“When we are in front of an abstract painting, we have the license to interpret in any way we want. Or music—music is a medium that we might not understand, but that we feel and enjoy. But in the case of cinema many expect to receive a clear and unified message, but what I’m suggesting is that a film could be experienced as a poem, a painting, or a piece of music.”
YA GIRL WENT TO SEE MOTHER HOLZER’S ROOM AT THE TATE MODERN LAST WEEK AND LOST HER WHOLE MIND AND CAME OUT W EVERY REMAINING LAYER OF CONSCIOUSNESS + STRATUM CORNEUM PEELED OFF AND LEFT OUT THERE LIKE AN EXPOSED NERVE THRUMMING AND THRUMMING AND THRUMMING AND THEN OH SOSTILL. // Selections from ‘Survival’, 1983-84. Jenny Holzer.
Shortly after the Millennium Campaign was announced in 2002, world hunger actually began rising, not falling. To “correct” this, the UN did not airdrop food or deploy convoys of aid workers. Instead, it relaxed the qualifications for being “hungry.” Those affected by food shortages brought on by the 2008 financial crisis, for instance, were simply not included in official Campaign figures. The UN reasoned that such instances were not “normal indicators” of hunger. Overnight, global hunger rates plummeted by hundreds of millions of people, but not because the UN had given anyone more food. Even the initial methodology of the Millennium Campaign was suspect. Those living in inner-city Milwaukee, for instance, were not included in Campaign data because they resided in the United States, not a poor country, though they also suffer from food insecurity.
Part of the problem, Hickel believes, is determining what exactly qualifies as “poverty.” Those living on less than $1.25 a day — approximately one billion people — are said to live under the global poverty line. This is terribly disheartening, says Hickel, but also woefully inaccurate. Even in extremely poor countries, two dollars a day does little to lift anyone out of poverty, let alone grant them some semblance of a dignified life. It is more reasonable to say that $5 a day is sufficient to keep someone out of extreme poverty, which would still only begin to cover all of their expenses, as it includes sufficient caloric intake and housing but passes over larger expenditures like medical care and retirement savings.
How did this come to be? After decolonization, and from the 1950s to the 1970s, incomes in the Global South were actually growing steadily, spurred on by the democratic elections of self-described “developmentalists” in former colonies. Many developmentalist policies were not dissimilar from the Keynesian economic principles that had helped the North prosper after World War II, including taxation of the rich, nationalization of certain enterprises, and collective bargaining by workers through unions. Such market control helped close the global wealth gap, but US companies were suddenly being boxed out of markets they had historically controlled. This couldn’t stand. Under the guise of combating Marxism, US and British leadership quickly began a campaign of military coups by forces loyal to Western interests. Salvador Allende was assassinated in Chile and a military junta instituted in Brazil, alongside military interference in Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, and the Congo.
In these newly captive markets, the North was able to institute economic policies known as structural adjustment programs, which were a boon for the United States and Western Europe. Poor countries were desperate for capital after coups and civil wars had disrupted their economies. The World Bank and IMF awarded them structural adjustment programs under very particular conditions, which insisted that developing countries deregulate their economies in order to create hospitable conditions for corporate investment. Trillions of dollars of previously nationalized property in the Global South — railways, hospitals, schools, and farmland — became privatized. Governments were not allowed to interfere, even as the prices of basic necessities such as food, transportation, and healthcare quickly rose beyond the means of the poor.
In order to attract corporate investment in these freshly deregulated markets, countries were required by the World Bank and IMF to grant corporations supremely low tax rates, meaning most profits were quickly ferried out of the country instead of being reinvested in infrastructure. If a nation’s government did try to impose extra regulations, corporations simply moved operations to a more hospitable country, or funneled money into offshore bank accounts through tricky trade invoicing. Hickel estimates that such practices loot over $1.8 trillion from developing countries each year. By 1990, the economic gains made in the South between 1950 and 1970 had reversed. In 1960, per capita income in the North was 32 times greater than in the South. Today, it is 134 times greater.
It is easy to see how magical realism emerges from Latin America during this time, as military coups materialize out of nowhere and children disappear into the night. The mountains and the riches inside them are no longer yours, though they still sit plainly before you. The same goes for the food you harvest. Even the rain has a price tag. Yet at every avenue, you are told you are developing. The skyscrapers erected from the ashes of the not-modern hold the wealth you should aspire to, even though they remain empty behind their veneer of glass and steel.
Saying “Gender is fake so how are people trans?” is like saying “Money is fake so how are people poor?” Like as much as we facetiously say gender is fake, “social construct” is not synonymous with “fake”
“Eventually you can’t help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.”
countervisuality 