see also a more developed essay here: Riding the Zone

1. Context – ongoing research etc

I became interested in special economic zones – space making practices that operate through exception – as I began to work with a group of undocumented organizers. This group had collectively gathered a tremendous amount of knowledge about deportation enforcement and the conflation of local policing with border policing, having worked inside and outside of local and regional prisons and detention centers of all kinds, and being exposed to the highly differentiated, changing and discretionary practices of PoliMigra themselves. And since they were organizing in Pilsen/Little Village, and connected with old-timers in the Immigrant rights movement, they also helped me understand how the gentrification and deconcentration of the “Mexican corridor” in Chicago was being incentivized through financial-territorial instruments like an enterprise zone and local TIF district. While campaigns focused on deportation enforcement, the group’s analysis considered the economic forces that squeeze parallel economies out of existence, so that enforcement (incarceration, deportation, local policing and so on) and in general the deportation regime can be seen as working to integrate populations into the dominant economic order.

So my interest in special economic zones started with the Pilsen enterprise zone, and  in relation to deportation and deportability.  (Note:in terms of our seminar, this can also be a way to look at the changing nature of statecraft, between two poles – regimes of territoriality and deportability. ) Our little group did a research/action trip and moving seminar through the suburban ring of Chicago to connect the massive warehousing industry and intermodal transport system – the global movement of goods – to deportation enforcement and polimirga practices, and to gentrification and the displacement of migrant workers from Pilsen/Little Village into concentrated and isolated pockets around warehousing districts in the Western and Southwestern suburbs. This was also our first effort to  develop a self-organized experimental seminar across different forms of knowledge production, it seems important to connect these different moments and models of experimental learning. Props and much gratitude to Carmela Garcia,  José Herrera, Jesus Guillen, Mario Cardenas, Yana Kunichoff, Juan Ibarra, Jorge Mújica Murias, Michael Johnson, the no name group, and the rest of the Moratorium on Deportations Campaign for all the learning we did together. (see here – www.moratoriumondeportations.org)

Notes for 3 Crises seminar – quick and dirty introduction to the two main US-based models for establishing “special economic zones”.

Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ) – developed during the first stage of the New Deal,  consists of establishing territories within US that are considered outside of the jurisdiction of the US, “offshore onshore” – from the standpoint of trade and the movement of goods (mostly). Brief history and structure today — complicating that picture a little bit, looking at zoning as space-making processes. Then a brief introduction to the Enterprise Zone (EZ), developed in the early 80s as a neoliberal instrument,  purportedly a solution to the stagflation crisis; EZ’s are areas considered to be offshore from the standpoint of labor conditions and local regulations. And the key question, which there is not enough time for today,  is how “zone” is experimented with in the current crisis.

These are partial notes, the research is in-process. I will be doing a visual/territorial research project focusing on FTZ #22 (Chicago) – tracing its history from an “island” model to “integration” model; what exactly does integration mean? Tracking new paradigms of integration in one specific site: Joliet Arsenal. Using Renaissance 2020, the strategic futures plan of Chicago developed by the Commercial Club, to read “integration”backwards. Also developing site visits, experiential engagements and video work… .

2.  FTZs – Foreign Trade Zones – from zone, to zone project, to zone universe

•    FTZ are significant in terms of scale of economic activity, also in terms of the ideological function they perform
•    Bibliography:  why such an absence of critical work on Foreign Trade Zones? A lot has been written about free trade zones, maquilladoras, export processing zone and so on around the world. A lot of scholarship on the direct historical precedents, historically the laboratories for the practice of modern extraterritoriality, or extraterritoriality as an instrument of statecraft – colonial freeports in 18th and 19th century , esp British outposts in China (Gouangjou) and the Caribbean (Kingston) (also sites of freeports today). Primary research on FTZ: Two studies of political and cultural history of the FTZ, monographies written by economic geographers in 1964 and 1965 . Since 1980′s, consulting thinktanks publish hundreds of studies touting the economic benefits of FTZ’s; and some independent academic quantitative and regressive analyses that are more inconclusive.  Academic research on  FTZ’s seems focused on asking: “do they work?”; not nearly as much attention has been paid to FTZ’s as a socio-spatial form, or the ideological function they perform. For the early cultural history I am heavily relying on the work of Dara Orenstein : Foreign Trade Zones and the Cultural Logic of Frictionless Production – Radical History Review — see also here for Orenstein’s collection of primary documents   Offshore Onshore

•    Precedent in the US: during the financial crisis of the late 1830’s bonded warehouses are introduced, following model of Britain and Netherlands, where goods could be imported and temporarily stored duty-free. Bonded warehouses do not escape regulatory oversight (commerce department, this or that seed inspection bureau, time limits etc) – so bonded warehouses were understood as sitting within national territory and shielding merchants from tariffs by administrative fiat, not by jurisdiction
•    1894 – 1918 Orestein charts the political pressure from merchant associations, railroad margates and chambers of commerce to open up freeports in the US on East Coast. What lobbyists see as models are the European freeports of the 19th century, esp the German model, particularly Hamburg. Freeports were about the international movement of goods and also about storage and warehousing. (without storage, no circulation). Freeports allowed goods to be warehoused outside the tariff jurisdiction (and regulatory mechanisms) of the nation state. This means commodities could sit “off the grid” without incurring tarriffs – merchants could wait for optimum market conditions for inserting goods into national markets.
•    in the US, these efforts were unsuccessful until 1934, with the passage of Foreign Trade Zones Act in the first phase of the New Deal. The US-version of the Freeport is called a Foreign Trade Zone, although apparently neither the legislators nor the administrators of the first zone seemed to remember the correct term, nor to understand if foreign is a modifier for trade or for zone… What is remarkable about the rhetoric of the FTZ boosters: it is not  about manufacturing and export, but about trade, and the dream is to depose Britain as the world’s marketplace

•    The Foreign Trade Zones Act refers to the zone as a space of exception, and a space of circulation:

(……) isolated, enclosed and policed area outside of US customs territory;
boundaries are under authority of US customs agencies;
The boundary is to be build under strict specifications (slide)
located in or adjacent to US international points of entry
various procedures for tariff and ad valorem tax relief –
“off shore” signifies a differential from economic regulations in the domestic economy

•    modern free ports were national regimes
•    looking at the discourse and imagery of the first FTZ: what comes in to subsume and suppress anxiety over zone as a partly denationalized territory (and of the magic of how exactly this works)   is an emphasis on the fence (dominates the legal text and dominates the diagrams and maps drawn out in the first FTZ in staten island; it also is the central to the iconography of the photographs of of FTZ #1)
•    the first decade of FTZ history – confusion as to what this is, what exactly is the juridical status of the territory…??? Outside the landed boundary of the fence was the US, on the other side of the water boundary was the rest of the world – how does FTZ mediate between one regime and the other (the national regime and the regime of global trade) ?

•    initially, manufacturing is specifically prohibited from zone activity – starting in the 50’s it is allowed on a case by case basis. Orestein notes that the question of manufacturing is a question of labor intensive processes which is a quest of labor politics.  In the first 40 yrs there are relatively few zones built and activated (by 1970 there are 7 zones established only), but each development, and each zone designation, each new commercial interest wanting to operate in the zone, is accompanied by a tremendous amount of rhetoric and negotiation around what can happen within zone and how it is isolated from the rest of the economy. How zone is talked about , imagined , represented and understood produces certain understandings of the distinction between production and circulation. The absence of labor helps to define zone as sites of circulation, not sites of production – ZONE becomes in a sense a regime that visually and rhetorically separates labour from trade, workers from commodities.

•    WPA posters depict manufacturing and toiling in the mines of the west, not in the FTZ of the east coast  — see Orenstein’s in-progress website  http://offshoreonshore.info/
•    FTZ also becomes a regime in which commodities replace workers – the fetishistic animation of commodities in the absence of real workers — commodities become reconceptualized as “live storage” – the time value of commodities which levitate and are put into circulation as collateral becomes a specific spatial fix to the credit crisis.

(note) History of the first 40 years of FTZ is also a history of the modern goods movement and warehousing economy,  a de-laboring of the global goods movement in general. In the 60’s containerization becomes standardized – which effectively removes human associations from products and dissolves distinctions between land and sea. Goods movement becomes a set of abstractions, of timetables.

(note) Today – FTZ – supply chain management, warehousing industry and logistics as well as development of major intermodal transport hubs(ports – inland ports) rail to rail, rail to road  – the networks of global goods movement – imagines the movement of goods in the absence of people. One of the main measurements of activity in intermodal facilities is number of lifts (cargo lifts). The only “workers” imagined in the FTZ are managers, administrators, clerical staff, tech staff, consultants and so on.  **** primary research done by Warehouse Workers for Justice on working conditions in the warehousing districts of FTZ #22 in Chicago    http://www.warehouseworker.org/badjobs/

•    Starting as early as 1940 FTZ: strategic stockpiles of resources, thus helping the government anticipate entry into the war; 1950′s – manufacturing can be allowed on a case by case basis; “island model” whereby commercial and production activity within the zone is isolated from the rest of the economy
•    FTZ act (amendments) – and a lot of changes to the FTZ regulations – interpret what some of this means.  Also changing depending on each round of GATT agreements (1946-1995) – battles over high-value added goods, increasing exceptions to the tariff rate, increasing manufacturing. FTZ Association becomes main lobby group to influence regulations: -Zones program acts as a tool by which the United States can practice both the letter and spirit of its trade laws and policies –
•    1980 – duty on products manufactured in Zones should not be assessed on U.S. value-added – that is, value which consists of domestic materials, parts, labor, overhead, or profit, only on foreign non-duty paid content. .. integrated model begins.
•    Since 1986, U.S. Customs’ oversight of FTZ operations has been conducted on an audit-inspection basis, whereby compliance is assured through audits and spot checks under a surety bond, rather than through on-site supervision by Customs personnel; increasingly, self-compliance via data integration.

FTZ regulations today:

⁃    processes that take place in zone: manufacturing, assembling, disassembling, mixing, testing, destruction, repackaging, repair, exhibition
⁃    Established by Department of Commerce FTZ Board – US Customs Port of Entry
⁃    Grantor agency manages zone project within a specified grantor territory, interpreted as being 60 miles or 90 min from outer boundary of port of entry
⁃    Developers or other commercial enterprises within the grantor territory apply for zone activation through Grantor Agency – for specific footprint (enclosed area)
⁃    Boundary: under supervision of Customs and Border Protection – since 1980 compliance is assured through audits and via electronic integration
⁃    General purpose zones or sites – multi-use warehousing, distribution centers (operate as “public utilities”)
⁃    Special purpose subzones – single-user and manufacturing; subzones may lie outside of grantor territory but are integrate in zone projects
⁃    Set of expanding exceptions on tariff and ad valorem taxes, also inventory taxes
⁃    United States has over 277 zone projects; each project has multiple zones, and multiple subzones
⁃    2,500 firms that operated under FTZ during 2009
⁃    Main processes: assembling, disassembling, repackaging, oil refining, automotive, pharmaceutical, and machinery/equipment sectors
⁃    In 2008, shipments into FTZ’s total $693 billion, or roughly 40% of US manufacturing GDP

•    concept/rhetoric of FTZ : from zone, to zone project, to zone universe
•    not only 277 perimeters on map, with around 1000 activated sites, zone is also a set of procedures and codes, a permitting and management system, a set of policy instruments, mediated by a constellation of terms: venture, innovation, flexibility, competitiveness, efficiency, profit recovery, trade.
•    Commodities that move within the zone universe — between zones/subzones, ports of entry and military bases — never enter the territory of the United States. This means they can be assembled or stored, repackaged or tested without incurring tariffs. It also means that commodities appear as continuously moving, never in place.
•    Because they are territories but also policy instruments and financial mechanisms (responsive to “global trade factors” and historically changing), FTZs constantly under construction, expanding and reconfiguring internally. As smaller areas consolidate, new zones are carved out, and the differentials or distances that are produced by zone-ing expand in scope. More and more territories and processes (including industrial and manufacturing processes) are off-shoring, and “off” signals increasing distanciation and increasingly stratified differentials. Centralized “magnet zones” are expanding, but so too is the constellation of small, discontiguous zones outside of FTZ geographic boundaries; the interconnectedness and integration of zones and subzones, as well as of processes that take place within them, is deepening. Much of the acceleration of FTZ has to do with the emergence of enterprise zones — which are a separate instrument but often nested within FTZ.

3. ENTERPRISE ZONES – EZ

•    British model, credited to Peter Hall who imagined bringing the maquilladora model into the urban areas of the developed world . ‘wages would find their own level’ in zones of   “fairly shameless free enterprise. . . outside the scope of taxes, social services, industrial and other regulations”. The resulting low wages, reduced regulations, and minimal taxation would incentivize or attract investment. If FTZ is about offshoring from the standpoint of the movement of goods, EZ are imagined as offshoring from the standpoint of labor conditions primarily.  In Britain the first zones opened in 1981.
•    In the US, the idea appealed to Washington-based conservative Heritage Foundation, in conjunction with the Reagan presidential campaign. National legislation failed to pass, but states began adopting the model and experimenting in the early 80’s – Illinois was one of the first to establish legislation. The EZ is designated by local (usually state or county) jurisdictions. The possible location for EZs is not connected to ports of entry but instead is identified in terms of “underdevelopment” indicators and rhetorically justified in terms of job creation and local development. In these areas, which are not physically enclosed, commercial interests activate zone-ing to off-shore from the standpoint of labor, land use and tax abatement regulations, in relation to local and state taxes, among many other factors.  (example: exception to taxes paid on building materials,  a “jobs” tax credit, exceptions on state taxes and utility taxes for electricity and natural gas etc. this is standard. Plus, grants and deals for road repair, new water and sewage plants.  Etc.)
•    While “job creation” is one of the justifications for EZs, they become areas of corporate quasi-sovereignty – corporations exert de facto control over the conditions of living , laboring and migration of populations in special zones.  Zone makes flexible what exactly can be called a job, what are conditions under which people can be hired, retained, trained, discarded and worked (the rise of the perma-temp regime). Many EZ’s offer a credit for every job created, often with a cap on wages – so they effectively incentivize low wage jobs. (perma-temping  keeps wages low, keeps ability to unionize at bay).
•    establishing new EZ’s means a frenzy of deal-cutting and buyouts.  Most EZ benefits end up going to major corporations – in California a study finds the vast majority of EZ benefits have gone to less than one percent of the states corporations, those with revenues of 1 bill or more. Major corporations like Wells Fargo, Nordstrom and Levi Strauss are subsidized by the Enterprise Zone program. Even big banks get a cut through a tax deduction on loans.
•    EZ – competition has to do creating and speculating upon labor market differentials – zones can be designated at small scales – inter-area competition at level of counties or municipalities : play one area, one group of workers, off against another, to the net benefit of capital – inter-area competition

4. preliminary notes for a CASE STUDY: FTZ #22, Chicago
•    Established in 1975 –Illinois International Port District is the grantor agency – the first site, which is still the magnet site today, is a number of warehouses inside Calumet Harbor (below). Then a few sites added in late 1970’s and early 80’s

•    Expansion 1987-1989 – procedural changes in interpreting what it means to be adjacent to the boundaries of the port of entry create the idea of a grantor territory, a perimeter of off-shorability.
•    Also, EZ in IL is created in 1982. In IL, counties or municipalities designate zones and IL Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity certifies them.  1983 – Illinois Enterprise Zone Association established – a group of developers, consultants, business leaders and government officials, lobbying group.
•    Second expansion in of FTZ in 2000 – expansions again in 2002 and 2003
•    partial map of FTZ #22 in 2010, indicated perimeter of grantor territory across 6 counties as well as activated multi-purpose FTZ sites. does not include 14 subzones. Nor the zones that were activated and then deactivated or shut down, nor the sites for which there is no address or footprint available though gov records. still working on this map.

