scope magazine, summer 2011

Culture · Science · Politics · Businesswww.scope-mag.com Summer 2011

S C O P E

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www. sco pe -mag. com | S ummer 2011 | S C O P E 1

S C O P E

Art by Yoshitaka Iwamoto

India is the world’s largest democracy,with an electoral roll ofmore than 700 million

eligible voters. But the right to vote isn’t much helpifthe politicians that are elected systematically

ignore their constituents’ vital interests.

Using a recent law on information access, India’spoorest citizens have been fighting back—and in

doing so, setting the pace for the world’s other voters.

The watchersby Bishnu N. Mohapatra, page 12


2 S C O P E | Summer 2011 | www. sco pe -mag. com

S C O P E5 Steve Pyke

A SCOPE interview

From punk rocker to world-classphotographer, Steve Pyke discusses hisinfluences, his working methods, hisfavourite peers. . . and what it’s likephotographing the dead

Photography by Steve Pyke

30 The animal sideJean-Christophe Bailly

After an unexpected encounter with a deer,the philosopher reflects on the tenuousposition ofanimals in the human scaleofvalues, and on the strange bond we arecapable ofsharing with creatures we cannotunderstand

Photography by Karen Knorr

42 Codes of financeVincent Antonin Lépinay

The fact that derivatives are financialproducts based on mathematics soundsreassuring. Math, after all, is knowable,rational, and certain. Tell that to the traderswho must hedge these products, and theaccountants who track them

Art by Elisabeth Bond



S C O P ESummer 2011 Vol. 1, No. 3

Publisher & editor

I. Garrick Mason

Contributing associates

Luke GrundyKristen MaranoAbby Plener

SCOPE is published quarterlyin Toronto by Hassard Fay Inc.

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Copyright © 2011 Hassard Fay Inc.All rights reserved.

Front cover:“Ann Sophie” (2010) , by Elena Kalishttp://elenakalisphoto. com

11 Music brief: BeirutLuke Grundy

A critical darling charges confidently intoits third album

52 Olusola OyeleyeInterviewed by Abby Plener

A quick word with the director ofNYFringe Festival hit Call Mr. Robeson

21 SpectacleA selection ofstartling work from the artists,photographers, sculptors, and designers whohave impressed us—and will impress you too

Also. . .

40 Cities unknownHans-Georg Esch

HG Esch on photographing China’simportant but unheralded megacities



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T hough hopefully not for many of ourreaders on a personal level, for theworld as a whole this has been an

unsettled, unpleasant summer, marked byprotests and riots in countries like Israel andthe UK, the shock of domestic terrorism inNorway, an Arab Spring that grinds slowlyforward under intense reactionary pressure, andthe trauma-inducing sight of the world’s mostpowerful democracy descending to a politics ofeconomic brinkmanship in order to win apolicy debate over taxing and spending. All ofthis is, of course, in addition to an internationaldebt crisis that has already rocked markets,threatens to tip us back into global recession,and may soon break up the Eurozone.

We hope that this issue of SCOPE willbring both helpful insight and welcomediversion. Debt crises, of course, make us thinkabout financial crises, and financial crises makeus think about derivatives. Vincent Lépinaydraws on his ground-breaking study of a majorFrench bank’s exotic derivatives group,demonstrating how its search for profitthrough the sale and management of complexfinancial products led to the destabilization ofthe firm itself.

In the background better news is sheltering.Recent protests led by 74-year-old hungerstriker and activist Anna Hazare madeinternational news, and forced India’s nationalgovernment to introduce anti-corruptionlegislation. Democratic governance is rapidlyevolving in India: as political thinker BishnuMohapatra discusses here, though high rates ofeconomic growth tend to focus governmentattention on the country’s middle classes, theurban poor have been using the new Right toInformation law to ensure they are receivingtheir assigned share of development funds—and to shame MLAs into correcting theproblem if they are not.

In the context of our ongoing (if slowmotion) environmental crisis, we also presentan adaptation from Jean-Christophe Bailly’sprofound new book on the animal-humanrelationship. And in the rather happier contextof his recent book and upcoming exhibition,we interview Steve Pyke, one of the world’spre-eminent portrait photographers.

So give yourself leave to ignore the perilsof the moment, and enjoy the issue. The worldwill still be waiting when you get back. Sorry.

— I. GARRICK MASON

Editor’s letter



Steve Pyke

Interview by I. Garrick Mason

Photos by Steve Pyke | Drawing by Andrei Petrov



SCOPE: When and why did you first pick up acamera?What did you learn from using it?

Steve Pyke: I came to photography throughmusic. I was a singer during the late 1970s in anumber of punk bands; I’d been doing that fora couple of years and was thinking aboutpursuing a creative outlet that would be moresingular for me. Photography happened veryquickly. A good friend took me into a bar onTottenham Court Road and showed me thebasics: depth of field and ideas on perspective.We photographed each other over a table, and Iremember feeling an expectancy, a real curiosityto see how they would turn out. He lent me hiscamera—it was a Pentax ME Super—and Istarted to photograph pictures of people incircuses and fairgrounds.. . places whereemotions and our senses seem out of control. Iremember that being a conscious decision.

I photographed first in Dublin, inDecember 1979. At the RDS [Royal DublinSociety] there was a funfair show there calledFunderland, and that’s where I made my “Wallof Death” photograph. The imagery I madewas very intense. Everything seemed to click forme; I got a tremendous sense of place withinthe medium straight away, and because it wasimportant for me to know, I very quicklybecame immersed in the history ofphotography—particularly those photographersthat were connected with surrealism, which I

was interested in. Man Ray, naturally, and BillBrandt’s early work, and especially some of theportraiture of Irving Penn and his seriesWorlds in a Small Room. . . that was the firstphotography book I bought. It had a bigimpact on me and what I became interested infocusing on.

SCOPE: Ray and Brandt were portraitists likeyou, but how did their surrealism influenceyour photography?

Pyke: Brassaï and Lee Miller were alsosurrealists and I love their work too. From thestart, manipulation of photography interestedme, particularly photomontage. The work ofMax Ernst, Moholy-Nagy, and more recentlyJoseph Mills and the brilliant Toshiko Okanoueenthralls me. Surrealism represents a poetry ofthe mind, while photography can often beperceived as about surfaces. It’s true thatphotography can be incredibly objective, but ifyou turn away from depicting surface, it alsohas very powerful surrealistic potential.

I have to mention Eugene Atget here. Thefirst time I saw his book with Marcel Proust’swords A Vision ofParis, I fell in love with hiswork. The vision of a city, Paris, that you’reused to seeing teeming with people, but inAtget’s work people-less, really blew me away. Afew years later I was asked to produce anexhibiton of photographs for the film maker

In the 1 970s, Steve Pyke was a punk rocker with an itchto do something more “singular” . He borrowed afriend’s camera and since that time has shot for majormagazines, has exhibited around the world, and isconsidered one of the leading portrait photographers inthe profession. He spoke with SCOPE before and afterthe launch of his new book, Philosophers.



Peter Greenaway in Rome, for his film TheBelly ofan Architect. I set about photographingthe city’s statues and fountains, but withoutmodern references. Photographing at first light,the statues looked timeless to me in a way theydidn’t with the cars and people of 1985surrounding them.

SCOPE: You took this wide range ofinfluencesand boiled them down into the “Steve Pyke”style, which you’ve observed elsewhere hasstayed consistent over the decades. What virtuesdoes consistency have for you? And what roledoes variation and experimentation play inyour work?

Pyke: I was never aware that I created oradopted a style, although we are all influencedby all sorts of different work: books, painting,film, as well as photography. But there is a needfor consistency in some areas of my work. Thecamera, for instance, is the first I bought, a1957 Rolleiflex. It feels by now like anextension of my eye and arm, and so I don’t

feel any need to change it. I change the subjectsin front of it, instead: that’s where the variablesalways are, in the range of sitters. I try tophotograph as much as possible by naturallight. There’s a harmony I found by workingwith these two constants.

The main sense of order I am aware of inmy work is the need to stay with the projectsI’m involved in. They don’t end, these bodiesof work—especially, it seems, the ones thatinvolve photographing people: the series of mysons and daughter, for instance, or thePhilosophers series. There is a consistencywithin my work there that I recognize I need.Sometimes the engagement with the work feelsas important as is the photographing of it.

The camera is the first I bought,a 1 957 Rolleiflex. It feels by nowlike an extension of my eye and arm

“Wal l of Death” , Dubl in , 1 980



SCOPE: In a series ofphotographs that willmake up a given project, what are yousearching for that is notcaptured in a singlephotograph? In otherwords, what do youdiscover byphotographing categoriesofpeople, one afteranother?

Pyke: Well to begin theanswer to that questionI’d say that a singleportrait really isn't aproject. When you enterinto a series like, say,Astronauts orPhilosophers, you’refaced with a lot ofresearch and readingabout your subjects, andyou get to understandthe connections thesepeople you’rephotographing havewith each other. You get

a broader sense of the “family” you’rephotographing. Invariably I would be asked,“Oh, you met Jim. How is he? We first metback in such and such a place.” This can bereally enlightening as part of meeting andphotographing other people in the series. Itnever feels like a repetitive action becauseeveryone is so different.

SCOPE: You’re in a session; your camera is setup and you’re chatting with your subject. Howdo you know when it’s time to start shooting?What are you looking for?

Pyke: I tend to set aside time to talk from theoutset, unless I’m in a situation where time isvery limited: you can’t build any kind ofrelationship with your subject in such shortperiods of time, so I tend to try and avoid theseshortened sessions and prefer working overperiods of an hour or so.

I’m very clear about when I’m going to startphotography. During that time things canspontaneously happen, and I’m preparing andhopefully ready for them when they do. Ourconversation continues throughout the session.

Richard Heck, Boston , 2003 (“Ph i losophers” )

Dr. Buzz Aldrin , Los Angeles, 1 998 (“Astronauts” )



SCOPE: Who are some up-and-coming youngphotographers you’re keeping an eye on?

Pyke: I really like the sense of space in Kipp

Wettstein’s work right now; the landscapesseem to be so much about loss. Wettstein makeshis own cameras too, which is very cool. JacobAue Sobol: I have loved his work since I firstsaw “Sabine” at Arles some years back. We metat my studio and Jacob showed me his Tokyocollection, which he was still working on. Hiswork has always excited me.

SCOPE: Do you have a “bucket list” ofprojectsyou’d like to do before you die? Categories ofpeople, professions you're fascinated by?

Pyke: I wouldn’t say I had a list like that. I’mengaged in a number of long-term projects:Western philosophers, Jack and Duncan andLola Rae, my kids.. . I’d like to be able to spendan extended time in the East to photograph aseries of Eastern philosophers. A publisher isinterested in a book of my experiences as aphotographer over the past thirty years orso—photographs along with my memories ofbeing there.

SCOPE: Your new show, Los Muertos, isopening in New York on September 22nd.The photographs ofthe mummies ofGuanajuato show people who seem to have diedin pain. How did you feel when you firstentered the museum and looked at its contents?

Pyke: The mummies of Guanajuato in Mexicoare cholera victims from the 1830s. The reasonfor the condition of the corpses was said to beminerals found in the local soil. The bodieswere of men, women, and young children,including one stillborn foetus. I had seenphotographs but wasn’t prepared for the initialencounter.. . Walking into the small, darkmuseum I saw rows of glass specimen casescontaining atrophied yet completely mummifiedfigures. Some were arched over as if in deaththroes, some seemed at peace and were holdingbooks, while others I saw were standing as ifsoldiers on sentry duty. There was the faintmusty smell of mothballs in the room. It feltlike a church in there, but with a frozencongregation. I felt a hushed reverence about

these figures. I’m sure they would have beenrecognizable if I had been able to seephotographs of what they looked like whenalive, but at the time these people diedphotography was only just being invented.

