Social Acceleration

Farewell to 2011

2011-12-31T04:14:00.000-08:00

Farewell 2011...

The park was closed in order to deny protesters access to the parliament buildings within

The relatively insignificant Barcelona stock exchange became a target of protest...

Dirk and Rosa making their saucepans heard...

These last two are of a sign at the entrance to Paternoster Square in London, which the protesters had originally wanted to occupy. What had until then been presented as a public square, was suddenly bristling with security guards and barriers.

From "A Beginner's guide to Semiotics" by Daniel Chandler

2011-12-05T01:54:00.000-08:00

This is an extract from Daniel Chandler's excellent online and published introduction to semiotics, "A Beginner's guide to Semiotics".

(Gombrich 1974, 255-8;

Gombrich 1982, 150-151)

The touching innocence of 1950's indoctination

2011-09-09T11:53:00.000-07:00

“Like so many people these days we live in the suburbs and Dave needs the car for business”

“It’s a whole new way of life. Now I’m free to go anywhere, do anything, see anybody, anytime I want to.”

1950's suburban living, in fact, imprisoned people in an urban form from which the only escape was the car. The scale upon which the city had been built presupposed ownership of a car, and from then on the American ideal of freedom was synonymous with consumption.

“I couldn’t even shop when I wanted to!”

Adverts at this time, and I guess any time, are not simply for one product, the car, but for a whole consumer lifestyle, in which all the elements are mutually supportive.

The dynamic of growth and social acceleration

2011-08-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

For a number of years I've been trying to get to grips with the notion of growth. This started as an attempt to understand why it is that economies have to grow. The framing criteria of the 'health' or 'sickness' of an economy is always the extent to which GDP has grown. Low growth is unquestionably bad. Zero growth is described as stagnation. Negative growth a catastrophe. But why, I wondered, 'stagnation'. Why not 'equilibrium', or 'doing just fine, thanks' or even 'prioritizing other things at the minute'. I was quite aware that from a certain standpoint, these questions must appear as simply naive- there is no way that the principle of growth could play such a founding role in virtually all discussions about the economy without the reasons for its importance having been analysed to the compete satisfaction of all concerned, such that further discussion was not deemed necessary.

Still, I liked to consider that I was not an unintelligent person, that I was capable of grasping difficult ideas as long as they are patiently explained to me or I dedicate the time to trying to understand them, and yet there seemed to be something of a vacuum when it came to understanding this whole notion of growth.

Two things were clear. First, that growth was a non-negotiable requirement of the economic system that was increasingly being disseminated globally. Second, that it was patently unsustainable and the cause of a good deal of the social, environmental and psychological problems that are blighting, or will soon be blighting, the lives of just about everyone everywhere. The idea that the global economy could continue to achieve the requisite 3% compound growth per annum, with all this represented in terms of exponential increases in production and consumption, appeared to be transparently ludicrous. And yet this continued to be the framing assumption of any discussion of economic or social development. The answer to global poverty? economic growth. Urban degeneration? economic growth. Trans-national conflicts? economic growth.

Whatever the shortcomings of this model of economic development, the principle of economic growth remains the motor which is driving the acceleration of the pace of life that has been theorized by the likes of Harmut Rosa and Paul Virilio. As such it seems to be of paramount importance to understand the dynamics of this process.

In my on-going attempt to make sense of the enigma of growth, I recently exchanged emails with David Harvey on this question. He was good enough to respond to my questions and I post the exchange in full because I found it very useful as a way to think through issues relating to the dynamic of economic growth and I hope that others might find it equally thought-provoking.

From: Oliver Sutton [osutton51@hotmail.com]

Sent: Monday, June 27, 2011 11:34 PM

To: Harvey, David

Subject: question

Dear Professor Harvey,

I'm a teacher living in Barcelona who has been influenced by your work and I am in the process of preparing a course which will run from October entitled "Brand Barcelona; Selling Barcelona in a Globalised World". I want the students to locate the question of place branding and it's consequent effects upon the inhabitants of the city with the context of the globalisation of capital accumulation. The role played by cities in absorbing surplus capital is clearly of central importance, but it is here that I find myself hitting a wall in terms of my understanding of your work, and the dynamics of capital accumulation more generally, that I have hitherto been unable to resolve. Briefly stated, the question is as follows;

The capitalist mode of production produces surplus capital which must subsequently be reinvested. The process of urbanisation is, in part, driven by this need to reinvest the surplus. This requirement is partly due to the dynamics of capitalism and partly due to the fact that an excess of uninvested capital will lead to a devaluation of that capital through inflation. So large scale urban projects like those of Haussman's Paris or Moses's suburbanisation are in part a response to the requirement for surplus capital absoption. However, the funding of such projects always require the invention of new financial arrangements, such as debt financing. The question which I can't resolve is this; if the problem is a surplus of capital, why are such mechanisms as 'debt financing' necessary? Surely the point is that the capital is already available and ready for investment. Why is there a requirement to generate fresh capital?

I wouldn't contact you directly with this if I hadn't been unable to find a satisfactory answer in forums and browsing articles. Please feel free to direct me to an article or a website where this question is dealt with.

Thank you for helping with this and also for producing such an illuminating body of work over the years (I'm sure that's not the best metaphor, but you know what I mean).

Yours,

Oliver Sutton

________________________________________

From: DHarvey@gc.cuny.edu

To: osutton51@hotmail.com

Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 07:41:47 -0400

Subject: RE: question

the answer is that it is available in commodity form but not in monetary form. I send you a short piece that explains this, and another longer piece on the relation which is due to be published in socialist Register in the fall.

david Harvey

________________________________________

From: Oliver Sutton [osutton51@hotmail.com]

Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2011 6:30 AM

To: Harvey, David

Subject: RE: question

Dear Professor Harvey,

Thank you so much for your reply and the articles. I'll need a little more time with the second one. As for the first one, 'Voting to end Capitalism', while I found it wonderfully concise and illustrative, it didn't resolve this conceptual impasse that I've hit.

The capitalist has harnessed technology and labour power to generate a surplus. this surplus is originally in commodity form- ie 100 pairs of shoes. Options open to the capitalist are either to consume the surplus himself- but what the hell is he going to do with 100 pairs of of shoes? or reinvest the surplus into expansion- more labour power, machines, more shoes. In the first case the surplus remains a commodity- shoes. In the second case, the capitalist can't invest a commodity, he has to convert the commodity into the money form by selling the commodity at the market. But, it seems to me, this is where the problem is. Where is the effective demand going to come from for his shoes? It must be other capitalists like him who are effectively engaged in a zero sum game of making profits out of their own consumption. If, for what ever reason, he does succeed in converting the commodity into money form, (assuming that when you say in the 7th paragraph of your piece "...through investment in expansion..." this means that he has converted the surplus into money form and so can invest it) then there is no problem. He doesn't have to debt finance the expansion of the means of production because has converted his surplus into money form and can use the surplus directly to invest in expansion.

If, however, the problem is fundamentally one of effective demand, then I could clearly see how debt financing would be the solution, albeit an inherently unstable and crisis prone one. Furthermore I can see how this operates in the real world. What I still don't get, either in the real world or in the theory, is how an excess of liquidity can be resolved through the generation of further liquidity in form of debt finance?

Perhaps the longer piece will help to resolve this.

Thanks once again, I'll leave a link to my blog

yours,

Oliver

________________________________________

From: DHarvey@gc.cuny.edu

To: osutton51@hotmail.com

Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2011 07:26:11 -0400

Subject: RE: question

no the longer piece does not do so directly. The presumption is that the debt moneys at the end of the first day have to be equivalent to the real surplus value produced in commodity form at the end of the second day (when the problem of effective demand gets posed all over again) and this means that the 100 pairs of shoes have become 110 pairs of shoes and maybe nobody wants the shoes (they get devalued) but there was a possibility of getting people to want disneyland instead. The surplus liquidity problem is where does the reinvestment go? expansion of shoe production for ever? or can something else be made that people either want or can be persuaded or mandated to want (which is where the production of urban environments comes in.....we need cars because we created an urbanization that made cars necessities not luxuries. Th surplus liquidity lies in the reinvestment function of the credit moneys looking for profitable outlets other than shoes.

__________________________________

From: Oliver Sutton [osutton51@hotmail.com]

Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2011 7:12 AM

To: Harvey, David

Subject: RE: question

"The surplus liquidity problem is where does the reinvestment go?"- but there is no surplus liquidity, there is a surplus of commodities; the 10 shoes that no one wants. The consequence of this would be that the shoes get devalued, the capitalist can't repay the debt (because he has not been capable of generating enough capital in money-form) and the system grinds to a halt. Where does the surplus liquidity come from? Perhaps I'm taking the temporal structure of the model to literally (which would explain your tense change when you said "...but there was a possibility of getting people to want disneyland instead...". However if this is the case it seems as if the model requires of us a theoretical leap of faith whereby Disneyworld owes its existence to the fact that it would have solved the effective demand problem if only the capitalist had thought of it before he churned out the 110 shoes. In fact the capitalist, on this model, never generates the liquid capital that would enable him to invest in a Disneyworld. Do you think this a problem of taking the model too literally, is it a conceptual misunderstanding or is it a disagreement?

yours,

Oliver

________________________________________

From: DHarvey@gc.cuny.edu

To: osutton51@hotmail.com

Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 09:08:39 -0400

Subject: RE: question

credit is time future discounted into time present so you literally mortgage the future in order to save the present, that is why it is not money but credit money that does the trick and who creates that? privately the capitalist can do it but the state also does it and now look at how much money the fed has created with the flick of a switch these last few years...

________________________________________

From: Oliver Sutton [osutton51@hotmail.com]

Sent: Friday, July 01, 2011 5:59 AM

To: Harvey, David

Subject: RE: question

Which would suggest that what I referred to as a theoretical leap of faith is, in fact, a contradiction inherent to the system. The credit that was used to get the system up and running can never be repaid, the capitalist can only ever stay one step ahead of his creditors in a vast and burgeoning Ponzi scheme. This would also suggest then that it is debt financing which is the motor of the system flooding the system with a form of fictitious capital which nonetheless generates very material transformations.

________________________________________

From: DHarvey@gc.cuny.edu

To: osutton51@hotmail.com

Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2011 08:34:35 -0400

Subject: RE: question

exactly...as Marx notes, the credit system is very protestant and depends on faith (expectations, confidence, Luther, etc.) while the monetary commodity is very catholic and depends on gold and every now and again (e.g. in a crisis) we find that the system cannot liberate itself fully (pre-1973) from what Marx calls the the catholicism of its monetary base (which is why the right often demands a return to the gold standard, which would mean the end of capitalism).

________________________________________

From: Oliver Sutton [osutton51@hotmail.com]

Sent: Monday, July 04, 2011 5:28 AM

To: Harvey, David

Subject: RE: question

And that particular drama is being very clearly played out in the wrangling over the debt ceiling in the US. As you say, it's deeply ironic that it should be the Republicans who are willing to put the whole system in jeopardy, although their high-minded stance fairly reeks of corporate interest.

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my emails. I must admit that I still worry about those ten extra shoes and what happens to them, but that may just be the desire for a tidy narrative.

I noticed that you are speaking in Bristol in mid July. I will be working at the University of Leeds from late July to mid-September- will you be speaking anywhere in the UK during this period?

Oliver Sutton

________________________________________

From: DHarvey@gc.cuny.edu

To: osutton51@hotmail.com

Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2011 07:15:10 -0400

Subject: RE: question

I have had to cancel the bristol event owing to medical issues. but thanks for asking. it was useful to think through the ten airs of shoes.

________________________________________

I'm sorry to hear that, I hope that you get back to full strength quickly and I'll be watching out for any speaking dates (it would be great to hear you speak in Barcelona!).

Thanks once again,

Oliver Sutton

Who was responsible for the violence?

2011-06-18T05:41:00.000-07:00

Vale la pena difundir esta pelicula asombrosa de lo que ocurio el 15 de junio fuera del parlamento Catalan. Nos recurda de la anxiedad que tienen las autoridades para prevenir la formación de un movimiento popular. La legitimidad del 15M depende de el apoyo que recibe. En este momento es como el gato de Schrodinger, en un estado de posibilidades no-resueltas. Una asistecia masiva mañana podría ser un punto de inflexión hacá la formación de un movimiento verdaderamente popular.

It's worth spreading this astonishing film from the disturbances outside the Catalan parliament to remind ourselves of the lengths to which the authorities will go to undermine the emergence of a popular movement. The legitimacy of 15M depends on people identifying with it. At the moment it's a bit like Schrodinger's cat, in a state of unresolved possibilities. A massive turnout for the demonstration tomorrow could be a defining moment in the formation of a genuinely popular movement.

Globalisation, Space-Time Compression and Symbolic Exchange. Part Three.

2011-06-05T13:14:00.000-07:00

Seeing as so much time has elapsed since my last posting under the title of “Globalization, Time-Space Compression and Symbolic Exchange”, I think it’s as well to provide a brief reminder of the terrain.* My intention with this cycle of postings is to think about globalisation, paying particular attention to the way in which the apparent transparency of the term conceals assumptions regarding the character of the globe which is being globalised. On the one hand the process of globalisation, influenced by the demand for capital accumulation, is an indisputable reality that is affecting every area of our lives (See “What is Social Acceleration”). On the other, it conceals and disseminates, Eurocentric assumptions about the nature of space, time and subjectivity. I approached these themes first by highlighting a distinction, made by Heidegger, between the concepts of Earth and World. ‘World’ refers not necessarily to a physical reality, but rather to a field of meaning and signification, in the sense of ‘the world of medicine’ or ‘the world of football’. It is really, first and foremost, a world in which we live. Earth, superficially, might be described un-problematically as a physical entity, one planet amongst others in the solar system. The difficulty is that, no matter how much we may prioritise the foundational nature of Earth, to insist that it is the Earth upon which we live, it remains an entity which we do not, in fact, encounter, as such. Images of the Earth abound. However, in this sense, the Earth is only ever one more sign within the plethora of signs and meanings which constitute our worlds. My intention was, and is, to render the notion of ‘Earth’ questionable in order to then gain a different sort of purchase on ‘Globalisation’. Specifically I want to foreground the notion of ‘World’, as a system, or systems, of significations, references, and meanings, within which materiality plays a role, but not a founding role. In the last post I sought to highlight this by characterising the Yir Yoront’s relation to time in terms of social ‘homeostasis’. The ‘history’ of the Yir Yoront was determined not by objectively verifiable facts, but by what it was expedient to remember. To forget something is to annihilate it in its entirety, such that it never did occur. The only problem with this is that it is grammatically untidy. A related position can be adopted with regard space and geography, namely that the particular model of universal space with which we operate is very much a consequence of our literacy, which has enabled us to abstract from the immediacy of our apperception**.

