For sale now, $1285 at Intersection for the Arts. The price of one college credit.
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please flag with care: [?]Actress with Debt (potrero hill)
Date: 2012-02-19, 4:10PM PST
Reply to: q4rzc-2860168193@gigs.craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
I am a female artist working on an installation about student debt.PostingID: 2860168193
I am in search of a bold actress that has moral and financial issues with debt that she can draw from for a dramatic interactive performance.
There will be video and photo documentation of the final work and the process.
The culmination for the project will be on May 10.
Preparation will take place over three short meetings. I’m very flexible with meeting time and location.
I can offer the right candidate $200.
- it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
- Compensation: $200
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“Authoritarian religious thinkers construe an existential debt owed to their parents, while ethical religious thinkers construe an existential debt owed to their children. These are not necessarily incommensurable, as for example when one envisions ones descendants as being of the same pool as ones ancestors, and especially when one considers that oneself might BE one’s own ancestor or descendent….” — Peter H. Duchemin
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This week was the first of two town hall style meetings held at CCA, hosted by President Steve Beal to begin a conversation about financial transparency. It took place about 5 weeks after I wrote him a letter inviting him to meet and discuss the psychological implications of debt on students, and CCA’s role in that. Administrators from every department were present, about 15 staff and about 15 students attended.
I learned that California College of the Arts has a $73 Million Dollar Budget
The breakdown:
27% Financial Aid
23% Instruction
18% Admin Salaries
9% Employee Benefits
5% Plant Operations
5% Old Debt Service
4% Printing
4% Contracts
4% Other
3% Travel
_____________
73 Million Dollars
94% of the total budget comes from tuition
6% auxillary/ gifts
_____________
Financial Aid is 27% of the Budget
$34 million total in scholarships, grants, loans, employment
$19 million in scholarships
Average student scholarship is $13,000
One of the greatest symptoms of debt, or of which debt is a symptom is this internalization of responsibility, shame, and guilt that renders an individual separate from a collective and its power. When reading Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, he extends what Foucault wrote in two pages and places it in a few cultural and personal scenarios, grounding it in the education system because he is a teacher. (if you want a copy of the book, email me and I’ll send you the pdf). Here is a summary of the Subject and Power by Foucault that I wrote last year, that continues to influence how I read economic texts. Shout out to T.Purves. Caution: this is not good writing, but if you’d like a refresher this will do it.
Power requires a relationship between two entities. These entities are made of humans or institutions who become subjects. They may turn eachother into subjects through their relationship, or one entity might imprint the other so that the latter actually objectifies themselves based on the other entity’s principals.
The imprinting of individuals by a governor is done by committing to a rationale, which is like a social contract. Everyone in a community gives tacit consent to hold this rationale as a common denominator that lets society keep working as it does. The inability for a subject of this rationale to disagree or argue against this tacit truth is that if they do, they are irrational, wrong, and objectified as such.
Power relations happen through unequal oppositions between people and they are ‘transversal’. The individual’s struggle against power aims to change the immediate effects of the power, but are often shortsighted and do not confront the source of the inequality. Often the subject struggling against the effects of power is an individual, whose self perception as such is defined by the entity who holds the power. Their worth as an individual is tied up in the value system that has distributed the power. Thus when the individual attempts opposition, they also bring into question who they are without the identity that they have formed in the shadow of the power distributor. This deeply imbedded rationale is a technique and a symptom of the exertion of power.
Since the Middle Ages a new kind of political power has developed— the state is an individualizing and totalizing power which originated in Christian institutions. Pastoral power offered salvation in the next life as a bribe for compliance. The offer has recently been updated to offer rewards for participation in the various forms of standards of living such as healthcare and security. We must liberate individuals so that their primary individuality is not that which they were issued by the state—so their greatest goal is not gov’t issued standards of living.
Power is not the way that one entity exerts authority on another or the consequences of the transmission of power: communication, objectification, violence, consensus. It is when the other does not play back as an equal and struggles in response. Struggle requires and original freedom— something to defend, and the struggle happens because there is not consent to the transference of their rights to this freedom. For example, slavery is not a power relationship because one man is already in chains.
Contemporary models of power relationships exist in institutions, who have their own systems of implementing and maintaining power. A relationship of power has a perpetual tension that could allow for something to break into an adversarial relationship instead of power. This tension has to do with the strategies of struggle chosen by the individual in that position. Domination happens by way of the added strategies of the authority and the subject engaged in game or war.
I submitted a project to Good Magazine to support my creation of a currency, as well as to use the opportunity to cause others to make their own currencies— to flood old monetary systems with new money. BECAUSE WE CAN. While it seems ironic to ask for money to do this, I think it is worth taking the chance on money to make different money as well as for using internet attention as a platform to beat the impenetrable deaf dead horse.
Money is a promise, and we’ll never run out of those. I will make a unique currency to use for trade. You should too, and I’ll help you get started. Let’s flood the market of every day transactions with temporary, unique, homemade currencies and be surprised at the possibilities of exchange.
About my currency:
I have collected all receipts from December 2011. I have divided the receipts into either ‘groceries’, ‘eating out’, ‘transportation’, ‘health’, and ‘various’. All the money I spent on these things is pure debt from Sallie Mae and a personal loan. The receipts, in their groups, have been paper mached into rocks, and are being cast into metal. More details as they become available including exact numbers for the receipts, cost of production and use.
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