Lies and Levis

Karl Marx  points out in Capital  that we have a "fetishism" with the commodity. And, Naomi Klein reiterates that point in her work, No Logo, when she says that society has an obsession not with the product, but with its branding. We see a logo on everything, and it is because of that that we want the product. What it costs to get there doesn't matter; we are just following the trend that society has set.
Levi's Strauss and Company is an example of a famous corporation well known for their name and logo in the jean making industry. It one of those "big-time" companies that makes tons of money because of the fact that people want their brand. However, what exactly are we advertising by wearing these brands?

Oh yeah... this is what we are advertising

In the early 90's, Levi's withdrew from dealings with contractors in China because they could not guarantee that suppliers would follow their codes of conduct, mostly concerning a "pervasive violation of human rights" (according to the Wall Street Journal). During the second half of the decade, Levi's began a series of drastic employment cuts. First, they closed down 11 plants in North America and laid off approximately 7000 workers, which according to Contemporary Issues in Business Ethics, was about one third of it's employees within the United States in 1997. Then, in 1999, Levi's announced that they would lay off another third of their domestic employees - another 6,000 jobs were lost and 11 plants were closed down. All of this was under the pretense of keeping production levels at its current percentage, because competing companies had much lower labor costs than they did. Bruce Raynor, the vice president of the union said that "he did not believe it was feasible for Levi's to expand domestic production since most of its competition abandoned the U.S. market for cheaper labor costs years ago" (176-177).

The truth is that at this time, many multinational corporations were going into developing countries looking for the same cheap labor that Levi's refused to be apart of in the early 90's. A lot of this kind of cheap labor came from sweat shops and such, that subjected those poor and desperate for work and underage children in developing countries to dangerous conditions, being underpaid and forced to work extremely long hours without rest. Additionally, they are forced to comply with high production rates under the fear that they may lose their jobs and their only source of income for their families. Other labor, as we ironically refer back to Focault, came from prison labor and those under workplace abuse.

Despite all of this, Levi's began to feel the pain of their initial withdrawal from China. Almost five years after they left, in 2001, they claimed that there were suppliers in China that could be found that would follow human rights, child labor and counterfeiting laws and announced that they would return. Chinese dissident Henry Wu criticized their decision saying, "human rights conditions have not improved, only the business climate had". We could say that Levi's just gave in to the demand of the economy, that they really tried their best in serving their international employees. However, when we look at the fact that Levi's is now following a new trend, I think its because they were longer able to keep up with the good publicity that high labor costs gives them.

According to the New York Times, Levi's is now, in 2012, trying to minimize it's water usage in jean production, as a typical pair of jeans "consumes 919 gallons of water during its life cycle". Their goals are to be both environmentally friendly and to prevent the possible scarcity in cotton that may be caused by climate change and result in the jeopardy of the company. However, with the sudden peak in sustainability as an interest, its really no surprise that Levi's is following other giant retailers in this direction as it did in the past. In 2005, large well-known brand companies like Gap and Adidas founded the Better Cotton Initiative, to "promote water conservation and reduce pesticide use and child-labor practices in the industry". Countries like India are at a risk for shortages and companies that aren't trying to help preserve "precious" water, are given bad publicity.

So, lets look at this for a moment. Their plan for preservation of human rights didn't work out too well (I guess that trend wasn't powerful enough to improve sales). But, being eco-friendly has become primary importance. My "hippie" friend, as she likes to be called says to me as we discuss this fact, "That's right. I'm not interest in human rights; I'm interest in eco-rights. That's what I look for when I pick out my jeans". Is that the new trend now? Who cares about human beings when we can be preserving the planet?

Really, I'm in awe here. What causes hundreds of large corporations to change their ideology from human rights to saving trees? Both Marx and Klein tells us the answer. It's because society is obsessed with the commodity, they are obsessed with brand and trends. Making money is what is important; if good publicity brings the corporations their profits, they will do what they must to obtain it. And society, having this fetish with the brand of the product, is just supporting it. This sounds familiar - are we looking at an ideology here?

Modern Punishment

Michel Focault describes at the beginning of his book, Discipline and Punish, a scene by which a murderer was publicly and inhumanely tortured and executed. After the grotesque picture he paints, he describes a very strict and specific schedule created by Leon Faucher 80 years later for a prison in Paris, thus comparing the very drastic change in structures of punishment by the judicial systems during the short time span. Focault mentions how strange it was for physical discipline to just disappear completely. Under the pretense of humanization, public spectacles of torture became no longer acceptable and eventually public executions began to decrease. But, he satirically asks, "how important is such a change, when compared with the great institutional transformations, the formulation of explicit, general codes and unified rules of procedure; with the almost universal adoption of the jury system...?" (7). In other words, why bother analyzing the distinctive motive behind this change, when the majority of society has essentially already accepted and adopted a "better" institutionalized method? One where the justice system holds a unnecessary portion of power, buildings detain the convicted, and science solves everything. Focault indicates that we should be looking for the answer.

