THE END OF THE PRESENT T This publication draws together critical H reflection, speculative fiction, and collective E research to consider the ‘long crises’ of capitalism and the environment. It explores E the different forms of time in which N financial and environmental crises are D located, and how we as humans experience these massive events. O F Curator and artist Angela Chan and artist, writer and lecturer Emily Rosamond present T their own takes on time and crises, each H in response to the question ‘when does a E crisis begin and end?’ Emily Rosamond’s essay, Swarm Signals, connects astrophysics P to financial markets to question causality R and influence. Angela Chan’s short story, E Blurred Events, takes us to a near future in S which pandemic time blurs world politics. E N Jumping off from The End of the Present, T an online residency with Arts Catalyst, our quasi factual writing runs throughout this publication. Each narrative develops research undertaken by participants in public online co-research workshops where we collectively mapped events across recent and deep timescales. Our texts are a time(un)line of connections, which attempt to unravel cause and effect, and undo linear readings of history.

Ruth Beale & Amy Feneck, The Alternative School of

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P R E TIME(UN)LINE S E N The Alternative School T of Economics

3 T PINK ICE H E The Antarctic Treaty System, the post- colonial promise to ‘continue forever to E be used exclusively for peaceful purposes’ A N ends in 2048. It is 27 years until the end of D forever. Is this the point where the absolute chaos of ownership and self interest comes O forward? F The legacy of the ‘Heroic Age’, 1895- T 1914, explored in the book Gender on Ice H by Lisa Bloom, is a perception of Antarctic E polar exploration as ‘integral to the social construction of a distinctive nexus of P white manhood and nationalism’ and R ‘crucial to reifying a particular form of E white masculinity’. B The whiteness of its S endeavour is as white as the landscape. E N In Mesozoic time, the Antarctic Peninsula is T covered in lush rainforest – pine trees, ferns and mosses in the undergrowth, ginkgos and cycads.

In summer 2017, meltwater surges through cracks in the Larsen Ice Shelf, and a vast iceberg, A68, breaks free and spirals north. As the iceberg melts, it threatens phytoplankton, and in turn krill, and in turn seals, penguins and whales. After four years, it disintegrates near the island of South Georgia.

C Klaus Dodds’ book Pink Ice documents the politics of how – in 1908 and 1917 – the Antarctic Peninsula and wind-blown

4 island chains of the South Atlantic are incorporated into the pink-tinted British Empire maps. In the Handbook on the Politics of Antarctica he and the other authors describe the region as ‘unavoidably a political arena in relation to all activities on and off the ice, rock, air and waters that are assumed to materially compose D Antarctica.’

1775, South Georgia, uninhabited, is claimed for the King of England by Captain James Cook in HMS Resolution. He leads the first landing, survey and mapping of South Georgia. Whereas colonial practices in more northerly latitudes are largely based on ‘disempowering indigenous communities, establishing property regimes, building fences and hedges and managing new environments’ in the most southerly regions, BLURRED EVENTS harvesting and territorial claims are ‘ends as well as means.’ E Angela Chan

On 19 March 1982, a group of Argentinian people arrive at Leith Harbour in South Georgia and raise the Argentine flag on the island. It is occupied and retaken by the British Army during the Falklands War. Two wildlife film-makers, working in an isolated part of the island before the invasion, are evacuated by a helicopter to HMS Endurance.

In 2013, teams of Norwegian government shooters and Sami reindeer herders cull all 3,500 reindeer in South Georgia. Introduced by Norwegian whalers in the early 20th T century for food and sport hunting, the H animals are later seen as a pest, damaging E the island’s flora and wider ecosystem.

E In a climate similar to the 21st Century, N the Lower Paleolithic era, a huge iceberg D cleaves from the East Antarctic Ice Shelf and into the ocean, causing sea levels to rise O over three meters. As night set in, C settled into their habitual blue light scroll in F bed. Speech – article – report. ‘Escaping the Jaws of Death: Ensuring Enough Water in 2050’... ‘PM Increases Defence T Funding in the Teeth of The Pandemic’... ‘Children in England H Going Hungry with Schools Shut’. Headlines were all that actually E occupied the main webpages, now that only a few billionaires were the key stakeholders of the country’s media, far from P the free and independent press. C felt particularly angry about R tonight’s headlines. The state had just declared an extra £16.5 E billion spending for the defence sector, barely two weeks after S it had finally u-turned on offering free school meals. It took E campaigners months to get the decision overturned, and when N it finally was, the quality and amount was pitiful. C also read T about the state’s cuts to international , 93% in Sahel region, 67% in Syria, 63% in , and the list goes on. Aid was already the state’s disguised refusal to apologise with concrete reparations for colonisation, war, extractions, C thought, and now there was no longer even a need for pretence of charity anymore. All this redirected ... to fuel more war?

Lately, there was an unspoken realisation that events were happening without endings. The emergence of crisis events didn’t announce themselves with much fanfare – there were so many overlapping at once. Instead, they pressed down as infinitely accumulating physical and mental weights on everyone (except those profiteering through The Contracts). These became known as the Blurred Events, always beginning, staying but never ending. Citizens and grassroots organisers persisted through, despite seeing no end in sight.

6 T It was as if a fog had submerged the road ahead and behind, H and people could only move forward, concentrating on the most E immediate next moments. When they had adjusted to the fog and momentum of travel, their cautionary and outstretched arms would E get tired, but remain on guard to self-protect at all times. They had N to continue to move anxiously towards the unrecognisable future, D where endings to their ordeals never seemed to come.