SCOPE: You’ve been photographing livinghuman beings throughout your career, eachtime seeking a connection with your sitter.How did photographing the dead differ fromall this? How did you adjust your approach,your psychology?

Pyke: The practicalities of the photography,which were difficult, took over for a while sinceI only had an hour or so to work in. I was notallowed to use lights and had to rely on themuseum’s spotlights, which were harsh—making the mummies look even more ghoulish.To create fill-in we used the light from our cellphone screens. Having no ability to speak andinteract with these figures, I started to feel like Iwas photographing still lives, which in someways I was—except of course that these peoplehad once lived. I found myself staring into theirfaces and wondering about the lives they hadonce lived, and somehow recognizing people

Kei th Richards, London, 1 995



Born in England in 1957, Steve Pyke lives and works in New York City. He works on a regular basisfor The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. His work has been exhibited worldwide and is held inpermanent collections including the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC and London, theImperial War Museum in London, and the New York Public Library. His latest book, Philosophers, isavailable from Oxford University Press. See more of Steve’s work: http://www.pyke-eye.com/

Andrei Petrov is an artist living in New York City, with work in collections throughout the world.Visit http://andreipetrov.com

from my own past in them. Holding the gaze ofa dead subject instead of giving it a sidelongglance seemed to ease the making of theportraits, almost as if there had been anexchange between us.

Ultimately I believe photography has to dealwith our own mortality. As soon as we press the

shutter, the image becomes a part of our past.When you make a photograph, whether it is aportrait or a still life, the end result becomes asymbol of what you saw; it is no longer theobject you had attempted to represent. It hasinstead become a means created to extend ourways of seeing in our search for “truth”.

Mummified ch i l d , Guanajuato (Mexico), 2007 (“Los Muertos” )

UPCOMING EVENTS:

“Ph i losophers” privateviewing in London onTuesday, September 6th atFLOWERS (21 Cork Street,London). Exh ibi tion runsfrom September 7th –October 1 st, 201 1www. flowersgal leries. com

“Los Muertos” open ingreception in NYC onThursday, September 22ndat ARTJAIL (50 EldridgeStreet, 6th Floor NYC, NY1 0002). Exh ibi tion runsfrom September 23 rd –October 26th , 201 1

Al so at ARTJAIL, AndreiPetrov's “La MemoireI nvolontai re” , runn ing fromSeptember 23 – November3 rd , 201 1


http://www.pyke-eye.com/

http://andreipetrov.com


B egun as a hobby for a distracted college student, Beirut—thebrainchild of New Mexico native Zachary Francis Condon—have

gone from dorm-bound side-project to widely-renowned innovators in afew short years. Lauded for their combination of styles, the groupgenerates an utterly captivating sound, fusing together elements oftraditional Eastern European and world music, electronica and folk, tocreate their own genre. Comparisons, unsurprisingly, are hard to come by;Condon’s band is a law unto itself.

Beirut is special not simply because its musicians enjoy experimenting,but because the ingredients for their musical broth are so seeminglydivergent from one another. Drawing on the cultural histories of severalcountries, not just the Balkans but parts of France, Brazil and Mexico,imbues each Beirut track with an uncanny familiarity, a feeling that thesesongs have always been around but we’ve simply never heard them. It’soften said that the best songs sound familiar, that they instantly placethemselves in a musical canon. If that’s true, then Beirut are an exemplarof such a rule.

With their third studio album (entitled The Rip Tide) just released inlate August and a string of impressive support dates dotted across thesummer, Beirut seems primed to move from being a critical darling to apopular one. Condon’s tremulous vocals, playing off an ethereal,atmospheric backing, lilt and sway across Beirut’s best tracks; his ear forcomposition and fusion is unmatched in the current musical sphere. At atime when originality is at a premium, Beirut is a musical antidote to therepetitive, tuneless drone of pop.

We should all be grateful that Zach Condon’s studies didn’t interest himmuch.

— LUKE GRUNDY

Beirut

A remedy for musical disi l lusionment

http://beirutband. com

MUSIC BRIEF


http://beirutband.com


In the absence of di l igent oversight, democracy in andof itself wi l l not del iver on the commitments made in itsname. Just ask the residents of Delhi ’s slums, who haveturned a law about information access into a powerfultool for defending their economic rights

The watchersby Bishnu N. Mohapatra

Art by Yoshitaka Iwamoto

Yosh i taka Iwamoto, unti tl ed , “ I n terconnections” series, 201 0



The history of urbanity in India canbe traced to the country's ancientkingdoms, where movement ofgoods, royal power, and structured

hierarchies defined spaces for humaninteraction, for material and ideologicalproductions, and for social control. During theBritish colonial period, the municipaladministration emerged as a locus of politicalrule; it also served as a weak platform forconsolidating interests, a mirror in whichemerging classes envisioned their politicalfuture.

The East India Company establishedMadras as a corporation as early as 1687, and amodicum of municipal order came into beingin Bengal Presidency in the first half of thenineteenth century. By the end of that century,there were nearly seven hundred municipalitiesin British India, and in a significant majority ofthem, the members were nominated by thecolonial administration. It was Lord Ripon’sresolution of 1882 that gave a new lease of lifeto municipal governance in colonial India. Heargued that local government must beconstructed from below rather than imposedfrom above. By the early twentieth century,large corporations such as Bombay, Calcutta,and Madras had a growing sense of power inrelation to taxation, sanitation, basic services,and health. During the anti-colonial struggles,urban spaces provided platforms whereemerging nationalist leaders sharpened theirpolitical acumen. With national independence in1947, however, the political fortunes of cities inIndia were eclipsed. As the provincial andnational arenas opened up for politicalcompetition, city governments lost their earlierpreeminence.

Yet India now lives less and less in itsvillages. In 1951 , 1 7.3% of its population wasclassed as urban; in 201 1 , the proportion is31 .2%. According to some estimates, by 2030nearly 40% of India’s population will be urban.

This surely is not a picture of hyper-urbanization, but in terms of population, it isalready the second largest urban population inthe world. This population, moreover, isincreasingly concentrated in very large cities.The number of Indian cities with more than amillion residents has increased from twelve in1981 to thirty-five in 2001 . Metropolitan citiessuch as Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore,Madras, and Hyderabad have grown rapidly inrecent years, a top-heavy urbanization thatcreates a distinct set of problems for addressingurban poverty and development in India. Thesituation of small and medium towns,meanwhile, is to a large extent one ofstagnation and decay.

Historically speaking, cities and towns holdan ambivalent position within the Indianimaginary. This ambivalence varies across classand caste lines. Dalits (former “untouchables”) ,for instance, view cities as places for goodfortune, where caste rules do not apply with thesame brutal intensity as they do in villages. Inmodern Indian literature the city issimultaneously a sign of wonder, a crucible ofcuriosity, and a location where individuals losetheir moral anchor—their community—and fallprey to aggressive individualism. But from aneo-liberal point of view, cities are primarilyengines for economic growth, and the future ofIndia’s economy depends on how they aregoverned and replicated. According to thisagenda, cities should not only have adequateand cheap supplies of labour, but theproductivity of this labour should be enhanced.

The neo-liberal ambition of Indian policymakers is reflected in a consensus visible acrosspolitical and ideological lines. For example,there is very little difference between the IndianNational Congress and the Bharatiya JanataParty when it comes to core economic policies.However, the poor and vulnerable continue tochallenge the legitimacy of these policies, andto point out their inegalitarian character. In the

In between elections, the urban poor have to devisenew ways of ensuring the delivery of services and theenforcement of rights that the state recently granted



struggle for their own well-being, they haveoften exploited not only the traditionalcommunitarian strategies, but also the growingpotential of India’s competitive electoraldemocracy.

Unfortunately, these strategies turn out tobe effective only in limited circumstances. Inbetween elections, in everyday situations, thepoor in general and the urban poor in particularhave to devise new ways of ensuring thedelivery of services and the enforcement of aplethora of rights that the Indian state recentlygranted to its citizens, such as rights toemployment, to education, to subsidized grains,and so on.

Decentralization: promises and

parablesSince the 1990s, India has adopted the paths

both of neo-liberal economic development andof democratic decentralization. There is a deep-seated tension between the two. Neo-liberalismemphasizes macro-level economic growth,seeking to create conditions for the smoothrunning of business and the unhinderedreproduction of capital. The explicit intent ofdemocratic decentralization is to establish self-government at the local level by creating spacesfor greater citizen participation in and oversightof the governance process of the city. Yet tothe extent that the neo-liberal economic orderreduces the welfare and agency of the urbanpoor, it undermines their citizenship.

More than a century after Indian viceroyLord Ripon’s reforms were enacted by thecolonial state, the Indian state constitutionallyenshrined the urban decentralization process byincluding it in the historic 74th Amendment of1992. Despite the broad democratic spiritinforming this amendment, there was greaterparliamentary enthusiasm for ruraldecentralization than for urban; some thoughtthe implementation of panchayat—administration of villages by people—wouldrealize Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of rural self-governance, or swaraj. Urban decentralization,by contrast, did not evoke such high ideals.

Discussion in Parliament centered ondevelopment deficits, the financial constraintsof both state and city governments, the poordelivery of services in towns, and the rent-seeking behaviour of local elites and

administrators. The debate did not carry muchconviction or commitment. As local self-government is a matter for states, theconstitutional amendment limited itself toproviding a framework within which stategovernments would align the range of existinglaws pertaining to panchayats andmunicipalities. Yet necessary legal changes instates were put off until the last moment, andthe rushed legislation that resulted did notsignificantly alter the internal functioning ofmunicipalities. Many urban administrations, forexample, continued to practice the indirectelection of chairpersons and mayors.

The 74th Amendment, however, was notwithout benefits. In the past, election to urbanlocal bodies was erratic, their power andfunctions were uneven, and state governments’




control over them was enormous. At least in aformal sense, some of these things changed.Whenever an election was not held on time in amunicipality, people now went to court tocomplain. The most significant change was theentry of women, dalits, tribals, and socially-disadvantaged middle caste groups into theurban political arena in India, made possiblethrough the mandatory reservation of seats inurban local bodies.

But the potential of decentralizationremains largely unfulfilled. Eighteen years afterthe enactment of the amendment, urbanpolitics in general and urban local bodies inparticular continue to suffer from hugedemocratic deficits. Until forced by the judiciarylast year, constitutionally-mandated districtplanning and metropolitan planning committees

had not even been formed in several states. Thefate of ward committees, the smallest unitsenabling citizens to articulate their interests andopinions, is no better: in many urban areas theyare almost non-existent, in others they are solarge as to be ineffective. Eighteen functionsare assigned to urban local bodies in ScheduleXII of the Indian Constitution, but thesebodies have neither the autonomy nor thefinancial resources to carry them out. Theinterference of bureaucracy at all levels, theoverpowering nature of para-statal bodies likedevelopment authorities, electricity boards, andwater authorities, the absence of dedicatedfunctionaries, the personal failings of electedrepresentatives, and the poor financial situationhave together made urban local bodies bothweak and ineffective. Under suchcircumstances, their contribution towardseconomic development and social justice, asmandated by the amendment, remains far toolimited. An eighteen-year shadow of bad faithand inaction stands between the historicconstitutional amendment and itsimplementation.

