I'll take the irony for now

The dozen or so readers who have entertained my writing would have noticed that I have not posted since May. Since May there has been a heartbreak, a longish pause spent on the reflection of my life in which no obvious solution to its woes was found, and an entry into finance, as a venture capitalist to be specific. Yes folks, I now spend my days figuring out better and more efficient ways to make money in risky ventures, under the auspices of the invisible hand. Upon a second bout of reflection – which now seems like a recurring disease – I have figured out that it is the same hand that now hovers over this keyboard, the same hand that produces nonsense from spreadsheet to pirated word document, the same hand that clutches a cigarette in the hope that my solitude will not be in vain. It began – and believe me, I do not wish to get press this point home again – with a hand. The guiding, if soft-spoken, question posed by a friend whilst his fingers snuck around his hands: ‘Have you ever thought of going into finance?’ My answer, if slightly desperate, was true: ‘Yes, I have’.

The irony, of course, is palpable: initially starting this blog as a rage against consumerism in all its varied and gilded forms, I am now an attempt to justify its relevance. I’d celebrate the irony, if it weren’t so boring. No, irony here is not some off-hand witticism, but a dull affair. It is some twisted realisation of history, or destiny, depending on your theological bias. I had a feeling my life could end up this way – with a dullness called irony.

Don’t get me wrong, there is something liberating about this dull irony, which allows me to go unthinking for hours on end. I spend my days collecting and producing reports on investments, sending emails to folks whose money is being invested and who evidently deeply care about their money, sit in board meetings with people who enjoy board meetings, and have lunch with hedge fund managers who sold off the old age of an entire generation. None are particularly difficult activities; however, they do require a different engagement with the 'world' than I'm used to - one where reproducing networks of capital is the primary objective. It is perhaps unnecessary to place this within the context of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism, taken to spectacularly popular heights by the 2008 crash and its ensuing catastrophes (recall, the hedge fund managers), but it would be remiss not to: my daily routines are governed by the vacuous attempt to produce something, anything, that resembles real value. Instead, what happens is I sit pretty on the merry-go round for the eternal quest of higher growth rates, whose only role is to mimic economic development. Generally unconcerned with the actual sustainability of the investment, the merry-go round operator and myself (both financiers) are rewarded for this gambit, largely thanks to a vague notion of financial 'success'.

So, what am I doing in this god-forsaken place, you may ask. Would you believe what I half-jokingly tell my friends - that I am the world's foremost Marxist investor? There is the opportunity for subversion in such a tale, one where I destroy capitalism from the inside, like a bad rehash of Fight Club’s end scene set in the infinitely quieter suburbs of Lusaka. Perhaps my increasingly bifurcated personality - indeed, the ability to distance my practical reality from the ideal of myself - lends itself to such tragedy. Or perhaps this properly reflects that hallmark of industrial society that has passed into Marxist folklore: alienation from one’s labour; except, that I’m not so much divorced from the means of production, nor its products: financiers are not known for their penury. Our father Marx would have probably thought of me as the modern aberration of the petite bourgeoisie, and abandoned me.

Keeping in mind the clear patricide I am committing, I would like to absolve myself, and instead frame my betrayal in terms of enlightenment: I feel it necessary to sacrifice myself to the godhead of capital for the time being, if only to better understand: i) myself - I've always wondered if I’m fit to pretend I care about finance and business; and ii) how the other half live, in their mansions of make-believe, sustained mostly by fictions of their self-value, but also through the dishonesty of the capital being raised and deployed. Dishonesty here is not a moral judgement on finance or capital per se, a common mistake made by folks who assume finance is reprehensible because it ‘profits without producing’[1]; rather, it is a moral judgement on the types of economic ‘progress’ (or ‘growth’) valued above others, where high-growth enterprises are valued above low-growth enterprises, regardless of the sustainability of that enterprise. And financiers, because they have an explicit interest in maintaining high growth rates, will always choose the former.