O In one recent case of a Blurred Event, a mental health nurse was F reported to have been fined £10,000 for breaking the Rules, by protesting in a public square against the meager 1% pay increase for T frontline health workers. C felt that most individuals online and H in person chatted about it with empathy and anger, yet exchanges E soon resulted in hopeless sighs as the next Blurred Event came. People asked why there was a scarcity of public sector funds, and P demanded the state to rechannel spending towards adequate wages R for frontliners. Yet again, it became a deadlock of time, energy E of the people and inaction from the state, who aimed to blur the S people and issues away. E N C leant the postcard against their glass of water and tilted the T matte image towards the setting sunlight, as if the shadows could be hiding any clues. All that was printed on it was tomorrow’s date in DD/MM/YYYY format. But nothing else indicated the significance of tomorrow. Although it was named and addressed to C, there was no product or service advertised. C had a hunch that it wasn’t as simple as some brand’s abstract marketing strategy, so they could only wait for tomorrow to arrive.

Nothing in C’s schedule tomorrow warned of a potential surprise either. C would be volunteering at the Food Hub all weekend, ticking off the inventory tasks. It used to be a restaurant where they had worked as a part-time chef, before the pandemic hit and they were made redundant. It had been a humble little dining spot, and the only independent eatery hidden behind the angular steel and glass buildings, which tower over every generic city centre in the country. The old boss eventually gave in to the unyielding landlord,

7 T TRADE ROUTES: A SERIES who demanded full rent to be paid throughout the endless cycle H OF COLLISIONS of lockdowns. Like many other family legacy businesses, already E worn down by franchise competition and austerity-pinched purses, The end of the last ice age: The boreal it was declared bankrupt. E forests – found in the northern hemisphere N of Earth, sandwiched between temperate C felt bad for their boss, who had already paid the lease for the D deciduous forests in the south and tundra remaining quarter, and was upset not to have the chance to say in the North – migrate. Certain species in a final farewell to his neighbours. C suggested reshaping the empty O these forests climb and descend mountains, premises, adapting the dining area to organise a safe redistribution F move south and then north again, as the of food to the local community. When the restaurant food stock climate warms. A self-migrating forest soon diminished, small carrier bags of donations helped fill the T clears a route across, one that is easier for fridges and shelves. C had teamed up with a few other laid off H human navigation. hospitality workers to keep the door open for anyone in need. E Instead of the lavish farewell banquet the boss had dreamed of ‘In order to really know much about the ending the business with, he told C he was actually happier to have P big, abstract, universalising forces at work this humble goodbye – one that centred need, not indulgence. It R in the world, we have to pay attention to was challenging work, there were queues everyday. No one really E what happens when they meet and collide knew when fairer access to food would be available, or how they S with particular situations... called zones of could shorten these queues in the long run. They just tried their E awkward engagement or cultural friction... best in the moment to organise their campaign, while the Food Hub N A space where various competing universals still had its lease. T get mixed up in local situations. A universal here is some kind of knowledge that * * * moves objects and subjects... universals can transcend localities, but they have not taken Tick, cross, tick, cross, cross. C’s recording of the incoming stock over the whole world...’F at the Food Hub was like a game of noughts and crosses; without — McKenzie Wark balanced ingredients, potential meal plan ideas for the food packages had to be struck off. Z and J were also in the kitchen, packing The invention of bronze; an alloy metal frozen food for the afternoon’s drop-ins. made primarily from copper and tin is a harder and more durable metal than ever ‘Did you read the news, C? They reckon the UK’s gonna run before, and demands trade. Ores of copper out of water in two decades. Sounds too long away for me to be and tin are rarely found together and new, concerned’ said Z. long-distance trade routes are established for the first time. Trade – that centre of C felt like they had something to respond with: a surprising jolt of collisions between localities and locals, along imagination or alertness they hadn’t experienced in recent memory routes of awkward engagement between began to rise – rainfall, access, consumption, groundwater – but the

8 T nodes of extraction, defended by warriors H – create multiple frontiers of capitalism, E where ‘the landscape itself appears inert: ready to be dismembered and packaged E for export.’ G N D 1956, Malcom McLean, an American entrepreneur, revolutionises logistics systems O of globalised trade with the invention of F the shipping container. A universally sized box travels across the world stuffed with T products for global consumption. Watching H shipping containers travel past in quick E succession through a passenger railway station – the container seems to be a non- P place, a place between, a trade route in itself, R yet quite literally it is colliding with the E locality at high speed; friction is inevitable. S A brief visual of graffiti marks the outside E of a container, blurred and only seen in N passing, it is no bronze age standing stone, T but serves, like the latter – as a place-marker on a route, a sign saying this is where, a story of connection ‘co-produced in the interaction I call “friction”: the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference... Friction refuses the lie that global power operates as a well-oiled machine... Friction can be the fly H in the elephant’s nose.’

