5 5

April 14, 2011 Ananya Roy City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley

Ananya Roy teaches in the fields of urban studies and international development. She also serves as Educa- tion Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies and as co-Director of the Global Metropolitan Studies Center. From 2005 to 2009 Roy served as Associate Dean of International and Area Studies. Roy holds a B.A. (1992) in Comparative Urban Studies from Mills College, a M.C.P. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty and co-editor of Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America. Her most recent book is Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development.

Location: The Campanile (Sather Tower)

Books: Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development by Ananya Roy, 2010

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time by Karl Polanyi, 1944

Journals: Time Magazine Feb 14, 2011

Time Magazine December 26, 2005 “Persons of the Year” (Bill and Melinda Gates, Bono)

Food: -Wholefoods crakers -Black Tea -Sugar Raw/ Unedited Transcription of Picnic Discussion with Ananya Roy at the base of the Campanile Clock Tower

1015 Ananya Roy: I’m a professor in the department of City and Regional Planning here at Berkeley. And I also chair the Global Poverty and Practice minor. 1016 Amy: We have aligned your research with ten to the fifth power. InThe Powers of Ten, this frame is the first time you get a glimpse of the city of Chicago as it is growing out into the greater landscape and region of Illinois and the Great Lakes. Can you describe your field of research as aligned with this frame? Ananya: I grew up in the city of Kolkata in India and I think growing up in Kolkata made me very interested in cities and how the world’s megacities were growing and in the 21st century were going to house much of the worlds population. And would those cities provide better futures for the people who moved to these cities with such great aspirations. Some of my early research was with very poor women working in Kolkata often commuting in on local trains and their struggle’s to make a better life for themselves. But more recently, I’ve also been very interested in research at a global scale, really thinking about global flows of capital and global flows of “truth” and expertise. And so after the Kolkata work I turned to look at the study of poverty and I’d spent a lot of time studying very poor communities and their struggles and aspirations, but I wanted to zoom out and really think about what it meant to study poverty from the Birdseye view of something like the World Bank for example, and what would it mean to come to terms with that sort of institu- tion. So the book “Poverty Capital” which I think we have somewhere (here on the blanket) is in fact an attempt to come to terms with this new global order. 1017 Ananya: So in the mid 1990’s poverty became really fashionable as a global issue, a new global conscience emerged about poverty. And I see that particularly in the generation of “millennial’s”, the undergraduates in my class, that they are very taken by the idea that they can make social change and that they can alleviate poverty if not eliminate it. So I was interested in studying this global order and which is why we have this “Persons of the Year” Time magazine issue right, The Gates, Bono, these global celebrities who have been leading these global poverty campaigns. I wanted to understand this in a way, inspired by Kandinsky, as a composition, as these col- liding worlds. He talks about the compositions as this thundering collision of worlds, but this composition in particular is called Small Worlds. So I’m interested in how this global order also makes for small worlds, and these strange interactions. So one of the reasons why we have a lot of Whole Foods on the blanket is because this book starts with an image .. 1018 of a woman I’ve never met, or rather I met her, only in one of these small worlds, Felicita... And I tell the story in the book of how one evening shopping at Whole Foods, I came across this flyer, a really colorful flyer with Felicita’s image on it and she was portrayed as the microfinance client of the month, one of the many microfinance programs in South America sponsored by the Whole Plant Foundation which is the philanthropic arm of Whole Foods. So when one was buying groceries at Whole Foods one could add a dollar or 5 dollars as one checked out, and the idea was that that would go to poor women like Felicita- far away. So I think its an example of these small worlds of that have been created, that also tie in with how we think of ourselves in the world; these practices of phi- lanthropy, a way of thinking about...I guess what we would call spatially distant neighbors- that we don’t know Felicita and yet we think we know her. And in fact, I also in the book I tell the story of how as I tried to get the permission to reproduce Felicita’s photograph in this book, I contacted Whole Planet Foundation and usually its really hard to get this permission, but it turned out the photograph had been taken by a young man named Alex Crane who’d spent the summer interning in Guatemala, and who was in my class that semester. Alex wrote to me saying “yes, of course you can have the photograph!”, I took it and I actually wrote up that little flyer telling Felicita’s story. So that was a wonderful example for me of these “small worlds”. 