propositions press... 2.0

an oasis unable to grow outside of itself

Historically, the labor and intellectual leadership in and around Madison has made an outsized impact on statewide progressive policy. The density of citizen engagement and public conversation has always been exceptional here. That has not changed. If anything, since the upsurge of 2011 the political climate in this city has settled into a permanent low boil. And yet the Walker regime has continued its systematic dismantling of Wisconsin’s once-vaunted public institutions, largely unimpeded despite the superficial vitality of Wisconsin’s progressive political culture. One could say then, that the rise of the right wing in Wisconsin is at the same time the story of the left’s failure, and particularly the failure of the left as can be observed in Madison. 

Two recent public exchanges had me grousing about left political culture, both having aired on Madison’s leftist media lifeline, WORT. The first happened on Allen Ruff’s radio show of May 21 (archived until July 20, 2015), between a caller and his guest for that day, Mary Bottari, of the Center for Media and Democracy. CMD provides detailed information about the conflicts of interest and corrupt ways that have become standard procedure under Republican governors across the country and glaringly under the Scott Walker regime, for example, as chronicled in the CMD investigative project ALECexposed. Ms Bottari is without a doubt one of the best informed watchdog journalists now working. True to her expertise, she rolled out one outrage after another, describing in detail the erosion of good government happening in nearly every direction.

But she herself—and by extension the entire leftist mentality of which she is a vehicle—was exposed by the program’s first caller (@22:30). To paraphrase, the caller professed frustration with all available activist responses thus far, ie marching in protest, helping with the recall election, supporting progressive candidates, educating oneself, etc. Then he added, to the right wing members of his family nothing that Bottari said makes a difference. For them Scott Walker can do no wrong—the charges of corruption, nepotism, plunder, and outright lying, whether true or false, are irrelevant. What matters to them is that Scott Walker stands in contrast and opposition to the “the people like us” they despise, which I took to mean, for one thing, the people who do care about GOP misdeeds. For the provincial, activist right, leftist loathing of Walker is in fact a mark of legitimacy. The caller then addressed a challenge to Bottari: “It’s time for the people who are providing the information to also provide some answers. What does your guest suggest that we should be doing?”

Bottari failed to answer the challenge; she did not even seem to take the caller’s perspective as a serious analysis. Her response was pure liberal boilerplate: let’s keep on witnessing, reporting, and educating—basically saying that is all we can do, that is the best we can do, that is the only thing we can do—as if she had not heard anything the caller had just said. Bottari probably declined to take up the question of cultural divides in her capacity as a CMD staffer for reasons of professionalism. But she at least should have validated the question. Instead of amplifying the caller’s challenge, Mr Ruff more or less let her off the hook, thereby contributing to the evasion. The caller was desperate for something besides more gory detail about how bad things are. The response was at best a missed opportunity and at worst an example of the complacency that runs on the smugness of the well-informed who value political knowledge over political achievement, or else confuse the former for the latter. If the left cannot let go of the presumption that self-evidence of information necessarily produces political achievement, the right will continue to steamroll all who stand in their way. To be perfectly fair, I for one did not expect Bottari to have “the answers.” She is no doubt flummoxed just like the rest of us. Nonetheless, instead of spending precious community airtime detailing the wreckage, the voices of the Wisconsin left need to be in constant strategy session mode, precisely because everything else, including the valorization of information and accuracy as stand-alone strategies, have thus far failed. It is important that figures like Bottari lead that conversation—to begin with, simply by acknowledging that political creativity and experimentation are what we need. 

The second complaint-worthy media moment took place on Carousel Bayrd’s May 26 edition of A Public Affair (archived until July 25, 2015). The guest was Harriet Brown, a writer who tackles the subject of female body image and the obsession with weight loss. She is a critic of “fat-shaming,” particularly as delivered by health care professionals, and she questions the received wisdom regarding the “obesity epidemic.” She claims to debunk causal associations between weight gain and a host of maladies, and aims to recontextualize the contemporary weight standard as a problem of obesity rhetoric and distorted science. As Ms Brown went on about how there is no evidence of BMI being linked to various illnesses, I had a couple of negative reactions. The first is that Ms Brown never acknowledged the cultural specificity of the thin body ideal, namely, that it is a racialized ideal. The vast majority of the collective “we” and “us” she repeatedly used in her declarations are, in fact, young white women of higher education and it is to that demographic that her critique pertains. I almost feel that this should not have to be said, because it has been noted in so many places, but Native, African American, and Latina women in general have very different beauty ideal hang ups—skin color, hair, voice, eyes, etc. Weight plays out very differently. While eating disorders affect people of all races and gender, analyzing weight loss in isolation from other body issues tends to erase women of color, for whom weight is but one body issue and often not the most important, and instead speaks primarily to the particular body image battles of young white women.

Further, because she universalizes freely, Ms Brown also glosses over what is an epidemic outside of the US. In fast developing societies such as China and Brazil, and where genetic predispositions are more common than in European bloodlines, the incidence of Type II diabetes is clearly on the upswing at alarming rates. One of her points is that there is no causal relationship between weight gain and diabetes. This may be true; whatever the weight, sugar is the known culprit. But nonetheless, in, say, persons of East Asian genetic make-up (like me!), the risk for adult onset diabetes rises sharply for people of Asian descent at a lower BMI than that corresponding to risk in caucasians. Whether weight gain by itself causes diabetes is not as important as it being clearly an indicator of risk; not unexpectedly, reducing weight reduces risk. Moreover, higher caloric intake is also known to be a contributing factor, irrespective of exact sugar consumption. These patterns are provable to the extent that at the level of populations, the trends can be predicted—societies that move to American standards of caloric intake can expect to see a rise in adult onset diabetes. Because that is what happens. To invalidate these realities is plain irresponsible. And I called into the show and said so (@46:30). My points weren’t taken well by either the guest or the host.