2019, thirty nine Vietnamese men and women are found dead in a container lorry in Essex, UK. Migrating across the English Channel ‘for the chance of I a brighter future’ they suffocate from lack of air, as people smugglers load too

9 T many migrants into the truck. This deadly usual fogginess quickly enveloped their thoughts, so instead, they H frontier of capitalism, one of many horrific shrugged, ‘Yeah’. E and messy end points to the unequal and unstable threads of global connection; the ‘Mmm, I’m not sure about that Environmental Agency report, they E universalised metal box, made to speed don’t seem neutral. Seems a bit dangerous to just blame household N up global trade, hides the migrant, traded consumption, and the growing population. It’s convenient isn’t D like goods, struggling for breath. it? When the scarcity comes, they’ll look back and say they took enough action by warning us. But they messed up England’s rivers O with the water and sewerage companies, didn’t they? The state will F keep quiet on that, and everything else. But it will end next month.’ J had muttered this under their mask, not looking up, as if speaking T to no one, and expecting no response. H E But C had heard it. They hadn’t noticed J express so much certainty before and this startled C. People rarely spoke about endings these P days. In an instant, memories returned of how normal it used to R be to speak so surely about near future wants and dreams. C realised E their agency to engage with this optimism was activating after a S long, uninvited hibernation. E N J looked up from tying up a bag and did a double take at C, who T had been staring in surprise at them.

‘You... heard me?’ J asked. C nodded slowly, then firmly as if ready to hold onto this return to reality.

‘You weren’t able to notice me yesterday’, J said gently. ‘Let’s take a break outside’. They left Z, who seemed to not be aware of this exchange, and walked out of the back door to stand in the sunny back alley. Then J sincerely greeted C, ‘Well, welcome back!’

* * *

‘What you’re experiencing, it’s happening everywhere. Whether it’s by eye contact, speaking, signing or writing, communication at this level of certainty doesn’t work if you’re not on the same channel. People are calling it the Clarity Broadcast’. J explained

10 T not everyone has returned to their certainty levels yet; it was a H natural response to impactful events, and disinformation also fogs E a clear sense of direction. ‘It’s not even a tech innovation, or some sort of cult wisdom back to reality. It’s more like a big undoing E of stress that is now gradually resuscitating society, whenever N we’re ready. It’s a widespread reconnection that reminds us we’re D actually good at transparent communication. My determined energy didn’t get through to you before, because you weren’t O ready, the fog was up. When you broadcast seeds, they don’t F all germinate at once. So it’s optimism, really. Once we regain confidence in clarity and truth, we will go against the bullying T state that’s not listening to us – yet’. H E ‘But how did you tune into the Clarity Broadcast before me?’ asked C. P R ‘The Clarity Broadcast is the work of grassroots organisers and E activists across the country, a mix of people who like to teach, S grow, care, build, design, feed, write, heal...’ J gestured an imaginary E list with their hand, ‘everyone can find their way in really. You N know that foggy sense of memory and passivity you’ve had towards T issues, Blurred Events?’

C nodded, then J continued, ‘Well, these people never stopped what they do best – meeting, organising and supporting everywhere. By grouping regularly, they’ve managed to remember how things can end. In other words, as a collective, they grasped at the confusion we’re feeling from different angles simultaneously, which resisted the fog of Blurred Events for them. Of course, we’re all human, there are some difficult days too. But having clarity means documenting the stories and knowledges of our social struggles. They’re useful, as both evidence of this time and as methods to end what we don’t want. They’re trying to broadcast these clearly, as part of the resistance’.

‘Right,’ C breathed in deeply then exhaled. ‘I got a postcard with today’s date. Was it from them? Like a sign things will change now?’

11 T DESERT STORM ‘No, it’s a beginning. Apparently, I heard this from a friend who H regained it before me, the Clarity Broadcast only reminds you to E Crude oil price fluctuations over a century feel sure of your feelings again by circulating truth back into our resemble an erratic heartbeat. A sudden media. You still have to do the work with other people to put a E high of $57.06 in 1974 begins a half century stop to the injustice that’s building up around us, and elsewhere N of turbulence. In April 1980 it shoots up to in the world. I don’t know how, but you actually wrote it yourself. D $128.26, before plummeting in the mid- There’s no postage paid, did you notice?’ C flicked a pictorial decade to a low of $25.19. Another crash to memory of it in their mind, it seemed plausible somehow. O $18.00 in November 1998, before zigzagging F to new heights of $168.20 in 2008, then a ‘You wrote it to yourself because you’re ready to jump out of the shock low of $19.33 in April 2020. In April fog today’, J explained. ‘It’s a memory trigger too. In case you slip T 2021 it hovers at $63.00. out of Clarity later on, you’ll have it to remember how on this day H you returned to feel aware and comfortable in your own thoughts E ‘A map marked with crude chinagraph- again. The work begins today for you’. pencil shows the ambition – and folly – of P the British-French plan that helped create C felt positive, things were starting to become clear. They spoke R the modern-day Middle East. Straight lines slowly, ‘We’ve all been hoping “soon it’ll be different” for a E make uncomplicated borders.’ J The map, while now, but without a real timeline. Nothing special seemed to S drawn by two white men in 1916 divides happen, but I can simply feel my memory has started to make sense E the land, which had been under Ottoman of the past Blurred Events: I can look backward as well as forward... N rule since the early 16th century, into new and I think I get where the endings could be. I guess the people T regions – , Transjordan, and Palestine who never stopped working against the fog kept things anchored. under British influence, and Syria and I’m returning in my own time’. Lebanon under France. J pulled down their mask for a quick sip of coffee, smiling hopefully First World War shortages of at C before slipping it back on and returning to the food parcels. drive the big powers to seek their own oil ‘A lot of work to do, let’s go’. sources. The French gain a share in the Turkish Petroleum Company as the spoils of war. The excluded Americans mount a campaign for an ‘open door’ policy to Middle Eastern oil. The British government resists, then concedes.

