Public Seminar Review: The Inaugural Issue

Robin Wagner-Pacifici

Innovation Overload

Every era defines its heroes. Ours is currently fixated on the innovating entrepreneur, creating something new that everyone must have. This type breaks the mold, striking out alone, even leaving school to do so. He (and he is usually a he) is designated as brilliant, sometimes charismatic, sometimes argumentative, often solitary in his vision, though gathering a team to put his vision into practice. His skills are more technical than poetic, more digital than prosodic. Neither poetry, nor prose is, by definition, entrepreneurial.

It’s important to have such innovators, but they are not necessarily heroic and they are not good role models for the millions of people already in the labor market looking desperately for work in an era of job contraction. Nor are they a good role model for the thousands of high school and college graduates entering the labor market each year.

There are two problems with the innovator ideal. And the problems point us in different desirable directions – one toward preservation and one toward change.

The first problem is that mandating innovation and singing panegyrics to the innovators degrades those who convey us reliably forward by sustaining what we have. The virtues and skills most widely available to productive adults – workmanship, craftsmanship, communication, responsibility, competence, discipline, and civility– are demeaned when compared to the arcane skills of the entrepreneur who innovates. Most people are simply not innovators, nor should we want them to be. The millions of nurses, police officers, sanitation workers, assemblers, teachers, administrative assistants, doctors, air traffic controllers, electricians, accountants, and musicians are as essential to the sustainability and vibrancy of our society as the few innovators who have given us Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.

Neither society as a whole nor individuals in it can live in a state of constant state of reinvention and change. Most of the time we need a world that is solid and reliable – food we can afford on shelves of markets, transportation that moves us about predictably, knowledge of where we’ve been (literally and metaphorically) and a road map to where we’re going. Our society and our culture need to be maintained at the same time they are continuously altered.

The second problem points, paradoxically, in the other direction, toward that of change. Exclusively lauding the innovator as social and economic hero denies the significance and world-changing capacities of collective enterprises and movements. Labor union membership is at historic low-point in the United States and, pace, the Occupy Wall Street movement, there have been no sustained and effective collective movements of social change for decades. The backdrop of the aggrandizement of innovators is the persistent culture of individualism in the United States, and this aggrandizement, in turn, exacerbates this hyper-individualist mantra. Social and political movements can also change worlds – in many ways and many directions. They can call attention to categories of individuals overlooked or disadvantaged. They can demand restructuring and rebuilding. They can push for expanded job opportunities and better working conditions. Of course, some social movements can auger change we may find objectionable. The point is that the prevailing innovation mantra points us toward individuals as our saviors rather than toward collective enterprises and collective transformation.

The world is constantly changing and each day we are called upon to do things a bit differently, to respond to new situations. In that sense, we all do innovate, or more accurately, improvise. But we are not all self-defined innovators. The reality is that there are few well-paid, secure, full-time jobs today and the call to innovate is a call to invent and achieve your own job. Such a call is neither fair for all nor adequate to the task. Innovation cannot be the only solution to our economic dilemmas. If we were less enthralled with innovation and innovators as the key to solving our national economic dilemmas, we might be able to focus on the critical work of sustaining and strengthening our economic infrastructure, our cultural fabric, and our civil society.

The work of civilization has been long and hard and it takes great effort, individual and collective to remember, carry on, and renew. This effort is also heroic and essential and should be reinvigorated.

Nancy Fraser

Against Anarchism

For Edward J. Snowden and Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley): Heroes of transnational publicity — in gratitude and with admiration.

One strategy for reimagining public sphere theory in the current conjuncture is neo-anarchism. Distrustful of global governance institutions, and of the expert networks entangled with them, this approach looks to anti-systemic movements as agents of transformation. Valorizing the independent militancy of Occupy, WikiLeaks, and the World Social Forum, it affirms efforts to build counterhegemonic centers of opinion and will formation, far removed from circuits of institutionalized power. Aiming to counter the hierarchical logic of administrative rule, it seeks to reconstruct public sphere theory in a way that gives pride of place to autonomous direct action by subaltern counterpublics and “strong” (decision-making) publics in civil society. Where else, after all, are we likely to find democratizing forces that can advance the theory’s ideals under current conditions?

Proponents of this approach reject schemes that would democratize global governance by transferring the powers of rogue institutions to transnational parliaments, accountable to transnational publics and electorates, charged with reining in private power and with regulating common affairs on a global scale. For neo-anarchists, that strategy cannot empower autonomous public opinion. On the contrary, it is in the nature of formal institutions, whether national, transnational or global, to functionalize input from civil society, incorporating the latter into the autopoetic processes by which they maintain and expand their own power. Only a project of “engaged withdrawal” from the institutions of global governance can evade the logic of cooptation. Only the concretization of counterpublicity in self-organized collectives and self-managed councils can dispel heteronomy, restoring capacities for self-determination, alienated to external governing powers, to their rightful subjects. To realize the ideals of public sphere theory requires, in sum, that we abandon the political project associated with it. Instead of mobilizing public opinion to influence public authorities, we should circumvent the latter altogether, averting cooptation through stealth and cultivating autonomous action to transform social arrangements from the bottom up.

