Richard Foreman’s “Old Fashioned Prostitutes” at the Public Theater

Around this time last year I was busy writing my thoughts on a lot of the theater I was attending here in New York City. A post, 21st Century Capitalism on Stage at the Public Theater was an exploration of two shows there that directly confronted the human dimension of this economic crisis in interesting ways. One of them was the now-notorious one-man show by Mike Daisy about his trip to China to visit the Apple factories there (“The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”) ; the other was Ethan Lipton’s wry and absurd jazzy song cycle about his being laid off from a survival job titled “No Place to Go.”

This spring finds me attending a show at the Public again, but a show by the avant-garde theatrical experimenter Richard Foreman. Foreman is by now a legend in this area of post-dramatic theater and it is a treat to see an artist born in 1937 and who lived through and pushed forward that whole 1960s experimental era get his slot at a quality theater in NYC to present his latest bizarre creation. In an era obsessed with youth and the next big thing, it is nice that the Public has reached out to a few of these figures (Sondheim, born in 1930, got his troubled musical “Wise Guys” mounted there a few years back. No one else in NYC wanted to produce it. I saw the show in D.C. back in 2002 when it was still called “Bounce.” The musical has had four titles. As they say: If you don’t know what your title is, you don’t know what your show is about. But Sondheim is a genius and geniuses should be given a stage and actors and a budget to present their failures to us. Or at least that’s how it should be.)

I have only seen one other Richard Foreman show, “DEEP TRANCE BEHAVIOR IN POTATOLAND” back in 2008. What struck me most of all about that show was how claustrophobic the set was; how the set was constructed, close in to the audience in a space (the Theater at St. Marks) that I have seen so many times completely open and empty; how the actors were allowed no freedom at all, every move and gesture and even facial position and emotion seemed choreographed (as opposed to watching an actor “be real” or really “become” her character in an identificatory way; how the male actors played characters who were like vampires and how the female actors were very feminine; how loud his sound design was at times; how the film at the end had images shot in Japan?; and perhaps most of all (this is the key thing I remember) is that in the hour of the play’s duration I became quite aware of the physicality of my own body, my own weight. How I was sitting, how my legs were crossed, these became conscious as the post-dramatic nature of the “show” took me away from that affective head space I usually find myself when viewing art. Time did not fly by, it sank. Time sank down into my body, time became material and uncomfortable.

And the last time I had felt such a feeling was sitting in church, in a hard pew with a soft cushion that attempted to ameliorate the hardness of the seat. I wouldn’t call this boredom necessarily. Boredom is an emotion engendered more from a deeper unexpressed anxiety that in contemporary society time is money–The monetization of time and the greater and greater monetization of every aspect of our private experience has widened to a totalitarian extent and created the conditions where something like “boredom” can be felt. Thus the wonder Westerners and other citizens of capitalist megalopolises feel when they encounter societies that still have a whiff of that “old” world where wages were not earned by giving one’s time, but by giving the fruits of one’s labor, or one’s whole person in the case of slavery. Even in so-called “developing” societies where capital still has a long way to go in its primary process of uprooting millions of peasants from their land the psychological regime in place is closer to a world where “boredom” is impossible. One should also think how the risk of boredom is so great in countries such as the USA that an absurd fraction of our economy, workers and time is spent in different ways to create and consume the enchanting puzzles of the culture and entertainment and media industry. Or the other side of the coin of boredom is synthetic entertainment. And to be clear: A world without boredom, such as a feudal society, a slavery society or primitive society is not “better” but one in which the mediating emotions are unnecessary– As the wage relation becomes general and experience itself becomes quantified and monetized the emotions also find themselves internalized. The genius of the wage form and the mystery of how surplus value is extracted (As Marx spent his whole career analyzing, researching and theorizing) is that the previous labor forms of giving a share of the fruits of one’s labor to the lord, or emperor or tax collector (or “giving” one’s whole self in the case of slavery) make the collection of surplus value explicit and spectacular; with the generalization of the wage form, the collection of surplus value is mystified, hidden and the old anger and fury against one’s lord or emperor, say, is now internalized against one self– “I need a new job”, “I agreed to work this crappy job for this crappy pay”, “I need to work harder and get a promotion.”

Back to the church– The Protestant church and the internalization process of the personal God is of key importance in the study of the development of markets and the emergence of capitalism and the wage form. But I would say boredom is not what I felt at church when I sat there most Sundays of my youth. It was more an awareness of myself, my body and the incoherence of my thoughts. If the converse of boredom is entertainment and the church services I attended were certainly not entertainment then boredom was not what I felt. Perhaps I could call it “awareness” with a healthy dose of impatience. The explosion of Yoga in contemporary USA (and perhaps worldwide?) as an “exercise” phenomena probably has something to do with fitness, but much more to do with this religious head space that eschews “entertainment”, which leads us towards the body.

Where did that Protestant religious head space that is so closely tied to the emergence of capitalism go? And what exactly is its relationship to capital? Is it really the Weberian cliché of the “Protestant Work Ethic” that is almost synonymous with the “spirit”of capitalism. What if the Protestant head space is instead a sort of sanity check against the oncoming poison gas of capital that is on the verge of annihilating our time, subdividing it into nanoseconds of billable moments, annihilating our space? A question for a different post or different time – - But there can be no doubt that in the era of “Enjoy!” and the totalitarian grip “entertainment” has over our lives that the religious headspace has fallen off and many churches even see their services as forms of entertainment– What has been lost is that mental sphere of “awareness” with a healthy dose of annoyance, annoyance because it is simply not possible to wage a battle against entertainment with non-dramatic forms without annoying a good percentage of your entertainment-drunk audience.

