Economic Tides and Fluid Data in Hito Steyerl's Liquidity Inc.

Christina Gerhardt and Jaimey Hamilton Faris
in Make Waves (ed. Paula Farca) U of Nevada Press, 2019


INTRODUCTION (for full essay go to academia.edu)
You must be shapeless, formless, like water.
When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.
--Bruce Lee

There are reasons to consider “fluidity” or “liquidity” as fitting metaphors when we wish to grasp the nature of the present, in many ways novel, phase in the history of modernity.
--Bauman (2)

Water is the lifeblood of human survival, liquidity is fundamental to corporate vitality.
--J. P. Morgan


Liquidity connects to and expresses our most cataclysmic contem- porary crises: be they financial asset fluctuations or climate-change- induced sea level rises. Through metaphors of water, filmmaker, artist, and essayist Hito Steyerl’s large-scale 30-minute video installation Liquidity Inc. (2014) connects topics such as late capitalism, precarious labor, climate change, and data circulation. In particular, Liquidity Inc. thematizes the economic tides after the financial crisis of 2008. The first epigraph above, quoting Bruce Lee on water, opens the video and appears as a refrain throughout the installation. Spoken over recurring images of waves, diagrams of liquid assets, storm systems, and other idiosyncratic visuals of water, the video offers a renewed engagement with Lee’s statement. What does it mean to be water, especially in the twenty-first century?

This essay examines the literal and metaphorical use of the concept of water in Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc., focusing on the following four concerns. First, water, like the installation’s very title, obviously puts forward the economic notion of liquidity, that is, the degree to which a financial asset can be accessed or brought onto the market; and the fluidity associated with financial transactions. Second, in the contem- porary economic world of fluid and ever-changing labor conditions, individuals swim in the fluctuating waters of economic tides and need to be flexible to flow in the river of capital. Thus, the video engages liquidity as an articulation of precarious labor. Third, the video considers water as weather. It discusses water as climate change–induced tsu- namis, as clouds, as torrents, as rain, as storm, and as flood. Reporters in balaclavas, invoking the Weather Underground but with a contem- porary climate change and computer cloud referencing twist, also ap- pear.1 Fourth, Steyerl attempts to engage the liquid circulation of data, of information production and dissemination, of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and of animation.

These four concerns are clear in retrospect, but the rhythm and sequencing of the video itself mixes them all together like a brewing storm in the ocean: segments are intercut in faster and faster waves, crashing down on other segments; frames generate within frames. By the video’s end, the viewer is awash in sounds and images of water, building the perception that a particular message does not need to be understood by the viewer, but rather a virtual superstorm of clichés about liquidity needs to be felt and absorbed. Steyerl’s work, here and elsewhere, is intentionally nonlinear and playful in her engagement of key issues in contemporary politics, economics, environmental stud- ies and informatics. Her keen attention to recurring deployments of water aims to expose how the poetic coincidence of “liquidity” across domains might actually operate as a veil for the integration, implementation, and catastrophic consequences of neoliberal power. Ultimately, this essay seeks to articulate the video’s claims that politics, economics, environment, and informatics now flow through each other and thus must be read together.

Liquidity Inc. opens with what seems at first to be fairly straight- forward exploration of economic liquidity learned through the lessons of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Its first main sequence features a TV magazine–style story about Jacob Wood, a Vietnamese American stockbroker-cum-martial-artist. Wood is an empathetic protagonist who had been working for Lehman Brothers at the time of the stock market crash of 2008. For the camera, he retraces the day he lost his job, how he felt, as well as his efforts to rebound by making a living as a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter and announcer. Wood’s explanation, replete with Bruce Lee’s watery metaphors about learning to adapt gracefully, seems to minimize and naturalize Lehman Brothers’ role in the financial crisis. In the video, Wood looks to the camera and says:

There were purges every year because of the economy. Especially large financial companies have had a lot of pressure, for more earnings, for their stock price to increase, and so it’s normal, kind of purging every year to lay off a certain amount of people. That’s why you’ve got to position yourself to be defensive, to be ready for those shocks . . . to have a shockproof portfolio. You’ve got to adapt to whatever is happening in the market . . . You’ve got to adapt to your situation. It’s very fluid. It’s kind of like fighting.

