Reanimation, recuperation, redemption

Christmas in July

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 04:48:00 +0000

It is Christmas day here and we are playing cricket and frisbee on the lawn!

Holiday season

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:15:00 +0000

The gifts have been chosen, the plane tickets bought, the holiday schnapps (so to speak) drank. The year is almost done. The decade too. I am sitting at home getting things in order; packing; unfolding Anne's plastic Christmas tree; washing dishes. Thinking.

Last night, I made the following Brilliant Drunken Foods: hot chocolate and Bailey's, baked yams, grilled cheese and sauce and coriander sandwiches. I think they were appreciated.

Today, I'm cleaning up the dishes. There seem to be more dishes than counter space. My mind wanders while performing the relatively mechanical task: scrub, scrub again, rinse, drying rack. It's one of the many moments that I wish Anne was here. Not because I don't want to wash the dishes, but because it's one of those dubious pleasures of independent living that feels happy when done by two, and lonely when done alone.

I don't really think I like living alone, and I like living alone without Anne even less. Many things now fall into the category of "fun with two, sad with one": Renting a movie, going to the farmer's market, waking up on a Saturday with nothing on the schedule...

Time hangs on me like a dust–cloth, and no matter how I procrastinate there is always another 15 minutes of solitary tedium to be found.

What do we mean when we say "conservation"?

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Or: Steps in the direction of a Benjaminian environmentalism.

I took a different route home today and ended up walking by an ecological mural on Webb St. Since I last walked that way, the front of it had apparently been sandblasted off, for some unfortunate reason, but it continued unharmed around a corner. Among the painted ferns and native birds was this statement:

We did not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We borrowed it from our children.

In today's political climate, it's often easy to forget that the word "conservation" shares a root word with "conservative". While the latter now seems definitionally opposed to the former, they share the urge to preserve heritages. The urge to maintain and pass on the ecosystems that were "inherited from our ancestors" is reminiscent of conservative philosopher Edmund Burke's injunction to defend tradition against the tides of revolution.

In other words, this notion of conservationism is essentially oriented towards the past. It defends nature on the grounds that what was there yesterday should still remain tomorrow.

Past-oriented environmentalism sees nature (and hence humanity) as something that travels on a linear axis of time - from the past to the present to the future. But the mural I quoted above collapses this notion of time. The idea of "borrowing the earth from our children" presents an entirely different temporal scale: one that sees the present and future generations as bound together by nature. Here, our children don't lie ahead of us on a time-line; they are present right now in our relationships to the environment.

I drew out this contrast - between past- and future-focused environmentalism - using some of the concepts developed in Walter Benjamin's theses On the Concept of History. In them, Benjamin draws a contrast between Social Democracy, which in his time was a spent force, and some form of still-dormant iconoclastic utopianism. The cleavage between the two, he suggests, can be found in their attitude toward the past and future.

In the final analysis, Social Democracy relied upon a notion of linear progress. In its view, the working class was "moving with the current" of technological progress towards an inevitable utopia: "progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course." But if you believe that a better world will arrive anyway, why bother to struggle for it?

Benjamin's political jumping off point is his statement that

Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.

The foundation for his politics is, in short, an awareness of the past, and of the duty of the present-day "struggling, oppressed class" to avenge the wrongs done to its forebears. He symbolizes this idea in his remarkable image of the "angel of history" who "would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed" - in short, to fulfill the terms of the "secret agreement" that binds together past and present generations. But the storm called Progress is blowing the angel away, endlessly, into the future to which its back is turned.

But the situation described by the mural is somewhat different. It inverts Benjamin, suggesting that the natural environment is the subject of a "secret agreement" between the present and future generations, rather than past generations as usually believed.

Interestingly, the environmental movement does seem to be employing this rhetoric rather than appealing to an Edenic past that must be preserved and passed on. The debate over the disappointing Copenhagen summit shows that our compact with our children is now at the center stage of environmentalism. Climate modeling have painted a grim picture of what sort of world we can expect if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the present level: island nations will disappear, along with much of the living space and farmland of East Asia; extreme weather will increase the risk of mass starvation or large-scale migration; a large proportion of species will go extinct; glaciers and ice shelves will disappear; and large areas of the planet will be made to hot or too dry for human life.

The forecasts are waking a lot of people up to the calamity we are visiting upon our children.* To see clearly, it's impossible not to fold the time-line a little bit, and realize that through our present-day exploitative relations to nature, we are dealing directly with our own children. In that spirit, I propose a slight environmentalist rewriting of Benjamin's second thesis:

There is a secret agreement between future generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.

If we are to fulfill any promises - let alone deliver any utopias - we are faced with some hard choices. But, as Copenhagen shows, the "victors" of previous economic development, the nations and classes that have benefited from previous and present carbon emissions, are unwilling to relinquish their "spoils." They - we? - prefer to let others - face a constant "state of emergency".

* If I have children in about a decade, the oldest of them will be only a few years older than I am now in 2050. By this time, we will either have cut worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80%, or begun to suffer unthinkable ecological damage. But cutting emissions by that amount will also require radically restructuring our technology and habits of consumption and daily life. In other words, they will face either a horrifically worse world, or a drastically different one.

1000

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:57:00 +0000

This is my one thousandth blog post. I have been at this for almost four and a half years at this point.

A lot can change in that time - writing styles, locations, maturity, goals, ambitions, tastes, people. A lot of things have changed profoundly. A lot of things haven't changed much at all.

As you might have noticed, I'm changing the title from "Flesh-eating zombie radio" to "Reanimation, recuperation, redemption". The new title reflects a few more things than the old one, including Benjamin's politics of time, Argentinean practice of resistance, and, yes, zombies.

It seems pointless to rehash my life since July 2005. So instead I'll just point out that Serbian writer Milorad Pavic died this week. Pavic wrote several books that had a major impact on me as a teenager - The Dictionary of the Khazars, which still shapes the way I think about love stories, and Landscape Painted With Tea. His perspectives, and his nonlinear way of writing the world, have been with me for a lot longer than I've been writing here.

Other writers have followed, but from time to time I still return to Pavic. As the Romans used to say, omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

Where do we go from here?

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:55:00 +0000

Sometimes, we forget what uncertain times we are living in. Our economic system has never been more precarious - on the one hand, governments are reflating asset bubbles to prop up an over-leveraged financial sector; on the other, millions have effectively been exiled from the job market by a lack of demand for all that can be produced.

The other day, I was having a conversation with a former professor who had been teaching a course on the Great Depression. I asked: Where do we go from here? It seems as though several possibilities are occupying the discourse:

1. The first, and most popular position, is that the crisis has passed, due to unprecedented government intervention in financial markets, and that business as usual will resume shortly. Unemployment will decline extremely slowly, ruining millions of lives in the process, but the system will survive unaltered.

2. The second position, heard mostly among international political economy folks, is that we are in a moment of transition from one arrangement for global economic management to another. The importance of the US will decline, gradually or precipitously depending upon who you ask, and other leading economies - China, perhaps, or the European Union - will take its place. This will be the occasion of protracted and profound disturbances, and no small degree of friction, but capitalism will live to accumulate another day.

3. The third position, which is heard only intermittently, is that capitalism is over; it's reached its limits; it can't accumulate any further without leading to global collapse. This argument is partially ecological - the earth has reached its maximum as far as resource extraction and habitat destruction goes - and partially Marxist - there is too much capital searching for too few profitable outlets.

In short, are we living in the 1990s, when several financial collapses devastated Third World economies but left the overall economic regime intact, or in the 1930s, when a great depression led (through oceans of blood) to a total realignment of world political and economic power? Or are we living through some heretofore unknown transition?

The professor argued for a fourth option - that we are undergoing a sort of reprise of the 1970s. In the 70s, many of the key structural elements of the world economic order (in particular, the Bretton Woods agreement for fixed exchange rates) fell apart, and various forces ushered in new patterns of capital accumulation (in which real wages were held down and production increasingly subdivided across larger areas). However, the dominant groups - especially in the US - managed to reconstitute their power within these new arrangements. The US didn't lose control of the global economy as a result of the failure of Bretton Woods. They proved flexible enough to adjust to a new set of rules, and strong enough to bat off European and Japanese challengers. Were the same thing to happen today, we could expect the world's economic patterns to change but for the US to remain the center.

