Cross & Clouds

Here's something we worked on for Steve to fill up space on his arm sleeve done elsewhere....more images coming soon

SKATE TATOO AND PUNK.. IN MEXICO... WE WERE THERE

Beyond Budgetary Fundamentalism

John Buell
Author of Evil Doers: Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics (NYU Press)

“Run away government spending” is an easy target now. Nonethless, It is not the cause of our problems. Government spending will not “crowd out” currently nonexistent private investors. It is essential in stimulating the demand on which the private sector and even our ability to sustain healthy debt to GNP ratios depend. Further cuts in domestic job creation, sure to result from Congress’s unwillingness to add new stimulus and its slow and miserly extension of unemployment benefits, will even be counterproductive. It will lead to more unemployment, more benefit spending or prisons, emergency healthcare, domestic violence, and further declines in government revenues―a true death spiral.

That message, however, hardly ever gets a hearing. CNBC anchors regularly proclaim: “only the private sector creates wealth.” I wonder what these anchors would be using for their research and communication but for massive government subsidy and R&D on computers and the internet.

Critics also claim that the Obama stimulus did not work. Using carefully sourced data the nonpartisan CBO shows that the stimulus package created jobs and saved others that would be lost. The problem here is political. As even some business economists pointed out at the time, the initial Obama package was far too small. Dean Baker points out the Federal package amounted to less than half of the trillion- dollar hole caused by the housing bubble collapse. Government stimulus was reduced even further by cuts in state government spending. Perhaps Obama could not have achieved more, but he should have chastised Congress and made clear the country would need more and soon. Obama’s inflated claim on behalf of that modest legislation is a major reason that more Federal job creation is so politically difficult.

The deficit mania has other deeper roots. A core within the business community, especially financial services, never accepted the New Deal. Social Security has always been especially offensive. It is a universal program that worked and became very popular. It constitutes the major reason poverty rates among the elderly declined dramatically. Had George W. Bush privatized Social Security, our great recession would likely have become Great Depression II.

Unable to go after the program directly, conservatives attacked Social Security through fallacious arguments that the program, which its bipartisan trustees certify as fully funded through 2044, is a fiscal time bomb. As Baker points out, the real fiscal time bombs are exploding private sector dominated health costs, the bank bailouts, and war costs of a trillion and counting. Concern about deficits has never prevented the business press or our Senators from supporting these corporate behemoths.

Paul Krugman also provocatively argues that more than immediate monetary interests drive this issue. Ideological and even identity issues are in play Krugman cites Keynes’s powerful aside on classical capitalist culture:

“The completeness of the [ the notion that government can do nothing] is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority.”

The anti deficit mania has tangled roots both in immediate monetary interests and in the broader political culture. It has surprising support among some working class citizens, who stand to lose financially from its implementation. They are led by and in turn sustain the so- called Blue Dog Democrats. Nonetheless, its deep and tangled roots constitute no reason to treat it as inevitable. Why deficit mania cuts across class and how to construct a culture and economics that sustains full employment are among our most pressing political tasks.

The politics of private and government debt provides an occasion to contest both conventional economic theory and related moral narratives. The old story is that a profligate working class and indulgent governments spent themselves into deserved ruin. Others maintain that liberal government do gooders through the Community Reinvestment Act forced banks to make inappropriate loans to poor citizens. Yet most of the subprime mortgages were issued by banks not subject to CRA, and government support for such mortgages through Fannie Mae began only long after private banks were heavily involved. In addition, as the NY Times reports, the wealthy are now defaulting in disproportionate numbers on investment housing loans. But as Robert Reich points out, working class Americans went into deep debt because their wages didn't keep up. The median wage dropped between 2001 and 2007. Workers could keep spending at the rate necessary to keep themselves ― and the economy ― going only by borrowing, primarily against the value of their homes. The borrowing, however, ended with the bursting of the bubble. Only government can fill the void left by a consumer who is now so debt burdened as to unable to buy more than mere necessities. And in the longer run, more recessions are likely if working class incomes are not bolstered. Yet the same authorities who told consumers to borrow and spend now argue against any role for government either in job creation or redistribution.