The bigger mistake, of which Brown’s arguments are only one example among many, is the tendency of ostensibly progressive social critics to accept the framing of myriad problems as individualized experiences. In this case, she identifies fat-shaming as a problem, ie the messaging that emanates from physicians and other health professionals, as well as social peers, directed at people considered overweight, often patients or people in otherwise vulnerable positions. The shaming implicitly or explicitly attaches a moral failure to a person’s inability to control weight. By this dynamic, fat people are assumed to be weak, unreliable, lazy, etc. Of course the moral angle is a fallacy. But Brown makes the wrong counterattack by accepting that weight control is a matter of individual management, and that the solution is to advocate for a no-standards ethic. Rather than dispensing with the shaming, she merely turns the tables; health care workers are the guilty ones—guilty of attaching health concerns to body weight, which in her world have no association. She fights finger-wagging with finger-wagging.

Besides some passing mention of media and advertising, Brown failed to address anything structural or economic, not even obvious widespread problems like junk food being sold in schools to offset decreased funding. Or the basic industrial reality of processed foods being manufactured for such a low shelf price as to render healthy fresh foods unaffordable by comparison. Or the general observation that there are whole economic sectors invested, directly or indirectly, in making and keeping people overweight. Instead, Brown’s blindspot opens her for uncritically legitimating the neoliberal solution to all social inequities: diversity and inclusion. By privileging the pain, triumph, and acceptance of the individual as the site of struggle, above collective, cultural, or structural fronts, Brown re-inscribes a genuinely resistant impulse with the instrumentalized flexibility demanded by global capital, ie a bundle of interests all-too pleased to redefine “fat” ever upwards.

 *

Even the dissection of leftist failure in Madison is a failure. It is like shooting hot air balloons but then not knowing where they land. There can be no follow-up and no debate because A) the unvarnished information, or B) the pain of the individual, is so compelling as to preclude any self-location of argument. The valorizations of these two factors are deep-rooted, tendencies that can be traced back to the philosophical underpinnings, now two or three hundred years old, of rationalism and individual rights as the pathways to social order. A generation’s worth of collective effort built the alt-infrastructure from which Madison residents now benefit, including WORT itself. Such projects took a leap of imagination, of dreaming the possible, beginning with adopting priorities outside of those prescribed in the given pathways. At larger scale, the progressive social and environmental policies that originated in Madison and became models for the state and the country were founded on some germ of imagination. If only today's left could amplify that creativity, rather than retread the inherited frames.

same time, different season?

Ah, it is finally over. The Christmas season, that is. 

As the ordinary shopper has undoubtedly noticed, the Christmas displays in stores seem to move inexorably forward year after year, extending the holiday season by intruding from the future into our present. Having undercut Thanksgiving and put Halloween within sights, the pressures of Christmas retailing have flattened the meaning of “seasonal.” 

The last six weeks of the year used to be a retreat into the coziness of long nights, for gratitude and family bonding, looking forward and back. This is what I recall, well into young adulthood. Now the holiday season is layered with the fatigue of the too-long and the boredom of the over-familiar, a spectacle that delivers the psychic pressure of maintaining human relationships through the literal exchange of commodities. The retail strategy of branding every 6 weeks of calendar time a “season” to be observed through shopping, themed decoration, and commercialized social events is an occupation of time driven by capital, and never more so than from the beginning of October on.

How are we to go about imagining something else? How about a different kind of season? How about knitting together a counter-calendar, a “movement season” to overlay the prevailing American holiday season? Through the chance of historical events and the reclamation of imperial markers of time, social movements new and historical exist in calendar cycle proximity already. Whatever it is called—maybe the Long Hot Winter?—the days are there, waiting to be linked. 

Here is how it goes.

It begins with the yearly recognition paid to the deepest resistance in all of imperial history, that of the First Peoples, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day in mid-October. Campaigns to rewrite Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day are well underway in many cities and towns, including some notable successes. Thinking of this day not in isolation but as the opening of a series of holidays, each celebrating and advancing an aspect of the Movement of Movements, properly positions the long-haul wisdom of the native cultures at the forefront of contemporary political and cultural resistance. Maintaining the holiday as coexistent with the official celebration of the “discovery” of the New World has the effect of fundamentally contesting imperial history, and more importantly, of shifting values. The message is that the heroism of Columbus is nothing compared to that of those who survived settler violence, theft, duplicity, supremacism, enclosure, and disease. The season of resistance and survival opens!

The day we presently observe as Martin Luther King Day, usually falling between the second and third weeks of January, marks the season’s end. Here we have work to do. The holiday as it is—sanctioned and sanctified, an official investment in a standard “great man” version of history, and therefore effectively defanged as the political holiday it ought to be—is in need of a makeover. The only political struggle associated with the holiday had to do with establishing it in the first place. After hold-out states were finally shamed into recognizing MLK Day, it proponents were satisfied and the holiday promptly lost its political edge. What we have instead are ritualized annual re-treads of basic achievements from a half century ago, sanitized of all associated radicalisms, simplified to the point of ignoring flaws and contradictions, and cut off from present day political forms.

Let’s reinstall some rebelliousness by calling the MLK holiday Movement Monday. It is a gesture that will remind all that Dr. King’s work and legacy is intertwined with the political movements that made the man. Also, renaming the day Movement Monday—ie in acknowledgment of social movements pluralistically, but timed to highlight Dr. King’s birthday, naturally—foregrounds the political synthesis Dr. King himself moved towards after the mid-1960s. Furthermore, contextualizing the one voice and leader against a mass movement comprising thousands upon thousands of activists who will never be individually recognized, is the most powerfully symbolic way to continue the struggle.

In between and around Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Movement Monday there are now in place occasions for annual displays and statements of resistance. For protests, this would include the days of political reckoning: the November general election and, every four years, Inauguration Day. On the discursive level, in recent years Thanksgiving Day has attracted serious revisionist attention, also from the perspective of the indigenous experience. If we can believe the conservatives, Christmas is currently a rear-guard front in the Culture Wars, as has been Halloween for the paranoid fringes of devout Christiandom. For those looking beyond the mainstream, people have been observing alternatives since the 1970s: Kwanzaa for the Afrocentric and Yule for the contemporary pagans. So there are precedents for deliberately deviating from the presumed norm. 

Where it gets interesting is in the possibility for building into the calendar recurring grassroots political action. What has become the most politically threatening day in this whole stretch of calendar time is the day after Thanksgiving. At first having no name but Friday, the business media termed it Black Friday for its revenue-generating significance as the opening of the Christmas shopping period. In response to the day having become the materialistic frenzy we know now, the Canadian activist publishers Adbusters declared it Buy Nothing Day in 1997. Then, in the last couple of years, in addition to the bohemian refusals of Buy Nothing Day, the same Friday has become a day of strikes and demonstrations focused on the working conditions suffered by low wage retail workers, particularly those employed by Walmart.

