Notes about Presentations & Presenters:
-----------------------------------
Henry C.K. Liu
-----------------------------------
Dubai, Workers
The Case Against Market Fundamentalism
This is a talk on how market forces are destorying the world.
Henry C.K. Liu is an independent commentator on culture, economics
and politics. He was born in Hong Kong and educated at Harvard
University in architecture and urban design. Liu developed an
interest in economics and international relations while working
as a professor at UCLA, Harvard and Columbia University on interdisciplinary
work on urban and regional development. Liu is currently the chairperson
of a New York-based private investment group and a contributor
to Asia Times Online. He is a Visiting Professor of Global Development
in the Department of Economics in the University of Missouri at
Kansas City.
The term "dollar
hegemony" was coined by Liu in an extensively quoted
April 2002 article: US
Dollar Hegemony has to go in Asia Times Online to describe
how he sees the dollar, a fiat currency since 1971 that yet continues
to play the role of the major reserve currency distorts global
trade and finance. Liu is a critic of the United States and the
policies of its government and also a critic of central banking.
Liu calls for the use of sovereign credit in lieu of foreign capital
for financing domestic development in developing countries. In
a series of articles titled The Abduction of Modernity, Liu has
developed his idea that modernity is not synonymous with Westernization.
Liu's critics contend that he turns a blind eye to the failings
of China compared to his critique of the United States. Others
observe that Liu's criticism is focused on US policies that are
disconnected to values and ideology set out by the Constitution,
and not on US values as such. Liu has also been vocal in his critique
of Chinese economic policy, particular on China's excessive dependence
of export, developmental imbalances that result in severe income
disparity and environmental neglect. Liu is openly unsympathetic
to Western liberal criticism of China that he considers as cultural
imperialism in disguise.
In February 2006, in a
series of articles in Asia Times On Line, Liu proposes the
establishement of an international cartel for labor to be known
as Organization of Labor-Intensive Exporting Countries (OLEC)
to restore balance of market power between capital and labor in
the globalized economy
http://henryckliu.com
http://www.atimes.com
top
-----------------------------------
Reading
and discussion -- Neoliberal Urbanism: Cities And the Rule of
Markets
-----------------------------------
Williamsburg, Gentrification Walk
Please
download here
Neoliberal Urbanism: Cities And the Rule of Markets
By: Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore
top
-----------------------------------
Andy Bichlbaum
-----------------------------------
Yes Men / Exxon
Andy, who is one of the Yes Men will be available to speak about
the work they did in New Orleans and their general thoughts about
the efficacy and development of their tactics and strategies of
repurposing the media apparatus to bring attention to important
issues.
top
-----------------------------------
Coalition
of Groups
-----------------------------------
Coalition of Groups Fighting Columbia Gentrification
of Harlem
Details forthcoming
-----------------------------------
Claire Pentecost
-----------------------------------
Spain, Almeria Intensive
agriculture in plastic greenhouses by the sea,
How the growing environmental /climate change/water
preciousness/ food consciousness is effecting urban organizing
Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer, engaging a variety of
media to interrogate the imaginative and institutional structures
that organize divisions of knowledge. Having spent years tinkering
in a conceptual laboratory for ideas about the natural and the
artificial, her recent projects concentrate on industrial and
bioengineered agriculture, the alternatives and the trade regimes
that force one over the other. She is currently work-shopping
a beta phase of VisibleFood: an open content database and website
exposing the hidden costs of the global corporate system that
produces our food. Pentecost is Associate Professor in the Photography
Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where
she teaches photography, drawing, critical theory and interdisciplinary
seminars.
http://www.clairepentecost.org
-----------------------------------
Neil Smith
-----------------------------------
Dubai, Construction
Site
Mega Gentrification
In the last years, we have been witnessing an extreme intensification
of investment and speculation in property. This has of course
lead to wide scale construction and development proposals in all
parts of the globe. At the heart and fringe of nearly each of
these developments, one can find the inherent contradictions of
this process referred to as globalization. Here one finds the
losers of the equation as well. The people who are forced out,
not given a choice or a voice, evacuated, or simply played out
of the game. In this game, each specific city or zone of redevelopment,
appears as a kind of experiment to broaden and extend the vocabulary
of neoliberalism. And it is in this extension, this apparent experimentation
that today's resistance runs into some corners. As we struggle
with our vocabulary, the facts continue to be created on the ground.