Contemporary deficit mania has a curious, occasionally quarrelsome parentage. It includes fear of full employment, disdain for the poor and leisure, dreams of rags to riches for those who combine self-denial and luck, and a blind-- albeit selectively applied-- faith in markets.

Some wealthy have reasons to fear full employment. Even more than redistributive taxation, full employment narrowed gaps between rich and poor substantially during World War II, the late sixties, or the final years of the Clinton Administration. Full employment and steady productivity growth funded social security, private pensions, and gradual reductions in working hours, so crucial to family and to wider ranging interests.

The very success of full employment has also been its undoing. In the late sixties, Lyndon Johnson’s guns and butter economics gave us full employment. Full employment, however, also encouraged corporate pricing power, unleashed latent workplace and racial conflict, and productivity problems. Inflation rates increased and OPEC and automatic cost of living adjustments (COLAs) gave the US economy an embedded inflation. This became an occasion for a full business counterattack on the Post World War II political economy. Many businesses slashed investment and highlighted inflation and social turmoil. Confused and ever more insecure in the face of job loss and fierce cultural conflict, many of the white working class retreated to older conventions of self-reliance. The new political dynamic forced Jimmy Carter to appoint a conservative banker, Paul Volcker, as Fed chair and to inaugurate a series of deregulatory reforms continued and magnified under Reagan. Interest rates and unemployment went sky high.

These problems might have been addressed―and often were in Europe-- through wage and price guidelines, labor/management negotiation of codetermination or profit sharing schemes. . Except in war and briefly during Nixon’s administration, however, such an approach has been rejected as inefficient and intrusive by politicians. Ever since the Carter years, tales of sixties turmoil and seventies stagflation have been trotted out to blunt enthusiasm for any government initiative. Just as importantly, academic economists have constructed laws like the Phillips Curve and the non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) to suggest the impossibility of achieving unemployment as low as in the late sixties. These “laws” blunted consideration of the possibility that with different institutions, social mores, and constructive engagement of racial and ethnic animosities, policies might be crafted to foster full employment without vicious inflationary spirals.

In recent US experience, only very high levels of employment in the last years of the Clinton Administration led to even modest wage gains or inflationary pressures―probably because unions had been so beaten down and workers were so traumatized. But on a more positive note, various forms of profit sharing and joint labor management collaboration in Europe can also curtail inflation under full employment circumstances. The inefficiency of curbing inflation through chronic working class layoffs engineered by government is seldom considered.

The private debt economy’s unprecedented crash gave Obama a brief window to redress these economic and moral narratives. Once his feeble stimulus disappointed, however, it became easy to revert to familiar narratives. Pundits celebrated a return to government and personal austerity, scapegoated African Americans and immigrants, and magnified the dream of rags to riches.

Congress also seems reluctant to consider inexpensive―albeit unconventional-- ways to reduce unemployment. A German work- sharing program extended tax credits (less costly than unemployment compensation) to firms that shorten worker hours while retaining wage and salary levels. It held unemployment constant even with falling GNP,

Much polling data suggests Americans are also ambivalent about the public debt. Depending on the question, some suggest jobs are more important than the deficit. Polls and economic arguments probably won’t by themselves carry the debate.

Rather than reflexively blame economic troubles on individual moral failings, the US has also periodically demonstrated deeply democratic moral commitments. In fights for unions, jobs, voter rights, and shorter hours, the Catholic social gospel, the civil rights and labor movements, and various strands of secular liberalism have collaborated. They questioned work without end, challenged gaping inequality, and broadened democratic participation. We cannot, however, revert to the post World War II consensus. For many reasons, war today is unlikely to catalyze any progressive economic consensus. Like all such efforts, the coalitions that built the post World War II consensus also had blindspots. Efforts to build on these examples would do well to attune themselves more fully to a pluralizing world where moral and social foundations are more shifting ethnic and racial lines more fluid and where new rights claims are likely to emerge.

Part 4 Tattooing and the Paradox of Decolonization

PART 4

With the weave metaphor being identified and assumed as evidence of the cultural continuity we all claim, there is another element in the pop-mechanism (popular culture) that needs identification. That is the fact that the pop-mechanism is active in a capitalistic ideology. We can say here that the majority of the world and especially New Zealand are politically and economically capitalistic. Commercialism transforms our wants into needs and our real needs are confusedly suppressed somewhere in the intended circulation of deceptive images.

