QU may ask, “What is your purpose in doing this?” And so if news can never be fully objective, there must be an agenda in there somewhere, or at least a tendency, an implication. “Gentrifier” could be one in this case, as per recent discussions at HomeShop, the Other’s guilt, or being accused of cultural colonialism. Production of any sort could then be nullified, re-organised, rendered meaningless…but to muster up the words—oh!—now wouldn’t that be amazing?

The press was seen as a tool, a transmission belt for public opinion, a marketplace of ideas. It was the platform for public discussion of issues of local as well as national importance. Hence the Chinese government “is well advised to consult public opinion” through newspapers. Pictorial evidence from November 1907 ironically underlines this point. A huge pot is filled with a burning substance labeled 舆论 yulun, “public opinion.” The characters on the lid read: “The power is with the court.” It is apparent, however, that the fire inside the pot will not easily be controlled. Public opinion seethes visibly in spit of attempts to “put a lid on it”: clouds of smoke and flames escape not just through the gap between the pot and the lid but also from a hole at the bottom. [p. 16]

Of course it seems ridiculous to say ‘subversion’, just as it is to render pure identity, forms like ‘global’ can never be slick surfaces but would rather seethe like pots.

“The past is being drafted (consciously or unconsciously) into the service of present needs and purposes.” —Paul Cohen

A cartoon that appeared in the 申报 Shenbao in October 1907 depicts the role of that alien medium, the newspaper: the caricature shows two buildings, an elaborate one labeled  宫庭 gongting, “the court,” and a much simpler one named 民间 minjian, “the people.” From the court,  秘密消息 mimixiaoxi, “the secret news,” is being transferred by telegraph to the people–but not directly. The node at which the telegraph line from the court and that leading to the people meet is labeled 外国 waiguo, “the West”. This image echoes a declaration made by the Shenbao in its first issue: “新闻纸之制疮自西人搏舆中土 The making of newspapers has been transmitted by Westerners to Chinese lands”. [p. 23-24]

Maybe that time of trying to ‘integrate’ can be laughed at now in retrospect, dynamics change here all the time and I’m just trying to keep up. Would it be possible to propagate from the perspective of distance (BJ to GZ), without being thrust into a commune-like resort of separatism? Words gather for the sake of themselves, sadly just another kind of branding, but what other pretext can there be for the gathering, words and identities on paper, another party?

Since the foreign Xinbao 新报 (＝ new bao) was a 报 bao just the same, it was bound to be seen as akin to the Jingbao 京报 (capital bao). Foreign-style newspapers were aware that their audience’s perception of the newspaper was conditioned by their familiarity with the jingbao. They were quick to exploit this expectation: among other things, they reprinted the court gazette, imitated its format and punctuation, and adopted a name (xinbao, literally new announcements) formed in analogy to that of the court gazette (jingbao, literally capital announcements). They evidently felt that this foreign medium needed some “Chinese” legitimation. Why, then, did they not pursue the potentially convincing argument that the newspaper was really just a continuation of a indigenous Chinese tradition? Since by the late Qing finding Chinese origins for Western knowledge to be introduced to China (西学中原 Xixue Zhongyuan) had become a well-established rhetorical practice,  would this not have been a striking argument? [p. 25]

The principal difference, then, between foreign papers and their indigenous counterparts is the fact that the newspapers spread news by everyone from everywhere, whereas the Chinese papers report only official news. Naturally, the number of its readers was small and continued to dwindle. Moreover, the increasing centralization of politics, which peaked during the Qing and which was accompanied by a rigid system of secrecy laws (preventing the spread of all the “secret news” hinted at in Fig. I.2) confined the Jingbao to only the most commonplace court news and thus rather “boring” information. [p. 26]

Hurrah to boring news from everyone, all the time. Is it impossible to find a ‘new’ language starkly founded in realism, unimaginative?

… the Xinbao, the new(s)paper, was neither sold nor perceived as a foreign import. Instead, there was a strong tendency to domesticate it for Chinese use and Chinese understanding, for only thus—so it must have appeared to China’s newspaper makers—could it be an effective agent of change. [p. 31]

Indeed, however much the Shenbao may have profited from its foreign background, more often than not it had to defend itself against charges that it was a foreign medium or that it was pro-Western. this is the reason for its insistence that it relied on a Chinese readership and was thus written in Chinese by Chinese according to Chinese customs to be sold to Chinese. Like many other foreign-style papers, the Shenbao took pains to adapt to Chinese “idiom” (kouqi 口气). In the process, it created a “new” language with a “new” syntax that made the newspaper an acceptable and understandable means of communication. [p. 32]

Badiou, truth, new. Trajectory, 你的目的是什么？

All quotes above taken from A Newspaper for China?: Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872-1912.

