Childhood and time

I think that the afternoons, days, summers, years were longer when we were young because everything was new. Life was full of wholly new sights and experiences, which stamped themselves into our memory. Time was minutely recorded because it was marked by newness.

Now it's possible to go through an entire day without seeing anything substantially new. You? You're traveling at the speed of light.

Weekender 2

Over the weekend, I decided a few minor loose end type things:

-I need to watch more trout. Trout are beautiful creatures.
-If I ever get a dog, I will name him Prints Charming.
-I like things that I can sit on, like elephants, giant tortoises, and corrugated iron gumboot sculptures.

I had a lot of time to think about random little ideas, because I ran almost 11 miles as part of a relay around Lake Taupo on Saturday, and hiked the 12 miles of the Tongariro Crossing with Anne, Dad, Jessica and Aunty Caron on Sunday. It was a strenuous weekend made more interesting, but less picturesque, by heavy fog and gale-force winds at the top of the pass.

We also spent a lot of time in hot pools.

Suck my communism!

Last night we went to a French film festival and saw a depressing film about a man with terminal cancer. Then we got premium burgers, and went to the Mighty Mighty, where there was a Berlin music and film festival.

My favorite Super 8 home film was one of a man and a woman fondling and licking a hammer and sickle. Suck my communism, I said. We talked to a co-worker of mine and his Belgium friend, and repeatedly dodged the woman who was trying to collect covers.

The band was a one-man act called This Show is a Rainbow. It was more melodic than I expected.

Welcome home

Anne has been here for a week. In that time, we have gone for romantic walks on beaches, discovered the dry goods aisle in the supermarket, bought a retro dining set and picked it up from Upper Hutt, endured rain and sunburns. Just now, Anne's painting the walls orange, and I'm reading comics in the comfy chair my co-worker Ged donated to us. We're making a home.

We've already found a lot of beautiful things - the aforementioned dining set, bought from someone's grandma who's moving into a rest home, the record player/radio, the light fixture Anne made out of architectural plans, the glass-and-plastic teacups from Denmark, the big bed. I am thinking of buying a motorcycle. This place is feeling better by the day.

At work, I finally cracked and asked my boss why the Deputy Secretary kept saying "I have a cunning plan." It was my phrase - friends have mocked me for using it too much. Turns out that it's a Blackadder reference - the incompetent servant Baldrick is constantly saying it.

I know Blackadder too - used to watch it as a child. I wonder what other Commonwealth cultural references have surreptitiously infected me.

25 things (installment three)

20. I wish I had known my dad's father.

21. I'd rather be rich than famous, but I'm still undecided as to whether I'd rather be rich or a revolutionary. I guess that it would depend on how I would get the money, and what sort of revolution it would be.

22. I was never totally sure whether or not I liked Williams until midway through my senior year, when I started going out drinking a lot with Anne. We'd read and write and debate, guzzle the poison of the night, come back and drunkenly collapse into each others' beds, muttering about ideas and aspirations, and I'd think: This is finally working out. And then we graduated and have been finding out how to make our own way.

23. I have grown fond of ties, in spite of their noose-connotations. I hope to have much weird neckware. On the other hand, I have been unable to accustom myself to ironing shirts. I have also been trying to figure out what type of shirt collar I prefer. Such are the perils of the office.

24. More on taste: I have this sneaking suspicion that I have bad taste, thinly wallpapered by second-hand opinion. If I was the last man on earth, would I take advantage of the plethora of clothing to stylishly attire myself, or would I revert to my mid-high-school ensemble of awkward Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses?

25. But still - it's good. Very good.

25 things (installment two)

13. Regrets: Most of all, I regret not getting to know people as well as I could. If I could go back and do over the last six or seven years, I'd spend more time talking to people. I'd take a few more risks - go to lunch with that smart person from class, spend more time in office hours, get a drink with the people I wanted to be drinking with, follow up a bit better. I feel lucky to have made the friends that I have, and somewhat sad that there are not more of them.

14. Anne's plane lands tomorrow. I hope that living here feels like an adventure rather than a burden. If not, we can always go somewhere else - San Francisco, or Chicago, or London, or Northampton... or just live in a tent on the beach somewhere.