Oil is struck at Baba Gurgur, and the Red Line Agreement is signed by partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company on July 31,

12 T 1928. The signatories are the Anglo-Persian H Company (later BP), Royal Dutch/Shell, E Compagnie Française des Pétroles (later Total), Near East Development Corporation E (later ExxonMobil) and Calouste N Gulbenkian (an Armenian businessman). D A ‘self-denial clause’ prohibits the group from independently seeking oil interests, O and marks the creation of a 20-year oil F monopoly of immense influence.

T 1972 – Iraq’s Ba’athist government, led by H a dictatorship, nationalises oil production E along with most large industries, and imposes stiff tariffs to keep out foreign goods. P R 2003 – In the wake of the US-led invasion, E the Coalition Provisional Authority issues S binding orders to privatise Iraq’s economy E and open it up to foreign investment. N Contractors reap $138bn. At the same time, T thousands of members of the Ba’ath Party – previously forced to show support for through Party membership – are removed from their posts, including doctors, professors, bureaucrats and teachers. Iraq’s public services, economy and security near collapse.

The 1991 Gulf War, or Operation Desert Storm, is an invasion of Iraq by a coalition of 35 nations led by the USA, with and Saudi Arabia paying $32bn of the $60bn cost. It is a response to Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait, a conflict designed to co-opt Kuwait’s productive oil fields, raise Iraqi oil prices, and default on Iraq’s $14 billion

13 T debt (loaned by Kuwait to Iraq to finance H the –, a previous oil-fuelled E incursion into its neighbours territories). The daily broadcast of images from cameras E on board US bombers earns the Gulf War N the nickname Video Game War. D On 11th September 2001, four passenger O airliners are hijacked by 19 al-Qaeda F terrorists. Two of the planes crash into the World Trade Centre in New York, T claiming nearly 3000 lives. A third crashes H into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the E US Department of Defense, and a fourth is downed in Pennsylvania whilst heading for P Washington DC. Days later, US President R George W. Bush declares a ‘war on terror’. E S A new metaphor is used by President Bush E in the State of the Union Address on 29th N January 2002 – the first to be streamed live T on the internet – to represent Iran, Iraq, and North Korea: ‘States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an Axis of Evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.’ K The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, does not criticise the US President’s claims, but Chris Patten, European Commissioner for External Relations, calls them ‘absolutist and simplistic’. The Foreign Minister, Jack Straw, says they are ‘best understood by the fact that there are mid-term congressional elections coming up in November’. L

President Bush and his advisors build a case for war on the idea that Iraq possesses or is in the process of building weapons of

14 mass destruction. On 15 February 2003, a coordinated day of protests erupts across the world: millions of people in more than 600 cities express opposition to the imminent Iraq War.

