Speculation, Now: Essays and Artwork 9780822375906

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Speculation, Now Essays and Artwork

Speculation, Now Essays and Artwork Edited by Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao with Prem Krishnamurthy & Carin Kuoni

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

In association with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School

Contents

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Foreword Carin Kuoni

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Speculation, Now Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao

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Design Notes Prem Krishnamurthy

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40

52

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MODELS Josiah McElheny

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VERIFICATION Iddo Tavory

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OBFUSCATION Orit Halpern

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WITCHCRAFT Peter Geschiere

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MIRRORING Luke Fowler

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SPECULATIVE HEDGING Kenan Halabi

Visible and Invisible Sides of Reproduction Boris Groys

Dreams, Magic, and Mirrors: More Histories of Extraversion and Speculation in Central Africa Filip De Boeck

Hedge/Hog: Speculative Action in Financial Markets Satya Pemmaraju

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Preface to the third edition Walid Raad

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The Ethics of Deep Time Trevor Paglen

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86

92

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THE CONTEMPORARY Katherine Carl

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EXCEPTION, THE STATE OF Chen Tamir

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METAHISTORY Judith Barry

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WITHDRAWAL Graham Harman

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RISK Larissa Harris

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MODELS David Reinfurt

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UNLIKENESS McKenzie Wark

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TRADING MARKETS Byron Tucker

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CREDIT Dushko Petrovich

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INSURANCE Elka Krajewska

Colors, Cash, Fabric, and Trim: Fast-fashion Families in Downtown L.A. Christina Moon

Synchronicities Sherene Schostak

Post-Racial America? Addressing Racial Inequality Darrick Hamilton & William Darity, Jr.

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Psychics Special Lin + Lam

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Speculation with Data: Remittances,Refugees, and Migration Laura Kurgan

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STATES OF HALF-KNOWLEDGE: THE ECONOMY OF READING Marysia Lewandowska

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INFRASTRUCTURE Nader Vossoughian

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PROTOTYPE Benjamin Aranda

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STABILITY/INSTABILITY smudge studio

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BROKEN PROMISES, OR A QUICK SKETCH OF THE PROTOTYPE Jamer Hunt

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RUIN Beth Stryker

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MODELS Brian McGrath

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NEGLECT Reem Fadda

Diary: Towards an Architecture of Balkanization Srdjan Jovanovic´ Weiss

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Image: Visual Speculation and Political Change Victoria Hattam

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Night Thoughts: Unintended Consequences in the Modern Economy Mary Poovey

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146

over/sight Lize Mogel

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The Barzakh of the Image and the Speculative Scene of Possession Stefania Pandolfo

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GAMBLING Elizabeth Thomas

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RISK Holland Cotter

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TOXIC DEBT Dushko Petrovich

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INVESTMENT Özge Ersoy

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INTENTIONAL FAILURE Hakan Topal

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SHADOW WORLD Metahaven

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FORTUITOUS Aleksandra Wagner

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HALLUCINATION Nicolas Langlitz

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HALLUCINATION Joachim Koester

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MAYBE Sarah Oppenheimer

On the Matter of Change: Three Scenes of Collective Action Robert Sember

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Taking a Trip Gary Lincoff

202 204

The Paradox of Beginnings Angie Keefer & Lucy Skaer

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Speculation, After the Fact Arjun Appadurai

EXCEPTION, SENSITIVITY AS Chen Tamir

207 MIRRORING Amie Siegel 210

!?!?… Hans Haacke

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Speculation, Now The Expanded Field Biographies Acknowledgments Vera List Center for Art and Politics Considering Forgiveness

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Index

234 250

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265 INFRASTRUCTURE Céline Condorelli

270 272

Photo Credits Colophon

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Foreword Carin Kuoni

Nothing on this planet remains untouched by human activity: how then should we account for our entanglement with everything in this new era of the Anthropocene? What new frameworks are possible to guide action and discourse in the face of our complex connections with living and inanimate matter? How can we develop ethical positions that are responsive and accountable to divergent, unstable and vastly different constituents in areas ranging from ecology to finance? 1 This book does not propose to answer such questions. It does propose “speculation” as a framework for action and thought in order to be constructive in this historic moment of radical change and uncertainty. A (long) moment that is shaped by two striking developments: on the one hand, the environmental effects of human activity on a planetary scale, and on the other, the onset of a global economic crisis that is changing conventional notions of monetary, creative, affective, and social economies, the distribution of and access to resources, and the definitions of systems and infrastructure (►102 & 265 ). From rising sea temperatures to melting ice caps, from the mortgage crisis in the United States to massive urban developments occurring throughout the world, from local to globally distributed production cycles in information industries and manufacturing, the changes are profound. Speculation can be held in practice as a common, not individual, pursuit of happiness.

Speculation as Methodology Traditionally, speculation is associated with financial markets and defined as measuring investment ( ►154 ) risk ( ►73 & 146 ) against future returns. With this book, we propose speculation as a methodology that accommodates our awareness that things could be different, that there exists an alternative to analytical assessments that can be useful in navigating a world of systemic failures, new levels of complexity, and unobtainable standards. Such a methodology embraces the non-intentional contingencies of action, the unknowable, and thus the necessity to weigh and hold in balance a multitude of possibilities. As such, speculation facilitates a commitment to the imaginary as a realm of the simultaneous presence of multiple temporalities or conditions. If we are able to conceive of such a multi-imaginary, multi-temporal existence, we may find new ways of being engaged and politically effective.2

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Defined in such broad terms, speculation transcends disciplines. Practitioners in every field—artists, financiers, scientists, and politicians alike—share the moment of considering the potential outcome of actions, the moment of pause or suspension, a realm of the imagination where we mentally enact possible scenarios. What if this imaginary is seen not as the moment before a decision is taken, but is sustained in the moment of action? What if the imaginary is understood as a salient part of reality? Would such an adjustment in our understanding of reality change reality itself? It would require the practitioner to prepare for recognizing potential dimensions, depths, and directions in order to give meaning to an uncertain world where parameters we imagine to be in our control increasingly elude our grasp. Transdisciplinary by design and concept, Speculation, Now gathers the voices of artists, architects, designers, economists, scientists, and social thinkers who reflect on the speculative moment in their fields, ultimately affirming the significance of the imaginary. Commissioned for the book, theoretical premises and anecdotal accounts, artistic interventions and ethnographic fieldwork circumvent analytical methodologies and initiate adjustments that are open-ended and, in traditional terms, unverifiable. Therein lies one of the failures of Modernism, but also the subversive and political potential of speculation, and of recent philosophical movements such as Speculative Realism, of critical scholarship within the human sciences, artist projects, and financial and environmental design practices, which all reflect an embrace of this ethos.3 Speculation, Now proposes nonlinear, simultaneous temporalities in order to comprehend, develop plans of action for, and quite possibly change conditions that pit the individual against global flows of information and resources.

Speculation as History of the Present Speculation, Now mines public research on speculation conducted over two years at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and brings to the pages of this book multiple entry points that emerged during the center’s various public programs on that topic ( ►252) . Time was acutely on our mind as we curated the live events on speculation: we placed and timed them along their own temporal axis, which functioned not unlike a musical score with recurring refrains and themes. Three intensive daylong roundtable discussions among practitioners from

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different fields were crucial, providing the caesurae, the pause and focus from which all other events radiated. Many of the contributors to Speculation, Now participated in one or more of these roundtable intensives. Each session was orchestrated according to unconventional notations of reality: the first began with a masterful sleight-of-hand show of close-up coin tricks by a professional magician. The second roundtable featured two readings of tarot cards: one answered specific questions by the speakers in the room, the other was a “reading” of the speculation project itself. All the while, we collected the participants’ birthdays and employed them later as arbitrary ordering device: mailed on the speakers’ birthdays—and now sprinkled throughout the book— they feature key questions regarding speculation that arose during the roundtables, and by virtue of the mailing’s irrational timing served to further destabilize conventional thinking about time, causality, anticipation, and expert knowledge. Accordingly, the book reflects an unusual degree of risktaking and playfulness. The contributors to our glossary encircle the term “speculation” with a variety of related concepts, weaving a rich artistic, scientific, and cultural web around it. In the pages of this book, such a multiplicity of perspectives is enacted through the experimental distribution of interwoven voices, narrative strands, and temporalities that encourage nonlinear reading. A word on the artists. Like the written essays, their contributions were made for this book. The visual essays, however, are specific to the material foundations of the book. They punctuate the book structure with arrhythmic and unexpected moments, self-knowing ruptures that show the design itself to be openended and self-critical. In that way, these visuals are key: they don’t speak of, but embody, the speculative in vexing clarity: precisely tuned to the specifics of the page, the paper, the layout—all that you now hold in your hand—they demand deepest concentration as they expand on the unknowable. 1 Ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer coined the term ‘anthropocene’ in the 1980s, to describe a new geological era of humanity’s own making. It was popularized in an article by him and Nobel Prize laureate Paul J. Crutzen, “The ‘Anthropocene,’”Global Change Newsletter, 2000, 41: 17–18.

2 Philosopher Jacques Rancière’s demand to fictionalize reality in order to intervene politically is relevant. See Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics. Gabriel Rockhill, trans. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006. 3 See Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: On the Political Ecology of Things. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

Carin Kuoni

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Speculation, Now Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao

“All men by their very nature reach out to know,” says Aristotle (Metaph., A 1.980a21). If this is so, it discloses something important about the activities of knowing and desiring. They have at their core the same delight, that of reaching, and entail the same pain, that of falling short or being deficient. This disclosure may be already implied in a certain usage of Homer, for epic diction has the same verb (mnaomai) for “to be mindful, to have in mind, to direct one’s attention to” and “to woo, court, be a suitor.” Stationed at the edge of itself, or of its present knowledge, the thinking mind launches a suit for understanding into the unknown. So too the wooer stands at the edge of his value as a person and asserts a claim across the boundaries of another. Both mind and wooer reach out from what is known and actual to something different, possibly better, desired. Something else. Think about what that feels like. —Anne Carson, Eros The Bittersweet.

Speculation, Now? Reaching out, launching a suit for understanding into the unknown—these routine imperatives and their effects travel across the secular, modern disciplines and practices that make the contemporary ( ►53 ) world. Experimental science, artistic practice, design, divination, and mediated communication all share a spirit of speculation in this sense of reaching for the unknown sometimes with unpredictable effects, unintended consequences. The recognition of chance and contingency as significant factors shaping our physical and social world is both transhistorical and dynamic, changing across place and over time. Yet our protocols for constructing knowledge are based on a decision about what to hold constant, on how to decide what is certain, and what has already occurred. What is distinctive about contemporary life is that the scale and scope of the preoccupation with contingency and the many forms in which it appears has intensified with the transformations entailed by modernity, in particular with the “tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order,” as Max Weber put it in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Over the course of two centuries, the concept of risk ► ( 73 & 146 ) has become a dominant means of making sense of chance, through the calibration and quantification of possibilities and unknowns and has gained legitimacy as a mechanism

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of modern knowledge about contingency, gradually governing every aspect of our lives—biological, financial, political and social. Ironically, our conceptualization of chance into risk and risk into an object of knowledge introduces new doubts about how to recognize certainties and how to separate the known from the unknown. The overwhelmingly negative representation of contingency as risk, insecurity, danger and threat—whether in physical or moral terms—is symptomatic of the modern need to understand experience in terms of structure, pattern, order and system. Acting as if risk can be controlled, itself tied inextricably to the imaginary of uncertainty and contingency as risk, is a dominant form of producing economic and other value in our world, a way of placing specific values upon what is not known and what does not yet have a price. Such forms of accounting for and valuing the contingent preoccupy popular understandings of speculation, as practice and as habit of thought; at once alluding to the perception of the unknown and the yet to come as risk, and to the conception of risk and its management as opportunity for creating value based on that perception. Yet there are clear signs that the world we inhabit today and one we have inherited may have moved beyond our ability to conceive of the contingent and the unknown as manageable objects. The proliferation of discourses of crisis in every domain suggest increasing failures of ennumeration but also, more broadly, raises questions about existing frameworks for conceiving, measuring and dealing with uncertainty. Scholars and experts now debate not only the identity of the subjects and objects of knowledge but indeed the very possibility of a clear separation between the two. We remain committed, nevertheless, to acting even whilst questioning the composition of our subjective selves, our bodies, our beings, other beings, the partitions between beings, the partitioning of the world between real and virtual and the impact of our codes and ways of knowing on these compositions. Corresponding to these signs of existential anxiety, can we discern new ways of thinking about contingency and the uncertainty that the unexpected event or the unintended outcome invoke? Speculation, Now is a collective formulation and exploration of conditions that demand new ways of conceptualizing contingency—conditions that also demand a move away from conceiving speculation as a practice of calibrating risk and

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managing objects of risk to produce economic, political or social value. Our premise is this: it is not only possible but necessary to recognize the co-presence of numerous practices in diverse locations that trace other ways of understanding contingency and therefore other practices of speculation. Broadly and provisionally, we defined speculation as an array of practices and habits of thought concerned with conceptualizing contingency and the value it offers as an arena for configuring modes of living in a contemporary world skeptical about the value of inherited belief. Our collection, then, is an accumulation of observations about situations where a necessity to depart from calculation, to launch a suit into the unknown, is actively practiced and put into play, where normative intent may become murky and where other agencies come to the fore. It is an accumulation of observations about existing practices that fill the gap between the “ought” and the “is” and of practices that hold a skeptical attitude towards the relationship between what has occurred and what is about to occur. Speculation now is everywhere. It is a tacit premise underlying modern knowledge—the episteme of the liberal age, intensified under neoliberal conditions. We can hardly function, here and now, without imagining what is to come, without acting as if and without being ready to act on those anticipations. The present is beholden, in thrall, to multiple future anteriors, to a future multiple even as the future is contingent on present decisions. From finance to ecology, from science to art and politics, disciplinary practices depend upon imagining a future multiple—its possibilities and possible disappointments. Speculation and the very idea of modernity itself are inextricable: there is no modernity without the sustained practice and the engagement of thought that is tinged with doubt about the future or about continuity in some form, about human identity and ways of being human, without negotiation about the autonomy of forms and the sources of value. Speculation constantly brushes up against a lawlike structure and consistency attributed to nature or to the divine sovereign. We live then in a world shaped by speculation in this sense—released by secularization, which in turn demands a transcendental subject and a set of practices to compensate for the loss of the world’s theological center. Max Weber argues as much when he suggests that the speculative ethos of Calvinism vis-à-vis salvation and redemption is at the root of capitalism. Marx told

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us that “interest bearing capital is the mother of all insane forms,” forms whose values are always in flux and therefore open to speculation.1 Yet speculation as such remains enigmatic. We live, we know, in a world shaped by a speculative economy—a network that constricts our apprehension of the relationship between affect and effect. Our needs are anticipated, produced, shaped, reflected, and anticipated again as the cycle repeats itself. This enchanted process of wish fulfillment throws the world into flux, as distant forces are drawn together and generate unexpected outcomes, turbulence, and instability (►118 ). We anticipate in turn, keep anxious guard as we spy out, speculate about risks, threats, dangers, and opportunities that might arise from this turbulence of unpredicted and unpredictable outcomes that draw wish fulfillment out of catastrophe, destruction, loss, and abjection. Speculation is a regular and regulated practice within this economy, embodied in the instruments and rituals of risk management. It is a practice of inquiry into the unknown that proceeds by dragging and dropping the indeterminate and the inchoate unknown onto the ground on which we stand, where we stand now. But then the ground beneath our feet no longer holds. Latent possibilities inhabit our present and turn into calculable outcomes within this understanding of a speculative economy. Profit and loss are but the most limited and limiting imaginative horizons of these phantasmic calculations. Paradoxically, speculation is both necessary and unwelcome—there is no profit without speculation, no value that is not touched by a practiced brush against the pre-determined norm ordained by laws of cause and effect, by chains of demand and supply, and by methods for determining needs and their fulfillment. In the dominant framework of the exact sciences—in knowledge wedded to the production of objective truth—economy, thought, and language are unified in an infrastructure ( ►102 & 265 ) for controlled speculation. It is a formal apparatus for engaging the unknown by dividing the world into possible states and scenarios, calculating risks, threats, and opportunities, directed by specific goals and ideas. This infrastructure of instruments measures, calibrates, and converts uncertainties into risks that can be managed. Not surprisingly, our tacit acknowledgement of this calculative infrastructure for discerning possibility and potential renders other forms of speculation invisible.

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At the same time, this infrastructure also produces a fundamentally unstable world, one in which uncertainty can no longer be controlled, constrained, explained, and analyzed. In The Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel writes that “speculation itself may determine the fate of the object of speculation.” 2 The practice of speculation proleptically produces a world of potential, where uncertainty can no longer be analytically explained nor practically contained through calculative strategies. Now, where we stand, is uncertain, unstable, precarious. Overwhelmed by its association with the sphere of the economy, speculation is generally treated as an other of judicious, calculating, instrumental reason—as error, wild movement and avarice, leading reasoned practice astray, producing false values. Following Georges Bataille, however, we must also recognize in this understanding of speculation, an accursed share: at once an indivisible part and an uninvited participant at the table of deliberative democracy. Expanding this narrow, economistic understanding of speculation, we suggest, tacitly and collectively, another way to understand the practice of speculation: to speculate is to situate ourselves at an edge, a limit, an impasse. It is also to reach out from that edge, to peer over and to partake by peering over; speculation’s classical Latin roots, specere and speculari, suggest that looking, observing, and anticipating are the active components of the act of speculating. Yet to speculate is to observe something that is not evident, that remains obscure even when it has been speculated upon, or perhaps because it has been speculated upon. In this sense, speculation does not reference the unknown as such but the murky, intermediate terrain of potential. What has been spied on at the edge of the horizon, from the highest point in a watchtower—speculari—is seen but still unclear. Its object remains unverifiable. In its press over the limits of the evident, speculative practice is always disappointed, estranged from its desired object by a host of possible states and conditions of being. Its object is always another, that which is suspected to lurk behind what is seen and apprehended as form or as forms in a mirror. The Latin speculum, or mirror ( ►46 & 207 ) . is the other root from which speculation has derived its meaning in history. Once spied, form knits itself into a chain of being. Following its etymological unfolding, our book posits speculation as a habit of thought that connects, enchants, and wreaths what is with what might be—imagined not only as risk

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but also fantasy, desire, potential. We perceive however, that what emerges from a speculative process is and remains virtual. This does not mean that what emerges lacks reality, but rather that it remains in a process of potential realization. Our explorations suggest that the speculative moment is one in which a new understanding of uncertainty emerges—uncertainty conceived, not as the lack of knowledge about the content of any specific possibility but rather as the idea that a variety of actualizations can emerge from the event. What is possible cannot be understood in the image of the real (or vice versa) but in the image of a state of virtuality in which the actualization of any object implies the creation of divergent lines which correspond to a virtual multiplicity. While the term speculation labels a diverse set of practices that configure uncertainty and contingency, the deliberate individuation of contributions in this book suggests that each instance should be treated as a clue in unravelling the rhizomatic relations between these different instantiations of speculation. Our book, then, invites another look at the here and the now. We ask if another way of rendering speculation is possible. We agree, in other words, to speculate about speculation. Over many meetings, face to face, in artistic production, in visual exchanges, and in writings, the authors here have entered tacitly into an agreement to free speculation and to speculate freely from where they stand—to open speculation up to its many creative possibilities as a practice, to remain attentive to its potential contributions in our midst and, equally, to its thorny conundrums. Tacking between different scales of production— between the small-scale and the extended—the work gathered in this volume attempts to illuminate speculation as a process, as does our glossary, where ordinary words carry different weight, becoming other in relation to this pervasive and recalcitrant habit of thought.

Now, Speculation Now, speculation is entangled and spread through a wide range of disparate practices, all sharing the tacit assumption of an immanent logic of things and the impossibility of translation into transcendent forms but operating with different methods for valuing and experiencing this immanence. This understanding of immanence is translated into a world experienced viscerally as uncertain, demanding that all practitioners—whether artists,

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activists, scholars, scientists, financiers, or simply the men and women planning their distant retirement whom Mary Poovey invokes in her contribution—formulate and build an infrastructure for confronting a realm that is neither sensible nor intelligible, yet imaginable. At this threshold, the desire for knowing what is to come and what may come meets a practice of mindful preparation to confront the potential dimensions, depths, and directions that reside virtually in any situation, in any object of significance. Christina Moon’s ethnography of downtown LA’s Jobber Market vividly details the emergence of fast fashion and the speculations of immigrant entrepreneurs that are at the heart of this industry. Keeping pace with the tempo of this market means oscillating between the tremendous risk of being embedded in a system that operates around hard cash alone and hedging that risk by turning one’s own family into the infrastructure of manufacture and marketing.  The visceral anxiety of the young designer who struggles to stay ahead of trends while keeping pace with her producers in China as she dreams of “margins of predictability” embodies the kind of mindful preparation that speculative practice demands as much as the practice of highstakes financial traders. In some of the situations presented in this book, the demand of this world to acknowledge its uncertainty is so tacit that the realm of the imaginary has itself become a plane of everyday operation. Filip de Boeck’s account of the Congolese capital Kinshasa from its colonial establishment to its present day redevelopment delineates the imagined and imaginable worlds produce a proliferation of methods for inhabiting the urban materials at hand and for dealing with the dynamics of capital’s extraversion. In other situations, this demand intervenes directly to create new ground that becomes the plane of operation rather than a directive force that suggest ways of coexisting with the imaginary. In Satya Pemmaraju’s account, the Hedge/Hog trades by balancing ennumerable risks with suitable hedges. Pemmaraju suggests another form of speculation, where value is created precisely by conceiving risk differently from the market’s terms, by radically opposing the idea that risk can be priced with probabilistic accuracy. As the only acceptable strategy for engaging the indeterminate outcomes of such improbable combinations of distant and dissimilar objects, speculation remains a cloudy view over the horizon, without “clear answers to

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legitimate questions” even while providing a tactic for evaluating indeterminacy as the source of creativity and value. Speculation in this sense is also fundamentally open-ended. It creates an unstable and contingent ground, open to change, and provides a set of tools for engaging with the resulting uncertainty. Like Smith’s “men of speculation,” for experimental scientists, epistemic value is produced precisely by open-ended inquiry, cultivating, in other words, a speculative practice in order to make positive, empirical claims. At the limit of experimental science lie otherworldly, communicative beings associated with the religious and spiritual practices of divination, prophecy, and prediction. Considering the concept of the image from the perspective of Islamic philosophy in her contribution, anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo touches on the “ontological realm of the limit” from where images draw their power. She explores the concept of barzakh or the realm that stands inbetween “sensory experience and the manifestation of the divine.” If the barzakh functions as the passage to the divine it also opens up the a space for speculating upon other presences, distinct from the divine. Pandolfo draws on her ethnography of possession and her work with an Islamic healer in Morocco to explore the ways in which the experience of barzakh and its reach beyond the human introduces otherworldly presences as speculative presences that manifest the potential lives and failed encounters arising from the radical dispossession of subjects. In this way, the mediation of representational forms such as images and speech is at once affirmative and threatening, reinforcing the idea of the world as an entanglement of beings, sensed and un-sensable. Our conversations with mycologist Gary Lincoff and Sherene Schostak, a noted practitioner of tarot reading, reveal similar preoccupations, albeit in a different register. While de Boeck and Pandolfo’s anthropological accounts provide an opening onto another scene in the global generalization of speculation, Lincoff and Schostak’s voices add the dimension of inner voice and sustained interrogations of the invisible in relation to mystical and metaphysical experiences in familiar practices. In equal measure, speculation might involve acting as if a particular condition has been attained, or has been transcended, or perhaps it involves acting in a subjunctive mode, not accepting present conditions or acquiescing to accounts of what is but rather proposing that the condition under study could be

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transcended but has not yet been. In William Darity and Darrick Hamilton’s contribution to this book, the economists critique action that takes place as if race has already been transcended as a force of inequality in the economic sphere. Their work proposes something different—operating in the belief that the still-present racialization of the economy can be transcended. These propositions proceed by creating models ( ►27 & 7 5 & 130 ) that engage specific analytic questions concerning the economy, the polity, the environment, or society. The model provides the space to speculate, to act as if. In Laura Kurgan’s story of global migration, the difficulty of speculating with numbers invokes a parallel with the arts of storytelling. Because “nothing” in “data—despite the etymology of data as what is given—is simply given, in the sense of natural and neutral” she writes, “the stories told with data are often incomplete, uncertain, and open-ended.” On the other side of such open-endedness, the contributions from Boris Groys, the philosopher of art, and from the practicing artists in this volume theorize the relationship between speculation and invisibility, doubling, distinction, and repetition. Speculating on the relationship between a work and its copy or its expression in multiples, Groys, Walid Raad, Lize Mogel and Hans Haake explore the constant intervention of hidden and invisible strata into visible expression in the unique work of art. To speculate is to suspect and to sort between the multiple possibilities posed by these strata. Speculation, writes Groys, is both “a true reflection of reality that presents itself as an empirical fact” as well as “a reflection on reality that may be hidden behind its empirical image.” Reflection on doubles, multiples, repetitions, and distinctions have therefore come to preoccupy artistic practice in the contemporary moment. In Srdjan Jovanovic´Weiss’s diaristic entry in the book, the process of balkanization and its proliferation as a virus into disparate architectural situations across the globe—from Manhattan to Mongolia—signifies the hold of distinction and the possibility of mutation from within, even as visible expressions deceive the viewer into a false sense of coherence by establishing an equivalence among objects along the dimensions of scale, color, and process. Lin + Lam’s “Psychic Special” takes a visual field through time, presenting the field as if it were unchanged by time. As in the children’s game of “spot the differences,” time intervenes

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in the form of subtle, poetic alterations of the field, the photographic double capturing a catalogue of invisibilities at work. In Robert Sember’s reflection on the collective Ultra-red and its establishment of a relationship between artistic practice and political activism, he claims radical change can only emerge from resisting the repetition of “established institutional and aesthetic forms.” He names that resistance speculation, arguing that in that moment activism moves from analysis to “organizing the space of reception above and beyond the analysis itself.” The speculative moment—in which a new world is envisioned and striven for—is therefore the moment in which radical change is possible, but only through the enactment of a “space of reception,” as yet unborn.

Speculation, Now, Again Whether I describe myself as an artist, a scholar, or a market maker who gives value to different things, I must also speculate on what is to be held in common. In his exploration of the emergence of a modern “aesthetic regime,” philosopher Jacques Rancière explains that the aesthetic regime constitutes the “opening of a space where there is no hierarchical presupposition,”3 because the idea of aesthetic judgment presupposes a community of equals. In this sense the modern aesthetic regime is a pedagogic apparatus with significant consequences for the forms of democratic politics and for its staging, for “politics also obeys this principle of a judgment that anticipates a possible common sense or possible community.”4 The work gathered together in this book reaches for that understanding of practices held in common. Although individuated by design, as a book the contributions enact a movement away from the individual reflection or the analytic calculus of the individual author. Under this premise, speculation moves away from its two commonly held understandings associated with anticipation, calculation, and positioning on the one hand, and the creativity and imagination associated with privileged practitioners on the other hand. Our book is an invitation to speculate differently about speculation—to embrace its radical possibilities for collective creativity by identifying its proliferating sites of operation and the rhizomatic process by which speculations proliferate forms and substances. Speculation, Now is a collection in three distinct registers:

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first, a set of reflections from practitioners in various fields on speculation as a method in their discipline or field of operation; second, a set of figurations that formally investigate the speculative method or deploy speculation as a method; and third, a voluminous glossary authored by distinguished practitioners, which takes terms having a kinship to speculation as practice, method, and a form of the real and reframes those terms actively into a vocabulary for investigating speculation. Our object comes into view as these registers intersect actively and by design. At the edge of the possible, I affirm and inhabit failure as a real possibility when I speculate. Paradoxically, I also continue to risk failure, risk disappointment, as if my speculation made no difference, as if I could never tell whether my speculation came true or not. I continue to hold two possibilities at once, risking and affirming. I change something and yet continue as if nothing has changed. I act with the knowledge that the world can be changed in unpredictable ways by action, even when I act directed by a specific goal, goaded by a certain ambition. I have faith in cause and yet I am aware of a hidden, contingent force that lurks behind—the real behind the empirical, the true form reflected in the mirror. I act today assuming a future scenario—I act as if it were the case and I then enact a possible world, acting now. But now, where we stand, is uncertain, unstable, precarious. The unknown still lives on as time and desire, in the indeterminate time scales of the material and the oneiric worlds affected by these acts of conjuring value and producing need. Another kind of speculation is necessary to address these indeterminate effects, these uncertain paths that apparently lie beyond calculation. This then forms the imperative to speculate, now, again. 1 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1909), p. 547. 2 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, [1900] 1978), p. 352

3 Gavin Arnall, Laura Gandolfi, and Enea Zaramella, “Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An Interview with Jacques Rancière.” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 2 (Winter 2012): p. 296. 4 Ibid.