It is too early to judge which one of these four possibilities is correct. But I'd like to quote a few words in the direction of the third possibility (the end of growth). Here, the question seems to be: Are there alternatives? If we couldn't have capitalism, what could we have? And how would we get there?

I recently read a very interesting article by historian Tony Judt, whose book I have been stuck on for almost two years but whose articles are fascinating. It's entitled What is living and what is dead in social democracy?

Judt makes a point that I think is generally overlooked: That many of the foundations for today's social life and economic activity were laid by social democratic movements in the postwar era. The welfare state, the provision of public goods, and so on and so forth enabled businesses and average people to enjoy mutually-reinforcing prosperity by reducing inequality and developing mass-consumption middle classes. This in turn provided a powerful bulwark against the return of fascism and the spread of communism. But, Judt comments, later leaders "— even in Sweden — began to forget why they had sought such security in the first place."

Judt, who mainly studies the reverberations of World War II, sees a serious danger in rolling back social democratic initiatives. He argues, ultimately, for a "social democracy of fear" rather than one of optimism about a brighter future:

If social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear. Rather than seeking to restore a language of optimistic progress, we should begin by reacquainting ourselves with the recent past. The first task of radical dissenters today is to remind their audience of the achievements of the twentieth century, along with the likely consequences of our heedless rush to dismantle them.

The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

That these accomplishments were no more than partial should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing those same improvements: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?

A social democracy of fear is something to fight for. To abandon the labors of a century is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come. It would be pleasing—but misleading—to report that social democracy, or something like it, represents the future that we would paint for ourselves in an ideal world. It does not even represent the ideal past. But among the options available to us in the present, it is better than anything else to hand. In Orwell's words, reflecting in Homage to Catalonia upon his recent experiences in revolutionary Barcelona:

There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

There is much more to Judt's essay than I have excerpted here, but his notion of a "social democracy of fear" is one to reflect upon. For one thing, it concedes utopian dreams - and bold initiative - to the right, to the Thatcherites and neoliberal wreckers who see a perfected humanity waiting behind the next deregulation or tax cut.

Quite predictably, Marxist geographer David Harvey isn't quite ready to concede that ground. In a rambling essay entitled - overly portentously - Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition, he comments:

Of course this is utopian! But so what! We cannot afford not to be.

Harvey begins, really, with the statement that capitalism must end, or that it has no choice but to go away. He comments that:

Three percent compound growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets and financial affairs over the last two decades). There are good reasons to believe that there is no alternative to a new global order of governance that will eventually have to manage the transition to a zero growth economy.
[...]
If we are to get back to three percent growth, then this means finding new and profitable global investment opportunities for $1.6 trillion in 2010 rising to closer to $3 trillion by 2030. This contrasts with the $0.15 trillion new investment needed in 1950 and the $0.42 trillion needed in 1973 (the dollar figures are inflation adjusted).

In the face of this "necessity", he elaborates a Marxist theory of transition between one economic system to another without being programmatic or prescriptive. Rather than laying out the rules for a perfect communist utopia, he describes the ways in which a transition from capitalism could be accomplished. His analysis rests upon his understanding of the ways in which capitalism arose and then transformed itself in response to new challenges:

Social change arises through the dialectical unfolding of relations between seven moments within the body politic of capitalism viewed as an ensemble or assemblage of activities and practices:

a) technological and organizational forms of production, exchange and consumption

b) relations to nature

c) social relations between people

d) mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs

e) labor processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects

f ) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements

g) the conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction.

Each one of these moments is internally dynamic and internally marked by tensions and contradictions (just think of mental conceptions of the world) but all of them are co-dependent and co-evolve in relation to each other. The transition to capitalism entailed a mutually supporting movement across all seven moments. New technologies could not be identified and practices without new mental conceptions of the world (including that of the relation to nature and social relations). Social theorists have the habit of taking just one of the these moments and viewing it as the “silver bullet” that causes all change. We have technological determinists (Tom Friedman), environmental determinists (Jarad Diamond), daily life determinists (Paul Hawkin), labor process determinists (the autonomistas), institutionalists, and so on and so forth. They are all wrong. It is the dialectical motion across all of these moments that really counts even as there is uneven development in that motion.

When capitalism itself undergoes one of its phases of renewal, it does so precisely by co-evolving all moments, obviously not without tensions, struggles, fights and contradictions. But consider how these seven moments were configured around 1970 before the neoliberal surge and consider how they look now and you will see they have all changed in ways that re-define the operative characteristics of capitalism viewed as a non-Hegelian totality.

An anti-capitalist political movement can start anywhere (in labor processes, around mental conceptions, in the relation to nature, in social relations, in the design of revolutionary technologies and organizational forms, out of daily life or through attempts to reform institutional and administrative structures including the reconfiguration of state powers). The trick is to keep the political movement moving from one moment to another in mutually reinforcing ways. This was how capitalism arose out of feudalism and this is how something radically different called communism, socialism or whatever must arise out of capitalism. Previous attempts to create a communist or socialist alternative fatally failed to keep the dialectic between the different moments in motion and failed to embrace the unpredictabilities and uncertainties in the dialectical movement between them. Capitalism has survived precisely by keeping the dialectical movement between the moments going and constructively embracing the inevitable tensions, including crises, that result.

Change arises, of course, out of an existing state of affairs and it has to harness the possibilities immanent within an existing situation.

Harvey's describing a revolutionary - or evolutionary - process that is at once bewilderingly complex and astonishingly simple. Stripped of the Marxist terminology, here's the point:

1. Revolutionary change doesn't require you to have it all worked out in advance. It merely requires you to put continual pressure on existing institutions and weak spots, and opportunistically change pieces of the system.

2. However, in doing so you have to keep your eye on the larger picture, as a revolution in one area will be undone or absorbed by opposing forces in another unless it is followed through.

3. As a result, any revolutionary movement will need to be able to respond very rapidly to changing situations, and to shift its efforts from one "front" to another before victories are rolled back or absorbed. Single issue campaigns don't work amazingly well against the octopus of capital and the state.

What's interesting about this account of social change is that Harvey argues that anti-capitalist movements need to adopt the tactics of capital. Where Judt sees a competition between the forces of revolution - the neoliberals - and the forces of reaction - the remaining social democrats - Harvey perceives a struggle between two different kinds of revolutionary movements - one to serve capital, the other to serve the people. One is organized, of course, while the other fragmented among a variety of discouraged people and single-issue campaigns.

But who knows? Another world may be possible. And, depending upon the severity of the crisis, it may be necessary.

End of days

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:31:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I acquired a free pass to see a movie. As I had nothing better to do last night, I went to see 2012. It was a depressing experience, in part because watching movies alone is always a bit glum, and in part because it was a genuinely awful movie.

There were a few too many tearful farewells over mobile phones for my taste, honestly. There were at least three scenes where airplanes were taking off on too-short disintegrating runways and leveling out just in time to miss slamming into rock formations or collapsing buildings. (But the scene where the plane is almost hit by a subway train was sort of cool.) And it shared one major flaw of a lot of recent apocalypse films (including 28 Days Later and War of the Worlds) in that it celebrated the survival of the nuclear family against all odds.

(There has to be some sort of connection between the imagination of total disaster and the 1950s-style family dream.)

However.

Some of the individual images were quite impressive - I was most fond of the image of Los Angeles shearing off and sliding at a 45 degree angle into the sea. While most of the film was taken up with images of total natural disaster and the miraculous survival of four people against all the odds, it seemed as though the plot contained a significant element of conspiracy theory.

Essentially, it went like this: In 2009, scientists discovered that the continental plates were destabilizing, and alerted their governments. The G-8, led by the US, decided to keep the whole thing a secret while preparing "arks" in which a portion of humanity could survive.

