propositions press... 2.0

companies and towns

“The company town, that is the next logical step.”

Said an old friend of mine in between chomps of his mixed seafood salad—bosses’ fare for a man expressing discontent from the point of view of labor. Such is life in the Political Age of the 99%. Even the well-fed are fed up. We were sitting at the counter of the Tadich Grill early on a Friday night in early June, in San Francisco’s financial district. This was a treat for me—the food, the city, and now getting to hear a first hand report from a pal who works deep within a major tech player. For him the treat was for the first time in months leaving work for a dinner engagement before eight o’clock. He had bolted the office at five o’clock not just to work around my evening departure flight, but because he had already resigned himself to going in the next day, Saturday, and most likely some on Sunday for good measure.

When I asked if he was always that swamped with work, he basically offered that he was swamped with evaluations. No annual performance evaluations in fast-moving Silicon Valley—no, those old-fashioned ways are for east coast brokerage firms and midwestern insurance companies. In an application of many a start-up guru’s wisdom, this internet behemoth (long beyond its legendary start-up days) subjected its many hundreds of heavy-lifting engineers to the pressure of the quarterly evaluation. At his salary level and with his skills, my friend learned to be paranoid constantly, to assume that any negatives on an evaluation would open the door for a younger, cheaper, and more recently graduated worker to be brought in. He’d been there for three years and it is time to move up or move on, else face stagnation, which in his field means a sour fate indeed: contract work for life.

What about the work itself? To see your brainpower and problem-solving going into web architecture relied on by hundreds of thousands people all around the world, that must be satisfying, no? No. First of all, his team’s assignments come down from above, which means that his input on the strategic level is very limited. When the assignments come, they come with pressure—everything needs to be done yesterday. But the assignments are cancelled and completely reformulated with equally short notice. Imagine sprinting for a finish line as hard as you can in one direction, all the while knowing that the race may be halted at any time, and that the whole team will be redirected toward a completely different finish line and expected to sprint toward it with no break. Second, this breakneck pace and unceasing work, backed by the pressure of quarterly reviews in which upper management grades on a curve, ie no matter one’s empirical performance, half the team is reviewed negatively—what is it all for? For this particular web-empire’s sports news portal. Can you say, Who the fuck cares?

Before he goes into his serious venting, my pal hands me a selection of varietal chocolates courtesy of the company. This is his summary of the conditions there—a beautiful campus, free high-quality, mostly organic breakfast, lunch, and dinner, free big-name weekly entertainment (bands, authors, up-close celebrity appearances), yoga and premium workout facilities, and little treats thrown at them all the time, like these chocolates, which ironically advertise themselves as being free of slave labor. Why even go home when the goodies are at work? Oh, to sleep, change clothes, and check the junk mail. Sleeping pods are the next amenity, if the Valley ever runs out of single twenty-somethings with CS degrees who don’t mind pulling all-nighters. My friend is wrong. It’s not the company town, it’s the company life.

*

“You see, Madison is a company town.”

Those are the words of our local radical historian Allen Ruff, spoken at the Fighting Forward session on the Aftermath of the Wisconsin Uprising. He was speaking of the University as “the company” and he is correct. Like the company towns that dotted the Rust Belt in its industrial heydey, Madison is also home to many spin-offs, suppliers, and copycats of the main company. The business of the University is research and education. The spin-offs are the start-ups and tech companies, the creative industries, the hospitals and clinics, and the whole range of knowledge-work institutions that call Dane County their home. The support industries include the coffeeshops, the 24-hour gyms, and the locavore restaurants. The sizable body of non-UW state employees who reside in Madison also fall into the category of workers in related industries.

Like the company towns of a generation ago, this town’s company is under growing pressure from new forces of competition, internal decay, and the rigidity of its fixed investments. The superficial trend is toward a company that does more with less, an abstraction of efficiency that tells nothing of the real costs of the University’s responses to the pressure it receives. Those responses include the generation-long trend of steep tuition increases—a development that shuts out academically qualified would-be students and practically indentures others—and the making of a precarious body of workers, first among them the graduate students who teach many of the courses and almost all of the discussion sections. Moreover, a small but increasing number of slots once offered to Wisconsinites and other Americans are now being taken by the cash-paying wealthy from around the world, especially China.

The unfolding crisis is most apparent in the secondary institutions, the ones that suffer some variety of the same ills but surf on far less accumulated fat and prestige than does the University. And as in Janesville, Saginaw, Benton Harbor, or any other twentieth-century company town, here the gap between decay and reterritorialization is wide enough to accommodate the establishment of a substantial class of human beings, what Ruff calls (quoting Chomsky) the superfluous population, that is, people who are neither consumers nor producers. For them, another industry serves, employing guards, police, surveillance hardware, probation officers, and social workers.

Near the end of the session a fellow in the audience, one of only two (from what I could see) persons of color in the room, asked a question about the achievement gap in Madison. He posed it as a query concerning the connection between race-correlated high school achievement in Madison and, as he said, the University’s annual “importation” into the city of thousands of white students. In attempting to make sense of his own words, the man mentioned the factoid of Madison’s achievement gap being most wide at the upper income levels, thereby implying that controlled for income, racism stands as the most plausible explanation of the operating gap between black and white students. Then he called attention to our segregated geographies, citing Owl Creek as an example of the spatial margins of race in Madison. Calling attention to racism in the context of a political discussion of the Uprising through highlighting the specific marginalizations suffered by black and brown people in our city was a welcome intervention, though his synthesis remained incomplete.

In response and as a closing remark Allen spoke of the color line, of its primacy as a line of separation keeping the full power of the left from being realized. The simplicity of the statement only hints at the complexities for of course there has always been more than a single, static color line, and color lines stretch unevenly across geographical space. Allen himself applied a spatialized racial analysis in the post-recall analysis he wrote for The Progressive. He convincingly argued then that Scott Walker and the WI GOP leadership forged a winning statewide coalition by successfully bridging the divide between rich and poor, suburban and rural, through appeals to a white electorate.

How to apply this analysis to progressive, enlightened Madison is the question. Thinking of the University as a company that, like all dominant employers, manages its labor in accordance with the interests of the institution (whether for-profit or not) may be helpful. Though not capitalist by nature, for the last decade at least the University has been turned strongly toward a corporate and privatized agenda, and now largely defines and negotiates its interests in reaction to an aggressively anti-intellectual, anti-educational conservative regime. Given that, and the consequent rollback of the University’s once active redistributive agenda, what is the connection between the University and the worsening racial/spatial politics of Madison?  

*

It is a little over a month later and I am back in the Bay Area. My, how four weeks can change everything.

My plane touched down only a couple hundred yards from the burned out hulk of Asiana Airlines flight 214. I could see the investigators on the ground studying the wreckage.

A broad contingent of inmates in California prisons are on hunger strike.

 

BART workers are observing a shakey truce with management but may strike again at any time.    

And my friend? He indeed has moved on. Interview and negotiation turned into an offer; he is about take to the treadmill at yet another Silicon Valley pioneer-turned-corporate-giant, by my count his sixth company in a career fourteen years old. I'm crashing at his Palo Alto pad while he's out east visiting family. His vacations only come between jobs–the companies take the rest.

 

the mural experience in kalamazoo

The first few pages of the print prospectus for Kalamazoo College are a marvel of branding and not even in a bad way. The rest of it is attractively functional, a statement of confident modesty. Economically worded passages describe the best that a small college has to offer, through the particulars of a Kalamazoo College education, or should I say a Kalamazoo College experience. Whoever produced this booklet hit the sweet spot. They landed K exactly on the line joining the forward-looking and the reverential, the meeting point of the classically typical and the singularly unprecedented. All the top-tier private liberal arts colleges carve out their own space between the expected and the unique. K is no exception. 

An experience is exactly why that type of education remains relevant, perhaps more so than ever. Forget that chestnutty nonsense about a citizen’s education or even the pleasingly vague platitude about critical thinking. The private liberal arts education is, in its contemporary essence, about cultivating individuals who can imagine themselves doing and being, or in other words, experiencing. Experiencing what? It almost does not matter. It is a type of person being produced, that is the important point—as social theorists would say, a subjectivity or a self. And this type—the person who expects to experience life—is not produced just anywhere, the prospectus implies. In fact it is produced outside of the academy, but that production happens erratically, and is more often than not self-motored. Academies such as K, by contrast, are factories producing a yearly crop, as reliable as the organic distributors now supplying their Sodexo-managed food service.