Thus, Thanksgiving and Black Friday have emerged as a calendar focal point, connecting in temporal proximity the three-pronged actions fueled by critiques based on decolonization, anti-consumerism, and labor rights. Add to the deliberate timing of Buy Nothing Day and the Walmart strikes the happenstance one-two punch from this past year, the outrageous grand jury decisions in the Mike Brown and Eric Garner murders. The decisions were returned on November 24 and, less than two weeks later, December 3, first sparking and then snowballing mass outrage into a multi-local movement for police accountability. The density and endurance of this movement, which has tinted the entire season's news coverage, continues in part because the decisions were rendered in such nearness of time, stacked one on the other.

So, might we have the building blocks for a new season?

Given the variety of discontents on display, what presents is a problem of unity and commonality. Diversity, that neoliberal virtue, is again the obstacle, only not in its usual primary guise of identitarian gulfs, but rather in political priorities, sometimes contradictory demands, and naturalized constituencies. And yet the Ferguson protestors, the striking retail workers, and the “stop-shoppers”   shared a calendar phase. As Jason Adams has argued, the occupation of time is as or more important than the occupation of space. How might localized uprisings and social movements that move in temporal proximity, but each with their own particular conditions, constituencies, messaging, and demands, come to form a common front? Perhaps it happens through a redefinition of the season, of common time itself. As historians and memoirists often describe it, a zeitgeist is fashioned through the sheer weight of bunched events. What I am after is something more like a saisongeist, or spirit of a season, a power that endures outside of singular events and that rolls around every year when the northern weather turns cold. 

Am I the only one who can imagine a succession of insurgent holidays, observances, and excuses to get politically active and visible? What better way to celebrate the end of such a season than with a long mid-winter weekend of movement strategizing, civil disobedience, and coalition building, culminating on Movement Monday?

recalling legitimacy

While the rest of the American left was out on May Day celebrating, trying to make something happen, or block business as usual, Occupy Madison marked the day by quietly closing down the encampment they’d held for months. The fact that this development meant practically nothing to the Wisconsin movement says volumes about the different political space traveled by the Wisconsin Uprising at this moment, compared to the national Occupy movement. It is not Occupy that is on the mind of Wisconsinites, but rather the upcoming Wisconsin recall election targeting governor Scott Walker and several others.

The election, set for June 5, 2012, only about six weeks from now, was forced by overwhelming petition. Before then, the Democratic and Republican candidates will be winnowed down to one nominee from each party by a primary election set for May 8, barely one week from now. May Day it is not. But unlike the May Day protests, actions, symbolism, and demonstrations—whose sound and fury, let’s face it, are pretty easily tuned out by the mainstream (and not just media, but actual people)—the consequences of this election will be felt concretely by everyone in Wisconsin, activist or not, and for way longer than the news cycle of a single day. Hundreds of thousands in Wisconsin—probably even millions—will feel the effects of this election directly in the measurable forms of a reduced paycheck, a lost job, a health problem that leads to financial ruin, an unmanageable classroom, and twenty other big things. Furthermore, the consequences will ripple out nationally, either to draw a line on austerity attacks or to green light the regressive austerity agenda.

It has been said by Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and countless radicals that if elections mattered, they would be made illegal. Well, through their various voter suppression efforts, the Wisconsin GOP has been trying to do exactly that—make voting difficult and legally restricted. This election matters and they know it. But the movement grassroots has not grasped yet the meaning of the election. We must discuss this, if the movement is to have any hope of effectively continuing beyond the advertised finality of the recall election. This is my attempt to think through how the movement needs to interpret the election if the Uprising is to remain relevant, powerful, and strategically ready on the morning of June 6, no matter who wins or loses.

*

Wisconsin has an open primary, meaning anybody of any party affiliation or non-affiliation can vote for any of the candidates. Conservatives can vote for a Democratic candidate and progressives can vote for a Republican. An open primary removes the exclusivity of an official party-identified electorate, which is good. At the same time, the open primary assures an element of cynicism through tactical voting and bad-faith candidacies. 

For example, right now the Republicans are running several candidates in Democratic primaries without a shred of pretense that they are anything other than electoral hurdles and tactical disruptions. In the case of some or maybe even all of the “fake” Democrats, there is hardly anything dishonest about them. For example, the Senate Majority Leader of the Wisconsin state senate is Scott Fitzgerald, and he is facing a recall election of his own (also June 5). In order to force the Democratic challenger, Lori Compas, into spending resources on a primary election, regressive Republican activist Gary Ellerman is running as a Democrat. If it weren’t for him, Compas would not have to compete in a primary at all. This helps Fitzgerald by taking the fight to the Democratic primary election, which, if enough Republicans vote in it, theoretically could be won by Ellerman. Then he simply runs a concessionary campaign for the recall election and hands a victory to his buddy Fitzgerald. So Compas must win the primary.

This tactic was used back in the summer of 2011 against some of the Democratic state senators facing recall. It has not been actually successful, not to the point of undermining a good-faith candidate. Not yet. But this time the Republicans are trying harder, and I heard some rumor about Tea Partiers pledging to vote in the Democratic primaries.

The tricky part comes with the rule that however one chooses to vote in the primary, a voter only gets one vote. So if conservatives spend their vote on a bad-faith Democrat, then they leave the Republican side open for progressive voters to do the same thing to them. Democrats, unsurprisingly, are not aggressively taking the opportunity to generate havoc for the Republicans by running bad-faith candidates, somehow being content to leave the Republican candidate unchallenged while they sort out their own. As usual we can chalk up the Democrats’ timidity to a cowardice masquerading as integrity—a lack of fighting spirit that essentially has become the national Democratic brand, from Obama on down.