As Wood describes the pressuring and purging forces of the economy, questions arise for the viewer. How is it that Wood (despite hard-hitting exposés like Inside Job, 2010) does not blame particular people, corpo- rations, or governments for his financial straits? How is it that Wood even empathizes with Lehman Brothers because it was under “pressure” to perform? As the video repeats his words along with pictures of storms and water, it cultivates sensitivity toward and curiosity about how the economy is naturalized through water metaphors.

To understand the context for Wood’s point of view, it is instructive to review how watery metaphors emerged in economic thinking in the first place. The notion of the economy acting like a liquid “under pressure” has its origins in the seventeenth century, when new discoveries of hydraulic power and blood circulation were at the forefront of technological, political, and economic thought. Blaise Pascal and others described how the pneumatic properties of water multiply force and William Harvey revolutionized medicine when he described the human pulmonary system as hydraulic--blood pumping both away from and back to the heart in a ceaseless and elegant cycle (Harvey 48). Economic and political thinkers of the day quickly seized upon these paradigms. Thomas Hobbes, for ex- ample, made it a key theme of his 1651 treatise Leviathan:

Money . . . goes round about, nourishing, as it passeth, every part thereof; in so much as this concoction is, as it were, the sanguification of the Commonwealth: for natural blood is in like manner made of the fruits of the earth; and, circulating, nourisheth by the way every member of the body of man. (118)

As scholar Kath Weston argues in “Lifeblood, Liquidity, and Cash Transfusions,” metaphors of circulation and flow gained momentum when Adam Smith wrote in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations about “the free circulation of labor and stock, both from employment to employ- ment and from place to place” (57). Indeed, the concept of circulation undergirded the whole of Smith’s argument--that the natural and auto- matic forces of the free market should be able to self-regulate.

Recurring motifs of economic circulation were broadened by the literal link between water and wealth in the Age of Empire. The health of nation-states depended not only on rain, irrigation, and riverside mills but also on rivers, canals, ports, and transoceanic crossings of a far-flung trade system. Water became a primary metaphor for the “natural” state of the economy. Yet, despite the seeming fluidity of the world trade system represented by Smith, a need already existed in the early years of the stock market to establish mechanisms by which money could be shifted from one account to another and hence used to hide and absorb over-extended investment and debt.2 Two centuries later, John Maynard Keynes was the first to use the term “liquidity” in a scathing critique of such practices. In his 1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes argued:

Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine that it is a positive vir- tue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of “liquid” securities. It forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the commu- nity as a whole . . . The actual, private object of the most skilled investment today is “to beat the gun,” as the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreci- ating, half-crown to the other fellow. (155)

Reflecting on the lessons of the Great Depression, Keynes insisted that liquidity was really a shell game played by investment institutions and that ultimately, it was usually the citizen and community who bore the brunt of speculation. Yet over the course of the twentieth century, the orthodoxies of liquidity have come to dominate the computerized probability-driven system of futures trading and hedge funds. As J. P. Morgan asserts in its marketing brochures, “Water is the lifeblood of human survival, liquidity is fundamental to corporate vitality.” It celebrates the power of the corporation to concentrate global cash flow and further claims that “web technology enables active, automated liquidity and investment management.”3 Yet the average consumer’s confidence in these seemingly fluid and automated systems, as many have argued, actually hid the calculated activities of firms like Lehman Brothers, who knowingly bundled subprime mortgages that led to the 2008 crash (Langley; Pasanek and Polillo). As this brief overview shows, the laws of hydro-physics do not govern economics: economics has simply drawn on its language.

Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc. emphasizes the confusing build up of liquid and water metaphors in Wood’s language by pairing them with visual montages of CGI waves, water drops, texts referencing water, clouds, tsunamis, and more. As these images begin to break up the narrative, they also challenge the viewer’s understanding of the 2008 financial crisis and of Wood’s interpretation of it. The video’s approach is both radical and subtle in that it eschews an exploration of the cause and effect of the crisis (as other documentaries have done) for an exploration of the persistent metaphoric and affective use of “liquidity.” This visual strategy of exaggerating the simple juxtaposition of economic operations to the natural pressure systems of waves comments on how the notion of the economy as a “natural” ecology of water is instrumentalized throughout the cultural sphere, used, in effect, to displace and disguise the human forces at work.

