Despite the frequency with which the phrase “international community” is invoked, its precise meaning – like its origins – is difficult to discern. And, as France’s recent intervention in Mali has shown, this ambiguity lies at the root of many of today’s most urgent foreign-policy problems.
For some, an international community simply does not exist. For others, the term refers, more pragmatically, to all countries when they decide to act together. Still another, more accurate definition encompasses all countries with international influence – that is, any country whose identity and sovereignty is recognized, and that chooses to participate in global discussions and decision-making.
Beyond semantics lies the more consequential, but equally ambiguous, question of the international community’s role and responsibility. Just as too broad a definition could undermine a country’s sovereignty, too narrow a definition – like that which seems to predominate today – allows violence and instability to proliferate.
Excerpt from an article written by Michel Rocard, one of Europe’s leading statesmen, was Prime Minister of France from 1988-1991.
Continue HERE
In the days following the bombings at the Boston Marathon, speculation online regarding the identity and motive of the unknown perpetrator or perpetrators was rampant. And once the Tsarnaev brothers were identified and the manhunt came to a close, the speculation didn’t cease. It took a new form. A sampling: Maybe the brothers Tsarnaev were just patsies, fall guys set up to take the heat for a mysterious Saudi with high-level connections; or maybe they were innocent, but instead of the Saudis, the actual bomber had acted on behalf of a rogue branch of our own government; or what if the Tsarnaevs were behind the attacks, but were secretly working for a larger organization?
Written by MAGGIE KOERTH-BAKER. Continue Reading at NYT
LIKE ANY POPULAR food writer, Gary Taubes gets more than his share of e-mails about his work. So he didn’t give it much thought one day two years ago when he got a five-line comment about a podcast he’d given the week before. It was plainly signed “John.”
The man was intrigued by Taubes’s theories on why people get fat—more specifically, the food writer’s argument that most of the science on obesity is either badly flawed or inconclusive. What was needed, Taubes had said, was a comprehensive experiment that can answer some of the key questions about how our bodies process food. The problem is that such a study is hugely expensive. “From the little I know about the science of nutrition, your study makes a lot of sense,” the listener wrote, adding that he ran a foundation focused on public policy.
Taubes noticed that the full name in the email was John Arnold, and a quick Google GOOG -0.75% search turned up a curious figure under that name: a wunderkind natural-gas trader at Enron who later founded his own hedge fund. The fund was secretive—little-known in its hometown, Houston, much less the rest of the country—but legendary in hedge-fund circles for its mega-returns. It was starting to get interesting.
Taubes passed the name onto Peter Attia, a medical doctor with whom he had recently founded a nonprofit focused on nutrition science. Attia recalls that when he called to see if he could set up a meeting with Arnold, the response was, “First give us the names of 20 top experts in the field, half of whom think you are crazy.” A few weeks later, he found himself in a conference room located just off the trading floor at Arnold’s Houston office, during which it became apparent that Arnold and his staff had already spoken with most, if not all, of the experts Attia provided. And something else was apparent: Though boyish and just 37, Arnold was dead serious about launching the obesity study. Indeed, his ambitions couldn’t have been higher. He wanted to know if all the best and brightest food scientists got together—and had unlimited resources—what could they accomplish?
Is the Internet a vast arena of unrestricted communication and freely exchanged information or a regulated, highly structured virtual bureaucracy? In Protocol, Alexander Galloway argues that the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom, and that the controlling power lies in the technical protocols that make network connections (and disconnections) possible. He does this by treating the computer as a textual medium that is based on a technological language, code. Code, he argues, can be subject to the same kind of cultural and literary analysis as any natural language; computer languages have their own syntax, grammar, communities, and cultures. Instead of relying on established theoretical approaches, Galloway finds a new way to write about digital media, drawing on his backgrounds in computer programming and critical theory. “Discipline-hopping is a necessity when it comes to complicated socio-technical topics like protocol,” he writes in the preface.