家作坊是我现在工作的地方。最近我们在出一份有趣的报纸“北二条小报”登载的都是周边发生的各种各样的事情，超级生活化。这是我喜欢的话题。有一天和何颖雅聊天，聊到了我的爸爸。记忆中有一份报纸也出现在他的18岁，而且他和朋友包揽了内容编辑、排版印刷、成本核算、出版销售等格格环节的工作。何非常感兴趣这段经历，所以请我去请我的爸爸写下了他18岁时那份报纸是如何出生的。

私人办报并没有那么的功利，我父亲的那份报纸完全是各种巧合促成的。他们甚至根本没有考虑过卖不出去会怎么样。我想“北二条小报”或许也是这样的吧，但这正是有趣的地方。不确定的选题、不确定的观众群、不确定的销售模式或许就是私人板报的魅力吧。也许吧……

— 高杏

“文革”办报记

我喜欢看报，长年以来订有“武汉晚报”，“作家文摘”，从报纸的字里行间洞悉了世界风云，社会变革,人生百态。看报已成为人生一大乐事。但“办报”之事在我一生中曾经历过一次，哪是在难忘的“文革”岁月中。
我是“老三届”学生（高中68届）。在1968年全国正处在文化大革命的深入，发展阶段，革命形势仍然是“一片大好”。但是我们经过两年来的文化革命，当年革命小将的革命意志有所消退，同学一起在学校打牌、聊天、整天无所事事，处于一种逍遥状态。在68年4月的一天，我有一邻居叫原原（高我一届），跟我说他家一批白纸，我到他家一看果然有5捆白纸，他说纸的单位叫定（每定约5000张），面积和现在的作家文摘版面一样大，他说想将每定纸20元卖掉。第二天我将原原想卖纸一事告诉了我同学周冀元，随后周冀元对我说我们把这批白纸买来办一期报纸吧。我说：我们是学生，手无寸铁，身无分文如何能办报纸，想要把油墨、铅字、纸性搅到一起变成报纸，谈何容易。他说报纸印刷不成问题（他哥哥是文革小报“五干里狂澜”主编，认识印刷厂的人），只要商量把这批纸买过来就行。过了两天我们两人一起找到原原把我们想办报的想法告诉了他,然后,用卖报的钱来还他的纸钱,原原当时没有多想就答应了（虽然文革年代，虽然都是中学生，但诚信是不容置疑的），这时办报的硬件都已完备，如何办报的事就紧锣密鼓进行了。首先我们进行了经济测算，纸张要100元,印刷费要130元，成本在250元左右，（根本没有考虑报纸卖不出怎么办），当时小报是两分钱一张，我们要印2万多张才行，目前纸张不成问题。接着就是对报纸进行总体设计，为了使报纸更有可看性，首先是刊名要醒目，我们几个同学讨论后认为“红旗”比较醒目，决定用“红旗”作我们的刊名，出版单位为，中学红联武汉20中红海燕战斗兵团。然后，我们几个同学在一起商量报纸的版面策划。经讨论确定一版为要闻版，并登一篇创刊词（由周冀元主笔），再加上“中央首长讲话”“北京来电”等等内容，第二版为全国各地文革动态，第三版为本报亮点，我们找了一些“二战期间”斯大林，苏联红场，希特勒等等一些历史趣闻。第四版主要是武汉市的文革动态，四个版面的内容确定后，我们就分头准备，并吸收其它小报的长处（文革时期各种小报很多）经过一星期的努力按计划完成了四个版的内容，在68年4月中旬的一天我们借了一辆三轮车，将纸张和四个版面的内容，拖往了两里路远的印刷厂，这辆车上就承载着我和同学们的寄托和希望。三天后我们如期到印刷厂进行了校对，又过两天印刷厂就通知我们报纸印好了，现在是木已成舟了。报纸印好后如果卖不出去对我们当年还是学生来说将是一个沉重的打击，不光是经济上的还有思想上的。所以对报纸的销售我们进行周密的策划。我们几个同学经讨论后一致认为应该在一个星期天的上午（天气晴好）在武汉市的江汉路进行销售（江汉路是武汉市的商业中心和文革信息的集散地，相当于北京西单地区，离我家也只有5分钟的路程），在4月下旬一个星期天，天气果然不错，我们几个同学拖着三轮车一早就到了印刷厂，办完了有关手续后就看见经过20天的努力，两万多张报纸静静的放在面前，一种成就感从心里油然而生，我们同学几个赶紧将报纸装车上午九时拖到了目的地江汉路。还飘着油墨香的报纸一到江汉路就引起了广大革命群众（文革语言）的关注，面对满满一车刚印好的报纸，大家围了过来一看又是一个新面孔，同时我们同学一起喊“20中红旗、20中红旗”。接着就不但有钱递过来，三轮车已被团团围往，我们接着喊请大家排队。几分钟后我们车前竟排起了上十米的长队，经过简单收钱发报的安排后，只见钱不断进来，报纸不断出去，中午12时估计已卖了几千份，我和同学轮留到蔡林记（武汉老字号热干面馆）吃了碗热干面，下午接着卖到5点钟，第一天就估计卖了1万份，剩余的报纸就拖到我家，在回家的路大家都兴高采烈，成功的感觉都写在了我们脸上。第二天，第三天我们又接着去卖报，销售就差多了，两天共卖了5干份，就在第三天卖报时两个带袖章的解放军来到三轮车前对我们进行查询，并要我们到武汉警备司令部去登记备案，我和同学商量后认为我们又不是经常办报的，这期报纸是我们办的第一期也可能是最后一期，不必登记备案。接着我们又卖了两天，估计这几天共卖了1万8千份左右成本是收回了还略有赢利，最后还剩4千份报纸就动员我妹妹及她们的小伙伴拿到街上卖，并承诺卖报钱，可适当买冰棍吃，经过上十天的努力报纸卖了2万多份，家里还剩1千份左右就没有卖了，遗憾的是我们辛辛苦苦办好报纸一张也没留下来。
经过一个月的努力，我们的办报经历总算完成，通过结算后我们不但还清了所有的欠款，还赢利100元左右。1968年的100元和今天的100元是不能同日而语的，对我们学生来说就是一笔大的收入，我班同学用这笔钱到武汉东湖风景区玩了一天，并吃了红烧桂鱼，余下的钱还买个篮球  和排球供班同学同共玩，到此，我们第一次办报按我们的理想顺利的完成了。
通过这次办报使用领悟到办任何事除要周密的思考，努力工作外，天时、地利、人和，也是成功的重要因素。