The persons who come out of these institutions become the artists, the business leaders, the scholars, the tech innovators, the service chiefs, the opinion makers, the record keepers, and the forward thinkers—the people for whom life is an experience first and work second. And a struggle maybe never. Privilege has its benefits. The learning atmosphere feels refreshing, earnest, and active, at least from my perspective as a visitor. 

*

I made the trip to K College for the third time in thirteen months. All three visits were centered around an inquiry into the Philip Evergood mural The Bridge of Life, the dominant work of public art on campus. The mural holds the most visible spot in the most heavily frequented room, Welles Dining Hall, where most students spend at least some time nearly every day. The image of the town and college is populated by dozens of figures, only two of which are identifiably African-American. The rest are Euro-American. Two years ago the near-total racial homogeneity of the tableau was brought to the attention of the school leadership by a small group of students, many of whom were Posse Scholars from the working class brown and black parts of LA (Riverside, South Central, East LA), as an objection. The gap between the community represented and today’s actual make-up of the college and its host city, both of which are considerably more diverse than that dipicted, was flagged by the students as a problem.

The ensuing conversation between students, faculty, and administrators led to Christine Hahn, an assistant professor of art history at K, taking the lead on formalizing the exchange of ideas, with the goal of beginning a process by which the campus community in time might determine an action corresponding to the critique. I contributed to the first stage of this process on my visit in the spring 2012. At that time I sharpened the critique after meetings with students. I outlined an analysis that takes into account both historical trends and the position of the students themselves, and encouraged the students to recognize the limitations of a critique based on issues of inclusion and exclusion. Now it is a year later and in the latest chapter in this unfolding process the artists Sonia Baez-Hernandez, Conor McGrady, and I took turns presenting our ideas about the mural at a K symposium on Art and Critical Theory, further developing the lines of discussion.

Sonia, who was just completing a year as artist-in-residence at the Arcus Center, delivered an overview of Evergood’s career and the WPA context within which he made much of his work. One of the relevant paradoxes mentioned is that some of Evergood’s works from the 1930s were explicitly linked to anti-lynching campaigns, and that Evergood himself identified with the socialist Left. As a believer in racial justice-as-social justice, he deliberately included African-American figures in many of his paintings and prints. Particularly interesting is the story related by art historian Andrew Hemingway about Evergood’s mural Cotton from Field to Mill, a landscape of laboring field hands, black and white, commissioned for a post office in Jackson, Georgia. The design attracted negative comments, resulting in Evergood changing up the composition to satisfy the local post master, who declared himself against any picture resembling “a cartoon.” But the final victory belonged to Evergood, and to the cause of racial justice:

Nothing was said about the iconography but, as [scholar] Beckham has emphasised, the imagery of black and white men and women all labouring in the same way contradicted the symbolic order of Southern murals at their most sensitive point. Moreover, as a postal worker pointed out when I [Hemingway] visited the mural, the range of colour phenotypes in the image indicates that sexual relations occur between black and white….Evergood may have compromised on formal matters in some degree, but it was a political achievement to insert a mural of coopertive inter-racial  labour into a federal building in the heart of a state where lynching was rife and whose governor, Eugene Talmadge, was an infamous white supremacist and one the New Deal’s fiercest opponents at state level.¹

Considering his oeuvre and history of social engagement, I think it is fair to argue that Evergood’s racial politics are not well represented by the The Bridge of Life alone. A serious critique of the mural’s racial homogeneity must account for the artist’s record of making pictures that advanced the cause of racial justice, and that he did so in a time and place where taking such positions invited racist terror. 

Conor McGrady briefed the audience on the murals of Belfast, where art and politics meet in contested space. Interestingly, Conor (a native of the region) emphasized the fact that the murals were typically painted as tributes first, but came to represent Republican or Loyalist neighborhoods afterward simply because they reinforced the already existing geographical divides. Visitors often describe the murals as turf signs, marking territory as belonging to one side or the other, but Conor’s contention is that the original motivation was something more reverential and commemorative. Thus, one lesson for the K community is that pictures prominently displayed in public spaces become part of the already-existing politics of that space, usually in ways that go beyond the original intentions of the artist. In the case of The Bridge of Life, it is well-recognized that members of minority groups often sit together for meals on majority-white campuses, and that happens in Welles Dining Hall, too. The temporary self-segregation of meal time, a dynamic that often has nothing to do with overt exclusions, in an elite school context is usually a way of building community among sub-groups. The meaning of the seating arrangements may feel somewhat different when the hall’s majority racial group is permanently echoed in a highly visible mural floating above all. In which case the mural may reinforce a message of unwelcome—more subtly than do the murals of Belfast, but nonetheless with the same constance of presence. In fact, this uninterrupted message of heritage homogeneity and the reminder of late-belonging it sends to students of color formed the heart of the students’ critique. 

Which brings me to a couple of my points. The first has to do with the seemingly self-evident fact of the Posse Scholars and other students of color studying at K and being part of the campus fabric, indelibly and irreversibly changing the profile of the school from nearly all-white to simple majority. In the process, those students undergo a change in themselves, especially those of working class origin, in effect gaining entrée into the bourgeois class—a case of embourgeoisification, as it were. I believe that for the students to launch an effective and convincing case for a response project of some kind, their position must account for their own transformation in class terms, a transformation facilitated by their having been admitted into the exclusivity of an elite liberal arts education/experience. While it is always difficult if not impossible to assess an experience while undergoing it, asking the following question would seem to be a good start: Just as the former (unofficial and default) exclusion of students of color served an establishmentarian code and social structure, how does today’s (deliberate and planned) inclusion serve the same?

I can imagine the students with whom I met taking broad offense at my criticism of their position. One of them might well ask of me, who am I to demand an accounting of their own unfolding class privilege when she has a kid brother getting into trouble back home, a laid-off dad or a sick mother with no health insurance, and all three asking why she wants to go halfway across the country to attend a school they never heard of instead of UC Riverside? Or for another student, what does the admission into the school matter when he experiences the micro-aggressions and cluelessness of his white classmates and professors on a regular basis, people with little or no experience with people of color, with each instance sending the repeated message of you don’t belong here—not to mention the shockingly explicit racism he witnesses from time to time. For some working-class racial or ethnic minority student, the K Experience may be an episode they must simply survive. Having to see the faces in the mural is the everyday visual confirmation of their beleaguered position.

I get that it is not easy. But that goes to my second point. Contesting anything on the grounds of having been offended is a losing game in our time. When liberation politics turned inward, toward the interpersonal dimension, we of the margins made our sensitivities available to be appropriated by the Right. I reminded the students that the white conservative may in fact feel anger and resentment whenever he or she sees an image of Barack Obama at an intensity many times greater than the deep feeling of disgust I had when seeing images of George W. Bush. The field of affect as has been politicized by the left of color is now owned by resentment-driven conservatism as exemplified by the audience for right wing talk radio. I believe it is a strategic mistake to foundationally invest any initiative with arguments based on having been made to feel excluded, unwelcome, foreign, different, less than, or whatever—not because the arguments are untrue or the feelings not painful, but because conservatives launch from their positions the same argument much more vigorously. They have learned well. Conservatives have a lock on the victim thing.

This is only a sampling of the issues highlighted by myself and the others. We will continue the discussion at the College Art Association conference in Chicago, 2014, if not before.

* 

Thanks go to the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership for partial sponsorship of this event. Special thanks to professor Christopher Latiolais and the Critical Theory cluster at Kalamazoo College.

 

¹Hemingway, Artists on the Left (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 158-9.

 

 

 

justseeds in milwaukee, again

I walked the 100 block of State Street some weeks ago and something didn’t feel right. I stopped and looked the storefronts up and down. It was gone. Ian’s on State was gone. I guess the WI Uprising—the social movement that lived on Ian’s pizza—is really over.

Not it is not. Ian’s, that is. I didn’t know they had moved across the street. As for the movement, it is going into hibernation, if you can call sleeping on a hair trigger hibernation.

