propositions press

mic check'd! the best from america, 2011

By the one-month mark Occupy Wall Street had gone from a ragtag activist question mark to a movement tying together all parts of the left spectrum that changed the national political conversation from a vapid argument over Democrat and Republican debt ceiling posturing to a substantive one about income inequality, financial industry irresponsibility, and freedoms of speech and assembly. Over those same crucial weeks from the middle of October to the end of November, the movement grew and mutated, spread across the country, and evolved as a culture of political engagement. One of the hallmarks of the Occupy culture—and one of the first indicators of OWS as a new political culture—is the human mic, identified early on as an innovation by necessity, a creative technique born of and against the absurd amplification restrictions placed on the Zuccotti occupation. It is therefore accurate to say that every time the human mic is used, it is a performance with roots in resistance and a reproduction of what makes OWS its own political creation, that is to say, a political reality. That partly explains why the mic check was readily spun off by activists from its native milieu of the General Assembly and deployed as a technique of confrontational intervention in hostile spaces. Even as a tool of confrontation and invasion into the spaces of the 1%, as opposed to a device used for internal organizational communication, the human mic reproduces the movement whenever used.

For me, the first attention to the mic check as a protest tactic came in a post to the nettime mailing list dated Friday, November 11, 2011:

Dear nettimers,

it seems like the MIC CHECK, the ritualistic practice of amplifying a

speaker's voice in public space through call and response, is now

migrating from cities and squares to public (or semi-public) events held

by the authorities in various venues. Basically, protesters bring with

themselves a text and engage in call and response so as to overcome the

amplified voice of authority. A very simple tactic, but quite effective,

as you can see from the videos below.

 

The first powerful action that I know of was held at the Panel for

Education Policy in New York on October 26:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbmjMickJMA

 

Then Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (the union-buster) was mic-checked

at the Chicago's Union League Club on November 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oHRdiklTlU&feature=share

 

And yesterday Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann was

mic-checked by a group of students in Charleston, SC:

http://mountpleasant-sc.patch.com/articles/bachmann-talks-foreign-policy-at-yorktown#video-8403501

I can see this spreading so as to become one of the favorite forms of

contestation of the Occupy Movement. It would be interesting to know

whether someone is working on a social history of the Mic Check.

Enjoy,

Snafu

 

I have not worked on the said social history, but I have been keeping an inventory of incidents in which activists have “mic check’d” political opponents, corporate heads or representatives, or even the consumer public.

Now that more than two dozen such interventions have been carried out, recorded, and circulated via Youtube, from all parts of the US, it is time to make some distinctions on how these events went down, and how well the documentation communicates. In general, what I find interesting is the use of the open source tactic, combined with the lo-tech versatility in terms of where and when it is used. The recognizability of the form makes for a unified movement culture no matter the different kinds of content, even if the verbiage is very particular to that target, event, or locality. Precisely because the content is changeable, even more importantly, affect and emotion is largely unified across all the events. Righteous outrage, monopolized in idiotic form not so long ago by Tea Party-types, belongs to the left once again, along with a small and just right dose of true pain exposed (see the Lindsay Graham and the John Stumpf actions, below). Because the content is tailored to the particular event, the outrage is genuine, and after watching a few of these, that is really what gets communicated.

That said, through all these actions I can see the limits of the mic check as an effective action. The events featuring well-protected, well-practiced figures of national stature speaking in front of large audiences are more difficult to hijack. The action becomes a disruption rather than a takeover, an illustration of how unreachable, insulated, and repressive they really are. As with the mic checking of Karl Rove. On the other hand, functionaries who have no public role, who rarely get confronted by the 99%, who probably don’t even think of themselves as doing the work of the 1%, are less quick to defend themselves from the lectern, and thus are easier targets for a full human mic takeover.

It is difficult to generalize about the venues and spaces. One might think that the more elite the institution, the more tightly controlled the event space, and the quicker the demonstrators will be tossed out. Not true. Probably the most beautifully complete takeover of an event occurred at Princeton University—about as elite as it gets in the world of the 1%. There the mic text was based on the university’s motto and includes a searing self-critique of the school’s privileged campus culture. Three cheers. 

As the calendar year turns, the Occupy movement seems most likely to grow in at least two directions. First, that of housing activism, anti-eviction campaigns, and foreclosure occupations—ie defending and making our homes in a small and personal sense. And second, in the direction of stopping the Keystone pipeline, anti-fracking, and on other environmental fronts, ie defending and making our home on an ecosystemic level. If this be the case, then new elements of the Occupy culture are bound to emerge. But to send off 2011 and bring in a New Year of ever better and greater occupations, here are my annotated favorite mic check action videos. Visitors, comrades, and fellow citizens, enjoy.

9. Karl Rove Get Mic Check’d at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlko7nweb4k

Unlike the politicians he influences, Rove is not under any pressure to respond decorously. Even so, Rove proves himself unbalanced and quick to anger, leading a grouchy one-man counter chant. Apparently he still suffers from the instant defensiveness of being held responsible for two failed wars on foreign lands. If the mic check works sometimes only as a disruptor, this was a good one of those. Make them drag you out. Even though the action is not a successful takeover, the marriage of form (war at home) and content (wars abroad) satisfies.

8. Minnesotans Confront Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsybOu8VJ28

This group gets kicked out pretty fast by some pushy business school security workers. The intervention turns into a human mic rally outside the venue featuring an impressive young woman who tells her story of Wells Fargo’s treatment of her parents as homeowners who had never missed a payment for over twenty years, including for two years after they lost their jobs. It is heartbreaking. Also of note, John Stumpf may be the only person who has thus far been mic check’d at two separate events (the other in North Carolina).

7. Occupy El Paso Mic Checks Walmart on Black Friday, El Paso, Texas http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9lamTknxnw

I for one did not know that there was an Occupy El Paso. I love the emphasis of this mic check: low pay, poor working conditions, and important everywhere but especially in El Paso, the poverty rates in the Hispanic population. And c’mon, to have the human mic take over the ambient media voices of an electronics department in a Walmart is just great on the face of it. The Occupy El Paso brigade looks to be an anarcho-youth posse, which always makes a corporate retail environment more interesting.

6. Chancellor Gets Mic Check’d at University of Oregon Statutory Faculty Meeting, Eugene, Oregon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uvA8u5WDww&feature=endscreen&NR=1

The mic check brigade makes a point specific to a UO governance and hiring controversy here, but links it to the wider trends of corporate culture invading the public universities. I love that the amplified voice of authority sounds both more hysterical and less understandable than the human mic. The activists remained seated, seem to have not been escorted out, and finished with a courteous “Thank you!” Also notable is the space, a major conference university basketball arena. Only 249 views of the video as of Xmas night? Let’s change that.

5. Senator Lindsay Graham Mic Check’d at Private Fundraiser, Washington DC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmEiREqvUMg

This is probably the most intimate confrontation of an elected public official in my portfolio of bookmarked videos. I hate to give it up to Lindsay Graham—he’s such a slime—but he went for the dialogue and that is way more than most of the politicians have done. Of course, he was essentially captive to the group as this intervention was something close to a genuine temporary occupation, so he did not have much choice. Along with the whole idea of crashing intimate gatherings to begin with, the personalized confrontations are an excellent strategy when the target is this close because it leaves the man no room for hiding behind platitudes. Compared to the videos listed here that have none, the basic text intro and outro are helpful. Activists ought to take the time to add them.

4. Gas Industry Event Mic Check’d at the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9jQXop_6RiU

Ah, here we go, a complete takeover. Industry flacks are defenseless in the medium sized lecture hall. Student activists deliver an uninterrupted speech calling out the industry for its lies, and condemning it for the environmental damage and cyclical economy the millenial generation refuses to accept. The speech seamlessly ends in a militant chant, to which the students march out. The text intros and outros are more informative than in #5 above. Excellent on all levels but one. I would have liked to hear the speech tie in some public university funding or governance issues.

3. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Mic Check’d at Union League Club, Chicago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oHRdiklTlU&feature=related

This was a contentious intervention on a couple of levels, but exemplary in its success. On the intramovement level, the action was designed and carried out by the labor activists of Stand Up! Chicago and the teachers’ union, but not by Occupy Chicago. Occupy Chicago activists refused on principle to buy the entrance tickets to this private event, but many Occupy partisans expressed solidarity by protesting Walker’s appearance outside the building. The activists inside also had to deal with a shouting battle against the governor’s regressive supporters, and the activists won. The video is edited down to an effective narrative and captioned in full for total communication. The language of the event’s human mic brings together Chicago city and Wisconsin state austerity politics, and even gives voice to the Occupy Chicago arrestees. The tag team lead voice technique is also used here to great tactical effect, seeming to confuse the security people. Finally, it is not just me who despises Governor Walker. Stand Up! Chicago knew that mic checking Walker would guarantee the video an audience, since there are now many thousands of Wisconsinites working to rid their state of him. The views stand at 320k-plus.

2. Occupy DC Mic Checks Big Insurance at Chamber of Commerce Event, Washington, DC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ1_Pebu5Tc

I love this first woman, playing lead voice while shooing away the big security guard giving her chase. Note that the tag teaming is performed to the prolonged maximum here. The language of the intervention is a great example of the conversation-changing spin of the Occupy movement. They don’t speak solely of big insurance as parasite, but specify Scott Serota’s bloated salary as proof of the broken healthcare system. And not least, this was apparently broadcast live on C-SPAN. Probably not a huge audience, but I am sure there were a lot of surprised viewers. The middle aged activists play right into the sympathies of what I imagine to be the middle aged and older viewership of C-SPAN. And the Chamber of Commerce? Talk about taking the intervention to the heart of the beast.

1. JP Morgan-Chase Mic Check’d at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ0J_HUsRaI

Another beautiful takeover, from the 1% to the 1%. The corporate shills never stand a chance. It cannot but tap at the heart when seeing the youth of the privileged class demanding that the institutions of the 1% live up to their billing as the standard bearers of service and stewardship. It is the beginning of their radicalization. And 49k views cannot be sneezed at.

 

SHoP, justseeds, ivaw: printing views and conversation this weekend

Two events this Saturday, December 3, one in Chicago, one in New York, both have to do with printing, with contributions from me.

In Chicago, South Side Projections will be screening Typeface, the Kartemquin documentary about the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. April Sheridan of CBPA put together a small show of letterpress work to go along with the film. I'll be bringing a couple of pieces to show. Plus, there will be a roundtable discussion after the film on the history and future of letterpress. Respondents include film director Justine Nagan, April Sheridan, Martha Chiplis of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Celene Aubrey of the Lillstreet Art Center, and me.

Event starts at 7 pm, but the venue, SHoP, will have activity going all afternoon, too.

5638 South Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, Illinois

Full details on the SHoP website.

*

The New York event is the reception for the brand new War Is Trauma print portfolio from Justseeds and IVAW. I'm proud to say, not only did I contribute a print to this collection, but I helped Nicolas Lampert and Sgt. Aaron Hughes print the portfolio covers on my SP-15. We did it on Combat Paper, no less.

7 - 10pm
@ Booklyn, 37 Greenpoint Ave. 4th Floor,                                                                                    Brooklyn, New York

The show will be up from December 3, 2011 - January 8, 2012. Full details on the Justseeds blog.

The portfolio is a terrific collection of thirty-some prints by a combination of Justseeds artists,

Josh MacPhee (Brooklyn)
Mary Tremonte (Pittsburgh)
Kevin Caplicki (Brooklyn)
Chris Stain (Queens)
Thea Gahr (Portland, OR)
Bec Young (Pittsburgh)
Erik Ruin (Philadelphia)
Pete Yahnke (Albuquerque)
Alec Dunn (Portland, OR)
Colin Matthes (Milwaukee)
Nicolas Lampert (Milwaukee)
Jesse Purcell (Montreal)
Roger Peet (Portland, OR)
Molly Fair (Brooklyn),
Santiago Armengod (Mexico City)
Shaun Slifer (Pittsburg)
Dylan AT Miner (E. Lansing)

 IVAW artists,

Drew Cameron (Army Veteran, Vermont)
Joyce Wagner (Marine Veteran, Pittsburgh)
Aaron Hughes (IL Army National Guard Veteran, Chicago)
Jeremy Bergren (Marine Veteran, North Carolina)
Peter Sullivan (IL Army National Guard Veteran, Chicago)
Chris Arendt (MI Army National Guard Veteran, Michigan)
Malachi Muncy (TX Army National Guard Veteran, Texas)
Ash Kyrie (WI Army National Guard Veteran, Wisconsin)

and a handful of invited "allies" of those two organizations: 

Bay Area Civilian Soldier Alliance: Siri Margerin and Nave Fortin 
Michael Rakowitz (Chicago)
Marshall Weber (Booklyn Artists Alliance, Brooklyn, NY)
Harrell Fletcher and Transformazium with Brettiny Hucks
Gayla Jean Clemons
Deon Archie
Deshon LeGrand (Portland, OR / Braddock, PA)
Temporary Services (Chicago, Philadelphia, Copenhagen)

And me, as a late addition to the allies list. Nicolas called me up to see if I could make a 16x12 print in an edition of 130 less than three weeks before the deadline. Of course I had to say yes! 

the getaway that left questions

Walking home from the hardware store, I was lost in my own thoughts when a rising gutteral roar turned my head. My eyes settled on a remarkable scene unfolding in comical slow motion across the street from me. The first thing I saw was a young pale-faced man in a name-patch uniform lumbering across the lot of a BP gas station, apparently at a full sprint, but weighed down and misbalanced by a beer gut so big that he might have rolled faster than he could run. Then I saw what he was running after. Super loud but super slow, a rust-eaten nineties mufflerless Caprice with a young black man about two-thirds reclined behind the wheel lurched out of the lot, accelerating at a rate just barely faster than the man on foot. For another two seconds it was a contest, but the car gained in momentum what the belly lost. The chase went into the street but after another moment it was all over except for the cursing.

I deduced what had happened easily enough, but the meaning of the event is not so simple to determine. To my mind the story of this one event can be interpreted in at least three ways.

1)    It was a routine drive-off from the pump, the kind of loss-leading nuisance that vexes small retailers daily, the costs of which are built into the price of purchase.

2)    It was a counterproductive assertion of entitlement, feeding the perception in the secure spaces of white America of a growing and increasingly dangerous black and brown criminal underclass.

3)    It was an act of everyday resistance, a concrete, elemental, but banalized fuck you of the kind for which even the anti-capitalist activists of Occupy Wall Street essentially lack the guts.

These interpretations do not hold mutually exclusive purchase. In fact, all of them make sense simultaneously because of the subject positions in play, not only across the spectrum of positions but within them. Consider the players. First there is the station attendant. Then the driver/perpetrator. There was a white man watching from one of the other pumps. And there was me, witnessing from across the street. The multiple interpretations move across the complexities of and between these subject positions.

My first assumption was that the paying customer at the pump would tend toward interpretation number (2), but who knows; there are ostensibly anti-racist white leftists around here among whose questionable ideological merits include the capacity to rationalize even the most anti-social of behaviors on the part of African American persons. There was part of me that hoped the driver himself harbored a feeling going in the direction of number (3), but it was probably more like a perpetrator’s perspective on number (1); he was likely already thinking about how to get his next tank of gas as he pulled into traffic. He already had to seek out a non-pre-pay station for a fast one, and how far could he get on a single tank of gas, in a guzzler? For the station attendant thinking about his job—how to explain the incident to his boss, maybe having to fill out a theft report—number (1) might be the go-to interpretation. But the driver was an African American man, with all the stereotypical indicators of an inner city migrant, quite out of place in Middleton, Wisconsin, a town less than 2% African American. With an outsized pride of place, some residents of Middleton (adjacent to where I live in Madison) actually believe that Middleton is one of the country’s “best places to live,” as trumpeted in mainstream media reports. Would these factors of race and social exclusivity figure into the station attendant assigning number (2) as a meaning? 