Steyerl also brings home this point narratively at the very end of the opening documentary sequence by also inserting some found foot- age of a folksy-looking nineties financial advisor wearing a cream col- ored turtleneck who explains the virtues of liquidity for the individual investor. This short clip plays in a box at the upper right corner of a larger screen in which Wood spars with another fighter. The expert investor’s voice is privileged while Wood fights silently. In the clip, the investor explains how simple it is to convert certain assets (a home mortgage or stocks) quickly into cash before, as he puts it, “financial disaster strikes.” This scene within a scene brings the contradictions of Wood’s situation to the fore. Even Wood, himself a stockbroker, did not have enough economic liquidity to avoid the market “shocks” of 2008. This reminds us of Keynes’s comment on “liquidity”--that there really is no such thing at the individual or community level. Even at the corporate level, Lehman Brothers did not escape bankruptcy. Still, if the construct has any applicability, it is for corporations who are “too big to fail” (like J. P. Morgan and Bear Stearns) and can rely either on huge global networks of cash flow or government tax-payer “bail outs.” Lacking financial liquidity, Wood’s only option is to “be fluid” in his changing work situation. ........ (see link above for full text)

In his lecture "Waiting for Gaia," Bruno Latour establishes an oblique critique of the political figure of the leviathan.  He describes the breakdown of the fictional "we" in the current discussions  of climate change, arguing that the ideal political collective,  supposed to have vanquished the natural forces of chaos, violence, base instinct, has  actually constructed an even deeper chaotic force of climate change.  He says:

The human collective actor who is said to have committed the deed [of climate change ] is not a character that can be thought, sized up, or measured. You never meet him or her. It is not even the human race taken in toto, since the perpetrator is only a part of the human race, the rich and the wealthy, a group that have no definite shape, nor limit and certainly no political representation. How could it be “us” who did “all this” since there is no political, no moral, no thinking, no feeling body able to say “we” —and no one to proudly say “the buck stops here”?

I am interested in how Latour articulates this breakdown of the "we"–--when the political system of the sovereign state has failed us, when its political economic systemacity seems to have overtaken any notion of a body politic.  How did this happen and in what context?  In this essay I want to look at a few art pieces that might offer some answers to this question. 
 
Two important contemporary media projects address this new representation of the Leviathan (and its historical becoming) obliquely through the lens of Herman Melville’s narrative about the white whale, Moby Dick.
 
One of these is of course the highly influential photo essay, Fish Story by Allen Sekula,1989-1995, a foundational documentary/art photo essay on the global port and container system under deregulated capitalism, from the early nineties. The book documents the growing network of container ships and their ports,  seeking to create visibility around the dispersed and flowing aspects  of our economic system.  Another is a  more recent film from 2012, titled Leviathan made as part of an experimental program at Harvard in Critical Media Studies called the Sensory Ethnography Lab or SEL, which focuses on an industrial fishing vessel off the coast of the US eastern seaboard. These two fish stories use Herman Melville’s Moby Dick as an entry point into their aesthetic spaces and symbolic structures. But  might seem at first to be about fish and other sea creatures (especially given their titles). The Leviathans they identify are not fish at all, but the diffuse political and economic substructure of capitalism itself.  How do they do this?  They address the way in which the ship becomes a metonymic figure of the monstrous machine, and ocean a forgotten space or conceptual gap of the capitalist system -- a space in which the ship, as a means of exploitation labor and natural resources, has largely made the processes of colonization and globalization possible.

90% of our consumer goods are now shipped in containers across the oceans and continents.  The container box is so pervasive it seems a rather innocent matter of fact object.  In fact it is part of a huge global infrastructure supported by logistical algorithms.  Keller Easterling has recently described this kind of technology and logistical infrastructure as extra statecraft, “undisclosed activities outside of, in addition to, and sometimes even in partnership with statecraft."[i] With 5 million data centers and transfer stations, computing daily costs of factories, labor-forces, shipping ports, container lines, and oil prices, this network is one of the largest energy users in the world.[ii] Though the infrastructure is materially intensive, it cultivates a perception that global consumption is an automated, ever-circulating network of container boxes creating an efficient economies of scale. Since the 1970s, the revolution in container shipping has transformed every aspect of the commodity supply chain.   Before the advent of containerization, dock workers took weeks to pack in jumbled stockpiles of goods on ships.  It was so incredibly labor intensive and expensive to transfer goods from far away places and to make the many transitions— from factory to truck or train, to boat, back to truck or train, to store— that it limited the amount of globally available items.  With the standardization of containers, now 20 and 40 foot steel boxes, along with standardized trucks, trains, ships and cranes, AND the development of software to track all these boxes—we now have very extensive and convoluted supply chains charging back and forth across the oceans. 