How to name and describe these processes today? Can we imagine
a short list of terms which could help us construct a map of current
processes being enacted upon urban centers globally? If terms
like gentrification and uneven development are insufficient, might
we need to invent new terms? Or may it just be a question of dusting
off some old books, revisiting and rethinking some older insights.
Neil Smith was trained as a geographer and his research explores
the broad intersection between space, nature, social theory and
history. He teaches in urban anthropology, cultural anthropology
and environmental anthropology, and directs the Center for Place
Culture and Politics. His environmental work is largely theoretical,
focusing on questions of the production of nature. His urban interests
include long term research on gentrification, including empirical
work in North America and Europe and a series of theoretical papers
emphasizing the importance of patterns of investment and disinvestment
in the the real estate market. He also writes more broadly on
New York City, focusing especially on the "revanchist city"
which has filled the vacuum left in the wake of liberal urban
theory.
His interests in social theory include political economy and marxism
and lie behind his theoretical work on uneven development. From
the global to the local scales, he argues, our spatial worlds
are constructed and reconstructed as expressions of social relations
and especially as expressions of capitalist social relations.
Uneven development is in many way the hallmark of capitalism.
More recently he has been studying the "geography of the
American Century," trying to understand the ways in which
global economic development in the twentieth century -- up to
and including so-called globalization -- represent specific expressions
of US power and responses to it. This has also led to considerable
research on the construction of geographical scale. He co-edits
Society and Space and sits on numerous editorial boards including
Social Text and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
-----------------------------------
Hakan
Topal
-----------------------------------
Possibility
of Justice and Justification of Artistic Production
City is an exciting place for new comers; both artists and researchers
often take cities as objects of study. Not surprisingly, one of
the main themes of last two Istanbul Biennials was the city itself.
As an attempt to escape from habitual touristic gaze, curators
and artists vigorously looked for alternative ways to present
their works and “activate” new locations within different
neighborhoods, sought to communicate with “local”
communities and produced new in-situ projects.
In certain ways, urban condition can be understood in terms of
flows. In this rather chaotic site, flow of bodies, flow of capital
and flow of desire exceptionally merges together, creates new
possibilities for productive activities, especially artistic ones.
As pseudo-natives of Istanbul, we (Xurban_collective) did various
projects considering the city as a ground of constant catastrophes
and we try to dig possibilities of refusal within impossible conditions,
specifically in Anatolia.
For the 9th Istanbul Biennial we selected somewhat different route.
In short, we proposed to transfer garbage from the brothel/whore-house
to a European museum as a contribution to unified Europe.
Quote from proposal;
“Whore
House (Kerhane/Genelev) signifies an official (as approved by
the state) domain of prostitution where bodies are controlled
by a gate to restrict and moderate the intersections of various
flows; flow of desire and the flow of capital. The boundary of
the brothels is strictly defined, the houses are color-coded,
policemen guard the entrance and workers are subjected to regular
medical examination. Thanks to the ultra-conservative social codes,
temporary intimate (ie. like husband-wife) relationship between
Muslim men and the sex worker is a hypocritical one.
If sex is the ultimate product of the brothel, fluids are the
leftover of that transaction. The xurban proposition incorporates,
in various media, the garbage collected from Istanbul’s
official brothels at Karaköy (which will be carefully packaged
in haz-mat drums), the imitation crystal chandeliers that are
produced around the same district and the notion and elements
of ablution for purification of the body and the soul. The technological
assemblage of the mentioned components and layers is planned to
integrate data flow from selected activities in virtual and real
space, and the whole process will be carefully documented and
exhibited online as well.