*

In spring of 2009 the print media artists’ cooperative Justseeds opened a large-scale graphic art installation in the Union Art Gallery of UWM. I noted back then that the installation Which Side Are You On? was one of the most effective uses I had seen of an exceptionally difficult exhibition space. A cavernous zone with an odd foot print, the suffocating concrete architecture of the Union Art Gallery normally washes over whatever feeling emanates from the work on display. In that takeover, Justseeds did not merely tame the space, they bent it to their will.

In March of 2013 Justseeds does it again, only better than the first time. Compared to the earlier project the new installation, Uprisings: Images of Labor, is edited and simplified, but not in any way compromised or lessened. Elements have been reduced, formats unified, and the stylistically diverse design work, typography, and handworked imagery allowed full visibility. This time around the group attacks the walls neither as aggressively nor as freely as they did four years ago, but instead grabs attention through an aerial hanging of numerous but repeating forty-inch screen prints.
The multi-point messaging effectively broadens our ideas of what qualifies or defines itself as a labor struggle. At floor level the installation is a village of Justseeds activity and production—tables for blocks and brayers, books for sale (including, I was happy to see, a short stack of Deep Routes), small prints and publications on display, pulp vats and floor tarps for a papermaking station, and other stuff I didn’t get around to scrutinizing.

What is interesting to me is taking the two shows as a measure of time in social movement terms. Picture a line beginning in March of 2009 and ending in March 2013, with March 2011 in the center. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and Arab Spring, the Wisconsin Uprising, the movement of indignados, Occupy Wall Street, and other insurgent flare-ups happened over the year halfway between the time of the two shows. In 2013, it makes some sense, in fact, to think of the current installation not as a “show” but an occupation. Not comparable to 2011’s actual social movement occupations of political space, obviously, I am speaking rather of a functional gesture and/or metaphorical act that extends the dream of those beautiful, frightening, and exhilarating occupations of 2011—events that currently sit on the two-years-later cusp of falling into the slow fade of memory. 

But Uprisings: Images of Labor is also more than a retrieval of the once-heady feeling of recent movements gone stale, particularly in Justseeds’ strategy of organizing a two-day free conference (shadowing the SGCI academic conference), of which I attended for a half day.
The programming created exactly that which our social movements need now, spaces in which partisans since dispersed by defeats and exhaustion can freshly connect, educate each other, exchange views, and be visible to one another.

Lane Hall and Lisa Moline's breakdown of OLB encounters with law enforcement set the afternoon tone of movement self-analysis.
By the time we had an intense twenty-minute audience discussion about feminist politics, feminist process, and feminist criticality following Meredith Stern’s afternoon presentation, a vibe of shared struggle and respectful inquiry settled into the room.
In other words, in an art event Justseeds created temporary conditions for what arose organically during the capitol rotunda occupation in Madison, the occupation of Zuccotti Park, and (on an incomparably huge scale) the occupation of Tahrir: a social forum. After 2011, the constituent elements of social movements are searching for space within which to locate themselves. Justseeds, with special effort by the Milwaukee-based members, has that space for a little while. In as potentially cold a gallery as the Union Art Gallery, this was a feat of social engineering equivalent in spirit to raccooning the birdfeeder.  

 

 

 

 

mess hall ends its haul

Mess Hall is ending its run.

Alan Goldberg, the Rogers Park landlord with the exploratory sensibility who made available to Mess Hall its storefront space and economic freedom, is going in a different direction with the space. True to form, along with what might be happening at Mess Hall on an average month (such as the report on antifascist work in Greece, where the Golden Dawn party has been gaining strength, delivered by a touring Greek activist–that's happening tonight, March 1), Mess Hall is offering a series of discussions and events in response to its own end. 

Over the days that I received news of Mess Hall’s imminent closure I had been reading Jelena Stojanovic’s article “Internationaleries,” her short account of the continental post-war collectivism of radical artists. Mess Hall counts those histories as part of its lineage, but being reminded that groups of sprawling influence and eventual legend  often lasted much less long helps to put the ten years of Mess Hall into perspective. For example, Stojanovic’s text reminded me that the Lettrist International was active only from 1952-1957. People went on to work in other configurations, but as a body the LI only went for five or six years. As an experiment of its kind—shoestring, horizontal, volunteer, resolutely independent, radical in orientation—Mess Hall’s decade is an achievement in endurance. 

Obviously, compared to the lived time of the 1950s, the experience of time is much different now. Maybe five or six years then are the weirdly equivalent of ten now. The factors of distractions, mobility, instant and constant communication, life expectancy, and digitalization all have intensified, resulting in an ever more frequent oscillation between living in hyper-speed and hyper-inertia, back and forth between a brain overwhelmed with tasks and information to a body standing still with mental gears abruptly switched. The comparatively continuous ennui of twentieth-century life, the fat target of Situationist critique, has been superseded by the stop and go of everyday confusion in the last decade and a half. Mess Hall, which by its six-month anniversary had settled into the dormancy of a closed shop alternating with the liveliest of temporary inhabitations, was not entirely immune to the schizo-velocity of the neoliberal city. But from its beginning Mess Hall traveled the timelines according to a rhythm of its own making, self-liberated from career concerns and freed from the monthly deadlines of a standard lease. Ten years is a long grace period.

Mess Hall always was a kind of resistance against the mandatory scheduling of professionalized art activity. Over any given stretch of months, the calendar would be overlaid with serial meetings, day or weekend-long projects, semi-permanent experiments, and a sprinkling of one-off events, and all without much discernable regularity, plus the constant exercise of the most basic of freedoms, the freedom to do nothing. Going to Mess Hall blindly was nearly a guarantee that one would find a locked door and darkened space, but wandering in while an event was going on without pre-knowledge was just as certain to produce wonder, delight, lasting memories, and more than a few collaborations. For frequent passersby Mess Hall must have seemed strangely out of step with the rest of the working world—mostly dark and quiet, but then suddenly animated, doing an open/closed stutter step for years on end. Ten years seems like the proper duration for making such a statement about uncompromised time management and scheduling.

The origins of Mess Hall have been recounted in different places. The struggles within Mess Hall have been less well documented (or not at all), but from the inside those are some of the moments I remember most clearly. In my time as a keyholder the main points of contention centered around philosophies of money and non-commercialism, but questions of racial justice, authorship and credit, and individual keyholder responsibility also came into the picture from time to time. Later keyholder groups grappled with tensions similarly. As they always do within small groups, personalities informed the fault lines. Unlike the rigid purism of far too many politicized groups, Mess Hall keyholders could never argue their points from positions of certitude. The days of such power plays and bullying, I think we all had to acknowledge, were long over. That is not to say that feelings weren’t hurt, or that divergences in otherwise promising relationships didn’t result. Both happened, but the strength of intra-keyholder relationships that accumulated over the same course of struggle considerably out-weighed whatever fraying there was.

An extreme negative-positive ledger could also have been applied to the many Friends of Mess Hall. For every obnoxious drunk hanger-on, for every Soren Renner looking to make intellectual provocation, there were twenty regular positive contributors who took ownership, sometimes even keyholders but for holding a key, and who spread the message of Mess Hall far and wide.

I don’t know where the spirit of Mess Hall goes now, whether and how it manifests in a different place or time. I don’t know what the keyholders are thinking, if they feel that there is some unfinished business, or what is the internal strength of the final keyholder group. Like Mess Hall itself, I suppose, the legacy will be determined by the people who make use of its lessons and history, and those are available to whomever is ready put in the labor. I am sure I am not the only one looking forward to seeing who that will be, and what they will do.

*

Above photos, starting with top:

Letterpress printed poster for event with Janice Misurell-Mitchell, 2004.

Harold Mendez, wall drawing, The Geography of War, 2005.

Amos Kennedy Jr., letterpress posters, 2004.