高孟枚
2011年2月26日

Below is an attempted translation of an earlier post, quotations from a comment in response to a post about a conversation.

There is nothing less passive than the act of fleeing… reading group day 10, photo by caleb waldorf

The thing to remember while crossing the threshold is that the process of world-making does demand the maintenance of suspended spaces of inquiry, even as it presses toward effective changes in the way that you sustain your material existence:

With whom do I create a world? What will it be made of? How will we maintain it? Where will we find the gazes that we humans need to keep doing whatever it is that we do? How to raise our own gazes past personal satisfactions to an activity that can attain the bracing and tragic dimensions of a real world? Can we or should we bring along any symbolic or material supplies from the richly appointed illusions we’ve just left? Is a politics necessary: do we somehere have to stand and fight? Is a counter-institution necessary: do we have to set up objective structures to start sharing whatever we have learned with people we don’t know? And how to keep this whole quixotic enterprise from failing, or drifting by inertial necessity back to the established and symbolically stingy formats of what you are calling the artworld?

–Brian Holmes, responding to Quitting: a conversation with Alexander Koch on the paradoxes of dropping out

re-jigging around the interruption. a compelling incompleteness. this must be the place.

When you start in-between, what you’re in the middle of is a region of relation. Occurrent relation, because it’s all about event. Putting the terms together, you realize straight away that the relational event will play out differently every time. In repeating, it takes up the past differently. In taking up the past differently, it creates new potentials for the future. The region of occurrent relation is a point of potentiation. It is where things begin anew. Where things begin anew is where they were already present in tendency.

JM: Then what precedes the event? What gives rise to it?
BM: Shock. That’s what Peirce says. Affect for me is inseparable from the concept of shock. It doesn’t have to be a drama. It’s really more about microshocks, the kind that populate every moment of our lives. For example a change in focus, or a rustle at the periphery of vision that draws the gaze toward it. In every shift of attention, there is an interruption, a momentary cut in the mode of onward deployment of life. The cut can pass unnoticed, striking imperceptibly, with only its effects entering conscious awareness as they unroll. This is the onset of the activation I was referring to earlier. I’d go so far as to say that this onset of experience is by nature imperceptible.

This is one way of understanding “microperception,” a concept of great importance to Deleuze and Guattari. Microperception is not smaller perception; it’s a perception of a qualitatively different kind. It’s something that is felt without registering consciously. It registers only in its effects. According to this notion of shock, there is always a commotion under way, a “something doing” as James would say. There is always a something-doing cutting in, interrupting whatever continuities are in progress. For things to continue, they have to re-continue. They have to re-jig around the interruption. At the instant of re-jigging, the body braces for what will come. It in-braces, in the sense that it returns to its potential for more of life to come, and that potential is immanent to its own arising.