Simply put, xurban plans to transfer, across national (but expected-to-be
invisible) borders, a set of residuum and ideas of contamination
and ‘disease’, together with the suggestion of their
spiritual antidote, as a genuine cultural contribution to the
wisdom of unified Europe…”
(For
full text please visit to: http://www.xurban.net/scope/refused/index.htm)
During the presentation, Hakan Topal will talk about issues related
with containment, transference, contamination and the failure
of Xurban_collective’s project proposal. We will also discuss
ethical responsibilities with respect to justification of artistic
production.
Hakan Topal (imam) is a media artist and scholar at the New School for Social Research. He is one of the founding members of xurban_collective, together with Guven Incirligolu(pope). His current interests are issues in contemporary artistic production, urban sociology, social theory, extraction of valuable metals and some geeky stuff. http://www.xurban.net
-----------------------------------
Marty Lucas
-----------------------------------
Cyber-Urbanism in Southern African
This will be a short sketch of what urban development
and communications culture look like in Blantyre, the commercial
capital
of Malawi. Malawi is a small Southern African nation with a post-colonial
economy where 90% of the population are subsistance farmers that
is at the same time entering the information age through the penetration
of advanced communications technologies such as the cell phone
and the internet. NGOs, large corporate interests both global
and regional, and of course foreign governments, all have their
hands in. This is an effort to examine some of the tectonics of
one small part of this particular continent as the forces of ‘globalization’
impact a region characterized by extreme poverty and rapid urbanization.
Some
material that will be dealt with in the discussion can be found
at:
http://www.neoscenes.net/hyper-text/text/third/lucas_one.html
Also
useful:
http://www.storyworkshop.org
www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/4753
MARTIN
LUCAS is a videomaker and media educator. From his first
film, Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet, a look at New York
City’s fiscal crisis screened at the 1980 New York Film
Festival, to more recent work such as Subway Outside, an exploration
of where New Yorkers find culture, made with Dutch artist Jeanne
Van Heeswijk, and Paco Ignacio Taibo: Urban Activist made with
Fred Barney Taylor, Martin’s work speaks to an abiding interest
in the urban and its relations of culture and communication. Martin
teaches in the Film and Media Studies Department at Hunter College,
City University of New York. He recently spent time in Malawi,
working to develop a video production unit with Story Workshop,
a media production group that focuses on issues of HIV/AIDS education,
gender violence, and food security.
His website is http://www.martinlucas.net
-----------------------------------
Jeff Halper (Video)
-----------------------------------
Occupied
Palestine, Bethlehem
Wall
Good Architecture
Interview with Jeff Halper -Israeli Committee Against
House Demolitions
Good Architecture is the Ironic title
of this encounter with Anthropologist Jeff Halper, coordinator
of The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD)
, as he was giving a political tour of Jerusalem in 2006 for a
group of artists and activists. The video also includes an interview
with Halper as he elaborates on the role of architecture and planing
as a military device to maintain the occupation and expand it.
What is the Matrix of Control?
It is a system of control designed
1. to allow Israel to control every aspect of Palestinian life
in the Occupied Territories, while
2. lowering Israel's military profile in order to give the impression
to the outside that what Palestinians refer to as "occupation"
is merely proper administration, and that Israel has a "duty"
to defend itself and the status quo, yet
3. creating enough space for a dependent Palestinian mini-state
that will relieve Israel of the Palestinian population while
4. deflecting, through the use of "administrative" image
and bureaucratic mechanisms, international opposition and thus
to maintain control indefinitely and, in the final analysis,
5. to force the Palestinians' to despair of ever achieving a viable
and truly sovereign state and to accept any settlement offered
by Israeli. ("Time is on our side" is, as Sharon has
often said, a cornerstone of Israeli policy.)
to read the full article click
here
to view the video
In Search of Just Peace in Israel-Palestine: A View from
the Ground.