Finally, the station was a BP. After feeling the frustration of both last year’s impotent post-Deepwater Horizon boycott campaign against BP stations, demonstrating that consumers really do not have the power to meaningfully punish transnational corporations, and of the current inability of the Occupy movement to exercise a power beyond changing the national conversation (which I acknowledge is huge, gratefully), I tended to see the episode as an example of number (3). I was actually glad to witness an action that could be described an unapologetic fuck you—after all the devastation (which is still inconclusively known, but constantly upped in estimation) in the Gulf of Mexico and BP’s proven impunity—finally! Inarticulate or not, politically meaningful or not, counterproductive as it was, for one short moment, in my mind I quietly saluted the driver.

But then I felt terrible afterward, for the knowledge that the tendency toward racial profiling in an area where even I, a Chinese American, routinely get stared at had just been fed the equivalent of an energy drink by this young man's action. Also for what such an act of disobedience says about the conundrum facing the Occupy movement. That is to say, significant parts of the Occupy movement must show that they can make progress in creatively addressing the system it critiques, opposes, and abandons, as one that is fundamentally racist. But the all-important African American street element, having suffered thirty years of massive incarceration and everyday police repression, is basically neither politically present nor self-consciously politicized, made up of individuals existing in survival mode, same as the driver of the Caprice.

Finally and not least, I felt the negativity of the continued erosion of trust that goes along with another business perhaps deciding to safeguard against theft through pre-pay means. On the other hand, why should the self-satisfied town of Middleton expect a different standard of public trust than what millions of people live with in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, and other places across the region? Another salute....

I witnessed a crime. Or was it an act of resistence?

These questions follow:

Is an interpretation informed by racism in any way a reasonable response?

If not, then how does one begin to address racism when those who racially profile their fellow citizens believe it reasonable?

What hope have we that the everyday daring of the most economically desperate become self-consciously politicized? 

How do those of us who are less daring than we need to be model ourselves on the driver and inflict a pain, no matter how small, measureable in units other than webpage hits?

 

psychedelic recall

“What’s going on in this country, it’s fascism, simple as that.”

The stranger who spoke those words to me had not attended and did not even know about the Saturday noontime rally on Capitol Square, at which there was an estimated crowd of 40,000 celebrating the recently launched campaign to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. On the square the spirits were high, and the consciousness evident. This was the massive and genuinely popular Wisconsin movement, again visibly churning to life. But the critical pronouncment above came neither from the rally stage nor from any of the scores of petition-gathering volunteers, nor from a protest sign. It came later that evening, from the mouth of the guy in his early 50s sitting next to me at the Furthur show.

“The people are distracted by this bullshit corporate media, which is all lies and pure bullshit. What’s that show, Three Men and a Half, or some shit. Fuckin’ bullshit. And in the meantime the rich are putting up a police state, and nobody fuckin’ notices. They’re defunding schools, keeping people stupid. It’s fascism!”

This man was pissed, possibly in despair, but clear-sighted. When I asked him what he did for a living, he admitted embarrassment and then proceeded to tell me all about the new gold rush of the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, where he has been working as a contractor for six months at a time. He was embarrassed because, as he put it, “It’s a goddam free for all out there, 4 billion barrels of recoverable oil, maybe more, with no consideration for any kind of environmental responsibility. And it’s insulated. You don’t see any big oil company that you’d recognize. Only Halliburton, and a lot of companies like Halliburton that nobody’s every heard of. It’s fucked up. I hate it.”

And right then the band went into Throwing Stones.

Picture a bright blue ball, just spinning, spinnin free,
Dizzy with eternity.
Paint it with a skin of sky,
Brush in some clouds and sea,
Call it home for you and me.

This encounter did not happen at a political rally. Or did it? I spent $110 on two Furthur shows this weekend, outside Chicago and in Madison. Very un-critical art of me. Not radical.

It was great.

Not because the boys opened the party with a raging Sugar Magnolia and Chimenti wailed the keys on a tightly shuffling Stagger Lee in Friday’s first set, or because they hit the euphoric passages of The Eleven and St. Stephen with full, thunderous volume in the second set. And not because they offered up favorite cover Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues in Saturday night’s first set, or because the band pummeled Viola Lee Blues and Bobby crushed the vocals on Death Don’t Have No Mercy in the second set.

Those are some of the reasons the shows were excellent for Deadheads, something I most certainly am. But these nights were not merely about Dead fandom. They were about an old counterculture meeting a new moment of economic and cultural upheavel.

The thoughts that came to me during the shows had to do with if and how those nights connected with the times of the heterogenous psychedelic counterculture before “Deadhead” gained meaning as a defined subcultural identity, and which had emerged visibly already by the early and mid-70s. Having come into the scene in the age of the mega-Dead (from 1987 on—basically the years after Garcia’s diabetic coma), aesthetically speaking the ur-mythical early days had always felt rather remote, even with Captain Trips on stage. By then the concert experiences had become packaged and predictable, all the more so for having attained the status of a major concert draw. By the 90s, the band was falling apart in terms of internal communication and the concert experience ran on the fumes of cliches. I had tickets to two shows at The Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan, in 1992. The first show was so flat that my friend and I gave our tickets to the second show to some “miracle”-seeking fans, who looked extra-pathetic given the sorry performance they were dying to see.

By contrast, the Furthur shows of this past weekend were meaningful on an intellectual and aesthetic level I have never felt before. The shows were great because they gave me time, space, and stimulation to think—and feel—through the political sensations of our day. To really stop and wonder about this cultural moment in America, in so many ways seeming to be on the edge of a cliff—or, more promisingly, on the take-off edge of a growth spurt of a kind. That Furthur remains a direct link to some of the most important American cultural experiments of the Sixties—open-ended, bravely good humored, at once literati and working class, astonishingly amateur, and selectively provincial—figured importantly in the experience.

My musing began with the questions, what does it mean for a few thousand people to gather for an evening party, many of them wigged out on mushrooms, Ecstasy, or acid, plus copious amounts of grass, shaking to music supplied by a fresh-sounding and expertly performing outfit directly descended from the original house band for the Acid Tests of forty-six years ago? What does it mean for this event to be happening in a time of unrest, persistent economic crisis, and a general deep questioning of values? Can a form of hedonistic revelry borne out of a turbulent and revolutionary time from a generation and a half ago maintain purchase on a measure of meaning that goes beyond a consumer experience—and maybe even opens doors to new pleasures and, therefore, desires? What are the changed structural circumstances, from then to now, that might limit the reach of the experience, or re-inscribe fresh meanings?

The discontents and desires out there, products of a generalized injustice, so personally felt and expressed in the America of 2011, had me reaching for the poignancy of forty year-old lyrics, my ears pulling them out of the mix. See the romantic indignation of Hunter’s losers and wharf rats.

Half of my life
I spent doin’ time for
some other fucker’s crime…

Measured in pure pleasure, the Rosemont show was the better of the two. It was a happy crowd, ready for a high energy party. The first set put us on notice. The band was tight. The unusually coherent second set, full of high points and seamless transitions, took me to the recordings of the early Seventies, the mindfully groovey playing I never got to hear in the late Grateful Dead. I could only think, so this is what this music is supposed to feel like. Music sung to the hassled longhairs of 1969, newly resonant in the contested space that is brutalized Occupy America, 2011. A basic message we can all relate to, from Ron Paul supporters to the drummers of Zucotti, and everbody who has been hassled post 9/11—which is to say, everybody. Get off our backs. Let us be. Stop telling us what to do.