1019 Michael: I love this idea of the Birdseye view. One bit of that we found out in the research of this Eames film is that the picnic was actually staged in LA where their offices were, but then when they are zooming out they’ve picked Chicago. They’ve decided to reconstruct the picnic sight slightly and pick Chicago, and I’m thinking of the Chicago school as this interesting starting place for Americas view of poor people and how that effected this frame of urban planning. And I don’t know if you could speak a little bit about the American view. has been framed with this European American view for a long time and there’s pitfalls in that. Ananya: Sure. Well you know I’m trained as an urbanist and the Chicago school for almost a century was so influential in shaping how academics, scholars and policy makers thought about cities and thought about poverty. And one of the key aspects of the Chicago school was that they really struggled to come to terms with the persistence of poverty in American cities. The most traditional Chicago school theorists thought that immigrants moved to the city and were assimilated into this great American urban fabric, and as their lot in life impproved, they moved out into better parts of the city. And of course, that’s not how it worked, and one of my favorite texts from the Chicago school and on Chicago, something I teach about, actually comes from a critique from within the Chicago school. It’s a book by Drake and Cayton called Black Metropolis and it takes on the idea that Chicago has this ghetto that has never gone away, and how do we explain this ghetto if not through racial red lining, through policies of segregation, through this long history of exclusion. So I am very interested as an urbanist in trying to retell the story of our cities and to rethink the legacy of the Chicago school. It is a legacy, but how else can we talk about our cities, so of course I am interested in cities in the global south and in the 21st century much of the urban growth will take place in these cities. So cities like Chicago, New York and L.A. will not be the important cities of the 21st century. So how do we better understand those cities in the global south. But I’m also interested in how understanding cities in the global south may better allow us to understand cities here. And one of the things I’ve been very interested in is understanding the histories of colo- nialism and imperialism. Be it internal colonialism here, or globally. So one of the reasons I wanted tea and sugar is perhaps my favorite post colonial theorist is someone called Stuart Hall who writes in the British context and the has this lovely line about how English identity is so anchored by certain rituals like drinking tea. And having grown up in India it’s also a legacy that I’ve inherited. 1020 Ananya: I have to have my cup of tea at four in the afternoon, and it has to be done in a certain way. But he makes the point that there isn’t a single tea plantation in great Britain. Their tea comes from elsewhere. It comes from the former colonies. It comes from Sri Lan- ka it comes from India. So he wants us to think about who makes up that cup of tea that is the basis of English identity. And one can tell something similar about sugar because there aren’t sugar plantations in England. So he asked you know, who quite literally is that sugar at the bottom of our tea cup? Where does it come from? So I’m really interested in how we think about this outside history that is inside all of our histories. And how can we think about cities in that way. And then of course Chicago or San Francisco become part of much broader global networks, they are world cities. But what is that hinterland of resources and labor that make up these cities? 1021 Amy: Since we are using this movie as a historical marker, made between 68 and 77, what has been a shift in your field from that period to now? Ananya: Well a couple of things, one, urban studies more generally has been paying much more attention to the global dimensions of urbanization. But there’s also been much more attention to cities like Los Angeles that seem to lack a clear center, that are examples of ex-urban or suburban sprawl, multi-center, polycentric, some would say with the center hollowed out. So we’ve had in the last couple of twenty years or so the rise of the Los Angeles School and that has been very influential to think about the post modern urban condi- tion. There’s been tremendous work around post-colonial urban theory, really paying attention to the long histories of colonial and post- colonial connections. I’ve a book coming up next month which I co-edited with an anthropologist here at Berkeley, Aihwa Ong, and its called Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. And we were really interested in the very ambitious making of the Asian world class city, in what is claimed to be the Asian century. What is interesting to me is that these are experiments not only with space, but also with time. But how do we think about this idea of making an urban future. Now, that happens at the very grand scale of city planning and architecture and design, but I think it also happens on an everyday basis. And one of the reasons I’ve been so interested in the revolution in Egypt aside from the fact that Egypt, in particular Cairo, have a very special place in my heart, is I think that this sort of social revolution is an attempt by young men and women who felt that the future just didn’t arrive, to claim the future, it was a claiming of space in public spaces likeTahiri Square, but it was also a claiming of the future. Amy: That’s a beautiful way to think about it. 1022 Michael: A side note, its beautiful talking about time in front of the sun and this epic tower, big clock. Ananya: And you know what is lovely about our Campanile is that usually each face has a different time on it. Sometimes two to three hours late, so we are used to that on the Berkeley campus. Michael: One question we ask, and I think we ask it in part because as artists we make tools to help solve some aesthetic problem in some cases. When we visit peoples labs, in a very kind of science lab way, its wonderful to see how they are building those tools and I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about as an urbanist, or someone studying poverty, how would you describe the tools you use. And I know they might not be physical, but I think its interesting thinking of this Eames picture of science.