But we cannot condemn every image in a Polynesian mix tattoo considered outside our imagination(s) of a Polynesian tattoo to be as negative.Albert Wendt once discounted the validity of the post-colonial term ‘hybrid’ because in its popular understanding, it fails to account for the continuity and fluidity important to understanding and therefore preservation of culture in the form of tatau (tattooing). Many Pacific Island texts theorizing for alternative methodologies in the effort to rescue our culture(s) from the relentless absurdity of ‘Western’ scholarships and institutions champion similar fluidity and continuity theories.

What Albert Wendt means I believe is we cannot let ourselves as Polynesian fall into the trap of theorizing in linear terms because hybridity tend to present culture in a horizontal and chronological manner. Hybridity tend to speak of culture still in a one dimensional way as if it is a progression through past, present, future or left, centre, right or inbetween ‘high’ and ‘low’. A bit of that and a bit of this or a collection of both extremes still curtails the movement beyond the boundaries enforced by thinking limitedly within a face to face dialogue.

Development and growth are two dynamic concepts important to regard in this because they both point us to a type of continuity that is constantly in the move. We need not to think of this movement in terms of having an origin in the sense that such is where it began or such is where it is going to end. But talking about tattooing is pretty tricky because to some extent, tattooing in general (apart from ‘traditional’ Polynesian tattoos) is still condemned as not art in various people’s ideas. So here lies both a question and a mission depending on how you answer that question. The question is, “Is the practice of tattooing an art?”. I remember when I first got into tattooing I had uploaded some images of my work to this blog and telling a friend of mine about it. We looked at the some of the images while I was telling that friend and my friend immediately assumed I was doing the ‘traditional’ type using ‘traditional’ tools and all that. But to my friend’s disappointment, I was only doing just ‘normal’ tattooing, which to my opinion didn’t really qualify as ‘art’ or perhaps not included in the ‘creative department’ in my friend’s thinking.

I cannot be certain of my friend’s opinion but I can say that every person’s opinion exists within or is designated from a certain context or a collection of contexts. I suppose it is understandable to think of our traditional practice of tattooing (by that I mean the type of practice that use traditional tools within a ceremonial type of context) as ‘art’ in the sense that such practices have certain connection and embeddedness in the culture handed down to us from our ancestors. Does this mean that for something to be considered or deemed as ‘art’, it has to have the same or play a similar functional role within a certain society? Rightly so and a lot more. It seems to me that to a great extent, ‘art’ here in New Zealand must exist within the dynamics of several well established institutions. Firstly the gallery and the museum, but there are others that are branching off them and although with the intend to counter and critique the philosophical underpins of these institutions, such critiques are still inheriting the essential idea that there is something called ‘art’. More so, if there is such a thing called ‘art’, then there must be something outside it which is not ‘art’.

Street ‘art’, graffiti ‘art’ and etc although reacting against institutional snobbery and critiquing the boundaries of what ‘art’ is, are still operating from and within the same psyche – that there is ‘art’ in human culture. Thus, it is more a fight and a critique against exclusionary elitism, and a critique to be included than a critique to unsettle and stifle a dialogue and a negotiation about who should be in the box and who shouldn’t be. Honestly, you can read through the entire history of ‘art’ (a Western one) and this generalization runs through it. So many movements especially in the last 3 hundred years have emerged and disappeared into the pages of history only to be remembered as championing a certain type of ‘art’ in the defense of the ‘new’.

With art, it is important to understand the space in which its critique must begin. The conception of ‘Art’ has a long and wide narrative and it is in here we should begin any form and movement of critique if we are to rescue our culture from becoming irrelevant to our lives. Continuity is an aspect of that ‘nostalgia’ mentioned earlier in the last part of the discussion. But there is already continuity one might say – nevertheless, the continuity we aspire to is different in that we want our creative practices to have the ability to flow and exist both within and outside the modernity that claims our everyday lives...

to be cont...