It might not sound political, at least in the way it’s usually meant. But it is, because the virtuality is of an event to come, and as we saw before the event always has the potential to affectively attune a multiplicity of bodies to its happening, differentially. Aesthetic politics brings the collectivity of shared events to the fore, as differential, a multiple bodily potential for what might come. Difference is built into this account. Affective politics, understood as aesthetic politics, is dissensual, in the sense that it holds contrasting alternatives together without immediately demanding that one alternative eventuates and the others evaporate. It makes thought-felt different capacities for existence, different life potentials, different forms of life, without immediately imposing a choice between them. The political question, then, is not how to find a resolution. It’s not how to impose a solution. It’s how to keep the intensity in what comes next. The only way is through actual differentiation. Different lines of unfolding bring the contrast into actuality, between them. The political question is then what Isabelle Stengers calls an “ecology of practices.” How do you tend this proliferation of differentiation? How can the lines not clash and destroy each other? How do they live together? The “solution” is not to resolve the tension through a choice, but to modulate it into a symbiosis: a cross-fertilization of capacitations that live out to the fullest the intensity of the event of their coming together.

There’s a certain incompleteness to any micropolitical event, like the events I was talking about. A lot of things that you feel were on the verge of taking shape didn’t quite happen. Potentials that you could just glimpse didn’t come into focus. The goal is not to overcome the incompleteness. It’s to make it compelling. Compelling enough that you are moved to do it again, differently, bringing out another set of potentials, some more formed and focused, others that were clearly expressed before now backgrounded. That creates a small, moveable environment of potential. The goal is to live in that moveable environment of potential. If you manage to, you will avoid the paralysis of hopelessness. Neither hope nor hopelessness—a pragmatics of potential. You have to live it at every level. In the way you relate to your partner, and even your cat. The way you teach a class if you’re a professor. The way you create and present your art if you’re an artist. If you participate in more punctual events like the ones I was describing, this will provide a continuous background for what comes of those events to disseminate into and diffuse through. A symbiosis of the special event and the day-to-day, in creative connivance.

Micropolitics is not programmatic. It doesn’t construct and impose global solutions. But it would be naïve to think that is separate from that kind of macro-activity. Anything that augments powers of existence creates conditions for micropolitical flourishings. No body flourishes without enough food and without health care. Micropolitical interventions need macro solutions. But success at the macropolitical level is at best partial without a complementary micropolitical flourishing. Without it, the tendency is toward standardization. Since macropolitical solutions are generally applicable by definition, by definition they act to curtail the variety and exuberance of forms of life. Macropolitical intervention targets minimal conditions of survival. Micropolitics complements that by fostering an excess of conditions of emergence. That inventiveness is where new solutions start to crystallize. The potentials produced at the micropolitical level feed up, climbing the slope that macropolitics descends. Micropolitical and macropolitical go together. One is never without the other. They are processual reciprocals. They aliment each other. At their best, they are mutually corrective.

It has become a commonplace recently to say that we are in a situation where the end of the world is now imaginable—but the end of capitalism isn’t. That is definitely one “solution” that is not likely to come programmatically, top-down— given who’s on top. The dismantling of capitalism is a “corrective” that will only come from a breaking of the reciprocity I was just talking about between the macro- and micropolitical. The prevailing operating conditions of macro/micropolitical reciprocity should not be taken to imply that the symmetry is never broken, that a bifurcation can never occur. The complementarity can be broken in both directions. When macrostructures miniaturize themselves and work to usurp the ground of the micropolitical with scaled-down versions of the dominant generalities, that is fascism. When micropolitical flourishings proliferate to produce a singularity, in the sense of a systemic tipping point, that’s revolution. The ultimate vocation of micropolitics is this: enacting the unimaginable. The symmetry-breaking point, the point at which the unimaginable eventuates, is but a cut, “smaller” than the smallest historically perceivable interval. That is to say, qualitatively different. A moment of a different color, one you never see coming, that comes when it’s least expected. Inevitably, a next micro/macro complementarity will quickly settle in. But it will take a form that could not have been predicted, but is now suddenly doable and thinkable. Micropolitics is what makes the unimaginable practicable. It’s the potential that makes possible.

–Brian Massumi, Of Microperception and Micropolitics

For the second part of the meeting we turned to the text “N-i-n-e-t-e-e-n-e-i-g-h-t-y-n-i-n-e and the historical roots of neoliberalism” by Wang Hui (2004), who is known as one of the protagonists of the “New Left” in China.
While it predated Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine,” Wang’s text shared continuities with the theme of the seeming, superficial contradiction between neoliberalism and what it called neoauthoritarianism.
“One theoretical characteristic of neoliberalism is to deny that there is an intimate relationship between market and political processes and, in the name of the disarticulation of the state, to force the abandonment of all investigation into the problem of democracy under the conditions of marketization” (p. 49)
This text began by tracing the reforms from 1978 to N-i-n-e-t-e-e-n-e-i-g-h-t-y-n-i-n-e, and their consequences, then continues to 2004, focusing on the various historical, economic and political views that intellectuals had promoted, and the horizon represented by the discussions happening through those years.