Galloway begins by examining the types of protocols that exist, including TCP/IP, DNS, and HTML. He then looks at examples of resistance and subversion—hackers, viruses, cyberfeminism, Internet art—which he views as emblematic of the larger transformations now taking place within digital culture. Written for a nontechnical audience, Protocol serves as a necessary counterpoint to the wildly utopian visions of the Net that were so widespread in earlier days.
Since gender equality, democracy and freedoms of expression were used duplicitously as ruses for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, it has become fashionable to suspect these very principles as permanent neo-colonial conspiracies against all Muslims.
Despite objections to the orientalist project of ‘saving brown women from brown men’, a new wave of post-9/11 ‘corrective’ politics ironically continues to deploy the rescue motif itself. This time, it seeks to defend Muslim women from universal, rights-based values, laws or freedoms and so it rationalises anti-women practices in Muslim communities. The reasoning is that liberal (western) freedoms must be replaced with ‘Islamic rights’ based on ‘Muslim autonomy’. After such reinvention, there must be global concessions across international legal and social policies in order to accommodate this exceptionalism.
In the post-9/11 period, conservatives in the west view Muslim women’s freedom exclusively through the act of unveiling, while ‘anti-imperialists’ fetishise it as a tool of passive revolution against racism, imperialism and Islamophobia. Neither wishes to discuss discrimination or material rights beyond wardrobe politics.
Excerpt from text written by Afiya Shehrbano. Continue HERE and THERE
Who will outsmart who, and who will be kicked out first? This is the job market, and probably society at large, reduced to the level of a TV reality show, writes Bauman. However, though the spirit of solidarity is in exile, it would be premature to give up on the prospect of its return just yet.
To practice solidarity means to base one’s thinking and actions on the principle “one for all and all for one”. Respecting this principle of mutual responsibility (of the group for the individual, and the individual for the group) was labelled as the state of solidarité by the French Encyclopédie in 1765. The word stems from the adjective solidaire, which means “mutually dependent”, “complete”, “whole”. Solidaire stems from the word solide, which implies “solidity”, “completeness”, “massiveness” and “permanence”.
A group with members who display the attributes of solidarity is marked by permanence and resistance to the hardships caused by the widespread human vices of jealousy, mutual distrust, suspicion, conflicts of interests and rivalry. The attitude of solidarity successfully prevents the emergence of opposition between private interests and the common good. It is solidarity which transforms a loose aggregate of individuals into a community; it supplements their physical coexistence with a moral one, thereby raising their interdependence to the rank of a community of fate and destiny… At least such were the hopes attached and pursued when solidarity started to be promoted, cultivated and groomed around the middle of the eighteenth century as the ancien régime began to break down and the era of modern nation-state-building opened.
The faux red carpet had been laid out for the famous and the wannabe-famous. Politicians and journalists arrived at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, bedazzled in the hopes of basking in a few fleeting moments of fame, even if only by osmosis from proximity to celebrities. New to the Washington scene, I was to experience the spectacle with my husband, a journalist, and enjoy an evening out. Or at least an hour out. You see, as a spouse I was not allowed into the actual dinner. Those of us who are not participating in the hideous schmooze-fest that is this evening are relegated to attending the cocktail hour only, if that. Our guest was the extraordinarily brilliant Oscar-nominated director of Beasts of the Southern Wild, Benh Zeitlin. Mr. Zeitlin’s unassuming demeanor was a refreshing taste of humility in a sea of pretentious politicians reeking of narcissism.
As I left the hotel and my husband went to the ballroom for the dinner, I realized he still had my keys. I approached the escalators that led down to the ballroom and asked the externally contracted security representatives if I could go down. They abruptly responded, “You can’t go down without a ticket.” I explained my situation and that I just wanted my keys from my husband in the foyer and that I wouldn’t need to enter in the ballroom. They refused to let me through. For the next half hour, they watched as I frantically called my husband but was unable to reach him.
