Indebted to Intervene: Critical Lessons in Debt, Communication, Art, and Theoretical Practice [1 ed.] 9781783206414, 9781922216267

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IN-

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Oliver Vodeb: To my daughter Mina who shows me everyday the power of love- it is more powerful than any debt. Nikola Janović Kolenc: This book is dedicated to my newborn son Lev, and my wife and best friend Irena, with much love and thanks.

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Intro TXT

Oliver Vodeb, Nikola Janović Kolenc

TXTS 14 Debt as a Mode of Governance Nikola Janović Kolenc



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Indebted Interaction: The Wages of the Digital Economy

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Cyber-Debt, Barter, and Gift Economies

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Mark Andrejevic

From the Fetish Character of Commodity to the Fetish of Interest-Bearing Capital

TXT Sašo Furlan

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George Petelin

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Overcoming the Fear of Exercising Our True Desires

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Debt in the American Economy: Busted Bubbles and Booming Inequality

TXT Nenad Jelesijević

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Daniel Marcus

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Debt and Public Communication: Towards an Interspatial Counterpractice Oliver Vodeb



Type Illustrations – Ben Mangan



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PAGES: 20, 34—35, 52—53, 60, 77, 82, 106—107

114 DEBT Friendly Competition 2012 CURATED BY

Oliver Vodeb

120 Party’s Over, Starts Over AUTHOR

Lydia Dambassina Greece

COUNTRY

VISUAL COMMUNICATION PRACTICE

122 On the Other Side of the Mirror AUTHOR

Katarzyna Pagowska Poland

COUNTRY

124 First World Problems + Consumed AUTHOR

Ashlea Gleeson Australia

COUNTRY

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128 Change Your Mind. Change Our World. AUTHOR COUNTRY

Darcy Mangan Australia

130 The New World Order AUTHOR Mariyah Arif

COUNTRY United Arab Emirates

132 Debt Machine AUTHOR Belinda Li

COUNTRY Australia

134 Rich Uncle Pennybags's Game of Debt AUTHOR Andrew Cox COUNTRY Australia

136 00.05.00: Debt Doom AUTHOR Aaron Croft COUNTRY Australia

138 Savers' Credit Card: The Card that Pays You AUTHOR Charles Mayfield COUNTRY Australia

140 ATM Sale

AUTHOR Lucy-Ann Moore COUNTRY Australia

142 Wonderland Series AUTHORS COUNTRY

Vladimír Turner, Sergi Palau Czech Republic

146 Tunnel Vision: Campbell Newman’s Tunnel vision: A Cost-Benefit Analysis. AUTHORS:

Luke Robertson, Gem Copeland, Aaron Gillett

COUNTRY Australia

148 Loquitur Muros

AUTHOR Bleeps and Dimitris Petalas COUNTRY Greece

150 The Third Deadly Sin

AUTHORS Majida AlSafadi, Sarah Zohair, Omnia ElAfifi COUNTRY

United Arab Emirates

152 Value Quest Bourse: An Electronic Allegory of Casino Capitalism AUTHORS

Eduard Balaz, Ivan Blagojevic/Urtica Art Group

COUNTRY Serbia

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156 Surplus Debt

Søren Rosenbak

AUTHOR

COUNTRY Denmark

CRITICAL WRITING

164 Debt, How to Get out of it Antonio Rollo

AUTHOR

COUNTRY Italy

172 What Is Your Occupation?: Meditations on and Mediating the Corporeal Self and Corporate Society AUTHOR Johnny Merryman COUNTRY USA

174 Escape from the Tyranny of Things Aaris Sherin

AUTHOR

COUNTRY USA

175 Instincts on debt AUTHOR Brendan Ross COUNTRY

Australia

178 Reconsum AUTHOR Lukas Lehmann COUNTRY Germany

BEYOND...

180 Let's Play Tag: Culture jamming Harvey Norman AUTHORS COUNTRY

Paul Kimbell, Nicola Paris Australia

182 Call Centre Experience! Contact Centre Emulator AUTHOR Ivan Kozenitzky COUNTRY Argentina

184 Speculative Numismatics AUTHOR COUNTRY

Anja Groten Germany

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186 Safety First

AUTHORS Vladimír Turner, Ondřej Mladý COUNTRY

Czech Republic

188 Plakatopolis AUTHORS COUNTRY

Kaja Kisilak, Janez Plešnar, Goran Ivašić Slovenia

190 Finitude

AUTHOR Keith Armstrong COUNTRY Australia

194 In Search of Extradisciplinary Dialogue and Intervention: Debt and Brisbane TXT

Oliver Vodeb

218 IN MEMORIAM: Zravko Papič Shoaib Nabi Ahmad

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You cannot evict an idea whose time has come! These words express the nature of the global movement against the rule of money over life. They belong to the people, the 99 percent, who are bringing fundamental, urgent issues to the street, into the media and the realm of public consciousness, into schools, universities, jobs, homes, and into intimate discussions and relationships. These words also express something else. They articulate a state of mind, a focus, and a concise articulation of the problem. The idea whose time has come is mainly about three things: inciting interventions that create a rupture in the order of things with the goal to redefine our fields of experience and the relationship between being, doing, and saying; encouraging dialogue; and creating new, emancipatory social institutions.

INTRO

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If communication and art are to play a relevant role in shaping a future worth having, we need to further redirect, reinvent, and reimagine our own understanding and the way we think, theorise, and practice them both. The burden of debt not only offers an opportunity to do so, but also an urgent responsibility. During the global protests against the austerity measures and financialisation, one thing became clear. Debt is no threat to the capitalist economy. In fact, it lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. The imperative financial logic is simple: to generate more debt. While punishing indebted people and states for unpaid debts, financial capital simultaneously offers them new loans that they will not be able to repay in future. Drawing these nations deeper into the cycle of debt, (mostly) Western democracies and financial institutions have loaded debt onto future generations. Today, public debt is an obligation handed down from the present generation to future ones. Millions are enslaved through debt, and indebted life has become naturalised. Debt has become the primary mechanism that takes power from the people and gives it to the hands of the 1 percent. But debt is rarely questioned. Its moral obligation is culturally embedded. It is shaming and therefore unspeakable. Its power lies in its violent normalcy. What is to be done? Clearly, after years of the welfare state, we are now

in the cycle of debt—the capitalist age of economical, financial, and political emergency, which could last forever. It could turn into a constant way of life; life under debt. Surely we do not want to become the “capitalist entrepreneurs” of our lives, or self-governed “human capital”. Yes, we are witnessing the uncertainty of the current times, which generates mass anti-capitalistic critique through interventions in the public sphere. But public critique is not enough. Our struggle should use all that public reason and power offer to support the many aspects of the current common anti-capitalist effort. Our aim should be one: to abolish capitalism with all reasonable means. Taking a step back and looking at the global movements from a distance, it is clear that we need to learn more. We need to create strategies for understanding and ways of learning that go beyond the institutional, cultural, and pragmatic boundaries of professions and fields of knowledge. This process is already happening with great intensity around the world, and we at Memefest have been contributing to it for many

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years. From our perspective, a better understanding of communication and art for social and environmental change, together with developed relevant practices, is crucial. InDEBTed to Intervene is a book of critical lessons in debt, communication design, art, and theoretical practice. It is inspired by the intensive process we have undertook during the Memefest 2012 Festival of Socially Responsive Communication and Art, themed ‘Debt’. It shows some of the results of this process but also presents additional work on the theme. The book starts with texts written on the subject for this publication by scholars, educators, and activists from Slovenia, Australia, and the US. Debt is discussed through the lens of public communication, art, design, technology, political economy, social struggle, surveillance, protest, education, enforced subjectivities, and urban as well

as virtual space. This is followed by an international selection of works from the 2012 festival process: visual communication, critical writing and participatory radical art. Works include written contextual articulations by participants and commentaries by some of Memefest’s curators. This extradisciplinary contextual, public, and dialogic approach to analyse and evaluate communication design and art is unique to Memefest. It shifts the focus beyond the image and towards communication. Finally, an essay about the extradisciplinary seminar/workshop/intervention held in Brisbane at the Queensland College of Art in November 2012 follows. This collection of response-able essays, theoretical discussions, art, and communication design works presents findings about debt through the lens of communication and art for social and environmental change; in this sense, it is the first of its kind. It offers analytical insights, conceptual apparatuses, practical tools, and radical inspiration. Debt defines our lives and lies at the core of human relations; this book is an intervention that aims to contribute to the process of real change. The time for change is now. Oliver Vodeb, Nikola Janović Kolenc, Brisbane and Ljubljana, December 2013

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DEBT AS A MODE OF GOVERNANCE TXT

Nikola Janovic Kolenc

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ontemporary social relations, as we know them, are changing. The category of capital is still essential for social relations, but today even more essential is the production of debt and the indebted man. In other words, the creditor–debtor relationship, which operates as a specific mechanism of biopolitical control, exploitation, and domination over individuals and society as a whole, is a fundamental one. The production of the (post)modern subject, as defined by biopolitics (Foucault (1978/79) 2008; Negri 2000; Virno 2004; Esposito 2008), has had at least two purposes: First, to provide conditions for the reproduction of homo economicus, and second, to meet the needs of capitalist economy and human flexible morals, for the purposes of creating a (post) modern consumer self. But with economic and political neoliberalism has come the era of “financialization”.1 During this period, predatory and speculative (financial) capitalism and the production of “the end of work” (Rifkin 1996) are increasingly coming to the fore, as is the socioeconomic function of debt, which significantly changes the form of daily life and the constitution of subjectivity in capitalism. Constitution of subjectivity is no longer bound to the relationship of work/capital but, through the creation of debt relationship, subjects—the “entrepreneurs of the self”—are constituted as debtors. Since creditors, i.e., Capital – ensure the effect of society through debt relations and not through social cohesion or ideology, it is necessary to observe the fundamental transformation this has on social relations. One can see that the morality of subject is also changing. This new morality—the morality of the indebted man—stems from the underlying social relationship of creditor–debtor that has become dominant in most societies. 1  Financialisation or time of violent financial capitalism (Marazzi et al. 2011) is the processes of global profit production (financial products, investments, stocks and bonds, currency exchange, lending money at interest etc.) prior to the accumulation of money and in a today’s world financial system.

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Debt cannot be articulated only as a socio-economic disposition. Debt also has biopolitical power.2 It should therefore be seen as a technique of governing individual and collective subjectivities. State apparatus–serving Capital subordinate subjects—through political decisions and through subordinating national laws to the requirements of the neoliberal market by increasing taxes, making cuts to welfare and pension funds, reducing health, education and culture funds, and increasing the precariousness of work—to adapt their own lives to new conditions of the market (in the name of capital) and become entrepreneurs of their own lives. Adapting state apparatuses to suit the requirements of the neoliberal market (Sassen 1996) has led to the introduction of subtle control and surveillance, which is just a new form of neo-liberal-slavery. WHAT IS HAPPENING? Deleuze wrote that man is no longer a man confined, but a man in debt (1995). Over seventeen years later, Maurizio Lazzarato writes that this has produced an indebted man (2012). We could say that the subject of debt— homo debtor—is a new figure of biopolitics and economics. Together, biopolitical and economic production are pursuing "a new social relationship", which is characteristic of the current stage of the neoliberal project. What produces the (over)indebted man can be explained in a few steps. Debt is just another form of capital, and it lies at the heart of neoliberal project. Is it therefore possible to say that debt crosses all social and class relations? The products of debt are the workers, the unemployed, pensioners, students, consumers, etc. In the eyes of capital, these people are reduced to the common denominator of debtor, while the capitalist is the lender/creditor. From a sociological perspective, debt is a social relationship between creditors and debtors. From a biopolitical perspective, debt is not just an ordinary creditor–debtor relationship; its formalised relationship is governed and protected by legal power and control mechanisms. And this is of great importance for capitalism, mainly because it forms a new historical form of human capital relations. In the current capitalism paradigm, the fundamental relationship is based between capital and labour. However, this relationship—at the end of work and with the destruction of the social contract with capital—can no longer be taken as given. The relationship between capital and labour is now replaced by the forced re2  Biopower is term coined by Michel Foucault in his lecture courses at the Collège de France (197579). Foucault relates biopower to the governmental practices and techniques of modern state.

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lationship between creditor and debtor. The resulting creditor–debtor relationship due to the financialisation of social and class relations. DEBT ECONOMICS The financialisation is a product of the accelerated and expansive spread of financial institutions and markets that have taken over the organisation of the capitalist economy in the post-Ford era (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). The consequences are not only visible at the macro level but also at the micro levels of everyday life. From here, there is a need to understand financialisation of fundamental social and class relations through the economic apparatus. Not because social relations can be interpreted as a form of social economy, but because financial order colonises social and class relations, and structurally redesigns them in creditor– debtor relations. The fundamental economics of social and class relations have been (re)articulated in our debt economy. Change has its referent in the inverted logical operation. Let's look at some symptomatic cases that show how debt is imposed on society. Instead of raising the wages in real sector (the part of the economy that is concerned with actually producing goods and services) to encourage consumption, capitalism insists on placing long-term and short-term borrowings (debt) for consumption. It could be said that the state is no better when it comes to the nonprofit housing and social care. The state as an instrument of capital continues to build housing designed to service its citizens by providing them with access to housing loans (debt), while social instruments and other forms of housing co-operatives are neglected. When it comes to education, there is also no understanding. For graduate students and students who travel to universities abroad, most affordable credits (debt) are designed to pay their tuition fees. These fees are not the students’ only expense, however; buying a computer, going on vacation, buying school supplies are all subject to the consumption of loans (debt). Debt is ubiquitous. It means that debt might appear once as an innocent loan, another time as the only solution in distress. In both cases it is important to realise that the imposition of such loans is purely a economic mechanism that allows the appropriation of surplus value. Therefore, the economics of debt is symptomatic of a deeper domestic economic and social disequilibrium. These symptoms are seen through a new social division. On the one hand are homo debtors; on the other, the institutions of capital—creditors—of which there are not a large number. This means that capital is very concentrated.

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BIOPOLITICAL MODE When it comes to debt problems, the term 'financialisation' can be somewhat unclear. Many people think that financialisation is only about stock exchanges, financial institutions, and financial instruments. No. Indebtedness should be seen also as biopolitical control over lives. Therefore, it is necessary to talk about the state as an extension of capital and biopolitical production (which is the domain of the state), as it was first described by Michel Foucault ([1978/79] 2008). State The ideology of the ruling class in the early 1990s modulated to gouvermentalité—model of expert governance—at a time of political and economic neoliberal capitalism (Foucault 1991). With the help of the ideo-political apparatus, which Althusser mentioned as a supplement to the legal system (1971, 142–48), a special political caste was created whose political ideology of governance was subordinate to the interests of Capital as the national interest of state (people). Today, allows political caste to remain in power and adapt to the new neoliberal conditions. The new role of government is to serve the global interests of capital. Therefore, the main role of the state is to subsidise the necessities of capital (Močnik 2006, 58–59). In other words, the task of such a state is to eliminate all (local) social and other inadequacies that are contrary to the universal ideology of capital, and make them acceptable. This means that the state should constantly manage and monitor world economic processes in its territory, ensuring that this takes place smoothly. In particular, this means that the state must comply with the obligations and duties imposed (in the name of capital) by institutional representatives of the global economy, global processes, and universal legal order. Subject The production of the indebted and subordinated subject fits perfectly into the context of the above-described conditions, ensuring for the smooth functioning of capital. At the micro level, the state itself, through internal institutions, provides conditions under which management practices of the ruling caste seem unproblematic and acceptable. The ruling caste's task is to convince the public that the production of the indebted man is the only option. It could be said that their communicative approach is a special technique of domination, which is possible due

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to the specific political monopoly of the ruling caste.3 The ruling caste governs society through and with the apparatuses of control and surveillance (media, pedagogy, internal security, economic policy, etc.), which places financialisation at the centre of everyday life. It is impossible to overlook the fact that debt or the production of the indebted man is not a biopolitical strategy—the work of power that at the same time constructs and subordinates subjects and their lives. It creates the subjectivity of the debtor that corresponds to the expectations of Capital. Hence, debt is continuous and limitless; capitalism, in relation to biopolitics, is taking total control over life. Creating debt without limits should therefore be recognised as a new biopolitical relationship between the government and the subject. The microphysics of power connecting external subjectivity, which is subordination with objectification, runs through the building appliances of individualisation techniques. This means that debt as an external constraint subordination (made by the debtor) has its own internal psychological dimension. From that perspective, to get into debt means to internalise the obligation to return debt. In contrast to the external relationship, in which the state imposes a tax, internal debt-to-indebtedness is less visible. That relationship is pushed in man’s cognitive apparatus, which implies the creation of an individual's control over himself at least. The main aim of this process is the internalisation of norms of capitalist behaviour and becoming (the capitalist ideal) the “self-regulating man”. Dual external-internal force produces the subjectivity of the debtor, which is controlled by the relation to the creditor, which is self-regulated. Of course, the creditor—to whom debt should be returned with interest—is a capitalist. This means that capitalism, with the help of debt, is transforms subjects into infinitive debtors. It marks every individual, making them a vessel through control and dependence (debt), and confines them to their own identity (the conscience of debt). Both approaches allude to a form of government, which, through debt, now controls subjects (subjectivity) and produces subjects (subjectification). Therefore, it is necessary to recognise the birth of a new form of life under debt. 3  The communicative approach of the ruling caste is based on the specter of manipulative communicative practices that are misleading. These practices are not established through democratic dialogue and in the direction of a more equal distribution of power. Contrary, they are based on media manipulation is to divert public attention away from important issues and changes decided by the political and economic elites, and to keep the public busy with trivial politics and trivial mass culture. In other words, manipulative communicative approaches are used by the ruling caste to create problems and then to offer solutions which are common with the interests of dominant, elite groups in the society. Noam Chomsky described this kind of manipulative communicative practices in his book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988).

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FINANCIALISATION BEYOND DEMOCRACY Since debt is not only a universal economic category but it is also a universal political construct, it is necessary to speak of its transversality. What does this mean? It means that debt hit everybody: we woke up one morning as debtors. And today, as debtors, we are all obliged to repay debt, regardless of our social status—student, unemployed, scientist or millionaire). creditor–debtor relationships are now new forms of financialisation—forms of the neoliberal capitalist exploitation and domination over society and individuals. Therefore, debt and debt relations in Foucault's language could be articulated as financial dispositive of control and surveillance. Seen from a social perspective, it is a capitalist biopolitics, the policy of life, the purpose of which is to produce social life of homo sacer in relation to a debt (as an economic and financial category). Enforcing debt as a form of financialisation should be thought of as a form of structural violence that ignores what little democracy still exists in the world (Balibar 1994). Twenty-four EU Member States are over-indebted. Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Italy are in a very difficult economic and political situation, while unemployment is the biggest problem in the EU. The scenario is no different in the US. Barack Obama and José Manuel Durão Barroso, in their public appearances, cannot offer concrete solutions. In 2012 Greeks experienced the power of financial disciplining. The financial elite didn’t allow Greeks to have a referendum on the methods of debt payment. Their rescue programs are scheduled by their creditors, i.e. global institutions and representatives of capital. Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Slovenia also appear to be non-sovereign states when it comes to deciding on financial policies and use of fiscal instruments. Democracy is suspended in this case. It was also suspended when politicians decided to socialise/reward private debts produced in the "global financial crisis" by spending public contributions on citizens. Today, we pay these debts in such a way that government regularly reduces wages in the public sector, funds for schools and health services, pensions, etc., so as to recover these costs. Capital is extending the working time, introducing precarious work, optimising working processes,, reducing salaries, and reducing the number of workers And politicians repeat the capitalist mantra: the crisis is a challenge. The problem with this capitalist mantra is its solipsism, which remains trapped in an endless cycle of one and the same thought: how to help capital, and not the people. Therefore it is not necessary to repeat Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) sentiments in order to realise that contemporary neoliberal capitalism is a space without a mini-

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mum of the holiness, in which everything alive is democratised with the intention to be profitable, (ab)used, and, in the end, left to the controlled vegetation (bare life in debt). HETEROTOPIAS OF RESISTANCE Why do we obey the authorities that enforce our debt? There is no single answer to this question. Maybe this answer could be articulated with another question: why can we not resist such a power? Rebellion against debt was a central part of the global Occupy Wall Street movement. Although the protest movement did not achieve all its goals, it was successful in its manifestation and temporary insistence. The movement proved to be insufficient in terms of articulating a stronger and more permanent/common interest. It has been shown that debt has its individualistic power, which is still more powerful than the collective power of the multitude. This movement has not coped as a collective, which does not mean that it did not establish itself as a multitude, in the sense of Antonio Negri’s conception. 4 The fact is that the Occupy Wall Street movement started a new alternative politics. In this movement, the common interest prevailed, which was geared toward finding new common alternatives. At this symbolic level and with tactical communication skills, the multitude began a conflict with the authorities. In Jacques Rancière’s language, their speech was articulated around an injustice (1999, 1–21). Through protest, movement was manifested as an alternative request that was critical to the socialisation of private debts. Expressing this particular truth was a political manifesto from the outset. Notwithstanding the partial success of the movement, which reached the stage of doxa (the appearance of people who manifest and protest), the mobilised multitude showed, at least, that debt is disputed property. Resistance, whatever it was, showed that a critical force builds new world politics. It became clear that a politics exists precisely through confrontation. Through symbolic, non-violent confrontation with the police (a representative force of ruling order), debt became political issue. FINANCIAL OR PASTORAL TECHNIQUES The Occupy Wall Street movement failed in its manifestation and in its rebellion. Further, no other movement has succeeded in protest4  The political concept of multitude was first used by Machiavelli and then by Spinoza. In its (post) modern use, the term 'multitude' (which refers to the distinct category of people who share their common fact of existence/resistance) is used by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their book Empire (2000) and defined in their book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004) as 1) the name of an immanence, 2) class concept, and 3) concept of power

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ing financial capitalism. Even Herodotus wrote in The Histories about the rebellion of slaves—"the poor against the rich"— which alludes to every fight today. Deleuze and Guattari’s ([1993] 2000) explained concept of debt through the interpretation of the despotic society refers to Friedrich Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral where Nietzsche emphasised the difference between finite and infinite debt. If the finality of a debt is characteristic of archaic societies (debt can be repaid), in capitalist societies, we are faced with infinite debt that cannot be repaid. Lazzarato also points the infinity of debt (Lazzarato 2012). Through the works of Nietzsche and Deleuze,, and Foucault's concept of Christian pastoral techniques, Lazzarato has introduced an analogy between an infinite debt in capitalism and an infinite debt to God. For Christian pastoral power—a biopolitical thesis is developed by Foucault ([1977/78] 2007)—is characteristically that only God can take debt and pays it off. The Son of God took all the sins of mankind to repay debt. With this gesture, all humanity is committed (or bound) to believe in God . Today, the crisis is not the saviour who would repay debts. Debt is infinite; it cannot be repaid, and the ruling class does not want to erase debt. The reason for this is not hard to find. The capitalist insistence on debt is to be understood as its ruling technique. This technique provides conditions for the reproduction of inequality and helps to govern divided people/a divided world. Of course, this technique shows divided communities and ways of dictatorship through capital. Techniques of domination, are tied in our Western society to Christian eschatology and the Christian genealogy of morals (Nietzsche [1887] 1990, 53–94). Christian pastoral techniques emphasise responsibility (moral bond), obedience (subordination), knowledge and humility (which individualises through the practice of self-awareness), and death (the sacrifice for god/sovereign), thereby creating a psychological matrix in which every individual/subject is formatted. These elements help capitalism to produce and maintain (individuation of) the indebted man, his servility, humility, isolation, guilt, memory pressure and obligation promises (commitments, contracts) to return the money. In this way, techniques of debt governs a borrower’s future live. They isolate and subordinate him. Therefore, the establishment of a debt ratio in the next period is nothing more than a specific form of bonds; a way of internally and externally controlling every indebted individual; a way of avoiding collective resistance.

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CLASS STRUGGLE Biopolitical production has the power to shape individuals into subjects who establish control over themselves, to produce subjective feelings of guilt, to force subjects to isolate themselves, to become publicly invisible and socially alienated. This biopolitical power is now more powerful than the collective form of resistance or multitude of singular subjects. Obviously, the multitude is not yet able to establish strong social (collective) relations. It is therefore necessary to look for new forms of socialisation and solidarity, and to organise masses in the direction of resistance. Resistance should not be directed solely against debt. So far, rebellions against debt and financial instruments have not been very successful, as evidenced by the recenthistory of neoliberalism. In this context, the rebellious multitude should be understood through the concept of class; as a rebellion against capital. Today’s resistance of multitude against capital must be conceived through the frontal class struggle (Negri 2005, 113–14). The multitude should be seen as a productive class of singularities. In other words, as a class that is no longer one class, but is a creative set of economic realities, which is subject to the authorities. In this context, a multitude is offered as a subject of class struggle and revitalises the politically defeated working class. The numerical labour force—as opposed to the problematic term 'working class'—must once again become a productive class and go to the fight against capital as a united front (and not as a trade union organisation). It must become the ontological force that will embody common desire to change the world.

REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 142–48. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Balibar, Etiene. 1994. Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx. New York & London: Routledge. Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London and New York: Verso.

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Herman, Edward S., and Chomsky, Noam. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1983) 2000. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press. Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bìos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: The Minnesota University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1991. Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govermentality, edited by G. Burchell, C. Gordonand, and P. Miller, 87–104. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. (1977/78) 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78. New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. (1978/79) 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France 1978–79. Basingstoke: Palgrave, MacMillan. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2012. The Making of the Indebted Man. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Marazzi, Christian. 2011. The Violence of Financial Capitalism. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Močnik, Rastko. 2006. Svetovno gospodarstvo in revolucionarna politika (World Economy and Revolutionary Politics). Ljubljana: Založba *cf. Negri, Antonio. 2005. Negri on Negri: In Conversation with Anne Dufourmentelle. New York, London: Routledge. ———. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Negri, Antonio, and Michael Hardt. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1887) 1990. Genalogija morala (On the Genealogy of Morality). Beograd: Grafos. Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Rifkin, Jeremy. 1996. The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: A Tracher/Putnam book. Saskia, Sassen. Losing Control?: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. New York: Semiotext(e).

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BIO Dr. Nikola Janović Kolenc is a sociologist and cultural theorist, independent researcher, Memefest collaborator, and a member of The Initiative for Democratic Socialism. His theoretical and practical research mostly focuses on contemporary studies of culture and society, and issues regarding ideology theory and biopolitics. He has been a research associate at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. His previous research has focused on new forms of communication and mobility, the crisis of social cohesion, cultural flows, cultural experiences, and multiculturalism across European city spaces. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. He has published several articles and co-edited the book Demonstrating Relevance: Response-Ability, Theory, Practice and Imagination of Socially Responsive Communication (published by Memefest and Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, 2010). He still wants to become le chef cuistôt-un philosophe when he grows up.

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INDEBTED INTERACTION: THE WAGES OF THE DIGITAL ECONOMY

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Andrejevic

n his manifesto-like pronouncement on the demise of disciplinary society, Gilles Deleuze observes that, “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt” (1992, 5). This telling and timely formulation asks us to consider the ways in which debt stands in relation to enclosure. In what respect might it be opposed to enclosure? After all, when we incur a debt, we colloquially ‘enter into’ an agreement of some kind that, along the way, we hope eventually to ‘get out of’. Isn’t a debt simply another kind of enclosure—something that, in a sense, traps or captures us? It is clear that Deleuze is not here interested in mobilising the full spectrum of oppositions: if enclosures serve as a form of confinement, the state of indebtedness is surely not a contrasting form of liberation, but rather a different (but related) modality of containment and control; we might describe it as ‘de-confined’ control. The spatial metaphors are not incidental to the argument, since Deleuze is specifically (and presciently) identifying the ways in which spaces of control are reconfigured in the era of alwayson, information-age technologies and practices. If disciplinary strategies are associated with the grand enclosures of the nineteenth century—the schools, factories, penitentiaries, and other institutions—strategies of control emerge alongside the reconfiguration of these enclosures and, in particular, the ‘de-differentiation’ of the spatial distinctions that defined them. In the disciplinary society, one leaves one space to enter another: distinct realms of leisure, labour, domesticity, punishment, treatment, training, and so on, become the hallmark of specific disciplines exercised within their relevant spaces: factories, prisons, schools, etc. In the digital era, one can list the ways in which these distinctions continue to be reconfigured by what might be described as post-enclosure

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strategies: distance learning, telecommuting, house arrest, and various forms of technology-dependent ‘de-institutionalisation’. The promise of spatial de-differentiation as a form of alleged empowerment for those once confined to institutional enclosures takes shape against the background of disciplinary strategy. How else would one construe the promise of being able to work from anywhere as ‘liberating’? Deleuze reminds us that the very rationale for de-institutionalisation is the advent of technologies of flexible control that render the institutional boundaries increasingly unnecessary. Always-on, ubiquitous forms of monitoring reach beyond institutional boundaries, allowing these to explode outward. The story of de-differentiation is by now a familiar one—but the explicit connection to debt bears further examination. In what way is the spatial reconfiguration associated with emerging strategies of control subsumed under the logic of debt? Why figure the ‘control society’ in terms of this particular economic relationship? To begin, foreground the relational character of debt, which is to be opposed to the discrete character of simple exchange. Deleuze notes that, “In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed services...” (1992, 3). Something similar might be said of the relationship between simple exchange and the creditor–debtor relationship: in the case of the former, people are always starting again (a new transaction, a new product), whereas in the latter, people are ‘never’ finished—the debt relation is an ongoing, indefinite, perhaps infinite one (another subscription, another membership on another platform). This opposition is echoed in the juridical distinction invoked by Deleuze between, “The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control” (1992, 3)). Relations of control, obligation, and exchange become ongoing relationships rather than discrete, self-contained transactions as they adjust to the de-differentiation of the enclosures. Debt is the economic relation of the always-on, always-connected informational infrastructure. To take just one example, consider how subscription services have displaced direct-purchase relations. Once, we bought our music in discrete, material packets: vinyl 45s or LPs, cassettes, CDs. Now the tendency is towards subscription services: we pay for a streaming service that follows us wherever we go—through spaces of domesticity, labour, leisure, etc. Or, perhaps, we subscribe to a

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commercially supported service that allows us always-on access wherever we go. The ‘cloud’ is a relational infrastructure: when we entrust our data to it, we enter into an ongoing relationship—indeed, were we to ‘finish’ the transaction, we would lose access to our documents, our music, our photographs, our data. Our relationship to these spatially and temporally de-differentiated services is continuous and ongoing as is our obligation to them for the services they provide. In exchange for the convenience, flexibility, and access they allow, these services seek ongoing access to the informational resources (including our data and how it is used) they need to generate revenues. The online economy is increasingly reliant upon this debt relation: the proliferation of services it provides come with an obligation that is indefinite and potentially infinite, at least insofar as there is no limit to the data that is sought in exchange for ongoing access to an array of services: search, social networking, photo- and video-storage and access, and so on. The remainder of this essay considers how the relational character of networked digital media—the reliance on models premised upon always-on access and availability—has developed around the logic of debt as a strategy for control. The proliferation of services that come with an ongoing obligation—typically of submission to increasingly comprehensive forms of data collection and monitoring—invokes Lazzarato’s description of capitalism’s production of “the indebted man, who will never finish paying his debts” (2012, 77). This logic is neither new nor distinct to digital media: it is caught up in the system of advertising more generally. This is evidenced by the fact that when, in the 1990s, the television industry was first absorbing the challenge posed by digital video recorders (DVRs) that threatened to allow viewers to skip advertisements with a flick of a button, its representatives made explicit the terms of their implicit ‘pact’ with audiences: viewers get ‘free’ programming in exchange for doing the ‘work’ of watching the advertisements. That is, the commercial pact entailed an implicit obligation or responsibility on the part of viewers; in return for not having to pay directly for free-to-air programming, viewers owed something to producers—an obligation variously described in terms of viewers’ time, their attention, or their ‘eyeballs’. Thus, as the technology changed and it became easier to skip advertisements, people such as the CEO of Turner Broadcasting began to describe the use of DVRs as a form of theft: “Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to

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watch the spots ... Any time you skip a commercial ... you’re actually stealing the programming” (Kramer 2002, 32, emphasis added). Of course, no actual contract was signed by viewers; this term is meant to characterise the implied logic of free-to-air commercial TV. The very act of watching incurs an obligation: the responsibility to provide something in return for the freely available content. It was only against the background of the threat that viewers might withhold their value-generating activity—via a technologically facilitated ‘general strike’—that the need to find new ways of enforcing the pact, and thus of making it explicit, emerged. This task has become an increasingly urgent and productive one in the digital era with its plethora of ‘free’ online content and services that impose a similar obligation on users; the implicit message is ‘if you want this service or this content, you owe us something, and we will extract it from you’. Moreover, the relational, always-on character of networked, digital services renders the extraction an ongoing process: the more services we use, the more content we access, the greater the backlog of debt we create. We provide the growing collateral of our personal data, but it is never enough to buy our way out of the obligation: more services require more data, and as long as we use them, we can never quite catch up. The collection of this data, oddly enough, is framed for us as a form of personal attention and care: the promise that if we are being counted then we must really count. But of course, this promise is as misguided as the conflation of creditworthiness with care for the creditor critiqued by Marx. Indeed, Marx’s characterisation of the logic of debt as relying upon the false promise of dis-estrangement resonates with the false promise of personalisation in the digital era: this abolition of estrangement, this return of man to himself and therefore to other men is only an appearance; the self-estrangement, the dehumanisation is all the more infamous and extreme because its element is no longer commodity, metal, paper, but man’s moral existence, man’s social existence, the inmost depths of his heart... (cited in Lazzarato 2012, 56)

In a sense, this is the currency of the infinite debt imposed by the interactive digital ‘enclosure’—the various platforms that allow us to seamlessly move through physical spaces without leaving or arriving. Facebook trades in the currency of our ‘social existence’ while various applications probe data about our desires and fantasies, hope and dreams, as well as the more mundane details of our movements throughout the

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day, our purchases, our web searches, and so on. The capture of such data highlights the integral relation between surveillance and debt—a defining feature of the digital landscape. As Richard Dienst puts it, “The two great abstract machines that define our era—the market and the media— are two faces of this inscriptive-projective process, the organisation of lived temporality around the interminable working-up and working-off of an imperishable indebtedness” (2011, 125). Simply put, a regime of debt is simultaneously and necessarily one of surveillance even if different regimes are associated with different modalities of monitoring. Lazzarato associates this equation with the rise of finance capital and its reliance on various techniques for leveraging debt: “financial power is essentially a power of public evaluation whose claim is to make all organisations transparent, to make visible and thus assessable (measurable) the relation and behaviour of the actors in each institution” (2012, 138). From the perspective of the commercial digital media economy, the frantic consumption and circulation of information is paired with the injunction to become hyper-productive, generating increasingly detailed data about oneself with every mouse-click, every page visit, every text and email, and phone call. Following Lazzarato (2012), Mark Coté emphasises the way in which debt enables market-based strategies of control in the digital era because of the way it “breaks down the binaries producer–consumer and working–nonworking ... Debt is a strategy of control, a command of encumbrance: ‘become productive’” (forthcoming, 32). 1 In this regard, the sporadic moral panics surrounding high levels of personal and household debt in the US (and elsewhere) can be deceptive: economists see the willingness of consumers to incur new debt as a positive sign for the economy. After the staggering recession triggered by the 2008 collapse of the sub-prime lending market in the US, for example, financial analysts welcomed Americans’ increased willingness to take on debt as a healthy sign of recovery. As one press account put it, “For the first time since the Great Recession hit, American households are taking on more debt than they are shedding, an epochal shift that might augur a more resilient recovery” (Lowrey 2012). One of the key indicators of economic growth in the US is new housing starts—an indicator that, in the majority of cases, refers to the incurrence of debt in the form of long-term mortgage obligations. From 1997 to 2007, the US experienced significant economic growth, during which time “household debt ballooned from 66% of economic output to 98%” and “was knocked back down to 89% 1  Cited with permission from the author.

