propositions press... 2.0

a field trip, in truths

[This essay was included in Meandering Methodologies, Deviant Disciplines, a publication produced by Public Art Saint Paul. The book is the final document from the four-year City Art Collaboratory project that brought scientists into collaboration with artists.]

My interest in science and art resonates with what philosopher Alain Badiou calls the “truth process” in his book Ethics. Written as the Yugoslav Wars unfolded, and particularly with the failed response of the Western powers in mind, Badiou composed his system to counter moral systems based on the so-called natural rights of man. He targets the cynical flexibility resulting from the universalizing claims of liberal humanism. With Badiou’s framework in mind, I found myself intrigued by the field trip taken by City Art Collaboratory scientists and artists to Coldwater Spring, as reported on the City Art Collaboratory blog. Knowing that the area around Coldwater Spring, above the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, was the site of an anti-road campaign only several years after the Yugoslav Wars, I wonder if applying Badiou’s language to a consideration of that site adds productive complexity to his ethics of truth, between abstraction and materiality, in space more than time. In understanding Coldwater Spring as a source not only of water but also of truths, and considering the ethical demands it might make in turn, I hope to advance Badiou’s political aims, which I share.

Reviewing Badiou’s system is the place to start. Greatly simplified, Badiou describes the truth process as opening with the event—a specific circumstance that occurs in time, immanently rupturing a situation, and that, whatever its temporal duration, “vanishes as soon as it appears.”1 The event divides consciousness, or a historical narrative, or a demarcation between self and other, or one’s relation to an imagined ideal, into the situation before and the situation after. But once perceived, the event is always already over. Those who experience the event are afterward called to observe a fidelity to it, and this is the basis for Badiou’s ethics. Performing this fidelity—thereby becoming an agent of truth, touching the eternal—is the ethic of the truth process. In plain language, I take this to mean carrying forward with new being, new thinking, or changed conduct that has been demanded by the revelatory event. A basic ethical failure is to go forward as if the event had not happened. The most extreme infidelity is the simulacrum of a truth, a dishonesty that legitimizes war. For Badiou, this is evil.

To support his analysis, Badiou returns repeatedly to his four-fold subjective “types”, across a spectrum from intimate to public realms: politics, love, science, and art. In politics, the subject is induced through mass experience; society is the actor. Love resides at the opposite end of the intimacy spectrum, inducing a subject in the space between individual persons. Science and art serve as intermediate zones in which the individual and the social meet. To take one of the many instances where Badiou uses the fourfold matrix to illustrate his point, he lists as exemplary events in order of politics, love, science, and art, “the French Revolution of 1792, the meeting of Heloise and Abelard, Galileo’s creation of physics, and Haydn’s invention of the classical musical style.”2 Thus, in politics he means revolution. By love, he means the life-changing intensity of amorous relations between individuals. Science and art, activity attributable to either individual practitioners or group efforts based on shared frameworks, produce paradigm-shifting insights. But he never presents his cherry-picked examples of events as existing within layers of history, much less in relation to one another.

Moving beyond the decontextualized examples of truth events he prefers, grounding Badiou’s language in a particular place reveals that different subject types may articulate truths along a common thread; in the Coldwater example that follows, in some sense all four are present. The different events entail multiple fidelities but are bound by relation of varying depths of time to the same place. Together, they produce a compound truth, at times contradictory but moving toward resolution. We could say the original truth is the spring itself, the existence of which was and is a hydrogeological event that occurs outside of human purpose.

Science can make truths legible in ways that no other endeavor can, but in contrast to the theory of relativity or the invention calculus, the self-evidence of the spring precludes the need for a formally presented insight. All science of the spring, from the earliest descriptions by explorers to latter-day hydrological measurements, only supplements the fundamental fact of flowing water.