Politics and the urban poorA city of nearly 17 million inhabitants,

Delhi is not a single entity, but contains amultitude of distinct and overlapping spacesand enclaves. With its layering of history fromthe medieval to the modern, it is a palimpsest.As the capital of India, it houses the country’smost powerful people, but it is also home tomany powerless and homeless people; anestimated 45% of the city’s population lives inslums. Delhi is also a city of babus—government civil servants—whose presence isstrongly visible in the public sphere; nearly 80%of workers in the city, however, belong to theunorganized sector, many of them without anysecurity of employment.

On the first of March this year, fifty womenof Motilal Nehru Camp—a slum close to themiddle-class residential colony of Munirka inSouth Delhi—met in a community room, asthey did every week. As a researcher, I wasallowed to attend the meeting. Members ofSNS (Satark Nagarik Sangathan: Society forCitizen Vigilance Initiative) , a civil societyorganization that has been working with theurban poor since 2003, also attended the




meeting. The discussion at first focused on therole and responsibilities of electedrepresentatives both in the Legislative Assemblyand the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, andon how the residents could monitor theiractivities. Some women, for example, werecritical of candidates bribing voters with cashand liquor—a common practice at electiontime. The discussion was as much about theexisting political system as it was about activecitizenship. The urban middles classes oftenexpress their cynicism about their electedrepresentatives, but they rarely come together tochange the system. By contrast, in this meetingroom a critique of the system went hand inhand with a desire to improve it.

Towards the end of the meeting thegovernment’s proposed cash-transfer programcame in for some intense criticism. Argumentswere proffered as to why the new way ofdelivering services might not be good for thepoor. “If we are not getting the old age pensionon a regular basis,” argued an old woman,“what is the guarantee that the cash transfersystem will work?” Many of the womenexpressed their desire to join a demonstration afew days later to protest against the proposedcash-transfer system.

Over recent years, and with the support ofSNS, community groups like this one havefought against irregularities in the PublicDistribution System (a program that providessubsidized food grains and kerosene for thepoor) in their localities, arguing their cases withlocal officials and elected representatives. As aresult of their continuous monitoring, the PDSworks better in their localities today, andcommunity groups are not ready to sacrificethese gains for a new and untested system ofreceiving cash in lieu of subsidized grains. Byfacilitating regular conversations on concreteissues and by providing easy-to-digestinformation on policy issues, SNS hasundoubtedly played a significant role inquickening their political agency.

H ow does one make sense of thepolitical activism of these women?It is certainly not merely a

reflection of a generalized distrust of politicsand politicians. One could clearly see in theirdiscussion a reasoned political logic, an attemptto recognize the import role of monitoring inchanging the character of electoral politics andelected representatives. They also clearly saw anintrinsic connection between their politicalassertiveness and their socioeconomic well-being. The political agency of these slumwomen is not an endowment from nature.Quite the opposite: it is an achievement, theproduct of ongoing mobilization, collectivereflection, and support from local activists. Inthis context, the deep and respectfulengagement of SNS with slum dwellers has hada real impact, as has its ongoing leadershipprogram, which brings in local youth and trainsthem on issues concerning public policy andgovernance, and makes them aware of arepertoire of tools for citizen mobilization andaction.

SNS has assisted slum dwellers in andaround Delhi for some time. Soon after itsfounding in 2003, the organization beganworking with the residents of Jagadamba Campin South Delhi. Both Jagadamba and MotilalNehru Camps contain nearly 1500-2000households each. Densely populated, theseslums offer poor living conditions. The supplyof water and electricity is erratic and sanitaryconditions appalling. And though a significantnumber of families in these two camps havebeen there for a long period of time, the fearof demolition has frequently been exploited bylocal politicians aiming to maximize their votecount at election time by offering “protection”from this often non-existent threat.

In the beginning, SNS’s mobilization ofslum dwellers in these camps focused on thePublic Distribution System. As in many otherplaces in India, the distribution of PDS goodsin the camps was erratic, and many poor people

Political agency is no endowment: it is an achievementof mobilization, collective reflection, and activist support



were forced to make do without theirentitlements. SNS worked with local families touse the Right to Information Act of 2005 (RTI)to get the records of a number of ration shopsin these areas. As expected, these recordsrevealed irregularities, so SNS organized apublic hearing on PDS at which a significantnumber of PDS card-holders providedtestimonies concerning the working of the localration shops in their localities.

This activism accomplished three things:first the distribution of rations in theselocalities improved; second, the governmentdepartment dealing with PDS was reminded ofits duties and responsibilities; and finally, theuse of RTI as an important tool for securingtransparency and accountability in the systemwas demonstrated.

RTI enables citizens to access non-classifiedinformation; over the past few years, civilsociety organizations and social activists inIndia have used and still continue to use the lawcreatively to impact on the workings ofgovernment administration, service delivery,and the realization of socio-economic rights. Itis arguable that Indian social activists have notonly consecrated the marriage between the rightto information and right to life, but have alsomade it work in many inspiring ways. Thestrategy of the slum dwellers and their socialactivist allies, for example, was not merely topoint out the leakage in the delivery of servicesbut also to create an ongoing structure ofdemand that puts pressure on the institutionsand personnel responsible for the delivery ofservices. Today, in the slum clusters where SNSworks, citizen vigilance groups work to overseethe delivery of services, including PDS and oldage pension.

F or some years now, electedrepresentatives in the Indianparliament, state legislatures, and

municipal councils have each been assigned aspecific fund for local development. Each

Member of Delhi’s Legislative Assembly(MLA) gets 20 million rupees per year to spendon development in their constituency, aprogram known as the Local AreaDevelopment Scheme. Each MLA also gets 5million rupees from Delhi Jal Board to spendon water issues in the member’s constituency.Each municipal councilor, meanwhile, getsbetween 5 and 10 million rupees to spend ondevelopment in the ward that he or sherepresents. The MLA and the councilor areresponsible for the allocation of funds, an theappropriate department of the MunicipalCorporation of Delhi implements the project.

In the absence of strong scrutiny, however,councilors used to spend the developmentfunds entirely at their discretion. Maximumresources were spent on road and pavementconstruction—projects that overwhelminglybenefit the middle class colonies. This tendencyhas two roots: first, large construction projectsare only possible in the non-slum areas, andsecond, the absence of robust accountabilitymechanisms has kept the urban poor and theirelected representatives disconnected. In 2007,however, SNS used the right to information lawto obtain details on the allocation of funds bycouncilors in Delhi. This data, widely circulatedin the media and discussed in several wards inDelhi, revealed the biases of the electedrepresentatives towards the interests of themiddle class.

Slum dwellers felt betrayed. While they wereforced to live without adequate drinking water,their representatives were spendingdevelopment funds on building water fountainsin middle class neighborhood parks. Yet SNS’sefforts to focus their collective gaze on theirelected representatives were generally effective.On more than one occasion, the slum dwellersforced their MLA to allocate funds for diggingtube wells or for providing basic amenities intheir districts, simply by pointing to theirrational and biased allocation. Such changesbecame possible whenever it became obvious

While slum dwellers lived without adequate drinking water,their representatives were spending development fundson water fountains in middle class neighbourhood parks



to representatives thatthey might lose theelectoral support of thepoor, who vote in largenumbers in comparisonto their middle classcounterparts.

After its initialexperiments, SNS beganproducing report cardson the individual MLAsof the Delhi Assembly,once again using datacollected through theright to information law.The first time round, inthe election of 2007, thecards reported only onthe allocation of eachmember’s developmentfunds; the latest versiondocuments arepresentative’sperformance in thelegislature and as amember or the chair ofvarious governmentcommittees. Aremarkable innovation inthe sphere of politicalaccountability in India,the MLA report cardswere widely circulatedthrough mediacampaigns and incommunity meetings indifferent parts of Delhiduring the Assemblyelection of 2008.According to one study,voter turnout increasedby about 4% in areaswhere campaigns usingreport cards were run.Recently, SNS unveiled amid-term report card,giving electedrepresentatives the opportunity to enhance theirperformance during the remaining portions oftheir mandates.

Though far from being a magic formula thatcan bridge the gap between elected

representatives and citizenry in India, theimportance of this invention cannot beunderestimated. There is no doubt, forexample, that report cards can help to makeelected representatives more accountable—andthere is evidence to suggest that improved




Bishnu N. Mohapatra is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the South Asian Studies Programmeof the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. Prior to this he alsotaught at Jawaharlal Nehru University, University of Delhi, and University of Kyoto. He headed theGovernance Programme of the Ford Foundation's South Asia office in New Delhi from 2002-2010.Bishnu is a well-known poet who writes in Odia, an eastern Indian language. He has published threevolumes of poetry; A Fragile World is the first collection of his poetry in English translation.

About the artistYoshitaka Iwamoto was born in Tokushima, Japan in 1983. He recently completed a Masters in FineArt at Central Saint Martins College in London, sponsored by The Rotary Club. In 2010, Iwamoto wonthe Cecil Lewis Sculpture Award, also in London. His focus is on new art representations madepossible through the overlapping of and spacing between fine art and science.http://yoshi-iwamoto.com

political accountability has the potential to yieldnot only democratic but also developmentdividends. During my own fieldwork in Delhi,many stories about the re-allocation ofdevelopment funds to their proper uses wererecounted to me by slum dwellers in thesecamps. To keep this process moving, however,electoral reforms such as transparency ofcampaign finances and barring people withserious criminal records from contestingelections are also necessary.

A new kind of politics?The tension between the neo-liberal

economic order and democraticdecentralization is quite evident in many partsof India today. In a substantive sense, the 74thconstitutional amendment is yet to beimplemented fully in many parts of India,including Delhi. The struggle of citizens livingin Jagadamba and Motilal Nehru camps is notshaped by urban decentralization; on thecontrary, it is the absence of truedecentralization that they are protesting against.Whenever the Delhi government has expandedthe space for citizen participation, it is themiddle-class-dominated Residents WelfareAssociations who have captured it. The publicsphere of the city remains insensitive to theneeds of the urban poor; in judicial rulings thepoor are still typically characterized as intruders,polluters, and encroachers upon public spaces.It is within this hostile environment, that theurban poor continue to fight for their rights andentitlements.

The Right to Information Act has emergedas a potent instrument in their struggle byenabling the combination of two criticalprinciples. First, the demand for informationoften deals with “what” questions: it helps poorcitizens find out what is happening to theirentitlements, for example, and what the statusof their applications for redressing grievancesmight be. Second, the struggle for politicalaccountability, which is more often about“why” questions. Why are officials behaving theway they do? Why don't they act according tothe rules? Why were the poor refused theirentitlements? It is in combining “what” with“why” questions that the urban poor manage toconnect the pursuit of transparency with thatof accountability.