The Guillotine - looks like the event of the year

I found this question really interesting, because living in the Bahamas all of my life (and this is in no way everyone's view, but it is the majority), I was brought up believing the capital punishment was the primary way to deter crime; as the crime rate continued to increase, so did this ideology. Hanging used to be a public spectacle and then all of a sudden it disappeared. In the past, Focault explains that there is a reason why we moved in a new direction - attacking the soul. But why is it that we have dismissed punishment of the physical kind and now look for a motivation - an intent - in an attempt to both punish and reform the human soul, rather than punish the offender based on the actual crime committed? First and foremost, according to Focualt, this change is a direct result of the judicial system's attempt to physically separate the judges and the executioners from the actual punishment, somehow making it morally acceptable to them (in my opinion, probably because of the church). By making the punishment more humanized, more individualized, they were relieved of the burden of physical punishment and the shame of being considered the villain, while criminals were pitied. Second, in punishing the soul and not the body, discipline became more about reforming the individual and making them a better person (that's debatable - its possible that they just wanted some kind of mental breakdown show, in my opinion). Therefore, scientists with knowledge of the mind were given power to define a persons offense based on their normalcy - placing the crime in context rather than as just the offense, as if the crime had some kind of authorship that we had to review to truly understand their actions. Furthermore, they were able to provide what they felt was appropriate sentencing as such. Incidentally, no executions have occurred in Britain since 1964.

The Privy Council - even within the Bahamas,
its apparent who still has power

Similarly today, there has to be a reason why the Bahamas (along with other former British colonies) have decreased the amount of actual executions since it's independence - especially considering the Caribbean has approximately four times as much of a death row rate than in the United States (statistics according the Leonard Birdsong in his blog on death penalties in the Bahamas here). The Bahamas was once an active contributor is both advocating and utilizing Capital Punishment. However, since independence in 1973, only sixteen people have been executed, six of which have occurred within the past 10 years and the last execution having took place in 2000. The Privy Council ruled  in 1993 in its famous Pratt & Morgan decision that inmates could only be executed within the constitution after holding them on death row for more than five years. In direct defiance of the ruling they did not approve of, the Bahamas executed a man exactly 5 years after being placed on death row, making the country the "first Caribbean nation to conduct an execution" since the ruling was placed and the first execution within 12 years according to the International Journal of Bahamian Studies. According to the same journal's research, "As many as 100 people who had gathered at the prison cheered when their execution notices were posted".

Consequently, in March of 2006, the UK-based Judicial Committee of the Privy council mandated that the mandatory death penalty was "unconstitutional" within in the Bahamas and Amnesty International further engraved the suggestion in stone when they regarded it as "the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights". Since this ruling, no executions have taken place, although criminals continue to be placed on death row.
However, with the crime rate in the Bahamas rising to heights beyond what we've ever experienced, the use of the death penalty and and the removal of the Privy Council as the country's highest court is continually being reconsidered, despite the fact that such an overt separation would lead to political problems.

It is clear in the Bahamas' insistence in continuing with capital punishment that they have no problem in using physical punishment to illustrate a point. Focault mentions that the prison system creates such an illustration because a restriction of liberty and food and sexual deprivation are physical restraints. However, imprisonment in the Bahamas is something a bit more. Her Majesty's Prison (better known as Fox Hill Prison) is nothing to be messed with. From my own house, approximately 2 miles away from the prison, I can hear the alarms that indicate their stringent time schedule. The cells are like holes in a wall, where in medium security detainment, five to six men occupy one small, concrete light-less cell (once the sun goes down, there is nothing but darkness). Men defecate in a bucket in a corner, and in combination with the lack of windows or any airflow and the heat that comes with the climate, it hardly makes for healthy living conditions. Fox Hill imprisonment is more than just a restraint of liberty, it truly is a physical punishment, where not only one's dignity, but one's health and security can be at stake. Furthermore, the judicial system that sentences them are not organized. Citizens are put at risk everyday when buses full of prisoners are carried to the courts to possibly be sentenced that day, as seen in the video below (sorry, its sideways).