Ooo, Freedom!

 Ooo, Liberty!

Oh-wo, leave me alone

I want to find my own way home

I expected the Madison show to have some discernible political vibe, simply because of the setting—there were sure to be recall campaign volunteers out, fans with buttons and Wisconsin solidarity t-shirts on. Appropriately, the music was darker than the previous night’s jolly ride, more bluesy, sadder songs, and hard driving rock. Less ecstatic.

Saturday night’s message seemed to be that nowadays, we are losers, all of us. But we can wallow together if we are fortunate enough to escape the various wars (dodging the draft then, evading the creditors now), score a ticket and a ride. And for an evening at least, a diversion of mind and body that might be more than only a diversion, with the right dosage and preparation, can still be had.

It used to be said that the Grateful Dead weren’t the best at what they do, they were they only ones who do what they do. That is no longer true, and hasn’t been for quite some time. The second generation jam bands, not to mention the modern psychedelia of techno tribes and orchestral pop, reached maturity long ago. Now the kids have a lot of choices. Consequently, the Madison show wasn’t a sellout. Not even close. The upper sections were were sparsely attended, mostly with people who wanted lots of space to “white person wiggle,” as Jim DeRogatis would say. But the floor was another story. It was full, with many from the upper reaches having come down. And here again, as I scanned the floor party, I wondered, is this what those 70s Winterland shows felt like—intimate and non-glamorous, and decidedly not the hottest ticket in town?

Like my discontented new friend—whom I never would have met at an activist event, or at Mess Hall, or through a critical art project—people are back to speaking and working against the system, and most importantly, hating it while having to make do in it. 

We used to play for silver, now we play for life;
And one's for sport and one's for blood at the point of a knife.
And now the die is shaken, now the die must fall.
There ain't a winner in the game, he don't go home with all.
Not with all.

For me, the guy made the occasion more than a party. Maybe not a political rally, but even better, a politicized reenactment of Deadhead social memory once in danger of being permanently overtaken by stylized consumerism and now returned to the truth of an aesthetic experience, a pre-enactment of times to come. We are going “furthur” indeed, both forward and back.

*lyrics from Throwing Stones, Wharf Rat, Liberty, and Jack Straw.

 

from wisconsin, on OWS and post-democracy

During the Great National Debt Ceiling (non-)Debate of 2011, when President Obama stood his ground after giving it away first, like many of my fellow Americans I called and emailed the offices of my US senator and my congressional representative. I urged my senator, the ultra-regressive Ron Johnson, to vote for the debt ceiling-increase plan, and I advised my congressperson, liberal Tammy Baldwin to vote against the House version of the bill. In the end, Ron Johnson blew off my opinion and voted against it. Tammy Baldwin honored it and voted against it. I sent an email to Senator Johnson expressing my disappointment, and an email to Ms. Baldwin applauding her for listening to her constituents. 

Did you get that? On my score card Johnson voted against it and did the wrong thing. Baldwin voted against it and did the right thing. Huh? 

The thinking was this: voting against the bill would be handing the regressives a victory in their effort to sabotage the US economy; this invented crisis was their method of blackmailing the American public into accepting draconian cuts to social spending. From this position, the conclusion was that Senator Johnson needed to hear from constituents opposed to his extreme regressive tendencies. So, call his office and lodge a tally in the Vote Yes column. 

For her part, Tammy Baldwin always needs encouragement to uphold the progressive standard she proudly advertises but frequently fails to deliver. As noted, President Obama gave away the ranch even before getting the Republicans to the table. No self-respecting defender of social priorities could possibly vote for such an insult. So, call her office and tell her to stand up to the assault by voting No.

In the end the bill passed, with the No votes cast by a bunch of Tea Party greenhorns who had gleefully put Speaker Boehner’s panties in a twist, and a cadre of progressives who couldn’t stomach the bill’s passage without lodging a principled refusal to take part in the charade. Nevermind that the Great (non-)Debate has already been forgotten, more or less, in just the several months between then and now. The absurdity of the actual vote—what those votes represented, and how complex positions mixed with ideological posturing cannot be reduced to a yes or no vote—not only remains, but is replayed every single time an ideologically written bill comes to the floor of the legislative chambers. Which is to say, now, all the time. 

Governing by lowest common denominator may work in periods of equilibrium, but dysfunction and the exacerbation of crises are all but guaranteed when a society deals with urgent challenges using the blunt tool of majority rule in an oligarchical representative democracy. Tactical voting and manipulative campaigning (was I secretly trying to get Senator Johnson to vote No?) against ever more preordained outcomes only makes the base level limitations more obvious. Though I tell the story above as a personal experience, it is a mass phenomenon, experienced by millions every day. The absurdity of the participatory experience can no longer mask the essential disenfranchisement that supports the cheap veneer of a functioning democracy. Though perhaps most acute in the US, with the unrestricted amounts of money now warping the electoral process beyond repair, the limits of democracy are felt in all variations of the parliamentary system, and in all presidential systems, the world over. Judged by the standards of effectively tackling the problems faced by societies, representative democracies as functioning systems are the exception, not the rule. 

*

As the existing system proves itself incapable of addressing the needs of ordinary people, an out of whack economy, and ecologies on the brink—and, most fundamentally, the crisis of political participation itself—other systems, embryonic and half-blind, emerge, wherever they can. The most evident emergence of a non-parliamentary system from recent times is the process at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement, that is, the direct democracy of the General Assembly. Owing much to the long history of group process identified with movements of social justice and egalitarianism, going back directly to the councils of Seattle, the cultures of consensus in the social experiments of the 60s and 70s, the workers assemblies of revolutionary Catalonia, the voteless decision making of the Quakers and nineteenth-century utopian societies, the GA presents the seed of the long term project, the one that builds different social relations through an extraparliamentary, non-representative system.     

It is the resolute refusal to avail itself of the existing democratic system—not just the political parties, but the system of representation as a whole—that marks Occupy Wall Street as a movement for a different world, as much or more than any of its critiques of finance capital, corruption, and corporate power. The General Assembly takes the direct vote and/or consensus process to a new level of proliferation by virtue of its visibility and performed display. For the six weeks of the Occupy movement at pretty much every Occupy site the GA has been held in the open, anyone can listen, and anyone can participate. The process has thus far resisted corruption and the concentration of power, and yet still allowed groups of people numbering in the hundreds and even single thousands to make concrete decisions. What is being created through the practice of daily assemblies (at some sites twice daily) are new political cultures and working models of direct democracy.

Philosopher Alain Badiou specifies the resonant radicalism of the Paris Commune precisely in its Committee’s rejection of, as he says, a parliamentary destiny. Based on his interpretation of March 18, 1871, it seems reasonable to wonder whether the Occupy movement might qualify as, in his word, an “event.” It is difficult to say, for two possible reasons. First, the historical reverberations that conclusively mark a political moment (a “site,” as he says—and OWS is already that, certainly) as an event only come later; it is too early for such reverberations even if the original moment over. The other, better reason may be that OWS is not over, and an event is never known as an event for its duration. Within that duration, time is different; seasons change, but the present holds still for as long as the insurgency authors life freshly, thereby disrupting the reproduction of daily life.

Unlike the territorial particularity of the Paris Commune, the Occupy movement has proliferated across geographic space and distance. With the arrests in Chicago, the bulldozing in Richmond, and above all (thus far) the brutality of Oakland, the mediated affective center of the movement pinballs around the nation, with each turn extending the movement. The longer the Occupy movement stays viable as an unpredictable process, the longer and broader the site gets stretched, facilitating its evolution toward an event. On the level of long term possiblity being considered here, the most dangerous of the counterforces is neither police repression nor eroding public sympathy, nor even the shrinking of public spaces suitable for occupation. Rather, it is the reassertion of normal processes of governance, ie a turn away from the GA and toward a formalized representative system, especially as some elements of the Occupy movement eventually move toward an institutionalized, sustainable form. 