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by the recession” (Hilsenrath and Simon 2011). The figures are striking: economists and pundits describe a shift toward debt levels that equal the nation’s entire domestic output as a step in the right direction. Alternatively, foregoing consumption in order to pay off existing bills rather than continuing to carry high-debt levels is seen as a drag on the economy: “Paying off bills slows consumer spending on appliances, travel and a slew of other products and services...” (Hilsenrath and Simon 2011). Thrift has fallen a long way since the days of Benjamin Franklin: “During the Great Depression, economist John Maynard Keynes warned of a so-called paradox of thrift: When everyone turns frugal, everyone suffers. Synchronised thrift slows the economy … Some experts worry that is happening now” (Hilsenrath and Simon 2011). The relationship of monitoring to debt takes place in several registers: as a precursor to the imposition of an obligation (background checking and census data collection); as a means of monitoring and accounting for outstanding obligations; and as a population-level indicator of economic growth. Given the close relationship between monitoring and surveillance, it is no coincidence that credit-card companies and credit-rating agencies helped pioneer the forms of economic surveillance that are becoming an increasingly important part of the commercial online economy. Along with loyalty cards, they are a key player in the attempt to bridge the realms of online and offline data collection by linking an online consumer with past patterns of purchase behaviour and preferences. BIG DATA DEBT Viewed as a data-generating activity, the lending process contributes to what William Bogard (1996, 1) describes as the “simulation of surveillance”—forms of data-driven analysis that seek to displace the uncertainty of the future by modelling it. Simulation stands in for a kind of knowledge about the future that exerts control in the present. The fantasy of simulation is that total information capture in the present might saturate the possibilities of the future. As Lazzarato puts it, “What matters is finance’s goal of reducing what will be to what is, that is, reducing the future and its possibilities to current power relations” (2012, 46). Colonising the future requires the accumulation of as much data as possible about the present. The bottomless appetite for information is one way of approaching the infinite or limitless data-debt obligation that has come to characterise the digital economy: the fact that the increasing range of available services and applications with which we are

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provided is the obverse of the process of monitoring without limits. The exchange on offer is one in which the development of new information services and products is intertwined with the widening and deepening of the scope of data collection. While once, services such as Google, Gmail, and Facebook might have been thought of as ‘free’ services provided by commercial entities whose motives remained obscure, we are arriving at a less romanticised and mysticised understanding of the exchange that supports them: we ‘pay’ for access to these services not simply with our attention (as in the case, for example, of commercial free-to-air broadcasting), but with our data. This data is not a ‘found’ asset, something that marketers simply stumble across because it is lying around cluttering the information landscape. Rather, it is a resource generated by user activity and deliberately captured by an infrastructure developed for the express purpose of creating useful databases. Thus, the same sorts of criticisms are voiced about ad-blocking software as were about TiVo. One executive of an online company likened ad-blocking to “a shoplifter coming in and stealing your money” (cited in Flynn 1999). By the same token, attempts to limit online tracking and targeting of consumers, such as ‘do-not-track’ legislation, are described as grave threats to the future viability of the online economy. As one advertising executive put it, “this may sound like a good idea to online privacy absolutists, but the practical implications of such regulations would be devastating—not just for advertisers and the online publishers who depend on their money, but for the technology industry and economy as a whole” (cited in Wheeler 2012). There is a somewhat circular aspect to such arguments: once you build a commercial economy predicated on the comprehensive monitoring of consumers, then the economy itself becomes an argument in favour of comprehensive monitoring. However, such arguments also reiterate the value proposition on offer: consumers owe something in return for the services they receive. As these multiply indefinitely, that consumer debt correspondingly increases. At the limit, we are offered total convenience and complete automation in exchange for willing submission to comprehensive monitoring. The emerging commercial architecture of the Internet, then, can be construed in terms of a certain type of indebtedness, not simply in its technological configuration, such as the development of new and more sophisticated capabilities for data capture built into the hardware and the software, but also in the implicit message: ‘we built this for you and in

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return you owe us your submission to the forms of tracking that sustain it’. Such architecture is neither unprecedented nor limited to the ‘virtual’ realm. The wholesale privatisation of public space that has come to characterise suburban and small-town US might be described in related terms. The private sector has, in a sense, taken on the duties of the provision of publicly available facilities for sociality, conviviality, and popular forms of diversion. The commercial shopping mall is a ‘free’ space, in the sense that we do not need to pay to enter into a costly enclosure or to benefit from its amenities: spacious promenades, lounge areas, and even landscaping and play facilities for children. Although they are open to the public, commercial spaces such as malls are not public spaces in the civic sense. Rather, they are private spaces governed by the commercial imperatives of their owners and operators who have the discretion to limit speech, commerce, social intercourse, and access as they see fit. In his discussion of shopping malls, Dienst suggests that insofar as such spaces impose a certain sense of obligation upon their users, they embody, “the global sprawl of an indebted world within the terms of a single building” (2011, 129). The huge investment in commercial infrastructure carries with it a certain imperative—perhaps even an implied obligation—towards those who have supplied the ‘public’ space: “the sheer proliferation of shopping spaces should be seen as the physical extension of the regime of indebtedness where individual subjects are empowered to enact their own fidelity to the reigning powers of money” (Dienst 2011, 129). Once such a physical infrastructure is created, it carries with it its own set of imperatives built into both the spaces themselves and the social and economic logics that sustain them. Empty or underused malls become yet another economic indicator: the sign of an ailing economy, an admission of weakness, a public concern. Echoing the transformation of physical space, the Internet rapidly transformed from a publicly supported infrastructure to a commercial one—a digital mega-mall of sorts—and continues to construct an information-intensive system of commerce that carries with it not simply the injunction to consume, to interact, and pay attention, but also to submit to its monitoring logics. In an environment in which data miners are continually finding new uses for the data collected by commercial sites and applications, consumers cannot be expected to anticipate any and all uses to which their information might be put. Thus, the implicit claim that users have a clear, informed understanding of what they are signing up for when they agree

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to have their data collected and mined is absurd. Typically, the claim that users are happy with the terms on offer is inferred from user behaviour, because when they are asked, people tend to express concern over the collection and use of their personal information for customisation and targeting. For example, a 2012 Pew study revealed that the majority (65%) of people who use search engines do not approve of the use of behavioural data to customise search results. More than two-thirds of all Internet users (68%) in the study did not approve of targeted advertising based on behavioural tracking (Purcell et al. 2012). Another nation-wide survey in the US found that 66% of respondents opposed advertising targeting based on tracking users’ activities (Turow et al. 2009). And a US study of public reaction to proposed ‘do-not-track’ legislation found that 60% of respondents said they would opt out of online tracking if given the choice. The overall picture, then, is very different from one in which users happily agree to the capture and use of their personal information. There is a split between what people say and what they do—that is, they may not like the available model, but they submit to it regardless. That is a far cry, however, from claiming that users embrace this commercial model, that they are happy with the available choices, or that they find the balance between ‘privacy’ and ‘convenience’ to be a healthy one. On the contrary, what emerges from the research is a world in which people submit to the available model because they do not see any alternative way of accessing the services and conveniences on offer. For the commercial service providers, the mere fact of acceptance is certainly enough, but the need to push the further claim that people like and embrace the terms on offer is a telling one. One of the central tenets of data mining large databases is that the mining process is an ‘emergent’ one, in the sense that patterns cannot be discerned, predicted, or modelled in advance. That is to say, the explicit goal is to discover indiscernible and perhaps even inexplicable correlations in the data. If, for example, a person’s political preference can be reliably predicted based on the model of car he or she drives or the brand of toothpaste he or she uses (or vice versa), this is actionable information in the sense that it can facilitate targeted forms of political campaigning or marketing, but it is not necessarily comprehensible information. In other words, there may be no clear underlying explanation for why people who drive Mercurys vote Republican. To put it somewhat differently, we do not know what type of predictive power particular types of data might bestow upon those who can access it. Do habits that seem completely un-

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related place us within groups who are stigmatised (or privileged) in one way or another? In the ‘small data’ era it was relatively simple to reverseengineer the forms of sorting that resulted in various types of discrimination. In the ‘big data’ era, this might be much more difficult: are we turned down for a professional post because other people who share some similar, seemingly random, trait have not had success in the past? As the algorithms get increasingly complex, we may not even know what combination of traits conspired to include or exclude us, or to turn us into a target of one kind or another. The question becomes not so much whether we want to hide some aspect of our private lives, but rather how data, once it is sorted and mined, might be used to influence decisions that impact our lives but remain profoundly opaque to us. BEYOND PRIVACY The paradox of the fate of personal information in the digital era is that it often involves mundane information that, in general, people are not particularly concerned about revealing. The notion of debt gets us to the related question of how this personal data is extracted. In order to access what is good and useful about the Internet, we need to rely upon a commercial infrastructure that sets the terms of access. We do not need to pay—in fact, we cannot pay directly for services such as Facebook or Gmail—but we are told we owe something to them in return for access and use. In this regard, the notion of debt (and various forms of resistance to the obligations it imposes) refers directly to the political economy of the commercial Internet—the fact of its commercialisation and the ways in which privatisation begets privatisation or, as Marx suggested, in which separation begets separation (De Angelis 2002). When you separate people from (control over) the means of sociability, communication, and information storage and access, you can then separate them from their own data—and extract further data about them in exchange for allowing them to access what they have created (their email, Facebook account, Tweets, and so on). The notion of debt also speaks to the familiar attitude of resignation in the face of the seemingly incontestable obligation imposed by the digital economy— an understanding that, as in the case of broadcasting before it, the huge private infrastructure must be financed somehow. Once we accept this commercial model, we find ourselves beholden to the logics that support it. Finally, the notion of debt invokes the character of the current commercial arrangement as an ongoing relationship. This is a defining

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element of debt as a form of social control: it designates an ongoing relationship between debtor and creditor—one that can be extended indefinitely given the right combination of interest and payment rates. As new commercial conveniences and capabilities continue to develop, the appetite for data is as infinite as the ongoing obligation to supply it.

REFERENCES Bogard, William. 1996. The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coté, Mark. “Data Motility: The Materiality of Big Social Data.” Cited with permission. De Angelis, Massimo. 2002. “Marx and Primitive Accumulation: The Continuous Character of Capital’s ‘Enclosures’.” The Commoner, 2 September. Accessed 10 July 2009. http://www.commoner.org.uk/02deangelis.pdf. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (Winter): 3–7. Dienst, Richard. 2011. The Bonds of Debt. London: Verso. Flynn, Laurie. 1999. “Battle Begun on Internet Ad Blocking.” The New York Times, 7 June, 1. Hilsenrath, J. and R. Simon. 2011. “Spenders Become Savers, Hurting Recovery.” The Wall Street Journal, 22 October. Accessed 12 December 2012. http://online. wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204294504576614942937855646.html. Hoofnagle Chris, Jennifer Urban, and Su Li. 2012. “Privacy and Modern Advertising: Most US Internet Users Want ‘Do Not Track’ to Stop Collection of Data about their Online Activities.” Paper presented at Amsterdam Privacy Conference, 8 October. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2152135. Kramer, Staci. 2002. “Content’s King.” Cable World, 29 April, 32. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2012. The Making of the Indebted Man, translated by Joshua David Jordan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lowrey, Anne. 2012. “Rise in Household Debt Might Be Sign of a Strengthening Recovery.” The New York Times, 26 October. Accessed 12 December. http:// www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/business/rise-in-household-debt-might-besign-of-a-strengthening-recovery.html?_r=0.

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Purcell, Kristen, Joanna Brenner, and Lee Rainie. 2012. “Search Engine Use, 2012.” Pew Internet and American Life Project, 9 March. Accessed 12 December. http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Search-Engine-Use-2012.aspx. Turow, Joseph, Jennifer King, Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Amy Bleakley, and Michael Hennessy. 2009. “Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities that Enable It.” Social Science Research Network, 29 September. http://ssrn.com/ abstract=1478214. Weinberger, David. 2011. "Too Big to Know." New York: Basic Books. Wheeler, Eric. 2012. “How Do Not Track Is Poised to Kill Online Growth.” C/Net, 20 September. Accessed 12 December. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_357516422-93/how-do-not-track-is-poised-to-kill-online-growth/.

BIO Mark Andrejevic is an ARC QE II Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Director of Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. He is the author of Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era, and Infoglut, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on surveillance, digital media, and popular culture.

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FROM THE FETISH CHARACTER OF COMMODITY TO THE FETISH OF INTERESTBEARING CAPITAL TXT

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Saso Furlan

NTRODUCTION Ever since Karl Marx’s Capital was first published, his theory of fetishism has been highly debated. Some Marxist theorists, such as Louis Althusser, have disregarded it, denoting it as a bourgeois-idealist theory in which a fabric of Hegelian idealism persists. Other Marxists, such as Georg Lukacs, have praised it, declaring it as one of his most daring and brilliant deliberations, and have used it as a key tool to the critique the modern society and its ‘reified’ social relations. Diametrically opposed, these approaches nonetheless agree when it comes to evaluating the theoretical significance and implications of Marx’s theory of fetishism. They usually treat it as a digression that accompanies his economic theory that is presented in the three volumes of Capital. They see it as either an obscure or an ingenious socio-philosophical supplement to Marx’s theory of value; something that can be considered independently from his economic theory. Contrary to this common perception, I will try to show that the theory of fetishism is not a supplement to Marx’s theory of value, but rather a central and constitutive element. In the words of Isaak Ilich Rubin: “[T]heory of fetishism is, per se, the basis of Marx’s entire economic system, and in particular of his theory of value” (1990, 5). Another notion about Marx’s theory of fetishism frequently held by both its proponents and opponents is that Marx’s theoretical deliberations on the subject are exhausted in the section on the fetish character of

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the commodity in the first chapter of Capital Volume 1. Most of the discussions of Marx’s theory of fetishism are therefore reduced to comments on this section and are usually complemented by considerations of the implications of what Marx said in this section. In contrast to this approach, I will claim that Marx’s theory of fetishism spreads throughout all three volumes of Capital. I will show that the theory of fetishism initiated in the first chapter is enhanced by his consideration of the capitalist process of production at appear in subsequent chapters in Volume 1 (particularly in his discussion of the capital fetish). This is further developed in his analysis of the unity of the capitalist process of production and circulation in Volume 3 (most notably, in his consideration of the redistribution of surplus value and the formation of categories of the price of production, profit, and the rate of profit). Finally and most importantly, I will examine Marx’s treatment of the externalisation of the relations of capital in the form of interest-bearing capital, which coincides with the completion of the capital fetish. I will demonstrate how interest-bearing capital, which designates the specific capitalist form of debt relation, constitutes what Marx calls the “most superficial and fetishised form” (2010 [1894], 255) of relations of capital. THE FETISH CHARACTER OF THE COMMODITY AND MONEY Marx’s theory of the commodity fetish as presented in section 4 of the first chapter of Capital Volume 1 has often been interpreted as a specific version of a theory of false consciousness. According to the most widely accepted view, it designates a state of affairs in which people are subjected to an illusion of assigning the characteristics that have their origins in social relations among people to things. When people are engaged in the act of exchange, they supposedly ascribe false properties to the products of their labour, i.e., commodities, and fail to recognise that, in reality, these properties are but properties of the relations between people. In the context of commodity fetishism, that which is in fact a relationship among people supposedly appears as a relation among things. According to this view, the relations among things are considered as a false appearance that camouflages the essence—the relations among people. Even though this interpretation is almost generally accepted in Marxist literature, it is, strictly speaking, wrong. Marx is clear that the commodity fetish cannot be reduced to a mere subjective illusion, to false consciousness as it were. He starts the section, entitled “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”

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with the observation that, to everyday consciousness, a commodity appears as an obvious, trivial thing. A specific thing is perceived by spontaneous consciousness, above all as a particular use value, which is not in any way mysterious. Insofar as this thing is a commodity, i.e. a unity of use value and value, it is also perceived as something that, in addition to a particular use value, has a particular value. Note that either from the point of view of satisfying certain human needs (use value), or from the point of view of being a product of human labour (value), the commodity is, in both aspects, far from being enigmatic to everyday consciousness. Michael Heinrich correctly points out that the so-called secret of the commodity fetish that Marx seeks to decipher does not initially emerge in the consciousness of the people engaged in exchange, but is rather a result of an undertaken analysis (2012, 72). Marx makes this very clear in the first two sentences of the section: “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (2010 [1867], 46). Analysis of the commodity shows that the triviality of a thing as use value vanishes into dust and becomes an enigmatic “sensory extrasensory thing” as soon as it is considered as value, as a product of (abstract) human labour. By pointing out the “sensory extrasensory” character of the commodity, which is first made clear by the analysis, Marx is referring to the analysis of the value form of the commodity elaborated in the preceding section of Capital Volume 1 (i.e., section 3). This section shows that the value of a commodity cannot be expressed as a substance of a single commodity; it cannot be expressed within the commodity itself as something intrinsic to it. In order for the value of a commodity to be expressed, at least one other commodity is required. A commodity positioned in the relative form of value can only express its value in relation to the commodity positioned in the equivalent form of value whose use value serves as an embodiment of the value of the commodity in the relative form of value. The analysis of the value form further shows that, in the last instance, a socially valid and objective expression of value of the commodity necessitates a general equivalent, i.e., money (Marx 2010 [1867], 32–46). When Marx explicitly asks himself from whence “arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, as soon as it assumes the form of commodities?”, he formulates the following answer: Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the

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measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products. A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men‘s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. (Marx 2010 [1867], 46)

It is thus the specific character of the commodity production in which the produced goods assume a specific commodity form that makes the social relationships among people appear as the relationships among things. Marx continues by claiming that under the conditions of commodity production, things take on “a life of their own”, and uses the analogy of the “misty realm of religion”. In the same way that deities—the products of human minds—“take on the life of their own” (2010 [1867], 47), the products, which are produced in the capitalist mode of production, appear as having an independent life. He writes, “This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” (2010 [1867], 47). Significantly, immediately after engaging in an eccentric rhetoric full of metaphors from the religious world, Marx asserts that the fetish he is talking about is inseparable from the production of commodities. This again indicates that the fetish character of the commodity does not originate in people’s consciousness, and is thus not a subjective phenomenon in the form of a mere deception, but a phenomenon that has an objective basis in the sphere of production. But what exactly is this objective basis? The distinctive characteristic of the capitalist mode of production is that individual capitalist enterprises are autonomous entities—as private firms, they organise their production separately and independently from each other. However, they do not produce commodities for their own use, but for the sake of selling them in the market. In the context of commodity production, commodity producers thus do not relate to each other in a direct social manner. Interactions between producers are brought about not by direct cooperation and communication, but by exchanging their commodities in the market

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(Heinrich 2012, 73). Commodity producers first enter into a relation with one another through the act of exchanging the products of their labour, i.e., things. This explains why social relationships among commodity producers appear like those relationships among things; this is an expression of an actual social relationship. This is not false consciousness, then, but an illusion that is both objective and necessary. Namely, in the capitalist mode of production, there is no other way for the producers to enter into interactions with each other than through the market—through the interaction of things. Isaak Rubin correctly asserts that in the market: commodity producers do not appear as personalities with a determined place in the production process, but as proprietors and owners of things, of commodities. Every commodity producer influences the market only to the extent that he supplies goods to the market or takes goods from it, and only to this extent does he experience the influence and pressure of the market. The interaction and the mutual impact of the working activity of individual commodity producers takes place exclusively through things, through the products of their labour which appear on the market. (1990, 9–10)

That is exactly why Marx, in reference to the commodity producers, states that “the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things” (2010 [1867], 46, my emphasis). These social relations that exist between things are, of course, not generated by social properties supposedly residing in things, but are the consequence of the fact that individuals mediate their activities through these things, and at the same time relate to these things as commodities. In Chapter 2 of Capital Volume 1, Marx continues his analysis of the fetish character of commodity with the analysis of the so-called “money fetish”. He considers money to be an independent manifestation of value, which possesses a specific form of value, i.e., the form of the general equivalent. Heinrich correctly emphasises that a special commodity can function as money only insofar as all other commodities (that are in a position of a relative form of value) relate to it as money. No commodity or a piece of paper can by itself function as money, since its ability to function as money is not its inherent characteristic or its natural property, but is rather a result of a specific social practice that establishes a relation between it and other commodities (Heinrich 2012, 77). However,

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the money fetish consists precisely in the objective appearance that mystifies this fact. Money appears as a thing possessing specific socio-natural properties that seem to be intrinsic to it. Referring to gold, which, in the nineteenth century, functioned as world money, Marx states: What appears to happen is, not that gold becomes money, in consequence of all other commodities expressing their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in gold, because it is money. The intermediate steps of the process vanish in the result and leave no trace behind. Commodities find their own value already completely represented, without any initiative on their part, in another commodity existing in company with them. (Marx 2010 [1867], 63)

Although specific properties of money are exclusively an effect of commodity producers relating to it as money, it seems as if money that assumes the form of independent manifestation of value somehow in itself possesses these properties. THE CAPITAL FETISH When dealing with the money-mediated circulation of commodities in Chapters 2 to 4 of Capital Volume 1, Marx (2010 [1867], 59–108) distinguishes between two types of sequences. The sequence of simple commodity circulation is displayed in the formula C-M-C (C stands for commodity and M for money). This sequence designates a process that starts with a producer that produces a commodity (C) with a particular use value, and sells this commodity in order to obtain a sum of money (M), which is then used to acquire another commodity with a different use value. This process is directed towards satisfying the producer’s needs, which is carried out by consuming the use value of the commodity that has been bought with money. The formula that designates the movement of capital is based on a different logic: it consists of the sequence M-C-M. In this case, a commodity is bought by the producer in order to be sold. The goal of the process is not to consume the use value of a commodity but a definite amount of money. Money is therefore the starting point and the end point of the process. Moreover, in order for this circuit to result in a certain advantage for the producer, the amount of money gained from the sale of the commodity has to be more than the initial sum. In this case, the formula should be: M-C-M’ (M’ designating a greater sum of M). Here,

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money is advanced in order to expand in value. According to Marx, a sum of value that performs this function is capital. Capital is value that performs the sequence M-C-M’; it is the movement of the self-valorisation of value achieved through the accumulation of surplus value (the difference between M and M’). The movement of capital is unlimited and indefinite since it does not cease with the consumption of a specific use value, but demands constant reproduction of itself through the form of money by means of producing surplus value. Capital, i.e., self-valorising value, is referred to by Marx as an “automatic subject”, a self-moving substance, which, like a Hegelian spirit, is a subject of its own process: Value, therefore, being the active factor in such a process, and assuming at one time the form of money, at another that of commodities, but through all these changes preserving itself and expanding, it requires some independent form, by means of which its identity may at any time be established. And this form it possesses only in the shape of money. It is under the form of money that value begins and ends, and begins again, every act of its own spontaneous generation. (2010 [1865], 105)

It appears as if value is able to increase itself in the movement of capital; it seems as if the money advanced yields a certain income from itself and by itself. However, this illusion also cannot simply be reduced to a false appearance, since, as I will try to show, it also has an objective basis in the sphere of capitalist production. It is well known that Marx argued that accumulation of surplus value cannot take place in the sphere of circulation alone, but is conditioned by the production of value that takes place in the sphere of production. Namely, at the start of the M-C-M’ circuit a specific commodity, whose use value is the ability to create more value than it costs, has to be bought; this commodity is, of course, labour power. The basis of surplus value is, according to Marx, precisely this difference between the value of labour power, which is determined by the value that is needed for its reproduction, and the value that is created by the use of this labour power. Productive consumption of labour power in the process of production is therefore the basis of the movement of capital that, in the sphere of circulation, appears as an automatic subject. When dealing more precisely with surplus value in Chapters 7 to 15 in Capital Volume 1, Marx (2010 [1867], 124–353) differentiates between absolute and relative surplus value. Production of absolute surplus

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value refers to the method of lengthening surplus labour time, which is achieved by lengthening the work day. However, production of absolute surplus value has definite limits, since the workday, especially in the context of legal restrictions on its expansion, cannot be lengthened indefinitely. Nonetheless, there is a different method of increasing surplus value without lengthening the work day. Marx refers to this method as production of relative surplus value. It is achieved by increases in the productivity of labour. When the productivity of labour in the branches that produce the means of subsistence and/or in the branches that produce inputs for those branches increases, the value of the means of subsistence decreases. Since the value of labour power is determined by the value of the means of subsistence, i.e., the value necessary for the reproduction of labour power, the value of labour power also decreases. Socially necessary labour time for the production of commodities therefore falls, and although the work day has not increased, surplus labour time relative to necessary labour time has increased. Importantly, in the context of the capitalist mode of production, the production of relative surplus value is a necessity for an individual capitalist. Should a certain capitalist lag far behind in productivity increases relative to his competitors, he would soon lose his market share, and in turn go out of business. It is thus the impersonal mechanism of competition that forces the capitalists into joint action of constant increases in the productivity of labour. The most important mechanism for increasing the productivity of labour in capitalist production is the use of (heavy) machinery, which came about with the introduction of industry. The introduction of heavy machinery as means for producing of relative surplus value, according to Marx, coincides with the completion of the so-called real subsumption of labour to capital. Namely, in the case of the production of absolute surplus value, the extraction of surplus value can be achieved by increasing the work day in the process of production that is, by itself, not yet organised in a capitalist way. In this case, the capitalist just increases the length of the labour process without enforcing a specific capitalist mode of organisation to it. The valorisation of capital is thus external to the production process, since it attaches itself to the process of production from outside, as it were. This is the logic of what Marx calls formal subsumption of labour to capital. Alternately, the logic of real subsumption is asserted in the case of production of relative surplus value. Here, the valorisation of capital becomes inherent to the process of production, since it can only be achieved by reorganising the production process according to the logic

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of capital. This is where the real subsumption of capital occurs. From here on, the process of production has to be constantly revolutionised under the pressure of the “iron laws of competition” in order to increase labour productivity over and over again. The valorisation of capital is no longer external to the sphere of production, but rather internal to it; it is no longer a parasitical force that attaches itself to the process of production from outside, but an immanent force that operates through the process of production, sucking the blood out of workers from within. In the context of real subsumption of labour to capital, capital thus indeed becomes an autonomous subject, which takes on a life of its own. With the mechanisation of industry, a worker becomes but a cog in the complex of heavy machinery. He/she is reduced to monitoring, preparing and standing by the machines, executing tasks that are beyond his/ her control. Heavy machinery, as Heinrich points out, is thus a system in which the domination of workers by capital is materialised (2012, 111). As Marx writes: Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labourprocess, but also a process of creating surplus value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power. (2010, [1867], 282)

Subjectivity is no longer on the side of the producer, since he/she becomes but a cog in the system of heavy machinery, neither on the side of the individual capitalist, since he/she too has no choice but to submit to the “iron laws of the competition”, but rather on the side of this blind unconscious force of self-valorising value, i.e., capital. Individual labour power, even though the sole source of the self-valorisation of capital, is devoid of any subjectivity and reduced to a subordinate element in relation to capital, which penetrates the production process. Therefore, the same point with regards to the fetishism of commodities has to be made in reference to the capital fetish (Heinrich 2012, 111). The appearance of capital endowed with the power of subjectivity and its own immanent productive power is again not a mere illusion, but a specific aspect of reality that has its objective basis in the process of production of commodities.

