Reviewed by Niamh Hennessy, York University

This is an interesting and provocative collection of stories, commentaries and reviews that offer a series of meditations on the transformations of everyday life in the new century. The perspectives are drawn from a range of cultural contexts even as these particularities strike a universal chord in the themes that link them together. The tones of the various articles continually shift; even the emphasis on nostalgia in Bell’s subtle inquiry on the Garbage Museum in Curitiba, Brazil is coupled with a certain joy in the discovery of lost objects made meaningful by the social relationships embodied or projected in their display. The female workers at the museum sort objects by hand as they move along a conveyor belt. Not well paid, but with relatively good benefits and conditions, the workers are situated in relation to the poor who collect and deliver garbage to the museum in exchange for food. All of this takes place in context the active promotional campaign the city of Curitiba launches during the 80s and 90s as the eco capital of the world.

The complexities of the social relationships examined by Bell are followed by Quentin Stevens’ eerie account of the American Murdo Station as the hub of scientific conquest of Antarctica. US interests in Antarctica date back to post World War II and the Cold War, and come to reflect contradictory impulses of modernity in the design of metropolitan and frontier spaces at Murdo. In detailing the ‘architecture’ of its colonial ideology, Stevens seems to mimic the mono-tonal hum and monochromatic images of the military’s regulation of landscape and social relationships. If these lead essays offer contrasts in tone and centre-periphery dynamics, other essays on cultural production and display invert and subvert the public/private dimensions of reality television, the construction of nation and the inward/outward glances in the reporting of community tragedies.

Susan Hedges’ article on Schlemmer’s ‘The Triadic Ballet’ points to how machine technology came to be incorporated in the movement of human bodies on stage, suggesting a more futuristic vision that is simultaneously an architecture of theatre space and a repetition. The theme of nation and performance returns in Richards’ account of the increasingly urbanized Maori alongside Susan Ballard’s account of the corporeal in installation settings in which digital codes intersect with material forms. The emphasis on performance over production is troubled by Kirsten Hudson’s efforts to link the former with the production of everyday life.

The hybridity of global media and advertising that depend equally on the expansion and segmentation of new markets of consumers suggest new definitions of the diaspora in Grixti’s essay, while other essays discuss how previously untapped markets, for example senior citizens, bring the periphery to the centre of advertising strategies and formats. Kate Greenwood theorizes how films like Metropolis (1926) and The Matrix (1999) fall short of representing contemporary experiences of subjects even with their recognition of the simulated of character motivation and action. Surprisingly absent from Redshaw’s essay on speed and the car is any mention of Taylorism or scientific management in its genesis, but the essays on new technologies and forms like email evoke these themes by detailing the collapse of time and space that figures in any account of postmodern subjectivities, whether singular or collective. Accordingly, the cyborg requires new rethinking and redefinition for its original instantiation as ‘half-man’ and ‘half-machine’ is superseded by the idea of a ‘self-regulating machine’ that Wiener, for one, likens to the activity of human intelligence. In that sense, we are cyborgs because we are, at least minimally incorporated in the feedback loops of machine technology whose functions are only most recently perfected or exploited by digital forms of communication. In short, this collection of essays from Canterbury University Press in New Zealand is worth a read not only for the resonances that cross culturally, but also for its distinctive character in voice and perspective.

National Recessions and Regional Depression

Last year, we asked about the geography of what we called “The Depression of 2009”. This year, in February, The Economist provided a brief article pointing out the differences in regional economies in the US – Montana still growing at over 4% versus Michigan’s economy, contracting at over 7%. Now in March the New York Times provides a map by county of the rate of change in the official unemployment rate compared to March 2008, noting, “Job losses have been most severe in the areas that experienced a big boom in housing, those that depend on manufacturing and those that already had the highest unemployment rates.”

Referring to “The Great Recession of 2008” it notes that layoffs affect men more than women construction workers, hotel workers, retail workers and others without a four-year degree, homeowners and investors more than renters or those on Social Security and Latinos more than other ethnic groups.  It is no satisfaction to see that Depression terminology entering the discourse of the media:

If the Great Recession, as some have called it, has a capital city, it is El Centro, Calif., due east of San Diego, in the desert of California’s Inland Valley. El Centro has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, a depression like 22.6 percent. …hit by the brutal combination of a drought, a housing bust and a falling peso, which cuts into the buying power of Mexicans who cross the border to shop.

Locatable Assets and Non-Geography
There is a more fundamental geography of the economy. This is a geophysics of property and specifiable, locatable assets. On this material basis avatars and representations for these objects can be constructed and through this, trust can be maintained at a distance. As a system of signs grounded in valued locations and valued assets, the economy is not those assets per se but the signs of those assets.

