Drifting (part one)

I set out to wander the Woodstock neighborhood without conscious purpose, headed out into the built environment in order to see where it led me, and in order to be sure to be aimless I started my journey by going wherever the arrows pointed. I was in the parking lot of a strip mall, between Safeway and Bimart, and beneath my feet the white arrow pointed North. I walked toward the exit, and then turned to follow a forest green Volkswagen station wagon that was driving into the parking lot. When I reached the double doors of the Supermarket I stopped.

I was the red dot on a map. I was exactly there, a fixed point. I didn’t know where to go next.

The concept of confronting the built environment directly, of intervening in everyday life, has a multi-faceted history. The derive or drift may have originated in the middle of the twentieth century in Paris, but many others have played with the concept since then. In 1970 a woman artist named Adrian Piper took to the street after she saw how traditional art galleries and museums were faltering. She concluded that if the art world as she’d known it was crumbling this was because the capitalist structure on which these institutions relied was also giving way. Her response was to quit producing conceptual art installations and instead perpetrate what she called catalytic actions. She adorned a polo shirt laden with white paint, hung a “wet paint” sign around her neck, and set off to shop at Macy’s.

According to Wikipedia Adrian Piper is a philosopher as well as an artist. Her confrontational stunts at Macy’s apparently, in some small way, informing her development of a “Kantian conception of the self [that] accords priority to freedom, autonomy and moral obligation over the satisfaction of desire and the maximization of utility,” but while Macy’s may have been able to deliver Ms. Piper to a firm conception of her self, the Safeway parking lot was for me a difficulty.

I zigged and zagged between parked cars, and worried that I might spend my entire afternoon bouncing around the parking lot like a pinball. I followed another painted arrow to my left, then trailed behind a college student whose uniform of a purple Izod shirt and Khaki shorts somehow attracted me. He was talking on a smart phone and I followed him around the corner of the Safeway, and then stopped when I found him pacing in front of the dumpster. He just wanted a private corner where he could talk to his girlfriend or his boss or his mother.

I walked around him, squeezed between the dumpster and the brick wall of the Safeway, and then stopped one more time when I reached a high voltage junction box. I stood there and waited.

Psychogeography is meant to offer a violent emotive possession over the streets. Exotic and exciting treasures were to be found in the city by drifters able to conquer her. But standing by the junction box, watching the traffic slowly pass by, I could only muster a critical gaze.

“I’m tempted to, uh, knock on the door of this house with a wooden welcome sign. To take it literally. But that welcome sign actually means the exact opposite of what it says. The welcome sign means ‘Stay Away.’” – recorded note to myself during my drifting

In 1991 I worked for an environmental organization called OSPIRG. I was 20 years old then and they sent me out into these built environments in Portland as a part of a search for environmental types. My job was to wander residential streets, examine the ranch houses and bungalows, and find good liberals willing to hand over checks.

Wandering those same streets nearly twenty years later it is as if nothing has changed. By continuing to wander the urban forest of Portland, remaining with the Alders and Oaks, I am always caught in my memory. Or more precisely, I am always stuck in my same alienation. Walking along Ramona in 2010, stopping outside an orange Raised Ranch style house, staring at the dark red garage door that someone left slightly ajar, I sense a female presence inside. I flash on a memory of a memory. A woman in business attire, maybe a Pant Suit, a faceless woman whose ordered life was contained inside a Raised Ranch like this one. Or maybe I’m remembering a woman in a tweed jacket and a brown pencil skirt who lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright style Prairie house in SW Portland. Or maybe she was wearing polyester pants and a purple plush robe and lived in a converted International House of Pancakes in Beaverton.

In any case there was a presence. I could feel it as I stood on the sidewalk not daring to look in. I stood on the street and strained to hear her voice inside. I tried to remember what relationship I might have had with her when I met her before. I must have met her when I was working for OSPIRG. Or maybe she was one of my friend’s mothers back in highschool.  Perhaps she was the woman who lived next door to my family when I was just a baby. The woman who told me about reincarnation and served me store bought chocolate chip cookies on a crystal plate. She told me that I’d had lived before, maybe. She told me that I might have been somebody else before I was me. This was back in 1976, in Colorado, in what was probably a converted farmhouse.

I stood outside this house, this orange Raised Ranch style house, and felt that some part of my history, some unknown and inaccessible part of my life, was in the garage. There was a woman from my past in the garage, or maybe in the kitchen.