SWARM SIGNALS Emily Rosamond T H E

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O When does a crisis begin and end? F Let’s try out one theory: a crisis begins and ends with signs of crisis, T looped and swarming. Early disturbances in market confidence H – share prices going out of whack, Twitter storms, mortgage E delinquencies, rising credit card default rates – get pored over like crystal balls, like currents. Which minute shifts are symptoms of P some incoming calamity – and which are merely passing ripples? R Apophenic priests crunch the numbers, searching for warnings, E trying to grasp the grain of the moment. S E Yet, as with particle physics, so with finance: acts of observation N can profoundly change the nature of what is being observed. As T feminist theorist Karen Barad recounts in an essay on the queerness of physics, within quantum mechanics, ‘entities (atoms, photons, electrons, etc.) do not have an inherent ontological identity (as either particles or waves)... identity is not given, but rather performed.’ 1 In the subatomic realm, indeterminacy reigns: linear conceptions of causality break down, and it becomes impossible to disentangle an observation apparatus from the phenomenon detected. For the physicist Niels Bohr, experiments designed to determine whether a subatomic entity was a wave or a particle instead demonstrated that ‘an entity either behaves like a wave or a particle depending on how it is measured (i.e., on the nature of 1 Karen Barad, the measuring apparatus it becomes entangled with).’ 2 For Bohr, ‘Nature’s Queer concepts, such as ‘wave’ and ‘particle,’ are inextricably intertwined Performativity,’ with what is being measured and observed; it is not possible to Qui Parle: Critical disentangle the two. 3 Analogously, within the financial realm, Humanities and Social Sciences 19, no. 2 (2012), identifying signs of crisis might well change the outcome. p. 41. 2 Ibid., p. 42. 16 3 Ibid. T RICE FUTURES How might such entanglements between measuring apparatuses H and the measured entities operate in the financial world? Here, 4 Tiziana Terranova, E The Japanese have more words for rice than what is being measured is not waves or particles, but rather, capital ‘Attention, Economy love. – itself propelled by the ‘circulation of social quanta of beliefs and the Brain,’ Culture 4 E and desires.’ The crisis-ridden field of post-Bretton Woods Machine 13 (2012), 5 N In her book, Rice as Self: Japanese Identities finance produces myriad entanglements between measurements p. 10; paraphrasing D anthropologist Emiko Onuki- and observed entities. Donald MacKenzie, for one, has written from Gabriel Tarde, through Time, , Tierney suggests that unlike other creation extensively on the performativity of financial measures: their ways Psychologie Économique Volume 1 (Charleston: O myths in the world, Japan’s mythology of producing the very conditions they purport to merely measure. Nabu Press, 2010), F is not about the creation of the universe For instance, he argues, the discovery of methods for calculating and Gabriel Tarde, but about changing wilderness through and pricing financial risk (such as the Black-Scholes model for Psychologie Économique, T rice cultivation. pricing options within derivatives trading), ended up dramatically Volume II (Charleston: H reshaping the financial field; what were once assumptions in Nabu Press, 2010). 5 The 1944 Bretton E Wet field agriculture begins in Japan in 1100- a mathematical formula became descriptors of the regulatory Woods Agreement 6 850 BC. The irrigation method of growing conditions governing trades. established rules for P rice creates its own ecosystem. Although monetary management R man-made, forcing some plants and wildlife The performativity of financial measures – their tendency to between the United E to move higher into the mountains, paddy produce conditions they purport to merely describe – can create States, Canada, Australia, S fields function like wetlands. Minnows and worrying ‘self-validating feedback loops,’ and raise questions about Japan, and Western 7 European countries. E loaches survive in the paddies, along with the ‘politics of market design.’ But identifying possible signs of One of its key features N frogs, aquatic snails and crawfish, attracting is also a matter of distinguishing signals from noise. was the mandate that T birds like egrets and snakes to feed on these Financial markets are full of ‘noise’; they are so complex that these countries maintain animals and other insects such as dragonflies. ignoring much of the activity within them (not to mention the external exchange rates For some wildlife that has adapted, their life extraneous factors that affect them) is unavoidable. In order to within a 1% range by tying their to cycles begin to match the seasonal rhythms be able to interpret them at all, some signals must be singled out gold. In August 1971, of rice farming. from all the noise – identified, explained and measured. (Which US President Richard factors are the most significant signs of looming financial crisis: Nixon suspended the 1603-1868, during the Edo period (the final asset bubbles, irrational exuberance, mortgage default increases, convertibility of the US era of traditional Japanese government, social unrest, climate change?) There is no absolute distinction to gold. Though culture and society) – rice is the primary between signal and noise in financial markets; it is always possible this was intended as a temporary measure, form of . Workers pay their taxes to look at the ‘noise’ differently, and try to reinterpret some of it it was a crisis that in rice and Feudal Lords run stores for the as a signal. Legal scholar Jesse Cunningham and effectively collapsed the rice collected at ports where rice receipts are researcher Huon Curtis address these complex entanglements . used to conduct purchases and sales. Receipts between financial signals and financial noise: 6 Donald MacKenzie, are also generated against the upcoming An Engine, Not a harvest – these are the first futures contracts, ‘The essence of finance economics, like all that is social in nature, Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets paving the way for future commodities is a forming of meaning. Whatever cannot be formed meaningfully (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 17 7 Ibid., p. 19, 35. T trading.The chronin class (artisans and is not available to the system. This unavailability, as ‘noise’, is H merchants) develop nobe-mai (延べ米), the dynamic difference (noise/information) that scintillates the E or Total Rice. It is a primitive form of system. [...] Without noise and the possibility of its conversion to futures trading, a financial instrument that information there would be no opportunities to exploit.’ 8 E helps them amass great wealth, and the N economic system in Japan begins to change Cunningham and Curtis defy the tendency to overlook the ‘noise’ D from a traditional land economy, to one in financial markets: that which is not – or not yet – framed, that is dominated by money accumulation. understood and measured as socially meaningful information. O Instead, they see noise as the very dynamism of the system – the F Throughout the 1700s the Shogunate try possibility for new signals to be found. What will have come to to control the new money market. They count as important or meaningful market information? what will T confiscate the property and wealth of the have remained mere noise? The indeterminacy of such questions H chronin class and close the Dojima Rice is the very medium through which opportunities emerge – or, E Exchange in Osaka. It reopens under new conversely, through which crises might creep up, if signs of their regulation – the price of rice is set by the imminent arrival fail to register as signals. P ‘fire cord price’ and the ‘bucket price’: R a wooden box containing a fuse cord is hung MacKenzie, Cunningham and Curtis are among many thinkers E off the highest horizontal pole in the roof who disrupt the myth of the true price signal: the idea that, given 8 Jesse Cunningham S of the exchange building. Each morning conditions of perfect competition, prices tend to convey meaningful and Huon Curtis, ‘Noise as Information: Finance E the cord is set alight and trading continues and ‘true’ information to consumers and producers alike. For Economics as Second- N as long as the box is on fire. The price of example, , one of the important early architects of Order Observation,’ T rice at the moment the fire goes out is the neoliberal thought, describes how, if a particular resource becomes Theory, Culture & official closing price – the ‘fuse cord price’. scarce, its price will likely increase. Therefore, consumers may Society 37, no. 5 (2020), However, traders often take no notice of this begin to purchase less of it than before; in this way, they align their p. 51. 9 Friedrich Hayek, official closing of the market, and continue rates of consumption with the needs of the economy in the process. ‘The Use of Knowledge to trade until ‘watermen’ – splash buckets Although it has been widely debunked, the idea that prices tend in Society,’ The of water over them to stop the transactions, to gravitate (if imperfectly) toward the condition of true signals in American Economic flooding the market place to disperse the ideal market conditions has often been used to justify the ideological Review 35, no. 4 crowd. It is the ‘bucket price’ that becomes view that governments should not intervene in markets. This, so (September 1945), p. the daily registered trading price. M the myth goes, could dampen the price signal’s value as legible 528. For an alternative to Hayek’s extreme information. To Hayek, the price system was a marvel – efficiently optimism about the Long-term flooding of rice fields cuts communicating social information and enabling the ‘coördinated efficiency of the price the soil off from atmospheric oxygen, utilization of resources.’ 9 The performativity of price measures, system, see George A. causing fermentation of organic matter however – and the propensity, in many situations, for speculative Akerlof, ‘The Market in the soil, producing methane. In 2016 market bubbles to appear, in place of any innate tendency to settle for “Lemons”: Quality rice is the most valuable agricultural crop into a natural position – depose the price signal myth. Instead, Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,’ in the world, and third to sugarcane and we might say that there are swarm signals: signals that entangle The Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 18 (August 1970), 488-500. T corn in quantity produced. 1kg of rice uses themselves with milieus and measures in complex ways; signals H on average, about 2500 litres of water, that swarm together, amplifying or cancelling one another out; E supplied either by rainfall or irrigation into swarms of signals whose unexpected movements are the very a paddy field. Paddy fields cover 160 million medium of crisis. E hectares of the worlds’ surface. Rice fields N are responsible for 11% of anthropogenic Swarm signals mete out market moods, gathering into ‘bull’ and D methane emissions – a greenhouse gas that ‘bear’ markets (respectively, rising or receding). Confidence, that is twenty times more potent than CO2. elusive medium, swells or shrinks, through and as signals. Where O Human-made flooding, plus groundwater does it come from – and how does it move? In an essay on literary F extraction for crops like rice, contribute to tone, Sianne Ngai describes confidence as ‘the “tone” of capitalism climate heating. itself.’ 10 As ‘tone,’ confidence can be a strangely exteriorized object T of circulation. Reading Herman Melville’s Confidence Man (1857), H In 2014, a analyst speaks of how Ngai describes how confidence can course through societies – E water being traded as an asset is ‘intuitively jumping from handshake to handshake, sealing the deal – even as it appealing... If you look at projections over remains a feeling that nobody actually feels. A specular object – the P the next 25 years, you’ll see that global sign of a feeling-not-felt, generalising as tone – confidence gathers R water supply and demand imbalances are momentum: establishing something like a velocity of transaction, E on track to get worse. The majority of the without having ever been straightforwardly (causally) transmitted S world population is living in water-scarce from point A to B. Everywhere and nowhere at once, flaring up E and water-stressed regions of the world.’ and fleeting without quite ever having been caused: perhaps there’s N He continues: ‘Water demands will increase something like a quantum confidence in financial markets. T at a faster rate than supply. Some of the notions about and preconceptions about Might there be something analogous, in finance, to the wave/ N water being a right could change’. particle problem in quantum physics? If so, it could be the ‘fungibility of different forms of credit,’ 11 to borrow Michel Reeling from the impact of extreme Feher’s phrase: the ability for financial credit and social or moral weather events and climate change-related credit (as in reputation, for example) to act interchangeably, 10 Sianne Ngai, Ugly disasters, America’s richest state, California appearing as one or the other depending on how they are measured. Feelings (Cambridge, is propelled to look for ways to lock-in Take, for instance, the recent GameStop share price frenzy. Wall MA: Harvard University future water prices. In December 2020, the Street hedge funds such as Melvin Capital heavily shorted (bet Press, 2005), p. 62. 11 Michel Feher, Chicago Mercantile Exchange makes water against) stock in GameStop: an American bricks-and-mortar video ‘Another Speculation a financial product. game and electronics retail chain, which seemed to be failing. is Possible: The Then, amateur investors on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets Political Lesson of R/ Environmentalist, physicist, economics coordinated their efforts to thwart the hedge funds. Using the WallStreetBets,’ Progress professor and former Spanish member of Robinhood investment app, they collaboratively executed a short in Political Economy, 5 parliament Pedro Arrojo-Agudo says ‘In squeeze: driving stock prices up, such that those who had shorted February, 2021, www. ppesydney.net/another- Spanish there is a saying: “You don’t ask that stock were now forced to purchase it, to offset the potentially speculation-is-possible- the-political-lesson-of- 19 r-wallstreetbets. T an elm tree for pears.” In this case it is H inconsistent to ask the market to properly O E manage water as a human right.’ The market doesn’t distinguish between E whether the water being traded is for N a swimming pool or for sanitation: D Arrojo-Agudo ‘The logic imposed by the financialisation of life – which is often O presented as unavoidable – corresponds F to the idea not only that everything can be bought and sold, but that everything has to T be bought and sold.’ P H E Indigenous water rights activist and legal scholar Kelsey Leonard proposes in 2020 P that water be granted legal personhood, R giving water visibility in a court of law: E ‘If you can grant legal personhood to a S corporation, why not to the Great Lakes? E Why not the Mississippi River? Why not N to the many waterways across our planet T that we all depend on to survive?’ Q