 3

A series of Coldwater truths across subject types can be traced back to a work of art: a shimmering 1856 watercolor landscape by Alfred Sully, a commissioned officer and West Point graduate. The painting depicts the area from the perspective of the western bank of the Mississippi, above the confluence; Coldwater Spring is in the wooded foreground and Fort Snelling is off in the distance. The picture glows with summer light and the expansive skies of the northern prairie, capturing a moment when the settling of Minnesota was beginning to accelerate, and the sacred place Mndota (“where the waters meet”) was subsumed by its strategic significance. As the subject type art, the watercolor preserves a truth in the image and also exists as a truth-event in its objecthood. Sully’s image presents an event not as artistic innovation (Badiou’s preferred art reference), but as a document of opposing vectors—that of the free Dakota lands as represented by the unfenced terrain, or the simulacrum of democracy advanced by the settler nation, monumentalized by the fort. Competing fidelities ensued, resulting in the Dakota Uprising of 1862.

Sully seems to have observed a fidelity to the events of his own artistic creations. Even as he carried out his orders to secure territory, Sully is reputed to have been an advocate for Indians, treating them fairly and honestly, if not softly. To add to the truth in art already present in his Mississippi riverscape, an event in love seems to have emerged between the Anglo Sully and the great romance of his life, Manuela, his first wife, a Californian Chicana who died tragically young. Later, perhaps readable as a sort of fidelity to his mixed first marriage, Sully wed a French-Yankton woman in the Minnesota Territory, thereby contributing to the polyglot universe he found in the territorial settlements. One of Sully’s granddaughters was Ella Deloria, an ethnographer who conducted formal research on Navajo, Lumbee, and Lakota cultures. The social scientific reports she helped author contributed to both government recognition and tribal self-recognition. These published reports were events in Badiou’s sense; the reclamation and growth of tribal identities are the fidelity.

To add to these linked events in art, love, and science, and to complete the poetic redemption of the compound truth, one of Sully’s further descendants, the activist writer Vine Deloria Jr., carried forth a four-generations-late fidelity to the 1862 Dakota Uprising that Sully himself played a part in suppressing. Deloria’s 1969 book Custer Died for Your Sins helped to shape contemporary indigenous political consciousness and became a key text in the resurgence of native resistance against the imperialism of which his great-grandfather was a historical agent. Moreover, Custer Died for Your Sins came wrapped up in an event of its own moment—in the subject type politics at global scale, i.e., the worldwide systemic convulsions of the late 1960s and early 70s. A generation after that, a fidelity to the heyday of Red Power was an element in the production of a new political event, one that returns the thread to Coldwater Spring.

In 1997, in response to a planned highway widening and new interchange that threatened the spring and nearby sacred stand of oaks, a resistance movement rose up and established itself physically as an outlaw road-block encampment that became known as the Minnehaha Free State. Eventually, this became the nation’s longest ever blockage of a government road construction project. The campaign was comprised of those fighting to preserve the oaks, property owners resisting eminent domain, and the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota, whose claims to tribal identity are interwoven with their claim on the spring. The Minnehaha Free State produced a militancy that kept the encampment going for sixteen months—we could say this was partly in fidelity to the indigenous rights and identity articulated by, among others, Vine Deloria.

The area being defended was the geographic heart of a truth-event, fidelity to which was evident not only in the road-block, but even more so through the years of grassroots political action, testimony in public hearings, court challenges, and other kinds of dedicated resistance. That fidelity prevailed to the degree that Coldwater Spring remains free flowing, and, through persistent striving, it was eventually granted governmental protection. In grappling with the problem of ethical consistency—key to combatting the moral flexibility of the neoliberal human rights frame—Badiou posits perseverance (in performing one’s fidelity to an event) as the opposite of opinion. The preservation demands made by the activists of the Free State may not have been achieved in total (the oaks were destroyed), but the perseverance following the event undoubtedly exposed the original position of the state—technocratically insisting on the road and dismissing concerns about the spring, but then later scaling back those plans—as mere opinion.