Part 3 Tattooing and the Paradox of Decolonization

PART 3

By now, I have probably taken the discussion too deep into a theoretical paradigm, but I think the positive thing about blogging is, there are no constraints and definitely no disciplinary boundaries curtailing the freedom to explore ideas in ways otherwise impossible to do so in academia. Indeed, speaking of constraints, it is adamant that we as Pacific Island people, artists, writers and perhaps also bloggers continue to explore new ways to express understand and explain to ourselves our own culture(s) and experience. The need to do so is a result of our contemporary conditions as living both within and beyond the experience and history within which we are continued to be confined. Call it what you want, and there are a lot of catchy terms floating around in texts as well as in the boundless matrix of the web. However, I think it serves this discussion better to use the term ‘Modernity’.

We theorize and continue to do so for various reasons. A standout reason is our need to understand the world around us and how we fit into that mechanism. But we fail from the outset because our thinking about these conditions is initiated by an eruption and violence to what we understand reality to be. So that our theorizing process begins by disregarding and discounting the very fabric of the reality we attempt to understand by assuming our standpoint from without and beyond the constraints of that reality. We begin by assuming ourselves and our reality outside and beyond temporality. We assume ourselves as existing outside our own experiences so that we collectively attempt to read culture(s) as a simultaneous and contesting mechanism. Indeed, I would also add that our culture(s) is such to the point that we always already from the outset must locate ourselves somewhere outside our own. Indeed also, it is from this without which I tend to designate my discussion from and the ‘palimpsest’ and weaving metaphor helps in breaking the constraints in which we find ourselves.

The paradox of decolonization is therefore a given situation. With the present interest of popular culture in tattooing, it is a situation already violated from the outset. Tattooing in popular culture is already a fragmented collection of its assumed ‘authenticity’, and to say the least, this ‘authenticity’ exists alongside its fragmentations, weaving and mirroring each other.

The question of ‘authenticity’ still remains a problematic issue in that the above sense of co-inhabiting the same plane of existence suggests that such is a reciprocal and interdependent existence. What is an ‘authentic’ form without the in-authentic? Indeed, it is an existence through differences. We can go to and fro arguing in-between these two poles but the fact of the matter is, it is problematic in that such arguments are too reliance on extremity. In the same sense, where does the popular idea of decolonization come from? By this I mean to question the whereabouts of its designation and its origin form of movement. Decolonization is an important albeit problematic issue for all indigenous peoples and cultures. It is an issue raised largely in light of a culture’s mentality towards itself and outward.

Decolonization is revolutionarily thinking about oneself and his or her culture, identity and the world without. I say revolutionary because it is very much a political action. It is a process to overthrow the oppressive psyche dominant in our reality. Decolonization is a strive towards a nostalgic form of ourselves and our culture(s) that’s outside our reality but with which our experiences often at times crisscross to form weaves, therefore marking points in our historical narrative connecting us and that nostalgia even if for a short moment.
In a contemporary Polynesian inspired tattoo sleeve, we see these weaves in several aspects of a sleeve’s own narrative. We see points in a Steve Ma Ching Samoan sleeve that may construct a weave point with the more traditional form of the Samoan ‘pe’a’ tatau. The same could also be said of Joe Brown’s work, or Carl and Afa Cocker’s. More so, the same could be said of every other form of tattoos relevant in today’s so called tattoo renaissance….

to be cont...

Part 2 - Tattooing and the Paradox of Decolonization

PART 2

Initially, as you can tell from the previous and first part of this ongoing discussion, I never intended to delve into the theoretical s side of things because I know too well of the usual direction such discussion tend to lead – deep into theoretical wonderland. Such is difficult to overcome and brought back into our usual realm of reality and straight-forward talking. Indeed, the ability to do so with ease comes only from those skilled and well-versed in the English language. Likewise, and on the otherhand, I am not one with such abilities. However, I hope something useful and simple may come out of it at the end.

Continuing from the previous part, I want to get into discussing the idea of the ‘palimpsest’ as a way to understand how elements of popular culture as a mechanism operate. There aren’t much texts (if non what-so-ever) floating around linking this idea with tattooing, but I thought since tattooing features prominently in popular images in conjunction with the body as an important site for expressing dimensions and layers of the self otherwise inaccessible to the outside world, it might be interesting to see where the mechanism of popular culture is/are most affective in the recent interest in tattooing.