15. Let's play "would you rather..." Would I rather be invisible, or be able to fly? Fly. Would I rather live forever, or die laughing? Die laughing, but not too soon. Would I rather play lead guitar, or bass? Bass, but I'd tune it real weird and play nothing but Gang of Four numbers. Would I rather eat a dog, or starve a refugee? Cook the dog, and share it with the refugee. Would I rather never have sex again, or fuck a walrus? Walrus - and die laughing.

16. I am trying to articulate the things that we have lost the ability to discuss. To paraphrase Slavoj Zizek, thirty years ago, we were all debating what the world would look like - communist, capitalist, fascist, whatever. Now, we all silently accept that capitalism is here to stay, but at the same time we are all worried about global catastrophes - movies about asteroids hitting the earth, or viruses killing all life on the planet. (To which I might add that apocalypses are merely the Janus-face of utopias. Have you ever seen a zombie movie that didn't carry a subtext of liberation?) That long-since-stifled debate - what will the future look like? - is the one I am interested in having. It has preconditions: We must have places in which to peacefully gather and discuss, and words in which to discuss possible futures.

17. Beer. I have fond memories of my first home-brew, Budweisers and cut-off shorts by the Green River, drinking gallon jugs of Berkshire Brewing Company, litre bottles of Quilmes, the ongoing very rigid search for a cheap beer in New Zealand, a gallon milk jug full of flat Miller Lite consumed to celebrate my chest surgery.

18. I want to buy a motorcycle.

19. Since I was 15, my country's been at war. I wonder how that's fucked me up. In fact, I wonder why it hasn't fucked us all up more. Quoth Black Sabbath, I don't believe in violence, I don't even believe in peace.

25 things (installment one)

A nasty little Facebook virus that is going around: People are revealing 25 things about themselves. Does anybody else have extreme difficulty coming up with a full 25? I am finding it very rigid.

Further ado, etc, etc:

1. O my friends, there is no friend. No friend oh. Indeed.

2. Due to chest surgery, I went four months in 2006 without sneezing. To this day, sneezing remains one of my favorite bodily functions.

3. I am a crisis-watcher and catastrophe documenter. I like cusps, break-points, tide-lines, nonlinear dynamics and the inflection points between one equilibrium and another. The world would be mediocre if it did not contain the possibility of primordial chaos and sudden upheaval.

4. Most of us would not be very good at surviving on a desert island, or rebuilding civilization from scraps. The problem? Complexity and division of labor. We probably have a very good understanding of how various little bits and pieces of the world work - microbiology, for example, or epic poetry, or transmission repair. When we need other things done, we generally pay people to do them. All fine and dandy, as long as there are enough other people around. Left to our own devices, we might be able to, say, capture a wild boar, but we'd die off when it turned out that we didn't know how to purify the water, or build a shelter. Picture yourself in this situation: What competence would you spend the most energy rediscovering? I would spend a lot of time figuring out how to distill a drinkable alcohol from coconut milk.

5. The financial crisis has turned me swiftly towards the left. I am trembling between social-democracy and open advocacy of Jacobin methods. The hell of it all is that I am having no luck joining any local radical groups, as it was recently revealed that the New Zealand police was illegally spying on all of them. As a result, they appear to be suspicious of new members. So I remain an armchair revolutionary.

6. An increasing proportion of my clothing is second-hand, as I'm finding it much easier to buy used in New Zealand. (Perhaps my body type is more prevalent here?) I recently purchased a black, wool, four-button suit with lapels almost out to the sleeves. I think it was made in the 60s or something. I wear it to work on a regular basis. Nobody has objected.

7. I am a runner. This means that I will probably always half of every September wondering why organized cross-country practices haven't started, and the first month of spring anticipating track workouts. (And thinking of teammates from years past.) Due to the peculiar circumstances under which I became a runner, I will never approach the end of a race without hearing an echo of my friend Shine Ning admonishing me to "demonic strength" to pursue my opponents.

8. I appreciate my brothers. As the old saying goes, me against my brothers; my brothers and I against the rest of you.

9. In the world's beat up road sign I saw new history of time. Well at least it's something different from what they got in every other airport.