In an interview with Don Cato for the Vancouver Sun, Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist of the global poor points out that economic havoc ensues when the system of signs and locatable assets breaks down:

The way we document property rights and record every change of hands — not just our land titles, but cars and equipment and stocks and bonds — is the basis of the trust on which strangers can do business. Only documented assets give strangers the confidence to give us credit cards and lines to credit, mortgages to start new businesses, cellphone contracts and apartment leases. Without the trusted record-keeping that enables due diligence, both individuals and businesses would be limited — as is most of the world — to cash transactions, or paltry credit from family or usurious loan sharks.

This is the situation that has bedeviled the most impoverished countries. Without stable institutions of property, trust is at risk.

And the reason we trust each other is paper. It tells each other what we own. It gives us credit records. We can track people down. We can infer from the information on paper, if we trust it, what’s going on. From the land, to the house, to your car, to boats, to your ships, to your investments, to your rights over intellectual property and patents — is recorded. There’s only one asset you Northerners haven’t recorded. Derivatives. Worse, investments with known risks have been bundled with those whose future value is anybody’s guess, and sold to people who don’t know how much they hold of what. … You don’t know who has them. And, when you don’t know who has them, you don’t know who you can lend to. That’s what’s causing the credit contraction. … The root of the problem is that the money was available to lend [to people with no assets but over-valued homes] because it was derived from paper that has no location. You can’t find it. You can’t evaluate it. … But it’s not only money that can be debased, it’s also paper. And far more credit is based on paper than on cash. … If you talk about cash in the world — all the Canadian dollars, U.S. dollars, Euros, Renminbi — there’s probably something in the order of $13 trillion. But if you talk about derivatives, there’s $600 trillion. According to some, it’s closer to one quadrillion…”

The key point is the lack of location. What is completely immaterial or virtual has no physical substance and so has no spatiality or locatedness in place, on in time, like a memory of a great party that once was. Some derivatives, such as futures, operate exactly in this manner: they are a contract to buy at a present price at a given time (ie. later). That is, at a future time, they will be converted into specific material assets. The mistake of non-asset backed paper derivatives is to leave open the maturation date, allowing them to be traded infinitely and also to become difficult to re-associate with the material aspects they originally stood in for, acting virtually, as if they were those things. Futures do not have this ‘as if’ quality in themselves until new instruments were created which could then stand in for the futures instead. Syndicated risks in the insurance market are also different – they are fundamentally probabilities – but once one creates a second order of instruments which are presented ‘as if’ they were insurance policies, then one is again dealing in virtualities, a place-less, non-geographic set of entities.

- Rob

In its 11th hour, the Bush Administration has authorized a new US Arctic Policy (National Security Presidential Directive 66), which will serve as a continuing, broad policy guideline to government agencies until replaced. That is, it has effect until the next Arctic policy (which can take years to produce). It governs seven broad areas of the American approach to the Arctic: national security and homeland security, international governance, extended continental shelf and boundary issues, promotion of international scientific cooperation, maritime transportation, economic issues, including energy resources, and environmental protection and conservation of natural resources.

Although there is sceptical acceptance of ‘the effects of climate change and increasing human activity in the Arctic region’ the main focus is access to oil and gas reserves on the extended continental shelf, beyond current territorial waters north of Alaska. These reserves are technically recoverable and would be easier to control.

One intended audience is the US Senate, where as the Guardian summarizes: ‘One of the main obstacles to staking a [American] claim on the Arctic seafloor [ie. the extended continental shelf] has been opposition in the Senate to ratification of the United Nations’ 1982 Law of the Sea Convention’

In concert with this policy, US News and World Report mentions that in one ‘midnight regulation‘ by which the outgoing President is attempting to tie the hands of incoming US President Barack Obama,, the Administration recently eliminated an important provision in the US Endangered Species Act requiring “independent scientific reviews” before construction or drilling can occur in an endangered species’ habitat – such as polar bears.

Another major focus is on the right to over-fly and also to freely navigate the Arctic – which will be contested by Canada should the Northwest Passage routes across its Arctic Archipelago become ice-free enough to transit. China’s Xinghua News Agency quotes Bush saying:

Preserving the rights and duties relating to navigation and over flight in the Arctic region supports our ability to exercise these rights throughout the world, including through strategic straits.

The document ignores the signing of the Ilulisat Declaration by all Arctic coastal states, claiming ‘aggressive moves by other countries’. This raises fear without providing facts, as Gunnar Sander notes in a comment to a Wall Street Journal article. Although commentators do not appreciate it, one key audience of this policy is likely to be China, which plans its own voyage to the pole in 2010 and anticipates that a shortcut route over the pole to Europe will become its main shipping route for goods if the polar cap melts.

Ironically, anticipating that melting ice will make access to hydrocarbon and other resources easier is rather ghoulish: give the extra absorption of solar energy by dark-coloured ocean compared to the white ice (the albedo effect) this implies that the planet will have been heating up at a faster than anticipated rate with sea-level rise affecting major capitals: New York, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Mumbai, all of Bangladesh, the Yucatan, the San Francisco Bay Area and so on. Perhaps the extra fuel will be needed for the lifeboats or for constructing dikes.

(Followup: Google this)

-Rob