*

When activist researcher Brian Holmes speaks of post-Fordism, he is careful to describe that condition as the new media, hyper commodified, globalized environment of complex subjectivities living in societies that at many key institutional and structural levels remain Fordist in origins, design, and essential operation. When theorist Xudong Zhang writes about the cultural politics of postsocialist China, he is describes the contradictions of an unshackled market economy and exploding middle class, learning to consume the material and the symbolic, overlaying a society whose socialist foundations are far from disappeared across an uneven geography. In other words, the “post-” phase of a society is about emergence, layering, and coexistence. The later system, paradigms, lifeways, and economies never wholly or cleanly supersede the earlier frame—especially when that earlier frame was itself a wholesale displacement of the pre-modern, as it was the case with both American Fordist industry and Chinese revolutionary socialism.

Similarly, OWS hints at the coming of the post-democratic. This is the long term potential of the movement. One can see it in Madison, where the GAs take place practically within shouting distance of the capitol building. The GA is a study in the amateur, what with its balky sound system, ramshackle info tables and grungy participants. Every additional day is a kind of existential victory. Meanwhile, the edifice of officaldom that is the Capitol silently screams permanence. For the rest of our lives and probably far beyond, these two systems of governance, decision making, and power distribution will coexist, with the post-democratic system growing, developing, and gaining traction wherever it can, and the democratic system continuing to monopolize official power but rotting from within.

For activists, the challenge is how to fight and function in both arenas at once. The nascent world must be nurtured, we must acculturate ourselves to the post-democratic social relations by participating, giving of ourselves to the emerging embryonic systems. At the same time at the very least we must defend against the brute attacks coming out of the existing democracy, wielded by the regressives with the stamp of state legitimacy. That means fighting battles on the terms of that system: using the legislative process and the elections. 

In Wisconsin, this contradictory position will be coming to a head in the next few months. The recall campaign targeting Governor Walker will be starting on November 15. The recall campaign will almost certainly achieve its goal of staging a new election, but the outcome of that election is far from a guaranteed victory. Republicans will do everything they can to win it, precisely because they understand that when they win, they will then have the final mark of legitimacy that they will need. The extremist agenda we have seen up until now will be nothing—nothing—compared to what will come should Walker win (or, more accurately, buy and steal) the recall election. Therefore, we must defend against this possibility by working for a Walker defeat in the election, but at the same time articulate our basic rejection of the election as anything but a sham exercise that confers zero legitimacy on whomever should win. There is no simple way to deliver this dual message, other than through our actions—to work in the electoral sphere (door knocking, fundraising, get out the youth and minority vote) and also to build up our local post-democratic initiatives (co-ops, GAs, experimental forms).

In Wisconsin, in Oakland, at OWS, and all the as yet unknown future sites, it is up to us to make this latest “post-” phase a reality. As with other post- phases, it is really not a choice, but simply where the decaying but extant structures leave us. We have the rest of our lives to do it, but the reasons for diving in are all right now.

 

another book event: madison

As I've mentioned before, I contributed a couple of texts to the book We Are Wisconsin–texts that originated here on this blog. One by me, and one co-written with Nicolas Lampert.

Editor/instigator Erica Sagrans has been pounding the pavement, getting the book out into the reading public. This weekend we'll have two events around the book, a discussion at Rainbow Bookstore on Saturday and then a panel at the UW Cinematheque on Sunday. The Sunday event is a part of the weekend's Wisconsin Book Festival. I'll be saying something at both events, along with some of the other writer/activists. Amazingly, this will be the first time that I will be in town for the festival since having moved to Madison after having missed it because of travel or whatever, for five consecutive years. 

These will be the first events for this book to take place in Wisconsin, and for that reason obviously they will produce a different and more meaningful atmosphere. Undoubtedly, these events will be high energy and participatory. Many if not all of those in attendance will have had some involvement in the Uprising and subsequent movement, including in the offshoot campaigns targeting politicians for recall, saving Badger Care, protecting the Penokee Hills, and so forth. In this sense, these events will likely include an organizing element and take on a social forum character.

See you there.

Here's a bit of the event copy from Erica: 

"We Are Wisconsin: The Wisconsin Uprising in the words of the activists, writers, and everyday Wisconsinites who made it happen" is a new collection that gives an up-close view of the Wisconsin struggle. This mix of essays, blog posts, and original writing looks at what happened, what it means, and what comes next—and includes the real-time, fast-paced story of the Capitol occupation as told through tweets from those who were on the inside.

In conjunction with the Wisconsin Book Festival, join us to celebrate the launch, talk about what's next for this movement, and hear from contributors including Andy Kroll from Mother Jones, Alex Hanna, Jenni Dye, Dan Wang, and editor Erica Sagrans. 

We'll also be showing short films on the protests produced by Shahin Izadi and Jason Nolen.

Sponsored by the Teaching Assistants' Association.

Books will be available for purchase.

http://www.wearewisconsinbook.com/
http://www.twitter.com/WeAreWIBook

Sunday, October 23 · 2:00pm - 4:00pm

UW-Madison Cinematheque 

4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave

Madison, WI

 

home from the CT summit and occupy wall street

I am returned from NYC for about ten days already, but am still unpacking thoughts from the trip. The Creative Time Summit was more than a hoot. The Skirball Center atmosphere was charged; a daylong drenching rain could not douse the energy.

The presentations are archived and viewable here. My favorites: WochenKlausur, Urban Bush Women, Voina, and my old friend Theaster Gates.

Speaking of Theaster, the Creative Time exhibition that opened on the same weekend, Living As Form, included a display from the Dorchester Project. Among the items shown was an example of the hate mail Theaster has received. Racist hate mail is always shocking.

I was there to say something about the Wisconsin Uprising. Why me, out of the hundreds of thousands who participated in the events in Wisconsin? As I told people in NY, I think I am the only person Nato Thompson, chief curator at Creative Time, knew who lives in Madison. Here is the video of my eight minutes at the lectern.

Watch live streaming video from creativetime at livestream.com

 

The Occupy Wall Street camp-out was already going on by the time of the Summit. Nato made reference to OWS from the stage several times, encouraging conference attendees to go down to Liberty Plaza to see for themselves what was happening.

I made it down twice, on Thursday, my first evening in NY, and on Sunday, my last afternoon. In between was Saturday, the first day of mass arrests–some 80 people–and the widely seen instance of police terrorism in which one Tony Baloney, unprovoked, maced a couple of young women. This was a turning point for OWS, bringing media attention, galvanizing the activists, and presenting the suddenly serious question: what next?

On Sunday, when about 40 of us from the Summit went down to OWS as a group, Gerald Raunig hatched the idea of pulling together a quickly produced e-zine of some sort, with poetic and analytical texts about and relevant to OWS written in the moment, and in anticipation of the struggle yet to develop. I pledged a text, and here it is, on the EIPCP website.

nyc: summit notes, before the event

I was conversing with an artist friend yesterday. At one point we talked about the Creative Time Summit 3 in New York, which I am on my way to now. He said that he’s been finding these kinds of gatherings less and less satisfying, ie conferences and symposia in which a bunch of socially engaged artists come together and discuss how and what “social engagement” means for art and artists. I understand where he’s coming from. When Daniel Tucker and Nato Thompson organized a one-day gathering in Chicago back in January of 2009, inviting what would be for any conference an impressive list of art activists, I skipped it. Maybe because I already knew a lot those folks, or it didn’t seem clear as to what the purpose of such a meeting would be. Many of the people already had working relationships with each other. And—now I’m remembering—at that time I just needed to stay home in Madison for a while and not travel. All in all, for me the event just felt kind of unnecessary.