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Design Notes Prem Krishnamurthy

Design is sometimes mistakenly considered a posterior act—one that happens after writing, editing, or curating. This sequence, now ingrained in cycles of production and publishing, is a relative newcomer to the scene. The division of design’s labor into discrete steps and fixed responsibilities establishes a smooth workflow that exists, above all, to create efficiency rather than to encourage progressive developments within the dis- MODELS cipline. Counterexamples against this specialization— What is a model when it comes the visual arts? The from printer-publishers such as Aldus Manutius in the to history of the twentieth Italian Renaissance and Jack Stauffacher in twentieth- century offers numerous of paintings and century San Francisco, curator-architect-designers such examples sculptures in the form of as El Lissitzky in Soviet Russia and Arnold Bode in Kassel, models or diagrams, seemingly to apply to a world to groundbreaking collaborations such as the inter- scaled well beyond their own limited woven work of Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, and bounds. From the littlework of Hilma af Klint Jerome Agel that generated The Medium is the Massage known (ca. 1905), the woman who (1967) 1 —serve as high-points within the history of invented abstract painting, Vladimir Tatlin’s famous design and its related activities. These figures and situa- to tower proposal Monument tions suggest an integrated approach to exhibition-mak- to the Third International Mike Kelley’s ing and publishing that spans the range from content (1919–20),  landscape built from development to composing type. Such slipperiness, an memory, Educational Complex or Isa Genzken’s inability to split labor into singular and autonomously (1995),  protest in New Buildings defined roles, becomes an essential condition of similarly for Berlin (2002), artists have used their sensitivity experimental and genre-bending design work. to the scale of the body in This book follows its own embedded model ( ►27 constructing images and of both utopian & 75 & 130 ) of production, developed through idio- experiences and dystopian visions of syncratic means. Beginning with three multidisciplinary society. For physicists or roundtables, the Speculation, Now project integrated economists, a model is from the outset questions of design alongside contri- defined as akin to a theory: representation of some butions on the multiple valences of speculation by con- aaspect of the world that can tributors from diverse fields. At the first roundtable, my be tested and then confirmed rejected. In contrast, presentation focused on examples of future-oriented or for architects or the city and variable design systems. Following the event, Carin council, a model is something can be used as a kind of Kuoni invited me to conceive of a communicative format that plan or set of instructions.  Yet models created by to bridge the considerable gap of time between the first and second roundtables, as well as to engage the loose artists differ from other fellowship that had been formed. Emerging out of these conJosiah McElheny versations, I designed a series of open-ended postcards (reproduced in this volume on endpapers and on pages 32 , 78 , 171, and 209) to mail to a small group of participants and friends. Timed for delivery on the successive birthdays of the event contributors (yet without explicitly announcing this structure), the postcards

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formed an occasional edition with a mysterious and unfolding rhythm. Each card featured a question about speculation generated during the roundtable and built upon the previous card with the accrual of a new typographic voice. Rather than functioning as a preconceived series with a fixed logic and sequence, the cards instead served as temporal breadcrumbs from one event to the next. Connecting a dispersed and dispatypes of models with regard to why they are made or how they rate community, this initial design manifestation sugfunction and age. For artists, gested the ongoing questioning and establishment of the a model is something that does not necessarily describe the project’s contours. world as it is or will be, but As the project developed from those initial instead it delineates various aspects of “an alternative roundtables and additional programs into the conceppresent.” Such artworks often tion of this book, Carin and Vyjayanthi Rao invited me propose possible variations on the social, personal, to be part of the next stage, as both book designer and or political order of the a co-editor. This allowed for unique opportunities and day, demonstrated through aesthetics, abstraction, exchanges. For example, the simultaneity of roles and satire, imagination, or even high-level discussion around design that happened early through an absurd scale. By “present” I mean something in the process led us to commission some pieces with two-fold: a possible, however consideration of their eventual visual form. The glossary impractical, present that differs from the world as was conceived as a series of short, subjective texts, which it is, but also a sense of would function as a persistent sidebar to the entire book. persistence. The artist’s model may survive well Given this compact format, we were able to invite an even beyond the moment of its wider range of contributors. Yet once the glossary entries construction and continue to echo as a renewable, endlessly arrived, it became clear that our expectations would not reinventable idea revisited be met precisely—but would, in fact, be exceeded by by succeeding generations. These works are not about the the diverse and wonderful pieces offered by the book’s future — as in plans — nor are authors. Instead of following a single format, the works they about an idea that may be proved or superseded. They are demonstrate a heterogeneity that reflects the different about the potential for the backgrounds and viewpoints of their authors. This variindividual, any individual, to explore a vision of a ation within the glossary is mirrored ( ►46 & 207 ) on different now, without a broader scale, in the large range of voices, texts, and f limits. ormats contained in the book. Creating a book always involves a speculative gap, even when the designer knows the book content intimately. Based on a best guess of the book’s interior— derived from the initial manuscript, images, and other materiJosiah McElheny als—the designer develops a format for a book, including grids, guidelines, image structures, typographic styles, and rules. This planning is typically meticulous, measured, and highly analytical. For example, Richard Hollis, the seminal British designer who designed Ways of Seeing in concert with John

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Berger and other collaborators, is a strong example for planning a book’s content precisely. When preparing for the design of painter Bridget Riley’s monograph, Hollis diagrammed out the relative sizes of every painting to be reproduced in the book. An exquisite drawing of overlapping colored outlines, this exercise allowed Hollis to determine the optimum book size. The format he chose allows every painting in the monograph, from smallest to largest, to be reproduced at nearly the same scale yet be optimally discernible. Hollis’s complex and rigorous approach is a thorough attempt to know the book entirely—before it even exists. Yet, in my own experience, even such a thoughtful (and necessary) exercise in pre-visualization is an imperfect mapping at best—demonstrated most vividly by Speculation, Now. However much one might plan for a book (or any design), in the best cases one cannot avoid it happening on its own terms. Unexpected contingencies emerge that both challenge the system and demand an expanded sense of what constitutes internal structure. A writer contributes a thousand words instead of three hundred; an artist poses a logical quandary that evades its context and requires a new frame to emerge. In a more conventional publishing situation, such ruptures might be rejected with a stern note to the contributor requesting compliance. Here, given the interplay of editing and design, the system itself can flex to welcome such works. Their inclusion in this volume on speculation allows for a more interesting, complex, and engaging book to emerge. Within a modernist or functionalist trajectory, we have come to appreciate design in proportion to how neatly it appears to solve a given problem. Even if the result is merely well-ordered, we often deem it a classic. Such clean design “solutions” might have been sufficient in the mid-twentieth century moment, directly after the chaos of world wars and human tragedies, when the value of visualizing order was of primary social importance. However, in our contemporary context, characterized by smooth mathematical abstractions that engender belief and investment (►154 ) through a sleek suspension of risk (►73 & 146 ), design systems that are spiky, ungainly, and self-conscious of their own ephemerality are more essential. Rather than attributing beauty to those objects that evince a perfect surface—like a flawless bubble—let us acknowledge that the most telling systems are those that allow themselves to fail, in a visible manner. Their radical transparency opens up a space for action, consideration, and

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change. It is this potential for failure, embedded within thorough analysis and planning, that is the speculative action in design. The design of this book attempts to render this unpredictability in myriad ways, ranging from the macro-structural to the micro-typographic. The sequencing of the book weaves together diverse visual and textual narratives in a polyrhythmic order. Multiple typographic voices are also at play; these range from DTL Paradox, a handsome Dutch serif, for the book’s main text column; to Nitti Typewriter, a quirky monospaced typeface, for the persistent glossary sidebars; and finally Karbon, a spurless sans-serif with faint echoes of FF Dax (by happenstance, also the abbreviated name of the German stock exchange), which provides the titling and captioning type for the book. The contrasting typography of the page numbering follows its own evolving structure. Each folio is set in a unique typeface, for a total of 272 fonts. These faces were generated by the Metaflop type generator, a contemporary application based on mathematician Donald Knuth’s metafont. Developed in the late 1970s, metafont describes a letter’s intrinsic proportions and scale, rendering them with a virtual pen to produce the font’s characteristic look.2 One could say that it lays out the underlying causes of a typeface rather than the exterior symptoms. As a constantly shifting variable within Speculation, Now, these Metaflop folios—each generated by inputting parameter values such as “width,” “proportion,” and “superness”—chart the book’s transformation over the course of its pages and render visible the volume’s own uncertainty. Through such devices, the design of the book is defamiliarized in order to engender a situation of pause and closer reflection: upon the varied contents herein, their interrelationships, and the design’s organizational structure—itself a work within the book, even as it frames the book simultaneously. 1 Designer/editor Adam Michaels touches upon this in his introduction to The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback, his book-length study (with Jeffrey Schnapp) of the age of experimental publishing in the 1960s epitomized by Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage.

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2 David Reinfurt of Dexter Sinister (who is represented in this book through his contribution on p. 75) has developed an impressive and extensive body of work using and reflecting upon Metafont and its native typesetting language, TeX. My own first exposure to Metafont was through my mother’s work as a software developer, which surely programmed me well for such variable and nerdy pursuits.

June 4, 2010, in cards by Sherene Shostak.

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Visible and Invisible Sides of Reproduction Boris Groys

Speculation is a word with at least two meanings. The first is “mirroring (►46 & 206 ),” from the Latin speculum (mirror). Here speculation means a true reflection of reality that presents itself as an empirical fact. But speculation can also mean a reflection on reality that may be hidden behind its empirical image. In other words, speculation is a reflection on the mirror and not merely the reflection in the mirror. Speculation refers to the double character of any reproduction that has its visible and invisible sides. In the following I would like to speculate on the difference between modern (mechanical) and contemporary (►53 ) (digital) forms of reflection/reproduction/speculation. How original is our contemporaneity—is it merely a repetition of modernity and its innovations, projects, and frustrations? This question is equally relevant for contemporary art and politics. I believe that our contemporary time is, indeed, a repetition of modernity, but it is an original repetition, and it is radically different from the modern. I would like to analyze this difference by comparing two modes of reproduction: mechanical and digital. The modern mode of reproduction is the mechanical. In his classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin famously assumed the possibility of perfect reproduction, which made it no longer possible to visually distinguish between an original and its copy. He then raised the question of whether the elimination of the visual distinction between original and copy meant the elimination of the distinction itself. As we know, Benjamin answered this question

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in the negative. The disappearance of the visual distinction between the original and the copy does not eliminate another— invisible, but for Benjamin no less real—distinction between them: the original has an aura that the copy does not.1 Benjamin’s formulations are well known: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its here and now, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” 2 VERIFICATION The dream of verification He continues: “These ‘here’ and ‘now’ of the original conwas the empiricist attempt stitute the concept of its authenticity, and lay basis for to ground both science and language in observations. To the notion of a tradition that has up to the present day get rid of pesky metaphysics passed this object along as something having a self and and other speculative attempts to come to terms with an identity.” 3 The copy, by contrast, is siteless, ahistorithe world, philosophers of cal: from the beginning it appears as potential multiplicscience required assertions to be verifiable — that is, to ity. Accordingly, for Benjamin photography and film are be consonant with independent the most modern art forms. From their inception they observations. As philosophers of the early twentiethare mechanically produced and destined for topologicentury Vienna Circle held, cally undetermined circulation. In other words, they are statements that couldn’t be verifiable in such a way originally copies. Thus, the age of mechanical reproducshould be discarded as idle tion cannot produce anything truly original—it can only speculation, or at least be met with the philosopher’s eliminate the aura, or erase the originality of the originals, stony silence. that it has inherited from the previous times. As a profusion of critics has argued ever since, At first glance, this claim of essential non-originalhowever, verification ity of modernity seems a bit strange, because the notion occupies an unattainable horizon. Karl Popper noted of originality was at the center of the modern culture and, that some theories are especially, modernist art. Indeed, every serious artist of verified no matter what the observations are: the avant-garde insisted on the originality of his or her anything an analysand may art. However, their notion of originality was completely tell her analyst would only strengthen the analyst’s different from Benjamin’s. He did not ask the question: explanatory framework; for how original—new, different—is an object compared to the believer, any observation proves the existence of objects from the historical past? Rather, Benjamin was God. Verification, it interested in the ability of the artwork to secure its origiturns out, may not be such a straightforward criterion nality for the future. For Benjamin, to be original means for evaluating either meaning to be irreproducible. Originality is the relationship of the or science. Moreover, as others have noted, the methods artwork not to the past, but to the future. and standards for verifying Benjamin’s concept of originality is obviously rooted in his understanding of nature, because only the natuIddo Tavory ral is supposed to be inimitable and irreproducible by technical means. Not accidentally, Benjamin uses the experience of being in the middle of a splendid Italian landscape as a model (►27 & 75 & 130 ) of an auratic experience that cannot be reproduced without losing its “here and now.”4 Even if Benjamin is ready to

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accept that nature can be technically reproduced and perfectly simulated on the level of its materiality and its visual form, he still insists on the impossibility to reproduce its inscription in the here and now. One can say, it is dependent on the genius loci—the invisible spirit that gives to visible things their place. On the other hand, contemporary, digital reproduction is by no means siteless, its circulation is not topologically observations are themselves undetermined, and it does not present itself in the form theoretically informed; is impossible to access of multiplicity. On the Internet every piece of data has its it observations from an innocent address—and, accordingly, its place. This place is deter- point of view. For all the skepticism, mined by the Internet’s genius loci—the URL. The same a version of verification data with a different address is different data. The aura lives on. It lives as some attempt to gain does not get lost but, rather, replaced with a different philosophers’ “empirical adequacy,” and, aura. On the Internet the circulation of digital data pro- more importantly, it remains in the pragmatist duces not copies but new originals. And this circulation central notion that meaning is is perfectly traceable. The individual datum never gets always defined through its consequences for and in deterritorialized. action. This, as William James Moreover, every image or text on the Internet argued, is also the case for notion of truth. Truth is has not only its specific unique place but also unique the made through the resonance of moment of appearance. It is not so much the digital experiences and arguments. is a weaker notion of image or text itself as the image or text file, the digital It verification — rather than data, that remains identical through the process of its being consonant with a reality, reproduction and distribution. The image file is not an mind-independent pragmatist verification is actual image—the file is invisible. The digital image is a principle of experience. yet, the juxtaposition of an effect of the visualization of the invisible image file, of And speculation and experience invisible digital data. Accordingly, a digital image cannot remains central. We go about lives speculating, but be strictly copied (as an analogue, mechanically repro- our also refuting, provisionally ducible image can) but always only newly staged or per- verifying, and rethinking our in relation to formed. The digital image begins to function like a piece speculations the experiences we encounter. of music, whose score, as it is generally known, is not identical to the piece—the score being not audible, but silent. One can argue that digitalization turns visual arts into performing arts. This performative character of digital reproduction means, however, that the visual correspondence between the original and the copy—or, rather, the visual corIddo Tavory respondence among different visualizations of the same image file—cannot be guaranteed. As a music performance is always different from other performances of the same score, a digitalized image or text appears always in a new form—determined by the formats and software that a particular user applies when

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he or she makes the digital data appear on a screen. As users, we rely on our computers to visit the digital data at its place and give it time to appear “here and now.” Thus, every digital copy has its own “here and now—an aura of originality—that a mechanical copy does not have. This change can be described as a moment of break between modernity and contemporaneity: digital reproduction is original (compared to mechanical reproducOBFUSCATION To obfuscate is to make tion) because it produces originals and not copies. confusing, to “becloud,” In this sense one could speak about digitalizato hide and complicate the intended meaning of a message. tion as a return to nature. However, I would argue that the One should not confuse digital age does not only effectuate a return to the natusuch language with noise. Obfuscation is not about the ral, but also to the super-natural. We make the digital files corruption of a signal, so appear by clicking on their names. By so doing we activate much as the camouflage of a message. It’s about patterns invisible programs that deliver these files to us. One could of mist that make navigation say that we conjure the data as earlier we were conjuring difficult, but serve as beacons, or portents, of spirits by calling their names. However, in this way the future storms. spirits—good or bad spirits, gods or demons—become Clouds have long been of concern to strategists not only visible to us, but we also become visible to them. and scientists. The first This is precisely what happens today when we use the futures markets emerged over agriculture in Chicago Internet to call the data: we become visible, traceable for in the nineteenth century, the spirits that we call. It is no secret that big corporations, but already in the sixteenth century insurance companies state agencies, and others permanently track our personal and trading companies guessed use of the Internet to create an image of our behavior, on the success of expeditions and betted, essentially, on tastes, environment, and personal lives. Every production the weather. The military has of a digital image is at the same time a manifestation of always been at the mercy of nature. our own image—an act of self-visualization. Making a In 1896 the first digital copy, I make a copy of myself—and offer this copy International Cloud Atlas appeared. It was a miracle of to an invisible spectator hidden behind the surface of my political coordination and personal computer’s screen. This is also a fundamental an astonishing scientific achievement. It presented an difference between mechanical and digital reproduction. international standard in Friedrich Nietzsche continued his famous prothree languages — English, French, and German — for the nouncement “God is dead” by writing that we lost the assessment of clouds. Now spectator of our souls—and because of that, the souls clouds had order, patterns, types. Even if no one yet themselves. After Nietzsche and during the whole epoch knew how they were made, of mechanical reproduction we heard a lot about the demise of subjectivity. We heard from Martin Heidegger that die Orit Halpern Sprache spricht (language speaks), rather than an individual who speaks the language. We heard from Marshall McLuhan that the medium was the message. Later Derridean deconstruction and Deleuzian machines of desire rid us of the last illusions concerning the possibility of identifying and stabilizing subjectivity.

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However, now the universal spectator is back, and our “virtual” or “digital souls” have become traceable and visible again. Our experience of contemporaneity is defined not so much by the presence of data to us as spectators but, rather, by our presence to the gaze of the hidden and unknown spectator. We do not know if this unknown spectator is the benign God or a malin génie. Of course, we can—to a certain degree— the truth could be gleaned analyze the activities of Google and Facebook, but we not by understanding but organizing. It paved cannot exclude the possibility of a completely unknown by the way for the nascent spectator—because this possibility is technically given. science of meteorology — the prediction of In other words, the hidden universal spectator of the scientific weather. Furthermore, the Internet can be imagined only as a subject of universal International Cloud Atlas in the words of its conspiracy. The reaction to this universal conspiracy was, reviewers, notable for its necessarily takes the form of a counter-conspiracy: one “beauty.” These beautiful the portents of will to protect one’s soul from an evil eye. The contempo- clouds, fortune either fair or rary subjectivity can no longer rely on its dissolution in terrible for mercenaries, generals, the flow of signifiers because this flow has become con- colonialists, and homesteaders alike, inaugurated the careful study trollable and traceable. the very misty. Scientific Of course, individuals and organizations try of truth became a matter of to escape this total visibility by creating sophisticated aesthetic judgments; tying world of mist to that of systems of passwords and data protection. Today, sub- the knowledge, these atlases jectivity has become a technical construction: the con- inaugurated calculated on the heavens. temporary subject is defined as an owner of a set of speculation These atlases that unified passwords that he or she knows and other people do the world in a systematic of the cloudy might not. The contemporary subject is primarily a keeper of study have something to say to our a secret. In a certain way this is a very traditional defi- present. Today clouds are the rage. The concepts nition of the subject: the subject was always defined all of big data, data mining, and as knowing something about oneself that only God analytics are bandied as the of the next economy. might know but that other people could not because harbinger Masses of information are they are ontologically prevented from reading one’s supposed to be the resources which the future can be thoughts. However, today, one has not an ontologi- by conquered — by which space, cally but, rather, a technically protected secret. The time, and subjectivity can made visible, knowable, Internet is the place at which the subject is originally be manageable. The language is constituted as transparent and observable—and only telling: data are “beautiful;” afterwards adds technical protection to conceal the we like to “visualize.” One originally revealed secret. However, every technical protection Orit Halpern can be broken. Today, the hermeneutiker has become a hacker. The contemporary Internet is a place of cyber wars in which the secret is the prize. To know the secret means to put the subject that is constituted by this secret under control—the cyber wars are the wars of subjectivation and de-subjectivation. But

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these wars can take place only because the Internet is originally the place of transparency. Thus, a new Utopian dream emerges which is the truly contemporary dream—it is a dream of an unbreakable code word that can forever protect our subjectivity. We want to define ourselves as a secret that would be even more secretive than the ontological secret—the secret that even God would not be able to break. The parawonders what it is that is being seen in such cloudiness? digmatic example of such a dream can be found in the And what is being obfuscated practice of WikiLeaks. by or behind these clouds? Perhaps nothing. This is In recent times we have become accustomed to speculation without alignment protests and revolts in the name of particular identities to the specular. The desire to command space, the capacity to and interests; the revolts in the name of universal projsee territory, has disappeared ects, such as Liberalism or Communism, seem to belong into the raw act of gathering and organizing data. to the past. But the activities of WikiLeaks serve no parObfuscation takes on a new ticular identities or interests. Their goal is general and logic, no longer hiding some invisible truth. The clouds universal: to guarantee the free flow of information. of our present draw us into Thus, the phenomenon of WikiLeaks signals a reappeara desire to enter and never leave the network. We appear ance of universalism in politics—not just universalism’s to enjoy being wrapped in return, but also a deep transformation of the notion of the sensuous and senseless embrace of our data. We like universalism over recent decades. WikiLeaks is not a being inside the fog. We political party. It does not offer any universal vision of have embraced the beauty and aesthetics of the atlas, and society, political program, or ideology that would be our clouds coordinate the designed to spiritually or politically unify mankind. time and space of our world. But we have abandoned the Rather, WikiLeaks offers a sum of technical means that search for a natural, true, would allow the universal access to any specific, particuand objective order. Bounding rationality, trading with lar content. The universality of idea is here substituted by algorithms, speculation is the universality of access. not about full information, but immersion into the data At the same time, the practice of WikiLeaks demmist. Visualization has onstrates that universal access can be provided only in replaced vision as we accede to an unremitting longing to the form of universal conspiracy. In an interview Julian continue analyzing a world Assange says: we no longer wish to see, but whose orderly cloudiness wraps us in delight.

Orit Halpern

So if you and I agree on a particular encryption code, and it is mathematically strong, then the forces of every superpower brought to bear on that code still cannot crack it. So a state can desire to do something to an individual, yet it is simply not possible for the state to do it—and in this sense, mathematics and individuals are stronger than superpowers.5

Transparency is made possible here only by radical non-transparency. Universal openness is based on the most perfect closure.

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The invisibility of contemporary subjectivity is guaranteed as long as its password is not hacked. Here we don’t witness any more the reduction of the invisible aura (or soul)—the reduction that opens the way for the uncontrolled mechanical reproduction of the visible objects. Rather, we are confronted with the passwordprotected invisibility that guarantees to the subjectivity the control over the practice of its digital manifestations. 1 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Horry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992). 2

Ibid., pp. 214–15.

3

Ibid., p. 214.

4 Ibid., p. 217. 5 Hans Ulrich Obrist, “In Conversation with Julian Assange, Part I,” e-flux journal 25 (May 2011), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/inconversation-with-julian-assangepart-i/.

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Dreams, Magic, and Mirrors: More Histories of Extraversion and Speculation in Central Africa Filip De Boeck

I am an important witch. I am a boss among the witches. I am talented and initiated. I have opened my own village of the night. During the night we eat well. We have lots of money. We feel sorry for the people in the village of the day. We own a “mystic” airplane that allows us to circulate everywhere in the Republic of Congo. At night we travel to Bandundu, Lower Congo, Mbuji-Mayi, Kananga, Mbandaka, and other places. I live in Kinshasa but friends from all over the country come to visit me. I also visit them. I also return home, in Kananga, where I work: I go to the market and sell my meat. I also sell human bones. They are used as spare car parts. When your car breaks down you can replace the broken part with a human bone. When I am not working like that I kill “animals” and I eat. There is one setback though. At night there are a lot of night soldiers around. These are all the soldiers that Mobutu left behind when he died. They don’t know what to do for a living. They are angry and do not like it when other airplanes than their own land in Kinshasa at night. They do not want to see other witches sell their meat on the markets of Kinshasa. The soldiers want to monopolize the market. On that market all items are very expensive. We are very unhappy about the way in which the prices keep going up. We only hope that the soldiers will eventually flee, since their Boss, Mobutu, is already dead.1

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The lines above, excerpted from a much longer narrative by a twelve-year-old Congolese boy accused of being a witch, are a testimony to the fact that the oneiric world of witchcraft (►4 1 ), with its nocturnal markets and all of the economic transactions, monetary exchanges, and price fluctuations that take place there, is omnipresent in the daily lives and minds of Congolese citizens. It has also been profoundly pene- WITCHCRAFT trated by the logic of capitalism, its speculative nature, ‘Witchcraft’ is often seen a hallmark of ‘traditional its unpredictability and volatility, its specific modes of as society’ in opposition to mobility, its risks (►73 & 146 ), calculations, and vacil- modern formations that, for like Ulrich Beck or lations, and all of the anxieti es and uncertainties that scholars Anthony Giddens are marked by come along with it. For centuries, within this Central- risk-taking. This is not djambe — a notion that African setting, the speculative character of capital has how locals now translate as been connected with the specular nature of the world sorcellerie or witchcraft — from everyday life itself, a world that oscillates around the two sides of the emerged during my field-work among speculum, the diurnal and the nocturnal, the first world the Maka in the forest of Cameroon. One of and the second world, the world of the living and of the Southeast my first surprises was to dead, of reality and its double, of the reverse and the discover that the most prized object was a ‘Madame obverse, the visible and the occulted, the material and magical Mylla–ring’ purchasable by the oneiric. And in this Central-African context, mirrors mail order from a lady in (►46 & 207 ), or mirroring elements such as a surface Paris. Such a ring would make its proprietor irresistable of water in a bowl, have always been used by diviners and in love affairs; but it could serve as protection other ritual specialists as the technology par excellence to also against witches, returning open up the invisible, reveal the unseen, facilitate a pas- their evil and making them ill their turn — which of course sage between the known world and the underworld, open in meant for victim that this up different temporal scales, and speculate about the hid- ring was a very aggressive of djambe. When I arrived den causes in the past of wrongs and misfortunes in the form in the region deep into the forest in 1971, I quickly present. that people could The mirror and the history of its introduction in noticed talk endlessly about ‘magic’ West Central Africa also take us back to one of the deci- and ‘witchcraft.’ But I was determined to ignore as sive historical periods in which merchant capitalism also much as possible what I saw as expanded across the world: the slave trade, which started more ‘traditional’ aspects of These were the heydays along the Atlantic coast of Africa in the fifteenth century life. of modernization theory and and continued to penetrate deep into the African conti- even anthropology was not nent until well into the nineteenth century.2 Between 1500 immune to this. I wanted to and 1830, an estimated eleven to fifteen million Africans were Peter Geschiere shipped off across the Atlantic to the New World.3 Not only did the Atlantic Middle Passage give rise to the invention of another kind of speculum, the speculum oris (originally a dentist’s tool to hold open the mouth, but used on board to force-feed slaves), but mirrors also played an important role

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as objects of barter on the African continent itself. After the Portuguese established a colony in Angola in the seventeenth century, a whole new political economy developed, generating new caravan and trading routes that traveled inland from the Atlantic coast to obtain rubber, ivory, beeswax, and slaves in exchange for various imported European commodities, including mirrors, but also beads, guns, cloth, and, more surprisingly perhaps, be a modern anthropologist, not to be burdened with Catholic statuary. By the mid-eighteenth century, the slave ‘traditional’ anthropological trails had deeply penetrated eastward. Through mission hobby-horses like witchcraft or kinship. People’s excited stations implanted along that eastward route, and through whispers about Madame Mylla the activities of African trading agents and itinerant pedand her terrible powers gave me a first hint of how dlers who acted as middlemen between Portuguese traddeeply these supposedly ers and local populations, statues of the Virgin Mother ‘traditional’ aspects of life were marked by constant Mary and other saints such as Saint Anthony (the patron innovation and therefore by saint of Portugal), together with their surrounding belief uncertainty and speculation. The villagers depicted systems and iconography, made their way to local marthe world of the djambe kets and villages. Along with the mirror as cult object, (witchcraft) as an endless battle in which it is vital this statuary was quickly absorbed and incorporated to surprise the other — the into local ritual universes that were hinging on a number victim or the opposing witch — and to break through his or of cults devoted to mahamba, a diverse and open-ended her protection. Of course, new class of spiritual entities among the Angolan Chokwe and sources of power have special advantage in such a contexvt. related peoples in Congo and Zambia. Even today, particIndeed, throughout Cameroon ular forms of disease and misfortune are associated with and in many other parts of Africa, there is now great particular mahaamb, and these spiritual agencies can also popular unrest about new forms be invoked to obtain something. Mahaamb may be either of witchcraft because older forms of protection seem to be benevolent or malevolent and may consist of both a posiof no avail against them. It tive and a negative side. They may promote someone’s is the perpetual attraction of the new that makes witchcraft well-being, wealth, and luck, but they are also capable of discourses and practices — in provoking diseases of all kinds, death, and misfortune, Africa as elsewhere — at least in some respects unexpectedly especially when they have been neglected (►136 )—that is, close to what is often seen as when their ritual installation has not taken place for a long characteristic of modernity. This means also that people time.4 Around the statues of the Virgin Mother and other are constantly dealing with saints quickly emerged a new hamba spirit cult, which new threats and possibilities, which have to be tried out focused in particular on healing, hunting, commerce, and in practice and which can material wealth in cash, goods, and people. This new cult— in many ways a cargo cult, referred to as hamba dia santu (from Peter Geschiere Portuguese santo)—was incorporated into a larger class of other new mahamba spirits known as the mahamba ma putu (putw, putu, poto: derived from the word “Portugal,” itself a name that evoked the wider, whiter European world that gradually penetrated the African interior as the slave-trading frontier advanced).

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As we know, feitiço, the name given by sixteenth-century Portuguese sailors to African power objects, was itself subsequently fetishized, as part of the colonial project, in a European theory about Africa in which it was used to denote and explain “the strangeness of African societies … wherein the new forces and categories of the mercantile world economy then reshaping African and European societies alike were read into constantly surprise people by a foreign social order and locale.”5 In a move that mirrors their outcome. James Siegel that witchcraft is about this, however, the European statues of the Virgin Mother notes making impossible links: of God and of other saints that reached the Angolan and relating things that cannot be creates unprecedented Congolese hinterlands equally provided local people linked power. The continuing with a possibility to reflect upon, interpret, and capture obsession with witchcraft in parts of Africa turns the foreign and “strange” white man’s social, moral, and many these societies into ‘riskpolitico-economic realities: as Ioan Davies notes, “Fetish societies’ in optima forma. As before, such risk-taking is itself a product of two different economic and cul- said is seen by many as a hallmark tural spaces, hence its appropriation by both Marx and of modern society, but it is crucial to witchcraft Freud to objectify various transactions.”6 The coupling of equally discourse, often seen as preMarxism and psychoanalysis is appropriate for a reading eminently ‘traditional.’ of both the hamba dia santu and (merchant) capitalism as fetish, which is at the heart of the economy of desire that the opening narrative reflects so many centuries later. The santu figurines, as material objects in unstable space, or as a composite border phenomena reveal the fetishistic nature of capitalism itself.7 Even today, the santu cult metonymically evokes this “white” outside world and its storehouse: objects playing an important role in the cult are, for example, bread and potatoes (the white man’s food), forks, knives, spoons, and white plates (evoking the white man’s eating habits), but also soap, dollar notes, or other foreign currencies. Through a logic of magic through contiguity, these commodities and goods, as well as the santu statues themselves, allowed people not only to incorporate the white man’s world into their own ritual universe, but also to attract and capture, hunt or trap, its unpredictable sources of wealth (according to the same logic of magic through contiguity Peter Geschiere that pushes today’s young Congolese diamond diggers to wear T-shirts with large dollar prints: the dollar signs themselves will attract real dollars that will stick to their bodies in the same way as the print on their T-shirts) (image I).8 That is also why, from the very start, the santu figures, epitomizing fertility (both the

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I: Young diamond traders on the border between Congo and Angola. Kahemba, 1994.