Ananya: So I guess the tools I most use and cherish are ideas. So when I teach my large Global Poverty class on campus I start with a piece that Subcomandante Marcos wrote at the height of the Zapatista struggle. It’s a piece called Ideas Are Also Weapons. And I think that’s a very empowering notion, that ideas actually matter. And I think its important, particularly at this conjunction in American history, to reclaim the power of ideas. So that to me is a tool. And this is why I love Karl Polanyi’s book because it shows that within , not just outside of it, all sorts of struggles are possible that double movement of capitalism, which is why again I think it’s a very empowering book for my undergraduates to think that the world does not always have to be as it is. And so that notion of idea’s, and it could be.. ideas is everything from design practices to a particular analytical argument to a scientific experiment. That to me remains one of the most important tools that shapes my life. Now there are all sorts of other tools of imagination. I have a particular weakness for fiction for example. 1023 Ananya: but also as you can tell from Kandinsky (referring to her use of Small Worlds on the cover of her book), for how and why art allows us to imagine a certain politics of the possible. I don’t want to suggest that’s its an instrumental relationship with art, but I do think that art in the broader sense of the term allows us to step outside of certain safe ideas and allows us to reimagine what we thought we knew. So I think all of those are tools, and are particularly important in teaching. Amy: Speaking of teaching, we are sitting in this very particular place that you chose, and I would imagine that teaching is a tool that you use, do you want to tell us why you chose this place and your connection to this particular place. Ananya: You know I feel very lucky to have a quite global life, I grew up in Kolkata and go back regularly, and my spouse grew up in Cairo so we spent a lot of time in Cairo, so I feel very fortunate that we divide our lives between Kolkata, Cairo and the San Francisco Bay Area. And yet, I think at the center of all of that is Cal, and Berkeley is a city but Cal is a campus. And I’ve been very committed to the idea of a public University, I got my graduate degrees at Cal and I’ve taught here ever since. And we are at a moment where we re- ally have to work hard and fight hard to maintain the idea of a public university. I really think this is one of the greatest public universi- ties in the world and I think its worth fighting for this ideal, so I wanted this picnic to be right in the heart to of a place that I love very much. And that I think has a mission and mandate that is worth holding onto and if not reclaiming, so we have the plaque, we have the Campanili. There are all sorts of ways in which the public university has not fully lived up to its task for the future that we could do a better job. Many people have been kept waiting at the gates of this public university, but never the less the heart of the campus I think symbolizes something that is really fantastic about American higher education which is world class public universities. 1024 Amy: I have a question related to the Subcomandante Marcos text. He also talks about the power of the media and the image. During the uprising he was very clear that the media was his weapon as well. And as a public figure do you want to talk about the making of images and the distribution of them. And we are sitting here in the making of an image. Ananya: I have to say as someone trained as a scholar we don’t do a very good job of thinking about images, and I also think that in America we don’t have a strong enough tradition of public intellectuals, there are some, but I think we have been overwhelmed by the talking heads (well really the screaming heads) on television and radio. And I think its important to think about how we counter that, so one of the points I often make to my students in the Global Poverty class is that I’d like them to think of themselves as public scholars. I’d like them to think about how their work travels and how we can do a better job with that. So, I think that Subcomandante Marcos’ writings have been brilliant, he has this piece where he talks about the great effort that he has undertaken in order to convey his ideas to people around the world and how this communique must travel and must travel slowly, but in fact the Zapatista movement was one of the first examples of a brilliant use of global media, as strategy, and I think it shows us and the Egypt revolution shows us this again, how its not that this was a cyber revolution say in the Egypt case or its not that the Zapatista movement was an internet movement, but the power of those tools is quite astounding, and how one can harness that. 1025 Michael: In one of your articles you mention this idea of the view, overview, that urban planners would look at, and there’s kind of this new view that’s more about the process of things moving around. It does seem like when we are thinking of framing things that, there are still pictures being taken of us, it seems like that’s the one thing that’s missing - this idea of time. Its kind of this grabbing of one mo- ment and what can we learn from this one moment and how we are standing in front of this clock tower and there’s this kind of harder to understand when we let the clock run. Ananya: Well I’m sure this is something you deal with in your practice of art, that how does one capture the dynamic temporalities that go beyond a moment. I think that urban planning for a long time has fetishized space and I guess, master planers and master architects like to think of space as something that they can mold and shape, and that people are in the way, that’s the rather brutal history of mod- ernist planning and architecture. So I teach also in the fall a graduate course on the history of city planning, and I taught it for the first time last fall and I loved it because it is an attempt to come to terms with that very difficult history - the Robert Moses and Le Corbusier- legacy. But I think it its also to think about how planning has also always had roots in anarchism which is the part of city planning that I love, which drew me to city planning in the first place. That in the 19th and 20th centuries as Corbusier and Moses and others were try- ing to think about these grand cities, these machines cities so insurgent planners were also thinking about anarchism and were trying to do away with private property and trying to re-make human life. So that piece of it is still very attractive to me, and my personal approach to it is ethnographic, it is to immerse myself in a place over a long period of time, and to build that connection which goes beyond a particular moment of research and really think about how one is implicated in a place over a long period of time and what then does time mean. And what does that arc of time teach us about a place. 