Tag Archives: economic crisis

Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room. My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment (London: The Bodley Head, 2017)

04/02/2019Book reviewEuropean Union, European integration, Greece, IMF, crisis, crisis Greece, economic crisis, loan agreementsGiorgio Baruchello

Henry Kissinger, an academic turned politician, is said to have quipped that academic disputes are extremely bitter because the stakes at universities are painfully low. The book reviewed hereby is authored by Yannis Varoufakis, another academic turned politician, and it suggests, in an entirely unintentional manner, that political disputes are fairly polite and verbally restrained even if the stakes are incredibly high, such as the livelihood of millions, e.g. the common people of Greece as of 2010.

Varoufakis’ book chronicles his turbulent and short time qua finance minister of the Hellenic Republic in 2015 (chapters 6 through 17) while adding a number of reasoned observations about the world’s, Europe’s and Greece’s economic sorrows since the annus horribilis 2008 (chapters 1 through 5). Finally, it informs the reader about some of the latest developments in Varoufakis’ own recent career as a Greek MP (Epilogue), including the launch of a new political party, called “Democracy in Europe Movement” (or “DiEM25”). The idea of founding a new political party matured several months after Varoufakis left his post in the Hellenic cabinet headed by Alexis Tsipras, the young leader of the initially broad leftist alliance Syriza, which came to power during the most painful years of Greece’s economic collapse (chapter 5).

Tsipras and a now much ‘thinner’ Syriza have recently celebrated the formal end of the nation’s subjection to its creditors’ representatives—the so-called “troika” aka the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB)—and their notorious Memorandum of Understanding (cf. especially chapters 8 and 9). Therein, the socially chilling and economically contractionary conditionalities of the debtor country are cast black on white in the pursuit of three bailout agreements that future European scholars, politicians and activists ought to retrieve, peruse and reflect upon whenever contemplating how nations should deal with their creditors. Latin American and African ones are likely to be familiar with the score at issue. The conditionalities accepted by three different Greek governments included repeated rounds of cuts to old-age pensions and public expenditures on healthcare, culture and education; mass dismissals of public-sector workers; reduced funds to tax-monitoring bodies; loss of State control over public bodies that must thereafter respond directly to the creditors (cf. especially chapter 2).

It transpires from the book’s accumulated evidence that many experts, especially within the IMF, knew perfectly well that such conditionalities would strangle Greece’s economy and make it incapable of generating the revenue whereby to repay its creditors, and that only the most creative economic modelling could buttress the official position of the troika (cf. Appendix 2). Nevertheless, the creditors pressed all the same such conditionalities onto the Greek State and particularly, despite growing signs of snowballing deterioration, onto the government led by Syriza, which many eggheads in Europe’s governing elite feared qua resurgence of the political left, evidently to be snuffed out in its cradle (chapter 9).

The first and the second bailout agreements were required to salvage German and French banks that had invested in Greek bonds and were now unwilling to oblige to market discipline, which John Kenneth Galbraith had once claimed to be praised by all market sycophants as long as it applies to people other than oneself (Tout savoir, ou presque, sur l’économie, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978). The third one had a specific political mission to accomplish, whether the money involved in the process was going to be recovered by the creditors or not. Had the European authorities and the German leadership failed “to win Alexis [Tsipras] over to their side”, then they should “create such chaos that his government fell, allowing for its replacement with a compliant technocratic administration, just as they had in 2012.” (92).

Meeting by meeting, debate by debate, telephone call by telephone call, e-mail by e-mail, SMS by SMS, the actual exchanges between the protagonists of this intricate political saga come across as surprisingly civil under most circumstances and most carefully worded in public as well as in private conversations, even when great tension and palpable disagreement occur. Gallant propriety endures even when starkly opposed conceptions of the European unification project are voiced and debated, such as German conservative Wolfgang Schäuble’s plan to “ditch […Europe’s] welfare states” as no longer affordable vis-à-vis the competition of “places like India and China”, contra Varoufakis’ aspiration to the “globalization of welfare benefits and living wages” (212). Greece, in this debate, is revealed to be the starting point in Schäuble’s plan for the pauperisation of Europe’s middle class that also the IMF’s director, Christine Lagarde, seems de facto keen to facilitate, starting “with Greek pharmacies” (367).

Some nasty epithets did fly now and then, and the media’s recurrent, blatant and effective smearing campaigns are duly noted too, including a horrid “set up” scene in which an “irate businessman” attacked Varoufakis in July 2015 as the “former minister” who had ruined him (476). However, unlike the talks between Varoufakis and a long list of high-ranking European officials and politicians appearing in his book, these mucky incidents of character assassination are not worth being recalled with equal care and written all down for posterity to muse upon. Incidentally, we learn that “vulture fund” is regarded in high-level political circles as too crass a term, hence “hold-out” is preferred instead (508 n33). Apparently, strong language is not required in determining or merely discussing whether the wealthy creditors’ pecuniary concerns or the vulnerable people’s more immediate ones—shelter, food, health, survival—should be given precedence in a time of conspicuous recession. As the leading European institutions and the IMF are concerned, the former come obviously first.

Perhaps, as several passages of the book point to, the generally cautious politeness of the conversations can be explained by the way in which all these powerful individuals talking to each other seem generally aware, if not afraid, of being spied upon, recorded and/or leaked to the press. As a result, all these powerful individuals regularly hide their real meanings beneath layers of ambiguity and vagueness, which too blunt a language would impede. As an amusing account of a conversation between Varoufakis and the US economist Jeff Sachs discloses, some spies can show “no compunction whatsoever about revealing they were tapping [Varoufakis’] phone” (396).

Honest and constructive rational dialogue is thus one of the victims of the endless tactical games played by the powerful and frequently unscrupulous individuals paraded in the book. Lying is considered by many of them a sign of intelligence, deafness to argument a sensible stratagem, and the most political issues of all—who gets what, when and how—are couched dogmatically as technical matters. Time, energy, resources, decency and integrity, if not humanity itself, are sacrificed to strategies aimed at outsmarting and manipulating one another, until the point comes when a modicum of frank exchange is eventually permitted, almost as the last resort (cf. especially chapter 11).

As a scholar born and raised in Italy, this recurrent and over-intelligent lack of honesty reminds me of the (sub)culture of so-called furbizia (cunning), whereby each individual takes undue advantage of other people by way of selfish duplicity (e.g. skipping queues, double parking, giving backhanders, ignoring regulation). When this kind of seemingly smart individual behaviour is generalised, however, it results into inane collective inefficiency (e.g. delays, traffic jams, lost income, fire hazard). Game theory, in its neat complexity, confirms this simple realisation that so many southern Europeans, Greeks included, have to cope with on an almost daily basis (cf. Appendix 3).

