Posts Tagged ‘revolution’

Towards an Understanding of Social Revolution in the Digital Age – The False Negative of Communism

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Revolution, as understood in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, meant a seizing of the means of production and state power. This no longer makes sense. To seize power is to fall into the very trap of the capitalist and anti-capitalist revolutions. The true rupture points in a society are not those places wherein an accumulation of power is exerted over a populous. The true rupture points lay in the shadows. They are in front of us yet hidden from view. They are invisible.

It is held as common knowledge by many that the failure of the 20th century “communist” revolutions proves that not only is any derivative of Marxist theory wrong, but that the only viable option is liberal democratic market capitalism. The true failure of the “communist” revolutions was precisely their inability to rework the social or economic order. Zizek, in In Defense of Lost Causes, argues that liberal democracy is a dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. Liberal democracy is a system which, to its very core, reinforces the values of the Bourgeois class. If this is true, most 20th century dictatorships are merely a twisted inversion of that logic. Instead of smooth market flow, we have forced top down control. Either way the focus is on pockets of wealth and power and the exercise of control from as high up the pyramid as possible.

Taking this newly cleaned Marxist lens and looking at serfdom as the dictatorship of the Aristocracy and liberal-democratic market capitalism as the dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie, what then would a dictatorship of the Proletariat look like?

Obviously when we say ‘Dictatorship’ we are not talking here of totalitarian political regimes. That kind of centralized power and socio-economic control is tied in with Democracy’s Bourgeois dictatorship. Capital(ism) is about centralizing power through economic processes. This is a vast improvement over centralizing power through brute force, but none the less causes great misery in its wake. In order to keep the engines that fuel it alive the working class must be convinced they need not only more than they have but more than they can afford. Once the worker buys into this idea the use of debt markets allows the workers to “own” the things they were told they wanted by the corporations.

Aesop Rock puts it a bit more succinctly when he states “We the American working population/Hate the fact that eight hours a day/Is wasted on chasing the dream of someone that isn’t us.”

In short the “communist” revolutions of the 20th century were mere perversions of the democratic revolution. The revolutionary forces took market agents and forced them under centralized government control in a style much more akin to the pre-democratic governments than anything since. While the rhetoric was different the shape was familiar. Instead of corporation we had government departments. The names were different. That is all.

We have yet to see the form a true dictatorship of the Proletariat would take. We have no sense of what life in such a system would be. How would our lives change if we worked directly with one another for the exchange of goods and services. If the exchange value of our goods, time, and services was not mediated by the wealth extracting capitalists and corporations would we treat each other differently?

What might a new shape look like? Aristocratic dictatorship places everything under a single control. All power radiates from a single source. Bourgeois dictatorship opens that space up a bit. Rather than one autonomous agent there are several. These multiple agents overlap. They are owned by more than a single actor and thus have aspects of autonomy yet maintain permeable edges.

Perhaps this next phase has no edges. Perhaps it is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

Perhaps the very nature of power is in need of revisioning. A return to the direct human experience is an opening of a potentially new understanding of power. A third possibility, to pry us free of the dichotomy of (free vs. controlled) capital, is desperately needed. Power, as an expression of authentic human relating, by its very nature destabilizes the classical power structures of capitalism (and its negative).

Capitalist modes of control are failing before our eyes. The dust has not even settled on the latest economic bubble burst and already the wealthy who control this planet are working to gain more wealth at the expense of everyone else. Already the new free commons are under attack by the capitalist forces. Were it up to them we would pay hefty sums for services that should be free.

Of course the devious nature of debt markets has made everyone so concerned with keeping a roof over their heads that we hardly have time to look up and see a world of free information, free exchange of goods and services, true freedom taken away from before our very eyes. Or to put it in the words of Dead Prez, “How can you represent if you can’t pay rent?”

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Towards an Understanding of Social Revolution in the Digital Age – Credit Markets

Monday, December 7th, 2009

The genius of late post-industrial capitalism can be seen in the appearance of the expansion of wealth through the development of “credit markets” (or more accurately debt markets). At the end of WWII the United States had the highest national debt (adjusted for inflation) in its history, before or since. While that debt serviced the economy in terms of creating industries focused on mobilizing against the threat of militaristic expansion from Germany, Italy, and Japan, when the dust settled the debt still remained. Something had to be done. In the intervening years that debt was shifted from the government to the working class through the expansion of debt markets in a similar way that the “threat” of the Axis powers was shifted to the Communist bloc to maintain and expand those military industries we had just created.