2006 Sabeel Conference, Kansas City USA
please go
here
Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against
House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a Professor of Anthropology at Ben
Gurion University. He has lived in Israel since 1973.
-----------------------------------
Scott Berzofsky,
Dane Nester, Nicholas Wisniewski
-----------------------------------
East
Baltimore, The Three
Ecologies
How can our artistic, activist and research-based practices respond
to the overwhelming urgency of the present moment, to the sweeping
“double movement” of neoliberal globalization?
We are now living in a period of unprecedented geopolitical transformation:
By 2050 the world’s population is expected to peak at 10
billion (the current population is 6.6 billion). For the first
time in history, the majority of people on the planet will live
in cities. Three quarters of all future world population growth
will take place in the emerging megacities of the global South,
where there is virtually no planning or infrastructure in place
to accommodate these new residents or provide them with services.
Consider the prospect of a “planet of slums” in relation
to the recent warnings of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, which claim that unless we significantly reduce our greenhouse
gas emissions (80% by 2050) and therefore largely free ourselves
of carbon emitting technologies, the planet will be unable to
avoid some of the worst consequences of global warming, including
sea levels rising enough to submerge island nations, the elimination
of one-quarter or more of the world’s species, widespread
famine in places like Africa and more intense hurricanes. The
potential danger of these circumstances is escalated by the violent
partitions and enforced inequalities of what Naomi Klein has recently
termed “disaster apartheid.” As Klein suggests, the
situations we witness in post-Katrina New Orleans, the West Bank
or US-occupied Iraq are not exceptions to the norm, but rather
present themselves as windows into a near-future terminal condition
of neoliberal globalization. A world in which spatial politics
have been reduced to Green Zones of privilege and security, Red
Zones of poverty and despair and the militarized borders that
keep them apart.
Can we shift scales of analysis and recognize the impact of neoliberal
policies and uneven geographical development within our own cities?
How are local struggles for affordable housing, environmental
justice and the “right to the city” related to the
larger concerns described above? How can experiments and interventions
at the local level contribute to a global movement of resistance
to neoliberalism and the invention of alternatives?
Over the last year we have been working on an ongoing site-specific
project in east Baltimore based on converting a vacant lot into
a sustainable urban farm and social space. We are squatting the
land and collaborating with residents to produce a space that
responds to our collective needs and desires. We are interested
in generating a process of small-scale urban planning which is
participatory and dialogical. During the first season we produced
a variety of vegetables that were distributed for free within
the neighborhood. The project has been informed by Felix Guattari’s
concept of “ecosophy,” discussed in his short book,
“The Three Ecologies,” published in 1989. In it, Guattari
argues that in order to respond to the challenges we face today
we must develop a new ethico-political articulation that integrates
the three ecological registers—the environment, social relations,
and human subjectivity. Our project is a modest attempt to put
this concept into practice.
top
-----------------------------------
Brian Holmes
-----------------------------------
Alphaville, Lemmy Caution
Escape the Overcode: Guattari's Schizoanalytic Cartographies,
or the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics
( Excerpt )
...
Deleuze insisted that you have to seek out the problems to which
concepts respond, if you want to understand their meaning and
potential. These problems present themselves in the immediacy
of social life – in aesthetics, therapeutics, politics,
technics, etc. – but also at more abstract levels of articulation.
In this text I will analyze cybernetics as a problem to which
A Thousand Plateaus, and later, Cartographies schizoanalytiques,
offer responses. In particular, I’ll examine Guattari’s
attempt to create a “metamodelization” of the ways
people join experimental assemblages in order to escape the behavioral
patterning of cybernetic systems.