I would imagine that, for many people, raising questions about our notion of space might seem like a rather pointless exercise in metaphysical speculation. We don’t practically have a problem with space. We aren’t bumping into things due to an unreliable model of space, and our model of space seems to provide us with a very functional and effective way of representing territory. The problem, I believe, relates to the second of these examples, not to the first. Our phenomenal apprehension of space, when making coffee for example, is of a categorically different order from the way we represent space, just as our unreflective apprehension of time is quite distinct from the ways in which we measure it. The point is that there is nothing “natural” about the notion of absolute, objective, quantifiable space which we take so much for granted and which is central to our ideas of territory and property. Once again, examples of resistance to, or alternatives to Eurocentric representations of space abound among pre-literate peoples. Marshall McLuhan cites Guinean born Prince Modupe who, in his autobiography, tells how he had learned to read maps at school and of how his father had been decidedly unimpressed by the flimsy sheet of paper which presumed to represent territory.

“He refused to identify the stream he had crossed at Bomako, where it is no deeper, he said, than a man is high, with the great widespread waters of the vast Niger delta. Distances as measured in miles had no meaning for him. . . . Maps are liars, he told me briefly. From his tone of voice I could tell that I had offended him in some way not known to me at the time. The things that hurt one do not show on a map. The truth of a place is in the joy and the hurt that come from it. I had best not put my trust in anything as inadequate as a map, he counseled. ... I understand now, although I did not at the time, that my airy and easy sweep of map-traced staggering distances belittled the journeys he had measured on tired feet. With my big map-talk, I had effaced the magnitude of his cargo-laden, heat-weighted treks. (1)

This represents a striking illustration of the adage “the map is not the territory”.

Similarly, Daniel Everett, in his book, Don’t Sleep there are Snakes, describes how the Amazonian tribe, the Pirahã, have no conception of things that fall outside of their immediate experience, or the experience of someone with whom they have directly spoke (2). Hence their reluctance to listen to his evangelising about Jesus Christ on learning that Everett had never actually met the man. More relevant to a consideration of space is the Pirahã notion of xibipíío. This word might be used to describe a boat coming into view from around the bend in the river, a candle flame extinguishing or a plane appearing on, or disappearing, over the horizon. Everett managed to establish that xibipíío picked out a culturally specific concept relating to experiential liminality; that’s to say the state of something’s being on the border of existence and non-existence, experientially speaking. The contention is that the Pirahã don’t extrapolate from what is presented immediately in their experience and that concepts of arrival and departure presuppose the existence of a territory or space which lies beyond the field of their immediate experience. Things don’t so much appear from around the corner, as come into being. If that sounds impossibly improbable, imagining it from the point of “view” of the deaf person may make it slightly more comprehensible. It doesn’t offend against intuition quite so much to suggest that the plane pops into existence if ones only means of perceiving it is sound. This disjunction between the fact that experiential liminality is unacceptable when related to the visual field and yet plausible when related to the aural field illustrates another contention of McLuhan’s, that the absolute primacy of the visual is a characteristic of literacy.

What characterises the oral cultures that I have discussed in this and the previous posting is that their societies are not grounded on absolute notions of time and space, which means that they provide a radical counterpoint to Eurocentric, or literate, historiography and geography. *** What they reveal, and what gets concealed within literate cultures, is the homeostatic nature of society and culture. Time and space are not containers into which we are thrown and in which we set about constructing culture and society. Rather time and space are inseparable from our practices. Just as the Yir Yoront collectively conspire to adjust their past to the exigencies of the present, so Europeans collectively conspire to sustain their historiographies. **** Of course we are a little uncomfortable with the idea of adjusting them to meet the demands of the present and yet all recounting and dissemination of the past is clearly carried out in the present and must serve some current purpose. Sarah Palin’s recent reinterpretation of American history, and the way it is being defended by her acolytes, provides a cheap, but illustrative, example of this. The principal differences between the Yir Yoront’s mythological past and the historical past of European peoples, leaving aside the crucial divisions we make between personal and public history, are:

· the externalisation of knowledge (knowledge is not contained in the body of the knower, but on parchment, manuscript, in book or database form)

· the degree of coordination involved in reinforcing and disseminating that history (the homogenising effect of the media through which that history is narrated, be that books, academic disciplines and museums or more recently, and more shakily, docu-dramas, quiz shows and internet forums *****)

· the regulatory mechanisms through which relevance or obsolescence are determined (selective memory in the case of oral cultures, academic coherence, political expediency and potential for commodification in ours)

· The mythological past of the Yir Yoront is unapologetically symbolic in nature, whereas the goal of European thought has been to replace the symbolic with the factual. A better way of stating this might be to say that the aim has been to systematise the symbolic such that it becomes undeniable, unquestionable and, hence, impersonal.

On this last point, the heyday of factual, objectively verifiable knowledge was from the renaissance to the late 20^th century; a period which coincided with the invention of the printing press, the extensive dissemination of books, the rise of mass literacy and the technological innovations that facilitated first a Europe-wide and then a global reconfiguration of culture and society. However, for all the coordination and dissemination of Eurocentric concepts and practices, they remain no better grounded than the mythological past of the Yir Yoront and no more compelling as a model for living than that of the Pirahã of the Amazon. In each case, each one of us embody and are the product of the entirety of our culture. Technological changes within the culture give rise to more or less subtle reconfigurations of that culture in its entirety and concomitantly reconfigures us and our mental conceptions, histories and value systems.

The social structure of the Yir Yoront was irreparably disrupted by the encounter with European people, not because Europeans colonised their territory or spread disease, but rather through the introduction of alien technologies and associated mental conceptions. The paradigm example used by Lauriston Sharp is the introduction of the steel axe into the world of the Yir Yoront by missionaries (3). The Yir Yoront had been using stone axes for millennia. The stone axe was not simply a utilitarian object, it held a key position in the symbolic economy of the Yir Yoront. There were implicitly understood codes which governed how the axe was produced (involving intricate trading relationships with other tribes and rituals for its fabrication) and who had ownership and access to the axe (women and children could not own an axe but had to borrow it from the male head of the family). Introducing steel, factory made, axes into this symbolic economy had the effect of de-structuring the economy and the social relations that it implied.

In subsequent postings I will consider how technological innovations in Europe generated a reconfiguration in its symbolic economy that accelerated and intensified with the development of money as a universal medium of exchange (clearly symbolic, and yet sufficiently standardised and universalised to conceal its symbolic nature). This, along with the reconfiguration of mental conceptions that this transformation implied (in the fields of geography and cartography, for example), contributed to what David Harvey refers to as space/time compression and the elaboration of a symbolic economy which annihilates geographical distance.

* Notice how territorial metaphors suggest themselves so readily (map out, chart, navigate). This is neither incidental in terms of language, nor in terms of the project that I am engaged in. Can the ideas I’m describing be rightly equated with a territory? They probably can if I will insist on that highly abstracted and literate practice of developing ideas over a series of postings / chapters / paragraphs, etc…

** I choose ‘apperception’ as opposed to ‘perception’, because whereas the later has a clear visual bias, the former refers to a much broader field which makes no clear distinction between the sensory and the cognitive.

*** This ‘Eurocentric’ / ‘literate’ division is interesting. By choosing the former term as the opposition to oral cultures, a whole discourse of cultural relativism is activated along with its concurrent limits to thought. If the later term is chosen, I feel the nature of the European colonial project is better revealed. Europe is not one culture among others in the cultural soup that makes up the world. Rather, the world becomes world to the extent to which it can be metabolized within the structures and terms of a totalising conceptual / system, the source of which is overwhelmingly European. From this perspective, America is also essentially European.

**** I use the word ‘historiographies’ to highlight the heterogeneous nature of the writing, recounting and dissemination of the past.

***** Also important are strategic devices for reinforcing certain narratives, such as using bullet points.

1. McLuhan, M. 1962, The Guttenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press

2. Everett, D. 2008, Don't Sleep there are Snakes, Profile Books

3. Sharp, L. (1952). Steel axes for stone age Australians. Human Organization, 11(1 )

Impersonal Transparency

2011-05-29T23:48:00.000-07:00

In a posting a few days ago I mentioned the ambiguity of standing with thousands of other people on the outside of a thin police cordon all looking in on the events unfolding in the square. Many people were filming what was happening, but in that moment of suspended animation, the roles and motivations of the onlookers were no longer self evident. Activists film to remind the police that they too are under scrutiny. Tourists film so that they can later demonstrate that they were indeed where they claim to have been. Protesters film to project the events in the square to the wider on-line audience, and thereby prove to the world that what they subjectively experienced in some transient moments really did form part of an objectively verifiable reality. I think there is a difference between these categories. However, the line dividing them occasionally blurs.

That morning, as I mentioned in the posting, I had been at a conference at the CCCB. The first speaker, Daniel Innerarity, delivered a paper entitled "The Observing Society". He was equating the proliferation of observation with a new form of democratic accountability. The subjugating gaze of Foucault's Panopticon is no longer uni-directional. It is not just the state that keeps citizens in check through its elaborate system of surveillance. Citizens have learned to turn the camera (or other apparatus of surveillance) around and subject the state to an interrogatory gaze. His thesis, as far as it goes, was born out by the events of Friday the 27th. Every move that the police made was being filmed by protesters and this was up on the blogs and websites in some cases within minutes of it having been taken. The evidence that it provided of the use of excess force contributed to the revitalization of the protest and since last Friday many more people have got involved. In other words, there's whatever happened in the square, in all it's fractured, contingent messiness and there is the mediated construction of that reality after the event across the various media platforms.

Which is fine, except there seemed to something that Innerarity was missing out, something about the inherent danger or uncaaniness, or something about the way immediate reality is so subjugated to the demands of mediation. A friend, "The Amazing Beryl" told me that she had seen a group of protesters filming a bunch of police who were filming them. No need to come to blows, reality is elsewhere, all that was happening there was "content" creation. I had a camera in my pocket and it occurred to me to start filming as I, along with thousands of others, re-entered the square and watched as the Mosos retreated. It would have been a great film- especially the last five Mosos to leave who put on a show of bravado, firing their rubber bullets in the air, before withdrawing. But I felt, as I often do in these situations, that I didn't want to experience what was happening through the prism of what would make a good film and what would tell the story that I would like to be told when the video is played back later. I kind of kick myself now. Sod what was happening, that was essentially transient and meaningless. Far more important was that great vid that would have really "captured" the situation. After all, and to paraphrase Baudrillard, it's not that mediation distorts, undermines or covers up reality. This would in fact leave reality unscathed in the sense that it is presupposed, as if we know what we are talking about. Instead, mediation has supplanted reality, it has become reality. What we care about isn't what happens in the square, but rather the narratives which are constructed out of the "content" which the square provides. And that feeds back into the supposed immediacy of what is going on in the square, such that peoples actions are determined by the knowledge that they are involved in a fight to control the narrative, which largely takes place elsewhere across the various media platforms. So it's not enough to be peaceful, they have to put on a performance of 'being peaceful'. Hence the flowers and free hugs.

Returning to Innerarity's confidence that the prolferation of observation can be seen in terms of an inversion, or leveling out of Foucault's notion of a surveillance society, I wonder whether the significance of this lies not in questions of democracy and accountability, but rather in this question of the totalizing effect of mediation.

Odious Debt

2011-05-29T15:06:00.000-07:00

This film explains the idea of "odious debt", which is to say debt that has been incurred by a population without their knowledge, not in their interests and with the complicity of the lender. It is an important weapon in the fight to delegitimise the "there is no alternative" narrative.

Back to the Square

2011-05-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

Where was I when Plaça Catalunya was taken back from the police and (bizarrely) the waste disposal trucks? Among the thousands of people who broke through the police lines to join the protesters who remained on the inside of the square, but only just.

In the morning I went to a conference at the CCCB, a cultural centre and exhibition centre in the middle of the Raval district of Barcelona. The talks were entitled, "Post-national Collective Subjectivity", which connects with subject matter of a course that I am struggling to prepare. I received a text from my friend Dirk during the first talk saying that the Mosso d'Esquadra (Catalan Police) were moving on Plaça Catalunya to clear it. I stayed at the conference and listened to what the speakers had to say. Some interesting points were raised, but it all felt a little cosy and self-congratulatory. Mid-way through the last speaker's talk he made a reference to what was occurring in Plaça Catalunya, vaguely holding it up as an illustration of some point he had made. Some one from the floor said that the protesters were in the process of being cleared out of the square. At that point I immediately got up and left the conference (I think I was the only one).

I cycled to the square and found the perimeter of the square, the large central circle, surrounded by a cordon of riot police, they were holding back a thick crowd of people, some of whom were trying to enter the square, others who appeared to watching events like an audience in an amphitheater, many seated. Inside this inner circle there were some 200 protesters, and a similar number of police, plus the incongruous refuse collectors. there was some jostling and shouting, but it didn't seem like the police were about to use violence to clear away the 200.

I peddled home to drop of my bike and had a quick look at some websites to get an idea of what had been going on. There was one particularly nasty clip of police in the cordon repeatedly beating the tightly packed and seated protesters whenever they tried to stand up. That riled me, and I grabbed my passport, camera and some cash and headed back to the square. Approaching from the nearby Plaça Urquinona, I could hear a lot of noise and the sound of rubber bullets being fired. A wave of people scattered from the periphery of the square, just as I was arriving, suggesting that they had been fired upon. I ran up to the cordon, which now consisted of a very thin line of police, backs to the centre of the square, facing the people who had come to support the protesters. It was clear at this point that the police who formed this thin cordon could never have hoped to forcibly prevent the crowd from entering the square, yet the people stood, obediently respecting this imaginary 'line in the sand'. They stood and they gazed and they took photos. The scene was surreal in that the role of the onlooking crowd was ambiguous. For sure many were protesters come to support those on the inside of the cordon, however it seems that others were more motivated by curiosity and there was even a sprinkling of tourists. If the police line had been tighter, the situation may not have felt quite so ambiguous. The roles would have been more sharply defined. We are the demonstrators and we want to enter the square. You are the police and you are charged with preventing us. Everyone knows where they stand. But with the line so porous, there was no escaping the fact that we on the outside were choosing to remain outside, observing, filming, consuming. Just then one of the protesters inside the cordon ran forward, imploring those on the outside to enter the square. Suddenly the spell was broken, someone shouted "Ya!" and we ran between the police into the square. As I reached the centre, I saw, with exhilarated disbelief, how the riot-gear clad Mossos where piling out of the square as fast as dignity would permit. The square was filling up once again and everywhere the police were retreating, not through the force of violence, but simply though the weight of numbers and determination. Overhead a police helicopter droned, ineffectually.