*

If you are in Chicago this coming weekend, March 2, please join for one of the final and what looks to be another amazing Mess Hall event:

The Material Production of Cultural Spaces (II): Cooperatives

Saturday, March 2, 2013

2-5 PM

Mess Hall

6932 North Glenwood Ave., Chicago 

The second workshop in the final series focuses on cooperatives as practical and political experiments in creating shared resources and shared ownership. Guest presenters will give concise presentations on different co-op types; these presentations will serve as a basis for imagining other possibilities. Can we envision the proliferation of cooperatively-owned social/cultural spaces? OR what could community-owned counter-institutions look like? How do non-commercial or experimental spaces/projects actually work? How do they sustain themselves? From organizational forms to the dirty nuts and bolts of resources and logistics, what are some of the practical lessons learned from experiments in counter- institutions and alternative economies? 

Nicolas Lampert will present on the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative - how a decentralized collective of 25 artists from various cities across North America run a worker-owned print collective and how we sustain ourselves and contribute art to movements.   

Sara Black will present on Backstory Cafe and Social Center in Hyde Park/Woodlawn.

Kathleen Duffy will present on Dill Pickle, a member-owned food coop in Logan Square.   

Michael Carriere will present on a new experimental art space - ReciproCity - that is housed inside the Sweetwater Urban Farm in Milwaukee. 

Shelly McClone will present on the Riverwest Food Cooperative and the Riverwest Cooperative Alliance that includes the food co-op, People's Books Cooperative, and the Public House - a cooperative bar whose profits go to starting new cooperatives in the Riverwest neighborhood in Milwaukee.  

detroit journals, 2012

10/30/2012: As of last Sunday and for the two evenings before that, this little frame house long abandoned and brought back to the world of warm bodies by the artist couple Jon Brumit and Sarah Wagner, was full of voices, movements, spirits. It was a Compass gathering. Now it is Tuesday and in the house are just I and the spiders. Even they are not much for company, static as they are for the cold season.

This latest of Detroit excursions started with my attentions on family at the beginning of the weekend and then shifted over to Compass by noon on Sunday, except for a short overlap on Saturday night. It was a bit stressful because there was no place near the D*Flux house for my family to stay, and no affordable vacancies in the downtown area because of the World Series, forcing me into driving between the city and Southfield, where the three of us stayed.

Helpfully, on this trip Rozalinda shared with me a few of her further thoughts on the social construct of nuclear parenting as it remains unaddressed in practice by the better part of the left movement spectrum. Her critique rings true, I must say especially in relation to parenting teenagers, who require very imaginative solutions to the problems posed by their needs. I never thought about it deeply before I became a parent myself, partly because frankly I never had to, and partly because the people closest to me with the divided attention problem mostly deal with small children. For better or worse, there is a popular starting point for the conversation about family-inclusive practices in relation to small children, and that is childcare (and how to best provide it, how to ensure its quality, how to pay for it, etc). I never did think about it much beyond that, even though childcare as conventionally imagined is ultimately on many levels a stop-gap. But for adolescents it is even harder because the conversation has no obvious starting point.

In any case, there were plenty of reasons for my time-segregated weekend having to do simply with scheduling and the aforementioned distances. So I only enjoyed about an hour of the full Compass effect on Friday night. It is wonderful to be with Compass collaborators in any situation, including the institutional setting of MOCAD for our screening of the Monsanto Hearings and book release, especially while the exhibition Vision in a Cornfield is up. On Sunday afternoon, after the second of the two lightly attended but invigorating public events, the group began to disperse. I missed not only the full group in its nighttime form of deep, joyful discussion lubricated by love, but also in its daytime form of group drift. In this instance the outing was conceived, researched, and scouted by Rozalinda B, in keeping with her work around Foreign Trade Zones and migrant labor justice in the Chicago area. Early Sunday morning the group ventured out to view selected Detroit FTZs, evidently containing the faceless warehouses in which is parked a considerable fraction of the world’s aluminum stocks. Who knew? Well, according to Compass research, Goldman Sachs knows this well. The London Metal Exchange is where the prices are set and the futures traded, but Detroit is where tons of the actual material is held.

By Sunday evening the group of nine melted down to five, with five leaving and one (me) rejoining. We were smaller but charged up fresh from an appearance by Cheri Honkala, the Green Party VP candidate, only about nine days before the election. Ms. Honkala, who described the Green Party ticket as "Jill Stein from Harvard, and Cheri Honkala from the School of Hard Knocks," laid into the System. She was not there to discuss the Green Party program, but rather to critique directly the deadliness of the status quo. She had as openers our Detroit acquaintences Maureen Taylor and Elena Herrada, and a special warm-up by the Rev. Pinckney of Benton Harbor. We couldn't pass up a photo op with Cheri.    

After that it was another freewheeling late night Compass gab-fest. Brian and Claire burned the threads brightly as usual. Such a pleasure, although I tend to get a little lost when the property rights discussion takes off. That is because unlike responsible intellectuals Claire and Brian, I never bothered to read John Locke. And I do not plan to, not after Nick S, a grad student from southern Illinois who joined us for the weekend, briefed us on what Locke says in his three applications of the Digger Winstanley's argument for autonomy to the argument for private property rights. Got it. Sort of.

*

10/31/2012: More powerful for me is what I am reading, a D*Flux house copy of The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey. The event as Hersey reports it is gripping by itself, but that he could not have known in 1967 what Detroit would become decades later makes reading it alone on cold rainy nights in Detroit in 2012—in fact, on both Devil’s Night and Halloween, still notorious nights in Detroit for the long shadow cast from the bad old days—feel especially elegiac. It is as if the Rebellion wrenched open a new set of historical possibilities, but none of them were taken, and I am visiting the city that grew from the default path that ensued. The New Left proved unable to avail itself of the new or refreshed opportunities due to unresolved contradictions within the movement. Big labor certainly could not either, bound in partnership as it was to the industrial capitalism that it ostensibly resisted. The forces of Black liberation failed in the same as well, due to their unresolved contradictions. Instead, the rot of corruption, dysfunction, and disinvestment set in, hollowing out the pride that once existed in the word public. The economic and physical void left when capital flees now moves into the last of the vulture stages: the late return of speculators, this time would-be emergency management profiteers.

Because Detroit has evolved into such a visually sublime city, with evidence of a once-dense urban terrain confirmed only through absence and fade, I cannot help but read the book with massive visualizations and curiosities about what Detroit looked like in 1967. Not the famous sights of Belle Isle, Tiger Stadium, or the flagship Hudson's department store, but the seedy stretches of Woodward, the commercial strips along Grand River and Gratiot, and the small machine shops and parts factories that dotted the city by the hundreds—the cityscapes that probably nobody bothered to record. All that remain are decaying fragments here and there. The moving imagery of the Prelinger compilation Lost Landscapes of Detroit helps, but much of it is in black & white, or very grainy and degraded color. Very beautiful in its aging, but I want images that are better preserved, still and not moving. The neon palm-decorated motel sign featuring the “Africa-whispering name” as described by Hersey, sits in my head tugging at retronaut pleasures, in full color. Thanks to the wonders of the Web and a vintage motel postcard, here it is, an answer to one of my desires: to have a picture of the Algiers Motel, which even by 1969 had been renamed, two years after the police killings of the Incident.

Today the corner of Woodward and Virginia Park bear the trace of previous decades in the negative, through empty spaces. The car wash behind the motel mentioned by Hersey is still there, but there is nothing but a lawn where the motel once stood.
In 1967 that and most other spaces were full I am guessing, but how healthy did they appear then? It says a lot about the illusions of our world today if Detroit entered its terminal crisis 45 years ago despite having visually apparent vitality.

The racism of the policemen involved in the incident is made evident particularly in the words of Robert Paille and David Senak. Theirs is a racism built of neither a pointed prejudice nor a self-aware loathing, but rather a pervasive and personally-felt negativity in attitude toward whole groups of people. It is a negativity that precludes any benefit of the doubt and any true witholding of judgment, not to mention forgiveness. On the contrary, it is a glacial racism of slowly accumulating resentments. Paille on the Negroes: “It just seems that the more you give these people, the more they want.” This again resonates deeply with this moment. It is a few days before the general election of 2012. The hard right hatred of Barack Obama exceeds anything that was directed at George W. Bush. The rich-poor white coalition of rural conservatives, suburban elites, and disappearing white workers is rabid. The feeling comes from resentment: the Obamas are living like kings while the rest of us are struggling, and they only got in there because of their race! Indeed the putrid slogan belies a constituency. 