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III: Billboard in Kinshasa for the Cité du Fleuve project. Kinshasa, 2010.

II: Santu statue used to attract diamonds and dollars on the border between D.R. Congo and Angola, 1991.

IV: Construction of Cité du Fleuve. Kinshasa, 2012.

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Saint Anthony and Mary figures are often holding the baby Jesus) and therefore also wealth, were rapidly incorporated into local hunting cults. The statues were turned into “hunters” themselves, equipped with ritually charged objects or “guns” (usually antelope horns and more recently also bullets, stuffed with powerful human, vegetal, and animal substances and sealed with small mirrors), to track, shoot, and capture these new foreign MIRRORING Mirrors are metaphors for commodities (image II). the Western concept of the In analogy with hunting rituals used to over“self.” In his theory of the “mirror phase,” Jacques come the speculative nature and uncertain outcome of Lacan has posited that a the hunting enterprise, the santu statues were, and condeveloping child first discovers his “self” by a mirror- tinue to be, instrumentalized not only to attract and hunt like identification with an down various commodities and forms of wealth, but other. When the mother holds the child up to the mirror, also to domesticate or neutralize the dangers inherent the child views his body-imin such processes of “extraversion,” understood here in age reflected in the mirror as an objectified and com- Jean-François Bayart’s sense as the local mobilization of plete form, at a time when it resources derived from (what is often a very unequal relais subjectively experienced as incomplete and uncoordi- tionship with) the external global environment. 9 These nated. The child identifies resources, in other words, have their source outside one’s with the image of an other, or an image which is outside own world, and as such they pose a potential risk, a danits body sensations, but, in ger that needs to be ritually dominated and neutralized.10 terms of social reality, must be taken to be its identity. Just as “the white man” (mundele in Lingala) is often said — Dan Graham, “Essay on Video, to behave in incomprehensible and totally unpredictable Television and Architecture,” 1979 ways, so do the sources of wealth that come with him. In this respect it is significant to note that the I. Theorist Christian Metz famously transposed the idea spread of the santu cult in West Central Africa was accelof the Lacanian mirror stage erated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as to the identification of the cinematic spectator with the a ritual response to the growing inflation that accompacamera apparatus. Metz was not nied the end of the slave trading period in Angola and saying that we essentially identify with what the camera the gradual decline of ivory and (apart from a short-lived shows us, but that as viewers revival during World War II) the rubber trade in Angola we identify with the schema of the camera in its capacity and Congo. The lower the value of the commodities sold to frame and record events — to Portuguese and Belgian traders, the more people on thus, the camera is a mirror of our capacities to perceive and both sides of the border between Congo and Angola (a understand experiences. border that itself was highly volatile and continued to shift several hundreds of miles to the north or the south until well Luke Fowler into the 1920s) tended to turn to the santu cult in response to this incomprehensible crisis.11 Santu quickly became a local attempt to control, dominate, appease, and tame the irrational changes in value that characterized white people’s money and wealth. The same response accounts for the continued use of santu statues in

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the contemporary ( ►53 ) world of artisanal diamond digging and cross-border trading and smuggling of diamonds between Angola and Congo.12 As an unpredictable source of wealth (the diamond sector in both countries suffered greatly from the 2008 banking crisis for example), diamonds and the dollars they generate behave like wild animals that you have to “kill” and possess before they kill or fully take possession of you. II. Mirror of Ambiguity. Objects such as the santu figurines underscore Jonathan Harvey, the British described the functhe longue durée of what is a violent—and still ongoing composer, tion of early computers in and unfinished—frontier history in which local worlds composed music as that of a ful mirror.” Unlike have colluded and collided with different rounds of glo- “truth trained musicians, who are balization, colonialism, and capitalist expansion. The called on for their technical and artistic judgment santu figures, as well as the witchcraft narrative told by skills to interpret a set of instructhe twelve-year-old Congolese child, also illustrate the tions from the composer, the only reflects what highly unforeseeable and occult, oneiric, magical, and computer you tell it to do — punch in often dangerous and deadly nature of various past and some numbers, listen, adjust, in some more numbers present materializations of the shape-shifting capitalist punch “and so it goes, back and machine. Whether in the form of merchant capitalism, forth, mirroring of subjecand objective until a slave and barter trade, extractive comptoir and planta- tive kind of mutual adaptation is tion economies, processes of industrialization, or the reached.” private investment ( ►154 ) schemes that are currently III. Documentary filmmaker being attracted to the African continent in the age of John Grierson summed up the moment as “the global neoliberalism, this machine has held out prom- documentary creative treatment of realises of wealth, and of the possibility to insert oneself into ity,” but it is difficult to where the “treatment” and become part of a more global world, but it has also know ends and the “reality” begins. engendered considerable—physical and symbolical— How can a camera mirror without influencing violence. The specters of violence embedded in these reality the reality it documents? long histories of capitalist and colonialist extraction, and The filmmaker must acknowlthe pro-filmic event, the necro-political form (that is, the contemporary form edge the distortions and illuin which sovereign power subjugates life to the power of sions that come into play her presence, the death) these incursions often gave birth to, continue to through apparatus and attitude taken haunt the present.13 That they can do so is partly because towards the facts she chooses these histories have so deeply impacted upon the lives of to present. people throughout Central Africa that they have become IV. “Sound-scale” is a term indissolubly entangled with local experiences of life and coined by Rick Altman that death. But it is also because they have profoundly shaped local Luke Fowler imaginaries, while also being shaped by them. The speculative and volatile nature of capital, profit-making, and accumulation runs parallel with and can easily be incorporated into the cultural vocabularies of the occult and the oneiric that people continue to use both to capture extravert sources of material

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well-being, as attested by the opening account, as well as to exorcize the nightmarish abysses of material and spiritual insecurity that constantly open up in the realities of their everyday life. In this sense, I contend that the very same images and vocabularies that framed and signified processes of extraversion in Central Africa’s past history of contact with Europe and the West also continue to form and inform Central Africa’s describes the mirroring of the image scale (focal depth) with contemporary relationship with the global forces of that of the microphone perneoliberalism and its enchantments. In spite of popular spective — that is, the proximity between the microphone discourses of crisis, loss, and rupture that pervade the and its source. The prevailing African continent today, many of the local responses to tendency in industrial film has been to ignore the offthese new powerful intrusions often build on traditions axis, distant, or reflective of available cultural categories and vocabularies that sound in space, in favor of the illusory intimate sound. emerged in much earlier rounds of encounter with the The pressure is always for the forces of globalization, and that have persisted till today. voice to remain intelligible regardless of whether the The promise of profit and material benefit that subject is ten inches or ten neoliberal capitalism holds forth (a promise that is amplifeet away. fied in the discourses of the religious entrepreneurs who V. When the new technology of run the numerous “miracle” churches that have sprung up video was introduced in the late sixties, conceptual all over Congo) propels the extremely pauperized populaartist Dan Graham explored tion of Congo’s cities, towns, and villages into imagining the possibilities of using video feedback to influthe possibility of a future that magically converts nightence the static, private view mares into utopian dreams. Whereas many Congolese citof the self produced by the mirror-model. By comparison, izens are often not in the position to straddle the divide film is restricted in its between today and tomorrow, let alone to plan further shot length by the physical capacity of the film magazine ahead in time (and therefore frequently seek to escape and has to be developed and from the present by having recourse to nostalgia for a printed before the projection can take place. Video, reinvented colonial or precolonial golden era), the teleolhowever, produces an instant ogies of today’s global neoliberal frameworks address and image electronically. By introducing a delay before convert the otherwise uncertain future in utopian terms, the image would appear on the turning today’s hardships and disillusions into the possiscreen, Graham could break down the distinction between bility of hope and change. This is the attraction and the intent, behavior, and percepstrength of the visions of the future that private investors tion. When these processes are “performed” in front of an and government alike hold up to the urban residents of audience, the feedback view of Congo. Promising shining new towns for a middle class whose emergence still remains rather hypothetical in Congo, Luke Fowler almost every main street of Kinshasa, and other major Congolese cities such as Lubumbashi, is lined with huge billboards in a sustained politics of visibilité for what the Congolese government brands as its “revolution of modernity” (image III). Thus announcing and revealing the coming of a new and modern city, these

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advertisements offer a spectral, and often spectacular though highly speculative and very volatile, vision of Congo’s reinsertion into the global ecumene. While some of these projects are indeed being built, many only exist in an ocular form, as billboard images of conference centers, five star hotels, and skyscrapers with names such as Modern Paradise, Modern Titanic, Crown Tower, or Riverview Towers—as if showing the image is in itself already a sufficient materialization of the dream. the self and his internalized processes are exterIn yet another round of history that replays the same thought nalized, thereby converting dynamics characterizing earlier strategies of extraver- the private mirror experience sion, Kinshasa is now looking into the mirror of neo- into a social production. liberal global modernity to fashion itself in its longing to capture the aura of Dubai and other hot spots of the new urban Global South (and indeed, many of the billboards advertising this new city sport a portrait of president Joseph Kabila alongside the statement that Congo will soon be “the mirror of Africa”). And although utopias usually remain locked within the realm of pure speculation and material impossibility, Kabila’s “revolution of modernity,” with its specific forms of ocular urbanization, seems to have awakened new hopes and rekindled a dormant capacity to believe and dream against all odds: C’est beau quand-même, ça fait rêver!, people exclaim, “It is beautiful nonetheless; it makes one dream.” Strikingly, however, the vocabularies used to conjure up and bring home this new future are remarkably similar to the strategies of extraversion, capture, and domestication described above; they use the same miraculous imagery and language of dreams, mirrors, and magic, and they unfold according to a similarly complex dynamics of dependency, participation, movement, control, and change. The very nature of the current source of extraversion—global investment money that will make this new future possible, strengthens this new “turn to enchantment.” 14 Nowhere is this more clear than in La Cité du Fleuve, a Luke Fowler construction project, which—as the developer’s website states— “began as a dream in 2008” and is currently underway (although what is being constructed is far more banal and less spectacular than the advertisements promised) (image IV). La Cité du Fleuve is an exclusive development situated on two artificial islands.

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These are being reclaimed from sandbanks and swamps in the Congo River. The Main Island, the larger of the two, will offer mixed commercial, retail, and residential properties, while North Island, the smaller of the two and already under construction, will be reserved strictly for private homes and villas. According to the website, La Cité du Fleuve will provide a “standard of living unparalleled in Kinshasa and will be a model SPECULATIVE HEDGING ( ►27 & 75 & 130 ) for the rest of Africa” and, so the webSpeculative hedging. These antithetical words combine to site’s comments continue, “La Cité du Fleuve will showform two different meanings: an action taken to lessen or case the new era of African economic development.” offset risks which aren’t The new city, however, might well prove to be as known or fully understood, and, alternatively, engaging chimerical as the speculative capital, the hedge and vulin venturous, profit-seeking ture funds, that finance the construction of these projbehavior under the guise of risk mitigation. ects. For this kind of highly volatile capital it is often Actions described in inconsequential whether or not a development such as the former definition are constantly taken by all La Cité du Fleuve is really built or inhabited. One might people, consciously and even argue that this kind of venture capital is attracted subconsciously, in an attempt to shield things of perceived to an urban environment such as Kinshasa precisely worth from forces that may because daily life in this city is perpetually punctuated threaten their value or existence. Since the origin by uncertainty, risk, provisionality, improvisation, and and exact nature of these the continuous hedging of bets. forces is not understood in advance, individuals often To some extent, these characteristics constitute the put into place preemptive city’s main assets and generate its main financial oppormitigation: policymakers enact laws to defend voters’ tunities, because both city and capital share the same anticipated interests; volatility and are thereby attracted to each other. But the individuals utilize defense mechanisms to protect unsteady urban ground on which these new cities are supfeelings of self-worth; and posed to be built, combined with the speculative nature of companies acquire competitors with the motive of preserving the crisis capitalism that finances these new urban projfuture profits and market ects, also makes their realization highly unpredictable. In share. Behavior under the latter Lubumbashi, the capital of the copper-rich Katanga provdefinition is particularly ince, for example, Kipwishi City, a large new city project widespread in the context of financial markets. financed by Renaissance, a Russian investment company, Agricultural producers, has been postponed before it was even properly started airlines, restaurant chains, and financial institutions up, due to the 2012–13 Cypriot financial crisis. Similarly, in are examples of entities whose the case of the Cité du Fleuve, where construction has considerably slowed down because of cash flow problems, there is a Kenan Halabi huge difference between the spectacular images used to promote the idea of this new city and the banality of the actual materialization of this idea. Often, between dream and reality, as the childwitch cited in the beginning would say, “prices keep going up” in all kinds of mysterious ways.

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1 De Boeck, Filip and Marie-Francois Plissart, Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City (Ghent / Tervuren: Ludion / Royal Museum of Central Africa, 2004), p. 147. 2 Cf. Miller, Joseph C. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (London: James Currey, 1988). 3 Thornton, John K. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250– 1820 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 60. 4 De Boeck, Filip. “Borderland Breccia. The Mutant Hero in the Historical Imagination of a CentralAfrican Diamond Frontier.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 1, no. 2 (2000). See also Marie-Louise Bastin, Entités spirituelles des Tshokwe (Angola). Quaderni Poro, vol. 5 (Milano: Stapa Sipiel, 1988); and Boris Wastiau, Mahamba: The Transforming Arts of Spirit Possession among the Luvale-speaking People of the upper Zambezi. Studia Instituti Anthropos, vol. 48 (Fribourg: University Press Fribourg, 2000). 5 Pietz, William.“The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (1988), pp. 116–17; see also Wyatt MacGaffey, “Dialogues of the Deaf: Europeans on the Atlantic Coast of Africa,” in S.B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994); V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa. Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988); Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds., 1993, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). 6 Davies, Ioan. “Negotiating African Culture: Toward a Decolonization of the Fetish,” in F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press), p. 137.

7 Cf. Spyer, Patricia. Ed., Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Places (New York: Routledge, 1998). 8 As such the santu statue’s internal dynamics runs parallel to that of the more recent mami wata mermaid which, in Angola at least, has itself been incorporated in the class of mahamba spirits. 9 Bayart, Jean-François. “Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion,” African Affairs 99 (2000), pp. 217–67. 10 That is the purpose of the tortoise-shell on the head of the santu in Fig. 2. Symbolizing royal power, the tortoise is a powerful emblem of (political) control and domination. Other santu figures often incorporate mirrors to reflect or cast back to their own source the dangers of these foreign commodities. 11 Vellut, Jean-Luc. “AngolaCongo: L’invention de la frontier du Lunda (1889–1893),” Africana Studia (International Journal of African Studies) 9 (2006), pp. 159–83. 12 Cf. De Boeck, Filip. “Domesticating Diamonds and Dollars: Identity, Expenditure and Sharing in Southwestern Zaire (1984–1997),” in B. Meyer and P. Geschiere, eds., Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); De Boeck, “Diamonds and Disputes: Conflict and Local Power on the Border between Congo and Angola (1990–2008),” in K. Werthmann and T. Grätz, eds., Mining Frontiers in Africa: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, Mainzer Beiträge zur Afrikaforchung 32 (Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2012).

core business activities are vulnerable to movements in tradable financial assets. In this vein, an agricultural producer might employ an individual whose responsibility it is to hedge risks caused by price movements in the commodities they produce and sell. Since these entities typically benefit (suffer) when the price of their commodities rises (falls), they could choose to smooth out such potentially disruptive upsand-downs by methodically placing financial market trades that benefit (suffer) as the commodity price falls (rises). By design, the hedger’s role is mechanical and somewhat boring in nature. But if performance incentives are not properly aligned, the hedger, whose role it is to mitigate preexisting risks, can become tempted to do just the opposite — add unrelated, view-based, or speculative, risks on top of those preexisting risks in hopes of generating profits above and beyond the normal course of business.

13 Cf. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003), pp. 11–40.

Kenan Halabi

14 Royrvik, Emil A. The Allure of Capitalism: An Ethnography of Management and the Global Economy in Crisis (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011).

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Hedge /Hog: Speculative Action in Financial Markets Satya Pemmaraju

All the improvements in machinery, however, have by no means been the inventions of those who had occasion to use the machines. Many improvements have been made by the ingenuity of the makers of the machines, when to make them became the business of a peculiar trade; and some by that of those who are called philosophers or men of speculation, whose trade it is not to do anything, but to observe everything; and who, upon that account, are often capable of combining together the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects. —Adam Smith, On the Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 1 “Not to do anything, but to observe everything” is Smith’s fundamental characterization of the trade of a speculator, for it is the only path to opening up new spaces for thought and action, “combining together the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects.” The speculator in Smith is akin to the philosopher, creating value through daring conceptual linkages. This value however is mutable, contingent, and categorically unstable, precisely so due to the means by which it comes into being. Speculation as a concept and practice has been so inextricably linked with financial life that it is easy to miss the overarching general stance towards contemporaneity that speculation represents. If we posit speculation as a strategic form of engagement with uncertainty and the radical contingencies posed by the contemporary ( ►53 ) , then we can ask whether this form has much relevance in current financial practice. Indeed, this contribution will suggest that with rare exceptions (►55 & 202 ), the

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practices of modern financial life, as exemplified by various forms of securities and derivatives trading, have very little to do with a broad understanding of speculation. They have everything to do with enumeration, a far less complex response. The deep uncertainty, both metaphysical and empirical, regarding value, identity, and the future that marks contemporary life has created the necessity for formal apparatuses THE CONTEMPORARY that reflect and engage with undecidability, uncertainty, The contemporary we inhabit from traversing a indeterminacy, and incompleteness. Speculation is the comes century of stark realizations method through which these new apparatuses are cre- about how cultural objects as evidence even ated: speculation is not directed towards a finitude of function as they are understood not possibilities and their fine, rigorous analysis; it is instead to be strictly factual or in the focused on the creation of new spaces of thought and representational building of histories. This action. These spaces are not brought into being with an a speculative contemporary is of the immediacy priori well-crafted analytic framework; they are of neces- aofcomposite presence, memories, and sity both work-in-progress and continually under con- archives in tandem with the of a better future. struction. Almost by definition, the speculative method promise In particular, the involves anxiety, nervousness, tension, and the relentless contemporary — marked by simultaneity and speed — not-knowing that accompanies birth. recalls Futurism one hundred There is no certainty or finality; the goal is not to years on, as the “future now” of the present. be correct but to produce spaces for fruitful exploration. is Circularity rather than Various branches of physics and mathematics have pro- teleology has been recognized the progression of history, duced numerous well-known examples of speculative as as the twenty-first century engagement. Finance has been much less fruitful an arena has learned from the various calamities of fascism, for such creative engagements. colonialism, genocide, and I would like to delineate the contrast between nationalism, resulting uneven development and speculative action and standard financial practice in differential histories in a globalized world. through two well-known and studied examples. “It takes courage to be a pig.” —Stanley Druckenmiller

The fable of the artist who works at a distance from society and later emerges when s/he has produced something to show is the usual avantgarde tale. Mladen Stilinovic ´ played with this in Artist at Work (1978), a series of photographs of him sleeping. Goran Trbuljak stated that it

One of the most storied speculative trades, represented breathlessly in the journalism of the time, was the Quantum Fund’s bet against the British pound in 1992. The Quantum Fund, managed by George Soros’s flagship hedge fund Soros Fund Management, had a remarkable track record of returns. By 1992 Stanley Druckenmiller was the guiding force driving the major investment (►154 ) decisions. According to the New York Times:

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is more important that an artist exhibit than what s/he exhibits. However, in the contemporary time the re-coupling of the presence of the artist and the audience is now normal, as in Marina Abramovic ´’s The Artist Is Present (2010), and this is further mediated and disseminated. Therefore, would withdrawal be radical today? What happens when the artist does not show anything, as in Tomo Savic ´-Gecan’s practice of showing empty spaces or imperceptible movements? Or when there is multiplication of artists, art objects, and settings in such projects as the Salon de Fleurus or Museum of American Art, Berlin? So what reaches beyond avant-garde in the speculative contemporary infused by the intensity of the “future is now”? Communication has not been superseded by preoccupation with presence in contemporary art, though it has been suffused by it.  Picking up on avant-garde simultaneity as well as neoavant-garde communication, to make settings that do not have performance as the goal, what is the radical and critical potential of withdrawal — of the artist who withholds labor and of the artwork that refuses to show, demonstrate, or reveal?

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When Quantum bet $10 billion on the German mark and against the British pound and the Italian lira last September, it was Stanley F. Druckenmiller who created the investment strategy, which made $2 billion in profits in a matter of weeks. For four years, the 39-year-old Mr. Druckenmiller has quietly served as Mr. Soros’s alter ego, deciding on the complicated mix of investments by Quantum, while also handling his own large and highly profitable fund, Pittsburgh-based Duquesne Capital Management. Mr. Druckenmiller’s strategy goes far beyond buying stocks and bonds, into the esoteric world of derivatives like options and futures on a variety of products worldwide, including foreign currencies, bonds and stock indexes. His success has contributed mightily to the perception that, while the 1980s was the decade of the dealmakers, the 1990s is the decade of derivatives.1 The trade firmly established George Soros as a preeminent financial speculator and more crucially represents the first well-documented instance of a central bank unable to defend its stated policies against the actions of market players. While the sums involved may no longer be considered as significant today as they were in 1992, there is no denying the importance of the trade in demonstrating the fragile nature of European monetary politics. Druckenmiller said he had initiated a $1.5 billion trade that would profit if the German mark rose versus sterling. He expected Europe’s exchange-rate mechanism, in which the currencies moved against each other within a limited band, to come under pressure as Germany raised interest rates to prevent inflation after reunification. Germany’s move forced the United Kingdom and other members of the ERM [Exchange Rate Mechanism] to decide whether to increase rates, which could damage their already troubled economies, or devalue their currencies and fall out of the ERM. Druckenmiller said he calculated that the Bank of England didn’t have enough reserves to prop up the currency, and it couldn’t afford to raise rates. He was right, and selling by the Soros fund is credited with pushing the pound out of the ERM.2

Satya Pemmaraju

EXCEPTION, THE STATE OF Israel has been in an official state of emergency since its founding. Immediately after the country was established in 1948, the War of Independence, otherwise known as the Nakba, broke out. Each year, Israel’s parliament extends this state of emergency. The condition of prolonged emergency that has been made the rule has allowed the Israeli government to forego a national con­stitution and to justify its military’s jurisdiction beyond what is considered normal anywhere else. On September 11, 2001, the United States declared a state of emergency that continues today. By the simple act of proclaiming a national emergency, the president activated almost five hundred dormant legal provisions, including those allowing him to impose censorship and martial law, assign military forces abroad, regulate the operation of private enterprise, and control the lives of all citizens. Under the same justification, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury looted America’s coffers and funneled trillions of dollars in bailouts and loans to commercial banks. Declaring an exception to the norm confers enough

authority to rule the country without deferring to normal constitutional processes. When these exceptional circumstances become the standard mode of operation, however, they point to the shortcomings of the systems we have created. Governments that celebrate their democracy while continuously revoking the rights of some who are under their charge — in the Gaza Strip, Guantanamo Bay, or black sites — adhere to a system of operating that cannot properly function without a foil, a “catch-all” mechanism to patch over its limitations. This protracted double standard is deeply perverse, even obscene, more so because it slips so easily into everyday life. It is the essence of the speculative, the being in-between, the acceptance of the double, of the one as well as the other. When we cast a spotlight on these tattered seams — on the NGOs that fill in where governments fail to provide for their people, on the wavering percentage of unemployed in each capitalist society, on the black market, on “enemy combatants” who don’t enjoy even the status of mere criminals, let alone prisoners of war — we see the exceptions that make possible the rule, or rather, its shortcomings.

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Soros was reportedly upset that the wager was not large enough. With almost absolute conviction, he pushed his head trader Druckenmiller to increase the size of the position as far as possible. As Druckenmiller rightly points out, it takes courage to build a huge position even when utterly convinced of its correctness. Even more courage is necessary when the other side of the trade is controlled by a central bank. METAHISTORY Northrop Frye discussed However courageous, this is the classical world of metahistory as a synonym for the trader: an enumerated set of possible outcomes and a a “speculative philosophy of history” based in a Hegelian heuristic weighting for each. As events whittle down the model. Hayden White’s book set of possible outcomes, the trade becomes clarified. The Metahistory developed a methodology for analyzing possibilities can be monitored, the weightings can be bethow history is not only a ter calculated, and risks (►146 & 73 ) can be aggregated chronology of events, but also the product of many and managed more efficiently. The wager can be modiother factors, including the fied as conviction changes, but ultimately is supported by narrative form it employs — he called this employment — the progression of this enumerative logic. as well as the ideological/ Failures within this world are almost always reprephilosophical positions that it encapsulates as it produces sented as a failure to enumerate correctly: either the posa legitimizing narrative. sible outcomes or the heuristic weightings assigned to Developed during the period when the master each outcome have been inaccurately assigned. A whole narratives/humanist models industry has emerged around the failure to enumerof Western representation were being examined across ate: “fat tails,” “black swans,” and the like are versions of the social sciences as well the failure to enumerate argument. If only we could more as in art, film, and other forms of popular and literary accurately measure, if only we could account better for culture, the concept of meta the increased probability of tail events, if only…. The posas an operation that could be performed on the discourses sibility of enumerating and calculating more accurately producing these histories is still seen as a viable advance. This particular form does provided access to the ways deeper structures of meaning not engage with questions of uncertainty or undecidabilcan be teased out of the very ity: the fact that enumeration may not be possible at all same language that is used discuss it. from either a categorical or empirical perspective does Linguistically based not seem to enter the frame. in semiotics and poststructuralist philosophy, Finally, the logic and methodology of the trade metahistory appeared itself was too specific and enumerative in quality to open alongside the rise of postmodernism(s), feminism(s), up new possibilities for further action. The self-limiting and postcolonial studies nature of such acts of standard financial practice, however successful in their results, indicates the distinction from broader Judith Barry speculative practice.

Speculative Action 3 While rare, speculative creativity is not absent from financial life. Given the spectacular financial events of the past two decades,

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it follows almost as a matter of principle that there must lurk intensely daring speculators creating new forms that negotiate with, even anticipate, the uncertainty concomitant with these events. Following Adam Smith, we search for those whose trade is “Not to do anything, but to observe everything,” who then create connections and configurations that harness the uncertain into new action. In The Big Short, Michael Lewis describes located within specific Charlie Ledley as one amongst a handful of contrarian geographies (the subaltern, the trickster, the concept professional investors: of hybridity, and others). All of them were, almost by definition, odd. But they were not odd in the same way. Each filled a hole; each supplied a missing insight, an attitude to risk, which, if more prevalent, might have prevented the catastrophe. But there was at least one gaping hole no big time professional investor filled. It was filled, instead, by Charlie Ledley. Cornwall Capital Management, was founded in 2003, out of a garage in Berkeley, California. The founders were a pair of inexperienced young men, Charles Ledley and Jamie Mai, with no proven talent for investing. The firm had $110,000 in capital in a Charles Schwab brokerage account. Their curious proposition was a “belief that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.” The insight did not involve a correct methodology for pricing various forms of risk; instead it was the qualitative proposition that risk is fundamentally mispriced and that the mispricing becomes gross underpricing in cases to which enumerative methodologies assign low probability weightings. Their method is not one of precision or rigorous positivism:

These operations allowed for the emergence of new understandings and knowledge bases, elucidating how “subjects” are interpolated within the fabric of culture, as both the form and the content of discourse were unpacked, described, analyzed, represented, rerepresented, imaged, and understood differently, but never finally. That this was undertaken using philosophies predominantly developed in the West, no matter the origins, ethnicities, and cultural backgrounds of its thinkers, has for the most part remained unexamined. Nonetheless what constitutes the humanities as a discipline has indeed changed. Edward Said’s orientalism gave rise to Homi Bhabha’s hybridity; meanwhile, Gayatri Spivak and bell hooks interrogated the subaltern, and Jean Fisher’s trickster provided agency particularly for artists, so that by 2008 the Guangzhou Triennial could be titled Farewell to PostColonialism. Simultaneously, modernist traditions across the transnational cultural world can now be described

They never had to be sure of anything. Both were disposed to feel that people, and by extension markets, had difficulty attaching the appropriate probabilities to highly improbable events. Both had trouble generating conviction of their own but no trouble at all reacting to what they viewed as the false conviction of others.

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After initial successes following this method, they recruited a third partner, Ben Hockett, with derivatives trading experience and a knowledge of the practices of big banks. With Ben’s help, Cornwall Capital became an institutional client of Deutsche Bank, a position giving access far beyond the reach of their then $30 million in capital. Following a fortuitous (►176 ) encounter with a Deutsche Bank document that analyzed shorting as emerging out of, rather than being imposed onto, subprime mortgage bonds, the intrepid team at Cornwall the terrain of cultural began accumulating a huge position capitalizing on the differences emanating from an understanding of the subprime crisis. In Michael Lewis’s recounting of the tale, elasticity of these terms. we learn how observing and making connections takes Today, the discussions around cultural difference the team through the banking world in their search to need no longer make use of accumulate protection via bespoke credit ( ►93 ) default postcolonial discourse as it was first understood swaps, on such esoterica as synthetic CDOs (collateralized in relation to a series of debt obligations). The team is not expert in the details binary oppositions: center/ periphery, authentic/ of these exotic instruments, but, crucially, they do not derivative, or self/other, let their ignorance of specific details cloud the fact that to mention but a few. As Jean Fisher has remarked, they cannot find legitimate, clear answers to their questhe trickster was global tions. They were comfortable in admitting what they did before colonization, and as the postcolonial is a set of not know but still would not deviate from their strategy of ever-shifting relationships, accumulating credit protection at whatever price. postcolonialisms provide a “fertile ground for the play of tricky tactics.” Four such examples in contemporary artists’ work are Larissa Sansour’s A Space Exodus (2009) and Nation Estates (2012) and Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002) and The Time That Remains (2009).

Charlie and Jamie and Ben sort of understood what they had done and sort of didn’t. “We’re kind of obsessed by this trade,” said Charlie. “And we’ve exhausted our network of people to talk to about it. And we still can’t totally figure out who is on the other side. We kept trying to find people who could explain to us why we were wrong. We just kept wondering if we were crazy. There was this overwhelming feeling of, Are we going out of our minds?” It’s just weeks before the market will turn, and the crisis will commence, but they don’t know that. They suspect that this empty theatre into which they have stumbled is preparing to stage the most fantastic financial drama they will ever see, but they don’t know that, either. All they know is that there is a lot they don’t know.

