Bahar Noorizadeh and Alena Kavka in Conversation

Alena Kavka:
Kia ora Bahar, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me.

To set the scene, Free to Choose is an operatic financial sci fi or “fi fi” set in Hong Kong after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, in which ex race car driver and CEO Philip Tose travels to the future to borrow money from his older self to bail out his insolvent company. In the background is Milton Friedman, one of the architects of neoliberal economic theory, whom Philip Tose encounters in the future Hong Kong of 2047.

Could you talk about the background of the work and introduce its main characters?

Bahar Noorizadeh:
I was on a residency in Hong Kong in 2019 at Videotage, which was basically the last leg of the uprising in 2019, so it was a very particular time when I landed. At the time, my interests were intersecting around questions of urbanism, urban planning – especially with radical ideas of the city and city design, from communist traditions to what we know as “the global city” – and also economics.

Before landing in Hong Kong, I started this research project that became a film later on, The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism (2021), that was looking at the intersection of social organisation, how economic practice in the Soviet Union basically at some point became entangled with ideas of cybernetics: how network organisation became a form that some communist imaginaries could see ideas of communist planning in.

So, it's funny in a way that that led me to Hong Kong, because then I was thinking of Hong Kong as a formal opposition to this plan, [with] the extrapolation of a kind of highrise mentality, building completely vertically; and then the question of finance, because you go from something that was a communist kind of vision to this city that at some point could be called very socialist in a sense, with the public housing schemes, which [at the time] were one of the most radical on the planet, and then a transition happens where you suddenly see the most lucrative real estate market in Hong Kong. And all of these were just curiosities for me to dig into historically what happened. Very early on, what I realised was how much Hong Kong was central to the neoliberal narrative, especially the Chicago School [of economic thought], with Milton Friedman and people like that.

Milton Friedman, because he always had a storytelling edge to his theories, he needed an object like Hong Kong to become a kind of character for his story of neoliberalism. There was this TV series that he launched in 1980 called “Free to Choose” and the first episode was on Hong Kong, and he was walking around the city and talking about the fabulousness of how the private market has made the best environment on the planet there.

Philip Tose then came much later. [He] was a real person in 1990s Hong Kong. He was one of the founders of a venture capital firm that was one of the prominent ones in Hong Kong. I read that when the economic crash happened, he became a central figure in the story, because basically the financial community threw him under the bus as the central cause of the market crash because of his very risky deals. So, I thought he could become an interesting figure to play out this idea of a venture capitalist who goes to the future to borrow money.

AK:
Yes, a core element of the film is the portrayal of the credit banking system as a time machine. How did you arrive at portraying credit banking in this way?

BN:
I'm borrowing from a lot of literature on finance and thinkers who have been writing on the financial relation, which is something that has been there from the dawn of time, in the figures of gift and promise. Basically, it's part of the fabric of social relations of almost every society, the ritualistic form or format of finance. It's in the basic form of a promissory transaction, and what it means is that, in a transaction, there's always a kind of financial quality, there's always a futural quality in when a gift or an object is handed over and an expectation is built.

But, when we come to what we know as modern finance, I think what happens is that it's not the first time that finance has been linked to monetary or capitalist practice, but we’ve come to the full reign of how the idea of expectation is fully co-opted for capitalist drives. It also has become part of the predictive, calculative mechanism. So, not only it has become capitalised, but because of its full subsumption into capitalist modalities, now it's also calculated. That idea of expectation as something that's looser and more playful goes out of the picture.

So, this is the futural essence of finance, and I basically took the idea of the time travel machine of the credit banking system from economist Yanis Varoufakis, who wrote Talking to My Daughter About the Economy. There’s a beautiful line in that book, “If businessmen are time travellers of our times, bankers are their time travel agents.”

Basically, what it means is that the material kinds of money resources are always extant in the modern regime of finance. The banks themselves don't actually hold the money that people are depositing in them, so a credit card is basically a promise that a bank makes on your behalf when you make purchases, and that promise is based on how much trust the bank has in you being able to deposit it back. You enter this kind of speculative relation with the bank, purely in terms of how creditworthy you are.