•    More and more EZ’s are also being activated within FTZ#22, producing increasingly stratified differentials across a greater range of territorial scales. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of tariff differentials, competitiveness for private entities, profit restoration and trade efficiency which had been historically associated with justifications for FTZ is replaced by claims of civic engagement, local development and job creation, typically reserved for enterprise zone-ing
•    Integration at this stage of FTZ #22 restructuring apparently has to do with at least three ways in which the zone as a space of exception expands, gains permanency, and becomes molecularized (granulated) throughout the whole landscape of administrative units, governmental agencies, and special interests of all kinds. First, there is a considerable expansion of the perimeter of the service area – since this can be either a 60-mile or a 90-minute transit radius from the port of entry, new rail, inland waterways, and express roadways expand the distance covered horizontally. The zone is also rooting itself more deeply into local jurisdictions, cutting incentive deals at the level of local zoning laws and permitting processes, such that a host of previously unconnected localized actors and dispersed agents are brought into the incentivizing process, sometimes in overlapping relations. Secondly, there is a move toward permanence around increasingly autonomous magnet sites, which were initially designated with set expiration or “sunset dates” and required oversight by Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol. Currently, sunset dates are being removed, and regulatory oversight often is farmed out to third party contractors; in addition to making magnet sites permanent exceptions, there is now a self-interested coincidence between magnet site and grantor as public-private economic entity, rather than government agency. Thirdly, there is increasing flexibility for zone designation initiated by end-users for a number of industries, such as mixed-use warehouse districts and corporate parks, oil refineries, pharmaceutical and aerospace works, testing and destruction facilities. It becomes faster, cheaper and easier to activate zone-ing at smaller and smaller scales and at greater distance outside of the designated perimeter of the service area.
•    In a sense, integration refers to the zone universe as a form of governance through economic integration across a range of distinct municipalities, governing bodies and so on…. .

5. preliminary notes for a CASE STUDY – JOLIET ARSENAL site within FTZ #22
•    Joliet Arsenal is located within the FTZ 22 perimeter.  Former weapons manufacturing site; the Illinois Land Conservation Act of 1996 outlines how this site should be redeveloped – remaining land for military use; a wildlife refuge and the remaining for private development.
•    JADA – Joliet arsenal development authority – a quasi-public agency (private), mediate between all the taxing bodies, government agencies and private interests – the state utilizes the agency as facilitator of local and inter-municipal agreements.  JADA is very nimble and works at all diff scales – focus on working with 2 CenterPoint developments on consolidation of intermodal sites, together these massive warehouse districts and intermodal hubs form the second largest inland port in the country.

•    JADA worked to secure the conditions for the new sites:  village of Elwood incorporates the land and forms a TIF district in 2000, tax breaks for 23 years – 100-200 million subsidy. Village and state paid for a new $25 mil water and sewer plant . EZ is formed in 2002, rubber stamped by governor:  sales tax exemptions on construction materials used for buildings within the zone (7-10 mil), a $500 credit on Illinois income taxes for each worker hired and an investment tax credit for machinery and other equipment. tax abatement on commercial property tax.
•    In addition, the Illinois Department of Transportation : 125 mil in public roadway funds
•    Also political firepower to strongarm the army and the EPA regulations for cleanup of the site; the group includes U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.), U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and state Rep. Jerry Weller (R-Ill.)–  lobbying the Army for accommodations that would allow Oak Brook-based CenterPoint Properties to seize  “unique but fleeting opportunity for economic redevelopment”.   …. to expedite an agreement that explicitly permits the proposed intermodal rail facility and that redirects the roughly $8 million allocated by the Army for preliminary work on a biological remediation facility at the Arsenal, to be used instead for excavating and removing a former landfill on the industrial park site.
•    Intermodal, problem of political economy:
⁃    Chicago is not only the nation’s most dense hub for rail-to-rail transfers; it is also the most dense rail/truck intermodal center, accounting for about 5 million lifts (intermodal exchanges of containers and trailers) between rail and truck. This number is expected to grow to 12 million by the year 2020.  To put these numbers in perspective, the next largest rail/truck hub in the country is the Los Angeles/Long Beach region with about 3 million lifts per year.
⁃    Chicago : 10 rail companies, operate 100 switching yards – crossovers take time
⁃    consolidation of freight flows becomes one of the primary strategic objectives in the Commercial Club of Chicago’s document Renaissance 2020. This means regional economic integration across distinct municipal governments. The Illinois Constitution provides a mechanism for regional cooperation but it is seen as not efficient. Also, the strategic plan calls for a framework requiring municipal corporations to take account regional economic interests in the process of levying taxes; attracting new development; and designing and implementing their zoning, building, and housing codes.
•    Commercial Club solution:
⁃    Administrative reform for economic integration;  1. Stratified and targeted abatements and incentives that are end-user driven; 2. Overall regional policy that creates good business climate.
⁃    what does governance look like?
⁃    ”First, effective economic development directions must be led by private market initiatives while government policies should be designed to maintain a strong general business climate. business  leadership is necessary because the private sector has a natural understanding of the sources of economic growth and of the needs and conditions for job creation.  Also business leadership can provide continuity across changing government administrations.”
⁃    example from Renaissance 2010: “Over the last few years, the Illinois Community College System has developed a “Workforce Preparation Action Plan.” One of the initiatives under this plan (termed Education to Careers) calls for state and local partnerships of business, labor, and education to prepare young people with the basic academic and technical skills needed for careers in skilled and profitable jobs.  The program includes school-based learning and career counseling, work experiences integrated with educational programs, and activities that connect educators and employers.”
⁃    regional governance: the RCC, a quasi-public agency will provide strong incentives to counties and municipalities to use their powers in ways that advance reintegration of regional activity with global trade.  The chief incentive mechanism will be the RCC’s bond-issuing function. In addition, the RCC will have other powers and responsibilities to be exercised on its own initiative.    Private public entity that The state would utilize as facilitator of inter-municipal agreements.  Has the power to persuade, not the power to compel funding through taxes on services and redistributing the concentrated retail sales taxes from high density retain municipalities.

6. Directions for speculative research, (experiential, visual etc)

•    How can we read Joliet Arsenal site backwards, from the perspective of the future as imagined by Ren 2020? How do different collective bodies navigate the system of boundaries that make up FTZ 22? Where and how do frictions appear, entanglements develop?

•    experimental site visits and guided tours begin spring 2012, open to participants in the seminar. Also auctioned off at AREA auction, and proposed to colleagues in undocumented and migrant justice movement locally; how to intersect regimes of extratetrritoriality and regimes of deportability? can the zone serve as a paradigm for neoliberal statecraft (territproes and populations become zoned for maximum optimization and reinsertion into capital circuits???)

•    mapping project of FTZ #22 – focusing on criss-crossing juridical frameworks if possible (in-process)
•    a first text  will be published with Compass Group book, see link in readings (it is the final draft ,suggestions welcome)

(DRAFT)

Gratitude to Carmela Garcia,  José Herrera, Jesus Guillen, Mario Cardenas, Yana Kunichoff, Juan Ibarra, Jorge Mújica Murias, Hugo Esparza, Michael Johnson, Tito Moreno, the No Name Group and all those involved in the Moratorium on Deportations Campaign. I hope not to speak in anyone else’s name – I offer instead my own reflections on our discussions and actions, as well as on the sense of community and shared knowledge we were able to create.

Movements

In spring 2010, a few undocumented youth organizers from Chicago pulled out from DREAM Act campaigns and began trying to form an alternative to the mainstream of the immigrant rights movement. All the youth in the group had been organizing for several years, and had strong individual critiques of the politics of the movement. Some got their political education in college. Others became politicized while incarcerated in Cook County Jail under immigration hold. Some were organizing even while under deportation proceedings―and while living under various Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “remote supervision” programs, which vary from ankle bracelets and mandatory curfews to regular home visits and restrictions on movement.

One of their first actions as a group was an un-permitted march on Cook County Jail on July 29 2010, a gesture of non-compliance on the date in which Arizona bill SB1070 went into effect. I somehow stumbled into the organizing process in the run-up to this action, and became immediately drawn to this group. The organizing became more and more experimental and self-exploratory, and more explicitly about searching for a collective vision, a collective critical voice. Over the next year we worked together, meeting, talking, walking, writing, exchanging poetry and dance moves. We talked about the lock-step and top-down politics of part of the movement, its hostility to internal critique and co-dependency with the Democratic Party’s political machine. We staged parties and speak-outs to challenge the specific rhetoric and performance of “undocumented youth.” For me the most transformative experiences were those that put bodies in motion through and across territories―from prisons and detention centers to suburban warehouse districts, from heritage farms to city streets and corporate plazas.

In September 2010 we set off as a group of about thirty immigrants, some with papers and some without, for a three-day bike ride of more than a hundred miles around the suburban perimeter of Chicago. It was a counterclockwise arc: from Schaumburg to Wheaton, Naperville, through Romeoville and Bolingbrook, then Joliet, Homer Glen, Bridgeview and back into Chicago through Back of the Yards and La Villita. We rode through a landscape of residential enclaves and malls, massive warehousing districts and inland ports, rail lines and limited access roads, by detention processing centers and county jails contracted by ICE to warehouse and incessantly transfer almost 30,000 people under deportation proceedings in 2010 alone.

Our route kept us well within Foreign Trade Zone #22, the area within either a sixty-mile, or ninety-minute travel radius from the Port of Chicago. This is something we knew very little about. We knew it referred to territories which were in a certain sense outside of the jurisdiction of the United States, particularly for the purposes of goods movement, and also that it contained other “special economic zones” or zones of exception. We knew this suburban ring was a major node on the global supply chain, sometimes referred to as the Midwest Empire: the largest concentration of intermodal, warehousing and logistics facilities on the continent, where commodities produced all over the world were shipped, stored, repackaged, assembled, redirected, or destroyed. We also knew that goods movement through the Foreign Trade Zone had a growing impact on the movement of migrant worker populations, that immigrant communities from Central and Latin America (previously concentrated in the urban Little Village-Cicero corridor) were moving toward several pockets in the western and southwestern suburbs―a migration largely fueled by the labor needs of the warehousing and logistics industry. We knew that several townships in the zone integrated local policing and border patrol; that “heritage farms” served as national organizing hubs for the Minutemen, and that several townships had recently passed local anti-immigrant and English-Only ordinances.

In researching and preparing for the ride, I found it hard to visualize these different forces working together, to visualize how the management of migration and the logistics of trade were related. The zone appeared to me as a perimeter within which a set of confusing regulations gave exceptional, incentivizing status to certain enterprises engaged in trade and the global movement of goods, which is increasingly becoming a factor in the reorganization of urban/suburban space. But within the zone entire populations were on the move, too, re-concentrated in increasingly dispersed residential enclaves, and rendered increasingly deportable. The ride marked the beginning of my effort to make sense of the zone as a dynamic system, a process that integrates the mass movement of goods with the accelerated movement of territories and with the production and management of mass deportability.

Over three days we rode and stopped for a number of more or less organized local actions. There were meetings and protests, petitions and flyerings, and the dropping of large banners. We distributed several political statements and tactically inserted ourselves into mainstream media along the way. We rode slowly, at the speed of the slowest riders, on county highways and limited access roads, up to and through the boundaries of warehouse districts. We stopped to conduct picnic seminars in residential developments that warehoused thousands of perma-temp migrant workers. We rode thorough monoculture crops and monocultural counties. We held teach-ins and conducted sidewalk chalking actions about the history of English-only legislation and the conflation of local policing with border enforcement―what organizers refer to as poli-migra. We took turns speaking, in different languages, and through different frames, about the specific ways in which the border was widening and stretching across every aspect of social life.

We understood that our collective presence would be expressive, would say something. We assumed that the roving, inquisitive, public presence of migrant bodies would be disruptive in both residential and commercial enclaves, and on the network of roads that connect and enclose them. We also assumed that a bike caravan would be inherently discordant to the rhythms of suburban mobility and the densely integrated flows of the intermodal transport system. What surprised me was the capacity of the bike caravan as a social form to register, or somehow make legible and sensible, the system of differential mobilities and immobilities that made up the zone. Somewhere between a slow-moving intervention and territorial research, the ride involved people using their experiences, bodies, and the conditions of their own lives to collectively register a dynamic geography under construction.