Sitting at the table on the patio of a café mostly frequented by Westerners, and discussing all of this in English, we didn’t feel at all threatened, although one’s mind always wanders to the next table over, if only to wonder whether they are sitting there listening and judging. Aside from chemical reasons, then, it’s clear why a café would be a place to debate high-minded things, protected as it is by this cultural force-field and the relatively cheap cost of a coffee—a drink that, for the exact same reason it is cheap for some, is too expensive for others.

Firstly providing background for the reasons behind the social movement, Wang explained how during the rural reforms the attempt was to stabilize the lives of the rural population through policy changes, raising the prices of rural products and encouraging rural consumption. (p. 12)
From 1984, a series of urban reforms were then implemented to redistribute state-monopoly industrial resources. Because of the complexities of this process, the result was an unregulated and unequal transfer of benefits incomparable to the rural reforms, and which affected the country as a whole.
“The actual situation was that, under the rhetoric of politics/enterprise separation, what was separated was not the relationship between politics and the economy, but rather ownership and management.” (p. 16)

One of the members told an anecdote of being stopped by the police while driving home one night, and given a breathalyzer test. Totally oblivious to the fact that, to make the beverage that much more profitable, the bartender had spiked his drink after he had asked for something non-alcoholic, the reading club member had breathed out a 0.02, and was then brought to spend the night in the police station. After a great ethical struggle our protagonist called on a family member with ties to the police department. By the powers of “guanxi” (connections, relations) he was released, but just as one of the system’s hands had made him vulnerable, with the other hand it had granted him freedom that the other young men in his cell waited wondering about. He emerged, compromised.

Wang explained that the social movement that arose around these urban reforms, whose effects were already being felt sharply among certain strata of society (the rural reforms, for example, were finding the latest urban reforms reversing any progress they had experienced), was neither unified nor really self-conscious of what it was really looking for. There were clashes within the state level, with certain political figures or state companies supporting the movement, while “special interest groups that had been big winners in the 1980s decentralization of power and benefits and that were now dissatisfied with the impending adjustment policies” also joined in with the students, whose abstract demands “included such constitutional rights as workable democratic politics, press freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the rule of law” (p. 19) among more concrete demands from workers that centered on distributing economic and social benefits.
“In the context of globalization, neoliberals believe that it is possible to use the strength of multinational and domestic capital to reconfigure Chinese society and the market; they recognize that the state plays a certain protective, favorable, and adjustment role in the context of the relations between globalization and the expansion of the domestic market. Thus they no longer simply charge the state with motivating market expansion: this is the secret history of the mutual entanglement of neoliberalism and neoauthoritarianism.” (p. 21)

The impossibility of the social movement; the necessity of the social movement. This is the corner many conversations push themselves into, especially when faced with texts whose historical or political bases claim the objective and reasonable parts of our imagination. They are hard to refute, they are as crisp and clear as playing cards, sharp and constructive; but sitting in a café, consuming, we can only shuffle these cards, dovetailing facts, impressing and boring by turns.
This virtual experience isn’t helped by the knowledge that the facts are still facts, and history more recent than these texts has compounded rather than alleviated the facts. A scene from downtown Toronto during the G20 meetings there would provide many illustrations.
Sometimes you hear people assessing politics like weather; forecasting change according to the rumblings up in the clouds; decisions like the one-child policy reflect the visionary capability possessed only by an entity like The Party. Now if we could only get someone on the inside with a passion for the environment, etc. (insert cause)… a twinkle of hope in the tone of voice.

As is expressed in Naomi Klein’s book as well, “the dominant analysis of the N-i-n-e-t-e-e-n-e-i-g-h-t-y-n-i-n-e social movement in the world was one most advantageous to those special interests advocating radical privatization.” (p. 23) This pointed out that the economic relations affecting the globe as a whole were alive and well in China, but that the language and intellectual context with which to criticize it were unavailable. This was because of oppositional intellectuals at the time embracing everything American as the alternative model to the Chinese system (p. 33), let alone the second-guessing of any form of radicalism in the wake of the crackdown, or the tempting proposition to “jump into the sea  [xia hai],” a description for intellectuals capitalizing on their privileged social status within the new market paradigm. The various stages of these intellectual debates from e-i-g-h-t-y-n-i-n-e to the present were examined in the last part of Wang’s text.
“That is, the 1990s discussion moved from a conviction that the establishment of democracy could be achieved only through a radical transformation in political frame-work, to a conviction that reliance upon market processes, the formation of local and departmental special interest factions, and the uprooting of clan and other traditional resources would ultimately lead to political democracy.” (p. 42)

With no intention of sounding wearied, another tendency can be observed in this type of discussion, when we turn to the questions of what else we can do, how does it affect us, where is the hope: things like this are spaces of difference.
We talked about spaces; the spaces of cities, for instance, bear the marks of these quite abstract, factual reorganizations in tangible ways. The public sphere, emptied, discredited, shamed, hovers phantomlike over the contemporary urban experience, with its fractured relations and atomized groupings, its obliviousness to the citizens who navigate through its price tags. What is this space in which the normal rules seemingly don’t apply?