Written by Seema Jilani at Huffington Post. Continue THERE
The HIV epidemic animates this collection of essays by a noted artist, writer, and activist. “So total was the burden of illness—mine and others’—that the only viable response, other than to cease making art entirely, was to adjust to the gravity of the predicament by using the crisis as a lens,” writes Gregg Bordowitz, a film- and video-maker whose best-known works, Fast Trip Long Drop (1993) and Habit (2001), address AIDS globally and personally. In The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous—the title essay is inspired by Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theater Company—Bordowitz follows in the tradition of artist-writers Robert Smithson and Yvonne Rainer by making writing an integral part of an artistic practice.
Bordowitz has left his earliest writings for the most part unchanged—to preserve, he says, “both the youthful exuberance and the palpable sense of fear” created by the early days of the AIDS crisis. After these early essays, the writing becomes more experimental, sometimes mixing fiction and fact; included here is a selection of Bordowitz’s columns from the journal Documents, “New York Was Yesterday.” Finally, in his newest essays he reformulates early themes, and, in “My Postmodernism” (written for Artforum’s fortieth anniversary issue) and “More Operative Assumptions” (written especially for this book), he reexamines the underlying ideas of his practice and sums up his theoretical concerns.
In his mature work, Bordowitz seeks to join the subjective—the experience of having a disease—and the objective—the fact of the disease as a global problem. He believes that this conjunction is necessary for understanding and fighting the crisis. “If it can be written,” he says, “then it can be realized.”
New Yorkers don’t fade away—they just move. But to where? From Miami to Austin to Berlin, detailed maps of nearly every other significant city’s neighborhoods show ex-pats exactly where to emigrate.
The Informal City Dialogues is a year-long project supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and conducted by Forum for the Future. It homes in on six cities: Accra, Bangkok, Chennai, Lima, Manila and Nairobi. In each of these cities, it aims to foster a conversation about the informal urban realm, and how it can be cultivated and harnessed for the benefit of all.
These informal realms, from single-chair barbershops to nine-passenger vans to sprawling settlements, are propelling the explosive growth of the urban Global South. They are the neighborhoods, economies and systems that exist beyond the reach of government: the slums, black-market industries and undocumented businesses that fuel these cities’ growth. They’re split off from the formal city, and often neglected or harassed by local authorities.
And yet the informal aspects of these places are also intricately intertwined with the formal. Indeed, many residents have one foot in both worlds: the slum dweller who commutes to her job at a major hospital, the unlicensed microbus driver who lives in a condominium highrise.
Bruno Latour’s forthcoming book, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. We discuss his intellectual trajectory leading up to actor–network theory and the pluralistic philosophy underlying his new, ‘positive’ anthropology of modernity.
Bruno Latour’s work on actor–network theory (ANT) put him at the forefront of a wave of ethnographic research on scientists ‘in action’ in their laboratories and in the wider world. Starting with 1979’s Laboratory Life, his many books, written independently and in collaboration, have traced the chains of reference that connect instrumental inscriptions in labs to factual statements in journals and, eventually, to the laws of nature found in textbooks. Along the way, he has shown, facts take on increasing ontological weight, growing increasingly ‘universal’ through extensions of the scale and reach of networks and alliances between humans and nonhumans. His work has also contributed to rethinkings of modernity, leading scholars to study how scientists, engineers, and their heterogeneous allies have redefined and transformed both nature and society. Compelling, controversial, and constantly on the move, Latour’s arguments and collective projects have helped orient many research perspectives in Science and Technology Studies (STS) over the past three decades, creating bridges between science studies and anthropology, history, literary studies, art history, and environmental studies; philosophers have also increasingly engaged with his ideas (e.g. Bennett, 2010; Harman, 2009; Rouse, 1987; as well as Latour, 2010).
The language of more inequality, more poverty, more evictions from land and house, is not enough to capture the negatives in the current phase of global capitalism. I want to explore the hypothesis that we are confronting the emergence of new logics of expulsion that take us beyond the more familiar notion of growing inequality. The last two decades have seen a sharp growth in the number of people, enterprises and places expelled from the core orders of our epoch; I add our collective destruction of bits and pieces of the biosphere, which are turned into dead land and dead water — an expulsion of bits of life itself from the biosphere. This aggregate of expulsions is likely to be more consequential than the epoch-making economic development and new middle classes in India, China, and some other countries.