It is unlikely that these thoughts would have developed elsewhere, in the vacuums of thought that characterise our everyday lives, whether it is endlessly scrolling through social media or engaging in small talk with a work colleague. And so, I thank the investment firm for making me angry. There is a poetics to anger that I have forgotten about, which in the past occasionally reared its wonderful head only in moments of true frustration. This is not that; this is an anger directed outwards towards the world, and inwards towards my own dull irony. But whatever the cost, I'll take the irony for now.

Notes [1] See Lapavitsas, Costas. “The Financialization of Capitalism: ‘Profiting Without Producing.’” City. 17, no. 6 (2013): 792–805.

The end of summer

The turn of seasons provoke memories, and at times nostalgia. Maybe it is because they recreate, in such short time, completely familiar conditions of existence. Sounds, smells and sights produce a sensory overload that mimics memories. I find there is something playful about the act of remembering this way: summer is taunted by autumn leaves, winter by spring blossoms. It is mischievous and fickle, like the poet’s pen that uses such symbols to good – if redundant – effect. In Cape Town, the seasons follow the course of capriciousness, as any visitor will tell you. But in Zambia, they are easier to distinguish from one another. They are brokered by two acts of providence: the first rains and the last rains. All other acts of god revolve around these two points, from planting seasons to the onset of myriad tropical diseases to political agitation. There is something in the cyclical nature of the seasons that structures our experience of life, that creates a sense of rhythm bordering on the poetic, and violent, and redundant. At times we forget that. [1]

Sport, I think, is a good way to get a grip on the rhythm of seasons. Many sports limit themselves according to the natural elements, like tennis and cricket that struggle to be played outside of summer. Others, like football and rugby, are 'winter sports' that could be played in the summer, but in Anglophone countries will not because they then compete with summer sports. Like with any cultural forms, these distinctions are the products of contested histories. Seasonal distinctions, along with the rules of 'global' games, were mostly codified during 19th-century industrial Britain, set against the backdrop the industrial revolution that pitted the ruling classes against the industrial and rural labouring classes in economic and cultural terms. In doesn't take much to imagine what sport meant, and means, in these terms; especially when they only went global after a quarter of the world's population was under British imperial rule. [2]

Taking note of this history, many popular sports may seem quite Victorian in their form. The most obvious is probably cricket, which is played in full whites, contains a break in play called 'tea', and has sporting terminology rife with Victorian-era sentiments (think of the moral undertones of the term 'maiden', which describes an over without a single run being scored, in a sense 'untouched'). However, sports do not simply reflect history, they also embody them. They occupy multiple cultural and symbolic spaces in public life - at once (and at odds), I am thinking here of strawberries and cream at the Wimbledon final, or of the Samba-esque - 'Ginga' - style of Brazilian football played religiously in favela streets. The difficulty of speaking about sports across time and space - to the extent that what is considered a 'sport' is never stable - reflects how interwoven the threads of culture, history, and sport are. [3]

However, there are relationships that cut across these different cultural forms, in spite of their unequal histories. On the one hand, this is a function of the fairly consistent rules of playing a sport, at least at the institutional level; for example, football across the world is translatable because of the adoption of a standard set of rules, from North Korea to Zambia, and cricket is understood as lucidly in California as it is in Afghanistan (I think, at least).[4] On the other hand, and outside of it as a translatable form of entertainment or spectacle [5], there is a ‘play' within sports that produces its own subjectivity, its own lightheartedness and competitiveness, and at times its own forms of democracy and injustice. These subjectivities, within and across different sports and produced in many different ways, allow us to speak with one another without the need to constantly translate our experiences. Sport becomes a theatre where the politics and culture are quite literally 'played out'. Sport is the great equaliser.