Happy Friends met on a sultry Sunday afternoon in Ritan Park, Beijing. There were two parts to our meeting. The first was a recapitulation of the book The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (2007). It is a long and thoroughly investigative book, so the below summary is simply a tracing of some points in its narrative that will hopefully give and idea what it’s about and just maybe inspire some to find a copy of the book.

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
“This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story—that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies.” p. 18

The beginning of shock therapies
Ewen Cameron was a psychiatrist at McGill University in Montréal, whose radical research on various experimental “treatments” (including shock therapy, extreme isolation, audio and light effects, and use of a huge variety of drugs) on unwitting mental patients was being secretly funded by the CIA. The effect of these treatments (and probably the intention) was not to cure but to create docile subjects; not to fix but to wipe away and start new (a metaphor commonly used by free market deregulation enthusiasts).
As a parallel to therapeutic work, these methods produced a set of conditions and instructions on how to terrify, disorient and infantilize, literally constructing a guide later used by military and para-military interrogators. However, it has been shown such approaches aren’t really effective in producing dependable information, but as forms of state terror.
“From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade. But torture is more than a tool used to enforce unwanted policies on rebellious peoples; it is also a metaphor of the shock doctrine’s underlying logic.” p. 15

What is the Chicago School?
The University of Chicago Economics department under the leadership of Milton Friedman in the 1950s, with Friedman going on to become one of the most influential economist of the 20th Century.
“Where Cameron dreamed of returning the human mind to that pristine state, Friedman dreamed of depatterning societies, of returning them to a state of pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions—government regulations, trade barriers and entrenched interests.” p. 50

Friedman dreamed of a pure capitalism, stripped of all its “distortions”, like a force of nature.
“the policy trinity—the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending” p. 15

Contrast this to the at-the-time more popular models among many other post-war countries. “Chicagoans did not see Marxism as their true enemy. The real source of the trouble was to be found in the ideas of the Keynesians in the United States, the social democrats in Europe and the developmentalists in what was then called the Third World.” p. 53 (Keynesianism’s basic premise was that “countries in severe economic recession should spend money to stimulate the economy” p. 145).
On the Developmentalist trends in South America:
“The extraordinary rise of developmentalism meant that the area was a cacophony of precisely the policies that the Chicago School considered distortions or “uneconomic ideas.”” … “These were believers not in a Utopia but in a mixed economy, to Chicago eyes an ugly hodgepodge of capitalism for the manufacture and distribution of consumer products, socialism in education, state ownership for essentials like water services, and all kinds of laws designed to temper the extremes of capitalism.” p. 53

And Developmentalism, not only insulting to the Chicago School purists, was not appreciated by the American corporations with stakes in countries where this trend was growing, and with close ties to US Adminstrations. When the chance came in Chile to experiment with an economic context “wiped clear” of governmental obstacles, Friedman was a champion of measures such as spontaneous mass-scale firing, privatization, deregulation and elimination of job security, and downplayed the political repression, which was often facilitated by American interventions, by the CIA and others.
But contrary to the hands-off rhetoric, the freeing of the markets had to be done in coercive fashion, because the chaos of currencies they created, the raising of prices of basic necessities, the instability and lack of social security they demanded, and the flight of capital to foreign corporations would generally not be accepted by a democratically engaged public.
“Chile’s coup, when it finally came, would feature three distinct forms of shock, a recipe that would be duplicated in neighboring countries and would reemerge, three decades later, in Iraq. The shock of the coup itself was immediately followed by two additional forms of shock. One was Milton Friedman’s capitalist “shock treatment,” a technique in which hundreds of Latin American economists had by now been trained at the University of Chicago and its various franchise institutions. The other was Ewen Cameron’s shock, drug and sensory deprivation research, now codified as torture techniques in the Kubark manual and disseminated through extensive CIA training programs for Latin American police and military.” p. 71