By focusing on their elected representatives’oversight functions, the urban poor of Delhiare contributing towards the effectiveness ofthose institutions responsible for delivery ofbasic services. The bigger question is whetherthe monitoring of elected representatives on aregular basis will make the political systemmore responsive and poor-friendly. In otherwords, can taming the existing breed ofpoliticians enable a new kind of politics toemerge? In a society which is riven byinequalities and hierarchies, inclusive growthcannot be achieved by administrative fiat—sothe creative use of democratic instruments bythe poor may well hold the key not only totransforming politics but also to transformingthe economic order itself.


http://yoshi-iwamoto.com


| Spectacle |



| Yong-Man Kwon: Big City (2011) |http: //www.yongmankwon.odexpo.com/


http://www.yongmankwon.odexpo.com/


| Stephanie Lock: The Fifth Floor, series (2010) |http: //www.behance.net/stephanielock


http://www.behance.net/stephanielock


| William Zweifel: Equinimity (2010) |http: //www.midlandstudio.com


http://www.midlandstudio.com


| Al Farrow: The Spine and Tooth of Santo Guerro (2007) |http: //www.alfarrow.com/

Bu l lets, guns, glass, shot, steel , bone64 x 50 ½ x 74 inchesPhotos by Jock McDonaldFine Arts Museums of San Franci sco, Museum purchase, gi ft of Dr. Thomas J ackson and Dr. Kath leen Grant. 2008. 1 0.Image courtesy of Catharine Clark Gal lery, San Franci sco


http://www.alfarrow.com


| Jürgen Heckel: Gras, series (2011) |http: //www.behance.net/sogar_heckel


http://www.behance.net/sogar_heckel


| Elena Kalis: Girl and her fish (2009) |http: //elenakal isphoto.com


http://elenakalisphoto.com


| Crystal Liu: “busted”, from “what sparkles. . . ” series (2011) |http: //www.cl iuart. com

I nk, gouache, water colour and gl i tter on canvas36 by 48 inchesImage courtesy of Crystal Liu and Hosfel t Gal lery New York / San Franci sco (http: //www.hosfel tgal l ery. com/)


http://www.cliuart.com


| Andrei Petrov: Radius of Desire (2011) |http: //andreipetrov.com


http://andreipetrov.com


The animal sideBy Jean-Christophe Bailly

Translated by Catherine PorterPhotographs by Karen Knorr

In humankind’s longrelationship with animalswe have consistentlysought to place them ina tier safely beneath us.Phi losopher andplaywright Jean-Christophe Bai l ly arguesthat this imposedhierarchy is i l lusory,obscuring both ourfundamental bond withwild animals—and theunbridgeable abyssbetween us

Adapted from The Animal Side by Jean-Cristophe Bai l ly (Fordham University Press, 201 1 ), original ly publ ished in Frenchas Le versant animal (Bayard Éditions, 2007)



Karen Knorr, “The Grand Monkey Room 3 , Musée Condé, Chanti l l y ” , 2006



I would like to have a video camera setup, one that could position itself onthis narrow uphill road (a camera thatwould know what to do, that would

film a car speeding off into the night) andfollow me. This is one of those moments whenrelationships—between consciousness and thecountryside, between the speed of a point inmotion and the space around it—converge on asingle spot: the road becomes an estuary inwhich one is moving upstream; on each sidehedges lit by headlights form white walls. Evenif one is not speeding, there is a pure cinematicsensation of irreversible thrust, headlong flightforward, gliding. Driver and passenger alike areoffered a sensation of passivity, are hypnotizedby the ribbon of road, which may not bewithout danger. But this time the driver is alone,and not traveling far, it must be said—just a fewkilometers to visit a friend in the neighborhood.So the landscape is familiar, as are the borders,the outlines, the paths belonging to the densewoods and meadows through which this roadpasses. And yet, because it is night, there issome small discrepancy, the soft but deep growlof something unknown. It is as if one wereskidding over the surface of a worldtransformed, a world filled with terror,frightened movements, silent gaps.

But now, from this world, someoneemerges—a phantom, a beast, for only a beastcan burst forth this way. A deer has come outof the undergrowth; frightened, it runs up theroad, trapped between the hedgerows: it too iscaught in the estuary. It rushes ahead, just as itis, just as it has to be—fear and beauty,quivering grace, lightness. The driver, goingslowly now, follows the creature, watches itscroup move up and down, bounding in itsdance. A kind of hunt is under way, in whichthe goal is not—certainly not—to catch up, butsimply to follow, and since this race takes longerthan one might have imagined, several hundredmeters, a strange joy comes, childlike, orperhaps archaic. Finally another path opens upfor the animal, and after hesitating ever soslightly the deer plunges in and disappears.

Nothing more. Nothing but the space ofthis race, nothing but this instant, fleeting andyet so ordinary: many times, and in moredistant places, I have seen beasts emerging fromthe night. But this time I was taken aback,overcome; the sequence had had the clarity, theviolence, of an image in a dream. Was thisowing to some defining quality in the objectitself, and thus to a concatenation ofcircumstances, or could it be attributed to myown state of mind? I could not say, but it wasas if with my eyes, in that instant, for theduration of that instant, I had touched somepart of the animal world. Touched, yes,touched with my eyes, despite the impossibility.In no way had I entered that world; on thecontrary, it was rather as if its strangeness haddeclared itself anew, as if I had actually beenallowed for an instant to see something fromwhich as a human being I shall be foreverexcluded, either the nameless, purposelessspace in which animals freely make their way, orthe other way of being in the world that somany thinkers through the ages have turnedinto a background against which to highlightthe supremacy of humankind—whereas it hasalways seemed to me that this strangenessought to be considered on its own terms, as adifferent posture, a different impetus, and quitesimply a different modality of being.

What happened to me that night, whatmoved me to tears at the time, was both like athought and like a proof that there is nosupremacy, neither of humans nor of beasts,that there are only passages, fleetingsovereignties, occasions, escapes, encounters.The deer was in its night and I in mine, each ofus alone. Still, in the interval of the chase, I amquite sure of what I touched: it was that othernight, the deer’s night coming to me, not givenover but granted for an instant, that instantopening onto another world. A vision, nothingbut a vision—the ‘‘pure origin’’ of an animalfrom the underbrush—but clearer than anythought. Perhaps also just a sort of old-fashioned illustration (in fact, I’d like that, all inshades of grey, like the ones in the old editionsof Peter Ibbetson) , but this is the truth,speaking of animals, from which I wanted tobegin.

• • • • •

The deer was in its nightand I in mine, each of us alone



S peaking of animals. I have becomeaware, stratagems and effortsnotwithstanding, that declarations of

intense feeling on the subject of animals quiteoften not only fall flat but give rise to a sort ofembarrassment, rather as though one hadinadvertently crossed a line and gotten mixedup in something untoward, or even obscene.Nothing is more painful, then, than the choiceone has to make: pull back discreetly or forgeahead obstinately and speak out. The truth isthat a point of solitude is always reached inone’s relations with animals. When this pointextends into a line and the line extends into anarch, a shelter takes shape, the very place wherethat solitude responds freely to its counterpart:a beloved animal. But as soon as we go outsidethe line and reveal our love (that solitude andthat bond), those to whom we have taken therisk of speaking almost always pull back, in amove resembling the one we ourselves might

have made upon encountering a similaradmission by someone else. There is a verymurky zone of affects here, involving in thefirst place our relationships with so-calledcompanion animals, pets, but a zone thatnevertheless extends far beyond the merelyprivate sphere: visits to a zoo or a game reserve,the positions we hold or adopt toward huntingor eating meat (‘‘s’il est loisible de manger chair[if we are entitled to eat flesh] ,’’ as Amyot,translating Plutarch, put it so aptly) ; it is ourentire relation to the animal world, or ratherworlds, that is traversed by affect and that istroubled and troubling.

Against this affective power, thought,especially Western thought, has seen fit to armitself, less by erecting self-enclosing walls thanby confining animals in vast concept-spacesfrom which they are not supposed to be able toexit, while human beings are to be definedprecisely—if only it were that simple—by the

Karen Knorr, “The Witness, Humayun 's Tomb, New Delh i ” , 201 1



fact that they have managed to get themselvesout of these enclosures, leaving behindbestiality—condemned as disgraceful—andanimality, deeply feared, as if these were stagesin a journey and bad (though haunting)memories. Whether they have been recognizedas fellow creatures, but of lower rank, or viewedas complex machines, but lacking any access tothought, animals have found themselvesassigned to specific places and urged to staythere. But whatever purchase—on behavior aswell as on knowledge—this hierarchicalstructuring of existences may have had, whatwe have seen, without interruption, is thatanimals have never been able to stay in theirplaces, neither in their own right nor in humanthoughts and dreams; the fact is that, on theirown and without trying, animals have neverceased to make the border-boundary betweenhumans and beasts an unsettled one.

This vacillation is found at the point ofcontact, before affect comes into play. Thecontact is always unsettled, for the encounterrelates and even stipulates difference: differenceis there, it is there like an abyss, and the abysscannot be crossed. As Descartes, the

theoretician par excellence of animals asmachines, acknowledged in a letter, referring to‘‘living brutes’’: ‘‘the human mind cannotpenetrate their hearts.’’ But there are thosehearts, those existences; there is the whirlwindof all those lives and the beating of each andevery heart . . . What I would like to talk aboutis not a transgression in either direction(something that would cross the abyss fromhumans to animals or from animals to humans)but contact, the close contact, always singularand always consisting of touch, that is theordinary mode of the bond between them andus—something scarcely formed, alwaysnascent.

• • • • •

T he gods are there’’: Ulrich vonWilamowitz sought to characterize theparticular consistency of the divine in

the ancient Greek world with this formula, andwe may be tempted to apply it to the presenceof animals in nature, at least in lands wherethey are still abundant enough to give us theimpression that they are at home, in their

Karen Knorr,“The Aestheti c

J udgement, Salondes Caryatides,

Le Louvre” , 2009

“



overlapping territories. A presence that is like animmanence: it does not need to show itself inorder to exist; on the contrary, it manifestsitself all the better to the extent that it hides,retreats—or turns up unexpectedly. Butwhether that presence is abundant, at oncemassive and diffuse, as in the game reserves ofequatorial Africa, or scattered and rare, as in theFrench countryside (although night often turnsthe tables and restores the power of thatpresence, especially by way of sounds) , for usthere will always be something remote aboutit—not only something missing but somethingthat eludes us, holds itself back. The ‘‘gods’’found there turn away; they do not want usamong them, or near them; they do not want tohave anything to do with us. Some remainmotionless, or pass by without fleeing,impassive, indifferent (only the largest andstrongest can afford to do this) , but most ofthem leave, escape, scurry or fly away.

Contact between humans and wild animalsis above all this complex system of avoidanceand tension in space, an immense entanglementof uneasy, self-concealing networks in which,once in a while, we have the privilege of pullinga thread. It is not just that animals, like natureaccording to Heraclitus, ‘‘love to hide’’; it is alsothat they have to hide, and that since the dawnof time, over and above their own conflicts,they have identified man not only as a predatorbut also as a strange, unpredictable, lawlessbeing. No matter how peaceful we may want toproclaim ourselves, no matter how eagerly wemay seek a slow, gentle approach, in ourpresence they flee and hide.

And I come back to the flight of the deerthat was my starting point or opening feature.The strangeness did not lie in the fact that thedeer burst forth or that it fled (deer are fairlynumerous in these woods: on another night onthat same road, one of them had crossed in asingle bound perhaps a meter in front of me);the strangeness lay in the opportunity I wasgiven to follow the animal for a while: that is, atbottom, the chance to accompany it in spite ofitself, thus prolonging a contact that as a generalrule is much briefer. In a way, I found myselfback in the position of pursuer, a dog in a pack,or a hunter, so much so that what comes backto me like an image from a film, like a puresequence, converges in the realm of the

imaginary, like a fragment that might have beendislodged from the whole, from Paolo Uccello’sextraordinary Hunt in the Forest, a wide canvason which, in dark green undergrowth gilded bylate-afternoon sunlight, the very flight of theprey (doe of some sort) organizes among thevertical tree trunks the vanishing point, theperspective of fuite, as if each animal isproducing a link in the very optical networkfrom which it is seeking to escape. If thispainting is so beautiful, it is not only onaccount of the legendary material it evokes sospontaneously but also because it shows, rightin the field of vision (the forest) , by way of theanimals that have come from there and aretrying to return, the full power of what liesoutside the field: the forest, still, but as a worldbeyond, a selva oscura that, even more than theprey, attracts hunters and heightens the pack’ssense of smell, because the forest is theanimals’ rightful place, the place where theyhave shelter and where they are, properlyspeaking, at home.