Who was on the arks, you might ask? At the end of the movie, a US government official tells the chief scientist that they were chosen by genetic algorithms to ensure the survival of the species' diversity and talents. The scientist is skeptical - the people boarding the arks are obviously very well-heeled, while the people who built them are being left behind to die.

It turns out that the selection algorithm was this: 46 governments were notified, and they sent enough of their upper leadership to ensure the continuity of their states. (An intelligent observer would notice that only 1/4 of all countries were actually made aware of this - leaving out, I suspect, the poorest places on earth.) And the rest were chosen by their ability to front up 1 billion Euros apiece.

The American official explains how that "public-private partnership" made the survival of the human race possible. Meanwhile, the secret was kept from the public through the assassination of anybody who threatened to reveal it.

In spite of its horribleness, I wonder whether 2012 isn't actually the perfect movie for today's political mood. There's an emerging sense that there is something rotten in the state of capitalism - that our economic system is now some sort of government-assisted plutocracy, where the well-off and well-connected are delivered unlimited bailouts in the event of financial disaster, where top government officials are guaranteed high-paying lobbying and consulting jobs after leaving the "public service", and where ordinary folks are left outside the arks to drown.

In such a system, human decency and compassion can only exist as an accidental afterthought, rather than a design feature. So, for example, when one of the four completed arks fails, the other three are opened up at the last minute to accommodate the remaining plutocrats (and, yes, steelworkers too). Or to give another example, the US president stays behind in Washington to tend to his citizenry and go down with the ship. (He ends up being hit by the USS Kennedy on the White House lawn.) But as supposedly inspiring as these actions are, they merely draw into sharp relief the systemic failure to include or provide for the billions who are left to die.

In the US, you might think of Congress's recent votes to extend the duration of unemployment insurance. It's a theoretically compassionate act, but the fact remains that the American "social safety net" is completely inadequate to meet the needs of those unemployed through no fault of their own. It doesn't cover a majority of laid off workers, and replaces less than half of their previous income.

Meanwhile, the US Federal Reserve and Treasury are trying to make it mandatory to extend "emergency cover" to banks whenever they run into trouble.

One last note: Three "arks" packed with hundreds of thousands of the rich and powerful would make for an extremely interesting society. For one thing, who would cook, clean, and care for them? Would the arks also contain a designated servant underclass, or would their inhabitants be expected to do some productive work for a change? If the latter, I can't imagine that going over very well - even the end of the world isn't going to dramatically alter the attitude of the sorts of people who bring handbag dogs with them.

The whole thing reminds me of a recent study by the UK's New Economics Foundation, which found that low-paid service workers - hospital cleaners, waste recyclers, and childcare workers - produced value in excess of what they were paid, while high-paid professionals - advertising executives, bankers, and tax lawyers - actually destroyed value:

A total of six different jobs were analysed to assess their overall value. These are the study's main findings:

The elite banker

"Rather than being wealth creators bankers are being handsomely rewarded for bringing the global financial system to the brink of collapse

Paid between £500,000 and £80m a year, leading bankers destroy £7 of value for every pound they generate".

Childcare workers

"Both for families and society as a whole, looking after children could not be more important. As well as providing a valuable service for families, they release earnings potential by allowing parents to continue working. For every pound they are paid they generate up to £9.50 worth of benefits to society."

Hospital cleaners

"Play a vital role in the workings of healthcare facilities. They not only clean hospitals and maintain hygiene standards but also contribute to wider health outcomes. For every pound paid, over £10 in social value is created."

Advertising executives

The industry "encourages high spending and indebtedness. It can create insatiable aspirations, fuelling feelings of dissatisfaction, inadequacy and stress. For a salary of between £50,000 and £12m top advertising executives destroy £11 of value for every pound in value they generate".

Tax accountants

"Every pound that a tax accountant saves a client is a pound which otherwise would have gone to HM Revenue. For a salary of between £75,000 and £200,000, tax accountants destroy £47 in value, for every pound they generate."

Waste recycling workers

"Do a range of different jobs that relate to processing and preventing waste and promoting recycling. Carbon emissions are significantly reduced. There is also a value in reusing goods. For every pound of value spent on wages, £12 of value is generated for society."

Surplus value, anyone? I guarantee that a society composed solely of decision-makers and lacking in factory workers and service workers - value creators - would be completely incapable of sustaining itself. It's a good thing for the ark plutocracy that Africa seemed to have survived the mile-high tsunamis.

Lost on the Freeway EP

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:54:00 +0000

I've been listening to a 1987 album called Daddy's Highway by the Christchurch band The Bats. (Do you ever feel like you're on your dad's highway? Sometimes that's my inescapable conclusion while living in New Zealand.) The title track goes something like this:

You're lost on your daddy's highway
You're living out from day to day
But you don't know why
It's all you ever try

And this of course got me thinking about very similar words on the Meat Puppets' II, which was put out in 1984. A track called "Lost" goes like this:

Lost on the freeway again
Lookin’ for means to an end
Nobody know which way its gonna bend
Lost on the freeway again

So I started thinking about the romance of the open road in music. A quick survey of my music library turned up not that many songs about highways and byways. Most of what I listen to was made by British people, who never seem that interested in roadtrips, punks and rappers, who live in cities and tend too be too poor to afford cars, and urbanites of various other stripes.

What's left is, basically, this: musicians from the American west, who didn't have much of a choice but to drive across those big open wide spaces. The Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime mocked Ted Nugent's attitude towards freeways, but didn't actually contain any songs about driving. The Meat Puppets and Camper Van Beethoven wrote a few tracks about driving across the desert, while Modest Mouse did whole albums about being out their in the big empty. And then there's ZZ Top, whose love affair with the car was third only to their love for ridiculous beards and fur-trimmed guitars. (I know. What the fuck.)

So it's somewhat thin. An attempt to compile a mix of songs about highways - and confusing times on highways - was futile from the start, so I ended up with an EP:

Laurie Anderson - Speechless
Meat Puppets - Lost
Spoon - Car Radio
Midnight Oil - Lucky Country
The Bats - Daddy's Highway
Sonic Youth - Death Valley '69
Modest Mouse - A Life of Arctic Sounds

800 miles is a long drive inside a car. 900 miles is a long, long, long, long ways in a car. And a 1000 miles is a LONG drive inside a car. 1100 miles is too far inside a car.

Goddamn!

Philosophers

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:54:00 +0000

Today, I ran across the results from a fascinating online survey of philosophers. It was sent out through one of their trade journals, and asked philosophers what their views on various issues were. Furthermore, and possibly more interestingly, it asked philosophers what they thought other philosophers' views on various issues were. In short, a survey and a metasurvey.

Many of the questions are incomprehensible to a non-philosopher - they employ a range of obscure terms and bizarre classifications. (I suppose that this isn't that different from most specialized disciplines.) But a few of the demographic results were quite interesting:

Respondents were overwhelmingly male (5/6ths of respondents), overwhelmingly American (1/2 of respondents) and overwhelmingly interested in analytical philosophy (5/6ths of respondents).

And (if I’m reading the chart right) only about twice as many faculty responded as did philosophy PhD students. That implies that for every two professors, there is one student seeking to take his or her place as a professor. Either PhD students were much more likely to respond to the survey, or the job market must be dismal for philosophy PhD graduates.

On this front, I am inclined to compare the situation in philosophy with that in economics. The fields represent different evolutionary offshoots of what was, as late as the 1800s, one species of intellectual inquiry. In one case, jobs (and funding) are few and far between; in the other, they abound in university departments, private think-tanks, banks, international development agencies, government departments... And it’s not entirely clear to me which discipline provides more useful information about the world and human behavior.

Basically, what I’m saying is that it wouldn’t be inconceivable for the Ministry to have a Chief Philosopher rather than a Chief Economist.

On a slightly more frivolous note, a majority of philosophers apparently believe in zombies:

Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?
35.5% - Accept or lean toward: conceivable but not metaphysically possible
25.1% - Other
23.3% - Accept or lean toward: metaphysically possible
16% - Accept or lean toward: inconceivable

In other words, about a quarter think that zombies are entirely possible, while over a third think that they are "conceivable". What do philosophers know that we don't? This might indicate that, come the zombie apocalypse, a degree in philosophy may not be a handicap in the academic job market but an advantage in the ruthless struggle to survive against the undead hordes. Your average philosopher probably already has three contingency plans for escaping to his or her well-stocked cabin in the Yukon Territory, where it's too cold for zombies to move rapidly.