Judith Barry

This is an exemplary method through which speculators engage with the unknown, uncertain, and undecidable. The logic is neither enumerative nor calculative: it is conceptual and posits a very specific form of action arising from a basic set of connections

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regarding the pricing of risk independent of asset classes. Unlike the absolute conviction of Soros and Druckenmiller, what we find here is a state of action structured around partial clarity, partial information, and partial awareness. The action is in a constant state of discovery and construction. This is characteristic of speculation as a method: it cannot deal in certainty, with fully cast frameworks that generate propositions that can be simply verified. The nature of speculation is to be unsure, uncategorical, uncertain yet to keep elaborating an approach that is productive but not final. The tentative, nervous, questioning method of building an approach to trading vastly complex instruments with vastly sophisticated institutions is based on undeniably fundamental insights. The approach is not circumscribed by specificity of market or location. The group is clearly evolving an analytic framework while proceeding to implement their plans. This neither hinders nor helps execution; it merely clarifies and eases the process of communication. The space created by the relentless questioning and elaboration of their basic principle continues to be explored creatively across various markets. Regardless of the results, the process is far from the classical enumerative world of the trader where actions are finally selflimiting and circumscribed. 1 Barry Rehfeld, “Soros’s Alter Ego: Low Profile, Very High Returns,” New York Times, April 18, 1993, http:// www.nytimes.com/1993/04/18/ business/profile-soros-s-alter-egolow-profile-very-high-returns.html.

2 Katherine Burton, “Druckenmiller Calls It Quits after 30 Years as Job Gets Tougher,” Bloomberg News, August 18, 2010, http://www.bloomberg.com/ news/2010-08-18/druckenmillercalls-it-quits-after-30-years-ashedge-fund-job-gets-tougher.html. 3 All quotations in this section are from Michael Lewis, The Big Short (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).

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Preface to the third edition Walid Raad

Preface to the third edition is one part of my ongoing art project titled Scratching on things I could disavow, which I initiated in 2007. My overall project proceeds from the recent emergence of large new infrastructures for Arab, Islamic, and Middle Eastern arts in the Arab world. These developments, when viewed alongside the geo-political, economic, social, and military conflicts that have consumed the region in the past few decades, shape a rich yet thorny ground for creative work. The artworks and stories I present with this project emerged from encounters on this ground with individuals, institutions, economies, concepts, and forms. — Of the nearly 18,000 objects held in the Louvre’s newly established Département des Arts de l’Islam, 294 will be loaned to the Louvre Abu Dhabi sometime between 2016 and 2046. Of the 294 objects, the following 8 will be affected by the journey in ways that historians, curators, and conservators could not have anticipated nor predicted. While no one will doubt the subsequent changes, the nature and reason of their onset will be contested. Many will attribute them to the weather, asserting that the “corrosion” began soon after the exquisitely crafted, climate-controlled crates were opened in the Arabian Desert. Others will insist they are immaterial and psychological, expressed only in the dreams and psychological disorders of non-citizens working in the Emirate. And a few, the rare few, will speculate that they are aesthetic and came into view only once, in the enclosed 28 photographs and videotape produced by an artist during her Emirati-sponsored visit to the museum in 2026.

The Ethics of Deep Time Trevor Paglen WITHDRAWAL Withdrawal is one of the key technical terms in objectoriented philosophy. It is drawn from Martin Heidegger, who writes as follows: “The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically.”1 This comes from Heidegger’s famous tool-analysis, which expands and reverses the phenomenology of his teacher Edmund Husserl. For Husserl, philosophy must begin by avoiding all explanatory theories (scientific or otherwise) that go beyond what is immediately given to the mind. Philosophy becomes a patient description of phenomena, which gradually strips away their inessential features in order to gain direct insight into the essence of each phenomenon. Heidegger’s critique of phenomenology is that it reduces things to presence in consciousness, even though most of our dealings with things do not involve explicit presence.2 We invisibly rely on stable ground, atmospheric oxygen, and bodily organs, which tend to become present in consciousness only when they malfunction. This is what Heidegger calls readinessto-hand (Zuhandenheit) as

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Over the last two hundred years, humans have restructured their relationship to time. The late eighteenth century saw the discovery of geologic, or deep, time when James Hutton and other early geologists examined rock formations and concluded that Earth was far older than the six thousand years calculated by biblical scholars. The discovery of deep time was followed by the invention of absolute time. Before railroads and telegraphs revolutionized transportation and communication, vastly contracting the effective distance between disparate locales, each town and city kept its own time. Noon was whenever the sun was overhead. The railroads changed all of that: beginning in 1840 in England, a system of uniform time was established and spread across the globe over the following decades. By the turn of the twentieth century, the world’s clocks were synchronized with one another. Time was made uniform; human activities were coordinated to the artificial backdrop of a ticking second hand on a centralized clock. With the reinvention of time came the reconfiguration of space. As time became absolute, space became frangible—a phenomenon Marx famously called “the annihilation of space by time.” The ability to distort space and time became a central vehicle for capitalist accumulation and military dominance. On the capitalist side, altering the length of the workday and increasing turnover times through automated manufacturing, efficiency in transportation, just-in-time production,

and high-speed financial transactions led to increased profits. On the military side, advances in speed through railway transportation, autobahns, communications infrastructure (►102 & 265 ), and remote imaging translated into strategic advantages. The space-time constructions and annihilations that characterized the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have continued uninterrupted through the twentieth and twenty-first. opposed to presence-at-hand The contemporary (►53 ) period, however, is also in consciousness (VorhandenTo investigate the way haunted by a human reconfiguration of time. Humans heit). in which things withdraw from have not only distorted the time and space of everyday presence is to investigate being, which manifests life and lived experience, but have invaded the deep time their itself as time: their simulof geologic processes and even the cosmic time of plan- taneous absence and presence. contemporary objectets, stars, and galaxies. On the timescale of atmospheric For oriented thought, objects processes, anthropogenic transformations to Earth’s withdraw not just from human animal minds, but even atmosphere will influence the climate and weather sys- and from each other. This leads tems for tens of thousands of years. Furthermore, troves to a theory of how objects with one another in of nuclear waste stockpiled deep within Earth from the interact indirect or vicarious fashGobi desert to New Mexico will guarantee that these sites ion: “vicarious causation.”3 real objects withdraw exude poison for tens or even hundreds of thousands of Though and cannot interact directly, years. Human activities have transformed the chemical they are linked through the objects (or intenmakeup of the atmosphere and created bizarre strata in sensual tional objects) emitted from 1 each, which form the neglected Earth’s geologic record. discovery of Husserl. Humans’ spatiotemporal footprint extends even central Causal relations can only further into the future than the deep time of geomor- unfold in a sensual world of phology, and further across space than the confines of our masks and shadows. 1 Martin Heidegger, Being and planet. Human activities, it turns out, have also produced Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and a cosmic archaeological record and a galactic footprint. E. Robinson (New York: Harper The solar system is punctuated by a handful of machines, & Row, 1962). For Heidegger’s most including the Stardust space probe, engaged in a long 2detailed critique of arcing orbit around the Sun, and the Chinese Chang’e-2 phenomenology, see the hundred pages or so of spacecraft, parked at a Lagrange point 1.5 million km from first Martin Heidegger, History Earth. Moreover, hundreds of geosynchronous commu- of the Concept of Time: trans. T. Kisiel nications satellites in stable orbit, 36,000 km from Earth, Prolegomena, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana form a man-made ring around the planet. All of these University Press, 2009). machines will glide through the solar system until the Sun becomes a red giant in approximately five billion years. A much Graham Harman smaller group of machines, the two Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft along with the New Horizons probe, will leave the solar system entirely to spend eternity wandering among the stars. While the remnants of human civilizations on Earth’s surface will eventually be pulverized by erosion, volcanism, glaciation, and

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tectonics, the machines in distant earth orbits and those on much further trajectories may prove to be the longest-lasting material artifacts of the contemporary moment. When we think about all of the ways humans have transformed their environment, we tend to think about anthropogenic transformations of Earth’s surface and its consequences for the present and near future. When we think about 3 See Graham Harman, “On Vicarious Causation,” time, we tend to understand it on scales familiar to our Collapse, vol. 2 (2007), everyday experiences. We worry about the effects of fispp. 171–205. cal policy over the course of a few years, or, at best, concern ourselves with climate change over a few decades. But humans have made equally great interventions into the deep time of geology and even the cosmic time of the galaxy. Geologic time and cosmic time are so far removed from our everyday experience that to even consider them seems fantastical. Nonetheless, the transformation of deep space-time comes with ethical responsibilities that we have failed to even imagine, let alone acknowledge. Can we imagine, for example, a “human rights” framework that extends far beyond individual human subjects, to flora and fauna, even minerals and geomorphic processes (both anthropogenic and “natural”)? Can we imagine democratizing the production of time itself? What’s at stake, quite literally, is the future of everything. 1 Interestingly, a thin layer of radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear explosions has altered the radiocarbon signature of the present. Archaeologists in the distant future using radiocarbon dating techniques on contemporary artifacts will conclude that we

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existed nearly five hundred years later than we did. From the perspective of future radiocarbon dating, we are living in a period of five hundred “missing” years.

Colors, Cash, Fabric, and Trim: Fast-fashion Families in Downtown L.A. Christina Moon RISK During a 2012 talk, philosopher Akeel Bilgrami contrasted the Western debate between liberty and equality (the capitalism-communism axis) with the goal, associated with the global South, of an unalienated life, a life of social ties and ties to the natural world. Liberty vs. equality is often understood on a continuum of risk: individualism has more, collectivism has less. But if the goal is the unalienated life, attention is directed away from surfeit or lack of risky behavior as such. From this perspective, attempting to reduce or manage risk is to treat the symptom, not the disease. A big part of being unalienated from life is being unalienated from money. Hopefully it’s not too much of a leap for the reader from here to the housing crisis, when our money was performing extraordinary feats without our permission and beyond our understanding, and “high-risk behavior” was the much-discussed problem. I was lucky at the time to be working on artist and urban designer Damon Rich’s exhibition on the history of home finance, Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, first known as Red Lines, Death Vows,

To fully understand speculation, one has to consider that feeling of standing at a precipice. Speculation always comes with a gamble, a risk (►146 & 73 ). It is that feeling of hitting it big, along with the deep anxiety of possibly losing it all. The clothing manufacturers of Los Angeles’s downtown Jobber Market tell me that this intense feeling of both hopeful anticipation and deep anxiety is what they experience on a daily basis in the making of fast fashion. Speculation is the basis for the entire neighborhood where they work: an informal wholesale clothing market that supplies trendy fashions to the largest fast-fashion retailers in the United States: Forever 21, Hot Topic, Macy’s, Marshalls, T.J. Maxx, Urban Outfitters, and many others. Located east of the formal Fashion District on Main Street, this once desolate area of downtown L.A. has witnessed, in the last decade alone, the emergence of hundreds to thousands of small-time clothing manufacturers who run their fast-fashion businesses along 12th Street, San Pedro Street, and all the small streets and alleyways just east of Santee Alley.1 Dominated by a community of Korean and Korean-South American (in particular Korean-Brazilian) clothing business entrepreneurs who migrated to Los Angeles throughout the 1990s and 2000s,2 the whimsical and catchy store names of their wholesale showrooms (“4-Ever Young,” “Check It Out,” “Girl Talk,” “Glam,” “Hot Kiss,” “Miss Me,” and “Be Cool”) characterize the trendy women’s

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wear clothing sold to teenage girls on a daily basis in department stores, retail chains, and boutiques across the U.S. Speculation— in the form of the profound risks and gambles these small-time business owners take in their daily predictions of colors, patterns, textures, fabric, and trim—has not only transformed the local neighborhood from what was once a garment district into a locale for fashion, but also our relationship to Foreclosures, Risk Structures. That was where I learned clothing and the tempos of the global fashion industry that bankers are less likely at large. to gamble with “other people’s money” when they personally The small-time clothing manufacturers of the Los know those other people. That Angeles Jobber Market tell me that each day, they set out is, if all concerned are living a less alienated life. to do the work of fashion—making the trusty relationHome finance = risk + the ships and connections needed to bring about suppliers built environment. In fact, Red Lines had grown out of an who can offer even better colors, patterns, fabric, and trim earlier, unrealized proposal at better costs for consumers who are incredibly demandby Damon and the Center for Urban Pedagogy for a project ing, fashion-conscious, and know everything about trends on risk alone. This proposal and design. They tell me that to create a successful design would have used personal experience with risk (should I or style—one that will sell and sell well—requires the take my umbrella today?) as the accurate prediction of a very tricky and complicated comstarting point for understanding the ways risk is managed bination of the right colors, the right fit, in the trendiest in our complex society. “Even of designs, made at the highest quality possible, at the though exhibit viewers may not have the mathematical traincheapest price possible, in the shortest amount of time. ing to understand the BlackMost of those I speak with tell me that each Sunday, at Scholes algorithm for pricing stock options,” said their their local evangelical Korean church, they pray, not only 2005 proposal (found buried for the health of their families but also for that needed in my files), “all people use techniques for controlling introduction, secret bit of information, special or unique and ‘financing’ the risks they color, or new supplier—anything that will bring them take every day.” ”‘Financing’ the risks they closer to the creation of a successful money-making take every day” is a way of saydesign. When it all works out—when the designs sell, ing that a minuscule, personal bout of risk management takes sell repeatedly, and sell well, or when the design sells and place before every action, sells until the trend dies out—they get to simply continue large and small. If we lived an unalienated life — following to live their modest lives, maintain their middle-class Bilgrami’s formulation — there existence, pay their employees, pay the rent or the mortwould be no request to define “risk” as such, and its manage- gage, and continue to make their beautiful but fast fashment would be up to all of us. ions. Successful designs reaffirm their migrations—once, twice, across continents and languages—to provide something Larissa Harris better for their children, a life of greater opportunities and a life of fewer struggles. Successful designs mean that it was worth it for the better opportunities they were able to provide for their kids. Most days, though, I hear a great deal about speculation and anxiety. Speculation as risk takes on the physical form of

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cash, which must be paid up front in the fast-fashion business. Manufacturers in the neighborhood tell me that “key money” of $200,000 cash must be given up front to landlords in order to secure a better geographic location for showroom spaces, which can potentially bring better foot traffic among buyers. This, along with a monthly rent of $20,000 in cash, is needed for store spaces along Pico, 12th Street, and San Pedro. Cash must be MODELS paid up front to order fabrics, hire cutters, and pay for There’s a model at the New Hall of Science in the work of factory sewers in cut-and-sew factories in York Flushing Meadows. It was Guangzhou. They tell me that the production of just one included in Mathematica, a of Numbers … and Beyond, style of clothing, fifty-thousand pieces of which can fill World an exhibition designed by one entire shipping container, can cost $1.5 million dol- Charles and Ray Eames in 1961 was installed in Queens lars and must all be dealt in cash. And the money paid and several years ago. This model out under the table to all the undocumented workers, is called The Zeta Function its descriptive label ends those originally from Mexico, Guatemala, or El Salvador and with a koan of sorts: who work in the Jobber Market as sales reps and general “The surface is a model laborers throughout the district, must also be paid in for expression, and the expression is a model for cash. In just under a mile, one can walk from the formal the surface.” Fashion District, with the white walls and fixed prices of its corporate showrooms, to the streets, sidewalks, and The surface here is a compound plane alleyways of the Jobber Market, where anything can be three-dimensional sculpted in smooth white negotiated and where every exchange must be handled plastic, which constitutes model. It’s about two feet in cash. And cash because cash is real and cash is final and the long, one foot wide, and one cash makes the flow of transactions quicker. Cash pro- foot tall; it sits in a vitrine a collection of other duces an instant sense of trust and makes relationships with mathematical models. The stronger. In a landscape of anonymity and mistrust, cash expression in question is a that describes the sum gives confidence that the other person will most likely formula of a specific infinite series.1 deliver. In this informal clothing market of downtown It is essentially boundless lives in the mind. The L.A., cash cuts out the corporate white world of bureau- and arithmetical procedure cracy—the department store executives who are too expressed by this function be used to produce the high up in a chain of command and whose approvals can model. In turn, the model’s slow down the decision-making processes of a fast-paced, surface could be reverseto discover the quickly changing industry of fast, fast trends. Cash, they engineered formula. The model and its tell me, cuts out the white world of government officials expression have a complicated and immigration policies, eager to tax already slim profit relationship — they are margins and inhibit the quickly needed, constant, and flexible David Reinfurt flow of labor and goods. Competition in the L.A. Jobber Market is cutthroat and unforgiving, and manufacturers must be able to offer ever-trendier designs at ever-lower, rock bottom prices to incredibly demanding buyers and retailers who sell to fashionconscious consumers. While manufacturers may create up to

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twenty-five different styles or designs of clothing in just one day, one never quite knows which one of these designs might catch on, sell, and make money. There is a saying in the neighborhood that cash, in millions, is easy to lose in just a matter of hours. In downtown Los Angeles, the risky business of fast fashion, which fuels a multi-billion dollar industry, is the product of the highly speculative work of immigrant families—famexchangeable, reversible, ambiguous. It’s a bit like ilies who hedge great risks to bring quickly produced L.A. Necker’s skeletal cube items to the market. The fashions they produce take the optical illusion, which was 2 first presented in 1832. latest designs from the high-end runway shows of New The Necker Cube is a multiYork, Paris, and Milan Fashion Week and quickly turn stable figure constructed of twelve lines of equal them into low-cost knockoff versions for mass consumweight that describe a threeers at affordable prices. In just one decade alone, the quick dimensional cube. The drawing first presents itself as availability of these knockoffs have contributed to the a cube sitting on a floor. rise of the fast-fashion retailers that now dominate the Recalibrate your mind, and the figure flips its orientation U.S. and global clothing scene. Fast fashion has changed to become a cube protruding our relationship to clothing—how much clothing we buy, from the wall. It’s not difficult to how often and for how much, our expectations of what imagine a model that works clothing is, and how long we imagine wearing it. like this: a model that has an integral and symbiotic Curiously, the quiet rise over the last decade of relationship with the thing Forever 21, the largest fast-fashion retailer in the U.S., is it is representing. Blink and the relations flip; the model the direct result of these risk-taking fast-fashion famibecomes the thing and the lies and their daily speculative work in the Jobber Market. thing becomes the model. This definition might just be one.3 This informal clothing market first appeared in 1988 but 1 This infinite series is exponentially grew in the 1990s, when Korean vendors, described by the equation prompted by looser immigration laws and a peso crisis ζ(s) = Σ [n=0->∞] 1/n^s. Have a look here for its proper in South America, were eager to establish clothing factoformat: http://bit.ly/YCagjL ries and businesses in a community made vulnerable by 2 Actually, it was a the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Today, the market comprises rhomboid, not the more familiar cube shape we’ve over six thousand Korean wholesale clothing manufacturcome to identify with this ers who display their trendy designs on sidewalks and in relationship although the principle is identical. See showroom spaces. Retail buyers from across the U.S. and http://en.wikipedia.org/ the Americas arrive daily to shop in person or in online wiki/File:Necker_cube.svg showrooms.3 They forgo design and manufacturing themselves to instead pick and choose from the many vendors who display their clothing, buying small quantities of the latest David Reinfurt trends to stock their franchise stores. In the U.S., this process is different from European fast-fashion retailers such as H&M and Zara, which are “vertically integrated”—design, production, and distribution happen in one place. These European manufacturing-retailers rely on in-house designers and store employees

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to conduct market research and pick up on consumer tastes for trends. The U.S. model (►27 & 75 & 130 ) relies instead on the L.A. Jobber Market as a source for runway-like, knockoff designs and fashion trends, but also as a test market for consumer tastes—a barometer for observing what sells well among the local wholesale and manufacturing vendors who sell to boutiques and stores across the country.4 3 On The Zeta Function Key to understanding how these fashions are so model’s label, the line the one quoted above fashion-forward, design-conscious, quickly made, and preceding says, “Many mathematical sold at such affordable prices is recognizing that these expressions can be visualized the same way.” To read the enterprises are all mom-and-pop shops and family-run in rest, go to http://www.o-r-g. endeavors. Each vendor and accompanying showroom com/view.html?project=103 space often represents a family—a husband-and-wife team who has, over the course of three decades, gained manufacturing experience throughout Asia, Central and South America, and Los Angeles. An earlier generation had experienced the industrialization of postwar Korea through garment and textile manufacturing for export to the U.S., and first migrated to South America because of the difficulty obtaining visas to the U.S. This generation raised their children with Korean-South American identities while making a living in the rag trade. With the inflation and crash of the peso throughout the 1990s, a younger generation migrated from South America to Los Angeles. This generation, born in the 1950s and 1960s, now works in Los Angeles alongside their children, who are in their twenties and thirties and many of whom have pursued college degrees in the U.S. and Europe, studying design, marketing, merchandising, and business. The few studies on the fast-fashion industry often explore the global economic supply chains in the making of fashion, but leave out the social histories of migration and labor that tell the story of these families. For it is the families’ migrations and the combinations of intergenerational skill sets to form a family division of labor that play a central role in the making of fast fashion and have David Reinfurt powerfully impacted the transformation of the U.S. and global fashion industry in the last decade. And since vendors must create designs that are put into production even before retailers have ordered them (a retailer expects that the designs are boxed and shipped out to their stores the same day they are ordered), taking

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on enormous risks to produce styles that may never ever sell, it makes sense that fast fashion would rely on families—characterized by intact relationships, quick communication among numerous parties, and a deep sense of trust—in order to glue and oil global links and offset the risks in a fragile, precarious, and volatile global fashion market. In the back inventory room of one of these show- UNLIKENESS room-stores, Carolina, the daughter of a fast-fashion For an image to be a likeness also must be an unlikeness. family who runs the design and sales segment of her fam- it Plato was the first to grasp ily’s manufacturing company, unpacks cardboard boxes this as a matter of simple If an image were not wrapped in green plastic wrapping along with Carlos, logic: unlike what it represents, her young twenty-something employee. She tells me then it would be that thing, not an image. If for Plato that these boxes contain styles that had been designed and an image is always less than and created a month earlier and had only arrived in the the thing, in our time we another kind of warehouse and store just the day before. The walls of the recognize image: one that is more than back inventory room are stacked with hundreds of boxes, the thing, that is unlike it by it rather than containing thousands of pieces of clothing in vibrant col- over-shooting falling short of it. The image ors and patterns, waiting to be driven out to retailers that can be less-than-real, but also too-real. same day. The truth procedures in Carolina shows me the custom prints that sit in either case are different. The that is less-than her inventory—fifteen hundred sequined blouses in unlikeness reveals itself in comparison different colors and sizes that she will sell to her cus- to the thing. The unlikeness is more-than is not tomers for the wholesale price of $13.50 each. She pulls that revealed by the thing; if out one blouse from its plastic sleeve and unfolds it to anything, it is the thing that wanting. The only truthshow me the research that went into the design of this seems procedure for the too-real is one style. She had spent time learning the latest trends to try to relate one too-real to a second too-real from women’s magazines such as Vogue, Elle, and InStyle, image image and find the exponential and in her free time perused fashion websites and blogs excess where one squares off other. like ShopStyle, Nasty Gal, and the Sartorialist. She tells withIfthe the less-than truth me how important it is for her to spend days in and procedure would do for the era we called the spectacle, out of shops at the Beverly Center in Beverly Hills, or in that the more-than procedure high-end shopping malls like the Grove, or at the fash- is perhaps more fitting our time of simulation. ion boutiques along Melrose or Robertson Boulevard. to How unlikely seems this She even frequents 3rd Street Promenade in Santa unlikeness when mapped onto Monica and the high-class suburban neighborhoods of this other or these others? greater Los Angeles to observe the latest trends worn by pedesMcKenzie Wark trians and tourists. Carolina herself is young, hip, and fashionable. She watches shoppers and takes notes on what they are wearing, where they shop, and even what clothes they touch while in stores. Although it was her mother, a skilled patternmaker with a knack for fit, who had the idea of making their most

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recent design endeavor—jackets—so that they could corner a niche market, it is really the designs of Carolina and her husband Danny that have most recently piqued the interests of the latest round of buyers from retail chains and department stores like Anthropologie, T.J. Maxx, and Urban Outfitters, who have ordered her designs online or in person at the showroom-store on 12th Street. They might be simulations, dabblings in the too-real, but Carolina tells me that her speculative work in they lend themselves to this fashion is always a tricky gamble—she has to be careful speculation — this wagering on the magnitude of their overto pick up on the latest trends, but at the same time, keep shooting of the real. “ahead of the trend” before the market is oversaturated. This is, after all, how markets now work. They are a Timing is everything, and designing something late will truth procedure of mapping inevitably lose money, since everyone will have the same quantitative fictions onto one another. But perhaps there thing coming in from China at the same time in just a is a qualitative dimension week. As an example, she shows me how many items in as well — another mapping, outside of quantity, or at the Jobber Market incorporate some version of horizontal least outside of it for a stripes or camouflage. If someone had caught the trend moment. That might be a job for art. before the others, it is likely that this person made a great profit. At this point, however, most everyone already has stripes and camouflage in their inventory—the entire neighborhood is full of horizontally striped and camouflaged things just sitting there in inventory rooms or warehouses. And for that reason, now the stuff is nearly impossible to sell. Carolina laments that her spring merchandise is just sitting in her back inventory room. When the styles first arrived back in February, she had confidence they would sell—they were right on trend with the other stores in the neighborhood, which had picked up on similar ideas and were doing well selling similar items. Now that it was the start of summer, she had begun to worry. She and her husband Danny were seeing too many of the same designs, patterns, and prints in the neighborhood. They noticed that by the time retail buyers had walked down the street to their showroom, after going in and out of the many other stores that preceded them, they had already grown McKenzie Wark tired of seeing similar designs. When the buyers showed up, they were already asking for the merchandise at even cheaper costs. Carolina tells me that she has four thousand sequined tops to move out of her store. She badly needs to sell the clothes for cash, and quickly, since she’s already paying the cash deposit

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Warehouse.

Jobber.

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for the fabric on the new jackets they are making for this winter. She will need the cash to pay the Guangzhou factory for the cut-and-sew assembly of the clothes, and there is much anxiety in her voice. She has watched her already slim profit margin on the sequined tops grow even slimmer and remarks that in this economic state, not only is she not able to mark up costs by all that much, but that even her own regular buyers won’t buy this trend at this point in the season. She tells me she will have to cut her losses and hope that that they will buy at cost so that at least she’d make her money back. Her mother, traveling twice a month to oversee the production process in China, calls the L.A. showroom at the end of the L.A. workday (morning for her in China) to see what has sold and what cash is immediately available for wire to make the next style at the factory. Here in the Jobber Market, where the profit margins are so slim and the risks are so great, these small mom-and-pop businesses of immigrant wholesalers and manufacturers take on the risks that large retailers demand, in order to make fast fashion available for mass consumption. Speculation is the well-educated guesswork made by two generations of family members working together, where years of trial and error experience in manufacturing (knowing what factories to use, who to trust, what connections to rely on, from whom to source the materials) and garment production (how to save costs, how to cut a pattern, how the fabric drapes and falls, how the garment fits) work in tandem with trend-spotting intuition and fashion savvy. Speculation is the ability to stomach the uneasy feeling of shifting large amounts of cash on a daily basis and across continents, knowing that at any given moment one just might lose it all. Speculation is the intense trust that comes from family and the creative work of designing children, on whom parents rely to make styles that will sell and bankroll the next trend. Speculation is the intense trust children have in parents, whose manufacturing experience cannot be learned at school: already established connections across the globe, understanding of garment construction and fit, and the ability to predict and hedge against all the possible things that can go wrong with the fragile links of a global production process. It is the daily high-risk gamble of these immigrant families who work in fashion that plays an enormous role in getting fashions so quickly produced and on retail floors. Carolina tells me that she never knows which of her

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designs will ever actually sell. Sometimes it is predictable and sometimes it is a total surprise—a complete mystery. She just knows that she has to keep it going—keep on designing multiple styles hoping that one will be “a hit.” At bare minimum she will make fifteen hundred pieces of clothing per style, perhaps ten styles a month. I learn that larger manufacturing companies run by families in the Jobber Market will make up to TRADING MARKETS twenty-five styles and samples of clothing a day, employ- A trading market is a price vehicle involving ing a team of in-house and hired designers that will send discovery transference of risk or their already made sample to China that evening, for the anticipation of profits in an with uncertain cutting of fabric and the sewing of the garment in just environment outcomes. Modern organized two days. Phone and Skype calls go out to China at the markets show a constant flow opinions on value that end of the L.A. workday and the start of the workday in of are expressed in price and Guangzhou, a global system that is at work around the volume. Graphically they presented as bar charts clock. It is Carolina’s ability to produce new designs and are reflecting high, low, and last styles daily, and in smaller quantities that are staggered trade with volume shown as a Such markets are onto retail floors, which keeps buyers coming back for histogram. ideal speculative vehicles more. When the design is a success, she will ask the cut- due to their liquidity, broad dissemination, and ease and-sew factory in China to cut more. These families turn price of access. Virtually every trader profits only if a buyer has to re-order and re-order small looks at these visual amounts of the fashions, small profits gained gradually charts and interprets them with each re-order. Then, in just a few weeks, the momen- personally. They are simple on a page onto which tum will slow down and the trend will end, but Carolina lines we project meaning. Working and other manufacturers like her will already be chasing backwards, the graphs transfer our projections onto and designing another trend. the thing itself — the stock The anxiety that comes from the daily risks of or bond or future or currency we buy or sell. This making fast fashion wears on Carolina. When she needs pair imputation of meaning and it the least, her neighbors give her unsolicited advice outcome can of course also be without any chart, but about the clothing she designs and sells. They tell her done the directness of projection, that her styles have been on the sidewalk mannequins unadulterated in its purity, more clearly expressed for too long or that they have noticed that her merchan- is when we see lines that lead to dise is not moving, and she fears that her own custom- actions. As mechanisms for the ers and regular buyers will pick up on this fact. The very creation of meaning, these worst, she tells me, is when closeout people start coming projections are contingent by her showroom. They linger around the neighborhood upon the experience and when trends have died out, counting the numbers of boxes that Byron Tucker move in and out of the stores, hoping to buy out the leftover merchandise at a ridiculously low cost. Carolina tells me that closeout agents watch closely who needs money, who to prey upon, who is the most vulnerable, and then find the right moment to come into the store, make an introduction, and offer a cheap deal for

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unsold merchandise, exploiting desperation for cash—the cash needed to pay fabric vendors or factories for new styles. She tells me that they bring her to her knees, these young guys in their twenties and thirties who roll into her store wearing sunglasses and flashy clothes announcing, “Do you have anything to sell to me?” She needs the cash to maintain her business and livelihood, but most importantly to maintain the crucial relationdesires we bring to the process of producing them. ships with fabric sources, factories, and sewers as well as Thus, our own, very personal with the buyers from department stores and retailers who lens determines what we see, and it accounts for the fact come back for business, the many relationships she has that different individuals cultivated across the global production process. Carolina using the same data draw different conclusions needs to pay her employees and deliver goods to buyers regarding the potential who provide fashions to their demanding and finicky outcome of a trade. Outcomes, too, elicit customers. She is just one of the many involved who keep individual responses — fashion going, providing the wage labor and livelihoods satisfaction or upset, happiness or anger, et cetera, of so many. depending on whether the trade Yet fast fashion comes at the cost of profound is a profit or a loss. Because we continually interpret the labor and environmental violations in places like China, world instead of experiencing where most of the clothing is sewn, or among the it directly, we are always confined by what we bring to Mexican workers hired without job security at or below it with the emotions being minimum wage. It also comes at a cost to these manufacthe functional parameters of our encounters with the event turers, who came to work in this informal market because of market engagement or of they did not have access to other means of formal work. encounters with life. We experience the market as They work in extremely ephemeral conditions, where we experience ourselves, in prices fluctuate daily. Their labor is flexible—orders don’t a process of self-mirroring: what we encounter in the come regularly, and they must constantly accommodate market and in the world is to circumstances dictated by powerful brands. Retailers ourselves, as the experience of looking and projecting onto like Forever 21, whose business relies entirely on this marmarkets is akin to how we see, ket, have at their fingertips an entire neighborhood full act on, and react to the world at large. A supreme challenge of designs and styles to pick and choose from for their for a speculator is to break private labeling—and if you don’t have what they want this self-referential cycle and discover profound freedom at the price they demand, then they’ll just try the showon the other side. room next door. The feelings of resentment and the looks We ignorantly believe what we see and experience of suspicion are palpable throughout the neighborhood. exists independently of us. Carolina tells me that every other day she wants to quit. When the designs are a success, it feels to Carolina like Byron Tucker winning the lottery. It isn’t so much that she’s sold a lot of merchandise or made a lot of money—the feeling is about the potential of beginning a long-term relationship with a customer, one who will come back regularly and re-order time and time again. This is Carolina’s ideal situation—her idea of success—to have

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just five big customers who order regularly, and bring about some stability ( ►118 ) , predictability, and therefore comfort in her family’s lives. Success isn’t so much having material things in life, but rather the chance to not live from paycheck to paycheck and to not have to take so many risks day to day. “We don’t know what will happen tomorrow.” These are the conditions of this immigrant com- If we invalidate the false munity, who originally fell into this line of fashion work object of our belief, we can to a true and unobscured because they had no other choices here in this country. come vision of our experience. In Their children, who witnessed the ups and downs of such trading markets this means decisions in precarious fashion markets in the work of their parents, clear-headed the context of volatility and risk, free of the contingency dream for margins of predictability. 1 Santee Alley has existed in the neighborhood since the 1970s, perhaps even earlier. It was the first alleyway within the neighborhood to transform into a street clothing market. At first various vendors sold clothing wholesale. Today, many of the shop vendors sell at retail. These vendors buy samples sold on Saturday mornings by neighboring showroom-stores, and sell during the week at retail prices. 2 In tandem with an entire workforce of immigrants from Mexico who work as day laborers and sales representatives for the showroom-stores.