The neo-anarchist approach sounds breathtakingly radical. Raising questions that transcend the current conjuncture, even as they surface acutely within it, it alters the deep grammar of public sphere theory. The latter has always assumed a two-track model of politics: on a first, informal track, autonomous publics in civil society generate public opinion, while on a second, formal track, political institutions make authorized binding decisions and carry them out. The theory’s chief claim, of course, concerns the relation between the two tracks: conditional on free communication between them, democracy requires that the second track channel the first, empowering public opinion by translating the discursively generated sense of the general interest into binding decisions and authorized action. Neo-anarchists reject such arrangements. Given a foothold, they claim, the administrative logics of the political system are bound to colonize the independent energies of civil society. To emancipate, the latter one must eliminate formal institutions. But that implies an entirely different model, premised on a single-track understanding of democratic politics.

To assess the neo-anarchist argument requires resolving some questions of interpretation. Is the rejection of political institutions merely a matter of transitional strategy, a way of getting from where we are now to the world envisioned in the two-track model, in which governing bodies implement the considered desires of civil society? Or is it a matter of principle, which signals a different end goal, a world without institutionalized public powers? Likewise, do neo-anarchists hold that formal political institutions merely tend to coopt public opinion, all other things being equal? Or do they view that outcome as an ironclad necessity, entailed by the very nature of government as such?

As I see it, the stronger thesis, which takes as its end goal a democracy without formal political institutions, is conceptually incoherent. Premised on a single-track model of politics, this thesis purports to dispense with the distinction between civil society publics and institutional actors. It assumes, accordingly, that a single body (the self-managed council) can play the part at once of both those instances. But this presupposes that everyone can always act collectively on everything that concerns them. Failing that proposition, which is patently absurd, the question of accountability must arise: in what way and to what extent are a council’s actions accountable to non-participants who are affected by or subjected to its decisions? These “others” are, in effect, the council’s public(s). From their perspective, moreover, the council itself is an institutionalized power, to be subjected to independent scrutiny and, when necessary, to contestation. Qua political actors, then, self-organized collectives do not circumvent the need for autonomous publics. But the converse is equally true. Far from being self-implementing, publics require institutionalized powers to enact their will. Counterpowers by definition, they lose their raison d’être in the absence of such powers, whose actions they seek to align with public opinion. The civil society counterpart of formal political actors, informal publicity can never replace the latter, but must strive ad infinitum to guide and constrain them. In general, then, the distinction between publics and institutions is not so easily dispensed with. It returns, inevitably, to haunt the neo-anarchist scenario. An approach that would simply scrap the two-track model is conceptually incoherent.

If anarchism is not viable as an end goal, how does it fare as a transitional strategy in the current conjuncture? Certainly, the affirmation of anti-systemic movements and subaltern counterpublics affords a salutary corrective to those who put their faith in mainstream national media or in the “transnational advocacy networks” of INGO experts that cluster around global governance institutions. After all, it is only thanks to direct action by the independent militants associated with Occupy, WikiLeaks, and the World Social Forum that radical criticism has managed to pierce the veil of economistic and militaristic apologetics that dominates official public discourse in the present era. But anarchist tactics are not themselves sufficient to effect fundamental structural change. The strategy of evading, rather than confronting, the institutions of global governance lets off scot-free the mammoth concentrations of private power­­ whose interests now rule. In fact, finance and corporate capital are the chief beneficiaries of efforts to retrench, let alone deinstitutionalize, public authorities. Better to fight to democratize, than to abolish, the institutions that regulate transnational interaction in a globalizing world. Better, too, to adopt the account of subaltern counterpublics I proposed in “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” which counseled “engaged withdrawal” not for the sake of any principled separatism, but as an agitational tactic, aimed at empowering subordinate voices in the battle for hearts and minds in wider publics. Better, in sum, to treat direct action as one among several weapons in one’s arsenal, and not as the master strategy for social change.

The larger lesson is “don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.” Neo-anarchists are right that the process of translating public opinion into implementable policy can easily go awry — as, for example when emancipatory claims are rewritten as administrative regulations, and citizens are turned into clients, a process I analyzed at the national level in a 1985 essay, “Struggle over Needs.” But, as I argued there, translation should neither be equated with domination nor eschewed altogether. The better course is to recognize the power of bureaucratizing tendencies and to envision counter-instances that work against them. That was the spirit in which I contemplated the possibility of “hybrid strong publics” in “Rethinking the Public Sphere” — a proposition exemplified in participatory budgeting and aimed not at collapsing the two tracks of the public sphere model, but at softening the border that separates them, making them more porous to each other, and enhancing the flow of communication between them.

In that spirit, too, I conclude here that a critical theory of the public sphere should incorporate neo-anarchism’s best insights, while rejecting wholesale anarchism. The latter perspective is implicitly vanguardist, I think, appealing chiefly to (especially male segments of) a precariat of relatively privileged but downwardly mobile youth, on the one hand, and to isolated indigenous communities struggling to subsist off the grid, on the other. Certainly, the view that representation is tantamount to domination is far too hyperbolic to tap the potential for broad-based emancipatory struggle in our situation. In that sense, neo-anarchism fails to sustain the tension between fact and norm required by a critical theory.