(Yes, I know that in philosophy "zombie" means something quite different than in the Romero-esque vernacular.)

Kelvin Tom LJ and me

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:42:00 +0000

...fucked off to town to see the Verlaines. They were a tour de force. And, unlike when Anne and I saw Xiu Xiu, they played the song that I was hoping for:

It's ten o'clock in the afternoon
You'd better come by here soon
Or I'll go out... of my mind
The winter's been unkind
Some idiot untied all five
And locked them in my room

"Don't do anything important," you said,
"With anybody else.
They fuck it up for you my friend."

But I lie on your bed and I touch your head
And your hair is as soft as the fox fur you wear
And my head feels sweet again

I sit here skulling wine
Yeah I'm smoking all the time now.
It's hard living your life
On a knife edge
You either cut your feet and die where you bleed
Or fall of the edge

"Don't do anything important," you said,
"With anybody else.
They fuck it up for you my friend."

But I lie on your bed and I touch your head
And your hair is as soft as the fox fur you wear
And my head feels sweet again
-"Joed out", the Verlaines

All I want to know after seeing that is: Who is Joe?

What my youngest brother is doing

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:48:00 +0000

My mom reports:

Harry is currently occupying a building in Berkeley. Its a protest to get at least one building to stay open 24 hours for students to study for finals. He assures me it is peaceful.

This sounds awesome! Wish I was at Berkeley. (Except that Berkeley students are facing massive tuition hikes and cuts in education quality.)

Thoughts from Auckland

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 09:22:00 +0000

I realized today that I may have been through Auckland Airport more than any other airport. At any rate I have spent a rather large amount of time here. It is one of the most inconvenient major airports to get to: Auckland's motorway is famously disconnected from the city in any case, and the airport is located way down among the mangrove flats in Manukau City. To get to it, one has to get off the motorway in the middle of Auckland, drive along a suburban street, twist around two roundabouts, and rejoin another motorway for the remaining five or six miles. Or, if you're approaching it from the south as we did today, you have to leave the main highway and approach it through an industrial park that gradually gives way to languid mangrove flats.

In an unrelated development, I discovered that it is extremely difficult to drink from a waterfountain while in possession of a substantial mustache.

I spent the weekend up in Auckland, as my dad was in town, and traveled down to Hamilton (Hamiltron) for relatives' housewarming party. It's a different end of the island. Spatially very different. Wellington is all compressed, hemmed in by steep hills and fast winds on all side, while Auckland just expands and expands into the distance. Farmland is progressively chewed up by suburban developments.

Another thing I noticed was the stores. One of my uncles recently became regional manager for a chain of paint stores, and so he was keen to show us their store out on Barry's Point Road in Takapuna. The road itself is like nothing in Wellington City: It is formerly light manufacturing territory that is now inhabited by a row of construction supply and outdoor gear stores. (It should be said that Petone, as the flat bit to the north of Wellington, does have quite a lot of that.)

Driving south through Auckland, towards Hamilton, I noticed a lot of large shedlike buildings. Some of them were warehouses and distribution centers; others were factories making metal and plastic goods, or various food products. They were all single story affairs with high roofs; within them, parts and pieces and raw materials would move around across the wide floors.

The overall impression I got was spaciousness. Auckland is much broader than Wellington; it expands rather than grows denser. In Wellington, a new building must replace an old one. In the Auckland-Hamilton-Tauranga triangle, you can simply move a mile further into the countryside. Industry has largely vanished from the city center, where tall skyscrapers have replaced smokestacks and workshops. (Overseas-owned consulting firms and banks occupy the tallest ones.) But a lot of it has been reconstituted on the outskirts.

A while ago, I got curious about what people actually did for a living in New Zealand. (In Wellington, it is sometimes possible to get the impression that everybody works for one ministry or another.) Across the entire country, about one in eight workers is employed in a factory. In some places, that is slightly higher. In Wellington, only about one in sixteen works in manufacturing. Seeing these factories - big sheds, really - it's possible to see why. There isn't the space in Wellington City or in the Hutt Valley. Factories are too horizontal to survive in diagonal Wellington.

In a way, coming to Auckland was a minor version of the shock I got upon landing in California in June. Streets were wider and larger houses sat on larger plots. A walk around the lake and down the beachfront showed forms of life that I hadn't come across recently. There were driveways - driveways! - and garages for two cars. Some of this was climactic: subtropical plants can flourish in Auckland's balmier and less temperamental climate.

I bought Ross a Lego set for his sixth birthday, which was two weeks ago today. It was a huge hit. He insisted that we sit right down before lunch and assemble the two planes in the kit, and reportedly spent all evening flying them around at home. But perhaps it was as much a present for me as for him. After all, it's been years since I built anything with Lego, and I loved it so much as a kid. I loved puzzling out the pictorial instructions, and clicking together minute piece after minute piece to create a finely engineered whole. I suppose that I should wonder why, if I have been so influenced by my past, my childhood origins and interests and experiences, Lego never pushed me towards engineering, towards designing and making intricate machines.

Interestingly, I checked the labels in the toy store where I bought the Lego, and discovered that it was one of the few plastic toys on offer that wasn't manufactured in China.

Uppers and downers, uppers and downers

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:23:00 +0000

That is to say, white wine and strong black tea. And good conversation.

Unbridled free market capitalism couldn't win an election

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:26:00 +0000

From a survey released almost a month ago:

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.

In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well.

Most thought regulation and reform of the capitalist system were necessary.

[...]

More than 29,000 people in 27 countries were questioned. In only two countries, the United States and Pakistan, did more than one in five people feel that capitalism works well as it stands.

Almost a quarter - 23% of those who responded - feel it is fatally flawed. That is the view of 43% in France, 38% in Mexico and 35% in Brazil.

And there is very strong support around the world for governments to distribute wealth more evenly. That is backed by majorities in 22 of the 27 countries.

If there is one issue where a global consensus seems to emerge from the survey it is this: there are majorities almost everywhere wanting government to be more active in regulating business.

What this says to me is that if our economic models were actually put to a vote, rather than installed behind the scenes by shadowy technocrats like me, the currently-accepted policies would lose. Quite badly.

The problem, I suppose, is that there's effectively no democratic means of dissenting. If you think that free-market capitalism is working well, then great: you get to choose between the two major parties. If you think that more regulation is needed, you can vote for the major center-left party, and hope that they haven't been bought out too thoroughly by big business and banks.

But if you're one of the 23% who thinks that the whole thing needs to be replaced, there are neither well-known ideas for doing so nor parties to carry out such a program. This, ironically, seems to be one more "market failure": the failure of the market of ideas to sell any ideas about alternatives to markets.

Fantasy political science courses

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:28:00 +0000

If I had to draft up, say, an introductory political theory class overnight, I'd probably stick with the basics. Teach them Plato Aristotle Machiavelli Hobbes Rousseau Locke Mill Marx Arendt, add on one or two out of personal pique, and we're more or less done with the canon. It would get the job done - "the job" being giving them an idea of some of the perspectives on offer in the field - in a relatively workmanlike way.

The problem, I suppose, is that making the material into a coherent whole would be left mainly up to the student. Survey courses, I've found, can do a good job teaching individual theories, but a poor job presenting them as a coherent field of thought. The broader question - what is political theory actually addressing? - remains nebulous. People go away saying things like, "Marx and Plato are both political theorists because, uh, they're both writing about politics."

As we say in mathematics, that's true, but trivial. (Or not necessarily so much. A political theory course dedicated to exploring the question of "What is politics?" would be interesting and important, as there is a great deal of debate over what politics is. The problem is that it's a tough question - too advanced, in fact, to present to introductory students straight off the bat.)