3 One example is the site LA Showroom: https://www. lashowroom.com. 4 For instance, I was told by several sources that J.C. Penney, a company that was looking to revitalize its clothing business, had been visiting vendors in the local market to observe what was selling well to all the franchises and boutiques in different regions of the country. It is also common for buyers, from retail chains such as Forever 21, to buy small quantities of different designs from the local market and see if it sells in their retail stores. If so, these companies will put into production large quantities of similar designs (knockoff copies of knockoff copies) with their own manufacturing facilities abroad.

of our own self-defeating, self-imposed limitations. Speculation then becomes a statistical process of applying skill and knowledge, and turning an emotional gambit into a probabilistic engagement producing profits greater than losses.

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Synchronicities Sherene Schostak

Talking on March 22, 2013 CARIN KUONI

What is a metaphysician?

A metaphysician works on the invisible level of things. Much of my work tries to uncover what is not seen, or what could be missed, what is inherent in a symbol, and what is not obvious. Even in dream work, I look at what the unconscious is trying to reveal, what is disguised. Related is the idea of duality. Even if we think we’re getting a message, there’s always the hidden, the counter message—whether it is male / female or sun / moon. Part of metaphysics is looking for the contradiction, the opposition, for the invisible missing other path of the paradox.

SHERENE SCHOSTAK

What makes something invisible? Is “invisible” even an appropriate term, since what you’re finding—fear, pain, hope—is not something that you then see? Why do we use terms related to the sense of sight? It becomes no more visible with discovery than it was when it was invisible. CK

Lewis Hyde puts it best, relating invisibility to the often-overlooked dimension of the sacred. Based on how we’ve been conditioned to see, we take our perceptions for granted. It stays in that one conscious viewpoint, and

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yet there is this whole world going on behind the scenes. The sacred is what carries, or compensates for, or balances everything that we are aware of. It influences how we perceive. That was Carl Jung’s definition of fate: anything that you’re unconscious of appears to you as fate. We’re looking at an encapsulation, a microcosm of whatever the unconscious is trying to reveal through a repetition of life situations, life patterns, or relationship patterns. Metaphysical readings give a symbolic depiction of situations, so that you may open something that might be invisible or wasn’t known to you, something happening at another level of consciousness. If there can be that bridge of understanding, then maybe ( ►187 ) it won’t have to play out again in waking life. Perhaps you can have insight and shift your consciousness or perception around that pattern. If these symbols can completely transform how we understand something, can we be more strategic in evoking or using them? CK

There is one very simple and tangible strategy. It is to stop and set an intention, to invite the symbol in. If you work directly with your dreams, then that is one way to get a whole dictionary of symbols going and understand how your unconscious is communicating. They used to do an old Mercury-related ritual: they would say, if you want to connect with the god Mercury, then you go into the town square. Before you enter the square, you ask a question—and the first conversation you hear will be your answer. Another strategy is simply closing your eyes and asking the unconscious for a symbol. Something will come. There are so many ways to do it. SS

Isn’t the moment of revelation, and the recognition of the symbol as such, closely related to the idea of the mirror ( ►4 6 & 207 ) ? The fact that the mirror allows you to recognize yourself is itself a construction. The idea of the mirror is a construction. So my question is really about your practice: how do you see yourself in a sequence of historical professions? As a Jungian metaphysician, CK

READING CARDS ON JUNE 4, 2010 1 “What Value Does Society Place on Speculation?” Let’s see what the Tarot has to say. You all know of the principle of synchronicity, the idea that this is a moment when time collapses. Past, present, and future are one; a kairos moment arises; a very special moment in time occurs. The first card always reveals the nature of the person asking the question. So this person has a remarkable capacity for objectivity and places a strong emphasis on moving a mask or persona. This is somebody approaching the question and wanting honesty. She doesn’t want to hear the pleasing answer or the approved answer. The second card is the context or the overall situation. When a card is reversed, I read it as less conscious. It takes more work to bring out the potential. So the context of this question is showing us the card Ace of Swords, which indicates that there’s a lack of clarity. This is very much about the present moment. Right now we would say there’s a strong lack of clarity about this. But speculation itself would be, right? It is not the sword of absolute decisiveness. Then we look at the foundation. Now, the foundation is an archetypal card. We call these the major arcana. We have the Sun card reversed. The Sun card is about illumination of consciousness, but, again, it is a reverse. There’s a potential for consciousness, but it hasn’t been realized. We have to work to unearth this potential. That’s pretty fitting. Next we move up to the top position of the reading, which is the overall potential, the most we can hope for. Here we have a very fiery card but not one of the major archetypal cards. That’s a little bit disappointing. At the roots there is this really deep archetypal possibility, but at the highest it’s like this is a card of ego. As you can see just by the colors of these cards, there’s a lot of fiery, very dynamic energy. That is interesting to me as an astrologer, because the planets, too, are moving into a much more

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fiery dimension. We’ve been in a really heavy, earthy, stuck place, and we’re just about to enter a time of risk-taking. This is reflected in this card. This is actually called the card of Victory. Then we look at where we find ourselves, where are we going to find ourselves in the near future. External influence shows a lot of confusion. This is like almost too much feedback. Speculation becomes a very chaotic, messy enterprise indeed. Then we have the outcome, a very strong outcome. This card feels like a 9 / 11 card, because of the burning tower and people jumping out of the burning building. When I see that I always say something is collapsing. Old structures are collapsing because they don’t work. Whether society values them or not, they are collapsing. 1 Condensed reading from the roundtable of June 4, 2010, see p. 229.

where in that sequence do you belong? Perhaps this question allows you to think not about the reality of the mirror, but about the construction of the mirror. SS I’m reminded of the pathology of body dysmorphia. Because of an eating disorder, patients who suffer from dysmorphia look in the mirror and see themselves as bigger than they are. As a therapist, you play the mirror, yet the way you are able to mirror somebody back is so influenced by the client’s projection and what they’re open to seeing on the one hand, and by what you are able to reflect on the other. The idea of mirroring is very complicated. Yet, that is what we are all looking for. Mirroring and containing are probably two of the most important parts of therapy and healing. Jung said that therapy evolved out of the idea of confession. We have to confess something in our soul to another soul. Jung was a little bit of a bridge to some of the earthier, more pagan structures that were less hierarchical, less patriarchal than the Catholic Church. He tries to go back into a more mystic and timeless space. As you can tell, I live in a very nonlinear, nonchronological reality.

In the contemporary (►53 ) art world, there seems to be an increasingly serious interest in other kinds of intelligences that are not necessarily rational or even human. Do you think it is necessary for us as a certain species—human animals—to reach out to other beings, whether nonhuman or even other forces? Astrophysics, for instance, or mycology.

CK

From my perspective, intelligences become meaningful in the way they come to the symbolic realm. For instance, a few weeks ago a friend and I went to this really beautiful talk. It was a Jungian talk, and somehow the experience of going there felt very archetypal, just filled with symbols; there was something very magical about it. I share this because there was this one moment when we

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literally became lost. We were in the backwoods of Marin County, California, a retreat center buried in the woods. There were no signs. We were driving in circles. We were so late. Then all of a sudden, a raven showed up. We just followed the raven, and it showed us where to go. The question is: would the raven have come anyway? Or, is it because we opened up to this other dimension that it showed up? I have been trying to find ways to invite the symbolic into daily life, so that it doesn’t have to just be in the context of a therapy session or a ritual space. What if every day you set the day itself as a ritual space, as sacred? That’s what people used to do. You could, for instance, not let a day go by where you don’t connect to some form of beauty. Returning to an earlier idea, can duality perhaps be not a question of choosing either-or, but of keeping both paradoxical, opposing options open and possible? CK

SS

To hold both?

To hold onto both, yes, in the sense of speculative thinking. Does speculative thinking allow you to be multiple things at the same time or to comprehend or encompass contradictory terms and keep them as potential, simultaneously? CK

SS That’s perfect. Jung’s real contribution was the idea of holding the tension of opposites. In fact, that is the only way for growth to happen in the psyche. As long as we choose one and reject the other, that’s where we get into trouble. There’s splitting; there’s projection; there’s shadow. He found that the hardest thing for us was to hold the tension of opposites, to be this and that, an angel and a devil, to love connection or have nothing to do with this connectedness. We need that to create the birth of the third, to call that the transcendent function. That would be the miraculous.

READING CARDS ON JANUARY 21, 2011 2 I thought it would be interesting to offer the numerology aspect of speculation from an archetypal perspective. Everyone in the metaphysical realm was talking about the fact that the first day of the year was 1 / 1 / 11. Eleven is a master number. It’s also considered a portal, when you have four ones. From a numerological perspective, this year the number one will be very important. If we look at it from an archetypal perspective, it has to do with beginnings, initiation. Even if we look at the astrology behind it, the planets are backing this up: there’s a strong emphasis in the very first sign of the zodiac, which is Aries. We see that also when we get deeper into the numerology. If we take apart the number of the year, 2011, we can first look at each number as its own archetype, and then the numbers that they add up to. The prevailing archetype is the number two. Two is often linked with the duality in the paradox, which I feel in the collective unconscious. We seem to be on a precipice. Many of my clients have this sense of uneasiness. On the one hand, there is a feeling that new beginnings are possible, but on the other there is real dread or hopelessness in the air. It’s an interesting place to be when you feel both, when you’re right on that cusp or that edge. Are we still in an ending phase? Has the beginning started? The archetypes really speak to this, the archetypes of the Tarot system that Jung was interested in, a Western system by the way. The number one has to do with the archetype of the Magician, who is very connected to the planet Mercury and the trickster god. As an archetype, the Magician conjures things. He brings things into being. He actually is considered the divine channel. He’s standing like this, one arm connecting to the heavens and one finger pointing down to the earth. Literally, he’s a conduit. He’s trying to bring something from the

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other side down into the earth. There is this sense of a portal again. We’re looking to the gods about time. The next archetype also has to do with trusting our intuition and our feelings. One of the other predominant archetypes, along with the number one, is the number eleven, which has to do with justice. You see this coming up immediately in 2011. I don’t know if it’s the advent of the social networks, but to me, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this year felt different, like people were really embracing his teachings and repeating his beautiful messages. Saturn is in the constellation of Libra, which rules justice. From an astrological perspective, collectively, we are all going through deep lessons of looking at how our own actions or karmas or choices affect the consequences we live with, and how we can choose differently and more deliberately. It’s also sometimes called the archetype of adjustment. We have that sense of something needing to be adjusted. I feel that’s really strong right now, and people are looking at the decisions they make. This has been an ongoing trend, but I think we’ll see that even more. Another interesting aspect in this archetype is the mirror, the idea of the mirror, and how things are mirrored back to us in our relationships, not just our intimate one-to-one relationships, but also collectively. It extends to looking at the news, and asking how the news is a mirror, even in my personal life. How am I actually contributing to this in the way I think, and through the decisions I make? People are seeing the news less as being on the outside, outside themselves. Next is the number four, because 2011 adds up to four. That’s a powerful archetype. It’s called the Emperor. The Emperor is interesting in that it has a lot to do with being the first. There’s a real pioneering aspect that I think is trying to emerge. I know with my clients too, there’s this sense of urgency. This energy is just coming into existence over the next few days. There’s a big shift happening in the planets, too. Jupiter, which rules the collective philosophies,

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CK The last time you read for us was on January 21, 2011, four days before the Tahrir Square uprising, which brought the so-called Arab Spring to Western audiences. The transcripts of that reading now are uncanny. You spoke of “things [that] are out-of-balance,” and told us that “where things are unjust or unfair, people are focusing on this much more now.” Later you said, “We’re all going through deep lessons in terms of looking at how our actions affect the consequences we live with, and how we can choose differently”—in hindsight concepts closely aligned with sentiments arising from the revolutionary wave of protests of the Arab Spring or the Occupy Wall Street movement. I’m curious about how you manage—or seek—a balance between the specific and the symbolic. SS

With the predictions?

Yes. Do you predict for yourself? Does the mirror construct itself? Do you have ideas about politics in the world, and if so at what point do you say, this is as far as I go and no further? CK

SS It comes through you. It is almost like the gods knock you unconscious. It’s so hard. It does go back to the mirror question. I can read myself, but I know my own desires, wishes, fears will color what I will take from the symbols. It’s not as pure. It’s much easier to do the reading when you don’t have an agenda attached. That’s why a lot of people—psychics, mediums, clairvoyants—will say of the cards you read for yourself, that your ego, your subjectivity definitely get in the way of a pure reading. Even if you know somebody well and you know they have an agenda, that can sometimes influence the reading. It’s best if you don’t know the person at all.

Are there moments of more profound recognition of patterns of developments? Are there special moments, when readings are more specific or revelatory?

CK

There are times when the channel is more open to receiving, to really receive a foreshadowing, or when you

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are pulling information through visions of the future. There’s always a part of me that says, I don’t know. I could be making this up. A big part of it is trusting. Sometimes you just have such a strong feeling. All of your hair stands up on end and you feel it with every cell of your body. I’ve learned that you have to trust, trust at the deeper level of faith.

is moving into the sign of Aries. Throughout the year, there’s going to be a big lineup in Aries. Astrologically, Aries is going to be the predominant energy for the year, and it resonates with the number four, the archetype of the Emperor. Together they are pushing into existence new beginnings through action. We’re right on the precipice of trying to initiate this new beginning. Aries is also the warrior, the survivor. He is our ability to see things. It will be interesting to see how these archetypes play out. I see my clients feeling a sense of urgency to take a risk. It is similar almost to after 9/11, when I saw this with a lot of my clients, this desire to really take a risk, to do something meaningful. To be almost a daredevil. It takes a certain amount of going into the uncertainty, the unknown. That’s the warrior aspect. An interesting thing happened to me recently, and I thought it was relevant to this speculation. When I was writing up a preliminary statement, I could have sworn I saved the final version of the text. When I went to attach it to an e-mail, I noticed the older version of the text was attached to my e-mail, the one before the changes had been made. The difference concerned the spelling of the word “prevailing”—it was flagged in red and had this very interesting look that reminded me a lot of the year, like the feeling of the year with the number two. “Prevailing” was spelled with two l’s, and it just wanted to stay there. I changed it so many times, and it kept coming back. Still, it looked very interesting like this, with the two pillars. So I think there’s something right when we are talking about paradox and duality, and this archetype really wants to be present. I thought this is the perfect topic for what it feels like this year is really about. It feels so present, this speculation. It’s a perfect word for it. 1 Condensed reading from the roundtable of January 21, 2011, see p. 232.

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Post-Racial America? Addressing Racial Inequality Darrick Hamilton & William Darity, Jr.1

Despite enormous and persistent racial inequality, the ascendant American narrative is one that asserts that our society has transcended the racial divide. The proclamation is often coupled with the empirically unsubstantiated claim that remaining racial disparities are due primarily to dysfunctional behavior on the part of minorities, particularly blacks, themselves. Consistent with this dominant narrative, public sentiment has shifted away from a social responsibility for the conditions of black America, and today the only acceptable remedial social policies are those that are facially race neutral. Nevertheless, even without redistributing assets directly on the basis of race, our nation still can do so indirectly by judiciously using wealth as the standard for redistributive measures.

Have we transcended race? Perhaps 1965 marks the beginning of this speculative discourse, the year that the U.S. Labor Department’s Assistant Secretary and future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his oftcited report that emphasized the “tangle of pathology” within the black family as the culprit for the racial divide. Sociologist William Ryan has aptly labeled this post-civil rights, post-racial perspective, as “blaming the victim.”2 Its rhetoric contends that discrimination and other social barriers are largely things of the past, that blacks now need to stop playing the “victim role,” “take personal responsibility,” and recognize their own fault in the persistence of racial inequality. Moreover, blacks are enjoined to stop making

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particularistic claims on America and solely pursue programs of social change designed to reach all Americans. All of these sentiments were expressed plainly by Barack Obama in his “More Perfect Union” speech—his major address on race in America when he was a presidential candidate: For the African-American community, that path [to a more perfect union] means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances—for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs—to the larger aspirations of all Americans—the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for our own lives.

CREDIT Credit is etymologically rooted in belief, but it has evolved in a decidedly cynical direction. From the notorious credit default swaps and the ensuing crisis to the endless preapproval mailings and plastic “platinum” cards, it’s clear that the contemporary business of credit trades heavily on recklessness, deception, and fantasy. The ever-elusive “free credit report” has become our era’s Loch Ness Monster, but other aspects of credit have also earned skepticism. “Buy now, pay later!” offers flexibility through postponement, but the proverbial fine print binds debtors both firmly and punctually. The risk is mutual, but often imbalanced: while borrowers’ vulnerabilities are personalized through bankruptcy and foreclosure, lenders’ losses have often been socialized through taxpayer-funded bailouts. Even governmental sovereignty can suddenly be subject to terms of credit, with international bankers and NGOs brought in to “adjust” the debtor state. When credit is too big to fail, the rest of us are too small to succeed. Nearly ubiquitous, credit has also been able to

Both implicitly and explicitly, Obama is proposing that there is nothing unique about the discriminatory barriers faced by black Americans today. However, Obama does seem to uniquely direct his personal responsibility rhetoric at blacks. What is lacking from his discrimination narrative is the empirical evidence, which indicates that since the mid-1970s, the black-white wage gap, along with the measured component of that inequality attributable to discrimination, has remained roughly stable.3 Indeed, the election of Barack Obama itself has further fueled the post-racial discourse. For example, after the 2008 presidential election, actor Will Smith proclaimed, “all of our excuses have been removed. … There’s no white man trying to keep you down, because if he were trying to keep you down he would have [also tried to keep] Obama down.”4 The rise of blacks to elite positions is the typical evidence put forth by post-racialists. Common examples—prior to the election of Obama to the supreme elected office—included the hiring of black CEOs at Fortune 500 corporations like Time Warner and American Express, and the appointment of blacks

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at the highest levels of the cabinet, such as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. Post-racialists attempt to bolster their case by contending that these examples of black exceptionalism result from individual or familial acts of perseverance and hard work. The flip side is that the distributional underachievement of blacks results from a deficient individual and / or familial orientation towards dematerialize and accelerate the rituals of monetary achievement. The problem is that this claim is based on exchange. Cash was replaced convenient anecdotes without the benefits of proper by a simple signature, then by a quick swipe. Now you counterfactualsto validate or invalidate this conjecture. just tap your card like a For example, are there examples of individual and familmagic wand. Credit’s swift alchemy turns delayed ial acts of perseverance and hard work that did not lead to gratification into delayed successful outcomes? And, if so, how many, and how sysconsequence. When payments come due, credit promises to tematic were they? help (discreetly). Fraying In fact, during his 2009 address at the hundredth social nets are bolstered by credit’s invisible web, but anniversary celebration of the National Association for as everything falls apart, the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Obama credit tightens the knot. Credit’s speed is actually offers himself and the hard work and parenting behavior its patience. Its stealth is of his mother as an example in contrast to less successful cunning. From Occupying Wall Street black youths: to simply cutting up cards, resistance to credit has entailed an emphatic return to the physical realm, and the various global and personal crises have made credit more of a public, and shared, concern. Collective efforts have so far produced modest government reforms and heartening mechanisms like Rolling Jubilee, microlending, and credit unions — but we are still a long way from the kind of credit that is really credible.

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I was raised by a single mom. I didn’t come from a lot of wealth. I got into my share of trouble as a child. My life could have easily taken a turn for the worse. When I drive through Harlem or I drive through the South Side of Chicago and I see young men on the corners, I say, there but for the grace of God go I. They’re no less gifted than me. They’re no less talented than me. But I had some breaks. That mother of mine, she gave me love; she pushed me; she cared about my education; she took no lip; she taught me right from wrong. Because of her, I had a chance to make the most of my abilities.

What Obama omits from his narrative is the fact that his single mother had a Ph.D., and the fact that he received an elite education both abroad in Indonesia and domestically while on scholarship at one of the best private schools in Hawaii. Instead, his narrative emphasizes the love, motivation, and discipline that his mother instilled, which he indicates is lacking in the households of his black inner-city comparisons. Clearly, Obama comes from a more privileged background than the inner-city black youths to which he compares himself,

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irrespective of any love, motivation, or discipline that his mother may have instilled. Another leading proponent of the post-racial narrative is highly acclaimed author Charles Johnson. In the cover story of the summer 2008 issue of The American Scholar, “The End of the Black American Narrative,” Johnson qualifies himself as a social theorist by describing how fiction writers concerned with social issues use their craft to put forth narratives describing social experiences. Johnson’s own social theory on race begins with a tale of exploitation and victimization from his award-winning novel Middle Passage. But, this narrative of victimization changes as a result of the heroics of integration leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and the successes of the civil rights movement, including the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the growth of the black middle class. Johnson speculates that we are now in a post-racial America, and the narrative of black victimization is over. He asserts that it “is no longer the case that the essence of black American life is racial victimization and disenfranchisement, a curse and condemnation, a destiny based on color in which the meaning of one’s life is thinghood, created even before one is born.” But how does the new and improved Obama-Johnson narrative explain the racial wealth gap and the fact that this socalled black middle class dramatically shrinks when wealth is used as the indicator of class position?

The role of the racial wealth gap in post-racial America Wealth is a paramount indicator of economic and social wellbeing, and also a dramatic indicator of black-white inequality. Before the Great Recession, the typical black family had a little less than a dime for every dollar in wealth of the typical white family. After the recession, that gap nearly doubled; the typical black family now has about a nickel for every dollar in wealth of the typical white family, with the median black family having less than $6,000 in net worth and the absolute racial wealth gap exceeding $100,00.5 Regardless of age, household structure, education, occupation, or income, the typical black household has less than a quarter of the wealth of otherwise comparable white households. Perhaps even more disheartening,

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white households whose head dropped out of high school typically have greater wealth than black households whose head graduated from college.6

What are the conventional explanations for this disparity? There are primarily two mechanisms put forth to explain INSURANCE Accompanying the totalthe racial wealth gap consistent with Obama-Johnson loss inventory of damaged post-racial speculation. First, blacks, more in search of art donated to Salvage Art Institute by an art insurance immediate gratification, are presumed to be less frugal corporation last year were compared to whites when it comes to savings. Second, sets of documents tracing the history of each claim. blacks are believed to have a lower financial acumen, They lay bare frictions which translates into inferior asset management and surrounding the business of shared risk. Outwardly, they overall lower financial portfolio returns. formulate the sequence of Indeed, when asked at an April 2009 lecture at each settlement: the often banal circumstances of loss, Morehouse College why the racial wealth gap is so large, reports on the condition, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke attributed the the routine stages of each devaluation, the back and gap to a lack of “financial literacy” on the part of blacks, forth of proofs and names, particularly with respect to savings behavior. numbers, and signatures culminating in the final terms It has not historically been the case, however, nor of transfer of title to the is it now the case, that blacks have a lower savings rate damaged work, from the owner to the insurer, “absolutely than whites. Economists ranging from the conservaand forever.” tive Milton Friedman to the founder of the Caucus of However, alongside precisely crafted forms and Black Economists, Marcus Alexis, have found that, after terms that propel “exchange accounting for household income, blacks have a slightly of title” for a settled amount of money, we find disorderly higher savings rate than whites.7 More recently, Maury scribblings and annotations, Gittleman and Ed Wolff confirmed these results, again, evocative modes of address, urgent questions, and almost after adjusting for household income.8 lyrical explications backed The mild black savings rate advantage at most with ghostly copies of images documenting the dimensions income levels is actually indicative of even greater black of damage. This ebullience frugality, since blacks typically have greater family obliannounces anxieties that fuel such exchanges, as if a gations in assisting low-income relatives than whites, and certain excess resulting from this further reduces their resources to save.9 loss could not be processed by any claim. In addition, the Gittleman and Wolff study, based The tension is amplified on data before the discriminatory subprime mortgage market crisis, finds no significant racial differences in asset Elka Krajewska appreciation rates, once household income is controlled for families with positive assets. Moreover, the finding mentioned earlier that white families whose heads dropped out of high school have higher median wealth than black heads with a college degree indicates that not even a college degree shields black

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families from low levels of asset accumulation. Thus, the speculative explanation of a lower financial acumen and lower level of frugality are not empirically supported.

So, what actually explains the racial wealth gap? The explanation actually grounded in sound empirical evidence is that racial differences in inheritances, bequests, and intra-family transfers account for more of the racial wealth gap than any other demographic or socioeconomic indicator, including education, income, and household structure.10 Why do blacks have immensely fewer resources to transfer from one generation to the next? Beginning with three hundred years of slavery, in which blacks themselves were considered material assets for whites, there has been a long history of government, institutional, and individual acts of discrimination that have limited the ability of black families to acquire and transfer wealth from one generation to the next.11 This history includes the exclusion of blacks at local levels from post-Depression and World War I–era public policy, which was largely responsible for the asset development of a white American middle class.12 The biased treatment of blacks in housing and lending markets is not limited to the past. There are several accounts of ongoing lending and housing discrimination, particularly with regards to predatory subprime lending. 13

by another divide, the divide between precision and ambiguity, explicit in what is called a floater policy. Commonly applied in the art insurance industry due to the peregrine nature of art objects, the floater insures works of art in motion, traveling between multiple destinations, sold and resold at galleries and auctions. It applies to work at the original location, final destination, and in transit (i.e., wherever), either in its complete form or disassembled (i.e., in whatever), without certainty of where the object is or how it looks — tentative, as if, until settled in front of appraiser’s eyes. The seemingly irrelevant by-product of a concluded total-loss art insurance case, the total-loss object itself, the no-longerart expunged by contract, remains, perhaps, in order to absorb that excess and uncertainty at the core of our exchanges and to coincide fully with all unknown contents of the futures to come.