Hersey draws a clear picture of the troubled entry into adulthood of directionless working class black urban young males–a latent force of talented, brutalized, traumatized beings now three generations lost. For example, from all the descriptions of him, one of the three youths killed, Auburey Pollard, comes across as too quick to fisticuffs and way more intense than was good for him. He is described as a promising draughtsman and generous guy, but he also clearly did not care to consider the consequences of playing the role of muscle. These none-too-flattering leanings are conveyed through the words of his own family and friends, not Hersey's imaginary rendition. But Hersey reports contradictions and reversals as they occur. For example, one of the witnesses and a friend of the deceased, Michael Clark, comes across as arrogant and uncooperative in court, to the point of dislikeability, even by most of the other young men. 

Presenting his unvarnished findings with regard to the flawed characters he found in researching this tale, Hersey's writing strangely hints at an age to come, in which the post-traumatic moral impurities, real or fabricated, of individuals are exploited expertly by the Right. The absolute injustice of the slayings–Pollard's clearly being a confessed police killing–is in no way lessened by the sometimes unsavory profiles of the young men. Hersey's research presents the criminal policemen, Officers Senak, August, and especially Paille, as surpassing the mediocrity of the victims in one chilling respect, at least: an insensitivity to their own violence. 

*

11/01/2012: I imagined coming to Detroit to think about and travel Cass Corridor and University Research Corridor. That was the ostensible starting point for my research residency at MOCAD, but my focus quickly devolved. By noon Monday, my first day alone, I fell into the general poking around that I often do when traveling solo. That day was spent waiting for messages to get to people I hoped to see (did I bother to arrange any of that beforehand? No, that would be way too organized), so I let myself get side-tracked by the products, the interiors, and the people of Hello Records, John King Books, Dabl’s African Bead Museum, Source Booksellers, Lo & Behold in Hamtramck, the food at the Yemeni Café, and the coffee and sweet rolls at Avalon. Those are the places I spent my money, and if the opportunity presented, time in conversation with shopkeepers and acquaintences.

I recommend a leisurely browsing of all the places named above, and eating at the Yemeni Café, a Hamtramck hang-out for Yemeni dudes (but warmly welcoming to all) that serves an excellent combination platter of lamb, vegetable gallaba, and fragrant rice. I cannot judge the food for its authenticity, but it was so tasty I went there three nights in a row. 

A big part of the week's equation was the crummy weather. The days forming the heart of my visit were dominated by storms, rains, and chilly winds blown through the interior by Hurricane Sandy. For three days I'd leave the house at about ten and not return until I holed up for the night starting at around eight o'clock. I stayed indoors during the day, just not in the house, but rather in stores, coffeeshops, and libraries, and driving around town. Instead of taking the walks I had hoped, I opted to stay warm, dry, and more or less sedentary. Staying warm meant leaving the house because it is heated by wood stove. The warmth is terrific, but it takes over an hour for the fire to attain a charcoaled state, and thereafter requires the constant feeding of wood. Being the sole occupant and therefore the only one working the stove, it was easier to only have to start and tend the fire at night and then let it die as I went to sleep, instead of having to keep it going during the day.

Hurricane Sandy was only one of the events that made this particular week memorable. There was also the aforementioned World Series and Devil's Night. The Tigers home games took place on Saturday and Sunday, losing both, and with that the Series. On Tuesday and Wednesday, for Devil's Night and Halloween, the city imposed an early curfew for youth.
 And  there was the imminent election, featuring a scion of Michigan royalty challenging the centrist African-American president, as well as a number of interesting ballot initiatives. On Monday I dropped by the Teamsters hall on Trumbull and picked up a yard sign.
I may not be a Michigan resident but the collective bargaining amendment put in front of the voters under Proposal 2 contained more than an echo of the WI Uprising.

To sum up the historic week: the Tigers lost, the storms of Sandy kept most people in and washed out the expected Devil's Night fires, and the Romney campaign pretty much threw in the towel on the candidate's home state. But rain or no rain, these were no ordinary days to be visiting Detroit.

 11/02/2012: My final night in Detroit was enlivened by the appearance of the artist Åsa Sonjasdotter. We met some years ago in New York. At that time she was just beginning a new job in Tromsø, in the far north of Norway, helping to establish an art department at the university there. She was back in the States to take part in a show in Cincinnati and had a week or two for traveling around the region. She'd made her way from New York to Ohio, from there to Chicago, and then back eastbound. Being a food activist and an artist of critical engagement, she had intense curiosity about Detroit. As well, she has experience traveling and working in some of the desolate urban industrial landscapes of the post-Soviet cities of northern Russia. 

We went to Windsor for Chinese food, confused the Homeland Security man upon re-entry with our convoluted stories in response to the question "how do you two know each other," and lingered into the night with discussions about art, politics, and of course Detroit. Jon gave us a tour of the D*Flux Sound House–a house around the corner from their homestead as of now entirely given over to sound installation/recording/performance experiments. The house itself is an instrument, set up currently with deep looping bass rumbles triggered by the opening of the front door. The interior paint job was executed by two visiting artists from L.A.

The next day, Friday, I left for family visits in Ann Arbor. Åsa stayed for another day or two, courtesy of Jon and Sarah, and continued her solo drift from there. In Ann Arbor I made a last acquisition in my research residency book hunting: a hardcover edition of Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine. I skipped the Port Huron at 50 conference, napped at my uncle's house, and drove home with a mobile library of Detroit-related, -relevant, and/or Detroit-found titles. I resisted the urge to lift Jon's ratty copy of the Hersey book, partly because I knew I could find it in Madison. The next week, it might have even been on Election Day, I called Paul's. They had a copy for three dollars. Who really needs Amazon when you live in the mrcc?

 

 

 

 

 

 

questions for "confronting inequities"

So I'll be joining UW-Madison's Center for the Humanities for this event later today, the live stream of the fourth Creative Time Summit. This year's summit is organized around the problem of wealth inequities, phrases as "confronting inequities." I will be helping by leading a discussion over the lunch break. I wrote up a sheet of questions for the audience. It is pasted below.

The event is free and there will be refreshments. Please come if you are in the area. It goes for most of the day and anybody can drop in and out.

 

Creative Time Summit: Confronting Inequity

 For the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities live stream event, October 12, 2012

 

What does it mean to “confront inequity” when the labor movement has prioritized a non-confrontational mentality ever since the years of the Cold War?

 When do careers and professional status that depend on an economy of attention get in the way of confrontation? Does notoreity pay?

 How important is the public, as concept, political formation, and institutional infrastructure, in the struggle for wealth redistribution?

 How is wealth redistribution best represented visually? Aurally?

 What constituencies stand to gain the most from confronting inequity, whether actual wealth redistribution follows or not?

 How do inequities in wealth find expression and effect in the politics of military occupation and human-induced climate change?

 What affects are produced by income and wealth inequities? In what ways are these affects effectively politicized or de-politicized?

 How do inequities of wealth define the physical architecture of cities, suburbs, towns, and rural areas? And how does this architecture affect the production of art and culture?

 In the US, poor urban youth of color experience the most extreme effects of wealth inequities, arguably. When and how will they enter the conversation we are having?

 Racism and wealth inequities overlap in patterns of mutual reinforcement. How are they reinforced through the patterns of one’s own life, and how might those patterns be “confronted”?

 Do we who live and work in the multi-state Great Lakes/Upper Mississippi region have a special or particular contribution to offer this project of confronting inequities?

 What places on the planet are wealth inequities creating the most volatile instabilities, and what do those places have to do with where we are?

 What is wealth, anyway?

 

 

 

finding our global midwest

I am just returned from the Opportunity Agenda’s Creative Change Retreat 2012. The three full days we shared were filled with an effective combination of directed exercises, facilitated conversation, and free form socializing. The place was the Sundance Resort, a superlative setting with a worry-free culture of service, comfort, and natural beauty. The experience as a whole was complex, enormously inspiring, and indeed revitalizing. I can superficially summarize by saying the retreat was amazing and I feel very fortunate to have been invited. What the experience meant and what it might lead to requires a long moment of reflection. It is too soon to know.

The retreat was generative, that is for certain. I left thinking about many things, but one simple question stands out.

