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Visit us at e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Charles Mudede and Roxanne Emadi‘s Dawn of the good times (2010), streaming from Monday, June 28th to Sunday, July 4th, 2021.
Dawn of the good times is a documentary that approaches (or remixes) the sad and long history of public housing in the United States like a DJ on two turntables and a microphone held by Hegel.
It is presented along with an essay by the director of the film Charles Mudede.
Dawn of the good times is the fourth edition of Planet C, a program of films and essays convened by Charles Mudede and comprising the seventh cycle of Artist Cinemas, a long-term online series of film programs curated by artists for e-flux Video & Film .
Planet C runs from June 14th to July 25th, 2021, with a new film and essay released every week.
The spirit of Good times
Charles Mudede
As a subject, capital is a remarkable “subjectâ€. While Hegel’s subject is transhistorical and knowing, in Marx’s analysis it is historically determined and blind. Capital as a structure constituted by certain forms of practice can in turn be constitutive for forms of social practice and subjectivity; but as a subject it has no ego. It is self-reflective and, as a social form, can induce self-awareness, but unlike Hegel’s mind, it has no self-awareness.
—Moshie Postone
Let’s think about Hegel for a moment. One of his many strange (and now seemingly outdated) ideas made reason (or the absolute) the engine of history – reason is in the real, and so the point of its development over time (history) is to reach a point in which they and matter (the real) are one and the same. In this way, Hegel merged the god of Timaeuswith the God of Christianity – the God who deals with matter, who forms it, with the God who has a fate, a purpose, a goal, the final countdown. As fantastic as it all sounds, Hegel, following the Italian historian-philosopher Giambattista Vico of the Enlightenment, was not entirely wrong when he saw the history of mankind as shaped and driven by an inner will conatus, a unique passion, a logic, a self-realizing theme. Hegel was almost right to call this subject a ghost.
For Hegel a spirit could only be supernatural (or a subject); but in the twenty-first century we see the spirit more and more as something wholly worldly. It doesn’t take anything from that other Page; this side of the stuff (or material-Electrons, protons, fields, bosons, fermions, gravitational waves etc) is more than enough to do the trick. And the mind is not only limited to the material world, but is very open to the cultural world and is mostly experienced in it. In the former, it is described as lame as emergence; with the latter it can steer a whole direction of economic life. My point: what Hegel saw as a subject, it turned out, was the abstraction of concentrated cultural practices that were historically specific and materialized as capitalism.
Just as a star arises from gravitational forces and pressures that act on trapped dust and gas particles, the spirit of capitalism arises from the trapped and naturally developed elements of human biology and sociality (desire, dreams, morality, appetite, conatus). The separation of these natural elements from capitalism is not so easy when its processes have reached a level of maturity that some Marxists call “socially developed capital”. In the West, this transition (from liberal to social) began at the end of the 19th century and was completed in the middle of the 20th century. At the end of this particular evolution, the mind became less invisible and mysterious than in Hegel’s (and even Vico’s) day. In our post-Nixon shock era of socialized financial markets (as well as industrial production) a much greater level of ignorance and prejudice is required to confuse the spirit of capitalism with a transhistorical world spirit.
While the invisible man’s footsteps can be observed on his stroll on the beach, the temporal movement of the capitalist absolute becomes visible on film. The visibility of this form of historical offense is the subject of the short film Dawn of the good times.[1]
The capitalist spirit not only moves in time, but can also speak to us in a table-turning spell. It says who is hungry and who is not. Their income comes from a low wage and their income comes from a portfolio. In the glowing sphere of this spirit one hears the distress of a person who has too many debts. We can also hear those who live and die in a ghetto and those who now live and thrive in elongated towers. We can hear voices from the projects.