Think of your time– Your work and how your work shapes your time. That is your work and your work is intimately connected to your money and your self-reproduction. This is one headspace of the wage, or the salary. Then think about your non-work time. This will be eating, sleeping, communicating, sex and entertainment. Eating and sleeping time are twinned with our work time because it is our money which allows us to eat and our sleeping which allows us to restore our headspace so that we can work. It is “entertainment” time where there is a gap, a gap that can be filled by contemporary “boredom”, but more likely it will become an oversaturated, mediated zone where our sexual phantasies or revolutionary dreaming play out and intersect and fuse and forge and spill over into the other zones. This is not the religious space. The religious space confronts itself partially as the negation of the entertainment space–and under a commiditized temporality this negation takes on a dangerously negative aspect because if it seriously presents itself as anti-entertainment then this would lead us to question its content, which must be political. So as I wrote religion becomes entertainment in many instances, but also “devotional” forms of entertainment like yoga and “exercise” also find a more widespread acceptance.

So what if theater itself were to lead in this direction? It already has in many ways and many forms. I don’t think Richard Foreman is interested in anything “religious” and I haven’t read enough of his journals online to really know what his overarching concerns are. I’m also not really aware of what his explicit theoretical approach is. But to experience one of his plays is to be taken into a new headspace that will be unfamiliar to most contemporary audiences. I have avoided speaking of the content of this play, “Old-Fashioned Prostitutes”, but I can only say that watching the work is like swimming around the mind of an older man and watching the ego, id and superego duke it out against a dyad of desirable coquettes: The main character “Samuel” speaks in a vague southern accent with the grammar of an ego struggling with memories interrupted by a judgmental, superegoish recorded voice harshly interjecting its opinion: “OKAY”. All the while an impish ID scrambles across the stage like a character from MAD Magazine, holding a mirror to deflect the gaze back onto the viewer– Then the prostitutes lean seductively on poles and talk in gnomic utterances and slowly grow more and more confrontational. Both “Samuel” and the prostitute “Suzie” have “best friends”, narcissistic doubles that fill out the action, heighten the chaos, and shuffle the variety of character combinations while lights blink then glow and fade, sound crashes, walls move upstage and quickly close, doors slam, and characters drop boxes off the front of the stage, a sort of ritualized menstruation.

There is poetry and it is evocative, but we are in another man’s mind and only so much signal can come from so much noise. There is no history here except a personal internal history– “Old-fashioned” gives us an idea that there is a sort of literary nostalgia at play, but beyond that… It is much easier to write of plays that confront a historical situation such as the two I wrote about last year and linked to above, but a play such as this (even if unconsciously) tells us something about our contemporaneity, our time, the material passing of time and specifically what that passing of time feels like, or can feel like, or did feel like.

Bangladesh at a Precipice – A tale of two massacres

I attended a talk last Thursday night at CUNY Graduate Center that focused on the Shahbag Movement in Bangladesh, which was a quasi-spontaneous movement of individuals who descended on the Shahbag neighborhood a few months ago in Dhaka in protest after an International Crimes Tribunal there failed to declare a death sentence on war criminal Abdul Quader Mollah (who received a life sentence instead). This tribunal and the movement that created it (and pressures it) revolves around the prosecution of a few key figures who have escaped punishment for the more generalized, widespread violence and genocide at the time of Bangladesh’s war for independence from Pakistan in 1971– The recent collapse of a textile factory in Dhaka that has killed at least 501, 600 (which will most likely rise) is one of the worst manufacturing disasters in human history and will also see the trials of a few key figures who will be found guilty while the more generalized, widespread violence of capitalistic competition and cost-cutting will escape prosecution. These two events, while concerned with scenarios separated by decades and distanced by the different foci of nationalism/genocide vs. international finance/proletarianization still allow us to focus on this unique area of the world where a confluence of currents shows the crisis of bourgeois/market capitalist democracy.

Bangladesh of course was not always “Bangladesh”– Because of its predominately Muslim population it was made a part of Pakistan (called “East Pakistan”) at the time of Indian independence and partition in the late 1940s. This drawing of borders and creation of two new countries (India and Pakistan) of course led to many massacres as the exact position of each country’s new boundary line left many groups on the wrong side of the fence as unprotected minorities. Millions of Hindus in what was now Pakistan and East Pakistan (Bangladesh) fled their homelands as refugees into India, and many Muslims fled violence in India and emigrated as well. Communal violence was rampant and many massacres and atrocities were committed by both sides.

Fast forward to 1971 when Bengalis in East Pakistan fought for independence from Pakistan after the 1970 election result (which was won by the Bengali nationalist party Awami League) was not honored by the Military leadership in Pakistan. Bengalis, who already speak a different language from the Urdu-speaking Pakistanis and were chafing under the yoke their distant ruler took up arms against the Pakistani army which quickly became murderous, targeting intellectuals and instituting a policy of mass-rape. This terrorizing of a civilian population coincided with months of organized and spontaneous guerrilla warfare against the Pakistani army by Bengali irregulars and militias. But when the Indian army (provoked into fighting by Pakistan preemptively bombing an Indian airbase) joined the struggle, the combined Indian-Bengali forces had the Pakistani army on its knees within two weeks. 93,000 Pakistani soldiers surrendered, most (or all?) of which escaped punishment (even for heinous crimes) under complicated prisoner exchanges to ensure the safe return of Bengalis residing in (West) Pakistan. The context for this 2013 International Crimes Tribunal is thus atrocities committed in 1971 not by members of the Pakistani army (who received a blanket amnesty), but the “fifth column” of Bengalis who supported the Pakistanis and helped commit massacres during the war.