Sitting down to plan who would ride when and where, and who would drive the supply cars was a real lesson in the complexities of how different bodies can or cannot move under specific conditions. The production of these differentials is mediated by a system of overlapping jurisdictions, a framework that produces distances across which certain bodies can be policed in certain ways. And it is neither simple, nor always visible, nor easy to visualize. There are many changing and often discretionary ways in which people become identified, targeted, incarcerated, conditionally released, electronically monitored, detained, and shipped between detention centers. In the case of our small group, undocumented organizers were denied access to drivers’ licenses, and several were under deportation proceedings, their movement restricted to the jurisdiction of particular deportation courts. Once placed in electronic surveillance programs (a regime often referred to as the “prison without walls”), people who are facing deportation have the rhythms of their lives structured by ankle bracelets, mandatory curfews, or regular home visits. Criss-crossing jurisdictional frames also has to do with differentiated policing practices. Some counties and townships fully integrate local policing with border enforcement, through programs like 287g (which deputizes local cops as border patrol agents) or Secure Communities (which operates by integrating the data gathered by local police with homeland security databases). The result is that undocumented parents and their American citizen children would be differently affected by the possibility of encounters with police across different jurisdictions.

We negotiated these issues because our caravan purposely occupied at least one lane of traffic at all times, and was sure to encounter some hostility. More importantly, we negotiated these issues because one of our goals was to expose and contest poli-migra practices. This became the basis of our presentations in several public meetings along the way, from meeting with two people in Schaumburg to hundreds in Joliet, themselves part of the growing concentrations of increasingly undocumented migrant workers in the suburban counties.

During the ride we learned that how movement is policed has a lot to do with how people are made to appear to be in or out of place. We also learned about how commodities and places themselves are on the move. Juridical frameworks can tether and immobilize specific bodies within specific territories; but they also extract territories and move them elsewhere, off-shoring entire localities or industries.

(incomplete map of FTZ #22 – grantor territory as of Fall 2010, includes active general purpose zones; does not include subzones or sites no longer active, also missing several sites for which there is no footprint in Department of Commerce archives)

Strangers in a Foreign Trade Zone

Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ) #22 covers a vast area. On a map, FTZ #22 covers Cook, Du Page, Grundy, Kane, Kankakee, Kendall, Lake, McHenry, and Will Counties, certain areas of Porter County in Indiana, and sites outside of this perimeter. But an FTZ is also a set of procedures and codes, a permitting and management system, and a set of policy instruments, mediated by a constellation of terms: venture, innovation, flexibility, competitiveness, efficiency, profit recovery, trade. An FTZ is a territory but also a project, that is to say, a set of integrated processes whereby zone-ing happens, whereby territories (spatial, economic, and juridical) are continuously being (re)made. A trade zone is not a static delineation on a map, but rather a process of spatialized power.

An FTZ is established in conjunction with international points of entry. Each port of entry can become a zone project; each zone project can produce numerous zones, and each zone can have numerous subzones. The boundaries of an FTZ as they are marked on the maps of the Federal Zoning Board can be a radius of sixty miles or ninety minutes transit from the edges of an international port of entry, and are established by the Department of Commerce. The area inside this boundary is the service area of a grantor agency. It is the area within which a zone can be activated, like a perimeter of off-shorability. In the case of FTZ #22, the grantor is the Illinois International Port District (containing the Port of Chicago). Within this service area, business interests work through the grantor to activate or make use of zone for specific footprints. Once activated, a zone is considered outside of the United States for the purposes of trade, tariffs, processing of goods (which includes assembly, disassembly, destruction, testing, mixing and manufacturing), and other regulations.

When a zone becomes activated it must be completely secured―enclosed by a border, with access points under the jurisdiction of Customs and Border Protection, often managed via proxy (private) agencies. FTZ #22 currently has at least eleven activated zones, including several logistics and warehousing centers, such as the 2,500-acre CenterPoint Intermodal Center in Elwood and the 3,600-acre CenterPoint Intermodal and Logistics Center near Joliet, which together form the largest inland port in the country. FTZ #22 also integrates dozens of sub-zones: smaller, discontiguous, single-user, restricted-access areas that are frequently used as manufacturing sites. Subzones may even be located outside of the boundaries of the grantor territory, but are connected to ports of entry and other “special economic zones” via an expanding network of publicly-funded rail lines, roads and inland waterways.

The US currently has over 270 FTZ projects, each with a service area radius of between sixty and120 miles from center, and around 1,000 sub-zones. Manufacturing and waste generating processes, assembling, repackaging, storage, exhibition, shipping, and other processes within the zone legally occur outside of the United States. Commodities that move within the “zone universe”―between zones/subzones, ports of entry and military bases―never enter U.S. juridical territory. This means they can be assembled or stored, repackaged or tested, without incurring tariffs. It means manufacturing and assemblage can take place without value-added taxes on domestic materials, parts, labor, overhead, or profit. It also means that materials and commodities appear as continuously moving, never in place.

Because they are not only territories, but also policy instruments and financial mechanisms (responsive to “global trade factors” and historically changing), FTZs are not stable. The zone universe is constantly under construction, expanding and deepening. As smaller areas consolidate, new zones are carved out, and the differentials or distances that are produced by making zones expand in scope. More and more territories and processes are “off-shoring,” where “off” signals a range of increasingly stratified differentials. Centralized “magnet zones” are expanding, but so too is the constellation of small, discontiguous zones outside of FTZ geographic boundaries; the interconnectedness and integration of zones and subzones, as well as of processes that take place within them, is deepening. As a system, zones are in accelerated movement.

Nested within FTZ #22 are dozens of other special economic zones. The most pervasive of these are the “enterprise zones,” (EZs) which are designated by local (usually state or county) jurisdictions. The location of EZs is not related to ports of entry, but instead identified in terms of “underdevelopment” indicators and rhetorically justified in terms of job creation and local development. In these areas, which are not physically enclosed, commercial interests activate zoning to off-shore from the standpoint of labor, land use, and abatement regulations, in relation to local and state taxes, among many other factors. While “job creation” is one of the justifications for EZs, they put into motion incentivizing mechanisms as well as risk management systems that make flexible what exactly counts as a job―the conditions under which people can be hired, retained, trained, discarded, and worked. EZs emerged around the rhetoric of “development”, while creating corporate tax havens that deprive local communities of revenue and subsidize buildings, roadways, water treatment plants and other major infrastructure to encourage territorial centralization of specific economies.

FTZs and EZs offer “competitive advantages,” an effect of nimble, overlapping, and contradictory jurisdictional frameworks. FTZ implies that goods enter US territories but remain outside of US trade markets, while EZ implies that bodies that are physically in the US in terms of policing and labor are moved outside of the US in terms of labor regulations and human rights. FTZ has to do with the connection to ports of entry, to the mass movement of goods, and the assembly, storage, or destruction of commodities and materials; EZ is tied to managing and speculating upon shifting labor markets, warehousing, and supply chain management of labor as commodity. FTZ has to do with tariff differentials and cost differentials for parts, as well as flexible inventory and storage of commodities (the time value of money, which pertains to price differentials between spot and futures markets, for instance, and “just-in-time” production). EZ has to do with tax differentials and labor cost differentials at smaller scales (competition between states or even counties) and to the flexibilization of work.

Both are responsive, dynamic financial organisms, each ostensibly developed as a solution to previous crises of capitalism. In the U.S., the legal framework for FTZs was first established in 1934, a response to the Great Depression. Initially, regulations explicitly prohibited manufacturing processes from FTZ’s; free from labor intensive processes, zones would also be free from the friction of labor politics. In the first 40 years there were relatively few FTZ’s activated (by 1970 there are 7 zones established only), but each development, each zone designation, each new commercial interest wanting to operate in the zone, is accompanied by a tremendous amount of rhetoric and spatio-juridical experimentation. How zone is talked about, imagined and represented produces certain understandings of the distinction between production and circulation. Gradually, and increasingly after containerization becomes standard in the 1960′s, human associations become separated from commodity movement, even as manufacturing processes become normalized as an FTZ activity: FTZ becomes in a sense a regime that separates labor from trade, workers from commodities, producing a de-laboring of the global goods movement.

EZs were developed in the early 1980’s and justified as a solution to the “stagflation” crisis, following the British model credited to Peter Hall who imagined bringing the maquilladora into the urban areas of the developed world. In Hall’s vision, “wages would find their own level” in zones of “fairly shameless free enterprise (…) outside the scope of taxes, social services, industrial and other regulations”. The resulting spiraling low wages, reduced regulations, and minimal taxation would incentivize or attract investment. While FTZs and EZs emerged as distinct spatial and rhetorical regimes, in the current crisis, these systems of exception cumulate in ways that are intensely experimented with and speculated upon. This is producing new geographies that correspond not only to “just-in-time” production and the logistics management of commodities on the global market, but also to the management of cheaper and cheaper labor and the marketization of migrant bodies.

Integration and Hallucination

Our little bike caravan took place precisely as FTZ #22 adopted the “Alternative Site Framework,” an extensive process of expansion and restructuring. As we were riding, the zone was shifting from an “island model” to an “integrated model”, which refers to integrating zone activity within the larger economy.

Integration at this stage of FTZ #22 restructuring apparently allows the zone as a space of exception to expand, gain permanency, and become molecularized throughout the whole landscape of administrative units, governmental agencies, and special interests. First, there is a considerable expansion of the perimeter of the service area. Since this can be either a sixty-mile or a ninety-minute transit radius from the port of entry, new rail, inland waterways, and express roadways expand the distance covered horizontally. The zone is also rooting itself more deeply into local jurisdictions, cutting incentive deals at the level of local zoning laws and permitting processes, such that a host of previously unconnected localized actors and dispersed agents are brought into the process, sometimes in overlapping relations. Secondly, there is a move toward permanence around increasingly autonomous magnet sites, which were initially designated with set expiration or “sunset dates” and required oversight by Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol. Currently, sunset dates are being removed, and regulatory oversight has been transferred to the companies themselves as a set of compliance procedures. In addition to making magnet sites permanent exceptions, there is now a self-interested coincidence between magnet site and grantor as public-private entity, rather than a government agency. Thirdly, there is increasing flexibility for zone designation initiated by end-users for a number of industries, such as manufacturing, mixed-use warehouse districts, corporate parks, oil refineries, pharmaceutical and aerospace works, testing and destruction facilities. It becomes faster, cheaper, and easier to activate zoning at smaller and smaller scales and at greater distance outside of the designated perimeter of the service area. The increased “reach” of zoning has accelerated so much that there is currently no agency that keeps an up-to-date map of the integration of FTZs in Illinois.

More and more EZ’s are also being activated within FTZ#22, producing increasingly stratified differentials across a greater range of territorial scales. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of tariff differentials, competitiveness for private entities, profit restoration, and trade efficiency, which had been historically associated with justifications for FTZ, is replaced by claims of civic engagement, local development, and job creation, typically reserved for enterprise zoning. In the absence of significant studies on the claims to benefit made by either FTZ and EZ, or of any real analysis of the rhetorical and political function they perform, the two are merging into a single dreamworld.

As zoning deepens, integrates, and molecularizes, and emergency financial managers declare entire states exceptional territories, questions of jurisdiction become granulated, so that deportable bodies are both commodities to be seen as never in place, as well as offshorable entities. In the hallucinatory world of efficiency and profit maximization woven by zoning, significant parts of the U.S. are off-shoring, enclosed by walls and yet moving outside of national jurisdiction, subject only to the rules commensurate with “just-in-time” management―a territorial and financial organism integrating each of us as distinct subzones bounded at the level of skin and activated within the limits of the individual human body.

Living Systems

If extra-territoriality and deportability are instruments of statecraft, they are also global regimes. The zone offers a perspective on the articulation of neoliberal logic and the state form: a dynamic process whereby territories and populations are increasingly zoned for optimal insertion into capital circuits, enforcing regimes of stratified spatiality. Our little group had long understood that a politics based on “rights” and “papers” would not allow us to develop a shared analysis of neoliberalism, nor to call the state into question as the necessary and inevitable frame of reference. Riding the zone became a way to explore and also to disrupt specific space-making practices and capitalist relations. We began to refer to an “undocumented perspective” as not merely the perspective, knowledge, or experience of people who are themselves rendered illegal by the state. “Undocumented” came to refer not to an identity, but to a set of practices, to the production of social relations that could be resistant to the capitalist relations that characterize the zone.

After the ride we continued to organize, and our actions became increasingly public. We also re-crafted our analysis of poli-migra. It seemed to us the violence was of a different nature―and its effects were different―than we had though. Our work still focused on deportation enforcement, but we began to discuss the ways in which criminalizing migration worked to forcibly integrate so many aspects of life into the logic of the dominant economic order. In writing about the scale and scope of migrant incarceration, and its connection to increasingly widespread disenfranchisement in the name of the current financial crisis, we reconsidered what we felt was at stake in migrant resistance

. . . (poli-migra) is also an all-out attack on the communal relations and economies that immigrants are crucial in sustaining: neighborhood arrangements that collectivize domestic and reproductive work, economies of barter and exchange, social and institutional practices of self-governance. In other words, all the social relations that correspond to a definition of communities as living systems. These arrangements are a nuisance from the perspective of capital; they are an impediment to efficiency and profit maximization, [. . .] an obstacle to the total marketization of life . . . (Moratorium on Deportations, from Why an Immigrants Freedom Ride)

Our little group initially came together around a shared set of critical questions. They had to do with the hierarchies that characterized the dominant local organizations. As the mainstream immigrant rights movement shifted from “Aqui estamos, y no nos vamos” to “We are not criminals,” we questioned the political effects of the movement’s rhetoric, which seemed to rely on normative understandings of “Americaneness” and reproduced the difference between rightful citizen and rightless other in the form of “good immigrant” vs “criminal.”

Our questions also had to do with the ways in which difference based on racial, class, gender, and immigration status could sometimes become erased in social movements (via claims of inclusivity or commonality) or alternately reduced to identity politics and a narrowly-defined ally relation. In some ways, our experiments with organizing made us inefficient, especially from the perspective of campaign politics. But they produced new possibilities for how difference can be understood, and tactically leveraged. We recognize that it is capital that produces regimes of stratified and increasingly unequal differentials, and that our differences can therefore be neither overlooked nor overcome within it. In our experiments, various forms of entanglement with and across territories became our way of neither erasing nor essentializing difference, but rather leveraging it in order to force its production into some kind of legibility.

Deze beschikking is door mij op 23 november 2000,
omstreeks 13.25 uur, aan de vreemdeling ter hand
gesteld; de betekenis ervan is de vreemdeling in een voor
hem begrijpelijke taal medegedeeld onder meer door
uitreiking van der folders model C16/C17.

Zich toegang tot Nederland heeft verschaft en hem/haar
de verdere toegang tot Nederland is geweigerd en hij/zij
niet onmiddellijk naar het buitenland kan vertrekken.