Basically, anything that is understood through the idea of the palimpsest is firstly understood as multidimensional and multilayered. Using the ‘palimpsest’ as a conceptual conduit through which to better understand the multiplicity of such things indicate such things’ complex nature. So that a thing or things that are considered in this light have multiple elements or layers of meanings that are read simultaneously.

Whether I am talking about popular culture, tattooing or whatever, ‘palimpsest’ is a useful concept from which to designate and initiate my argument because it assumes from the outset that these things are complex weaves. People use a lot of metaphors in their writing mainly because a metaphor is useful to explain the complexity of what they talk about. If you think of culture, it is a very broad concept with multiple layers of history and meanings, almost as if the word ‘culture’ is merely a gateway to those meanings and history, and its pronunciation announces these meanings/histories to our attention. Hence, I use the idea of a ‘complex weave’ metaphorically to speak of these complexities and dynamics because I am too lazy to explain them everytime the idea comes to mind or enters the discussion. Tongan women weave mats together with flaxes and the process is very complicated but once its completed, the result is a single mat – yet the patterns of how these flaxes are weaved together are still evident. This is what we mean by the ‘complex weave’ as a metaphor and it’s a very useful one too.

When you talk of the image of Jesus, there are many different narratives simultaneously echoing. You know that Jesus in this case is firstly a religious image, but you can also see that Jesus’ image is used for other means as well. Jewish beliefs don’t see Jesus the same way as Christianity do. Feel-good hippies don’t embrace the entirety of Jesus’ teaching, and I would also say the same of rap musicians such as Kanye West ‘s appeal to Jesus in their fashion and music. Hence, there are different narratives appealing both negatively and positively to the iconic image of Jesus, but however they utilize this image, it is clear that there are different weaves creating and forming new and anew old narratives, bringing into contact narratives that were otherwise existing and weaving at opposite sides of history.

The way we see tattooing in its contemporary form and subforms is similar in that a certain tattoo initially associated with a style can be dissected and undone in terms of its history as such. An image of Jesus is intensely popular and such an image is tattooed to speak in and about different circumstances important and specific to that wearer’s experience. Each of these truths create a weave of narrative contributing to the ongoing building and weaving of an overarching historical narrative that demands the identification of each weave in its understanding. This demand is also its resistance to essential and deductive articulation and reasoning regarding its nature as a multilayered weave of narratives that are at certain perspective dynamically contesting existence.
Where such or similar contestations are dynamic, a palimpsest-like effect can be metaphorized, lending also to the idea that such dynamism mirrors the process of weaving.

As is with before, I hope this topic remain interesting for me so that I am able to come back with more bull..see you next time..

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Don Rush - West Coast Classic Cougar - How he got Started

Find out a little bit of the history behind our friends over at West Coast Classic Cougar.

Stacey David's Gearz - Mercury Cougar V8 Interceptor

This Season Stacey David's Gearz is rebuilding a 1967 Mercury Cougar called the Intercetor.

Click here to see all the details,

Don

V8 Interceptor


Stacey picked up this 1967 Mercury Cougar as raw material for an extreme build! Stay tuned to GearZ to see what he has planned for it---stock? What do you think?! This is Stacey we are talking about...

Get more insight into Stacey's idea for this car at his blog

The idea for the V8 Interceptor has been bangin’ around in my head for a number of years, just waiting for a chance to get out. I have always loved the early Mercury Cougars and figured I wasn’t the only one, so I knew that people would want to see a high performance street machine project that wasn’t just the typical early Mustang or Camaro. I also wanted the feel and direction of the buildup to be based around the natural mystique of the Cougar. These cars with their hidden headlights and sequential taillights were always very sinister and menacing looking on the street, very much like a smaller coupe version of the legendary 68-70 Dodge Charger. When you add to that the fact that a four-footed Cougar is one of nature’s most perfect natual “interceptors”, you’ve got the basis for a great project. I mean, in the wild a Cougar will chase down a Mustang or Firebird, or Impala and eat it!....... is that a great visual for a hot street predator or what!?!