This post is excerpted from Fraser, “Publicity, Subjection, Critique: A Reply to My Critics,” forthcoming in Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: Nancy Fraser debates her Critics, ed. Kate Nash (Polity Press, 2014).

REFERENCES

Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (M.I.T. Press, 1991) pp. 109-142.

Nancy Fraser, “Struggle over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Critical Theory of Late-Capitalist Political Culture,” in Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (University of Minnesota Press and Polity Press, 1989), pp. 161-187.

Simon Critchley

On New Political Identities

Below is an interview of Simon Critchley by founder and editor of the UK-based quarterly print magazine STIR, Jonny Gordon-Farleigh. It appears in the Autumn issue of STIR under the title “An Interview with Philosopher Simon Critchley.” 

The most challenging task of recent times has been to find a common name — a new political identity — much like Proletariat was for the politics of the 19th and 20th centuries. In response, Simon Critchley’s work has explored political names such as the ‘indigenous’, and more recently ‘Anonymous’ — the name of those with no name — and Occupy’s slogan ‘We are the 99%’. In this interview Critchley argues that we need to create a new hegemony — the shaping of an alliance or common front — and also start a serious investigation into the history of political forms in general. With the remergence of general assemblies, affinity groups and spokecouncils, Critchley claims we should not be scared of the need to produce a formal political theory of these practices.

 

Jonny Gordon-Farleigh: Antonio Gramsci said, “the challenge of modernity is to live without illusions without becoming disillusioned”. In other parts of his writing he separates the intellect and the will — pessimism in the former and optimism in the latter. Is this the only way to get through the impasse of working for new alternatives within our political reality?

SC: Funnily enough, I sent that quotation, those very words to Thomas Hirschhorn, an artist who has been running a Gramsci monument in the Bronx under the auspices of the DIA Art Foundation. He’s built a fantastic, precarious, transient monument with a library and media centre with all sort of Gramsci-related activity. I sent him that quotation and it was put on the wall. The quotation is interesting because the point is not to become disillusioned while living without illusions. Maybe we could add another twist to that line of thought by saying the challenge of modernity is to live without illusions without becoming disillusioned but to accept that politics is the creation of an illusion that we know is an illusion. I think that illusion has a positive function and that it’s not all bad. It is not that we move from illusion to reality, necessarily. Politics is often about the creation of forms of positive illusion, which can stitch together a political movement and political front around a slogan or image. I don’t think we can just disregard illusions but we have to inhabit illusions while knowing they are illusions.

While we’re on the subject of Gramsci, another quotation I like from his work is when he says that the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born. In many ways this describes our situation ­— the old is dying and the new is struggling, with difficulty, into existence. We are in a critical state between a world that is falling apart and a new world that we’re unsure of what it will look like — it might even look worse than the old world. But the old order in Europe and North America has collapsed and something is struggling for emergence, and all these signs we have — different movements such as Occupy, the Indignados and all the other mass movements that have appeared around in the world in the last few years — are symptoms of this difficult birth (whatever name we’re going to give it).

 

JGF: The need for a new political identity is one of the driving forces of Infinitely Demanding . Now that communism appears to be politically useless, at least for the moment, the ‘commons’ has emerged as a viable alternative name around which to organise new forms of political action, from Indian peasant’s saving seeds to open source computer hackers. Firstly, what’s in a name? And does political action always require some form of self-identification (communist, indigenous, commoner, etc.)?

SC: I think it does, yes. In Infinitely Demanding I argue that politics is about acts of nomination; it’s about naming a political subject that can come into existence. The example I give in Infinitely Demanding is the indigenous subject or indigeneity as a new form of political identity in the Mexican context. What this reveals is that there has to be something around which an identity takes shape. This could be a slogan that functions to shape an identity, such as Occupy’s ‘We are the 99%’. This is a good example of how an identity was shaped around the 99% against the 1%. So politics is about the activity of naming and the construction of identities around which groups can conform, and this is the activity (to go back to Gramsci who is on both of our minds at the moment) called hegemony. Hegemony is the shaping of an alliance or a common front, a construction of what Ernesto Laclau used to call a ‘chain of equivalences’. Hegemony is the art, and it really is an art and not a science, of the construction of a political front and one of the things that forms a front is a name, an identity.

The question is whether such a name exists at the present time. There are some philosophers like Alain Badiou who think that names are lacking and that we need a new name, like Proletariat was for Marx. I’m not so pessimistic. I think that names like immigrant, say, can become mobilising forms of identity for new political fronts but names do have to be invented and identities have to be formed: and then it is around those that political action can take shape.

 

JGF: One of the major concerns of your work is the question of motivation. How do you understand the motivational deficit in our recent political history, and does Occupy represent the emergence of a new participatory paradigm?

SC: I would start by clarifying my thoughts here: I think there is a motivational deficit in regards to the citizens’ relationship to the institutions of existing states. We have a demotivated relationship to the party system, institutions like parliament, various institutions of government and all the rest. We did, arguably, in the past feel some affinity to those institutions but now we feel a distance from them and one symptom of this is the decline in party membership in countries like Britain. So political parties are now technocratic elites rather than the consequence of genuine popular movements, which was the case with the Labour Party a long time ago.