But here again, an opportunity opens up. Arthur Kohl-Riggs, a young activist with no Democratic Party connection, recognized the gap and filled it by running in the Republican gubernatorial primary as—and get this—not a “fake” Republican, but as a good-faith Lincoln Republican, a LaFollette Republican, which is a posture that carries inescapably more than a whiff of irony, if not exactly bad-faith. Kohl-Riggs is recognized by many in the uprising circles as a regular at Capitol demonstrations and for his social media activism, so it is clear to all that he is certainly not of the contemporary Republicans. But he is playing it straight, pounding the argument that he is, in fact, the true conservative, that Scott Walker is a traitor to the grand Lincoln tradition of integrity, justice, and leadership, and that true conservatives will consider voting for him.

That Kohl-Riggs got himself on the primary ballot means that however secure Walker and the Republicans feel, a signal has been sent. The mantle of the LaFollette tradition—such a Wisconsin thing—could be picked up yet in the future by some enterprising and substantive candidate who speaks the language of Colbert irony, and who potentially could bring a measure of chaos into the Republican side, and do it without any Democratic Party involvement whatsoever.  Could there really be an insurgent force of ironic conservatism brewing somewhere that could invade the Wisconsin GOP? Not if the GOP can help it, of course. See how they’ve shut down the principled libertarian candidate, Ron Paul, for years. If Kohl-Riggs dedicates himself to his idea, I for one would not discount the possibility of some youth-driven movement to reclaim conservatism eventually gaining visibility. It might be marginal to the party mainstream, but again like Ron Paul, it would bring into play many new people. Kohl-Riggs is only 23. If he decides to become a politician (as opposed to the citizen-running-for-office that he is now), to perform that act, follow that career, and dedicate himself to the craft of becoming an image, then who is to say where will he be in fifteen years.

Let’s parse out the present situation.

Scott Walker, the incumbent Republican governor, faces a primary challenge from Arthur Kohl-Riggs.

Democrats Kathleen Falk, Kathleen Vinehout, Tom Barrett, and Doug LaFollette are running against each other in the primary. Gladys Huber, a known Republican, is running as a bad-faith Democratic candidate.

Voters get one vote, and it goes to only one of the above seven candidates—the vote will be spent on either a Democrat or a Republican, not both. Say a sizable bloc of progressives decide to vote for Kohl-Riggs. Maybe a previously non-voting bloc comes out of the woodwork, attracted by the Kohl-Riggs novelty. Whatever the case, the vote total for Kohl-Riggs is sure to be small. But in a tight Democratic primary, those votes (or rather, the consequent non-votes for the Democrats) will make a difference. Where might those non-votes leave Falk, given that, presumably, many of those people would have voted for her over Barrett? Then again, a prediction based on ideological correspondence perhaps would have many of Kohl-Riggs’ crossover voters going for the outsider-ish progressives,Vinehout or LaFollette.

Similarly, conservatives who might otherwise have voted for Huber just to mess with the Democrats might feel some pressure to spend their vote on the Republican side for Walker because of Kohl-Riggs. If he were to attract even a five-digit vote total, Kohl-Riggs, the future/throwback candidate, might garner more media attention embarassing to Walker, and therefore (though we know that Walker himself plays the unflappable zombie to inhuman perfection) further damage the Republican brand. I can imagine conservative activists thinking it more important to put on a display of overwhelming support for Walker than throw vote wrenches into the Democrats’ race by marking the arrow for Huber.

* 

As in an epic sporting contest in which the bad breaks, bad calls, and bad bounces on both sides cancel each other out, perhaps the tactical manuveurs will ricochet through all corners of the contest, leaving no perceptible effect. Or, maybe it is all even until the very end, leaving a final surprise to stand as the defining controversy that shifts a race this way or that. Of course, unlike in sports, political candidates feel no special obligation to respect the rules. They bend or challenge them all along the way. And that, of course, only guarantees the expansion of cynical tendencies in two directions—ie, that platoons of lawyers searching for technicalities end up deciding the contest for the parties while ordinary voters throw up their hands and wonder, why did we even bother doing this?

My armchair dissection may not clarify the elections themselves, and likely further confuses one’s predictions. But the very futility of sorting through the permutations and possible outcomes of tactical versus naïve voting makes apparent the larger but hardly abstract problem of legitimacy as it relates to elections in general, and to this election in particular. Because of the unavoidable cynicism and calculation inherent in voting, there can be no moral legitimacy gained or lost in an election victory, period. The Wisconsin movement must be very clear about this. No matter who wins or loses, we will not accept the victory as the final stamp of legitimacy—any outcome is in essence illegitimate on the level of values. An election is a non-violent contest for control over the state’s levers of coercion—and that is all it is. This is a crucial statement to broadcast because should he win, whether it be fairly or by theft, Scott Walker will wear the victory on his sleeve, using its aura of legitimacy as a bludgeon. Make no mistake, Walker and his GOP cabal have a second, more horrible act of legislative aggression at the ready, to be unveiled just as soon as he beats back the recall. To the good people of Wisconsin: be prepared to fight a governor unafraid to rule by emergency executive decree—and everyday forward, he will remind everyone that this is what the voters decided. Such will be the emboldened Scott Walker we will face after his victory. 

Thus, it goes without saying that we must defeat Walker in June. This is no small task given that Walker will have amassed a war chest that guarantees dominance of television and radio advertising, and has the support of any number of third party groups, flush with cash and a willingness to lie. 

But should this much-desired defeat come to pass, whoever the Democrat is will have earned no legitimacy on a values level. The movement grassroots must view and treat the new governor as distrustfully as any other ambitious, ego-driven careerist politician all too capable of selling out the public interest once in office (which is, of course, a specialty of the Democrats). The values of the movement will only be expressed by the elected leadership if the movement remains large, vital, visible, and beyond the reach of both union and Democratic Party control—or, in other words, dangerous, hydra-headed, and untamed. How to be that movement and yet engage in the most difficult and momentous electoral contest most of us will have ever seen is the paradox within which the Uprising now exists. Let us embrace it. 