49 THE COMPLETION OF THE CAPITAL FETISH IN INTEREST-BEARING CAPITAL This section will analyse the externalisation of the relation of capitalin the form of interest-bearing capital. Before doing so, I need to outline the logic of the distribution of surplus value in the capitalist mode of production. In the first chapter of Capital Volume 3, Marx (2010 [1894], 17) depicts the value of a capitalistically produced commodity with the formula c+v+s (c stands for constant capital, v for variable capital and s for surplus value). Constant capital consists of the value of the means of production, and variable capital consists of the value of labour power. It is important to note that c and v play a qualitatively different role in the capitalist process of production. Namely, the value of the means of production does not increase during the production process; it is only transferred to the value of the product. On the other hand, the value of labour power is not transferred to the product at all; as already explained, the use value of the commodity labour power is its ability to produce a value above the value needed for its own reproduction. The function of labour power in the process of production is the creation of new value, the value needed for its own reproduction plus surplus value. However, this qualitatively different role of variable capital is not apparent to the capitalist, since they perceive no difference between different inputs of the production process with regard to value creation. From the capitalist’s point of view, it seems as if the surplus is equally derived from all the inputs, such as machinery, land, and labour. What interests the individual capitalist—who is regularly unaware of the fact that the sole source of surplus value is human labour—in their everyday experience is not surplus value but profit. At the start of the production process, the capitalist is mostly interested in the sum of money that designates how much the commodities they need for production (C+V) will cost them. This sum of money is referred to by Marx as cost price. But when the commodities are produced and about to be sold, the capitalist is mostly interested in the sum of money against which these commodities will be sold. The capitalist is thus interested in the surplus of money over the initial cost price, i.e., the difference between the sale price of commodities and the cost price. This difference is called profit. Profit is a manifestation of surplus value that is realised as the yield on total capital advanced (C+V). But as soon as surplus value is realised in the form of profit, its own source becomes concealed. I have stressed that surplus value originates in the productive consumption of labour power

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within the process of production; this consumption is the only source of surplus value. However, when profit is realised, this fact becomes veiled. I will explain why this is so. According to the aforementioned price determinants, which are taken into consideration by the individual capitalist, the return on capital is determined by the surplus of the commodity’s value above the cost price. It is considered as the yield on the whole capital advanced, i.e., the yield on c and v. This is why it seems as if this surplus does not originate from a specific part of capital, from variable capital, but from constant and variable capital equally (Heinrich 2012, 143). The actual conditions of the creation of surplus value are thus mystified, and concealed in its realisation in the form of profit. From the capitalist’s point of view, the rate of valorisation of capital is not the ratio between surplus value and the value of labour power (variable capital) but the ratio between surplus value and the whole capital advanced. This rate of valorisation is outlined in the formula of the rate of profit: S/(V+C). Taking this rate of valorisation of capital into consideration, and abiding by the assessment that labour is the only source of value, it would seem that capitals with different value compositions of capital (the ratios between constant and variable capital in value terms) would realise different rates of profit. Capitals with a low value composition of capital (low ratios of C to V) would supposedly realise higher rates of profit in comparison to capitals with a higher value composition of capital (high ratio of C to V), since their share of variable capital, from which value originates, would be higher than the share of the capitals with low value composition of capital. However, in reality, this is usually not the case. In Chapter 10 of Capital Volume 3, Marx explains why (2010 [1894], 118–35). Following the thesis that the sole interest of an individual capitalist is the increase in the valorisation of their capital advanced, i.e., the maximisation of profit, Marx recognises that, if some branches offer lower rates of profit than others, then capitalists will, obviously, pull out their capital from these branches and invest it in branches with higher profit rates. The rates of profit in different branches will thus tend to converge, because capital will flee from the branches with low rates of profit to branches with higher rates of profit. According to Marx, equalising the various rates of profit will, at least in the context of free movement of capital, take place automatically through competition. Namely, if the capital is withdrawn from the branches with low rates of profit, the supply of commodities in these branches will shrink. Consequently, the prices of commodities will rise, and, in turn, cause the rates of profit in these

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branches to rise again. On the other hand, if the branches with high profit rates are witnessing an influx of capital, this will cause the supply of the commodities in these branches to rise. Their prices will therefore fall and consequently cause the rate of profit to also fall. This is how the mechanism of competition will automatically produce a tendency for the rates of profit in branches with different value compositions of capital to equalise. But, this same mechanism will, in the eyes of an individual capitalist, also additionally conceal the fact that surplus value originates from labour, since it will solidify the illusion that surplus is but a rate of return on the whole capital advanced. Under the conditions of equalising profit rates, each individual capitalist will receive an average rate of profit, no matter how big the ratio of variable to constant capital is in their capital advanced. As Heinrich points out, the capitalist’s profit will be considered as a premium added to the cost price. This appearance will make the fact that surplus value rests on the appropriation of surplus labour completely unapparent. The capitalist will perceive their profit the same way that an income on a share in a corporation is perceived. Namely, shareholders receive a share of profit in the form of dividend that is proportionate to the magnitude of their investment (Heinrich 2012, 147–48). Following this analysis, it is possible to analyse what Marx declared to be the most fetish-like of all forms: interest-bearing capital. This fetishised form arises out of a specific form of debt relation that asserts itself in capitalism. It is well known that debt and interest are not inventions of capitalism, since they have been around for at least 5,000 years. However, what is regularly overlooked is that a specific debt relation, i.e., the relation between lender and debtor, assumes a specific form in capitalism that distinguishes this relation from pre-capitalist practices of usury. There are two types of debt relations. In one, money is lent to a non-capitalist, say to a worker, and demands from this worker to repay their debt, including interests, out of their income, assumes the form that is is commonly seen incontemporary capitalism, but does not assume a specific capitalist form. Namely, in its form, the established debt relation between the lender and a non-capitalist is the same as the usurious debt relation established between, say, a feudal landlord and a farmer in the Middle Ages. I am not concerned with this kind of debt relation here. Rather, my interest is in thesecond type of debt relation, which is a specific form of debt relation that takes place only in capitalism. Heinrich notes that one of the most important specificities of money in the context of the capitalist mode of production is its ability to become capital. Money is potential

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capital, as it were. Consequently, money that can be transformed into capital is characterised by a unique capacity to yield a profit (Heinrich 2012, 147–48). According to Marx, money “enables the capitalist to extract a certain quantity of unpaid labour, surplus-product and surplus-value from the labourers, and to appropriate it. In this way, aside from its usevalue as money, it acquires an additional use-value, namely that of serving as capital” (Marx 2010 [1894], 231). It has to be stressed that the sale of money as potential capital has a peculiar form. When money as potential capital is lent, its ability to yield profit is sold to a certain capitalist. The price that is paid for this specific commodity, i.e., potential capital, by this capitalist is called interest. Moreover, this interest has to be paid from the profit that was made with the help of the money that was lent. Marx displays the specific form of circulation of interest-bearing capital in the formula M-M-C-M’-M’’ (2010 [1894], 233). The peculiarity of interest-bearing capital is that it is advanced twice. It is first advanced by the money owner to the industrial capitalist, and then advanced again by the industrial capitalist in the form of productive investment. Moreover, surplus value that is produced in the process of production in which the industrial capitalist has advanced their money also assumes two forms. It first appears in the form of profit, and second, in the form of interest, which is paid to the money owner by the industrial capitalist. It is important to note that this interest is paid out of profit, i.e., it is a definite share of profit, which is why the difference between profit and interest is not qualitative but quantitative (Heinrich 2012, 157). Both profit and interest have the same source; they both originate in the surplus value produced in the process of production. Nevertheless, from the money lender’s point of view, this fact again becomes blurred. Heinrich stresses that the owner of interest-bearing capital: receives interest for putting his property at the disposal of others. Thus interest appears to be merely the fruit of the ownership of capital, capital that seems to exist outside of the production process. In contrast, profit of enterprise seems to be the result of capital functioning in the production process. Interest and profit of enterprise therefore appear to be qualitatively different amounts, originating from different sources. This illusion is strengthened by the fact that the rate of interest develops on the market as a uniform quantity independent of individual capitalists. (2012, 157)

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As a share of profit, interest is a fruit of the valorisation of capital that is achieved by means of appropriating surplus value in the process of production, by means of exploitation of labour power. But the debt relation that is established through the form of interest-bearing capital makes this fact completely invisible, because it seems as if the money owner is receiving interest merely by putting their money to work on its own. Namely, the debt relation between the money lender and the industrial capitalist in the role of the debtor takes place solely in the sphere of circulation, in the sphere outside of the production process. Interestbearing capital thus appears not as a capacity to appropriate surplus labour, but as an income stream that originates totally independently of whatever takes place in the process of production. It seems as if money multiplies itself on its own behalf in a sequence, as expressed by Marx, with the formula M–M’: money that yields more money. When capital assumes the interest-bearing form it thus also assumes the most fetish-like form: “Money as money is potentially self-expanding value and is loaned out as such—which is the form of sale for this singular commodity. It becomes a property of money to generate value and yield interest, much as it is an attribute of pear-trees to bear pears. And the money-lender sells his money as just such an interest-bearing thing” (Marx 2010 [1894], 269). One can see here why the capital-fetish completes itself in the interest-bearing form. The establishment of a specific debt relation between the lender and the debtor necessitates that capital acquires a form of the relationship of money to money, which is nothing but an unmediated relationship between two things. It is precisely this specific debt relation in which the capital-fetish materialises itself in its most peculiar and most developed mystified form.

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REFERENCES Heinrich, Michael. 2012. An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press. Marx, Karl. (1867) 2010. Capital Volume I. Marxists.org.http://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/. Marx, Karl. (1894) 2010. Capital Volume III. Marxists.org. http://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-III.pdf. Rubin, Isaak Ilich. 1990. Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Montreal and New York: Black Rose Books.

BIO Sašo Furlan is a political science student at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. He is a member of the programming committee of the Workers and Punks University, a member of the editorial board of the journal Borec, and a member of The Initiative for Democratic Socialism.

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CYBER-DEBT, BARTER, AND GIFT ECONOMIES TXT

C

George Petelin

an debt be ‘good’? Is there good debt and bad debt? I will argue here that some kind of credit economy is unavoidable but that debt and, indeed, profit become more damaging the more abstract and immaterial they become. This is increasingly the case in the period of late capitalism, the era of ‘cyberculture’. In the globalised economy of the ‘Information society’, more so than in Marx’s day, "all that is solid melts into air" (Marx and Engels [1888] 1965). Marx saw injustice in the fungibility of value in industrial society. It was unjust that a piece of paper with $100 written on it could have the same value as a heap of coal that men had given their lives to extract from the earth. Obviously, what mediates intrinsically incommensurable exchanges is money—an imaginary commodity than in itself has no value. But are there even greater levels of abstraction that commodity exchange can undergo in the emerging post-industrial economy? In pre-industrial European societies, although there was an interdiction against the ‘sin of usury’, usury (the charging of interest) flourished. Even in the early years of the Christian era, this could take the form of exorbitant interest on straight-out loans, or of unequal exchange, particularly when Hebrew currency was exchanged for Roman currency at religious festivals. The story of Jesus throwing the money changers out of the temple is a symbolic representation of this double abstraction that even further removes intrinsic value from any exchange. Once symbols without intrinsic value are exchanged for more symbols without intrinsic value, their connection with reality becomes distorted and room opens up for exploitation and inequality. To this day, it is obvious how manipulated and arbitrary currency exchange fluctuations wreak havoc on innocent national economies.

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But even further levels of abstraction emerged in later centuries. In the great maritime era of the twelfth through to the nineteenth centuries, methods of ‘hedging’ against shipwreck, piracy, etc., involved preselling the commodity to be transported to a speculator, and perhaps buying it back on arrival at a higher price. This constituted an insurance against total loss but also a reduction of overall profit. The speculator, meanwhile, could resell the rights to the promised cargo as the probability of its arrival or of its predicted market value altered. Thus, the promissory note rather than the actual product became the exchangeable commodity. A further abstraction occurs where the insurance against storms at sea, or, say a crop failure, ostensibly attached to a product, becomes simply a gamble on the elements with more at stake than the value of the product itself. In a similar way, tax debts to the crown, on-sold by sovereigns needing to finance wars, could be bought and sold and generate financial profit and loss long before any debt was ever collected. This, then, is the nature of ‘derivatives’—stocks that can be gambles against gambles to such an extent of abstraction that there is no longer a material commodity to be received by anyone, yet a potential for huge financial repercussions. The ultimate abstraction, however, occurs when these derivatives are bundled into complex packages, ironically termed financial ‘products’. Here, real possessions, such as mortgaged homes, factories, and businesses, can be bundled en masse with risky derivatives. Banks divest themselves of potentially ‘bad’ debts by mixing them seamlessly with what appear to be good debts. Some mortgages (dubbed ‘sub-prime real estate’ in the Global Financial Crisis) are essentially nothing but bets against default—derivatives rather than sources of genuine life assistance. "By the end of the 20th century", writes Louis Hyman, "loans to workers had become one of American capitalism’s most significant products, extracted and traded as if debt were just another commodity, as real as steel" (Hyman, 2011). By 2005, debt buyers purchased approximately $110 billion in face value of delinquent debts (Weston, 2013). Homogenising the mix by reducing it to sheer numbers and formulas, like seventeenth-century crown tax speculators, banks trade these with other banks. Inflationary price increases valorise the packages so that they appear to be intrinsically profit-generating and no longer associated with particular material assets or even events. But what happens when the chain-letter ends— when, as David Graeber (2011, 15) estimates, the global debt exceeds the gross national product of all countries combined, and repossessed real estate becomes worthless?

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The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–08 (which, in 2013, has by no means yet run its course) is almost entirely due to this phenomenon. As Graeber recounts, the "new derivative markets were so incredibly sophisticated, that—according to one persistent story—a prominent investment house had to employ astrophysicists to run trading programs so complex that even the financiers couldn’t begin to understand them" (2011, 15). With the growth of global trading by means of computer-generated algorithms, the complexity and speed of transaction of financial packages began to entirely exceed human comprehension. Whether or not all of these can be considered to have been, as Graeber suggests, deliberate "elaborate scams" (2011, 15), their sheer removal from physical reality and social obligation surely destined them for disaster. What alternatives are there for the global economy? Can a barter economy maintain our connection with the real and the social? Can we do without money? Is another more intrinsically useful, less ‘abstract’, medium of exchange desirable? Or are our institutions, processes, circumstances of exchange merely at fault? Relatively imperishable products, such as salt or wine, have been a form of currency or instrument of commerce in many cultures throughout history. Citing substantial anthropological evidence, Graeber disputes what he considers to be the myth of a natural evolution from barter to money to bank credit. Citing Mitchell-Innes, he argues that credit preceded the invention of money and that money as coinage was just a convenient way of calculating debt. Thus, credit is more fundamental to social relations than money. Social groups, in his view, operate by consensual sharing, and, even when trade occurs between groups, this need not be characterised by a distancing from everything other than the abstract notion of profit, but rather by an increased complexity of social exchange and bonding even though it may also at times have an adversarial character. Clearly, replacing the credit economy with a barter economy is no more than a romantic dream and its systematic exponents, in any but a very small isolated community, today should be seen merely as tax avoiders who actually abrogate their own social responsibilities rather than remedy those of the economic system. What appears pernicious within today’s credit economy is not debt per se but impersonal, finely calculated debt reduced to a mathematical quantity that disengages itself from the profoundly specific circumstances of an original exchange and thus discards any consideration of reciprocal obligations of a social nature.

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This is in some contrast to a barter economy but more so to a gift economy as first theorised by Marcel Mauss (2011). Mauss found that In the systems of the past we do not find simple exchange of goods, wealth and produce through markets established among individuals. For it is groups, and not individuals, which carry on exchange, make contracts, and are bound by obligation (2011, 3).

It appears that within social groups—particularly in non-industrial and small, closely knit, societies, as both Mauss and Graeber have argued—there is predominantly a spirit of cooperation. As in a family unit, whoever is hungry gets fed and whoever needs help is supported. This is not barter but gifting. By contrast, commerce, even through barter, occurs only between groups. However, Mauss also finds that elements of gifting persist even when ‘commercial’ forms of exchange take place between groups in ‘archaic’ (non-industrial) societies where what they exchange is not exclusively goods and wealth, real and personal property, and things of economic value. They exchange rather courtesies, entertainments, ritual, military assistance, women, children, dances, and feasts; and fairs in which the market is but one element and the circulation of wealth but one part of a wide and enduring contract (Mauss 2011, 3).

Mauss begins his analysis of exchange by studying a practice of gifting called potlatch, a custom amongst tribes of North West America, which obliges displays of extreme generosity, extravagance, and disdain for accumulated wealth in interactions among clan groups. Finding that there is a social return for this sacrifice of personal wealth in terms of respect and hierarchical standing, Mauss goes on to show how ritual exchanges in other societies similarly intertwine social and economic dimensions, and theorises gifting as ‘total social phenomena’. "In these total social phenomena, as we propose to call them’, writes Mauss, ‘all kinds of institutions find simultaneous expression: religious, legal, moral, and economic" (2011, 1). Notwithstanding the differences Mauss finds in potlatch and formalised gift giving from spontaneous unreciprocated generosity, these practices do not reify human relationships in the manner of computerised stock trading. For, however antagonistic or competitive the ritual of presenting gifts may sometimes be, it is its very quality of being able to exchange economic wealth for status and social relationships that keeps

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it firmly within the ambit of ‘real’, specific, rather than anonymously traded, transactions. Moreover, in its creation of ongoing, unspecified personal reciprocal obligations instead of temporary contractual obligations, it cements community instead of the alienation that currently prevails in the West. But the emergence of an entirely new economic system in the immediate future is unlikely, however disastrous the present system is. For, neither has any other system operated successfully on the huge global scale to which we are now committed, nor can the infrastructure of global economic management be dismantled and replaced overnight. And, as Graeber’s research suggests, credit is essential for any but the smallest scale of commerce to take place. All we can hope for is that more socially binding elements of a gift economy will become introduced into aspects of our economic system—particularly in its fiscal practices. Aspects of a gift economy survive in the West as traditions of patronage that, as in Renaissance times, seem mostly public expiations of corporate sin masking as community-conscious generosity. In reality, however, most of these practices are now carried out for direct economic advantages, such as tax concessions and product publicity. Even ‘expiation’ is no longer used for divine forgiveness but simply for positive marketing spin: attaching false connotations to a product in order to boost company profits. It is no coincidence, for example, that banks, tobacco firms, and oil companies sponsor sport and culture. Exploitative and unhealthy products need to be linked with their opposite. The hypocrisy of such practices is well illustrated within Hans Haacke’s famous artwork The Chase Advantage1 (1976a) in which he exhibits a letter from Chase Bank to its stockholders outlining the financial value of its charity work to them. In The Road to Culture is Paved with Profits2 (1976b), Haacke exhibits an advertisement by another prominent ‘donor’, the Allied Chemicals corporation, that boasts about the company’s philosophy of cultural philanthropy. Next to it, Haacke places a list of statistics demonstrating that their actual contribution to cultural activities is $92,250, merely 0.08% of its profits, while, in the same year, their uncontested fines for dumping cancer-causing chemicals into waterways totals $13.3 million. If consid1  The work can be seen at this address: http://luna.lib.uchicago.edu/luna/servlet/detail/uofclibmgr2 ~3~3~41974~111392?qvq=w4s:/who/Haacke,%20Hans/;lc:uofclibmgr2~3~3,univcincin~27~27,COR NELL~14~1,FBC~100~1&mi=5&trs=8. 2  The work can be seen at this address: http://luna.lib.uchicago.edu/luna/servlet/detail/uofclibmgr2 ~3~3~41982~111394?qvq=w4s:/who/Haacke,%20Hans/;lc:uofclibmgr2~3~3,univcincin~27~27,COR NELL~14~1,FBC~100~1&mi=7&trs=8.

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erations of social good had entered into each of these companies’ own transactions, there would be no need for their spectacular public displays of apparent largesse. Examples of an alternative system of credit exist in Islamic tradition. Sharia forbids usury (Khan 2013). Consequently, Islamic banks have introduced practices that replace interest while performing a similar function: voluntary gifts in return for depositing savings, Islamic banks buying a commodity from the ‘borrower’ and selling it back to them on an instalment plan, and partnerships in which one partner pledges labour and the other one capital in order to share in the profits or losses on an agreed proportion (“Principles of Islamic Banking” 2013). All of these practices attempt to preserve a social bond rather than reduce debt to an abstract figure. Payment for goods in advance, for example, is based on a specific description of the goods or project to be accomplished, rather than merely a sum to be reinvested or gambled in any way at all. However, human casuistry never ceases to amaze, for some Islamic banks have found a way to justify trade in derivatives (“IIFM and ISDA Launch Tahawwut (Hedging) Master Agreement”, 2013). Although, because the Koran forbids gambling it should also forbid excessively risky trading, what constitutes ‘excessive risk’ has not yet been adequately defined by Islamic jurists. As in the West, the law in the Islamic world has just not been able to keep up with the rapid creation of complex financial commodities by banks. Promising alternatives, such as the Islamic practice of bank partnerships in enterprise rather than loans, may be able to be introduced in the West. And, perhaps other forms of genuine patronage and social responsibility can be revived and incorporated into all financial transactions. However, one should be mindful that in many gift economies there can be an indistinct line between a gift and a bribe or nepotism, and, as the Islamic experiments seem to indicate, without adequate legislation and critical scrutiny, any financial system has a tendency to revert to random usury and speculation. Thus, there is no simple solution; but, for reforms to be tried and for positive change to occur, the failures of the present system must not be dismissed as an unfortunate temporary aberration while its operators return to business as usual (as they currently seem to have done). Merely reminding the world of the fundamental flaws in the system, although perhaps not extremely radical, is both a realistic and necessary mission for intervention.

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REFERENCES Graeber, David. 2011. Debt. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing. Hyman, Louis. 2011. "The Making of Debtor Nation." The Chronicle Review-The Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 March. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Makingof-Debtor-Nation/126657/. “IIFM and ISDA Launch Tahawwut (Hedging) Master Agreement.” 2013. International Islamic Financial Market. Accessed 1 October. http://www.isda.org/media/ press/2010/press030110.html. Khan, Ajaz Ahmed. 2013. “Ajaz Ahmed Khan—Sharia Compliant Finance.” Accessed October 1. http://www.halalmonk.com/ajaz-ahmed-khan-shariacompliant-finance. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. (1888) 1965. The Communist Manifesto. Washington Square Press. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=DFSevbr6VJgC. Mauss, Marcel. 2011. The Gift Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Mansfield Centre, Conn.: Martino Pub. “Principles of Islamic Banking.” 2013. Al Baraka. Accessed 1 October. http://www.albaraka.com/default.asp?action=article&id=46. Weston, Liz Pulliam. 2013. “Attack of the Zombie Debt.” MSN Money. Accessed October 1. http://money.msn.com/debt-management/attack-of-the-zombiedebt. BIO Dr. George Petelin is an art critic and digital photographer with an interest in the economics and politics of culture. He teaches at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, and has campaigned for civil liberties and the recognition of politically critical indigenous artists.

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OVERCOMING THE FEAR OF EXERCISING OUR TRUE DESIRES TXT

Nenad Jelesijevic

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inancial institutions TISE from Poland and Fund 05 are offering the possibility to gain a bridging loan for the projects financed from the public finances of the European Union. These loans are offered to non-governmental organisations, social entrepreneurs, public institutes, and all other legal entities who have a valid contract for project implementation. The insurance of the loan in the form of a guarantee, mortgage, or cession is not needed; the payment of the premium into the Guarantee Fund 05 is sufficient. — Excerpt from an e-newsletter of CNVOS, Centre for informing, cooperation and development of NGOs from Ljubljana, Slovenia1 This unabashedly frank commercial of a financial merchandiser distributed through the local NGO network beautifully exemplifies the reality of the parasiting by the loan-based financial speculators on the supposedly public money of the European Union (EU), i.e., the funds that are purposed to co-finance non-profit-based activities, social affairs, employment, education, or alternative culture. Obtaining EU funding is dependent on the financial stability (i.e., on the wealth) of applicants, which means that these funds are more easily accessible to those who already have a good financial history. All others have to take a loan, which is only possible if they are able to meet loan-giver conditions. In which case, they start generating the easy earnings of camouflaged philanthropists who will, in this very case, charge them with a 7 percent interest rate. A further example that illustrates the subject of this text is also a local one. Some unofficial sources recently report that the increasingly neoliberal state of Slovenia is about to announce the change of the mechanism of financing the program-based contents executed by non-profit 1  CNVOS, 26 November 2012, http://www.cnvos.si/showmailnotice/id/22772.

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organisations from the field of culture. Namely, the state intends to remunerate public subventions retroactively, i.e., after the funds are spent, which means that most of these (non-profit!) organisations would have to take loans in order to start and realise projects that are officially in the public interest. Such cases were already noticed several years ago in cases of non-profit organisations who carried projects financed by the European Social Fund.2 Even more absurdly, these projects were to do with training, education, and the employment of vulnerable social groups in the field of culture, such as immigrants and persons with disabilities. These two examples amply illustrate the relations of power and the condition of debt that I will articulate below in order to co-relate elaboration of the phenomenon of debt by post-Marxist activist and theoretician Maurizio Lazzarato and some aesthetic connotations of a recent theatre performance by artist Saška Rakef, based on her personal experience of indebtedness of a typical 'multipractic' precarious worker. Through this co-relation, I wish to open a perspective towards the specific aesthetic dimension of debt, which turns into a schizophrenic condition of exploitation through the financial means of contemporary authoritarianism, but also to seek within it possible chances of developing and practising further emancipatory politics. INDEBTED = SUBORDINATED. DEBT AS AN APPARATUS OF (CONTEMPORARY) SLAVERY 3 Lazzarato claims that he wrote his most recent book La fabrique de l'homme endetté (The Making of the Indebted Man) quickly in order to heal himself. He has been observing the concept of debt since 1962 via the theoretical apparatus of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. He excerpts certain emphases from their thinking—for instance, the fact that debt was present for a thousand years before the problem of exchange emerged. He also refers to Deleuze's rethinking of Nietzsche's theory, claiming that as “the pain of the debtor is internalised, the responsibility for the debt becomes a sense of guilt” (Lazzarato 2012, 85). Together with the Marxist theory of money, these knowledges are joined into two hypotheses: the first one claims that the social paradigm does not result from exchange, 2  Cf. Dialog gluhih (A Conversation of Deaf Ones), Mladina, Nr. 36, 10 September 2009, http:// www.mladina.si/48204/dialog_gluhih/?utm_source=tednik%2F200936%2Fdialog%5Fgluhih&u tm_medium=web&utm_campaign=oldLink. 3 This section of text is based on my article "The Debt as an Apparatus of Slavery" for the radio broadcast ‘Oči, da ne vidijo’ (‘The Eyes Not to See’) transmitted on Radio Student Ljubljana on 17 December 2012. The text in Slovene and the audio recording of the broadcast are available at http:// www.radiostudent.si/kultura/oči-da-ne-vidijo/dolg-kot-aparat-suženjstva. 

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but rather from debt; and the second one claims that debt is an economic relation firmly connected with the production of the debt-subject and his/ her 'morality'. Economics and 'ethics' work together from that point on. Significantly, the fact that the class struggle currently occurring in Europe is spread around debt, as has largely been the case in other parts of the world in the past. Here it is good to recall that debt is one of the contemporary sophisticated ways of money manipulation, which reminds on artificially created inflation or big America’s depression. Such mechanisms were/are, in fact, in service of depletion/extracting money from the population. Loan and debt are, for Lazzarato, one and the same thing; it is a matter of perspective on which side of the thing you are, or, as he notes, it is about the question if your time can be expanded. The creditor– debtor relation does not discriminate between workers and the jobless, consumers and producers, active and non-active ones, etc. Everybody is a “debtor”. In this regard, he sees the American university as an “ideal neoliberal society”; as a perfect metaphor of neoliberalism. University studies in general are more a matter of indebtedness than a matter of a right to choose and get a free university education. Since the debt is then converted into valuable papers (i.e., bonds) that circulate on the market, it is more influential than ever before. Loans influence subjectivity, establishing a new form of control that is different from the one that prevailed in post-Fordism. The control is actually performed by an individual who in any case must take care of loan repaying. If you have a loan, Lazzarato claims, that is the reason for which you are controlled. Troubles of the neoliberal condition and the continuous hiding of its more-or-less obvious basic drive—exploitation of the relation of creditor–debtor that Lazzarato names the governance of debt—are written in both the leftist and rightist language of authoritarian manipulation: “Governance of debt is presented as a power which is not implemented neither through repression nor through ideology: the debtor is ‘free’, but his/her acts and behaviours must stay in the frames defined by the signed debt” (2012, 35). The debt is therefore to be understood as a fundamental social relation. The debt is socialised, while the profit is privatised. The debt generates precarisation and at the same time performs an up-to-date form of surveillance. The fact that Lazzarato is not only a sociologist and a philosopher but also an activist is evident in many places within his book. By adding to it the subtitle “An Essay on Neoliberal Condition”, he actually specifies capitalism as a complex mechanism of exploitation, unfolding the

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problem of debt in a close relation with the current crisis, which in no way promises a re-reformation of the system, but rather indicates a direction towards its urgent abolition. This author's commitment to radical social changes is undoubtedly related to his personal situation. Namely, his rebellion activities within the Autonomia Operaia movement based in Genova led to his decision to move to Paris in the 1970s. However, in France he has not been fully accepted into academic circles, but works and lives there mostly as an independent researcher, dealing with issues of immaterial labour, working force, ontology of work, the precariat, cognitive capitalism, biopolitics, social movements, activism and art. To understand The Making of the Indebted Man one needs to delve further into the creditor–debtor relationship, which is reminiscent of the relationship between the global North and the global South. The indebted (wo)man is someone who has made a ‘mistake’; i.e., the debt must be repaid to redeem this act. The first big (neo)liberal expropriation happened between 1980 and 2000, and today we are facing the period of the second big expropriation. The property as ownership in general should be scrutinised to identify absurd dimensions of the inequality that exists between people. There is an incredible differences in terms of the amount of wealth that the rich minority is drowning in, while the precarious majority—the contemporary working class—is sinking into increasingly bigger and bigger debts. The question of property is therefore key in neoliberal capitalism, as the creditor–debtor relationship reflects the power relation between owners and non-owners of capital. Increasing the differences between property amounts is the result of the second expropriation operated in the first place through suitable taxation policies.Taxation policies are an important part of plundering apparatuses, as Deleuze and Guattari also elaborate in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). If the main issue in Fordism was the profit and in neoliberalism the rent, it is all about taxes and so-called fiscal policy in today's crisis. Tax makes it possible to support the first and second head of the three-headed apparatus: profit-rent-taxes. Consequently, we are now facing the rule of corrupted technical governments—some kind of fiscal governance—that are rapidly introducing radical austerity measures to public services, social affairs, education system, healthcare, research, child care, support for the disabled and mentally handicapped, etc. They are doing so for a very harsh fact: capitalism is not successful in its predation or producing promise of wealth anymore, as was the case in the past. Capitalists are therefore plundering the social wealth. In order to achieve

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this, they have had to abolish capitalist democracy—which, according to Lazzarato, has been happening in European countries since 2007. Since then, financial decisions have been mainly made through Troika (which consists of the European Commission, European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund), various stock exchanges, and strange financial institutions, such as private rating agencies. For instance, in Italy, where parties are practically abolished, there is actually an executive board of citizens instead of a government. In Greece, the referendum was cancelled as a result of pressure by the reigning duo Sarkozy-Merkel. In Lazzarato’s opinion, what follows and what we are witnessing is an increasing authoritarian capitalism that will last for a long time. The primary problem is that the debts are impossible to pay off. While Lazzarato is unable to predict what is going to happen in relation to that crisis situation, it is clear that the end of the capitalist welfare state goes hand in hand with the end of the system of representative democracy. Capitalism is promising regression and at the same time—as expected—falling into authoritarianism. It is increasingly obvious that the EU's periphery (Greece, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania) faces and practices increasingly repressive ways of managing the current system—maintaining inequality and suppressing various resistances. Across Europe and further afield, we are facing the fact that differences between so-called leftist and rightist representative options are minor—in conceptual sense they are even not so different aesthetics of the fatamorgana of democracy. Lazzarato notes that these differences are “infra-super-small”, refusing the demagogy of governors who are telling us to forget democracy until the return of the economic growth.

*** The end of the social state or welfare state does not mean the end of state sovereignty at all; as Lazzarato states, the “welfare state is being transformed from an instrument of reformism of capital to a means of establishing authoritarian regimes” (2012, 138–39). The state is continuously withdrawing and disappearing in terms of its public and social functions, while at the same time staying completely sovereign over its inhabitants, which is the model being implemented now, especially in Germany. The state should have been re-established there, but at the expense of public rights redesigned by economy. The state thus has become an economic state. At the same time, the Euro has become the money

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influenced particularly by German financial centres, writes Lazzarato, attributing that to the so-called ordoliberals. In the 1950s, they introduced and raised the role of the German state by establishing conditions for the smooth operation of the free market, providing a kind of social market economy. Five decades later, the new currency, i.e., money, has established a European political area via economy. The state maximised in favour of liberals. Such conditions have escalated to such a degree that any reformism is not possible any more, since we lost classic reference of the class struggle, therefore we cannot perform it from that point of view. Thus, when I attended a lecture by Lazzarato held in Ljubljana in October 2012, I posed him the following questions: Where do you see possibilities for a turn, i.e., for the urgently needed reappropriation?4Do you perhaps see a chance in some sort of conversion of the crisis of representation, representative democracy, in favour of the exploited? His answer swivelled around a proposal that pretty much results from the horizontal democratic praxes of emancipatory social movements. Like many activists, he believes that we should invent a transversal organisation, just as capitalism itself is ordered transversally. A new tool should be invented that crosses multiple capitalist quandaries and exploitations. To do that, one should take enough time and practice political experiments, i.e., processes based on horizontal organization, such as the movements of Indignados and Occupy.

*** Let's take a look at some basic postulations made by Lazzarato in relation to debt. The fact that debt is first and foremost before exchange, in his opinion, is anthropologically indisputable. The creditor–debtor relation has never been well investigated; therefore, it deserves more attention and rethinking. Today, we are facing differences on the level of indebtedness regarding the colonial past of various entities. Southern countries have a higher level of debt than northern ones, as almost all inhabitants are indebted, if not personally then via the so-called public debt. The problem is the very surplus value, and, in particular, the fact that we do not know how or are not able to block the financial (unlike industrial) capitalism in an efficient way. A more substantive (core) social change could be based on a modified understanding of the concept of 4  The lecture was organised by Maska - Institute for Publishing, Production and Education and it took place in Theatre Glej. The audio recording of the lecture held in French is available at http://www. radiostudent.si/kultura/odprti-termin-za-kulturo/lazzarato-predavanje.

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production. Production is now mostly based on production of surpluses, i.e., exploitation. The biggest change during the transition to neoliberalism was the privatisation of money, for banks gradually gained jurisdiction from states to issue money. That key transfer of power to the private hands opened the door to ever-increasing pillaging. For, capitalism works while it is able to pillage, and it stops as soon as it fails to do that. However, capitalism today sees no predictable opportunity to keep increasing the value of money. Therefore, changes should be made upon the whole connection line between concepts of money, taxes, and democracy, taking into account that the capital-labour relation is not the central one. As an appropriate response to that condition, Lazzarato primarily suggests solidarity to be set beyond the state. In other words, the combination or junction of two moralities should be broken—the morality of debt and the morality of consumption-enjoyment, the alliance that he illustrates by the media phenomenon of televised news programs followed by commercials. I try to link to that notion, just interrupting the connection is not enough, it is enough to open a space of possibilities in a process of socialisation of desires, needs, rights, and intelligences. As observed by Lazzarato in the middle of The Making of the Indebted Man, capitalism is not a structure or a system, but instead, a work-inprogress, since it is continuously being reconstructed, reorganised, and adapted to imperatives of exploiting and governance. The power of capitalism is therefore being constantly updated and is still in construction: “Governance has produced a collective capitalist, the one not concentrated in finances, but working transversally in companies, administration, services, political parties, media, at university” (2012, 117). This transversal operation of capitalism is provided by the universal language of development, managing, and methods; i.e., the same politics of governance exists everywhere. Capitalism actually hides the fact that money works in two basically different manners: as income and as capital. As income, it is a means of payment used to buy a variety of goods that could be fairly easily obtained without money, if only the payment was not imposed by the capitalist production itself. Consequently, this reproduces already established relations of power and ways of subordinating. Money as capital works in the sense of structure of financing—as credit money and virtual financial money. The last makes decisions about future productions, goods, and relations of power, i.e., about the subordinated who supports such relations. In that sense, money as capital pre-buys the future.

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*** Lazzarato assumes a potential error in the neoliberal way of thinking, and proposes an active approach by debtors: Who will pay the mountains of debt accumulated because of saving the banks and the system of governance of debt economy? The answer of the neoliberal bloc of power is clear. Yet it is only a strategy of neoliberal wizard’s apprentices that could potentially make things running out of their control! (2012, 124)

The power of debt should therefore be reverted: Contrary to the consensual theory of ‘society of risk’ as a rhetoric of contemporary capitalism, the only way to block and invert—not ‘risks of financialisation’ but—the destructive power of debt is through the debtors’ capability of action and collective thought. (2012, 170–171)

Besides the very request for abolishing the debts, which is the first condition of refusing debtors’ slavery, there is a need to actively think of reappropriating the common/public, i.e., to work on empowering the people within non-submissive ways of production. Lazzarato's (discussable) proposal is that the institutions and structures of power should be enforced to 'self-reflect' by means of the struggle that divides society, meaning breaking with the existing consensuses of inequality. Namely, debt reflects the anti-production logic of today's capitalism being expressed through the policy of widespread indebtedness that perpetuates current conditions. Or, debt itself is anti-production. And such a kind of destructive anti-production leads directly into totalitarianism, poverty, and a social desert of the American type, as it efficiently destroys social ties, free research, creative expression, andthinking. The whole of Europe (at least) is involved in this devastating process. In Slovenia, for instance, the expression of an angry but clearly articulated answer of the emancipatory social movements to that process in the streets has sounded like this slogan: “We don’t discriminate—you are all done!” People simply do not accept paying debts imposed by the governance of corrupted elites who push them to the edge of poverty; they are resisting the virtually democratic representative system that has ended up as rapidly increasing exploitation.