These Razakar collaborators for the most part escaped trial through similar amnesty or prisoner-exchange schemes after the war with the result that over the decades the Bengali traitors to the independence movement have slowly found their way back into power. Because the British split their colony along religious lines with Pakistan becoming an Islamic state and India Hindu, the Bengali Razakars (which means “volunteer” in Urdu) in Bangladesh who fought with or guided the Pakistani Army mostly had the ideological commitment to preserving Pakistan and East Pakistan as one country for all Muslim believers. The Islamic political parties and formations such as Jamaat-e-Islami are thus at the center of the controversy as the demands of the Shahbag protestors modulated into demands that this Islamic party be banned once again and forbidden from politics.

The contemporary political terrain is complex and adding to the complexity is that (as one speaker put it) 80% of all Bengalis alive today were born after the 1971 conflict. It is a very young country and yet the salient political questions hinge on historical questions that occurred before a large majority of the citizens were born. One of the speakers Nazmul Sultan had previously published an article on Radical Notes titled “Situating the Shahbag Movement: Re-founding the National?” which raises the national question in the context of Shahbag:

Instead of simply seeking to resolve the lingering question of history, this movement is arguably accomplishing something more than that: it is re-founding what we earlier termed the national. The national, of course, never left Bangladeshis.  Since the Jamaatis [members of Jamaat-e-Islami] have held state-power and have some public support, they often claim to be equally naturalised and the term Razakar no longer exists. While the members of Jamaat may win seats in national election and get one or two ministerial posts, the symbolic form of the term Razakar remains an outsider. This thus does not make the symbolic form of the Razakar integral to “the national”. The Jamaatis’ argument is something like this: their political opponents construe them as outsider or Razakar, while they do not actually fit the term. By arguing so, they speak in the terms of the very language that seeks to banish them from the ground of the countable (or the legitimate). The empty place of Razakar, the constitutive other, remains intact even when the signified Razakars come to share state power. The Razakars are those who can neither be absolutely excluded from the national (for the national needs the other to demarcate itself), nor can they be counted as an inclusive category of the national.

By mobilising the demand for excluding the Razakars from the legitimate space of politics, the Shahbag movement is not only seeking to resolve a historical question, but also performing the re-foundation of the national – i.e. it is tantamount to a call for re-asserting the absolute that is the national. The desire to negate that which denies the self-evident reality of the national accomplishes more than provisionally clarifying the unfinished assertion of the foundation. Without this recurrent negation of the other – that is the Razakar –  the national cannot lay a positive foundation for itself. This negation, in other words, is a positive negation. The re-foundation is neither a return nor a plain continuation of the foundation. This is a renewal that seeks to re-assert the foundation, but the renewal takes place at a distinct point of conjuncture, and thus open to political prospects and pitfalls that often overflow the logical form of the idealised foundation.

This renewal of the national also is an evtentualization of politics that attempts to short-circuit the moribund processes of the current liberal market democracy that has so spectacularly failed to protect its citizens. Throughout the 1990s groups calling for a trial against these Razakars were prosecuted as enemies of the state for digging up long-buried ghosts. Calling for a tribunal of war criminals was simply not an acceptable position to take and those agitating for the trials were thought to be anti-Islamic, or even Indian spies trying to destabilize Bangladesh. But when the thoroughly capitalist (but roughly “liberal”) Awami League party found itself out of power for almost a decade, it decided to listen to popular demands and made the trial of the war criminals a part of the platform for the 2008 elections, which they won decisively. This is not the first time a bourgeois party which smiles left but walks right attempts to energize its base through electoral promises which it is nearly structurally incapable of fulfilling. But a promise is a promise and 40 years after the atrocities were committed the trials are taking place. In the case of this current tribunal there are rumors of backroom deals between the Awami League and its rivals the BNP that swayed the judges from delivering the death penalty. The Shahbag movement is thus that attempt to circumvent the bourgeois political machines and their commitment to cementing their own power and profit.

The owner of the factory that has massacred so many workers Mohammed Sohel Rana, paints an interesting portrait of interconnections between politics and business in Bangladesh. As this NPR article quotes, you couldn’t find a better example of how capital operates in the realm of contemporary electoral politics:

While Rana is currently a leader of the youth group of the ruling Awami League, he has also worked for that party’s archrival, the Bangladesh National Party.

“He doesn’t belong to any particular political party,” said Ashrafuddin Khan Imu, an Awami League leader and longtime Rana rival. “Whatever party is in power, he is there.”

But blaming a “corrupt” political process for this manufacturing catastrophe is a cynical ploy better left to magazines such as the Economist which from a safe distance have been busy ridiculing the Bengali government and regulatory agencies for their carelessness while watching the clothing retailers profits grow and grow. But Bangladesh is also a country where the prominent labor organizer Aminul Islam was tortured and murdered in April 2012. Although a gruesome death, it is this sort of violent intimidation and repression that creates the conditions in which wages can be as low as they are. The Gap, Walmart, Tommy Hilfiger, H&M are all dependent on a labor environment that actively works to crush worker organization and brutally repress their leaders. The rule of bourgeois political parties is a rule by massacre.

In early 2010, the country’s popular prime minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, expressed sympathy for garment factory workers. But after the government agreed to raise minimum wages to 3,000 taka, she said that her government would not tolerate any more protests.

Soon after, the police arrested Mr. Islam, along with more than a dozen other workers and activists. Mr. Islam and several of his associates were charged with instigating riots — accusations that he and the others denied. Criminal cases against him and two other senior labor leaders, Kalpona Akhter and Babul Akter, are pending.