AK:
The film confronts a number of contradictions, including this fundamental paradox of Hong Kong as a beacon of neoliberalism and at the same time having once been organised in a relatively socialist manner. I appreciated the irony in the film when Milton Friedman, in the future Hong Kong of 2047, actually wants to go back to the past, now that he sees what it's become.

I wondered whether there's something here about the conflict between the Chicago School’s vision of neoliberalism and “actually existing neoliberalism”, as theorist Michel Feher calls it.

BN:
That vision of the unhappy Milton Friedman in future Hong Kong is directly linked to Michel Feher’s reading of the history of neoliberalism. There are different people who revisit this history of the origins of the neoliberal doctrine. There are different takeaways of how where we are now doesn't really match that first vision.

That's where Feher talks about the figure of the entrepreneur. I mean, Friedman had a problem with businessmen too. He wasn’t up for a form of rampant neoliberalisation in this sense. With all the kinds of visions of the market [the Chicago School economists] had, it didn't quite match this.

What my take is, from my readings of someone like [the economist] Friedrich Hayek, is there's always something a bit more esoteric and a bit more kind of uncapturable about how the market organises the future. The future wasn’t fully a calculative process for them, for Hayek at least. Actually, they’re quite against computation and calculation because they were in a way anti-modernist. That's also what I find very interesting, because that drive to computation, you would see it more in somewhere like the Soviet Union, with communist imaginaries of organisation.

I also think, where we land in the future Hong Kong, with the central bank now as the Central Time Travel Agency, there's this return to monopolies, which I think the Chicago School was also not fully for. Their image of the freedom of the entrepreneurial system had to break the monopoly form, hence Friedman's disgruntlement with the businessman as trying to jam everything into their own asset portfolio.

So, that vision of the future is very much in line with what's happening now. We’re going deeper and deeper into a form of monopoly capital that states must have a role in because this is a fully militarised world we're living in now, and it's going to get worse. So, in a way we’re moving towards a monopolized techno-capital sovereignty complex. The nation-state is going to have more of a central role in the future, it seems like, not less.

AK:
Indeed, Hong Kong now has one of the world's most lucrative housing markets, and one of the largest wealth gaps, despite having once had the highest rate of public housing in the world.

Aotearoa New Zealand went through its own history of rapid neoliberal reforms in the 1980s, shifting from a heavily protectionist postwar welfare state. Similarly to Hong Kong, it now has stark wealth inequality and a housing crisis, which is driven by speculation and compounded by a colonial fantasy of property ownership.

You’ve spoken about this transition in Hong Kong from social housing to rampant speculation and privatisation, so I was struck in the film by the networked “blob architecture” that Phillip Tose encounters when he arrives in the future Hong Kong, which is a massive entity that stretches across cities and towns.

BN:
That is in some sense my hallucination on a real plan in action, which is kind of like the Chinese Silicon Valley project called the Pearl River Delta, this sprawling mega city that is going to run from Guangzhou to Hong Kong to Macau.

I was trying to, I think in a twisted way, imagine that as a social housing block, but also it basically became a kind of sprawling city. It's a bit of a contradictory kind of notion. It's almost like the disurbanist plans of the Network City,^[1] which was supposed to run on high-speed trains. So, you have high-speed elevators taking the workers back to the suburban areas, because I was just trying to imagine, how would labour look like? How would movement to the city look like?

There are many different versions of the idea of urban sprawl that we are seeing now that are quite the opposite of the disurbanist vision; what we are facing now is hyper-centralisation in major cities and further removal of the working class into what someone like Mike Davis calls “the slumification of the planet.”

AK:
I wanted to ask you about the format of the film as an opera, how that came about, and how that relates to the concepts of urbanism and economics that you wanted to explore.

BN:
The process of making the film was very collaborative. When we came to building Free to Choose as the film, I worked with a group of friends, Waste Paper Opera (Klara Kofen, James Oldham, Gary Zhexi Zhang and Anna Palmer) and Rudá Babau who was my collaborator for a while on animation.