*

My last thought concerns the mentality and commitment of a winning movement. The last and perhaps most meaningful victory gained in the Wisconsin movement was the successful blockage of new mining up north—a key item on GOP’s corporate agenda. (For those interested in the story, Rebecca Kemble’s reporting for the Progressive is a great place to start.) The victory was gained at the Capitol through a state senate vote, but was won over a translocal theater of activism and coalition-building, binding together numerous groups and constituencies across different parts of the state. Of complementary significance was the willingness and even resignation among coalition members regarding the likelihood of having to fight an eventual ground war up north, pitting our bodies against their machines. Without this coalition, led by the native peoples of the Bad River Band Chippewa, the victory could not have been won. Without the latent militancy, spiritual dedication, and specter of nihilism belonging to a people who recognize a battle for survival when they see it, the victory could not have been won. Without the ability to simultaneously: lobby legislators politely and agitate on the streets angrily; collect independent, scientifically-sound research and launch barbs of wit and ridicule at GOP targets; pack the assembly hearings in person and disseminate information through social media, the victory could not have been won.

The lesson is clear. Prepare for the worst. Work for the best. Make our appeals to the hearts and minds of the unconvinced while standing firm at a threshold of ultimate defense. And deal with whatever comes.

 

 

from wisconsin, on OWS and post-democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

 

thinking about a button

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GOT WAR?

GOT CLASS WAR?

GOT POVERTY?

GOT A WAY FORWARD?

GOT A FUTURE?

GOT A MOVEMENT?

GOT A BETTER SYSTEM?

 

HOW ABOUT TAXING THE TOP?

WHO’S WINNING?

WHO’S ENTITLED?

 

FUND THE SCHOOLS

THEY CAN AFFORD HEALTHCARE FOR THE REST OF US

CLEAN UP WALL STREET

JAIL, NOT BAILOUTS

CORPORATE PIE

NO PIE IN THE SKY

AMERICAN PIE

WHERE IS YOUR SLICE?

 

NO JOKE

WHO IS LAUGHING?

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

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

 

 

 

artists on campus, '57 to now

A text I wrote for the >>an-academy<< project of EIPCP, the European Institute of Progressive Cultural Policy, has been posted.

The original English is here. The Spanish translation, here. The German translation, here, and pasted below. Just for fun. 

Vom liberalen Konsens zum neoliberalen Chaos

KünstlerInnen in den Vereinigten Staaten suchen ihren Platz auf dem Campus

Übersetzt von Birgit Mennel

Als der linke Maler und Grafiker Ben Shahn an der Harvard University im Jahr 1957 einen Vortrag hielt, in dem er über die Chancen und Fallgruben nachdachte, mit denen KünstlerInnen konfrontiert wurden, als sie Aufgaben innerhalb der Hochschule übernahmen, sprach er sehr allgemein und in gehobenem Tonfall. Würde das universitäre Milieu die KünstlerIn befreien oder abstumpfen und würden die Universitäten den künstlerischen Dilettantismus rechtfertigen? In welcher Weise würden sich KünstlerInnen durch die Verfehlungen der wissenschaftlichen Gemeinschaft beeinträchtigen lassen? Dies waren die Probleme, die ihn beschäftigten. Hinter diesen Bedenken zeichnete sich die Frage ab, wie die einzelne KünstlerIn, die damals vollends den Rang eines modernistischen Archetyps angenommen hatte, das vordergründige Willkommen durch die unpersönliche Institution bewältigen würde.[1]

Welchen Bezug KünstlerInnen zur einzigen dem höheren Lernen und Lehren gewidmeten gesellschaftlichen Institution haben und wie sie ein Teil von ihr sein könnten, war lediglich eine der vielen großen philosophischen Fragen, die sich den amerikanischen Universitäten in ihrem Wachstumsschub nach dem 2. Weltkrieg stellten. Die großen öffentlichen Universitäten mit ihrem massivem Wachstum bei den Immatrikulationen, die Tausende von neuen Studierenden und Forschenden beschäftigten und höhere Bildung für Zehntausende von Universitätsstudierenden der ersten Generation leistbar machten, stellten einen bedeutenden Sektor der ökonomischen Expansion nach dem 2. Weltkrieg dar. Es handelte sich um eine Expansion mit noch offener Agenda, da die Universitäten rasch wuchsen, um den doppelten und nicht gänzlich stimmigen Anforderungen einer wohlhabenden, idealistischen und zahlenmäßig sich erweiternden Bevölkerung ebenso gerecht zu werden wie einer ganzen Reihe von Bedürfnissen der Industrie, die hinsichtlich des Typs wie auch der Komplexität gleichfalls im Wachstum begriffen waren. All dies ereignete sich in einer seltenen Periode von systemischem Gleichgewicht und verwaltetem globalen Konflikt, als der kalte Frieden den Westen mit nuklearer Entspannung erfüllte und der liberale Konsens den Vereinigten Staaten die Erfüllung ihrer heimischen Entwicklungsagenda durch groß angelegte öffentliche Investitionen ermöglichte. In diesem historischen Kontext hielten die Künste ihren weitflächigen Einzug in die moderne Welt der amerikanischen Hochschulbildung und Wissensproduktion und wurden in diesem Sinne als Disziplin legitimiert.

Heute – nach ’68, ’89 und zu vielen rezenten Krisen, um es in aller Kürze zu sagen – sind diese lauten Stimmen für immer verloren. Eine Agenda hat alle anderen überdauert, eine Entwicklung, die wir neoliberal nennen könnten. Die grundlegende Logik besteht in der Privatisierung von Ressourcen, in der Streichung öffentlicher Unterstützung sowie in der Instrumentalisierung der institutionellen Mission. Die Konsequenz ist Stratifizierung. Ihrer politischen Offenheit verlustig gegangen, wurden die Universitäten, als eine angepriesene Erfahrung, zu der man per Kauf Zutritt erlangen kann, zum einen vollends in das Geflecht eines konsumorientierten Marketings eingewoben. Zum anderen wurden sie als Produktionsstätten mehr oder weniger explizit in die marktgesteuerte Fertigung von Wissen und WissensarbeiterInnen integriert. In Kombination mit ihren noch immer engen Beziehungen zu militärischer Forschung sowie aufgrund der Tatsache, dass unternehmerische Erwartungen in die Verlaufsbahnen der Grundlagenforschung eindringen konnten, ist die Beziehung zwischen kapitalistischen Interessen und Universitäten stark und innig, wenn sie auch gelegentlich unangenehme Seiten aufweist.  