To take advantage of the cheapest labor markets and shipping port costs, there is a perpetual transit of inventories of parts or unprocessed materials that go from factories to other factories before goods (in this case fish) get boxed up again and sent to distribution warehouses or stores. The ability of business logistics to control the supply chain so tightly has allowed a dramatic shift in capitalism since the nineties. Profit has moved from sites of production to sites of circulation: that is, corporations now calculate their profit not just in terms of cost of materials and labor-saving technologies at the factory; but in terms of “value-added” in the system just-in-time organization of production and delivery systems –costs of ports, customs, shipping, etc.
 
Seeing containerization as extrastatecraft is to begin to recognize its biopower—its systemic reach in regulating and normalizing not only the production of things, but also the production of an itinerant global labor force, not to mention the production of a de-politicized consumer citizenry. [iii]

Aesthetic Encounters with Petro-Capitalism

This is the introduction to a forthcoming article by myself and Jan Dickey for a volume on Climate Change in Hawaii and the Pacific.


In 2014 artist Kelly Jazvac, along with scientists Patricia Corcoran and Charles Moore, identified some curious stone formations on Kamilo Beach, located on the southeast tip of Hawaii Island. They appeared to be rock conglomerates; stones composed of lava rock, coral, organic materials, sand, and––what is most striking––colorful plastic debris. Jazvac and her collaborators dubbed this discovery “plastiglomerate,” writing an article together for the Geological Society of America’s news magazine GSA Today.[1]  They argued that this new stone could be understood as a visual and material indicator of large-scale anthropogenic impact on the planet. The theory put forth in GSA Today is that beach bonfires heat up the plastic flotsam, allowing it to glom onto other natural and unnatural substances. The result is a curious human-oceanographic-geologic collaboration involving distribution, sedimentation, and metamorphosis. 

The plastic found on Hawaii’s beaches is just a fraction of the ocean trash currently concentrated in the middle of the North Pacific currents. The Hawaiian archipelago, forming a huge arc in the middle of this convergence zone, acts as a giant dragnet or trap for the plastic. The floating debris often traps turtles, monk seals, dolphins, and whales.  As the material breaks down in the ocean and along the islands’ shores, bits of it become part of the regular but indigestible diet of birds, endangering entire species.[2]  Once it breaks down even further, it attracts toxins.  These micro-plastics are digestible for plankton, crabs and fish, introducing poisons into the food chain.

For Art Basel Hong Kong (March 2016) I was invited by Asia Art Archive to participate in a panel hosted by the artists MAP office.  The following was a brief introduction for discussion.

It would be interesting to think about the ocean as an archive.  Literally.  Does it employ shelves or rather shark holes? Or is it composed in an altogether different kind of organization? What does it archive?  These questions reminded me of a short tall tale by Michel Serres at the beginning of his book Genesis in which he finds a message-a-bottle archive of sorts.
I found myself one fine morning in the green and stagnant waters of the Sargasso Sea, at a mysterious spot where thousands of tiny sparks, all shapes and all colors were glimmering crazily.  Bearing off, I was dumbfounded to see an area almost two hundred and fifty acres square entirely populated by dancing bottles. There were countless little vessels, and each one no doubt bore its message ….ballasted with seawrack and rockery, each carried its hope and its despair.  Constant and perilous collisions.  Cacophonic noise across the horizon. (1)
This sea of bottles represents a space of memory that is both a cultural and ecological log.   It holds messages of human connections sent but never received, and also stands as evidence of historic patterns that keep these particular calm waters full of Sargasso grasses and human detritus and the currents of the Atlantic Ocean’s swirl about it.  Serres gives a lyrical introduction to the ocean as a medium that bears witness both to geologic time and human time. Is this what it means for the ocean to be an archive?