For the citizen turned consumer things like education, large quantities of consumer goods, and home “ownership” were no longer available only to the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production or the proverbial millionaire next door). Through the use of consumer debt, capital was given the appearance of shifting from the owners of the means of production to the workers (while some form of this has always existed the quantitative expansion caused a qualitative shift by making debt not only all pervasive, but the default assumption behind market actions). What happened was a decentralization of the “company store” allowing the working class to purchase goods beyond their means and, as a result, bind themselves inextricably to the lender. Buying in installments became increasingly commonplace, as did taking out loans in excess of one’s entire net worth for the privilege of having to do all the maintenance on one’s residence, and eventually owning a property that, when accounting for inflation, was worth what was paid for it. In short what was opened up with the expansion of debt markets was indentured servitude for the 20th century.

Once debts and assets are accounted for these workers lived with the outward appearance of the bourgeoisie and yet their personal net worth was near zero to negative. Traditionally we would call a person with a negative net worth poor. Now however we offered them the opportunity of working for the system rather than sending them to a debtor’s prison. This expansion of debt markets put much of the working class under house arrest, able to move more or less freely but suffering under the yoke of consumer debt. Because of the debt (and its commensurate lifestyle), these people now had “more to lose,” they become even more invested in maintaining the status quo, and any revolutionary potential is wiped out by the hope of owning this year’s newest gadget. At a surface level things had improved. More people had more stuff. This “expansion of the middle class” seemingly gave opportunity to millions. Yet a quick look under the hood shows a radically different picture.

The working class was now divided between those engaging with the debt markets and those living within their means. The proletariat became alienated from itself. This alienation made it unable to recognize itself due to the difference in lifestyle. Those whose lives had taken on the appearance of the bourgeoisie began to don the class actions and assumptions of bourgeois values. “Free Markets,” rugged individualism, profit as the ultimate good, and other class values of those who own the means of production got infused with the thinking of the self-alienated working class. Markets became freer, consumer debt expanded, the rights of corporations (huge pockets of wealth) began to take on a status equal to, if not greater than, that of the individual human subject.

The working class became reduced to the status of a consumer with a bank card. In short, Trotsky’s goal of reducing the human subject to a working number came to fruition through our credit cards. After September 11, 2001 we were told that our duty as citizens of the United States was to shop. Our rightful place in the order of things was nothing more than that of a consumer of goods and debt. Perhaps George W. Bush was a communist sleeper agent a la Phillip K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth, for he did more than most to trun Trotsky’s vision into a reality. And all the while, the rich became richer.

The profit motive was the motive. In that rhetorical action of this nation’s former President the ethical basis of this country was shifted to place profit and wealth as the pinnacle of human achievement. To quote Eric B. and Rakim, “Stop smiling. Still don’t nothing move but the money.” And money did move, as well as the labor power of the, now masked, working class, directly into the accounts of the bourgeois money lenders. Credit, of the scale and sophistication we have today, is a fairly new development. Even as late as 1948 the capitalist system was based around actual ownership.

The opening of new commons is in large part a reaction to this tendency of debt (and the illusionistic possibility it offers) to lay its noose around the neck of the worker. A simple rejection of debt markets is not enough to overcome its totalizing effect. Rather an alternate system which operates from an entirely different ethical foundation is needed. A system which recognizes the primacy of the human subject as subject provides the possibility of resisting the dehumanizing tendency of contemporary capitalism. But nothing will be possible so long as the self-alienation of the proletariat is maintained by the powers that be.

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Towards an Understanding of Social Revolution in the Digital Age – The Free Commons

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Last week I opened up the possibility that true social revolution in our contemporary age might not take the form of open revolt against state power and economic infrastructure. Rather, true revolt occurs within the realm of the interpersonal. It is exactly the place outside state control wherein we are free to exercise our existence however we see fit.

In these days of advertising everywhere we go and near absolute control of our cultural choices by economic and market forces that would have us do their bidding rather than follow our own will it is difficult indeed to see a place for human Being outside the market place. To see the self as more than consumer is increasingly difficult every day. Thus I suggested that “[i]n a world increasingly mediated by technologies that give the appearance of connection, while fostering distance and misunderstanding, perhaps the most radical act we can take is to carve time out of our schedules to meet another being face to face and find out who they truly are.” Radical action then is a reclaiming, a taking back, of our authentic and unmediated reality.