Varoufakis’ chronicle is detailed, carefully reconstructed from personal diaries and, as a matter of fact, from recorded conversations (cf. the opening “Note on Quoted Speech”, ix). Also, it includes a substantial body of explanatory endnotes and appendixes, which remind the reader of its author’s background as a well-established university professor and an experienced economist who, in a Cassandra-like fashion, had foreseen the crisis to come because of “the bubble in American real estate and in the derivatives market” and feared a novel “Great Depression” (30).

Varoufakis’ declared and effectively “heroic” aim is to be nothing short than a “whistle-blower” and reveal the secretive workings of Europe’s top-level bureaucracy, the IMF, and the realm of transnational finance at large (12). The price to be paid for such a brazen act of defiance is quite straightforward. Varoufakis is bound to join the ranks of institutional “shooting stars” that will never again be allowed to be members of the international elite wishing—frequently in vain—to control world’s events, since in order to belong to this elite one must not let the outside know what goes on in the inside (12). Larry Summers, Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi would never write a book like the one reviewed hereby.

Once again in an unintentional manner, such a lengthy and sometimes fastidious chronicle of Euro-bureaucracy and cabinet meetings does more than what it sets itself to accomplish. Varoufakis’ book contains many informative elements allowing the reader to grasp the larger picture in which the Greek events have unfolded, namely “the myth of the ‘new economy’, popular around the turn of the millennium and centred on the claim that technological progress had made business cycles obsolete” (Jóhann P. Arnason, “Questioning Progress”, Social Imaginaries, 4(1): 180).

Specifically, the reader is reminded of how the deregulated and liberalised largest private banks and financial institutions of the world made a killing with the waves of privatisations, mergers and acquisitions kick-started by Thatcherite Britain and Reaganite US in the late 20^thcentury (chapter 2). Unsupervised by State authorities and entrusted faithfully to the presumed providential invisible hand regulating the markets, these increasingly larger and larger private banks and financial institutions ended up believing themselves invincible, the true masters of the universe (chapter 1). Indeed, the best and brightest that they proudly employed thought themselves capable of such technical wizardry as to disperse risk once and for all in novel and most ingenious ways, securing at the same time further profits ad infinitum (chapter 1).

Alas, all this much-cherished and trumpeted financial genius—which John Kenneth Galbraith had famously claimed to be nothing but a rising market (The Economics of Innocent Fraud, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004)—concocted bad products leading to bad investments, namely the now-forgotten “toxic American derivatives” monopolising the media’s attention in 2008 (31). This toxic kind of financial assets, which are still a threatening presence, annulled ten years ago the trust that the very same private banks and financial institutions had in themselves and in each other (cf. Michael Greenberger, “Too Big to Fail U.S. Banks’ Regulatory Alchemy“, Working Papwr No. 74, Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2018). Paralysed by the fear of massive losses, their lending came to a grinding halt and a global credit crunch took place. Money was no longer available to big- as well as to medium- and small banks, and to their customers too: from States themselves down to small businesses and individuals. The financial crisis became an economic crisis, causing enterprises to go bust, people to lose their jobs, demand to collapse, and the downward spiral of depression to materialise. Pace the widespread beliefs in the end of history and financial capitalism’s unstoppable triumph, 2008 was truly the new ominous “1929” and another Great Depression could not but ensue (125).

Libertarians, whom Varoufakis often compares himself with, would leave the spiral of depression free to destroy as much of the existing economic and social life as required before finding a new equilibrium, perhaps at a lower level of civilisation, in which creative new entrepreneurs could emerge and flourish; but such libertarians are a minority even in the US that, by and large, have been spawning them in great number (cf. chapters 7 and 13). Traditional socialists, whom Varoufakis collaborated with as finance minister, would seize the opportunity to skip the middle man, i.e. the private banks and financial institutions lending money that only the State can lawfully warrant, and replace them with public ones; but few such socialists can be found in the world after the end of the Cold War: not even within Syriza is the “Left Platform” at the helm (cf. chapters 10 and 17). Old and new Keynesians, whom Varoufakis is associated with, would let the State and its central banks step in and pour fresh money into the depressed economy by way of, inter alia, large-scale public works and public investments, but the ECB is prevented from doing so by its own charter and regulations, unlike, for example, “the Bank of England, which from the moment the City went through its 2008 credit convulsion had printed billions to refloat the banks and keep the economy ‘liquid’”. (35)

What happened in the European Union is that the governments of its member States, through the ECB, decided first of all to buy worthless paper belonging to the inept large private banks and financial institutions as though it was still the gods’ ambrosia. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, not just in America, there were bankrupt conglomerates that, albeit culpable for their own toxic mess, were deemed “systemic” or “too big to fail” (138). At the same time, these bankrupt but unsinkable banks would buy the new debt issued by those States to keep funding part of the latter’s activities, i.e. saving the very same banks and institutions, while cutting other expenditures in order to pay for the rescue itself and avoid the inflation that huge emissions of new debt could engender (chapter 2).

Told suddenly that they had been living beyond their means, the citizens of Europe were imposed “austerity” measures, and their tax money was used along so-called “quantitative easing” (and “credit lifelines”, “liquidity injections”, etc.) to salvage the incompetent institutions bearing prime responsibility for the crisis (92). The burden of this crisis was shifted intentionally from the private sector to the public one: “taxpayers” from a vast rainbow of countries “were actually paying for the mistakes of French and German bankers” (27).

Soon after 2008, in a climate of growing economic precariousness for millions of Europeans, “banksters” and the “1%” were quickly forgotten as the object of general opprobrium. As the crisis’ burden got shifted from the private to the public sector, “PIIGS” and “profligate” States became the new target for media-fuelled public anger. Later still, it was the turn of foreign migrants coming from countries that had already been squeezed in previous decades by unsustainable debt, the IMF’s heavy-handed technical advice, and the dubious wisdom of currency unions (e.g. the French-Franc-tied CFA currencies in Central and Western Africa). In an eerie recurrence of the 1930s, “the deepening crisis would produce a xenophobic, illiberal, anti-Europeanist nationalist” reaction (482). To add scorn to injury, “it is one of history’s cruel ironies that Nazism is rearing its ugly head in Greece” with the electoral success of the ultra-right Golden Dawn party (215).

As a scholar and a citizen of Iceland, which despite its geographic isolation and economic peculiarities (e.g. energy security by geothermal power) experienced a complete financial collapse immediately after the 2008 credit crunch, Varoufakis’ account of the recent “Greek tragedy” flags out significant differences that are worth thinking about (49; Iceland’s woes have been covered extensively in Nordicum-Mediterraneum, especially issues 6(1), 7(1) and 8(1)).