On the final afternoon, after participants had two days of forming new friendships and becoming acquainted with each other’s histories and thought processes, a program segment was reserved for Open Space Conversations, a time for participants to generate their own topics for small group discussions. People were asked to suggest a topic or question—anybody could do it—and then everybody else was free to group around whichever topic attracted them. Being too curious about what topics others would offer, and just being too slow to think on my feet, I failed to offer one of my own. It only occurred to me after the process had moved on, but I offer it now: where is the global Midwest?

I have been using the descriptive term “global Midwest” here and there, including once or twice at the retreat. Some of my Compass comrades may be using it, as well. But I myself have neither attended to the task of defining what it might mean, nor, perhaps more pointedly, located it. In some larger and indirect way all of the Compass work around the idea and reality of the mrcc is about locating it. Asking others to locate it, or simply posing the question of where it is, opens another pathway for thinking through the problem of place in the neoliberal age.

A radical reorientation stands at the heart of the question. The regionally demarcating term “Midwest” carries with itself a legacy of spatial orientation based on imperialistic Manifest Destiny. My feeling is that the descriptor “global” may productively upset the ways in which neoliberal structures reinforce Manifest Destiny, but only if we who are indigenous and immigrant, straight and queer, precarious and secure, bind our futures to a sense of place that stands in opposition to neoliberal logic. Capital has an answer to my question. What is our answer? Where is our global Midwest?

At the retreat I met Bao Phi, a spoken word artist and organizer of Vietnamese descent living and working in Minneapolis. He put his voice into the mix, exemplifying for me the task of revealing the contradictory "glocality" people live with everywhere, but especially in the Midwest. Dig this, a poem he performed for us at the retreat. Bao had another poem picked but in a last minute decision changed it this one because he had just learned of the verdict in the Private Danny Chen hazing case. The poem is, in Bao's words, "from a body of my work where I explore alternate and untold stories and perspectives from Vietnamese American lives, through fictional persona poems."

 

Mercy

Nguyen, John – ROTC, Iraq

 

Let my father know it is not

for his blood

that I fight this war.

 

His decision, made in Saigon.

Mine, made at a recruiting table in an L.A. high school

 

Let him know that his hands, which once cradled guns

in another war,

are not my hands.

 

Let his friends know the difference,

at least to us,

between a communist and an Iraqi

and understand why he won’t speak about me.

 

Let my mother know one day where she

does not fear violence an ocean away

where the body and home

are not always in a dance

toward fracture.

 

Let my little hippie sister’s letters to me, telling me it’s not my fault

I was sent to this unjust war, be true,

at least in the eyes of God.

 

Concerning my little brother

who stabbed a white man in San Jose for calling him a chink

let the judge presiding over his case

know that what my brother did,

he did in the name of war.

 

Let the last cradle of my tender vessel

not be this godforsaken Humvee.

 

Let this boredom, this blessed boredom,

easily fill that thin space between my finger

and the trigger.

 

If bullets should fly, let the air pounding from

my lungs as I run be my song.

 

Let my affection for the people here, for the children here,

be real, not sweetened by Nestle or Coca-Cola

or plastic toys Made in China.

 

Let them know I am trying to understand

no matter what I say or do,

it is never enough

because they never asked for this.

 

Let me not tear apart a people, a country, causing Iraqi food

become the nouvelle cuisine in twenty five years back home,

like they did to my people –

let me not become my father, and my son or daughter, myself,

wandering the wavering borders made by someone else.

Let me ask this and mean it,

Though I’m the one holding the gun.           

 

Let the globe on the desk be mightier than the grenade.

 

The soldier, who looked at me and snorted, gooks killing ragheads,

that would make a great video game, let him know a hatred

he never asked for and cannot reason with, and let him die with it

choking his sleep, and let it pass

onto his children and haunt his children’s children,

without mercy.

 

The Eminem wannabe Marine, who when freestyling in the cipher in our barracks squeaked me love you long time, saw me scowl at him, and who the night after left a bullet on my pillowcase with a pair of tiny lips scratched into the casing, let me not be tempted to be first, to beat him to the finish line of the race that he and his kind set up, let me not be tempted to line up the promise in the eye of my M-4 to the back of his bleached blond hair, let me not chain lightning from my finger through the hollow echo in the valley of the chamber through to the domed pellet of steel that would become his whistling reaper, let me not be the first, of he and I

 

to play God.  Let me not pull the trigger on his story.  But let everyone know

that I could have.

 

Let me pronounce the last names of the curly-haired Filipina twins in the next platoon correctly, even as they pronounce Nguyen as best they can.

 

Let every poor brown, black, yellow soul who signed up for college tuition have children who grow up to be NBA stars drafted for millions out of high school.

 

Let me have the courage to erase the names of the dead

from my cellphone.

 

Let my lover, in our most private darkness, know, that when I tell her

you have a Quixotic pussy

except

that your pussy tilts windmills –

let her know, that I mean

that she, the all of her,

has a gravitational pull

and I am only a man

helpless in her current

I am swept in her undertow

and I drown

gladly.

 

Let her know, as the Lord is my witness, that I have confessed

to doubting God

but I have never doubted

her.

 

If we mirror one another then let us be both our homelands –

she, the jagged edge of California, and I her reflection, the jigsaw

coast of Viet Nam, or one, the other,

 

and let no one say I fought this war to make a better world

for our unborn children.

 

Let them know, that I mean the first Persian Gulf,

let them know I mean Viet Nam, and Korea,

and the bombs that made blossoms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

let them know I mean every man that will call me gook

every man that will slap my sister behind a closed door

let them know I mean police beating down Cambodian kids

in the park

and people who make fun of my mother using welfare checks

at the supermarket

let them know I mean my father screaming in nightmares

and ghetto neighbors who call my parents gook

when walking by their front yard

Let them know I mean my uncles drinking themselves to death

and aunties losing life savings at blackjack and

white hunters killing Hmong in Wisconsin

and yes, let them know I mean this, here, now, Iraq,

when I say

Fuck this war.

 

Bao Phi

 

 

wi uprising lit review, part 1

In Madison, Wisconsin, fifteen months ago the pitiable American inhibition on public political expression dropped away on a mass scale. The result was, among other things, the collective performance of an insurgent spectacle, beginning with the demonstrations under the capitol rotunda. For once in my political lifetime we had more performers than cameramen and the stage was accordingly enlarged. The resultant images were and are fundamentally appealing. With everybody participating, the picture represented not merely a small group but rather a whole public, a whole society, a body in which many viewers would recognize themselves, and, most significantly, want to join.

The images of the Wisconsin Uprising were made enduring through thousands-fold repetition, most of them slightly different versions of the same picture, a proliferation of infinite protest details bound by a whole, generated over the many days of action. There is no doubt—the pictorial, video, and sound documentation of the movement is vast. But finally, the social movement actually lived up to the flood of documentation produced of it.

Writing is a peculiar form of documentation. Unlike photo and raw video, writing by the nature of its production takes on a variable temporal distance from the events being recorded. From on-the-spot tweets to daily or weekly blog postings, to articles or columns that undergo an editing process for webzines or newsmedia sites, to texts written for traditionally published and distributed books, writing provides space for reflection and descriptive processing. For that reason, in terms of understanding the hows and whys of what happened in Wisconsin, writing is the most important kind of documentation we have. And we have a lot of it.

There can be no hope of reviewing even a sliver of the ‘first order’ online reporting that took place as the Uprising unfolded. There is simply too much. For example, as of this posting I have well over 600 webpages bookmarked in my browser’s Wisconsin Uprising folder, each url representing a notable detail or moment in the struggle. As a whole my bookmarked sites preserve the feeling of daily and weekly turns of events, and how people were thinking in the moment. These are but an unknown fraction of all that was typed and posted. 

I have taken on the more doable task of reading through a selection of the ‘second order’ movement literature. These are the print media published works, ranging from proper books published under well-known left wing imprints to DIY zines produced by small groups or individuals. Though these works vary in their physicality, professionalism of editing, and ideological orientation, they all belong to the Uprising in the sense that they are addressed to a movement-identified readership. This literature grew to a considerable body of work less than a year after the uprising broke out, and the titles I review here are not the complete roster.