20 T GET BIG OR huge losses their short sells could incur. (This would drive up H GET OUT: INDUSTRIALISED, the stock price even further.) Whether lauded as ‘socking it to E CAPITALISED FARMING Wall Street’ or denigrated as out-of-control speculation, this story received extensive press coverage, given the novelty of the amateur E Between 1990 and 2007, Indonesia destroys investors’ coordination. But the way Melvin Capital and other N 28 million hectares of rainforest for palm hedge funds had shorted the stocks in the first place (a far more D plantations. Between 2001 and 2018, Brazil typical manoeuvre) was already thoroughly, strangely looped. loses almost 55 million hectares of tree O cover. 22.2 million hectares of land are A short position can be achieved in numerous ways. In this case, F converted to soy plantations. The majority Wall Street hedge funds borrowed stock they did not yet own, of the world’s soybean crop – 80% – is used to sell now – on the agreement that they would pay for the stock T to feed livestock, mainly for beef, chicken, they had already long since sold at a later date (by which time, if H egg and dairy production, in an industry they were lucky, the stock would have diminished in value). They E worth $1142bn. executed a ‘vote’ of no confidence through a strange, temporal- financial-contractual loop, according to which one sells now what P In 2020, venture investments in plant-based one will have purchased later. Their prediction about the fate of the R meat and dairy alternatives and lab-grown company, as Feher notes, seems also to be strangely circular: ‘the E meat technology soar to $1.4bn. managers of Melvin Capital certainly fancy themselves as serious S investors: if they decide to short the stock of GameStop, it is because E 1957, John Davis and Ray Goldberg, they believe that the economic prospects of the company are not N US diplomats, coin the term ‘agribusiness’ good. At the same time, once their decision is made, they use their T to include agrichemicals, breeding, crop reputation as financial wizards to make sure this becomes a self- production, distribution, farm machinery, fulfilling prophecy.’ Equally, when the amateur investors were processing, seed supply, marketing and barred from investing on the Robinhood app, they intervened in the sales. Agricultural transnational mega reputation of the company to change the situation. For Feher, the corporations, like Monsanto, enter on political lesson of r/WallStreetBets must be neither that financial the stage and expand rapidly through buy- markets are out of whack (a perfectly obvious point), nor that the outs and merges. Neoliberal policies in ‘little guy’ is winning (this may not be so); but instead, that, given the 1970s favour large-scale, industrialised that financial and moral credit have become interchangeable to a production, and disfavour small and certain extent, ‘another speculation is possible.’ 12 family farms. Earl Butz, US Secretary of Agriculture, says ‘Get big or get out!’ R The strange loops of fungible credit, reputation, and confidence go back much further. From its very inception, the Bank of The unexplained loss of honeybee colonies England (established 1694) circulated more banknotes than it had – colony collapse disorder – is first reported backed up in bullion. Thus, a run on the bank, resulting from a loss in 2006 by a commercial beekeeper from of confidence in the fledgling system, was always an inherent risk. Pennsylvania, USA. A variety of possible Public confidence in the bank was not incidental, but fundamental 12 Feher, ‘Another 21 Speculation is Possible.’ T causes are suggested, from chemical H contamination, poisoning from pesticides, E lack of genetic diversity in colonies; infection of colonies by pathogens or parasites, to E colony stress. The California almond export N crop alone requires more than one million D bee colonies for pollination.