Policies: what can the public sector do? Given the importance of intergenerational transfers of wealth and the past and present barriers preventing black wealth accumulation, private action and market forces alone cannot close an unjust racial wealth gap. We need a shift away from the unsubstantiated “blaming the victim” approach, and a shift toward more dramatic public intervention. We need a shift toward dramatic and bold policies that lead to economic security, mobility, and sustainability for all Americans, while

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targeting for eligibility the characteristics and outcomes in which we are most racially disparate.14 To eliminate the racial wealth gap, we need a policy to provide an opportunity for asset development regardless of race and the financial position in which individuals are born. We propose that a substantial child development trust fund program— or “baby bonds program,” as coined by the recently STATES OF HALF-KNOWLEDGE: THE ECONOMY OF READING deceased Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and scholar “It is what we have in comof African-American studies, Manning Marable— mon not only with those who live with us, but also with would in about two or three generations go a long way those who were here before towards eliminating the racial wealth gap.15 The baby and with those who will come after us.” bond program would be designed to provide an oppor– Hannah Arendt, The Human tunity for asset development for all newborns regardless Condition, 1958 of race and the financial position in which they are born. What are the systems upon Even among only whites, the 2009 Survey of which we rely for the sustainability of knowledge? If we Income and Program Participation (SIPP) reveals that are committed to the sharless than 10 percent of families hold more than 50 pering of collectively produced ideas, do we also need to cent of total household wealth. The richest 20 percent of consider establishing new the entire U.S. population holds over 80 percent of the platforms, which will enable different types of knowledge nation’s wealth, while the top one percent holds nearly to nourish the public domain? 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.16 Moreover, since about The mediation of ideas has always been linked to repre85 percent of black families have a net worth below the sentation and therefore to median household,17 it is clear that the vast majority of power, so how can we insist on renegotiating the presence the nation’s wealth, along with the opportunities that of unincorporated knowledge? stem from this wealth, is skewed heavily towards a relaA knowledge that through its spectacular dematerializative few, who are predominantly white. tion calls for the creation The average baby bonds program account could of a new value system? The artistic projects that explore be about $20,000 per child and progressively rise to the world of social relations, $60,000 for newborns born into families with the lowest whether they occur on- or offline, engage dynamics such as wealth. The accounts would grow at a federally guaranaffection, cooperation, and teed annual interest rate of 1.5–2 percent, and they could friendship. All of these shape and bind our contributions by be accessed when the child becomes an adult and used placing trust at the center of for some asset-enhancing endeavor, such as purchasing creative exchanges. If we consider reading as a home or starting a new business. an economy and explore the In addition to providing the necessary endowment to actually engage in asset accumulation, a positive indiMarysia Lewandowska rect consequence from the baby bonds program would be an enhanced incentive for youth self-investment. Youth, who lack motivation as a result of perceived limited opportunities as an adult, might be incentivized to self-invest as a result of the enhanced opportunities stemming from a baby bond.

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If all of the roughly four million babies born in the U.S. each year were eligible for the program, by a crude estimate the program’s cost would amount to about $60 billion a year. While this simple estimate does not incorporate costs resulting from increased fertility incentives, it also does not incorporate savings resulting from reduction in other federal transfer programs associated with better-resourced young adults. economy of reading, we may This cost could be fully funded based on a frac- find that it lies where a of ideas is produced tion of what the federal government already spends surplus without a need for immediate on asset-enhancing activities. A 2004 report by the release. Reading is as much as it is accumuCorporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) esti- speculative lative. It offers freedom, mates that the federal government allocated $335 billion literally and figuratively, negotiating between of its 2003 budget in the form of tax subsidies and savings while different states of recogto promote asset-development policies.18 An updated nition; it explodes what is to us, while competing version of this study puts the allocation around $400 bil- known for our attention. Reading produces tacit lion.19 The bulk of this allocation comes from items like knowledge in the context of mortgage interest deductions, exclusion of investment its shared experience. Al( ►154 ) income on life insurance and annuity contracts, ready in the sixteenth century in Gargantua and reduced rates of tax on dividends and long-term capital Rabelais, Pantagruel, offered the vision of a future print culture gains, and exclusion of capital gains at death. a consumer’s heaven, emIt is noteworthy that the top one percent of earn- as phasizing its liberating poers, those typically earning over $1 million dollars a year, tential. Access to knowledge bring democracy of disreceived about one-third of the entire allocation, while would course. Perhaps he intended to the bottom 60 percent of earners received only five per- warn us that the promise of new technologies, cent.20 We are proposing that the federal asset promotion printed-word today revolutionized by the budget be allocated in a more progressive manner, so Internet, might intoxicate by linking freedom that federal policies could be transformative for unprivi- culture to its different uses. The leged low-wealth Americans. The baby bonds proposal printing press borrowed its from the technology of provides a far more progressive, opportunity-enhancing name the wine press. Books began to subsidy and is a lot less expensive than many of the asset flow, eventually giddily satthe market. The quest tax policies already in existence. Indeed, the proposal urating to control this flood resulted could be fully funded by simply capping mortgage inter- in the copyright law; today it reached an unprecedented est deductions for wealthy families. Ultimately, baby has form known as DRM (digital bonds are designed to level the playing field by offering rights management) or digital an opportunity for all newborns to accumulate assets, enclosure, where commernot just those who where fortunate to be born into privileged Marysia Lewandowska familial backgrounds.

Conclusion The Moynihan-Obama-Johnson post-racial narrative, which describes a black deficiency in personal responsibility,

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demonstrates a potential stigma and the political harm of empirically unsupported speculation. In reality, the vicious cycle of poverty, and in particular asset poverty, has less to do with a culture of poverty and everything to do with unmerited deficits of privileges and resources. We offer a policy proposal, baby bonds, that could virtually eliminate the racial wealth gap in about two or three generations. In contrast with post-racial explacially motivated regulation replaces social relations nations, the policy that we propose is based on the sound based on trust. It may be that empirical evidence that the racial wealth gap is rooted in a world saturated with images the circulation of words in the large racial differences in structural barriers and is still capable of connectendowments, particularly when young adults begin to ing us to thought processes by agitating their unbound meanbuild a trajectory of asset accumulation over a lifetime. ings. Books no longer depend If America is ever able to truly become post-racial, on paper editions to reach us; instead the flat, luminous there should be no transmission of racial economic screen delivers their content advantage or disadvantage across generations. Public as efficiently. Having dematerialized in front of our provision of a substantial trust fund for newborns from eyes, they have in turn mobifamilies that are wealth-poor would go a long way toward lized our longing for printed matter. achieving that ideal. Until then, the speculation that the In 806 CE, someone somehistoric election of the first self-identified black president where in China hand printed a value on a piece of mulberry has abridged the racial divide merely will serve as a sympaper and asked everyone to bolic racial reconciliation. agree that it was actually worth that much. This gave rise to paper money. An homage to this act of trust lives on today in the middle of London where, in the 1920s, the Bank of England planted a small stand of mulberry trees. While we inhabit with ease the world of technological accumulation we often lose sight of how much of that world rests on enclosure and prohibition. Perhaps we must insist on reconnecting knowledge with trust, thereby challenging the prevailing culture of permission, in support of a culture of acknowledgment from which everyone benefits.

Marysia Lewandowska

1 The authors would like to acknowledge Alvin Aja for his contributions. 2 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist by training. at the time was Assistant Deputy Secretary of Labor, and his research into the black “under-class” was released under a report entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which is commonly known as the Moynihan Report. William Ryan, a psychologist by training, wrote his book in direct refutation of the Moynihan Report, and he describes the ideology issued in the report as justifying racism against blacks by inaccurately attributing racial inequality to the group based attitudes and behaviors on blacks themselves. 3 William Darity, Jr., and Patrick Mason, “Evidence on Discrimination in Employment: Codes of Color, Codes of Gender,” The Journal of Economic Prespectives 12, no. 2 (1998): pp. 63–90.

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4 Will Smith, quoted in Annette John-Hall, “Race still matters in Obama’s post-racial U.S.,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 26, 2009. 5 Rakesh Kocchar, Richard Fry, and Paul Taylor, Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2011). 6 Maury Gittleman and Edward N. Wolff, “Racial Differences in Patterns of Wealth Accumulation,” The Journal of Human Resources 39, no. 1 (2004): pp. 93–227. 7 Milton Friedman, A Theory of the Consumption Function (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Marcus Alexis, “Some Negro-White Differences in Consumption,” in The Black Consumer, ed. George Joyce and A.P. Govoni (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 257–74.

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9 Ngina Chiteji and Darrick Hamilton, “Family Connections and the Black-White Wealth Gap among the Middle Class,” Review of Black Political Economy 30, no. 1 (2002), pp. 9–27; Colleen M. Heflin and Mary Pattillo-McCoy, “Kin Effects on Black-White Account and Home Ownership,” Sociological Inquiry 72, no. 2 (2000), pp. 220–39. 10 See for example Francine Blau and John Graham, “Black White Differences in Wealth and Asset Composition,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 105, no. 2 (1990), pp. 321–39; Paul Menchik and Nancy Ammon Jianakoplos, “Black-White Wealth Inequality: Is Inheritance the Reason?” Economic Inquiry 35, no. 2 (1997), pp. 428–42; and Gittleman and Wolff. 11 William Darity, Jr., and Dania Frank, “The Economics of Reparations,” American Economic Review 93, no. 2 (2003), pp. 326–29; Darity, Jr., “Forty Acres and a Mule in the 21st Century,” Social Science Quarterly 89, no. 3 (2008), pp. 656–64. 12 See for example Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/ White Wealth, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005). 13 See for example Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/ White Wealth, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005). 14 Such policies, which allow for universal eligibility to garner greater political support, while at the same time are designed to specifically target certain marginal groups, have been characterized by John Powell as “targeted universalism.” See John Powell, “Race, Place, and Opportunity: Where We Live Influences Our Life

Chances. Too Many Blacks Still Live in Concentrated Poverty,” The American Prospect 19, no. 10 (September 21, 2008). 15 See William Darity, Jr., and Darrick Hamilton, “Bernanke Ignores History of Black and White Wealth Rift,” The Grio (October 30, 2009); Hamilton and Darity, Jr., “Race, Wealth, and Intergenerational Poverty: There Will Never Be a Post-racial America if the Wealth Gap Persists,” The American Prospect 20, no. 7 (September/October 2009); Hamilton and Darity, Jr., “Can ‘Baby Bonds’ Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial?” Review of Black Political Economy 37, nos. 3–4 (2010), pp. 207–16; Hamilton and Darity, Jr., “Bold Policies for Economic Justice,” The Review of Black Political Economy 39, no. 1 (2012) pp. 79–85; Chiteji and Hamilton, “Family Connections and the Black-White Wealth Gap Among Middle-Class Families,” The Review of Black Political Economy 30, no. 1 (2002), pp. 9–28. 16 Hamilton and Chiteji, “Wealth” in International Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, 2nd ed., ed. Patrick Mason (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2013). 17 Rakesh Kocchar, The Wealth of Hispanic Households. Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, 2004. 18 Corporation for Enterprise Development, Hidden in Plain Sight: A Look at the $335 Billion Federal Asset Building Budget. Washington, DC: Corporation for Enterprise Development, 2004. 19 Beadsie Woo, Ida Rademacher, and Jillien Meier, “Upside Down: The $400 Billion Federal Asset-Building Budget.” Baltimore, MD: Anne E. Casey Foundation, 2010. 20 Corporation for Enterprise Development, Hidden in Plain Sight: A Look at the $335 Billion Federal Asset Building Budget. Washington, DC: Corporation for Enterprise Development, 2004.

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References Alexis, Marcus. 1971. “Some Negro-White Differences in Consumption.” in The Black Consumer, edited by George Joyce and A.P. Govoni, 257–274. New York: Random House. INFRASTRUCTURE Infrastructure. Noun. The institutions, architectures, and spatial practices that contribute to the production of public space; the conventions and systems of representation that produce (and are in turn produced by) community; any activity that engenders solidarity and/or hospitality; any gesture that yields knowledge; the design of empathy; the design of alterity. Examples of infrastructure include speech; art and culture; the commons; encyclopedism; language; the rule of law; the transgression of the rule of law (i.e., the practice of civil disobedience); dissent; democracy; debate; discussion; the agora; détournement; flânerie; the squat; the neighborhood; and acts of citizenship. Contrary to popular perception, roadways are not infrastructure; they are superstructure. The Oxford English Dictionary is thus mistaken when it writes that infrastructure is the “basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g., buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.” This definition confuses cause and

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Bates, Timothy. 1997. Race, SelfEmployment, and Upward Mobility. The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Washington, DC.

Darity, William Jr. 2008. “Forty Acres and a Mule in the 21st Century,” Social Science Quarterly 89(3): 656–664. Darity, William Jr. 2005. “Stratification Economics: The Role of Intergroup Inequality,” Journal of Economics and Finance 29(2): 144–153.

Becker, Jo. June 6, 2009. “Behind Judge’s Spending and Income,” New York Times.

Darity, William Jr., and Dania Frank. 2003. “The Economics of Reparations,” American Economic Review 93(2): 326–329.

Blau, Francine, and John Graham. 1990. “Black White Differences in Wealth and Asset Composition,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 105(2): 321–339.

Darity, William Jr., and Darrick Hamilton. October 30, 2009. “Bernanke Ignores History of Black and White Wealth Rift” The Grio.

Bogan, Vicki, and William Darity, Jr. 2008. “Culture and entrepreneurship? African American and immigrant self-employment in the United States,” The Journal of Socio-Economics 37: 1999–2019.

Darity, William Jr., and Patrick Mason. 1998. “Evidence on Discrimination in Employment: Codes of Color, Codes of Gender,” The Journal of Economic Prespectives 12(2): 63–90.

Bucks, Brian K., Arthur B. Kennickell, Traci L. Mach and Kevin B. Moore. 2009. “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2004 to 2007: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances,” Federal Reserve Bulletin 95: A1–A55. Chiteji, Ngina, and Darrick Hamilton. 2002. “Family Connections and the Black-White Wealth Gap Among the Middle Class,” Review of Black Political Economy 30(1): 9–27. Chiteji, Ngina, and Darrick Hamilton. 2013. “Wealth” in Patrick Mason’s edited volume: International Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, 2e. Macmillan Reference, USA. Corporation for Enterprise Development. 2004. Hidden in Plain Sight: A Look at the $335 Billion Federal Asset Building Budget. Washington, DC: Corporation for Enterprise Development.

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Friedman, Milton. 1957. A Theory of the Consumption Function. Princeton: Princeton UP. Gittleman, Maury, and Edward N. Wolff. 2004. “Racial Differences in Patterns of Wealth Accumulation,” The Journal of Human Resources 39(1): 193–227. Hamilton, Darrick, and William Darity, Jr. September /October 2009. “Race, Wealth, and Intergenerational Poverty: There will never be a post-racial America if the wealth gap persists,” The American Prospect. Hamilton, Darrick, and William Darity, Jr. 2010. “Can Baby Bonds Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America?” Review of Black Political Economy, 37(3,4): 207–216. Hamilton, Darrick, and William Darity, Jr. 2010. “Can ‘Baby Bonds’ Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America?”

Review of Black Political Economy, 37(3,4): 207–216. Hamilton, Darrick, and William Darity, Jr. 2012. “Bold Policies for Economic Justice,” The Review of Black Political Economy 39(1): 79–85. Heflin, Colleen M., and Mary PattilloMcCoy. 2000. “Kin Effects on Black-White Account and Home Ownership,” Sociological Inquiry 72(2): 220–239. Hutchings, Vincent. 2009. “Change or More of the Same? Evaluating Racial Attitudes in the Obama Era,” Unpublished Manuscript. Institute on Race and Poverty, University of Minnesota. February 2009. Communities in Crises: Race and Mortgage Lending in the Twin Cities. Report. John-Hall, Annette. January 26, 2009. “Race still matters in Obama’s post-racial U.S.,” The Philadelphia Inquirer. Johnson, Charles. Summer 2008. “The End of the Black American Narrative,” The American Scholar. Katznelson, Ira. 2005. When Affirmative Action Was White. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Kocchar, Rakesh. 2004. The Wealth of Hispanic Households, Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center. Kocchar, Rakesh, Richard Fry and Paul Taylor. 2011. Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.

Menchik, Paul, and Nancy Ammon Jianakoplos. 1997. “Black-White Wealth Inequality: Is Inheritance the Reason?” Economic Inquiry 35(2): 428–442. New York Times. February 4, 2009. “Adding Up the Government’s Total Bailout Tab.” Nopper, Tamara. 2009. “The Globalization of Korean Banking and Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the United States,” Unpublished Manuscript. Powell, John. September 21, 2008. “Race, Place, and Opportunity: Where we live influences our life chances. Too many blacks still live in concentrated poverty,” The American Prospect. Oliver, Melvin, and Thomas Shapiro. 2006. Black Wealth /White Wealth, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Sherraden, Michael. 1991. Assets and the Poor: A New American Welfare Policy. Armonk, New York: Sharpe. Sherraden, Michael. 2009. “Individual Development Accounts and Policy,” In Insufficient Funds: Savings, Assets, Credit, and Banking Among Low-Income Households, edited by Rebecca M. Blank and Michael Barr. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

effect (how can you have physical structures unless you already have a society in place?). It fetishizes technology (are people not also infrastructure? Are infrastructures not also cultural?). It is deeply positivistic. It is ultimately also anachronistic. Infrastructure is “the continuation of politics by other means,” to borrow von Clausewitz’s language. It is unconscious politics. It is the space of contestation. It is the space of the polis, the uncanny “home” of speech. It purports to worship silence — the “voice” of the bridge and the roadway. But it also cannot help but communicate. What planners call “circulation” is in actuality a form of signification, a community masquerading as a commuter.

Woo, Beadsie, Ida Rademacher, and Jillien Meier. 2010. “Upside Down: The $400 Billion Federal Asset-Building Budget.” Baltimore, MD: Anne E. Casey Foundation.

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What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection. It is further an attempt to follow out an idea consistently, out of curiosity to see where it will lead. —Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James and Alix Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute for PsychoAnalysis, 1950–74), vol. 18, 23.

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Speculation with Data: Remittances, Refugees, and Migration Laura Kurgan PROTOTYPE A prototype is the possibility for a work to be both a model and a representation. In science, models work in the same fundamental way as prototypes: what they describe are events to be predicted at different scales. A series of ones and zeros describes a working tree model — a branching algorithm — but only once you apply substance to that code do you see the representation of a tree through the lines that make it. It is interesting to wonder where the intrinsic qualities of “treeness” lie, on the side of the model or the representation. Either way, and because of both, the application of geometry (representation) to an algorithm (model) that describes it makes the algorithm also a prototype for a tree. There are other cases in which the prototype is a special condition of being a model. For instance, a paper airplane is a prototype for a full-scale airplane because it uses its same principles of flight. It is both an abstraction and a tool for experimentation. Prototypes tend to be invariant to scale. Often 1:1 but not necessarily, the idea is that the laws of physics do not change substantially in

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The last decade has seen tremendous activity in the field that has come to be known as “data visualization.” In policy, advocacy, scholarship, and the news, quantitative information is being presented visually—and not just in charts and graphs. News and information providers, in particular, now routinely publish smart, attractive, and even surprising graphics built from often large, often complex, and sometimes real-time data. It is a field saturated with designers, artists, and architects working with natural and social scientists whose research generates or investigates data. And it is not just a specialized academic exercise. Today, data seem to be everywhere, all the time. We are starting to take for granted the idea that data have something to say about us and how we live—and about what counts, numerically and politically, social, financially and ecologically. More importantly, though, data are thought to be objective or factual and to form the foundations of truth on which difficult decisions can be based. This makes things more complicated. No one knows better than the data visualizers that data are always partial, incomplete, uncertain, and open-ended, and require interpretation and often interpolation. Data become available to us because someone has named and identified an event or a category, and generated or collected information about it. There is no such thing as raw data. Long lists of numbers or lines of text look “raw,” but that is just another presentational

device. The figures become data when people observe them, read them, make claims about them. Data are always collected for a reason, by people or institutions or machines. Nothing about data, despite the etymology of the word, is given: not the numbers, the rules for analyzing them, or the forms in which we see them. Without observation, decision, translation, interpretation, and memory, which is to say without interven- the scale of the prototypes. On the other hand, a “model tion, there would be no data. Data are taken, not given. is a scaled-down Data tell us about the state of things, about airplane” version of its real-world what’s (been) happening—but we sometimes make use counterpart without the abilto fly and cannot be tested of data to take a risk (►73 & 146 ), to make a guess, to ity for performance. A prototype imagine a future. To speculate with data, in the sense, isolates fundamental princiof a full-scale artifact would mean to create a model (►27 & 75 & 130 ), which ples into a model. The issues of means making decisions about what data are relevant scale and abstraction reveal the differences and afand what rules will govern their transformation over both finities between prototype, time. Whether treated as planning or prophecy, this model, and representation. Representations have a work with data has no guarantees—interpretations vital function different from and propositions must be made but they happen in a models; they render events without being field defined by a certain structural instability (►118 ), comprehensible explicit about their inner and not only because we are talking about the future workings. A sketch drawing a tree does not necessarbut just as importantly because, if we are working with of ily communicate the rules of data, we are in the realm of the partial, the cooked and branching. Rather, it comscale, materiality, the incomplete. In that sense, we speculate not in spite municates and texture. A prototype needs of this data-condition, but because of it. If data simply to perform an outcome while being able to describe told the truth, and with it gave guidance on what to do also its effects. A prototype is next, there’d be no need for any imagining. Fortunately, thus a model that maintains the properties of what it repit doesn’t, and so we speculate. resents. It occupies the overlap between imagination and empiricism. It is a liberated Exits precursor to a full-scale, A few years ago I worked as part of a collaborative team fully represented artifact, and defining ceron a project called Exits.1 We produced a 360-degree isolating tain properties and effects. dynamic and immersive projection that visualized mas- It is projective, and it wants sive quantities of data from around the world on the eco- you to believe in it. nomic, political, and environmental causes of human migration.2 Why do people leave their homes and move to other Benjamin Aranda countries or other parts of their own country? What puts people in motion? Employment? War? Floods and famines? Exits aimed to render visible the complex set of factors that sets people and things and ideas and signs on the move, and it sought to chart those processes as they are embedded in a range of data

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sets. The installation presented them in dynamic maps and animated graphics. Institutions like the World Bank, the United Nations, and other governmental and non-governmental organizations routinely publish data on political, economic, and environmental events taking place in the world. We used this data, and at the same time reflected on how it came to be available: we underlined the scope and limit of each data set, its biases, its purposes, and even its errors. The material of Exits is data, data that have been processed and visualized in the form of maps and charts that are at once descriptive and analytic and interpretive. The data also make a narrative: over time and space, data translated into images tell a story. We wanted to show that, most of the time, the people most responsible for global effects like climate change are the ones least affected by it. The model, not surprisingly, showed a strong dividing line between the Global North and the Global South. Although Exits relied heavily on existing data and looked retrospectively at population movements, money flows, and climate changes, it also hazarded some predictions about where the numbers might be headed. Using a variety of models, the project extrapolated and imagined a future of rising sea levels, growing populations, changing refugee pathways, and surging remittance flows. One of the first data sets we looked at during our work on Exits came from the U.N. and counted the number of refugees or “internally displaced people” (IDP) around the world between 1991 and 2007. We created maps representing these movements, and we asked some questions about our sources. Take the year 2006, for example: we see the counts recorded for the ten countries generating the largest number of refugees and IDP: 3,000,000 1,834,368 1,586,174 1,325,235 1,075,297 709,228 686,586

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Colombia Iraq Uganda Sudan Democratic Republic of the Congo Ivory Coast Azerbaijan

469,165 400,000 245,980

Sri Lanka Somalia Georgia

There is a big difference, and it’s not just a matter of quantity, between figures like 3 million or 400,000 and figures like 1,075,297 or 686,586. Which is more accurate, the round ones or the sharp ones? The list shows how counts of people are affected by the political, technical, and social resources available to observe a situation. The count of three million people in Colombia has to be an estimate, but what about the apparently more exact count for Azerbaijan? While it is hard to fathom the magnitude of the global political crises represented in this table, it is especially difficult to see the strings of zeros following the records for Colombia and Somalia, indications that accurate statistics may never arrive. These estimates do not give us much confidence in the accuracy of the unrounded figures elsewhere in the list. Every person must be counted: there is an ethical and political urgency to getting this right, it would seem. And yet, this list is what we have—and the same instability affects the global count of refugees and IDPs, which in 2006 was around eleven million (fourteen million if you count Palestinian refugees). While the list cannot be precise, we trust the range in the numbers if we trust the organization collecting the data. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees starts entering numbers into their database once five thousand people have crossed a border and cannot return home. While not every person is counted, we can create a timelapsed global picture of the pattern of refugee movements. The visualization can remind us of which wars were happening when, and lets us see the moments when and places where internally displaced people outnumber refugees. At the very least the numbers can be imagined. — Elsewhere in Exits we told a very different story about movement and data. The scenario called “Remittances, Sending Money Home” began with a data set we could not trust, which ultimately compelled our team to find alternative ways of telling a story.

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I: Flag Map.

III: Population Delta’s Highres.

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II: UK Overview.

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In 1970 at the United Nations, industrialized countries committed themselves to spending 0.7% of their Gross Domestic Product on development aid. Forty years later, only five countries have fulfilled this promise. But vast sums of money nevertheless flow along that pathway. The money comes from people who have left their homes and found work—and income—elsewhere and are sending some of it home. These flows are STABILITY / INSTABILITY Stability/Instability known technically as “remittances.” isn’t a dualism, nor is it In 2007, the World Bank estimated this flow of a contradiction — it’s an ambiguity. All things are in cash to be about $208 billion worldwide. Their figure motion and are part of larger was based on bank and wire transactions taking place assemblages, and they are continuously tending toward in that year, tallied by source and destination countries. stability or instability, or But not everyone uses banks and wiring services. Their both simultaneously. What is being lived, and what method of counting did not account for the myriad of needs to be sensed, designed, other ways money travels across borders—as cash, carplanned for, and worked with, is the precariousness and ried or mailed or otherwise transferred, without ever contingency of both stability passing through or leaving a transaction record at a bank. and instability. Contemporary material The World Bank itself acknowledged problems with their realities are fueling methodology and estimated that their $208 billion figwidespread speculation that today the movements of things ure was probably too small by about fifty percent. We tend toward instability. asked ourselves whether there was another way to count Planetary-scale events (global flows of capital, remittances. workers, and extracted earth This led us to the research of Manuel Orozco, then materials; climate change; complex reconfigurations of at the International Fund for Agricultural Development humans and things) shift our (IFAD), a U.N. agency. Rather than looking at bank and relationships to place, time, habit, connection, work, and wire service records, Orozco used a common statistical cultures. Consequences unfold tool: the survey. He asked immigrants around the world quickly and propagate far into the future. Ironically, whether or not they remitted and if so, how much money in response, some designers they sent home. He was not seeking a complete accountof infrastructures, processes, and logistics are ing, but instead hoped to estimate, first, the global popbecoming more speculative ulation of senders and, second, the quantities remitted. as they try to shore up what is becoming more and more The method was empirical—data were generated—but precarious. Problems and statistical, which is to say, probabilistic. imaginative “solutions” that, until recently, would While the World Bank used transaction records have been considered science to count the flow of money from country to country, Orozco produced a synthetic estimate. He began with pubsmudge studio lished counts of migrant populations. He then used his surveys to assess the probability that a person from such populations would send money home based on the Gross Domestic Product of that country, as well as the average amount sent. The product of these three numbers gives an entirely different kind of

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estimate of global remittance flows—one that speculates intelligently on the behavior of people. Estimated this way, it appears that migrants from poor countries sent home about $300 billion in 2007. From data like this, we told a story. Migrants travel across borders in large numbers and send money home through more than a billion-anda-half transactions per year, in small increments (two fiction are now commonplace or three hundred dollars per year), by hand, by mail, by conditions of daily life contemporary thought. bank-to-bank transfers, and mostly by wire transfers. and These developments present These transfers add up quickly. More than three times us with urgent opportunities unsettle moribund design the total amount of global foreign aid, remittances rep- to practices, governmental resent the main source of external funds received by preoccupations, and common ignorance. Some projects many countries in the developing world. respond by setting out Once again—this was a structure demonstrated design specifications that precariousness many times in our global visualizations—these flows foreground itself: “Design ways to are not evenly distributed: fifteen percent of the host keep in check radically materials such countries (about thirty in total) account for eighty per- destabilizing as high-level nuclear waste cent of the immigrant inflow and ninety percent of the for the next one million years.” “Mitigate the effects remittance outflow. on humans of planetary forces In this scenario, we had to visualize two differ- that act on their own accord: surges, tsunamis, ent flows: migration and remittances, people and money. storm tectonic plates, hybrid In order to portray immigration flows and the transna- super storms, droughts.” individual and tional networks created one person at a time, each coun- “Facilitate civic actions that require try is represented as a flag on the map. When data about humans to alter our cognitive imaginings, and a specific country appear on the map, its flag is enlarged processes, dispositions toward a future and lines representing people move from their home that is growing ever more countries to their host countries. Eventually, each nation unknowable.” Sensations of becoming is resized in its new location, proportional to the num- unsettled (aesthetically, cognitively, physically) ber of people who have migrated. can be instructive. Artists, To visualize the return flows of remittances, the designers, and audiences can them to make something of direction of movement on the map reverses and lines use and with forces that actively representing money flow back (from host to home) de- and re-compose conditions in the form of thin green lines connecting the send- of contemporary life. ing and receiving nations. India, China, Mexico, and the Philippines receive the most remittances while the United States, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Germany, and Russia smudge studio send the most. To underscore the relationships between the home and host countries, the maps transform and the data are sifted, reassembled, and sorted into a container surrounding the viewer. A chart is built showing the sums of remittances country by country,

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from the top twelve remitting countries to the sixty countries that receive the most remittances in the developing world. Orozco’s methods were not just an important source of data for us—they were a crucial way of thinking about data as well. He showed us not only how difficult it can be to learn from data, but also how inventive and speculative (in the sense of informed estimation) this act can be.

Conclusions In the remittances project, we looked for the spaces and communities that, by virtue of what’s happening there, often remain hidden from ordinary view. Then, by creating a spatial frame, which enables visualization, specific phenomena are revealed, and highlighted, on a map. This meant aligning migration and remittance data to geographic coordinates that allowed presenting the data as a map. The relationships between places, and between flows of people and money, could then become visible. Of course, only the data embedded in the data sets were visualized, and so the maps were often incomplete in Exits, but they told enough to let us understand and convey the partiality of the data or of the topic being examined. The processes highlighted on the maps opened up stories, suggested policy changes, exposed environments in need of speculation—the kind that demands imagination. Remittances are particularly relevant here because, as Orozco’s research showed, a lot of the money does not flow through the formal channels of the global economy. Today, migrant workers are increasingly being encouraged to become financially literate, to use banks, to invest. Banks would like to harness remittances for their own form of speculative investment (►154 )—bringing cash out of domestic hiding places and putting it into financial action (to make money work, and to make money with it)—but the remittance maps can open other speculative perspectives as well. Some advocates are urging migrant workers to form hometown associations, encouraging transnational and responsible investments—pooling money together to build infrastructure (►102 & 265 ) in their hometowns, for instance. For now, I can only leave this as an open question. Should the informal be formalized? Like the data that generate the questions, the answer is as uncertain, open-ended, and full of

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unequal assumptions as the questions that come from both sides of the border, of many borders, while simultaneously blurring those same borders. 1 The team included Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan, and Ben Rubin in collaboration with Stewart Smith and Robert Gerard Pietrusko. The project grew out of an exhibition concept proposed by Paul Virilio. See: Paul Virilio et al., Native Land: Stop Eject (Arles: Actes Sud and Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2009), and Raymond Depardon and Paul Virilio, Native Land: Stop Eject (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2009). Native Land incorporated Exits, a 360 degree panorama of dynamic maps divided into six themes.