The question of time frame must be considered from the outset. The writings compiled in and through these publications represent the period January 2011, when Scott Walker was sworn in as governor, through December of that year, by which time the effort was underway to gather signatures to force a recall election. From where we stand now, at the end of June of 2012, after the June 5 election debacle in which Scott Walker engineered a decisive victory, that period can be considered the first and brightest phase of the Uprising—and, most importantly, a phase of the movement that is definitively over.

The writings of that period are optimistic in comparison to the post-June 5 spirit of the movement. Even the most critical pieces are informed by the memory and experience of the initial insurgency itself—the heady first week through which a movement of many tens of thousands unexpectedly materialized out of little but a suddenly recognized common precarity. After June 5, the point of reference is quite different and certainly more difficult. Perhaps more than even before June 5, then, we need to study our movement, our collective decisions, mistakes, hopes, and potentialities, as found in the literature of the Uprising, and do it with the sobriety of the defeated.

*

These are the four books I have read:

We Are Wisconsin: The Wisconsin Uprising in the Words of the Activists, Writers, and Everyday Wisconsinites Who Made It Happen, Erica Sagrans, editor. Minneapolis: Tasora Books, 300 pages.

It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest, Mari Jo and Paul Buhle, editors. Brooklyn: Verso, 181 pages.

Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back, Michael D. Yates, editor. New York: Monthly Review Press, 304 pages.

Uprising: How Wisconsin renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, John Nichols. New York: Nation Books, 192 pages.

*

Out of the four books We Are Wisconsin has the distinction of having appeared earliest. Being a contributor, this is the one I know best. It was a project initiated by editor Erica Sagrans, a young refugee of Nancy Pelosi’s DC office who was inspired by the Wisconsin Uprising from a distance. The collection of texts she put together make for a remarkable pre-recall, pre-Occupy Wall Street document. Especially valuable are the reprinted tweets, complete with time and date stamps, grouped on pages interspersed between the essays. They convey the excitement, anxiety, determination, camraderie, and astonishment of the Uprising’s first days and the occupation of the capitol. Look no further than the tweets for evidence of the ‘now-time’ theorized by Benjamin, the messianic arrival of historical possibility.

Though none is longer than nine pages, the articles are formally diverse. A good number are first person, bridging the gap between the tweets and the analytical pieces. Nationally-known left wing luminaries like Medea Benjamin, Noam Chomsky, and Van Jones supply familiar voices at best and a platitudinous superficiality at worst. Making the first of their appearances that run through two of the other books are words from Michael Moore and John Nichols. On balance, the lesser known and local writers offer the stronger contributions. For example, UW graduate student Alex Hanna’s critical take on the Madison-Cairo (dis-)connection is an informed and tempered analysis of two insurgencies that in some respects jumped a border, but also remained particular to their locations. More so than either Benjamin or Chomsky, both of whom also wrote about the Middle East/Midwest vector, Hanna parses out the parallels worth holding onto. He is in a position to do that given his membership in the TAA and the fact that his area of study is Egyptian social movements.

The best articles are those that expand the scope of the Uprising while retaining the urgency of the first phase. For example, in “What Next: Mobilizing or Organizing?” Milwaukee activist Monica Adams argues for revisiting the known frames of oppression—racism, sexism, and other forms of exclusionary supremacy—to interrogate the “we” of the Uprising slogan “we are Wisconsin.” As well, she takes the mobilization/organization dichotomy of her title from Kwame Ture’s differentiation between mass action against something (mobilization) and mass action for something (organization). One both scores she adds substance to a struggle represented mainly as a battle about collective bargaining rights. The text is an excerpt from a report she delivered to the Left Forum on March 20, only about five weeks after the Uprising began.

It Started in Wisconsin has the feel of a local production though it is the book with probably the widest reach because of its publisher, Verso. The cover image is a photo of the capitol dome and the endless blue sky above it, a pure Madison image. It is the only one of the four books to use a cover photo at all. The visual richness continues inside in the form of photographs at chapter breaks, several comic spreads, and a couple samples of graphic art. Though not a large selection, the visual voices range from a wonderful shot of Uprising nuptials taken on a snowy day in front of the capitol by wedding photographer Becca Dilley to the minimalist iconography of Lester Doré. Other distinguishing features of the book are the lists of recommended further readings at the end of selected chapters.

Editors Mari Jo and Paul Buhle have ties going back to Madison’s radical heydey during the Vietnam era. As the founding editors of the 1970s-80s New Left periodical Radical America, they helped to disseminate essential political ideas of from their generation’s struggle. The Buhle’s experience in an earlier era is evident in the comics spread titled “Solidarity 1970.” It tells the story of the TAA’s contract battle of that year, their first. The then-newborn union won most all of their demands through a spring semester strike that was respected by Teamsters Local 695, whose drivers refused to make deliveries across picket lines. The chain of solidarity running parallel to the narrative of escalation in 1970 rang true to the opening salvos of February, 2011, when the growth of the Uprising similarly corresponded to the escalation of resistance actions.

I remember the book for some spot-on texts, including Mari Jo’s “The Wisconsin Idea.” She could have gone for the boring straight treatment, but instead she plays off the familiar term to describe the complex and crucial sense of identity, belonging, and ownership that produced the movement and that in turn were produced by it. As she writes, “No idea figured quite so prominently throughout the course of events as that of the identity of Wisconsin….” The insurgent re-definition of Wisconsin and Wisconsinite (finally!) is an aspect of the Uprising that has not been remarked on in many places. Only after the expanded discussion about the Uprising’s claim on the state’s identity does Mari Jo return to The Wisconsin Idea as an historically specific policy orientation with links to the Progressive Party.

Another valuable contribution is Patrick Barrett’s interview with Madison organizer and Green Party activist Ben Manski. Manski and one of the organizations he helped to found, Wisconsin Wave, were protest stalwarts. They came into the Uprising with an anti-corporate, alter-global politics, and use as their banner motto the European anti-austerity slogan “we won’t pay for their crisis!” The Wisconsin Wave was significant because it offered the movement an organizing force and a political discourse that went beyond the special interest represented by the unions. As such, the Wave (as Manski calls it) helped to dilute the predominance of AFSCME in the movement. This was a great service even though the Wave itself was and is arguably unfocused in its organizing priorities.

Wisconsin Uprising is the most ideological of the books, though not pointlessly so (I will get to the pamphlets in a minute). The book frames the Uprising as a working class labor struggle, pretty much in those terms. Going beyond the Wisconsin-specific touchstone of La Follette’s Progressive reforms, the contributors to this volume variously analyze the Uprising in relation to earlier episodes of labor organizing from throughout labor history. Elly Leary goes back to the Knights of Labor, the Japanese Mexican Labor Association of the early twentieth century, and the IWW-led strike against the American Woolen Company in 1912. Michael Hurley and Sam Gindin consider the lessons from the Canadian hospital workers strikes of Ontario in the mid-1990s. Rand Wilson and Steve Early co-author a chapter on the experience of recent union organizing in such open shop states as Tennessee, Texas, and North Carolina—a discussion even more relevant after June 5.

These and other authors make a compelling case for a wealth of tactical creativity available in the broad history of militant labor struggle. What they do not address are the reasons for the Uprising’s failure in strategic orientation, that is, why exactly the constituencies that initiated the chain of militant escalation allowed for the strategic re-routing of their movement. The failure is recognized as such given that it was the teachers’ sick-out that raised the spectre of larger strike actions, and even gained the term general strike traction at the height of the Uprising across a grassroots segment of the movement. For example, both Dan La Botz and Frank Emspak describe the strike possibility in their chapters, but neither offers a good explanation for why the movement went in the direction of electoral politics, just that it did.

Lee Sustar comes closest in his article titled “Who Were the Leaders of the Wisconsin Uprising?” In it he tells who actively argued for a general strike (J. Eric Cobb, executive director of the Building Trades Council), who was friendly to the idea (Joe Conway, president of the Madison chapter of the firefighters’ union), and who was against it (the top leadership of AFSCME, WEAC, and the state AFL-CIO). If there is a take-home point in Sustar’s piece, it is that the big unions prioritized the preservation of their dues-collection apparatus over the defense of their membership’s standard of living. As we now know definitively, this is a losing strategy.