The shock doctrine, then, is that disaster, war and shock are very useful for promoting large-scale economic changes in pursuit of this elusive “pure state” of the free market. Klein goes on to provide dozens of case studies in which the Chicago School policies were implemented by force or trickery in countries outside the United States, from Argentina and much of South America (where political repression resulted in thousands disappeared and assassinated), to Poland (in which a democracy newly formed from the breaking up of the Soviet Union was forced by massive debt to accept privatization conditions by the IMF, a recurring theme) and Russia (in which overnight privatization and handouts by Yeltsin’s government resulted in huge, unchecked concentrations of wealth and glut of poverty) to China (whose liberalization of the market disproved any theories of consequential political liberalization) and Southeast Asia (results of economic crash), as well as the UK and United States (Thatcher and Reagan) and elsewhere.
“In Russia the billionaire private players in the alliance are called “the oligarchs”; in China, “the princelings”; in Chile, “the piranhas”; in the U.S., the Bush-Cheney campaign “Pioneers.” Far from freeing the market from the state, these political and corporate elites have simply merged, trading favors to secure the right to appropriate precious resources previously held in the public domain—from Russia’s oil fields, to China’s collective lands, to the no-bid reconstruction contracts for work in Iraq.” p. 15

“As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, however, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning—this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance.” p. 9
How these processes are “legitimately,” systemically spread is in cases of disasters or political upheaval and regime change, where a country is in need of help and the aid funding bodies (IMF, World Bank) mandate vast, swift Chicago-School-style changes to economic policies in order to release funds, but they are also done by a government on its own people (for example in China).
“In China in n-i-n-e-t-e-e-n-e-i-g-h-t-y-n-i-n-e, it was the shock of the T-A-M S-q-u-a-r-e m-a-s-s-a-c-r-e and the subsequent arrests of tens of thousands that freed the hand of the Communist Party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights.” p. 10

As the spread of Neoliberal economic reforms exhausted possible developing countries, post-socialist states or changed regimes to exploit, it seemed to be facing its own limits.
“In retrospect, it is striking that capitalism’s monopoly period, when it no longer had to deal with competing ideas or counterpowers, was extremely brief—only eight years, from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the collapse of the WTO talks in 1999. But rising opposition would not slow the determination to advance this extraordinarily profitable agenda; its advocates would simply ride the waves of fear and disorientation created by bigger shocks than ever before.” p. 280

One of the bigger shocks Klein refers to is the timely beginning of the second Iraq war, where the disaster capitalism process took another turn, with the Chicago School ideology dismantling the State itself from the inside. Consequently, it was very good for business. “Hollow Government,” the goal of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and a host of other Bush administration figures, means that the government sheds many of its previously core responsibilities and basically call on corporations for disaster response, war-fighting, defense, as well as the many secondary support industries.
“It was a move that brought the shock doctrine to a new, self-referential phase: until that point, disasters and crises had been harnessed to push through radical privatization plans after the fact, but the institutions that had the power both to create and respond to cataclysmic events—the military, the CIA, the Red Cross, the UN, emergency “first responders”—had been some of the last bastions of public control. Now, with the core set to be devoured, the crisis-exploiting methods that had been honed over the previous three decades would be used to leverage the privatization of the infrastructure of disaster creation and disaster response. Friedman’s crisis theory was going postmodern.” p. 288

“Although the stated goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the disaster capitalism complex—a full-fledged new economy in homeland security, privatized war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatized security state, both at home and abroad. The economic stimulus of this sweeping initiative proved enough to pick up the slack where globalization and the dot-com booms had left off. Just as the Internet had launched the dot-com bubble, 9/11 launched the disaster capitalism bubble.” p. 299

“The role of the government in this unending war is not that of an administrator managing a network of contractors but of a deep-pocketed venture capitalist, both providing its seed money for the complex’s creation and becoming the biggest customer for its new services. ” p. 12

In this new order, Klein claims that where before there used to be an unspoken “revolving door” between government and industry, the corporatist state has installed an archway between governments and corporations. (list on p. 315) Many US politicians (and Israelis, ch. 21) have direct investment in the defense industry, and therefore have an interest in prolonging the endless cycle of destruction, fighting and reconstruction.

Klein sees hope in newer developments, such as the return of a social awareness and sense of control to areas of the former Southern Cone (South America), some 20 or 30 years after the fact. Getting over the shock is a matter of time, but also of being given the ability to reconstruct on their own, without the intervention of multi-national corporations providing ready-made and usually inadequate and indifferent solutions at a profit.
“Such people’s reconstruction efforts represent the antithesis of the disaster capitalism complex’s ethos, with its perpetual quest for clean sheets and blank slates on which to build model states. Like Latin America’s farm and factory co-ops, they are inherently improvisational, making do with whoever is left behind and whatever rusty tools have not been swept away, broken or stolen. Unlike the fantasy of the Rapture, the apocalyptic erasure that allows the ethereal escape of true believers, local people’s renewal movements begin from the premise that there is no escape from the substantial messes we have created and that there has already been enough erasure—of history, of culture, of memory. These are movements that do not seek to start from scratch but rather from scrap, from the rubble that is all around. As the corporatist crusade continues its violent decline, turning up the shock dial to blast through the mounting resistance it encounters, these projects point a way forward between fundamentalisms. Radical only in their intense practicality, rooted in the communities where they live, these men and women see themselves as mere repair people, taking what’s there and fixing it, reinforcing it, making it better and more equal. Most of all, they are building in resilience—for when the next shock hits.” p. 466

