THE JOURNAL OF THE
MENTAL ENVIRONMENT
gress
Cockerel (1938), Pablo Picasso
-Graeme Maxton, The End of Pro
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Michael Wolf, courtesy Robert Koch Gallery
Marco Antonio Cavalcanti|Riotur
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Rafael Vilela, (CC BY-SA) Fora do Eixo
Carnival is the largest spectacle on Earth. There was a time when Carnival was about grit, spirit, struggle, passion, sensuality, contrast, celebration, people. It was simple. Now, Carnival consists of naked dancers performing erotic acts with float-size cameras; bronzed beauty queens massaging products for advertisers; an entire megacity on hold so that a party-bazaar the size of Nascar can pass unhindered through the streets, reminding all that life is meant to be lived.
Marco Antonio Cavalcanti|Riotur
Rafael Vilela, (CC BY-SA) Fora do Eixo
Corporations have all but trademarked the country’s most sacred season – creating the world’s first total advertisement . The same process that turned Jesus into Santa Claus, love into a Valentine’s gift and celebration into a ticketed event, is now turning the magical pulse of Brazil into a corporate brand to sell beer, telephones and energy drinks. Today, the world’s largest corporations fund the favela schools who create the acts that draw the adoring crowds. No corpate cash = no spot in the mostcherished downtown precession.
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(F1) Politico•e.indd 2
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The Moonlight, Full Moon (2012,) Yang Yongliang, © Yang Yongliang / Courtesy Galerie Paris-Bei jing – www.galerieparisbei jing.com
The Moonlight, Full Moon (2012,) Yang Yongliang, © Yang Yongliang / Courtesy Galerie Paris-Bei jing – www.galerieparisbei jing.com
We were standing in the memorial room of the elite University for Political Studies. For the past few decades, this illustrious institution served as a breeding ground for top party bigwigs. A small, frail student with jerky motions, a waxy complexion and a Hitleresque hair part was telling us a lot about the university’s glorious past and even more about China’s invincible future. The student was nineteen. Even though he looked completely lost — in time and space as well as in translation — he was positively smouldering with conviction. The student’s terrifying earnestness, along with the image of his exhausted colleagues staring into their computer screens at the university’s library, offered a fascinating contrast to what one could see in the streets of downtown Beijing. In the past decade, these streets have been turned into a battlefield for the sort of architects who specialize in skyscrapers, classy shopping centres and other such palaces of robotized communication. In China, shopping has been transformed into a very basic human need. Both for the locals and for the visitors, it has been rendered all but obligatory. But what happened to communism? Perhaps we should simply call it something else — global-commo-capitalism, for example. Whatever it is, we at the very least need to name it correctly: after all, it seems it is what the future holds in store for all of us. Here and now. Or, if I may borrow the official slogan of Shanghai, the trade capital of the Universe: The Future Is Now. I asked Li Jiahua, the university’s deputy dean, how his school, the nursery for the hardliner’s hardliner, managed to adapt to the radical socio-economical change of the last twenty years. “Oh,” he replied: “We simply went with the flow. We have indeed been facing countless challenges. The ever-increasing progress of our country posed many questions. So we opened courses in economics and financial management, though the brunt of our curriculum still consists of social and political studies. Yet I would like to stress that moral education still represents the very core of our institution.” In the last twenty years, the basic profile of the students at this ideological nest also underwent a rapid change. What used to
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be the submissive party-liner with a fetishistic bent for military uniforms is now the digital consumer type entirely subservient to the dictatorship of choice. The army shirts have been exchanged for designer clothes, or at least the “original fakes” of the world’s most prestigious brands. The bitter redguard face has been replaced by the cosmetic smile. “Love more!” is one of the jingles being peddled in Beijing by one of Europe’s most respected automobile makers. The behemoth called China may have been dormant for centuries, but now it is turning into every free-market guru’s wet dream. The mood in Beijing is best described by evoking some classic futuristic movie. Think Blade Runner spliced with The Minority Report. Swarms of young people are chaotically racing in the streets, always on the go, always in a hurry. This is only to be expected. While they are growing up, time here in China is ticking by faster than anywhere else in the world. As you negotiate your way through the swarms, you quickly find out about the only remaining rule of the pedestrian flows in Beijing: “ME FIRST!” Yet even with all this perilous commotion, the young always find the time to glance at their cameras, their laptops and post-modern mobile phones — a formidable army of gizmos dispassionately recording every moment, every face and every act in this consumerist hell. With an intelligence corps of this magnitude, why would the state even need security services? In their hectic surgings, the streets of China’s richest cities are now more uniform than they had ever been. There are also many more slogans — only this time around they are phrased in the aggressive lingo of the advertising agencies, designed to plow straight through your frontal lobe and start whispering about unmet needs. “Love more!” indeed. The Chinese economy has been growing for the past thirty years. The obstacles fell by the roadside one by one. For thirty years, the genie of economic growth uprooted everything in its path, deftly taking advantage of all the perks of totalitarian communism. The party bosses have gotten used to posing as enlightened absolutists, but they have long become merely corporate executives in that sun-eclipsing mother of all corporations called The People’s Republic of China.