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AGAINST THE PRECARITY OF ART PRODUCTION BY THE MEANS OF ART PRODUCTION. THE PARADOX OF THE HERE-NOW I am Rakef Saška I am RS I am the debt I am the flexible concept π the set of premises and rules prostitute repaying her father’s debt [...] I am status-symbol Cadillac I am served by lackeys in liveries [...] I am Madagascar, Bolivia, Philippines, Haiti I am a synonym for poverty and human misery [...] I am the money spent for the military I am the remuneration of expenses of pacification, modernization, Swiss accounts of railways, motorways, bridges of democratic representation, social state health service, education, culture I am a seizure of real estates, vineyards, sheep children sold into slavery [...] I am written into history of states and empires I play central role around the question what is right and what is wrong what is mine is not mine indeed5 In the performance entitled The Debt of Rakef Saška / The Debt of RS,6 performer Saška Rakef uses these lines based on her intimate situation of being indebted and at the same time working and living in the 5  Excerpt from the announcement for the performance that I am analysing hereinafter (translation from Slovene by myself). Source: http://www.maska.si/index.php?id=154&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5 D=1119&cHash=7d19acde96c4eab7c314c5777500a555. 6  The premiere of the performance, originally entitled Dolg Rakef Saške / Dolg RS (29 October 2012, Theatre Glej) and produced by Maska, was a part of the Ljubljana promotional event for Lazzarato’s book (Slovene translation), together with his lecture and accompanying roundtable. An audio recording of the performance is available at http://www.radiostudent.si/kultura/odprti-termin-za-kulturo/ dolg-rakef-saške-dolg-rs.

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highly precarious situation of being a self-employed cultural worker, in order to develop a specific performative tension. She performs while seated on stage, like one would in an office, mainly through speaking, using two microphones and few ordinary props—somehow recalling the atmosphere of a radio broadcast. The performance's background story is based on the real-life circumstance of transferring the debt of a family member to herself, according to a valid legal procedure in Slovenia. The burden of the debt is great, considering Rakef’s living expenses and her meagre pay that she receives from various underpaid jobs, following the decision to keep working in the field of culture, yet not being a star-artist, obviously. Multiple challenging questions and notions are raised through her performance; from a basic rethinking of the (local) art system to the more complex facing of a real precarious condition on stage: the flesh and blood of an indebted person almost on the edge of a nervous breakdown as a result of her indebtedness (in real life). The indebtedness that, in this case, is documented rather than represented through the performance, extends from reality to the usually supposed surreality, parallel reality, or sublimity, of the stage. The stage event therefore does not allow any 'contemplation' while one follows the performer's long speeches filled with a huge processual counting, neverending calculating, lucid comparing, and accurate converting of amounts and numbers. Art is here almost as real as it could possibly be, if not even more real than reality itself; for reality somehow does not “allow” the problem of indebtedness—as well as many other social problems—to be revealed. Exposing the personal indebtedness with all the facts, emotional conditions, and political connotations that follows makes the very stage—as a place of the performance—turn into an everyday place/space of potential exchange, communication, andaction. Persistent questions about how to address the audience without really addressing it appears here in all its greatness. It is true that the performer reveals her frustrations, pain, humour, and fear of the uncertain future and present. However, at some point, this situation turns into a status quo. Being introduced to the cruel unfairness of the performer's personal condition (which could be understood as a typical/universal one), we (as the audience) are left with these thoughts in mind, obviously in order to process them. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this theatrical approach; however, thinking of performance as an emancipatory act of rupture in the usual order, the question that is raised here—as in many other cases like this—is, what is to be done with the conceptual/ structural border that emerges between audience and artist? How to ac-

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tually not address the audience, but rather to abolish it? By setting the performance beyond the frame of production-representation pair? Is it even sensible to request this from a performer if she/he is really indebted and therefore uncertain in her/his everyday fears conditioned by indebtedness? To be clear, any request on this level is certainly redundant, so it is not a question of a request as such, but it is a question of possibilities, options, and, why not, expectations. Yet, to answer the question in another way, the performer in this specific case earns her artist’s fee for performing, while sharing her personal experience with the public. At the same time, there is a high probability that many members of the audience are indebted, too. Still, this chain of individual indebtednesses is missing a link, i.e., an interchange in (performance of) solidarity, in possible (performance of) resistance. Some of the main aesthetic qualities of indebtedness as a personal and social condition are isolation, loneliness, atomisation. One takes care of one's own future conditioned/controlled by one's own debt. By training its governed ones to promise payment of their debts, capitalism possesses their future in advance. Time is objectivised, controlled in advance, which means that all possibilities of making choices and decisions hidden in the future are subordinated to the reproduction of capitalistic ratios of power (2012, 50). Following the performative potential of an emancipatory act of rupture in the usual order, it seems that precisely the aesthetic of atomisation is the one to be broken, de-tabooed, through the process of performance as a happening that goes beyond/ through the artist-audience structure, that allows multiple entrances and exits, and switches of the roles of all protagonists present at a time in the performance space—which is relativised again and again. The paradox of here—now that can be seen by taking part in this performance, tending to reach out from the present precarity of art production, somehow suggests to us that the production—representation pair is analogous to the capital—labour pair mentioned above. Art production as an obvious process and result of an invested amount of labour in order to make an artwork is an important heritage of modernity, being devalued in neoliberalism, which started to emphasise the high importance of presentation following the critical switch from artist-producer to curator-manager agenda. Institutions of the art system have turned from supporting production (and at the same time controlling it) to simply capturing it; they have switched to massive labour outsourcing, giving priority to presentational techniques, looks, brands, marketing strategies, touristification (i.e., making art exhibitions touristic events to visit).

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(Re)presentation has a lot to do with capital, since it is often works as its symbolic upgrade, a symbolic capital of an object given a power by an instance of governance (in general, from an art-related or other type of institution), and could also be interrelated to the phenomenon of the objectivisation of time. This joint venture somehow once again exposes the fact that art operates with power and vice versa. However, in the performance in question, it seems that we are facing the potential power that— although militant in its idea—still remains weak and vulnerable, thanks to its commitment to representation. But, more optimistically, one can say that despite this, we can definitely see in it a potentiality of raising awareness of a need/capability to act, i.e., a potential of mutual empowering through self-organisation beyond the stage, beyond artistic representation, beyond art production. IN-BETWEEN RAPED DESIRE AND FREEDOM Transferring slightly to the psychoanalytical level, it can be claimed that the overriding sensible quality of debt is a kind of raped desire. While being fulfilled through indebtedness, the desire is actually (yet only materially) fulfilled by buying an object of desire (such as a car, a real estate, a trip around the world) or by ensuring a certain social position, that remains distant and forever out of reach, as a result of the risk connected with the fear of debt—the constant threat of failing to make mortgage repayments, of falling into unemployment, or succumbing to an illness that would make the debtor incapable of working/earning, etc. This dramatic, stressful situation of eluding desire, desire conditioned by debt—indebted, raped desire—is, however, represented as a totally normal, usual circumstance that could be gradually solved, under the condition of subordinating to the bank (creditor) as a representative/actor of power. Freedom, contrary to the state of raped desire, means unconditionally having access to one’s basic living needs without being depraved, subordinated, exploited. The unbridgeable neoliberal gap is here obvious. The virtual time vacuum that prevents us debtors from living in the present—from living our true desires—in order to reach unreachable future is only a result of the perverted financial conceptualisation of exploitation, i.e., the systemic financial violence, violence of counting. However, the quest should not only be to abolish debt (2012, 178), but also to exit from the morality of debt and its discourse—to free ourselves from any guilt, any duty, any bad conscience. According to previous notions, my assumption is that one should be aware of representations of the neoliberal gap, especially because they eas-

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ily slide into representations based on art, too. However, to avoid misunderstanding, the impotency of art is not caused by representation as such, but implemented in the very operation of exploitation—through the highly managed representational techniques of the art system that are in service of covering/masking its exploitative collective body that consists of variety of actors who are involved in its operations, often including the artist. Being aware of the (raped) desire-freedom gap and its representations of different kinds, we face the challenge of bridging it, the challenge of reclaiming our future, as often requested by emancipatory movements. Taking our future back is exactly the emancipatory point of taking back our time, our present, our here-now, freeing ourselves from dangerous threats, such as the paradigmatic threat of debt: when one decides to take exactly that time that one lacks, that otherwise does not belong to her /him by the decision of the governors, the emancipation process starts. As Jacques Rancière claims, that supposedly inevitable lack of time is actually implementation of prohibition written into the very forms of sensible experience, while the politics begins right at the moment when those who 'do not have time' take the time they need to establish themselves as inhabitants of the general/ common space (Rancière 2010, 24). The possibility to make a rupture in a time vacuum—to act politically—is then open. Making a rupture means precisely using that time for the purpose of fulfilling one's desire, whatever that desire is—as long as it is anti-authoritarian, does not jeopardise others’ desires, and respects others’ efforts toward self-realisation in a community. A decision to take time to perform an autonomous effort toward political emancipation potentially turns into an interaction of protagonists present in an open space of political performance, whether in the street or on stage. Reclaiming the future as an emancipatory request refers to remodelling the space of political here-now towards the space of everybody and for everybody. Accordingly, the subordinating creditor–debtor relation is one that has to be abolished through overcoming the fear of exercising one's own true desires in the common space, beyond hierarchies.

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REFERENCES Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2012. Proizvajanje zadolženega človeka (La fabrique de l’homme endetté). Ljubljana: Maska. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press.

BIO Nenad Jelesijević focuses on exploring critical artwork and reflects upon the links between contemporary art and activism. He has worked as a critic, publicist, and researcher since 2003. He is a co-founder and member of the (non)artistic tandem KITCH - Institute for art production and research based in Ljubljana. He has an MA in Video and New Media and a PhD in Philosophy and Theory of Visual Culture.

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DEBT IN THE AMERICAN ECONOMY: BUSTED BUBBLES AND BOOMING INEQUALITY TXT

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Daniel Marcus

ver the last generation, debt in the American economy has been used to replace income, social spending, and investment in solid assets. It results from, and contributes to, increases in inequality, privatisation, and the financialisation of the economy. Debt has masked Americans’ increased difficulties to achieve upward mobility and financial security. It has been a key mechanism to provide the promised rewards of consumer capitalism during the hollowing out of the middle class and a move to a two-tier economy. Ronald Reagan and supply-side conservatives offered a deal to the middle class in the 1980s: sunder whatever was left of the New Deal alliance between the middle class and the poor, and ally instead with the upper class. This move offered an appealing vision of mixing with social superiors rather than social inferiors, reducing taxes on the middle class and the wealthy at the expense of spending on the poor, and rejuvenating the troubled economy with exciting entrepreneurialism. Many middle-class taxpayers felt that they were being unduly burdened with the costs of supporting the poor, given the only mild progressivity of the US tax system; many leapt at the chance to jettison responsibility toward the poor, and join the wealthy in a celebration of free spending on themselves. The grand bargain did not turn out so well for most middle-class voters, however, for they did not understand that the rich’s desire for wealth had no limits. Rather than making sure the middle class received

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their deserved share of the rewards of economic growth in the 1980s, the wealthy tried to keep as much for themselves. They retreated into an evermore privatised existence: gated communities, private security forces, private education, investment funds that moved into offshore assets. The middle class was left with a crumbling public infrastructure, reduced quality of common goods (such as the national park system), increased crime, and a declining public educational system. For the high end of the industrial workforce, who had achieved a modestly middle-class lifestyle, the manufacturing sector declined and their unions came under sustained attack. Thus, economic growth of the 1980s went almost exclusively to the wealthy and a privileged group of upper-middle class professionals and business people, who joined the wealthy in their escape into privatism. For the rest of the middle class, the deal had gone bad. The middle class reacted in a number of ways. Many of them, particularly the ‘Reagan Democrat’ blue-collar workers and socially liberal, lesser professionals, abandoned the Republicans, and split between a bewildered political independence and a grudging return to the Democrats, but the Democrats’ tepid neoliberalism during the Clinton period could not cement their loyalty. They held out hope for joining the success of the investing class during the 1990s’ technology bubble, even though most had meagre resources to invest in the stock market, and middle managers were particularly imperiled by the digitisation of the contemporary corporation. Their fantasies of miraculous growth in stock portfolios burst with the popping of the bubble at the end of the Clinton presidency, and they looked for another avenue for investment. They found it in the housing market. Housing seemed a more solid asset than ephemeral tech start-ups; it involved actual real estate, a resource that would not evanesce like a lighted digit on the NASDAQ ticker. Homebuyers took out large mortgages, thinking escalating prices would provide a handsome return on investment before the credit charges got too steep. Those who already owned homes took out second mortgages, turning their home equity back into debt to pay for their children’s college educations, additions to their existing homes, or consumer goods otherwise out of reach because of stagnant incomes from their jobs. Just as the media had touted the 1990s’ stock market as a can’t-lose opportunity (unless one chose not to participate or was financially unable to invest, in which case one was assuredly a loser), now the media insisted the housing market would be the source of greater wealth for ordinary Americans. The middle class, and even the more financially stable of the lower class,

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could ignore rising inequality and stagnant salaries by making a profit in real estate. Americans were looking at their jobs less and less as a way to secure middle-class security, and were funnelled by financial advisers and media cheerleaders into the magic of market speculation as the solution to their economic worries. Among these worries was the responsibility to pay for their children’s higher education. With manufacturing jobs no longer yielding a decent wage for most workers, a college degree seemed necessary for any chance at the good life, even at modest levels. Meanwhile, tuition and other costs rose spectacularly, in part because of the lack of requisite rises in public spending for state-run schools. The anti-tax mania of the Reagan era had stripped state governments of the ability to sustain adequate levels of subsidies to forestall large hikes in tuition. Along with parents taking equity out of their homes, students took on ever-larger loans to pay their costs, graduating with debts that could take decades to pay off. Debt replaced social spending as a means to extend higher education to a new generation of students, privatising the social investment in education that had been a key hallmark of post–World War Two American society. The housing boom grew reciprocally with a second Wall Street surge, based on unregulated derivatives, financial instruments that were often used to bundle and split mortgages created by banks, semi-public agencies, such as Fannie Mae, and unregulated private financing companies. Investment in these bundled slices of mortgages displaced investment in productive assets, and the financial sector took increasingly larger shares of total corporate profits in the 2000s. The circulation of paper assets replaced productive capital, feeding the housing boom by increasing incentives for mortgage providers to bring in more customers, while the notion of real housing provided the illusion of foundational solidity to the speculative market in derivatives. The collapse of the mutually reinforcing booms revealed unsustainable levels of debt throughout the economy, from the accounts of individual homeowners to major Wall Street institutions. To bail out the financial sector (much more so than individual homeowners), the federal government became the debt holder of last resort, exploding the federal budget deficit during the transition from the Bush to Obama administrations. In the wake of the 2008 crash, it was left to the federal government to instigate recovery through deficit spending, taking on the debt that had provided the illusion of prosperity during the Bush administration. Many homeowners, however, have remained anchored to over-

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priced houses, not even able to relocate to take advantage of regional patterns in employment, thus hindering economic growth. Students remain under a heavy debt load after graduation, even after reforms instituted by the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats to eliminate profiteering by intermediary loan companies. One of the innovations of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement has been to raise money to provide debt relief to homeowners, a way to suture left-wing criticism of financial elites with the immediate interests of middle- and working-class communities. One of the major new battlegrounds in American politics reveals yet another angle of the debt web. Local and state governments constrained by undertaxation have underfunded pension plans owed to public employees, and Republicans are now taking aim at these workers, stoking jealousy and envy on the part of taxpayers who do not enjoy similar pension security. Akin to corporate raiders who have stripped cash-heavy pension plans in the private sector, conservatives now want to cancel contracted payments to government workers in the name of fiscal probity and low taxes. (This has the added benefit to conservatives of weakening or killing public-sector unions, one of the last bastions of the union movement in the country.) By renouncing public debt to middle- and workingclass workers, Republicans will protect tax cuts for the upper class and weaken wage demands among both public and private workers. Conversely, Republicans in Congress have insisted that the US Postal Service, the national semi-public mail delivery system, take on full financing of pension obligations to their workers, adding present costs to cover payments not to be made until far in the future. This is a transparent attempt to drive the Postal Service into bankruptcy, thus ceding delivery services to private corporations who have already gained significant market share (and who do not operate under the same federal law to fully fund all future pension costs now). Debt in the form of pension costs to public workers has thus become a tool at the local, state, and national levels, manipulated to weaken the public sector, destroy public unions, continue the trends toward inequality and privatisation, and replace the provision of goods and services in the real economy with financial skullduggery. Debt, therefore, has masked increasing economic inequality by letting Americans spend as if their incomes were actually rising in proportion to productivity increases and the massive growth in the wealth of the upper class; replaced rises in social spending to finance higher

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education in the midst of tax cutting primarily aimed at the wealthy; and abetted the increasing dominance of the financial sector, where profit margins in proffering unsustainable debt issues have surpassed productive uses of capital. Conservatives have invoked the specter of government deficits to promote austerity initiatives that will push inequality to even higher levels, which will only deepen individuals’ reliance on private debt. The regime of debt, in its many sides and functions, remains a key area of political and economic conflict. It consists of a bewildering array that alternates between exhilaration and crisis, survival strategy and dangerous trap, financial lift and dead weight, and tool for upward mobility and mask for scarcity. FURTHER READINGS AND VIEWINGS Cassidy, John. dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Chinn, Menzie, and Jeffry Frieden. Lost Decades: The Making of America’s Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. De Goede, Marieke. Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Ferguson, Charles. Inside Job. Sony Pictures Classics, 2010. Noah, Timothy. The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012.

BIO Daniel Marcus is the author of Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics (Rutgers University Press, 2004), and writes on media treatment of political and economic issues, documentary, and alternative media. He is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Goucher College, in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

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DEBT AND PUBLIC COMMUNICATION: TOWARDS AN INTERSPATIAL COUNTERPRACTICE TXT

Oliver Vodeb

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ITY AND DEBT

The city has increasingly become humans’ primary habitat. Its economic power creates flows of millions of rural inhabitants who move to the city, while its cultural nature creates an environment that seems to fulfil the most passionate of human desires. It shapes our social ties, our relationship to nature, technologies, lifestyles and aesthetic values we desire (Harvey 2008). In this light, it is also a medium for the capitalist accumulation of power. Urban sociologist Robert Park beautifully describes the city as: man’s most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself. (Park in Harvey 2008)

The city is a space of collective political, cultural, and emotional life. Jürgen Habermas (1989) sees the city as a vital centre of the public sphere. True political activities—action and speaking—cannot take place without the presence of others, without the public, without the city, and its public spaces, writes Habermas. Moreover, Hannah Arendt argues that the notion of a city denotes the space of appearance where one can be

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seen and heard by everybody, but the notion also connotes the common world, which not only gathers us together, but also prevents us from falling over each other (Arendt 1958). The city plays a highly important role in social change. In relation to debt, the city has become a crucial medium; one where capital is parked in real estate under the conditions of the ruling class; one where the physical space as well as the urban culture makes sure that those who ‘wake up’ the city every morning and provide the services for the official economy are made invisible. They come early, they leave late, and they live their lives in the suburbs—not in the city centre or its wealthy parts. Within the dynamic of the city, low-paid, mostly precarious, contract-based workers along with the creative workers, the artists and designers—the cognitariat—help its real-estate worth to rise. But the physical representation of these classes, the movement of their bodies, is strictly regulated and channelled so that it does not interfere with the mechanisms of capitalisation that the city carefully implements under the rule of those in power. Most cities exemplify this. The city, through its strategies of urbanisation, channels the regimes of capitalisation into its centres. Meanwhile, in the suburbs, aside from the economic projects, the social and political dimensions of urbanisation are intriguing. Suburbs are being made through private debt, and a fascinating dimension of social control is involved in this, since, as a rule, indebted homeowners don’t go on strike. Further, the biggest debtrelated profits are being made by credit-card and subprime-mortgage businesses who are lending money to the poorest people who don’t live in the urban centres or gentrified suburbs. This is a very similar technique to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which entangle third world countries into debt from which it is almost impossible to escape; these countries pay such high interest that they have little or no money left over for essential functions. Urbanisation strategies are intertwined with macro-economic strategies and corporate-business strategies. Capital needs to control urbanisation, as urbanisation is the result of class power in action (Harvey 2008). The public has a right to participate in the city’s power structures for very pragmatic reasons. Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey elaborate on the idea that not only are the affordances of physical environments changed by development, but also human experiences are proscribed and defined in doing so. Harvey argues that the right to the city “is a right to change ourselves by changing the city”. It is “moreover, a common rather

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than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanisation” (Harvey 2008). THE CITY: BEYOND PHYSICAL COMMUNICATION Urban environments however, like social life more broadly, reflect an accelerating division between digitally mediated experiences and physical space, which in fact signals a wider process of the digitalisation of many aspects of social life. The rise of the so-called network society has changed spatial relations, which have become mediated, virtualised, and organised into networks and digital experiences. Manuel Castells labels these relations “the informational city”. He observes that people still live in places…but because function and power in our societies are organised in the space of flows (the digital, networked and mediated space), the structural domination of its logic essentially alters the meaning and dynamics of places. (Castells, 2000) Communities therefore are not necessarily linked only to ‘place’, and may be quite varied in how their environments are constructed—in terms of both their physical and digital dimensions. Physical and digital experiences are profoundly disconnected: the space of “flows” (digital) and the space of place (physical) are separate entities and power is mainly organised in the space of flows, which allows for distant, synchronous and real time interaction. (Castells 2000) While our bodies move in the city, as the physical space, our minds travel more and more in the digital as we are constantly engaged in network technologies through devices such as our smart phones. As this trend continues, social experiences become further disconnected, thus creating significant problems in constructing sustainable communities while, at the same time, potentials for resistance in the physical space are being weakened. In this age of globalisation, the media, the use of public spaces, and other citizenship practices have all been reshaped by the processes of privatisation and commercialisation in urban areas. For example, many debates of the public sphere and public space today are dominated by a narrative of decline or loss (Sorkin 1992). But there is a strong argument in the debates about emancipatory spatial developments too. From political activism and civil engagement to self-improvement and opinionated reflexivity, the proliferation of especially urban media is supposedly challenging the authority and exclusivity of mainstream media and restructuring the

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‘traditionally dead’ public spaces. Urban electronic media in particular (such as monitors, videos, the electronic billboards and screens, together with ubiquitous computing) are changing our public spaces. However, one should be cautious of making hasty conclusions over the emancipatory potentials of this new technology. Although new, it operates, in most cases, on old principles and functions—that Wodiczko described a long time ago as a contribution to the grand aesthetic curatorial project of the city—and contaminates space with bureaucraticaesthetic pollution (Wodiczko 1987). Edward Soja’s (1996) understanding of “place” as being composed of three mutually dependent aspects—an objective material space, the ways in which space is imagined and represented, and the ways in which it is experienced by people—is reaffirmed by Lefebvre, who thinks place is most coherent when all three of these constituent elements are in alignment (Lefebvre 1992). While cities compete on the global market, squares are becoming attractive spaces for branding strategies employed to put cities on tourist maps, and to gain commercial, investment, and media attention. Squares are fast transforming from political spaces to commercial, branding locations. Merging architectural strategies of fluid physical spaces with digital environments, squares become multi-media(ted) environments, generating complex social, political, cultural, and economic relations. Besides its physical locality, squares are digital environments in the sense that they become important symbols and signifiers in the digital media’s sign economy. Its meaning, image, and perception gets constructed on the spot, through the interplay of space, architecture, media, events, and human interaction as well as within the complex digital media sphere, ranging from online branding strategies, on one hand, and more personal and alternative and DIY bottom-up public media (such as blogs or real-time communication platforms, usually connected with on-the-spot mobile phone use), on the other. Squares’ on-the-spot media cultures usually range from artistic to commercial and entertainment. Its digital media platforms—for example, digital screens—are usually in the service of advertising. While places like squares are somehow open and public, they are also regulated and controlled by its (mediated) cultural practices and surveillance. They are mostly controlled and shaped by the city’s branding strategies—a complex commercial (social) technology of exclusion and regulated (commodified) interaction (Vodeb 2008).

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From creative-city concepts and manifestations of gentrification to advertising’s natural tendency to use the public cityscape as a private billboard, the physical space of the city is transformed into a commercial interface. The digital use of physical space paired with mobile technologies uses the city as a commercial amusement park. The physical experience is increasingly shaped by digital commercial preferences. Nevertheless, the city as a public space remains powerful in its potentials. It is, in my opinion, the crucial space for social change. There is a long history that demonstrates the relationship between cities and revolutions. In recent history, we have learned about cities’ potential, via the Arab Spring uprisings, the uprisings in Slovenia, and the worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement. While all of these initiatives also used digital social media to network and organise, it was the movements’ presence, representation, and impact in the physical space—the presence of human bodies in a central location—that achieved real communication success. The processes of marketing colonisation, privatisation, and control in the city, however, seems unstoppable as the physical becomes subordinated to the digital, and technology works increasingly as a control mechanism that creates a spatial relation of de-differentiation. In the disciplinary society, one leaves one space to enter another: distinct realms of leisure, labour, domesticity, punishment, treatment, training, and so on, become the hallmark of specific disciplines exercised within their relevant spaces—factories, prisons, schools, etc. In the digital era, one can list the ways in which these distinctions continue to be reconfigured by what might be described as post-enclosure strategies: distance learning, telecommuting, house arrest, and various forms of technology dependent 'de-institutionalisation'. The promise of spatial de-differentiation as a form of alleged empowerment for those once confined to institutional enclosures takes shape against the background of disciplinary strategy. How else to construe the promise of being able to work from anywhere as 'liberating'? (Andrejevic 2013, 24–25)

The pseudo liberation through working from anywhere anytime comes with the promise of economic progress through creativity. Berlin, for example, as the mecca of creative industries, has experienced difficult times in the past. In 2005, its mayor described it as 'poor but sexy'. It was about then that the new strategy for Berlin as a creative city was put in action. It was then that Berlin’s debt doubled. It was then that debt-driven

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public-communication strategies were set in place. Today, one in every five people living in Berlin live under the poverty line and the number grows every day (Slobodian and Sterling 2013). But the advertising approaches in Berlin are cutting edge; for example, those who are too media savvy to really pay much attention to traditional media are captured through free wireless spots accessible at bus stops via an installed app that then, of course, tracks and feedbacks information to the advertiser. The new profiles of the consumer targets are also advanced, such as the highly mobile Yummies: Yummies like to consume. The target group tends to spend more than planned and to make spontaneous purchases. They are curious and open to inspiration. They are always up to date, follow trends and become trendsetters themselves. They never miss anything, thanks to their digital companion, the smartphone. (Slobodian and Sterling 2013)

In the networked city landscape of debt, advertising does not sell our demographics but it sells our networked self. As I will show, these technologies are directly related to debt. Or, more accurately, debt is embedded in their very design principle. DEBT DESIGNS US Maurizio Lazzarato writes: "The specific of capitalist domination does not come only from 'buying power' but from the possibilities of reconfiguration relations of domination and subjectification". (Lazzarato 2012, 93) In order to think about possible interventions that would combat existing and accelerating divisions of power between space of flows and space of place, it’s necessary to look at two things. First, the logic under which web-based network technologies operate, from the perspective of capital; and second, the logic under which the worker operates in relation to debt. Consider the worker in current conditions enforced by the ideology of debt. Lazzarato offers a compelling and useful analysis of this figure in his book The Making of the Indebted Man (2012). He writes about conditions where the ‘laws’ of market competition are extended to all areas of social life. Health and education, for example, are to become investments made by the individual in his or her individual capital. The worker is no longer only labour power; he/she is reconceived as personal capital, making business choices through good or bad ‘investment’ decisions as he or she moves from job to job. These strategies increase or decrease

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his or her capital value. This reconceptualisation of the individual as an entrepreneur-of-the-self teaches us about a significant shift in the nature of governance of capitalism (Lazzarato 2012). The individual entrepreneur-of-the-self works within the realm of free market choices, such as products and services, lifestyles, technologies, time, etc. How can one apply the concept of governance to the free- market choices of individual entrepreneurs-of-the-self? Individuals make their choices in environments made by other forces and in response to the behaviours of others. They cannot predict or control these powers and relations. Neoliberal governance is thus exercised at the level of the environment in which people make decisions. The point is that people mainly think that their decisions are autonomous. Debt supported by public communication (mostly advertising and PR) can function as a mechanism of normalisation of people’s desires and wishes. Brian Holmes described the immersion of one’s personality and its change into the so-called flexible personality as neoliberalism’s way to interpelate the individual. The worker is blinded by the mobile technology, flexible working times, the myth of creativity, and the attached freedom that seems to enable him or her to live a life and especially work according to his or her personal and personalised life project standards (Holmes 2002). But the flexible personality is flexible because it needs to answer to the always-changing precarious life conditions. But here lies the key: debt designs the individual as the entrepreneur-of-the-self. Since the financial crisis that started with the dot com bubble burst, capitalism has forced the individual to take on everything that finance companies and the social state are externalising into society. The entrepreneur-of-theself is not only dependent on the institutions that should provide him/her with some sort of capital and security, even if it’s on precarious terms; they are dependent on themselves (Lazzarato 2012, 103). The ‘independence’ and ‘freedom’ that is attached to the situation of the individual is paradoxical only at the first glance. First, the independence is undergoing an economic colonisation of the Freudian super ego as the 'ideal self' can’t be any more the authority that protects the 'moral' and values of the society and guarantees for them, but has to protect also and above all the productivity of the individual and guarantee for them! (Lazzarato 2012, 103)

The productivity of the individual becomes the lens through which we see the world. The flexibility becomes the culture of our actions and the technology enables us to perform in a time space continuum that is deteritorialised and almost instant.

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MARKETING COMMUNICATION AND DEBT: THE ULTIMATE SOCIAL CONTROL Marketing-based communication shares something fundamental with debt: both became naturalised. Together, they form a technology of social control that works interrelatedly and supports each other. Debt in relation to marketing-based communication works on two levels. First, it creates a dynamic of dominance through colonising the mind. Second, it creates a new dimension of governance—a self-governance—which is constantly reinforced by advertising and other marketingbased communication. The logic of debt and the logic of marketing-based communication operate as one; one supports the other. This process happens on two levels, which will be discussed below: a) submission through a specific authority that is paradoxically linked to freedom, which both derive from the nature of debtrelated governance and marketing-based communication; b) through the destruction of attention and therefore care. Considering the first point (a), I will discuss how the logic of submission through authority is linked to freedom. In his book The Treatise on Liberal Slavery: Analysis of Subordination, French social psychologist Jean Leon Beauvois (2000) describes the clear distinction between the premise of behaviour we have rare access to, and the meaning we attach to behaviour, i.e., social and social-psychological circumstances that affect our actions, and the meaning we attach to our own behaviour (Beauvois 2000, 32–35). We must find again the roots, which have luckily not been completely erased by the endeavors for “the end of ideologies”, and say that a social psychologist should, with the help of ideological analysis of social action, discover the meanings society puts in the place of certain premises. (Beauvois 2000, 35)

Beauvois argues that the processes involved in the everyday explanation of events are more influenced by the social usefulness of offered explanations than striving for validity, which would cause people to seek real explanations from the point of view of events’ premises. His argument is based on the following four points (Beauvois 2000, 35): 1. In our societies, there is a norm of judging or assessing a social norm of internality, which defines values to explanations that

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stress the causal weight of the actor (the so-called internal explanations). 2. This social norm of internality is connected with the implementation of democratic liberal authority. 3. Social utility of internal explanations in personalised cognition originates in assimilation of a) evaluation (their worth, their usefulness) and b) psychological diagnostics, referring to these people (i.e., men and women). This very assimilation seems important for the meanings, the democratic liberal authorities’ implementation practices attribute to these events. 4. This usefulness can be put into action without the use of more vast cognitive resources, namely since internal explanations are easier to discuss than external. From the cognitive point of view, the everyday course of events is easy to attribute meanings to, full of social utility, demanded by the democratic liberal authority implementation. These meanings have proven to be efficient cognitive weapons for internalisation of social utility. .

