Lucas Vigroux

Photographs by Don Pettit Title: The Stoics via Retina via Boing Boing Title quote found in Tomorrow’s Eve. Will 50 Watts

'Customer'; 'growth'; 'investment'. We should scrutinise the everyday language that shapes how we think about the economy

At a recent art exhibition I engaged in an interesting conversation with one of the young people employed by the gallery. As she turned to walk off I saw she had on the back of her T-shirt "customer liaison". I felt flat. Our whole conversation seemed somehow reduced, my experience of it belittled into one of commercial transaction. My relation to the gallery and to this engaging person had become one of instrumental market exchange.

The message underlying this use of the term customer for so many different kinds of human activity is that in all almost all our daily activities we are operating as consumers in a market – and this truth has been brought in not by chance but through managerial instruction and the thoroughgoing renaming of institutional practices. The mandatory exercise of "free choice" – of a GP, of a hospital, of schools for one's children – then becomes also a lesson in social identity, affirming on each occasion our consumer identity.

This is a crucial part of the way that neoliberalism has become part of our commonsense understanding of life. The vocabulary we use to talk about the economy is in fact a political construction, as Stuart Hall, Michael Rustin and I have argued in our Soundings manifesto.

Another word that reinforces neoliberal common sense is "growth", currently deemed to be the entire aim of our economy. To produce growth and then (maybe) to redistribute some of it, has been a goal shared by both neoliberalism and social democracy. In its crudest formulation this entails providing the conditions for the market sector to produce growth, and accepting that this will result in inequality, and then relying on the redistribution of some portion of this growth to help repair the inequality that has resulted from its production.

This of course does nothing to question the inequality-producing mechanisms of market exchange itself, and it has also meant that the main lines of struggle have too often been focused solely on distributional issues. What's more, today we are living with a backlash to even the limited redistributional gains made by labour under social democracy. In spite of all this, growth is still seen as providing the solution to our problems.

The second reason our current notion of wealth creation, and our commitment to its growth, must be questioned is to do with our relationship with the planet. The environmental damage brought about by the pursuit of growth threatens to cause a catastrophe of which we are already witnessing intimations. And a third – and perhaps most important – defect of this approach is that increased wealth, especially as measured in the standard monetary terms of today, has few actual consequences for people's feelings of wellbeing once there is a sufficiency to meet basic needs, as there is in Britain. In pursuing "growth" in these terms, as a means to realise people's life goals and desires, economies are pursuing a chimera.

Instead of an unrelenting quest for growth, might we not ask the question, in the end: "What is an economy for?", "What do we want it to provide?"

Our current imaginings endow the market and its associated forms with a special status. We think of "the economy" in terms of natural forces, into which we occasionally intervene, rather than in terms of a whole variety of social relations that need some kind of co-ordination.

Thus "work", for example, is understood in a very narrow and instrumental way. Where only transactions for money are recognised as belonging to "the economy", the vast amount of unpaid labour – as conducted for instance in families and local areas – goes uncounted and unvalued. We need to question that familiar categorisation of the economy as a space into which people enter in order to reluctantly undertake unwelcome and unpleasing "work", in return for material rewards which they can use for consuming.

This is a view that misunderstands where pleasure and fulfilment in human lives are found. Work is usually – and certainly should be – a central source of meaning and fulfilment in human lives. And it has – or could have – moral and creative (or aesthetic) values at its core. A rethinking of work could lead us to address more creatively both the social relations of work and the division of labour within society (including a better sharing of the tedious work, and of the skills).

There are loads of other examples of rarely scrutinised terms in our economic vocabulary, for instance that bundle of terms clustered around investment and expenditure – terms that carry with them implicit moral connotations. Investment implies an action, even a sacrifice, undertaken for a better future. It evokes a future positive outcome. Expenditure, on the other hand, seems merely an outgoing, a cost, a burden.

Above all, we need to bring economic vocabulary back into political contention, and to question the very way we think about the economy in the first place. For something new to be imagined, let alone to be born, our current economic "common sense" needs to be challenged root and branch.

• Doreen Massey will be discussing Vocabularies of the Economy at a Soundings seminar on 13 June, 6.30-8.30pm, at the Marx Memorial Library, London. More information sally@lwbooks.co.uk

From TED: What’s a proven way to lower your energy costs? Would you believe: learning what your neighbor pays. Alex Laskey shows how a quirk of human behavior can make us all better, wiser energy users, with lower bills to prove it.

Related Situationist posts:

• Christakis Speaks to Harvard Freshmen about Social Networks
• The Scalability of Cities
• The Unequal Situation of Seperation
• Some Situational Sources of Longer Life
• Nicholas Christakis on the Situation of Epidemics
• The Stressful Situation of Disease
• Inequality and the Unequal Situation of Mental and Physical Health
• The Situation of Handguns on Urban Streets-Abstract
• Innovative Policy: Zoning for Health
• The Situation of Social Networks
  
• The Social Situation of Breaking Up
• Social Networks
• Common Cause: Combating the Epidemics of Obesity and Evil
• Situational Obesity, or, Friends Don’t Let Friends Eat and Veg

Paintings (oil on linen) by Karen Gunderson Title: Aleister Crowley Folkert

“L’odieux sourire des bourreaux d’enfants: le père urinait sur leurs tartines ou les badigeonnait avec le caca des chiens”

- La Meuse (à cause de yenlamare)

Illustrations by Atelier Olschinsky Title: Cocteau Previous posts on this artist: one, two Will 50 Watts

(Merci à Charlotte pour la suggestion)

Check out a very unique and incredibly fucking awesome cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station. Hadfield will leave the International Space Station at 7 p.m. Monday. To celebrate his last day in orbit, he has recorded this.

Amazing.