It was a powerful feeling, taking back the square, one that brought me to the brink of tears. It was a surging mixture of joy, strength and solidarity. It was a feeling that has been described in literature. I recognize the same feeling in George Orwell's descriptions of Barcelona in the 1930's. One which enables you to believe that more is possible than we normally permit ourselves to believe. One that also has to be handled with extreme caution.

The Spanish Spring

2011-05-25T15:49:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of weeks something truly impressive has taken place across Spain. The central squares of the major cities have been occupied en-mass by a diverse cross section of people united in their frustration with the status quo which insists that everyday life continue as normal when the political and economic system which regulates everyday life is clearly broken. The immediate cause has been the cuts in social spending that were put in place at the insistence of the financial markets which now determine social policy across Europe. For a short while the protesters have managed to throw off the passivity that characterizes our relationship with power. Places have been established in which people have voiced their anger, discussed alternatives and made their presence felt. The mainstream media took notice for the first few days while it was still breaking news, but gradually lost interest in spite of the fact that these emblematic spaces in the cities continue to be occupied by thousands of people in peaceful and imaginative protest. Perhaps the most important feature of the protests has been the form of organization which has been spontaneous, non-hierarchical and inclusive. Inevitably, as the days pass, the lack of concrete demands or a unified voice will start to erode the initial enthusiasm for the protest, but I think that scale of the protests, their duration, the organizational model which they employed and the symbolic connection they forged with the 'Arab Spring' will leave an impression upon people's sense of what is possible that will out-last the dismantling of the last tent.

The photos were taken by the artist, Dirk Helbig, whose blog you can visit here.

So what's happening in Iceland?

2011-04-09T16:33:00.000-07:00

Today Iceland held their referendum on whether to accept liability for the debts of a private bank. This is hugely significant as it represents the alternative to the narrative that has been repeated ad nauseam in the rest of Europe that there is no option but to nationalize these debts, forcing the general public to take the hit that would otherwise be taken by investors. It has gone pretty much unreported, and I still don't know what the outcome was. I was passed this article about the options facing Iceland by the American economist Michael Hudson. He makes the case very convincingly that there are alternatives.

It's the models!! The stuff about economics and ideology is also really interesting.

2011-03-06T22:05:00.000-08:00

The Business podcast: Broken economic models and the role of emotion in finance | Business | guardia...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/audio...

Roman Frydman, David Tuckett and Phillip Inman join Heather Stewart to discuss the failure of mathematical models during the financial crisis

Post-crisis we do appear to be sleepwalking through a dreamscape in which everything kind of looks like it did before, but there is slightly surreal stuff happening in the periphery of our vision like Greece imploding, revolutions in the middle east, the Tories in Britain getting serious about the country's oil dependency. Roman Frydman expresses astonishment at one point that the one group of people who seemed to survive the financial crisis relatively unscathed were the economists, who have got away with tinkering with their models rather than having to consider the possibility that those models bare little relation to the reality they purport to describe and are wholly inappropriate to the financial markets. I suspect that faith in the integrity of the economist's models is something that we all have a fair amount invested in, irrespective of whether we could ever hope to understand those models.

A revolution against neoliberalism? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

2011-03-03T06:33:00.000-08:00

A revolution against neoliberalism? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Chinese workers denied information about the Egyptian revolution, but permitted to make Egyptian revolution souvenirs.

2011-02-25T08:12:00.000-08:00

I was going to leave some kind of an ironic comment about how the financial markets were none too happy about the revolutions sweeping the Middle East- it seems, however, my glibness would be misplaced...

Click here for a great blog entry on the subject by Jack Shenker, for the Guardian.

Edgelands

2011-02-19T05:38:00.000-08:00

What do you call those great tracts of land that cling to the suburbs; too uninhabited and barren to be urban and insufficiently picturesque and pristine to be countryside? Edgelands.

Al Jazeera, Empire; Social Networks, Social Revolution

2011-02-17T11:47:00.000-08:00

A kind of interesting discussion programme on Al Jazeera about the role of social networks in facilitating revolution. The most interesting thing is just seeing people sitting round in a familiar television debate format, talking about revolutionary change.

Iceland is the Answer

2011-02-12T15:04:00.000-08:00

Apparently Tunisia and Egypt are not the only countries in which the population has kicked out its politicians and are in the process of drafting a new constitution. Icelanders, faced with the prospect of shouldering the burden of crippling debts incurred as a consequence of the irresponsibility of their banking sector, demanded a referendum and rejected the proposed austerity measures by a majority of over 90%. Strange that we don't hear a great deal about the Icelandic response to the crisis on main land Europe. It could call into question the whole "there's no alternative" narrative. The blog entry below, The Hushed up Revolution discusses the Icelandic model.

Islandia; La Revolución Silenciada

Artículo del blog No sin mi bici, de Luis Picazo Casariego

Recientemente nos han sorprendido los acontecimientos de Túnez que han desembocado en la huida del tirano Ben Alí, tan demócrata para occidente hasta anteayer y alumno ejemplar del FMI. Sin embargo, otra “revolución” que tiene lugar desde hace dos años ha sido convenientemente silenciada por los medios de comunicación al servicio de las plutocracias europeas.

Ha ocurrido en la mismísima Europa (en el sentido geopolítico), en un país con la democracia probablemente más antigua del mundo, cuyos orígenes se remontan al año 930, y que ocupó el primer lugar en el informe de la ONU del Índice de Desarrollo Humano de 2007/2008. ¿Adivináis de qué país se trata? Estoy seguro de que la mayoría no tiene ni idea, como no la tenía yo hasta que me he enterado por casualidad (a pesar de haber estado allí en el 2009 y el 2010). Se trata de Islandia, donde se hizo dimitir a un gobierno al completo, se nacionalizaron los principales bancos, se decidió no pagar la deuda que estos han creado con Gran Bretaña y Holanda a causa de su execrable política financiera y se acaba de crear una asamblea popular para reescribir su constitución. Y todo ello de forma pacífica: a golpe de cacerola, gritos y certero lanzamiento de huevos. Esta ha sido una revolución contra el poder político-financiero neoliberal que nos ha conducido hasta la crisis actual. He aquí por qué no se han dado a conocer apenas estos hechos durante dos años o se ha informado frivolamente y de refilón: ¿Qué pasaría si el resto de ciudadanos europeos tomaran ejemplo? Y de paso confirmamos, una vez más por si todavía no estaba claro, al servicio de quién están los medios de comunicación y cómo nos restringen el derecho a la información en la plutocracia globalizada de Planeta S.A.

Esta es, brevemente, la historia de los hechos:

A finales de 2008, los efectos de la crisis en la economía islandesa son devastadores. En octubre se nacionaliza Landsbanki, principal banco del país. El gobierno británico congela todos los activos de su subsidiaria IceSave, con 300.000 clientes británicos y 910 millones de euros invertidos por administraciones locales y entidades públicas del Reino Unido. A Landsbanki le seguirán los otros dos bancos principales, el Kaupthing el Glitnir. Sus principales clientes están en ese país y en Holanda, clientes a los que sus estados tienen que reembolsar sus ahorros con 3.700 millones de euros de dinero público. Por entonces, el conjunto de las deudas bancarias de Islandia equivale a varias veces su PIB. Por otro lado, la moneda se desploma y la bolsa suspende su actividad tras un hundimiento del 76%. El país está en bancarrota.
El gobierno solicita oficialmente ayuda al Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI), que aprueba un préstamo de 2.100 millones de dólares, completado por otros 2.500 millones de algunos países nórdicos.
Las protestas ciudadanas frente al parlamento en Reykjavik van en aumento. El 23 de enero de 2009 se convocan elecciones anticipadas y tres días después, las caceroladas ya son multitudinarias y provocan la dimisión del Primer Ministro, el conservador Geir H. Haarden, y de todo su gobierno en bloque. Es el primer gobierno (y único que yo sepa) que cae víctima de la crisis mundial.
El 25 de abril se celebran elecciones generales de las que sale un gobierno de coalición formado por la Alianza Social-demócrata y el Movimiento de Izquierda Verde, encabezado por la nueva Primera Ministra Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir.
A lo largo del 2009 continúa la pésima situación económica del país y el año cierra con una caída del PIB del 7%.
Mediante una ley ampliamente discutida en el parlamento se propone la devolución de la deuda a Gran Bretaña y Holanda mediante el pago de 3.500 millones de euros, suma que pagarán todos las familias islandesas mensualmente durante los próximos 15 años al 5,5% de interés. La gente se vuelve a echar a la calle y solicita someter la ley a referéndum. En enero de 2010 el Presidente, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, se niega a ratificarla y anuncia que habrá consulta popular.
En marzo se celebra el referéndum y el NO al pago de la deuda arrasa con un 93% de los votos. La revolución islandesa consigue una nueva victoria de forma pacífica.
El FMI congela las ayudas económicas a Islandia a la espera de que se resuelva la devolución de su deuda.
A todo esto, el gobierno ha iniciado una investigación para dirimir jurídicamente las responsabilidades de la crisis. Comienzan las detenciones de varios banqueros y altos ejecutivos. La Interpol dicta una orden internacional de arresto contra el ex-Presidente del Kaupthing, Sigurdur Einarsson.
En este contexto de crisis, se elige una asamblea constituyente el pasado mes de noviembre para redactar una nueva constitución que recoja las lecciones aprendidas de la crisis y que sustituya a la actual, una copia de la constitución danesa. Para ello, se recurre directamente al pueblo soberano. Se eligen 25 ciudadanos sin filiación política de los 522 que se han presentado a las candidaturas, para lo cual sólo era necesario ser mayor de edad y tener el apoyo de 30 personas. La asamblea constitucional comenzará su trabajo en febrero de 2011 y presentará un proyecto de carta magna a partir de las recomendaciones consensuadas en distintas asambleas que se celebrarán por todo el país. Deberá ser aprobada por el actual Parlamento y por el que se constituya tras las próximas elecciones legislativas.
Y para terminar, otra medida “revolucionaria” del parlamento islandés: la Iniciativa Islandesa Moderna para Medios de Comunicación (Icelandic Modern Media Initiative), un proyecto de ley que pretende crear un marco jurídico destinado a la protección de la libertad de información y de expresión. Se pretende hacer del país un refugio seguro para el periodismo de investigación y la libertad de información donde se protegan fuentes, periodistas y proveedores de Internet que alojen información periodística; el infierno para EEUU y el paraíso para Wikileaks.

Pues esta es la breve historia de la Revolución Islandesa: dimisión de todo un gobierno en bloque, nacionalización de la banca, referéndum para que el pueblo decida sobre las decisiones económicas trascendentales, encarcelación de responsables de la crisis, reescritura de la constitución por los ciudadanos y un proyecto de blindaje de la libertad de información y de expresión. ¿Se nos ha hablado de esto en los medios de comunicación europeos? ¿Se ha comentado en las repugnantes tertulias radiofónicas de politicastros de medio pelo y mercenarios de la desinformación? ¿Se han visto imágenes de los hechos por la TV? Claro que no. Debe ser que a los Estados Unidos de Europa no les parece suficientemente importante que un pueblo coja las riendas de su soberanía y plante cara al rodillo neoliberal. O quizás teman que se les caiga la cara de vergüenza al quedar una vez más en evidencia que han convertido la democracia en un sistema plutocrático donde nada ha cambiado con la crisis, excepto el inicio de un proceso de socialización de las pérdidas con recortes sociales y precarización de las condiciones laborales. Es muy probable también que piensen que todavía quede vida inteligente entre sus unidades de consumo, que tanto gustan en llamar ciudadanos, y teman un efecto contagio. Aunque lo más seguro es que esta calculada minusvaloración informativa, cuando no silencio clamoroso, se deba a todas estas causas juntas.

Algunos dirán que Islandia es una pequeña isla de tan sólo 300.000 habitantes, con un entramado social, político, económico y administrativo mucho menos complejo que el de un gran país europeo, por lo que es más fácil organizarse y llevar a cabo este tipo de cambios. Sin embargo es un país que, aunque tienen gran independencia energética gracias a sus centrales geotérmicas, cuenta con muy pocos recursos naturales y tiene una economía vulnerable cuyas exportaciones dependen en un 40% de la pesca. También los hay que dirán que han vivido por encima de sus posibilidades endeudándose y especulando en el casino financiero como el que más, y es cierto. Igual que lo han hecho el resto de los países guiados por un sistema financiero liberalizado hasta el infinito por los mismos gobiernos irresponsables y suicidas que ahora se echan las manos a la cabeza . Yo simplemente pienso que el pueblo islandés es un pueblo culto, solidario, optimista y valiente, que ha sabido rectificar echándole dos cojones, plantándole cara al sistema y dando una lección de democracia al resto del mundo.

El país ya ha iniciado negociaciones para entrar en la Unión Europea. Espero, por su bien y tal y como están poniéndose las cosas en el continente con la plaga de farsantes que nos gobiernan, que el pueblo islandés complete su revolución rechazando la adhesión. Y ojalá ocurriera lo contrario, que fuera Europa la que entrase en Islandia, porque esa sí sería la verdadera Europa de los pueblos.

2011-01-26T06:06:00.000-08:00

David Harvey talking about "The Enigma of Capital".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E11peQC0XXU&feature=player_embedded#!

Conspiracy Theories

2011-01-22T04:54:00.000-08:00

I guess the farmer would be the interests of global capital and the sheepdog the apparatus of state security.

2011-01-19T08:29:00.000-08:00

It's hard not to like an article that contains the line, "The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood-funnel into anything that smells like money."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405

Shame there's nothing anyone can, or is going to, do about it.

Programmed Obsolesence

2011-01-10T14:53:00.000-08:00

A great documentary on La 2 last night about programmed obsolescence. If you suspected that stuff about lightbulbs was the paranoid imaginings of conspiracy theorists- check this out. Lightbulbs could last indefinitely, Nylon tights were originally designed to be ladder-free and as for your i-Pod...

Here's the link to the documentary (Spanish):

http://www.rtve.es/noticias/20110104/productos-consumo-duran-cada-vez-menos/392498.shtml

And here's one to a pioneer in the field, Bernard London, as early as 1932 (English):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/London_%281932%29_Ending_the_depression_through_planned_obsolescence.pdf

We don't choose the stuff we buy, the stuff we buy chooses us

2010-12-29T06:29:00.000-08:00

Decentering of the subject

(From Firat and Venkatesh Postmodernity: The Age of Marketing; 1993)

The modernist project placed the human

being at the center, as the subject-that is,

as the agent that acts through and upon

others; nature and objects. The Cartesian

idea of the subject, as it is known, has dominated

modern thought. This subject is endowed

with the ability to act independently

and autonomously in the choice and pursuit

of one’s goals. This subject is also constituted

in terms of the separation between the body

and the mind (Rorty, 1979, pp. 142-145); a

precondition for the subject to graduate from

a state of being to a state of knowing. The

existential subject has now become the cognitive

subject. Knowledge acquisition for this

subject is possible by separating or distancing

oneself from a pure experience of being in

order to cievelop a cognitive understanding

of being; its context and conditions. Modern

society is organized to reflect and actively

promise the potential of the cognitive subject

by providing the knowledge and the means to

act through science and technology, The

products of modernity (of science) arc really

meant to serve the ‘subjects’ of modernity.