The actions’ meanings, which in practice replace the actions’ premises, must comply with certain socially created norms. In The Indebted Man, Lazzarato is interested in particular subjectivities that the indebted man develops. He links these subjectivities to the associated right to evaluation, moralisation, and temporalities. The essential point about moralisation—and, clearly debt is a moral burden; a moral obligation that is socially and culturally reinforced even if most of the debt is not legitimate in the first place—is that the indebted subject is associated with two kinds of work. Firstly, there is salaried labour. Secondly, there is the work upon the self: the work that is needed to create the entrepreneur-of-the-self, the work that is needed to produce a subject who is willing to give promises and to repay debt. This subject must also be ready to assume its guilt for being an indebted subject. But more than that, a specific set of temporalities is produced with indebtedness. The indebted man must be able to repay (to remember one’s promise). In this process, one has to make one’s behaviour predictable, structured, regular, and calculating. Lazzarato argues that such temporalities directly negatively influence future resistance, as there has to be a reproduction of a situation where one reinforces one’s own capacity to repay. Interestingly, Lazzarato also makes the point that this dynamic creates an erasure of the memory of past rebellions and collective resistances, which are character-

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ised by disrupted time and behaviours that are hard to predict. Moreover, the indebted subject is constantly allowing and openly evaluating others, as seen in individualised appraisals at work, credit ratings, interviews with those hoping to gain credit, etc. To reiterate, the indebted (wo)man is an entrepreneur-of-the-self; thus, all social networks and situations, private or public, are here to be used for the entrepreneurial life project. The subject is thus in a situation where he or she needs to show that he or she will be able to repay debt; he or she also has to show the right attitude and assume individual guilt for any failings. Through these attitudes—through assuming individual guilt—not only does submission happen but also value is ascribed to the submission. Beauvois’s (2000) analysis of several social-psychological experiments demonstrated that an individual, when put into a certain situation and addressed by authority,1 will submit to this authority and do what he/she is asked to do. Here, Beauvois divides experimental situations into two very interesting variations. Though claiming that an individual can succumb to expectations, which can be contrary to their values, the difference lies in whether their subordination changes the individual’s beliefs they held in regard to the action they are expected to carry out. Beauvois discovered that an individual who has been granted freedom will normally rationalise their subordination and change their beliefs. Granting freedom, furthermore, carries two additional consequences: an individual will be engaged in subordination, and they will be engaged in subordinating to authority—and not necessarily the demanded task—while at the same time making their subordination a value (Vodeb 2006). Here it is necessary to understand the logic of submission. Debt is strongly associated with freedom; therefore, the moral obligation to repay debt, the self-disciplining mode of the indebted entrepreneur-of-the-self, becomes value. The perception of freedom comes from a new governance of the mind, which is strongly supported by marketing-based communication, the flexible personality of the precarious worker, and the resulting role of the entrepreneur-of-the-self who is ‘free’ to take care of everything that previously the state took care of (Lazzarato 2012). In addition, debt interpelates, as it answers the need to live in the “constant now” (Rushkoff 2013). The debtor is very active, but he/she is not able to govern his/ her time or to evaluate his/her own behaviors. His or her capacity of autonomous action is strictly limited. 1  In his case, this was symbolic or institutional authority, while most cases dealt with professionalscientific authority.

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I will now consider the second point (b) in detail. The first level of connecting marketing-based communication with the logic of submission through granting freedom is the logic of ‘cool’. Established in the creative advertising revolution in the 1960s, cool is, in principle, about breaking rules projected onto social norms. As a communication approach, it addresses the individual and the postmodern mass at the same time. Cool was convenient as it created distinction and used the obsession consumer culture had for authenticity to sell through the medium of advertising. Breaking social norms (those that were not difficult to break) and packaging them into aesthetics, driven by popular slogans, and attractive products misused advertising’s representational potential that could work as a cultural critique. And here is the key: cool mostly uses the appearance of cultural critique to create its momentum. It attaches itself to nothing less than resistance, even revolution, but in reality is of course not part of it. Instead, it creates a cool culture of pseudo-authenticity through acts of consumption that work on the principles of cool.2 But here, I am more interested in another dimension, namely attention. Marketing-based communication works within the political economy of attention. Over the decades, audio-visual industries have learned how to capture our attention in order to capitalise on it. A quick look at some advertising methodologies reveals the underlying ideologies as effectiveness tends to be measured on the basis of attention spans, ‘eye contact’, times of exposure, etc. While, from the perspective of advertising, attention equals capital and profit, from a social perspective, attention is related to care. Attention is the reality of individuation in Gilbert Simondon’s sense of the terms: insofar as it is always both psychical and collective. Attention, which is the mental faculty of concentrating on an object, that is, of giving oneself an object, is also the social faculty of taking care of this object—as of another, or as the representative of another, as the object of the other: attention is also the name of civility as it is founded on philia, that is, on socialised libidinal energy. This is why the destruction of attention is both the destruction of the psychical apparatus and the destruction of the social apparatus (formed by collective individuation) to the extent that the later constitutes of system of care, given that to pay attention is also to take care. (Stiegler, 2010)

2  For an extensive analysis on this read "Rebelliousness as a Condition for the Engaged Subordination to the Advertising Authority" (Vodeb 2006).

97 Bernard Steigler relates that the destruction of attention through the cultural industries is directly related to the destruction of care. Stiegler extends Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘Biopower’ to his own concept of ‘Psychopower’ as the next stage of governance. While biopower, for Stiegler, is a form of care imposed by the state—even for disciplinary purposes—the new governance, namely psychopower, is based on a state of care-less-ness that controls hegemonically through psychotechnologies (Stiegler 2012). The purpose of this power is to control and produce consumers: Stiegler calls it a consuming machine (Stiegler 2012, 132). According to Stiegler, the destruction of attention happens through the “most brutal and vulgar techniques” (2012, 42). Besides specific marketing techniques, there is something else in play, which is connected to this destruction: technologies we use to communicate work in real time. These technologies are the essential part of marketing-based communication. What happens now is what matters. Consumers are being trained to crave for a state of mind that is constantly in a choice mode. I have already discussed that debt imposes a particular type of selfgovernance designed around the profile of the entrepreneur-of-the-self. While care used to be related, to various degrees, to the state and to the public sphere, care-less-ness is related to the entrepreneurial project of the self. What matters is our ability to be productive, and, as social networks, including friends and family, become also business networks, care that is linked to the other disappears. For the ‘indebted man’, the entrepreneur-of-the-self personal networks become business networks; work is happening everywhere and all the time. The personal computer and the mobile phone allow us to be networked at all times, and online social networks like Facebook become the environment of self-representation and self-commodification. The main point, however, is that language is the key means of production. The end product itself is language. The relations these languages are producing are crucial in reproducing power relations between the cognitive capitalist and the creative worker. Further, the relations that these languages are producing also determine the relations between the cognitive capitalist and resistance. Marketing-based communication cultures—advertising, design, public relations—are the arm of the operation of cognitive capitalism. The objective of these operations is to gain control over social networks, that is, the digital networks wherein new models for the capture and formation of psychic attention as well as collective attention are revealed: it is a new age

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of reticulation that is being implemented, and it constitutes a new stage of what Steigler (2011) described as a process of grammatisation. At this stage, it is the mechanisms of transindividuation that are grammatised, that is, formalised, made reproducible, and thus calculable and automatable. Transindividuation is the way psychic individuations are meta-stabilised as collective individuation: “…transindividuation is the operation of the fully effective socialisation of the psychic” (Stiegler in Cohen 2012, 106) The gigantic financial crisis sending tremors all over the world is the disastrous result of the hegemony of the short term of which the destruction of attention is at once effect and cause. … [M]arketing, from the emergence of the programme industries, transforms the psychotechniques of the self and of psychic individuation into industrial psychotechnologies of transindividuation, that is, into psychotechnologies threaded by networks, and as the organisation of an industrial reticulation of transindividuation that short-circuits traditional and institutional social networks. (Stiegler 2012)

Transindividuation is the meta-presence of the individual that is inscribed in technological networks that, as in the case of Facebook and other social networks, keeps working. We like and can’t stop liking. If our post is liked, we are indebted to like back. It is an economy. Why do we congratulate our ‘friends’ for their birthday on their Facebook wall instead of sending them a private message? And, more importantly, do we know that we are working when we are on Facebook? What is digital labour? Digital labour describes a type of labour based on the technologically mediated exploitation of work that happens mostly through networkbased technologies. The process of capturing creativity began with the transformation of the Internet to a media environment that transmitted content to consumers, which paid for its content mostly with the time that consumers were exposed to online advertising. The change to a web 2.0 model transformed the Internet into a media environment that was not merely producing content but was providing platforms for contentproducer-consumers. These consumers became digital labourers. The capitalisation happens on the level of exposing online platform visitors to advertising. But more than that, it happens on the level of data mining and selling data-related information for which the source is the very content or online behaviour—such as linking, searching, commenting—that is produced by digital labourers. The shift on the level of exploitation is in the very relation of the online labourer in relation to capital. The digital

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worker does not know he/she is working; neither are they getting paid for their work (Scholz 2012). It is important to note that digital networks can act as a tool for emancipation. They do have a value, but the value is organisational. Tools like Facebook and Twitter have proven to be helpful in social movements, uprisings, as seen in the Arab Spring or the uprisings in Maribor, the second biggest city of Slovenia, which ultimately led to the change of a highly corrupt city government, and the change of the national government in Slovenia.3 But these digital networks, through the process of grammatisation, systematise, calculate, and organise data that is being used so as to find new ways to surveil people, predict their behaviours, and capitalise on them. These digital networks capture attention and channel it in a particular way. Datasift, for example—a company that is focused on producing state-of-the-art data-filtering technology and “claims to have around 1,000 clients willing to pay up to 10,000 pounds a month to analyse tweets for them”4—has recently bought two years’ worth of public tweets from Twitter. Certainly, in the tweets that were bought would be those used in organisational processes for social movements. The Guardian recently reported that the fifth-largest defence contractor in the world, the multinational company Raytheon, has secretly developed software named ‘Riot’ that mines social-network data as a “Google for spies”. The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be transformed into a “Google for spies” and tapped as a means of monitoring and control. Using Riot it is possible to gain an entire snapshot of a person’s life—their friends, the places they visit charted on a map—in little more than a few clicks of a button. […] photographs users post on social networks sometimes contain latitude and longitude details—automatically embedded by smartphones within “exif header data.” Riot pulls out this information, showing not only the photographs posted onto social networks by individuals, but also the location at which the photographs were taken. […] Riot can display on a spider diagram the associations and relationships between individuals online by looking at who they have communicated with over Twitter. It can also mine data from Facebook and sift GPS location information from Foursquare, a mobile phone app used by more than 25 3  For more information on this process see: http://www.memefest.org/en/memeblog/2013/02/aghost-is-haunting-slovenia-the-ghost-of-revolution/?showme=1 4 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/02/29/twitter-to-sell-your-old-tweets/

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million people to alert friends of their whereabouts. The Foursquare data can be used to display, in graph form, the top 10 places visited by tracked individuals and the times at which they visited them. (Gallagher 2013)

As data that they generate gets used, the entrepreneur-of-the-self needs to exist in the conditions forced upon them through debt. Debt as an instrument for social control does not, as discussed, operate only on the logic of someone owing money, but its cultural, social, and psychological effects produce a particular form of (self) governance that is tightly connected to marketing communication. It is direct as well as indirect. Psychopower works on the level of care-less-ness, as meaningful relations implode and the image becomes necessary capital for the indebted (wo)man to repay debt. As the state does less and less to guarantee the indebted (wo)man’s education, health, and employment, the individual, the flexible personality, the indebted (wo)man need to use technological networks for his/her own promotion. The process of branding-of-the-self is a substantial part of the indebted (wo)man, the entrepreneur-of-theself. It is the unavoidable tool of re-presentation of the self. It is a metaprocess that embodies in the form of an image of flexible identities that are working simultaneously on various technological platforms. As this need is fundamental, the industry offers appropriate services. The company More Friends for You offers to sell you Facebook friends: one can buy 500 friends for $29.95! Their website is a fantastic example of the current perception of necessary behaviour. Do you like to be popular? Do you want a bunch of people at only a click distance, for broadcasting your messages quickly? Or maybe you just want to impress your friends or family with hundreds of social media contacts? Then Buy Facebook Friends is the product for you. Adding new friends on Facebook will significantly improve your personal branding and will determine a chain reaction. When someone becomes your friend updates will be shown to all of his friends and this will lead to an increasing interest for your profile. (MoreFansForYou 2013)

The company claims to use only so-called ‘white hat’ techniques approved by Facebook and offers a money-back guarantee. Besides friends, it also offers ‘likes’. Some companies use robots that create fake accounts and then populate these accounts with software that automatically likes someone’s profile or someone’s posts: a total automatisation in the process of grammatisation.

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The coercive impact of these marketing-driven processes can of course also be seen in the sphere of politics. Consider the case of Slovenia; below is a screenshot of a profile from Maribor’s corrupt ex-mayor, Franc Kangler, who has launched a Facebook profile “Franc Kangler should again run for mayor”, after he resigned because of a series of massive, partly violent street protests that spread over the whole country. People from outside of Slovenia with non-Slovenian names populate his list of Facebook friends. The dots cover faces of his real Facebook friends. The campaign was created to capture artificial symbolic capital in the same medium that was used by the protesters to organise themselves. But for Kangler, the aim is not organise anything but to create an image. The campaign was created by a local advertising agency after the mayor created millions of euros of debt for the city of Maribor.

Marketing-based communication penetrates all social relationships, as does debt. The entrepreneur-of-the-self invests in him/herself to peruse the project of existence. He/she needs to use all his/her networks also for business purposes, as he/she is often in a precarious working position and works on a project/contract basis. Facebook works as a gramatisation platform in Siegler’s sense as well. The ways of capturing and formatting psychic attention are inherently related to the social situation of the precarious (digital) labourer. The user’s attention is formatted to work towards self- promotion; this again, on the second level, is formatted to generate direct financial profit. The social relation is formatted to act reciprocally in the sense of automating a business transaction. So, a user posts content for which they think will work according the self-representational strategies in line with their personal brand. There is a hierarchy of attention that

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is designed by the Facebook interface as the receiver of the message will not always be exposed to one’s posts in the same way. In the process of informal communication, between so-called friends, through various media and genres on Facebbok, business goals for the entrepreneur-of-the-self need to be implemented. This was always the case, informally, as the social networks on all levels partly act as networks for business purposes. But in September 2012, Facebook launched a new service that helps users promote their posts; this means that the post will generate more attention since it will be represented differently to one’s friends through the Facebook interface. This promotional activity is a service that people pay for. The level at which psychopower works is revealed in the sentence: “your friends will not know you promoted this”. Marketing legitimises the invisible colonisation of human relations as a personal-business strategy, for which Facebook offers the tools for communication. This promotion uses another tool of psychopower—participation in the ‘like economy’ through the mechanism of ‘likes’, which is also explicitly promoted in the text on the advertisement below and embedded in the very technology as a key element. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Copy Research Validity Project’s findings showed that if an audience considers an advertisement likable, this directly relates to the product’s sales (Russel et al. 2000). A related article in the Journal for Advertising Research suggested that liking is more important than other marketing parameters of success, such as recall or clarity of message (Russel et al. 2000). Confirmed by research findings, the advertising industry today understands that positive feelings towards an advertisement means an association of such feelings with the product and the brand. Significantly, at that time, researchers theorised that liking an advertisement meant paying attention to the advertising and the product/brand. ‘Liking’ abstracts and categorises the emotions and complex thoughts it contains and it provides a quantification of this complexity. (Gehl 2013). ‘Liking’ works both ways; it promotes the person who likes since it associates the personal brand with potentially likable data. In return, it provides highly valuable data for marketing strategies as ‘likes’ are monitored. Surveillance plays a crucial role in this and is part of the psychopower’s logic in the culture of care-less-ness. In sum, personal branding is a reaction to the logic of the surveillance economy, and, to be fair, the pleasures of surveillance. The personally branded enjoy connecting with one another, engaging in the synopti-

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con, collaborating, and constructing their identities. They see the subjective possibilities of Web 2.0. But there is more involved than those pleasures; personal branding in Web 2.0 is an explicit attempt by users to use social media to increase their economic capital. It is the attempt to objectify the pleasures of the Web, much as the ideology and technology of Web 2.0 has been deployed by new media capital to objectify Web pleasures. (Gehl 2011)

Marketisation of attention interestingly used to be related to care in official corporate statements. Facebook described the 'like' button as a way for users to “give positive feedback and connect with things [they] care about” (Gehl 2013). Today, it describes it very differently: “Clicking Like under something you or a friend posts on Facebook is an easy way to let someone know that you enjoy it, without leaving a comment” (Gehl 2013). It has gone from commodified care to pleasure through self-branding. Since liking operates in an attention economy, the very act of liking becomes currency. In order to balance one’s social network, as all these acts happen publicly, the digital labourers are indebted to like back and expect to be liked in exchange for their likes. The logic of debt and marketing communication are inseparable.

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The commercial colonisation of social relationships has happened for a long time, as marketing technologies aim to capture any productive energy embedded in human activities. But we are going through a new and more extreme phase of this process that is caused by a new level of abstraction, as labour is no longer dominated by a physical force (power) but by an abstract force, mostly through the culture of debt. Digital abstraction leads to the virtualisation of the physical act of meeting and the manipulation of things. Financial abstraction leads to the separation of the circulation of money from the production process of value itself. These new levels of abstraction not only concern the labor process—they encompass every space of social life. Digitalisation and financialisation have been transforming the very fabric of the social body, and inducing mutations. The process of production is merging in the infosphere, and the acceleration of productivity is transforming in to an acceleration of information flows. Mental disorders and psychopatologies are symptoms of this dual process of virtual derealisation and acceleration. Digital abstraction and the virtualisation of social communication in general has so deeply transformed the social environment, that the cognitive process of learning, speaking, imagining and memorising is affected. (Berardi 2012, 51)

Social relations are shaped according the instruments that control them. Debt and marketing communication work in the realm of care-lessness, because the level of abstraction imposed on social relations—with the underlying ideology of profit tied to the actions of the entrepreneur-of-theself—destroys care. The financial abstraction, debt, again happens together with the abstraction of communication on the level of signs. Semio-inflation happens because of the forced increase of productivity in the sphere of semio-capital, cognitive capitalism’s main domain. Semio-inflation happens when: “we need more signs, words and information to buy less meaning” (Berardi 2012). For Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, precarity starts when language gets disconnected from the body (Berardi 2012). Today’s generation learns more language from machines than from their mothers. The social attention span has its limits. The ongoing pressure on rising productivity through the semio-sphere destroys care. The technologies (machines and marketingbased communication approaches) used for the new governance are inherently designed to produce semio-inflation. And they are inherently designed to capture attention and destroy care. The marketing-based service society has also developed another mechanism of capture. Through the endless in-

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vention of services, we become less able to do things, to take care of things. We lose knowledge and, in turn, we lose civility (Stiegler in Crogan 2010). The current crisis is therefore also a crisis of knowledge and the effect is the proletariatisation of the consumer—who does not have knowledge, but has the power to consume-care-less, while working at the same time. AGAINST DEBT/MARKETING COMMUNICATION: INTERSPATIAL COUNTER PRACTICE The only real form of deep attention is dialogue. —Plato Submission to debt and marketing communication happens in the process of psychopower’s governance, which colonises and destroys attention and with it care. Societies organise knowledge in relation to attention. Care becomes care-less-ness. The precarious, indebted entrepreneurof-the-self has less and less knowledge, but more and more skills in how to promote or brand him/herself. The flexible (digital) labourer seeks to end the never-ending mode of constant self-representation, but his/her personal brand needs to continue and is forced to be in this permanent game as grammatisation works as psychopower only if it never stops. The pure logic of indebted life designed according to the empty image becomes all- encompassing in an economy of meaningless-ness. The idea of sustainable communities seems distant. Relations between people become a medium through which psychopower operates in the space of flows as well in the space of place. The space of place and the space of flows needs to be bridged for any attempt towards sustainment in a society built on solidarity and respect. The city needs to play a fundamental role in this process. Thinking of sustainment needs to include the relations of attention/care and labour/freedom in a way that changes and avoids the logic and the reproduction of the predatory combined logic of debt and marketing-based communication. Because debt-driven public communication fuels the neoliberal logic of profit for the 1 percent through economies of exclusion, we need to think of public communication that distributes power more equally in relation to economies of distribution. Our perspective therefore needs to be twofold: first, we need to think about public communication in relation to sustainable economies in the city; and second, we need to think about public communication in relation to protest, subversion, and social change.

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Key parts of cultural sustainment are relations between communities and economies that enhance viable social ecologies. Distributed economies, in particular, foster a regional approach to promote innovation by small- and medium-sized enterprises, as well as sustainable development of communities. A big advantage of distributed economies is that they enable entities within the network to work much more with regional/local natural resources, finances, human capital, knowledge, technology, and so on. It also makes the entities more flexible to respond to local market needs, thus generating a stronger motivation for local participants. Therefore, distributed economies become a better reflection of their social environment and are more effective in improving the quality of life (Johansson 2005). Distributed economies rely heavily on their networked organisation mediated by digital technology, and as they are manifested in both the physical and digital environment, they can contribute to a decentralised relation between the physical and the digital. Here, the question of the type of technologies that should be used must be raised. How do we overcome the corporate and state surveillance mechanisms and how do we avoid the debt-driven mechanisms of coercion through marketingbased public communication? By 'distributed economies', I mean economies of collaboration, sharing, participation, and open-bottom-up innovation. This includes peer-topeer, open source, gift economies, and crowd-driven (crowd sourcing, crowd funding) economies. Distributed economies are mainly based on the logic of a) decentralised power; b) the notion that sharing benefits the person who shares as well as the broader community; c) collective self-governance; and, in many cases, d) a common/shared property (Bauwens 2005; Johansson, 2005). This logic fundamentally shifts the precarious position of the worker, and it creates an ethic that works in opposition to the enforced individualism enforced through debt. This approach can significantly contribute to the social capital of places. They are enabled through decentralised technologies of the Internet, but their effects go beyond the digital. Peer-to-peer production, for example, creates value in the forms of ideas, concepts, and knowledge that can be used for the production of space and products that then become part of a local physical economy. Urban space is fundamentally connected with local economies; we should examine the relation between communities, the relation of ‘space of place versus the space of flows’, and how it can be mediated through public communication, bearing in mind that the

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indebted (wo)man is also someone who, because of lacking resources, can consume less and less. In many cases, he/she can’t consume at all. This is probably the main reason that new inclusive and collaborative cultures of production and exchange emerge: “we’re seeing barter networks, social currencies, co-operatives, distributed economies. Networks of providing services for free to others in the expectation people will do the same for you” (Castells 2000). While this is now happening all over the world, the strategic link to public communication that would work against the logic of debt remains missing. The important step towards empowering communities of sustainment and countering the coordinated effects of debt and marketing-based communication is that this approach to communication and representation does not deploy only the symbolic image of the community but is focused on its operative dimension. It is about the visualisation of citizenship (Cruz 2012). Things become visible not mainly through the image but through communicative inter-action and response-ability, strengthening informal cultures, autonomous flows of social relations, dialogue, improvisation, and transparency. Urban design that is focused on the development of communities is not approaching the nature of economies from a perspective that would include the problems of the gap between the space of place and the space of flows; neither does this approach consider economies from the perspective of cultural sustainment. Debt and related marketing communication need to be considered in any serious urban-design strategy. The majority of practitioners do not recognise the important relation of institutions of representation/communication with local economies, besides the usual top-down marketing approach. Institutions of representation and bottom-up distributed economies need to be redefined and strategically integrated in the urban-design process. A participatory process inclusive of local creative communities and official urban-design strategies needs to be based on decentralised cultures of sustainment, communication, and value creation. By 'institutions of representation', I refer to socially responsive communication (Vodeb 2008). It is crucial to understand that this type of communication creates different power relations—more evenly distributed—than dominant marketing-based communication, since it fundamentally questions and is in conflict with the dominance of instrumental marketing and social marketing, but at the same time does not completely exclude commercial value creation. This, I believe, is very important,

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because we have to establish a dynamic of both non-institutional, radical pressure as well as structures of institutional, socially responsive communication. In between, there should again be a relation of conflict coming from the bottom up. These approaches create dialogue and/or conditions for dialogue in a public sphere that is colonised by instrumental commercial communication (Vodeb 2008, 2010). The approach includes four communication approaches5 working at various institutional levels: 1) informal, mostly non-institutionalised, bottom-up, critical, sometimes radical, public interventions, such as culture jamming;6 2) participatory communication; 3) formal institutional “NGO” driven practices of socially responsive social communication (that does not, in opposition to ‘social marketing’, treat social issues as products, and audiences as consumers); 4) socially responsive (commercially driven) advertising, which, on one level, is strictly focused on representing companies, services, and products that are in line with sustainment. On the other level, it connects the market economy and the gift economy (which is a distributed economy) through the integration of a communicative surplus/gift in the form of social value of sustainment. Socially responsive communication can exist as interspatial communication frameworks at intersection points in ‘the informational city’ to provide a tie between digitally mediated networks (or ‘flows’) and ‘the space of place’. The very nature of distributed economies is to create communities of collaboration, in which they operate in both the physical and digital dimensions with strong potentials of bridging between both. Socially responsive communication can also act as an alternative information and communication system, which is critical for the development of distributed economies. Although the Internet provides open-source tools that can act as such, socially responsive communication can create open and participatory physical and digital public spaces and discourses connected to a particular urban area. It can facilitate between the different community nodes within the system of local distributed economies and the wider local community. This connection between the digital and physical is crucial in order to establish a communication/ social ecology of sustainment. A coordinated relation between specific representations through socially responsive com5  These four communication approaches need to be researched further and additional approaches need to be developed in the future. 6  I use the term ‘culture jamming’ in a broad sense (i.e., not only related to image production), although I still see it as a semiotic conflict that turns the dominant discourse against itself through various strategies and tactics.

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munication, distributed economies, and urban design bridges the space of place and space of flows not only through decentralised distribution of power that happens in both the virtual and physical space but also through a more emancipated experience of time.

----------------------------------I would like to thank the members of the Memefest Kolektiv for continuing to work on all these wonderful things and the broader Memefest network for creating great possibilities for extradisciplinary research. Big thanks especially to everyone who was involved in the Debt issue of the Festival. I would also like to thank Scott Townsend for the important discussions we had in relation to the city and design.

REFERENCES: Andrejevic, Mark. 2013. "Indebted Interaction: The Wages of the Digital Economy." In Indebted to Intervene, ed. Oliver Vodeb and Nikola Janovic Kolenc, 24–37. Brisbane: Memefest & Octivium Press, 2013. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bauwens, Michel 2006. “The Political Economy of Peer Production.” Post-Autistic Economics Review 37, 28 April. http://www.paecon.net/ PAEReview/issue37/ Bauwens37.htm. Beauvois, Jean Louis. 2000. The Treatise on Liberal Slavery: Analysis of Subordination. Krt, Ljubljana Berardi, Franco 'Bifo'. 2012. The Uprising On Poetry and Finance. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I (Information Age Series). Malden, Mass: Blackwell. Cruz, Teddy. 2012. "Mapping Non-Conformity: Post-Bubble Urban Strategies." In The Visual Culture Reader, 3rd ed., edited by Nicholas Mirzzoef. London: Routledge. Gallagher, Ryan. 2013. "Software that Tracks People on Social Media Created by Defence Firm." The Guardian, 11 February. Accessed 20 July. http://www. guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/10/software-tracks-social-media-defence. Gehl, Robert W. 2013. "A History of Like." The New Inquiry, 27 March. Accessed 23 July. http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/a-history-of-like/.

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Gehl, Robert W. 2011. "Ladders, Samurai and Blue Collars: Personal Branding in Web 2.0." First Monday. Accessed 2 August 2013. http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/ view/3579/3041. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haley, Russell, and Allan L. Baldinger. 2000. "The ARF Copy Research Validity Project." Journal of Advertising Research 40 (6): 114–35. https://journals. cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=162739. Harvey, David. 2008. "The Right to the City." New Left Review 58 (SeptemberOctober). http://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city. Holmes, Brian. 2002. "The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique." Transversal 1. http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en Johansson, Allan, Peter Kisch, and Murat Mirata. 2005. "Distributed Economies: A New Engine for Innovation." Journal of Cleaner Production 13 (10–11): 971–79. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2012. The Making of the Indebted Man. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). LeFebvre, Henry. 1992. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. MoreFansForYou. 2013. "Buy Facebook Friends 1000+ for $29.95." http://morefansforyou.com/buy-facebook-friends/. Park, Robert. 1967. On Social Control and Collective Behaviour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rushkoff, Douglas. 2013. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. New York: Penguin Putnam, Inc. Scholz, Trebor. 2012. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. London: Routledge. Slobodian, Quinn, and Michelle Sterling. 2013. "Sacking Berlin: How Hipsters, Expats, Yummies, and Smartphones Ruined a City." The Baffler no. 22. https:// www.thebaffler.com/past/sacking_berlin. Sorkin, M. 1992. Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. NY: Hill and Wang. Steuer, Eric. 2013. "How to Buy Friends and Influence People on Facebook." Wired 5 April. Accessed 11 August. http://www.wired.com/business/2013/04/ buy-friends-on-facebook/. Stiegler, Bernard. 2001. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Stiegler, Bernard. 2012. "Care." In Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Volume 1, edited by Tom Cohen, page numbers. Michigan: Open Humanities Press.

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Stiegler, Bernard and Irit Rogoff. 2010. "Transindividuation." e-flux, 1 March. hhttp://www.e-flux.com/journal/transindividuation/. Stiegler, Bernard (2001). For a New Critique of Political Economy. Polity Press: Cambridge. Vodeb, Oliver. 2006. "Changes in the Business of Interaction." Revista KEPES 3 (2). Vodeb, Oliver. 2007. “Rebelliousness as a Condition for Engaged Subordination to the Authority of Advertising”. Annales, Series historia et sociologia, year 17, nr. 2, pg. 441-458. Koper: University of Primorska. Vodeb, Oliver. 2008. Socially Responsive Communication. Ljubljana, Slovenia: Faculty of Social Sciences. Vodeb, Oliver, and Nikola Janovic. 2011. Demonstrating Relevance:

Response- Ability, Theory, practice and Imagination of Socially Responsive Communication. Ljubljana: Faculty for Social sciences. Wikipedia. "Like Button." Accessed 24 August 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Like_button. Wodisczko, Krzysztof. 2009. "Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?" In Discussions in Contemporary Culture, No. 1, edited by Hal Foster, 41–45. New York: Dia Foundation.

BIO Dr Oliver Vodeb (PhD) is a Slovenian sociologist of communication and design, researcher, theorist, practitioner and educator, currently living in Australia. As communication practitioner his work focuses on the public sphere where he uses mainly visual communication, art and photography to design social futures. As an educator and researcher he believes that design and communication practices need to change fundamentally if they want to become relevant in times of radical uncertainty and environmental degradation. In the past ten years he taught and researched at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana and at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University in Brisbane. From 2014 he is an academic at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Oliver Vodeb is a member of the communication/ theory/arts Memefest Kolektiv and founder, facilitator, curator and editor of the Memefest Festival of Socially Responsive Communication and Art. Among others, he is author of the monograph Socially Responsive Communication, has co-edited and co-curated the book Demonstrating Relevance: Response-Ability, Theory, Practice and Imagination of Socially Responsive Communication and has with his communication studio Poper co directed/authored the biggest self-initiated human rights campaign in Slovenia for the “Erased” people. [email protected]

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VISUAL COMMUNICATION PRACTICE STATIC MOVING INTERACTIVE

CRITICAL WRITING

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FRIENDLY COMPETITION 2012

BEYOND ...

MEMEFEST FRIENDLY COMPETITION

1.

OUTLINES:

DEBT IS EVERYWHERE. IT DESIGNS OUR LIVES AND THE WHOLE WORLD. DEBT TAKES THE POWER FROM THE PEOPLE AND GIVES IT IN TO THE HANDS OF BANKERS AND EXPERTS. BUT DEBT WASN’T ALWAYS WHAT IT IS TODAY. CAN WE IMAGINE A DIFFERENT RELATION TO DEBT?

WE HAVE CHOSEN THREE INSPIRING TEXTS IN DIFFERENT MEDIA THAT WILL HELP YOU TO RETHINK IT.

First, read an excerpt from the text Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber

Anthropologist David Graeber argues that it is only with a general historical understanding of debt and its relationship to violence that we can begin to appreciate our emerging epoch. Here he begins to fill in our historical knowledge gap. What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call ‘the economy'. What's more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence—but also, the systematic threat of violence—maintained by the contemporary state. Check the whole excerpt used for outlines here: http://www.memefest.org/shared/pdf/Graeber%20 DEBT.pdf

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2.

Then watch the chosen part from the documentary Debtocracy:

See it online here: http://vimeo.com/36609539

3.

Finally listen to the song No Banker Left Behind by Ry Cooder (you can find the song online, but here the lyrics):

My telephone rang one evening my buddy called for me Said the bankers are all leaving better you come 'round and see It's a startling revelation they robbed the nation blind They're all down at the station no banker left behind No banker no banker no banker could I find They were all down at the station no banker left behind Well the bankers called a meeting to the White House they went one day They was going to call on the President in a quiet and a sociable way

And the afternoon was sunny and the weather it was fine They counted out our money and no banker was left behind No banker no banker no banker could I find They were all down at the White House no banker was left behind Well I hear the whistle blowing it plays a happy tune The conductor's calling all aboard we'll be leaving soon With champagne and shrimp cocktails and that's not all you'll find There's a billion dollar bonus and no banker left behind No banker no banker no banker could I find When the train pulled out next morning no banker was left behind No banker no banker no banker could I find When the train pulled out next morning no banker was left behind No banker no banker no banker could I find When the train pulled out next morning no banker was left behind No banker no banker no banker could I find When the train pulled out next morning no banker was left behind

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT DEBT NOW? NOW, RESPOND TO THIS POSITION FROM YOUR GUT, FROM PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS, FROM RESEARCH, OR FROM A MIXTURE OF ALL THREE WITH YOUR VISUAL COMMUNICATION WORK. CHECK OUT THE RESULTS!

VISUAL COMMUNICATION PRACTICE CURATORS AND EDITORS Shoaib Nabi Jason Grant Scott Townsend Aleksandar Maćašev Kevin Yuen Kit Lo Roderick Grant Tony Credland

The category of Visual Communication Practice is open for static, moving and web/interactive works. We are looking for visual approaches that are conceptualised to go beyond the image of the visual and create social relations which respond to the socio political reality in a emancipatory manner.

All published works are selected works from 2012 Friendly competition with selected curators comments. To see all received works and curators comments, please visit our website www.memefest.org.