When coming into Schiphol, either by land or by air, you are guaranteed a fantastic shopping experience. The authorized shopper, benefiting from the proper passports and plane tickets, can enjoy the See Buy Fly and the delirious dilemma of hundreds of different body care products, perfumes or types of chocolate to choose from.

Between the Schiphol Plaza and the See Buy Fly, a few hundred meters from the shops, backlight advertisements, window displays, bright lights and busy cash registers, is a glass perimeter they call the Immigrations Lounge. It is a long, narrow room, with three rows of chairs. One side of the room is a long white wall with numerous doors -behind them, men in uniform have taken possession of our papers. The other three walls are made of glass; there is one glass door, and it is locked. As we sit, for three days, we watch thousands of people pass by a few meters in front of us, just beyond the glass, pausing briefly at the Passport Control station before moving on. They do not see us back. We have, it would seem, been made to disappear.

I spent the first night alone here, except for the black men who clean the floors in the airport at night after all the shops are closed. They tell me they come from South Africa, and bring me a few crackers to ease my hunger, as I await deportation. This morning the Lounge is almost full: Bulgarians, Serbians, a variety of other “other”Europeans, and a family that seems to be Chinese. We look at each other with hopelessness, with shame and fear. I am fortunate to speak English, so I offer to translate for as many people as I can. And then it is her turn.

She is tall and thin, wearing a fur coat and elaborate jewelry, and is extremely agitated about her 6 pieces of matching luggage. She has a Romanian passport, like me, but unlike me she has been on a tour vacationing in the Netherlands on a group tourist visa. She is bored and doesn’t like the country, she announces, and wishes to go home. The officers, despite their obvious confusion, insist: “you must remain here and return later with your group”. She is adamant and replies with a sense of entitlement I find pleasure in translating: “I wish to leave, I no longer want to stay in this country”. Confusion soon turns into controlled anger. Though the officers continue to call her “madam”, they are clearly enraged by her complete disruption of their expectations, her refusal to enact the role of “asylum seeker”. The foreigner, particularly this type of foreigner, the “other European”, should not look like this, speak like this, act like this, nor should she desire to leave. Something is very wrong.

This confrontation has stayed with me long after my departure from that place of nowhere. Is it that she desired to access power, the right to transgress a border, to be an authorized body, by reproducing herself according to the most accessible of tropes: the shopper? Money, the ability to shop, the conflation of a choice between brands of cosmetics with freedom, seemed perhaps a way out of the trope given to a foreigner from one of those “refugee generating countries, a way of not being looked at as a potential “asylum seeker”. Because in the trope of the “asylum seeker” is all the fear, hatred, the crimilalization and demonization of poverty, a representation that divides the world into good countries and bad ones, into moral countries and the “axis of evil”, into authorized bodies and disposable ones. This same mentality divided the airport between the bodies inside and outside of the glass room. She was authorized to remain in the shopping plaza. How, then, can she not want to stay, why was she crossing the border in the wrong direction? How can she bebored, something so existentially familiar to the guards and yet rendered immediately estranged by the source of the claim? Who is this other, who is reflecting everything back to us, and why is she not well behaved? Order was once again established as all petitions – ours to enter, hers to leave -were denied.

I arrived at Schiphol armed with a video camera, and attempted to surreptitiously record the process through which I was denied an entry visa into the country, detained and then deported. These negotiations had long been of concern in my artwork, an on-going exploration of power and how it is negotiated through bodies. Apart from the geo-political border there was another kind of “access” which was being negotiated: the capability to ‘film’, to tell the story, to have a voice. What developed was a careful negotiation with the border guards over what type pf recording I was allowed to do – once assured that I was merely recording “art”, the pretty lights, shadows and reflections, the guards became friendly and cooperative. Masquerading as “just art”, something assumed to be inconsequential or non-political, the camera was briefly allowed to record the See Buy Fly as seen from the Immigrations Lounge. The resulting short video entitled “Schiphol trans-” is about transit, transition, translation, about the meanings, experiences or spaces at the border which are always dangerous, and the ways in which they are subject to control.

I continue to take a camera with me in airports, particularly after September 11^th, provoking numerous negotiations around the notions of “security”. In the proximity of X-ray machines, the ways in which a person is marked, or represented, can determine whether or not they pass . I have learned that in order to pass through, I must first be able to pass for a particular kind of norm. The new trope, that of “terrorist”, has become the useful one for the criminalization of foreigners. On one hand, terrorists are imagined to be primitive, living in caves, less than human, uncivilized, incapable of complex rational thinking or of upholding higher (Christian) values – on the other, they are highly sophisticated, wealthy, hi-tech and highly trained …even living among us. The terrorist has been antithetical to the shopper from the beginning, as fears of consumer capital’s instability in the face of attacks by terrorist networks continue to be fostered. Yet on the other, the terrorist seems adept at navigating the financial networks of transnational capital, a clever capitalist themselves. I am reminded of the Romanian vacationer with the matching luggage, the foreigner who did not play her proscribed role, whose contradictory behavior simultaneously reinforced and broke the most stereotypical ways in which the guards defined what was “normal”. In confused anger, the only response available to the officers was punitive.

How to write on Palestine and Israel when more or less everything that you know about it was gathered through the filter of mass media ? How to write anything that make sense in this publication, when you never worked nor went in Israel or Palestine ? This was our main concern when we accepted to take part to this project.

This outsider position and our common interest for questions related to pedagogy, led us to imagine a dialogue with Rozalinda Borcila, a Romanian artist and writer based in the US, who is also a member of the women’s art collective 6+. In this article, Rozalinda Borcila – who is speaking in her own name and not in the name of the collective – is bringing a reflexive and critical approach to 6+’s projects in Palestine.

6+ developed, during the last six years, projects in the Occupied Territories of Palestine. In 2006, the collective worked with Palestinian women artists on a project called “Secrets“, that led to an exhibition which traveled in the Occupied Territories and in the US.

Leaning on the network they built during several working trips to the West Bank, 6+ then developed new projects in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp, just outside Bethlehem, a camp established as a temporary living solution in 1948.

In 2006, the collective began a series of workshops with 18 young women from the camp, which also lead to a web project entitled “Turning our Tongues“. Starting with the idea of intimate journals, audio and video recordings were used and led to a series of poems, performances, narratives or songs, that can be listened to on the collective’s website (http://6plus.org/deheisheh.html). The work was developed in small groups, aiming at collectively supporting each participant’s own narrative.

At the end of 2007, 6+ initiated a new project in the same camp. Through a series of workshops 20 young women were invited to pay a special attention to the five senses while walking from the home of one participant to the next. Exploring the links between memory, senses and familiar places, they used video, photography and writing to share their personal memories; some of this material resulted in a second web project entitled “Daughters of Palestine“  (http://6plus.org/deheisheh2.html)

A third project organized by 6+ in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp has been developed around the creation of soundscapes and sound mappings. It is currently being finalized.

Some very interesting texts[1] have been written about those projects and, rather than explaining again each work in depth, the discussion presented here is aiming at raising specific issues linked to pedagogy as well as to question Eternal Tour’s positioning through the example of the 6+ projects.

microsillons : When we decided to accept writing an article for this publication about Eternal Tour – taking place this year in the very complicated Israel/Palestine context in which we never worked before – we immediately felt that we couldn’t speak directly in our own name, but that we would need to step a bit aside and to open a discussion with someone who have a personal experience to share about the area. Yet, it looks like in the “Secrets“ exhibition, with your “Disclosure“[2] piece, you have also chosen to use a “step aside“ strategy. Why did you decide to present a piece about the stereotypes on Eastern Europe in the context of a show presenting the work of Palestinian artists?

Rozalinda Borcila : “Secrets” was even from the beginning imagined as a traveling exhibition, and we sought the support and guidance of several cultural venues in the West Bank in formulating it. We invited contributions from eight Palestinian women artists, as well as the members of 6Plus, under a loose thematic concept which we felt was relevant to each artist’s work in some way, as well as offering a range of possibilities for interpretation. Some of the artwork developed in response to the theme referred directly to the occupation, but the works covered a broader range of topics. Our interest was twofold. On the one hand we wanted to work with, and in support of, Palestinian artists and cultural institutions, in direct defiance of the Apartheid Wall. On the other, we wanted to place our work and ourselves in the context of the occupation. In this sense, Secrets as a theme refers to knowledge, power and resistance; but it also refers to that which is hidden in plain sight, that which remains unacknowledged and unspoken, even as it structures almost every aspect of our lives, of our artwork. In my view, American militarism and its role in the occupation is precisely such a “secret” – it operates in every cultural act, in every aspect of contemporary American culture and daily life. And as women living in this country, we spoke of needing to confront ourselves with its reality in a direct way – not necessarily by making art objects thematically about the occupation, but by directly acknowledging that we are making work during an occupation, within a war zone, that the occupation is there even in art works that do not thematically address it because it structures the conditions within which we live and work. I did not want to be a cultural tourist, a voyeur, I did not want to be the artist that parachutes into a place to somehow “give voice” or speak for others, nor did I want to reduce the brutal violence of the occupation to whatever limited subjective responses I could offer. I decided not to make work about the occupation, but rather to mine my own work, knowledge and personal history from a very specific critical perspective, which for me represented also an ontological shift: that is, my own experience or internalization of some of the systemic geopolitical processes upon which the Occupation is predicated – by this I mean, broadly speaking, the forces of global capitalism in its current historical form. This lead me to look more closely at the injection of capitalism into “Eastern Europe” after 1989, at some of the tropes that became mobilized to conflate capitalism with freedom and democracy – and which worked, and to a large extent still work, to delegitimize alternative worlds both there and in the US.

microsillons: When you choose to work about Palestine, do you felt like it was necessary for you to go there physically to run a project ?

Rozalinda Borcila : It is clear that the forces that directly impact the lives of people in Palestine, the agents and powerful actors whose actions directly effect the destinies of millions of people around the world, are situated very very far away in the privileged spaces of neoliberal power. This gap is something that we saw as a critical problem. As I mentioned earlier, my art work was not about Palestine. But the collectively organized exhibition and, later, our workshops and collaborations with people in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp, are certainly modes of engagement that required learning about Palestinian cultural and political history, required a certain level of research into the conditions of the occupation, but also required our direct and embodied presence. We did not want to do an exhibition project that would be organized elsewhere, funded elsewhere, then curated, packaged and drop-shipped into Palestine; we did not want to work within a cultural politics that merely replicated the power dynamics we found already at work in military logic and the logic of the global (art) markets. Instead, we wanted to use the exhibition form as a vehicle for different kinds of encounter, at different scales and unfolding slowly, with time – and which would carry the very real weight of consequence and accountability. We also had to learn what it means to create an exhibition collectively, to work as equal partners without imposed or assumed hierarchies, which is what we mean when we say it was a self-organized project. And of course, the very quotidian aspects of traveling an exhibition within the Occupied Territories means someone with access and privilege must carry the works through the numerous checkpoints; our passports gave us this privilege, which we were determined not to deny but to leverage.

microsillons : How is your position as western artists perceived when you arrive to work on the field ? How important is it for you the collaborate with organization that are already working there ?

Rozalinda Borcila : Very early on in the dreaming process, we often spoke of wanting to work in solidarity, or to become the allies of women artists in Palestine. Some of us discussed the question of solidarity as we found it in various feminist traditions, and recognized that we did not know what it meant, what kinds of actions, attitudes, orientations would constitute solidarity in this sense. For me, this was a critical question and desire. I have since found my own formulation – partially learned through this 4 year process of working within 6Plus, and partially through my collaboration with the group Compass: you cannot call yourself an ally, you cannot claim solidarity, because solidarity hinges on being recognized in the eyes of another as an ally, based on your actions. This requires finding (or creating) the specific institutional, organizational, social and political conditions under which such a relation is possible.

There are many wonderful NGO’s doing excellent work in the West Bank. However, a foreign nonprofit is often not accountable to the people with which it works, and often forced by its own funding structures to adopt a service paradigm… which we were uneasy about. We received invaluable logistical support, advice and a great deal of “cover” from some of these organizations, but we were looking for a different framework within which to place ourselves. Our experiences lead us to the much besieged and only partially built Al Feneiq Cultural Center in Dheisheh Refugee Camp. This is a self-organized community and cultural institution, with an existing understanding of what role culture plays in struggle politics and in the life of a community. It is run by members of the camp Popular Committee, itself an expression of the self-governing process which began during the first intifada. I think we self-consciously placed our efforts within an existing struggle, and tried to make our work accountable to it.

Some things can seem trivial, but I think they are actually essential, and it goes to the question about being present in a place – being physically there, but more than this, paying attention, being exposed and being accountable for your position in the complex web of social relations that define a place. For instance, my Palestinian friends and hosts in Ramallah could not enter Jerusalem. So, would I go visit this city ? How would I make sense of my decision when the people who had extended their trust and knowledge, the people whom I called my partners, did not have this privilege? What does it mean to be a partner or ally in this situation?

I felt very strongly I could only go into Jerusalem when there was something strategic to be leveraged through my presence there, when I could accomplish something useful to those who were excluded from accessing the city. Hence my initial reservations and questions addressed to you[3] about this publication and the larger Eternal Tour festival in Jerusalem: what kinds of (cultural and financial) capital is involved in this project, who is generating it and where does it become concentrated? How can it involve Palestinians as equal participants with European cultural producers, when Palestinians do not have the same privilege to enter the city? I don’t think there is a way to remain neutral in a situation in which silence functions as direct complicity; I am a supporter of the cultural boycott against Israeli institutions because this campaign asks us to become accountable for, and to intervene into, cultural and institutional politics. How does the Eternal Tour project formulate an ethico-strategic position in a situation where systemic oppression has very concrete and undeniable spatial expressions – not only the restrictions placed on movement, but also the coercive, naked violence to which all Palestinians within the city are constantly exposed? I am interested to see how these questions are addressed as the project unfolds.

microsillons: You are talking about your strong opposition to the existing ‘community arts’ models[4]. What kind of methods did you use in the Dheisheh projects to differentiate your approach from those models? How can the artist, in such a context, be something else as “parachuted saviors“, go beyond a “symbolic help“ which just divert from the real problems ?