Iceland, after a failed attempt at rescuing its national banks, opted essentially for letting them go bankrupt. Greece and the whole European Union committed themselves to saving them at any cost, even if it meant letting Greek pensioners starve, Greek citizens die because of unaffordable healthcare, and Greek homelessness explode (i.e. the “humanitarian crisis” denounced by Varoufakis, 37).
“[C]apital controls” were reintroduced in Iceland “in the wake of its own financial collapse in 2008” and kept in place for a decade in order to prevent capital flight and allow the Icelandic State to have a manageable monetary mass whereby to restart and reorganise the national economy (121). The European Union did nothing of the sort, and actually allowed financial speculation between member countries to take place as well as the continued siphoning of large amounts of money into non-EU countries and tax havens (cf. the recent Panama Papers and Paradise Papers scandals).
A new Icelandic government not tainted by collusion with the banking sector came eventually into power in 2009. Their role was to clean up the mess left by the conservative parties that had always claimed to be the business-savvy ones. The new Icelandic government proved genuinely disposed and overall adept to serve the common good, even if it meant conflicting with the IMF or pushing for what Rachael Lorna Johnstone and Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir call “progressive regressive measures”, i.e. austerity for the better off so as to pay for the welfare needed by the worse off in times of dwindling resources (“Defending Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Iceland’s Financial Crisis”,The Yearbook of Polar Law, 3, 2011: 454-77). Syriza’s new and largely untainted government in Greece, under its creditors’ enormous pressure, did much less to alter the regressive-regressive measures that the previous two governments had already enacted. Varoufakis regrets that his own achievements as finance minister were, in this respect, meaningful but scarce, given the extent of his country’s gruelling humanitarian crisis (e.g. the prepaid “plastic card[s]” providing for the needs of the poorest families, 476).
Iceland’s currency could be devaluated and was devaluated, first by sheer speculative pressure and then by central bank’s fiat, thus making the nation’s export goods and incoming tourism more attractive. Greece’s Euro, which is also the currency of its chief creditor countries with a very different set of post-2008 problems, could not and was not devaluated.
In Iceland, the new government, the central bank, the trade unions and the industrialists’ representatives participated in largely cooperative and constructive behaviour to keep unemployment in check and favour the nation’s recovery. In Greece, not to mention within the EU, bitter divisions affected all interest groups and prevented the same synergy from being firmly established. The pulverising atomism of selfish furbizia trumped comprehensive cooperation: the common good, consequently, agonised.
Debt bondage by foreign loan or so-called “rescue packages” became a likely outcome of the Icelandic crisis too. The international pressure towards this dubious solution was noteworthy, as epitomised by Gordon Brown’s Labour government invoking in 2008 the UK’s anti-terrorism legislation so as to freeze the assets of all Icelandic nationals and businesses based on British soil. Against all odds, the Icelandic nation rejected debt bondage, i.e. getting loans to repay other loans to repay other loans to repay other loans and so on ad nauseam (French economist Gérard de Bernis used to call it “the usury model” of State funding: cf. his 1999 essay “Globalization: History and Problems“). This refusal occurred via two referenda promoted by a president of the republic in search of lost popularity—this long-time president having been too vocal a cheerleader of the banks that, a mere five years after their privatisation, had brought the country to its knees. Only one allegedly ‘populist’ centre-right party supported the rejection of the “Icesave” agreement with the Dutch and British governments on both occasions (i.e. the Progressive Party), while the self-proclaimed “responsible” parties spoke favourably of it, on either occasion (e.g. the Left-Greens) or even on both occasions (e.g. the Independence Party). In 2015, the people of Greece voted by a sizeable majority against the third bailout agreement that the Syriza government had itself opposed but ended up accepting nonetheless—a U-turn that Varoufakis defines aptly as “the overthrowing of a people” (467).

Varoufakis’ new book is most interesting, well-written and, above all, it constitutes a political memoir that future scholars, politicians and activists should consult in order to be ready for the next major crisis that, sooner or later, will come to pass. On top of that, it is an apology, in at least two senses. First of all, it is a self-defence by a politician who, in the panic and confusion of the Greek depression, has been accused of all sorts of nasty schemes and treacherous actions, sometimes grotesquely. Secondly, it is a token of self-promotion, for Varoufakis has now a Europeanist party to sponsor, with the aim of making European institutions much more democratic and considerably less technocratic.

Apologetic partiality aside, there is no doubt that the conversations and the events reported in Varoufakis’ book did occur as we are told, or at least the vast majority of them, as the robust critical apparatus of the book can help confirm. Any person interested in current socio-political affairs should read them and meditate upon the astounding amount of deceitful cynicism, harmful cleverness and obtuse pride that they display. Every attempt at improving the world’s economic order and political praxes—and Varoufakis’ book spots good will, intelligent leadership and responsible policy too, in both Nordic and Mediterranean nations, as well as on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean—is bound to have to face and, hopefully, surmount such obstacles. Varoufakis, on his part, has been trying hard for years, but to no avail.

Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir & Rachael Lorna Johnstone, Mannréttindi í þrengingum: Efnahagsleg og félagsleg réttindi í kreppunni (Akureyri-Reykjavík: Háskólinn á Akureyri og Mannréttindaskrifstofa Íslands, 2011)

23/03/2012Book review (editorial review)ICESCR, Iceland, economic crisis, human rightsAndrea Hjálmsdóttir

Three of the biggest Icelandic banks, which had been privatized in the late 1990s and early 2000s, collapsed and were taken into public ownership. An economic collapse was a fact and the former Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde asked God to bless the Icelandic nation at a press conference in October 2008. Certainly, the crisis (kreppa) was not a nightmare we would wake up from, but a reality that had to be dealt with. The next step was when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was called in to organize a crisis management program. Then the currency collapsed. The unemployment rate has since been on the increase; from 1.5% in September 2008 to 8.7% in May 2009 with others taking wage cuts and/or cuts in working hours.

Although the everyday life of the Icelandic general public was in some way perceivably paralyzed in the fall 2008, people began to revive themselves. It was at this time that “The Kitchenware Revolution? was conceived in Iceland. The general public started a massive protest against the government. Icelanders, who have no great tradition of political resistance, rallied in the streets with their pots and pans. In front of Althingi (the national Parliament) people knocked upon their household utensils. January 2009 witnessed masses of people who gathered everyday, aiming to disturb the operations of the parliament, demanding that the government resign. For the first time since 1949, when Iceland’s entry into NATO was objected to, the police used tear gas to keep protesters back from the Althingi. Icelandic society was experiencing formerly unknown turbulence.

The Kitchenware Revolution won its first victory on the 23rd of January 2009, as the government resigned. New elections were called for and took place on the 25th of April 2009. The new government elected confronted the great task of “saving? Iceland from bankruptcy without jeopardizing its rather strong welfare system. For that to be possible it is obvious that the prosperous population of Iceland has to adjust to a new way of living. During these times of kreppa and turbulence both the national government and the municipalities have been facing huge decline in their annual budgets and the undertaking of cutbacks in services has been the biggest task ever since.