1026 Amy: It seems like we’re in an interesting point right now. We’ve been visiting a lot of post industrial American cities recently; Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia and some friends are living in Detroit. Detroit seems like a picture of a return to anarchism and lawlessness, its exciting and inspiring to think about the recreation of a place that had such a different identity and I guess my question is, will we be seeing more of that? Will we be seeing more of the death of a certain type of city, or will we be seeing more of this Shenzhen effect .. Ananya: I think that’s a great question and it’s a political question because ultimately its going to be about how these cities are shaped by certain social political forces, but its an open ended question. I was just in St. Louis last week and I think folks there are very much thinking about Detroit and the experiments that are going on in Detroit, like you, I’m fascinated by the fact that artists and activists have been flocking to Detroit. Now, there is an opportunity then to rethink the paradigm to say that post-industrial cities need not go a certain route but they can become more inclusive places with a more creative economy or in the past in some cases, these experiments have turned into the basis for gentrification, right?. And there’s a very complicated relationship between artists and gentrification in our cities where artists often lead the way in terms of social experimentation and then those neighborhoods become the new hip fashionable places to be, like lower east side in New York, and become the frontiers for rapid gentrification. So whether or not these social experi- ments in Detroit will become co-opted by broader forces of comodification and commercialization I think remains to be seen. But at the moment, it is a way of rethinking the paradigm. 1027 Michael: I’m thinking things being co-opted. In your writings about micro-lending, micro-credit and this idea that we can start in Bangla- desh from inside and then bankers in America and Europe see this potential of people that will pay back their loans, and I forget how you phrase this, the potential of this the bottom of the pyramid and it does feel like its so difficult for it not to be taken advantage of. Ananya: I fully agree, and that’s what got me interested in this project that led to this book, it became almost a five year project. That whole question of how an idea with some amount of revolutionary capacity then becomes one of the primary tools of globally circulating finance capital, for me was an important story. But the flipside of that co-optation was the fact that there was also quite a bit of trouble- making and subversion going on within this global order. In my book I talk about these characters as double agents, as folks who work in really powerful institutions but who are able to make change from within, or at least articulate critique from within. And I find that idea very useful, and I try to present that idea to my students because in some ways, I work for a very powerful knowledge producing institu- tion, and I like to think of myself as a double agent, where I’m completely sold on the mission and mandate of this place and yet there’s a lot of troublemaking to be done within this institution. So that idea which is the flipside of co-optation which is how within structures that are completely co-opted how we can make change is for me an important political endeavor. 1028 Michael: I guess we all have potential to be a double agent, but are there some really interesting double agents out there or people that can straddle those two sides. Ananya: Yes I mean I think all institutions have double agents. The Gates are a double agent, but clearly they’ve build up the worlds wealthiest foundation and that foundation is hegemonic and powerful, but they’ve also challenged billionaires around the world to step up and give away large pieces of their fortune. So in that sense they’ve transformed what it means to be rich, right, now being rich is not good enough you also have to be a philanthropist. Bono is I think an interesting double agent because I think he quite strategically uses his rock star celebrity to make all kinds of change and to get commitments from folks across the political spectrum, I think that’s what I find interesting, that he’s just as comfortable with George Clooney as he is with George Bush. One can say that that is complete compro- mise, that’s a sellout, or one can say wow that’s a really brilliant strategy, that works. So I’m very interested in these complicated transac- tions that people undertake. 1029 Amy: In thinking about this time period when this movie was made, if we zoom into the idea of poverty in 1968 or 1970 and then poverty now, what’s the shift of perception? Ananya: That’s a good question. So two points, one of them is for those of us who study poverty internationally and we look at how poverty is managed by development intuition’s, its fascinating to note that in the mid 1990s, early 21st century poverty became once again a global issue. Many of the ideas that were being revived came from the mid sixties and early seventies. The World Bank under Jim Wolfenson in 1990’s remade itself as a kinder and gentler institution committed to poverty alleviation. And of course I show in my book how much of that was in fact a finacialization of development, so not very convincing as an actual strategy for ending poverty. But, the Wolfenson World Bank was really a re-creation of the McNamara World Bank of the late sixties and early seventies and I think the McNamara World Bank points to some interesting contradictions because McNamara’s architecture of the Vietnam War becomes president of the World Bank and then decides to take on poverty as his main thing and becomes one of the most progressive precedents the World Bank ever had, right?. Inevitably his ideas were shaped by his experience in running the war in Vietnam. And that link between something called global security and poverty is very much with us in a post 9/11 era, so there’s that piece of it. But I think the other piece of it is that the late sixties was a time of great social turmoil and that great social turmoil, one could say was co-opted. Music! 