Rozalinda Borcila: In the process of organizing this exhibition, we needed to move slowly and with mindfulness: creating relationships, listening and learning, over several trips to Palestine. Out of this work a new and unexpected direction emerged, through our connection with the Owdah family in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp. So, even as we were organizing and then traveling an exhibition of 14 artists through the West Bank and later the US, we began another process which is at the intersection of art and pedagogy, and which unfolded as a series of workshops with young women in Dheisheh. These two lines or trajectories became more and more separate from each other.

In my writing and public speaking I critique a specific model or approach to community arts, (and community organizing as well). I would say this has to do with an understanding of culture that separates cultural producers from cultural consumers, that separates organizers from communities being “serviced”. We see this also in the humanitarian relation, in which people are to be saved from their predicament by benevolent agents from the elsewhere – and this often works to obscure the ways in which these outsiders have privileged access to resources precisely because of their very implication in the dynamic that produces the inequalities they are supposedly there to remedy. I admire and greatly respect many community artists, but I am also uneasy about the colonizing function of culture, particularly once genres become created, legitimized and massively deployed on the circuits of the global art market. Not only does it work to obscure the ways in which we reproduce very specific power dynamics, but it also works to divest both symbolic and material capital from efforts at local self-organization and self-governance that emerge within the struggles of oppressed communities.

So, did we solve these problems, or have we found a way out of these paradigms? Of course not, I think our work can and should be critiqued in a number of significant ways. We could not wait for structural inequalities to be resolved before acting, so we stumbled along imperfectly and, as the poem goes, we “made the road by walking”. We are also making our own strong self-criticism along the way, which can hopefully also contribute to the efforts of others – I think of this text, and many others, as part of this process. Our self-criticism has greatly reduced our “productivity” and “efficiency”, because it has meant we have internal conflicts and disagreements, and we question what we are doing at every turn. One solution that has been helpful for us has been to deliberately place our work in Dheisheh in the context of the Rights of Return movement and in support of the Al Feneiq Center as I mentioned earlier. But this has also been a complicated and uneven process. The essay I wrote for Third Text outlines some internal contradictions and struggles which remain unsolved in the work.

microsillons : For “Daughter of Palestine“, you mention that 6+ was asked to work with young women aged sixteen to eighteen. Who proposed you to develop that project ? Did they somehow influence the project and/or it’s content ?

Rozalinda Borcila: We were invited to work with the Al Feneiq by the Owdah family: Naji, director of the Al Feneiq, a leader in the Popular Committee and widely known as a radical pacifist organizer, and Suhair, a well-respected woman’s leader and counselor. They gave us a much needed education. They helped us to understand the desires for the Al Feneiq Center, their vision for a strong and empowered youth, particularly when it came to the young women of the camp, their concerns over the limited ways in which the camp could nourish the potential of young women. We spoke as intellectuals, as political people, as parents. I also met with many of the young womens’ parents, and of course the young women themselves – several of whom, over the course of our 4 year engagement, grew into leadership roles in Dheisheh, became workshop leaders in our most recent series of workshops. I feel that they helped us to understand a specific perspective on the role that culture, art and education play in the highly politicized life of the Dheisheh community. This was specifically at odds with western liberal assumptions about personal emancipation and upward mobility through education – and I feel my encounters there have helped me to understand education as both a tool for empowerment and as a site for oppression. So, yes, what we learned completely framed the project and its content.

In devising the specifics of the workshop, we proposed a general structure and welcomed guidance. The Al Feneiq staff selected the participants in consultation with their parents, helped us understand the schedules and responsibilities of the young girls, as well as introducing us to what was possible logistically. Given the real physical dangers in the camp, the girls would normally navigate it with a certain alertness – however, our recent workshops called for the group to linger, to experiment with different modes of attention, so the Al Feneiq staff organized protection for the duration of these explorations. I don’t think we experienced others influencing “our” workshops, perhaps because we did not have investment in our creative or authorial autonomy. This relation of consultation and guidance was not the same in the development of the web projects, and this shift is precisely where many tensions and unresolved contradictions can be seen operating in our work.

microsillons : You used the term “empowerment“ before. How would you discuss this term in relationship to the projects 6+ have ran in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp ? 

Rozalinda Borcila: I want to retract any suggestion that our contribution was somehow empowering people. I think the question of empowerment and disempowerment can only be addressed as redistributive and shared – and there is a very real material dimension to it without which “empowerment” becomes a way to mask a crude privatization of cultural capital under the guise of political work. I think actually this particular self-organized and highly politicized community of people in Dheisheh – who have played such a pivotal role in the intifada – are extremely powerful and do not need us to empower them. Certainly, the conditions of their oppression cannot be removed by 6 women artists doing a workshop ! However, the arduous and highly dangerous work of building the Al Feneiq was part of the process of building institutional, social and material capacity for the movement. Inasmuch as we contributed to the efforts of building a community cultural center – which means not just stone and glass but also practicing activities and modes of engagement understood by people there to be creative and/or communal – our work was a way of acknowledging the struggle for self-empowerment of this community.

microsillons : What can one learn about oneself and about one’s environment in realizing a cartography ? Is it “simply“ a mean to talk about one’s situation to the outside or can it goes further in any way?

Rozalinda Borcila: I want to first specify that I am not interested in the cartography or the map as an image, but rather in the mapping process – at times, the map works to obliterate the conditions of its own making. In the limited scope of our work with young women and girls in Dheisheh, the mapping process was intended as a way to remake our collective and individual perception of the camp. We worked with the senses, but perception is also connected to affect and to intellection – so we wanted to introduce the girls to a specific set of tools for interpreting their own experience and re-imagining their surroundings. I’m not sure to what extent this process can be transformative or in what ways exactly its transformative force can be manifested. The girls expressed a tremendous joy in “taking on” the camp environment, and very quickly engaged with their surroundings not as a given and highly coercive set of “facts”, but as open-ended, as “under construction” and therefore open to their remaking. In our discussions with people in the camp we found that this specific understanding of the work of the imagination was highly appreciated and well developed, very sophisticated: there were many projects and traditions (more or less formalized as cultural) which worked specifically to generate a radical re-imagining of the world. Al-Feneiq itself seems to be a complete remaking of reality, a material embodiment of a political reality which is not yet actualized. It is a very powerful place.

microsillons : The use of sustainable means for your workshops seems to be linked to the idea that pedagogical work, knowledge exchange could continue without you, after you leave the camp ? Is this working ? What is the importance of “teaching to teach“ ? What can “each one teach one “in such a close situation ?

Rozalinda Borcila: This has not worked as well as we had hoped, in that we were not able to create a process which could then remain active and be “owned” by people there, in our absence. Still, several of the girls in the first workshop formed their own collective, which signaled to us that they were experimenting with different forms of association and intersubjective exploration. And several of these young women taught their younger sisters the simple bookmaking skills we introduced, as well as becoming workshop leaders in the most recent visit. But of course teaching each other is a highly developed practice in the camp; I suppose one must look at the camp both as open-air prison but also as an open-air free school.

microsillons : Could you tell us more about the idea of ‘experience as constituted with struggle politics’ ? Is pedagogy here a mean to connect individual experiences to a community struggle, the present with the past and the future ?

Rozalinda Borcila: I think perhaps we can leave the term pedagogy behind – or at least signal that it presupposes that there are aspects to experience or struggle politics that fall outside of the realm of “pedagogy”. It seems to me that Dheisheh is itself a space of learning – of an imaginative and oppositional kind, that is to say the kind of learning that draws upon the capacity to imagine and postulate a reality which is not yet there. I think this also fundamentally characterizes the Right of Return movement. But this imagining is also intersubjective – knowing oneself, sensing oneself (in terms of affection and perception even) are always in relation to others: the large family, the camp, the original villages, history… this knowing also seems to be generative and somehow prefigurative, in that it brings into the present a sense of a future different from the past.

microsillons : Working at an educative project in Palestine implies a central political dimension. Do you think that with educative projects in the US, this political and critical dimension can also exist in such an evident way ?

Rozalinda Borcila : I think increasingly we need to acknowledge the political dimension of education, to understand education – as it emerges historically within the project of liberalism – as a subjectifying process. For instance, the global struggles over the university have finally articulated a refusal of the neoliberal corporate model and will hopefully go much, much further; here is an amazing indicator that the range of practices, institutions and paradigms constituting “education” is indeed a front of struggle.

- Awad, Dina, “Turning our tongues: Journals from Dheisheh“ , in : The Electronic Intifada, 17 September 2007, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article8993.shtml, last visited July 2010.

- Farhat, Maymanah, “The Unearthing of Secrets: Palestinian Art, 6+ and a Series of Transgressions“, in : ArteEast Quarterly, March 1 2007, http://www.arteeast.org/pages/artenews/article/88/, last visited July 2010.

- The “Secrets“ catalog is available online at this address http://www.6plus.org/secrets_catalog.pdf, last visited July 2010.

- Information about the projects in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp are available on the 6+ website : http://6plus.org/, last visited in July 2010.

[2] “Disclosure“ is a Rozalinda Borcila’s video referring to the “exotic“ representations of Eastern Europe by the West, more specifically to the images of Romania broadcasted by the western media after the 1990 revolution. The work is described in the “Secrets“ catalog (http://www.6plus.org/secrets_catalog.pdf, last visited July 2010). Some further thoughts related to the romanian context (and more generally to the practice of collaborative or participatory art) can be found in : Borcila, “Rozalinda, In search of liberation“, http://borcila.com/In_Search_of_Liberation.htm, last visited, July 2010.

[3] When we proposed this dialogue to Rozalinda Borcila, she wanted to first get clear view of Eternal Tour’s position. She read the Festival’s statement and we further discussed a few points with her through emails.

[4] See : Borcila, Rozalinda, “Learning Alongside“, in : Third Text, September 2008, pp. 559 – 568.

I have been teaching listening in social centers, free schools and universities. This project repurposes methods from musicology, structural acoustics and acoustic ecology, and leverages them toward a polticized understanding of space. It uses the workshop form; it is intended as a lived, live and living practice. Past iterations include critical geographies of the WTO headquarters in Geneva, the Boeing headquarters in Chicago, the underground rivers and ancient foot trails around Sulfur Springs in Tampa.

“Three Lessons” is an attempt to produce an image/text interrogation of the practice. It draws upon Jérôme Grand’s response to the exercises, as well as his interests in the history of writing and design. To formalize aspects of the practice in page form, we thought of this collaboration as a kind of scribing, which for us raised questions about orality and literacy (the contingent shaping of listening, speaking, reading, writing and remembering), and about the process whereby co-operative, oral and memorized learning becomes enclosed as reading and writing.

click here for project PDF

Dear friends

I write this letter with a heavy heart, a few days after Israel’s attack on the Mavi Marmara. The power of the flotilla campaign is in how it provokes us to understand the occupation as a function of a global regime — in which we are all a part, with which we are complicit. But mainstream media debates in the US would have us focus on whether or not the activists used metal poles when a heavily armed commando unit descended upon them in the middle of the night. Once again, it is the activists who are to appear as “violent”, in a normalized order of things in which “stability” and “way of life” for some are predicated on the controlled exposure to death of millions of others.
But you asked about interventionist art, so I shall begin again.

Dear friends

10 years ago the discourse around interventionist art was still relatively new to my students in Florida – even though many practices described as “interventionist” seemed familiar, particularly for those students with activist backgrounds. In our discussions about what these terms may mean, we tried to look at how and where they were used, what claims were being made and by whom? More importantly, we tried to chart what were some of the effects of this emerging discourse: what was changing, what was staying the same? How was the discourse itself changing over time, and what did this change do?

It seemed clear to us that this was our question, and by this I mean that the intervention-ist tactic emerges from and within the privileged spaces of neoliberal globalization – the smooth spaces where social conflict is rendered invisible, where we become subjects through our enjoyment and our “way of life”. It also seemed clear that “intervene” meant “intervene into the political”, and that the search for oppositionality was in relation to a politics of visibility – based on the assumption that increased representational visibility is linked with political agency. But intervention has at times also complicated notions of visibility, in the sense that it has tended toward disrupting the processes by which things become normalized or “hidden in plain sight”. And it has often been accompanied by much experimentation with, and debate around, what we could call an ethics of conflict – an attempt to explore ways of practicing social conflict that are an alternative to violence and annihilation.

However, we have also seen how the massive deployment on the international art circuits of interventionist, relational and socially-engaged art has worked to defuse the threat of more widespread confrontational or oppositional processes – so that the success of intervention as an art genre, its mobilization within the circuits of capital, has also worked to produce a certain normalization or, as the organizers of the Art Goes Heiligendam project have stated in their promos, “de-escalation” (the discussions around this very project and the critical response by HOLY DAMN IT and others can, I think, serve as an instructive case study for understanding how the larger dynamic can be seen to operate in specific conditions).

So where are we now – especially if the “we” asking is art teachers and students struggling in increasingly corporatized institutions?

The rise of interventionist practices/discourses has given my students an alternative way of imagining their occupation, at least an alternative to that of producer of commodities – a different understanding of an artist’s work, a different set of possible colleagues, interlocutors, communities and social arrangements, a different set of possibilities for coexistence. In a sense, this may have been the greatest opening for young artists in the US: the possibility for a reorganization of the conditions in which artists live and work. However, in the absence of more widespread struggles for systemic change, this reorganization cannot be actualized, cannot become a lived reality – not for students who are heavily indebted, who pay for college by going to war, whose families have lost homes and safety nets, who are watching the oil spill deep into their lives. We face the limits of artistic intervention and of course of the artistic paradigm itself in opening up possibilities for social relations that are not determined by our relation to capital. In other words – without social processes at all scales, whatever we may designate as an artistic arena or an artistic process that is “interventionist” does not seem to me to be propositional.

You asked me to write about intervention based on my work with the 6Plus collective. At first I found this curious, perhaps because our work has been much “quieter”, more implicit in how it attempted to disrupt or intervene, focusing instead explicitly on supporting certain institutions, communities and practices. Still, the overall project is one that desires to unmask, to disrupt a normalized logic, and our experience can also serve as an example of the contradictory dynamics and limitations I mentioned above.

As you know, 6Plus organized traveling art exhibitions of work by US and Palestinian women artists, both in the Occupied Territories of Palestine and in the US. We also conducted several workshops and experimental media projects with young women in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in the West Bank. I think the most important thing to understand about this work is this: it comes out of a struggle to understand how we might act in solidarity with our dear friends in Dheisheh. And solidarity is based in action, in a specific sense, as the Compass group remind us in their developing glossary: solidarity hinges on being recognized in the eyes of another as an ally, based on one’s actions. This also requires finding (or creating) the specific institutional, social and political conditions under which such a relation is possible.