But it didn’t just stop there. Calling a project “the V8 Interceptor” takes a lot of balls, because you’ve got to be able to back that name up, just as the legendary Mad Max car did years ago. So I definitely wanted to add in a little flavor of the original Mad Max car, but also step beyond that and build a car that nobody has really considered or visualized yet. This is, of course, is one of the main purposes and goals of GEARZ. To encourage people to think beyond the boundaries, and limits that they already know and see, and get really creative when they are building their projects. Just because you have a Chevelle or Roadrunner doesn’t mean you have to build an SS or 440 six pack clone. There are SO many other things that you can do to these cars to make them different and up-to-date without destroying the original magic of the car. And if you take your time and do it right, you’ll probably end up with a car that is more valuable and definitely more cool then just another clone, and the idea behind the V8 Interceptor is to prove that point.

The center piece of this project is the incredible Boss Nine engine I am using from Jon Kaase Racing. From the outside this thing looks just like the legendary Boss 429 but this is 520 cubic inches of Ford Hemi that is twisting the dyno at just under 800hp and an astounding 700ft/lbs of torque! Mash the throttle on this thing, and all that torque could affect the Earth’s rotation! Topping it off will be a custom Hilborne 8-stack injection that is going to stick up thru the hood with ram tubes going all different directions. Intimidating???...... you bet!

Backing that up is the new Magnum 6spd tranny from Tremec that is designed to handle that kind of power, and an entire clutch and driveshaft system from American Powertrain.

The only way an engine this size will fit in an early Ford is if you remove the shock towers, and using a kit from Total Cost Involved we did just that. We removed the shock towers and installed TCI’s state of the art independent front suspension that includes a complete subframe assembly to stiffen the unibody. A TCI rear torque arm suspension will do it’s best to plant all that power to the ground and pulling everything to a stop are are Wilwood 13” rotors and 6 piston calipers in front, and 4 piston calipers in rear. The rearend is the massive Fab 9 nine inch Ford from Currie Enterprises and it’s packing a tru-trac posi and forged 31 spline axles.

To bring the original interior and body back to life, we hooked up with the Cougar specialists at West Coast Classic Cougar for things like upholstery, weatherstripping, sheetmetal, etc, and for any Mustang parts we may incorporate into the project we have been using Mustangs unlimited, Year One, and other suppliers.

Of course this is just the tip of the iceburg on this project, but hopefully you get the idea. So what am I going to do with the car when it’s done? Well……… the plans are definitely to run road courses and other racing events like the Maxton Monster Mile…….Blast it down the drag strip from time to time…….Drive it across country on events like Power tour and hit some shows like SEMA so people can get a good look at it……and at some point, take it up over 200 MPH just to show that it can be done. But,…. let’s not forget the most important job of a car like this……to run down and eat anything that tries to get ahead of it…….because…..well…….that’s what Interceptors do! HA….ha……ha…..

Hope this helps

One life, One chance

Out of all the sayings and phrases people come up with for a tattoo, this has to be one of my favorites...

My Video of the Week - Lowkey "Fire in the Booth" Freestyle

One of the few rappers from the UK worth listening to...

Inside Arm

My friend Dan came through to finish off the inside part of his arm-sleeve

The Fragility of Things

William E. Connolly

Johns Hopkins University

We inhabit a time when things have become more fragile and urgently in need of delicate tending. At the same time, a large section of the populace is belligerently opposed to recognition of this condition. It is a time when militant pressure to engage the fragility of things must be joined to acknowledgment of the limited ability of the human estate to master the world. It is thus a paradoxical time.