I also recall people asking questions about the first Creative Time Summit, which took place in the fall of 2009. The presence of a few art star names in the program, while not exactly disappointing, did pose the question of what this event was aiming for, in terms of status, prestige, and constituency. That was my main question, understanding that those considerations can be quite practical. For others there was the hang-up about access, specifically the price and availability of tickets. This event charges more than a nominal fee for entry—some of the costs are definitely passed on to the audience. For a summit ostensibly about exactly those issues of democratic process, access, and structures, it did not seem out of line for art activists to wonder aloud. 

And when I heard about Open Engagement, I concluded that the deed had been done. Now we can say it. The collective force of artists, curators, teachers, writers, and others has successfully opened up a new genre, even though we haven’t made our society any more democratic or participatory. We have carved out a tiny niche in the resource-rich world of cultural production, a niche that seems to be going by the name of “social practice.” If, as Todd Gitlin likes to say, the Sixties generation took over the English departments but left the real power of legislating and governing to the Right, then we have achieved something, but haven’t even accumulated English-department levels of power. What we can do is organize periodic get-togethers, and even sponsor some of the travel.

Where is this all going? And what are these gatherings for? Based on how Summits 2 and 3 were designed, I can see that these questions have been considered by the Creative Time team. The presentations were streamed live for Summit 2 and archived—I don’t think they were streamed live the first time around. And the range of presenters for Summit 3 is noticeably wider, reaching out of the art school/art world and into social service and regionally identified people and projects. They also dropped the "Revolutions in Public Practice" tag that was used for years 1 and 2.

I certainly still have those questions. But here I am, participating in Summit 3. Why? 

Well, for one thing, it is hard to say no to Nato, the curator. His friendly force of personality—let’s call it that laid-back California soft persuasion I find irresistible—is perfect for the job of bringing lots of interesting people together, and making intense, urgent topics fun. Plus, not to be discounted, it's a mostly-paid for trip to New York. That could just be me, or an art thing; some people and groups who are farther from the art universe who were invited didn’t get on board. (That's another way of saying the spectrum of participants is not quite as wide as it was hoped to be.)

Beyond Nato and the personal pleasure of helping to realize his vision of what the Summit could be, there is the substantive reason I was invited: to say something about what happened in Wisconsin and especially Madison back in February and March, to a New York audience of artists, activists, and intellectuals. Yes, somebody has to do it—or more to the point, the Summit audience definitely needs to hear about it. And yes, bringing an account of the most important turn in American labor and left wing movement politics in the last three decades is a good reason for being here.

But then I’m back to the problem of these gatherings, on a structural level. There are about thirty presentations. Outside of the keynotes and performances, the slots are limited to eight minutes at the microphone. You can say a lot in eight minutes about one, precisely bounded thing. A single, titled art project, for example—which is what many of the presenters talk about. Try saying something compelling in eight minutes about an incredibly complex social and political movement, one that’s not finished and in fact continues to unfold even now, to an audience of people who might know a lot about it, or nothing at all. As is always the case with any kind of conference, the best conversations will happen outside of the program structure, in the socializing and informal encounters. But the presentation is the only time when the whole assemblage will get their ears stuffed with Wisconsin Uprising info. What am I or anybody speaking about the Wisconsin Uprising under such constraints supposed to say?

Even though I’ve rehearsed and have my talk pretty much down, I have no idea how it’ll come across. The points I make might be obvious or even stale to many, but completely baffling and without context for others. I guess all I can plead is, folks, go through my old blog posts on the Wisconsin Uprising and do some searches of your own. There is so much great reporting out there, tackling the million or so angles on our movment: John Nichols, Rebecca Kemble, Abe Sauer, Lane Hall/Lisa Moline, and others. And there you go—the last and best reason for being here: I’m at the Summit to get people intrigued, to open the doors of their curiosity about what the hell is happening in the Great Lakes states, and, hopefully, to direct people to the world of activism, movement analysis, and exemplary solidarity work that is our Wisconsin of the moment.

 

The Summit schedule is here.

I'm going on at around 12:30 PM or shortly thereafter. Catch it live here:

http://www.livestream.com/ 

 

 

 

 

book points, furniture joints: John Preus and The World As Text

The Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College commissioned me to write a text to accompany the exhibition The World As Text from earlier in the summer, organized by artist John Preus. The publishing schedule has been pushed back, the show is over, and I have not been given any info on a definite timeframe. But that is what a blog is for. Here it is.

– Dan

Book Points, Furniture Joints: John Preus and The World As Text

❆

What do books ask of us, besides some time with our minds and our eyes? Our ears, fingers, and palms? Our butts and our backs? Using a book usually means using all of these things. The comfortable functionality of most ordinary books is based on conventions that attend to the act of reading, that is, bringing all these body parts into coordination. But while the average paperback bears evidence of considerations that go into making a book a user friendly object, the space beyond the reader’s body almost always seems to lie outside the bookmaker or designer’s purview. And still the books demand of us—their readers, borrowers, and collectors—a consideration of space and support, of storage and display solutions. Books need a furnished space in which we can read them, look at them, and learn from them. A collection of artists’ books want even more, neither the false neutrality nor the ostentatiousness of a collecting institution, but rather a space equal to the books themselves.

✴

For decades now artists have been making books and book systems that take note of the space in which books get read and browsed. That attention could be negative, as in the literally passive aggression of Jorn and Debord’s sandpaper-bound memoires. Or utopian, as in the swarming circumvention of commercial art scenes and the creation of autonomous networks through mail art, which so often made use of book forms. The fine press bookmakers who create amazing hand-bound or letterpress printed books that seduce through aesthetics and celebrate a shared history of analog skills, situate their books self-consciously or not in the conservative surroundings of the special collections libraries or within vitrines in museums and art centers. Artists of a revolutionary nature have sometimes reworked the relationship between books and printed matter and their spaces of study altogether, as in Temporary Services’ Binder Archives. But it seems the “reading room” itself remains under-developed as, ideally, an aesthetically unpredictable but eminently functional space.

✼

Lots of books need to be disposed of. Bad novels, mass market paperbacks, textbooks, pamphlets, ring binders, magazines, and manuals of all kind overflow the bottom tier secondary markets. That is, if they are lucky enough to make any stops at all before going to the recyclers, incinerators, and landfills—in the case of mass market paperbacks, sometimes from the store rack straight to the dump, unsold much less unread. Books-on-demand and the new legitimacy of self-publishing are bringing books into existence that as of yet have no clear long term place in the world. E-books promise a whole other universe of waste, plastic, recoverable heavy metals, and unread gigabytes. Perhaps the Adam Batemans of the future will arrange thousands of e-book readers in carefully interlocked stacks. On the other hand, ever more books are collected, protected, conserved, and put away with some notion of perpetuity—or else treated as a semi-liquid investment. The pool of buyers of vintage, antiquarian, and collectible books, magazines, newspapers, maps, cards, art books, and comic books, has been greatly enlarged by the Internet marketplace, bringing in who knows how many buyers who otherwise might never have found access to such objects. Other than bidding and buying, the disparate online world of book wealth includes the viewable items of special collections libraries, the pictures of personal collections that generate bookshelf envy, and the occasional news item about institutional acquisitions of personal libraries and archives of notable persons. Electronic media in all its forms and uses in relation to books only makes the problem of real space functionality and purpose if not more urgent, then at least more neglected. Just ask any librarian, or for that matter, the former strategists of Borders. 