Cybernetics should be understood as the most broadly applied social
science of the postwar period. This is due to its origins. Like
information theory, cybernetics springs directly from electrical
engineering. However, its scope is much wider, it is a system
theory, with links to Bertalanffy, Luhmann, etc. Cyberneticists
create models of feedback relations between the heterogeneous
elements of a system. Yet because they are engineers they use
these models to build technical systems, within which human beings
will have a limited range of options. In this way, they construct
the parameters within which the elements of complex systems evolve
over time; and thus they try to realize the normative idea of
homeostasis which in their eyes is the defining characteristic
of a stable, predictable, useful system. The classic figure here
is the engineer Jay Wright Forrester, the inventor of the Whirlwind
computer, the key figure in the early development of Cold War
defense systems, and subsequently the theorist of Industrial Dynamics
and Urban Dynamics (computerized techniques for modeling the interactions
of psychological, technical, logistical and economic factors in
an industry or even a city).
Guattari, who was more directly involved with the applications
of the human sciences than Deleuze, was particularly aware of
the ways that behavior is patterned and environments are constructed.
His lifelong preoccupation with delirious machinism clearly has
literary and artistic roots in the French avant-garde tradition
(Roussel, Duchamp, Tinguely) and is clearly posed against the
normative universals of Freudian psychoanalysis and Lacanian structuralism;
but it is also an attempt to respond to the construction of homeostatic
environments and the patterning of behavior within them. The key
concept here is “overcoding.”
Overcoding is defined in A Thousand Plateaus as the expression
of the capitalist axiomatic, resulting in “phenomena of
centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization
and finalization.” But far from being just a linguistic
phenomenon, overcoding works through the built environment, which
must be conceived as inseparable from its many language machines
(billboards, speakers, televisions, computers, etc.). The desire
to formulate collective enunciations through participation in
deterritorializing flows is an attempt to speak another kind of
language, and more than a language. It’s here that Guattari
rejoins Deleuze: in the engagement with experimental literatures
and their geopolitical deliriums, expressed in the books they
wrote together. In their assemblage, resistance to the sociological
problem of cybernetic behavior-patterning rejoins the deeper philosophical
problem of resistance to cognitive science paradigms, or what
Jean-Pierre Dupuy has called “the mechanization of the mind,”
emerging from cybernetics and information theory – and present
in the linguistic structuralism of Levi-Strauss and his followers
(including Lacan). However, Guattari in particular would always
insist that semiotics extends beyond language, to embrace all
signifying systems, whether visual, affective, gestural, volumetric,
musical, etc. Thus his call for the creation of truly complex
machines, simultaneously aesthetic and logical, pathic and rhizomatic:
paradoxical vehicles of an embodied attempt to escape the overcode.
Now, how could that be done? Again we must refer to cybernetics.
The bugbear of early cybernetic engineers was positive feedback.
It was conceived as a danger for homeostasis; and any correctly
designed cybernetic system had to have damping mechanisms, to
keep excessive feedback from causing the system to oscillate out
of control. However, what Heinz von Foerster dubbed “second-order”
cybernetics was interested precisely in positive feedback, and
thence, in the passage of critical thresholds and the event of
phase-changes. The Anti-Oedipus can be conceived as an experiment
with the subversive effects of positive feedback, in the form
of an excess of self-catalyzing desire (probably inspired more
by Tinguely’s self-destroying machines than by any philosophical
or scientific source). A Thousand Plateaus, on the other hand,
consciously partakes – though on its own highly idiosyncratic
terms – in a larger, counter-cultural shift toward second-order
cybernetics, a shift which is signaled in the very title of the
book by the reference to Bateson (a transitional figure between
the two periods of cybernetic theory). Shortly after the publication
of A Thousand Plateaus, Guattari became aware of the sociological
effects of Bertalanffy’s system theory via its applications
in so-called “family therapy” (also decisively influenced
by Bateson). Around the same time he was powerfully affected by
the work of Stengers and Prigogine, who established the paradigm
of chaos theory in physics, and formalized the scientific concept
of phase-changes. From the early 1980s, Guattari’s theoretical
and experimental practice articulates a deliberate opposition
to the environmental overcoding imposed by the models of first-order
cybernetics.