1031 Ananya: I think that whole notion of what social turmoil or protest looks like is so shaped by what we think we know about the sixties, and clearly as we had our campus protests and our California protest around public education I think there was a lot of talk at least about is this the sixties all over again, whether from the right or from the left. That was the critique of the right that we were simply recreating the sixties. But I think that in that sense, that moment of social turmoil linked to certain co-optations is a similar moment. 1033 Michael: One question about problem solving and how our perspective or view on something will effect how we problem solve. And again back to this idea of a very American view compared to a South American or African view of a problem and a solution. I recently got this book called something like “Design for the Other 90%” it’s a beautiful book, but there needs to be two books in that There needs to be Design for the Other 90%, but there needs to be design by the other 90%. Ananya: That’s a great question and it speaks to a lot of the work I’ve done as a researcher, so I think my mission within urban studies and planning has been to disrupt the cannon of urban studies and that’s how I teach and that’s the research I do, and its very much to say that models of knowledge that are completely derived from the Euro-America experience may be important but they’re not adequate, to explain 21st century urbanization. I think what’s interesting to me is how some theories and some forms of expertise come to count as universal even though they’re actually very parochial, but all knowledge is parochial. So how the Chicago school, which is a great story of Chicago in the 21st century, became this universal theory that was meant to explain cities everywhere. So I’m interested in fostering mul- tiple forms of parochial knowledge, but to think about how we can learn form those different kinds of parochial knowledge-How a story about Kolkata or a story about Cairo may in fact have great relevance to urban experiences in Chicago or Los Angeles. So of course I’ve been trying to fight the ways the Euro American story as a parochial story has become universal. So that’s a lot of my theoretical work, research and teaching but I think it also relates to this notion you are raising of “what is expertise”. I think in design and planning, this is a very difficult question. More difficult than planning because planning is very ambiguous as a profession. Planning doesn’t have formal powers in North America, and yet there is a profession called planning and one of the questions we often ask ourselves as planners is well “who plans?”. And its clearly not just those certified as planners, and clearly they are not the only ones who know what is needed to know about planning. So clearly when one is working in the global south that question sort of blows up in ones face, because cities are produced through a multitude of processes. I think a wonderful movement within architecture to think therefore about vernacular architecture or architecture not designed by architects and its precisely that designed by the other 90%. And how do we think about those building practices and those spatial practices and what do we learn from them, so I think that piece is very important. The question is can those forms of knowledge be considered legitimate within the walls of a great university like this, right?. And then in some ways I see my role (for lack of a better term) as a translator, as a mediator as an interlocutor. Where you make visible forms of knowledge that have been de-legitimized and you give it importance precisely because of the position you hold within a great research university which is another sort of a double agent thing if you will. 1034 Amy: Why do you think IBM made such a movie? Ananya: I don’t know the answer to that but I think the question is an important one to think about the role of powerful corporations and the production of images and knowledge. I say this because we are the heart of the campus and every building is named and we are a public university but we spent a lot of time really thinking about how we can cultivate donors, and find resources for the things we care about and I am very much a part of that enterprise and I don’t apologize for it, hope I do it ethically but recognize that’s a part of our lives. I think IBM is an interesting example because it’s part of this larger knowledge economy itself, right?. So how do we think about how corporations lik that? I think Google would be the current day equivalent of that, and we tend to think they are not the Chevrons and Monsanto’s of the world, but I think we have to figure out what that connection is between these knowledge economy companies- The creative entrepreneurial companies and the political and social work we do as academics and artists. Amy: I think its interesting to think of Google, and how we could do this without any photographers and we could use their tools, another removal of people. Ananya: I think a company like Google is fascinating. They do all of that and they have the google.org which is their philanthropic piece of it, really thinking about poverty development, and now they are supposedly really getting into the book publishing business, where books are going to be available through Google. So that kind of an empire if you will, transforms the conditions of knowledge, so I think those companies require quite a bit of our attention. We need to think about what their doing, and that shapes almost all aspects of our lives. Much more actually than Whole Foods perhaps, Whole Foods is perhaps more visible. Amy, Michael and Ananya go up to the top of the Sather Clock Tower:

Amy: How does San Francisco factor in as a city? Ananya: I think, well I joke San Francisco is a lovely little quiet village and I love it. I think the bay area is such a beautiful cosmopolitan place. With its on inequalities of course, one of the challenges is not everyone that lives here can enjoy the quality of life that the bay area offers. One of my ongoing conversations with my students is that many of us have been committed to the idea that slow food and organic food, but even in a city like Berkeley you think about whether slow food and organic food is available for those who are not well off, you go to shop at whole foods and its impossible expensive. I think that question of who has access to that beautiful quality of life is a pressing one in the bay area. Michael: And fast food versus slow food. Ananya: You know I love to hit McDonalds and those chains, and so do my students, you think about downtown Berkeley and McDonalds is often the only place someone whose homeless can go in, sit for awhile, use the restroom, have a meal for a few dollars, it shouldn’t be that way. It shouldn’t only be places like McDonalds that serve affordable food and yet that’s the case. And all of the fancy slow food organic places that I love, wouldn’t allow to anyone who seemed homeless come in to use the restroom or get a cup of coffee. So that’s really a challenge in the bay area I think. I think this beauty which often overwhelms us can also make us forget these sort of questions. Amy: Do you have an example of a city whose dealing with issues of poverty in a progressive way, or that you’ve used as a model? Ananya: You know unfortunately not that many, but I think there are efforts, colleges on this campus who study cities in brazil and a couple of years ago we spent a summer in Rio De Janeiro, and what’s been incredible about Brazil is how the struggle for democracy has been accompa- nied by a struggle for something on the right of the city which is the right to inhabit the city. Its come with a whole set of progressive policies where by city governs can tax property speculations and use that money for affordable housing, but more generally its also meant participa- tory planning, participatory budgeting. That idea to write to the city has been institutionalized in brazil both in the constitution and in actual practices by urban planning and government. That is a very far cry from what we have in a North American context. And the Indian case is of course rather .. of the of urban poverty and the effort to almost erase the urban poor from the landscape of urban cities. Michael: In one of the interviews online you mention being in an .. studying this sort of squatter village and then days of being there, the guy asked you a question and it was so beautiful.. 1043 Ananya: That was a very formative moment for me because it was right at the end of the Kolkata research, knew these squatter settlements well, but on this particular occasion this young man of maybe nineteen or twenty, came up to me and said “well you’ve been asking us all these questions, can I ask you one instead?” And he asked me why there is homelessness America. This is a young kid living in a very poor squatter settlement on the edges of Kolkata, but he kept talking to me about the politics of housing and he insisted that he and his family and other families in that settlement had the right to construct on public land and create shelters for themselves. And how is it the case that in America which he understood to be this most prosperous country on earth, the homeless were homeless. He kept insisting that if one is a citizen one can be homeless so for him there was something dreadfully wrong with American ideas of citizenship. So I think that question really prompt- ed me to take up what I call asking third world questions about the first world. That what do those questions seeming margins of prosperity do to our understanding of democracy. But the sad irony of the story is about a couple of weeks after that that entire settlement was demol- ished. And I never in fact found him again and I don’t know to where they were moved. So his claim, the bold one, was actually quite fragile itself, I don’t want to romanticize that piece of it. I think the questions he asked were very important and I came back and took his question seriously and spent a couple of years studying homelessness in the bay area and studying policies to this homelessness in the bay area which I think is an important practice for me it was a way of coming to terms with the poverty that existed here. Amy: It seems there is a lot of interest in poverty and humanitarian aid elsewhere and I’m wondering where the concern for poverty right here is on campus. Ananya: It’s a huge part of what we try to do in the Global Poverty and Practice minor, that minor degree established about three years ago has become the largest minor on campus. Five hundred students in it, not counting the two to three hundred students who have already graduated from it. And I love the fact that students from all majors, we have most students from humanities in fact. Students come to that minor with a really interest in working in the developing world and helping alleviate poverty and through the course of the minor we encourage them to think about working here, these are not mutually exclusive but rather connected fields. I think in my class at least I try to get them to move from thinking about how do we end poverty to asking questions about how poverty is produced to then asking questions at the end of the semester about how wealth power and privilege are produced. And to me that is a rather radical shift, because I think we need to better under- stand how well power and privilege are produced if we are to get serious about poverty. Its too often that we see this as an act of benevolence that oh well look I’m going to do this humanitarian work, and however wonderful that is its not going to make structural change, until we can face up to these forms of wealth and power and privilege which this university also embodies. Michael: Seems like its gotten worse, like the percentage of wealth is held in an even smaller and smaller group of people. 1045 Ananaya: yes worldwide its gotten worse, and in the US its really stunning, there have been so many Berkeley faculty that have worked on this issue, faculty in economics and political science and in public policy. And they have shown that in the last ten years or so inequality in the us has dramatically increased. The top one percent of American households now hold more share of the income than at any other time in Ameri- can history since 1928. And that the new set of books out talk about how that sort of inequality shapes politics as well. The implications are huge and I think we see this play out in our country all the time, play out in discussions around the National budget, we see it in our everyday lives as well. Ideas Are Also Weapons by Subcomandante Marcos