The truths of Coldwater Spring described in terms of Badiou’s system of ethics begins with the spring itself. Additionally, the spring exists as, and in relation to, multiple events, with fidelity to one event sometimes contributing to the production of another. It meanders through all four of Badiou’s subject types, by way of bloodline or political narrative. In a constructive departure from Badiou’s theory, applying his language to Coldwater Spring shows that a particular point of departure in space breaks linear time, stacking events into a single, compound truth. Furthermore, the original event, unlike the disappearing acts of Badiou’s exemplary events, remains open, perpetually reinvigorated by its flowing water.

Seen this way, the City Art Collaboratory visitors who quaffed clear water from the spring may yet express fidelities to the land in ways unforeseen, or may find themselves ensnared in their own Coldwater-threaded events—certainly in the science or arts of their training, but equally as likely, in politics or love. The hypocrisies of capital’s moralistic cloak will never be punctured without the blades of compound truths—Badiou supplies the language, but Coldwater Spring is the pure fact and the gushing event.

1 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, translated by Peter Hallward (Brooklyn: Verso, 2001), 67.

2 Ibid., p. 41.

3 Image supplied by Beinecke Digital Collection of Yale University Library.

from the archives, our first site specific work

I found this old slide the other day. It is from the spring of 1990.

Miyo Kachi, Dan Froehlich, and I were students at the time. We rented the lower flat of a house in Northfield, west of the Cannon River, almost exactly between the two campuses. We (and our frequent guest Sarah Van Orman) called our home Pineapple House.

The house didn't come with a compost bin and the idea of household composting was still kind of a subcultural thing at the time. But we were all former Farmhouse residents, so composting had already become second nature to us. I remember that we can been "saving" our kitchen waste over the cold Minnesota winter, ie collecting it in a can or bucket out back, leaving it frozen until the spring thaws. As it warmed, we had to build a bin for it.

As it happened, Miyo and I were in a sculpture class together that spring. She had scavenged this cyclone fencing material and a clump of chicken wire. So we collaborated on this compost bin project in satisfaction of one of our assignments, the site specific project. We planted the bin on this little slope that ran across the property like the step into a sunken living room, about the only distinguishing feature of the backyard; you can see the brick supports on the back end, keeping the hardware cloth bottom level. For the critique we christened the bin with a banana peel, also visible.

I'm not sure if it was used much–the end of the school year came and we all moved out in a matter a few weeks. But it is funny to see this pic now, before I knew about all the different currents among artists that this project relates to. It just goes to show, often artists find their way to where they are through modest beginnings of intuition and immediate needs, without worrying about the formalities of discourse, art history, and proper theorizing. We had non-academic reasons to be creative. What mattered in this case, and what I am concerned about now even as I look at this image, is how the bin performed. It still strikes me as nice looking and a clever reuse of found materials, especially considering our somewhat limited skills at that time. But obviously it is not going to facilitate a hot compost, or be very convenient for turning.

Maybe Miyo and I could plan on designing an improved version for the project's 2015 25th anniversary. 

summertime in walkerville

It is high summer in Madison, warm lakes, fireflies, and thunderstorms. 

And camping. Not in the woods, but on the sidewalks and patches of grass outside the Capitol.  

The Wisconsin Uprising lives. Which is saying a lot considering that after the real, meaningful, and historic victories of the first two to three weeks, we have suffered a string of defeats, each more serious than the last. But the movement is in a stage of metamorphasis, in a fragile state but trying to grow wings.

So let us review the political achievements of the Scott Walker regime, pretty much all of them concluded in the month of June. After recounts, at the very end of May the April 5 election for Supreme Court was finally certified in favor of the reactionary incumbent, David Prosser. The state’s Government Accountability Board declined to review the widely reported irregularities in the Waukesha County vote-counting process that made the difference in the election, despite problems during the recount that were documented by observers. The challenger declined to call for an investigation, instead opting to note the irregularities in a statement that called for improvements in the election system. Only about two weeks later the Supreme Court overturned the ruling by a Dane County judge that blocked the GOP-backed law stripping state workers of their collective bargaining rights, in a legally unconventional opinion blasted by the minority. The end of collective bargaining and payroll-deducted dues collection is now the law and will probably be upheld against further legal challenges. And then, as of last week, the budget, packed with deep cuts to nearly all state services (for example, BadgerCare, the state’s award-winning Medicaid program that serves about a million people), savaging anything progressive in particular (past provisions friendly to wind energy), and doling out special favors to private interests (the highway and road construction lobby), was passed with zero input from the Democrats and now waits to be signed by the governor.  