Article on Jacobin Magazine

My blog thoughts have usually extended (devolved) into magazine-length articles anyway, so I decided to send my thoughts on Les Miserables (both the musical, the film(s), the book) and Victor Hugo to Jacobin Magazine and now it is HERE. An essay that attempts to bridge the gap between (musical) theater and politics, a recurring theme here. 

“enjoy” 

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/01/les-miserables-and-its-critics/

Where there is no history (you make history) : Suburban Violence

There’s an interesting piece up on Jacobin today about the recent massacre at the Newtown, CT elementary school. I’m unfamiliar with the author James Livingston’s work (though his blog is usually a good read) and although I have not read his polemic Against Thrift , it seems to be a buy-side Keynesian response the crisis along the lines of: “Tax the rich, increase the salaries of workers whose increased spending will solve the economic crisis.” This is a far cry from Marx’s take on crisis, which doesn’t make it necessarily wrong of course. I thought n+1′s Benjamin Kunkel was something of a Marxist as he has reviewed in prominent places David Harvey and Frederic Jameson, but Kunkel blurbs this book as “the most important book yet to emerge from the ongoing economic crisis.” This book it seems approaches the underconsumption debate by claiming that a more even distribution of income will solve the problem of a lack of demand for all the commodities that have gone unsold. This is a historic debate which Rosa Luxembourg famously picked up, but in the end, if one reads Marx and all the volumes of Capital, one may begin to agree with him as he writes in the 20th chapter of Volume II that

It is sheer tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity of effective consumption, or of effective consumers.

Perhaps I’ll engage more with these issues later as this politics of Tax the Rich! surely fails as an effective politics in the short and long-run.

Livingston, in this Jacobin essay is talking about the young rampage-killer Adam Lanza and has some very interesting points to make. One of the best is his citing of William James’ analysis of a crisis of masculinity James saw dawning as technological advancement eventually disenfranchises a physical masculinity from its traditional role and begins to destabilize masculinity itself. Livingstone writes:

Here’s how James put it: “The transition to a ‘pleasure economy’ may be fatal to a being wielding no powers of defence against its disintegrative influences.  If we speak of the fear of emancipation from the fear regime, we put the whole situation into a single phrase: fear regarding ourselves now taking place of the ancient fear of the enemy.”

[James] worried that this fear of emancipation from the older “pain economy” would take a regressively masculine form; he knew the manly virtues could be reinstated by the violent means of war, by militarism unabashed, and he designed his moral equivalent—real work with a social purpose—with that possibility in mind.

Back in February I wrote a blog I titled The Duke: Paul Blart / John Pike Part 1 which aside from providing this blog with a frighteningly steady stream of Google image searches for that infamous Mall Cop, attempted an analysis of masculinity in the era of the petty private security guard. John Pike, you may remember was the campus police officer at the University of California who with flat affect pepper sprayed students congregating on the common. The image of his casual comportment and emotionless gesture as he routinely sprayed the eyes of the sitting students like so many weeds between the patio bricks quickly created an explosive internet meme. Very soon one could find John Pike spraying the eyes of different innocents in famous paintings, etc…

And then there is John Pike’s uniform. He’s suited up in black with a leather belt containing assorted holsters. He’s wearing black gloves, heavy boots and dons a hard plastic helmet with a chin-strap and clear plastic visor. Although attempting a level of sartorial intimidation that some of the other riot police squads these days deploy (such as the deadly and brutal Oakland PD), what made John Pike’s image so iconic was that his slightly flabby physique fails to live up to the athletic “Black Ops” uniform and image. Even his gait is irregular as he is clumsily caught mid-step in an almost-balletic fourth position.

John Pike, with his baggy black police uniform bulging in the wrong places is the image of the contemporary crisis of American masculinity, one that the movie Paul Blart: Mall Cop embraces at face value and grafts onto a sentimental tale of masculine redemption.

Comedies do not joke around: This 2009 movie Paul Blart: Mall Cop had a budget of $26 million dollars; its total box office ended up at $183 million dollars. That is not only a fat return on a small investment, but like many low-budget films that drive millions to the theaters, its a signpost of sorts as to which way the political winds are blowing. The plot follows the sad slouch of the mall cop who attempts to catch a criminal who is attempting to steal credit card numbers from the mall’s stores and escape to the Cayman Islands by taking hostages and escaping in an airplane. Of course the criminal’s henchmen are a racially diverse group of Gen-X extreme sportsmen who get around on their evil skateboards and BMX bikes. (So much for the glory days of 1980s emancipatory alternative sports films such as Gleaming the Cube and Karate Kid).

Contrary to Peggy Noonan’s desire for the gruff macho masculinity of John Wayne’s Duke to return after 9/11 and straighten the course of a manhood that had been veering off in the previous decades towards decadence and passivity, the rent-a-cop of Paul Blart and his accidental real-life farcical double in John Blart instead paint a picture of the overweight, foolish and sentimental masculinity that struggles and fails with its desire to fill the shoes of a previous “pain economy” of physical skill. The transition to James’ so-called “pleasure economy”  is of course met with a response of the cult of hyper-masculinity, a imperial violence and more traditional forms of martial reaction, but on the home front, Paul Blart teaches us that being a mall cop, though ridiculous, is a perfectly decent job that also puts one on the front lines of the more insidious war against terror. The recent batch of deadly shootings in malls, movie theaters, schools and other suburban commons would tend to render this argument correct.

Livingstone sees the Adam Lanzas (and one might as well add the countless other young men who don military fatigues and accoutrements before they begin bloody rampages against defenseless citizens) as a symptom of this transition of masculinity:

Adam Lanza couldn’t have told us what made him unimportant as a person, or a man.  He lived forward without understanding backward, so he needed a template, a blueprint, a script he didn’t author.  He found it in the insane militarism of American political culture—that’s why he dressed up like a commando and stormed an elementary school as if it were a fortified bunker.  He played his part.

