Empires and dance

[imomus]

How do you define an empire? The question comes up in a New York Review of Books review of Harvard prof Charles Maier's new book Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors. Maier says that the US, post WW2, sought to be both a territorial and a post-territorial empire:

"The US compromise between traditional empire and a Kantian comity of democratic republics was to establish American "hegemony" over the "free world," backed by military commitments and military bases, and underpinned by nuclear weapons and Ford assembly-line technology. Maier distinguishes between the "empire of production" and the "empire of consumption." In the first phase, the American productive system was transferred to its allies through Marshall Aid and other aid packages; Phase II's "empire of consumption" was based on the dominance of the dollar, and culminated in the "twin deficits" of today—the budget deficit and the balance of payments deficit."

I'd like to advance a sociological definition of what Maier calls "post-territorial empire" (something, by the way, the US has yet to achieve: it still has military bases all over the world, and has recently started re-fighting -- and re-re-fighting, because they never quite seem to get won and done -- wars of imperial conquest). Okay, so here's my definition:

Post-territorial empire -- the empire of influence -- is the assumed convergence of diverse habitus towards the habitus of one specific culture, a culture which nevertheless presents its specificity as something universal.

Commentary on this post-territorial empire often hides the specificity of the imperial hub, refuses to admit that it's situated. Such commentary assumes that all difference to, all resistance to, the dominant habitus is temporary, frail and doomed.

I seem forever to be battling this specificity-hiding, convergence-assuming behaviour. Journalists, essayists, bloggers and cultural commentators are forever passing off the Anglo-American way of doing things as some kind of norm to which everyone is inevitably converging. All resistance to this norm, we learn time after time, is something frail, dwindling towards extinction, glimpsed momentarily in a process of tumbling or submitting to a Darwinian-style market -- a triumphant and unopposed Anglo-capitalist system all-crushing in its inevitability. America everywhere! (Just don't call it that...)

Specificity-hiding is itself hidden in innate assumptions and future projections. The word "increasingly" comes up a lot. Increasingly, we learn, Japanese women are becoming [something which more closely resembles American women, but don't call it that]. Increasingly, dirigiste technocracy is falling to market control. But, as Maier points out, "today's market model of globalization hides the role of US multinationals in spreading "imperial employment patterns" through offshore production." In other words, the universal habitus is actually a specific habitus, belonging to the corporations of a specific nation, and benefitting one specific nation.

There was an interesting section in the Modernism show I saw last week at the V&A headed "Americanism". It showed a vogue, in the early-to-mid 20th century, for the uncritical adoption of specifically American industrial processes, like Fordism. I found it fascinating because in our own time we don't talk about "Americanism" any more. We have euphemisms which mean pretty much the same thing. We talk about "markets", "freedom", "reform", "rock and roll", "human rights", "globalization", "democracy" and so on, but really we mean "the American system". Or perhaps "an idealized version of the American system". Because the reality of the specific American system is that it's financially shaky, increasingly dynastic, decreasingly democratic, ecologically toxic, and no great supporter of freedom or human rights. And as ideology gets more and more unmoored from observable reality, it gets increasingly visible as... mere ideology.

"To be sure," says Robert Skidelsky in his review of Maier's book, "there is a strong ideological element in the current US drive for empire, especially among neoconservatives in the academy and Washington think tanks. It is based on the belief that the West is best, and will only be secure if the Western way becomes the universal norm. Those who resist the embrace of the West are thought to be savages and must be persuaded, or forced, to recognize the error of their ways."

At the end of July a journalist will interview me about Berlin for a British newspaper. The article will ask how long the urban utopian idyll enjoyed by Berlin's artists, musicians and hipsters can last, and whether Berlin won't soon become a "free market", as expensive as London or New York.

The "inevitable convergence towards Anglo-market norms" theme hinted at here will not set the tone of my answers. I don't believe that's the case. It's Anglo-market norms which are in crisis, not the Berlin alternative to them. I plan to tell the paper that, far from being an endangered enclave or anomaly, Berlin is in fact a laboratory for future ways of doing things. This city is not just post-industrial, but post-imperial. It's a divergence machine.

I think, if you asked around, you'd find a surprising number of the artists here would agree with that view. The post-imperial future is what we're all brainstorming here. It's why we're not in New York or London. We're working on very specific questions, questions of habitus. What will music sound like after the empire? What will food taste like? How will people dress? How many hours a day will they work? What will their houses look like? How will they dance?