• • • • •

B ut what would be needed, probably, isa pact, and a pact requires theformality of blood. This is quite clear

in Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man, when thehero, ‘‘William Blake,’’ a fugitive himself, liesdown next to a dead deer on the ground in theforest and paints his cheeks with the deer’sblood. Something very simple is achievedhere—totemism in its pure state, its nativestate, but also and especially a rediscovery.‘‘William Blake’’ was once an office worker, asort of nervous cousin of Bartleby; now ahunted man, he goes deep into the forest andwith surprising speed but nevertheless in stages,as in an authentic initiation, he reconnects withwilderness. We have the image of two bodiesstretched out side by side, lying on the materialthat makes up woods and forests—pineneedles, moss, dried or rotting leaves—the deadanimal and the living man are there on theground with water (from eyes and mouth) andblood, and the man confides in the animal,

Contact with animals is a complexsystem of avoidance and tension



incorporates and entrusts himself to its soul,travels with its soul, an improvised shamanismin which death and life embrace each other in aprodigious act of peacemaking.

Temporarily sheltered from the world of hispursuers, the world of conquering civilizations,the world of winners, where there are factories,offices, whorehouses, and hired killers, the manwho has broken with that world and whounwittingly bears the name of a visionaryEnglish poet invents a rite, a residue of sacrificethat opens up for him the pathway toreintegration. In a heartbeat, an enfolding lapseof time, an alcove, he finds—what?—lostintimacy.

Lost intimacy is the name Georges Bataillegave, in his genealogy of a continuousdistancing, to the set of social forms throughwhich humans in earlier times remained boundto violence owing to the harsh reality of theuniverse, bound to the mystery of theirexistence, contained as it was in the nets of allthe other existences. Arising from the hard-to-reconstitute network of sacred bonds that gavesubstance to that intimacy, Paleolithic paintings,as revealed above all in Lascaux, were forBataille the very inscription of this tension; inthem he recognized the ‘‘birth of art,’’ to besure, but he understood that birth as theemergence of the very possibility of experience,as the first and most ancient trace of an activitythat we can relate to experience. And thesepaintings, for the most part, as we know well,are representations of animals; while theChauvet cave paintings, discovered too late forBataille, antedate those of Lascaux by tenthousand years, they only confirm the Lascauxlesson on this point.

However we may try to interpret thosefigures of horses, felines, bison, aurochs, thefact remains that they impose the relation ofhuman to animal as the absolutely originaryrelation: animals are positioned at the thresholdof the symbolic; but what is perhaps mostextraordinary is that they are there forthemselves and as themselves, that is, with thegripping effect of captured life that has stunnedall painters by its reality, its artistic and magicaleffectiveness. Leaving aside the dispute over thesacred to which these wall paintings inevitablylead, we can nevertheless say that they point toan origin or an originary state of designation,

and that they can be understood as a first,stupefying recording in which, at the heart ofnature as a whole, the animal is recognized asthe great other, the first companion.

All hunting peoples had to negotiate a pactwith the animal world, not only because theydepended on it and took from it, but also andno doubt as much because they were fascinatedby the exuberance of these beings who lived onearth in a way unlike their own, a way thatseemed more natural than theirs. (Thiscleavage must have appeared at the dawn ofhumanity.) The prehistoric paintings themselvesare the form or the modulation of such a pact:through their representation of animalssomething is taken away from violence. Theseimages take on violence as ‘‘William Blake’’takes on the deer’s blood, then they deposit it,perhaps by dint of a ritual action, in a calmedspace, that is, in the darkness that has settledback over the grotto.

The lost intimacy is indicated by thisthreshold where loss begins. The will to havethe relation be a bond—a suture, a splice—iswhat is reinvented, with the gentleness of atransfusion or a tattooing, by the fugitive inDead Man.

Of all that, all the violence of impregnation,no more than a distant murmur reaches us,perhaps. But this is precisely the murmur thatwas still present when the deer went boundingdown the road. Once continuous with orimmanent to the acts of life, the contactbetween man and animal has becomediscontinuous and haphazard. Whetherembodied or terror-stricken, the bond hassomehow become diaphanous, evenevanescent. Yet every animal, if we will onlypay attention to it, if we will only watch it existand move, is the repository of a memory thatsurpasses the creature itself as it surpasses us,and where every instance in which its specieshas brushed against our own is inscribed. Thelost intimacy I am evoking comes straight fromthe abyss that separates us from animalswhenever we meet them, and it may be that theconditions orchestrated by the most recentcivilizations make the separation sharper thanever before. Yet something is still on the alert,or is still ready to awaken, something thatrecognizes itself in an animal’s gaze orsomething that we grasp in passing, in a stable



in winter, for example, or with bats streakingthrough the air on a summer evening, or evenwith fish swimming in a pond in a park.

• • • • •

T he disadvantage, with reserves, withthe very fact that there has to besomething like reserves, zones that are

reserved, recognized as such and more or lessself-enclosed, is obviously the fact itself, thissubtraction from the rest of the world to whichthey owe their existence, thereby denouncing astate of the world that makes of themintrinsically, so to speak, vestiges and scraps.Hunting, poaching, the destruction of naturalenvironments and of forests in particular, thewarming of the planet and its consequences forthe various ecosystems, from the far north tothe equator, and finally the development ofmass tourism—all these factors converge tojustify the existence of reserves and even ofgame parks and zoos.

In a wild world truly left to itself, that is,unviolated, as we say, or at least very littlepenetrated or marked by humans, there would

obviously be no need to reserve spheres foranimals that could protect their overlappingterritories. To evoke such a world is to evokesomething that was the unwritten rule, theinstantaneous adjustment, for millennia; it is toevoke a form that has given way only during thelast few centuries in Europe and during recentdecades in the rest of the world. But themovement seems irreversible, so much so thatone cannot help sensing, while traversing thosereserves, that one is facing the vestiges of aworld about to disappear.

The possibility that there will be no morewild animals, or that they will exist onlyconfined or subjugated, is taking shape beforeour eyes day by day. Reactions to the threat ofthe avian flu that recently spread throughoutthe world, for example, all conformed to amodel in which wildness itself was accused andsingled out: peaceful domestic fowl threatenedby hordes of uncontrollable migrators. Thiswill become the accepted schema—eventhough intensive breeding and all the modes ofconfinement (the word speaks for itself) , farfrom sparing animals effectively, have been, onthe contrary, the direct origin of the most

Karen Knorr,“Salon Li l as, MuséeCarnavalet” , 2004



serious epidemics ever known. Between thethousands and thousands of carcasses burnedduring the years of mad cow disease and thecommon graves of birds in the new century,what is taking shape is the psychologicalpreparation of humanity for the necessity oftotal control, a world in which wild animals willbe no more than tolerated and in which theytoo will be, in a way, ‘‘in human hands,’’ inallotted spaces that will be more and morerestricted or instrumentalized.

The destiny of animals is perhaps just oneaspect, and not necessarily the most striking, ofthe sort of preapocalyptic climax whosecontours are refined day after day. But as soonas the hypothesis of a world deprived ofanimals (deprived, then, of the so-called ‘‘poorin world’’!) takes shape, as it did in Chernobyl,in what is called by locals the Zone, we see thatthis disappearance is configured as mourning,as absolute mourning. Not only on the basis ofclear-cut biological solidarities (to recallEinstein’s famous remark on the foreshortenedfuture of a world in which there would be nomore bees) , but directly for the way in which ispresented, or might be presented, the ‘‘thus’’ ofa world without animals, a world in which allanimal presence—visual, auditory, olfactory—has disappeared.

In Voices from Chernobyl, the book oftestimony collected by Svetlana Alexievich (abook that eludes conventional standards andthat is for the reader the book of a completeunsealing, a work of naked intensity) , the fateof animals is evoked several times. I recall thestory of the hunters charged with liquidatingthe domestic animals that continued to wanderaround in the Zone, and the way in which thesemen, whom one imagines a priori to be tough,hardened—some had served in the war inAfghanistan—say that they could not carry outtheir task, as if they had been confronted with ahorrendous injustice, something monstrousfrom which they had had to turn away, not inorder to spare their own lives, exposed as theywere to radiation, nor even to spare the beasts,but to save perhaps a principle of evasion, alife, a survival, survival itself, that is, somethingobvious and untranslatable, something preciselylike the vague glimmer in animals’ eyes.

It is clearly not a question of comparing thedrama’s effects on animals to its effects on

humans. Everything, here, is connected, andnot only connected but dragged down to such adepth of disarray that a bottom is reached,similar to the reservoir of existence that Moritztouched with the calf going off to slaughter,the calf into whose eyes he was gazing. There isa glimmer, or the remnant of a glimmer, andthe animal holds onto it, is its mute testimonyand its panic-stricken mark, and at the very spotwhere horror overtakes him, the animal bucklesunder, but in total innocence.

The cameraman Sergei Gurin, whose voiceis heard at length in this book, says that his lifehas been changed by everything he saw in theZone, starting with the mute lesson and theappeal that he heard, coming from abackground of obscure life of which animalsare the ultimate and faithful guarantors: ‘‘Astrange thing happened to me. I became closerto animals. And trees, and birds. They’re closerto me than they were, the distance between ushas narrowed. I go to the Zone now, all theseyears, I see a wild boar jumping out of anabandoned human house, and then an elk.That’s what I shoot. I want to make a film, tosee everything through the eyes of an animal.’’

What has become of Sergei Gurin? Whereare his films? Who will show them to us? And,speaking of films, how strange it is that inStalker (which Tarkovski made several yearsbefore the Chernobyl catastrophe) the onlynonpoisoned gift made by the Zone should bethat of the dog, Egyptian-looking, whichappears trotting above the puddles and whichthe ferryman ends up taking back with him.

A dog, an elk, the Zone . . . Between thestories of Acteon or Procris and the irradiatedbushes all history stretches out, all our history.The leaping deer that was a phantom in mynight remembers, it is translucid, it is stillrunning: in Paolo Uccello’s painting, in SergeiGurin’s film, the elk’s life is a thought, obscure,like life itself. It came back and it comes back, itgoes around in a loop, discourse is unhinged,this had to happen: our sisters and brothers byblood have kept silence forever. What wouldthe world be without them? The sky withoutbirds, the oceans and rivers without fish, theearth without tigers or wolves, ice floes meltedwith humans below and nothing but humansfighting over water sources. Is it even possibleto want that?



About the photographerKaren Knorr is Professor of Photography at UniversityCollege for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK. She is currentlyworking on a series of photographs called INDIA SONG,exploring Indian cultural heritage and highlighting the conflictbetween the animal world and development.See more of her work at http://www.karenknorr.com/

In relation to this tendency, which seemsineluctable, every animal is a beginning, anengagement, a point of animation and intensity,a resistance.

Any politics that takes no account of this(which is to say virtually all politics) is a criminalpolitics.