Es spielt keine Rolle, ob die öffentlichen Universitäten aus Gründen des Selbsterhalts eine neoliberale Wende hinlegen oder ob die Campus-Aufstände der sechziger und siebziger Jahre wirkliche Ergebnisse erzielten, was die Öffnung der universitären Ressourcen für traditionell marginalisierte Gruppen angeht. Während der achtziger und neunziger Jahre verstärkten die Konservativen ihren Zugriff und stärkten die jahrzehntelange Verbindung einer universitären Gouvernanz mit den wohlhabenden, den gut Vernetzten sowie den politisch Mächtigen. Wer kann das (den Investitionsabbau propagierende) Anti-Apartheid Disinvestment Movement vergessen, das sich in den 1980ern auf den US-Campussen einstellte, als studentische AktivistInnen durch die konservative Unnachgiebigkeit öffentlicher und privater Universitätsbeauftragter zum Ungehorsam gezwungen wurden? In einer Angelegenheit, die die Geschichte mit wenigen Ausnahmen definitiv zugunsten der AktivistInnen entschied, war die Antwort der Universitäts- und Hochschuladministrationen auf die Forderungen nach Gerechtigkeit und Menschenrechten konservativer und gelegentlich faschistisch.

Der Unterschied heute besteht darin, dass die Basis den Anschluss an den Überbau gefunden hat. Kapitalinvestitionen verwandeln Eliteschulen in der Bildung gewidmete Ressorts. Die großen öffentlichen Forschungsuniversitäten preisen Investition und ökonomische Aktivität an, deren Schaffung der Rechtfertigung staatlicher Unterstützungsleistungen dient, während sie die Kosten für die Studierenden kontinuierlich erhöhen, um die Mittelkürzungen von oftmals feindseligen staatlichen Gesetzgebern wettzumachen, auf die sie wegen schwindender öffentlicher Mittel angewiesen sind.[2] Am dramatischsten aber ist, dass eine rasch wachsende Zahl von Studierenden aus allen Bereichen der Bildungswelt, von Eliteschulen über Junior Colleges bis hin zu handelsorientierten Ausbildungsprogrammen, ihre studentische Laufbahn – ob diese erfolgreich verläuft oder nicht – in einer modernen Form von Schuldknechtschaft verlassen, die ein Ergebnis der Darlehen ist, welche sie zur Deckung der in die Höhe schießenden Studienbeiträge und Gebühren benötigen. Diese Trends werden sich in den kommenden Jahren voraussichtlich empfindlich verschlimmern, da drakonische Kürzungen bei der Finanzierung von öffentlicher Bildung von der Grundschule bis zur Universität in den USA gerade erst spürbar werden.

Diese Entwicklungen erklären die unverblümte Instrumentalisierung der höheren Bildung bis zu dem Punkt, dass die Bedenken Shahns hinsichtlich der an der Universität verankerten KünstlerInnen untrennbar werden vom grundlegenderen Problem ihrer Position in der Lohnarbeitsökonomie des globalen Kapitals. Die besonderen Bedingungen der universitären Arbeitskraft, die sich derzeit in ein zweistufiges System von Personen mit befristeter und unbefristeter Anstellung aufteilt, wird durch die sonderbare Position der KünstlerIn weiter verkompliziert, da diese möglicherweise auch für Mittel, Chancen und Anerkennung durch den Kunstmarkts und die nicht-akademische Kunstwelt zeichnet – eine Welt, die aber ebenfalls den Marktlogiken unterworfen ist. Werden die sozioökonomischen Realitäten der Universitäten unter neoliberalem Zwang mit der Position von KünstlerInnen zusammengeführt, die sich aus der inneren Logik von Kunst und Kunstgeschichte ergibt – und die ergänzt wird durch die breiten Strömungen des linken Humanismus, zweier Generationen kontinentaler Theorie sowie der Invasion der Zentren von allen Punkten der Peripherie aus –, dann wird der gegenwärtige Widerspruch deutlich. Als KünstlerInnen, die in der Welt der höheren Bildung operieren, sind wir in das Beziehungsnetz, welche die zeitgenössische Universität und das College bestimmen, involviert und müssen uns diesem unterwerfen. Gleichzeitig lehren uns die Imperative unseres Feldes (im Namen der Kreativität) die Klärung, Infragestellung und kritische Reformulierung unsere eigenen Subjektpositionen, einschließlich unserer Positionen als arbeitende ErzieherInnen. Für KünstlerInnen stehen Fragen wie „Wie und warum lernen Menschen?“, „Wie und warum lehren Menschen“ sowie „Wie und warum forschen Menschen?“ nunmehr im engen Zusammenhang mit den Krisenbedingungen, in denen die öffentliche Sphäre unter der Federführung des Neoliberalismus verwaltet wird.

Die Perspektive von KünstlerInnen auf die Destabilisierung der institutionellen Autorität und auf den Niedergang der Universitäten als Ort der Wissensproduktion wird in der starken Verbreitung von Bildungs- und Forschungsplattformen deutlich, die entweder einer künstlerischen Identität verortet sind oder von KünstlerInnen konzipiert und organisiert werden. Auch wenn es zu einer Vervielfältigung von Experimenten in sowohl vorübergehenden wie auch dauerhaften institutionellen Formen kommt, bleiben die Dilemma und Widersprüche bestehen. Im Bereich der Vermittlung von Kunst etwa, und zwar insbesondere im Anschluss an das Baccaleaureat, gehört die programmatische und lehrplanmäßige Entwicklung von künstlerischer Erziehung in Zusammenhang mit politisierter Pädagogik nunmehr ebenso zu den herausstechenden Aufgaben wie deren Bezug zu einem unersättlichen Kunstmarkt, der sich mittlerweile auf Kunstschulen verlässt, wenn es um die Produktion von sofort kommodifizierter Neuheit und immer vermarktbarer Jugend geht. Kurz, das kritische Element in der Kunstausbildung lebt und ist wohlauf, aber ebenso die Ansprüche eines Kunstmarkts, der von KünstlerInnen verlangt, sich bereits während ihrer Ausbildung als Marke zu etablieren. In den letzten Jahren wurden diverse Programme entwickelt, die in gewissen Sinn alle miteinander konkurrieren, und die die einstmals behagliche Nische der Akademia, die den Kunstschulen und den Kunstabteilungen der Universität vorbehalten war, in ein durchlöchertes Terrain verwandeln. Die Stipendienprogramme für den Master im Bereich der Bildenden Künste konfrontieren Studierende und Fakultäten mit einer ungeregelten Situation von Werkstatt-PhD-Programmen und hochprofilierten unabhängigen Studienoptionen – die Teil des Trends zu einem zusehends professionalisierten Berufsbild KünstlerIn sind. Gleichzeitig agieren immer mehr KünstlerInnen aus ihrer Unzufriedenheit mit der konventionellen akademischen Ausbildung heraus durch die Organisation und die Teilnahme an einer Vielzahl von temporären Ausstellungen, die unter dem Motto der Bildung stehen und die praktische Elemente ebenso beinhalten wie anti-institutionelle Projekte von unten, in denen Bildung und Forschung kombiniert werden.[3]