I wanted to talk about cricket when I first started writing this blog. For me, the end of summer translates as the end of cricket. My Saturdays have cleared up, no longer spending time driving across Cape Town, and cooking up half-baked theories about cricket, and how the world revolves around it, and oh how glorious the sun is giving me heat stroke (one has much time to lyricise during a cricket match). But upon reflection, it seems to me that the seasons strike the timbre of a metaphor, not only fact. Seasons are formulaic, constantly reproducing the same movement of the natural environment [6], whether it is the subtle capriciousness of the Cape or the dogmatic dramatism of Zambia. Sports are too, by staying true to their forms, their 'rules of play'. It is within the limits of redundancy that we create our own passages of joy and play. It could be a walk amongst the auburn plane trees in the leafy suburbs of Cape Town, or harvesting inswa after the first rains in Lusaka. It could be spending a day of cricket wondering about only god knows what on a large oval field, or playing football in the compound near you. These experiences, disparate and fleeting, for a moment ground us in the common language of playfulness, allowing us to speak across and to one another.

In my view few things are as enjoyable as passing time, and knowing what may take place has taken place a thousand times before.

Postscript; or a preface to A Love Letter to Cricket

I have been meaning to write a 'Love Letter to Cricket' for a while now, and part of the reason for this blog was to sketch out a framework for that. Maybe I failed in that intellectual task, but in speaking about the seasons and sports I recalled the poem below. I wrote it a while ago. It was a reflection on cricket and some 'thing' deeper. I couldn't quite figure out at the time what that 'thing' was or is, but maybe that isn't the point. On rereading the poem, I 've come to realise how influential my childhood was in shaping my love of cricket, [7] the passion for which I have since tried to rationalise in a number of ways. As a child I was awed by the grace of the game. I still am.

the pavilion

along the way

to a Methodist boarding school

my peers gathered at the pavilion

in tradition watching

white hats against white slacks

maybe we can be redeemed

in the way children play

dancing around

and alighting their souls

in spite of the homes their parents burnt

along the way, an Indian summer dragged us

from fields of carelessness to manhood.

like the monsoon

come on time, but too early

for a soul to travel back in time.

Notes

[1] Although, I’d like to point out that large parts of the historical canon have, with periods of varying intensity, taken the 'structure' of geography and nature seriously. I'm thinking here of Fernand Braudel's pioneering historical surveys of the world of the Mediterranean, which popularised the term 'longue duree' - essentially privileged the 'long' (almost ahistorical) histories of geography over other, shorter, forms of histories centred on events.

See: Fernand Braudel. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, 1972

[2] Although, these sports were not only spread through colonialism. For example, in Italy, the spread of football was brought over by British expatriates. The first football clubs in Italy were actually cricket and football clubs, where the team played cricket in summer and football in winter. From there, football spread like wildfire across the country.

[3] Anyone interested in what this undertaking might look like, must read David Goldblatt's The Age of Football, 2019.

[4] There is a cricketing anecdote, though, I find quite telling of the possible limitations of this, or at least the possibilities of limitations in a pre-globalised world. Cricket journalist Scyld Berry amusingly narrates umpiring a cricket match in the remote north-eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea, where the local counting system does not extend beyond 3. Here, the game can never really progress beyond the most basic level. The logic of the game still remains, although it cannot be quantified according to numbers. His conclusion is that without numbers, cricket just resembles a 'middle practice', without any real point, or excitement for that matter.

Scyld Berry, Cricket: The Game of Life, 2015, pg. 242.

[5] The practice of sports being confined to certain seasons presents a problem for increasingly profit-driven sporting consortiums. For in order to generate revenue, an ideal situation would be to play sport all the time. However, these enormously wealthy entities have found a way to capitalise on the 'lull' of the off-season. Through the investment of the public in international speculation - for example, in the 'transfer windows' of European football clubs, where much of the football-loving public think and talk about who will go where etc. - you can be your own play-pretend club owner.

[6] Increasingly punctuated, it is true, by major out-of-season weather events caused by global warming. Slavoj Zizek notes how "The lesson of global warming is that the freedom of humankind is only possible against the background of a stable environment (temperature, the composition of the air, sufficient water and energy supplies, and so on): humans can 'do what they want' only insofar as they remain marginal enough, so that they don't perturb the parameters of life on earth." This does leave an interesting, if subliminal, question of metaphor here: if the season is slowly being broken down as a concept, what of other 'forms' will break down with the imminent destabilisation of the 'natural' environment. I am not able - perhaps more importantly, do not want to - answer this question.