Postmodernists see this narrative of

modernity to be mythical or illusory. According

to them, there is, a confusion between

the subject and the object (products of the

market) as to who or what is in. control

(Hassan, 1987; Jameson, 1983). Rather than

the subject controlling the circumstances and

processes of life in one’s interactions with

the object, the objects are viewed as determining

the conditions and procedures of

consumption (Baudrillard, 1983b). In driving

cars, using microwave ovens, washing machines,

computers, and the like, the human

being is generally the follower of instructions,

the correct ways of doing things. One’s

actions are determined by the features and

structures of the products. One can as easily

visualize that the role of the human being is

to allow products to perform their functions

rather than products enabling the achievement

of human goals. Concerns for the health

of the economy, the market, often seem to

override the concern for the goals of individuals

in policies adopted by the state and/or

corporations.

The confusion between the subject and

the object is further reinforced by the fact

that consumers tend to perceive themselves

as marketable items. This tendency is reinforced

by the marketing system in encouraging

representations of oneself as images. The

marketing orientation dominates not only the

positioning of products in the market by organizations,

but also in positioning of the

consumer itself, say, in the social market

(Far-at, in press). As briefly discussed earlier,

consumers assume different images and personalities

in different situations to make

themselves acceptable in each case. This is

much in evidence in today’s “body” culture.

For example, many consumers, male and female,

are increasingly buying plastic surgery

and body implants to customize parts of their

bodies to cultural expectations. There is a

distancing of one’s own gaze from one’s own

body to “view” oneself and scrutinize

one’s own images, assessing each fragmented body

part in terms of its contribution to these

images. This scrutiny often occurs from the

perspective of the other; that is, not from

one’s own, autonomous perspective, but from

the perspective of cultural expectations which

are internalized by the consumer (Emberley,

1987; Kroker and Kroker, 1987). This is really

a test of how well we fit the images

required for success. In this sense, fashion

becomes the metaphor for culture (Faurschou,

1990; Sawchuk, 1987). Such objectification

of one’s own body and self allows one

to be consumed; just like a product, acting

only to fulfill a prespecified function determined

by the market system. Specifically,

consumers become products consumed for

the production of other objects, in the offices,

production lines, and elsewhere.

Churlish reflections on a heartwarming story

2010-10-13T22:19:00.000-07:00

Amid the heartwarming scenes that have accompanied the rescue of the Chilean miners over the past couple of days, I couldn't help but be reminded of Baudrillard's stubborn refusal to countenance the reality of the 1991 gulf war, as the TV broadcast nightly images of American missiles raining down on the Iraqi desert. It first struck me when, in a "context" piece on Radio 4, we were reminded that between 10 and 20,000 miners lose their lives every year in mining accidents. Put in the context of this loss of life, the joyous escape of the Chilean miners starts to look like a decoy, a distraction from the far more significant everyday reality which does not lend itself to the event-based format of news presentation. However, I'm not sure that it is the thousands of annual deaths that we are being distracted from.

The spectacular nature of the rescues and the tidy narrative structure lends itself irresistibly to the requirements of rolling news providers who have, consequently, fashioned from what are probably rather scrappy and confused raw materials in the Chilean desert, a global media event. Thus packaged by the media, the event takes on an irresistible reality. But the reality that is triumphantly being affirmed is less that of the very personal dramas of the people involved and rather a universalist notion of human sentiment, as refracted through the global media. How could it not be real, look at the joy on the faces of the loved ones as each miner emerges safely from the capsule. So we consume the joy that other people elsewhere are experiencing and associate it vaguely with an idea of common humanity, but one that is stretched so thin across the surface of the globe that it could only ever be symbolic.

I live in Barcelona and both the Chilean desert and the events that are unfolding there are very distant. Not, however, in the specially selected and packaged world of global news events. The media has erected, and struggles to keep aloft, a fictitious globalised world stitched together from scraps and fragments that can be re-packaged to conform to the narrative requirements of that world.

The media traffics in symbols of a globalised world which is not in fact any different from the symbols that represent it. In this tenuous version of reality, the story in the Chilean desert has proved to be a gold mine.

Change of Course

2010-10-12T02:05:00.000-07:00

I'm going to put the cycle of posts "Globalisation, space-time compression and symbolic exchange" on the back burner for the time being. This is for two reasons; first because the extended piece of writing that I was hoping to develop wasn't really taking shape, suggesting that I probably need to approach it in a different way and second, because I haven't got so much time at the moment. Instead I intend to treat this blog more like a blog and post regular self contained shorter pieces. As well as this I will post more links and the like. I will post the writing and links that relate to my academic interests on this site and more free-form pieces over at my other blog The Long-Legged Fly.

Globalisation, Space-Time Compression and Symbolic Exchange. Part Two.

2010-09-01T11:40:00.000-07:00

Human beings living at the beginning of the 21^st century are freaks, and abnormalities. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing to be an abnormality, but there it is. In the 50,000 years or so that Homo sapiens has been recognisably human, that’s to say using language, playing music and inventing mythologies, our cultures and societies have been articulated, reproduced and recorded orally. An oral culture is not simply a culture without writing and literacy, to be characterised purely negatively. It is a different culture with a different way of conceiving of and inhabiting the world (Ong, 2002). It is a culture in which knowledge is not contained in books which must be silently studied, but in the body of the one who knows, who will then transmit that knowledge by means of stories, poems, song and mnemonic devices (Mignolo, 1995). This must establish a far more intimate connection between people than that that to which we are accustomed in literate societies. There is no reason to suppose that oral transmission is inferior to literary transmission. There is increasing evidence that the oldest and most venerated texts of western culture, the Bible and Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, were imperfect transcriptions of older oral “texts” (Ong, 2002). What’s more, there is no reason to suppose that the world of someone in an oral culture is in any way deficient with respect to the world of a literate person. Rather it will be qualitatively different, articulated exclusively within the resonant, intimate and inclusive medium of sound (McLuhan, 1963). Just as a bat inhabits a qualitatively different world from that of a human, one which is constructed through the medium of sonic echoes, so the oral conception of the world is qualitatively different from the literate one.

This matters when it comes to thinking about globalisation, because one central, yet often overlooked, feature of globalisation is the globalisation of a peculiarly European form of literacy. At its inception, with the advance party of missionaries preparing the territory, teaching the natives to read and write went alongside clothing them and converting them to Christianity. This represented, and continues to represent, an unquestionable hallmark of civilisation and development. I doubt that many people would raise an eyebrow at the inclusion of literacy in the United Nations Development Agency’s Human Development Index (HDI). Given the de facto development of the world since the early days of colonialism, this is hardly surprising. However, this doesn’t mean there is anything natural or inherently superior about a literate conception of the world, it simply demonstrates the extent to which colonialism and European influence generally, were able to dominate the territories that they encountered not only through force, but also through the imposition of alternative conceptual frameworks, in terms of which the dominated were obliged to re-orientate themselves.

None of which is intended as post-colonial hand wringing. I think territorial aggression and domination seem to be a virtual universal constant in human history so we can hardly be surprised that European peoples exploited their technologies for just those reasons. It is equally unsurprising that their conceptual apparatus should end up suffocating indigenous schemata much as the Strangler Fig smothers its host. What’s more, whilst the capitalist political economy that currently dominates the world clearly has its origins in European thought and practice, it no longer respects the well-ordered geo-political system of nation states. Rather those in a position to mobilise capital are able to link up with each other irrespective of geography and tradition (although both these still exert a powerful influence). However, the conceptual framework which we employ in order to map and understand the world and which, consequently, lies at the heart of our understanding of the process of globalisation could have been very different. An interesting, though unfashionable, way of exhibiting this is to try to imagine how peoples unaffected by European colonialism might have conceived of, or still conceive of, time and space.

In his article, “Steel Axes for Stone age Australians” (Sharp, 1952) Lauriston Sharp described how the Yir Yoront aborigines, in what was fast becoming Australia, orientated themselves within a temporal framework that was quite different from that of modern Europeans, one that must have produced an entirely different sense of identity.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Europeans imagine themselves to be irreducible individuals, existing at one moment along a temporal sequence that stretches far into the past and will, presumably, stretch far into the future. The individual is, of course, greatly influenced by his predecessors and by the historical conditions that gave rise to the present, but he is essentially different from them, by virtue of the fact that he is just this one here, occupying precisely this position in the historical progression of time and the geographical expansion of space.

The Yir Yoront, however, did not experience themselves as just this one here. The name of a member of the tribe refers to an ancestral archetype which both defines who the person is and how they are expected to behave. That behaviour, the basic pattern of the person’s life, his or her relations with others in the village and, to a certain extent, his or her personality, is thus experienced as an ahistorical garment which the tribe member wears, the origin of which is to be found, not within the person, but within the archetypes which, in fact, define who the person is.

“A man called Dog–chases–iguana–up–a–tree–and–barks–at–him–all–night–long had that and other names because he believed his ancestral alter ego had also had them; he was a member of the Sunlit Cloud Iguana Clan because his ancestor was; he was associated with particular countries and totems of this same ancestor; during an initiation he played the role of a dog and symbolically attacked and killed certain members of other Clans because his ancestor (…) really did the same to the ancestral alter egos of these men; and he would avoid his mother–in–law, joke with a mother’s distant brother, and make spears in a certain way because his and other people’s ancestors did these things. His behavior in these specific ways was outlined, and to that extent determined for him, by a set of ideals concerning the past and the relation of the present to the past.” (Sharp, 1952)

In one sense this doesn’t seem so different from the European experience. I’m English because my forefathers were English. I associate myself with certain places and symbolically important objects because of my antecedents. What seems to distinguish the case of Dog–chases–iguana–up–a–tree–and–barks–at–him–all–night–long from John Smith is that whereas the later has a personal identity which is constituted in large part by the idiosyncratic choices he makes and fortunes that befall him, the later seems to be defined entirely by his communal heritage, right down to the most idiosyncratic details of his life story. In no aspect of his life can he be considered just this one here, he always orientates himself with respect to a mythological past which is, in fact a-historical. A reasonable objection by a European observer would be that, whilst the psychological disposition of this relation to time might be comprehensible, it would surely not stand up to the contingencies of the real world which would guarantee that the events of an individual’s life would not conform to any pre-ordained archetype. Sharp acknowledges this, but explains it in the following way,

“But when we are informed that Dog–chases–etc. had two wives from the Spear Black Duck Clan and one from the Native Companion Clan, one of them being blind, that he had four children with such and such names, that he had a broken wrist and was left handed, all because his ancestor had exactly these same attributes, then we know (though he apparently didn’t) that the present has influenced the past, that the mythical world has been somewhat adjusted to meet the exigencies and accidents of the inescapably real present.” (Sharp, 1952)

To this extent, the mythical world, as well as producing and defining the world of the present, is also always in the process of being produced. So this oral relation to time might be considered to be homeostatic in nature. Whereas the past for European peoples is nailed down in books and on databases, for the Yir Yoront it is, or was, contained exclusively in memory and that which is forgotten, consequently, ceases to exist. That which does exist, in terms of mythological memory, is in need of continual adjustments to ensure its isomorphism with experiential reality just as experiential reality needs constant adjustments to ensure its isomorphism with the mythological past.

An illustration of the extent to which the Yir Yoront is capable of regulating its reality is shown by the fact that some eighty years before Lauriston Sharp carried out his research, in one of their rare encounters with Europeans, the Yir Yoront were confronted by, and confronted, a party of cattlemen, who, in response, opened fire on them, killing 30 of their number. This was all well recorded by the cattlemen, however in extensive interviews with Yir Yoront just 70 years later they had no collective memory of the events. It had obviously not been considered expedient to preserve that aspect of reality, so it was discarded (Sharp, 1952)

Once again, the reasonable European observer would reasonably say that irrespective of what the Yir Yoront choose to remember or not, the event did take place. It is hard to argue against that. Nonetheless, I am inclined to think that this gets to heart of the conceptual colonialism that the European peoples have so successfully imposed upon the rest of the world. This will be a recurring theme.

Mignolo, W. (1995). The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Colonization and Territoriality. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press

McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Ong, W. (2002). Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge

Sharp, L. (1952). Steel axes for stone age Australians. Human Organization, 11(1 )

Parenthasis

2010-08-10T01:55:00.000-07:00

The series of posts, "Globalalisation, Space-Time compression and Symbolic exchange", will continue just as soon as I've worked out what the hell it is I want to say. In the meantime, a couple of things.

First, some further reflections on the treadmill on my other blog, The Long Legged Fly. This loosely connects to my discussion of Hartmut Rosa's metaphor of the treadmill in the series of posts, "What is Social Acceleration".

Also, further to the discussion of Earth and World in the last posting on this blog, I came across this short piece by Heidegger entitled "Why Do I Stay in the Provinces". Let's say it provides ballast to postmodern fripperies. I want to ridicule the piece, especially the last lines, but can't quite bring myself to do it.

Globalisation, Space-Time Compression and Symbolic Exchange. Part One.

2010-08-02T13:57:00.000-07:00

What a disorientating, exhilarating image that must have been the first time it was beamed back to Earth and then put out for general consumption, not just in the western world, but everywhere where there were television sets or newspapers.

Earthrise.

Even the word has a dislocating, uncanny quality to it. Sunrise is a word, an image and an idea, which takes its place seamlessly in the framework of words, images and ideas with which we are well familiar. Sunrise; signifying the dawn of a new day, signifying the romantic contemplation of our relation to nature, signifying a precise moment in the morning, it contains a potential potency, albeit one that requires the poet or the artist to retrieve it from the anesthetising familiarity of its habitual usage. Earthrise, however, did not require the poet or the artist to exhibit it in its strangeness and singularity. It didn’t fit into any prescribed contexts of usage or practice, save from the imaginings of science fiction. Earthrise did not simply show the Earth as it had never been seen before, it showed the Earth for the first time; a whole, unsupported, sphere situated in… what? Space? Nothingness? The Solar System? Our central nervous system did not evolve to make sense of perspectives such as this. Here was visual evidence that we didn’t only inhabit London or Delhi or Mexico or China, but that we also lived on a terribly fragile looking planet, what Carl Sagan was soon to liken to a mote of dust.