The world is not square, or so we learn at school, yet, on the brink of the third millennium, it is not round, either. I do not know which geometrical figure best represents the world in its present state but, in an era of digital , we could see it as a gigantic screen-one of those screens you can program to display several pictures at the same time, one inside the other. In our global world, the pictures come from all over the planet. But some are missing-not because there is not enough room on the screen but because someone up there selected these pictures rather than others.

What do the pictures show? On the American continent, we see a paramilitary group occupying the Autonomous National Univer- sity of Mexico (Unam); but the men in gray uniforms aren’t there to study. Another frame shows an armored column thundering through a native community in Chiapas. Beside this, we see US police using violence to arrest a youth in a city that could be Seattle or Washington. The pictures in Europe are just as gray.

A MEMORABLE OMISSION

Intellectuals have been part of society since the dawn of humanity. Their work is analytical and critical. They look at social facts and analyze the evidence, for and against, looking for anything ambiguous, revealing anything that is not obvious-sometimes even the opposite of what seems obvious.

These professional critics act as a sort of impertinent consciousness for society. They are non-conformists, disagreeing with every- thing-social and political forces, the state, government, media, arts, religion, and so on.

Activists will just say, “We’ve had enough,” but skeptical intellectuals will cautiously murmur “too much” or “not enough.” Intellectu- als criticize immobility, demand change and progress. They are, nevertheless, part of a society which is the scene of endless confron- tation and is split between those who use power to maintain the status quo and those who fight for change.

Intellectuals must choose between their function as intellectuals and the role that activists offer them. It is also here that we see the split between progressive and reactionary intellectuals. They all continue their work of critical analysis. But whereas the more pro- gressive persist in criticizing immobility, permanence, hegemony, and homogeneity, the reactionaries focus their attacks on change, movement, rebellion, and diversity. So, in fact, reactionary intellectuals “forget” their true function and give up critical thought. Their memory shrinks, excluding past and future to focus only on the immediate and present. No further discussion is possible.

INTELLECTUAL PRAGMATISM

Many leading right-wing intellectuals start life as progressives. But they soon attract the attention of the powerful, who deploy innu- merable stratagems to buy or destroy them. Progressive intellectuals are “born” in the midst of a process of seduction and persecu- tion. Some resist; others, convinced that the global economy is inevitable, look in their box of tricks and find reasons to legitimize the existing power structure. They are awarded with a comfortable armchair, on the right hand of the prince they once denounced.

They can find any number of excuses for this supposedly “inevitable” outcome: It is the end of history; money is everywhere and all- powerful; the police have taken the place of politics; the present is the only possible future; there is a rational explanation for social inequality. There are even “good reasons” for the unbridled exploitation of human beings and natural resources, racism, intolerance, and war.