Waste Paper Opera had already collaborated with Gary Zhexi Zhang on another operatic piece on finance, and so we thought that this would be a second iteration of the financial opera. When we started talking, there was a common interest around the form of spectacle and the form of surplus energy that finance produces, and that surplus always being part of opera since the Renaissance to its Victorian form.

Later, specifically with Klara Klofen, we were thinking about mutual interests in the sentiments that capitalism organises and that sentimental space of opera, and also that element of role play and theater. We were trying to think through the idea of role play, and all these ideas we discussed about how capitalism now lands in a stage where everyone's in a way role-playing a character and trying to extract themselves as much as possible from the material context where their bodies are placed in.

AK:
I wonder whether you could talk about how finance relates to fiction, which is an idea elaborated on in the book Catastrophe Time, which you also worked on with Gary Zhexi Zhang. One of the ideas explored in the book is finance’s relationship to fiction as a technology of belief, albeit with very material consequences.

BN:
I feel like the idea of fiction to me is always a little bit of an unconscious lack that I go around to redefine my relationship to [it], because I did start my practice as an experimental fiction filmmaker, and literature, theatre, plays, and drama always had a big role in my practice from early on.

But I feel also what we are facing is a moment of post-truth, and information just being a matter of who has the means and the infrastructure to produce what kind of narrative that would run for a certain agenda.

I am critical towards a generic idea of fiction, especially in the art world… What kind of fictions are we actually discussing? How much reach do they have and how aware are they of the economic and the socio-economic infrastructures that make them usable or useful in a certain sense, or what do they generate?

In that sense, I feel like it always needs an analysis of what the fiction means in our time. That's how I also come to finance, because at the intersection of the financial world and technological advancements, and where these kinds of mega-capitalist platform models are driving the world to, that’s where I detect a monopoly on the production of a particular kind of fiction.

That then raises the question of when we, artists, produce a work to be shown in a white cube gallery for a certain kind of audience, what our project becomes then in countering the thematics of our critique, when we talk about counter-fictions or counter-imaginaries. How can we be aware of the forms of distribution, the forms of display? Obviously, it doesn't [compare] to the scale of how the other side, the enemy, is producing these fictions. But what can we do from the site of this diagnosis?

So, I'm also in conflict with fiction. I really appreciate practices like Forensic Architecture, because I think in a field of fiction, they're kind of holding a ground for almost a structuralist notion of such a thing as a fact that can be investigated, and there's kind of an appreciation for techniques of investigation. I also teach a class at Design Academy in Eindhoven, which is called “Investigative Moving Image.” We start from the idea of a world that is run on technofictions, and how we can reclaim investigation in a world where journalism has fallen apart and the media is completely captured by what we just described.

AK:
I'm keen to return to this idea of technofiction, particularly in a colonial context.

To return to the Hong Kong of 1997, I was interested to draw out the relationship between Hong Kong as a testing ground for neoliberalism and its colonial context.

There's a particular clip played in the film of Margaret Thatcher leaving a meeting with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping over the future of Hong Kong’s sovereignty, where she trips and falls down some stairs. So, there is a link made there between neoliberalism, with Thatcher as the spearhead, and British imperial interests in Hong Kong.

BN:
When I was there in 2019, I could feel that the general sentiment is that the British intervention in Hong Kong was benevolent, and it wasn't as harmful as elsewhere in the world or other colonial stories, which you always have to dig deeper into.

But for me, time travel again became an important form, because you might not find the presence of the British government exactly now, but you can see that extended timeline of the spectre of colonialism that is still hanging over the city. The same with the Chinese role.

I wanted to keep both states as still [being] present in what this moment of hyper-financialisation means for Hong Kong. That is, the temporal looping of these different stages in Hong Kong's development, but also the boomerang loops, once these colonial sites become the testing grounds for certain ideas, there's the boomerang effect; immediately, they're transposed into the UK or New Zealand. So, the spectre really can be seen in the different sites and different temporalities at the same time.