And I imagine the moment when people from all over the planet first saw that image and were, momentarily, wrenched from the familiarity of the many and various worlds that they inhabited, both individually and collectively, captivated by the image of what, within a hitherto unknown way of thinking, might be considered home. Was there, in that moment, an acknowledgement, however fleeting, of the reality of the planet, of Earth and of space? And would not such an acknowledgement inevitably impel a radical relativisation of the systems of meaning in which people found themselves, be they religious, familial or nationalistic. Did this not represent a reality upon which everyone was compelled to agree?

I don’t know. Perhaps it was nothing like that. I was one at the time and so probably had different priorities. What is clear is that any force that the image once had has long since been drained away as it has taken its place in the field of images that we consume and discard in the traffic of our everyday lives. In fact, it is striking how, in the intervening period, interest in space exploration seems to have evaporated and we seem to be more entrenched than ever in the networks of meaning that constitute our various worlds, as if we were intolerant of the absolute non-functionality of this extra-terrestrial perspective on terrestrial existence.

What I find interesting about this is that the image of the Earth from space seems to represent the culmination of a process of mapping, rationalising and objectifying space that was set in motion at the start of the renaissance. This was the proof, that was no longer even required, that all of those maps really did represent an objective reality. And yet now, 40-odd years on, that proof no longer seems quite so incontrovertible and the rationalisation of space which it vindicated no longer seems quite so secure. What was dislocating about Earthrise was that it referred to an ungraspable, inconceivable reality in the face of which we could only wonder. Now, however, thanks to Google Earth, the updated version of Earthrise, the manipulable globe that shimmers on our screens is fully incorporated into the networks of meaning and significance that constitute our everyday lives. From planning holidays to zooming in on familiar places in our home-town, the Earth has been truly domesticated and assimilated into our mundane routines.

All of which raises the question of Earth and of World and the relationship between them. Is the Earth an objective reality upon which we can agree? Does the Earth take its place within the play of signifiers that constitute our world? Is our world grounded upon the Earth or is the Earth dynamised by the place it holds within our world? Can a sense of the Earth resist such assimilation?

Heidegger addressed this question in his article, The Origin of the Work of Art (1). For Heidegger the work of art provided the locus for a struggle between the antagonistic, but mutually dependant phenomena of Earth and World. In Heidegger’s account, ‘World’ is the less problematic of the two terms. World is concerned with human goals and meanings and constitutes a totality of such meanings. Put simply, it corresponds to our everyday usage of the term when we speak of the “world of work”, the “art world” or the “Islamic world”. In this sense we obviously inhabit multiple worlds all of which interpenetrate each other at various points. Importantly, such a notion, while being well understood, is not grounded upon, or dependant upon, any geographical, or objectively quantifiable idea of space. World, in this sense, is a world of significance and significations. From this point of view, we can rightly assert that the Earth exists as an object in the world, in so far as it, or at least its representation, its idea or its image, is operable within the flow of significations that constitute our world (in the worlds of astronomy, geology and climate studies for example). For Heidegger, Earth is the problematic term. While the work of art seeks to uncover a world, Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Shoes” evoke the world of the peasant who wears them, Earth is that which both provides the possibility for such an uncovering, being the material with which the painting is created, and that which resists human attempts to make it intelligible, to draw it into the web of human signification.

It is not my intention to engage with Heidegger’s terminology or use it in a way that remains faithful to his vision. It is enough, for my purposes, to point out that he is obviously not employing the term “Earth” in any of its habitual uses here. He does not mean planet or soil or anything that is immediately familiar to us and operable within the flows of human meaning. If he is not employing the term in a metaphysical sense, then it is always right on the edge of metaphysics in so far as it is that which resists assimilation into the networks of human meaning. For ‘metaphysical’, one could read ‘religious’ or ‘mystical’.

So much for Heidegger. But what do we mean when we talk about the Earth? Is it an objective reality? Does it provide the ground upon which, within which, we construct our various worlds? Is it an ungraspable something which resists our attempts to represent it and incorporate it into our worlds of significance and meaning? Or is it a perfectly functional concept which operates seamlessly within the everyday exchange of meaning? Is it possible that the reality of Earth as a body in space is achingly vast and exterior to any ideas that we might have about it? Earthrise, or Google Earth?

I don’t think this amounts to semantic quibbling. ‘Globalisation’ is a term that is exchanged freely and unproblematically. It operates seamlessly within our discourse, albeit a discourse dominated by the semantic fields of economics and global politics. Yet with what model of the globe are we operating here and what theory of space does it presuppose? If globalisation defines the new horizon within which cultural, economic and political meaning is articulated, then surely it is only natural that we should subject that horizon to some interrogation.

What is clear is that for virtually all of the natural history of human beings, there was no recourse to this idea of Earth as an objective reality. What’s more, there was no recourse to space and time as objective constants, independent of the lived reality in which people were embedded. Pre-renaissance maps of the world, such as the O-T maps of Christendom, were symbolic in nature. They didn’t presume to map an objectively existing space, but the symbolic world within which people orientated themselves. Hence the O-T maps always placed Jerusalem at their centre. The question that this raises is whether the geographically accurate mapping of space corresponded to an objective reality, or whether it represented the triumph of a culturally specific way of conceptualising the world, which proved to be a highly effective tool in the service of colonial and capitalist domination.

In the following series of postings, I want to explore the concept and phenomenon of globalisation, taking as my point of departure the rupture with the symbolic world of the middle ages and the production, at the time of the renaissance and the voyages of discovery, of universal and objective conceptions of time and space. I will then go on to consider how such conceptions are bearing up in the media saturated world of instantaneous electronic communication.

Is more flexibility the only answer?

2010-07-04T03:57:00.000-07:00

Last week UK government floated a proposal to offer subsidies to people who want to re-locate in order to find work. It seems people are just still not flexible enough.

The solution to the economic crisis of the 1970's, was to introduce a series of measures designed to make the global economy more flexible and dynamic and thus create new possibilities for growth. Floating exchange rates were introduced, the principals of free trade were advanced and increasingly countries that didn't get with the programme were punished by international financial organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF. What this meant domestically was that as manufacturing industry was decimated, at an accelerated rate during the 1980's, the workforce was expected to be highly flexible in its pursuit of employment. They had to be willing and able to re-skill, re-locate and reduce their expectations in terms of salaries and workers rights. While the salaries of the rich have grown exponentially since the 1970's, average salaries have fallen in real terms.

This flexibility affected every area of our lives. We were expected to be flexible in our employment choices, flexible in our working practices, flexible in our choices of where to live. Such flexibility inevitably extended to other areas such as values, social bonds between people, loyalty to a region or a specific place and our way of seeing the world.

Of course the narrative is that all of this flexibility has been in order to make the UK more competitive. What this really means, if you don't view it through a nationalist prism, is that people are expected to live their lives increasingly in the service of capital accumulation. Not their own accumulation of capital, of course, but that tiny minority who, in one way or another, are playing the stock market. Any doubt about this should have been dispelled by the role the markets played in UK elections. Political and social processes were subordinated to the reaction of the market.

So the government's response to the crisis is more of the same, but with greater intensity and at a faster rate of acceleration. Why are we collectively incapable of seeing how manipulated we are? Why are we not talking about the damage which has been done to the social fabric by so much flexibility and thinking seriously about alternatives. Have we given up on trying to assert the value and importance of, for example, social relationships over and above the demands of the economy?

It seems to me that the economic crisis should provide an opportunity for a major reassessment of the values that we have been pursuing up until now- but nothing of the sort is happening. The government in the UK, and in other countries, has committed itself to a continuation of the policies of the 1980's and 1990's that got us into this mess in the first place and we believe them when they say there is no alternative. Talk about subdued!

In this video David Harvey talks about this and related themes.

What is Social Acceleration? Part Seven: Conclusion

2010-07-02T07:50:00.000-07:00

Capitalism, like any term is loaded. It activates a series of narratives related to Marxism, economics and politics and establishes, for many people, a prescriptive evaluation regarding what is under discussion. Of course nowadays there are plenty of people who, following the likes of Freidman, will hear the term in a broadly favourable way, but for many the term contains an implicit condemnation. This duality is a problem- it introduces a form of oppositional thinking which disfigures that which is under discussion. That’s not to say the term can be circumvented or abandoned. I think that the term captures the central dynamic of the acceleration which is taking place in our societies and in our lives. Not perfectly and not exhaustively; the narrative could be and frequently is recast in quite different terms and is both revealing and compelling. Nonetheless, I don’t think there is anything that captures the dynamic of social acceleration quite as completely as does the designation of capitalism, for all the many reasons that I have discussed in previous postings.

However the problem of evaluation remains, and it is a serious one. After a discussion on some related issue in a class recently a student who quite understandably wanted to defend some facet of the modern world, added somewhat forlornly, “but I don’t want to be a capitalist”. Who would? It hardly secretes ideological glamour (if such a thing is possible). Self-interest, aggressiveness, a dour work ethic perhaps, but not any idealistic desire to right the wrongs of the world. It is not the case that there is, on the one hand, this avaricious capitalistic system driving an acceleration of social processes and on the other, human beings caught up in, but ontologically different from, such processes. We are, rather, its agents, propagators and medium. And what that means is that claims to being in favour of, or opposed to capitalism and the social acceleration that it implies are either superficial or disingenuous. When I attended classes for my Masters in Globalisation at the University of Barcelona, some of the more ideologically committed students would frown upon those of us that drank Coca Cola in class, as if abstinence from certain totemic symbols of capitalism could exempt one from complicity in its logic. This is an obvious example, but examples abound from NGOs and aid organisations to indie rock bands and student demos. All, to varying degrees, ostensibly oppose themselves to the logic of capitalism, whilst carving out niches within its overall architecture. All of which is to say that the logic of capitalism is totalising, leaving barely any corner of our lives or thought processes untouched. Which raises the question of whether, given this totalising characteristic, it really makes sense to designate the manifold processes which are transforming our lives and our world in terms of an economic system. And if we do, does it not, at least, become important that the term resonates slightly differently, so that it does not lend itself so easily to a rather un-nuanced form of oppositional thought.

We might wish to condemn capitalism, but in so doing we will often be implicitly reinforcing a form of traditionalism. Capitalism may have brought us alienating labour practices, massive social inequality and global warming, but it has also been instrumental in the development of rights and inclusiveness for all sorts of previously marginalised or persecuted groups, all the gadgets and technologies that have come to dynamise modern life (see the posting on David Harvey for a description of his views on time-space compression) and a sense of personal autonomy and freedom from the asphyxiating effects of traditional values.

On the first of these points, exclusion of certain groups from the social mainstream also excludes them from the market. This is an intolerable barrier to capitalism, which will then seek to re-insert them within the commercial field. Consider what a boom-market the gay scene has provided since the 1960’s. On the second, there are few among the relatively affluent of the planet who would be willing to dispense with the tools, the internet foremost among them, that have enabled us to so comprehensively overcome barriers of space and time. This can be seen in many different guises from the various dynamised production networks that enable us to buy cheap Chinese imports or provide novel Christmas present ideas on Amazon to the anti-globalisation activists who are able to communicate and organise globally thanks to the space-annihilating new technologies. These processes have been greatly facilitated and accelerated by the tendency of capitalism to creatively overcome barriers to capital accumulation. The third point mentioned above also relates to overcoming barriers, but this time the very intransigent barriers of social values and customs. Here the question of evaluation is particularly problematic and shifting. What seems like an unpardonable breach of a social value today can appear in a very different light with the passing of time. Sunday opening in the UK (the overcoming of an important temporal barrier to capital accumulation) seemed like a big deal when it was first introduced. Nowadays people would probably feel their rights had been violated if they were unable to shop on a Sunday. And how are we to judge the undermining of social institutions like marriage? It could be viewed negatively, in terms of the atomisation of society, or positively in terms personal liberation from confining social conventions. Either way, in the case of this example, people are being forced to re-evaluate and often re-negotiate the ground rules for their relationships. Even if a couple goes for a church wedding followed by a nuclear family, they are well aware that, these days, that this is but one option among many. Previously such an arrangement had not been option, or if it was, it was so to a much lesser degree, and so could not really be seen in terms of a choice. However, once it becomes optional, it also becomes a choice. This phenomenon of optionality is highly subversive of social institutions and identities (see T. de Zengotita, Mediated).

The key words and phrases here seem to be ‘overcoming barriers’ and ‘dynamism’. This seems to get to the heart of the acceleration of societal processes that is taking place. Over the course of the previous postings we have seen repeated examples of systems becoming increasingly dynamic, and how the rhythm of that dynamism is accelerating. This could be seen during the introduction of the factory system, which spelled the end of the craftsman, and the introduction of specialised, repeatable tasks controlled by the rhythm of the machinery. It is clear that technological innovation has been right at the heart of social acceleration as human beings are increasingly forced to adapt to the new technologies that are foisted upon them and which, increasingly, they greedily embrace. The paradigm example was the ‘just-in-time’ production method, where speed of turnover and the tight coupling of the system are of the essence. People have to adapt to the accelerated rhythm of such a production method as best they can. Stress in the work place is not an undesired consequence of imperfect institutional organisation, it is oftentimes a virtual condition of employment. We also saw a similar dynamic at work with airline scheduling, household chores, the working day and the timetable. As people adapt to these technologies and organisational forms, they become subtly reconfigured. In the same way as you can often spot an ex military man because of his mannerisms, way of walking and talking and values, so the curious, but rarely fully committed browsing and skimming of the internet subtly reconfigures our expectations, attention span and tolerance for mental effort (see Nicholas Carr).

It’s as if we have broken free from well established conceptions of time, space and historical development to occupy instead a timeless, spaceless universe in which anything of value from any time or space is decanted into the present in order to extract that value. Such a transformations could not be achieved without some violence to existing systems, conventions or values. Hence the breaking of barriers. Collectively the relatively wealthy of the world, which almost certainly includes everyone reading this blog, are acting like the loving middle class boy who becomes a junky and quickly fritters away all of the emotional and literal capital that he had accumulated over the course of a lifetime of good behaviour, all in service of the next fix. First he drains his trust fund (literal capital) and then starts using his parent’s credit card and stealing from them (emotional capital). The paradigm illustration of this is the stock market which operates both figuratively and literally.