If I had, say, several weeks to design such a course, I would present one that addressed a specific theme within political theory. The best theory courses I had took this tack - one (in political theory) was focused on war, and the other (in literature) was focused on postmodernism. Every week, class would revolve around the same basic questions: "What is war/postmodernism according to this writer? How does it relate to politics/aesthetics? How does this compare with what others are saying about war/postmodernism?"

The benefit of this approach is that it puts everyone in dialogue around a specific theme. Students get to go away saying "Political theory is about war, and the various perspectives on war are X Y Z..."

So with that in mind, I might think it worthwhile to spend a semester on the following topics:

Inequality

This couldn't be a straight political theory class, as a lot of the debates over what inequality is, and whether it is good or bad, aren't done by political theorists but by economists and other social scientists. If I had to teach this course, I'd probably start off with several theoretical perspectives on inequality - perhaps Marx, John Rawls, and, I dunno, Hayek or someone repulsively libertarian.

Following that, I'd get into some of the empirical literature on inequality - what's been happening to it? (Increasing in worldwide and within countries since the 1970s.) is that good or bad? how does inequality affect other parts of a society?

In this section, I'd probably have people read, at a minimum, Saez's work on income inequality, Worlds Apart by Milanovic, which discusses global inequality, and The Spirit Level by Pickett and Wilkinson, which discusses the relationship between inequality, health, happiness, etc.

I'd like to finish up the course reflecting back upon how inequality relates to the concepts presented by the theorists discussed in the first section. So: How does inequality lead to revolutions? Does it undermine democratic institutions? Does it improve well-being through faster growth? And, more broadly, does political theory need to be concerned with inequality, or can we simply leave it to the statisticians?

Money

We tend to take money for granted: It's so common a store of value that we don't even notice it. (Incidentally, living in NZ has made me hyper-aware of the socially constructed nature of money, as the NZD - and hence my purchasing power and the value of my labour - often fluctuates wildly from week to week.) But paper money, which has a monopoly within a specific country and can be printed at will by its central government, is actually an extremely recent invention. This course would teach the history of money and theories of money.

If I had to take a first stab at the reading list, I would probably start out with a couple of different theories of value. Perhaps Marx and some 19th-century economists would be a good place to start. Marx's theory of value contains within it a theory of money as the unit of account by which all other commodities are measured. It would also be an idea to include a few differing perspectives on the gold standard - i.e. the principle that all paper money must be "backed" by government holdings of gold - and inflation.

Following that, I'd want to teach a few histories of money and finance. Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money is the only one that comes to mind, unfortunately, as I think he's a bit of a windbag. Perhaps some Giovanni Arrighi on the origins of modern finance?

Capitalist crises

From whence the economic/financial crisis? It's an interesting question, but the problem with this course is that it would run the risk of turning into a course on heterodox economics. I'd teach Minsky, Marx, Keynes, Ricardo, Schumpeter, Harvey...

Yeah, I think that it would end up as more of an economics course for people who are skeptical about capitalism's stability. The problem with teaching such a course in political science, of course, is that word "political". When political theorists write about crises, they tend to talk about crises of government, rather than economies. (Even most Marxists do this, which is somewhat ironic but perhaps tactically sound given that their opponents were often organized around strong states.)

Perhaps to make a course like this work, it would have to be refocused - less about "what causes capitalist crises?" and more about "what effect do such crises have on governments, societies, etc?"

Utopia

This would be quite fascinating, I think: Distilling five centuries worth of views of how to build the perfect human society. I'd organize the class around a contrast, suggested by Russell Jacoby, between "blueprint utopians" and "iconoclastic utopians". With that in mind, I would probably start off with a chapter or two from his book Picture Imperfect.

The former type attempts to plan out the details of a perfected society. Thomas More was the first to do this, in his book Utopia - although Plato arguably had a strong claim as well. He was succeeded by people such as French socialist Fourier, and various utopian communities in the 1800s. For completeness, I would do some readings about the Soviet theory of the New Man and Mao's vision of a Cultural Revolution - both of which attempted to make over people and society into a perfected communist society. Following this, I would do some readings from latter-day blueprint drawers - the economists from the Chicago School and IMF, who have attempted to run plans and rules roughshod over actually existing societies and people.

The latter type, which sometimes draws upon Jewish notions of the unknowability of god, asserts that utopia is possible but that its form is not yet certain. Here, I'd definitely read some Bloch, Benjamin, Buck-Morss, and Jameson - and the rest slip my mind.

There would be a third category in the course as well, composed of the utopians who occupy a gray area. Chief among them would be Marx - as we are never certain whether he's got a plan for communist society or not, and whether he thinks that he can offer one in advance.

I've got a couple of other ideas as well - courses on the themes of "Space" and "Citizenship", which, unlike all of the above, wouldn't feature the word "Marx." But they can wait. It's not like anyone's currently beating down my door asking me to teach political science. This whole exercise remains on the level of a pointy-headed variant of fantasy football.

Point that thing somewhere else

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:32:00 +0000

One of the nice things about Wellington is the graffiti. It seems to be mostly tolerated, and a lot of it is very good and weird. There's a lot of stray surfaces all around the city that get recovered frequently - often in broad daylight.

We were walking up Devon Street the other week and come across several guys rolling gray paint over a tagged-up wall. When I asked whether they were buffing it or getting ready to paint something new, I was pleased to hear that it was the latter. And, sure enough, the next day this bright piece of work had appeared:

I think that it's a shout-out to Texas. Hi Texas!

The next weekend, the same guys were back with a bunch of friends, working on the adjacent wall. They grayed out the tags and throwups and covered the whole wall with a set of gorgeous pieces:

This graf instructs us that we need "less chat" and "more cat" - whatever that means.

I like the abstract nature of this piece, and the treefern in the background.

This bit reminds me of Jesse, for whatever reason.

Finally, another wall just a bit further down Devon got buffed and re-tagged a few days later. This bit of wall was installed, several months behind schedule, to shore up the crumbling sidewalk above. It sat there for a few weeks before BMD - an excellent local artist/collective - put up a bizarre two-headed monster on the spot. That was buffed within a week - a great loss for the beauty of the neighborhood. And then someone tagged "ViVa John Key" in the same spot, and it was left for two months. A conspiracy? I think so.

The wall was buffed again last week, and someone put up this line drawing of what appears to be a loving caterpillar:

On great wealth

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:06:00 +0000

The Baltimore City Paper has something well worth reading today. It is part of an ongoing blog series on the financial crisis. This article makes a point that is often sorely overlooked when discussing wealth and work.

Critics of the millionaire tax say they've never heard of a poor man hiring a worker. Only the rich do that; therefore, to render the wealthy less so by taxation is to destroy jobs.

The theory presumes that the wealthy hire people out of charity. In this model, jobs are bestowed upon lucky workers by the industrious entrepreneur, who derives his own wealth from some magical practices (having nothing to do with the workers he may hire) which are anyway unfathomable to outsiders.

To hear self-proclaimed capitalists make this argument is irritating, because it suggests they don't understand how our economic system is supposed to work. They have the process exactly backwards.

In a capitalist system, investors make money not despite hiring workers, but because they hire workers who, if they are adequately managed, create value in excess of the wages and benefits they are paid. This value is called "profit," and the business' owner gets to keep that, after paying taxes.

In a properly functioning capitalist economy, rich people don't "create jobs" for workers; workers, upon having jobs, create rich people.

That's how the system works, in theory.

The article goes on to discuss the ways in which the world deviates from this theory, pointing out that a great deal of the "wealth-creation" now supposedly taking place in the financial system is, in fact, wealth redistribution by means of tax scams and job- and pension-slashing. (This is what David Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession".)

One of the things that I find troublesome about the economics profession is that it often fails to consider how value is created. It's often assumed away as a type of alchemy carried out by entrepreneurs: Bill Gates comes up with a brilliant idea, and boom, Microsoft is worth billions and you have a computer on your desktop.

Basically, though, value is something that occurs when people make things that are of use to other people. (Those things don't necessarily have to be material - a lot of what people want these days is intangible.) And because modern economies are so complex, a lot of work - and a lot of workers - are needed to produce and distribute even the most basic of things. Devaluing them will, in the end, destabilize the capitalist mode of production - and the wealth - that depends upon their labor.