The unabashed hyper-masculine militarism he performed was, as William James suggested, a hysterical reaction formation against the “pleasure economy” we have created but denied—as if we could still locate the source of manhood in the demands of necessary labor, in the rigors of military discipline, in the sacrifice of war.

If Adam Lanza is the tragedy, then the Paul Blarts and the John Pikes are the satyr play. But what is the plot, what does this transition of masculinity mean as materially lived experience?

Is there not a space of history, where experience and family life obtain a historical topography, either rural (peasant or family farmer) or urban/metropolitan? Is this dichotomy too simplistic? Is it too easy to say that peasant experience and the experience of working classes in the urban centers and factory towns were collective experiences, and that collectives entail history, or live experience as history? The peasant experience is especially lived history as land use and its very geographic specificity enables one’s self-reproduction and the reproduction of one’s group (I avoid the problematic word “family” here…) One thinks of the peasants in Mexico demanding the ancient paper land titles from the Church lock-box during times of rural rebellion and unrest. The farms of America and the rural ideal in a different way tied work and experience to a historical development as the frontier grew, vanished, and found other technological ways of manifesting  itself. The crops failing, the farm going under to creditors, the struggle against the market,  the competitive techniques that form the basis of the agricultural revolution that snowballed into what we call capitalism is a history tied to place.

The urban experience obviously offers a horizon so vast and an intensity so strong that each moment offers a million simultaneities, the collective worker is self-evident, the mass worker a stark fact. The creation of history is effortless but also a weighty burden. The neo-liberal project to abandon multiple urban centers (Detroit, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, etc, etc) in the wake of urban unrest and falling rates of profit proves the historical gravity of 20th century urban agglomeration: The center cannot hold.

That leaves us with the suburb, where there is no history.

The suburb has no manifest history because it is habitation as negation. Negation of the city, negation of collective living, negation of apartments, negation of danger, negation of violence, negation of blacks, negation of race, negation of riots, negation of work, negation of labor, negation of time, negation of sound, negation of space, negation of land, negation of knowing, negation of history.

The suburb has no manifest history because speaking the history of the suburbs is to speak that which it negates, which is impossible in the suburbs.

What is this land on which these false streets wind their artificial curves?

What must be realized is that the transition of masculinity has a spatial component which is the Suburban. The overweening arrogance of the Suburban falsely proclaims an ahistorical and atomized terra nova. “Here nothing ever happens” the real estate agent joyfully proclaims, although consciously aware of the idiosyncrasies of the market and fluctuating land values, not to mention the spectre of History that always threatens the suburbs in the guise of the City, Race, and creeping Poverty. The nervous suburb negates these with a gate; the successful suburb negates history by surrounding itself with a protective moat of less successful suburbs. This inner sanctum is an impossible absolute zero of anti-history and impeccable, if impossibly surreal taste.

But the Suburban itself is starting to show signs of a historical transition along the lines the William James writes above when he is quoted on masculinity:

“If we speak of the fear of emancipation from the fear regime, we put the whole situation into a single phrase: fear regarding ourselves now taking place of the ancient fear of the enemy.”

The glorious heydey of the Suburban was its birth as Negation in a pure fear regime. But now, with the trituration of almost all forms of urban and non-urban working-class resistance through the abandonment of the cities and the neo-liberal offensive, the suburb loses its originary myth and finds itself without an other. There is nothing left to negate, so it starts to fear itself.

Where there is no history, you make history. The bloody and cruel form this contemporary suburban history self-manifests can only be understandable against the banal and purposefully ahistorical innocence of its victims. The horrible trough the Adam Lanzas plow is not just that of an over-militized masculinity gone haywire, but a furrow in whose declivity grows the horizon of history itself.

Peasants vs. Markets

I wrote about Alan Knight’s scholarship here a few days ago and it is so rich a text I know it will be providing me with blog fodder for the next few weeks! His Mexico: The Colonial era also includes a brief rundown of a debate in peasant studies that focused on what effect growing markets have on peasant economies. Specifically, in Mexico the demographic collapse of the native population through disease weakened the old encomienda labor system in which a Spaniard ruler was allocated a native tribe who would be obligated to provide a surplus of food and craft goods. The repartimiento system was also an important compulsory labor service that natives were accustomed to performing from the Aztec times as indian chieftains or caciques would allocate so many laborers to a Spaniard for a certain amount of time. This practice was eventually was outlawed in 1633. But as mines started to be developed in the northern regions and also haciendas, or large agricultural plantations, to serve the growing towns, wage labor began to slowly outpace other forms. It is the growth of this wage labor and market relations against tradition peasant formations that is questioned in the literature. This is the “classic” problem of the historical transition of a self-sustaining peasant economy under the stress of economic mutations.

Wage labor in Mexico in the late 16th and throughout the 17th centuries was one method used to recruit labor to work in a competitive demographic environment. Knight then describes how this phenomenon in Mexico illuminates a wider debate in peasant studies and the study of historical change:

Scholarly battle has periodically been joined between, on the one hand, scholars who tend to see the spread of the market and free labour as heightening peasant exploitation (hence, they suggest, peasants cling to older, paternalistic or pre-capitalist forms, expressive, perhaps, of a ‘moral economy’ and resist the capricious and pernicious penetration of market relations) and, on the other hand, scholars who regard the market, which peasants enter as sellers of both goods and labour, as emancipatory, as freeing peasants from coercive, paternalistic authority, and as permitting them economic advancement, even cultural liberation.