P.S. XKCD has considered the question of whether or not this is the most expensive music video ever made.

animated by Norio Matsumoto

Posters by Boris Bućan Title: Jakob von Gunten / Robert Walser via Freaky Fauna Will 50 Watts

Une autre dédicace en BD sur le tout nouveau Grotesk : "Retour à l'anormal" qui sort demain en librairie ! Et c'est demain que je vous dévoile dans quel lieu vous pourrez très prochainement venir faire dédicacer ce nouvel album !

Photographs by Alberto Seveso Title: Paramahansa Yogananda Atley

From Situationist friend and Harvard Law School 3L, Kate Epstein, an essay about Monday’s tragedy:

As I hear reactions to the bombings at the marathon on Monday, I find myself agreeing with Glenn Greenwald’s column in The Guardian, titled “The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions: As usual, the limits of selective empathy, the rush to blame Muslims, and the exploitation of fear all instantly emerge.” Particularly interesting to me are our cognitive limits, as humans, when it comes to empathy. Greenwald writes:

The widespread compassion for yesterday’s victims and the intense anger over the attacks was obviously authentic and thus good to witness. But it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid.

I felt the same way in the aftermath of Monday’s events, but I can also empathize with those who do care more–or at least feel it in a more real way–when the victims of a random act of violence are white, close to home, and so obviously innocent. “They, unlike the countless non-white, non-American casualties of the War on Terror, are– for me and many around me–part of our in-group, and our minds actually function in a way that makes us much more easily empathize with them.”

Studies have shown that parts of our brain associated with empathy and emotion are more likely to be activated when we observe someone of our own race, as opposed to an out-group member, in pain. This makes sense given research on unconscious bias using implicit association tests, which have been shown to predict real-life behavior outside of the lab.

The good news is that our automatic attitudes are sometimes malleable. Awareness of the differences between our egalitarian values and our implicit attitudes can induce emotional reactions that can motivate behavioral changes and help us be the empathetic and altruistic people we hope to be. On the other hand, lack of awareness combined with an inundation of negative images and stereotypes from commercial media and popular culture can reinforce implicit biases, underscoring the need for education and self-awareness.

In a world with so much violence and pain, it makes sense that we simply could not feel deeply empathetic every time a human being is injured or killed. We rightly feel intense moral outrage that someone would senselessly harm innocent people gathered in Boston yesterday, and yet we do not so easily empathize with victims of drone strikes in Pakistan, most of whom see the bombings as just as random and senseless, against victims just as innocent.

We should forgive ourselves for exhibiting these cognitive limits–after all, we are only human. But we should recognize, in these moments when we do so easily feel sorrow, anger, and compassion, those events which do not normally elicit those emotions, and force ourselves to grapple with the consequences of that fact. When we read dry, mundane news reports about human suffering, when we (rarely) hear body counts of the War on Terror (such as the estimated 122,000 violent, civilian deaths in Iraq thus far), when we are made aware of the latest unnamed drone victims in North Waziristan, let’s try to channel the empathy events like this make us feel, and then let’s turn that empathy into action.

Related Situationist posts:

• 25 Mil­lion Years of Us vs. Them
• Attributing Blame — from the Baseball Diamond to the War on Terror
• The Situation of Being “(un)American”
• Patricia Devine on Resisting Implicit Associations
• The Situation of Prejudice: Us vs. Them? or Them Is Us?
• Laurie Santos on the Evolutionary Situation of Cognitive Biases
• Michael McCullough on the Situation of Revenge and Forgiveness
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy
• The Endowment Effect in Chimpanzees – Abstract
• The ‘Turban Effect’
• The Situation of Racial Profiling
• Jim Sidanius “Terror, Intergroup Violence, and the Law“
• Even monkeys know when they’re being treated unfairly
• Monkey Fairness
• Perceptions of Racial Divide.”

The Situationist has a series of posts devoted to highlighting some of situational sources of war. Part I and Part II of the series included portions of an article co-authored by Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon, titled “Why Hawks Win.” Part III reproduced an op-ed written by Situationist friend Dan Gilbert on July 24, 2006. Part IV and Part V in this series contained the two halves of an essay written by Situationist Contributor, Jon Hanson within the week following 9/11. Part VI contains an op-ed written by Situationist Contributor John Jost on October 1, 2001, “Legitimate Responses to Illegitimate Acts,” which gives special emphasis to the role of system justification. Part VII includes a video entitled “Resisting the Drums of War.” The film was created and narrated by psychologist Roy J. Eidelson, Executive Director of the Solomon Asch Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

To review a larger sample of posts on the causes and consequences of human conflict, click here.

Hubert & Takako est une future série TV réalisée par Hugo Gittard chez Xilam. L'épisode pilote est visible sur le site du studio,...

[English : Upcoming TV series produced by Xilam studio and directed by Hugo Gittard.]

Tavistock 516 from alberto mielgo on Vimeo.

About a subject matter.

bombsfall:

I have made a music video for Toh Kay, aka Tomas Kanolky. I would appreciate it if you watched it and stuff.

I wrote a bit about it here.

Preorder the album here.

Download the track here.

Beautiful dystopic things for your Friday.

According to the description: ”This film was made over the last two years in our evenings, weekends and days off. We had no budget but a lot of help from our very talented and generous friends.”

See? Make your own way! It’s the best way, if you can swing it.

(Also, the vertical format looked great on my iPhone, and I assume it would look good on tablets and other vertical things.)

Everything I Can See From Here (by The Line)

sketch from a gaga photo online. i had a dream once where i wore this same outfit to class. nightmare for me, apparently not for gaga.

Nos emplois du temps iraient-ils à l'encontre de notre nature profonde ? Selon les travaux de deux chercheurs, il faudrait consacrer 36 minutes à son travail pour 106 minutes aux relations sexuelles.