John Nichols’ resume reads like a long prologue to the role he played all through the Uprising, that of a Madison-based progressive journalist and commentator with national visibility. He has written books about media democracy, socialism in America, and a critical profile of Dick Cheney, and finds regular work as a Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine. As one of the most consistently present pundits delivering the Uprising to a TV audience (being a frequent guest on MSNBC’s The Ed Show and other cable news programs), as well as occasionally himself taking the microphone in front of protestors, it was almost a foregone conclusion that his Uprising would be the first book-length treatment of the subject by a single author. 

 

Nichols opens with a foreword that spells out his claim to authenticity as a fifth-generation Wisconsinite, and points out that at one time in their respective careers, he and Scott Walker were actually on good terms. As a political reporter allowed the space to roam, Nichols brings in not only discussions of labor battles from the past but the more timeless questions of democracy itself. For example, in Chapter 2 “First Amendment Remedies,” he unpacks the problems of despotism and the faltering constitutional guards against tyranny exposed in the course of the Uprising. He interweaves into these expositions of political history brief profiles or testimonies of the ordinary Wisconsinites he discovered at the demonstrations. As the expert journalist, he always attaches a human being to the most abstract parts of the narrative and then name drops the heavy hitter (Michael Moore, Rev. Jesse Jackson, etc) to keep up the narrative of national attention. 

My main objection to Nichols’ book is really that of Nichols’ politics. He is basically a social democrat, which colors his perception of certain events. For example, when he writes “It was hard not to feel hopeful on March 12, the day that 180,000 Wisconsinites welcomed home fourteen Democratic state senators who had fled the state to deny Governor Walker and his Republican legislative allies the quorum required to pass their anti-labor legislation,” I question whether he attended the same event that I did. Hopeful? I and almost everyone I know remember it feeling like a wake. It was three days after Walker and the Republicans rammed their bill through in a surprise procedural move, and the labor leadership did nothing at all, even though thousands who gathered at the capitol on the night of March 9 chanted “general strike!” at the top of their lungs. By Saturday’s demonstration, the predominant vibe was, the protest phase is over and the movement suffered a significant defeat. Nichols’ experience of that day might have been too heavily informed by the cheers he heard from his position near the stage.

To wrap up my comments on the four books, I honestly recommend reading them all for the fullest understanding of the Uprising. As with any genuine popular movement, all the perspectives and even the major storylines cannot be told in a single volume. Outside of the broad outlines and a handful of recurrent voices, there is surprisingly little overlap between the four.

*

In the next post I will cover a selection of pamphlets and zines.

Oh, and if you need another take on Wisconsin Uprising and It Started in Wisconsin see Allen Ruff's review here.

 

just like people, caution!! poster gets around

The Fourth of July is as good a day as any to say no matter how unfriendly to immigrants the immigration laws get, the United States is still a country of immigrants. The laws and policies themselves do not change that. Proportionally, the population is now more foreign-born than it has been for decades. Therefore I suppose it is not surprising that the broadside Caution Migrant Workers of Arizona that Nicolas Lampert and I printed up in the spring of 2010 continues finding audiences, now mainly in the form of its enlarged wall-hung gallery version.

The first exhibition for the enlarged piece was in Arizona. Very appropriate, yes. But as familiar as the immigrant narrative is, in some states the story is relatively new, as are the attendant anxieties. For example, parts of the Southeast—for generations the most proportionally native-born region—have seen its Latino population spike over the last decade, bringing in whole new communities, flavors, and sounds to cities and towns across several states. So we are happy to have our piece now on display in North Carolina, at UNC-Greensboro’s Weatherspoon Art Museum, in the very timely exhibition Zone of Contention: The US/Mexico Border.

Here is a gallery shot of the opening from June 16. I am glad to see that a young African American viewer is snapping a digital image of the poster, since the poster is an appropriation of an abolitionist broadside from the 1840s. Our piece was done before the recent Supreme Court ruling upheld the main provision of Arizona’s SB 1070. The meaning of that word CAUTION!! is more weighty now, after the ruling. If anything, the ruling brings the parallel between antebellum and contemporary liberation paranoias even closer.

Next up for the piece will be in a show called artWORK, opening in our backyard, at the Crossman Gallery at UW-Whitewater in September.

As Caution Migrant Workers of Arizona circulates, I imagine it intersecting with the circulation of humans. Will there be Salvadoran-born custodian who takes a moment out of her after-hours gallery cleaning to view the piece? Will a South African-born professor take his class to the museum to view the show? At what fleeting points in their circulatory systems do this particular art object and the narrative of human migration become one? 

If you want to kick around these questions with the poster in your own home, I remind you that a screen printed version of the poster is still available from Justseeds, as well as the original letterpress printed one.

 

 

22-3254: a great finish

Before I turn the page on the just-completed spring 2012 semester at Columbia College, I must make mention of the final project work done by my students. The course 22-3254 was called Making Print Media Political, and the last assignment was to produce and disseminate work without traditional authorship. In the course I exposed the students to work that is overtly political in both traditional fine art contexts (typically distinguished by standard authorship), on the one hand, and in a functional, social struggle, or guerrilla context (with authorship de-emphasized or erased altogether), on the other. The idea behind the last assignment was to free the students from the constraints imposed by authored work. They took the assignment to heart and pushed limits in both content and dissemination strategies. I cautioned them properly, outlining what kinds of gray legality govern even the smallest kinds of public dissemination. In fact, one of them ended up in handcuffs while executing his work. He talked his out of trouble, but was forced by Chicago police to give up his documentary images. I gave him full credit.

Overall, the results were impressive. One student who lives by dumpster diving made some wonderful hand-drawn signs to mark his favorite dumpsters, as if they were regular stores. He affixed them to nearby alley fences or on the dumpsters themselves. Another simply accelerated what she’d been doing more or less constantly since last fall: make posters for Occupy Chicago and Occupy Columbia. I critiqued her designs pretty thoroughly but I could not hide my pleasure. And some I could not constructively critique at all. Like this one. It is too good.

A pair of students made some bookmarks with partial but recognizable images of famous figures on one side and a date with a QR code on the other. The dates and codes lead to online information about what that person had said on that date. The statement is of a surprising or lesser known nature, somehow “political,” and certainly controversial. The students went to two different bookstores, Quimby’s in Wicker Park and a suburban Barnes & Noble. In both settings they made guerrilla placements using your standard reverse-shoplifting technique. Not surprisingly, the Barnes & Noble staff warned them off a few times while Quimby’s workers said nothing.

Several of the more pointed productions are worth showing here. One is this excellent appropriation of Magritte’s The Treachery of Images. The student had been obsessing over the Berlin Conference of 1884, at which the division of the continent by the European powers into defined territories was superimposed upon the many indigenous identities, languages, and generations-long homelands. Divided up without regard to the indigenous groupings, the Berlin Conference bequeathed to the modern nations of Africa a fate fraught with conflict, through broken cultural affinities and inappropriate unities. This work takes Magritte’s jab at the intangibility of representations to another level of futility, that of the tragic and unwanted inheritance. The student produced it as a poster, but we discussed it as a t-shirt. I would buy one.

 

Another student frontally addressed a college controversy surrounding the president of the college. With different campus constituencies applying pressure on the administration all year long—students, both full and part-time faculty, and staffers from various research units from around the college, President Warrick Carter at one point cracked. He very publicly lost his cool during his annual State of the College address, thereby sealing his reputation negatively in the minds of many students. To recall a moment Dr. Carter will never live down, this anonymous project made itself felt at Manifest—a prime occasion for a campus statement.

  

     

Finally, two students with different projects attacked the advertising on CTA trains. According to the intentions of their respective projects each achieved mixed results. The trains are a tempting venue, but harder to invade than one might think, and at the same time less interactive than one might assume. For the great majority of passengers, the train is about passivity and this can be overlooked in the design of placards that ask for response via Twitter (as one of the projects did). But in an instance of the art making leading to the production of a valuable image despite the unrealized intended outcome, one of them came away with this striking picture.

I would have difficulty coming up with a better document of the profound crisis within which we Americans all now simply accept as everyday life—the security/control-society on one side, and the speculative gambling economy, on the other. Both social poisons served up in the bite-sized portion of an individually comprehended and internalized advertisement. A bigger problem, indeed.