Up a tree

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:43:00 +0000

Oh man. Last night was sort of strange now that I think of it.

Went to see Casiotone for the Painfully Alone with a few friends. Brought an ice cream cone into the venue and ate it while sipping Castle Point. Music was good! As I had not heard Casiotone before, at some points I expected him to break into a cover of Laurie Anderson or New Order. Everyone else was cheering for his cover of Paul Simon.

Casiotone - a one-man band - was highly likable. He talked about how he really enjoyed this visit to New Zealand, as he saw some animals he didn't get to see the previous time, such as the yellow-eyed penguin and the spiny echidna. After the show, I invited him over to dinner on behalf of Tom and Criggy.

Then I climbed off the balcony and onto the nearby roofs, up a fire escape ladder, and finally into what turned out to be the courtyard of the venue-formerly-known-as-the-Valve.

Epilogues were doing the jerk to a teenage punk band at the Mighty Mighty, and, of course, chips and cheese at a kebab shop. It was an enjoyably strange night.

Addendum: Tom and I were mightily pissed off to learn that we had missed seeing the Verlaines the previous night.

Not spoken lightly

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:14:00 +0000

Or: Live acts I won't see while in New Zealand.

Admittedly, the list of live acts that you can't see in NZ is fairly long. I recently figured out why prices for live shows of any reputability were so high in Wellington: Because there's only one venue large enough to accommodate a significant crowd. Curse you for your monopoly pricing and shitty beer, San Fran Bathhouse!

Prompted by a Verlaines song from Tom, I went out in search of Kiwi rock bands. I didn't know much apart from some hand-wavy references to Flying Nun Records and the Dunedin Sound. So I lucked out when I found the blog Kiwi Tapes, which aimed to preserve all these random bits of musical flotsam and jetsam from New Zealand's period of cultural independence (c. 1980-present).

Kiwi Tapes collated four discs worth of music, 80 songs from 80 different artists. Some is virtually forgotten - when I try to search for a quite excellent Gisborne band called "Wasp Factory", all I get is references to an Iain Banks novel (whoever he is). Other bits of it are relatively well known.

Chris Knox is one of the better, and better known, artists on the tapes. He was part of a pioneering lo-fi band called the Tall Dwarfs, and then put out a bunch of solo material. Like some of his contemporaries, he was influential in the American indie rock scene. Minimum instrumentation, striking vocals. I would describe him as the Lou Reed of New Zealand rock.

(Then again, I probably have a penchant for describing people as the Lou Reed of X. Once Anne and I got into a heated debate over whether Richard Hell or Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks was the Lou Reed of punk rock. I was winning until one of us pointed out that Lou Reed was the Lou Reed of punk rock.)

So I've been getting into Chris Knox. I put his best-known song ("Not Given Lightly") on a mix for Anne. And today, I read in the paper that he had a stroke that left him virtually incapable of speaking. He's said to be in high spirits, which is good. But it looks as though no tours are on the cards.

I recommend that you check out Kiwi Tapes, because I'm just going to play them for you anyway the next time I see you.

Addendum: One interesting tidbit from one of the articles I linked to above:

“Punk was big for sure but in Dunedin we were extremely isolated and it took a long time for musical trends to filter down this far. You have to appreciate the pre-globalisation technological environment that existed back then (at least for us). A record released in the UK may have taken up to two years before a copy of the master was shipped out here and the pressing plant in Wellington produced the record. Case in point, Ian Curtis was dead and buried before any JD records were released here. They were awaited with great anticipation because people had read about the band in NME or whatever, but the actual records took an age to filter through. Being something of a backwater meant there was something of a disincentive to follow trends (why bother when they were moribund at their source by the time we knew about them). This allowed or fostered inclusive listening habits, anything from the 60's up to punk. (hence my rather conservative record collection was not frowned upon in any way as being uncool).” -- Graeme Downes, by email, 2005.

This is the reason why I am doing an informal series on New Zealand trade policy in the pre- and post-1984 era. As this passage indicates, daily life and culture were dramatically different in a distant economy with import licensing and without modern instantaneous data exchange. Because LPs had to be made in New Zealand rather than imported, they couldn't be had rapidly. (One of the most interesting bits of junk is a mix tape in a friend's car. The cassette tape reads "Made in New Zealand under license from West Germany" - a fossil in more than one respect.)

The Galapagos era of trade policy sometimes enabled a multitude of cultural, social, and technological niches to thrive. The results were often slower and clunkier, of course, but there were diamonds in the rough. New Zealand is more complicated to assess, as its arguably didn't begin to assert a culture independent of Britain until the 1980s, when trade barriers were being swept away rapidly. As a result - or a cause - of the still-mutating NZ identity, the last few decades have seen increasing film-making in NZ, and increasing consumption of local music.

The urbanization of the Third World

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 04:55:00 +0000

As I have mentioned before, I am working on updating several papers I wrote in my last semester of college. The essays dealt with a few similar themes: revolutionary classes and production arrangements, the spatial dimension of insurgency, and the urbanization of the Third World in an age of persistent economic crises. My instinct is that these things are connected, and that they can be theorized together through a central concrete phenomenon. (In this I am drawing upon Walter Benjamin's method of building theory through "constellations" of related images or phenomena.)

As I've finally finished a draft of this essay, which deals with the relationship between slum growth in the Third World and war and conflict, here is the rough draft of the introduction:

The world's demographics are rapidly changing as the Third World moves towards "maximum urbanization." Global population is expected to peak around 10 billion in the middle of the century, and most of this growth will occur in the urban areas of developing countries, which are forecasted to double to roughly 4 billion inhabitants by 2035. Poverty and socioeconomic exclusion are expected to follow, as the cities of the developing world lack the employment opportunities, land, housing, and infrastructure needed to sustain this burgeoning population.

This growth will, in turn, shape and change cities themselves. The biggest housing boom of the next decades will occur not in the Californian exurbs but in informal settlements in and around hundreds of Third World cities. UN-Habitat forecasts that the number of people dwelling in slums will more than double to 2 billion in the next 25 years. It defines slums as "an area that combines, to various extents... inadequate access to safe water, inadequate access to sanitation and other infrastructure, poor structural quality of housing, overcrowding, [and] insecure residential status." (UN-Habitat 12) Beneath this definition lies a range of social and economic ills ranging from poverty and joblessness to official hostility.

In short, "slum" is a term that encompasses a very heterogeneous mix of living situations ranging from poorly-built and -maintained state housing projects to small self-constructed encampments in marginal land. And as slums are a phenomenon that spans the globe, slum-dwellers are correspondingly kaleidoscopic in their origins and identities. As a result, it is difficult to survey the slums, and even more so to theorize about them. However, it is equally clear that it is necessary to engage with the slums.

Two recent works attempt to do so. The first, UN-Habitat's 2003 report The Challenge of Slums, attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon. In keeping with the UN's Millennium Development Goals, it focuses on developmental and economic aspects of the slums, arguing that the key problems are lack of housing and lack of regular work. The second, Mike Davis's polemical 2006 book Planet of Slums, adds to this report, delving into the environmental, health, and social problems arising from the growth of slums. It takes an apocalyptic stance, arguing that rapidly growing Third World cities represent an unrecognized humanitarian catastrophe for their inhabitants.

In the epilogue to Planet, Davis meditates upon the consequences of slum growth, which he sees as a sign of the creation and entrenchment of a "surplus humanity." Drawing upon US military planning documents, he suggests that one possible result would be the entrenchment of a new type of conflict - "a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor." (PS 205) However, this speculation is more of an apocalyptic coda than an in-depth analysis. Neither Davis nor UN-Habitat is willing to go too far "down Vietnam street". (PS 205)

This essay sets out to analyze the relationship between slum growth and conflict. In many respects, the urbanization of insurgency - as a 1994 RAND Corporation report called it (PS 203) - is creating an entirely new style of warfare. Conflicts are increasingly fought in a new type of terrain, in which the opposing sides employ new spatial, organizational, and technological advantages. On the other hand, today's urban wars tend to resemble the old form of partisan warfare, as practiced by both the Spaniards against Napoleon's invasion and the Viet Cong against the US military.