Slavoj Zizek, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight, 2018, pg. 33.

[7] To give context to the entire piece, perhaps I must explain that for me, sports and seasons are so intimately linked because I went through a Southern African schooling system modelled on the British, where each season has its own portfolio of sport, usually around 3 or 4 strong. I mostly played cricket in the dry season (summer in South Africa, winter in Zambia) and rugby or football in the wet season (winter in South Africa and summer in Zambia).

Ukraine and the prospect of history

If history rhymes, then today it sings. It sings in many voices, harmonising till the pitch resembles the whistle of a bomb as it drops from on high upon us. We know the victims of history’s ballad already – they are you and I, either now or in the past or in the future. We are in the throes of another ‘Nintendo War’ (as Peter Lamborn Wilson, in reference to the Gulf War, once so eloquently put it), where we watch from afar and near as our fragile lives are toyed with.

This post has been written, forgotten, re-written and then remembered, shifting perspective and tone across every new iteration. In the grip of a major event no one can remain certain about the travails of history, let alone such outdated concepts such as truth. The pace of the invasion of Ukraine has outstripped both the imagined horizon of its possibilities and its appended commentary: conflict brings out the surreal nature of the world, stranger than fiction. I find it impossible to keep track of exactly what I should think of it. I wish, in times like these, to have the safe temporal distance to know history properly.

*

The flurry of articles, podcasts, YouTube videos, or plain old conflict correspondence-to-TV was mobilised as soon as the conflict began is reminiscent of an orchestrated PR campaign. The grinding, orotund, surreal cogs of international media coverage satisfies our urge to simultaneously be horrified and entertained. Well, most of us will admit to being deeply horrified, with our ideals of universal humanity shattered. Few of us will admit that the spectacle of ongoing conflict somewhat sustains us. Whilst ostensibly focused on the plight of the Ukrainians, the timbre of these conflict dispatches is a reflection of ‘our’ broader anxieties: about Russia, about war, and about the prospect of history.

History has become a central rhetorical tool in the conflict. It has been used to justify Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, which was part of the USSR and the Russian Empire before that; although public historians have resisted the historical claims that leads to. In other ways, historical allegiances have also crept into the foray: not only have those American hawks (who have achieved a wondrous about-turn on Putin) taken their old battle-lines, but those who have a historical allegiance to Russia, like the ANC who were aided by the former Soviet Union among other soviet states, now support them. There is an absurd idea floating about that Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine is an anti-imperial move, and thus should be supported by those with anti-imperialist programmes.

But apart from these forays into history, which is part of the modus operandi of modern invasions, the most disquieting aspect for many people is how history has not ended. The ascendancy of Western liberal democracy, which Francis Fukuyama in The End of History claimed was ‘the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution’, has ironically ended. Its decline had been in the making ever since its primacy was pronounced after the fall of the Soviet Union (and thus, history reserves further irony for Fukuyama’s absurd reading of Marx and Hegel). Premature histories are the only ones that sell well.

*

War is often the most dreadful prospect of history, if not the brutal culmination of all its material desires. But what is truly terrorizing is history's indeterminacy. It may rhyme, it may sing, but you never know what verse lies ahead. This ambiguous relationship to the past is constantly disrupted by our collective memory. I began by suggesting that there is something eerily reminiscent about this point in history to others, not only in the global possibilities of war or how once again freedom teeters on the edge of ‘Europe’, but how for many of us in the ‘Third World’ countless conflicts have marked our fate and we have paid the price for them, whether they are our doing or not. In this part of the world we have grown up instinctively knowing that history is uneven, that some lives are more valuable than others. That history informs us while its making jars us is a dialectic that perhaps will forever remain unresolved.

That does not detract from the world-significance of this conflict, it just helps us to better recognise it, to better articulate a position from which we can be both sensible and critical. What that position is or ought to be escapes me. There is no doubt that this is a major historical rupture, one that will define the global stage for many years to come. Or not, I may be falling into the wide ambit of contemporary events, unable to exercise proper historical judgement. This just may be my Fukuyama moment.