It was, and still is, a huge project to restructure the welfare system during these times of great cuts in national budgets. During such difficult times a book like ‘Human rights in crisis: Economic and social rights during an economic crisis’ is greatly appreciated. Not only is it the first research conducted after the economic collapse focusing on human rights issues; it also provides valuable guidelines for those working in the public sector and raises the issue of the importance of awareness of human rights in it.

By outlining some of the main issues of the International Convenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights, the authors provide valuable guidelines on how the national and the local governments can avoid infringing the human rights of the citizens when cutting down expenses. As the authors Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir and Dr. Rachael Lorna Johnstone point out, it is more important than ever to appraise human rights during financial decline.

The main aim of the book is twofold; firstly to serve as a guide for Icelandic politicians, officialdom and the general public on economic, social and cultural human rights during times of economic crisis, as it outlines what these rights are and how they can be secured and accomplished through laws and policy making. Secondly, to increase the nation’s general knowledge in the field of economic, social and cultural rights. As the authors of the book recognize clearly, it is during times of kreppa that the task of protecting human rights may very well be more important than ever. A primary reason is that during such difficult times the economic situation tends to overshadow every other aspect of society, and the commonly heard phrase “it is not the right time to focus on this now” tends to distract people from other pressing issues and important accomplishments such as first and foremost protecting the actual human rights of the citizens.

Although Iceland has been a country of prosperity, human rights issues can be argued to have rather been in the shadow of public discourse on citizen’s wellbeing. The focus has been on the ‘welfare’ of the citizens, which of course is deeply related to human rights, but does not coincide with it. Indeed, the book casts light on how one of the main issues of past Icelandic governments has been to protect the general public’s welfare, sometimes in conflict with human rights considerations. The book’s body is built around the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights and Ámundadóttir and Johnstone argue convincingly why they choose to build on this specific covenant rather then than theInternational Covenant on Civil and Political rights.

The aim of the book to increase knowledge and educate about the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights and human rights issues in general is well conceived. The book starts with very informative chapters on the Covenant; its geneses and its role within the nation states and the work of its UN committee. Iceland’s legal obligations are also extensively discussed, since the covenant has been long ratified. Also, there is a chapter that outlines the essence and intentions of the commitments undertaken by the member states.

Since the book is designed for people working in the public sector with very diverse backgrounds and knowledge of the existing laws, these chapters are very enlightening and essential for further understanding the foundations of the covenant and, no less importantly, how it can be applied to policy and planning during times of restructuring and retrenchments in public services. The authors manage to explain the ideology of and the key-concepts pertaining to economic, social and cultural human rights clearly and in a helpful way, also for persons with no legal background. The reader obtains a good overview of the central tenets of the covenant and is likely to be better informed on how retrenchment has to be considered with regard to protecting human rights during economic decline. Good examples of these are the clear explanation of ‘progressive realization of rights’ and ‘progressive-regressive measures’.

Chapters engaging with specific issues of the Covenant in the Icelandic perspective follow these first instructive chapters. Ámundadóttir and Johnstone explain their choice of using the examples of employment rights, social rights and rights to education to outline the implementation of the covenant in Iceland before and after the economic crises. It can be argued that they could have taken different examples from the Covenant, or that it would have been helpful to use more than just three specific fields. However, it can also be argued that the authors manage to give a very concrete representation through their choice of specific fields, especially concerning the aim of the book to serve as a guide for national and local government and officialdom.

As stated above, the unemployment rate in Iceland has risen enormously since the fall of 2008. The chapter on the right to employment gives important insights on how governmental policy and regulations impact human rights and what has to be taken into consideration to keep the commitments under the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights. The authors give examples about certain things that have worked out well despite decline in budgeting; and they very well advise on what has to be taken into improved consideration in respect of the economic, social and cultural rights. The standpoint of the book is very relevant for the public sector and easy to learn from as it is summarized in a very resoluted manner and without any preciosity.

A good example is when Ámundadóttir and Johnstone point out how changes in regulations concerning the rights of students to unemployment benefits greatly affect their possibilities to make a living during the summer months, since the Icelandic Student Loan Fund only lends funds to students during a nine-month period each year. Therefore these changes in regulation concerning unemployment benefits leave students that do not have a summer job out of their right to enjoy the benefits of the welfare system. This is just one example on how the authors provide constructive illustrations on the subject matters, which gives the reader an idea of what kind of problems they can expect to approach during cutbacks in the public sector and in what ways they might be solved without violating human rights.

The book is in general written in an approachable language suitable for any reader. My conclusion is that Ámundadóttir and Johnstone reach the aims of their book, which is very enlightening and informative and manages to clear the line between ‘welfare’ and ‘human rights’. But as the authors state in the book, the Icelandic focus on ‘welfare’ has somehow shrug off the great importance of respecting human rights. The difference between those two concepts has not been clear enough, neither in political nor in public discourse. The book does deepen the understanding of the importance that the people who participate in the decision-making process with regards to economic, social and cultural rights. As well as it underlines the importance that the citizens themselves be aware of their rights.

This book is also an important contribution to human rights education in Iceland, a field which has been neglected by the educational system. Therefore this book is treasured even more for politicians, public officials and the general public. As Ámundadóttir and Johnstone underline correctly, there is great need to increase human rights awareness in Icelandic society, not least during these times of crisis, in order to enable politicians and public officials to make decisions based on enlightened knowledge of human rights, thus avoiding violations of basic rights of the population. It is also in the interest of the citizens to be more knowledgeable about their human rights, as it helps them to experience themselves as rightful owners rather than receivers of charity and enjoy human rights with dignity.

Today’s demand is resting on open, transparent and trustworthy administration; this book can help to direct us toward that path. It has to be distributed widely among officials and politicians in national as well as municipal governments for the benefit of the wellbeing of all Icelandic citizens and in order to minimize the negative effects of the crisis during times of retrenchment.

Maurice Hamington and Maureen Sander-Staudt (eds.) Applying Care Ethics to Business (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011)

23/03/2012Book review (editorial review)Adam Smith, Business, care ethics, corporate culture, economic crisis, ethics, moral developmentGuðmundur Heiðar Frímannsson

In her discussion she emphasised that women saw morality differently, were more occupied with their own situation, their relations to actual people around them, and how scholars and scientists should treat actual people in actual situations rather than just general rules for ethical reactions to events, persons, attitudes. This type of morality she called an ethic of care. In these thirty years since the publication of her book, care ethics have developed as a distinct view in ethics and might now even be counted as a major theory. Various authors have contributed to this development and if I should only name two, I think that Nel Noddings and Michael Slote should be mentioned.

Care ethics defines itself by starting with the fact that human beings are relational creatures meaning that they cannot develop and mature as human beings unless their relations to other human beings are normal. It is a moral fact of major importance that human beings are dependent beings and it is by and through their relations with other humans that they achieve moral maturity. Their moral sense develops as well by understanding the role of value of these relations and they become morally salient for it. This is not true just about female moral agents, but also about male moral agents.