After 450 pages of tales of disaster, exploitation and domination, such a conclusion might appear defensive and make-do, rather than a way to end the cycle. Our discussion in Part 2 of the Happy Friends meeting on June 20th was an elaboration of this theme of where there might be hope, in light of the atomization of groups and spaces, and with reference to the text “N-i-n-e-t-e-e-n-e-i-g-h-t-y-n-i-n-e and the historical roots of neoliberalism” by Wang Hui (2004). Appearing soon…

If this question of what we do and who we are must persist, if i must excuse myself for being an artist or being a designer or explain where the (any) money is coming from, then let us turn it into a discussion and practice at once, in process. We have been looking at HomeShop, ourselves, the general context, what we are doing and what we would like to do. All of these questions are tainted by labels, the disjunctures of what we believe versus what/how things are, or how they should be presented, or perhaps if i were to tell you how i really feel you wouldn’t understand anyway, or, they are all my own failures in communication. Language is weak and inadequate.

That said, I begin this conversation with a series of descriptions, rather as a series of self-composed (from the archive of all influences, inspirations, histories and desires) groundings for what may come. HomeShop is our space, moreso a thinking-acting process, i would like to say juxtaposed upon a series of precipices that mark a critical moment of exchange, or, a spinning in the revolving door. It could be the point where one label takes over another, what was thought to be is art is not, how one understands community is mistaken. How one organises things, mentally or at the work table, becomes our most crucial, ahem, point of order, the pivot between now and tomorrow, relationality, design for life. Design is about organisation as it is about choice, and if we should coordinate things with forethought to the future, or with an idea of how we relate to our surroundings, then perhaps we could imagine design and aesthetics as a micropolitical climate by which a day-to-day ethics occur. We are designers and artists and theorists and politicians. Nothing absurd at all.

To get anywhere with the concept, you have to retain the manyness of its forms. It’s not something that can be reduced to one thing. Mainly because it’s not a thing. It’s an event, or a dimension of every event. What interests me in the concept is that if you approach it respecting its variety, you are presented with a field of questioning, a problematic field, where the customary divisions that questions about subjectivity, becoming, or the political are usually couched in do not apply.

— Brian Massumi, “Of Microperception and Micropolitics“

We try to learn more about where rivers flow into lakes. Sustainability as a question of time, of slow persistence, of finding one’s own rhythms amidst enormous disparity, a Gini coefficient or a biological clock. How time relates to organisation is a kind of lifelong project, the 江湖 of HomeShop as a kind of “alternative practice”. There again, those attempts at description that feel sheepish, but let us say again that these things refer always back to the things we are doing everyday, making with hands, absorbing with eyes and ears and heart. Big brother and his wife got into a fight yesterday, and one cannot help but be coaxed out of house to try to try to nose in on the rising tension on our little street. It becomes a community affair, although Taotao’s dad says it’s “家务的事” (a household matter). Rivers flow into lakes. We try as we can to describe, as much as shape, the passing of time. This is the manyness of the event as we experience it or produce it, and such continual reciprocation is the very becoming of the project itself.

A friend introduced me to this interesting web documentary about coal mines which is essentially made of pictures and sounds/voices, and where you are a journalist who can choose which actions you want to do, where to go, and which questions to ask. Choices are actually not that many, but I still found interesting to have this interactive documentary. That could be an interesting way to use my records. We could even imagine more, and choose a few topics we would like to work on and think about how to illustrate them with pictures, records, artworks, etc. What is also interesting is that in every image you have the possibility to explore more information, watch the map, etc.

very simple project, easy to engage, and really perfect address to dutch cultural tendencies!

window event 03
title: BREAKFAST
date: Wednesday may 6th
window: Private home, Indische Buurt
Delicious breakfast for two. At a table that connects street and living room. Inside and outside. They belong together.

City-eyes addresses the border between the private and public domain. Subject of research are the Amsterdam windows: as windows are the eyes of the city. City-eyes offers a personal view into the souls of Amsterdam homes and thereby reveals the city’s hidden stories.

All window events are miniature test cases, playing with the characteristics of the window as a screen between interior and exterior. This way, one’s private parquet will be part of the outdoor pavement for a moment, and the city becomes home.

see the entire series: http://www.city-eyes.nl/