Some embrace this whole transformation. There are a lot of people who simply see technology as the saviour. And the religious language is no accident. The highly influential Ray Kurzweil is convinced, and argues persuasively, that the accelerated rates of technological innovation form an unbroken continuum with the development of RNA and DNA, the evolution of species and the first use of tools by humans. He predicts that the current exponential rate of transformation will result in a paradigm shift sometime around the middle of this century at which point the rate of technological change will be too fast for human beings to cope with from within their existing conceptual paradigms. Technological enthusiasts and futurists of this sort would advocate riding the wave of technological change. It’s heady stuff, although I can’t help being struck by the strong parallel with Christianity and wonder whether it is not an unconscious attempt to redeem religion. Arguments of this sort tend also to be strikingly uncritical and fail to satisfactorily locate technology within a broader social context.

At the other end of the spectrum we find Baudrillard who would have no argument with the idea that society is undergoing a rapid acceleration, though he would see this in terms of the production and consumption of signs. Having replaced the physical commodity as the source of value in society, all manner of signs and symbols are manipulated towards the end of extracting value. This can be clearly seen with companies like Nike which produce nothing. The production of their sportswear is subcontracted to hidden-away sweat-shops in China where the workers can be exploited in 19^th century European factory conditions. The brand, however, is everything and that’s where the money goes and that’s where the value is generated. His vision is ultimately pessimistic in that he senses an extreme desperation in the extraction and utilisation of all types of value, wherever they might be found. For Baudrillard this is what explains palaeontology, archaeology and history. This is not exclusively capitalistic, but part of a social imperative for symbolic meaning which has been largely forgotten and obscured in the West, though it remains alive and well in the Muslim world.

Broadly speaking I am sympathetic towards Baudrillard’s approach, especially the direction in which he took Marxist thought, and in subsequent postings I would like to explore some of the areas that this blog is dedicated to, in the light of Baudrillard’s emphasis on symbolic value. However, with respect to evaluating the social acceleration that I set out to define with this series of postings, I think that before any sort of evaluation can be proffered the multi-faceted phenomena that I have tried to capture with this term must be recognised. That is difficult because we tend only to see what is in front of our noses. We don’t really see the historical processes which we are caught up in, we don’t recognise the degree to which the planet is interconnected and networked and we treat with an apathetic shrug the extraordinary transformations that are being wrought on the planet and on our species. Evaluation tends to be a way of fore-stalling further thought about any of these matters.

What is Social Acceleration? Part Six: The Cultural Motor

2010-06-13T11:10:00.000-07:00

As I indicated in the previous posting, Rosa saw the economy as just one of three motors of social acceleration. The other two he labelled as cultural and structural. I think we’ve got to take all these designations with a pinch of salt. Depending on how the analysis is structured, one can give primacy to one or other area. The important thing to recognise is that that there is a dialectical relationship between these areas- they all act upon, influence and transform each other.

Rosa’s treatment of the cultural motor is a case in point. He draws upon the works of Hans Blumenberg and Marianne Gronemeyer to present a reworking of the early and pre-modern notion of the good life being equated with the fulfilled life. In this version, the idea of the fulfilled life is striped of its religious connotations of a higher life attained after death and is reworked in light of the decline of religion and the secularisation of time. This is to say, we no longer have confidence that time is articulated in terms of a religious narrative. We do not feel ourselves to be participants in an unfolding drama of sin, repentance and salvation. In the absence of this, time drained of its meaning and calls out for an alternative interpretation.

We no longer believe that by being virtuous and patient in this life we will be rewarded with fulfilment in the next. However, fulfilment remains an important, perhaps the important, goal of life. In the absence of transcendent, otherworldly fulfilment, which might relativize the limited nature of mortal life, what we are left with is a kind of nagging imperative to experience as much of the world and of life as possible in the time available to us. However the options available to us inevitably outstrip our capacity to explore them, prompting us to become ever more frenetic in our pursuit of fulfilment.

It’s not difficult to see what’s meant here. Imagine the broad acceptance that people had of their position in life and the possibilities that they were afforded by that position a few hundred years ago. You were the blacksmith’s son, you would go on to be the blacksmith. Work was a necessary evil and your obligation to the community. There was little option about who you were and what you did. People didn’t expect to be fulfilled in their personal lives (if such a notion even existed). The expectation was that they would lead a sufficiently virtuous life to guarantee the safe passage of their souls after death.

What a difference from now when people not only expect to feel fulfilled in the here and now, but consider it a failure if they are not. And there’s the catch, because fulfilment is most definitely not something that people experience as a matter of course, but they don’t want to be stigmatised as a failure and so the only way out is to pretend. Think about how routinely people exaggerate the satisfaction that they derive from their work. It seems that to express dissatisfaction or boredom is a sign of failure and people flee from it. The willingness to maintain the illusion of satisfied fulfilment is, socially, far more important than the reality which such insistent claims of satisfaction mask. The best way for someone to convince themselves and others that they are both satisfied and fulfilled is to stay busy. And even if one remains unconvinced, at least there is less time in which to think about it.

So the basic plot of our lives has changed from a sweeping theological drama in which the individual played a highly relativised, marginal part, to a personalised drama in which the individual, and his or her quest for personal fulfilment, takes centre stage.

Time becomes highly rationalised and the goal becomes to maximise the effective use of that time. Time is divided up into fragile structures such as work time and leisure time, being with friends time or being with partner/family time. We attend to these different temporalities and relationships in a way that is not dissimilar to the way we attend to the various websites, social networks and blogs to which we subscribe. We browse them, keep them ticking over, do what is required to maintain them, knowing that they are but one among many, that they are dispensable and that it wouldn’t do to get too bogged down in any one area, because there is so much more to attend to.

Doing nothing in particular provokes anxiety because the sense of unproductive, meaningless time becomes tangible. The meaningfulness of our lives has become externalised in temporal structures which act as temporary bulwarks against the meaninglessness which throws us back upon our own, much depleted, resources. Time becomes a weight that presses down upon us, provoking mild, but nagging feelings of guilt and emptiness. It is not dissimilar to the situation whereby multinationals like Monsanto sell genetically modified seeds to farmers, producing temporarily improved yields at the cost of the farmer’s autonomy.

And I don’t think this parallelism is accidental. It brings us back to the question of causes and whether all this can be seen as determined by the economic motor. To say that our cultural activities, our social lives, our relationships have been increasingly subverted by and subordinated to the demands of the market is not necessarily to argue in favour of economic determinism, however there is no question that economic factors were at the heart of the many tendencies that have been transforming our cultures and our way of life since the middle of the last millennium. Changing attitudes towards religion, new ways of thinking and technological innovation have all played an important role and one could construct a narrative in which any one of these areas is fundamental. However it is the development of universal, abstract money that has acted as the enzyme capable of catalysing all areas of human activity, reducing them relentlessly to a universal and abstract value. And following the logic of capitalism, the effect of this enzyme is to increase the rate of metabolic change within the social flows.

This has been a very fragmented, partial and un-nuanced survey. My intention has been more to throw up some ideas (none original) and see how they land than to construct a convincing argument. In the next and final posting in this series I will consider how to evaluate this process I have been describing and consider the limitation of some of the terminology I have been employing.

Parenthesis

2010-06-05T07:38:00.000-07:00

No final installment of "what is social acceleration" this week as I have been working on a posting for my other blog The Long Legged Fly about the Bilderberg meeting in Sitges this weekend. It deals to some extent with the idea of social homeostasis, although I will work that out more fully on this blog. Take a look.

By the way, after watching an installment of David Harvey's fantastic reading of Capital, I go back on what I said about him being and economic determinist.

What is Social Acceleration? Part Five: David Harvey on Time-Space Compression

2010-05-30T10:58:00.000-07:00

The contraction of the present, as Hartmut Rosa presents it, strikes an intuitive chord, but seems to be too rooted in the realm of sociological theory. Something like this seems to be the case, but experiential flesh needs to be put on to the theoretical bones. A lot of the elements seem to be there in previous postings, the tightly-knitted networks of production, the proliferation of weightless social contacts through social networking sites, the increasing pressingness of time as we struggle not only to meet our obligations, but also to avail ourselves of all the good things that are made instantaneously available to us at any time of day or night. But what are we supposed to make of all this? How are we supposed to knit these disparate observations into something that may serve as an explanatory model- something that helps us to understand our world?

Here lies one of the fault-lines between modernism and post-modernism. Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition (1) announces the disintegration and de-legitimisation of what he calls Meta-Narratives. On the one hand, to provide a generalised account of social acceleration, is to build a meta-narrative which seeks to enclose within its interpretive framework a heterogeneous bundle of ‘facts’ or ‘insights’ or ‘language-games’. Such language-games are drawn from very different and individualised contexts and the meta-narrative imposes upon them a homogeneity that no longer allows them to speak for themselves. Hence the oppressive nature of theory. This is, of course, the criticism that is often levelled at Marxism. On the other hand, do things really speak for themselves? Isn’t it the case that the immaculately turned out George Clooney, inviting us, from our television screen, to partake of his beautiful lifestyle consisting as it does of stylish machines, flirtatious encounters and sophisticated coffee, expressly obscures and conceals the nature of the commodity that is on offer and the mode of production through which it came to be on offer. And in the absence of an explanatory model that seeks to make connections between disparate phenomena, are we not left only with mute post-modern irony in the face of Clooney’s collusion with the forces of naked capital accumulation?

Perhaps we don’t need to worry away at these dichotomies and we should simply mobilize all the linguistic resources at our disposal to create the desired effect.

This is a subject that has been argued over a lot and I raise it here only in order to situate what follows.

David Harvey, in his The Condition of Postmodernity (2), picks out the same phenomenon of the contraction of the present as does Rosa. Harvey describes this as space-time compression. At one point in the book he describes it in a fairly similar way;

“…accelerations in turnover times in production, exchange and consumption […] produce, as it were, the loss of a sense of the future, except and in so far as the future can be discounted into the present. Volatility and ephemerality similarly make it difficult to maintain any firm sense of community. Past experience gets compressed into some overwhelming present.” (Harvey, D. p. 291)

Harvey is coming from the position of an economic determinist when he says this, which is to say that he considers the capitalist requirement for capital accumulation to be the driving force behind this process. Whilst this is an historical process whose origins coincide with the beginnings of modernity, he focuses particularly on the economic shift towards flexible capital accumulation in the 1970’s. I’ll look more closely at what is meant by this later, and whether it is too narrow an approach, but suffice it to say for now that however one accounts for space-time compression, its effects are felt across multiple contexts and on multiple scales.

From the financial markets which discount future trading operations into the demand of the present for the extraction of value, to the exploitation of the earth’s resources in order to make money now. From the cashing in of the study of history in order exploit it’s potential to amuse in the form of for-TV television dramas, to the reviving of old acquaintances on Facebook in order to burn up an un-productive half hour or so. From slit screen rolling news delivered in segments of no more than 20 seconds, turning context and analysis into a parody of itself in order to maximise audience share, to the ubiquity of gadgets that keep us perpetually alert to any new information that might stimulate us where we would previously have waited for the nine o’clock news or to get back and listen to messages on the answer phone.

And that’s all prioritising time. One need look no further than the process of globalisation to see how space is being compressed. Restaurants from every corner of the world in every city of the world, distance learning, cut-price air travel, American series disseminated globally via the internet, completely rupturing that outdated commitment to scheduling, all feverishly exploiting value, interest and novelty to stimulate us right here, right now.

The breeching of what used to be called values is another matter again, not immediately connected with time or space, but generally a prerequisite if spatial and temporal limits are going to be dismantled.

This is where the evaluation part gets so difficult, because it would seem from what I have written that I am outraged and alarmed by all this. In fact I lap it up. As I have said previously, evaluation tends to get used to forestall further discussion.

What seems incontestable is that there is some historical process taking place which demands to be understood. If it is not an historical process, and I don’t entirely discount the possibility, then it is unimaginably strange.

Harvey is clear on this point. He an economic determinist (a nuanced one, but one nonetheless) and sees the acceleration of social processes to follow naturally from the need for capital accumulation that sits at the heart of our economic system. The processes of technological innovation and globalisation were both generated by the particular dynamic of capitalism, whereby in order to stay competitive the productive sector must grow, creating the potential for crisis when that growth hits a limit, for instance in the capacity of people to consume. According to Harvey this is what happened in the 1970’s, after the post-war consumer boom petered out and there was little opportunity for fresh growth within Europe and the States. How else can demand be stimulated?

One way is through expanding the market. What had been done a century earlier through colonialisation was now repeated, but under the banner of globalisation. Exchange rates floated freely, free trade was either encouraged or effectively imposed by the international financial institutions and the project to convert the world into one great integrated market was set in motion. This market provided not only consumer demand, but also a vast and impoverished labour market.

Another is through technological innovation. Individual ingenuity probably has a part to play in this, however staying ahead of the game with respect to your competitors is certainly what lends the process of technological innovation its dynamism.

Something else that Harvey points out should be added. The de-industrialisation of western economies was also, in part, a response to the need to accelerate turnover times in production and consumption. Manufactured goods take too long to produce and they last too long. Built in obsolencence and disposable commodities have had a part to play in addressing this. Equally important has been an increased reliance on the service industries. With many service industries, value can be extracted from nothing, literally in the case of the financial sector (futures markets, credit financing etc…), and virtually in the case of the media, advertising, image consultancies and PR to name but a few of the slew of industries that have proliferated in recent years. The speed and scale upon which value can be extracted is, of course, greatly expanded by both the new technologies and globalisation. But so too is the need for expansion and growth.

Here, once again, we see a feedback mechanism whereby the demands of capital accumulation give rise to an acceleration in technological innovation which compresses space, creating a new form of global market, new forms of behaviour and new opportunities for accumulating capital which must be exploited to the full if the company is to remain competitive.

This connects to another important idea, that of the creative destruction of capitalism. In order to exploit any opportunities for capital accumulation capitalism tends to destroy all manner of established structures which act as barriers. This might be outdated manufacturing industries, maintained by subsidies because of the social importance that they have to the community or they may be the social values mentioned above that prevent, for example, Spanish shops from opening on Sundays.

Capitalism seeks to dynamise production and consumption through a perpetual revolution in values, institutions, loyalties and allegiances. Given the nature of capital accumulation, this is bound to occur at ever accelerating speeds, accounting in large part for why we live frenetic, over-stimulated lives, in spite of the technology we have at our disposal, in spite of the fact that the work force was massively increased by the introduction of women, in spite of so many factors that should logically lead to a reduction in working time and a capacity to spread the wealth more equitably and a focus upon how to live well as opposed to how to accumulate and do as much as possible in the time available. As to the question of where all that extra productive capacity has gone the answer is clear- profit. There is a tiny elite that controls an immensely exaggerated proportion of the worlds capital (and material) resources.

In Rosa Hartmut’s treatment of the topic he identifies three motors of this process of social acceleration. The first is the economy, and is broadly in agreement with Harvey’s analysis. In addition to this he considers the ‘cultural motor’ and the ‘structural motor’. In the next posting I’ll consider these approaches and, if time permits, start to consider how Baudrillard sought to reframe the debate in terms of the virtualisation of all aspects of social relations.