The double movement of motivation, though, is if there’s deficit in regard to normal politics, then there has also been a motivational surplus with regards to abnormal forms of politics. What’s happened in the last 15 years is a shift of political energies away from normal, electoral, politics into activities we could link with the alterglobalisation movement, critiques of globalisation and capitalism, anti-war movements, and then into movements like Occupy and the Indignados. There is a transfer of motivation from the usual avenues of politics into new avenues. Again, the meta-question, the key question, is how we take that new motivational energy and shape it politically into a more powerful force? In particular, what relationships those political energies are going to have to the existing state and institutions of the state. Are they, on the one hand, going to seek the elimination and annihilation of those institutions and state, in the guise of a classical anarchism? Or, are they going to aim at some other kind of space within the state, which I call in my earlier work, a creation of interstitial distance within the state that can exert a pressure upon the state and aim for its amelioration.

 

JGF: Jacques Ranciere’s idea of dissensus is very close to the practice of prefigurative politics — you act as if you’re already free — and by doing so reveal the democratic deficit of the society in which you live. How do you make sure that a subjective politics (personal anarchy) — a self-freeing process — is always part of a movement for widespread social change?

SC: Well you can’t make sure of anything, there are not guarantees — again, politics is an art and it also requires context, luck and skill. It is a question of binding together personal anarchy, subjective politics, with widespread social change. This happened for a brief period with Occupy, and it’s a question of learning from such moments when it happens and putting this experience into effect in the future. With regard to dissensus, I’ve learnt a lot from Jacques Ranciere, although for him politics is the spontaneous emergence of the people, of those people who do not count. They emerge into appearance spontaneously in the form of a manifestation or a demonstration around a particular issue. For me, there has to be more of an ethical background — we can’t just wait for politics to spontaneously occur. We have to inculcate arguments, cultivate habits that will allow such a politics to emerge and, I guess, that’s why I try to do in my work.

The idea of dissensus, of course, has a contradiction. Dissensus is dissensus in regards to the idea of consensus: if normal politics is known as consensus, then a politics of resistance is aiming at dissensus. Dissensus itself is the formation of a commonality, of a new commons. Or to put it in a more Gramscian register, and it seems to be my thing today, hegemony is the cultivation of forms of commonality. He calls this the construction of a collective will. So dissensus is not simply dissensus for its own sake but for the purpose of constructing a collective will, an alternative commonality. I think this is an important point.

 

JGF: Anonymity has featured heavily in oppositional politics from the Zapatista’s claim that ‘the mask is a mirror’ to the Anarchist Black Blocs who want to remain unidentified by the state to the most recent use of Guy Fawkes masks by participants of the global Occupy movement — and often for very good reasons. How do you understand anonymity philosophically and in terms of its place in a democratic project?

SC: I love the anonymity issue, particularly the Guy Fawkes masks and I really enjoyed V for Vendetta when I first saw it (and have now seen it three times). I really enjoyed watching the images of the institutions of the British Government blowing up. More generally, anonymity has taken on an increasing force in recent years, and rightly. This is an interesting issue, and to go back to the question about naming and identification, one of the names that has appeared is anonymous. The one without a name becomes a name. I completely understand why anonymity has become a political tool and also its urgency: A context of global surveillance — an NSA-governed police state — the most radical position one can occupy is to become anonymous and not part of the structure that can be identified (credit card, bank and email details). So there is a secessionary power to anonymity at this point and I find this very interesting and I think it’s become a very powerful line of political activity.

A final thought I want to try here is to say something a bit more general in terms of what we need to do at this point as intellectuals, with the Gramscian caveat, that every human being is an intellectual. Let’s say I’m the traditional intellectual — the enfranchised academic who might have sympathies with all sorts of groups but I’m part of the problem and not part of the solution — then the solution is, what Gramsci called, the organic intellectual. The organic intellectual emerges from a movement and can speak from that position, and this is essential to the activity of political education.

I want to talk about four concepts in closing. As intellectuals we need a scrupulous, historical investigation into the history of political forms, a genealogy of political forms, an analysis of their mechanisms — legitimation and governance and oppression — and I see this genealogical or historical task as an exposure of the contingent articulation of political forms. The first step in resistance is a history lesson — it’s not a lesson written for us, but one we write ourselves. The second thing we need is a strong formal analysis of the conditions under which an egalitarian and oppositional politics might be constructed. This would include a sketching of alternative political practices and institutions around concepts like association, general assemblies, affinity groups, spokescouncils and the rest. We need a formal political theory of this at some level and we shouldn’t be scared of this. Thirdly, and this is really important, we need a local ethnography of social life that would try to identify how any formal model might become operationalised in a specific context. It’s not just a question of providing a right theory in relation to the right history — we need anthropological detail. This is an account of habits, morals, local conditions, local traditions, what we might call mores. So, any radical egalitarian politics must not be imposed from above but must be generated from below, and to quote Gramsci once again, from the molecular level of social life. Then the fourth element, which is also very important, is when we’re done with the ethnographic research it becomes a case of argumentation, of persuasion. This is what the Ancient Greeks used to call Peitho (after the goddess). So it’s not just about having the right theory in relation to the right context and history, you also have to unleash persuasion in order to put it into effect. There is no philosophical ground to politics and nor should there be. All that we have are the tools we make ourselves and so the task is to sharpen those tools and put them into effect in a more powerful and forceful way.