A key source of these expulsions is a mix of elements often experienced (and admired) as requiring specialized knowledges and complex organizational formats. One example is the sharp rise in the complexity of financial instruments, the product of brilliant creative classes and advanced mathematics. Another is the complexity of the legal and accounting features of the contracts enabling a sovereign government to acquire vast stretches of land in a foreign sovereign nation-state. And yet another is the brilliant engineering and innovations that make possible types of mining that destroy land and water bodies. I propose to explore the extent to which we have reached a point in our advanced political economies where complexity tends to produce elementary brutalities.
This is based on the author’s forthcoming Expulsions: When complexity produces elementary brutalities (Harvard University Press 2014). Text and Image via Penserglobal
Isabelle Stengers is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting figures in the panorama of contemporary philosophy. A mobilized scientist who chose desertion, a free electron of thought, she has finally found refuge in the philosophy department at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where she initiates students into the abstract charms of Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative philosophy on the one hand, and the political practices of neo-pagan witches borne from the anti-globalization movement on the other. Her prolific theoretical output is both open and original. One dimension of her thought has initiated a renewal of the relationship between the sciences and philosophy, particularly in The New Alliance (1979), written with Nobel Prize wining chemist Ilya Prygogine, and in The Invention of Modern Science (1993), winner of the Prix Quinquennal de L’essai (1996). A second key aspect of Stengers’ philosophy has developed into a constructivist-inspired cosmopolitical reflection around the concept of an ecology of practices, as in Cosmopolitics I and II (1997/2003), Capitalist Sorcery (2005), and Au temps des catastrophes (2009). Between these two poles, there is one question that cuts across all of her work: “What has rendered us so vulnerable, so ready to justify the destruction committed in the name of progress?” This decisive problematic is animated by a vital exigency long ago articulated by William James and relayed by Gilles Deleuze: To believe in the world. It is with remarkable generosity that she agreed to this interview, which took place in July 2010, at her ULB office. —Erik Bordeleau
Emerging from the shadows of their secret command outpost in the war-torn city of Aleppo, these members of an all-female fighting unit posed for portraits. Their testimony speaks of the wrenching violence of the now two-year-long Syrian uprising. Photographed by Sebastiano Tomada. Text via TIME. See More HERE
Neoliberal crony capitalism is driven by a grand coalition between the pragmatic centre-left and the pragmatic centre-right. Crony capitalist policies are always justified as the pragmatic solution. The range of policy options is narrowed down to a pragmatic compromise that maximises the rent that can be extracted by special interests. Instead of the government providing essential services such as healthcare and law and order, we get oligopolistic private healthcare and privatised prisons. Instead of a vibrant and competitive private sector with free entry and exit of firms we get heavily regulated and licensed industries, too-big-to-fail banks and corporate bailouts.
There’s no better example of this dynamic than the replacement of the public option in Obamacare by a ‘private option’. As Glenn Greenwald argues, “whatever one’s views on Obamacare were and are: the bill’s mandate that everyone purchase the products of the private health insurance industry, unaccompanied by any public alternative, was a huge gift to that industry.” Public support is garnered by presenting the private option as the pragmatic choice, the compromise option, the only option. To middle class families who fear losing their healthcare protection due to unemployment, the choice is framed as either the private option or nothing.
In a recent paper (h/t Chris Dillow), Pablo Torija asks the question ‘Do Politicians Serve the One Percent?’ and concludes that they do. This is not a surprising result but what is more interesting is his research on the difference between leftwing and rightwing governments which he summarises as follows: “In 2009 center-right parties maximized the happiness of the 100th-98th richest percentile and center-left parties the 100th-95th richest percentile. The situation has evolved from the seventies when politicians represented, approximately, the median voter”.
Excerpt from a text written by Ashwin at Macroeconomic Resilience. Continue HERE. Image via Wiki
The lowest domination coin from each of the world’s currencies imaged by the Advanced Engineered Materials Group at the National Physical Laboratory, using an Alicona infinite focus 3D optical microscope. These are small low resolution versions from orginals containing over 400 million pixels.