✥

How many of us have furnished our own homes in ways shaped by the spaces of books, from out in the world? I have a favorite reading chair. It is a sturdy Danish armchair with a torn leather seat that I rescued from the curb in Hyde Park, which also happens to be one of the best neighborhoods for finding books—new, used, and thrown away. That chair, both in my front room and on the curb where I found it, represents the way in which books exist not just a medium and a technology in themselves, but also as a core form around which revolves a particular field of behavior and material support. I have a friend who bought a table from a public library that was in the process of replacing their furniture, repurposing it as a kitchen table. How many and what kinds of books had spent time on that four-legged construction? Weeks after making the purchase at the library garage sale, he found a clue—may ’68 had been carved roughly into the skirt. In the case of my chair, somebody’s junked furniture eventually got plugged meaningfully into another person’s life through the activity of armchair reading. My friend’s table, once the site of quiet study and silent subversion surrounded by public stacks, now supports lively multi-generational conversations and the conviviality of family life, surrounded by a private collection of books. In both cases, we as secondary users and owners came into an inheritance of furniture that merged with the past and present of books.

❉

With The World As Text, artist, designer, and builder John Preus works with and about books for the fourth time.* In each case a client or an exhibition space invited Preus or the collaborative group that he was a part of to design a solution to a problem having to do with books. Books themselves are not one of his media and in none of the four projects did he or the group select the books for which they built structures. His responsibilities essentially ended where the books began. Thus, on one level Preus relates to books as do all busy people in that he simply wishes he had more time to read, finding in them the world of ideas. But having to meet the design needs posed by book collecting clients or book-centered exhibitions reveals aspects of the life, materiality, and use of books that most people, including most book artists, do not think about. Moreover the privileged perspective into books that may be gained by designing and building reading and display spaces, as well as objects made out of books, becomes quite interesting when set in relation to Preus’s constant interest, the inheritance and mutation of building and architectural materials and their utility. The question is, how and where does his evolving understanding and view of books, book collections, and book culture dovetail with his larger commitments to building out of materials—often scavenged or drawn from streams of surplus—that contain particular histories of design put into use, cultural patterns, and economic conditions.

❀

As with my friend’s table or my chair, the desks and chairs in The World As Text have been brought out of one bookish environment (maybe an office, maybe a waiting room) and put into another. The difference is that Preus and his team were charged with no mere task of salvage and re-use, but rather of formal mutation within the confines of overall functionality—in other words, to create furniture that leaves the realm of furniture, but still functions as furniture. It is an ambition to match that of those who curated the books on display, as well as of those who authored, designed, and crafted the books themselves. The measure of success then, might also be those of the books. That is to say, will the creations of Preus and his team—not only the discrete objects, but also the reading room as a whole—live on after the show, as the best books live on after they are returned to the shelf? My guess is that Preus himself will only grant success when he sees that the project lives on as not only material evidence, to be seen and used again, but rather as the most powerful inheritance of all: as inspiration.

 

* The projects were:

2nd-hand reading room, threewalls, Chicago

Another Story, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago

Dorchester Project, Chicago

John has designed and assembled storage systems for several private residences, as well. Check out the Dilettante Studios site.

 

thinking about a button

Three texts by comrades—Mary Patten, Dara Greenwald, and Brian Holmes—came into my world in the last several weeks. Each one on its own is a valuable contribution to the conversation among activists today (conversations that in fact follow Dara's and Brian's posts online). Together, they map out our conditions as a left wing searching for coherency of analysis, clarity sufficient for resolve, and concrete ways of acting. Reading them over the same few days, I couldn’t help thinking them through in relation to each other.

First, there is Mary Patten’s new book Revolution as an Eternal Dream: the Exemplary Failure of the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, published by Half Letter Press. In it Mary takes on the difficult task of accounting for a chapter of American radical activism to which she contributed a significant period of her adulthood. The time is the 1970s into the early 1980s, the place New York and the East Coast. The circumstances: small, committed groups of radicals, communist and hard left in orientation, anti-racist and anti-imperialist in priority, targeted by the police state, operating against a backdrop of a fading youth movement, a fractured left, and a right wing in the process of regrouping. The band of radicals to which Mary belonged was the May 19th Communist Organization, of which the MBGC was an informally affiliated cultural wing comprised of people who overlapped membership with the May 19th group.

Mary asks a lot of hard questions, directed very much at her former self (and sometimes as a stand-in for the radicals of that time), having to do with revolutionary intention turned into political marginalization, and the limits of the MBGC’s working process and communicative potential. But the text is a post-mortem, not an apology. The only implied regrets come with Mary’s telling of the police repression the group eventually attracted through their direct attacks on whatever exposed elements of racism could be targeted. The key instance was the arrival of the Springboks rugby team—then an openly and unashamedly racist representative of the apartheid regime of South Africa—to NYC in September of 1981.

By outlining—and this text really is only an introduction that hits a number of complex angles, each deserving of elaboration—this one hidden history of the radical recent past, the book sets the stage for many important debates in our present. From those years, when declared revolt was a reality, and revolution seemed not only imaginable but concretely graspable, to today, the differences cannot be denied. Now the fascistic state creeps ever forward with a popularly elected African-American man at its purported helm, all while the corporate masters preside over the most serious structural crisis to afflict global capitalism since the 1930s. The old-style imperialism of the Vietnam War era has given way to a corporate transnationalism that accords the American state little role but as high-tech global thug—a part played with a mixture of high tech pizzazz, stunning incompetence, and most of all, zero thought for consequences. The new class war, for which the prison industrial complex has already been established, moves toward a boiling point, both globally and locally—along with the overall geophysical temperature of the planet.

With a world crashing around us, now many of the questions facing earnest resisters in this present recall the paradoxical binds Mary and her comrades wrestled with, except in the reverse. We do not suffer an overabundance of moral clarity as the revolutionary left of the 70s did, but rather an increasing confusion over what constitutes positive movement toward the world we want and need. In her text posted to the Justseeds blog “Does Corporate Culture STILL Suck?” Dara Greenwald zeros in on one of the political complications of our time, that of the insidiously mimetic co-optation of independent, self-initiated, and autonomous cultural activity by large corporations that have become expert at wrapping the productions of young musicians, hopeful artists, and ordinary people looking to share their creativity, in their consumer brands. Dara calls attention to corporate efforts such as the touring bike shop sponsored by Levis and Urban Outfitters, and the BMW Guggenheim Lab—expressions of branding that go way beyond what we could once call an ad campaign. While it is true that these examples are insertions of the corporate element into what was (and still often is) a culture comparatively free of the big business presence and in-your-face branding, I would point out that the punk and indie subcultures, just as the rock, hippie, and jazz cultures before them, already did the work of coding themselves in order that people could identify as belonging, and express to each other their subscription to some sort of shared values, however vague. Under the conditions of competitive retail capitalism, branding these subcultures is something of an inevitability. Corporations looking to attach a brand to an apparent (life)style will always cherry-pick from the subcultures that have done the work of aesthetically (and even politically) unifying themselves. When those subcultures produce moral, health, and ecological goods (bike culture!), what is there to oppose when the evil of branding comes to town in the form of a traveling Levi’s/Urban Outfitters (sweatshops, hello!) bike shop that performs cycle maintenance for free?

Dara’s questions fold back into dilemmas of personal morality—where one ought to draw a line—but with the clear-eyed vision of a person who knows that she and many of us work in an art world in which our very names become brands, under conditions of material scarcity that are realistically (if distastefully) answered by the sponsored resources of a corporate master, and all of us are subjected to two thousand ads a day anyway, so who the hell is gonna remember, right? But the effects of these individual choices of when and how to participate (or not) are always social in the end. Her way out of the paralysis of judgement is to return to the heart of the matter: self-sufficiency and autonomy, in a well-reasoned final thought:

In these examples of corporations as branded sponsors of community spaces, it is exactly our proposals toward some solutions (opening independent spaces, creating a vibrant self-motivated culture, etc.) that get co-opted, not our practices of critiquing the status quo. So are we to assume that corporate culture doesn’t suck because it is giving us access to things we once started and now can't afford to maintain: bike shops, print shops, recording studios, experimental art spaces, etc? But what happens when the marketers have moved on to the next marketing methodology and we are left without their infrastructure, or ours?