Guattari’s Cartographies schizoanalytiques remains practically
unread in the English-speaking world, due to its linguistic and
theoretical difficulty. It is a work of “metamodelization.”
In other words, it is an attempt to invent a diagrammatic matrix
that can indicate the ways different models are put to work in
existential and social worlds. It is based on four coordinates
or “functors”: existential Territories, which appear
in the form of cutouts; Universes of reference, which appear as
constellations; energetic Flows, which appear as complexions;
and Phyla of abstract machines, which appear as rhizomes (T, U,
F, ?). The interrelations of these four functors map out a self-overcoming
system oriented toward the event of the phase-change, in which
Guattari sees the possibility of collective speech. What’s
being sought is the capacity, not only to describe, but above
all, to experiment with a process of becoming. And this is what
has made the schizoanalytic cartographies such important tools
for the experimental assemblages of artistic practice.
The beauty of Guattari’s metamodelization is that, unlike
the models of cybernetics or cognitivism, it leaves ample room
for a pathic core of endo-referential subjectivity. This subjectivity
is grounded in its own intensities; but its actual cutouts of
territory are linked to the virtuality of artistic constellations
via the continual echo in embodied consciousness of refrains,
or “blocks of content,” which have the effect of deterritorializing
the experience of an existential territory. What the metamodelization
aims to reveal, however, is the movement from the content of this
subjective, enunciative field into the expression of objective
social process, from which concrete enunciations emerge. Thus
it places the pathic or a-signifying nuclei of subjectivity into
relation with the actual flows of techno-energetic-discursive
assemblages, themselves continually destabilized by the virtualities
introduced through the rhizomatic development of abstract phyla.
At stake here is the overcoming of the divide between what C.P.
Snow famously referred to as the “two cultures,” art
and science, subjectivity and objectivity – not through
the reduction of the former to the latter, as in contemporary
cognitive science, but instead through the dynamic interaction
of fundamentally heterogeneous realities, whose interplay orients
the unfolding of individual and social existence.
Guattari considered that every model should be abandoned when
it no longer produces anything of vital interest – including
his own metamodelization. In that spirit I will ask two questions.
The first is, what in Guattari’s metamodels (if anything)
can still resist the veritable rise to power, since the mid-1990s,
of the prolongations of second-order cybernetics, which have now
been codified, particularly in managerial and financial circles,
as “complexity theory”? But a second, perhaps more
important question is: how has the original goal of cybernetics
(instrumental mastery over the dynamic interactions of a complex
system) been further developed by contemporary cognitive science,
and what kinds of built environments are now coming down the governmental
and corporate pipe? Does the pathic core of Guattari’s schizoanalytic
cartography offer any clues as to how such built-and-informationalized
models could be subverted or subsumed? Or should his metamodelization
be cast aside, as no longer useful for the problems of the present?
Brian Holmes is a writer, activist and translator, born in San
Francisco, did a Ph.D. in Romance Languages at the UC Berkeley,
now lives in Paris and is endlessly curious about the world. He
has worked with activist art groups such as Ne Pas Plier and Bureau
d'Etudes, participated in the counter-globalization movements
and written essays on aesthetics and politics, the theory of contemporary
capitalism and artist/activist cartography. His writing has been
published in Hieroglyphs of the Future (Zagreb: Arkzin/WHW, 2002)
and Unleashing the Collective Phantoms (New York: Autonomedia,
2007), as well as the journals Multitudes, Springerin, Brumaria,
the listserve Nettime, various magazines, tracts, websites, exhibition
catalogues, etc. He is currently working on a new book, to be
entitled Escape the Overcode: Artistic Interventions in an Unstable
World.
Raw materials at:
http://www.brianholmes.wordpress.com.
http://www.u-tangente.org
*ground
as the contradiction and tragic failure of capitalism right now:
--ground rent, for everything that concerns housing
--ground to the bone, for flexible labor
--ground as the earth itself, overheating and poisoned
--ground zero wherever a bomb goes off and people die