This was my delusion, and it was a long standing one. I could almost remember a time when these American neighborhoods, these series of square yards and square houses with triangle roofs had been integral to real life. Some woman had, perhaps long ago, told me a secret and I’d just forgotten it over the years. And if I could remember what she said I’d be whole again.

A Five Part Critique of Orlov’s Five Stages of Collapse

Part One: Financial Collapse

A few years back Dmitry Orlov cleverly responded to James Howard Kunstler’s suggestion that we should understand our collective situation in light of the five stages of grief by writing an essay entitled the Five Stages of Collapse. Since then Orlov’s essay has proven to be influential in some circles, and in an effort to get a better grasp on what is often meant when people speak of collapse I thought I would turn my attention to Orlov’s essay with a critical eye.

Orlov starts his essay by asserting that we face a “discontinuous future” because “our institutions and life support systems [are] undermined by a combination of resource depletion, catastrophic climate change, and political impotence.” That’s an interesting combination, and I find it particularly interesting that that third reason behind our discontinuous future is so often left out. According to Orlov political impotence was one of the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union, but this essay offers no understanding of the cause of this impotence and there is no suggestion that this political impotence could be remedied. In fact, all three components are treated as though they are natural facts. Unchangeable.

But putting aside Orlov’s failure to engage with this third component in his collapse scenario, I want to take a closer look at how Orlov describes each of his five stages, and in this blog entry I’ll look at how he describes his first stage which is Financial Collapse.

Orlov writers: “Financial collapse, as we are currently observing it, consists of two parts. One is that a part of the general population is forced to move, no longer able to afford the house they bought based on inflated assessments, forged income numbers, and foolish expectations of endless asset inflation. Since, technically, they should never have been allowed to buy these houses, and were only able to do so because of financial and political malfeasance, this is actually a healthy development.”

Let’s go over that again. The first step in the financial collapse is that millions of people are thrown out of their homes. According to Orlov this is a good thing. They should never have had those houses in the first place.

Now it is absolutely true that people were encouraged to purchase houses with nonfixed rate liars loans. That is the bank wouldn’t establish that the buyer had the ability to pay back the loan before lending and would lend on condition that the customer assumed the interest-rate risk that a reputable lender would normally assume. So, in fact, people bought houses that they couldn’t afford or bought houses that they couldn’t afford when their rates increased. The important question is why were people put into this position, and what is the proper remedy for the situation now. The question is, do we want people to be pushed into the streets?

In order to answer this question we have to answer a couple of other questions first. The primary question is this: What do we want? If the answer to that question is that we want to consolidate the power of the banks and corporate institutions by looting government funds, driving down employment and wages, and generally weakening the general population of the United States then I believe we should absolutely support the eviction of people from their homes. If, on the other hand, we want an organized retreat from a way of life that is destroying the ecosystem then perhaps we do not want to put people out.

Let’s take a moment to reconsider what Orlov is telling us:

People purchased homes they could not afford. Now, while home ownership is not a universal right, access to a home is. One question we might naturally ask ourselves is this: Why are so many people in the United States too poor to afford a home, and why are so many forced to accrue massive debt in order to achieve a decent standard of living? (A friend of mine has frequently suggested that we should abandon the notion of a high standard of living, or a decent standard of living, because this decent standard is based on false and unsustainable norms. He suggests that we should instead speak of a decent quality of life. Current standards are absurd, especially in America. However, the term standard of living includes the concept of equality, and a hobo or drifter might be considered to have a high quality of life, especially when viewed romantically. Talk of quality of life in this context of crisis, especially when one doesn’t include talk of a struggle for political power, is often the equivalent of asking those who have been foreclosed on and forced into the street to learn to enjoy the great outdoors.)

According to many economists including Professor Rick Wolff, the current financial crisis has its roots in the 1970s.

“In the 1970s, employers found a way to stop the long-term slow rise in real wages of their employees.  By outsourcing jobs overseas to take advantage of cheaper wages, by drawing US women into the labor force, by substituting computers and other machines for workers, and by bringing in low-wage immigrants, employers drove down their employees’ wages even as they produced ever more commodities for sale.  The results were predictable…After a few years, stagnant workers’ wages proved insufficient to enable them to buy the growing output of their labor.” -Rick Wolff, Capitalist Crisis, Marx’s Shadow

What this led to was the solution of creating private debt. If the workers could no longer afford their products due to stagnating wages then the owning class would simply lend the workers the money with interest. This solution “provoked wild profit-driven excesses and corruption (the stock market “bubble” and then the real estate “bubble.” It also loaded millions of Americans with unsustainable debts.