10. If I had grown up in the 1960s, I would have expected the space age to be different. I would have expected us to have extended our footprints beyond the Moon, and maybe overcome many of our problems and prejudices in the process. And what happened? We never got close to the utopian dreams of the science-fiction writers. We haven't gone back to the Moon in three decades. The most significant astronomical news of the last few years was that Pluto was not, in fact, a planet. On earth, horizons have narrowed. We don't talk about new social contracts or fundamentally remaking our world; instead, we argue over whether it's possible to reduce poverty by ten percent (while still ensuring an appropriate rate of profit), or how best to prop up parasitic financial institutions.

11. I am an iconoclastic utopian. Unlike the IMF and Milton Friedman, I don't know what the perfect world would look like. I don't know when it will arrive, or what must be done to hasten its coming. Like Walter Benjamin, I maintain that a utopia is possible, and that it can begin to slip through any of our future moments. Utopia is a hopeful monster - a thing born slightly before its time, when it's not yet known if the environment is ready for it.

12. I have lived on four continents - North America, Africa, South America, Oceania - and I miss every place that I've ever been. I think of rattlesnakes caught in chicken-wire in the Brea Hills, glass soda bottles with rust-rings around the mouth in Lagos, the dusty trails and oaks of Mt Diablo, the first snowball fight of the winter in Williamstown, deciphering the bus system in Buenos Aires, bicycling through San Carlos, the Danish windmill of Iowa, Greek diners in Chicago, seeing the bay lights from the Berkeley Hills at different times (and with different girls), the black sands of Muriwai Beach. I'm sitting here writing this in Wellington, at the bottom of the world, and realizing: I am living in all of these places.

Listening to capital

My life is cut through with irony. I spend my university years slightly suspicious of economics - and I end up working in an economic development agency. As I'm starting out at that job, the world's financial architecture crumbles under its own complexity, and some of my gut feelings are vindicated.

Not that I'm happy about the prospect of another Depression. In the absence of strong left movements (labor unions, principled social democrat parties, communists, etc), we're likely to see what some are describing as "lemon socialism" - privatized profit, socialized losses. That bank bailout? It represents the financier class's successful attempt to transfer the consequences onto the backs of people who earn many times less than they do.

This financial crisis strikes me as a case of overaccumulated capital - too many profits with not enough places to be productively invested. When overaccumulation crises occur, the excess value must be destroyed. To quote one of my favorite Germans:

In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. [...] And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.

This does not, of course, refer to financial crises directly, but to crises of overproduction (too many goods, and too few dollars to buy them). But there is a similar logic to financial crises. The excess value must be destroyed. But as finance capital, the flickering digital embodiment of pure money, is flexible in ways that physical capital (such as factories, machines, inventories) is not, the losses can be distributed elsewhere. Lemon socialism.

Another irony: While at the economic development agency, I have begun reading, in voracious fashion, the commentary of mainstream economists ranging from the libertarian fringe to the neo-Keynesians. I've learned a lot in the process, gotten myself up to speed on many of the underlying debates. (And also watched the discipline attempt to comprehend this disaster, and at times even change its thinking.) But I've also been heading further afield, attempting to get myself familiar with heterodox thinkers all the way to the Marxists.

To that end, I just finished listening to David Harvey's (excellent) lecture series on Marx's Capital. I recommend it to all of you who want something to listen to on your commute. When the mood has struck me, I have been listening to it on my walks to and from work.

Harvey's last two lectures, which cover concluding remarks and Marx's chapters on "primitive accumulation", deal with finance, debt, and credit in a very interesting way. Marx argues, responding to Adam Smith, that capital is "jump-started" by acts of primitive accumulation, in which violence and state power are used to centralize money and property in a few hands, and "proletarianize" the other hands. Harvey notes that this has, in fact, continued throughout capitalism's history.

"Accumulation by dispossession", as Harvey calls it, is a key feature of finance capital and the international debt system. Oftentimes, as happened in Latin America and Africa during the 1980s and 1990s, a country's debt is used as a means to force it to sell off state assets at fire-sale prices - leading, for example, to the privatization of water that recently caused a cholera outbreak in South America, or to the sale of state-run enterprises that thrust millions into slums (favelas, villas de emergencia, etc) in Latin America.

Or take, as another example, the impending bankruptcies of the US automakers. As part of the "restructuring" of Ford, GM, and Chrysler, workers and retirees will lose their pensions and possibly health-care - i.e. lose their rights, their property, to satisfy the needs of finance. Accumulation by dispossession.