Then at the end we come back to this line, that “the British had never left, and China has already been there throughout these decades.” This is also my kind of historical materialist preference, especially at very tense moments of uprising or social movements, to be able to deconstruct and extract that moment into the materialist presence of all these different eras that live in a moment, where it seems as though the tension is between a people and a state or a people and a certain entity, not the long timeline of racial colonial capitalism.

AK:
For the past three years New Zealand has been led by a centre- to far-right coalition government, which has been invested in advancing business interests while rolling back Indigenous rights that had been enshrined in legislation many years before. So, it's helpful to be able to expand this moment to see where those influences come from.

One thing that I am interested in with these parallels between Hong Kong and New Zealand is both countries as sites of technocapitalist fantasy. New Zealand has been made very attractive not only to property developers but venture capitalists, particularly, in the construction of AI data centres and the space industry, but also doomsday bunkers. I’m interested in this post-apocalyptic imaginary that transforms colonies or former colonies into the sites of a post-apocalyptic, neocolonial, post-Western civilisation.

BN:
This was already something in Free to Choose, but I expanded from it in my works that came after, the idea of the global zonification that Quinn Slobodian talks about in Crack-Up Capitalism.

I think you see it in the new libertarian drive to seasteading, building communities on the sea. It's a combination of something psychically charged with a dystopian image of the future where the rich have to save themselves. Of course, it derives from the fantasies of Martian travels, et cetera.

I feel there's also something very strange about the geological shape of an island that they're really driven to. There's something about an island that makes them feel protected from the intervention from outside. They just like to be somewhere on the water on their own. It’s a very kind of isolationist psychic paradigm.

Actually, Slobodian talks about it in his book, one of the forerunners of seasteading and the libertarian movement is the grandson of Milton Friedman, a very weird figure. One thing they're also really fascinated by is LARPing, Live Action Role Play. They run these freaky LARPs on islands to relive medieval times. Annually they gather in different places. So, there's a kind of a cultural leg to how they want to implement these new plans that's really weird.

AK:
Something you've explored elsewhere is this idea of worldbuilding or financial worldbuilding, which feels really related to LARPing.

BN:
This is also related to that question of technofictions and the fictions of finance, because it has also something to do with gamification, role play as a way of not having your skin in the game, to act out a fantasy where you're not actually physically involved.

I think that also has a lot to do with how the media regime these days has occupied all spheres of the social. Social interaction has become basically about risk-free involvement in social and political life via the phone’s interface.

AK:
Do you have any advice for artists and cultural workers in navigating these financialised times?

BN:
I feel like since making those films, so much has happened to the world and myself. I feel like I went through a whole transformation myself, and I know a lot of people have been going through very turbulent times, but also hopefully something that could be generative for the question of production and the question of creativity.

Basically I feel like where financialisation in the art world has driven us to is towards a space of  full publicity, that everything happens in the public space (of primarily social media), and anything that happens in public space immediately turns into a kind of symbolic capital, and we are basically managers of that reputational capital, to use the words of Michel Feher, Emily Rosamond, and others. We’re basically portfolio managers for how we conduct ourselves pretty much online.

But, in terms of thinking about a form of militancy, which is my question now, how can artists think about forms of radicality and militancy at a time when everything has been serving the production of the image and an image that pretty much is going more and more generic and in its artificial reproduction? How much stake does the image, in its broad sense of sensory practices, hold?

I'm thinking more myself in terms of carving out spaces of privacy. Not the private space of how capitalism pretends there's such a thing as privacy, or capitalises on it, but how can we build communities of private actors on a form of sociality that's not so immediately in the public eye and so easily capturable by the now dormant symbolic regime?

It seems very counterintuitive because also then we face the problem that people have to eat. Artists need to make money. But, for me, at least, I'm thinking about, and maybe it's a bit old school, but trying to create a separation between a creative process that is not immediately monetisable and what we do as a job.

And maybe our jobs are still as artists, but then we can still hold a place for a form of creativity that's not in the public sphere. I don't know how that might look. I'm trying it for myself, and if I get to any more concrete resolutions, I’ll let you know.