, even though the pollution is acknowledged to kill thousands a year. To adapt Gandhi, we might say that Western democracy would be a very good idea.

Seed swapping at Liberty/Zuccotti today

Occupy the Food Supply’s day of action began outside the Stock Exchange and then marched to Liberty. We heard from David Murphy (below), an Iowa-based activist with Food Democracy Now! about the threat posed by Monsanto’s aggressive patent campaign for its genetically-modified corn. He held up an ear of Oaxaca corn that he had acquired at the recent California seed swap (covered here).

Murphy with indigenous corn

Because it has been decreed by agribusiness that corn is yellow and that other forms are therefore not corn, this green cob is a biological misfire in their view. In fact, Monsanto used the food crisis to push GMO corn into Mexico:

After originally denying authorization for a pilot program to cultivate its GM corn in Sinaloa last year, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Development, Fisheries and Food (SAGARPA) just gave the company the green light to plant genetically modified yellow corn resistant to the herbicide glyphosate as a part of a pilot program in Tamaulipas’ current agricultural cycle. According to the National Commission for the Use and Understanding of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Tamaulipas is home to 16 of the 59 remaining strains of native corn.

The risk of contamination between the GMO corn and native varietals is clear to everyone except agribusiness and their allies, who don’t care. Nonetheless, Monsanto also aggressively sue farmers who find themselves accidentally growing Monsanto’s patented pesticide-resistant plants because of seed dispersal. That is to say, they not only patent life, they sue it.

The Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and several other growers and organizations filed a counter-suit against Monsanto to prevent the company from taking such hostile action. Regrettably but unsurprisingly, today we learned that:

U.S. District Court Judge Naomi Buchwald, for the Southern District of New York, threw out the case brought by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) and dozens of other plaintiff growers and organizations, criticizing the groups for a “transparent effort to create a controversy where none exists.”

The hard lesson here is that seed democracy is unlikely to be fostered by a legal system whose prime function is the defense of “property” rights.

Against this grim background, Liberty was filled with would-be urban growers collecting and swapping seeds. The organizers had sensibly brought an extensive collection, which they gave away in packets and then encouraged us to sub-divide amongst ourselves.

Seed distribution

The promise exchanged was that everyone who grew plants should let a portion run to seed and bring them back to the next seed swap, or to create a seed library. On the way downtown, I happened to read an essay by Jeff Sharlet about OWS in which he spoke of the “joyousness” and “beauty” of what he called “the physical democracy” of Zuccotti during the encampment. In the more confrontational atmosphere post-eviction, we sometimes forget what that was like and how good it felt. This event reminded me and gave me hope.

And in case you wondered why we occupied in the first place, a quick look over the Atlantic shows why. In November 2011, a Parliamentary committee reported that air pollution caused over 30,000 death in 2008. EU air quality standards are being flouted wildly in London, whose air is notorious.

Welcome to London

Yet today the appalling heirs to Mrs Thatcher (another quick boo for Meryl Streep here, please) in power in the UK dismissed the issue as generating “disproportionate costs.” Disproportionate to whom? Certainly not to the one in five Londoners whose deaths are attributable to the pollution, a figure the government did not dispute. And, let’s see, who thinks we’ll have a debate about London air quality before the Olympics in the way that we did before the Beijing Olympics?

These two issues are linked biologically as well as conceptually. Aldo Gonzalez, a Zapotec engineer who has led the struggle against GMO corn in Mexico, points out that indigenous varietals evolved over 10,000 years in a great diversity of climates and altitudes. It may very well be literally life-saving to have some of these hardier plants at our disposal once the neo-liberals have had their way with the climate.

Let’s go back to the beginning. When the Occupy movement began, the Very Important People wanted to know what our demands were. When the courts and the representative governments reject basic claims to life–except should one happen to be a foetus–there was and is no point in making demands to them. You have to sow democracy.

 

 

Debt Servitude and (Micro)Fascism

IMF leader Lagarde to Greek PM Papademos: "Do something for the poor? that's hilarious!"

The widely-circulated photographs of the Troika laughing it up as they imposed their settlement on Greece reflect their triumph at imposing a neo-liberal colonization of Europe. As Frantz Fanon noted in 1963:

What is fascism but colonialism at the heart of traditionally colonialist countries?