• • • • •

B etween Monterosso and Vernazza, inthe Cinque Terre, on the customsagents’ path that runs along the coast

and that has unfortunately become a nearlyclogged hiking trail, in one of the turns wherethe path goes down a little and makes a curvecutting through a sort of valley, but still veryhigh above the sea, on a rocky ledge formingsomething like a shallow rectangular grotto, theguardian used to be found. A cat, a simple tigercat, but stretched out in the noblest, proudestpose: in other words, manifesting what in thefeline pose par excellence is connected to animmediate and spontaneous becoming-a-sphinx. Not a feral cat, I think, but rather astray, and in fact, as the presence of plates andbowls made clear, a cat fed by the nearbyvillagers, thus a sort of guardian, functionally, atleast, or a household divinity: placed on top ofa money-box bolted to a table that was itselfbolted to the ground, a small sign duly spelledthings out, moreover, asking tourists passing by

on the path not to give the animals anything toeat (there were actually several cats) and tocontent themselves, if they so desired, withslipping a coin into the slot. Now from all thisemerged—beginning with the remote presence,the kingly remoteness, of the first cat Isaw—an atmosphere that was not strange butstrangely familiar, although remote, theatmosphere, perhaps, of a very old recollectionof the sacred, not cumbersome but discreet,scarcely more extensive than a whiff ofMediterranean undergrowth, scarcely morepronounced than a slight inflection: a thought,here again, and not a thought ‘‘for’’ cats or for apower of which they would be therepresentatives on earth, but a thought sent bythem, working with them, with what was givenconsistency by one of them in any case, namely,what I can only call a legitimacy: that whichbetween a territory and an existence wouldform the space of a sovereignty. Any observerof a cat, even inside an apartment, knows rightaway how to identify the tenor and measure theimportance of this space, where it seems as ifone is visually registering the abyssal gapseparating all creatures, a gap that isnevertheless also the resource of a sacredfriendship, as the inhabitants of Vernazzaappear to know. A space that must not bedisturbed in any way: the instant a tourist fullof good intentions approached to pet the caton guard, the animal got up and disappeared.

Jean-Christophe Bailly is Associate Professor at the ÉcoleNationale Supérieure de la Nature et du Paysage, in Blois,France. His most recent book is The Instant and Its Shadow.

Catherine Porter is Professor Emerita, SUNY College atCortland; a former president of the Modern LanguageAssociation; and a renowned translator of French philosophyand theory.


http://www.karenknorr.com/


T ianjin was one of the first cities we visited for our Cities Unknownproject in early 2010. What first struck us was the fact that Tianjinlooked so familiar with its highways and city centre; everything seemed

to have just come up out of the ground. For the photograph, we had to find ahigh point to get this particular sight. We checked into a local hotel with a rooftopwhich promised us the right view. After having moved into our room, weexplained our plan to the staff and they gave us access to the roof. The view wasstunning, and we tried to capture as many light conditions as possible. Thisparticular shot was done in the early hours: the highway lights had just come onand lit up the streets, and hardly any cars were around that early in the morning.

Cities unknownPhotographs and commentary by Hans-Georg Esch

Hans-Georg Esch , “Tian j i n 01 ” , 201 0



I t was a big challenge to photograph Chongqing: we not only experiencedone of the biggest cities worldwide (it has over 32 million inhabitants) , butwe also had to deal with the local weather conditions—which in Chonqing

means fog. During certain periods of the year the visibility in the area is verypoor. The perspective in the photograph, which shows the prominent locationwhere the Yangtze River and the Jialing River come together, was only possiblewhen the haze allowed us to see the buildings on the other side of the river. Forthis shot we went up to the location several times to get the lighting situation andvisibility which suited us. Sometimes photography has a lot to do with waiting,patience, and the intuition to press the release at the right moment.

— HANS-GEORG ESCH

The proof of China’s rise to world power l ies not so much in theprosperity of her famous cities—but in the quiet, massive growthof mega-urbs that have no need for fame

Hans-Georg Esch , “Chongq ing 02” , 201 0

Photographs selected from the exhibition Chinas Millionenstädte (Cities Unknown) by HG Esch, September 201 0 to January 201 1 inKöln, Germany. For more, see http: //www.citiesunknown.de/


http://www.citiesunknown.de/


Codes of financeArt by Elisabeth Bond

Adapted from Codes ofFinance: Engineering Derivatives in a Global Bank, by Vincent Antonin Lépinay(Princeton University Press, 201 1 )

A former employee of one of the world’s leadinginvestment banks, Vincent Antonin Lépinay later spenttwo years as an academic studying the people,

processes, and organization behind the design andmanagement of “General Bank’s” most complex andprofitable derivatives—a world of high intel l igence, self-

deception, and hidden risk



At 8:00 a.m., Alan arrives in theGeneral Bank equities andderivative products trading room.Alan is in charge of maintaining a

portfolio of financial products, much like an artcollector would maintain a collection ofpaintings. He sells some products, buys others,and tries to figure out what will facilitatesuccess in the market and where the market isheaded. Upon arriving, he indulges for a fewminutes in the usual small talk with colleagues.

He catches sight of the quantitative engineer(the “quant”) , who specializes in creating pricemodels for the financial products that Alantrades. For a good twenty minutes, Alan quizzesthe quant on the puzzles that the market hascreated the day before. Much like a FormulaOne driver would report to mechanics thereactions experienced while driving on a testcircuit, Alan briefs the quant on the ups anddowns of his portfolio’s value and seeks anaccount that will help him anticipate future

market configurations that are similar. Hecannot afford to watch his portfolio lose value,and he presses the quant for some simpleaccounts of his products on the market. Hesees himself as part of an engineering collectiveworking to innovate and to understand itsinnovations.

Alan has been a trader at General Bank forfive years. He graduated from a Parisianengineering school and, after specializing for ayear in applied mathematics, he went straight tothe bank to work at a desk famous for itsfinancial engineering prowess.

The trader—as his title suggests—buys andsells “things.” But unlike the traders who roamother floors of the same building, Alan doesnot trade goods and commodities like silk, oil,or cotton. He specializes in financial productswhose values depend on the economic activitiesof companies, groups of companies, andsometimes countries. That difference mattersfor Alan: he deals exclusively with flows of

El i sabeth Bond , “Estuary” (l i nocut on paper), 2009



currency located in bank accounts spread acrossthe world so that, unlike most commoditytraders, he never has to worry about thephysical delivery of perishable goods.

Alan works at a desk alongside other tradersand engineers sitting side-by-side and facingrows of monitors. It is the beginning of a longday that may last until 6:00 or 7:00 p.m. ifthings go well. During the day he will access themarket through his computer to check the valueof his financial products. Figuring out the valueof the entire set of financial products he owns

is Alan’s quasi-exclusive activity. First amongthe pieces of information he consults are pricesand their variations, also called volatility. Alan isnot going to have much use for these products:if anything, he expects to get a return fromholding a debt that provides interest or fromowning a piece of property that offers adividend. Alternatively, he anticipates being ableto sell back the products to another trader, at aprice higher than the one he paid for the initialacquisition. He needs to get money out of hisproducts; the paper or digital bits oftransaction offer little else.

After much consideration and consultationwith other traders in the room, Alan turns tohis other principal activity—figuring out a wayof buying and selling financial productsaccording to a scheme derived from his analysisof the market. With many products in hisportfolio, Alan can easily lose track of thecomposition of price changes. Some productsgo up, others go down, and when hundreds ofthem move continuously in unpredictabledirections and react to even the smallest pieceof news, predicting the value of the portfolio isno easy task.

His attention is sharpened by theomnipresence of the “pricer,” a piece ofsoftware crucial to his strategies and plans.Designed by the quant and turned into a toolby the computer engineers of the research anddevelopment unit of the bank, the pricercontains information pertaining to all theproducts owned by Alan, and processes thatmass of data on a continuous basis. As hisportfolio grows, the task of figuring out therisk entailed by collections of financialproducts is largely given to the pricer. Thanksto this tool, Alan can assess the value of hisportfolio without having to engage intransactions: the products that Alan has in hisportfolio do not move from this place. Thepricer simulates real-world markets well enoughthat Alan can be confident its estimateapproaches what another trader would offer.

Although Alan delegates significantanalytical authority to the pricer when makingdecisions, he retains a much praised qualityamong traders. He has developed a sense of themarket. He knows not to buy too much at onetime so as not to raise suspicions among othertraders in the market monitoring the price

El i sabeth Bond , “Cracked Earth” (woodcut on paper), 2009



changes. He also knows that markets havetemporal moods: not all hours offer the sameresponse from other traders because of thelimited window of intervention. Alan buys andsells financial products on exchanges located inAsia, Europe, and North America, each ofwhich operates on local time. This dispersionadds to the problems already plaguing Alan’sday: He sits in a Parisian trading room, and ashe turns on his pricer, he has to deal withmarkets that are on the verge of closing or arealready closed. A Japanese financial product isassessed in parallel with a Canadian financialproduct, but one recapitulates into its price allthe trading-day’s vicissitudes, whereas the otherstumbles on the first bits of new information.

As a partial remedy to this geographicdilemma, Alan works with collaborators inthese other financial centers. When Alan leaveshis desk after the French exchange has closed,he passes his portfolio to a NorthAmerica–based colleague. But unlike an airtraffic controller who handles airplanes as theymove into his or her assigned zone and passesthem to another controller when they exit thezone, Alan has the final call on his portfolio andhandles over 8 or 9 hours of a plane flying 24hours a day. For more than 14 hours, the planeis on its own.

Alan is thus one among thousands oftraders who dedicate their lives to monitoringprices, selling in anticipation of downturns andbuying when they expect a price rise. But Alandoes not simply trade financial products. He hasmade his reputation—and much money—aspart of a group that designs new andsometimes unique financial products for banks.

As a consequence of this foray intoengineering, the dialogue that traders of simplerand more standard products would conductalone with their pricers is replaced bycommunication with a much larger populationin the bank: salespeople, engineers, and quantsbecome interlocutors and part of a complexchorus. Although financial products are nottangible—unlike cotton or oil—theircharacteristics can easily be captured on paper.

For Alan, innovative and unique securities canalso be defined, but as they are “produced” andnegotiated between the client and the bank’sengineers and salespeople, it is not rare to seethe text of the contract changing several timesbefore the transaction itself and even after: aseries of events, specified in the contract, canauthorize a client—and the bank—torenegotiate the terms of the deal. With aportfolio full of these customized products,each with changing characteristics, Alan is ofteninterrupted by a back-office manager askinghim to check on the actual terms of a contract.

Around 4:00 p.m., in the middle ofbalancing his portfolio risk exposure—sellingrisky securities, purchasing other morepromising ones—Alan gets such a call. One ofthe contracts sold by General Bank to a wealthyclient requires the payment of interest twice ayear. The back-office manager is phoning tomake sure that the front office (the site ofproduct design, marketing, and management:Alan’s world) and the back office (the site ofproduct maintenance and of the post-transaction client relationship) are referencingthe same product. This call comes on the heelsof a series of mismatches between the twooffices. Financial products registered as X inthe front office were simultaneously registeredas Y in the back office, and during discussionsabout individual contracts, each office believedit was talking about the same, unique contract.In some cases, the client had still anotherversion of the contract, turning a financial dealinto a genuine cacophony.

Alan leaves the trading room. He has donewhat he is employed to do, relentlessly, on adaily basis: hedging. He has adjusted thecomposition of his portfolio to protect itsvalue against anticipated changes. Yet as heembarks on the subway journey that takes himto the center of Paris, he cannot help but worryabout the ongoing value variation that theportfolio is undergoing. Even though theFrench exchange is now closed, his products donot enjoy much rest. Behind his back, so tospeak, other exchanges are in full swing, and

In some cases, the client had still another version of thecontract, turning a financial deal into a genuine cacophony



their moves cannot be hedged by Alan as theyunfold.

• • • • •

F inance is a derived modality ofeconomy that does not preoccupyitself with dealing in things, like

bushels of wheat or barrels of crude oil; rather,it elaborates and derives new economic vehicles(equities, bonds, futures, options) from existingeconomic activities. Unlike silk or cotton,financial products are nothing but contractualdocuments that define the volume and directionof money between the partners in a deal. Yetthese contracts can be much more difficult tounderstand and control than physicalcommodities, and because of this they canbring great hazards, as well as great profits, tothe bank that sells them.