In an era marked by two new paradigms- communication and the market-right-wing intellectuals have realized that being “modern” means obeying one rule: “Adapt or go under.” They aren’t required to be original, just to think like everyone else, taking their cue from international bodies like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, or World Trade Organization.

Far from indulging in original, critical thought, right-wing intellectuals become remarkably pragmatic, echoing the advertising slo- gans that flood the world’s markets. In exchange for a place in the sun and the support of certain media and governments, they cast off their critical imaginations and any form of self-criticism, and espouse the new, creed.

BLIND SEERS

The problem isn’t why the global economy is inevitable, but why almost everyone agrees that it is. Just as the economy is becoming increasingly global, so is culture and information. How are we to prevent vast media and companies like CNN or News Corporation, Microsoft or AT&T, from spinning their worldwide web?

In today’s world economy, the major corporations are essentially media enterprises, holding up a huge mirror to show us what society should be, not what it is. To paraphrase Regis Debray, what is visible is real and consequently true. That, by the way, is one of the tenets of right-wing dogma. Debray also explains that the center of gravity of news has shifted from the written word to visual effects, from recorded to live broadcasts, from signs to pictures.

To retain their legitimacy, today’s right-wing intellectuals must fulfill their role in a visual era, opting for what is immediate and direct, switching from signs to images, from thought to TV commentary.

FUTURE PAST

In Mexico, left-wing intellectuals are very influential. Their crime is that they get in the way. Well, at least one of their crimes, since they also support the Zapatistas in their struggle. “The Zapatista uprising heralds the start of a new era in which native movements will emerge as players in the fight against the neoliberal global economy,” they say. But we are neither unique nor perfect. Just look at the natives of Ecuador and Chile, and the demonstrations in Seattle, Washington, Prague- and those that will follow. We are just one of the pictures that deform the giant screen of the world economy. The prince has consequently issued orders: “Attack them! I shall supply the army and media. You come up with the ideas.” So, right-wing intellectuals spend their time insulting their left-wing counterparts, and because of the Zapatista movement’s international impact, they are now busy rewriting our story to suit the demands of the prince.

NEOLIBERAL FASCISTS

In one of his books, Umberto Eco provides some pointers as to why is still latent. He starts by warning us that fascism is a diffuse form of totalitarianism, then defines its characteristics: refusal of the advance of knowledge, disregard of rational principles, distrust of culture, fear of difference, racism, individual or social frustration, xenophobia, aristocratic elitism, machismo, individual sacrifice for the benefit of the cause, televised populism, and use of Newspeak with its limited words and rudimentary syntax.

These are the values that right-wing intellectuals defend. Take another look at the giant screen. All that gray is a response to disorder, reflected in demands for law and order from all around us. But, is Europe once more the prey of fascism? We may well see skinheads, with their swastikas, on the screen, but the commentator is quick to reassure us that they are only minority groups, already under control. But it may also take other, more sinister forms.

After the , both sides of the political spectrum in Europe rushed to occupy the center. This was all too obvious with the traditional left, but it was also the case with the far right. It went out of its way to acquire a new image, well removed from its violent, authoritarian past, enthusiastically espousing neoliberal dogma.

SKEPTICALLY HOPEFUL

The task of progressive thinkers-to remain skeptically hopeful-isn’t an easy one. They have understood how things work and, noblesse oblige, they must reveal what they know, dissect it, denounce it, and pass it on to others. But to do this, they must also confront neoliberal dogma, backed by the media, banks, major corporations, army, and police.

What is more, we live in a visual age. And so, to their considerable disadvantage, progressive thinkers must fight the power of the image with nothing but words. But their skepticism will get them out of that trap, and if they are equally skeptical in their critical analysis, they will be able to see through the virtual beauty to the real misery it conceals. So, perhaps there is reason to hope.

There is a story that when Michelangelo sculpted his statue of David, he had to work on a “second-hand” piece of marble that already had holes in it. It is a mark of his talent that he was able to create a figure that took account of these limitations. The world we want to transform has already been worked on by history and is largely hollow. We must nevertheless be inventive enough to change it and build a new world. Take care, and do not forget that ideas are also weapons.

Subcommandante Marcos leads the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas, Mexico. The above is excerpted from “La droite intel- lectuelle et lefascisme liberal,” first published in Le Monde diplomatique, August 2000.