It should come as no surprise that the central concept of this type of ethics, care, has already received various interpretations, and that the distinction between caring for and caring about has been clarified. It is fairly natural to expect that care ethics applies to intimate private life and it is easy to see how it can be broadened out to other areas, such as the health care system and education. Nodding has applied the care ethics to education convincingly and received support and wide following.

I admit that I have not been an enthusiastic supporter of this new trend in ethics. Care ethics seems naturally to flow into moral particularism, the idea that there are no general moral facts and hence no moral principles or moral laws; all we have is our moral sense, our ability to pick up moral characteristics in particular, embodied situations, and as our moral experience grows our moral sense becomes more skilled in discerning the moral characteristics. This seems to me to be implied by much of what is said about care ethics in this collection of essays. I do not want to doubt or argue for the merits of moral particularism, but if you want to believe it you must be prepared to argue for it, give good reasons for believing it. Much of what is said in these essays about other theories in ethics, such as consequentialism or deontology, is stereotyped with limited analysis and no feeling for the strengths of these theories. Sometimes it is as if it were an obvious truth that one should do away with general truths in ethics and limit oneself only to situational analyses and accept that there is no way to generalise about two situations where there are two different agents. But the fact that there are two agents in the same situation does not rule out the possibility that a general principle applies to both. It is also true to say that depriving you of all general principles makes it difficult if not impossible to decide in cases where limited goods have to be distributed among different agents. So there are serious questions to be asked about care ethics as it is laid out in these pages.

This does not preclude that there are many interesting analyses achieved here and a number of serious points about ethics in business. Applying care ethics in business is not the obvious choice from various ethical theories, it appears as a “Virginia Slim” ethic for women in business, as one of the authors puts it, not very promising and even a downright non-starter. But the authors succeed in arguing for a place for care ethics in thinking about ethics in business. It really is a serious contender for our attention in analysing and thinking about morality in the marketplace and its corporate agents. I think it is rightly pointed out that many influential theorists and politicians have believed that business and markets were somehow amoral, not constrained by the normal moral rules that we have to take into account in our everyday lives. But this is false. If anything should stare us in our face from the international tumult and collapse in global markets in 2008 and 2009, it is that markets and the corporate agents must act morally if markets are to be viable in the long run. This does not mean that it will be easy to affect this change in the players on the market because many of the largest ones, even though they had to accept large sums from public purses, still believe that they should go on as if nothing had happened.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part is called justice, distribution and economics and the papers address issues such as an overview of care ethic for organizations, an analysis of markets in terms of care ethics, a look at Adam Smith´s theory of the economy in terms of care ethic and an argument based on the care ethic for rejecting the free market. The second part is named corporate decision making and there are articles about stakeholder theory, the role of care ethics in corporate decision making and unintended consequences. The third part is about case studies and the authors discuss the enforcement of immigration in the workplace and care ethics, the possible role of care ethics in corporate competition and the exploitation of the homeless in TV series. The fourth and last part is about corporate culture and how the care ethic can contribute to the quality of that culture.

In many ways this is an interesting collection of articles, if for no other reason than that care ethic and business seem an unlikely match a priori. But the care ethic proves to be surprisingly resilient in the world of money, manhood and profits.

Locals Collection

28/02/2010Reflection on the economic crisis (editorial review)Neo-liberalism, economic crisis, hegemony, post-realityStephen Hastings-King

The population

density of Essex

Mass a chu sett s

is one person

every two acres

We stand distributed in our respective fields.
We communicate by semaphore.

My friend who lives around Cancun returned from a long journey through thickets of family and illness to find all his material possessions piled into one corner of one room. All around the house in spaces with which his possessions once interacted, wads of chewed gum had been affixed to every surface. In the course of the hours which followed his encounter with this rearrangement, he gathered the gum into a formation the size of a softball, which he placed in a bowl.

Meta

This is a map of Doxa, an electronic county in a state of confusion that could be anywhere in the United States except for the socio-economic particularities which determine the array of psycho-spatial relations to the notion crisis that one encounters. But because the socio-economic particularities as such are determinate everywhere in the same kind of way, noting them without specificity makes of this map of a backwater a map of anywhere.

This map of Doxa is not made on the basis of a geometrical projection: no device is in place that transposes sphere to flat surface. Perspectives are pre-linear: the aspects of others which face you the reader because they face me who mediates your relation remain facing you even as other aspects of the context of encounter may twist or turn or change.

This is a map of a very local slices of meanings associated by a particular duration (roughly January 2009-January 2010). Like any map, what is represented is weighted toward the point of its assembly, so the performances of relations to economic crisis which I take to be performance of an ideological crisis connected to the beginning phases of the collapse of the American Empire are weighted toward the end of this period. The explanatory narrative is also staged as an exploration of Doxa. A map is a collage of appearances.

Story

The Crisis Hunter sets out on repeated explorations of the same immediate environment looking for specimens of crisis to trap in a jar smother & mount each one caught on a corkboard after running a pin through its thorax. The Crisis Hunter would like to gather a cross-section of crisis types in order to enable Linnaeus or Buffon or other colleagues to fashion a typology; in the detailing of the specific surface features which distinguish this genus from another a distance can be established. I the Crisis Hunter am now looking down into a cabinet of crisis curiosities I can admire the colors of the wings and the delicacy of the antennae & tell stories about the hunting. I caught this one in the area behind the outhouse at the Shipbuilding Museum late at night bathed in yellow light that reminded me of the outhouse behind the cabin where I would spend summers as a child so much that the physical environment around which I stumbled holding my fine mesh net and peanut butter jar seemed to flicker between dimensions and perhaps this is what crisis is the experience of the capture, the ways experience complicates in the hypnotic space of beating wings & blurring colors. That is what capturing the crisis mounted second from the right in the top row produced in me. It seemed most itself when it was evading me, most clearly itself when I could only take it in as aspects of motion and the play of lights.

Another one, this one, bottom row same column, this one I found at the peripheries of stories I gathered from a financial advisor over dinner in the North End of Boston who after glasses of wine began to talk about the segments of his clientele which were burning and other segments which were not burning, talking in a way that indicated that perhaps the whole situation would be easier if either all segments were on fire or none were on fire but this shifting mosaic of pieces burning not burning this riot of movement without obvious direction & it was there around those sentences that I saw the moth-like crisis come but I was constrained by antipasti on a small table and open bottles of wine and did not have my fine-meshed net or my peanut butter jar in any event so I captured it with my hands, smothered it in my mouth & placed it in the pocket of my shirt and perhaps that is what later drew the cameras to me at the basketball game I looked up to see myself enormous looking up to see myself small looking up hovering over center court in Boston Garden and the crowd began to cheer & after the game walking through the corridors people tried to touch the hem of my garments like I could heal them but the whole time I was trying to protect the corpse of the moth-like crisis I held carefully in my pocket that I had smothered in my mouth after capturing it with my hands. Perhaps they sensed that in my pocket was a kind of solution.