Back to Derrida for a moment - last year, I read pieces of Derrida's Spectres of Marx, which marked his first real engagement with Marx. It was subtitled "The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International" - a fact that always mystified me. Why "debt"? What did that have to do with anything?

Looking at it now, as debts start to become a major issue - the US's rising indebtedness, never a problem when finding billions to shovel towards Halliburton, Blackwater, and tax cuts for the rich, suddenly became a concern for Republicans when talk arose of extending health benefits to children, say, or shoring up unemployment benefits - it's possible to see how debts matter. They're the means for disciplining the state and the rest of us!

Ze Germans

I am reading Derrida's The Politics of Friendship, partially due to its take on Carl Schmitt, a German legal theorist who defined politics as a matter of friends and enemies. Schmitt was also a Nazi, and, curiously enough, he is now being picked up by leftists.

Why is this? I suspect that it's got something to do with the nature of left-radicalism, which differs from left-liberalism by viewing political societies as struck with internal divisions or contradictions (rather than comprised of fundamentally similar individuals). This is a clear element of political projects from Hegel's master-slave dialectic to Marx's class struggle to Frantz Fanon's colonizers and "wretched of the earth". And in certain respects Schmitt would seem to map nicely onto the terrain of radicalism.

The logic is simple: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Schmitt critiqued liberal society; leftist intellectuals do the same. But what's interesting about Schmitt's work is that he spends a lot of time on antagonism, enmity, strife, and says precious little about friendship. Derrida, it seems, attempts to correct that ellipsis.

It is a slow-going book, with some striking statements. Consider the following:

Living - this is understood with with. Whatever the modalities may later be, living is living with.
-Politics of Friendship, p. 20

I quoted this to Anne, who made an instant connection to Martin Heidegger, another influential German philosopher and Nazi. She noted that Derrida, here, draws directly upon Heidegger's language - the division between Dasein and Mitsein, being-there and being-with. Now, I think that this is very interesting, for a number of reasons, but I want to talk about one in particular.

This linguistic revelation unsettled me slightly, disrupted my emerging relationship to this book. I have always felt unease with Heidegger, partially for murkily-thought-out philosophical reasons (i.e. the sense that he is taking Being to an unwanted level of abstraction where I feel that it calls for concreteness), and partially due to his affiliation with the Nazi Party.

We started with Schmitt, a Nazi with whom I am "comfortable" engaging, and we arrived at Heidegger, a Nazi who has always "discomforted" me. Why the difference?

A large part of it, I think, is down to directness. It's very easy to see how Schmitt's philosophy, with its naked antagonism and lack of thought about friends, could arrive at a repugnant political position. As a result, it's quite easy to keep Schmitt at arm's length, and say, oh, okay, what you've written about guerrilla warfare here in Theory of the Partisan is very smart, but...

Heidegger presents a more complex problem. People who like Heidegger tend to deny any essential connection between his repugnant political position and his philosophy, and people who don't like Heidegger often use his politics to write him off without any serious consideration of his philosophy. And my sense is that Nazism is in there, not entirely accidental and not entirely central. Unlike with Schmitt, the pitfalls are not so easily delineated.

(Which is not to say that people who read Heidegger without watching themselves are turning themselves into fascists.)

All of this may be another way of saying that I am not entirely comfortable with loss of control, readings that spiral out of my vision. Finding a layer of Heideggerese below the Derrida was like finding out that a friend with whom you had been conversing in Spanish was actually speaking Romanian. (Or, given that it's Derrida and Heidegger, more like discovering that a friend you thought was speaking Martian was actually speaking Venusian.) A shock, a reconfiguration, a new constellation appears in a flash. I wouldn't have thought this all through had Anne not said Dasein and Mitsein.

A terrible month for writing

Time is out of joint? I am out of joint, disassociated, slightly directionless. What should be a time for quiet reassessment, reawakening, has instead been fraught with anxiety. As a result, I've had trouble holding thoughts together.

Ah well.

In a totally mystifying development, I went out and ran the fourth race of the year - once again a 5k on Wellington's flat yet windy from all directions waterfront. I have scarcely gone running during the past two weeks. It was a hot and windy afternoon. I was shocked by the finish time - 18:53, or over a minute faster than last week.

I don't really understand how these things happen.