To buy the Autumn Issue of  STIR, click here.

Anwar Shaikh

The Trade Deficit: Beyond the Myth of Currency Manipulation

The US has run a assive trade deficit for over 30 years. In recent times, there has been a growing chorus of commentators who seek to place the blame on our trading partners, most notably China, just as in an earlier time others had targeted Japan and Germany. It is said that the problem stems not from our reduced international competitiveness, but rather from the manipulation of exchange rates by our more successful trading partners.

This claim is not based on any direct evidence, but rather on an inference derived from standard international trade theory, which predicts that free trade will automatically lead to balanced trade. From this particular theoretical perspective, our large and persistent large trade deficit must be rooted in some obstacles to free trade. The large surpluses of our trading partners such as China then make them natural candidates for our opprobrium. Of course, if the standard theory is incorrect, this line of inference collapses. I wish to argue that the standard theory is wrong, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, and that free trade does not automatically eliminate trade imbalances. On the contrary, free trade reflects international competitiveness, and persistent trade deficits are symptoms of persistent competitive weakness.

The theory of international trade is actually a subset of the general theory of competition. In a business driven world, international trade is largely conducted by businesses. Domestic exporters sell to foreign importers who in turn sell to their residents, while domestic importers buy from foreign exporters and sell to us. At each step in the chain, it is profit that motivates the business decision. Standard (comparative cost) theory rests on the proposition that a trade deficit in a country will drive down the real price of its currency, which in turn will reduce the deficit, until at some point both the balance of trade and the balance of payments are automatically reduced to zero. A trade surplus would have the opposite initial effect, bringing once again back this double balance. When the nominal exchange rate was fixed, as it was during the Bretton Woods era, a trade deficit generates a money outflow, and this is assumed to lower the national price level, thereby making the country’s goods more competitive on a world scale. When the exchange rate is flexible, as it has been since the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement in the early 1970s, a trade deficit is assumed to depreciate the currency, once again making the country more competitive on the world market. In either case, the process is supposed to operate until the trade deficit has been eliminated.

In his book International Economics (1957), the eminent Oxford economist Roy Harrod came to a rather different conclusion: in the trade deficit country, the resulting money outflows decrease liquidity and increase interest rates, all through the natural reactions of financial markets; in the trade surplus country, the opposite effect obtains, and interest rates fall. Neither of these substantially alters the trade balance. Instead, they induce short term capital flows into the high interest rate (trade deficit) country from the low interest (trade surplus) country, until the overall balance of payments in each is in equilibrium. In other words, free markets automatically cover trade deficits with international debt, and offset trade surpluses through international lending. As long as neither side does anything to intervene, the differences in international competitiveness, which induced the trade imbalances are maintained, not eliminated. This is why successful countries have always known that one must first build up a country’s competitiveness. In earlier times this was the policy of the UK, Germany, France and the US. In more recent times, it has been that of Japan, South Korea, and China.

In a recent article on China, David Leonhardt says that “there is … no question that China’s currency remains undervalued” because “the huge demand for Chinese goods should be driving up the price of its currency.” Since China’s large trade surplus has not driven up its exchange rate, he concludes that “Beijing has been intervening to prevent that.” Note that this explicitly relies on the standard theory. Leonhardt also cites estimates of the extent to which China’s exchange rate is supposedly undervalued. Yet, all such estimates are also derived from models that assume that balanced trade is the normal outcome of free trade.

Paul Krugman takes the same stance, accusing China of obstructing the “automatic mechanisms” of international trade that would otherwise bring about automatic balance (see here, here, here and here). As a renowned trade theorist in his own right, Krugman explicitly links his inference to the underlying expectation that free trade will automatically lead to balanced trade – a proposition which he has elsewhere called a “sacred tenet” of standard theory.

It is precisely this sacred tenet that I dispute. Trade imbalances are perfectly normal, at both theoretical and empirical levels. This does not exclude the possibility that China intervenes to lower its exchange rate below the free market level. What it tells us is that we cannot simply infer this from the existence of their trade surplus and our trade deficit.

Having consulted different stars, might we not find that at least some part of the fault lies in ourselves?

Nick Haekkerup and William Milberg

The American Dream Comes to Life in Denmark

The following is the prepared text of the speech given by Minister Haekkerup on September 28, 2013, at The New School, with an introduction by William Milberg.

Introduction

The word “capitalism,” describing our market-oriented economic system of wage labor, private ownership and the endless drive for wealth accumulation, was invented in the 19th century. For the last part of the twentieth century, “capitalism” was a dirty word. It alluded ever so uncomfortably to exploitation in human interaction and the unequal nature of modern economic society. The word capitalism was represented by euphemisms in economics –- “competitive equilibrium,” “pure competition,” or “monetary production system.” My late colleague Robert Heilbroner found that Gregory Mankiw’s popular textbook, Principles of Economics, a book over 500 pages long and first published in 1998, mentions the word “capitalism” just one time, and that occurs in a footnote.