1. Lyotard, J-F. (1986) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press.

2. Harvey, D. (1995) The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell

What is Social Acceleration? Part Four: Hartmut Rosa and the Contraction of the Present

2010-05-24T05:36:00.000-07:00

So if the accelerating rhythm of advanced capitalist / post-industrialist / late-modern society is captured by the metaphor of the wheel spin, is it susceptible to a more analytic account, and will it be possible to provide a description of the motors that are driving this acceleration?

Rosa distinguishes between three manifestations of social acceleration; the acceleration of technological change, of social change and of the pace of life ⁽¹⁾. The acceleration of technological change is the easiest to objectively verify. Moore’s law states that computer processing speeds will double every eighteen months and this has proved to be the case since it’s formulation in the 1960’s. Concurrent with this change in processing speed has been a proliferation of technical innovations giving rise to a perpetual revolution in all areas of society, but perhaps most significantly in the field of communication.

Social change, whilst less easy to quantify, is nonetheless fairly familiar. It relates to the rate of circulation and change of attitudes, fashions, lifestyles and the institutional vehicles for these things. This highlights something that gets to the heart of what people mean when they talk about modernity. Obviously people mean a lot of different, not always compatible, things when they talk about modernity, but at the very least, it must indicate a certain relation to time. Being modern, in terms of fashion, attitudes and tastes made perfect sense in the 1960’s. It must have made sense in the 1860’s because Nietzsche railed against it soon after. But in the 13^th century? Modernity implies a temporal directionality that was absent, or very differently conceived, before the renaissance.

Acceleration of the pace of life is the most subjective of the three. It relates to feelings of hurriedness, time pressure and the perception that one is unable to keep pace. One way of analysing it objectively would be by quantifying the amount of time people spend engaged in certain activities such as eating, sleeping and talking to one’s friends or family. However, I think this would be to neutralise the most interesting approach to the topic and our most immediate experience of the phenomenon. After this is, after all, where social acceleration really bites. But more of that later.

Separating out these three forms of acceleration is obviously a pragmatic way of highlighting features of a sociological and phenomenological situation which is highly complex, many sided and inter-related. However a concession is made to their interpenetration when Rosa considers a paradox inherent to social acceleration, namely that whilst the acceleration of technology is, in many cases, a response to the desire to save time, the consequence seems to be that time is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity. This links back to an earlier posting in which I suggested that all of these time saving gadgets and mechanisms should have left us wallowing in a glut of surplus time, but that this is patently not the case.

Rosa accounts for this by arguing that the acceleration of technological innovation has been outstripped by the increase in the quantity of activity. So, we may be in possession of an impressive array of time-saving devices, but if the amount things that we need to do is increasing faster than the time being saved by all our gadgets, then rather than saving us time, their macro effect is to increase the metabolic rate of our interactions. This creates a feedback loop. Technological innovation enables increases in social and commercial activity, which, in turn, generate time scarcity, the alleviation of which requires further technological innovation. Social networking sites make it quick and easy to stay in touch with people. Soon you’re in touch with vastly more people than you previously were and you’re spending far more time maintaining those contacts than you ever would have when the only option was to write a letter. Widespread ownership of cars was never going to mean that people’s travelling time was slashed to a fraction of what it had previously been, even if this was the initial attraction. The macro result was that new scales of interaction were introduced that gave rise to a reconfiguration of the field of social and commercial interaction.

This seems to be the pattern. There is a micro change in technology which enables something to be done faster or more efficiently. This has an obvious benefit so long as the macro environment in which the change took place remains unaffected. However, before too long the cumulative effect of such micro changes is to re-configure that macro environment, ushering in new expectations and assumptions regarding scales, velocities and rates of productivity.

From a certain perspective, the replacement of the handloom by the power loom towards the end of the 18^th century was indisputably a good thing. How could you possibly argue that the slower, less productive technology was preferable to the faster alternative? On a purely micro level this might be the case. The weaver who previously spent the entire day producing a given quantity of cloth could now complete the task in a matter of hours and spend the rest of the day wallowing in that glut of surplus time. Of course this is not at all what happened. For a start, ownership of the power loom required capital investment, so the handloom owner could forget it. Instead their livelihood and way of life was going to be utterly displaced by a new macro environment involving highly productive factories regulated by the timetable and hourly rates of pay and powered by external sources of power (external to the previously existing community that is. Obviously innovations of this sort played havoc with the meaning and scale of community).

In his article Steel Axes for Stone Age Australians(2), Lauriston Sharp showed how the introduction of steel axes into an aborigine society that ascribed symbolic and social importance to the traditionally made stone axes had the effect of de-structuring the social bonds that held the society together. The production of the stone axe had an important role to play in maintaining social links with neighbouring tribes, ownership of the axes was important in maintaining the social hierarchy and the stone axes held an important symbolic position in the mythology of the Yir Yoront. When the first kid was offered a steel axe by a missionary, this was surely a good thing- she didn’t have to go and pester her father for this symbolically important object- she could just take it and chop the damn wood. However the macro effects of the ready availability of steel axes were devastating.

When we get that new iPad, sign up to that new social networking site or buy that wonderfully clean, efficient and fast Nespresso maker the micro benefits are all to clear to see. What we tend to be completely unaware of are the tectonic transformations that are taking place at a macro level. Which is not to say I'm a Luddite, I think the question of evaluation is particularly thorny and generally used to forestall further consideration of the topic. I don't think the point is to either give our assent to or withhold our assent from such developments, but rather to recognise them for what they are, which is to say in the context which is appropriate to them. The car was never a labour saving and time saving technology. It was, and is, a symptomatic component of the cultural and psychological upheaval that is affecting societies and peoples across the planet. It is the visible sign of a metabolic shift which is taking place both in our societies and in ourselves. And so is the iPad. And the Nespresso maker. It seems to me that the nature of that metabolic shift is worth thinking about.

One of the ways Rosa approaches this is by talking about the 'contraction of the present'. Rosa defines the past as that which no longer holds or is no longer relevant to us and the future as that which does not hold yet. The present then is “the time span for which the horizon of experience and expectation coincide”. Rosa claims that this time span has been gradually contracting. Focusing primarily on the areas of work and family, he suggests that the pace of change has itself changed from being inter-generational, through being generational to the present situation where it is intra-generational.

“Thus, the ideal-typical family structure in agrarian society tended to remain stable over the centuries, with generational turnover leaving the basic structure intact. In classical modernity, this structure was built to last for just a generation: it was organized around a couple and tended to disperse with the death of the couple. In late modernity, there is a growing tendency for family life-cycles to last less than an individual lifespan: increasing rates of divorce and remarriage are the most obvious evidence for this.” (1)

While there is something intuitively convincing about this characterisation of the decaying time span of the present, it is a little unsatisfying in that the treatment that it receives from Rosa doesn’t really do justice to its importance as a determining feature of the transformation of our societies at a macro level in the postmodern era. Also I think that the relation to temporality holds promise as an mode of analysis that has the capacity to connect the extraneous technologies and timetables with the apparently subjective sense of the pressingness of time, or, to use Gleick’s phrase, ‘hurry-sickness'. It's for this reason that I find Rosa most interesting when he engages with such 'subjective' features such as pace of life, but also find his analysis a little bound by his apparent obligation to the methodological conventions sociological research. David Harvey, in his book The Condition of Postmodernity, provides a far fuller, though differently conceived, account of the contraction of the present, which he calls “space-time compression”. I will look at Harvey’s account in the next posting along with a consideration of possible motors of social acceleration.

1. Hartmut, R. (2003) Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High–Speed Society, Constellations, Vol. 10 Issue 1, Ps 3-33

2. Sharp, L. (1952) Steel Axes for Stone age Australians, Human Organization, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 17-22.

What is Social Acceleration? Part Three: Hartmut Rosa on the Motorbike and the Treadmill

2010-05-16T12:18:00.000-07:00

In his recent article, Full Speed Burnout? Hartmut Rosa offers two metaphors which he believes capture the metabolic rhythm of modernity and late-modernity. The first, relating to modernity, is the motorcycle, the second, relating to late-modernity, is the treadmill. More than just metaphors, each represents a practice embedded in the period to which he refers.

The motorbike was the embodiment of man’s longing for individual liberation through the conquering of time and space.

“The power and attraction of the motorbike is in the sensual experience of mastering life at high speeds, of being able—and having the power—to autonomously control and steer one’s motion; it is the promise of mastering space and time and conquering the world while leaving behind “all that is solid,” sluggish, earth-bound, heavy or burdensome.” ⁽¹⁾

This is most definitely directional stuff. It is about the autonomous individual taking the measure of the vastness of the horizon and annihilating it through mechanically induced speed. Paradoxically, while the biker seeks to overcome space and time through speed, he also depends upon both in order to carry out the performance of annihilation. In the same way, speed is contrasted to the “inertia and resistance” of everyday life, thereby creating a dependence upon such inertia.

One could equally think of the 70’s rock guitar solo. In both cases the individual frees himself from the monotonous rhythms that were holding him back to breathe the finer air that only the risk of crashing at high speed can make available.

This metaphor is clearly connected to the highways and big, open spaces of the United States as opposed to the swarms of mopeds that clog up the streets of southern European cities. These people are more likely than not on their way to work, and that’s definitely not the idea.

By contrast, the treadmill represents the transposition of this acceleration into the productive circuits of everyday life. Directional speed and the longing for liberation become accelerated rhythms of production and consumption, which reach into, and transform, every area of our lives. This is exemplified by the tightly-coupled networks that were considered from Gleick’s book. Competition in post-industrial societies, driven by the capitalistic requirement for capital accumulation, requires tighter and tighter margins, ever greater efficiency savings and increased consumption. As Rosa says;

The social logic of competition is such that the competitors have to invest more and more of their energy into the preservation of their competitiveness, until keeping up the latter is no longer a means to lead an autonomous life according to self-defined ends, but the single overarching goal of social and individual life alike. ⁽¹⁾

Rosa considers the motorbike to have been displaced by the treadmill as a guiding metaphor for our times. Clearly there are plenty of objections that one might raise to such a sweeping caricature. Nonetheless, the metaphor of the motorbike resonates strongly, evoking key features of what has come to be called modernity, most notably relating to space, time and personal autonomy.

However, I would take issue with Rosa’s second metaphor, the treadmill, because I don’t think it does the work that is required of it. It’s not the drudgery of everyday life that he wants to pick out here, but the increasingly frenetic rhythm of social life and the requirement that you keep up. The treadmill may work as a metaphor if you think Bill Murray struggling to keep his balance on a hotel treadmill that has gone rogue, but I’m not sure this is the first image to come to mind.

I think the wheel spin is a better one.

The wheel is rooted to the ground, but spinning irrelevantly as it seeks to gain traction. The faster it spins the less possibility there is of forward motion, but the driver, unable to conceive of any course of action other than increasing the velocity, keeps his foot firmly on the accelerator. The situation is clearly unsustainable and the only possible outcome is a rapid overheating and blowing of the engine.

As was mentioned earlier, in the case of the motorcycle, time and space remain in place and the sense of liberation is won through annihilating them through speed. In the case of the wheel-spinning car, the relation to space and time is severed as the vehicle embarks upon a metabolic intensification, which can only lead to a system failure.

In The Pataphysics of the Year 2000, Baudrillard invokes a similar dynamic, although by means of a different metaphor;

“…one might suppose that the acceleration of modernity, of technology, events and media, of all exchanges- economic political and sexual- has propelled us to escape velocity, with the result that we have flown free from the referential sphere of the real and of history. We are liberated in every sense of the term, so liberated that we have taken leave of a certain space-time, passed beyond a certain horizon in which the real is possible because gravitation is still strong enough for things to be reflected and thus, in some way to endure and have some consequence.” ⁽²⁾

Escape velocity, in this case, would be the equivalent of the moment at which the wheel loses traction with the ground. It then enters a hyper-reality in which forward motion is no longer possible and the vehicle becomes autonomous, responding only to the dynamics of its own metabolic intensification, until the point at which overheating occurs, or the stress on the components becomes unbearable.

In their frenetic search for investment opportunities and value, the capital markets invest in non-existent future markets, non-existent wealth that the banking sector persuade people to borrow, mortgaging their future earning capacity in order to generate value now and non-existent companies that, while they don’t produce anything, may convince others that others may be convinced that they are worth investing in. If ever there was a metaphor for our having reached escape velocity, or entered full wheel-spin, the financial markets surely provide it. And, as has been made plain in recent weeks, it is those markets which control our destiny far more effectively than any government.

So much for metaphors, in the next posting, I will look more closely at the theoretical underpinnings of Rosa’s position and connect it with David Harvey’s notion of space time compression.

(1) http://ijms.nova.edu/Spring2010/IJMS_Artcl.Rosa.html accessed 16/05/10

(2) Baudrillard, J. (1995) The Illusion of the End, Polity Press

What is Social Acceleration? Part Two: Faster- Making Time

2010-05-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

Earlier in the book Gleick talks about the "fast cycle time" system of production, exemplified by the practice of "just in time delivery". Increasingly manufacturers seek to eliminate profit-sapping inefficiencies within the production system by keeping the chain of production in perpetual motion. The key to this is to avoid the time wasting and unnecessary investment in fixed assets associated with storage of parts while they await assembly. Rather the production system is calibrated such that at every stage, delivery of parts dove-tails as tightly as possible with the assembly process. If you enquire about reserving products on the Ikea website, you receive the following message;

"We receive merchandise daily and that is why we usually have in our shops all the items the customer may need. We would need to have an extra store for the reserved items and this would increase the prices of the products".

Ikea operate a system of “just in time delivery” so as to reduce costs and, of course, maximise profits.

Gleick gives other examples such as airline scheduling, fast food and film sets, all dynamic systems that require the perpetual motion of their constituent elements in order to maximise efficiency. Dynamic is the key work here. The key to maximising the productive capabilities a system is to increase the metabolism of that system. Consider traffic driving around the M25 (London’s ring road). Increase the volume of traffic beyond a certain critical mass and the traffic has to slow considerably as the space between the cars diminishes. This makes intuitive sense. There is a close relationship between the speed we are travelling at and the distance that we are prepared to leave between ourselves and the car in front. This is principally conditioned by reaction speed. We project the potential situation of the car in front spinning out control or slamming on its brakes and gauge whether we would be able to react in time. The anxiety of living beyond the limits of your reaction time is what reduces the entire system to a snail’s pace. But there’s no reason why all the cars shouldn’t maintain their original speed, but just close up the gaps, so that they are spinning around the ring road bumper to bumper. As long as they forget about the potential catastrophe waiting to happen and have a lot of faith in the integrity of the system.