The class of people who own the corporations and the banks are not driven to these acts against their fellow human beings out of some personal pathology, but are driven rather by the imperatives of the free market system. Companies are only profitable to the extent that they maximize the exploitation of labor. Companies have to compete with each other, and the more profitable company will often destroy its less profitable competitor or absorb it. This isn’t about moral choices, it’s about institutional logic.
This is something Orlov either has yet to understand or refuses to understand. During our conversation on the Diet Soap podcast I brought this fact up to him this way:

“When you say that this model just represents stupidity, from the perspective of someone who is trying to maximize their profits…how is it stupid to move to a third world model?”

“Because you’re basically killing your own consumer.”

“You know, the irrationality of the system is something that has been talked about in Marxist circles for decades. Ultimately a production process for profit does have this [irrational character]. It may be irrational on a collective level, but for each company it’s not irrational.”

“In the short run that tendency of private greed to undermine public purpose can be mitigated in various ways. Mostly political involvement in running economic affairs and setting economic policy. [But] in the long term the unintended consequences of what you do will thwart your purpose. As Douglas Adams put it, ‘People are a problem.’ Any kind of system that you put together to control human behavior will eventually fail.”

“So social solutions aren’t viable.”

“I’ve never seen it be viable. All my life I’ve seen just mass stupidity. The larger the scale the greater the stupidity.”

So what’s behind Orlov’s position that massive foreclosures are a good thing? Not much apparently, except that the people who were foreclosed on were stupid. And while it’s tempting to suggest that his misanthropy, his view that people are a problem, is the real foundation for his argument I don’t believe that. Yes, Orlov believes that people are stupid and deserve whatever they get, but this belief itself may be just a symptom of a misunderstanding.

What’s important to understand about Orlov’s position on the financial crisis is not just to see how he fails to apprehend the true causes of the crisis (or to take those causes into account even if he does see them) but also to appreciate how he misses what the official solution has been and what its effects are likely to be.

Orlov claims that the government wants to continue to prop up the stupid people who bought houses they couldn’t afford and the stupid people on Wall Street who lent them the money and this is a bad thing. However, he’s only half right.

The bailouts have gone to the lenders while attempts to stem the tide on foreclosures were half hearted measures to adjust interest rates for people at risk of foreclosure to affordable levels. The effect of the current policies is not to increase the risk of the collapse of the multinational institutions of financial power, but rather will just bring the third world model home while maintaining the current power structure if not all of the institutions of power.

The driving force behind this move isn’t necessarily resource depletion, although that may play a role. The driving force is the institutional logic of the system itself.

“But, in any event, the economy’s becoming much more internationalized, it’s much easier to move capital abroad. The effect of that is that production can be shifted much more easily to low-wage/high-repression areas elsewhere. And the effect of that is to bring the third world model home to the United States and other rich countries. It means that these countries themselves are drifting toward a kind of a third world model in which there’s a sector of great wealth and privilege and a growing mass of people who are basically superfluous. They’re not necessary for a profit either as producers or consumers. You can produce more cheaply elsewhere and the market can easily become the international wealthy sectors. You end up with south-central Los Angeles and that’s happening more and more. ” -Noam Chomsky, 1994

Email Exchange

From Wikipedia: Ken Knabb is an American writer, translator, and radical theorist[1], best known for his translations of Guy Debord and the Situationist International.
Although Knabb has remained in substantial agreement with most of the situationist perspectives, some of his writings can be seen as attempts to meld, or at least to juxtapose, those perspectives with the rather different tone and scope of Kenneth Rexroth and with the experiential insights of Zen Buddhism (he is a long-time Zen practitioner). In a 1977 pamphlet, for example, he critiqued what he saw as the situationists’ blindspot regarding religion.[5] Conversely, he has also criticized the political naiveté of “socially engaged” Buddhists. Another of his recurring themes is the importance of paying attention to the psychological or “subjective” aspect of radical activities.

I’ve been rereading the Society of the Spectacle in an attempt to understand how Debord conceives consciousness and communication. This isn’t an academic excercise, or not entirely. Living in Portland, Oregon I feel the influence of Primitivism and Post-Leftism quite keenly. Those who are aware of the Society of the Spectacle in Oregon seem prone to mystifying “the situation” as something that resides outside of symbolic thought. Zerzan’s longing for a pre-verbal society is, I think, a symptom of his designation of the real as something beyond linguistic description or understanding.