The curtain on this first drama has been drawn. Austerity is come to Wisconsin, dressed in the brown shirts of anti-abortion fanaticism and the Voter ID xenophobes, planned by the hard-scheming policy minds of ALEC, and sponsored by Koch Industries and the Cline Group.

On the left the consensus is emerging, just maybe, if the many movement analysis panels are to be believed, that the leadership of the unions was too timid. Of course the rank and file and grassroots knew this as it happened—on the night of March 9, to be exact, when Scott Walker essentially dared the workers to strike by ramming through his union-busting bill. As gratifying as it is to have one’s assessment affirmed even if long after the time of consequence, moving forward I am not convinced that the movement, at least as constituted in Madison, has the power for what it is going to take to halt the Walker regime, never mind undoing the damage. That is because the movement’s last remaining hope in the legislative arena is in the recall elections and our efforts on that front have been spotty to say the least.

Six sitting Republican and three Democratic state senators will defend their seats in an August 9 recall election. The money on the conservative side is already pouring in, as are the dirty tricks, the most widely publicized of which is their tactic of running fake Democrats to screw up the primary elections. Knowing this already, and having seen the Waukesha County electoral theft in plain sight, the Republicans will no doubt resort to any tactic that they can get away with. They know full well that a result short of a three-seat net gain for the Democrats will preserve not only their lock on Wisconsin government, but also crush the chances of a later recall campaign targeting Scott Walker (which cannot be filed until he’s been in office for a year).

In the meantime, the looming recall elections have the Republicans nervous enough to be piling on new policy and legislative initiatives at breakneck speed. There are too many proposed laws and regulations to go into here, but you can trust that they are nearly all uniformly hostile to any sort of public interest, and some are so extreme in their costly privatization schemes and ideological slants that even Republican voices are questioning them. The recall elections are all the more important as a result, but only as a negative achievement. In other words, if the Democrats do not gain the majority, the Republicans will trumpet their victory, call it an approval of the Walker agenda, and press forward even harder. If the Democrats win, they can only slow or stop the process, at best. Nonetheless, we must win. Youth and minorities will make the difference, which, again, given their rates of participation is anything but a safe proposition. 

So what to do? Helping with the dispersed recall campaigns in other parts of the state (election in seven weeks) is only the first of at least three shifts attention away from Madison. The second is finding meaningful ways to reach out in support of our comrades elsewhere, to return the favor to the people of the world who touched us back in February and March, whether in Spain, Greece, and Egypt. These gestures are more important than ever in the YouTube age.

 

But the most important pivot turns toward the looming battle over proposed new mining in northern Wisconsin. This is primary extraction, a proposed four-mile long dirty gash (inevitable leaching of sulfides, acids, and mercury) at the headwaters of the Bad River, which flows directly into Lake Superior, the largest and cleanest of the Great Lakes, the planet’s largest freshwater system. The formerly unprofitable levels of iron ore are now viewed as a pile of cash, an illusion driven by the appetite for steel in China and India—the main markets to which the taconite pellets will be shipped. Some of it would probably end up being unloaded in Tianjin.