Meta: Looking at a Cabinet of Crisis Curiousities.

The notion of crisis: a singular noun, a spatio-temporal specificity.

In the crisis-days prior to the war. 1929 Commenting on the Wall Street crash of yesterday, the German press unanimously agrees that Germany has no reason to mourn. They’ll feel the Pulses of the Stars, To find out Agues, Coughs, Catarrhs; And tell what Crisis does Divine The Rot in Sheep, or Mange in Swine & Then shall the sicke..by the vertue and power of a happy Crisis, saile forth into the hauen of health. The Crises here are excellent good; the proportion of the chin good; the wart above it most exceeding good.

In principle crisis is a something a pattern of distortion distributed across waveforms regular enough to allow for commonalities to be attributed for example here when we see these moths we see the veering to the right characteristic of petit bourgeois organisms and their responses to certain types of real or imagined environmental perturbations and based on information we have from elsewhere we could reconstruct the symbolic environment of these petit bourgeois organisms, catalogue routine activities recurrent perturbations and responses and in that way catalogue and know the ecosystem into which these particular moths will fly. But I admit that it is confusing to have to think in terms of moths and systems and relations or effects to talk about crisis which should be condensed in these moths. But look at them. At the same time, a crisis should have a location. It should have boundaries. Because you can refer to it using a noun, one should be able to move into and out of crisis. Crisis should start somewhere so it can end.

1933 To escape a crisis so full of terror and despair the Federal Reserve Banks can hardly be blamed for their policy of credit restriction up to the moment of Wall Street Consciences Synteresis, and Syneidesis which can warrant her to passe her Crisis or conclusive judgement so exact that will with greatest scorne reiect the slump or depression of the 1930s which began with the Wall Street crash of 1929 in America.

It is curiously difficult to locate crisis. The words that define it that elaborate it float about. In the stories people tell crisis lands in a dizzying array of spaces. Depending on one’s situation, one might be in crisis if unemployed or go visit crisis when reorganizing one’s business through the instruments of commercial debt or see crisis on television. One might be related to people who are in it to the side of it who float above it who skim along beneath it.

Story

The Courtier is not bothered by the economic situation. O sure he reads the newspapers and knows the narratives. But that’s in order to make conversation. It is important to make conversation. Conversation is the mirroring back to another of what the other just said. It is flattering & he is good at it that is at its prerequisite that is at appearing to be interested without engaging. Engagement risks loss of control & loss of control risks exposure. He does not call himself The Courtier. The continual avoidance of exposure sharpens the self-awareness. A sharpened self-awareness is a polished surface for mirroring back to the other what the other just said. This self-awareness has its edges like any surface its points of dropping off sloughing away caving in. Very American, he imagines himself the froth atop an espresso. He imagines himself light in any situation. Like a bird. Like a bird overhead. He imagines himself the froth atop an espresso that he sits lightly in situations, smoothing the way, servile but unobtrusive, his self-awareness a polished surface that mirrors back whatever you just said. What you just said is very important I devote my full attention to that very important thing.

He says: When I think of economic crisis I do not think of anything. The newspapers say we’ve recovered.

Meta

Rule One: an ideological crisis is many things but one thing it is not is an ideological crisis.

1. Ask any Regulation School theorist and they’d have told you that crisis is the most pervasive and consistent phenomenon produced by capitalism. Crisis is everywhere continually emerging through geographical change consolidations automations obsolencences planned and unplanned emerging continually everywhere through the ordinary workings of the system of systems. Crisis is the air that capitalism produces for itself to breath; it is the medium through which capitalism grows and contracts, seizes up and lurches. But if this is the case and crisis is everywhere emerging continually through the ordinary operations of the capitalist system of systems, then crisis is not crisis at all. It is entirely banal, the smell of cigarette smoke that clings to your clothing.

2. Hegemony is an ideological practice or is a way of referring to what the practice of ideology is that is to the what that is being done through the circulation adaptation recirculation adaptation of ideology through the dominant relay systems. Hegemony is the continuous implicit argument for the legitimacy of the existing order through the continuous normalization of its effects. Ordinary crisis is continuous so not crisis at all. Ordinary crisis which is not crisis at all is more a stream of disruptions which could issue into actual crisis but for the fact that the stream of disruptions is contained in regularly moving streams of disruptions. Movement within these streams is the everyday practice of ideology circulation adaptation recirculation adaptation.

2.1 Crisis would emerge as a discrete category so as crisis something sensed or felt as crisis across a seizing up of this normalization function, so a disruption of repetition not so much at the level of statements or images as at the level of the regularity with which disruptions emerge and fall away.

2.1.1. This regularity of emergence and falling away renders as neutral the medium which enables the regularity of these flows of disruptions in the way that the overall system of commodity circulation is legitimated across the continuous transformation and stratification of the commodities that circulate within it.

2.1.1.1 This follows from the tendency to see in each element of ordinary disruption a discrete event or thing, self-contained self-referential.

2.1.2 Events or things succeed one another with remarkable regularity each one self-contained and self-referential to the extent that each refers to dense contexts in the immediate spatio-temporal vicinity of the Event or thing, dense contexts which are referenced but excluded by the mode of presentation of the local at the level of the aggregate.

2.2 The medium across which the aggregate flashes, so the fact of the aggregate, is neutral to the extent that it is the space of regular appearance. Regular appearance enables or constitutes meta-narratives and cross-referencing. The medium which enables these is a neutral space of control.

Benign control like GPS or the locating chips that are in your cellphone. It’s for your own good you see. In case you end up one of the missing children.

3. What disrupts the normalization is the emergence of the medium in its artificiality.

At the end of the 2000 presidential election in the US all the television networks called Florida in the same mistaken way because all were buying exit poll results from the same consultancy: the grinding attrition of legitimacy entailed by enthusiastic collaborations in selling the war in Iraq; Hurricane Katrina opening onto a reveal of racialized class war; the unraveling of the descriptive power of neoliberal categories in a context that did not allow for their adaptation only their repetition.

Rule One: an ideological crisis is many things but one thing it is not is an ideological crisis.

In a sense the strictly economic register of “crisis” is an abstraction an index a chain reaction entailed by the stalling out of traffic in derivatives. As signifiers, as objects of exchange, derivatives are expressions of a system-level attempt to use debt as a mechanism to maintain exchange velocities across a period of fundamental reorganization in capitalist manufacturing sectors. They were predicated on an assumption that real estate values would continue rising endlessly such that risk would be minimized.