Of course one lapse in concentration, one accidental over-compensation at the wheel, and the whole system crashes. Or, less dramatically, minor fluctuations in the behaviour of individual drivers will most likely lead to a series of jams in which the traffic is subject to start and stop motion. This was well described by Philip Ball in Critical Mass ⁽¹⁾.

Of course, if the system was fully automated this wouldn’t happen.

Gleick also addresses this fundamental instability under the heading of the ‘Paradox of Efficiency’. In it he describes the hyper-efficient, hyper-dynamic system of airline scheduling in the United States. Planes no longer fly regular routes between two cities, with a relatively stable crew assigned to that plane. Instead massively complex computer programmes calculate which route the aircraft should take in order to maximise efficiency of the system. Other programmes are used to calculate which crews should be assigned to which planes in order that they maximise their working time without going over the legal limits. As a consequence of this flexibility in the scheduling, only 2% of American Airlines’ fleet is on the ground at any one time.

This is a system which seeks perpetual motion.

This is described as a ‘tightly-coupled network’, and the paradox is that as the mesh of the network is pulled tighter together, small disturbances can cascade through the system, causing disproportionately high levels of disruption.

So we have a sense of acceleration which is metabolic in nature, and would appear to be a societal phenomenon, rooted in the systems of production, organisation and consumption which define us as workers, members of society and consumers. We increasingly inhabit environments which eschew dead time, non-productive activity and eccentric behaviour. Further, time must be experienced not as open and free, but rather in terms of pre-designated, goal-driven rationalisations. Clearly there is nothing new in any of this. Foucault has described how the control of time in the form of the timetable was central to the revolution in social organisation that took place in the early modern period⁽²⁾. With the development of the new ‘employer-employee’ form of social relationship, the regularity and exact calculation of working hours became indispensable. Weber also describes how the spirit of capitalism (to use his term) reconfigured people’s relation to time, such that non-productive time was seen in terms of financial loss⁽³⁾. This gave rise to the hitherto nonsensical formulation that time is money. We have inherited these temporal structures and the values that they generated.

What’s changed is the level of integration of disparate elements of the life of society and societies (the internet providing a single medium through which such elements can be coordinated), the rupture of categories of social involvement (such as work time / free-time, private life / public life) and the proliferation of digitised content which clamours for our attention. All this results in a quickening of the metabolic rate the societies of which we form a part and hence our increasingly frenetic involvement in those societies.

I’ll consider causes in subsequent postings, though I’d like to put down a marker at this point to say that, given that social organisation, on an increasingly global scale, is driven by the requirement for capital accumulation, this is an aspect of the phenomenon of social acceleration that can not be left to one side.

Gleick concludes his survey by focusing on the dual attitudes of boredom and mania in the contemporary world. Interestingly he points out that there wasn’t even a word for boredom until relatively recently. It existed as a verb, to bore someone, as a noun, as in ‘that man’s a bore’, but not in a passive, stative sense of feeling bored. He speculates that boredom is the backwash of mania, implying that as our lives become increasingly manic, accelerated, harried; we become acculturated to this rhythm. Sure we can take time out to have a leisurely stroll in the park. We can sit and read a book or just listen to music. However as we do, our minds race and our bodies twitch and we find it difficult to ignore the nagging suspicion that we are somehow wasting time, doing nothing.

And in such a situation, there is no better cure than going online.

1. Foucault, M. (1991), Discipline and Punish, Penguin

2. Ball, Philip. (2004), Critical Mass, Arrow books

3. Weber, M. (accessed 09/05/10)

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/WEBER/cover.html

Parenthesis

2010-05-07T00:50:00.000-07:00

I've added this video of David Harvey in which he talks about the financial / social crisis and capitalism's tendency to shift crises from one place to another both geographically and socially.

What is Social Acceleration? Part one: Faster- Saving Time

2010-05-01T02:37:00.000-07:00

At first sight the term "social acceleration" seems to hold promise. It connects to an intuition that there is some sort of acceleration taking place in the pace of life. Whereas a letter took days, email is instantaneous; whereas travel between the cities of Europe took weeks, now it takes hours (volcanoes permitting); production cycles are shortening, productivity is increasing and life seems more hurried.

Yet under closer inspection the idea shows itself to be rather more opaque. It may be the case that communication and transport have accelerated, but that doesn't mean that we have accelerated. In fact, the opposite should be the case. No longer required to deal with all that mundane paraphernalia that went with writing someone a letter, we should be wallowing in the time that has been gifted to us by email. As for the decades that must have been saved as a consequence of the acceleration of our means of transport, it's a wonder we even need to get out of bed. Weren't the futurists of yesterday earnestly discussing the post-work society that would be the inevitable consequence of automated production systems?

The point being that while the term seems promising it is far from transparent and needs to be got hold of in the right way.

My interest in the notion of acceleration was first roused when I read James Gleick's 1999 book, Faster (1). It was both a strength and a weakness of the book that it didn't attempt to provide a definition or try to characterise the nature of such acceleration. In fact it never really says what is accelerating. Its subtitle, "The Acceleration of Just About Everything" neatly sidestepped the issue. Instead, it provided a heady survey of instances of acceleration drawn from a huge variety of areas of culture and society, from the stock market and air traffic control to channel surfing and baking potatoes. The strength of Gleick's approach was that by juxtaposing so many different instances of what he is talking about he allows the reader make connections between them and form his or her own conclusions without reducing everything to a theoretical model. Its weakness is that it lacks an analysis that might deepen our understanding of the situation we are in with regards to accelerating social and cultural change. Of course, he was under no obligation to provide such an analysis, this was not an academic treatise. However a more sustained treatment of the phenomenon is required and can be provided.

In subsequent posts I will look at how the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa develops the idea of 'social acceleration' and discuss how, in my view, the phenomenon of social acceleration needs to be understood in relation to the dynamics of capital accumulation and social homeostasis. More of that later. In this and the next posting I will discuss themes related to Gleick’s treatment of the topic.

At the start of this posting I mentioned two features of the modern world which have been subject to an obvious acceleration- transport and communication. The first point to make about Gleick's book is that it reminds us that acceleration does not need to be directional. Processes can accelerate without going anywhere. Rhythm is more important than speed here. Whilst speed will often be required in order to increase the rhythm, this is not always the case. A paradigm example he uses is taken from a time and motion study done in the 1950's urging American housewives not to waste so much time with inefficient potato baking. They were reprimanded for carrying the potatoes from fridge to sink in one's or two's rather than using a pan to take them all and for not using both hands to turn on the tap and pick up the brush simultaneously. A more recent example of this has been the popularity of the Youtube video demonstrating the Japanese method for efficient T-shirt folding. Sounds dull, but it isn't.

No directional speed here, rather a combination of the elimination of unnecessary steps and multitasking.

Of course these are very specific cases, and most of us are quite capable of maintaining impressive levels of inefficiency in our private lives. However, we exist in environments that are dominated by these efficiency driven procedures and technologies, whether they be transport systems and traffic circulation or electronic communication and rolling news. For many people where it really bites is in the workplace, where idle chat by the coffee machine is the enemy of productivity. But just as insidious is the moral imperative that we stand on the right if we don't want to walk up the escalator in the Metro and soon become irritable when others don't fall into line.

To what end all this efficiency?

To free up time of course. But here's the rub, whilst such practices are always justified by reference to the almost absolute value ascribed to time-saving, the cumulative effect of such practices is that they end up colonising time. I suppose, in theory, we could wallow idly in the unstructured time that we have as a result of more efficient practices (and time saving devices), but we don't. Unstructured time induces anxiety which we seek to assuage with more activity, more projects and plans and more consumption.

Time comes to be experienced as a resource, or a commodity, which needs to be managed, rather than a gift that life bestows on us at absolutely no cost.

Who's to say that the 1950's housewife didn't enjoy dawdling as she prepared the potatoes, allowing her mind to wonder where it would? The same argument could be used with respect to the dishwasher, although I'm sure a lot of people would draw the line there and say that washing dishes by hand was, or is, boring and that if there is a device to do this for you it can only be a good thing. However, this operates on different scales. Sure it's a good thing that you don't have to stay at home for an extra half hour washing the dishes when you could be out shopping or watching a film or playing tennis or whatever else you enjoy doing. Taken on its own, and within a relatively unchanging context, the dishwasher is unambiguously a good thing. However, when seen in the context of the countless innovations and inventions designed to save us time, what we find is that our involvement in such processes, far from saving us time, acculturates us to these new rhythms. They cease to be a means to an end, and become an end in themselves. They cease to be time saving devices and become the media through which time is experienced.

Perhaps the inefficient potato baking process was in fact a way of creating time. I enjoy fly-fishing. It would clearly be cheaper and more efficient all round if I bought the trout from the supermarket, but that would annihilate the time that I enjoy creating.

It seems that far from being a waste of time, all that 'mundane paraphernalia that went with writing someone a letter' was constitutive of time.

The examples so far have been small-scale and personal, but this is clearly a systemic, society-wide phenomenon. In the next posting, and staying with Gleick, I will look more closely at the social side of the ‘social acceleration’ equation.

1. Gleick, J. (2000) Faster, The Acceleration of Just About Evereything, Abacus

Introduction to Social Acceleration Blog

2010-04-25T12:29:00.000-07:00

The purpose of this blog is to provide a forum in which to explore the phenomena of social acceleration, technological change, globalisation and effects of all these upon cultural and personal identity.

Given how slippery all of these terms are, I’m aware that such a bold introduction effectively says very little. So what am I interested in?

Firstly, following Marshall McLuhan, I’m interested in the way that human beings are shaped by the technologies that they use. That is to say that as well as fashioning the tools that they use, humans have, in equal measure, been fashioned by their tools and thus by technology generally. Of course, to some extent all this depends upon what you define as a technology. A convincing argument can be made that written language is a technology, and I’m interested in the development and use of writing and the transformative effects of literacy on oral cultures whether through its initial appearance within ancient Greek culture or its imposition as a consequence of colonialism. (Ong, W. 2002; McLuhan, M. 1997; Goody, J. and Watt, I. 1963).

While the issue of orality and literacy is one that remains alive and crucially important in understanding current technological changes, I think that it is the introduction and dissemination of print in the 15^th century which can show us most clearly the role that media plays generally in shaping our consciousness (McLuhan, M. 1997).

Whilst there is clearly an empirical distinction between the technologies we use and ourselves as bodies occupying space, the effect of these technologies is clearly to transform the social body and, in spite of what neo-liberal politicians would have us believe, the individual is an instance of the social body. For proof one need look no further than the social nature of language.

Consider some of the effects of the development of print technology in Europe.

Suddenly the ideas of the Romans and the Greeks, which had, hitherto, been contained within monasteries, became readily available to an increasingly literate population. People started to bemoan the relative backwardness of their society in comparison with that of the ancients, who were, to make matters worse, pagans. Ideas spread far and wide and became consolidated, now that they could be contained in an objective format (the book) and not simply in the body of the one who knows. A cannon of knowledge appeared and being learned meant internalising a proportion of this cannon, and synthesizing it into some sort of world-view, which then came to define who you were. In relation to this 'body of knowledge' (an interesting metaphor when you contrast it with the literal body of the knower which is the receptacle of knowledge in oral cultures) notions such as civilisation, and progress started to gain currency, defined principally in relation to one's literacy and learning. We are impressed by the capacity of the Internet to provide an external database of knowledge- but it was print that acculturated us to this externality. The rupture of authoritative canons of knowledge brought about by the Internet may actually put an end to the possibility of consensus as knowledge is disseminated via increasingly introspective and self-serving networks (Castells, M. 2004).

The development of print was, of course, just one of a plethora of synergistic transformations that were taking place during the Renaissance, laying the foundations for such modern phenomena as capitalism, colonialism, science and eventually electronic communications all of which have had a decisive role to play in shaping the particular form of globalisation that has subsequently emerged.

It is the latter, electronic communication, which has dominated the reconfiguration of the social body, and the shift in its metabolism over the last 100 years or so and I am interested in exploring the nature and ramifications of that reconfiguration. Authors who I have found particularly insightful in this include Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Thomas de Zengotita among many others. It is in order to try and capture that sense of a shift in social metabolism that I have borrowed Hartmut Rosa’s term ‘social acceleration’.

We have instantaneous access to an extraordinary quantity of information presented not only in text, but also in just about any medium imaginable from anywhere in the world. News, music, film, art, science, friendships, porn, clubs, the hotel situation in the town you're thinking of visiting in Florence at Easter, the price of second had garden gnomes on Ebay. You name it and it's instantaneously available as are all the people you know and, with Facebook, all the people you have ever known.

All of which is not a bad thing, but is it any wonder that people have difficulty finding the time- hence acceleration as our restless minds, grown accustomed to saturation, demand increasing stimulation. And this stimulation is increasingly external (to the extent that it does not form a part of what we consider to be an integrated part of ourselves- like our having read Dickens would be, for example). We are increasingly dependent upon external stimuli that can offer instant gratification and this is positively encouraged by an economic system which, in order to guarantee growth must either expand the market (through globalisation or innovation for example) or accelerate our rates of consumption (built in obsolescence, disposable everythings and channel surfing). Hence we enter an accelerating feedback loop in which an economic system which seeks to maximize turnover in order to guarantee growth offers us an ever increasing array of options designed to provide us with instantaneous (but definitely not permanent) gratification and we, like the fools we are, seize upon these passing goodies (be they the latest ipad, must-have trainers or reality TV show) as a temporary relief from a much more settled and deeply-rooted sense of dissatisfaction.

I found David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (Harvey, D. 1990) particularly useful in thinking about these issues and became interested in the Marxist analysis of capital through his online series of lectures (Harvey’s not Marx’s) Reading Marx’s Capital. Whilst I remain wary of economic reductionism, I do believe that neither social acceleration nor globalisation can be understood without reference to the unconstrained capital accumulation that was first theorised by Marx.

As a counterpoint to the reductive tendencies of Marxist analysis, I find Baudrillard consistently interesting and provocative and have been particularly influenced by his capacity to develop a analytical approach which is revealing of phenomenological aspects of our media saturated lives and managing to avoid getting bogged down in theory (Baudrillard, J. 2008).

As well as exploring the areas that I have outlined above, I would like to use this blog as a resource for articles and links as well as a forum for discussing these themes.

Baudrillard, J. 2008, Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press

Castells, M. 2004, The Power of Identity, Blackwell Publishing

Goody, J. Watt, I. 1963, The Consequences of Literacy, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 5, No. 3

Harvey, D. 1990, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell Publishers Ltd

McLuhan, M. 1962, The Guttenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press

Ong, W. 2000, Orality and Literacy, New Accents