The battle will bundle together a host of constituencies, pitting Gogebic Taconite and their hired representatives (GTAC, as they are known, was a big out-of-state donor to Scott Walker and expect to benefit from industry-friendly streamlining of regulations that are currently some of the toughest in the nation) against the citizens of the progressive strongholds of Ashland, Bayfield, and Iron counties, along with the Bad Water Band of the Lake Superior Ojibwe, whose traditional wild rice harvesting beds lie downstream from the lands eyed by GTAC—all in the context of lost American industry, globalization, and new BRIC economic power. This federally recognized band, though small in numbers, includes veterans from the Walleye Wars of the 80s and the Crandon Mine campaign of the 90s, both of which were successfully fought by grassroots anti-racist and anti-corporate coalitions. In the two campaigns, activists led by indigenous defenders of the land performed direct actions that confronted racist groups on the ground, stopped industrial equipment on the roads and tracks, and engaged legislative and media fronts simultaneously. In meetings, in letters to the editor, on message boards, references are already being made to both struggles. If the efforts to begin mining continue to advance, then the north woods is where colorful midwestern radicalism will make itself felt again. With the mining interests attempting to divide public opinion by promising jobs (first 700, then inflating that number to 2800–who believes them?), the position of labor will be interesting to watch. I’m not very hopeful, but what a time and place for labor to break its conservativism in relation to environmental politics. If there ever were an occasion to gang up on the common enemy, this would be it.

*

After the budget was passed last week, activists struck the camp. The square is mostly quiet, the Capitol will be reopened without metal detectors in about a week.

Walkerville is no more. Everywhere is Walkerville.

 

towards home, but still drifting

The China Drift continued even as the traveling group fractured and parts went in different directions. Wuhan was the place from which the big group, which grew over the first week to twenty-two or so, started to lose members. Xiao, Qu Ge, Orienna, Michael, Emi, Desiree, Jing, and Gordon all caught Thursday night trains back to Beijing. Gao Bei stayed to visit her family and I think SiSi went to another town to see hers. Elaine returned to Beijing the next night.

From Lashihai it was I who fell behind first. After two days together at the Lijiang Studio, I waved goodbye to Jay, Sarah, Ula, Claire, Brian, Stephanie, and Mai Dian as they rode off in the studio’s van, bound for Wumu on the rainy third morning. After another two days with just myself and the neighboring He family for company, I flew back to Beijing, rejoining Jing and Gordon. One night later, Ula and Stephanie caught up to Gordon, Joseph, and I for food and beer in Caochangdi. Stephanie and Ula brought stories of mountain liquors and pictographic scripts from Wumu, the remote Naxi mountain village. I wished I had gone with them until I heard about the rain and stomach bugs.

I had to get back to Beijing a day before them in any case. I needed a day to visit a future niece at the Shepherd’s Field Children’s Village way out of the city, practically in Tianjin. The outing mixed family stuff with research, which is to say, I was quite curious about Shepherd’s Field. It is a full service foster home for Chinese orphans with special needs that grew out of the Philip Hayden Foundation, a fifteen year-old service organization founded by an American couple dedicated to helping orphans in China. I was told that there are currently some 75 children in residence. A minority of them will be adopted into forever families (that is the lingo of American child services culture, something we’ve learned as we have gone through that culture ourselves). Some children will live at Shepherd’s Field for years.

Where would China be without all these Christians helping out? I am sure the society would be worse off, and that there would be many fewer social services than exist now. But I don’t think there would be any hugely increased number of Christian converts. I know that there are intense cultures of Chinese Christianity in both Taiwan and Singapore, as well as overseas. And yes there have been religious movements in China, some of them quite potent on a political level, from the Taipings to Falun Dafa. But I simply cannot imagine a faith like Christianity (which, let’s face it, is founded on some pretty outlandish stories) gaining serious mainstream traction in post-’89, post-idealism mainland China. After all, the missionaries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not manage to reshape China in any ultimately significant way, even though they fed millions of poor and hungry. My bet is, to most Chinese Christianity is, in the end, something that will always seem foreign. And therefore irrelevant to them, but for the concrete contributions the Christians can make.