O 1988, the World Bank introduces a new seed F policy in India and requires the government to deregulate the seed sector. Companies T become bound to Monsanto through H joint ventures and licensing arrangements, E and its seeds are defined as ‘intellectual property’, meaning it can collect royalties – P a percentage of revenues, or a fixed price R on harvests. Cotton seeds which were once E a renewable resource become non- S renewable, replaced with patented hybrids E and GMOs. Cotton, which could previously N be grown in harmony with other crops, T becomes a monocrop. Environmental campaigner Vandana Shiva challenges the legality of the patents and links Monsanto’s monopoly of seeds to chemical warfare, and an increase in farmer suicides: ‘There is an attempt, in the US, by Monsanto and the aiding US Government, to deem all non- patented seed illegal – even the tomato you have in your garden. And all this is being done in the name of “protecting and maintaining the food sources of America”.’ S

22 T PETRODOLLAR to the institution and its smooth circulation of notes. Further, as the H COLONIALISM: THE LATIN literary scholar Natalie Roxburgh argues, it ‘required a feedback E AMERICAN DEBT CRISIS loop in order to function: As long as there was commitment from the public, it worked; and as long as it worked, there was E July 1944, leaders of Allied nations gather commitment.’ 13 Where do feedback loops of financial confidence N in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, (or loops of its immanent loss, in crisis) begin and end? Much like D USA. They are preparing to rebuild the the strangely entangled subatomic causalities Barad describes – international economic system after the wherein, for instance, a photon ‘will have had to already wind up 14 O devastation of the Second World War, where it was going... before it left’ – perhaps confidence’s loops F and at the end of the conference, most can’t exactly begin or end. They can only keep going, they can allies sign the Bretton Woods Agreement. only emit strange velocities of transaction – as if presupposing they T It establishes the International Monetary will have already begun, as if already having had to wind up right H Fund (IMF), and sets up a system of rules, back where they were going, before they left. Emitting velocities E institutions and procedures to regulate of gains and losses, nudged into being with a rhetorical flourish an international monetary system which or an indicative signal, a nascent direction amplifies itself for a P uses the US dollar, tied to gold, as a global while – gain begets gain begets gain, loss begets loss begets loss – R . before disa-reappearing, diving off a knife’s edge, everywhere and E know-where, swarming cliff-wise... S 1971, US President suspends E the convertibility of the dollar to gold, as N part of a series of economic measures to T combat increasing – the ‘’ brings the Bretton Woods system to collapse, turning the US dollar into a fiat, free-floating currency. Fearing the decline in global demand for US , Nixon and his Secretary of State make a deal with the Saudi royal family offering military protection of their oil fields, if Saudi Arabia prices its oil exclusively in US dollars. Oil is the 13 Natalie Roxburgh, new gold, and Petrodollars are born. More Representing Public OPEC countries follow, and vast surplus Credit: Credible oil proceeds are invested directly in the US Commitment, Fiction, and Treasury securities, commercial banks of the Rise of the Financial the US and Europe, and in other financial Subject (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 1. markets of major industrial economies. 14 Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity,’ p. 23 40, emphasis in original. T Global financial flows, in the scale of H hundreds of billions of US dollars per E year are recycled in the shape of loans – – often to E ‘developing economies’, such as those N in Latin America. This recycling is most D prevalent when the is high: just two years on from the collapse of O Bretton Woods, OPEC countries proclaim F an embargo on oil to those they perceive to be supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur T War – including the USA. Consequently H in 1974 the price of oil rises to 300%. E August 1982, the Mexican Secretary of the P Treasury, Jesús Silva-Herzog Flores, picks R up the phone to the USA and declares that E Mexico will no longer be able to pay its S debt. Although dangerous levels of debt E have been accruing across Latin America N for years, Herzog Flores’ declaration from T Mexico begins the most serious debt crisis in Latin America – ‘La Decada Perdida’ or the Lost Decade. Following Mexico, 16 Latin American nations attempt to reschedule their debts; four of the largest nations owing commercial banks $176bn, much of this to the eight largest US banks, who as a consequence face major loan defaults and failure.