One such product, and the one I focused onin my study of General Bank over the pastseveral years, is the Capital Guarantee Product(or “CGP”) . This is a customized assetmanagement contract sold to sophisticatedcorporate or institutional clients that offers theguaranteed return of the client's originalinvestment, plus an additional return linked tothe performance of the equity markets uponwhich the product is based. Alan's domain, thetrading room, is a place where new financialproducts like CGPs are created, sold, andmaintained with the aim of guaranteeing thegreatest income for the bank while minimizingthe risk of losses. It turns out, however, thathaving even an approximate idea of the valueof some of these products is not at all intuitive.Typically, clients do not know how to assessthem, and find themselves having to rely on theinitial inventor for guidance.

Even the inventors have a difficult time. Inaddition to dealing with exchanges alreadyopaque to most financial operators, CGPtraders must face risks generated by theaggregation of unlike products in the portfolio,the unpredictable animation of which is akin todealing with wild organisms. Unsurprisingly, theterm “beast” comes frequently to the forefrontin the traders’ conversations about theirproducts.

The trading room doubles as a place wheresophisticated models are developed to figure

out the value of these inventions. It is a riskybusiness. Quants in charge of defining themodel best suited to a given product, forexample, are torn between two inclinations. Onthe one hand, by attaching standard modelswhose properties they are familiar with toproducts they are unfamiliar with, they can limitthe uncertainty of a structure which will beused by traders in charge of managing theseproducts; the valuations that emerge, however,will not be optimal, as a non-customized modelwill not fit perfectly with the joints of theproduct. On the other hand, by developing acustom-made model for a new product,engineers take on the risk associated with aninnovation that has not yet been tested in themarket. The product and the model combinetheir uncertainties and may well put traders in acompletely uncharted situation.

The uncertainty flows through to the toolsused daily by traders like Alan. The pricer hasbeen built to simulate a price without referenceto actual bids or offers because the productsthemselves have no histories or equivalents tobe compared against, and are not traded onexchanges. Indeed, such products are notdesigned for exchange at all: the products arecustomized to a client’s needs and cannot betransferred to a third party. Because CGPs defypossible comparisons, their value is dependenton the decisions made by the strings ofengineers who collaborate around the models.

The models developed in the trading roomscontribute, as do all models, to the setting ofthe level of risk to which the banks are subject.As a bank develops refined models thatmonitor risks more accurately, it can indulge intighter hedging policies. Instead of hedging inan approximate way, without regard for theactual risks on the market, the bank usesmodels to limit as much as possible its inactivecapital. Every euro cent that is freed from thehedging of market activities can thus bereinvested in a potentially lucrative activity.

This “race to the bottom” helps banksworking with more accurate models to resistthe turbulence of markets. However, modelsprotect them only marginally, and over a lengthof time that does not suit the far-reachinghorizons of banks. When more than one largebank collapses, the entire banking industry is indanger. The unpleasant aftertaste left by the



recent spate of crises is evidence of theconsequences of the modeling hubris of a fewinvestment bankers, convinced that they couldbeat the market and escape unscathed before itscollapse. The inadequacy of models is in fact aconsiderable source of risk for all the actors onthe market.

A nother source of risk is themalleability of the product itself, itsterms adjustable at the client’s

discretion. With hedging calculations focusedon a portfolio which may aggregate up to fivehundred contracts, and with end-of-termcontracts exiting the steady stream of theportfolio to reclaim their individuality one lasttime, how does a trader keep track of thesuccessive versions of the initial contract? Hisor her assigned job is to take care of theportfolio and to attend to its fluctuations sothat the bank does not lose money. Theattention required for such a task is less like thatof a collector keeping track of the minutestdetails of each specimen, than of a one-personair traffic control center, where the operator isin charge of keeping an eye on dozens—perhaps hundreds—of moving targets, all atonce. The portfolio has no other identity thanthat of an aggregate. It does not need amemory of its own turbulent ins and outs overtime. Whether the portfolio contains 500 or 478contracts changes the trader’s engagement verylittle. It remains a single portfolio with afluctuating value and a series of risk indicatorsas attributes.

Back-office operators, by contrast, areunconstrained by the near-instantaneous valueassessment so familiar to traders. Their primaryfunction is to ensure that the monetary flowsdefined by contracts are paid and receivedproperly by the bank once their calculation iscomplete. The back-office database is entirelydevoted to the reliable completion oftransactions. Nothing is worse for theseoperators than deals that linger in the limbo ofeverlasting negotiations between the bank’sengineers and traders and their clients. A gooddeal is a done deal.

CGPs and their changing parameters aretherefore a nightmare from the perspective ofthe back office. They hold the future open andforce operators to stay on top of each contract.

Key Terms of a Capital Guarantee ProductThe World-Wide Secured Exposure 8 Year EMTN on Global Indices S&P 500, Nikkei 225,

Eurostoxx 50

– 1 00% Capi tal Guarantee at Maturi ty– 1 20% Parti cipation in the Quarterly Average Rise of the Portfol io– 1 20% Parti cipation in the Best Performing I ndex in Case of Portfol ioUnderperformance– I n Euro wi th Exchange Rate Guarantee

The “Double Chance” Note—How Does It Work?

Thanks to the double chance mechan i sm, th i s note offers two chances to make a returnon the global equ i ty market. I ndeed , contrary to a classi c capi tal -protected investment,shou ld the final value of the portfol io be below i ts in i ti al value, the note wi l l offer asecond chance and pay the h ighest posi ti ve performance of the ind ividual i nd icescompri s ing the portfol io.

Redemption at Maturity

The fi rst chance :• On the launch date, the value of the portfol io i s set at 1 00.• Every three months fol lowing the Start Date (each being a fixing date), theperformance of the portfol io i s calcu lated as a percentage of i ts in i ti al value.• The Final Value of the portfol io wi l l be the ari thmetic average of the 32 level srecorded on each Fixing Date.• I f the Final Value of the Portfol io i s greater than or equal to i ts in i ti al value, theinvestor receives 1 00% of h i s investment amount plus 1 20% of the Portfol ioperformance as calcu lated above.The second chance :• I f the Final Value of the Basket i s less than i ts in i ti al value, the investor receives 1 00%of the nominal amount plus 1 20% of the average performance of the best performingindex in the portfol io.

Maturi ty date February 25 , 2008Underlying Equal l y weighted basket composed of the fol lowing ind ices:– DJ EUROSTOXX 50 (STX)– S&P 500 (SP)– N IKKEI 225 (N IX)I ssue Price 1 00% Nominal AmountReoffer Price 95% of Nominal AmountCapi tal Guarantee 1 00% of Nominal Amount at Maturi tyRedemption at Maturi ty Maturi ty, the holder wi l l receive the greater of the fol lowing:– Nominal x 1 00%– Nominal x (1 00% + 1 20% [Max(BKTm – 1 ; 0)] )

wi th

where t means the 32 quarterly fixing dates taken over the l i fe of the note. SPt, STXt,

NIXt i s the Closing Price of the Fixing Date t of the relevant index. SPi, STXi, NIXi i s theClosing Price on Start Date of the relevant index. BKT

ii s the Closing Value of the

equal l y weighted basket on Start Date.

Double Chance

wi th



At General Bank, this added workload was a by-product of two cultures splitting theorganization: customization alone withoutmemory would work fine; meticulous recordkeeping of standard contracts would workequally well; doing both at the same time was aproblem.

After CGPs were introduced, for example,the front-office and back-office databases soonbore no resemblance to one another. Theycontained the same products, but they cut themalong different seams and relied on differentcategories. Even the product codes differed. Onthe tickets issued by the front office, a field wasdevoted to the “front code.” The back-officemanager, who had the ticket in his or her handswhen entering the product into the database,then penciled in the back-office code, close tothe preceding fields. The same applied to theconfirmation, which described the operation intypically back-office terms; the product’s frontcode did not have its place on this documentand was only subsequently penciled into acorner. From its creation, the product was thusmodeled in two different ways by the twoprocessing centers. The bank had planned for aubiquitous product—with properties known byeach and every operator in the bank, in Parisand in Tokyo, front office and back office. Thereality of these multiple modes of existencethrough which products were traveling waspainfully different. There was never more thanone contract at the base of these disparate localexpressions, but because its unique animationcame from the various descriptions attached toit by operators in each milieu, there was nopossibility of finding a single, secureperspective from which to settle disputes overcharacterizations and descriptions. Operatorscould not bypass these partial expressions tolook the product in the eye, having instead todeal with all of a contract’s incarnations.

C ost accounting also gets morecomplex with CGPs in the mix—andthis before even the disciplinary

contortions often generated by products thatare bound to the off-balance-sheet zone. Thehedging prowess of the traders deal with theprices of CGPs, and infinite caution is taken tosave pennies for the bank. But no one isconcerned with total costs. The trading room

does not question the wealth of supportrequired to underpin its unique activity ofhedging properly-priced products, yet thesubtleties of the operations conceived of in thefront office by engineers, salespeople, andtraders require the disentanglement of themultiple conditions laid out in the contracts.The need to mobilize people simultaneouslyfrom the front, middle, and back officesweakens any economies of scale. The workrequired by these post-market operations goesbeyond what was imagined by the engineer whoformulated the product, and who kept in mindthe subtlety of its legal and financial structurewhile forgetting about the cost burden of laterprocessing.

This one activity, therefore, created asignificant cost for the bank. Actually, morethan a cost. A cost would have been easy, butinstead of a unique figure, the bank haddifficulty even circumscribing the limits of themany costs that unexpectedly plagued thegeneral economy of CGPs. As the inventor ofan in-house product tracking and pricingsystem explained to me:

It’s always the same story: in a largeinstitution like ours, between 90 and 95percent of products are processedmore or less correctly; they are enteredinto a catalogue of ten standardproducts, and the necessaryinvestments are made once and for allto correctly deal with those products.

So that is the industrial aspect. Butthere is always that little margin, thoseproducts springing from the engineers’creativity, and they represent 5 percentfor us. But when we look at thenumbers, we realize that this costs halfof the back office, whereas, in termsof volume, it’s relatively insignificant.Yet, it’s very important for thereputation of the house, for the senseof innovation that people get. And forthat, colossal sums will be invested,and that’s where the whole problemlies: in managing these products beforetheir quantities become sufficientlysignificant to justify an investment thatis, quote unquote, industrial in scale.. .The development of a new product



today does not really take into accountthe cost of executing the contract. Youhave a department that optimizessomething, that is, the three products itthinks it will be able to sell to clientsfor the most, and that in the end doesnot include in its economic calculationsanother factor. And so we have, onoccasion, discovered that a large partof the marvellous margin we thoughtwas being made on a product was, infact, pared down by management costs.

This does not mark the end of the toll takenby innovative finance. At the other end of thebank, on the highly standardized securitiesmarket, investors attempt to anticipate thefuture returns and decide whether to buy abank’s equity. These investors are GeneralBank’s peers, sometimes its partners on otherdeals, and they submit those deals to the sametechniques that the bank’s own engineers applyto the CGP’s underlyings. Yet, when theyconsider the bank itself as a security and not asa financial services provider, expectations shift

to another register. The unique structuringoffered by the CGP is no longer sought here,because General Bank shares are in an absoluteperformance race with a host of other publicly-traded companies. Unlike the many servicesoffered by its star product, the bank can doonly one thing for its shareholders: rise highand rise fast. Compared with the pampereddesigns offered to the bank’s clients, theinvestor wants very little of design when itcomes to foreseeing future results.