Even though there are several international non-profits doing remarkable work in Dheisheh, our experience has lead us to working within the framework of the (then much besieged) Al Feneiq Cultural Center. This is a self-organized and self-built institution, run by members of the camp Popular Committee, itself an expression of the self-governing process which began during the first intifada. Due to the very purposeful conditions of our engagement in Dheisheh, our activities became part of a specific struggle, and our work became accountable to it.

However, at the request of the Dheisheh organizers and staff, we have also developed print, video and web-based works intended for international circulation through mainstream educational and cultural institutions. This at once reframes our relationship with the Dheisheh community under conditions of extreme asymmetry, and removes our activities from the immediate context of the struggle which gave them meaning and initial form. Much of our internal conflict over the slippage between these two arenas of action, and the ways they each structure a range of possible relations between different co-participants and “publics”, is traced in a brief essay published in Third Text. It remains quite current, and I hope you will access it on the 6Plus website.

My best wishes

Rozalinda

Written to friends in the movement, many of whom are familiar with my involvement with the moratorium on deportations campaign, and the Whittier school occupation. I am caught up in the excitement and optimism of it all, even as I echo Raúl Al-qaraz Ochoa’s “tears, rage, love and sorrow”. 

I say “we” to acknowledge so many of you who generously shared your misgivings, commitments and hopes , and who wondered how we could bring these intimate consultations and deep internal conflicts into the “proper” political work of movement building. I say “we” because I assume I am not alone in my confessions. Campaigns are gravitational and centralizing – they require not commonality but a kind of lock-step uniformity, a unified language and a center of articulation. But this is often a precarious achievement; the reality is messier, and we struggle to make the best tactical decisions we can, often knowing they are imperfect. Absent a strong movement strategy – and given the current historical moment on the left that is skeptical of political strategy anyway – we are often left with little to guide our tactical calculations, and often in dissaray when a clean-and-simple definition of victory is not at hand. As battle lines are drawn and the chasm opens wider, I wonder not so much how we got here, but what will happen next. What will be the political process for rebuilding the movement after the vote on the DREAM Act? This is also a deeply personal question, about trust between friends, about love and commitment and fierceness.

The DREAM Act is a piece of legislation that was imperfect from the beginning, and then changed so much that it sometimes seems to leave even some of its most ardent supporters just a little bit queasy. Over the years many of us swallowed our collective nausea, hoping: it is a beginning, an opening, a spark… and acknowledging: we need something to actually change. And we knew that it was the emergence of the DREAMers, of the new generation of undocumented youth in struggle, that reignited the dream for a broad movement of immigrant justice and self-determination. I wonder if the DREAMers know to what extent the momentum they helped generate became greater than themselves, greater than any single-issue campaign, greater the horizon of peacemeal legislative reform, and far more radical (“radical” here means simply: by the root). It crossed into streams of labor struggles, and antiracist struggles, and the battles of queer radicals, and antiwar activists, and poor peoples’ movements, and education rights, and antifascists, and land rights, and indigenous struggles… so many currents finding their common groove. It broke through disillusionment and habituation. Under these conditions the fight for immigration justice is at its strongest, precisely when it is more than itself, precisely when it can challenge the larger logic by which human beings are made illegitimate, redundant, disposable. And it is only under these conditions that the battle cannot become coopted, cannot find itself feeding into the very power it seeks to confront.

Judging by the (truncated, sporadic and not at all thorough) debates over the past months, supporting the DREAM Act was often part tactical decision (imperfect policy but the momentum around it can help ignite and sustain the path for further reform, it might be the only opportunity to start something and so on) and part an ethico-human one (rallying in support of DREAMers), and the two became hopelessly entangled. We should not be surprised that the DREAM Act became good political capital for the Democrats, nor that it would be cynically coopted. What should surprise us is that our response to this attack is to redraw the battle lines internally. Despite the awful predictability of this final turn, we seem to be caught unprepared… we had not rehearsed this scenario, had not struggled over it together or decided how we would fight this cooptation… we kept our eyes on the prize, or so we thought, but the prize kept shrinking and pushing closer, leaving us claustrophobic, reactive. At this late hour, any attempt to fight comes to stand for abandoning the DREAMers, and the mutilated DREAM Act comes to stand for the dream.

What seemed at one time a calculus of means vs ends now seems like an end by any means – or, alternately, abandoning the moment of possibility. We see how little resiliency we have as a movement: we have little capacity for internal self-critique, we cannot endure disagreements around policy and tactics. The battle lines are drawn, and it is a losing battle. We can either pull out, isolating an important section of the movement, or accept gains that are not only limited but that are predicated on the suffering of others.

Where can we go from this impossible set of “options”?

Global Capitalism and the European Expansion: An Introduction to the “Economies of the Home”  

Rozalinda Borcila and Cristian Nae

Mapping Discursive Fields in the Representation of “Europeanism”

            Discussions about the expansion of the European Union have revolved around the construction of European identity itself. Many have also used a post-colonial perspective in order to discuss questions of this identity’s representation and (re)construction. Treating this matter from a historical point of view (even if the history concerned is of an economic nature), these discussions have focused mainly on the idea of self-colonization of the former East in the context of recent European expansion. Thus, they attempted by various means to deconstruct the binary opposition between East and West as it was politically and ideologically represented. Therefore, overcoming an “interstitial” condition for the East and the reconceptualization of difference as such has become one of the main points—if not the main point—of these debates.
     In this respect, we think that shifting the ground (a certain displacement of perspective) can contribute to opening up new ways of imagining and positioning ourselves relative to Power. This text intends to propose and expand such a possible model of analysis on the question of how we represent European expansion, focusing precisely on how this expansion led to the dismantling of certain social relations as a consequence of profit maximization in so-called Eastern Europe, which can be identified first and foremost at the level of private life or what may be called the sphere of the “home.” In short, it is the instrumentalization of reproduction, home labor and caregiving-as-labor that are at stake.

The suggestion for such a model comes from our reading of the “Shell Global Scenarios to 2025,”[1] produced by the futurists of the Shell Oil conglomerate in 2005. This document imagines possible alternative futures for the year 2025 as structured by the possible relationships of three major forces which are seen as being unlikely to all be active simultaneously. Their combination strategically reshapes possibilities for social action and describes strategies of governmentality. In the “Shell Scenarios,” the three forces which are considered the major drives in the socio-economic field are: 1.) “the force of community,”, 2.) a coercive and regulative force which acts in the name of (global and local) “security”, and, last but not least, 3.) “market incentives,” which aim at maximizing economic efficiency.[2]

What we will try to suggest is that this type of analysis of the present-day mapping of forces and of geo-political spatial representations of European blocs might open up a discussion about a recent social phenomenon accompanying the integration of the “East”  into the capitalist expansion of the former “West.” In a previous project[3] we developed a critical reading of the first Shell Scenario written after the fall of the Berlin Wall; without suggesting that postcolonial critique can simply be applied to the former East, we asked how such foreclosure on the future via corporate scenario planning could be productively questioned using Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics,[4] which refers to the production of death or the subjugation of life to the power of death. We proposed that necroeconomics predicates itself on the advantage of the individual and the amelioration of life, with this calculus entailing the exercise of the right to “let die” or “expose to death” upon certain populations in the name of the future superiority of the economic argument.

The “Shell Scenarios” as Spatial Narratives

What is also important for us in working with these scenarios is the type of knowledge production they open up via spatialized narratives. It represents an expansion of a condensed spatio-temporal continuum, which stands for the present-day geopolitically given space or what we could call the specific “place” we refer to—such as, for instance, “Europe.” As described by the above-mentioned scenarios, it also represents a place where predetermined future possibilities of action serve to determine its spatial coordinates.

Take, for instance, the present-day European space as it is mapped in geo-political terms as the “European Union.” Its (future) spatial representations depend on how these scenarios represent its expansion “above and below” the national economies of the integrated/excluded countries. Space becomes, therefore, a “place” ordered according to the logic, the calculative reason, of these narrative scenarios. And it is ordered by means of temporal predictions and confinements of actions which actually foreclose upon any possible but uncontrollable expansion or re-orientation of its territorial borders. This representation calculates in which way the market can take advantage of the economic relations which settle borders parallel to the territorial ones. Last, but not least, it expands towards a complete rationalization and instrumentalization of the way people live their lives, affecting human relations at their deepest level: those of the economy of “private life,” existence and subsistence. 

In the social space described by the trilemma model of the “Shell Global Scenarios to 2025,” the three determining forces (security, market incentives and the force of community) are either convergent or concurrential. None of them is mutually exclusive, but only the combination of two out of three forces is possible at any one time, reducing the influence of the third (“two wins, one loss” options). Their combination might also be represented as determining what Gilles Deleuze called “plateux” by their cooperation or opposition.[5] Each such “plateau” is, in fact, a different combination of economic positions, territorial security measures and communitarian reactions, each of which produces different representations in the distribution and exercise of power.

Shell has been producing future scenarios since the early 1970’s, imagining various possible futures in order to “rediscover the original entrepreneurial power of foresight.” Strategy, in this vision, entails identifying a set of tendences lourdes, a set of unstoppable forces or tendencies, which function to structure a field of unknown forces within a restricted set of possible futures: the inevitable against which the unknowable could be played out. Far from imagining the future as open to unlimited possibilities, the goal is “to imagine a future that is worth creating—and to reap the competitive advantages of preparing for it and making it happen.”[6] All the narratives written by Shell futurists after the fall of the Berlin Wall assume the expansion of market liberalization as an unstoppable force, producing a meta-narrative whose persuasive logic works to eliminate any alternative in the political construction of the global future.

         The scenario written in 2005 signals a re-conceptualization of the state under globalization in response to the “dual crisis of security and trust” associated with the Enron crisis and 9/11. Shell conceptualizes the “market-state” which “retains its power to coerce” but which also deploys “market incentives and mechanisms to transform behaviors and to implement strategies.” As the market state incentivizes, it also excludes populations which cannot be “entrepreneurialized.” In the scenarios, the logic of the futures markets can be seen operating upon the unknown forces of the future, which are put to work and operated upon as future assets. This calculus extends to the formatting of subjectivity and of life itself through a set of practices operating upon and within “the force of community,” which is the key factor in the transformation from “nation-state” to “market-state.” While the ability to deploy direct coercive measures underscores the narratives, the scenarios also rehearse the production of forms of being, of identification and participation through financial practices (social development programs, incentivizing practices targeting the cultivation of “self-interest,” massive resource allocation as a way to reform and re-form populations, etc.).

Necropolitics and the Security Principle

In a previous text,[7] we introduced the issue of “necropolitics”—the generalized instrumentalization of human life—in order to describe how, in the end, both presumed security and communitarian measures act in order to maximize economic profit. What we suggested was that the global capitalist expansion is unstoppable as described by these Shell Scenarios, since they in fact envisioned only a single possibility or goal. This goal referred to the predictive calculus of costs in terms of human life and to controlled or predetermined “exposure to death.” We proposed that necroeconomics predicates itself on the advantage of the individual and the amelioration of life, while this calculus entails exercising the right to “let die” or to “expose to death” certain populations. This can be exercised by economically exploiting territorial or civil war in long-term investments, and/or by creating and maintaining a permanent state of insecurity in certain regions.

Such an example of necroeconomic thinking is suggested by Anna Zalik[8] with regard to the Niger Delta, where the “force of community” is used in order to create further instability and therefore works to increase opportunities for profit maximization. This is an application of the ways in which the dynamics of the current and futures market are at least partially constituted through violence and social instability.[9] However, long-term economic development requires managing “consumer confidence,” which leads to the oil industry’s direct intervention in national and local processes of social regulation.

In the European context, we could look at the way in which the eastward expansion of the market was determined within a specific phase of inter-capitalist rivalry, occurring within an alliance united by market liberalization as the new planetary logic. This is necessarily underwritten by NATO as the military force which works both to forcefully open the eastern markets (as many analyses of the war in Yugoslavia have demonstrated, for instance) and to “stabilize” the business environment of the former East. But its expansion as a regulative principle only created a state of perpetual insecurity. The regulative force of NATO also worked in order to ideologically legitimate the capitalist expansion protecting against the “socialist,” “barbaric” former methods of production. It guaranteed that the socio-economic process of “de-Sovietization,” described as a civilizing and desirable structural reform meant to ameliorate people’s lives, could safely take place in the region.

However, we are also suggesting that the very regulative force described by the Shell scenarios—that is, “securization” through the intervention of the (market) state (which in our case can be regarded not only as the military intervention of NATO, but also, and mainly, as the economic regulations imposed by EU)—can also act as a necroeconomic agent by entailing social measures and structural reforms which regard as profitable the destructuration of human relations and the exposure to death of certain unprofitable categories of persons. We have also applied this at the level of the production of subjectivity, suggesting that the maximization of profit is behind the drive to create “perpetual states of insecurity” in certain areas. From this necroeconomic point of view, these “states of insecurity” can be treated as “states of precariousness,”[10] creating and maintaining precarious conditions of subsistence and insecurity about people’s futures. These “precarious states” only reinforce an ongoing instrumentalization of the “home” sphere, accompanied by the destruction of certain types of social relations and a restructuring of the sphere of “home” labor.

            Proposals for an Economy of the Home

1) The instrumentalization of the home and the “economy of care”

This sort of intervention of the Coercive Principle is therefore of major importance for what we call here the “economies of care,” reflecting the exercise of governmentality and of biopolitical adjustments to the private sphere, the sphere of “the home” and of “domestic labor.”