Obwohl die Bestrebungen von unten im Allgemeinen durch eine kritische Analyse von akademischen Trends genährt sind, ist es in diesem sich ständig erweiternden Feld der Kunst- und Wissensproduktion nicht ganz klar, wo und wie oppositionelle Strömungen verlaufen und wo und wie Vereinnahmungstendenzen ihren Anfang nehmen. Sicher ist jedoch, dass die Krise der Universitäten KünstlerInnen in all ihren Rollen – als Lehrende, KuratorInnen, AutorInnen, AktivistInnen und UnternehmerInnen – dahin drängt, ihre Bereiche in Bezug auf das alte universitäre Modell neu zu strukturieren.

Über dieses Dilemma könnte man viel sagen, aber in einem kurzen Text muss ich meinen abschließenden Gedanken auf einen einzigen beschränken, nämlich auf die Frage der Studierenden. Obwohl Shahn die Spannung im Verhältnis von KünstlerInnen und Akademia von Anfang an gespürt hat, hat er die Rolle der Studierenden überhaupt nicht angesprochen. Dies ist insofern überraschend als er seine Position stets auf dem Boden des sozialen Aktivismus verortete. Was Shahn jedoch nicht sehen konnte, wurde seitdem erwartet, wenn nicht sogar überdeterminiert: Studierende können, wollen und sollen eine politische Kraft sein. Vor einem halben Jahrhundert beschränkte Shahn seine Frage auf die Bedrohungen durch die Akademie als Setting, das, in Zeiten, die Widerspruch erforderlich machen,  Kunst zu umstrittenen Themen verhindert. Linke KünstlerInnen mit akademischer Anbindung können sich heute laut und in praktischen Begriffen danach fragen, wie sich die im Entstehen begriffenen Studierendenbewegungen der Zirkel, der Räume, der Sprache, der Legitimationsweisen, der Kreativität sowie aller anderen mittlerweile zum Standard gewordenen Werkzeuge bedienen können, die den Kunststudierenden zur Verfügung stehen. In dieser Frage liegt auch die zusätzliche Aufgabe dem besonderen Profil der Kunststudierenden von heute Rechnung zu tragen: in hohem Maße weibliche, zumeist weiße Studierende mit überdurchschnittlich queerer Ausrichtung, die tendenziell BewohnerInnen des städtischen Raums sind. Die Subjektposition(en) der Studierenden selbst werden sich nicht nur auf die Art und Weise auswirken, wie diese ihre Politisierung ausagieren, sondern geben auch Auskunft über die voraussichtlichen Rollen, die sie in den Bewegungen spielen werden.

Für Linke gibt es keinen Grund optimistisch zu sein. Die neoliberalen Agenden überwiegen, und dabei überdauern – dank der Überreste an oppositionellen Intellektuellen und politisierter Arbeit – anti-kapitalistische Strömungen innerhalb der Universität als sich ausweitende, von den Universitäten selbst produzierte Klasse von permanent prekären ArbeiterInnen; und die Studierenden bilden, wie ich bereits angemerkt habe, in ihrer besonderen Position als KonsumentInnen und im Werden begriffenes Prekariat, eine eigene Subklasse. Blickt man auf die Zahl und Talente derjenigen, die dieses Potenzial ausmachen und dabei mitunter konkreten Widerstand leisten, so sprechen wir von keiner geringen Größe. Die Tatsache, dass es zu Kreuzungspraxen von an der Akademie verankerten ArbeiterInnen in nicht- bzw. anti-institutionellen Settings kommt, in denen manchmal genuin kreatives und autonomes Wissen produziert wird, stimmt zuversichtlich, da die ParteigängerInnen in den kommenden Kämpfen so viele Brücken wie möglich ausmachen und benützen müssen, um eine nicht-universitäre Öffentlichkeit für die Kämpfe zu gewinnen – so weit dies geht. Auch diesbezüglich gilt, dass im Zuge der Entwicklung von Segmenten der höheren Kunstausbildung hin zu nicht-traditionellen und experimentellen Formen und Formaten – wie dies auch repräsentiert wird durch die Kombination von institutionellen und Grassroots-AkteurInnen in Publikationen, in der Verbreitung von Ideen in Kreisläufen globalen Austauschs, in einer zunehmenden Selbstlegitimierung sowie in der Partizipation –, dass im Zuge dieser Entwicklung also Studierende der Kunst mehr als in anderen Feldern möglicherweise eine besondere Rolle übernehmen müssen.

Ob individuelle Stätten von Campus-Kämpfen in irgendeiner substantiellen, funktionalen und erfindungsreichen Weise verbunden werden, bleibt noch zu sehen. In Anbetracht der Häufigkeit sowie der internationalen Verbreitung studentischer Aktionen in den letzten Monaten des Jahres 2009, könnte die Gelegenheit zu bedeutungsvollen Verbindungen sehr wohl entstehen.[4] Die koordinierten Kampagnen zur Verteidigung der öffentlichen Bildung in Kalifornien am 4. März 2010 waren insbesondere dadurch bemerkenswert, dass sie viele Jugendliche und Lehrende der Mittelschulen mit einschlossen, und damit die Tendenz zur Aufsplitterung in öffentliche Gebilde der Mittelschule und Öffentlichkeiten, welche die Mittelschule bereits hinter sich hatten, Einhalt geboten; diese Tatsache erinnert uns daran, dass vertikale Einbeziehungen zwischen Alters- und im Bildungsstatus variierenden Gruppen in einem gemeinsamen Territorium ebenso wichtig sind wie die horizontalen Einbeziehungen, die sich über internationale Grenzen hinwegsetzen. Der Blick darauf, wie sich an den Mittelschulen „leadership“ konstituiert, verbessert die Positionierung von Campus-Bewegungen im Zuge der Verteidigung gegen Angriffe auf den öffentlichen Sektor im Allgemeinen. Die Gefahr für die Studierendenbewegung besteht darin, in erster Linie die Kürzungen bei den Universitätsbudgets, die Erhöhung der Studiengebühren, die Jobaussichten von Graduierten und/oder die Finanzierung der eigenen auf die Mittelschule folgenden Ausbildung anzusprechen und sich so selbst darauf zu beschränken, als Gruppe mit besonderem Interesse aufzutreten.