More universal, and deserving of more effort to connect and weave narratives are the analysis of and the shared discontents around the concrete conditions of life. The Drift, at its best as an encounter-based research method, extends odd and specific strands of connection, far beyond the convoluted theologies of the proselytizers. So as the China Drift participants went off on our separate ways, I am sure many of us continued to draw connections. That was the case for me when I found myself eighteen hours beyond Beijing, traveling by pick-up from the Bainbridge Island ferry landing to to the Poulsbo home of climate and conservation scientists Jennie Hoffman and Daniel Froehlich, on the Kitsap Peninsula across the water from Seattle. My first stop: the grave of Chief Seattle, he of the famous words that laced a requiem for his land and culture with the biocentrism we dream of today. What place to kiss the ground of my country could be more American–and more global. And true to the experience of drifting over histories, places and cultures, thoughts about common fates and all the rest, I was just a little surprised to find that Chief Seattle had been, according to his gravestone, baptized. Those Christians again. Maybe they'll get us all in the end, Chinese or not.

Later that evening Dan continued telling me about the local history, Poulsbo’s Norwegian heritage, the raising of Seattle, and so forth. In the process we came across this photograph by Asahel Curtis documenting the flattening of old Seattle’s Denny Hill, a project also known as the Denny Regrade. The earthen towers visible in the photograph are the property owner holdouts who demanded better compensation or maybe just refused to leave. Having just returned from the land of the nail house, I thought I was seeing double, through time and space.

The part of Seattle that was reshaped by the Denny Regrade eventually became known as Belltown. Decades after whatever upheavels caused by the Denny Regrade had been settled or forgotten, artist Brett Bloom documented the neighborhood’s recent creative efforts to humanize the available public space. I remember learning something about Belltown when Brett and Ava Bromberg released the book seven years ago. But it was not until this trip, with China’s nail houses, big hydroengineering projects, and, most of all, the report we received while in Wuhan about the property megadeveloper OCT’s plans for an amusement park on the shores of Wuhan’s jewel, Donghu, fresh in my mind that the work in Belltown resonated. Now I wonder, after the futility of a last stand, whether in the face of corrupt developers or unstoppable eminent domain, what are the struggles and achievements to come, even on the same piece of land? What the Denny Regrade showed is that after the development happens, other problems and challenges emerge; it is always a matter of spatial politics in the end, and there is never a perfectly satisfactory (or even minimally functional) spatial arrangement for every stake holder. There is only another political problem.

I spent my first night back on North American soil managing my jet leg constructively—a 3:30 AM departure for the backlands of Fort Lewis and McChord AFB, to help out with some bird banding. It was the first session of the season for this particular station, one of several maintained by the Puget Sound Bird Observatory.
The data collected is given over to the MAPS program of the Institute for Bird Populations, one of the only continent-wide research programs that allows for a large-scale picture of bird populations, without which conservation management would be comparatively blind.

Dan told me the story of how the MAPS program came to be. It had to do with the timing of radioactive releases from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the suspicion that catastrophic breeding failures among certain West Coast raptors that year were linked to the April 26 disaster, but then not having the data to conclusively determine whether the radioactive iodine cloud could in fact be counted as the aberrant factor. Thus the MAPS program was born, to build a global perspective on bird population trends across species, through continental units. Obviously, with the Fukishima disaster still unfolding, not to mention the acceleration of climate change and habitat destruction, the work of collecting data is more important now than ever.

That said, it is science, meaning, attachments to presuppositions must be held minimal, even if those presuppositions are somewhat operational. There are simply too many factors at play at the level of detailed interaction between organisms and environment. Dan himself offered that the data collection helps with the broad outlines of what’s going on, but in the end the whole effort is still an educated gamble. While the physical laws point us toward definite conclusions (ie greenhouse gases work in a known way, therefore the planet is warming), the complexity of the planet’s natural systems makes management often less than straightforward. To the politically minded inhabitant of planet Earth and the politically-minded experimental artist, it is where our work exists: careful diagnosis, experimental strategies of response, and uncertain outcome.