“The economic system, which has raised to such notorious prominence in recent years because of its obvious impact on our lives, is a complex structure whose functioning is increasingly necessary to understand and, as much as possible, to predict or even control. In this sense, and in response to the dominance of macroeconomics in the discourse of the media, the artist chooses a microscopic view of the world economy. The Fundamental Units, a series that begins with the works produced by Horrach Moyà Gallery for this exhibition, is an exploration of the lowest denomination coins from the world’s currencies using an infinite focus 3D optical microscope at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington (UK). The images obtained with the microscope have been combined to form an extremely detailed large scale reproduction of the least valuable coins from Australia, Chile, the Euro, Myanmar and the Kingdom of Swaziland. In these images the humble metal acquires a planetary dimension and is displayed as the atoms that shape the global economy”. – Pau Waelder, Curator
This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past.
Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology in relation to other key media studies debates including software studies, German media theory, imaginary media research, new materialism and digital humanities.
What is Media Archaeology? advances an innovative theoretical position while also presenting an engaging and accessible overview for students of media, film and cultural studies. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary ties between art, technology and media.
Written by Jussi Parikka, a Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton).
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency based on an open-source, peer-to-peer internet protocol. It was introduced in 2009 by a pseudonymous developer, Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoins can be exchanged through a computer or smartphone locally or internationally without an intermediate financial institution. In trade, one bitcoin is subdivided into 100 million smaller units called satoshis, defined by eight decimal places.
Bitcoin is not managed like typical currencies: it has no central bank or central organization. Instead, it relies on an Internet-based peer-to-peer network. The money supply is automated and given to servers or “bitcoin miners” that confirm bitcoin transactions as they add them to a decentralized and archived transaction log approximately every 10 minutes.
Cody Rutledge Wilson (born January 31, 1988) is an American crypto-anarchist and law student. He is best known as the founder and director of Defense Distributed (The island of misfit objects), a non-profit organization that develops and publishes open source gun designs, so-called “Wiki Weapons,” suitable for 3D printing. Wilson has been named one of the 15 most dangerous people in the world by Wired magazine.
Cody Wilson: “We want to show that a handgun is printable. You don’t need to be able to put 200 rounds through it…It only has to fire once. But even if the design is a little unworkable, it doesn’t matter, as long as it has that guarantee of lethality.”
A 24-minute documentary film about Cody Wilson made by VICE:
Close to the port of Calais there is an area encompassing a few hundred square metres that is known as ‘The Jungle’. The people occupying this area have travelled many miles to get there, and their journey is still not at an end. Calais is the departure point for the final and most desirable crossing. There are thousands of people from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Nigeria, all in search of a better life in Britain, the destination of their dreams.
While they await the opportunity to make the great crossing, they build temporary shelters: tent-like structures made of waste material from the immediate surroundings of the camp. In the best cases, the cultural characteristics of the country of origin can barely be distinguished in these.
The way in which the primary requirements of life are manifested in such shelters forms the leitmotif of this documentary photography project, for which I travelled extensively to Calais, the south of Spain, Dunkirk, Malta, Patras and Rome. For me, the image of the shelter – wherever it is in Europe – became the symbol of the misery these refugees experience.
All photos and text by Henk Wildschut. See project HERE
New York State first began issuing paper licenses to chauffeurs in 1910, and the shape, form and style have changed over the past century, adapting to new laws and technologies. The following is a sampling of how the license has evolved. See More HERE
Of all the startups that launched last year, Fuzz is certainly one of the most intriguing and the most overlooked. Describing itself as a “people-powered radio” that is completely “robot-free,” Fuzz bucks the trend toward ever greater reliance on algorithms in discovering new music. Fuzz celebrates the role played by human DJs—regular users who are invited to upload their own music to the site in order to create and share their own “radio stations.”
The idea—or, perhaps, hope—behind Fuzz is that human curators can still deliver something that algorithms cannot; it aspires to be the opposite of Pandora, in which the algorithms do all the heavy lifting. As its founder, Jeff Yasuda, told Bloomberg News last September, “there’s a big need for a curated type of experience and just getting back to the belief that the most compelling recommendations come from a human being.”