German legal theorist Carl Schmitt's 1963 Theory of the Partisan draws upon this historical scope to lay out the characteristics of irregular partisan fighters. He argues that partisans have four key characteristics. First, they are irregular fighters, both legally and spatially, hiding within local terrain and civilian populations rather than fighting in the open. Second, they arise, autochthonically, from that terrain and population, and fight primarily to defend it. Third, their fighting - and hence political commitment - is a product of real enmity that is limited to specific territories and objectives. (However, partisans are susceptible to capture as shock troops of aggressive movements aimed at overthrowing the global order.) Fourth, they are caught up within a "forcefield" of technological progress, keeping pace with new developments in military hardware and tactics.

While Schmitt developed these categories to describe the rural anti-imperialist and revolutionary movements of the Cold War, it can productively be applied to conflicts originating in the Third World slums of today and tomorrow. This essay will argue that Schmitt's theory of the partisan is still relevant today, and that it suggests that the mass production of slums will tend to engender persistent, albeit episodic and territorially disconnected, violent encounters between slum-dwellers and Western militaries. This will continue, his theory suggests, until the conditions that produce slums are erased - either by development aid and economic opportunity, or through their inhabitants organizing themselves into a cohesive global opposition movement.

To support this thesis, I will draw upon the studies by UN-Habitat and Davis, and also upon the growing literature on cities, demographics, and war. The latter, which dates to the mid-1990s, has been written by a strange mix of military planners and leftist academics. While it is sometimes linked to research being done on Third World urbanization and the growth of slums, it does not tend to focus closely on those phenomena. However, the studies that I will draw upon, which include both military research and skeptical analyses of military plans, suggest both that war and insurgency is becoming increasingly urban, and that Schmitt's theory of the partisan remains relevant in a new milieu.

Across countries

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 03:25:00 +0000

I made mischief with the internet this week. According to the email list of the Williams cross country team, of which I was a member, a competing team had stolen their mascot, a three-decade old, repeatedly patched and modified stuffed bear. This is basically a yearly ritual. Revenge was being planned, including spamming the other team's email accounts and mobile phones.

I thought that this was pretty childish, and, in a puckish mood, forwarded all of this to a random member of the other team. It seems as though my ex-teammates' plans were foiled, as I was unsubscribed from the listserv and sent hate-mail.

While I ran for four years at Williams, the team never sat right with me. It was very cliquish - never openly unfriendly, but definitely cool towards people who didn't fit in in terms of attitude, culture, or background. I agonized about not "fitting in" for a while, and finally decided simply to show up, run, leave, and do other things with the rest of my time.

The contradictions of the situation can be summed up one of the nasty emails I received. It was sent by someone that I barely knew - I don't think that he made much of an impression on me because he was not particularly interesting. The letter reads, in part:

You piece of shit. What the fuck is wrong with you? If you didn't want to hear about the bear then get off the listserv. Come to think of it, the fact that you were on the listserv in the first place is a fucking joke considering how small of a role you played on the team.

[...]

God, I hate you. Eat a dick and die you fucking turncoat.

There is also a lot of incoherent swearing and the (frankly laughable) threat that "I can't wait to cross paths again. I assure you, you will be getting a fucking fantastic reception." But consider the logic contained within these two paragraphs. In them, the correspondent makes two contradictory claims.

Assertion 1: Because I played a small role on the team, I shouldn't consider myself a part of it.
Assertion 2: I am a "turncoat" for letting their rivals know of the plans.

The entire reason that this person claims to "hate" me is because I "betrayed" the team, of which I was a member. But at the same time, he argues that I was not a real member of the team in the first place. See the logical problem? One can't simultaneously not be in a group and be a traitor to the group.

This, I suppose, is the reason that I have always been uncomfortable with the Williams cross country team. They consistently signaled to those on the margins that they (a) weren't good enough (or WASP-y enough) to be part of the team and that they (b) had to display obsequiousness to the totems and rituals of the team. I thought that this was absurd, and still do.

A lot has been happening lately

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:28:00 +0000

Deer Jesus: He was mounted for your sins.

My sin is that I'm too damn busy. I have been writing an essay for the past week and a half - the longest time I've ever spent writing anything. It's the slums paper - at last. I've been waking up at 7am to write.

Also: Geoff came down from Auckland to visit. That was fantastic. We drank beers and played on flying foxes.

We threw a Halloween party that entailed Anne going insane for half a week while running around for decorations. The pumpkins have gone moldy and we threw out the fake cobwebs and burned all the candles to stubs, but we've still got:
-Five plastic skulls, painted red;
-Three maroon curtains;
-Beads galore;
-A framed photograph of Karl Marx; and
-Some of the surplus booze that people brought.

I dressed as Fidel Castro. We were serving vodka martinis from a pitcher in the fridge.

This weekend we set off fireworks in a slightly belated Guy Fawkes. Went to the beach in November and could actually swim; discovered that the second-best fish-and-chips shop in the country was serving fish-on-a-bun in Paraparaumu. Finished watching the second season of Star Trek that same day. We're drinking it in as fast as possible. And drinking as fast as possible.

Thin lives

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 09:40:00 +0000

Today, I took advantage of the lengthening days and ran up to Brooklyn, down through Happy Valley, and out to the south coast in Owhiro Bay. A few stereotypical white clouds dotted the sky to the south, and the sinking sun was turning the headlands to the west into dark silhouettes and the rocky coastal outcrops to the east into brightly-lit montages. The white-capped mountains of the South Island were barely visible to the west; a view straight south fell entirely off the horizon, and beyond that, Antarctica.

I ran east along the coast, past hard black volcanic rocks and weatherbeaten houses with rust streaking from every nail, to Island Bay and then back to human things. Berhampore, Newtown, Aro Valley.

Last night we were up in Wadestown, to the hilly north, at a going-away party for a French friend. At a lull in the party, I walked out the front door and ran out of words. The house looked straight out across Wellington Harbour, and it was a dark night. The docks below us cast some lights onto the water. To the north there were the bright lights of industrial Petone. Across the harbour I could see two lines of light - one running completely horizontal on the road out to Eastbourne, and the Wainuiomata grade slanting up into the hills. A few stars were visible above. Every other part of the vista was completely black.

Wellington Harbour, although deep, is wide with a narrow mouth. That, combined with the heavy winds that sweep down through it, keeps chop and waves to a minimum. (On the ferry back from Picton I could actually see the wind cutting the tops off of the waves left in the boat's wake.) So at night, there's very little to distinguish it from the sky above.

Sky above me, sea below, and very little to distinguish the two. Humans were present only in a narrow band of light. I thought about it.

The universe is an incomprehensibly enormous place, and no human has ever been more than 240,000 miles away from the earth. On a galactic scale, that's a rounding error. The part of the earth's atmosphere that is suitable for human life extends barely ten miles above the earth's surface. With short exceptions, we can't live outside that infinitesimally tiny bubble.

Our normal human activities don't go any deeper than the deepest mineshaft (a bit over two miles) or any higher than the average commercial flight (roughly 6 miles). In actual fact, most human life takes place within a thin terrestrial crust that's perhaps 50 feet thick. We don't even cover the whole planet, 70 percent of which is covered with water, and which has one whole continent that is permanently covered in ice. By any reasonable scale, our crust is unimaginably tiny - or perhaps, thin enough to be conceivable by us.

I don't think that there's a system of thought that is truly capable of coming to terms with this extraordinary fact. Our modes of thinking are definitively crustismic.

My former high school principal

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:55:00 +0000

To my great delight, my mom sent me this story from my old local paper. My old high-school principal, Becky Smith, is on forced leave after seemingly threatening a student with a pellet gun. (Article at Contra Costa Times.)

The principal of Monte Vista High in Danville is on administrative leave while the school district investigates her handling of an Airsoft pistol in front of a student.

Rebecca Smith has been on leave since Oct. 8 while the district investigates an incident in which she "handled a gun in an inappropriate manner in the presence of a student," said San Ramon Valley school district spokesman Terry Koehne.