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PARTY’S OVER STARTS OVER AUTHOR

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Lydia Dambassina COUNTRY Greece

121 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR I started working on this project when the economic crisis erupted in 2008, with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, and named it Party’s Over. Three years later, with the economic crisis taking a dramatic toll, particularly on Greece, my work was completed under the title Starts Over. Inequalities are growing exponentially. In the meantime, the international rating agencies, which “played a vile role in the country’s downturn are still operating without any limitation of their uncontrollable power, unilaterally issuing orders and endangering the very democracy of Europe”. Also, “no one ever foresees these great economic crises. And when they erupt, they always tell us that things will get better. This is what strikes me the most: this silence getting deeper and deeper…”. This series is of staged, large-scale pictures, shot with conventional film, from the same perspective and always in the same space. Each work consists of two parts on the same surface: the upper part features the picture in its entirety, while a text— mainly excerpts from the Greek and French daily press—is placed below it. Set at a neutral, internal space, in front of a white wall, the old wooden table on the first level is the dominating object; it functions as a stage and an altar, a peculiar tabernacle, and a ritualistic deposition. Human forms, when present, and objects, enclosed and self-sufficient as if forming a postmodern “still life”, are installed and claim their space in this spartan scenery, serving an allegorical role with regard to present-day events. Images and text alternate in a sequence: a carefully folded Greek flag (“All ways are closed”); a glass of water (“Let this chalice pass from me”); a headless body (“Finance headless monster”); a knife nailed on a bone (“Meanwhile, Greece travels and travels”); a plate of grapes (“The Grapes of Wrath”); a loaf of bread—a reference to the current adversities faced by the arts since governments are cutting cultural funding (“Man shall not live on bread alone”); the remains of a human brain (1330 grams of gray matter that sum up human history, its passions and doubts); the mottled plumage of a peacock—a reminder of the deceptive glamour of vanity… Then suddenly, the stage goes dark, all light disappears— Mourning: when you forbid light to enter. The images become open questions and contemporary riddles.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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ALL COMMENTS

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Scott Townsend This work is highly 'affective' regarding the subject of debt. One of the issues of this year's theme is to show the actual violence the global economy has created, and how various international economic strategies are being put in place, which (for the sake of ‘recovery’) will subordinate less economically powerful regions. The combination of photography and objects, and the use of scale, combines to create a sense of the subject matter’s presence and an absence of the portrayed people, which is really very strong. It successfully uses real objects and materials in way that places the viewer literally in the physical point of view of the portrayed and absent individuals in the photographs. I am curious about how social dialogue was formed around this installation, and if there were interactions in the space between the author and the viewers. The particular reading in the maker's description is quite rich and helps open up discussions about particular implications in the work."

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ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR AUTHOR

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Katarzyna Pagowska COUNTRY Poland

123 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR Describe your idea and your work's concept in relation to the festival outlines: Mannequins (representing men, women, children) are placed on the other side of a shop window, provoking discomfort, inconvenience, uncertainty, questions. Each of the mannequins raises different questions, but they all seem to ask: is the dream of a perfect city, of a perfect life, ours too? Who is born to own it? And who is born to owe? What kind of communication approach do you use? The mannequins are standing there, the rest is left to the viewer. What, in your opinion, are the concrete benefits your communication offers to society? To make one stop for a while and ask, on which side of the mirror am I at the moment? On which side of the mirror do I want others to be? Are there just two sides available? Is there any option beyond the "a/symmetry" of inequality, is there any other solution beyond the mirror-like society? What did you learn from creating your submitted work? 1. I am not the only one thinking this way. 2. People's reactions when seeing the naked child were very strong. 3. I have learned that my artistic work is worth continuing— which makes me feel alive. Why is your work good communication work? 1. Because it is mine; it is honest. 2. Because the work was well prepared and realised. It may seem a very simple and easily implemented idea, but thinking about it took me quite a long time. 3. Because it does not provide easy solutions, but raises difficult questions. 4. Because, I hope, it says something crucial. 5. Because it does not harm or destroy anyone/anything. Where and how do you intend to implement your work? The work was realised in 2011 on the main shopping street of Warsaw. Now I hope to show photo documentation of it whenever and wherever possible.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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ALL COMMENTS

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Roderick Grant The nature of this work seems to span both its initial installation and its documentation. Of particular effect is the second of this series, employing the child. While an overt commentary, I can well imagine the visceral argument posed by the mannequin on the street. The direct oppositions between need/want, have/have-not, and the resulting questioning about shockeconomic status and aspiration are well established by the media employed, and the direct/objective street level view in the photography. Late-twentieth-century photographers such as Thomas Struth, Harry Callahan, Gregory Crewdson, and Jeff Wall often use live actors as if they were mannequins to great emotional and formal effect. Alternate points-of-view employed by these photographers bring forward sensibilities of surveillance, security, voyeurism and other issues that play around and with the central theme of debt. The initial intervention is a successful one, but perhaps fleeting; the photography begun here shows the real potential of the project in its suspension of the moment of critique—the freezing of the instance that makes us uncomfortable. The partial covering of the female mannequin calls into mind other potential avenues of critique to call into question what we are willing to go into debt over in order to acquire other things... New high heels, but not pants? A new baseball cap but not diapers? New inning shoes but nothing else? This last point also paves the way for a distinct series, employing the mannequins themselves as lone actors or in combination—their power to speak for you lies in the fact that they are generic, without any real quality aside from what you assign them through interaction and intervention.

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FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS Ashlea Gleeson COUNTRY Australia AUTHOR

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125 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR All three stories spoke to me in different ways, and all of these were of different personal struggles. It seemed logical for me to centre my story around something personal,which is how I came to my concept on how debt affects young people in Brisbane. After doing further research into how debt affects people, I found information on how debt is linked to mental-health issues. A study conducted by Meltzer et al. (2010) found that, “Those in debt were twice as likely to think about suicide after controlling for sociodemographic, economic, social and lifestyle factors...”. They also found that an increased sense of hopelessness towards debt created a link to anxiety and depression, and therefore, the entrapment of debt can create psychological strain. How are young people psychologically affected by debt? Are they the generation targeted by credit cards? I read about the irrationality of credit-card debt and discovered the poorest members of society may view them as the only viable means to obtain a loan, because they fall outside of short-term financing (Farah 2010, 167). Young people could fall into this category as they begin to set up their lives. I then looked further at debt in relation to self-esteem and control in young people, and found that while some people use credit cards wisely, others feel out of control and usually blame someone else (Farah 2010, 167). Finally, I discovered that debt, anxiety, and depression go hand in hand. In particular, “Anxiety is more common among younger adults, in part due to economic hardship experienced in young adulthood” (Drentea 2000, 437). I started to interview the people around me, and collected stories from people in different phases of their lives; from first time out of home to first time homeowner. I discovered that some people are unafraid of their debt, while others feel they have to hide.

References Drentea, P. 2000. "Age, Debt and Anxiety." Journal of Health and Social Behavior 41(4): 437-50. Farah, M. 2010. "The Irrationality of Credit Card Debt: Examining the Subconscious." Law & Psychology Review 34:165-76. Meltzer, H., P. Bebbington, T. Brugha, R. Jenkins, S. McManus, and M. Dennis. 2011. "Personal Debt and Suicidal Ideation." Psychological Medicine 41 (4):771-8. Accessed 10 March 2012, doi: 10.1017/S0033291710001261.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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ALL COMMENTS

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Jason Grant This is a strong outcome for an undergraduate-level project. There is a level of accomplishment in the original research, writing, and visual narrative that reveals a real commitment to the potential of visual communication. The climactic sequencing of the interviews illustrates the spectrum of personal consequences of financial debt and leads to evocative and potentially disturbing conclusions. The confident restraint of the design is effective, although I think the typography should have had a little more attention and craft. The one overtly aesthetic device, the incrementally obliterating black 'smoke', could have been a distracting embellishment, but it does its job as an expressive emotive metaphor. A serious misstep I think is the publication's title—First World Problems. It seems to be a trivialisation of the experiences of some of the subjects and an undermining of the project's aims. Yes, of course, their situations may be benign relative to the extreme hardship in other parts of the world—but we can't on the one hand be expected to take seriously the notion of debt as a catalyst for depression or suicide, and, on the other, accept that relative privilege somehow makes this less tragic. Suffering is suffering, and suicide is suicide—whether you live in Brisbane's affluent suburbs or Bombay's slums. Debt is very much more than a 'First World Problem'. With a different title, I'd really like to see this work become an ongoing project.

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CONSUMED Ashlea Gleeson COUNTRY Australia AUTHOR

The zine Consumed is the work of QCA student Ashlea Gleeson. It was created in the Visual Communication Design 3 course and submitted to Memefest, where it was curated among the best submissions. It was later redesigned on the basis of the curatorial feedback within the festival process. As part of the Memefest/QCA event and intervention, 120 copies of Consumed were produced and distributed in Brisbane. With the hard copy beautifully printed on the Risograph printer, the final and online version of the zine can be accessed here: http://www.mediafire.com/?wb08ajbjk3nja1n

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CHANGE YOUR MIND. CHANGE OUR WORLD. Darcy Mangan COUNTRY Australia AUTHOR

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129 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR The campaign will function by making the public aware of shocking statistics and realities about the way the world operates. This will encourage debate, change opinions, and foster inquiry into the way society runs as a whole. By changing public opinion, individuals are more likely to be involved in and advocate for sustainable economic management. Government policies are more likely to change when large numbers of people are engaged in a similar political discourse. The direct action component will work because it will use two strategies with a proven history of creating change. The first method is microlending, which will be encouraged through first making viewers aware of the issue by making shocking statistics and information available, and then alerting them to existing microlending institutions, such as KIVA and ACCION, where they can donate to promote change. Microlending is a very direct way of donating, as funds are given straight to those in need instead of being wasted in administration fees and advertising. The other method is holding offenders (companies, people, institutions, governments) to account through petitions, letters, and signature-gathering. Signatures do make a difference. Petitions work by putting the offending parties under pressure and making them know that the public is aware of what they are doing. In 1978, the British Anti-Apartheid Movement delivered petitions signed by 45,000 persons to the United Nations to free Nelson Mandela. In 1980, a petition sponsored by Sunday Post received over 86,000 signatures. In 1984, three US organisations presented to the United Nations petitions for the release of Mandela signed by over 34,000 persons. In 1990, Mandela was freed. Amnesty International has countless success stories on their website, including Ma Khin Khin Leh, who was set free from Myanmar after a petition (2009); Ye Guozhu, who was set free in China after petitions were delivered (2008) and Sami Al Hajj, who was released from Guantanamo Bay after a petition (2008). Organisations such as Getup and Avaaz base most of their campaigns on petitions and signature gathering.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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ALL COMMENTS

3

Kevin Yuen Kit Lo This is an incredbily complete, wellresearched, and targeted social communications campaign. The strategic, tactical, and design decisions are well-thought out and presented. The information graphics and factual comparisons work very well to draw attention and explain the issues, while the calls to further action are clear. I really appreciate the amount of time, thinking, and effort that must have gone into producing and illustrating this concept, and I think it achieves the goals set out by the brief. All in all, this is a very professional project that clearly demonstrates the concept of design for social good. This being said, my criticism of this project in the context of Memefest also lies with this 'professionalism'. Though I do fully appreciate how this project could work in a real world context, by encouraging microlending and civic engagement (which in and of themselves are good things), the project does not question the inherent problematics/discourse of contemporary capitalism and the true nature of debt as explored in Graeber's text. It does encourage us to change the status quo, but only within the prescribed limits of a dominant ideology that, in my opinion (and likely Graeber's), is fundamentally flawed. Given the current state of the economy, I'm unsure that progressive social change can be achieved by the strategies you're seeking to encourage with this project. This is nonetheless a very strong design project, and I am very much behind its eventual implementation. You are clearly a talented and rigorous design thinker, so I would encourage you in future endeavours to also try applying these skills in more critically imaginative ways, to projects that, beyond changing our behaviour, might change us."

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THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Mariyah Arif COUNTRY United Arab Emirates AUTHOR

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131 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR The New World Order is inspired from my research of the 2008 credit crisis and the documentary called Meltdown. What I found out was frustrating and shocking. I began to question those who are responsible and in control of the monetary system of an economy—most obviously, the Federal Reserve and its bailouts to Wall Street’s biggest banks. Why didn’t anyone predict what was to come and, more importantly, why didn’t anyone try to stop it before it spiralled out of control? The Federal Reserve kept on decreasing interest rates, the banks kept borrowing more and more, making billions of profit through bundles of mortgages. Who suffered the most? The people, the 99 percent, the world! It is this continuous effect of debt and credit crisis, caused by greedy people controlling the money supply and interest rates, that affects everyone globally. I want to communicate the idea of power in the hands of banks and the Federal Reserve, which control our lives, our happiness, our future, merely through printed pieces of paper. Our trust in these pieces of paper is what makes it 'money' and yet it has the power to put us all into debt and cause us to suffer heavily. My work is intended to be blurred and sketchy to emphasise the concept of hidden truth, lies, and conspiracies. It is a personal representation of the big picture. Perhaps the New World Order is to control men and women through the cycle of infinite debt and slavery... secretly and silently. What are, in your opinion, the concrete benefits offered to society through your communication? What I hope to achieve through this poster is to at least get people thinking about the control of the Federal Reserve and banks on our economies and what effects they have on our daily lives. The whole system is complex and layered; however, I wanted to show a hint of who this power belongs to, which, in fact, so many of us fail to recognise. What did you learn from creating your submitted work? A lot! It made me understand so much more about our economies and what debt does to us in so many ways. It also urged me to dig deeper into the credit crisis of 2008, and so I learned about the greed and selfishness of people in control. Communicating a complex idea wasn't easy, and in the process, I polished my design skills and discovered new ways of representing the idea.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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ALL COMMENTS

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Tony Credland This straightforward intervention on the dollar that has a simple message. The point of contact is very relevant to the subject and it is clear and understandable at a glance. To highlight the responsibility of the Federal Reserve and Wall Street in the debt crisis is important, and needs continuous repeating; this can be done in a reduced form, as a stamp that shows that this is a cycle and continuous until the public intervene in some way. This only really works if you actually do the work and start mass producing the stamp on hundreds of notes and encourage others to join in; otherwise, it remains a idea with no effect. In poster or many other forms, it is less powerful. I note that you are from the United Arab Emirates and not based, as I first thought, in the US, which will make your distribution slightly harder... but it may be worth refocussing this project towards your own financial system, as they were all at it and it is just as relevant to target our own institutions rather than always blame the US."

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DEBT MACHINE Belinda Li COUNTRY Australia AUTHOR

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133 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR In a flash of lights and a ring of bells, poker machines across Australia are robbing problem gamblers of their money. What is echoed out as an after-effect of problem gambling is families being stripped of income, and loved ones being denied the good parents, children, siblings, lovers, or friends who they deserve. Problem gambling is an addiction and poker machines are designed to addict; poker machines are designed for debt. Recent attempts at intervention have been met with limited success. Independent-minded politicians striving to end the pokies, debt cycle in the form of a mandatory pre-commitment reform bill faced fierce and vocal opposition from both the gaming lobby and other politicians. Instigating change is rarely easy, but it is made all the more difficult when political power and commercial profit are at stake for the deciding parties. The proposed bill failed to pass and the pokies industry continues to reap ill-gained profits from the vulnerable. What kind of communication approach do you use? This work is materialised in the form of an instructional manual, taking advantage of the medium’s often dry content to employ both literary and visual satire for social criticism. The metaphor of the machine is made explicit in the diagrams and illustrations. The manual is a portable size for ease of distribution, and doubles as a poster that, when displayed, can communicate the message to a broader audience. What, in your opinion, are the concrete benefits your communication offers to society? This work intends to harness the power of the individual. It creates an informed audience by opening people’s eyes to the negative influence of money and power. Why is your work good communication work? This work condenses a vast scope of information, utilising the potential of visual communication design to reach the largest audience possible with immediacy. It serves the purpose of fostering support for reform that would aid people, such as problem gamblers, who are unable to help themselves, shifting from the dominant messages the gaming industry sells us of consequence-free entertainment to a dialogue exploring the oft-silenced predatory nature of the industry.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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Scott Townsend I like this work despite the fact that it tends to be about parody. Part of it is that the author has taken us through a process and a kind of discussion about things, though a bit tongue-in-cheek. If the gambling machine is a kind of metaphor, I am a bit unclear about what it is a metaphor, for. Is it about the current Australian government? People's habits? Literally about sanctioned gambling? Resolving some of these issues could make this highly effective; the graphic form and expressive typography are visually entertaining and nicely aggressive with their size form and contrast. Placed in a particular context with other graphic distractions, it could probably still make a visual impact on a viewer."

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RICH UNCLE PENNYBAGS GAME OF DEBT Andrew Cox COUNTRY Australia AUTHOR

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135 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR I decided to create Monopoly money with the iconic 'Uncle Pennybags' being used on all the notes. I personally felt it was important to show debt in different ways, especially after reading Graeber’s essay on debt; it was interesting to read how our earliest form of debt was related to violence and slaves instead of money or bullion. Each note has an illustration on each side, telling a different story about debt. The symbols on the note also have a connection to story. I use the word 'debt' on one side of the note, while the other side of the note has a different word, which also means debt but that has a connection with the story being told on the note (for example, the $500 note Debt/War). Each note will be blown up and printed to a larger scale, showing both sides of the note side by side and placing them on notice walls, poles, alley ways, buildings, etc. Where there's a large note, a stack of smaller notes are placed near the note so people walking past can collect them. Because the notes are located in various parts of a city or town, people are encouraged to locate all seven notes, making them a collectible item, each with their own story and meaning. This makes the viewer think about the meaning of debt as well as what is associated with debt. What kind of communication approach do you use? Poster-sized notes and collectable paper notes. What, in your opinion, are the concrete benefits your communication offers to society? People interact with one another after finding the collectable notes and discuss what debt really is. What did you learn from creating your submitted work? I learnt there was more to debt than money (for example, owing your life for your country) and how I was involved with debt without knowing it. Why is your work good communication work? It creates discussion on the subject of debt, what it is, and how it affects people. Where and how do you intend to implement your work? All around cities and towns on notice walls, poles, alley ways, buildings, etc.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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Aleksandar Maćašev Debt is monetary. That's how we usually think about it. And that is still a trap we fall into, even in the twenty-first century. It is imperative that we address all sorts of debt that we fall victims to by signing the social contract. Debt to the country is as sinister as bank debt. You owe something at all times. Your parents, your country, your hometown, your lover... Using an easily recognisable currency message, Rich Uncle Pennybags s Game of Debt speaks about forms of debt that we usually are not aware of. Or that we wouldn't even think of as debt. The work is simple and has an undeniable charm of street activism, coarse but articulate. Pointing social awareness towards all these variations of debt seems to be a good way of dismantling the mechanisms of debt that we are already familiar with. This is especially true because this work incorporates the mechanism of collecting the debt (collectible banknotes). Recognise it, collect it, disseminate it."

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00.05.00 Debt Aaron Croft COUNTRY Australia AUTHOR

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Doom

137 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR I have responded to the theme of debt through the creation of a publication. The publication title 00.05.00 reflects the stability of the global economy. Linking into the idea of doomsday and the doomsday clock, the countdown provides a visual and figurative representation of the state of the economy. Throughout the publication, the time left to the figurative collapse decreases intermittently. This reflects the constant flux of the global economy and the domino effects that are caused from the collapse of one market. The typography used throughout the book is warped and distorted, reflecting the impending doom and the effect debt has on the world. Debt manipulates and twists lives, creating a society that is enslaved by the power debt has over life. The type becomes more distorted as the time approaches closer to zero. The countdown reaches 59 seconds on the final page of the book. This reflects the current economic crisis and is calling on humanity to control the way that we could cause a catastrophic collapse of the world economy. What kind of communication approach do you use? I have created a publication that visually responds to the theme of debt. I intend for the publication to be distributed to the general public. To provide a different outlook on debt and promote change within society. What, in your opinion, are the concrete benefits your communication offers to society? It is hard to judge any concrete benefits of this work. The intention is to provide an outlook on debt that allows for discussion on the role of debt within society and how we can move forward without causing the economy to collapse. What did you learn from creating your submitted work? I have learned how debt affects the lives of everyone and its presence and effect on our everyday lives. This presence is often not seen as debt has become normalised within society. Why is your work good communication work? It is good communication work because it engages with the viewer, allowing them to visualise debt on a global scale, and prompts the viewer to question debt's place in society.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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Jason Grant I'm in two minds about this one. On one hand, do we really need more pronouncements of doom? Fear is negligible as a behaviour change tactic because it quickly results in a paralysis of agency. On the other hand, the notion that as a species we might in the relatively near future, and eventually inevitably (after all humans have only existed on earth for about .003 percent of its history) cease to exist, urgently needs to be contended with. Tony Fry writes that we, via our designing, make or negate time: The instrument of time arrived, via instrumentation, and culturally contested the variable measure of time. But now another time is arriving, a time of unsettlement, undoing, unsustainability and defuturing wherein "world-time" as the finite time, puts before us the challenge of having to make time—the extended event of being that is the essence of sustain-ability. Aside, perhaps, for very early forms of life, such as blue green algae, no living organism has had such a transformative impact on the earth's biosphere as humans have. And if we imagine the earth's lifespan of 4.5 billion years as a twenty-four-hour day, then we have only been on Earth for about six minutes and done most of the damage here in less than a second. So all this is to say that our finitude is a supremely valid subject but I think there needs to be better ways to contextualise finite time than just a linear countdown to doom. Formally however, the expressive typography is very well realised. The illustrative quotes and the restrained compositions result in a controlled and convincing visual outcome. Much potential."

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SAVERS CREDIT card that CARD The pays you Charles Mayfield COUNTRY Australia AUTHOR

/STATIC

139 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR For this brief, I wanted to draw attention to the financial loss created through the accumulation of unnecessary personal debt. The most common forms of personal debt are home loans, personal loans for vehicles, and credit cards. People obviously need somewhere to live, and owning your own property is a way to ensure that your income generates an asset as opposed to paying rent. Owning a vehicle is practically a necessity in nearly all modern societies, especially in comparison with credit cards. It is unrealistic to think that the majority of people can afford to save enough to buy a house or vehicle outright, so in these cases, credit is a reasonable option with valuable outcomes. I chose to aim my project at credit-card users, as this is the least necessary kind of personal debt. Although it has some short-term advantages, credit-card services cost money that users will never be reimbursed. The service used to sell credit cards to us as consumers is access to more money than we have in the present, based on the premise that we will earn more in the future. This convenience comes at a cost, which is strategically veiled within complex compound interest systems and a variety of seemingly small fees. These systems make it too confusing and complex to work out exactly what we are paying for this credit, and customers rarely take time to assess the implications of taking on this kind of debt. With this project, my aim is to dissuade potential credit-card applicants from creating this kind of personal debt by presenting them with a quantified description of the potential loss they are considering. In relation to the brief, my project is based on the idea that debt perpetuates itself, and, in the case of credit cards, it is an unnecessary debt we choose to create that costs us more than it initially appears to.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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Tony Credland Although not the most finished 'credit card' submission to the festival this year, this one is based on an interesting idea of the savings you make by not being in debt. This forms the basis of a good project that has a real potential to communicate and persuade. I would be interested to see this mock up progressed and much more time spent on the design, for, at the moment, they do not quite work as spoof cards or supporting documentation. This is the strength of graphic design—that we have all the skills to make this work, to get past that initial rejection and get people to read the message. Once you explain the amount of wasted interest people pay, making it visible and clear, then they are much more likely to find other solutions, and a credit card does not sound like such easy money any more. This project still needs a clear tag line—the saver logo works, although the anti-credit card line immediately situates it as a political project, which will put off most readers. The question is how far do you want people to read before you reveal what the project is actually saying? It is often a fine line and this one says it too soon."

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ATM SALE Lucy-Ann Moore COUNTRY Australia AUTHOR

/STATIC

141 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR This signage represents debt on a personal level; most people tend to buy items that are of no use to them, which therefore results in personal debt.The ATM pictured is used as a connection between the person and their bank account, making easy access to their money. What kind of communication approach do you use? The environment of the ATM has changed with the advent of advertising stickers that are used around it; suggest that like the ATM is having a sale, and use selling words, colourful signs and gimmicks that are represented in a shop. What, in your opinion, are the concrete benefits your communication offers to society? The signage makes the person using the ATM feel uncomfortable in taking money out of their account, especially when the instruction/slogan “Burn a hole in your pocket—here” is displayed. It draws attention to them and leads them to ask themselves, “Is what I’m going to buy something that I actually need?” What did you learn from creating your submitted work? I learnt the basic understanding of when to spend money and how to spend it wisely. Plus I learnt how to differentiate whether what I buy is a need or a want. Why is your work good communication work? Because I believe the signage on the ATM has a strong impact on the person who is using the ATM, which makes them feel uncomfortable taking money out of their account. Where and how do you intend to implement your work? I plan to implement this at a bank's ATM, where the artwork's message of debt is strongly appropriate.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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Tony Credland A visually strong and humorous interruption into public space that works in its simplicity to engage the public around the issue of debt. The bright graphics look so out of place at the ATM that they really change its character and force a re-questioning of the act of taking out more money. The vernacular typography that mimics cheap market stalls and this lettering on day-glow flash card adds to the play as a base form of consumerism. They also touch on the language of gambling, which also has resonance within this discourse. It would be more interesting if the words could relate slightly more towards the theme, giving a clearer focus to the message, which could be missed at the moment. Also more attention could be paid to the typography itself, if the detail of the intervention is to be most effective; small changes and kerning would improve this."

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Urbania Jones

WONDERLAND SERIES Vladimír Turner, Sergi Palau COUNTRY Czech Republic AUTHORS

Memefest/QCA awarded work

/MOVING

Save it for a rainy day

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Wonderland

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Spring-cleaning

/MOVING

145 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR The Wonderland series is composed of four critical videoactions. Each one of them is strongly connected to the main topic of debt. Each video revolves around one sub-theme: 1) Ecology (Spring-Cleaning): masking the problems that mankind causes is not the same as solving them! We should begin to act responsibly and think about the distant future, which is in opposition to populistic media-manipulated images that have some of the "green economy" projects. 2) Lack of public space (Urbania Jones): symbolic of escaping the hectic and oversaturated urban landscape through the symbol of new "natural environment"—a billboard. 3) The petrol industry (Save It for a Rainy Day): we dig into the ground to find more natural resources. We suck up all the treasures that our planet offers. We ruin our land and we are starting wars because of petrol. I buried my own personal supply of diesel next to the highway. I saved it for a rainy day (which is rapidly approaching). 4) Social situation of contemporary cities (Wonderland): our megapolises have many faces. There are many abandoned houses in Valencia. There is a lack of jobs and social security. Each one of us can end up on the streets, so we should think and act about this problem before it is too late. What, in your opinion, are the concrete benefits your communication offers to society? Each of my works is an act of free-minded creativity. I don't care if we call it art, activism, or destruction. I raise questions, I speak with people on the streets, and discuss topics related to the artworks so that I can effect the action immediately using their direct feedback. That means that the public is creating the piece with me and affecting its surroundings. I welcome feedback (including critical), and people have been in contact with me regarding the works; seeing that I can be an inspiration to others gives me great satisfaction! What did you learn from creating your submitted work? We are opressed and restricted to act according to exact rules that are set by our politicians and guarded by police. The fear of acting 'differently' makes the wolf look bigger. But, often our disobedience would not cause real consequences; nevertheless, we are generally closed-mind and fearful of stepping out of line.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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Shoaib Nabi The Wonderland series is an appropriate title that had me anticipating what to expect from each short video. Debt is not exclusively financial, and you seem to have captured the negativity associated with the word as a tribute through whimsical titles, cynically portraying the actions. However, I encourage you to perhaps, on a formal level, edit certain aspects of the audio track and the video so their relationship as a series is stronger. Wonderland kept me intrigued, first with the background audio giving clues to the narrative and then the figure seamlessly blending with its landscape similar to Spring-Cleaning, which is an intervention that masks the issues you so eloquently state in your written statement and through your video.

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TUNNEL VISION Campbell Newman’s tunnel vision: a cost-benefit analysis

Luke Robertson, Gem Copeland; Aaron Gillett COUNTRY Australia AUTHORS



/MOVING

147 DESCRIPTION DESCRIPTION OF OF IDEA IDEA BY BY THE THE AUTHOR AUTHOR Tunnel Vision is a response to the idea that debt takes power from the (common) people and gives it to the people in power, framing the issue in terms of Queensland politics. 'Tunnel vision' is defined as the tendency to focus exclusively on a single or limited goal or point of view. The 'Sunshine state' is currently $92.5 billion in debt, a figure that the Campbell Newman–led Liberal National Party (LNP) plan to reduce by establishing debt-management strategies. Unfortunately, during their recent short time in power, the party have demonstrated that minority groups are no longer on the agenda. Through minimising economic debt, the party is bankrupting Queensland's social culture by doing away with vital support networks they consider dispensable. For example, the LNP approach is one that values projects such as the Clem 7 tunnel, a $3.2 billion infrastructure behemoth that saves eight minutes of commuting time, over Sisters Inside. This $120,000-a-year state-funded service provides counselling and support to women prisoners at the Townsville Correctional Centre, many of them indigenous. Since its completion, the Clem 7 has been disastrously unsuccessful, running at just 26% of necessary capacity. The company that constructed it, RiverCity Motorway, has since gone into receivership after being unable to repay its debt. The LNP approach to Queensland's budget and our society's entrenched system of economic thinking is deeply flawed as cultural and social debt is not accounted for. What kind of society values saving eight minutes of commuting time over the possibility of saving a human life? What kind of communication approach do you use? Our approach was to use rhetorical protest, appropriating a portable LED sign, which is commonly used to communicate information about roadworks. This creates a quietly subversive and disarming effect on the viewer. What, in your opinion, are the concrete benefits your communication offers to society? Ultimately, Tunnel Vision asks the average Queensland citizen about the true cost of our politics. The 2012 state election saw the LNP win seventy-eight seats to Labor's seven, the largest majority in Queensland's history. The majority of Queenslanders therefore support this short-sighted political stance. Tunnel Vision seeks to question and expose the short-sightedness of this new government.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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Kevin Yuen Kit Lo This is a simple, practically effective public intervention. I appreciate that it is dealing with a specific, actionable, local issue, and challenges citizens to question the authority and inherent value systems of state spending. The LED platform is original, and seems to be a great tool to use for future interventions. Placing at construction sites works very well, and I could see many issues of corruption or misspending in infrastructure targeted by this campaign. I would have liked to have seen video documentation (instead of the gif) of the action, as I wonder if any LED transition effects were used to animate or enhance the message. Timing also seems to be an important element that isn't very well communicated by the gif. I also wonder about the structure of the messaging, though perhaps it is because I am not engaged in the local context and am not aware of the programs. I wonder if the amount of information is a bit much for people passing by to catch. While I think the compare/contrast approach is effective, I wonder if it could have been simplified a bit to more quickly deliver the message. I'd love to see more interventions using this technique."

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LOQUITUR MUROS Bleeps and Dimitris Petalas COUNTRY Greece AUTHORS

/MOVING

149 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR It is a documentary about the crisis in Greece examined through my street art. It focuses on the problems created by capitalism and the monetary system in general.The foundation of this systematic concept is the creation of debt. What kind of communication approach do you use? I use symbolic figures playing roles in obscure events. Usually, elements of the grotesque and calligraphy are combined. What, in your opinion, are the concrete benefits your communication offers to society? My works are on public display and thus free for all people to see. They communicate ideas and thoughts, which, in my opinion, can help individuals, especially ones belonging to the 'lower social classes' (I don't accept this terminology), to come in contact with an alternative analysis than the one offered by systematic media. What did you learn from creating your submitted work? The documentary helped me go deeper to the way the capitalist system works and creates social antithesis. Why is your work good communication work? The work is easily understood, and using visual with audio provides more information to the individuals, so that they may understand the social impact of capitalism and the 'debt creating policies'. Where and how do you intend to implement your work? I intend to let it follow its pathway mainly through the Internet.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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Tony Credland I find this documentary very engaging in the way it is narrated and structured. It's important to show what's happening to Greek society and explain it to a wider audience; thus, a documentary seems fitting. The start is quite poetic and engaging, pulling the audience into a more complex story of the effects of debt, and where many European countries are heading. The soundtrack sometimes gets in the way of the narrative, which is a shame as the visuals are well shot and interesting in their own right. The focus on the creation of various street paintings is well filmed and edited, getting a personal angle and giving hope through action, rather than waiting to see what happens. It is hard to comment too much on the style of graffiti/painting, as we don't often see close ups, but it seems strong and particular to the location if not a graphic style i would be drawn to. There are some quite striking moments, like when the you see the child crying in front of the balloons or the kids playing violins, some parts becoming more interesting the more times I watched it. I particularly enjoyed the anger and simplicity of the end sequence."