Jeder Zugewinn an erzielten Ergebnissen oder auch politischer Kapazität, der den Campus-Aktivismus in Richtung einer lang erhofften transnationalen und mehrere Generationen einschließenden Koordinierung von antikapitalistischen politischen Aktion bringt, wäre eine ernsthafter und dringend notwendiger Fortschritt für die globale Linke. Dies wäre insbesondere in den USA wichtig, wo die Campusse viele Kapitalinvestitionen angezogen haben, was sie erneut zu einem politischen Kampffeld werden lässt, während systemische Gabelungen mit jedem Jahr, das vorüberzieht, deutlicher werden.

[1] Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content, Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press 1957, S. 73–91.

[2] Selbst die Vorzeigeuniversitäten, die der öffentlichen Forschung gewidmet sind, erhalten in den Vereinigten Staaten nunmehr weniger als 25% ihres operativen Budgets aus freien öffentlichen Geldern. Im Jahr 2008 beispielsweise erhielt die Universität von Wisconsin-Madison nur 20,2% ihres operativen Budgets vom Staat Wisconsin. Die Universität von Michgan erhielt 24% und die Universität von California-Berkeley 22% von den jeweiligen staatlichen Regierungen. Nahezu überall in den Vereinigten Staaten zielen konservative GesetzgeberInnen auf das Universität, um jährlich budgetäre Kürzungen durchzuführen und zwingen die Universitäten zur Rechtfertigung ihres Wert in strikt ökonomischen Termini. Der Rest der operativen Budgets kommt zumeist aus beschränkten Forschungszuwendungen, Schenkungen und Stiftungen sowie aus steigenden Studiengebühren. Vgl. diesbezüglich http://www.wisc.edu/about/facts/budget.php,http://www.vpcomm.umich.edu/budget/understandig.html sowiehttp://newscenter.berkeley.edu/news/budget/img/revenue0809.gif.

[3] Die Werkstatt-PhD-Programme existieren als unausgereifte Form ohne klar definierte Standards. Die unabhängigen Studienprogramme beinhalten renommierte Marken wie das Whitney Independent Study Program und die Skowhegan Residency. Die Ausstellung und Workshop-Reihe AREA Chicagos Pedagogical Factory im Hyde Park Art Center ist ein Beispiel für eine Ausstellung als Lernlabor. Mildred’s Lane, eine Initiative des Künstlers Mark Dion sowie des Designer J. Morgan Puett ist ein Beispiel für eine von KünstlerInnen betriebene Kunstschule. Die Flying University von Red76 ist ein Beispiel für Bildung alsKunstprojekt– die von Gleichgestellten, informell und wesentlich sozial übermittelt wird. Beispiele von Grassroots und selbst initiierten Schulen und Forschungsprojekten beinhalten das Experimental College of the Twin Cities or EXCO, The Public School (in Los Angeles) sowie das Wanderseminar Continental Drift. Für eine exzellente Diskussion zum Master of Fine Arts im Hinblick auf die Vervielfältigung von Bildungsmöglichkeiten vgl., „The Currency of Practice: Reclaiming Autonomy For The MFA“, in: Art Journal, Vol. 68, Nr. 1, Frühjahr 2009, S. 41–57.

[4] Die unvollständige Liste von Universitäten, die gegen Ende des Jahres von Studierendenaktionen betroffen sind, beinhaltet die University of California, die Campusse in Los Angeles und Santa Cruz; die University of Illinois Champaign Urbana, die Universität Wien sowie die Universität der Bildenden Künste in Wien; die Universität von Zagreb; die Universität Bern. Zwischen diesen verschiedenartigen von Studierenden geführten Kämpfen kam es zu Gesten der Solidarität sowie manchmal zu regionaler und nationaler Koordination (bspw. in Italien). Aber soweit ich weiß, gab es keine transnational koordinierten Aktionen. Auch die scheinbar vollständige Abwesenheit einer Verbindung zwischen Studierendenkämpfen in Europa und den USA sowie die andauernden Studierendenkämpfe im Iran sind eine Analyse wert.

 

stressing the positives: conference report, part 2

After harshing on one of the presentations at the Space RE:solutions conference, I offer this On-the-Other-Hand: the panel that followed on Queer Visualities, featuring talks by João P. Marques Florêncio and Ernst van der Wal, was terrific. They both offered some urgent and complex ideas.

Marques Florêncio seeks to rework queer theory through what he called an ecology of the art event. This is his effort to bring the lessons and metaphors of ecology into relation with queer cultural performance, as a strategy to resist the normalization and flattening he sees happening in the latest chapters of gay rights struggle. He didn’t talk about it, but I suppose I would offer the focus on the gay and lesbian right to serve in the American military as a prime example of this flattening. Perhaps more controversially from a left perspective would be the efforts to achieve the right to marry. Either way, I can see what he’s talking about, and really found his suggested path forward provocative and promising. 

 Van der Wal, for his part, offered a nuanced analysis of the struggle for queer liberation in South Africa. There much of the retrograde sexual politics are being driven by a discourse of black African nationalism, in which “deviant” sexualities are described as colonial impositions on a “natural” African heteronormative sexuality. This of course greatly complicates the work of glbt activists in terms of how they use images to portray their movement. Van der Wal showed examples of images announcing various activist events and gave accounts of the background debates involved regarding the different meanings that might attach to the racial representation. He also discussed the complications in media representation of black lesbians, including those victimized by the horrible violence known as "corrective rape." Van der Wal had no clear answers but I’m convinced that he is asking the right questions.

You can read both abstracts on this page.