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By the mid-1960s, the American military had turned warmaking into a thoroughly corporatized, quantitatively oriented system that sociologist James William Gibson astutely calls “technowar.” The philosophy behind it was simple: by combining American technological and economic prowess with sophisticated managerial capacities, the Pentagon meant to guarantee ultimate success on the battlefield. The country’s unmatched military capability would allow it to impose its will anywhere in the world, with the war machine functioning as smoothly and predictably as an assembly line. This mindset was embodied most fully in the person of Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968. As a Harvard Business School professor, McNamara had designed statistical methods of analysis for the War Department during World War II, most famously systematizing the flight patterns and improving the efficiency of the bombers that decimated German and Japanese cities. ... In Vietnam, the statistically minded war managers focused, above all, on the notion of achieving a “crossover point”: the moment when American soldiers would be killing more enemies than their Vietnamese opponents could replace. After that, the Pentagon expected, the communist-led forces would naturally give up the fight — that would be the only rational thing to do. What McNamara and the Pentagon brass failed to grasp was that the Vietnamese nationalists, who had long battled foreign invaders in pursuit of independence, might now view warfare as a straightforward exercise in benefit maximization to be pursued in a “rational” manner and abandoned when the ledger sheet showed more debits than credits. ... Entire units were sometimes pitted against each other in body-count competitions with prizes at stake. This helped make the bodycount mindset even more pervasive, lending death totals the air of sports statistics. “Box scores” came to be displayed all over Vietnam — on charts and chalkboards (also known as “kill boards”) at military bases, printed up in military publications, and painted as crosshatched “kills” on the sides of helicopters, to name just a few of the most conspicuous examples. “We had charts in the mess hall that told what our body count was for the week,” recalled one veteran. “So as you passed through the chow line you were able to look up at a chart and see that we had killed so many.” ... The practice of counting all dead Vietnamese as enemy kills became so pervasive that one of the most common phrases of war was: “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC.” Nick Turse is a investigative journalist, historian and essayist whose groundbreaking research has changed the way we think about the Vietnam War. This excerpt is from his book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, published in January by Metropolitan Books.
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It used to be common for even the most bitter and vehement ideological foes of America to nonetheless admit that America’s consumer culture was compelling, entrancing, often interesting, but above all else, cool. We were critics of the American way of life – over consumption, spectacle, hierarchy – but we were also in love with the movies, the books, the fashion, the Halloween parties, the Super Bowl rituals, the Oscars, the bombshell blondes and the smells of Los Angeles, Manhattan, the windy city and a host of other places that epitomized the highest that capitalist civilization had to offer. The best food. The best talk. The best sex. The best drugs. The best of everything we could ever want, said the multibillion-dollar-a-year culture industr – and it wasn’t all a lie. America had verve; America was the leader of cool. But how many of us can really say that about America anymore? Television is beyond bad, it’s boring. The best English language shows are British now, such as the genuinely thought-provoking Black Mirror. American movies are worse and the most exciting books are translations from abroad. Supermodels don’t arouse. The Super Bowl didn’t really matter much this year and the Academy Awards felt like a momentary distraction. CNN and The New York Times pump out increasingly banal, vague and deceptive articles while more and more Americans are turning to The Guardian and Al Jazeera for hard-hitting, fact-driven news. There is still Silicon Valley but that too is starting to be so bedazzled by the logic of advertising and monetization that it can’t produce more than iterations of virtual gambling, social anxiety and meme inanity. Even the American consumer’s purchasing power isn’t as important as it once was... pretty soon it’ll be the Chinese middle class that will define what ketchup tastes like globally. That leaves the U.S. military, an institution that has become disgraced by unrepentant acts of torture and assassination while perpetrating unpopular civil wars.
Chris Hollo/Getty Images
What the hell is going on? Why are the rituals of American life losing their veneer? And most importantly, what will the decline of American culture do to the rest of the world?
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The world once dreamt American dreams. We became dependent on America’s cool-makers for a vision of how to live and what to strive toward. It may have been a wrong-headed vision but it was still a vision most of the globe chased. Few are going that way now. Who or what will rise up to fill the imagination void? — Micah White
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In a recent poll, 24 to 25 perecent of young German people interviewed by journalists answered the question “what do you want to do when you’re an adult” by stating that they wanted to be artists. What are they picturing? What do they think being an artist means, exactly? Are they thinking about the rich possibilities that the art market offers? Well, maybe, but I don’t think so. I think that they are saying that they want to be artists because they feel that being an artist means to escape a future of sadness, to escape a future of precariousness as sadness. They are thinking, well, precariousness and sadness can become something different, something not so sad, not so precarious, if they withdraw their faith, if they withdraw from any expectations a capitalist future can offer. I don’t want to expect anything from the future, so I start my future as an artist. —Franco “Bifo” Berardi
(I1) Beyond Fear•e.indd 4
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Rosea Lake, roseaposey.tumblr.com, roseaposey@gmail.com
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goldman sachs has 73 offices worldwide...
And we’re going to have some fun in front of every one of them! Goldman Sachs, the most powerful and unrepentant of the financial fraudsters, has 3 offices in Canada and 4 in the United Kingdom; 8 in China; 2 separate locations in Madrid and 19 scattered across the United States.
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#GOLDMAN is an indefinite realtime, live-action game to shut down each of these locations. Points will be awarded for speed, spectacle, courage and innovation.
We take everything we learned from Cairo, Madrid and Zuccotti … combine it with the lessons of Quebec, Pussy Riot and Idle No More … and turn #GOLDMAN into a global moment of truth for justice.
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