Dara’s last line speaks obliquely to the larger and timeworn ambition of controlling the means of production; back to revolutionary failure. The comments following Dara’s text are worth reading but pretty much fall into elaborations on different aspects of the basic problem, ie where and when does it make sense to accept corporate sponsorship (if ever). Or is it even possible to work and live outside the universe built and administered by corporations, and what it means for resistance if the answer is no. But no one has yet really offered a way to rebuild an ethical framework—one that is equal to the many crossed lines of good and bad, pro and con, acceptable and unacceptable, that make up the innumerable contradictions that vex our efforts now to live a just and responsible life, not to mention autonomously authored. And I’m not sure anybody will, as long as we don’t go deeper.

By deeper, I mean daring to raise the question of traveling the religious road. Not the bullshit forms of religion that we hate, but the existential traditions, the ones that embrace paradox, exhaust language, and navigate the real pain of the real world through subtle, practiced, and disciplined forms of faith. And I do not mean only the old traditions. Perhaps we are due some new ones, and we are the ones to experiment in that area of life, thought, and feeling. Many in my community of artist-researchers may likely recoil at this question, particularly those who have already gone through the personal experience of having rejected the religion of their upbringing. The point is, the many contradictions and interwoven ends of desirable and undesirable effects of any action—the corporate grip on culture, whatever its non-corporate origins, being merely one symptom of our age of multiple crises—have outstripped political ideology as a workable source of guiding principles for individual living. The rise of fundamentalisms around the world is evidence enough of this turn. What I suggest is to do battle on that turf rather than concede it, and in the process reformulate our own sensibilities about how to live ethically and morally. Maybe in earlier decades the spiritual search was considered an indulgence by radicals, an escape for the privileged, and another excuse to exoticize somebody else’s culture, and those are dangers now, too. But for the world’s billions who see a crumbling system and a future of nothing but uncertainty and perpetual loss, the reality at hand has made us all seekers, whether we like it or not, whatever our station, whatever language we speak, and wherever on this planet it is that we live.

Before you dimiss the place of religion out of hand, let me just point out that Mary’s book includes a reproduction of the famous act of protest by the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, whose self-immolation helped to catalyze pressure on the Diem client regime and remains to this day an incredibly moving and internationally recognized document of an action taken in the name of one’s love for humanity. So religion is more than a subtext; perhaps, given the conundrums and the endless traps of the sort Dara speaks, it is again time we explored the religious depths of our commitment and political self-understanding?

Finally, there is Brian’s text, a rumination on the concentration of wealth, starting with a straightforward break down of wealth distribution in the US, as gleaned from a couple of different sources. The information he cites says the richest 5% control more than 60% of the country’s wealth, property, assets, or whatever can be owned. Compare that to the bottom 80%, who own less than 13% of the same. From there he goes into the question of why this is not a source of outrage. Is it because people don’t know, or don’t care?

Here is the pie chart he posts, courtesy of a Rhonda Winter article.

This is an important question considering the next piece of information Brian digs out, a study of Americans’ attitudes about what the wealth distribution should be compared to the same people taking guesses on what it is, and then comparing both against what it actually is. The gist is that most Americans do believe in a scale of greater and lesser wealth, ideally linked to the meritocracy of achievement. But both the ideals and the estimates from the subjects of the study are so far from the actual distribution, that the gap can only highlight, again, the question: why aren’t more people pissed off, or if they are, then why is there no effective political pressure coalescing around the discontent?

He ends his short text with a call for a simple, doable action: let’s reproduce the pie chart as a button along with the words GOT PLUTOCRACY?, distribute them and wear them. The idea is to produce the conditions upon which an organizing effort—or better yet, a spontaneous uprising and consequent movement—could productively happen, beginning in a million ways, but here with a button campaign that exists somewhere between education and advertising.

This is a pretty straightforward idea, but on the level of image the pie chart communicates much differently than do the graphics of the MBGC. There are no fists, guns, crowds, or images of dignified resisters, nothing subcultural at all. Brian’s suggestion is a turn toward the infographic, a visual statement at once more abstract and more literal. Are we done with the depictions of bodies and faces in struggle? Given the corporate sponsorship that permeates so many efforts to amplify a message, today the gap between sponsor and a heroic figure in steadfast and romantic struggle may be simply too wide to process in any way but the easiest: instant invalidation. This is another way of saying that many of the images using figurative visuals distributed by Justseeds, for example, maintain an integrity of meaning because they also represent the economic democracy of the Justseeds organization itself. Without its own infrastructure for support, perhaps it is only the infographic that somehow maintains its integrity of message in the face of corporate distortion—and might even gain in subversive meaning: a pie chart, clearly showing more than half going to the top 5%...brought to you by BMW in more ways than one. Or maybe the facelessness of the pie chart is appropriate given that this would be an effort to prefigure a social movement, rather than support movements that already have names, leaders, locations, and ideologies.

Taking the issues, questions, and articulations of condition from Mary and Dara, and applying them to Brian’s idea, my suggestion is this. Remove all percentage figures from the pie chart. Percentages are too clinical, too academic—the messaging has to be about real people, not percentages. Replace with absolute numbers—I think these will be more shocking, especially when the top 1% are revealed as a specific number of individuals that is quite comprehensible. It would be even better to go with the top 0.1%. Based on the 2010 census figure for total population, that would be 308,745 people, leaving 246,996,430 as the bottom 80%. Shocking, but weirdly empowering as well—through the use of a number of which one is already part. No need to raise a clenched fist; you've already been counted, thank you. There is a demographic inevitability being communicated, outside of ideology, perhaps even outside of politics. Given the numbers representing real persons, such imbalances become questions of pure sustainability, as in, how long can this possibly last? Not forever, certainly. And maybe for not very much longer.

Then, instead of “GOT PLUTOCRACY?”, make a series of buttons, each using the same pie chart but adding copy that refers to a specific and different issue or question, some topical, some having to do with movement strategy or conditions:

GOT WAR?

GOT CLASS WAR?

GOT POVERTY?

GOT A WAY FORWARD?

GOT A FUTURE?

GOT A MOVEMENT?

GOT A BETTER SYSTEM?

 

HOW ABOUT TAXING THE TOP?

WHO’S WINNING?

WHO’S ENTITLED?

 

FUND THE SCHOOLS

THEY CAN AFFORD HEALTHCARE FOR THE REST OF US

CLEAN UP WALL STREET

JAIL, NOT BAILOUTS

CORPORATE PIE

NO PIE IN THE SKY

AMERICAN PIE

WHERE IS YOUR SLICE?

 

NO JOKE

WHO IS LAUGHING?

The idea here is to use the infographic to its fullest. So let’s take a single, authoritative chart and combine it with copy that speaks to the multiple starting points and priorities of the discontented. Presenting the chart as common may seem reductionist, but the variable copy is exactly the opposite—ie endless, irreducible difference in issue and/or tone. I believe that the non-representational strategy invites us to take a gamble on using the resources provided by the corporate world and branded sponsors for amplification. Of course, this does nothing in terms of building up an autonomous infrastructure, which is something that we must of course continuing doing. But that is the risk. In exchange, not only do we get a bigger megaphone, but possibly a sort of buffer against fascistic response. Not a reliable or permanent one, but any buffer helps these days. If the corporate sponsors join in or facilitate the repression because they don’t like the message, then they are revealed for what they are—and the credibility they so desperately seek goes down the toilet. (For their part, that’s the gamble they’ve made: new branding opportunities while hoping for tolerable messages.) But the beauty of our time is the same as the ugliness—that we can go both routes, and that we must, sponsored and not. Especially when the risk of simple cooptation is low, as in super grassroots milieu-building work like button campaigns, in which the messages move at street level, pinned to jackets and bookbags, outside the bounded control of corporate media and privatized space.

Those are my thoughts so far. If I work up some graphics or sketches, I’ll post them here.