Comments

[slipmesomething.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this post, I found it really interesting. I'm amazed that you can write so thoughtfully at 7am.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually, this was written Sunday morning, just before I moved into my new apartment. So "today" means Sunday and "yesterday" Saturday.

[(Anonymous)]

You know Nick, I have been reading your essays for a very long time now and this is the first time I have ever commented. Anyway, I am torn with your ideas, I am terribly disenchanted with the state of the world and specifically the state of the U.S. but I am more a part of the machine than most. I want to believe that you are right and that one day the slow-life "post-imperial" world will prevail but I can't seem to put aside my cynicism.
At least you are optimistic.

Respect,
- Lost in Paradise

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

It's a lovely post and part of me really hopes that it is true. But another part of me just tells me that Berlin is simply a site of as yet unrealised potential property revenue and everything - including newspaper articles - that points the speculators in its direction will serve to destroy it. Never underestimate the ability of this 'territorial and a post-territorial empire' - whatever one wants to call it - to gather together the forces of greedy local/national government and crush local divergence.

Over the past few years I've watched my own home town go from a boho backwater to a highly mediated and now aggressively exploited speculators' free-for-all ... but then it isn't a free-for-all, with the help of a compliant local government, a planning department that works hand-in-hand with selected developers and a population eager to be reassured by increased home property prices the scarring of the city and destruction of its communities continues apace.

Hope that this experience isn't replicated in Berlin.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, I took that paragraph out, carry on!

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

The "post-imperial future" has quite a lengthy past (http://www.eaps.uiuc.edu/readings/japan_as_museum.pdf).

[(Anonymous)]

I'd love to as optimistic as you, but I think Berlin's status is an anomaly because of its history, and that as the international capital of a major world power, it will eventually go the same way as London and New York. I very much doubt you'll be renting 2-bedroom flats for 400 euros in ten years' time.

The "American system" may well be in crisis, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the convergence will stop, it may mean it just gets absorbed by other power centres. Just as the influence of Roman culture and institutions didn't necessarily abate with the collapse of the Roman empire.

By the way, a propos of your "Jerpman" entry, have you heard of Yoko Tawada, a Japanese novelist who lives in Germany and writes in both German and Japanese? She's pretty interesting: http://www.tawada.com/

I love the optimism...

[(Anonymous)]

Yo Nick...

I love the optimism inherent in the final paragraph of your essay. You're basically -- if I'm reading you correctly -- propagandising the idea that artists based in Berlin might be able to keep Berlin a sort of Weimar Republic, if only they can resist Americanisation.

I hope the propaganda works!

I must say that I've had an itch to live in Berlin since a WIRED article about 10 years ago glorified the place.

I have to say, also, though, that Johannesburg, South Africa, where I live, seems to have a similar amount of raw power and reinvention going on.

What we also have though is a lot of crime. Very violent and life-threatening. Which probably gives artists here the edge, cos it forces one of two states... 'paranoia' or 'rose-tinted-glassesness'. Both have their merits. (I tend to the paranoid.)

By the way... have you seen the two pics I made of you, based on your screen grab from your li'l music video? They're at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/royblumenthal/169466623/ (http://www.flickr.com/photos/royblumenthal/169466623/) and http://www.flickr.com/photos/royblumenthal/169466601/ (http://www.flickr.com/photos/royblumenthal/169466601/).

Blue skies
love
Roy

[(Anonymous)]

Sadly, I think Momus has it exactly wrong. Berlin has reached its zenith as some kind of 'post-imperialist' artistic wonderland, and is on the verge of being subsumed by the imperium. These pockets of artistic energy are by their nature transitional. I'm guessing the next place everyone gets all excited about won't be in Europe at all. Maybe somewhere like Buenos Aires.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's Mexico City, in fact.

But that's on more of a dystopian tip: "How shall we all cope with capitalist anarchism, pollution, and cut-throat crime levels when they inevitably hit hyper-capitalist London and New York? I know, let's look at Mexico City! Let's read the American Apparel newspaper called Mexico City! And while we're at it, let's re-read "City of Quartz", that bit about LA's "Bladerunner Scenario", and then let's join Rem Koolhaas in "learning from Lagos!" All that toxic disorder, it's so fashionable! So funky!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Neomarxisme pulls up alongside today's theme with an entry entitled Pompous Particularism vs Pompous Universalism (http://www.pliink.com/mt/marxy/archives/000930.html). I can't seem to comment there for some reason, so I'm putting my response here.

every nation, not just the United States, considers itself exceptional to some extent.