What are some sources of the refusal to recognize this feature of the contemporary condition? First, some popular versions of the three monotheisms militate against it, acting as if God will take care of us no matter what we do to the rest of the world and, in the worst cases, defining those who bring such news to be enemies of God. Second, neoliberal ideology does so too, with its henchmen on the media acting as if markets can allocate prices, production, worklife, and consumption in a rational way without significant regulation. Third, the time scale and corporate dependence of the media does so, as it spins out scandals and neoliberal fantasies. Fourth, the divisions and methods of the human sciences make a contribution, so that the fragility of things too often gets lost in the gaps between them. Fifth, the sharp boundaries between the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences do so, diverting our attention from numerous interactions between the human estate and non-human systems with their own powers of self organization. Fifth, intense desires by several constituencies to believe that things will take care of themselves so as long as we pray and support corporate/market hegemony over the culture folds into this mix, fueling support for churches, media talking heads, political leaders and popular writers. There are numerous voices who fight against these trends, including by way of a sample Stuart Kauffman in biology, Catherine Keller in theology and biblical studies, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, Timothy Morton, Brian Massumi and Steven Shaviro in English and media studies, John Buell and Mark Blyth in political economy, and Jane Bennett in political theory. They remain voices in a larger wilderness to date, but the cumulative potential of their work should not be underestimated.

The disparate pressures listed above screen too much of public culture from fragilities that penetrate numerous aspects of life. The dangers and uncertainties are too much for many to face; the risks to future generations too abstract to be internalized; the changes that are needed in the American way of life too severe to be admitted. To change this situation would require concerted change in several of the above domains, with each adding energy to the others in a series of positive loops. As a few take off, they might spur other movements in churches, universities, investment communities, consumer groups, states, and the media to revise established private and public priorities.

What, then, are some of the fragilities created by conjunctions between unfettered capitalism and several non-human systems? One instance resides in the failure to turn to renewable energy resources that many started pressing for in the early nineteen seventies. Now late capitalism is compelled to drill oil in ever more treacherous zones, triggering destructive eco-events that careen out of control. The 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf, for instance, was triggered by the explosion of a gas bubble that surprised the engineers, overwhelmed available safety devices, and outstripped the capacity of the company to repair. The complex interfaces between oil, water, wetlands, species life, and human welfare are not readily susceptible to human control after the fact because each of these systems has some degree of autonomy and because they all interact. There are at least 3500 other wells in the Gulf tapped temporarily without being supervised closely by corporations or the state. The response this event generated was revealing: many demanded a rapid state resolution of the problem joined to an immediate return to drilling under the same old rules.

The fragility, too, resides in the perverse relation between the terms of capitalist expansion and the acceleration of climate change, with implications for world temperature increases, the decline of fertile soil, the loss of habitable zones, and a possible diversion of the Gulf stream that could trigger a new ice age in Europe. Each of these implicated systems, by the way, has its own mode of self-maintenance and fragility. The fragility resides as well in regional economic inequalities, exacerbated by regional religious differences and the differential effects of climate change on soil and habitation in vulnerable zones, finding variable expression in massive migrations, imperial pressures, terrorist movements and regional religious resentments. It finds expression, too, in the shrillness adopted by media defenders of neoliberalism, amply primed by tea bag anger. It resides in the more rapid border crossings of people, arms, drugs, ideas, music and goods that challenge the terms of territorial order upon which neoliberal state capitalism rests as it also generates bellicose drives to reinstate those borders. It resides even in the complex loops between bees, viruses, and pesticides that derange the brains of bees, leading to rapid decline in bee population and decline in the pollination of crops and fruits. It resides, too, in intensified efforts to manage and control the populace as the distributive effects of these fragilities pile up.

Such a list constitutes a mere sample of fragilities stalking the human estate. And it must be emphasized again how each of the processes listed in subordinate clauses of the above sentences constitutes a force-field of its own, with a degree of autonomy and some capacity to morph under new conditions of stress.

I have written elsewhere about how the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine supports a public culture of vigilante blindness. Today it is necessary to focus on how the human sciences--at odds with this machine in several ways--nonetheless contribute to this condition. In general, the social sciences are either too enclosed upon some aspect of human culture or, if and when they attend to human/non-human interfaces, predisposed to underplay how nonhuman systems have self-regulating powers of their own, interact with other such non-human systems, and periodically reach tipping points that recoil back on the human estate. 

Such tendencies are loosely connected to another disposition, itself connected to the desire to construct several self-enclosed sciences. Inattention in the first respect often leads to a tendency to underplay the contribution that the quality of role performances in every aspect of cultural, economic and political life makes to both the tonalities of public culture and sensitivity to human/nonhuman interfaces. Paul Krugman, for instance, is one of the few journalists who takes on neoliberal capitalism on a regular basis, and he folds ecological awareness into his economic analysis. Much to admire there. But in a recent piece on the economics of ecology in the New York Times Sunday Magazine he underplays the powers of self-maintenance and self-adjustment in non-human systems and fails to come to terms with the contribution that the quality of ethos makes to every aspect of economic life.