While this can happen to powerful effect in interpersonal relations we need not limit ourselves to this domain. Certainly interpersonal authenticity is a foundation. But while we work on our foundations we must have a vision of where we are going from here. Just like a return to direct and authentic interactions allow us to revision the entire social sphere away from the prescribed modes of being thrust upon us by corporate interests so too can we revision economic life as well.

For this revisioning to be successful we must move beyond the commodity fetishism of contemporary life. The bling bling culture we have been sold, and sadly bought into all too willingly, can be circumnavigated. For our survival as beings who are more than their bank card numbers we must. Slavoj Zizek indicates a turn in this direction when he states that:

[T]he Left should adopt a different, apparently more modest, but in fact much more radical strategy: to withdraw from state power and focus on directly transforming the very texture of social life, everyday practices which sustain the entire social structure . . . Any radical social change must be anti-fetishistic in its approach . . . our passive endurement of power constitutes it, we do not obey and fear because it is in itself so powerful; on the contrary, power appears powerful because we treat it as such. This fact opens up the space for a magical passive revolution which, instead of directly confronting power, gradually undermines it through the subterranean digging of the mole, through abstaining from participation in the everyday rituals and practices that sustain it.

One level of this revisioning of social life lies in the economic realm and specifically the exchange of goods and services between individuals. While one could make a case for the democratizing effects of ebay or craigslist a more radical manifestation of this potential lies in Freecycle.

Freecycle provides an alternative to our disposable culture that could have potentially systemic repercussions. It not only removes any mediation between agents (people interact directly with one another) but the very notion of, and potential for, capitalization has been removed. The core essence is the free exchange of goods. Because the system has no monetary incentive there is a tendency to heighten the authenticity with which these interactions occur. I know someone, for example, who gives items away to the person with the best story or most compelling need (rather than first responder, which would favor those with high tech gadgets, and the commensurate disposable income that goes with them).

In a similar vein to Freecycle are community gardens. Here the basic unit of production, the growing of food, is brought back into a communal mode of being. People come together to share in an activity which provides direct benefit to them and their fellow human. At the same time these action occur outside the realm of traditional economic forces. Similar too is the rise of urban farming as well as formal and informal trading between these urban farmers.

The above, as well as clothing swaps, book swaps, and other such activities, not only keep otherwise disposable items out of landfills, but bring people together to share time and space as human beings. Because the old “commons” have all been appropriated by private interests it has been necessary to open new terrain to common use.

Of similar import to these local manifestations of open commons is the rise of the open source movement and specifically creative commons. Here is a direct opening of a commons area out of a closed environment. Copyright is a closed system by design. The intent was to keep intellectual property held by its creator. Over time that has expanded ad infinitum until now genetic material which has existed inside organisms for millions of years can be “owned” by a corporation. Copyleft is open by design. With creative commons a public space has been opened up and created within the otherwise closed system. While software is the most well known aspect of creative commons, music is increasingly released under CC licenses as is a lot of writing, including this blog.

Each idea listed here provides a possible escape vector out of the misery of the disposable culture we have been sold. While it is possible that these may simply be recouperated into the economic engines of post-industrial capitalism, they none the less provide a rupture point which might be exploited to bring about a fundamental shift in society’s ethical orientation towards itself. Escaping the reality proposed by the corporate interests is necessary before we, the human subjects in this experiment, are deemed disposable too.

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Towards an Understanding of Social Revolution in the Digital Age

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Camille de Toledo’s advocacy for a “lucid romanticism” in his book Coming of Age at the End of History is a deeply impassioned quest for an alternative to the distant ironic veneer which goes for social engagement these days. While his rhetoric falls a little too firmly in the French existentialist vein of experiencing social problems as a physical sickness within one’s own body (Nausea was inspiring at 20, but a bit old hat to me now) the intent is squarely directed in the right direction.

Through the dissolving and decentering of power in the contemporary age any attempt at revolt, revolution, or rethinking, becomes dissipated. Unions have no power because factories simply move to another country. Governments are so compromised by their entanglements with private concerns like banks, insurance companies, and the like that with any push they recede into nothingness. There is no there there having already fragmented its existence into a multiplicity of nonexistent actors. Mortgages are bundled, chopped, and sold while the displaced homeowner can’t tell if it was the original lender, the investment bankers, the lack of government oversight, or their own greed that should have a finger pointed at it.

Perhaps the time of finger pointing has ended.