The debt servitude being imposed on mass populations in the interest of transnational capital represents a neo-colonialism, in which the colonial powers like Portugal, Spain and Italy will be recolonized after the long-term Ottoman colony Greece.

It’s worth rehearsing the breath-taking Treaty-of-Versailles-style conditions imposed on Greece. According to the Guardian:

the European commission will present proposals for “an enhanced and permanent presence” of debt inspectors in Athens later…Greeks have already suffered a 30% cut in wages and can look forward to steep cuts in the minimum wage as well as pensions…Eurozone finance ministers have demanded that the Greek Constitution be revised to give debt payments top priority in government spending.

The money for the bond markets will be placed in a charmingly named “segregation account,” as if to remind everyone of the fascist neo-colonialism that has been created.

There was an alternative: an 2001 Argentina-style default, with a relaunched currency. From this crisis emerged the practice of horizontalidad that has been so influential across the Occupy movement. In Occupy!#3, Marina Sitrin quotes Neka from the unemployed workers movement near Buenos Aires:

it was a sort of waking up to a knowledge that was collective…It was like each day is a horizon that opens before us

This “horizonism” is the direct opposite of debt servitude.

Towers of Debt at NYU

Today I was reminded that such servitude is local as well as global, a microfascism to match the global neo-colonial project. At my institution, NYU, there is currently a plan to build 6 million square feet of new office and residential space in a series of skyscrapers. As well as destroying the character of Greenwich Village, and making Washington Square a building site for 20 years, this plan will cost $6 billion.

When asked where this money would come from an official replied: “NYU is not afraid of debt.” Given the enormity of the sum–twice the entire endowment of the university–and the crisis of debt worldwide, you wonder why. I asked a friend who works at Credit Suisse–in the compliance department that makes banks abide by regulation–and she replied “Money is cheap.” Which is to say, the interest rates on the bonds will be so low that the investment makes perfect sense to a Board of Trustees filled with people from JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Paulson, Met Life and so on.

Who will repay the money? According to NYU4OWS and the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, the only possible answer is students–via their tuition fees, financed in turn by student debt. Student debt is about to surpass one trillion dollars and is the largest single sector of consumer debt, even exceeding credit cards. NYU is already top of the league for student debt per capita. What is especially heinous about this exchange is that money borrowed at less than one per cent interest is likely to be repaid by loans carrying interest in the range of eight to ten per cent. Student debt cannot be liquidated, meaning that even people who are bankrupt, or on social security have to repay it. As a powerful essay in the Village Voice last year showed, many NYU grads have to abandon ideas of careers serving the public good for corporate positions in order to make their payments.

What can be done about this servitude? Horizontalism insists that there is no point in applying for redress to leaders–as you can see above, the very idea makes them laugh. Yesterday at an event in New York City, David Graeber argued that one of the most critical developments of 2011 was a transformation of the imagination. In other words, it began to become possible to visualize a world in which the economic was not the dominant value.

In terms of debt, this would mean refusing the demand that debt repayment is the highest form of morality. When debts are imposed or exacerbated beyond any realistic possibility of repayment, the ethical approach is to move beyond the horizons of money. You can pledge to refuse to repay your loan if one million other people do so here: and decide whether you’re actually going to do that when it gets into the high 900,000s–for now it’s about pressuring for change. For faculty supporting debtors, pledge here and for family and others supporting debtors pledge here: this is important to show that the community supports debt refusal, but demands little more than a few clicks for now.

In terms of the horizontal imagination, imagine what was once the case: a public education from pre-K to PhD that is entirely free. This long-time position of abolition democracy needs to be insisted upon not in terms of accounting–that people need degrees to get jobs and so on–but in terms of democracy: a direct democracy needs citizens who are critical, knowledgeable, resourceful and autonomous.

That won’t happen overnight but here’s what we can do now: stop using economic metaphors for the critical projects that we engage in. Stop asking “how’s your work going?”, or using metaphors and scales of productivity, or otherwise commodifying the common intellect. In work using digital technologies in particular, leave aside notions of “rich” data, “robust” platforms and all the other quasi-market metaphors.

Stop thinking like a market. A market likes an investment (a beginning), a time of production (the middle) and, above all, profit, aka the end. This is why Occupy insists on the primacy of the everyday because it needs doing every day, like child care, sustenance, farming and other forms of sustaining.

Try it. It’s fun.