It should also be noticed that “home” represents not only the basic form of communitarian organization, but also an “institution of power,” a “space of enclosure” specific to disciplinary societies as defined by Michel Foucault,[11] the place where power relations are internalized and, ultimately, where strategies of biopolitical governance and biopower[12] are silently exercised. In his view, various technologies serve to produce subjectivity by “normalizing” the life of the individual. They serve to predetermine the realm of private life, confine it to “home,” and then to exercise control over the individual by strictly imposing a technology of reproduction, moral codes, social norms, etc. Thus, “home” is actually regarded as a region of the public sphere which plays the role of a “state of exception.” It is allowed by public governance, but is circumscribed via the imposition of control upon the ways people live their private lives and make decisions about their “private” milieus. It is basically a symbolic space, where individuals should internalize the outward control and discipline exercised upon “public” space.[13] 

For Foucault, the question of governmentality and exercising normalization upon individuals and their lives in the name of the “amelioration of life” also passes through the seemingly “civilizing” measures implemented in late modernity, such as “social care” and “health social insurance” which Foucault identified as actually being cynical regulative strategies meant to maximize profit for the state—since the working body is more valuable to the state than a dead person.[14] Although this description may seem contrary to the necropolitical description of “live and let die” or the “right to kill (and let die)” expressed as a form of economic sovereignty, what we suggest is that the “economy of care” as expressed by various social measures and structural economic reforms is only part of a larger Coercive Principle, one which is meant to strengthen the labor force and expand the capitalist production of labor towards an on-going instrumentalization of the home. Therefore, capitalist “amelioration” of living conditions, especially as presented to the ex-socialist countries of the EU, is nothing but a deeper instrumentalization of these living conditions—and at its core it implies a necroeconomic principle.

The instrumentalization of the sphere of home refers to how the issue of home governance (the entire sphere of reproductive work, including care of the elderly and children) is inserted into the economic principles of profit maximization as described by the Shell Scenarios. Unlike the cozy and idealized representation of the home as the symbolic order of intimacy and protection, home can at the same time also be regarded as place of labor and production.[15] In short, in the context of this economic representation, the home is an invisible factory. More than that, it is a factory where subjectivity is produced, and where macro-capital can be accumulated at the expense of the exploitation of this underpaid and unrecognized labor.

2.) Necrocapitalism and the European Expansion: Suggestions for Further Analysis

The perspective of necroeconomics requires the analysis of what kinds of social relations are disrupted and destroyed as a result. There are several possibilities we can suggest for an application of necroeconomic principles according to the logic of the Shell Scenarios in the context of the European Expansion.
a. Instability, precariousness and migration in the field of “home” labor.

“ Very briefly, I’d like to say that, as a collateral (or main…) effect of sovereignty and sovereignty thinking exhaustion, precariousness is the most problematic state, dimension, of the societies and individuals in the time of globalization, that it describes the human condition in a “society of spectacle” or in the “society of risk” in the times of “normative or disciplinary power”.” [16]

There is a simple thesis about recent European Expansion which links the instrumentalization of the home and the intervention of necrocapitalism, as reflected by the dissipation of certain societal relations being regarded as a profitable avenue of investment—similar to the creation of “market volatility” in the Shell Scenarios logic. It reflects the European expansion as an expression of the need to find cheap labor, as well as profitable new markets for capital fleeing the demands of Western workers; the consequence is a destruction of the previous labor relations in the East and an imposed circulation of the labor force towards the West.

In many nations, European integration indeed allowed merely for the “free circulation of the labor force.”[17] This resulted in the “abandonment”[18] of education and child care in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, as many had to leave their work at “home” and their families in order to seek employment in the West at underpaid wages and often in specific sectors of activity: as nurses for the elderly and babysitters.

Expanding the question of necropolitics in this context, therefore, is related to the question of creating European regulative economic measures which are meant only to perpetuate instability on the level of societal relations and precariousness at the level of living conditions, thus coercively “incentivizing” migration of the labor force towards the West.

            Put in more concrete terms, instability has been created through the destruction of any activity that is not subordinated to the logic of accumulation. This can be seen in two major areas: a move to annihilate any guarantees of subsistence recognized by the former socialist states,[19] and the marketization of the space of the home and the work of reproduction—the privatization of the sphere of domestic and family relations.
 

b). Capitalization of agriculture

We can also see how capitalist expansion into formerly Eastern Bloc countries has resulted in the massive privatization of rural areas, which had been the basis of reproduction for many ex-socialist regions before 1989. This marketization of the entire range of reproductive work has meant the radical reconfiguration of family relations (including childcare and eldercare) as well as the annihilation of self-subsisting micro-economies (involving the trading of homemade goods) by imposing common European regulations which are settled in favor of corporatist production. This is why, for us, it makes sense to identify and examine the expressions of necrocapitalism, particularly in terms of the capitalization of agriculture and the downward pressure on wages, pushing many into the cheap labor force of Europe in both domestic and agricultural work. What does this mean for the “rural” mode of production in the former East and the attendant systems of social relations—for the “rural” as a place (as above) and for the “home” as a place, both as they relate to reproductive labor? In this respect, familial property systems and modes of exchange are being silently destroyed.

            3. Reclaiming the Home

            In the current stage of the financial crisis, issues of housing and reproduction are for the first time becoming critical in both the East and the West, raising the possibility of a real crisis of legitimacy for capitalism. It is perhaps here that we find an imperative to think about oppositionality: reclaiming the (re)production of life which is not productive for capitalism, which is not subjugated to capitalist accumulation.

[2] Ibid., pp. 11–13

[3] Rozalinda Borcila and Cristian Nae, “Past Futures,” in Vector, 2007 (3)

[4] Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” in Public Culture, 2003, 15 (1). Available online at http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/icuss/pdfs/Mbembe.pdf

[5] Gilles Deleuze, Mille Plateux, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980

[6] Pierre Wack. “Scenarios: Shooting the Rapids,” Harvard Business Review, November–December 1985

[7] Rozalinda Borcila and Cristian Nae, art.cit.

[8] Anna Zalik, “Oil Futures: Shell’s Trilemma Triangle” and the “Force of Community,” Environmental Politics Colloquium, University of California at Berkeley. Accessed at http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/EnvirPol/ColloqPapers/Zalik2006.pdf

[9] Zalik bases her analysis on the work of Robert Pindick and others. In short, because of investment flows into oil futures market, the future price of oil can surpass its current trading value, incentivizing the storage of oil; this in turn raises the current (spot) price. Since speculative activity on the futures market is driven by (perceived) insecurity and volatility, there is a circular relationship between oil price volatility, social instability and opportunities for profit maximization in the futures market.

[10] In keeping with the writings of Ciprian Mihali, “precarity” could be spatially defined as the radical dependency on outward conditions and, in a temporal sense, as temporarity or a provisional state of affairs. According to his analysis, the existence of a precarious thing takes place under the temporary authorization of an outward source of authority which can always withdraw it and whose identity is acknowledged as long as it is attached to its origin by a required practice or belief. See Ciprian Mihali, “Intraductibilul politic. Deconstrucţie, autoimunitate, precaritate,” [The Political Untranslatable. Deconstruction, Self-Immunity, Precariousness] in: IDEA Art+Society Magazine, 2005 (22): 115

[11] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Disciplinary societies, according to Foucault, follow those based on the exercise of (territorial) sovereignty. For a definition of the term “disciplinary,” see “Discipline.” in Rethinking the Subject: An Anthology of Contemporary European Social Thought, Ed. James D. Faubion, 32–33. Oxford: Westview Press, 1995: “Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology”.

[12] In The History of Sexuality (New York, Vintage Books, 1990), biopower is defined by Foucault as “the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life,” (p.140) as “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge power an agent of transformation of human life.” (p. 143)

[13] Ibid.

[14] Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société. Cours au College de France 1976, Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997, and “The Birth of Social Medicine,” in: Michel Foucault, Essential Works, III: Power, New York: The New York Press, pp. 134–136. For a detailed analysis see also Ivan Brend, “Foucault and the Welfare State,” European Review (2005), 13: 551–556, Cambridge University Press

[15] See, for instance, an entire body of work by Silvia Federici which analyzes the role of unpaid reproductive labor as a key source of capitalist accumulation. The Reproduction Of Labor-Power In The Global Economy, Marxist Theory And The Unfinished Feminist Revolution, accessed online at http://www2.ucsc.edu/culturalstudies/EVENTS/Winter09/Federici.html

[16] Ciprian Mihali, Between sovereignty and precariousness: post-communist daily life condition, available on-line at http://www.ifres.info/europe-centrale-orientale/IMG/doc/  , see Between_sovereignty_and_precariousness.doc

[17] From this perspective, European integration might look like the “Open Doors” scenario in the Shell’s predictive trilemma (whereas the other two scenarios envisioned by Shell, “Low Trust” and “Flags,” would result either in generalized skepticism or nationalist dogmatism).

[18] For a detailed analysis of the situation, see the “Abandoned Children, Parents in Abandonment” folder in Periferic 7 Focussing Iasi/ Why Children? Exh. Cat., Ed. Atilla Tordai-S., IDEA Publishing House, 2006

[19] Silvia Federici used the term “new enclosures” to describe this state of affairs.

   

 

 

After Shell Oil : "Global Scenarios for the Future" 2001

Past Futures: Extreme Subjectification, The Engineering of the Future and the Instrumentalization of Life

Rozalinda Borcila and Cristian Nae

The extension of liberalism and the globalization of capitalism are not only the symptoms of a new planetary configuration,  the completion of a totalizing process begun with the modern project of emancipating private life in the juridical-procedural framework of the vacanting state sovereignty. Their present junction within a diffuse articulation of power constitues the very medium for the production of human relations, while the way we currently represent it mediates between capacities of decision and action. By modeling the context and translating it into in-progress scenarios for an anonymous „direction” of global „extras”, played out on the stage of history, corporate economy produces a new form of exercising sovereignty and life administration, extended at the level of the immanent formatting of subjectivity.

According to Shell International scenario guru Pierre Wack, scenarios are narratives that imagine and describe possible futures. The exercise is intended to help corporations and governments identify opportunities for competitive advantage: what actions or strategies today can maximize profit in any imaginable future. In addition, scenario narratives are intended to help today’s powerful actors to identify “the future that is worth building”. The 1992 narratives describe different visions for the year 2020. The big question asked by the visionaries in the exercise is: how will the world respond to liberalization? It is the last time in the history of future scenarios that two possible, opposite outcomes are imagined. All subsequent Shell scenarios operate under the collective premise entitled TINA  There is no Alternative to liberalization, a vision often expressed by neo-liberal revolutionary Margaret Thatcher in the early 80′s. Read as a single discursive corpus, „Global Scenarios 1992-2020” expose the narration of complete world domination, of the expansion of the corporate administration of the world on the level of an atemporal and immutable stasis. Thus, the two „fictional worlds” announce the emergence of a recent metanarrative: the process of „eternalizing the present” by controlling the future, rethinking subjectivity in the name of global planning. It thus signals the complete instrumentalization of life, the reduction of existence to the calculus of its efficient administration, the internalization of control exercised upon the social body regarded as a  site of immanence for the multiple territorializing actions of power.

PAST FUTURES is a collaborative project which develops a critical interrogation of the possibilities for positioning ourselves relative to the matrix of economic and political conditions defining us as social subjects. What began as a proposal for an artistic intervention, inserting a scenario as a „ready-made” textual object in the context of a discussion on the notion of bare life, evolved into a collaboration which proposes a disjunctive manner of (artistically/discursively) practicing historical reading. Where we look, through what medium and from where determine a series of disappearances, obfuscations and camouflages, displacements of perspectives opened towards the possibilities for shaping our futures, as they appear today regarded from the  perspective of the past, dissolving the concatenation of temporal regime within the present stasis which conditions the unidirectional perception of reality.

Articulated in the form of a critical „textual installation” consisting in graphic and textual interpretation of the ready-made Shell scenario „Global Scenarios: 1992-2020”, the project formally assumes the conditions of discursive production specific to the illusive modern separation between the economical, cultural, social and political. Inserted as a web resource operating as terminal of a network connecting the political macro-economical actors and singular individuals, the scenario in question is thus situated in the interstice of the stratified relations of knowledge and action constituting the public sphere, generating and problematizing the context of its own reception. The graphic interpretation of the original Shell diagram intends to produce a „subjective” counter-look upon the discursive practices of economical objectivation of human relations, while the invitation to simultaneously follow the textual commentary and the hyper-textually exposed scenario comments upon the complementarity between the media of distributing/concealing information. The actual absence of the scenario comments upon the relation between copyright/shareware, subsequently, between ready-made, production and recycling information, specific to the neo- liberal cultural economy.     

Proposing the production of critical interpellation through the practice of historical reading as an alternative vehicle of subjectivation, and conceiving intervention as a civic action, the project functions as a platform for information and analysis, offering the reader access to information of public interest while suggesting at the same time possible means for individual documentation and collective debate. The artistic/critical gesture intends to contribute to the construction of a mobile interface between the administration of the informational network at the level of global economic and political actors and the control of its distribution in the public space. In turn, its activation by the reader opens up a field of critical mediation between the political space of art and the artistic space of the political.

In Search of Liberation

Rozalinda Borcila

From the perspective of capital, some parts of the world are backwards and must be taught the lessons of market democracy. But this narrative of “lagging behind” can also be reinforced from the perspective of a counter-capitalism that privileges specific histories and discourses: if you want to recognize yourself as producing critique, you need to “catch up” on the bibliography and lingo.  I think this asynchronicity is internalized in the Romanian geographic imaginary. It works to capture and evacuate what arises in moments of becoming – the energy produced when we experience our shared capacity to transform our world.

Government through community

In 1969, Shell Oil began elaborating what it called “Global Scenarios for the Future”, a method of storytelling intended “to rediscover the original entrepreneurial power of foresight in contexts of change, complexity, and uncertainty”[1]. Shell’s method, developed by scenario guru Pierre Wack, is largely credited for the success of Shell Oil in the 1990s, and has become the basis of corporate futurology today. Wack insists his method is not about forecasting, but rather about visualization: about allowing decision-makers to “re-perceive reality”, “discovering strategic options of which you were previously unaware”[2] in times of change or instability, which are also times for entrepreneurial initiative and profit maximization.

I became interested in corporate futurology when I stumbled upon Shell’s scenario written in 1991 and made public in 1992. This was the first set of narratives composed after the fall of the Berlin wall, which visualized the world of 2020. Having declared the final planetary victory of “free market” capitalism, Shell futurologists imagined that market liberalization (conflated with political liberalization) was an unstoppable driving force, what Wack termed tendance lourde. The question asked of the future was: what other forces would develop in conjunction with, and in response to, market liberalization? How would the instabilities and changes produced by these forces create opportunities for profit maximization – or, how can one develop strategies for action today in order to anticipate and redirect such forces towards profit maximization??