Simplicity is not to be had. The exactopposite of the apparent clarity offered in thebank’s prospectus, the production of the yearlyprofit and cost of a CGP follows tortuous andwinding roads that demand expert eyes todecipher. The customization of products, theirlong duration, and their increasing structuralentanglements place them at odds withaccounting imperatives. At the same time thatthey have won the praise of their peers,General Bank’s exotic derivatives activities haveraised the concerns of its owners and of theregulatory agencies monitoring financial firms.

El i sabeth Bond , “Dancing Sandmen” (l i nocut on paper), 201 0



F inancial products like CGPs aredifferent from kitchen utensils. In thefirst place—and to pay a little respect

to an old distinction wielded by classicaleconomists—they are not, strictly speaking,going to be used. We call them financial“services” or “products,” indiscriminately, butone would be hard pressed to find a moredisincarnate service. There may be much todiscuss in the design of the product, and thereare definitely many characteristics to be chosenduring the negotiation, but ultimately what theproduct comes down to is greater or fewereuros served at the term of the contract.

One sure thing is their deployment in time.What lies in the future—the yield and potentialof resale to the issuer—is both the onlypromise of the product and its most uncertainoutcome. There is nothing more in a financialproduct than its promise; nothing to offer otherthan what is to come in a distant future—quiteunlike the fruit in the village marketplace thatthe customer touches and pokes, smells andscrutinizes, when wanting to assessing what hegets for his money.

Consider the difference between investingone’s money in a CGP and investing it in theshares of a company whose activity can bedescribed in traditional economic terms. FranceTelecom was one of the most traded companiesat the time of my fieldwork. Its appeal wasthreefold: it was a “too big to fail” Frenchcompany with major public participation andcapital share, a multinational company investingin almost all corners of the world, and a neweconomy investment fund with interests inmost cutting-edge startups in Europe.Assuming that the ultimate goal of FranceTelecom investors is to make profits, the widerange of activities engaged in by the companyoffers many possibilities for a salesperson toweave a marketing narrative. Tying the expectedperformance of France Telecom shares tospecific economic scenarios, for example, ismuch easier than giving a sense of thepotentialities of performance of a formula asconvoluted as the double guarantee mechanism.The challenge comes from the twist introducedby the formula: whereas sellers of FranceTelecom shares could shore up their stories ofthe company business plan by resorting toclients’ shared experience of the economy, how

can one convey such a sense of the mechanismat play when the formula concatenates mins,maxs, and averages of indices that arethemselves composites? The sheer mechanicalarticulation of the mathematical operators atwork in the formula does not reach a pointwhere the CGP can be seen to derive from theeconomy itself, because the derivation isengineered in such a way that no one client cansee through the structure: it is the combinationof indices (themselves summaries of nationaleconomies) through the mathematical operatorsthat are derivations.

This, however, can be appealing to clients. Itoffers exposure to the worldwide economythrough a payoff formula and—itseems—nothing more than a payoff formula.Farewell, dusty and noisy economies. Farewell,manufacturing plants and their recalcitrantworkers. Enter the agile vehicle of moderncapitalism, bearing clean profits and controlledrisks.

Accounting must take place in thebackground, a direct consequence of the legalstatus of the bank, whose activities must bemade public on a regular basis. Investors areentitled to these regular snapshots of the bankso that they can make informed decisions whenallocating their resources. The sophistication offinancial engineering activities must thereforegive way to straightforward accountingdisclosure and standardized financialstatements.

CGP contracts, sitting off the balance sheet,can only be made visible by assigning them amonetary value. Yet, with terms far in thefuture, nothing less than a model will provideinvestors and shareholders with that desiredvalue. We wanted facts; we are given models offacts—and the doubts over the artificiality ofmodel results are as concerning as ever before.Which model should accountants use to conveythe present day reality of contracts due tounwind five to ten years in the future?

An additional snag casts a shadow overinvestors’ efforts to predict the financial resultsof the bank: the accounting system itself offersflexibility in the way in which financialoperations can be qualified. No financialproduct can claim one single accountingmethod. Even products that have been tradedfor a long time still exhibit varying valuation



About the artistElisabeth Bond started life as a playwright, writing for theatre, radio,TV, and film. She recently changed course and did an MA in FineArt, specialising in printmaking: linocuts and woodcuts, mainly usingfound wood. Her studio is in London, and her prints are incollections in Britain, Italy and China.http://www.elisabethbond.com

Vincent Antonin Lépinay is assistant professor in the Science,Technology, and Society Program at MIT. His previous book, TheScience ofPassionate Interests (co-authoed with Bruno Latour) , waspublished by Prickly Paradigm Press. His next book, How (not) to Bea Bad Trader, analyzes the competing understandings ofinformation theory among economists, judges, and legal scholars.http://web.mit.edu/~lepinay/www/

methods among investors. When products haveno history, an adequate method is even lessclearly defined. The distortions that operatorsintroduce into the methods of cost or profitcalculation rattle the bank, which loses itspoints of reference, and investors, who lookinto their portfolios and find entities that nolonger fold themselves as easily to their oldvaluation routines.

The difficulty of providing a bottom line forthis activity to shareholders and prospectiveinvestors mirrors the difficulty of describing therelevant features of the CGP to the bank’sclients. In some instances, salespeople haveintentionally hidden risks created by theproduct’s design; similarly, accountants haveknowingly qualified products in ways that masktheir ultimate cost to the company. A common-sense diagnosis could conclude that they haveused artifices to distort the risk of the productsand their manufacture. Yet this is too simple,for it implies that at some point during thedesign and management of CGPs—and ofother similarly complex derivatives—someoneknew of the exact magnitude of risks beingtaken by the clients, the bank, and its owners.

My research shows that there was no suchprivileged site of comfortable exploitation.There was indeed the exploitation of gullibleclients and investors who were happy to be toldstories of genius quants and infallible traders,but there was equally as much self-deceptionwithin the bank as without it. This is the basicdilemma of quantitative finance: opacity offinancial design does not produce asymmetry so

easily and naturally that it would give the bankengineers and traders a solid and lasting edge.There are obviously real differences betweenclients and engineers, and the lack of anexisting “market” enables fat commercialmargins, but it also leaves the bank alone,without the solid ground of a market priceacting as a referent. A less tortured design forCGPs, meanwhile, would immediately level theplaying field between the client and the bank.

In the end, the journey through GeneralBank leaves one struck by the character ofquantitative finance’s elusiveness: values andprices, topographies and roles, quantities andqualities, distance and intimacy all slip betweenour fingers as we try to seize them once and forall. General Bank intentionally engineeredproducts that could neither be decoded with asimple magical formula offering access to theirultimate characteristics and risks, nor beembodied, because their composition keptchanging as engineers tempted clients with evernewer packages and these latter did not shyaway from asking for further transformationsto the perimeters of the products. This endlessescape was the only way of keeping ahead ofthe competition aroused by the prospect of fatprofits, but it also hampered the full control ofcost by a bank forgetful of its organization, andchallenged the ability of traders and clients toassign it a clear value. Living and exploitingtemporary profits on the edge carries morerisks than meet the eye, or than can becomputed in a pricer.


http://www.amazon.com/Codes-Finance-Engineering-Derivatives-Global/dp/0691151504

http://www.elisabethbond.com/

http://web.mit.edu/~lepinay/www/


A QUICK WORD

SCOPE: Your most recent enterprise, Call Mr.Robeson, follows the story ofsinger and civilrights activist Paul Robeson who was targetedby the CIA as a communist and “anti-imperialist”. Why was it important to you tore-visit Robeson’s story?

Oyeleye: Paul Robeson was an importantreason for my setting up Black Swan Theatreand Opera Company and then ARIYA Opera,the first company in the UK to createperformance opportunities for classically-trained singers, musicians, and composers fromAfrica and the diaspora. It was working on thisplay that opened up the real story of Robeson’ssacrifice, and it made me think of the manyheroes and heroines forgotten to history. As theplay tours we meet elderly people who met,knew, or worked with him [and] young peoplewho are discovering his contribution toAfrican-American politics.

SCOPE: Like much ofyour other work, the playcombines various storytelling techniques:poetry, music, and ofcourse dramaticperformance. How does this combination ofmediums resonate with the story?

Oyeleye: I come from a tradition of totaltheatre. A play moves, it sings, it speaks, andsometimes the story is in the silence. So I listento the play; it will show me how to tell its story—the patterns of the words on the page, thespaces between words, how they sound spoken,sung. In approaching this story, I knew that wecould not include everything, but through musicand movement, the tools of the theatre-maker,we aimed to tell the story above and beyond thewords on the page. By creating a one-man show,we wanted to explore the intensity of PaulRobeson’s life. He spoke several languages, waswell-travelled, intellectually brilliant, andcompletely dedicated in his struggle for equalrights for the working classes of the world.

SCOPE: Your role as an arts educator hasallowed you to work with youth across SouthAfrica, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Hungary,and the UK, along with contributing toeducation and outreach at the Royal AcademyofArt and the English National Opera. Why isthis work so important to you?

Oyeleye: Working in arts education is the mostimportant and rewarding work to me. It is notan adjunct to “mainstream” theatre; it is thevery core of theatre making. I firmly believethat it is important to extend the footprint ofparticipation in the arts. I have worked withyoung people with a wide spectrum of physicaland mental abilities and the work produced isalways refreshing, challenging, and raw.

SCOPE: Your body ofwork includes piecesinspired by the Western canon, yet you oftenspeak ofthe importance ofresisting formalstructures. What does the canon mean to you?

Oyeleye: My cultural references are wide anddeep. I am blessed with the influence of theAfrican traditions of story-telling, and I havetravelled widely in Nigeria and several othercountries on the continent. I was born in theUK, and have made a personal study ofFrancophone literature, from the Négritudemovement onwards, so my Europeaninfluences are a strong component of myperformance practice. The “canon” is widerthan Western/European classical forms. Thewidth of Africa and Asia offers a culturallydiverse platform of arts and artists. As thedemographic shifts around the word, so we mixand match the very best parts of ourselves. Wesee this very much in popular music. It isfrustrating when the canon is set in aspic, byso-called “cultural gatekeepers”, while the widerartistic/literary endeavour is labelled “naive”,“primitive”, or “other”. These ancient artforms deserve more respect.

Olusola Oyeleye is a UK-based writer, director, performer, and producer. She recently directedCall Mr. Robeson , which was featured at the New York City Fringe Festival . Next, she wil l bedirecting two operas by acclaimed Nigerian composer Akin Euba, and is also preparing for theinternational conference “Dialogue: Africa Meets North America in Harlem”, which wil l be held inNew York City this October. Olusola discussed her work with SCOPE's Abby Plener.

Olusol

aOyele

ye


http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/imagining_past_france/

Welcome to the endof the third issue.

Send us your feedbackand suggestions, and

let’s make the fourth oneeven better, together.

editor@scope-mag. com

mailto:[email protected]

* Page 14, inside

“Cities and towns hold an ambivalent position

within the Indian imaginary. This ambivalence

varies across class and caste lines. Dalits

(former “untouchables”) , for instance, view

cities as places for good fortune, where caste

rules do not apply with the same brutal

intensity as they do in villages. In modern

Indian literature the city is simultaneously

a sign of wonder, a crucible of curiosity,

and a location where individuals lose their

moral anchor—their community—and fall

prey to aggressive individualism. But from a

neo-liberal point of view, cities are primarily

engines for economic growth, and the future

of India’s economy depends on how they are

governed and replicated.”*

scope magazine, summer 2011

Documents

s c o p eart

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steve pyke30