Knight then footnotes the end of this paragraph thus:

The classic debate pitted Scott, Moral Economy, against Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley, 1979). McCloskey, ‘The Economics of Choice: Neoclassical Supply and Demand’ weighs in for Popkin and berates ‘the baleful influence’ of Scott, Polanyi and Chayanov; his contribution, characteristically bullish but unconvincing, is based on the dubious notion that a rational (neoclassical) economic actor, parachuted into a feudal society (as described by the baleful trio) would make a killing (‘buying low from one set of fools in order to sell high to another’) rather than be killed.

Knight takes the middle path in this debate and simply concludes that “neither side has a monopoly on the truth” and that the history of the rise of agrarian capitalism tends to show that these market forces tend to fracture peasant communities apart. The result can be a new strata of profit-makers such as the yeoman farmers of England, or the kulaks in Russia who create a new class of market-minded producers and owners, though results vary of course from region to region, with many specificities and regional nuances. This “debate” over the winners and losers, the beneficiaries and victims of the breakup of peasant economies in the face of growing markets will of course depend on the sample of data one is researching, its breadth, and the duration of the length of the transition one is studying.

Clearly in the Mexican process the disaster of foreign conquest and disease created the conditions in which the extremely hierarchical and class-stratified society of the Aztecs was almost flattened by the invasion of the Spanish. This would not just be a peasant economy under transition, such as in Vietnam which Scott and Popkin argue over, but an entire society in the process of near-disintegration. An analogy perhaps could be made with the post-Black Death scenario of the late 14th century in Europe, which Robert Brenner sees as the catalyst which induces extremely varying regional reactions by the peasantry and lords (varying reactions which ‘prove’ that varying strengths of class struggle can determine historical directions and trends). To compare the Mexican situation with Brenner’s analysis of Europe is too great a task for this short blog post, but a project that I hope Knight’s book can elucidate as I read more of his work.

To return the ‘debate’ over peasant rationality– Here is James C. Scott describing his own work in an interview:

‘Moral Economy’ was an argument about rational choice, that the problem of peasants was the danger of going under and its consequences were catastrophic; as agriculturalists they choose different crops, planning schedules, soil conditions etc., and spread their bets in a series of prudent economic strategies; they don’t maximize their yield in the way that modern capitalists would, but minimize the danger of going under; my argument was that they also had a whole series of social arrangements that do the same thing – about the sharing of harvests, the forced charity within the village so that big men have to distribute surpluses – so had a set of arrangements that were organized again, not to maximize production but minimize social danger to individuals in the community; these gradually broke down with capitalist markets and the colonial tax systems; …. my book begins with Tawney’s metaphor of the peasantry situation being like a man up to his chin in water so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him; the title of my book was ‘The Subsistence Ethic and Peasant Politics’ or something like that; then I was convinced by having read ‘Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ by Edward Thompson to use “moral economy” in the title; I think it was a mistake in the long run because it suggested to people who didn’t read the book carefully that I had a series of altruistic peasants who were not operating rationally; underlined by Popkin calling his book ‘The Rational Peasant’

The ensuing debate essentially boils down to neoclassically minded thinkers (and capitalist apologists) such as Popkin and McCloskey accusing their theoretical opponents of “not treat[ing] the dead with due respect.” Peasants, these neoclassical thinkers argue, are rational beings who are going to want to maximize ____ instead of remain content with the status quo. So we have a struggle over competing views of human nature, one in which a peasant or economic actor is ‘free to choose’ among several options, while of course constrained by several variables; the other in which the peasant or economic actor is beholden to tradition, or even subordination and necessity. McCloskey can accuse Scott, Polyani and Chayanov of having a ‘baleful’ influence because these thinkers supposedly strip the economic actor of the ability to choose, to better his life, to make it in the world, a view which is the theoretical foundation of neoclassical economics. In the case of Chayanov, who was eventually shot by Stalin, his view of the peasantry was that the family would only create as much food and crafts as would be absolutely necessary for their own reproduction. There was little production of surplus in order to create for the market and better one’s lot–

I’ll have to do more research on Chayanov’s work but it seems like a fruitful zone of study in light of Brenner? Chayanov saw the difficulty of peasants’ supposed transition into capitalist market economies, which is essentially Brenner’s view as well. I believe that it is this position of peasant intransigeance, which Stalin saw as ignoring the class stratification inside peasant economies (Kulaks, etc) that led to Chayanov becoming an enemy of the state. The peasant question is the stumbling block of the Russian Revolution, and that a theoretical dispute over the peasantry would have such varying responses speaks to the importance this debate holds for theories of history and political struggle as well.

I can only once again thank Alan Knight for foregrounding these debates in his Mexico book–

Alan Knight

“Readers of this blog should be aware that I’ve written about the so-called “Brenner Debate”, which is an interrogation and furthering of the Marxist theory of history and historical change. Beginning a study on the Mexican Revolution of 1910 I acquired a small collection of recommended books that would guide me through this fascinating (but understudied by Americans) episode: Womack’s classic Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, which is delightfully inscribed in my paperback copy:

“Dear Mary, This to prevent you from becoming “narrow” and “exclusive” when you go to Rutgers. Love, Barbara”

Aldolpho Gilly’s The Mexican Revolution, which Gilly (an Argentinian) wrote in the infamous Lecumburri prison–I have only dipped a single toe into Gilly’s book, but I can’t say his statistical analysis on the growth of Mexico’s industrial proletariat at the end of the 19th century impressed me too much. I detect a whiff of “doth-protest-too-much” in his trying to keep his story sufficiently “Marxist” (perhaps one could say a naive “Capital Volume 1-Marxist” in the over-emphasis of industrial labor?), when clearly the main story in Mexico is the agrarian transformation.