In all subsequent scenarios we find the trio of tendances lourdes “globalization”, “technology”, and “liberalization”, around which all uncertainties would become structured: the inevitable against which the unknowable could be played out. This becomes a feminized meta-narrative image called TINA (there is no alternative). I began to trace the ways in which a certain category of forces are understood and “put to use” in these stories: what Shell calls alternately the “human factor”, “social forces” or “the force of community”[3]. The narratives seem to ask: what forms of social relation and exchange, forms of being, of identification and of participation, will be profitable assets? The strategic aim is not always “stability” or energy security – there is a relationship between (social and price) volatility and speculative activity on the oil futures market[4].

A careful reading of the scenarios of the subsequent sixteen years affords a different understanding of by-now familiar practices of neoliberal planetary governance. In some cases they require the use of direct coercive force: identifying or creating a vacuum, a space in which some kind of governing structure has faltered (crisis/catastrophe, economic implosion, political instability) and various forms of “demographic manipulation” (relocations, displacements, regime changes, etc). Although the ability to deploy coercive violence underscores the narratives, scenarios focus more extensively on the arrangement of social conditions to incentivize and mobilize entrepreneurial “self-interest”. This includes social development programs, the rapid, large-scale disbursement of funds and massive resource allocation as ways to reform populations, constructing societies free of “delinquent elements”, changing worldviews, experience management.

TINA scenarios continue to be successful at helping their clients “to imagine a future that is worth creating – and reap the competitive advantages of preparing for it and making it happen”[5]. They influence energy markets and policymaking, futures markets and Pentagon war strategies. This success, we are told, is a demonstration of TINA’s inevitability. But I came to understand TINA as something else – as part of a mythmaking project, which puts itself into circulation in order to make itself come true. TINA is a process: it is how the fantasy of the global elites becomes reality. It is how the world is collapsed into a single historical queue: how the simultaneous coexistence of different ways of life, political visions and economic/social processes is reorganized as the conditions of profit maximization for those who are farther ahead in the queue.

Opening: The rush           

I was eighteen during the Romanian revolution, and I remember the feeling – joyous and terrifying – that anything was possible and nothing was scripted. In December 1989, popular revolts spread throughout the country in a matter of days – occupying police headquarters, main administrative buildings, media outlets and the streets. Our escape was swift – but it was also in advance of any meaningful political process, any real critique, any form of collectively imagining or experimenting with alternative visions.

On 22 December, as Ceausescu fled Bucharest, different groups were forming within the occupied government headquarters. They met on different floors of a building under siege, each rushing to lay out the management of the power vacuum and the political platform of the new regime. As they self-inaugurated, proclamations succeeded each other throughout the evening; decrees, political platforms, governing structures. By morning one such group had become dominant. Resulting from the organizational and networking savvy of a small group of former political aparatciks-turned-rebels, military commanders, media managers and intellectuals – the FSN (National Salvation Front) proclaimed itself the provisional, “apolitical” governing structure whose role would be to manage the power vacuum and organize the first free elections.

Within 24 hours the FSN began operating at the national level, often using the organizational networks of former institutions. The country’s best known political dissidents, whose presence in front of the television cameras had proclaimed the victory of the revolution, were at first the image but not the decision-makers of this formation. As they gradually distanced themselves over the next weeks, uneasiness grew about the totalizing rhetoric of the FSN. Small, local protests turned to more directed outrage in February 1990, when the Front announced its participation in the upcoming April elections. In the run up to the elections, the “opposition” was formed by a growing number of “historical” parties, whose commitments to privatization, liberalization, and “Westernization” made them largely ideologically indistinguishable from the FSN or from each other[6].

By early 1990, the December Revolution became referred to as “the events” and later as “whatever happened, happened”. Public discourse quickly adopted the logic of transition, according to which there were only two horizons: communism/the past (meaning totalitarian dictatorship as represented by the previous Romanian regime and the Soviet Union) or democracy/the future (meaning whatever type of market capitalism had made Americans so wealthy and happy and functional). From here on, any familiar or emerging social problems – from new forms of dispossession and exclusion, to escalating ethnic violence, to epidemic suicide rates – were paradoxically cast as symptoms of being insufficiently capitalist, being still too far behind in the transition. Any form of critique or resistance to the new regime reproduced, and to a large extent continues to reproduce, the same narrative. And because we were to see ourselves as being in someone else’s past, it remained difficult to recognize the power differentials being produced in the present.

 Opening, again: Occupation

The period between January and June 1990 is not as well known as the hyper visible televised revolution of the previous December and – although coverage has been extensive in the Romanian media – I fear it has not been sufficiently critically processed.

The most debated phenomenon of the period began in February 1990, as a convergence of hundreds of protests against the FSN and its leader in the University Square in Bucharest. After two months of off-and-on actions, the square was the site of a massive, continuous 40 day occupation ending in a two-day bloody repression. Criminalized before 1994-1996, and heroicized since, the occupation is always understood as “anti-communist” and “pro-Westernization”. It began, so the story goes, in April: tens of thousands cheered as a giant banner was hung in the University Square, declaring it a “space liberated of neo-communism”. Protesters accused the leader of the FSN of being too entrenched in soviet-style politics to successfully lead the country towards American-style democracy. It’s catchy, and it rhymes: “Cine-a stat cinci ani la rusi//Nu poate gîndi ca Bush”. (“One who spent 5 years in Russia, cannot think like Bush.”) Ten or twenty banners and slogans created during this time came to represent the entire process of the occupation in the media and – to my surprise – even in the subsequent testimonials of certain participants. This reduction produced a totalizing and overly simplistic understanding of the occupation within the narrative of capitalism as the only alternative, and it reinforced a continuing identification of the previous totalitarian regime as “communism”.[7]

I think there is another way to look at the production of public speech through hundreds of image/texts (inscriptions, markings, drawings, banners, signs, graffiti, songs, slogans) during the 40-day occupation and to challenge this understanding in two important ways.  Firstly, this production was continuous and at all different scales: on buildings, people, balconies, papers. There was constant writing, rewriting, overwriting.  As a material process, it had to do with reclaiming and recombining architectural surfaces, found materials and debris, domestic objects, food and bodies – and with producing different constellations of writers, sign-makers and bearers, new collectivities of speakers constituted across violently inscribed ethnic and class lines. During the occupation, space was experienced as open, as a process that was never finished. Secondly, image/texts did not emerge from an agreed-upon political position or shared history of critique, but rather were the medium through which different, often contradictory interpretations and positions confronted each other. They reflected hundreds of speeches, meetings and debates, resolutions, declarations and proclamations, and as many experiments in collective decision-making and debate. In this sense, the occupation claimed space as radically heterogeneous, as the dimension of the simultaneous coexistence of difference.

I want to suggest that the occupation can be seen the process of producing the future as open, as under construction[8]. In this way, the occupation as a political process was a way of thinking beyond the narrative of capitalism as the only alternative. In the absence of an established critical tradition, protest became the way to attend to the spatial and social expressions of power, and to open up a search for critical counter-narratives. It would entail the sustained collective attempt to learn about social reality by radically reconfiguring it. Instead of reducing the entire phenomenon to a handful of slogans, we can look to their production and transformation as evidence of a continuously shifting conception and experience of power.

For instance, many other banners naming the occupied space appeared alongside the dominant “space liberated of neo-communism”. “In search of liberation” suggests an understanding of the occupation as a political experiment in opposition to the logic of transition and normalization: a self-critical suspension of previously held assumptions about what liberation means, from what and towards what, an interruption of the logic of transition. The Square also became labeled as  “kilometer zero”, suggesting a kind of recalibration, a rebooting. This had been the site of some of the most intense street protests the previous winter, so in a sense the occupation was a return to “moment zero”, the moment when opening, a way out, was forcefully produced, and pushing back against closure. But there was also a reconsideration or rereading of the revolutionary moment, and the possibility of a reorientation: from the simple “down with communism” which formed the platform of December 1989, towards a collectively formulated alternative. After several failed and highly mediated attempts to instrumentalize the occupation by the newly-formed opposition parties, the occupants declare “We are not political parties, we are outlaws”. This points to the emergence of a more extensive critique of power as it is produced and expressed through the forms of electoral politics. “Nothing is lost, everything mutates”, a reconstitution of the former elite via the new (or rebranded) institutions of the state, operating under a new set of signs: privatization, democratization, Westernization[9]. A refusal to recognize the FSN drafted electoral law, and later the results of the election, further suggests a reading of the occupation as a kind of desertion that is not necessarily territory-bound, but a “‘founding leave-taking’ that inaugurates a realm of common affairs at the same moment it breaks from an established realm”[10].

The practice of art

I have found that working with the history of corporate scenarios – especially with past futures from the early 1990s – has been a way for me to make some sense of my experiences of revolution, to look for what has not been exhausted or vacuated by its failure. This remains to my mind an urgent task, and an increasingly tricky one given the ways in which capitalism makes use of culture; specifically, in the last ten or so years, the marketability of “social” and “participatory” art practices (and of artists such as myself who are increasingly mobilized in the circuits of capital).

A critical position would have to consider not only how tropes of collaboration and participation function to turn collectively generated value into privately appropriated (cultural/institutional/social) capital, but also how art operates to structure social relations into specific forms of “community” – to “practice” or rehearse a specific set of “social abilities”, which can be incentivized as a strategic asset for profit maximization.

To a certain extent my work as an artist begins from the premise that our available functional repertoire is expandable – that there is a certain plasticity to our social functionality, that we can learn to develop new “social abilities” conducive to a radical politics. In my work with the artist collective BLW[11] (with Sarah Lewison and Julie Wyman), for instance, we envisioned the collective as a body in need of “practice”, whose abilities were impaired by our limited experience within neoliberal capitalism (and we took this to be quite literally abilities to visualize, to see, to speak, or to otherwise act, to form relationships or affiliations that were not determined and limited by our relation to capital). I think we understood this as a spatial process, so our work developed as workshops or public meetings. We would look for how (art) “practice” could extend our collective capacities for a kind of escape, or at the very least for resisting capture.

At times we worked explicitly with the question of the future. In 2006 we produced a social performance (of sorts) at the invitation of the exhibition Locally Localized Gravity organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. We collaborated with the Think Tank that has yet to be named, a local artist/activist collective excluded from the exhibition, to initiate the Coalition of Inquiry into the State of the Future. Beginning from our shared critique of the ways in which this specific curatorial project framed “social, participatory, communal” art as a quasi-entrepreneurial practice (linked, for instance, with real estate speculation), we imagined a coalition as a social learning and practicing of something like “communal justice”. The coalition self-inaugurated via activist and indymedia networks as a possibly quasi-juridical body for investigating “the future” as a mythmaking project – the global future but also, specifically, the future as produced through various public/private initiatives in the city of Philadelphia. These included campaigns that legitimized themselves through “community involvement”, including the Microsoft School of the Future, the Next Great City initiative, The Great Expectations Program and the exhibition into which we were trying to insert the public meeting as a spatial interruption[12].

The investigative process involved submitting documents into evidence, soliciting “expert testimony” from residents, labor and community organizers, journalists, and artists, meeting with self-appointed investigators-at-large and witnesses. The future was summoned to a public hearing, where we deliberated whether there was evidence of harm, as well as the nature and extent of the harm it might have administered.  (We wondered what kind of collective body could indict the future and seek restorative measures).

Our deliberations suggested a number of possible understandings of such harm. We accused that the future was being produced through language that misrepresented  “the transparent and participatory nature of certain institutions and current and future initiatives associated with the city of Philadelphia” as well as, “the nature of democracy and of the democratic process” itself. The future demanded a specific kind of civic engagement, which “works to disable participatory democracy, or to work against civic education, or to actively create stupidity”. The most damaging accusation was that of “pre-empting the possibility of alternative futures”.

Our stay in Philadelphia ended before we could take on the question of “restoration” and find ways to sustain the process beyond the duration of the exhibit. This limitation is structural in the trope of the “art project”, but my sense is that it did not fully capture and spend the energies produced. Some of the media activists involved in the deliberations recently made use of the experiment to re-imagine and reframe their work; BLW continued to instigate public meetings in the most policed open-air space in Chicago. A full understanding of what we might have learned, what shared capacities we may have produced or uncovered, remains elusive because it is not measurable in results. But something remains open, remains in motion, and it pushes to dissolve art practice into a more generalized social process of oppositional learning.

[2] Ibid., p. 9

[4] In times of uncertainty, the value of a future barrel of oil can surpass its current pricing, which means there are greater opportunities for profit in oil futures – thus (social and market) volatility is often a product of speculative activity on oil futures. Anna Zalik has published several in-depth studies on Shell scenarios, oil futures and the commodification of violence in the Niger Delta.

[5] Wylie, Ian. There is No Alternative To... Fast Company, No ,60, June 2002. Accessed online at http://www.fastcompany.com/online/60/tina.html

[6] These are the conditions for the emergence and continued popularity of the ultra-nationalist party PRM, whose rallying cry “Our country is not for sale” is a reactive reassertion of local identity on the basis of longstanding ethnic and racial violence. 

[7] “Post-communism” as a critical discourse produced largely within the former “West” only goes to reinforce this problematic identification. I think we often underestimate the extent to which specific language remains affectively associated with totalitarian violence (communism, comrade, activist, collectivize, cooperate). Its coercive repetition functions to foreclose the possibilities for critique or dissent in the present.

[8] I am relying heavily on Doreen Massey’s relational conceptualization of space as “the sphere of coexisting heterogeneity”. Her work calls for a politics that does not evade or tame the challenge of spatiality, does not translate coexisting difference into different positions in a historical sequence.  Furthermore, attending to space as “under construction” and “never finished” allows us to be sensitive to the genuine openness of the future. For Space. London: Sage 2005.

[10] Zach Bratich on Virno’s notion of exit. His provocative essay rethinks the possibilities of secession as an exit that is not land-oriented – and re-imagines secession away from the breaking of a solid and towards the dynamics of fluids. “Swarmcession!” Lumpen Magazine #96 (July 2005) pp. 20-25.

[11] BLW produce situations for engaged speaking and exchange; these include workshops and meetings in public spaces, as well as re-speakings of video recordings from the histories of radical social movements in the US. BLW is Rozalinda Borcila, Sarah Lewison and Julie Wyman.

[12] More information on the investigation can be found at http://www.carbonfarm.us/blw/