2 Presented here is “Sending Money Home.” The exhibit travelled to the Kunsthalle in Copenhagen in time for COP15 in 2009, and to the Alhondiga Bilbao in 2010.

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Diary: Towards an Architecture of Balkanization Srdjan Jovanovic´ Weiss

First We Take the Balkans Dear Diary, A former student of mine at Harvard Graduate School of Design sent me a map depicting Europe’s contemporary ( ►53 ) minorities as fictional nation states. Conceptually, this map is like a “wig” for the European Union. It transforms European space, giving all its minorities, ethnic groups, and other natives in search of collective recognition political distinction as separate countries, possible nations, or simply common ethnicities across political borders. It is a European example of geopolitical fragmentation of territory considered frozen. From a Balkan perspective we can call it balkanization at its best. Whenever there is a map like this displayed in public, which depicts determinations about particularities of minorities, the public becomes colorfully divided, almost as much as the color divisions on this political map. — Dear Diary, What exactly is balkanization? — Dear Diary, The Balkan peninsula comprises a complex territory roughly stretching between the cities of Trieste and Istanbul. By now I have found out that there are three existing ideas of balkanization. 1. One idea of balkanization comes from a historical and

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geographical body of work about the Balkans, a European peninsula located in the southeast of the continent. 2. The second idea about balkanization comes out of the book by Maria Todorova treating the territory of the Balkans as an imaginary land, inspired by the idea of Orientalism, the defining work of Edward Said. 3. The third idea of balkanization comes from a book published by MIT press titled Balkan as Metaphor. It has expanded the view of balkanization from the imaginary to the almost arbitrary, such as that any disconnected process, whether actual or virtual, can be made analogous to the process of balkanization. However, what is missing is a fourth idea of balkanization. This missing idea is based on examining the concept of balkanization according to the effects it has in the very Balkans. One of them is that the proliferation of capital cities due to the balkanization of countries is central to the positive aspects of balkanization. More new countries = more new capital cities. But let me first remind us of Todorova: The only comprehensive survey of the semiology of balkanization comes from her 1997 book Imagining the Balkans. In it, Todorova juxtaposes the discourse around Said’s Orientalism with the possible idea of the imaginary of the Balkans, and calls it Balkanism. She suggests that both Balkanism and Orientalism originate in the Western perception of the Balkans and the Orient, respectively, and in the political logic of confounding the idea of the assigned territory with the actual image of it. Said’s legacy will always result in the unflattening, unlayering, and unbounding of the “flattened” image of the Orient. Todorova summarizes four historical periods of territorial unity in the Balkans: Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Yugoslav, none of which managed (or really tried) to merge ethnic differences. Thus we can say that the history of the Balkan peninsula is devoid of fixed common territorial ideas that were not imposed on it by an outside force. Yet it is Todorova who establishes the semiological timeline along which balkanization emerged as an active noun derived from the name Balkan. The word Balkan originally referred to a mountain ridge, and it has been historically unpredictable what the term meant at any given time. Todorova’s research summarizes the historical and contemporary indecision over Balkan’s shifting meanings. She recounts the term as related by outsiders discussing a place that had not been seen or experienced, only imagined as

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being seen and experienced. The imaginary architecture of balkanization flattens diverse and distinct territories into a single entity that any empire can deal with. I cannot help thinking that imaginary property of any name is an attempt to create a real property of both the name and the land. — BROKEN PROMISES, OR A QUICK SKETCH OF THE PROTOTYPE Always fading forward into some future perfect state, the prototype never resolves. The project may end, but any designer will tell you that the work product is in a state of chronic incompletion. But the project is, in the end, categorically different from the prototype, which must serve a uniquely subservient role in the process of coming to being. Through a series of successive approximations, the prototype plays two or possibly three primary functions. First, it is the instantiation of a platonic ideal into the pragmatic, failed space of the phenomenal world. Gleaming, complete, and fully realized in imagination, its birth is both the essential condition of any possible success and the mark of utter failure. For a designer, an idea is nothing. So a prototype is a start. Without it, there is no design. Second, and equally important, for it to be successful the prototype must flaunt all aspects of its failure; its responsibility is to solicit negative feedback. “Fail early and fail often” is the mantra of computer programmers. The

Jamer Hunt

Dear Diary, Back to the map that my former student has sent me. Of the possibilities on the map I mentioned in my earlier entry, most curious to me are the new capitals that would emerge from this geopolitical fragmentation. As a simulation, here these new potential capitals are listed according to the transcription of capital names listed on the map. As a result some city names familiar to us today read differently in the transcript: Aromani, Baile Atha Cliath, Banja Luka, Barcelona, Bilbo, Bozen, Brcˇko, Brno, Budyšin, Caerdydd, Casteddu, Corti, Cuira, Doolish, Gdunsk or Kartuzë, Giron & Guovdageaidnu & Murmanska & Johkamohkki & Naoned & Roazhon, Hüsem & Ljouwert, Komrat, Ladin, Ljubljana, Maarianhamina or Mariehamn, Nameûr, Novi Sad, Podgorica, Prishtina, Pula, Santiago de Compostela, Sarajevo, Strasburi, Tiraspol, Tolosa, Tórshavn, Truru, Udin, Uzhhord, Vanta, Wroclaw, and Zagreb. Note that some possible states, like Sami or Lapponia, could have more than a single capital city. Having two or three capital cities instead of one for a single nation is as a rather unusual concept, but I hear that South Africa has this already in place. Will it work? Does it work? I can’t tell via this entry. But, the idea is innovative for our understanding of the concept of the unified continent. —

Dear Diary, Just heard from a friend that both Naples and Palermo are representatives of the latest urban sects about to claim independence from Italy. Not too dissimilar from Barcelona or Bilbao. —

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Dear Diary, I read that an important Italian theorist has called for renewed focus on designing capital cities, following grand and historical schemes based on orthogonal geometry. This proposal seems redundant and elitist. And why is that so? These days we are learning the positive aspects of the process called balkanization. This process of dispersion is not only about being local, sooner the broken promise is the sooner its bugs but being distinct and extraordinary. When a new coun- shared, will reveal themselves. This try secedes from an old one, a new capital city emerges is also the stage at which differentiates itself that tries to be as distinct as possible. In the Balkan design from fine art. For design is region alone the number of capitals has quadrupled. always for an other, and the exists in order Before the fall of Yugoslavia there was one dominant cap- prototype to shuttle back and forth ital, Belgrade, and one suppressed and inward-looking between the designer’s own ideal and the capital, Tirana, in the region today dubbed the Western speculative needs, wants, desires, and Balkans. Today, in the Balkans, there are eight capital cit- unimaginable expectations of other — whether client, ies of eight new nations, all powerfully emerging as dis- the user, consumer, or community. Finally, the prototype must tinct from each other. To propose grand capital schemes knowingly anticipate a based on traditional geometry, in the midst of the pro- also future perfect. In this mode, cess of geopolitical dispersion, would eradicate both the it is more like a simulacrum, in reverse time. It is aims for regional unity and attempts for individual spec- though not a futile attempt to reificity. The Italian theorist would put in place of those present a primordial essence, with the simulacrum; goals a new empirical method of building a grand capital as instead, it is a promise of city where there was no need for it. In order to integrate a more perfect future state we all know will never the extraordinary distinctions of the new and emerging (that really arrive). It thrums in capitals in Europe, it is better to follow the excising pro- the space of “Imagine if … ?” cess of their own capitalization and learn from the process of balkanization in a positive way. On a different note, did I mention that Western Balkans is in fact a diplomatic category? The naming emerged as a compromise to assuage the confusion of the political aftermath of the wars in the Balkans during the nineties. The name seems to favor regional unity over rising national distinctions. It’s not popular in the Balkans. And not even in the European Union. — Dear Diary, Jeffrey Kipnis, a well-known critic from the United States, while surrounded by young and aspiring architects gathered in the street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, abruptly asked this question: exactly what is balkanization? I stepped in and replied that

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the term originally emerged in response to small-scale independence movements in the Balkans after the fall of Ottoman Empire, and so on, and so on. It describes tension, hostility, conflict, I added. But it is also positive. It depicts political self-determination, distinction: not in order to fight, but in order to sustain difference. It is a chance for the smaller to appear and play as an equal to the larger. Architecture plays a large role in … RUIN How to recover a city from a I am not sure that Kipnis heard my last sentence ruin? From ruin? A city that in the chatter of the group of architects moving towards is lived in, raked over by its citizens for ammunition? a restaurant. Pavement pounded to rubble and cast as stones against armed forces advancing. A city turning against itself. Buildings defaced, repainted, graffiti blooming on its fresh surfaces overnight. A city birthing itself. A city breaking down. A city which is already broken. To be a ruin. To ruin. Is the act of ruining reversible? And what would that look like? In the gleaming pristine replicas built upon the bombed out downtown of that city in a perpetual state of reconstruction, is there an antonym to be found? In those villages whose ruins are reconstructed in acts of conservation that lay claim to the past, where the past and the present are repeatedly being contested and remapped, can ruins be preserved? Can one ever reach the ruin? In that tourist town, where one went expecting a center that no longer holds, walking along stone-lined, deteriorated paths leading towards a destination that seems more fleeting as one draws closer, only to find that the castle on a hill has not survived the past. It exists only in

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Dear Diary, According to my findings the phenomenon of balkanization is usually investigated as the interplay between centrifugal and centripetal forces in society, ones that push communities apart and others that hold them together. Viewed politically, this dialectic is like a relationship between autonomy and central control. It is observed as the struggle between particularities and general formulas that craft balkanization as a set of undisciplined and often unpredictable spatial practices. It should not be that strange for Europe to understand balkanization as an integrated exceptionality given its own long history of violent conflict. Balkanization has largely been understood derogatively, as an anomaly to alignment and as a barbaric social and political force. However, though the forces of balkanization that have played out in the Balkans themselves were firstly negative, this struggle for territorial and spatial distinction can now have positive aspects. Besides what I mentioned earlier—that there are four times more capital cities in the Western Balkans than before the dissolution of Yugoslavia—the scale of dissent has shrunk to the scale of buildings, houses, even apartments within residential buildings. A friend sent me a photograph from a town in the Tuzla canton within the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It depicts the corner of a building whose exterior has been renovated and painted in a vivid, optimistic color—somewhere between peach and orange. A sharply defined area has been omitted from the new renovation; it appears to outline the facade of a single apartment. On

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the old, unpainted concrete walls one can still spot traces of decay, what appear to be bullet marks dispersed across the raw surface. The two areas mark two distinct apartments that did not want the municipality to reconstruct their portion of the entire building. What is striking is the precision and respect with which the town officials marked out the owners’ dissent. The perfectly delineated boundary between personal property a manufactured fantasy, a that was renovated and that wasn’t speaks to the new thing of Disney, something and evasive. Can the ability to refuse the image of reconstruction. This cen- timeless ruin be ruined? And would it be tripetal case, smaller than a building, is a vivid response remiss not to mention Borges? who knew ruins were to the centrifugal expansion of the European Union and Borges things of beauty, tempting and global hegemony in general. It is an inspiring precedent already lost, leading us on, promising things that suggests a future for neglect (►136 ) as a tool for promising, that cannot be grasped, that cannot be marked in words, extraordinary and integrated exceptionality. —

that cannot be placed on maps, that wash away, that erode. Envy their elusiveness.

Dear Diary, I didn’t have a chance to say more about this in my quick exchange with Jeffrey Kipnis, but I do believe that the proliferation of capital cities is perhaps the strongest benefit of balkanization. What can also be attributed to the exactness of this process is the curious way that all the new capitals are so distinct. Exactness meets distinctiveness. And it is not that this idea was not debated in socialist Yugoslavia, which itself had operated as a looser version of socialist ideology. According to Bogdan Bogdanovic´, the celebrated former Yugoslav state architect who became a Serbian dissident during the nationalist era of Slobodan Miloševic´, the building of cities is a noble goal for any society or nation. In other words, the city is the ultimate expression of culture. However, as Bogdanovic´ has written, Serbia did not have the tradition to build its own cities because it lacked experience in nurturing urbanity. I think that we need a deeper consideration of this. Within Yugoslavia, Serbian architects built the city of New Belgrade, as well as large elements of New Zagreb and Ljubljana, in the era of modern urbanism. Bogdanovic´ was largely outside these urban projects, building memorials in rural or near-urban landscapes and exceptional locations. His own building of socialist memory of World War II in Yugoslavia is distinct from the much larger project of urbanizing socialist

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Beth Stryker

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I: The imaginary prospect of Balkanized Europe.

II: Ordos100 architects looking for the location of their projects in Inner Mongolia.

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III: Balkanized Pepsi Cola Building, Manhattan.

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Yugoslavia. Bogdanovic´’s works—what I feel we can call sculptural architecture—are sprinkled across the territory of former Yugoslavia in various scales and in various shapes. This is logical, as most battles in World War II took place in the rural landscape, not in capital cities. Most of his memorials today are neglected and left to nature—to “naturalize” them with their own landscape, perhaps, wherever they are. Thus, the proliferation MODELS In Good City Form, Kevin Lynch of new cities in socialist Yugoslavia, due to balkanization, defined a model as a normative is the proliferation of both dramatic changes in those idea or mental image of an object or form that could be modern cities, as well as the proliferation of neglect and imitated. His idea of a model natural forces in the post-socialist countryside. for urban design was “a mental picture of how the city ought to be made.”1 In looking for the memorable and easily imagined, however, Lynch ignored the use of models to fuel desire and consumerism, dispensed with the ability of models to speculate on the dynamic and the complex, and separated design from scientific practices.2 At the Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall, visitors experience the city as an icon of consumption amid all the comforts of a shopping mall. After gliding along escalators past a huge, wallhung cast bronze model of the Ming Dynasty Imperial City, they walk over a giant bottomlit satellite photograph of present-day Beijing, as if walking on the surface of Google Earth. On the top floor, the lights dim, and a simulation 3-D fly-through visualization of the city of the future begins. Outside, in the developments depicted in the model city, fashion models greet visitors arriving at the latest condominium development, where architectural models await the

Brian McGrath

Then We Take Manhattan Dear Diary, I saw that Ayn Rand’s “Global Balkanization,” the transcript of a lecture she gave in 1977, is selling on the Internet for $29.95. I think that this lecture was where she first found herself at home with right wing rhetoric, or perhaps it was the other way around: the right wing found her where she already was. Rand unleashed a critique of the idea of the multiplicity of the commons, such as the multiple ethnicities of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, in favor of individualism. In a way, Rand’s influence, especially on the North American continent, can be read as a story of incorporating ideas about the architecture of social representation in a political system that is based on individualism. No wonder Rand was irked by the politics of Yugoslavia, which were based on multiplicity. This is interesting, because what we recently learned from the process of balkanization is that more territorial fragmentation means more capital cities. —

Dear Diary, Some architects are not happy with how corporate architecture changed from clean and simple minimalist forms from the 1950s and 1960s to the mountains of postmodernity and collage afterwards. —

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Dear Diary, I have thought about this again and again. What if we call balkanization into action? What happens if we use the spatial knowledge of the balkanization process in order to investigate the inner forces of the black-and-silver corporate monoliths found across Manhattan? As an anti-empirical process of dispersing and eroding empires, the balkanization potential buyer like expensive analogy can help disentangle complex distinctions in chocolates or perfumes.3 T. Odum introduced the corporate capitalism that take on a uniform appearance. Howard first integrative ecological The iconic Seagram Building by Mies van der Rohe and model in the 1950s, generating for a systemic analysis the Lever House by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill are data of a spring-fed stream in prototypes (►112 & 124 ) of towers that did exactly that: Silver Springs, Florida, by all the metabolic spatialize and represent inner distinctions as a com- measuring flows in a limited area. The mon skin, a common suit. There are a couple of dozen U.S. Forest Service’s Hubbard Experimental Forest minimal towers erected across Manhattan as bleak Brook in New Hampshire scaledcopies of these two authentic ones. They are rarely up Odum’s model from small to an entire noticed nor often mentioned modern architectural watersheds forest ecosystem. Decades of constant stream monitoring of history books. —

water chemistry, temperature, and flows proved, for instance, the depositing of acid rain from Midwestern coal power plants affected New England forests. This experiment became the model for urban ecosystem research in Baltimore, Maryland, which is framed around watersheds that connect outer suburbs and center cities as ecological systems. In Image of the City, Lynch introduced the concept of cognitive mapping as a means to understand urban form. 4 The use of smart phones for gathering and displaying data goes beyond mapping, connecting human behavior and the production of localities within larger forms of social and environmental change. Cities today could revisit

Dear Diary, How can we visualize conflicts and dissent in a corporation’s buildings? Conflicts between competing corporations are commonplace, however invisible to the naked eye. Dissent from within corporations seems even more complex, as it may never be detected directly, even though its effects, like hacking, will. Employees are often fired for their dissent. Theoretically, is it possible to use smarter architecture in order to rethink what dissent in a corporation might be? If corporations were to be redrawn according to the data of their inner conflict and dissent, how fragmented would they look like in three dimensions—or four dimensions engaging possible change over time? Do corporations work like a federation of independent countries, or are they countries in themselves, with dissenting voices that assure their economic success? More informed and smarter architecture can have a large role in this speculative proposition for an actual practice.

Brian McGrath

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Dear Diary, One of the most stunning and elegant examples of the minimalist kind is the building designed by SOM and architect Gordon Bunshaft on 140 Broadway at Wall Street in New York City. This clean, black, smooth monolith gives nothing away about the fiery dynamics of activity taking place inside. This includes the changes of tenants. The two top floors of this corporate and recombine consumerist and ecological models through a tower are allegedly rented by representatives of Linux, an revision of this concept. New open-source operating system software platform used forms of networked cognitive modeling could embody openby antiglobalization activists. Now that the antiglobalended processes where ization movement exploded as the Occupy Wall Street patterns of change are sensed by attentive bodies creating movement at Zuccotti Park—right in front of the 140 experiential knowledge to Broadway tower—we can detect dissent both at the street encourage new psychological, social, and environmental level and at the top, in its connection to the dissenting relations. Linux operating system. This in itself is a paradox of 1 Kevin Lynch, Good City Form our time. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984).

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See Brian McGrath, “Urban Designs as Models of Patch Dynamics,” in Designing Patch Dynamics, ed. Brian McGrath, Victoria Marshall, M.L. Cadenasso, J. Morgan Grove, S.T.A. Pickett, Richard Plunz and Joel Towers. New York: Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, 2007, pp. 148-158. 2

See Brian McGrath, Digital Modelling for Urban Design (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2008).

3

Kevin Lynch, Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960).

4

Dear Diary, Is much more less than a bit of more? — Dear Diary, I really do wonder what Balkan architects could now do with Manhattan. Whatever it is, I am sure that they would do it cheaper than the norm, and with generous and well-meaning imperfections. Would a bit of more imperfection preserve Mies van der Rohe’s radical concept of less is more?

Then We Take the Other World Dear Diary, Look for Ordos, a new capital city in the Inner Mongolian desert located in the north of China.

Brian McGrath

— More than one hundred architects worked on a design project for this new settlement: the Ordos 100. Now we have the first results and maybe (►187 ) a notion of who the first inhabitants may be.

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Srdjan Jovanovic´ Weiss

The architecture itself hails from all corners of the globe and invokes the Balkans’ lively patterns of distinct shapes, all clashing with each other, all seeking attention through distinction. No design is the same. — Dear Diary, While the architects were in the desert to present their schemes to the new city’s curator, Ai Weiwei, and a panel of builders, in June 2008 the Guardian published a column written by Jonathan Steele. Without any reference to the Ordos settlement, Steele wrote that the world should learn from the Balkans about how to deal with war criminals. Before, he said, they were all sent to live comfortably abroad in the prison of the International Tribunal in The Hague—that is, all those who were caught. Why wouldn’t, Steele writes, the world provide Robert Mugabe with a similarly luxurious setup by retiring him abroad? Here is the quote: “Tell Mugabe to go into retirement … preferably to a villa in China.” — Dear Diary, This kind of Saint Helena scenario (applied to Napoleon for instance) was entertained by some architects near the Ordos 100 site. They brainstormed which other clients—in the Mugabe mold—could be targeted and matched with the hundred available new villas. As there were only thirty-eight or so official dictators in the world at the time, there were multiple-choice strategies in place to fill up the villas—for example, by inviting their often large dictatorial families along, or extending the invitation to national intelligence services that would not mind experimental design. — Dear Diary, Robert and Grace Mugabe’s villa in Harare, Zimbabwe, is an example of their predilection for luxury status symbols by employing extreme but controlled kitsch. Coincidentally, their Harare villa was allegedly designed by a Serbian engineer and built by Belgrade corporate giant Energoprojekt, a commission from the age of the Non-Aligned Movement among developing nations.

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I: Ai Weiwei burying performance at Ordos100 development.

II: Villa 62 Ordos. Concept buried.

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III: Model of Villa 62 that collects the traces of weather.

IV: Ordos100.

V: Villa 62 Ordos, Street view.

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Dear Diary, Tonight we ask: Which of the villas in Ordos 100 would Mugabe love (or hate)? — An ad hoc Ordos committee including a voluntary delegation of architects now works on solutions for each prospective NEGLECT It is interesting how client. For example, a villa that has the archetypal pitched some words have certain roof is one of a few in Ordos that could convince Teodoro connotations, within specific contexts, while others that Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, of Equatorial Guinea, to leave seem equally plausible do his postcolonial Spanish residence and move to Inner not. These connotations are manifestations of social Mongolia into an innovative house. norms. When applying this observation to the word neglect, we find that it is usually associated with the helpless or with care towards children and the elderly, as cited with examples in various dictionaries. This sort of neglect is often considered a form of violence and often punishable by law. We associate the word also with a sense of duty — not so much in the sense of citizenry, but duty that is of a bureaucratic and systematic nature: being on time for work, meeting a deadline, or doing a chore. Similarly, this form of neglect is punishable in various ways that accord with corporate logic. However, what I find astounding and most pertinent about neglect is how a link to the notion of civic duty is missing. Why is this not inherent in the term? Why do the connotations of the word neglect lose any sense of urgency the moment they evoke “neglect” as related to fulfilling our citizenry? Neglect is the action of

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— Dear Diary, Muammar al-Gaddafi was unanimously assigned to a villa that looks like a dune and collects sand on the facade. — Kim Jong Il, since passed away, would have gotten one of the few subterranean villas, providing him with a sense of secrecy similar to his North Korean bunkers. — A globe-shape villa would be home to Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, who shows affection for everything circular, while one of the villas formed by multiple fourside pitched cottages may please the senses of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a lover of traditional Islamic architecture. — For Mugabe himself the architects decided on a non-linear parametric villa in the shape of a dune. —

Dear Diary, The unresolved client at the time of the improvised voting among the architects in Ordos remained the forty-third president of the United States of America. The architects of the two villas in Ordos that were suggested for “W” at the time opted against offering

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him a chance to live there. In a deadlock, the Ordos fictional housing committee decided that it was wiser to lose that potential client, and wait for change…. The change has happened. — Dear Diary, We had more discussions about the Ordos 100 project. It was interesting that one hundred architects produced such a inaction, be it deliberate out of carelessness. This diversity of ideas. Looking at the large-scale model ( ►27 or sense of apathy — in a state of & 75 & 130 ) that contained all the proposals proved numbness, which seems endemic political behavior around that our generation is thriving on multiplicity and dis- to us today — is certainly a form tinction among peers. Every house proposal looked of neglect, neglecting to political and civic distinct, to the point that we can observe a pattern of perform duties. By deconstructing multiplicity. I cannot escape calling it the Architecture inaction, we might begin to the sort of action of Balkanization. We all have proved to be so distinct, devise that would be effective in but not divisive and particular in our distinctions. The the political realm. We have understand the disease in Architecture of Balkanization is in that sense global. Our to order to develop the cure. imagined differences are indeed attempted distinctions. The most important meaning — Dear Diary, All one hundred architectural models for the Ordos 100 settlement were rebuilt in a single material (wood) in order to be shown as part of Ai Weiwei’s exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz. For me this became the proof of the subconscious and encroaching nature of the balkanization of architecture that is artfully made to appear monolithic. Every distinction among the hundred proposals was neutered by rendering all the scale models in the same wooden material. The extraordinary fact about this art exhibit created by Ai is that one is not entirely sure what drives the need for distinction in architecture, other than when it attempts to appear like art.

to be reactivated in the word neglect is the connection to notions of the civic. Resurrecting that particular meaning holds the promise of a different form and kind of engagement with the world.

— Dear Diary, This will be my last entry for some time. Reading back my notes to you I can see three distinct sociopolitical situations that address balkanization as an imaginary, if not fantastical, category, turning into polyphonic design practice, smeared over by art. Yet, even though these three situations that I noted—the

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balkanization of the Balkans, the educational experiment to balkanize monolithic towers of economic power in Manhattan, and finally the balkanization of architecture in Ordos under the hand of Ai Weiwei—are all distinct, some core ideas, such as imperfection, dispersion, conflict, and dissent, connect all three. They appear connected under the aegis of the proven forces of balkanization to separate the monolithic theater of unity into a field of dispersed distinctions, reconnected by their particularity rather than similarity. To balkanize is no longer simply a term about self-organization that leads into violence. To balkanize today also means to be strategic with the force of separateness that creates things that are extraordinary, things that are waiting to be integrated as they are. In that sense the architecture of balkanization is close to the idea of democracy.

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Image: Visual Speculation and Political Change Victoria Hattam

The fleeting glance, the casual look, the untrained eye open up conceptions of the political by creating threads to the affective and sensorial dimensions of politics. Images have an emotional pull that gives them a special power, an unusual capacity, for animating the unspoken political where identifications are made and remade. Identifications rather than policy positions are the terrain of the political, and as such reside in the realm of the unspoken political or in what Christopher Bollas calls the “unthought known.” 1 By the time we encounter policy choices, the important political work has already been accomplished elsewhere—in the social imaginary where partisan affinities and disagreements are formed. Images offer a portal through which affective economies can be engaged and the social imaginary remade.2 Images animate engaged speculation, which puts them at the heart of the political. Consider the photograph by Behrouz Mehri on June 15, 2009, hundreds of thousands gathered in the streets of Tehran to protest the declaration that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the June 12 election. Mehri captures the moment with a slightly elevated view of protesters packed into the streets, reaching as far as the eye can see into the hazy distance. A large piece of green cloth stretching above the crowd enlivens the image. There is something inherently political about masses of people appearing in public to challenge authority, but here it is the splash of green that draws me in. The green stripe and other color crowds, as I have come to refer to them, demand attention. We are invited in—invited to join this moment of collective identification.

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Tehran, June 15, 2009.