So says the New York Times in the article (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/magazine/02wwln_lede.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) which has triggered this entry. Yes, but... As my blog entry today points out, the post WW2 period has seen an American imperium in which military might and cultural influence have combined to make the American Way a particular which aspires to be -- and to an extent has become -- a universal, and to hide its particularity. In the early to mid-20th century much of the world admired and emulated "Americanism". Later, though, we stopped talking about "Americanism" and simply talked about modernization, globalization, markets, reforms and so on. The fact that these meant more or less the same thing as Americanism was elided. The United States became, as Jean-Luc Godard once said, "the only country without the name of a country". A place which was no place and all places at once.

I think this period has now ended. I've said before that I think the current Bush regime has done the opposite of what the first Bush regime did. Whereas Bush pere tried to create a "New World Order" with America at its invisible, omnipresent centre, Bush fils has situated (http://imomus.livejournal.com/61236.html) the US. (This year's Whitney Biennial was widely touted as the "post-American biennial" for exactly this reason: America, as an ideal, is over; what now remains in people's minds is America as a military threat, as the Pew Research Center (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10B14F638550C778DDDAF0894DE404482&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fOrganizations%2fP%2fPew%20Research%20Center) found recently.)

The gloves are off, then. But empires cannot be sustained under these conditions. Far from being the height of the American Empire, this new attitude signals its rapid decline. Show the gun, ditch the charm, and it's all over. As soon as you turn your back, somebody will jump you. We are entering a world of particularism, of every man for himself. The true end of the Cold War, with its "blocs" and "umbrellas". Japanese particularism is more benign than its US counterpart, because it doesn't combine it with war. They've been "special" longer, they've had more practise. But also, Japan has never presented its particularism as a model for others to emulate. "The Japanese Way", Japonism, Japanize -- these are things only artists talk about. If they work, they work by charm. You can't call this particularism "pompous". It has no ambition, no authority.

But it's nice to think that, just as Japan pioneered the iPod by inventing the Walkman 20 years before it, so it's pioneered American unilateral particularism by being closed all those years. Last time I went to the US I saw a sign from the Homeland Security Bureau boasting about how it was keeping "America open for business". Somehow, it managed to suggest the opposite, to conjur a picture of a closed America. Impossible to conceive of 100 years ago -- bring me your huddled masses, said Liberty! -- but all too easy now. And just think how "particular" that closed America would become, and how provincial its news broadcasts would be.

There's a little flavour of it in today's Guardian (http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1811066,00.html), which sees the media as the only force opposing the current regime in the US, or rather, sees the New York Times as that. And sees Bush asking "Who will rid me of this meddlesome press?"

[(Anonymous)]

I fixed my comment page. (Security has gotten tighter in the neverending War on Spam.)

Just one point: obviously Fordism is "American" in origin, but is the efficiency gained in production also "American"? Cultural behavior is one thing, but a lot of "American" inventions have had objective results that make the cultural element less apparent to the adopters. American firms adopted a lot of Japanese total quality management in the 80s, which was of course originally an "American" idea. (Some would even argue that Ford's innovation clearly went against the honest and decent old ways of American craftsmanship.)

Sounds a bit Scientology-like to call Fordism "technology" but a lot of grey area enters when you talk about the culture of scientific/economic practice. Not to say there aren't cultural products of industrial processes, but they my be results inherent in the process - not the birthing culture.

Marxy

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm not really convinced that "pure efficiency" can be distinguished from a localized "how we do things around here". Efficiency for whom, for what, and for why? By whose definition, and by which ideology? Towards what Utopia? These questions can only have cultural -- and local -- answers.

Re: I love the optimism...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Hee hee hee, thanks Roy!

[(Anonymous)]

Yep, Berlin is the future way of doing things. In 25 years every major city will be a hub of unemployable lazy ass artists. That sounds realistic.

cloud to the silver lining we call the melting pot

[(Anonymous)]

the "conservative ideological element" skidelsky sees is especially frightening to many americans. even as we look to a point of empire collapse (or any external point for that matter) many of us feel anesthetized by the non-american(ized) culture we enjoy. our own political disinclinations for the ouspreading of empire are simply placated by the constant influx of brilliant cuisine, music, style, etc. as long as there's ethiopian jazz, or mego records, or a revival of chinese painting, many americans will continue to find comforting evidence that the empire hasn't yet succeeded. on one hand that's optmisitic, on another its pretty deadening to think that even diversity is, itself, an attribute of this very complicated tumescence.