Story

Are you asking me? I can tell you. Changed lending practices opened up real estate for a lot of people who may or may not have been qualified so may or may not have been able to make the payments. Had the mortgage writers opted to extend the terms over 40 or 50 years this wouldn’t have been the same kind of problem. But they didn’t. Anyway one of the changes was that you could finance a house up to 100%. Nothing down. You might decide to keep your liquidity and just use someone else’s money. And you probably would have assumed like a lot of people did that real estate values would endlessly go up. So being into a loan for a million say if you couldn’t actually afford it wasn’t so irrational because in the end you assumed that you’d be able to flip the property. You know, unload it. People think: you look at a house you look at a property and it’s a real thing, you know, something solid. It’s value would be something solid too, like the trees or the dirt. But values are set through transaction patterns. The solid ground is subordinated to systems of mirrors and ways of looking into and through them. People know this and they don’t it seems like. Anyway, when the derivatives thing hit creative lending practices dried up and when the lending dried up the demand dried up and when demand dried up prices starting dropping. So you had people who had financed a mortgage for a million bucks at 100% who find that the property’s now worth 600,000 and there’s nothing they can do. Sometimes people just walk away, call it a bad investment. In some areas of the country there’s little choice because property values have fallen by 30 or 40 percent. It’s not so bad around here. But still, if you’re in that position of owing a million on a place that’s now worth about half that, you’re fucked. Upside down. Under water. Well and truly.

Meta

Derivatives as objects of exchange are symptomatic of a change in the meaning of autonomous flows of capital.

Derivatives as objects of exchange expose the extent and speed of the semi-visible networks through which these objects circulate; they expose the interconnectedness of financial centers, banking insurance and currencies. They expose the powerlessness of nation-states to regulate much less control autonomous capital flows.

1938 Whereas the others beauty and lustiness is a Crysis of their youth, not their idleness,

the crisis-minded always maintain that the problems of their particular decade are unique and insuperable.

The powerlessness of nation-states to act coherently within or on the spaces of flows that the ideology of neoliberalism enabled exposes the incoherence of the political arrangement in the image of which neoliberalism operated. Neoliberalism promised a self-regulating market world in which everything would be open to change while at the same time nothing fundamental would change. If a system tends toward equilibrium, elements within it may be scrambled but a single coherent viewpoint would nonetheless be possible as a transposition of the notion of equilibrium. In this way an imaginary American nation-state was super-imposed atop a lattice of bi- and multilateral agreements, institutional and legal infrastructures, supply chains and shipping arrangements, an expression of an imaginary natural tendency toward equilibrium within imaginary bounded systems.

1938 How many people are crisis-conscious? 1940 The point is to join up the crisis-feeling to what can be felt all the time in normal life.

The marketing of neoliberalism in the states as an ideology so dominant it did not have a name was of a piece with the construction and consolidation of a discursive empire particular to conservative politics. If conservatives were to support unregulated capitalist activity and not see in it a danger to their own political worldview, there had to be a mediating term which enabled tendencies logically contradictory to hold together.

For example, American dominance of the global capitalist order might have been as natural as the tendency to equilibrium in imaginary bounded systems if the Bretton Woods arrangement was understood not an expression of the balance of military and economic power after Word War II but merely a beneficient something fashioned in order to make reconstruction easier and facilitate political stability by stabilizing currencies. Neocolonialism might not be colonialism at all if your view of it is predicated on voyages between shelving units in retails outlets marooned in parking lots.

Story

First come the traffic barriers. Then come the action figures & their walkie talkies which bring conversations about license plates and stochastics.

The hole is dug by elaborate antiquated machinery all spindly arms and cables. The material is hauled away.

Once the void is determinate, a committee convenes around its edges. Each time they array and linger, silent, looking.

Then material arrives not the same but if the same then scrambled. Insectoid machines fill in the hole. The walkie talkies go silent. The action figures depart. The traffic barriers disappear.

The next day it begins again a few inches further along.

I monitor the Wandering Hole of the Causalityway. As happens with everyone who lives here, The Hole has migrated into my mind.

These days I think about the Silent Committee. I understand the compulsion to empty a space hollow it out look at the emptiness again and again. There’s an environment that arises in the space where continuity and rupture intertwine. It is a place full of parasites. Carriers rain down like ticks & parasites transfer & pass through their life cycles indifferent to the host environment self-contained and feeding with no effects on the host system only a silent eating until there’s a mutation. Mutation catches the host system unawares. The parasite system begins to express its characteristics which are shaped by its origin between continuity and rupture as a rationality inside a rationality. A disconnect between them. Thinking its his or her idea, the host repeats the parasite’s characteristics digging holes, looking into the emptiness, filling them back in.

Repetition becomes inertia. Continuities destroy themselves.

Meta

1965 Crisis-management problems.

Some people saw in the Reagan administration a thousand points of light. Others saw supporters of Liberation Theology being thrown out of helicopters into the Nicaraguan forest. Sometimes it is difficult to comprehend how different are the realities that coexist in the same geographic space much less how they are coordinated. Maybe there isn’t anything about space that is ever the same that is ever identical with itself.

It would be difficult to say exactly what the connections might be between the sense of imploding empire and the ideological problem that accompanies it that expresses it that is it, the seizing up of autonomous capital flows and the debacle in Iraq. But it is not at all difficult to see that there are connections. When the Bush Administration decided to invade Iraq they draped a war on ghosts over the neoconservative fantasy of a new American century in which the United States was a military hegemon that stood outside of that presided over networks of bi-and-multi-lateral agreements and institutions and patterns of capital and commodity flows. In this imaginary world the United States would ground a system the logic of which tended to dissolve nation-states in an image of nation-state and because without the nation-state conservatism has nothing to talk about the ideological rationale for the nation-state as ground was to be American conservative politics.

The Project for a New American Century was a conservative policy group formed in the 1990s the primary function of which was to write letters requesting that another war be launched against Iraq. Please start another war against Iraq they would say. We do not at all like the way in which the last one turned out. From their collective viewpoint the problem with the first war followed from the unseemly involvement of the United Nations which prevented the manly American military from motoring into Baghdad and finishing the job. The UN was a castrating multiplicity. The new and improved Iraq war would erase the memory of symbolic castration. The Wolfowitz Plan was the perfect encapsulation of this way of thinking. Iraq was to be a two-week theatrical run on a very large stage, an abstract space into which American forces would march to be greeted by Happy Natives welcoming their Liberators. Flowers would be strewn everywhere like August 1944 Paris except with live television coverage brought to you by the Pooled Press.

But things didn’t quite work out.

Story

Dave the Other Guy sits on a bar stool belted into a chair fighting the fish, pulling back & being pulled forward by the fish, watching the line run back and forth across the giant reel guiding it with his hand.

The invisible rod slips out of its holder: jerking around behind the mobile weight of the memory tuna the shadow of the rod traces complex patterns over the surface of the bar.

Dave the Other Guy’s arms shake from the fight then & now. Exhausted, he tries to hand off the rod to Tim the Lead Man who refuses in both times saying: “The first time you had sex did you try to hand off?” In order to prevent permanent damage to the man’s reputation, he says. Out here everybody remembers everything.

He says: The rule is that you have to boat the tuna within twenty minutes before it starts to cook itself in the energy expended by fighting you.