In 2013, we once again dare to speak the word. Why? Because with the international financial crisis of 2008 and the economic stagnation experienced in much of the industrialized world since then, there is a palpable sense that the system is at risk and in need of scrutiny, as a system. Capitalism, it would seem, is back.

In fact, however, capitalism does not exist. The ideal, competitive market system remains largely in the imagination of economists and some right-wing ideologues. What exists is not capitalism, but capitalisms, a variety of government policies and regulations, civil society institutions, social networks and innovation systems that are different, and often markedly so, across space and time. American dominance in the world economy in the late 20th century made the American variety of capitalism seem synonymous with capitalism generally. Today, as capitalism re-emerges as a category of analysis and debate, and as the American economic position in the world economy becomes tenuous, a more textured picture of the world economy has emerged.

The speech that follows, by Nick Haekkerup, the Danish Minister for Trade and European Affairs, lauds the Danish variety of capitalism. In a short speech delivered at The New School for Social Research on September 28, 2013, he provides a portrait of a well-functioning, growing, relatively equitable and humane Danish capitalism. Denmark’s variety of capitalism – characterizes by a “flexicurity” has received much attention in the last decade for its successful combination of labor market flexibility with significant guarantees of employment security. There will no doubt be questions about the Minister’s idyllic portrait of Danish capitalism. What about the status of immigrants? Why recent cutbacks in government support for higher education? I will leave readers to add to these questions and to provide response in the comment section that follows the speech.

Speech

Dear Guests, Faculty members, And – of course – Students, perhaps even one or two Danish students, as I know Danes love to study here, I want to thank the New School for the invitation to speak here today. It is – truly – a privilege to be invited to one of the world’s most prominent universities. To me, this place is about tomorrow. New York is about the future. It always has been. So today I want to talk about the future. To get there I will go back fifty years in time.

Half a century ago the Danish Secretary of State arrived to this magnificent city. He came from a small town in the countryside. He came here to talk about a changing world in the first decades after a war that changed the world, as it changed him. Later in his life he would retire, and sit in his house late in the evening, remembering the friends he lost. And remembering, with gratitude, how his country and Europe was liberated by the United States of America. He kept these memories alive by telling the stories to his grandchildren. I know this. The Secretary of State was my grandfather. And I bring these stories with me today. I am also grateful.

* * *

My grandfather was a social democrat. All his life he fought to create a society prosperous, democratic and socially just. So that future generations of Danes would live a life better than his. This was the welfare society, the welfare State. Preparing for this meeting here today I read about the American Dream:

Life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement, regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. 

This is how the dream was defined by James Adams in 1931. This is the aim of the welfare state. And my message today is that the welfare state, the Nordic welfare model, is the model of the future. That the American dream, if I may be so bold, comes to life in Denmark, in a welfare society…

* * *

The economic crisis in Europe has shaken the foundations of the European Union and prompted worries about the future of the Euro. Questions are also raised about the sustainability of the “welfare state” as an institution. Some people have even argued that the economic crisis is not about the European Monetary Union. It is really about the European welfare model. The expansion of social welfare combined with an aging population has resulted in excessive spending, budget deficits and economic crisis. The critics are quick to point out the paradox. A model designed to improve social security and stability has ended up creating insecurity, conflict and disappointment. While the debate has mostly focused on Southern Europe, outside observers have also criticised the Nordic welfare states and their excessive governments. Recently there was an article in New York Times that suggested that Denmark has been forced into reforming a shaky economic model that creates a lazy population and hampers growth and innovation. I know pictures have been printed, also on this side of the Atlantic, of a quite strange man dubbed “Lazy Robert”.

We are reforming. But the real story is in many ways quite different. Let me tell you why Denmark and the other Nordic countries do not fit the traditional stereotype of sluggish and wasteful welfare states. Why Denmark and the other Nordic countries on the contrary represent some of the best places in the world to both live and do business. Represent the society of tomorrow.

* * *

Most people would agree that Denmark and the other Nordic countries are doing relatively well compared to the rest of Europe. But some people would still argue that the Nordic welfare states are less competitive and less successful in creating employment than other models, such as the United States. Let us compare a few numbers: Denmark has a lower budget deficit than the United States. 1.8% as opposed to 5.4% Denmark has a lower unemployment rate than the United States. 4.3% as opposed to 7.4% Denmark has more working people among the working-age population than the United States: 73% as opposed to 66%.

And while the United States is one of the best places in the world to do business, Denmark is right behind. On the World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business Index”, the United States is number 4 and Denmark is number 5. Denmark even has a lower corporate tax rate than the United States. I know this comparison is not fair. I know that Denmark does not outperform the United States on all measures of economic performance. I am aware that your GDP is xxx times bigger than ours…

As Secretary of Defence I met with Leon Panetta, and we talked about cutting defence budget. I realised that the entire Danish defence budget matches what US defence spends alone on air conditioning… 3,3 billion dollars…Nevertheless, I will argue that the Danish model has produced strong results. Not only do we have a triple A rating and a high standard of living. According to the World Happiness Report released a couple of weeks ago by Columbia University, Danes are also the happiest people in the world. I am aware that the Wall Street Journal, perhaps fairly, questions these findings…But after all: Isn’t high income, security and happiness what most people strive for?