This then leads us to Alan Knight (with whom I was completely unfamiliar I’ll just admit) and whose 1986 2-volume The Mexican Revolution published by Cambridge is the classic study of the conflict, with v.1 subtitled Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants, v.2 Counter-revolution and Reconstruction. Since 1986 Knight has written many other studies of different aspects of Mexico and more recently Cambridge has commissioned him to write a three-volume history of Mexico, two of which volumes are complete: Mexico: from the Beginning to the Spanish Conquest (Cambridge 2002) and Mexico: The Colonial Era (Cambridge, 2002).

I am of course far from familiar with every history book written in a Marxist vein that is published recently, but I was shocked (in a good way!) to read in Alan Knight’s work a commitment to engage with the major (as I see them) historiographic disputes. One should keep in mind that the volume I’m currently reading (Mexico: The Colonial Era) is I believe intended for a more general audience, but Knight knows and makes clear that theoretical visions of history, theories of history, are of decisive importance. Knight footnotes Robert Brenner’s classic 1976 Past and Present article on page 66 and 199 of this volume and far from needing to endorse uncritically Brenner’s controversial thesis to elicit a incredulous smile from me, a mere engagement with the debate, a knowledge of the stakes of historical change as defined by this debate is enough to make my heart beat faster. I am aware that these sort of debates take place with much more frequency in journals such as Historical Materialism, New Left Review and others that have devoted considerable time to the possibilities and problems of writing history “after” Marx. That I would encounter these debates in a seriously academic, but still “general” history of Mexico is something I guess I would not have expected. History makes sense to me and even gains a dramatic element of a sporting event, say, when there is something fundamental at stake. But I should just quote Knight to give you a flavor of his learned style.

The concluding part of the first part of this Colonial Mexico volume Knight titles “Theoretical Reprise” and begins with this footnote (please enjoy, more Knight analysis to come soon, hopefully!)

And before entering the ‘theoretical reprise’ a brief health warning may be in order. Some students of history – readers or practitioners – dislike all theory on principle: they ‘do not recognize the need to construct a model and every attempt in such a direction….calls forth their indignation’ (Kula, Economic Theory of the Feudal System, p. 19). In practice, however, such theoretical know-nothings, in order to remain afloat in the swirling maelstrom of history, usually clutch at tacit assumptions if not arrant prejudices (‘common sense’ and ‘human nature’ are two favourites). Clearly, it is better that historians explicitly define their working theories (or models, or ‘organizing concepts’), thus making them clear and, perhaps, facilitating debate and comparison. Recently, however, even historians of supposedly theoretical bet have tended to abandon models derived from political economy (especially Marxist grand theory) in favour of the new Foucaultian, postmodern persuasion, which, despite its strident theoretical claims, is notable for its vagueness and vacuity, hence, precisely for its inability to define, clarify and compare. The objections to be made to a marxistant, mod-of-production analysis are several (Patch, Maya and Spaniard…offers a perceptive critique). However, there are also several defences, which should be borne in mind as this ‘theoretical reprise’ proceeds: (i) a political economy – or mode of production – approach does not claim to embrace the totality of human experience, simply a large chunk (see Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, pp. 401-2); (ii) different modes of production can coexist in a given ‘social formation’; (iii) modes do not unfold according to a strict teleological pattern (hence ‘marxisant’ may be a more accurate description of this approach than ‘Marxist’); (iv) this approach dos not imply a top-down imposition by masterful European elites on passive Indian subalterns; (v) the fact that Marx was a European does not necessarily mean that the approach is hopelessly Eurocentric (Patch, p.2 rightly questions the ‘unabashedly Eurocentric’ views of Braudel; but Braudel is no Marxist, and not much of a systematic model-builder either); (vi) even if political-economy concepts are deficient, they are better than the available alternatives (Divine Providence, the Hegelian Wold Spirit, modernization theory, neoclassical economics); and (vii) such concepts get us somewhere along the path of historical understanding – they are, in other words, organizing, rather than disorganizing concepts. I would finally add (viii) that the kind of diluted, politico-economic, marixisant-but-not-teleologically-Marxist approach which I am defending has a long lineage by no means all of it Marxist (e.g., Tawney, Pirenne, Sir James Harrington: see H.R. Trevor-Roper, ‘Karl Marx and the Study of History’…) At the end of the day, of course, these theoretical arguments usually depends for the appeal on individual intellectual inclination (and intellectual fashion?) as much as empirical demonstration; and a good deal of history can be usefully studied without recourse to grand theory. (Mexico: The Colonial Era, p. 185-186)

 

The Drowned World

Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance.

–from The Drowned World, by J.G. Ballard

Another year, another hurricane in New York City. Reading my inaugural post on this blog from last October, “Irenic Sketches”, I learn that the emotional toil of last year’s storm was quite greater I think than the affective shift that occurs right now after yesterday’s storm. Last year, there had not been a major hurricane aiming at this region for sometime, the atmosphere of 2011 was intensely hysterical (to use that unfortunate but apt word), a strange cocktail of fear and cynicism that only contemporary urban agglomerations can nurture spread through the streets like a vapor, and THEN: “Nothing Happened”– which was of course not true; as I tried to narrate in my blog, towns in upstate New York and the Catskills were inundated and ruined by river flooding. In an attempt to be clever I used the work “irenic”, but in a slightly “ironic” way in that irenic means peaceful or peace-leaning–Hurricane Irene of 2011 of course was mostly peaceful here in New York City, but much less so in the less densely populated regions.