What is your understanding of the Debord’s relationship to symbolic thought, reason, and communication?

Solidarity,

Doug

Forgive me if I am tersely brief: I think that the views of Zerzan etc. are so silly that I’m not in the mood to argue about them.

As for Debord, without going into detail about the nuances of his relationship to symbolic thought, reason, and communication, he was definitely for more of them, not less. He obviously opposed various kinds of alienated communication and reason, but he envisioned a liberated life as consisting of a richness of human potentialities (somewhat along the lines of Vaneigem’s “unitary triad” of communication, participation and realization).

I might add that, as a long-time Zen practitioner, I am well aware of the notion of getting beyond obsessive/compulsive thinking. But that does not mean retreating to some fantasized prehistoric vegetative state. Zen and other similar mystical traditions always include the notion of coming back into the world of activities and relationships and complexities; the “nonthinking” state is just one aspect of the journey, which must be in dynamic interrelation with action in the world and with others, including every sort of communication.

Cheers,

Ken

Being Gen X: Being Human

In 2010 Gen X is older than our boomer parents ever imagined themselves to be. We are mid-way through raising our children, and at this moment it’s important to remember and understand our own history.

Those of us born or raised in the 70s arrived on the scene after the turmoil of the sixties had been transformed into quiescence and our role models for adult behavior, our childhood memories, are based on this defeat. Bell bottom pants, folk pop, campfire songs, school house rock and the Brady Bunch, are all memories of co-opted resistance.

Today we are creating our own Kodak moments as we wander through sunny summer days and feel blades of cool green grass with our toes. And we do this unconsciously, telling ourselves that this passivity, this retreat, is our resistance. And perhaps it is. Perhaps it could be.

We meditate and percolate. We speak about dissolving our consciousness, but are we in danger of recreating an image of our parents failures? What we want to do is collage the past and all its various futures into our present, not merely out of some postmodern impulse, and not as a symptom of our exhaustion, but as a way to disrupt the field of ideology we find ourselves trapped in.

We let our kids grow their hair long and run barefoot, we dream of untroubled domesticity, of berry bushes and kitchen gardens, of arugula, raspberries, and lemon cucumbers, but this is only one part of our quiet revolution. Or so we tell ourselves.

“By 1973 Victor Burgin had come to see ‘pure’ conceptual art as the last gasp of formalism. Art should be concerned with how things and representations relate to one another in the world today (that is to say ideology). Artists must be involved in the world at large. And the central question was ‘how could artists intervene effectively in this unceasing flow of ideology?’”

There is a call today to return to nature. We are living a life out of balance. We are supersized, oil dependent, television heads who chat together on facebook. We are artificially constructed subjectivities who must learn to surrender to the real. We must finally put aside our egos and all the left brain chatter that comes with these egos. We must give up on our plans. We can see that society is ending, that we are on the verge of breaking the world. But, while we must prepare, while we are obliged to discover organic, local, healthy, sustainable approaches to consumption, while we must take personal responsibility for our individual lives as the tragedy of the totality continues to unfold, we must not seek any kind of total answer. After all, conscious rational attempts to create a system for living is what got us into this mess.

Micah White in the April 2010 issue of Adbusters pointed to our dilemma this way:

“By the time the project of deconstructing distinctions was widespread in academia and had filtered down to society at large, oppression lay not in the maintenance of dualism, but in the opposite–increasing hybridization.”

The revolution will not kill your ego. You will not be taken up on the mothership. You won’t be slipped easily into the oceanic tumble of a psychedelic vision. Instead you’ll be forced more concretely into your own skin as reality slips away and everyday life fades. Say goodbye to the tranquil, adios to surrender.

What is a derive? It is not a dream, or a form of meditation. The derive is a critique. A critique formulated not for its own sake, but with the aim of altering the built environment.

Don Juan explained our situation, our predicament, directly in “A Yaqui Way of Knowledge”:

“You think there are two worlds for you–two paths. But there is only one. The protector showed you this with unbelievable clarity. The only world available to you is the world of men, and that world you cannot choose to leave. You are a man! The protector showed you the world of happiness where there is no difference between things because there is no one there to ask about the difference. But that is not the world of men. The protector shook you out of it and showed you how a man thinks and fights. That is the world of man! And to be a man is to be condemned to that world. You have the vanity to believe you live in two worlds, but that is only your vanity. There is but one single world for us. We are men.”
-pg 152-153, “The Teaching of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge”

This text can be heard as an audio collage in the final “Pick Your Battle” Diet Soap Supplement.