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The swath of green anchors the image, generating a sense of linked fate across the crowd, while the interaction of color across the image amplifies the green stripe in turn, and the pinging of red and green animates the visual field. The redshirted man standing above the crowd next to the green stripe, the red writing on the wall, and scattered smaller flecks of green draw otherwise disparate elements together—the photo begins to sing. Yet, exactly what the green stripe means is by no means clear. The color sign at once connects yet remains open. Connection rather than specificity is the thing. The green stripe, in Mehri’s hands, is at once distinctive yet not particular, signifying powerfully at the scale of the crowd. While images advene, they by no means settle political differences. Images draw us into the contested field of the unspoken political where looking remains intense and contentious on the one hand and speculative and creative on the other. Images invite us into a moment of speculative engagement without relinquishing affective intensity and political investment (►154 ). It is this double move of political openness and affective intensity that make images the perfect talisman of politics. Either aspect on its own is of little interest. Affective intensity without a capacity or interest in change forecloses the political, while change without affective investment leaves politics as merely strategic calculation. What makes politics gripping is precisely the fact that intensity and malleability, affect and speculation, go hand in hand. Images capture this unusual twinning of affective investment with the desire for change. The creation and circulation of new images has the capacity to shift the visual field and in so doing reshape the social imaginary as well. The creation and circulation of images lies at the heart of the political. 1 Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

2 Sarah Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, 2 (2004), pp. 117–39. David Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Cultural Reader (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005). Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Victoria Hattam

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Night Thoughts: Unintended Consequences in the Modern Economy Mary Poovey

The spectacle of modern investment markets has sometimes moved me towards the conclusion that to make the purchase of an investment permanent and indissoluble, like marriage, except by reason of death or other great cause, might be a useful remedy for our contemporary evils. —John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money If you have a pile of money—say, $10,000—that you don’t need for current expenses, you could do one of a number of things with it. You could put it in a drawer, where it would be readily accessible but liable to loss through theft, fire, or flood. You could put it in a bank account, where it would be less accessible but probably safer than if it were left in the drawer. You could buy a bond, which would give you contractual protection and guarantee a future, though relatively modest, return. You could buy shares of a publicly traded company or mutual fund, which might—or might not—provide greater returns than would the bond or bank account. Or you could just give it to your Uncle Lenny, who has a hot tip on a sure thing. Whatever you decide, you’ll make what might feel like a personal choice in a monetary environment, one shaped by two frames. The first involves decisions made by other market actors and is reflected in the prices of shares quoted on a market index, like the Dow Jones Industrials or the NASDAQ , or on the bond market. The second is government policy, which reflects decisions made by Congress and the Federal Reserve Board. These

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decisions, which concern the economy as a whole, govern the nation’s tax policies and laws, as well as the money supply—and, hence, interest rates, the value of the currency, and the availability of credit ( ►93 ) . Your relation to this two-part monetary environment is not simply geographical, a matter of your citizenship and where you live. It also exists in time. Thus, what you ultimately decide to do with your $10,000 will be GAMBLING shaped both by your judgment about the relative value I. "the activity or practice of prices currently offered on the bond market or the of playing at a game of chance for money or other stock exchange (Are bond yields high enough to warrant stakes.” 1 deferring consumption? Are stock prices low enough to have a high probability of yielding adequate returns?) Historically, gambling as a means of and by your expectations about the future of the mon- originated making sense of the world. etary environment (Are interest rates likely to go up? Is “Casting the lots” was a ritual in which stones, inflation likely to rise?). Every time you make a finan- simple twigs, arrows, or other cial decision, you are expressing your judgment about small objects were thrown, readings of even or odd the present. You are also expressing your hopes or fears and numbers foretold positive versus negative outcomes. about the future. stakes were offered, All this is just to say that when you make your Soon bringing the economics of financial decision—when you choose whether to hoard, sacrifice into relation this chance operation; save, invest, speculate, or gamble—you will not be a com- with shortly thereafter, pletely free, autonomous agent, acting solely to maxi- divinatory intent gave way to financial wagering and mize your gains. Nor will you be exclusively a rational pure a commingling of both chance agent, for your own personal quota of fear and greed and skill (of the bettor or subject of the bet) in will always impede your rational choices, just as the fact the determining outcomes. The that you can’t know the future means that your attitude delusion that random acts the dice could predict toward uncertainty and risk ( ►73 & 146 ) will automat- of the future or reflect divine ically factor into your market decisions. The government, intention ceded to delusions probability: that a coin meanwhile, acting through the Fed and congressionally of flipped to heads on the fourth mandated laws and tax policies, will also be shaping your try should have a greater of flipping to tails on expectations about the future, money, and risk. The gov- chance the fifth (gambler’s fallacy) ernment might encourage long-term investment ( ►154 ) or that someone on a roll, to speak, is more likely by promoting mortgage lending, as Congress did in 1932, so to have success (hot-hand with the passage of the Federal Home Loan Bank Act. It fallacy). Probability based might encourage saving by protecting bank accounts on pure chance is 50/50; in with federal insurance ( ►96 ) , as did the Banking Act of 1933. It Elizabeth Thomas might encourage borrowing and, by extension, short-term extensions of credit by lowering the interest rate—even almost to zero—as the Federal Reserve did in 2008. One challenge for anyone trying to invest in an economy in which there is no indelible line between investment

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and speculation arises from the different temporalities embedded in and encouraged by the two frames of the modern monetary environment. Whereas the stock exchange’s continuous re-pricing of assets and near-total liquidity encourage individuals to engage in countless short-term purchases, designed to beat the market and make a quick kill, the macroeconomic environment overseen by Congress and the Fed points a skill-based game such as blackjack, it might be 42/58; us toward a more distant temporal horizon, because whereas a stock trade is we believe these institutions can’t turn on a dime. For incalculable, but might be 1/99. Gambling is an exercise one example of the unintended consequences this temin hope and a delusion of poral misalignment can cause, take the case of federvariance from the norm. From a penny slot to a million-dollar ally mandated depositors’ insurance, which was (and bet, it allows us to imagine is) intended to enhance the public’s confidence in the a fantastical outcome, and it drives us to imagine ourselves U.S. banking system. The FDIC promotes this confias exceptional in the truest dence by guaranteeing that, in case of bank failure, sense of the word. the government will make good on a specified amount of II. “The act or practice a depositor’s money. While this guarantee worked in the of risking the loss of something important by 1930s, when it halted the runs on banks that were threattaking a chance or acting ening to destroy the banking system, and again in 2008, recklessly.”2 when raising the insured amount helped quell the finanRisk-return tradeoff cial panic, federal depositors’ insurance is also arguably theorizes that the potential return on gambling rises one factor that has allowed modern financial institutions with an increase in risk. To to become too big to fail. Granted the inducement that win something real, we must sacrifice something real; FDIC insurance gives depositors to entrust them with to make something new, we their money, the ability to trade with this money legalmust sacrifice something old; to create something ized by the overthrow of the Glass-Steagall Act, and the together, we must sacrifice privilege of borrowing at the Fed’s lower discount rates in something individually. The questions remain: Who or periods of financial pressure, the big investment banks— what is risking the loss? Do complex, amalgamated, and risk-loving institutions like the same entities reap the return? Who determines the JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup—have rules and structures in and been allowed to become so large and so interconnected through which we gamble? How do we define recklessly in in a financial system that is global in scale that even a relation to those structures? country with great economic resources, like the United Are the structures themselves reckless? What are we prepared States, feels impelled to use taxpayers’ money to bail out to lose? What do we want to these banks when their investments prove to be too risky. The insurance program that originally encouraged savers to trust Elizabeth Thomas banks, paradoxically, is now part of a system of regulations and permissiveness that can ultimately cost those same savers dearly, in the form of higher taxes, more systemic risk, and curtailed lending by the very banks whose bottom lines the government protects.

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Mary Poovey

When you’re thinking about what to do with that $10,000, then, which you’ve worked so hard to save, you will be pulled in various directions by forces both psychological and social. You’ll try to make a rational decision, weighing the dreaded risks against the likelihood of those longed-for returns; you’ll take historical precedents, market forecasts, and possibly even the recommendations of a financial advisor into account. But if gain? Can we empower our you want to make certain that the investment you want to delusions and channel our Can gambling take make doesn’t become too risky, you won’t have as much exceptions? us back to its own origins, control as you might like. Just remember that the profes- helping us to make sense of the sional traders at Morgan Stanley lost nine billion dollars world? in 2007 trading in mortgage-backed securities; traders at 1 Dictionary.com — Free English Dictionary, Merrill Lynch lost almost $16 billion at the end of 2008 on Online Gambling|Define Gambling at risky securities; and a single trader, the London Whale Dictonary.com. at JPMorgan Chase, lost almost $6 billion on a series http://dictionary.reference. com/browse/gambling of derivative trades in 2012. If you think you can outwit other investors and successfully negotiate the monetary 2 Ibid. environment that the Fed tries but fails to fully control, forget about it. You might as well give your money to Uncle Lenny. Or put it in the drawer and hope that the waters don’t rise.

Elizabeth Thomas

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On the Matter of Change: Three Scenes of Collective Action Robert Sember RISK Dear Young Artist of the Future, When I was born in the middle of the twentieth century, de facto slavery still existed in America. People with black skin could not work with, eat with, or study with people who had white skin. This was almost a century after the Emancipation Proclamation. When I was born, women were assigned strict roles: wife, mother, spinster. They were allowed education within strict limits. They were allowed to work for pay within strict limits. They were allowed control of their bodies within strict limits. When I was born, queers were criminals. Sex between men was illegal. A man suspected of homosexual “tendencies” could lose his job, his friends, his security. Lesbians and transgendered people were blotted out, made invisible, consigned to “the well of loneliness.” As I write this early in the twenty-first century, we have an African-American president. Until recently, we had a female secretary of state. Last year I married my male partner. So there has been change. But it did not just happen. Black people, women, and

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You ask about change, how you know it is necessary, whether it is defined by the conditions that inspire its demands, if its course is predetermined, open-ended or, perhaps, both directed and speculative. My first maneuver is to observe that change is an action. It has a scene and a performance. For example, in one of his last texts, Louis Althusser returns to the materialism of Epicurus, specifically the drama of the original rain of atoms that move continuously through space until, without reason, one atom swerves from its path and comes into contact with another.1 If a second encounter follows this first, a chain reaction results that may bring into being a new world. For this outcome to occur, the first swerve must “take place” and then “take hold.” It must be received. Althusser presents this materialism of the encounter as a philosophy for revolutionary change, a model (►27 & 75 & 130 ) of the organizing long practiced by social movements. The conventional activist strategy is to organize around specific causes with discrete demands. An organization generally directs and administers the process, which includes coordinating the contributions and actions of specific individuals and constituencies. Often, the role of the intellectual in this process is limited to providing the ideological analysis or critique from which are derived the slogans that will brand the cause. This content is circulated to a cadre of voluntary supporters who convene at strategic moments to amplify the demands. Artists too may function in this role of

ideological patron, by representing the cause and helping to reinforce the terms of the analysis that will, in turn, define the terms of the activist intervention. The structure ensures that the direction of change is precise and the demands clear. It is an efficient, professionally managed, and often effective process. This is the initial encounter. The demands and actions remain within the boundaries of existing structures of power, which largely queer people made it happen. determine the space of reception for the activists’ actions. They walked, worked, fought, wrote, sang, sat, Thus, the exemplary demand of this form of activism is shouted, starved, gathered, lived, and died to make it happen. the demand for equality. continue to make it The second encounter, on the other hand, entails They happen, because they know organizing the space of reception above and beyond the that change is never done, it be constantly renewed. To analysis itself. Its aim is utopian. It envisions and strives must pursue it is an obligation, to to create a new world. Since that world is not yet con- themselves — ourselves — and unknowable future. stituted, the terms by which we may demand equality to the For us, you were that are uncertain. Thus, the analyses that give form to the future. When were you born? In In the twenty-third movement for change do not necessarily determine the 2150? century? Beyond? If so, the actions of the movement. Rather, they initiate a process world as it existed when I was must seem unimaginable of investigation or learning. The intellectual or the artist born to you. I hope that is so. The is engaged in all phases of this investigation rather than changes that the people I knew happen have long since articulating its questions or contributing the terms of made been part of your reality. I struggle from a distance. That is, the intellectual or art- hope that this so. Most of those people are ist becomes accountable to a constituency rather than gone, or going. Please know the autonomy that is often championed in academic that we loved you very much. are the reality that was. To and art spheres. This engaged process invites specula- We us, you were the reality that tion or collective learning, which helps regularly renew could be. Not perfect; there no perfection. But always the investigation and ensures that neither the terms nor is changing for the good of all. Please also know that the trajectory of change are prematurely foreclosed. Thus, trust you to continue to while structures of inequality may inspire change, this we make change. We trust that injustice is not resolved by demands for legal restitution. if oppression comes, if arises, if cruelty And while the movement may actively condemn existing injustice of any kind — any kind — is forms of oppression, denunciation alone does not direct visited on any living thing, eye will be vigilant; the course of action, for there is also the announcing of your your hand will be ready; your the possibility of radical change, albeit in forms that are art will speak, no matter at best speculative outlines of what might be possible if what. And we hope that you, in we stay the course. Holland Cotter I address questions and processes of political and social change as a member of Ultra-red, a sound-art collective committed to investigating the problematic of art’s relation to politics. For many years, we have experimented with how procedures and operations of cultural analysis and cultural action may

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contribute to the conditions of reception necessary for the second encounter and its world-building repetitions to occur. The researchers, community organizers, educators, and artists who constitute Ultra-red work from within specific movements and sites, and with a strong sense of accountability to the constituencies with which we are aligned. Our concerns include anti-racism, feminism, migrant worker rights, housing and educayour turn, will write a letter to the young artists of the tion struggles, and AIDS activism. Thus, our understandunknowable future, describing ing of change is related to particular collective concerns the reality you knew, the changes you saw, the risks you and investments ( ►154 ) and the interdisciplinary practook. That you will tell them tices that guide the cycles of action, reflection, and analof your faith in them. And that you will thank them from your ysis in which movements engage. Each of these actions heart. benefits from the openness we may associate with specThank you. ulation but only if speculation is not reduced to the conventional terms of creativity and imagination and seen as the privileged domain of the thinker and artist. Rather, speculation is that aspect of the collective investigation that resists the repetition of established institutional and aesthetic forms. It is rooted in the rigorous investigation of collective experiences and focused on the material conditions within which we operate. For Ultra-red, reorienting our approach towards the second encounter as a matter of strategy consists of an inquiry into the ways we conceptualize aesthetic operations. Do we continue, for example, using aesthetic terms derived from an autonomous artistic sphere to create and judge the semiotics of affect and form within political movements? The risk ( ►73 & 146 ) in such a case is that the political becomes constrained primarily to the representational content of a work of art, its content, while its function as an aesthetic object is privileged in the terms of the museum or other such institutions. In the simplest terms, it is removed from the conditions of its production and reception. What formal and aesthetic terms may be derived from inquiries that situate cultural production within the context of the antagonisms of everyday life struggles, Holland Cotter where the points of convergence and divergence between the domains of art and activism stem from political stakes and not solely from artistic skill or formal aesthetic judgment? Rather than calling for the dismissal of aesthetic terms and effects, such as beauty, style, proficiency, and so forth, we suggest they be

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situated within the context of collective struggle. For example, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire assigns the role of “codification” to the aesthetic object. The codification is an illustration of the conditions of experience familiar enough to trigger a community’s collective recollections and descriptions of their experiences. Yet, the object should not be so familiar that it becomes a transparent or naturalizing representation of established knowledge and understanding. Thus, the codification mediates reality. Its aesthetic value is its capacity to be both familiar and estranging. Most important, however, is that the codification shifts the perception of reality and makes it possible to speculate on how the conditions of experience may be shifted or transformed. Thus, the second encounter calls cultural workers into a different relationship to their work and audience, one in which the artist works within the context of struggle and aesthetic terms are conditioned by collective investigations. The focus on how the aesthetic object informs and is informed by its reception enables the political collective to teach poetics, form, semiotics, and audience, in ways that are very different from the pedagogy practiced in autonomous institutions of art. This can be illustrated by a historical scene, which is also, for me, a memory. It was the morning of June 12, 1988 in Durban, South Africa, where I grew up. The government had declared a second state of emergency, which came into effect just after midnight. Under this state of emergency, political funerals were curtailed, curfews imposed, and most indoor and all outdoor political gatherings outlawed. If two people were less than a few meters apart, presumably a distance that would make unamplified speech inaudible, they could be said to constitute an illegal gathering. Nevertheless, commuters were met on the streets that early winter morning by members of Black Sash, a multiracial women’s organization founded more than thirty years earlier. What we saw as we drove into the city were women of different races, dressed in black, standing motionless and in silence on the sides of the roads. They were separated from each other by the exact number of meters stipulated by law. Facing the oncoming traffic, they held above their heads or directly in front of them, as one would a protest sign, what I recall to have been large, blank white boards. As with their past actions, the women used a formal, aesthetic vocabulary to draw attention to structures of state violence. In this intervention they re-presented and repurposed

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the very procedures intended to suppress speech and action into expressions of political grief, activist defiance, and unequivocal solidarity.2 The very terms of the law were used to defy the intent of the law. This was, I would come to appreciate years later, a valuable lesson in the political potential of conceptual art. The legibility of the Black Sash action has a great deal to do with when and where it happened. Like most political performance, it employed both presence and present-ness. That is, it actively and immediately engaged the state’s current attempt to redefine the public sphere and consequently how we accessed and used it. The stillness and silence with which the women collectively occupied public space performed an analysis and judgment of the state’s actions. More challenging, however, was how their recasting of silence and inaction amplified the fact that we were all implicated in the situation and would have to decide whether we would comply or struggle. No place, no action, no silence was disconnected from issues of state power. The action added another to a long list of invitations issued over the decades of the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa to join a counter-public sphere, a space of reception in which to formulate the strategies of resistance to be enacted across South Africa and begin being together in a way that only a transformed future would make possible. Indeed, the fact that only women participated in this action, and that these women were from different races, as Black Sash and other women’s groups had done many time earlier, insistently enunciated a different world. By approaching the notion of the second encounter as the organizing of the space of reception, the conventional structure of activism is inverted. Reception, in the form of collective acts of listening, testing, learning, and mobilizing, make it impossible to predict completely or resolve fully how change will occur. It is not the analysis that constitutes a movement. In fact, it may be the other way around. The codification derived from our grounded experiences and actions enable us to speculate on the terms of the next phase of our investigation. It is the inter-subjectivity of these scenes of action, the shared experiences that are the focus of reflection and analysis that enables us to generate a speculative language and practices essential to world making. Slavoj Žižek describes this as “the art of recognizing, from an engaged subjective position, elements which are here, in our space, but whose time is the emancipated future, the future of the Communist

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Idea.”3 It is a formulation that enables action rooted in the projection or speculation of what might be rather than a resolved analysis. The “idea” guides an iterative analysis that inspires but is also shaped by investigative actions. The calibration of this work toward the future of the communist idea is what it means to act for radical change or to “dream dangerously,” which is what Žižek sees in TOXIC DEBT the insurrections that have taken place across the globe During the most recent real boom, which ended in in recent years from Tahrir Square to Puerta del Sol to estate 2006, words like toxic were Zuccotti Park. This is different from working toward often applied to certain kinds subprime loans, but only in a liberalizing of what is already in place, such as call- of private. Traders gave risky ing for equality. My experiences in AIDS activism and debts nicknames like “Nuclear and “Mike Tyson’s anti-racist mobilization have taught me the neces- Holocaust” Punchout” before they were sity of this dreaming if we wish to organize militantly bundled together, stamped with ratings, and marketed and remain engaged. Deborah Gould’s recent study Triple-A to unwitting investors as of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) is dependably high-yield — which half true. When the bubble an elaboration of this condition. She notes that while was popped, toxic went public as ACT UP was a place to fight the AIDS crisis, it was also a financial term, no doubt as efficient way to scapegoat a place “to refashion identities, to experience new feel- an a particular product while 4 ings, to be changed.” The long-term investment and at the same time dramatizing institutions labor required to constitute the new world Althusser credit-holding as fragile, living things sees as the potential of the second encounter requires susceptible to toxicity. U.S. presidential the breadth of ambition or hope articulated by the (cf. candidate Mitt Romney’s 2011 legal scholar Kendall Thomas, who explains that he declaration, “Corporations people, my friend.”) joined ACT UP because, as an African-American, “I was are But if a “toxic debt” is simply invested in the idea of helping to create a queer pub- one that’s unlikely to be back at full value, the lic sphere that wasn’t about civil rights, but rather was paid real systemic danger stems about freedom, which is larger and more audacious and from pretending they’re safe in the first bolder than a simple demand for civil rights.”5 In time, investments place. Now that their risks the AIDS crisis response in the United States became have been ever-so-painfully by all parties, the function primarily of an administrative elite distrib- recognized these unpromising debts are uted across a network of governmental, non-govern- slowly shedding the toxic Such is the (verbal) mental, and corporate entities. For the most part, the epithet. fluidity of the market. As that particular usage front-line staff in these organizations includes people living with HIV/AIDS. Their labor is guided primarily has waned, this evocative by administrative regimes rather than the notion that the AIDS Dushko Petrovich crisis provides a venue for the pursuit of freedom. Nevertheless, a generation of AIDS activists was wakened to dangerous dreams of freedom that literally changed our lives and bound us to the unfinished freedom struggles in the United States and elsewhere.

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For a time, the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa produced a similar conjunction between the fight for survival and the fight for a freedom that went beyond merely the end of apartheid. That struggle evidenced a dynamic common to all projects of change, namely, the antagonism between one future, such as the assumption in South Africa that living in poverty meant inevitable death from AIDS, and term has occasionally been applied more generally — and another future, such as vision of radical citizenship in perhaps more appropriately — a non-racist and non-capitalist society. For Freire, the to describe the pernicious effects that unpayable dialectic of denouncing one reality while announcdebts have on the debtors ing a new reality is essential to utopian thinking. This themselves. It’s ironic that the term’s application to is to be in two realities simultaneously, to live to dream actual people would emerge and to dream in order to produce the emancipated conlater, as a secondary meaning, but nonetheless, calling ditions for a future living. To perform this living, Žižek certain kinds of debt toxic suggests, “we turn around the usual historicist perspeccould help us acknowledge and address the broader effects of tive of understanding an event through its context and our troubled relationship to genesis [and] bring in the perspective of the future,” credit. The anxiety, bad decision for what we are doing now, “will only become readmaking, and vulnerability able once the future is here… .”6 He goes on to observe that often reinforce one another in a debt spiral, that these “signs from the future are not constitutive for example, certainly seem but regulative … their status is subjectively mediated … toxic both personally and socially. The term also seems they are not discernible from any neutral ‘objective’ study suited to describe the selfof history, but only from an engaged position.” 7 Once perpetuating social losses incurred from decreasing again, the emphasis is placed on action that shapes analywages, unfunded wars, sis, the speculative contingencies of which inspire investiskyrocketing educational loans, and out-of-scale gation. The regulative ideal is there to inspire the making medical expenses. On a of a future that is not immediately legible to any single global level, international loan policies have proved actor. Which brings us to the issue of leadership, particusimilarly toxic to developing larly the roles of the intellectual and the artist. nations. A simple adjective won’t eradicate these debts — In his famous 1934 address to an audience at but if the word is leveraged the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, Walter to describe the sufferings of borrowers, rather than Benjamin observes that it is the conventional practice those of lenders, then that’s of the intellectual and artist to act in the manner of an a small step in a nontoxic direction. ideological patron. The intellectual or artist who performs this function limits his or her work to the production of questions and analyses upon which others may act. Thus, Dushko Petrovich a demarcation of roles exists between the intellectual or artist who produces and others who perform the actions this work may generate. In other words, the intellectual or artist need not take a place and assume responsibility for the second encounter, for the reception of the analysis, critique, or ideological formation.

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Benjamin rejects the remedy that merely shifting the content of the intellectual patron’s work constituted a meaningful change in the distribution of political labor between thinker and activist. The sympathetic intellectual, he notes, will simply produce further themes and images for the ideological apparatus. He gives as an example how photographs of poverty transform the political struggle, “from a compulsion to decide into an object of contemplative enjoyment, from a means of production into a consumer article.” 8 Benjamin invites, rather, a different kind of identification, a critical identification with the modes of participation rather than production. Freire picks up this issue in his declaration that “a true revolutionary project is a process in which the people assume the role of subject in the precarious adventure of transforming and re-creating the world.”9 Those familiar with Freire’s work will know that this is a pedagogical relationship, and it will change the subjectivity of the intellectual, as illustrated by a third scene. In the opening chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 study of the anti-racist struggle in post-emancipation United States, we encounter the following recollection of the aftermath of one of his first racist encounters: “I remember well when the shadow swept across me … [and] it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”10 This veil demarcates the color line, which he declared to be “the problem of the twentieth century.”11 For a time Du Bois “lived above [the veil] in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.” 12 This sky was bluest when he intellectually, athletically, and in other ways outperformed his white classmates. His aspirations motivated him to a dazzling intellectual career and an early belief that cultivated, rational “Negro” 13 leadership, rooted primarily in the great humanist and scientific projects of Europe and the United States, was the surest method for resolving racism. It was when he first went South, however, that he began to hear from within the veil a different knowledge exemplified by the collective singing of Negro spirituals, what he calls “sorrow songs.” It was in their “shifting of centuries,” that, “the soul of the black slaves spoke to men.” The final chapter of The Souls of Black Folk is dedicated to this scene of listening and the very different schooling it provided in struggle that is “subjectively mediated” and codified dissonance formed by grieving while celebrating suffering.

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Du Bois’s late work, Dusk of Dawn (1940), written thirtyseven years after The Souls of Black Folk, is a testament to this pedagogy of experience. Like the songs, it shifts between sorrow and hope and recognizes the capacity for autonomous, collective organizing rooted in the depth of experiences and methods particular to the Negro. After years of attempting to appeal to the constitutionally defined principles and ideals of the U.S. INVESTMENT “Investment in art” it, “gradually … dawned upon me with increasing clarimmediately connotes ity,” writes Du Bois in “Revolution,” the final chapter of financial profit but can be also associated Dusk of Dawn, “that it is not simply a matter of change with non-financial gain. in ideals, but even more a decisive change in the methGovernment subsidies, corporate sponsorship, ods by which ideals are to be approximated.” 14 The proand philanthropic acts are gram of action he outlines toward the end of the chapter investments that seek a return in the form of cultural is toward organized, collective action: “[The American integration, image making, Negro] must work together and in unison; you must or the professionalized field of social responsibility. evolve and support your own institutions; you must Philanthropy aside, however, transform your attack from the foray of self-assertive investment is resonant of the action or process of individuals to the mass might of an organized body.” 15 In putting away money with the this final statement he calls explicitly for a shift from the prospect of future gain, and thus, in the context of art, first to the second encounter, from the activism of the means buying artworks for intellectual patron to the organizing of the collective. financial profit or expected realization of value in Du Bois outlines in “Criteria for Negro Art,” an the future. Investment is essay from 1926—therefore between the publication embedded in buying, selling, and reselling artworks in of The Souls of Black Folk and the publication of Dusk of an exponentially growing Dawn—a program of dangerous dreaming in which art market that is largely facilitated by surplus capital this mass organized body may engage. Early in the and lack of regulations. essay he telegraphs the stakes and process of collective As investors focus on what is profitable, they create change for Negroes using a series of direct questions a monopolized market, and and statements: “What do we want? What is the thing thereby transform art into an object of speculation and an we are after? … We want to be Americans, full-fledged asset class, instigating a Americans, with all the rights of other American citizens. taste for risk taking. Investment in art as a But is that all? Do we want simply to be Americans?” 16 method of speculation is This may be heard as a shift from the activist demand possible as long as the value of artworks are generated, for equality to the organizers commitment to creating perpetuated, or distorted in a world. Du Bois goes on to outline an engaged, subjective position from which, according to Žižek, it is possible Özge Ersoy to glimpse the signs of the future. “Once in a while through all of us their flashes some clairvoyance, some clear idea, of what America really is,” observes Du Bois. “We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans can not. And seeing our country thus, are we satisfied with its present goals and ideals?”17

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That flash of clairvoyance initiates the vital work of speculation, which nourishes through its projections of liberation and guides with its propositions the actions necessary to sustain iterative and long-term project of radical change.

1 Louis Althusser, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 163–207.

6

Ibid., p. 128.

7

Ibid., p. 129.

2 Those knowledgeable with the history of political struggle in Durban may hear another historical memory embedded in this one, namely the political actions organized by Mahatma Gandhi and members of the South African Indian Congress during the 21 years (1893–1914) he spent in Durban. It was there that he formulated his practice of satyagraha, which is translated variously as plain speech or speaking truth or passive resistance. This practice has been employed in a century of struggles, as clear an illustration of the world making consequences of the “second encounter” as one might find.

9 Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review, 2000), p. 56.

3 Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (New York: Verso, 2012), p. 128. 4 Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 178.

8 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), p. 232.

10 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings (Washington, DC: Library of America, 1986), pp. 363–64. 11 Ibid., p. 359. 12 Ibid., p. 364. 13 The term “Negro” is used by Du Bois and his contemporaries. I retain it here as a reminder of the historical specificity of his writings. 14 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (1940), in W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings, p. 765. 15 Ibid., p. 776. 16 Du Bois, “Criteria for Negro Art” (1926), in W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings, p. 993. 17 Ibid.

5

Ibid., p. 188.

its closed system. Autonomy in art, a sine qua non, allows every artwork to create its own justification. Art’s autonomous state enables it to take any form and allows aesthetic evaluation to mimic open-ended financial assessment where value is not innate. Approval by the market, the museum, arthistorical scholarship, and, increasingly, the branding culture then produce an added or additional value — all based on symbolic capital. Art’s speculative nature endorses financial strategies that are at the core of riskhappy investment. Artists nevertheless continue to seek ways to bend or distort the financial system and its instruments. Relational art and participatory practices, for instance, undermine marketable, sellable, and collectible objects, and expose themselves to a different system of value judgment. Art’s flexibility to take different forms thereby sustains speculative investments and serves as a tool to infiltrate and subvert them at the same time.

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over/sight Lize Mogel

Latin speculatus, past participle of speculari to spy out, examine, from specula lookout post, from specere to look, look at—more at spy. http://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/speculate

Google Earth 62˚24’26” N 145˚09’24” W (Image: Landsat, 4.10.13)

The imagery acquired from the satellites and cameras that composed the CORONA program had a specific security system called TALENT-KEYHOLE. This added the codeword KEYHOLE, for satellite collection... https://www.cia.gov/library/center-forthe-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/ books-and-monographs/corona.pdf

Google Earth 43˚06’16” N 76˚06’23” W (Image: NY GIS, 4.1.06)

Finally, the CIA-assisted technology probably most familiar to you is one many of us use on a regular basis: Google Earth. In February 2003, the CIA-funded venture-capitalist firm In-Q-Tel made a strategic investment in Keyhole, Inc., a pioneer of interactive 3-D earth visualization and creator of the groundbreaking rich-mapping EarthViewer 3D system. CIA worked closely with other Intelligence Community organizations to tailor Keyhole’s systems to meet their needs. The finished product transformed the way intelligence officers interacted with geographic information and earth imagery. Users could now easily combine complicated sets of data and imagery into clear, realistic visual representations. Users could “fly” from space to street level seamlessly while interactively exploring layers of information including roads, schools, businesses, and demographics. In the private sector, this flyover capability was so compelling that multiple TV networks used EarthViewer 3D to fly over Iraqi cities and landscapes in news broadcasts using publicly available satellite images. All of this acclaim eventually caught the attention of Google Inc., a multinational cyberfocused corporation, which acquired Keyhole in 2004, thereby laying the groundwork for the development of Google Earth. https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/cia-museum/ experience-the-collection/text-version/ stories/cias-impact-on-technology.html

Google Earth 37˚49’57” N 116˚26’15” W (Image NASA; Digital Globe; U.S. Geological Survey, 5.31.07)

Some locations on free, publicly viewable satellite map services have missing, incomplete, or unclear map data. In some cases, these regions have been intentionally digitally obscured or blurred. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_map_ images_with_missing_or_unclear_data

Google Earth 61˚41’37” N 6˚45’09” W (Image NASA; Data SIO; NOAA; US Navy; NGA; GEBCO, undated)

Google Earth is constantly working on gathering the highest resolution imagery possible. However, there are certain areas for which we don’t currently provide high-resolution data. https://support.google.com/earth/ answer/176147?ctx=sibling&rd=1

In some limited circumstances, we have chosen to incorporate imagery in our services that contains some blurred areas because this imagery provides our users the best experience overall. https://support.google.com/mapcontentpartners/answer/143985?hl=en&ref_topic=21608

Google Earth 34˚57’33” N 82˚55’06” W (Image Orbis, 3.1.04)

Landsat sensors have a moderate spatial-resolution. You cannot see individual houses on a Landsat image, but you can see large man-made objects such as highways. This is an important spatial resolution because it is coarse enough for global coverage, yet detailed enough to characterize human-scale processes such as urban growth. http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?page_id=2

The continuity of Landsat imagery has never been ensured through the development of a sustained government program. Instead, responsibility has been shifted from one organization to another over Landsat’s 40-year history, resulting in persistent uncertainty for the future of this important asset. http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_ id=18420&page=2

Google Earth 55˚8’57” N 37˚28’16” E (Image Landsat, 4.10.13)

Introducing WorldView-3, the first multi-payload, super-spectral, highresolution commercial satellite. Operating at an expected altitude of 617 km, WorldView-3 provides 31 cm panchromatic resolution, 1.24 m multispectral resolution, and 3.7 m short-wave infrared resolution. WorldView-3 has an average revisit time of