The idealism of the 19th and 20th centuries ended in brutal totalitarian misery or dinseyfied antiseptic wastelands. The failures of the past have made us unable, or more likely unwilling, to engage in enterprise that necessitate hope as fuel. Even elections won on the idea of hope are fast seen as the sloganeering and false promises for which they truly are. We are so desperate for hope in the world that anyone who comes by offering a way out of this capitalist misery is immediately followed with all our enthusiasm and vigor. We embrace fundamentalists because we hear in their voice a possible antidote for the reckless totalizing effects of post-industrial capitalism.

We have grown afraid in our comfortable settings of new gadgets from China and the latest plastic monstrosity of design. We are afraid both of where we are, that somehow this life as consumer has robbed us of our basic human potential, and also afraid that any attempt to break free of its stronghold would upset the precarious balance of our comfort and land us in an even deeper misery. So we choose a misery of the soul over a misery of the body in an attempt to find some semblance of sure footing in a world increasingly geared towards the well being and care of corporations and institutions.

But even our fundamentalists have failed us. For they do not want to toss out the whole order. They do not want a revaluation of values. What they advocate is the exact same world with a different rhetoric. The Christian fundamentalists want the same world we have now, but in the name of Jesus. The Muslim fundamentalists want the same world we have now, but in the name of Allah. The Atheist fundamentalists want the same world we have now, but in the name of Science. Just as the fascist movements of the early 20th century failed to reformulate society, but rather reinforced the status quo this time in the name of race or industry, so too do our modern fascists and our contemporary fundamentalists not want to truly upset the sitting order.

The sickness lies much deeper than any of these movements would be willing to acknowledge. Deeper even than Toledo is willing to admit. The fracture point does not lie at the day or night that one goes to religious services. The fracture point does not lie at the choice to protest or stay home. Rather, the fracture point lies at the basic unit of human interaction. Too easily do we let ourselves off the hook in our interpersonal relationships. Too easily do we allow our fellow human to be determined and defined by epithets ascribed to them rather than existing in their true being. We are an artist, or a parent, or a child, or a boss, or a worker. We are never a being. No wonder then that we live in a world which caters to objects (multi-national corporations, consumers) and gives only passing lip service to subjects.

In short we have given up our very core existence for the comfort of self as adjective. Once we reduce the human experience to easily definable boxes we no longer have to concern ourselves with the complexity of human Being. Once the social Other has been defined and ascribed with understandable attributes we can sit back and relax at our understanding. This causes us to continually be surprised when the individual acts in a way counter to the labels we, or they, have placed upon them. We end up in a continual state of shock at our fellow beings and must, out of necessity, shut down and distance ourselves.

The process begins so simply. With a question and an answer: “What do you do?” “Well I am a doctor.” And there the door has been both opened and shut. Action has been translated into adjective. Being, the infinite questioning of existence, has been replaced with definition. When asked “what do you do?” we rarely, if ever, reply with “I spend as much time as possible with the woman I love while working in an art form that I feel passionately connected to.”

I am as guilty of this as anyone. More than three decades of socialization has taught me to define and limit myself within the social sphere. I have been trained through various channels of social power to behave, even when rebelling, in a mode appropriate to social functioning. For even rebellion is necessary to define the social order and thus make it understandable. The anti-consumerist punk makes safe, secure, legitimate, and possible the consumerist middle-class. The peace, love, unity, and respect espoused by the raver is like a sad inverted mirror held up to a culture based on war, division, recklessness, and solipsistic egotism.

Perhaps true resistance to the totalizing effects of contemporary capitalism are, like Toledo suggests, not in the field of physical open revolt. Perhaps true revolution is an inner revolution. Perhaps we need a social revolution, not on the superficial order of the fundamentalists, but rather on the deep and real level of the interpersonal. Toledo sees revolt and revolution occurring in the world of ideas. But it must be brought one degree closer. A step before language. Authentic interrelating of two beings. In a world increasingly mediated by technologies that give the appearance of connection, while fostering distance and misunderstanding, perhaps the most radical act we can take is to carve time out of our schedules to meet another being face to face and find out who they truly are.

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Journalism and The Revolution

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Link

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

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un/conventional

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

So far for next season I have been hired for two shows because of a reputation I have for “unconventional” lighting. I understand the intent behind this categorization, but I find it curious that my work is seen as unconventional. Perhaps this comes from the fact that I do not think, initially about theatricalizing the text, but approach my work at a more formal visual level. When I am lighting a show I do not think first about lekos and fresnels and gobos and gels. Rather I think visually in terms of what quality of light do I wish to create. Are we interested in directional lighting or soft diffuse lighting? Do we want a compressed grey scale or something very chromatic. Should the light be solid or dappled? This is why I love using images to discuss lighting a show. It keeps the conversation focused on what the lighting should look like rather than technical execution. That part comes later, much later. At the beginning of a process it is about looking and reacting.