He said the district has determined it was an Airsoft pistol, which shoots plastic pellets that generally cannot break the skin. They are available at sporting goods and other stores. The pistols, generally considered a toy, are not powerful enough for hunting.

Sources have told Bay Area News Group that the incident stemmed from actions before a girls volleyball game, when a player had an inflatable toy that resembled a gun. The student was called to the principal's office, which is where the incident with the Airsoft pistol took place.

Translation: She waved a pellet gun in the student's face.

Smith could not be reached for comment. She came to the school in 1981, working as an assistant principal before becoming principal in 1996, according to the school's Web site.

Her time at the school has not been without controversy. In 2007, a district audit found that nearly $100,000 raised by recent graduating classes was spent for items not approved by students. The funds were raised by each graduating class during their years at the school, with students determining where the money goes, but administrators instead transferred the cash to other accounts and decided where to spend it. Items purchased included computers, landscaping and rugs.

My own experience with Becky Smith has been that she's mendacious, authoritarian, and interested in her own personal aggrandizement much more than the interests of her students. The only time I dealt directly with her was during my senior year, when she advised me to lie on a scholarship application.

It was the Bank of America scholarship; they picked four students for different areas. I was selected for applied arts because (a) I had taken technical classes (Architectural Design) and (b) had a really high GPA. They could have found people better qualified in the applied arts, but never mind that.

Smith brought us in to her office to tell us about the scholarships, applications, etc. In the process she suggested that we improve our chances of winning (and her chances of looking good) by padding our resumes either by exaggerating upon things that we had done or adding additional things that we had not done.

I was quite disgusted by the entire thing. I later learned that one of the girls who did get the scholarship did weasel on her resume. Meanwhile, I kept myself to the facts, and didn't get the scholarship. So my opinion of Becky Smith is quite low, and this worsens it.

Freight logistics

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:39:00 +0000

This title isn't a clever play on words. This is actually a blog post on transportation.

I've been reading an interesting book entitled - don't laugh - The Structure and Dynamics of New Zealand Industries. It's quite dry in most parts, but a lot of intriguing facts slip through the gaps between economic statistics. For example, two firms have controlled virtually the entire beer market since 1970s, and in 1999 about 70% of the beer brewed was something called "brown beer" - "full-coloured, relatively sweet, with a malty taste and an ale-like character... a lager of a type unique to New Zealand." (124)

That fact in turn illuminates another question that has been perplexing me: Why NZers have a preference for Mac's Gold, a truly terrible lager, when Lion Brown is (a) cheaper and (b) tastes beerish rather than like water adulterated with car exhaust. Lagers are relatively new here, and after roughly a century of drinking basically the same couple of types of brown beer, people here are keen to try something, anything else. The American beer market, on the other hand, has long since been built on crappy lagers, and as a result I am happy to try anything else.

But I digress.

Over the weekend, Anne and I went down to Marlborough, where we drank a lot of wine and took all sorts of Victorian-style transportation. We bridged the gap between the islands on a ferry, biked 20 miles to Blenheim, biked around vineyards, canoed, and took the train back to Picton. The train, like all of those in NZ, ran on narrow-gauge tracks, and as we stood up on the open viewing deck we could feel it sway from side to side. (Pretty much every other developed country, and many of the developing ones, use wider tracks, which reduce sway and allow faster speeds. NZ decided to build narrow tracks in the late 1800s in order to get the railway through the mountainous central North Island.)

I think about trains quite a lot. My petroleum geologist dad reckons that we're probably more than half the way through the earth's reserves of petroleum - i.e. the stored sun energy of hundreds of millions of years - and using oil at a quickening pace. When oil runs down, newer means of transport - cars, trucks, and airplanes - will become more costly. Possibly too costly. So maybe more trains are in our future.

The history of freight logistics in NZ is mainly the history of trains. From the 1930s to the 1980s, New Zealand's government pursued a policy of regulation and subsidies that favored rail transport over most other forms. Rail was preferred in part because, as a trading department of the government, prices and staffing levels could be fixed to meet industrial and employment policy needs. This led to a variety of inefficiencies - of which more later. In the 1980s, this regulated system was rapidly dismantled - the Railways Department was corporatized, and later privatized, and road freight was deregulated.

I am reading Structure and Dynamics in part for the "signs of the times" moments that it provides. In particular, I found this passage fascinating:

Prior to 1961, trucks were only allowed to move freight up to 30 miles (50 kms). In 1961 the protection limit was raised to 40 miles (67 kms). At this time several commodities were exempt, including livestock. The revised limit was further increased to 94 miles (150kms) in 1977, and the exemptions were increased. (191)

This was done mainly to protect the government's investment in costly rail infrastructure. But after its election in 1984, the Labour Party dismantled these controls (and a remarkable array of others - indeed, Structure and Dynamics often reads like "the New Zealand economy après le déluge) in favor of increased efficiency.

Efficiency they got. The new, market driven railways cut staff by 3/4 and managed to carry the same amount of freight. "For example, ten years ago it took seven to ten days to ship goods from Auckland to Christchurch. Today [1995], Tranz Rail offers a door-to-door service in under 24 hours." (193) They did so by getting rid of most of the funny little rules that formerly predominated, such as the requirement to stop trains after traveling a certain distance, which caused the Railways Department to set up tearooms and loading docks in the middle of nowhere.

(Or, as my dad's favorite bit of verse goes, "The squalid tea of Mercer is not strained.")

In short, the "controlled" freight logistics sector made transport of goods much more costly and time-consuming than it could have been. What I'm thinking about, I suppose, is the social world that would tend to produce. In a very basic sense, raising transport costs tends to make local production more economic. (It also tends to raise the costs of goods, and hence reduces their availability to most people.) So in a world of costly, slow transport, one effectively without road freight, we may see more localized economies. People and products would move less, and money would tend to circulate within smaller regions rather than nationally or globally.

So, for example, most rural NZ towns tended to have a cheese factory, as it was harder to transport milk long distances before it spoiled. (As Structure and Dynamics also comments, the level of technology also helped to spread around cheese manufacturing, as refrigerated milk tankers were only developed in the 1950s.) I would imagine that other types of production were also more dispersed.

I don't expect a return to the bad old days of the highly regulated economy. Like it or not, today's standards of governance - openness to trade and capital flows, deregulation, policies to foster competition - are pretty well entrenched. Economists, policymakers and businesses are in agreement on these policies, and other voices are poorly organized and rarely heard within the state machinery.

Governments aren't going to get back into the business of telling truck drivers how far they can ship goods. But I don't think that it's entirely unreasonable to expect fuel constraints to severely curtail the use of road transport. In the absence of major technological change, we might end up having to ship goods by rail or not at all, and at higher prices. This could in turn lead us back to a situation like that in pre-1980s New Zealand - more local production, more expensive goods, etc.

On the other hand, one general principle about the evolution of societies is that, absent a catastrophic exhaustion of natural resources, they tend to become more complex over time. To put it in Frederic Jameson's terms, the ease of cognitive mapping (i.e. representing the social space in a way intelligible to an individual) tends to decline as society expands. The only ultimate limit to this is the the ability of the planet's ecosystems and natural resources to sustain increased complexity.

Progressive change - even of a revolutionary nature - is unlikely to return things to a state of primitivist simplicity, as doing so would undermine its foundations in labyrinthine modern life. Conservative, reactionary, and fascistic change are similarly unable to return things to a "simpler past", in spite of their shared mythmaking around original sin, pastoralism, and racial purity.

On Jameson's terms, there's no turning back - we can shift from trains to trucks and back again, but the general drift will be towards increasing unmappability. All we can do is to widen the gauges of the tracks, and tell bigger and better stories about all of the places to which our labor is flowing.

The 21st century Tolstoy

noreply@blogger.com (Noons) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:20:00 +0000

I can't believe we just spent over an hour watching all 22 episodes of R. Kelly's Trapped In The Closet. It was like a social-realist novel for the 2000s.

Now pause the movie cause what I'm about to say to y'all is so damn twisted, not only is there a man in his cabinet, but the man is a midget.