We cannot periodize …
—Fredric Jameson
The esprit of capitalism, which the Dutch initiated with innovations in fish processing and banking, is made up of large and small periods. The major periods are of course the Dutch period, the British period, the US period, and the current Chinese period. Each period summarizes smaller periods that also summarize their own periods. The one that affects the subject Dawn of the good times lies between 1979 and 2008, the last few years of American capitalism’s dominance. What begins in 1979 is the end of the Good times, a sitcom about a black American family living in the twilight of the good times.[2]
What were the good times The civil rights moment, the Great Society moment, the moment just before the Mont Pelerin Society dreams with controlled explosives destroyed what sociologists at the Chicago School of the 1940s called “the black metropolis.”
The Good times ends in 1979, the year Reagan and Thatcher come to power. The year of the Iranian revolution and the year the Soviets invade Afghanistan and the seeds of the 11th century. Rambo III). The end of the Good times begins the crack epidemic that is destroying every black metropolis in America – Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, New York.
In 1989 there is a great change in capitalist history. His spirit, changed by developments in the 1970s (the Nixon Shock, the collapse of the Philips curve, the Volcker Shock), is heading in a new direction. With the end of real socialism and with it the story of the American Francis Fukuyama, the city center enters the decade that will change it. This is the moment of regeneration / gentrification and the relocation of the urban poor to the suburbs, to precarious residential property conditions, to the periphery of the city center. This post-9/11 accelerated shift (or “teaser-rate ownership societyâ€) will begin to collapse in 2007. One of the epicentres of this collapse, which sparked a global crash in late 2008, is Cleveland. Here a black serial killer comes to life in 2009 and ends the lives of two dozen black women. The victims are buried in his courtyard, which is surrounded by empty houses that have been forcibly sealed off.[3] The Spirit of Capitalism is also a horror film.
We cannot separate the subprime crisis from the murders. Nor can we separate the subprime crisis from the gentrification of the hood. Nor can we separate the hood from the destruction (deindustrialization) of the black metropolis by the forces of market-urbanism, which, as the Marxist geographer David Harvey has shown, begins with an attack on the public sector of New York City in the late 1970s.
“History, this best of all Marxists …”
—Rudolf Hilferding
In this sentence we see Hegel’s ghost– the mind that races through its self-made time. However, this mind has nothing to do with the Absolute (although it occurs in Absolute / Newtonian time), nor does it have a goal in mind. Instead, it is the phantom stream of underworld energy that is generated and motivated by actual social pressure, by the pressure in the inner city, by hunger, desire, by the struggle for recognition as a human being. “Damn damn damn.”
[1] This short documentation, Dawn of the good times, was commissioned by the Egyptian curator Bassam El Baroni for Manifesta 8, the 2010 European Biennale for Contemporary Art in Spain.
[2] “Between 1959 and 1963 the Chicago Housing Authority built 28 high-rise buildings with 4,321 public housing units and named the project after the first accredited African-American architect Robert R. Taylor (1868-1942). By 1974, however, the modernist utopia becomes a postmodern dystopia (a deadly concentration of poverty, unemployment, and gang violence) in both reality and on television, where unit 4,322 is a set for popular programming Good times. “Charles Mudede, Manifesta 8, 2010. http://arpa.carm.es/manifesta/manifesta8.artist?nombre=&codigo=5
[3] For more information on Anthony Sowell, see Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Sowell
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Charles Tonderai Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born cultural critic, urbanist, filmmaker, university teacher and author. He is a senior employee of The unknown, Lecturer at Cornish College, and has worked with director Robinson Devor on three films, two of which Police beat and zoo, premiered at Sundance, and one of them, zoo, shown in Cannes. In autumn 2018 he made his first film, Thin skin, from a script he wrote with Lindy West and Aham Oluo. He also did for that. written New York Times, Cinema area, Tank magazine, LA Weekly, Nest magazine, e-flux journal, and C theory.
For more information contact = (c = c.charCodeAt (0) +13)? C: c-26);}); return false “> program [​at​] e-flux.com.
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