Crisis ignites a meeting between the IMF and the US Federal Open Market Committee with members of Latin American governments – perceived by the Federal Reserve as bloated and inefficient with economic policies that

24 T were unsustainable and relied on ‘excessive H intervention by government into the E economy’ T – they tell them to privatise public services, enterprise and deregulate E their banking system. N D Accumulated unpayable debts form the basis of a neocolonialist relationship between O nations in Latin America and the USA. The F former becomes economically dependent through conditional loans, and is forced T to adopt systems and structures of the H latter – a neoliberal free market economy; E an economic system with ideological dimensions and consequences in the form P of – the privatisation of R public services and inevitable austerity E measures to bailout the debt, putting citizens S in service of the market. E N T

25 T CACO3 H E An explosion in a lithic time sense, the Cambrian explosion occurs over 45 million E years. A massive swell in the trajectory N of evolution and the diversity of species D includes the emergence of hard bodied organisms, with skeletons, which can defend O themselves from predators. Marine biogenic F calcification is the ability developed by organisms to use compounds dissolved in T seawater – ions and nutrients to utilise for H energy, or in the case of calcification, to build E shells and outer structures. As organisms die, this, in turn, creates mineral deposits. P R In the anthropocene, or capitalocene, E calcium carbonate – skeletons that have S been compressed to rock – is familiar to E humans as chalk, limestone and marble. N Its uses are innumerable: to further T extract other materials, to purify iron, to refine sugar, as building materials, as food supplements, as latex, and as a cheap filler in paper and to extend paint. When quarried in Cornwall, it is artisan limestone. In the mountain quarries above Carrara, , it is the pure white Statuario marble from which Michelangelo creates his sculptures.

In Mexico in the 21st century, cheap labour and ‘favourable’ employment and environmental laws make mining ‘attractive’ U for Canadian and US companies. With fewer toxic substances prohibited in Mexico than in its northern neighbours, emissions of manganese,

26 T zinc and copper are unregulated. H According to the Mexican Network of E Those Affected by Mining (REMA), extraction is the cause of over 15,000 social E conflicts. V Twenty-nine environmental N activists are killed in Mexico between D July 2016 and December 2017. Open-cast landscapes look like the fingerprints – or O teeth marks – of humanity itself. F In the oceans, corals use biomineralisation T to create skeletons of aragonite. Rising H temperatures and ocean acidification force E corals to expend more energy building calcium carbonate skeletons, slowing down P growth and eroding the reefs. Only rare R species that live in warmer water may E survive the 21st century. The Great Barrier S Reef’s five mass bleaching events – 1998, E 2002, 2016, 2017 and 2020 – see cumulative N catastrophic mortality of corals that need T years to recover. Australian authorities initially resist intervening in the reef’s ecology, then implement a transplant process using fragments of remaining coral revived on mesh platforms in a sandy lagoon adjacent to the reef.

Calcium carbonate is hailed as a poster mineral for technosolutionist geoengineering projects in the 2020s and 2030s: seeding marine clouds with salt water or calcium carbonate, increasing their potential to reflect solar rays, cooling the earth; or, in a reversal of the cycle of pollution, using a nickel catalyst to convert CO2 rapidly and cheaply into the harmless,

27 T solid mineral, calcium carbonate. Naomi H Klein, author of This Changes Everything: E Capitalism vs. the Climate, warns of quick fixes, given that scientists can’t predict ‘how E geoengineering in one part of the world will N impact the climate on the other side of the D planet’. It’s a case of ‘roll the dice and see what happens.’ W O F

T PINK ICE H based on research by Cathy Wade E TRADE ROUTES: A SERIES OF COLLISIONS based on research by Maria Alexandrescu P DESERT STORM R based on research by Sophie Bullock and Chris Fremantle E RICE FUTURES S based on research by Lucy Hutchinson E GET BIG OR GET OUT: INDUSTRIALISED, CAPITALISED FARMING N based on research by Laura Clarke, Maria McKinney and Poppy Cockburn T PETRODOLLAR COLONIALISM: THE LATIN AMERICAN DEBT CRISIS based on research by Cathy Wade CACO3 based on research by Becky Lyon

CREDITS

Illustrations by The Alternative School of Economics (Ruth Beale & Amy Feneck) Design by Europa Edited by The Alternative School of Economics (Ruth Beale & Amy Feneck) Copyedited by Poppy Cockburn and Anna Santomauro Commissioned by Arts Catalyst Supported by Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust

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