But while Fuzz’s launch attracted little attention, the growing role of algorithms in all stages of artistic production is becoming impossible to ignore. Most recently, this role was highlighted by Andrew Leonard, the technology critic for Salon, in an intriguing article about House of Cards, Netflix’s first foray into original programming. The series’ origin myth is by now well-known: Having studied its user logs, Netflix discovered that a remake of the British series of the same name could be a huge hit, especially if it also featured Kevin Spacey and was directed by David Fincher.
Excerpt from an article written by Evgeny Morozov at Slate. Continue THERE
Johanna Sjöstedt introduces her conversation with Nancy Bauer by explaining why Bauer is interested both in exploring the potential of a genuinely philosophical feminism and paving the way for a feminist critique of the philosophical tradition.
At the heart of the thought of American philosopher Nancy Bauer is the troubled relationship between philosophy and feminism. Put differently, Bauer is interested in exploring the possibilities for a genuinely philosophical feminism, while at the same time aiming at paving the way for a feminist critique of the philosophical tradition that is transformative, rather than dismissive, of the intellectual discipline as such. Instead of simply arguing in favour of feminist philosophy, where the issue of the value of feminism for philosophy and vice versa is settled in advance, Bauer works on the borders of feminism and philosophy, where difficulties in bringing the two enterprises together abound, but great intellectual rewards await in the case of success. In Bauer’s work, this ambition manifests itself in a way of doing philosophy that ties the abstractions of philosophy to concerns of everyday life, where French writer, philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir serves as a great source of inspiration. Writing about the philosophy of Beauvoir and its connections to the thought of Descartes, Hegel, and Sartre, Bauer received her PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1997.
Excerpt from a text by Johanna Sjöstedt at Eurozine. Continue THERE.
BAD NEWS SELLS. If it bleeds, it leads. No news is good news, and good news is no news.
Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers, based partly on data (ratings and circulation) and partly on the gut instincts of producers and editors. Wars, earthquakes, plagues, floods, fires, sick children, murdered spouses — the more suffering and mayhem, the more coverage.
But now that information is being spread and monitored in different ways, researchers are discovering new rules. By scanning people’s brains and tracking their e-mails and online posts, neuroscientists and psychologists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.
“The ‘if it bleeds’ rule works for mass media that just want you to tune in,” says Jonah Berger, a social psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling. But when you share a story with your friends and peers, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer.”
Excerpt from an article written by JOHN TIERNEY, at the NYT. Continue THERE
A defense contractor better known for building jet fighters and lethal missiles says it has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue.
The process, officials and engineers at Lockheed Martin Corp say, would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.
Because the sheets of pure carbon known as graphene are so thin – just one atom in thickness – it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water, they said.
Special effects…are coup de théatres, thunderclaps that shock you: a burst; an eruption; something small, like an insect down your back; a wall dissolving suddenly.—from The Vatican to Vegas
A richly illustrated journey through five centuries of optical illusions and other wonders. A guided tour through special-effects environments from 1550 to the present, Norman Klein’s The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects demonstrates how Renaissance and early Baroque artists pioneered interactive, cinematic, and even digital environments. As in our era, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century illusion serviced a global culture and even relied on “software” of a kind: solid geometry for architecture, optics, sculpture, painting and theater. As if from a cryonic thaw, these forms have reemerged very clearly in recent decades. And to manage all this friendly disaster, modern special effects have evolved a unique grammar as precise as the rules of film, theater, and music. Klein reviews this syntax and demonstrates how special effects are not only a barometer for politics, myths of identity and economic relations, but an instructive parallel for understanding where our civilization may be headed next.
In celebration of International Women’s Day, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is streaming the full Karen Cho’s award-winning NFB feature documentary Status Quo? The Unfinished Business of Feminism in Canada, and many others until Sunday, 10 March. Click HERE to see them.
Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.
What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call “the economy”. What’s more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence – but also, the systematic threat of violence – maintained by the contemporary state.
Excerpt from an article written by David Graeber at EuroZine. Continue HERE
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