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THE THIRD DEADLY SIN Majida AlSafadi, Sarah Zohair, Omnia ElAfifi COUNTRY United Arab Emirates AUTHORS



/MOVING

151 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR In this animation, we create an alter universe that has strong metaphorical meanings to a real society. Our underlying message revolves around greed, and how debt is used as a weapon. Here, we use animal ideologies to create the citizens who make up a society. Goats signify selfishness, and doing everything for self gain. Sheep are easily led astray, and that's why they always need someone to 'herd' them in order to protect them. Pigs represent greed. What kind of communication approach do you use? Animation allowed us to freely express our message through types of illustrations and language that are fitting to the subject matter. What, in your opinion, are the concrete benefits your communication offers to society? It serves as a wake-up call to the society. It also shows the close correlation between humans and animals with a strong metaphorical animal ideologies used. What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work? The more people watch it, the more we realised they could relate to it. Debt could happen to anyone, since we are all a part of a system that is controlled by a higher power. However, one must remember to keep their feet on the ground and not get carried away with the luxuries of life. Why is your work good communication work? Its engaging in the way that it presents an idea in a unique graphic language , which is very well conceived. The idea of debt was also treated differently with the use of metaphors in relation to greed. Where and how do you intend to implement your work? We are hoping to make it available to as many people as possible; we will be distributing it via festivals and the Internet.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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Shoaib Nabi Debt = Greed. The use of a metaphor is very effectively used for this project. It addresses the need for debt, which is often greed of some form and at some level. It could be the person who is giving the debt or the receiver or both. But debt can also be accumulated through misfortune or urgency or a particular need that may have nothing to do with greed. However, in context to the "Third Deadly Sin" you all have designed a superb piece of animation that captures and retains the attention of its viewer. It is whimsical and dark and takes you to a certain place but ends just when you expect more. I enjoyed the illustrations and encourage you to work more in this direction. You may want think of ending the animation with a strong statement before the rolling credits to bring us back to the subject and its intended focus. Also you may want to review and edit how the music flows in and out in some portions of the animation. A refreshing change from clip art and generic digital illustrations."

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VALUE QUEST BOURSE An electronic allegory of Casino Capitalism

AUTHORS



Eduard Balaz, Ivan Blagojevic /URTICA ART GROUP

COUNTRY

Serbia

/INTERACTIVE

153 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR The Value Quest Bourse (VQB) all-electronic platform performs as an art-game simulation of socio-economic cycles, which enables a real-time aggregation of 'social bourse' data (VQ Roulette), and over-the-counter financial instrument transactions with a broad audience (VQ Perpetual Bond). In contrast to the current casino capitalism that creates a moral hazard by “privatizing profits and socializing losses”, a player of VQ roulette doesn't compete for own profits but for the common good—a community-aggregated score of the VQ Industrial Sectors. Following a selection of the sector and a waged bet, an electronic roulette-based engine transfers users’ click-labour into bourse records. In order to fulfill future social capital requirements, the VQB issues the VQ Perpetual Bond to facilitate the quest for value in the time of crisis. This unique public debt security is based on an agreement or promise made by the bond-holder that he/she takes responsibility for the survival of identified value. Thus, the VQ Perpetual Bond gauging platform serves as an electronic repository of values submitted by a community. The performative over-the-counter transaction involves an exchange of a value of one sort (subjective value of a visitor deposed at VQ gauging platform) for the value of another sort (an art value object, i.e., the online/or/printed VQ Perpetual Bond). It is said: The way you work, for whom you work, makes who you are. The VQB points out that how you invest, and where you invest, impacts how the world looks. Hence, circuits of capital (knowledge and economic) and circuits of class struggle are spinning the cycle of society/commerce, and every participant is influenced by the actions/reactions of the others. Powered by the input of an online community,the VQB brings the issues of value, labour, and the accumulation of capital into the digital era. A gameplay depicts the perpetual movement of the social-economic-aesthetical metamorphoses of value, a never-ceasing conversion of value into some sort of capital (social, economic, or knowledge capital). Transfer your click-labour into social critique. Vote for Value. Revolve the wheel of casino capitalism. Keep the Value Quest Bourse alive! View demo video http://youtu.be/IFxT9PM7anA.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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ALL COMMENTS

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Aleksandar Maćašev I tend to think that the use of humor/ gaming softens the blow of a powerful message. Think of Slavoj Žižek’s lectures; a progressive force is sitting in the audience, who is rolling with laughter while hearing about a lot of issues that are not supposed to be taken lightly. OK, bitter medicine is easier to swallow with a bit of sugar. I find it important to discover that perfect ratio of irony/humour and the heavy stuff. Urtica is known for its amazingly elaborate work and masterful usage of media. And the deployment of humour seems to be carefully measured. Games (gaming) are also very well known fortheir educational angle. To quote Isaac de Pinto: “Commerce is a game, and nothing can be won from the beggars. If one wins everything from everybody all the time, it would be necessary to give back the greater part of the profit voluntarily, in order to begin the game again.” Although Urtica’s work (including this one) is set in the art world, which is well defined as another commodity machine (“The value of an asset, e.g., a capital asset or an artwork, depends on psychological trust in authority that stands behind it and the expectation of future profits flows.”), it doesn’t fail to provoke, entertain, and yes, teach. They summed it up pretty well themselves: "The VQB points out that how you invest, and where you invest, impacts how the world looks." It’s not about negating the system, it’s about turning the system on itself or at least using it for the common good."

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CRITICA WRITING CURATORS AND EDITORS Gal Kirn Steve Keen Daniel Marcus Nikolai Jeffs Nikola Janović

AL G

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The category of Critical Writing invites written reflections in different formats. Theoretical academic writing as well as more speculative, creative writing will be appreciated. This category is highly important to us. In our opinion, written articulation and theory are key for developing the paradigmatic shift needed in the culture of communication.

All published works are selected works from 2012 friendly competition. To see all received works and curators comments, please visit our website www.memefest.org.

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SURPLUS DEBT Søren Rosenbak COUNTRY Denmark AUTHOR

Memefest/QCA awarded work

Author’s Note: This essay was originally written in June 2012, and very much pertains to the events that were unfolding at the time. For this reason, figures, statistics, and the like are kept anno June 2012, as much has changed since then. This version of the article has been revised with minor wording adjustments. 12 November 2013

ABSTRACT

With the recent emergence of peerto-peer digital currency as well as social media debt, a new paragraph in the long history of debt is unfolding. By negating the core concept of debt, this essay introduces and outlines the idea of ‘surplus debt’ in this new context. Using the movement Fucking Friendly together with emergent new business paradigms as an offset, surplus debt sets out to create meaningful social experience on a local scale, yet with a global awareness. Without aiming to provide the answer to the debt crisis, surplus debt is a game changer and a call for action.

CRI WRI

KEYWORDS

surplus debt, Fucking Flink, gift exchange, transformation paradigm, critical design, call for action

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Debt is a curious phenomenon that seems more relevant than ever, with the current debt crisis setting the world agenda on a macro level and the personal tragedies of those affected filling up the news on a micro level. Debt works on all levels, and people become anxious and ill from debt (Belluck 2009; Greenglass and Constance 2012). The question is whether debt can be rethought completely into something new and meaningful. Debt has a high degree of versatility and can take many different forms. Renowned anthropologist David Graeber made the historical distinction between virtual and metal money in his essay, “Debt: The first 5000 years” (2009) and new spin-offs, such as Bitcoin and Pay with a Tweet, have recently emerged. These two examples are intriguing for different reasons. The first offers an international, decentralised, and completely digital currency that uses peer-to-peer technology for money transactions. Originally created by Satoshi Nakamoto, a rather mysterious Japanese gentleman with no apparent commercial agenda and an alleged background in cryptography (Davis 2011), Bitcoin can be seen as part of the same open-source knowledge paradigm (Brand and Rocchi 2011, 22–23) that so far has spawned Wikileaks, Anonymous, and, most recently, the Occupy movement. Pure digital currency raises a lot of questions, hacking and cyberwar being a few of the obvious concerns. However, due to people’s current level of familiarity with monetary transactions in the digital domain (Miller 2011, 64–65), I would argue that digital debt is basically experienced in the same way as conventional credit debt; as something abstract, if not even virtual. Social media adds a different perspective to this phenomenon. Pay with a Tweet is a company that offers anyone the commercial option of selling goods online for a tweet or a Facebook wall posting. On top of any possible conflicts with smoothly integrating the service into social interaction, Pay with a Tweet raises concerns with regards to a whole new level of possible social debt: social media debt. For marketing and sales, social media has long been a promised land for resurrecting an ever-decreasing advertisement impact, creating user involvement, brand commitment, and, of course, social media buzz.1 Whereas Facebook has explicitly reached 900 million users,2 quantifying and utilising the positive buzz hidden in all the ones and zeros still poses a challenge. Pay with a

TICAL TING

1  According to Reno Brand and Simona Rocchi’s definition of economies/paradigms (2011), the problem for marketing and sales is basically a matter of making the transition from the experience economy/paradigm into the knowledge economy/paradigm. 2  As of May 2012, according to Sengupta (2012).

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Tweet is interesting exactly because it establishes the ability to quantify social media exposure. It's a fact that Facebook users already feel socially indebted, most prominently with the ‘like’ tool and with wishing people a happy birthday on their ‘walls’. When someone from your primary school whom you haven't seen for ages sends his or her heartfelt wishes on your birthday, you’ll indeed remind yourself to return the favour on theirs. Essentially, this dynamic traces back to basic social courtesy, and French sociologist Marcel Mauss’s classic studies on gift exchange in Polynesia (2001). What’s interesting is that in an already universally streamlined digital framework for social interaction, the concept of socially quantifiable credit is now being introduced. The example of ‘gold farming’ in massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPG), such as World of Warcraft, offers a glimpse into the opportunities and tensions in taking debt across the virtual–real world boundary. Gold farming is “the real-world sale of virtual goods and services produced in online games” (Heeks 2008, 2). In 2009, the Chinese government reacted to gold farming by restricting the use of virtual money to buy real-life goods (Ministry of Commerce 2009); two years later, the Chinese Central Bank decided to double its annual issuance of gold panda coins, reaching a staggering 1 million ounces of gold (People’s Bank of China 2011). Thus, the transition between real and virtual life with regard to profit, debt, and social relations seems to be in a current state of flux. With Facebook’s $16 billion IPO entry at Wall Street causing an outcry in the financial sector (Evans 2012) as well as the media (Moore 2012), the scene is set for the biggest social media player and the global financial market to somehow come to terms with one another. I now return to my original question: Can debt be completely rethought? To begin with, what does debt really mean? Although debt in itself is a neutral word, it holds a lot of negative connotations (for the indebted part at least). Is it possible to imagine debt as a good thing? As an anecdotal reference, I once had a discussion with a good friend about what it means to have lived a full, rich life. He told me that he was planning to end up totally burnt out at old age, covered in tattoos, tinnitus in both ears, etc.; basically spent and ready to die. What about looking at debt from this perspective? Debt as a sign of having lived a rich, spontaneous life? Of having travelled the world, of having bought that amazing wedding dress, or having thrown that friend a huge birthday party? Imagine an account abstract as a CV—no red numbers, no employment. While somewhat interesting, the main problem with this experiment is that while negating the understanding of debt,

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it still defines it in terms of spending money and therefore traps itself in the world of credit and capitalism. When thinking of any concept, imagining the exact opposite is always an interesting exercise. What is the exact opposite of debt? Surplus? If instead of X owing Y to Z in some kind of contractual arrangement defined in time, it would be a matter of X possibly supplying Z with Y at any given moment. Obviously, this isn’t a negation in a strict mathematical sense, but let’s stay with it as a thought experiment. For a start, it’s worth noting that this idea doesn’t already have a name. ‘Anti-debt’ simply doesn't exist in the vocabulary. Why is this? ‘Surplus’ exists, as does ‘excess’. Neither word has any inherent notion of origin, obligation or relation. For the purpose of this essay, I will make use of ‘surplus debt’, simply because of its lack of connotations to decadence and because it clearly negates what we originally understand as ‘debt’. One of the key points in Mauss’s aforementioned studies on gift exchange concerns the fact that gifts are never free as such, but always have some kind of inherent agenda that socially indebt the recipient in one way or another (Mauss 2001, 83–84). This point of view has since been criticised and challenged by several anthropologists (Testart 2007; Laidlaw 2000), who argue that examples of free gift exchange do exist. Thus, the concept of free gift exchange is still a topic of debate. A recent case that I believe sheds light on surplus debt’s overall potential is the Danish movement Fucking Flink (‘Fucking Friendly’ in a non-official direct English translation). It has existed since 2010 with the following agenda posted on its website:

CRITI WRITI ITICAL ITING Fucking Flink is a manifesto for change. A movement that seeks to nudge Danes into becoming more friendly. Because, after all, being the happiest people on Earth, we kind of owe ourselves and the rest of the world to be the friendliest as well. Don't you think? Join in, take part, make yourself comfortable. And hey—it's so great to have you here.

Another post on the website lists good reasons to be ‘fucking flink’ and starts off with “Making the country more innovative”, while yet another tagline explains how “you don't have to pay tax from personal surplus friendliness”. The juxtaposition of the macro-economical capitalist apparatus with the micro-emotional human being echoes the introductory relationship between global debt crisis and personal tragedy. While the latter operates with a very real contract between the levels, Fucking Flink points to the exact opposite: how they don’t relate at all. Owing €50,000

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to the bank and bringing a delicious batch of muffins to the new neighbour in the building. The Fucking Flink Facebook site (currently with over 16,000 likes3) has daily posts consisting of these kind of feel-good anecdotes about how someone held the door open for someone or offered them a free car seat on a rainy day. Also, it’s worth noting that Fucking Flink has a strong underlying focus on chance encounters with strangers; the point is not to be friendly to your friends in a closed loop reminiscent of classic gift exchange, but to be surprisingly friendly towards the strangers who enter your life. Business and design is also moving towards the same direction, yet using a different vocabulary. Shared value creation seeks to overcome the gap between old-fashioned CSR and capitalism by “creating economical value by creating societal value” (Porter and Kramer 2011, 17). Furthermore, the idea of creating business clusters is about transcending business and society through generating surplus. Reon Brand and Simona Rocchi, design researchers from Philips Design, see these emerging strategies as part of what they name the transformation paradigm, as opposed to the present knowledge paradigm. Whereas knowledge can be understood in terms of Web 2.0 and empowering users through social platforms and peer-to-peer thinking, transformation is about systemic thinking and “addressing local/ global socio-economic and socio-environmental issues” (Brand and Rocchi 2011, 26). This is exactly what Fucking Flink manages to do by announcing an international friendliness revolution, consisting of a myriad of local actions and initiatives. Surplus debt is first and foremost about acting locally. To go back a step, the transformative paradigm also allows a better understanding of the intangibility of a Bitcoin, or the €10 trillion total debt for the EU governments (Eurostat Newsrelease Euroindicators 2012), for that matter: the debt crisis is basically a crisis of a system that is not perceiving the world systemically. Such a system is bound to fail, since it cannot optimise itself, redesign itself—or, in short, save itself. In Canadian writer Steven Marche’s (2012) comparison of studies done on Facebook, two of his key points concern how Facebook stimulates relentless, high frequent use and how it caters for narcissistic, selfrepresentational behaviour. Combining these insights leaves very little room for spontaneity. However, following John Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, dismissing the easy conclusion that Facebook makes people lonely, it 3  As of 30 May 2012, according to http://facebook.com/FFflink.

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is clear that Facebook after all is just like any other mediating tool; that is, a tool. It can be used for ‘liking’ and ‘tagging’ but also for arranging ‘flash mobs’, sharing Fucking Flink anecdotes, or organising Occupy movement demonstrations. A small detour into the realm of film fiction will concretise the above; Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s feature film Amélie (2001) exemplifies this loneliness-versus-meaningful-social-interaction phenomenon and the concept of surplus debt. Without going into a full analysis of the film, it’s worth taking note of some of the overall qualities that characterise Amélie (the protagonist and the movie): the bubbling, surprising magic realism and overall feel-good quality 4. Amélie does a lot of good deeds in her local environment and none of them is to send off €100 to a charity organisation. Not that we are sure that she might not do exactly that. For all we know, she might owe €100,000 to the bank. The point here is to distinguish surplus debt from the world of credit. Building on the initial definition, and with reference to Fucking Flink and Amélie, surplus debt is not related to the monetary world of credit in any way. It works on a completely different scale. One can think of parameters such as timing, surprise, spontaneity, creativity, customisation, location, environment, and social context. The list is by no means exhaustive or definitive. Surplus debt is not a solution to the debt crisis. Instead, it offers a completely different and meaningful range of experiences. If these experiences somehow make it easier for people to deal with their credit debt, that’s welcomed. However, it’s important to stress that surplus debt doesn’t have an agenda to balance out credit debt; instead, it aims to change the game altogether. More than anything, it’s an invitation for action and further research. For design practice, it offers a critical starting point for actively enabling quirks, hacking, customisation, malpractice, misuse, errors, mutation, etc., across working fields5. With reference to the critical design tradition, in particular as framed by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (2001), it invites the industrial designer to make an ATM for turning in surplus debt and the theatre performer to do surplus debt collection at people’s homes. Unlike escapist gimmicks working precisely towards upholding the global (power) status quo, surplus debt is first and foremost about creating local and meaningful change. With the dawning understanding over exactly how much potential gatherings such as the Occupy movement have, one can only dream of the global consequences 4  See Metacritic, http://metacritic.com/movie/amelie. 5  Eben Moglen’s recent writings on hackability in relation to innovation are very much along these lines (Doctorow 2012).

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of a planet inhabited by 7 billion surplus-indebted human beings.

With thanks to: Barbara Sonvilla, Aleksander Nikulin, Da∂í Jónsson, Marie Olofsen, Tara Mullaney & Leyla Nasibova.

REFERENCES

Belluck, Pam. 2009. “Recession Anxiety Seeps Into Everyday Lives.” The New York Times, 8 April. Bitcoin. 2013. http://bitcoin.org Brand, Reon, and Simona Rocchi. 2011. Rethinking Value in a Changing Landscape: A Model for Reflection and Business Transformation. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. Davis, Joshua. 2011. “The Crypto-Currency: Bitcoin and Its Mysterious Inventor.” The New Yorker, 10 October. Doctorow, Cory. 2012. "Innovation under Austerity: Eben Moglen's Call to Arms from the Freedom to Connect Conference." Boing Boing, 27 May. Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. 2001. Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects. Basel: Birkhäuser. Evans, Mark. 2012. “Warning: Stay Away from the Facebook IPO.” Forbes Magazine, 16 May. Eurostat Newsrelease Euroindicators. 2012. “Third Quarter 2011 Compared with Second Quarter 2011. Euro Area Government Debt Down to 87.4% of GDP. EU27 up to 82.2%.” Eurostat, 6 February. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STAT12-20_en.htm Fucking Flink. 2013. http://fflink.dk. Graeber, David. 2009. “Debt: The First 5000 Years.” Mute Magazine, 10 February, 5–13. Greenglass, Esther, and Constance Mara. 2012. "Self-Efficacy as a Psychological Resource in Difficult Economic Times." In Stress and Anxiety: Application to Economic Hardship, Teacher Stress, Childhood and Coping edited by Kathleen Anne Moore, Krzystof Kaniasty, and Petra Buchwald, 29-38. Berlin: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH. Heeks, Richard. 2008. “Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on ‘Gold Farming’: Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games”, Paper No. 32. University of Manchester, UK: Development Informatics Group IDPM, SED. Jeunet, Jean-Pierre. 2001. Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain. France/ Germany: Claudie Ossard Productions & Union Générale Cinématographique. "A Free Gift Makes No Friends." The Journal of the Royal Anthropological

Institute 6(4) December: 617–34. Mauss, Marcel. 2001. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge. Miller, Vincent. 2011. Understanding Digital Culture.

London: Sage Publications Ltd. Ministry of Commerce, People’s Republic of China. 2009. "China Bars Use of Virtual Money for Trading in Real Goods", 29 June. http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/ aarticle/newsrelease/commonnews/200906/20090606364208.html

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Marche, Stephen. 2012. “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” The Atlantic, May. Moore, Heidi. 2012. “Facebook's IPO Debacle: Greed, Hubris, Incompetence …” The Guardian, 23 May.

The People’s Bank of China. 2011. People's Bank of China Announcement No. 13, 20 June. http://www.pbc.gov.cn/publish/goutongjiaoliu/524/ 2011/20110620103438697783969/20110620103438697783969_.html. Pay with a Tweet. 2013. http://paywithatweet.com. Porter, Michael E., and Mark R. Kramer. 2011. Creating Shared Value: How to Reinvent Capitalism—And Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth. Watertown: Harvard Business Publishing. Sengupta, Somini. 2012. “Facebook’s Prospects May Rest on Trove of Data,” The New York Times, 14 May. Testart, Alain. 2007. Critique du don: Etudes sur la circulation non marchande. Paris: Syllepse.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

"

Nikolai Jeffs This essay is very stimulating with regards to the topic it explores (social media debt), the methodology used in the rethinking debt (thought experiments, imagining the opposite, so as to develop the argumentation, i.e., thinking dialectically), and in the development and deployment of an original concept (surplus debt). The work discusses what are, to my mind, so far under examined features of social life. Their importance, however, will only grow in the future. The work deploys new concepts and lays bare its own methodology and it strikes me as a ‘friendly’ and ‘open’ work in the sense of inviting others to continue in its tracks. The essay is also supported by relevant research, which is well documenteted in the footnotes and bibliography. Some of the examples and argumentation, however, could have been given more space to develop, so as to allow readers unfamiliar with this area to understand it better. I find the idea of dying in debt as the sign of a rich life very productive and alluring. One problem with this idea, though, is that it can necessitate disengagement from the various networks of relationships that the individual is involved in. This is primarily because debt can be passed

onto others who are otherwise unwilling to assume its burden. To give a concrete example regarding monies: I may want to die in debt. My life may become a lot richer than it is now is because of this. This is something I can revel in. However, my partner, who will legally inherit all my financial debts after I die, may face the prospect of my death in debt with dread as she will be forced to pay off what I owe. Now, one solution to this problem is that my partner and I terminate our relationship. Another solution is that we both plunge into a life of debt and leave our relatives to pay it off after our deaths. Neither solution seems very ethical to me. And the only way I can, at this moment in time, think of being ethical with regards to this problematic is to adopt some basic egoism and extreme individualism in the manner of Max Stirner or Ayn Rand. I do not, however, find this proposition very attractive or, for that matter, actually properly ethical: it may be a self-fulfilling pleasure to be a Stirnerite or Randian subject, but those who are consigned to being the ‘objects’ of the actions of such subjects may find the condition they are in not in the least enabling."

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DEBT, HOW TO GET OUT OF IT Antonio Rollo COUNTRY Italy AUTHOR

ABSTRACT

Debt is a bit of memory that lives within the social sphere. Even if we decide to disconnect from society, and live alone in the forest, we are indebted to nature for its food and water.

In this singular case, debt enhances consciousness to solve it, most of the cases with respect of the surroundings, establishing deeper relations with flora and fauna and having a clean state of mind occupied to feel instead to think.

RITICA RITING KEYWORDS

Money, Design, Media, Energy, Communication

AL G

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Debt is a memory that lives within the social sphere. Even if we decide to disconnect from society and live alone in the forest, we are indebted to nature for its food and water. In this singular case, debt enhances consciousness to solve it, most of the cases with respect of the surrounding, establishing deeper relations with flora and fauna and having a clean state of mind occupied to feel instead to think. The problem is how to manage a monetary debt. Money was invented because it is light enough to carry as opposed to real goods. Money is a memory machine that is open to the market, the place where goods are exchanged. In our diversity, people perform different actions. The things we produce and the transformations we make can be sold. If we do not have money to buy something from someone else, we can get credit, and thus we incur debt. To remove a debt, we need to give back the same amount of money plus a percentage called interest. Debt is a form of slavery. When we feel indebted to someone, we try to repay the debt/favour as soon as possible, because we do not like to feel like a slave. Modern Money Mechanics is a workbook on bank reserves and deposit expansion, distributed freely by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, that illustrates how ordinary people are part of a system that perpetually creates debt. We are born to be in debt forever; we are born to be slaves of money. Crucially, the only institutions that can create money from nothing are banks. The process of money making is so simple that it seems perverse (Grignon 2013). When we open a bank account to save our income, we do not receive insurance to get our money back, merely a promise. This is the reason why a nation can suddenly fail, as Argentina did a few years ago. Furthermore, consider the situation in which we ask a bank for a loan. In this case, we are asking something of someone that has nothing. A bank can loan money that it does not have, so can create money out of nothing. Why? Because of the modern money mechanics that regulate economies, stock-markets, banks, and governments. The more money is printed, the less value the currency is worth: this is inflation. Currency, the money we use in everyday life loses power because it is part of this system that is structured so that we are permanently in debt. There are a few specific underlying problems in this scenario, which I will elaborate on below. The first is a design problem. Industry is based on the recent concept of ‘obsolescence’, which means that every object produced has to be consumed, so we can buy new objects that lets bankers create new money,

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and this new money decreases the value of old money, so we have to work more to get the same object over time. Is this not slavery? Of course it is. The second is a media problem. Over the last fifty years, mass media, such as radio and television has served as propaganda for consumable objects, has served as nationalistic hysteria, has served as mass psychological suicide. We work more to buy more things that we do not need. Is this not slavery? Of course it is. The third is an energy problem. Industry and media are strictly related to electrical power. No electrical power equals no modern society. We feel like electrical energy has existed forever, but it is less than two hundred years since society began to be shaped by electricity. We cannot even think of something being without electricity. Is this not slavery? Of course it is. The fourth is a communication problem. The mobile web revolution is changing the way we interact as human beings with a shift from voice to text. New generations are afraid to speak, are losing confidence with bodies, are more vulnerable. Is this not slavery? Of course it is. The question is: how do we get out of debt (slavery)?

CRIT WRIT RITICAL RITING THE DESIGN PROBLEM Economies are based on the production of goods and services, which increases the national amount of products created every year. This is a parameter related to the exchange of products with money. If a nation can handle the consumption of all these products, internally and externally, then their economy grows; otherwise, their economy collapses and their national debt increases. In the last twenty years, national debt has continued to grow, becoming something that banks and markets can exchange; it is something with which to bet. These days, many new products are designed to last for a limited time. In the last two centuries, many objects have been designed by those who do not care about their environmental ‘footprint’, focusing only on the growth of production as a tool for an illusory democracy. They were wrong! We need a new industrial protocol that is related to a product’s entire lifecycle, from the design moment to the destruction moment (as trash). For this, we need a dexterous use of technology, a new form of democracy (it seems that we are driven to cleptocracy; see Steffen 2008), an economic

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system oriented to manage more parameters than profit and growth. PLANET EARTH IS LIMITED! Industrial design needs to change its rules; it needs to change the production system that is so often polluted and dangerous for people and the environment. For example, there are some byproducts of industry, such as dioxin, that are so toxic that nature never thought to create them. Industry, yes. Many cancers are related with this highly toxic compound. I frequently carry out a test with my students. I ask them to close their eyes and think of a close friend or a close family member who has died of cancer. Everybody has at least one. I do too. Do you? Every day, mass media and governments attempt to distract attention from the truth with new words and concepts that serve to generate clients (not free people). Let's do the same, but in the opposite direction. Possible solutions can be found in the design process at the ground level of education (Robinson 2001). If we become aware of the debt problem, then we can experiment with possible solutions (Bateson 2000). The next step is to evolve the educational system to a higher consciousness on the concept of debt with the planet, not to banks or governments. This new vision will direct the design process in the next future, thinking of industrial production as a part of an ecosystem that relates to technology, passion, sustainability, recycling, tolerance, communities, and territories (Latouche 2010). At this point, the idea of design becomes a resource, not a problem.

TICAL TING L

THE MEDIA PROBLEM The history of human beings can be told through the evolution of their tools—from the very beginning, with stones and fires, to the future, with robots and spaceships. We are living in a transitional moment in which mass media are shaping life on a truly profound level: the level of freedom. This is a mythical problem (Mosco 2004). In history, a new invention has a mythic aura, driven by the beautiful forces of the inventor's mind. Usually, inventions happen serendipitously. When one is looking for something, they stumble upon something

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CRI WRI CRITIC WRITIN else. If the invention is revolutionary, it brings better conditions for humanity, a wish for freedom from the forces of a particular time. By forces, I mean the apparatus of knowledge that the inventor is based in. These forces drive the wish for freedom. The combination of serendipity and personal research shapes human evolution. Let’s analyse two media: television and the Internet. Television was the icon of the 1950s, introduced with the mythic aura of the telepresence, audiovisual learning, peer opportunities of personal exposition, freedom of speech. Following technological evolution, television, twenty years later, became banal. People lose freedom when a medium enters the stage of banality, because at this stage, media are controlled by industry and governments. As soon as television became ubiquitous in Western society (i.e., America and Europe), its original mythic wish was inverted. Instead of freedom, we got isolation; instead of learning, we got propaganda (political and commercial); instead of peer opportunities, we got unique icons to follow like sheep; instead of freedom of speech, we got slavery to listening. This social shift plays a deep role in the creation and maintenance of debt. The arrow of time says that we cannot step back, but we can invent something new; we can follow the desire of freedom, we can adapt old myths to new tools. The Internet, in the shape of the world wide web, was the icon of the 1990s. Prior to its popularisation, it was a myth available to a restricted number of people, used for the stock market and airplane bookings, and as a military think tank. The Internet was the original solution for a peer-to-peer communication system, one able to maintain the flow of information between two points, even without a direct link. The solution is based on the creation of a net that connects a point to all others, like life does. The myth of the Internet was originally based on the end of the centralised computer network, a metaphor that brought to mind the end of centralised power. From the beginning of 1990s, the Internet became banal. Today we live in the “always on society”, and mobile screens are able to connect with virtually two billion connections, but somehow we feel alone (Turkle 2011). We are alone in the sea of information overflow. We are alone while in the range of close friends (we like to chat, not talk any more), we are alone among family members (parents are under the pressure of debt and propaganda).

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ITICAL ITING CAL NG We are alone in schools (teachers seem to be not as prepared for the digital revolution as young people are), we are alone in the understanding of economy (the only field where complexity is not used to explain the rules, but to hide them). We are alone sitting beside an interactive screen that has replaced basic activities (to work, to play, to communicate). In this context, the myth of the end of centralised power dies. Shift happens! Possible solutions can be found in the media process at the ground level of a nation. Iceland’s citizens helped to draft a new constitution via the Internet. Following the economic collapse in 2008, Iceland's citizens started to rethink their future—whether to continue to be slaves to banks or to redesign their constitution all together, united. Two years later, Iceland became the first country in the world to realise Gilberto Gil’s dream of peeracy. In his famous talk at Google Zeigeist in 2008, Gil said: “In politics and especially in governments, radical changes are only possible at specific historical moments. […] It is the rise of a peer to peer culture. Peeracy!” (Gil 2008) Europe is experiencing economic collapse. The gambling game of making money out of debt is failing, and the political systems are totally absorbed by financial dictatorship. People are under tax and media pressure, and all over Europe, the new Internet deal that can shift a nation from ‘perverse’ democracy to peeracy has been censored. Social media help to aggregate new memes, to spread new opportunities, and to be part of a creative society. At this point, the idea of media becomes a resource, not a problem. The future of the media is in our hands, but there is a further problem: the energy problem. THE ENERGY PROBLEM In the early 1980s, my grandmother's house did not have a connected water supply, so, as a young boy, I used to go to the central fountain in the middle of the little town and pick up some tanks full of public water. Nobody had to pay for the public water. By the end of 1980s, water had been connected to the house. Everybody was happy. Everybody began to view the water as a private source, and, in turn, there was a little tax to pay. While we earned the opportunity

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to have a hot shower, we missed the chance to converse with other people at the fountain. Private water was the end of the social power of water. There was a moment in history when Nikola Tesla was thinking of an open source of electromagnetic energy that can give to humanity an evolutionary step but without a capitalistic empire controlling the access and use of the electrical power. This story is extremely recent, as is the electrified world. The capitalistic model loves to centralise; in this way, people feel indebted to the producer. Without electricity, the world would be radically different: no radio, no television, no computers, no Internet, no trains, no cars, no aeroplanes. However, the main source for electricity is derived from limited raw materials, (oil, gas, coal) and new sources are still under development. We incur a gargantuan debt with the environment in terms of our consumption and pollution. We need to invent a new way of producing electricity, perhaps stepping back to Tesla’s idea of open source, if we want to guarantee a green future to the next generations. The energy problem is critical in the evolution of any civil society that wants to maintain all the services and goods we like to use. The electric light was a mythical invention too, but now is banal in the hand of a central power. People cannot even think of the consequences of possible crises related to the end of raw materials. Alternatives can be experienced with new memes on self sustainability, self production, and locality instead of global and central. At this point, the idea of energy becomes a resource, not a problem. THE COMMUNICATION PROBLEM At the micro level of body cells, when there is a communication problem, the new cell becomes malignant, and the body gets cancer. Translating this to the macro level of the planet Earth and the communication problem (between humans beings and nature) becomes the biggest cancer we have ever faced. We are the cancer of this planet. Now is the moment to invest time and resources to search for the cure. There are no alternatives, and there is not much time to do it. People need to share knowledge about the nature of money as debt. People need to rethink the industrial design process and understand the absurd idea of obsolescence. People need to experience new media as open-source technology. People need to experience local alternatives for

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electricity production. People need to communicate the evolution of democracy as a free form of peer-to-peer culture. At this point, the idea of communication becomes a resource, not a problem.

References Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an

Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. 1994.

Modern Money Mechanics: A Workbook on Bank Reserves and Deposit Expansion. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Modern_ Money_Mechanics.

Gil, Gilberto. 2008. No Google Zeigeist. http://www2.cultura.gov.br/ site/2008/05/19/gilberto-gil-no-googlezeitgeist/. Grignon, Paul. 2013. Money as Debt. http:// www.moneyasdebt.net/. Latouche, Serge. 2010. Farewell to Growth. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Mosco, Vincent. 2004. The Digital Sublime. Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. The MIT Press. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. ?? Robinson, Ken. 2001. Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, Capstone Ltd, London, 2001 Steffen, Alex. 2008. World Changing. A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. New York: Abrams. Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone Together: Why

We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.