AND YET– As the chainsaws buzz on my street, cutting through two unfortunate trees whose roots could never really develop properly among the concrete sidewalks, asphalt road surface and other subterranean obstacles, I think of this storm, Hurricane Sandy 2012 as being a different storm in an obviously empirical way in that it never really rained that hard and yet the storm surge amplified with the tides inundated the tunnels and submerged the shallower regions of the city– This much is obvious, but what seems to me most important is the psychological breach that occurs when what has only been glimpsed in works of fantasy and scientific models suddenly manifests itself, and in an eerie resonant doubling at that–Not only do we have the This, the Now to contend with, but also the echo-memory of the Cassandra scream, now remembered as a strange and ridiculous prognostication. These two layers of the Spectacular Now and the Mediated Prophecy reflect against each other, creating a sort of hallucinatory hologram whose strange opalescence we attempt to navigate. This sort of phenomenon of course reached its apotheosis with 9/11, videotaped from so many angles, but as the chorus chanted: “It looks like a movie”– And now with this hurricane we have the strange artifacts of Hollywood disaster cinema like “The Day After Tomorrow” merging with the less sinister, but more potentially catastrophic effects of real global climatological crisis.

Images from movies are deliberately purloined and passed off for “what is happening right now!” as a sort of adrenaline boost to the affective realm– And as the “real” images start to accumulate, they do so in the shadow of the spectacular. Perhaps the most significant “cost” of this hurricane, as it has drowned the subway system, breached the banks of lower Manhattan, is that one can begin to imagine the destruction of a large city– Real estate being a “non-productive” asset, psychological effects become extremely influential in the asset price. Land is only worth what the landlord believes he can rent it for over the next decade or five– And as has been documented countless number of times, New York City has transitioned over the past three decades into a domain for the FIRE sector of contemporary capitalism: Finance, Insurance, Real Estate. This has left many geographic regions of industry and trade open to colonization by artistic communities and outright gentrification, luxury condominium construction, etc…

Wall Street is the mecca of global capitalism, and although trading and markets are mostly electronic these days, the physical location of the stock exchange and the agglomeration of skyscrapers in lower Manhattan are fixed resources that would be difficult to relocate– And yet don’t you think the financial elites and titans of Capitalism are right now contemplating the risk of this precarious geographic location? New York is New York because it is a wonderfully diverse marine region with many natural harbors, its rivers allow access to both the interior regions of this once-wild continent (The Hudson) and the New England coastline in a remarkably convenient way, and also the island safety of lower Manhattan supposedly provides ideal location to house an undefeatable fort and its artillery battery. All of these factors which once made this an ideal region for trade, commerce and manufacture are no longer necessary in this era of financial-absolutism. Where will this future Financial-Canaan be created once the dangers of rising ocean waters threaten the smooth uninterrupted flows necessary to capitalism’s unquenchable thirst for more and more surplus? Will this new financial-Oz be in the model of Baghdad’s “Green Zone”, a militarized fortress for the financial elite and their thousands of drones who collectively copy, cut, and paste on the spreadsheet that has slowly inseminated its digital net into the very contours of our biological mundanity?

The urban organization of the workers in the 20th century and the concomitant strikes and rioting were closely connected to the strategies of an industrial capitalism that demanded the close proximity of production centers. Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Turin –A liability to the elites nervous of masses of workers accumulating and organizing in geographically specific zones– So much for that– The process of “greenfielding” is the industrial strategy of choosing a realm that is relatively green, underdeveloped from a capitalist standpoint, and plopping a factory into this region, coordinating with local elites to ensure that the labor pool avoids the obstacles of racial disparity and conscious proletarianization. Think of the Toyota plants in Mississippi, Kentucky, Texas, Indiana, Alabama and West Virgina. Can one imagine a greenfielding of the financial sector, should rising ocean levels threaten the historic centers of trade such as New York, London and Hong Kong and movements related to Occupy Wall Street metamorphoze, spread and threaten Wall Street’s functioning? Even the countless containers filled with commodities produced in Asia, South America, or Europea are delivered to the giant distribution ports in New Jersey and Staten Island. The one-time asset of Manhattan’s watery proximity flips into a serious liability.

J.G. Ballard’s futuristic novel The Drowned World is a powerful and poetic evocation of a seriously inundated urban metropolis populated by scientists such as the narrator Kerans, the sunbathing inhabitants of decaying and moldy penthouses such as Beatrice Dahl, and the dionysian libertarian crazy neo-pirates such as Strangman, who churn the watery avenues in their paddlewheelers, playfully terrorizing the new terrain. It’s a strange book, and having read it several years ago, my notes are sketchy. Ballard isn’t very well known in the US, his novels being quite difficult to find in libraries (at least in NYC). But a certain flavor of reader and activist is obsessed with his apocalyptic and strange literary imagination. In this novel the north is sweaty, humid and hot. A journey towards the south results in heat exhaustion and death. The world is a changed place, drowned and the decayed remnants of humanity create an interesting story whose narrative I can only half remember. There is a violent showdown at the end of the novel in a part of the city that has been drained somehow– Strangman  eventually becomes dangerous and violent and his band of accomplices I remember are depicted in a slightly racist way (if I remember correctly). But the mood is what remains, “a radically new environment with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance” as I quoted above.

What is the psychological change that precipitates from the solution of catastrophic ecological disaster, as a suicidal drive replaces the survival instinct? Detachment? Decadent nonchalance? Subversive anarchism? Piratical orgies of violence?

Racing around the lagoons like the delinquent spirit of the drowned city, apotheosis of all its aimless violence and cruelty, Strangman was half-buccaneer, half-devil. Yet he had a further neuronic role, in which he seemed almost a positive influence, holding a warning mirror to Kerans, and obliquely cautioning him about the future he had chosen. It was this bond that kept them together, for otherwise Kerans would long since have left the lagoon and moved southwards.