This leads me to ask, what is the motivation now? Why does Britain expect that the Commonwealth of the Bahamas follow restrictions on the death penalty, when England itself didn't completely forbid the sentence until 1964? Why are they asking, when the Bahamas became politically independent in 1973? Focault says that "paradoxically, England was one of the countries most loath to see the disappearance of the public execution" (14). Its ironic that the same power that was used in the slave era to execute based on racial control and was so unhappy to see public execution disappear, is now attempting to abolish these executions when the country is independent. Whats more interesting is the double edged sword here - continuing capital punishment will demonstrate our independence from England. However, Sir Arthur Foulkes, the current Governor General and representative of Queen Elizabeth II in the Bahamas, states here that "it is not inconceivable that sometime in the future the Bahamas may be barred from certain international organizations or otherwise sanctioned if we continue to practice capital punishment". Unfortunately, it appears that abolishing the death penalty will be necessary for international political acceptance and such can lead to continual dependence on England, which considering their past in needing power control, doesn't seem too far-fetched.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar... only sometimes though

I really had no idea what I wanted to write about. Up until last night I was drawing a blank. A friend actually suggested I write a blog about not writing a blog - I almost surrendered to that idea. So when I went to the Walker Art Center last night, I bowed down to the art gods for giving me the kind of lightbulb revelation that I needed. Okay, no.. not really, but I almost reached that point.

A little something like that..

I realized that the artist, like the author, has an intention - a story - to share (at least in most cases). Whether or not we think that their intention holds any importance will decide how we interpret the art and determine what we may potentially be missing out on.

 I went to the Walker for a performance of El Pasado es un Animal Grotesco, which although I found extremely crude and surreal, I still ended up loving in a way. There really was no way to react to it; even having already prepared myself for the worse, I didn't know how to respond. So I was surprised that when looking amongst the displays with some free time, there was a really interesting, provocative and oddly profound art display called Poison & Candy by Frank Gaard. The display features more than 200 works, many of which gave me the same impression as the play - you know there is something deep there, but you are too busy trying to control the mini-explosion in your mind to really find it. I won't go into detail as to what exactly two of these particular painting were of (there's a picture below of the more friendly piece) - because there is no real way to aesthetically describe them without offending someone. But many of the particular "objects" painted had names written on them. And not just any "proper names". These are names of artists, writers and literary theorists that any one who has the mildest peak of an interest in Literature, Philosophy, Psychology or Art (among many other topics) will recognize: Matisse, Picasso, Lacan, Nabokov, and ironically, Focault.

Frank Gaard : Satanic Housekeeping

There are a few questions that rose from seeing these paintings: Why are the names there? How do I interpret this? Are each of the paintings classifications of a certain genre of artists?  And lastly, what is the artist's intention for us to find? The painting to the left, "Satanic Housekeeping", has a few of the artists I mentioned before. We can see that there is Vladimir Nabokov, author of the famous novel Lolita, Jacques Lacan, renowned psychoanalyst and literary theorist, and of course Michel Focault, theorist and author of What Is An Author? If I look at these names, I see a certain trend. The question is, are we supposed to recognize this trend? There has to be a reason that the artist chose these particular people - these particular names that hold some meaning. Focault seems to have an idea; he tells us that the "proper name", in relationship to the writer, is not just a proper name. He says, "The author's name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and culture" (Focault 107). In other words, the author's name represents something, a homogeneity or an affiliation with something.

I really, REALLY, don't get this one.

I could have looked at the little card that tells you what the painting is about, but I, unfortunately, was too enthralled and failed to do that. So, with that said, we can only speculate what it means. Does the meaning of this painting lie in the author's names? I think so, but I can't say so for sure; it is only my interpretation. In my opinion, we can look at it's title "Satanic Housekeeping" and see how that has any significance toward these names. If I look at Gaard's other works in the gallery, personally I see another, less decisive and perhaps a not really understandable concept, which could actually be the authors intention.

But does any of this really matter? Roland Barthes says in his essay, The Death of the Author, that once the writer is done writing, he figuratively dies. His voice no longer holds any relevance, and his intention - whatever it may have been - holds no purpose because giving a text an author only "[imposes] a limit on that text...to close the writing" (Barthes 147). It is the reader's interpretation that is now important. We can take this theory and say that our interpretation of the art is most important, but I think it is rather presumptuous of us to think that the artist wasn't trying to share something with us. If we listen again to Focault, he also says that, "it is not enough to declare that we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work itself" (Focault 104). Without the artist lies the opportunity for false interpretations and rather copious amounts of insignifcant meanings to arise.

Oh yes, how very profound...

From another point of view, we can look at a text, or even the particular artwork above, and think that there is nothing there to see. Someone can look at that picture and see just underwear with names on it. I definitely felt that way with a lot of the pieces in the other parts of the gallery: a video of a cat drinking milk, a cardboard box in the middle of the floor, two cigarettes, and my favorite - the frame that framed nothing (which funnily enough, a friend of mine says in response, "How profound!").

There is a phrase attributed to Freud's psychoanalysis theory (although noone really knows for sure if he has even quoted it). It is: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". It's meaning is pretty straight forward - sometimes what you are trying to interpret isn't there at all; there was no meaning intended. Unfortunately, if we look at life that way, everything seems pretty bland, and a lot of authors like Focault and Barthes are no longer relevant either.