The contemporary fragility of things can now be stated in stark terms: As neoliberal capitalism expands, as it assumes hegemony over more aspects of life, as it fosters visible inequality between regions, and as it supports rapid growth in the world’s population, particularly in areas that are ecologically challenged, its intersections with a large number of self-regulating, non-human systems become more strained and precarious. As those force-fields recoil back on it, the fragility of things becomes accentuated and more visible to those with eyes to see. 

The answer is not to turn to a classical model of socialist productivism, nor to the themes of deep ecology with its assumption that nature tends towards a stable equilibrium. The first continues the growth imperative by new means; the second underplays the extent to which a variety of interacting fields contain independent powers to morph in this way or that. Fred Pearce, in With Speed and Violence, provides a powerful review of both slow and rapid periods of climate change over the last 100,000 years, with several instances triggered by a volatile intersection with other, non-human force fields. Only during the last 200 years has the human estate had such profound effects on these other systems. The Pearce study thus cuts between those who say that climate change is only “natural” and those who say it is determined by humans. It is both, today at least, which makes the contemporary fragility of things more severe than it would otherwise be.

If socialist productivism and deep ecology are both deficient and neoliberal capitalism is the worst of all, what is the answer? I do not have a perfect recipe, only possible directions to pursue. Today we must amplify cultural recognition of the limited power of the human estate in its close interactions with a world composed of innumerable force-fields with volatilities and pluripotentialities of their own. Such recognition must then be folded into production priorities, consumer choices, market regulations, investment decisions, church activities, generational relations, university education, high school courses, media reporting, state policies, and international organizations. That such a shift in operational priorities could make a real difference is supported by the fact that contemporary American capitalism would be quite different today if economic and cultural institutions were not so infused with the hubris and existential resentment that propels the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine. It will take a strange combination of political militance and ecological sensitivity to move in the needed direction. And success in this respect will only provide a start...

Let’s return, then, to the positive role for the human sciences in this larger scenario. Today to participate wisely in the human sciences we must also select some non-human systems to study in relation to the human estate. That in turn means reform of the professionalization and coarse methods that govern too much work in these sciences. The task is to cultivate new sensitivities to human/nonhuman imbrications in ways that draw the humanities and the human sciences closer together. For much work in the humanities focuses on how to enlarge human sensitivity in a culture that otherwise often works against it. As we come to appreciate the differential powers of self-regulation and potentialities to morph in a variety of non-human systems, we will acquire the existential modesty, political courage and ecological sensitivity to cope wisely with the fragility of things. That is one needed interface, then. But the new fragility of things also means that the human sciences must become more attuned to complexity theory as it unfolds in several natural sciences, incorporating some aspects of it into our own portfolios. The most profound versions of complexity theory discern what might be called degrees of cultural complexity ranging beyond the human estate. These sciences in the domains of biology, ecology, neuroscience, geology and climatology both speak to cultural theory and need infusions from it. A close exploration of the potential intersections between the human and non-human sciences must await a future post. But the larger point is that contemporary fragility of things means that the human sciences must alter their traditional sense of what it means to be “between” the humanities and the natural sciences. That word must now shift from its sense as the declaration of a boundary to its other sense of pointing to a space of movement and crossing that links different processes.

To attend to the fragility of things today is to fold literary and artistic sensibilities into the human sciences as you also attend to complexity theory in the natural sciences. Such crossings will improve the quality of the human sciences, as they help us to focus on a defining characteristic of the contemporary condition. It will not be easy to negotiate such a plurality of interfaces, given the professional grooves into which each science has settled and administrative pressures within universities to make the human sciences conform to the demands of neoliberal capitalism. But the effort is worth it: a degree of success could spur broader recognition of the fragility of things and new efforts to address this condition. For, as the list at the outset of this piece suggests, resistance to acknowledgment of the fragility of things comes from several, intercoded sources.