-stink/cheat/torture
www.stinkcheattorture.blogspot.com

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not convinced that modernization, globalization, markets etc. are "Americanism" in disguise. Sure, they're some of the means by which America has accumulated power, but they were around a long time before America became a superpower, and they also powered the development of all the European empires (the British one in particular), as well as Europe's post-war economic renaissance. The American empire has many particularities, but global capitalism is hardly one of them.

[(Anonymous)]

What if we say "productivity" instead of "efficiency." Then:

Productivity = Output of worker / Worker hours

This is not culturally defined. Fordism greatly increased this over the prior methods.

Whether efficiency is more important than equality is the cultural question.

Marxy

[larameau.livejournal.com]

every major city in the western world, that is (europe and the states).
and it's not that people are hanging about cause they're lazy. the problem is job precarity, which is just one of the myriad negative consequences of american-style globalization - workers in europe and in the us (but especially in europe) have become superfluous, disposable, because the perverse bottom line of capitalism - profit, more profit, and even more profit! - has led industries, and now also service companies, to employ people in non-western countries where the cost of labor is a fraction of what it is in europe.

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

You always have hints of Marxists hope, optimism, and utopia in your writings, but in none as much as in this post.

I doubt your optimism, however.

Throughout post-agrarian history, there have always been Empires and their culture is the culture that was dominate throughout their world. (Look at Ancient Rome, look at the Ottomans, look at the Ayyubid Dynasty, look at Tang and Song period China, look at the Ancient Greeks, look at the Mayans, look at the 17th. c. Dutch.) All had their influence spread in all aspects of life: ideas, culture, fiscal and military power, religion, even everyday life.

Perhaps you're right. Perhaps we are nearing a post-Empire world. Perhaps it might change tomorrow.

But if history is any sort of guide, the U.S. Empire will simply be eclipsed by a new Empire (China looks possible) and the U.S. will slowly fade into obsolescence or be destroyed.

If history is any guide, then the next Empire will fill in the gaps and the following generation will be frolicking in the cultural byproducts of the new Empire.

Then again, I hope you're right.

I just doubt it.

Doesn't mean we can't keep fighting for a better future, and hoping that our dreams can match reality.

[larameau.livejournal.com]

"The post-imperial future is what we're all brainstorming here. It's why we're not in New York or London. We're working on very specific questions, questions of habitus. What will music sound like after the empire? What will food taste like? How will people dress? How many hours a day will they work? What will their houses look like? How will they dance?"

i found this one really moving, nick.
my dream is that berlin's status as a work-in progress post-imperial experiment extends to other european capitals. "another europe is possible" to me means, at least, that a more humane capitalism, a social capitalism is possible. the socialist history of europe makes it just the right place to reform capitalism.

but in order to do that, europe must be politically united and, at the same time, european institutions and policies must be more democratic and closer to citizens.

the future of berlin, and of the other european capitals, as a source of social, cultural, and economic innovation depends on just this. it depends on how hard and how honestly we all work at finding a specifically european identity, one that is really alternative to, and independent of, the US in terms of economic, foreign, social and cultural policies.

[(Anonymous)]

Getting out and staying out of the US/Euro/(even Japan) loop isn't a wish for toxicity, it's.. precisely the same realist-optimist reasons you left London. These places are done. They are written in stone. They are unfightable. Let them chant "We win, we win!" and just go where the playing field is even and kids smile..

[(Anonymous)]

We should remember, while we sit here and criticize America and the UK to death, that Momus's lifestyle has been supported this year with a gig as a columnist at an American magazine and as a performance artist at an American museum.

I would hazard a guess that many other Berlin "creatives" are functioning under similar conditions. In other words, these artistic enclaves are not self-sustaining but require the patronage of those awful soulless capitalists.

If I were myself a professional gallery patron like Momus, I would be writing love letters to the United States every day, thanking them for supporting my (historically absurd and unsustainable) lifestyle.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Nothing would more quickly get me fired from Wired or the Whitney than writing paens to Bush's America, I can tell you. But who says describing the US as an awesome empire isn't a secret love letter, between the lines?

What troubles me more than anything is your idea that being an essayist and an artist is "absurd and unsustainable". Not quite sure why that should be.

[sirwilliam.livejournal.com]

Thank you for an (yet another) insightful post. The idea of "post-imperial" cities is not limited to Berlin; Portland Oregon, where I have escaped the imperial centres of London & Chicago, is one of the verdant islands of this archipelago.