CURATOR’S COMMENT

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ALL COMMENTS

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Daniel Marcus This essay creates connections among several social problems and offers some useful suggestions in trying to turn problems into productive challenges. I like the tone of the piece, which is critical and cognisant of the depth of our problems, yet also positive and even a bit hopeful. While offering a strong critique of things as they are, the author also recognises the complexity of our society and avoids simplistic utopian ideas. One issue he brings up is the banalisation of culture. In this, he responds to Walter Benjamin’s trumpeting of the loss of aura in art and Benjamin’s hope that this loss of cultural power will actually be liberating, in spurring a more decentralised and democratic experience of culture. The two sides of this dynamic remain with us: the Internet is indeed decentralising and democratic in many respects, but also promotes its own kind of addictive passivity. The protest movements that have grown in the wake of economic collapse show that digital and social media can be useful tools for activism, but ultimately, to create political change, actions must be based on old-fashioned physical activity to demonstrate visible commitment to change. In these movements and moments, we transcend the banality of our daily experiences through participating in larger events, without re-creating the cultural hierarchies of earlier eras. Of course, this does not guarantee such movements will succeed. But participants must share the critical yet hopeful attitude that Rollo displays here."

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WHAT IS YOUR OCCUPATION? MEDITATIONS ON AND MEDIATING THE CORPOREAL SELF AND CORPORATE SOCIETY Johnny Merryman COUNTRY USA AUTHOR

ABSTRACT

While there is significant attention being paid to creating a public banking system, that doesn't really get to the heart of the problem. Money is not a commodity. It is a contract. If you give someone a piece of paper that says redeemable for one ounce of gold, IOU, guaranteed by the taxpayers, the Federal Reserve, or whatever, it is a contract. The point here is that it is not notational value, but notational trust and it is the fact that civilization has managed to commodify trust that has first created a global economy and society and is now driving it over the edge.

C W CRIT WRIT KEYWORDS

nature, society, economy

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CURATOR’S COMMENT

ALL COMMENTS

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Daniel Marcus Usually essays that take such a broad view of the world—moving from the physical building blocks of atoms and energy to questions of human nature and social structure—stretch their parallels too far and fail to deal with enough specifics to be very useful. Yet, this essay moves well from the microcosmic to macroeconomics. Just as we now understand mass and energy to be fundamentally the same, the author argues that money should be seen as circulation as much (or more) than a physical entity. Money must be entailed in relationships to have any real meaning, thus pointing to the need to understand power hierarchies and social dynamics in order to understand financial facts. This points to Marx’s argument that class is a series of relationships among people, rather than a structure based on hard assets and physical products. Money must move to be effective, and its flows should be seen as a public good.

CRITICA WRITING TICAL TING As to the author’s specific proposals, I’ll let economists consider their efficacy. But I think the author’s well-intentioned proposal to change Congressional budgeting procedures is a bit naïve, as if simply installing new rules in Congress could be reform the budget process in an open and pure way. Politics involves trades, manipulation, and power plays, and these cannot be erased that simply. Also, the author states that governments always want to overpromise on what they can deliver, to please everyone. While this is often the case, and US politicians often seem to promise easy solutions (government services without needing taxes to pay for them, creating huge deficits), at the present moment there is also a strong movement to squelch belief in government efficacy, and to tamp down public demands for action. Much of the conservative movement is built around the denial of public goods and benefits, to assert that there is no alternative to domination by market forces and those who control the market. This enforced austerity needs to be resisted – we should demand more from our government, even as we recognize it cannot be the source of all answers to our social and economic problems."

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ESCAPE FROM THE TYRANNY OF THINGS Aaris Sherin COUNTRY USA AUTHOR

CURATOR’S COMMENT

"

ABSTRACT

Today’s consumers are inundated with, and purchase, an overabundance of cheap, non-durable goods. This essay delves into the darker side of consumerism by proposing that the ownership of too many objects is its own special kind of tyranny. While, in some cases, design helps to create and even perpetuate many object-related issues, a designer’s ability to recognise and covet quality items can also provide a model for more responsible consumerism.

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ALL COMMENTS

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Gal Kirn Aaris Sherin's essay is sound and convincingly argued; it focuses mainly on the critique of consumption and an urge to design and live with objects in a different way. It touches the topic of debt by a detour, by proposing less or a different kind of consumption, dealing with commodities and objects. The text is not completely clear if this demand is to be done only in the design field, on an individual plane, or if some of these refined consumption practices can be used on a more collective level. It seems that the austerity measures in Europe (and elsewhere, with crisis) self-impose less consumption, but then the choice is rather imposed as a matter of survival. Sherin's considerations are of different quality and demand a conscious and responsible "designer", which again brings us to education and a new sense of community."

KEYWORDS

consumerism, overabundance, consumer goods, energy, ownership

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INSTINCTS ON DEBT Brendan Ross COUNTRY Australia AUTHOR

ABSTRACT

With conscious living, you can get beyond dogma. You can make personal and community choices about what we give and what we receive in this world. Dogma breeds hatred, and the debates about the rightness or wrongness of debt creates only more righteousness. The opposite of debt is unconditionality, a principle that the most loving parents struggle to provide for their own children. Only the blindly ignorant would pursue such an organising system for humanity. The Ecuadorians kept some debt, wrote off other debt; their choices sought integrity in themselves and their debtors.

CRITICA WRITING ICAL ING CURATOR’S COMMENT

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ALL COMMENTS

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Steve Keen A brief but insightful essay on the erosion of morality imposed by rising debt levels, repeatedly emphasising the importance of bringing awareness to the fact that modern capitalism has become an ignorant subconscious behaviour. It encourages people to go beyond their oversimplified dogmatic tendencies to think of absolute terms, such as capitalism and socialism."

KEYWORDS

dogma, idealism, conscious living

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BEYOND ... CURATORS AND EDITORS Kevin Yuen-Kit Lo Alana Hunt Alain Bieber Aaron Gach Katie Bush

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'Beyond...' is a special category that has been added to encourage those radical communicators who like to think “outside the box”. While a lot of subversive writing and design has emerged that challenges the status quo by using its own conventions, very few of these initiatives have employed a mode of communication that is not rooted in commercial culture itself. All published works are selected works from 2012 friendly competition with selected curators comments. To see all received works and curators comments, please visit our website www.memefest.org.

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RECONSUM

Lukas Lehmann COUNTRY Germany AUTHOR

179 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR The idea was to collect food out of the waste containers at supermarkets and to find a way to give it back to the public. Many things that are thrown away are still useable and edible. In my social surroundings, “containering” or “dumpster diving”—the recollection and consumption of waste—is very common. In this installation, the wasted food of serveral supermarkets was collected during one night, sorted and cleaned, and made accessable to the public the next day. While the installation was being arranged, a lot of people came to talk with us about it. We informed them were the food came from and, on the bottom of the installation, we wrote in chalk that the food was available to take away for free. After fourteen hours, almost all the food had been taken by the people. What kind of communication approach do you use? Communication in public spaces where the public is involved not only creates a end product people can look at, but also it creates an interaction between artist, object, and recipient, which becomes a nesesary part of the installation . What, in your opinion, are the concrete benefits your communication offers to society? Hopefully, through this installation, people are given some very concrete and appreciable hints to realise that there are a lot of strange and illegitimate by-products and consequences of the consumption-process in capitalism. What did you learn from creating your submitted work? I learned that working with a group of twenty persons can be challenging and is not always easally managed. I also was surprised that the public was really interested but still poorly informed about some consequences of the consumptionprocess in capitalism. Why is your work good communication work? What I appreciate about this kind of installation is that the involvement, reaction, and reconsumption of the public are essential parts of the project. Without this, it would not be completed. Where and how do you intent do implement your work? I would like to publish it on the Internet , as well as in exhibitions.

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Alana Hunt Although not new, dumpster diving remains a marginal approach to doing things in the urban environment. What is wonderful about Reconsum is the way it introduces the practice of dumpster diving, along with the philosophy and politics that lie behind it, to an unfamiliar public in a very practical, warm, and easy-going form. What are the legalities of dumpster diving in your city? Reconsum gets me thinking, as I am sure it did the people who passed you by, about alternative free street side supermarkets popping up at regular intervals around the city. Imagine if instead of being an unanticipated surprise on the urban landscape, such events became part of a community’s habit—free, dependable and fluid transactions of re-consumables. The unwanted not only wanted, but suddenly needed. The photographs that document the work are also beautiful. The lighting and the movement of the shadows—at night, in the morning, and then in the evening—all help to convey the story intuitively. However, I found myself longing for more, for a detail of what was available, of what was taken first. I wanted to know if people hesitated or went straight in to take what would soon be theirs. I wanted to hear the conversations and to understand the dynamics of the social exchanges that took place that day. The documentation of fleeting works like this is always a difficult task, but it is worth giving attention to. We have become quite accustomed to the idea that it is the concept that will take precedence over the form. But we forget that it is the form, an image, a phrase, or a remnant of some sort, that will enable this moment (and, in turn, this concept) to have a life in other environments and relationships with other audiences."

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LET S PLAY TAG Culture jamming Harvey Norman

Paul Kimbell, Nicola Paris COUNTRY Australia AUTHORS

181 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR We created a multimedia ‘culture jam’ tag to be placed on furniture in Harvey Norman that is sourced from native Australian forests. The tag subverts Harvey Norman’s well-known graphical style and features a ‘QR Code’ or bar tag that is underneath a tag line ‘Find out how you can win’. If consumers have a smart phone, they can then scan the QR code and it will take them directly to a video that shows footage of real destruction caused by the logging of our native forests—for which furniture is often the excuse. The intention was to challenge the standard level of interaction between customer and company, and to encourage accountability in product labelling. We were also hoping this innovative approach would cause some interest in traditional and social media, thus generating conversations about the products, issues of native forest logging, labelling, and our organisation. We used guerilla marketing and an extensive online push through social media channels as part of the communication and dissemination of this action. Members of the Last Stand coordinated with activists across Australia and visited Harvey Norman stores to discreetly place tags on furniture known to come from native forests. The action was then launched through social media channels with traditional media follow up, and action kits for supporters to download to participate with. The video was promoted online and all Harvey Norman retailers were also contacted via post with a letter informing them of the campaign. We wanted to open up a new style of communication with multiple audiences. Consumers are becoming increasingly educated, and demanding greater accountability from the corporations they buy from. This is highlighted through many different industries; most beauty products label their chemical compounds, and there is a demand to label genetically modified foods, or those containing palm oil. Through this action, we draw attention to these concerns, both to the retailers and the broader public. In this age of social media and information overload, it is in retailers' interests to not only source products from sustainable sources, but also to provide clear labelling so that consumers can make informed choices.

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Aaron Gach This project strikes me as a really wellthought out aesthetic campaign. There is a physical action (which has been actualised), a social media component, a press component, an action kit, and a design component. Additionally, the artists/activists have given consideration to site-specificity and diverse audiences (supporters, shoppers, retailers, workers, etc.). The design components could easily have become superficial and trite. On the contrary, they are smart and funny. The action itself seems fairly well documented, although I wonder if there is a missed opportunity for more of a dramatic, human element. For example, they've done a wonderful job setting the stage with all the right props, but I really want to see the drama played out to its fullest potential. It's difficult not to defer to the Yes Men as the model for a project like this. The artists here are already masquerading as the retailer by appropriating their design language. Why not appropriate other aspects of the unfolding narrative (concocted corporate press releases, faux shocked shoppers, the illusion of a more massive campaign, etc.)? As the authors noted in their submission statement, the duration of the tags in the retail environment is limited. Why not maximise their potential, staging additional layers of interaction with all of those audiences that have already been identified as stakeholders in this righteous campaign?"

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CALL CENTER EXPERIENCE!

Contact center emulator

Ivan Kozenitzky COUNTRY Argentina

AUTHOR

Memefest/QCA awarded work

183 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR Whenever a customer calls a very important company's 1800 number, the call is usually answered by a teleoperator who is miles away, working for an outsourcing company. These companies are known as call centres. Call centres are companies that use new communication technologies to employ workers residing in countries where salaries are low. Even though there are many companies providing outsourcing services, they all look alike. They sell a youthful, casual image associated with advanced technologies and values, such as freedom and dynamism. Nevertheless, none of the above is true. As a result of this outsourcing, call-centre operators, who usually speak a foreign language, hide their true location and identity. These workers are trained to keep call control through a series of rules and protocols followed during the calls. Call centres aim at maximising their productivity, risking workers to be psychologically burnt out. Call Center Experience! is a small-scale call centre that allows us to make calls using a personal computer connected to the Internet. As it’s usual in call centres, participants will have to be trained in order to reach our goals. They will receive a short course on how to deactivate the way call-centre agents are trained. Once they get the skills, they’ll call customer care centres from all over the world, seeking to strengthen a bond with teleoperators and get to know the real person behind the operator. The goal will be to have an affective chat in order to relocate operators, give them back their identity, and leave a record of this experience in a map. The sum of all contributions will configure a global cartography of delocalised communication.

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Alana Hunt This is a beautiful disturbance working to highlight the undercurrents that lie beneath the mechanised nature of so many social transactions in our daily lives. The tactical use of parasitic media forms, for pedagogic and practical purposes, has been put together in a wonderfully cheeky and accessible way. In terms of making us conscious of the people whose voices we encounter at the end of a 1800-number, this work attempts to personalise and make real what are otherwise a series of distant and alienated relations. But one also needs to ask difficult questions. And so I wonder, in the context that you are working, what does it mean to “personalise” and to “make real”, and how can such things be pushed to their fullest and most meaningful potential? Unfortunately, the 'sharing' section of the website was not working when I tried to access the work online, so I was unable to view the information that the project has gathered—what I imagine could be an ongoing collection of personal stories and conversations that might even allude to the nuanced, changing tone of a voice as it shifts from being mechanised and alienated to personalised and somewhat intimate. Was it possible to get to the "deeper issues", including people’s opinions about their choice of career and work place? Or did the material remain mostly at the level of statistics? Did you meet some people who enjoyed their work and were proud of their career choices? And what do opinions like this say about the premise of alienation that the work starts from? It is, of course, important to understand the alienating undercurrents of call centres and other similar corporate set ups, and to find our own ways to warm these otherwise cold experiences. Yet, I wonder, how this work can function to its fullest. On the one hand, we have a compilation of statistics and stories and, on the other hand, an attempt to establish what you have described as ‘ties of affection’. Yet, what necessitates our ties, what makes us affectionate, and what creates a community? In what ways did the workers themselves find it relevant or meaningful to engage in the more personalised mode of conversation you were seeking to establish through the project? There can never be an overarching formula for meaningful participatory adventures of this sort, but there is great potential to explore how practices like this can be deepened in a mutual and reciprocal fashion. I look forward to seeing this work accumulate over time."

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SPECULATIVE NUMISMATICS Christopher Lee COUNTRY Canada AUTHOR

185 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR The workshop tasks participants with designing a currency— a process that raises questions about the power of (exchange) standards, the representation of value, legitimacy (and as a corollary, its relationship to violence), and the transformative and antagonistic potential of graphic design practice... Perhaps to the point of destabilising the practical boundaries and sphere of concerns of said practice. The workshop tries to depolarise 'debt' and 'currency/money' as being 'bad' or 'good' and rather takes it up for its potential to be mobilised as a critical tool. What kind of communication approach do you use? The workshop format often begins with an informal presentation that I give, which is loosely structured around an essay I recently wrote for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (http://www.joaap.org/issue8/chrislee.htm). I try to start a discussion, as it can be helpful for participants to share their respective situations, i.e. where they are coming from in relation to the question/problem of currency, labour experiences, to articulate a motivation, to recognise a frustration. Then we work! But often there are lengthy debates that can be paralysing, and I take on more of a role of facilitator and try to intervene with critical questions here and there, or just to get things moving again. What, in your opinion, are the concrete benefits your communication offers to society? The confidence to approach currency and economics critically through practice—a demystification of these things. What becomes available is another field in which to act, experiment and struggle. Why is your work good communication work? A lot of it depends on the workshop participants because I try not to prescribe a desired outcome. It's also important for the participants to treat the workshop as an experiment, and not something to 'learn' from. I think what is powerful about the workshop when it goes well is that the participants discover that they can indeed articulate sophisticated critique, or at least create some kind of 'generative device' that propels thorough reflection.

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Katie Bush Money is (obviously) so commonplace and vital in and to society that we rarely take the time to consider or deconstruct its influence, beyond the fact that everyone apparently wants and needs more of it. For this and many other reasons, Speculative Numismatics is significant in its power to shift the institutionalised and preprogrammed macro-assumptions about currency and surface themes relating to commerce, power, and global economics. In parallel, it also shifts micro (personal) paradigms of self-worth, societal 'standing', class hierarchy, etc., and encourages us to (re)consider the role money plays in our own lives. Speculative Numismatics is compellingly subversive and punk. It challenges and unearths the ridiculousness of global monetary systems (built on the ownership and physical embodiment of freakishly decorative pieces of paper and shiny objects) by stripping down the system itself and exposing the ridiculousness of its parts to their very core. It empowers individuals (both in the workshop and afterwards, through documentation of the workshops findings) by helping us all to see the basic formulas of commercial culture: who benefits and who is oppressed. The role government plays in declaring its own currency also takes on an absurd tone in the context of this art piece. The production and control of legal and illegal tender and the 'seriousness' of manufacturing either is quickly exposed. Bank and government control over the emission of coins and banknotes for its own area of circulation (meant to secure and assure) and the regulations on the production of currency through monetary policy are quickly humbled by Speculative Numismatics, to the benefit of the participants and its audience."

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SAFETY FIRST Vladimír Turner, Ondřej Mladý COUNTRY Czech Republic AUTHORS

187 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR The topic of our performance is the problem of the bikeways in Prague. In some places in Prague, the bikeway or bikepath is totally useless; in other places (especially in the city centre), they are impassable. We wish to call attention to this. We are creating our own bikeway wherever we want. What kind of communication approach do you use? Video-documentation of a performance. What are, in your opinion, the concrete benefits offered to society through your communication? Pointing out on topics that we consider are important. What did you learn from creating your submitted work? It was fun. Why is your work good communication work? We received positive, ethusiastic reactions from many people. Where and how do you intend to implement your work? That was reaction on our dissatisfaction with the possibilities of moving by bike in the city of Prague.

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Alain Bieber This was really crazy: after having posted this project on rebel:art, it has been re-blogged by several Gizmodo and gadget blogs on the net. Vladimir even told me that he got proposals from a company to produce it on a large scale and make a commercial product out of it. This means that most people did not really see it as an artistic performance; they thought about it as a ‘cool tool’ from some clever design students. But it’s not important that the recipient understood who the sender of the message is—it’s more important that he understands the message. And this performance made its point clear in a very fun and intelligent, DIY way."

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PLAKATOPOLIS

Kaja Kisilak, Janez Plešnar, Goran Ivašić COUNTRY Slovenia AUTHORS



189 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR We have built a virtual city of Plakatopolis that aims to reflect the current state of outdoor advertising in Ljubljana. We are creating a space where a discussion about the state of Ljubljana's outdoor advertising can take place. What kind of communication approach do you use? We use social media to invite people to an open discussion about the subject. All opinions, suggestions, and thoughts are welcome. Participatory communication and cooperation in shaping the agenda are at the core of Plakatopolis. What, in your opinion, are the concrete benefits your communication offers to society? The benefit, if we suceed, is going to be a less visually and otherwise polluted environment in Ljubljana and, hopefully, Slovenia. A public space void of commercial, one-way messages that serve no other purpose than the stimulation of consumption. We hope Plakatopolis can also show that participation and active involvement can move boundaries of thinking, create social connections, and help people reevaluate what they have taken for granted, all of which has emancipatory potential and brings a sense of empowerment. What did you learn from creating your submitted work? We are in the process of learning and evaluating our approach. We are exploring the ways in which we can maximise interest and lead a fruitful and constructive debate. We are also getting in touch with various communities of people who invest their time and resources in whatever they stand for, which is an enriching experience. Why is your work good communication work? Becouse it opens a place for discussion on the streets of the virtual city of Plakatopolis to make up for the fact that in its real-life counterpart—the city of Ljubljana—there isn't any. We are in the proces of developing an agora of Plakatopolis, if you will, where people can meet to talk about the subject. Where and how do you intent do implement your work? Our current work is going to be the basis for future campaigns within the frame of Plakatopolis. We seek to get as much experience as possible, which will be usefull for future attempts at communicating effectively and responsibly.

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Aaron Gach I respect the aims of this project as set out by the authoring collective: to create "a space where a discussion [can occur] about the state in which Ljubljana has found itself in regard to outdoor advertising". With that said, these aims alone are not what I most appreciate about this work. Rather, I find it a rather remarkable gesture—in and of itself—to attempt to map out all of the outdoor advertisements in a city. This Sisyphean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Sisyphus) task accomplishes several interesting cultural goals: 1) the mapping aspect makes visible in a god's eye perspective the very issue being addressed; 2) the accrued imagery produces a unique chronological archive, documenting the urban landscape at this particular moment in time; 3) the use of social media to help produce this archive is an interesting, project-specific use of Facebook; 4) the act of documenting these sites requires a psychogeographical approach to navigating the city that sets up a dramatic, yet anti-climactic, contest between the individual and the so-called ‘powers-that-be’; and, 5) hopefully, the main goal of producing actionable dialogue regarding outdoor advertising can and will occur. Of this last point, I am the most skeptical. The danger of relying too heavily on social media for a project like this is that the project will scrape by on the periphery of people's attention—and, to a large degree, people who are already sympathetic to the project's aims to begin with. Could there be an analog, public expression of this project as well? Guided tours? Advertising safaris? Town hall meetings? Or, perhaps something akin to Center for Land Use Interpretation? Beyond being merely discursive, is it possible to push this project in a direction that can lead to effective social action?"

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FINITUDE

Keith Armstrong COUNTRY Australia AUTHOR

191 DESCRIPTION OF IDEA BY THE AUTHOR Finitude is a powerful, whimsical responsive installation for individuals who recline underneath the work and interact, while other audience members can watch simultaneously. It seeks a multimodal form of communication that includes all bodily senses and involves both touch sensitive interactivity, 3D moving imagery, moving sculptural objects, lighting, and multi-channel sound. Finitude (Mallee: Time) was inspired through a series of recent visits to and residencies in Australia's outback Mallee desert country. Further drawing on recent writings by Australian postcolonial author Paul Carter, the work is envisaged as an evolving ‘personal topography’ of place-discovery. By contrasting and melding readily available generalisations of the Mallee regions’ rational surfaces, climatic maps, and ecological systems with what Carter calls “a fine capillary system of interconnected words, places, memories and sensations” generated through my own idiosyncratic research processes, Finitude (Mallee Time) invokes a “dark writing” of place through outside eyes—an approach that avoids concentration upon what 'everyone else knows', to instead imagine and develop a sense how things might be. This non-didactic form of communication and process, I believe, sets the context through which the critical conversations we need to have can emerge. This basis in re-imagining and re-invention becomes the vehicle for the work’s more fundamental intention—as a meditative re-imagination of 'time' (and region) as finite resources. Towards this end, every object, process, and idea in the work is re-thought as having its own ‘time component’ or ‘residue’ that becomes deposited into our 'collective future'. Thought this way, Finitude (Mallee Time) suggests the poverty of predominant images of time as ‘mechanism’ to instead envisage time as a plastic cyclical medium that we can each choose to ‘give to’ or ‘take away from’ our future. Put another way, time has become finitude.

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Alana Hunt What I like most is the way the work has been conceived as something ‘evolving’ in time as much as it is about time. Recently, I’ve become more and more fond of the way in which (art)works unfold over time and in space, and I’ve come to feel how necessary time is to the many folds of my own work. But as a “personal topography of placediscovery”, I am curious to not just know, but to also feel in the work, what this journey means to you. Was there a Mallee for you before Paul Carter? Through the documentation available online and embedded in your own words about the work, Finitude is a beautifully executed installation, carefully developed over time with collaboration and a deep sensitivity. But in relation to Memefest’s interest in works that exist somehow ‘Beyond….’, Finitude, at least as it has been presented here, exists in the form of a deep and beautiful, though conventional, installation. Being greedy for this work, I must say that I want more. I want to access and understand the work’s ‘evolution’ over time. Beyond the installation I want to experience how the research, how your own journey outside of hotel rooms and exhibition spaces not only informs but in a different sense actually becomes the work. I am thinking of multifaceted components— layers and folds that fall outside the installation. A creative articulation; a plurality of forms that share and make legible the participatory relations, the sustainable choices, and the interconnected nature of our ecological and cultural worlds. In essence, I’m looking for a story of the work as journey."

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IN SEARCH EXTRADISCIPLI DIALOGUE INTERVEN DEBT AND BRISBANE TXT

Oliver Vodeb

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he first Queensland College of Art (QCA) Memefest ‘extradisciplinary’ workshop/seminar/intervention was held in late November 2012 in Brisbane. We invited a diverse international group for ten days to research debt further, to learn about it in relation to Brisbane, and to intervene. Through Memefest’s festival Friendly competition process, debt was researched in and outside of university environments in thirty-five countries. It was the first serious investigation on debt from a communication perspective. The workshop/seminar/intervention was the next logical step. The face-to-face gathering promised to be an intense experience. Participants came from different countries and cultural backgrounds: students, researchers, professors, professionals, activists, and artists. Many of us were connected through the Memefest and the QCA (Design Futures) network, either formally or informally. Some of us were already friends, and some were about to become friends. The event tried to break down certain established relations. For ex-

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ample, the student/professor relation was changed as the context became informal and the process situated outside of the regular curriculum. The relationships to our institutions were questioned, and the limitations of our work were explored. To establish substantial critique and practice intervention, our relationship to our disciplines needed to be rearticulated in the light of breaking out of them and connecting with the ‘extradisciplinary’. Theorising a “new institutional critique”, Brian Holmes has introduced the perspective of extradisciplinary investigations. Touching on the historic notion of the artistic critique of institutions and conceptualised as a new critique of the institutions of art, the concept of extradisciplinarity is directed towards practices on the intersections of art/theory/activism. This approach offers a critique that can be, in my opinion, extended to the field of communication design and the broader design profession. Holmes writes: At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice. The word tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline; while the notion of reflexivity now indicates a critical return to the departure point, an attempt to transform the initial discipline, to end its isolation, to open up new possibilities of expression, analysis, cooperation and commitment. This back-

and-forth movement, or rather, this transformative spiral, is the operative principle of what I will be calling extradisciplinary investigations. (Holmes 2009) What we tried to do at Memefest was to create a dynamic through which we would be able to unfold an expressive, analytic, and aesthetic practice and at the same time collaborate and (self) organise situations of social exchange that would question institutional roles, professional ideologies, and inter-personal hierarchies. The extradisciplinary ambition is to carry out rigorous investigations on terrains as far away from art as finance, biotech, geography or psychiatry, to bring forth on those terrains the “free play of the faculties” and to carry out a lucid and precise critique. These are deliberate and delirious experiments, unfolding by way of material forms, conceptual protocols and situations of social exchange. Satire, hallucination and political activism go hand in hand with careful study and technological sophistication. (Holmes 2009) What is needed to achieve necessary change is an approach that generates a reflexive circulation between disciplines and “involves critical reserves of marginal or counter-cultural positions” (Holmes 2009). It is this specifically structured relation between disciplines that establishes a shift, which has the potential to change the dynamics, flows, protocols, and logics of institutionalised cultures. Interestingly, most of us involved with Memefest were working at QCA’s design department, which was, at the

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time of the event, undergoing a radical change, moving from skills-based, service-providing design training to an intellectual education for design for social and environmental change, called Design Futures. This very process, if it wanted to succeed in a university that increasingly follows a corporate model, paired with bureaucratised and automated procedures, needed to become part of extradisciplinary investigations. This was partly our aim, and we also wanted to contribute to the local Brisbane scene, but mostly, we wanted to learn.

BRISBANE

We focused on one place: the city of Brisbane. As Queensland’s capital and the third-largest city in Australia, Brisbane plays a major role in the region’s economy. While debt is a technique through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled, its image is related to freedom and progress. This image is mostly reinforced and legitimised through media and advertising, and the pressures to repay debt under any circumstances has become a moral obligation as part of an inhuman commercial logic. Our project aimed to explore these contradictions and ways so as to expose them in the public sphere. Through Memefest, debt was approached from a communication perspective. Debt was the theme, the problem, the concept and the 2012 festival

outline. Since the workshop/seminar/ intervention participants had worked on the issue of debt in class and in the peerreviewed Friendly competition process— many of them in relation to assignments within the QCA Visual Communication program—we were already quite prepared. In search of extradisciplinary intervention, a difficult but beautiful process would need to be created: stepping out of the private self in which persons are formally enclosed, and creating a split from the social order that imposes this particular type of position in the first place. A common project. An intimate encounter with debt. An intimate encounter with each other, our institutional contexts, and with ourselves. This, as we learned, can be very difficult. As part of the working concept, we articulated four main steps that, in our opinion, were necessary to achieve a change in the logic that debt creates. First, knowledge that acquires agency; second, interventions that create a rupture in the order of things with the goal to redefine our fields of experience and the relationship between being, doing, and saying; third, dialogue; fourth, creating new emancipatory social institutions. The ten days were designed as a focused/semi-structured event. To begin, there was a two-day intensive theory/practice seminar. This was followed by field research—a tour around chosen debt-related Brisbane suburbs. Then, three groups worked on concrete inter-

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ventions that culminated in three bigger projects and several smaller ones. Participation was by invitation only. QCA staff George Petelin, AnneMarie Willis, Jason Grant, Tony Fry, and myself (Oliver Vodeb) mentored the whole process. Three awardees—Ivan Kozenitzky, Vladimir Turner, and Søren Rosenbak, recipients of the first Memefest/QCA Award for Imaginative Critical Intervention—were invited and flown to Brisbane. The other participants included QCA students, engaged members of the local Brisbane community, as well as surveillance studies scholar Dr Mark Andrejevic from the University of Queensland, visual communication lecturer/tutor from the University of Ballarat Ben Mangan (whose students also participated in the Friendly Competi-

tion process), and Southbank Institute of TAFE lecturer/ tutor Manfred Huber. In what follows, you can read and see what emerged from our efforts. An online preparation phase commenced partly through discussion, partly through readings and documentaries. The first two days were devoted to theoretical investigations of debt and presentations from awarded and curated projects submitted to Memefest. Accompanying discussions helped to frame our focus. Since we hoped to make a public intervention, we needed to learn more about the city. Brisbane’s wider area has a population of more than three million, and it covers a huge area; it is one of the most spread-out cities in the world. Through its strategies of urbanisation,

199 < TONY FRY, ANNE-MARIE WILLIS, OLIVER VODEB, AND GEORGE PETELIN.

the city is channelling the regimes of capitalisation into its centres. If we look in to the suburbs, besides the economic project, the social and political dimensions of urbanisation are intriguing. Suburbs are being made through private debt, and a fantastic dimension of social control is involved in this. It is a fact that indebted homeowners don’t go on strike. It is also a fact that the biggest debt-related profits are being made by credit-card lending and subprime-mortgage lending to the poorest people who don’t live in the urban centres or the gentrified suburbs. This is a technique similar to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, who catch third world countries in a web of debt from which they can never escape, paying interest so high that they have little or no money left over for essential functions. Urbanisation strategies go hand in hand with macro-economical strategies and corporate business strategies. Capital needs to control urbanisation, since

urbanisation is the result of class power in action. Urbanisation also includes manifestations of communication. Most of Brisbane’s suburbs are characterised by low levels of community participation, relative isolation, and sprawl. The city is characterised by a lack of the urban. Most of the suburbs are lacking a centre or squares, and public places, such as cafes or restaurants, are situated in shopping malls. Many suburbs demand the car as the mode of transport, which—except for the commercial/shopping areas—prevents strangers from meeting other strangers, one of the key characteristics of a city. It necessarily contributes to a depoliticised individualism as there are almost no nodes for free interplay and urban interaction based on common interests. Active, engaged politics can barely happen. Connect this to the Australian/Queensland media situation— a hyper-commercialised and monopolised media sphere—and think about the logic of the public sphere. Memefest/QCA awardee, architect

200 Ivan Kozenitzky described Brisbane as a ‘non-place’. The term, coined by Marc Augé in his work Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (2009), refers to places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as ‘places’. Examples of a non-place are a motorway, a hotel room, an airport, a supermarket, or even ATMs (think of how much time we spend in front of them). This description, of course, can’t be applied wholesale to Brisbane, as the city has some wonderful, vibrant, and interesting places and also a critical subculture that is partly rooted in the resistance of its troubled oppressive history. Still, (non)places, such as the poor suburbs of Capalaba and Rocklea, or the fancy and expensive tourist central-Brisbane attraction of Southbank—which is especially good in continuously erasing its own history through a mix of surveillance, imposed hyper order, discipline, spectacle, and sterility—seem to be perfect in maintaining the rule of debt. What we also observed is a high level of electronic surveillance, a huge amount of rules communicated through warning signs, and a somehow internalised and cultured following of rules (and, at the same time—interestingly—a tendency to break small, rather insignificant, rules) among many Brisbane residents. The one day trip around selected suburbs that the participants went on in a van was revealing for many of the Brisbane locals as well as the visitors. But it was difficult to think about interventions. (Non)places were big, and it is hard

to get in touch with people outside of designated commercial areas. Participation is key and the public has a right to participate for very pragmatic reasons. The idea that not only the affordances of physical environments are changed by development, but also that human experiences are proscribed and defined in doing so is elaborated by Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey. Harvey argues that the right to the city is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. (Harvey 2008) We were interested in public qualities—communicative potentials where space would become active through an

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201 < VLADIMIR TURNER, BEN MANGAN, AND SHAUN CRUICKSHANK IN THE RESEARCH VAN

DUTTON PARK, BRISBANE >

< CHEAP GROCERIES AND EXPIREDFOOD STORE, ROCKLEA, BRISBANE

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CAPALABA, BRISBANE