Because of this approach I get sold on the look rather than the technique. As a result I use a mixture of traditional theatrical lights and other types of lighting instruments. Heather Carson taught at NYU my first year of graduate school and I had the pleasure of assisting her at San Francisco Opera this past season on a production of Norma. Heather is a designer known for her “unconventional” lighting. How she came about it is quite interesting. Working on a lot of European opera with Paul Steinberg, who creates large architectural sets, she began exploring architectural lighting. This search has led her to embrace an aesthetic composed almost exclusively sodium and mercury flood lights as well as fluorescent lighting. For those of you who are unfamiliar, sodium lights are the yellow street lamps and mercury, the white/green parking lot lights. Her work is quite stunning and very powerful.

Working and studying with her gave me a strong appreciation of the power and beauty of a much wider array of lighting instruments than I had previously explored. Let’s think of a lamp post at night. Most of us have probably seen some scene in a play that takes place outside where the characters are supposed to be standing under a street lamp. The lighting designer took a spot light, made the edges very soft and colored it some shade of yellow or amber. The effect feels little to nothing like a streetlight. An actual street lamp has a very beautiful quality to it. The light is very intense when you are close to it. Harsh and almost disorienting. As you move away the light thins out and dissipates rapidly. Far away there is a thin breath of light, barely visible. Certainly there is something here to be said for dramatic effect, but if what one wants is a streetlight, nothing can do that better than the real thing.

In Cupid and Psyche I was expressly interested in the quality of light. I was exploring the relationship between the formal quality of light and the creation of psychological space. We had quite a number of locations to deal with on a single set, so delineating the location came down to lighting. Two of the most important locations in the play were Cupid’s cloud where he laments his lovelstruck woe and the Apolo’s palace where Cupid takes Psyche to woo her. These two physical locations simultaneously represented psychological spaces as well. The palace was lit with 23 large tear shaped incandescent bulbs. They gave off a warm glow and reflected the other lights in their glass. This gave a kind of jewel like sparkle to the palace. The cloud on the other hand was a space of lovesick anguish. It was lit in a diffuse, soft, cold, grey light. Fluorescent tubes hidden behind the fabric walls of the set were the primary lighting for this location.

Had I limited myself to the conventional palette used by a theatrical lighting designer for Cupid and Psyche, the show would have been just that, conventional. In Suspendida we lit the entire piece in bare lightbulbs laying on the ground. Here the lights on the ground pulsed like breath, slow and deliberate, It was actually a very complex random sequence of programming, such that every time we performed the piece, the lighting was different. Looking beyond the conventional means of working a scene or an entire piece can be very difficult. A lot of the tradition has come about precisely because it works. But the sad reality is that a lot of work ends up looking very similar.

What I have found interesting is that as a result of doing a lot of “unconventional” lighting, I am able to take a conventional piece and give it a kind of unique quality. This is why I love working in a variety of mediums as well as in both traditional entertainment and more avant garde work. The different works talk to each other through me and inform one another in often surprising ways.

I was once working on a piece that wanted to be very “old-fashioned” in style, so I went back to the work of Stanley McCandless. What I ended up with was a modern interpretation of his ideas. And that research led me down some very interesting and exciting avenues of thought specifically in the realm of color theory that I might not have otherwise explored. The old and the new are often surprisingly close to one another. Both McCandless and Carson’s work is concerned with a kind of economy of volume. That is how to fill a stage both efficiently and beautifully. While the final product could not be more different, in many ways they stem from the same origin.

It is because of this that I find labels like ‘unconventional’ to be rather strange. In fact the whole idea of an Avant Garde sounds hopelessly mid-century to me. If for no other reason than the rate at which information is disseminated and absorbed into culture, the idea of an advanced rank of artists or producers of culture is just plain silly. Any work that has reached completion is already old and dead. The revolution is not a single event. It is not a deed or an act. Rather it is like the Aristotilian notion of Praxis, it is an underlying motivation that must and will continue until it has reached its final goal. If that final goal is a product then the revolution will die. If, rather it is a way of Being, a mode of existence, then it will continue on forever, always finding new sources of fuel and new means of expression.

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