Now in a second stool Tim the Lead Man looks for a gaffing hook pulls one up from beneath the surface of the bar & at that moment realizes the hook is too small. Nonetheless he grabs the lead & guides the memory tuna through the ocean of liquor bottles as the boat we are on jerks forward & reverses circling confusing the fish boxing it in. When the head of the fish breaks the surface of the water Tim arcs the too small gaffing hook over my macaroni & cheese and into the head and continuing the gesture pulls the 250 pound memory fish bleeding across my pint of ale and into the boat the far side of the bar.

And now the commercial fisherman who had been floating the whole time on other boats nearby are emerging from cabins appearing on decks breaking into applause sounding boat horns & shouting Now that’s how you boat a tuna.

Mirror

Outside my window the tide is low the tree branches bare the air Sunday morning silent in a fading imperial power the inflexible stories that the empire tells are distributed about the grasses like tickertape like white lace like frost the stories that are empire an empire of stories in a frozen space where movement is realignment is loss of position is a sense of something moving that should not be some ineffable change affecting objects and spaces.

Beyond the story of assemblages of stories a horizontal band of brown grasses framed by a model of collapse of empire, one without events, something on the order of the Hapsburgs in which collapse is a tightening around routines a moving into the regular a motivated avoidance a flight into the stable into nothing too demanding into a map of the world like a phonebook a list of objects their proper locations and co-ordinates that allow you to reach them in the low tide mud past the tree branches bare in the Sunday morning silence the sun fading through pink the tide filling the gullies by degrees the stories evaporating something ineffable in the air something is changing.

Story

3 Each television monitor is the Cathederal at Aachen. Like Charlemagne, each television image of the Leader is faced by an audience and the image of the Leader faces the altar faces God. In this way the Leader mediates the relations between the audience and Order. The gazes of all converge in the Gaze of the Leader. The actions of the Leader are the Actions of all.

3.1 Judged by a royalist logic that seems to require symmetry of inside and outside, virtue and what befalls, the second Bush administration was Illegitimate and the disasters its actions have brought down an expression of its Illegitimacy.

3.1.1 The role of the polity in such a situation is not obvious.

3.1.1.1 Within the revolutionary tradition the actions of the Authorized Subject/Object of History position were hedged around by potential revolts. But we are past all that now.

3.2 The crisis of empire is a spectacle. We watch it unfold as a cheap tragedy with an idiot anti-hero. The space of action is contained within the monitor. It unfolds at a temporal remove from us. In that dimension, the chorus already knows the story. A spatially and temporally inverted image of the chorus, outside the space of action, the audience assembles.

3.2.1 The anti-hero disappears to build himself a library in some wasteland locale.

There is no release. There is no catharsis. As a spectacle it is terribly unsatisfying.

3.2.2 Perhaps it is the lack of catharsis that inspires we the audience to pay expiation ourselves.

3.2.2.1 And what is expiation? A long march through thickets of pain & phantom purple mountains on the edge of the sunrise where no purple mountains should be the evacuation of the present it’s placement under the sign of a version of the past a placement which defines the present as an extension of a version of the past the loop this puts into a sort of motion and the accompanying self-immolation without end.

3.2.2.1.1 But we do not act.

3.3 We watch and wait then watch some more.

Meta

When you have a child you want the stream of disruptions to be contained and containable the medium across which disruptions stream to remain neutral a space of meta-narratives of patterns and control you do not want it to surge into the foreground and ordinary disruptions to wobble into crisis not for yourself but for the future that has to array itself around the child. But there is nothing you can do to influence it.

So you collapse into a fiction of the ordinary find an ordinary boy make an ordinary space of ordinary objects arranged in ordinary ways. Maybe then the wobble and spray will pass over like a tidal wave will curl over certain spaces or overlook you like crisis is the Khymer Rouge sweeping into a city rounding up people who wear glasses to send to die in the countryside & maybe you can survive if you look as though you can see.

Story

They hold each other as they sit on the couch. His eyes look in two directions. He is very sweet. He is hard to talk to. She is counting on her fingers.

He says: If you ask her any number she can tell you. She remembers everything about numbers. Other things not so much.

Not so much other things. One time her daughter was going downtown with a lady from the city. As they passed a building, she pointed and said that is where the man holds me down on a bed. Then lots of people from the city on the telephone. How could you not know about the man who was doing things to your daughter? I know eggs and how many there are. My health is not good. There are so many numbers to remember.

He who is holding her he looks out for her. When you knock on the window he comes downstairs to let you in. He helps you through the back room full of boxes and restaurant equipment to the stairs. He says going up: The only way secret entrance like a fort.

He makes her eggs and she knows how many there are. She counts the things in her cupboard. Unless she’s not feeling well again. Again lately she has not been feeling well again. Again. He says to her: How many trips to the emergency room this year? She says: 206. Loud. Definite. She knows everything about numbers.

He says on the phone with people from the city: Her health is getting worse things are going wrong I cannot protect her. He says: I ask the people from the city on the phone can’t you help her? And each says I can’t but I will find the person who can. Then someone else calls. Over and over the same conversation. So many people who will not help us. She just needs some care. I think they want us to die.

They hold each other as they sit on the couch. His eyes look in two directions. He is very sweet. He is hard to talk to. She is counting on her fingers.

Meta

I was playing a video driving game in which my car would only crash.

The impact of the crash extended indefinitely, shaking the wheel, the animated viewpoint tumbling end over end, the sound quite loud the crashing continuous end over end the wheel rattling the animated viewpoint.

Each time I lean past the edge of the low cube within which the game unfolds I see a large room that is dark and empty and silent.

I think about the drop-off, the boundary between inside and outside.

Mirror

Imagine you are in a room opposite. Between the two a space of passage that is overlaid with transparent versions of itself again and again each version slightly misaligned with respect to the layer before or after it depending on your viewpoint where you start from what motion is.

Draw a thin red square around the assemblage of spaces of passage with the tip of a pen that tears the flesh of the world

redthin Climb through the opening.

A thin line of bodies is moving across the water through the amplified sound shower of the rivermouth disappearing reappearing

disappearing again on the slacktide blue planar surfaces buckle & fold around thin wavering multi-colored vertical lines a lattice of attentions the light within against the water and sky breaks into beams & nodes then patterns maybe cracks or a honeycomb a scrim behind the recurrent appearance disappearance configuration of multicolored vertical folds that hover within above the black line that marks that is the edge the surface the water in the amplified sound shower of the rivermouth.

Locals Collection

Data Mining in Post-Reality

Stephen Hastings-King

Thanks to Marc Teatum, Heather McDonough, Sarah Slifer, Paige Larkin, Brad Powers & Guy Yasko for their responses to earlier versions of this piece, each of which generated a turn.

And to the fine people at the Essex Shipbuilding Museum for their support.

http://www.essexshipbuildingmuseum.org/

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