* * *

Then the next question arises: Why are Denmark and the other Nordic countries able to balance strong welfare schemes, high tax rates – and economic growth? The answer in one word? Work. Studies show that Danes are more positive about globalization and less afraid of losing their jobs than other Europeans. This has to do with the Danish “flexicurity” model which promotes employment security over job security. “Flexicurity” is a compound of flexibility and security. It means flexibility with a safety net. The model has three elements:

• First: Flexible rules on hiring and firing, which means that companies can adjust the workforce to changes in production without suffering great cost.

• Second: All workers have the opportunity to receive benefits from the government in the case of unemployment. The flexible labour market means that almost one in three Danes change his or her job every year.

• Third: An active labour market policy offers guidance or education to all unemployed.

Not only do Danes change jobs frequently, they are also well-equipped to do so. The “Flexicurity” model not only works in times of growth. It has also proven its worth during the crisis. One of the advantages of this system is that employers are not afraid of hiring young graduates with little or no experience. As a result, Denmark will not face a “lost generation” when the economic crisis is finally over.

* * *

Talking about generations, you may also have heard people talk about demography as another challenge to the welfare state. While the share of older people is increasing in all European societies, this is less of an economic challenge in Denmark and the other Nordic countries. Not only is the level of employment high in Denmark – so are the birth rates.

Comprehensive and affordable child-care and care of the elderly, enable women, especially the low-paid, to combine family and work. It is precisely because the Nordic welfare states have largely taken such tasks, that women have been able to enter the labour market to a greater degree than in other parts of the world. Denmark was recently ranked number two in the EU Equality Index because of a very high employment rate for women. And women rise to top-level management positions: At the moment, the amount of women leaders in the public sector is at an all-time high with 40 pct. My boss is a woman, the Prime Minister. And her boss is the Queen… We don’t even have a king. But no kidding, Denmark and the other Nordic countries are at the forefront as far as gender equality is concerned. That does not only make me proud, being the father of two daughters – it makes the Danish economy stronger.

* * *

Before I get to the matter of reforming our public sector, I would like to address the issue of public spending. The Nordic welfare states are based on shared political values of equal opportunities, social solidarity and security for all.

As a result of the economic crisis, some people have argued that if we want to control public spending we have to comprise on our values. Compromise on the principle that everyone is entitled to equal access to social and health services, education and culture.

I strongly disagree. Only by letting these core values and principles guide the reform process will it be possible to balance the books and modernise our welfare states. The alternative is clearly visible in the streets of Southern Europe. By sticking to our values and principles, Denmark and the other Nordic governments have successfully managed to carry out a number of painful reforms, including an overhaul of the pension systems, without losing legitimacy.

Besides, private is not always cheaper than public. The United States spends much more on healthcare per capita than Denmark despite having a system based in the private market. And I have to mention this as well, when it comes to public spending:

It wasn’t too much money spent on public education and public health care that brought the Lehmann Brothers down!…

* * *

But that shouldn’t stop us from keep reforming and sharpening our society. Reform and modernisation is not just austerity and cutbacks. Denmark and the other Nordic countries have been promoting welfare reform and innovation for many years. We may have big government, but not ineffective or inefficient government.

Let me give you some examples:

Much of Denmark’s economic activity is generated by the public sector and not automatically exposed to competition. Competition for public contracts is therefore an important tool for testing who is the best provider at the best price. This helps to increase efficiency and innovation in both the public and private sectors.

The Danish public sector is also a world leader in the adoption of IT and new technologies, aimed at improving welfare services. As such, Danes do not waste their valuable time on paperwork at their local government office. And taxpayers’ money is not wasted on printed forms and postage when digital solutions can carry out these tasks more efficiently. Taxes are relatively high, but you can pay them with a text message.

* * *

One could claim that the massive Nordic welfare systems impede the drive for new innovations. Speaking today in the most innovative city in the world, there may be some truth to this. On the other hand, the public sector in Denmark and the other Nordic countries is bigger than in most countries. This makes it possible to use the size and centralisation of public procurement to stimulate innovation.

In Denmark there is a longstanding tradition of public institutions acting as a test market for innovative solutions. We have seen this in the areas such a healthcare and clean-tech where Danish companies today play a leading role on the global market.

* * *

Denmark is among the five countries with the world’s highest social mobility. So are the other Nordic countries. The welfare model is based on a shared goal of equality and social cohesion. This means that everybody is entitled to equal access to social and health services, education and culture. Nobody needs to worry about whether they can afford to send their kids to college. Nobody needs to worry about who will pay for their healthcare. In that light it is perhaps not surprising that Danes are the happiest people in the world.

So, dear guests, faculty members and students: I believe the American dream comes to life in Denmark. I believe that the welfare state that my grandfathers and his generations fought for is still worth fighting for. I believe that the future needs the American Dream as a beacon – that:

Life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.

With opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.

Regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.

We are not there yet, and we most likely never will arrive. Denmark still faces major challenges to create greater economic and human equality. Our job is far from over.

We need to be more productive – particularly in the public sector. We also need to be more innovative – both in the public and in the private sector. We need to be better at turning innovations into new businesses. These are all areas where we can learn from the United States.

* * *

The Danish government is determined not to lose focus. When the New York Times asks whether Denmark can manage to sustain and reform its welfare state, my answer is yes, yes we can.

Thank you for your attention.

Vince Carducci

Jonathan Crary's 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

When I was a kid in the 1960s one of the big questions I remember being tossed about was what to do with all of the free time that modern society would afford us. That there would be a virtually unlimited horizon of material abundance and thus leisure, and how best to use it, was a topic of talk in the media and at dinner. Year after year, union contracts (back when there were such things) negotiated increasingly generous benefits, including substantial time off from work. John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 classic The Affluent Society set the terms of the conversation early on by challenging Americans to muster the country’s broadly experienced largesse, made possible by the productive capacity of modern mass manufacturing, to serve the larger social good. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was subsequently founded on the notion that widespread wealth, and along with it leisure, were faits accompli.

The decades since have provided the answer to what we would do with all of our spare time, though it’s not the one most people expected. We have dealt with the problem of leisure by getting rid of it. Instead, we now work nonstop. Digital technology and the communications network it supports allow us to be on the job morning, noon, and night, wherever we may be. In his important new book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, visual culture theorist Jonathan Crary tells us that rather than herald a new age of freedom and self-determination, the new media technologies have ensnared us in a stickier web of control. This condition is characterized by the obligation to always be “on,” the better to surrender ourselves to the continual means of our own mutual self-surveillance and hence domination in the form of Tweets, Facebook and Tumblr updates, texts, emails, blog posts, multi-tasking regimens, and the like.

Crary, who is Meyer Shapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University, is the author of two other significant books. The first, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1990, looks at the origins of modern visual culture in the first half of the 1800s, in particular the ways in which then emerging physiological science reduced human perception to a function of biological impulses, replacing the spiritual definition of self (i.e., the soul) with a more mechanistic one grounded in pure motor response and base instinct. The second, the award-winning Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, was published a decade later and looked at the crucial period between 1880 and 1905 when vision was redirected toward solving the problem of attention (actually the lack of it), called upon to focus on specific phenomena as a way to combat the sensory overload of newly industrializing society. Both books essentially argue that these changes came about in the service of capitalism — a cadre of isolated self-interested individuals was created who could function as perfect cogs in the machine constructed by the modern division of labor.

Though brief (a mere 133 pages) and lightly annotated, 24/7 is the capstone of Crary’s archeology of the spectacle and arguably the most significant of the lot. It’s informed by the erudition of one of the most thorough and original researchers at work today. The vast bodies of knowledge Crary seamlessly weaves together in 24/7 is reminiscent of the work of Michel Foucault, but without the gnarly, headache-inducing sentence structure. It’s marked by a moral passion that fuels Crary’s polemic and underscores what’s at stake, specifically the future of the human being in both the physical and emotional sense. Plus, it’s eminently readable, eschewing the critical theory gobbledygook of the tribe of radical art historians he’s most closely associated with, the so-called October group that includes Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. (Those folks have done and continue to do important work in their fields, but the need for cultural critique these days is simply too dire to be locked away in the ivory tower.)

In the round-the-clock world of twenty-first century global capitalism, our only relief is sleep, and as Crary notes, even that is coming under attack. 24/7 starts with a report on research being undertaken by the US military to extend the amount of time combat soldiers and other personnel can go without sleep, seeking to extend it from days to weeks. Given that military innovations usually make their way into broader aspects of everyday life — air travel, the Internet, GPS, over-the-counter medications, all manner of consumer electronics, recreational assault weapons — there is every reason to believe, as Crary asserts, that the sleepless soldier is the prototype of the sleepless worker/consumer. “Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism,” Crary writes. The endless here and now of 24/7 proposes to harvest surplus value not from only our bodies but from our psyches, rendering us little more than real-life Matrix pod-humans.

Crary doesn’t discuss it in 24/7, but an early iteration of this process can be discerned in the first part of the twentieth century when the techniques of mass manufacturing greatly reduced the amount of time needed to produce goods and services. In Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture, historian Gary Cross details the conscious policies adopted by the government and industry in the 1920s and 1930s to encourage material consumption, and along with it increased profit, instead of allowing spiritual respite. The commodity fetish, to use an old-fashioned term, became the mechanism by which capitalism increasingly inserted itself into everyday life, replacing personal relationships and local cultural practices with cold market logic mediated by consumer goods, proffering more stuff in lieu of more time.

A watershed moment Crary does address is the introduction of broadcast television after the Second World War. Following Raymond Williams ‘s 1974 study Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Crary recognizes the way in which TV was inserted into everyday life as a soft mode of social control. Through what Williams terms its “planned flow,” television organized the daily routine from morning commuting information and weather reports to midday newsbreak to evening entertainment, culminating in nightly sign off, all the while promoting the ostensible benefits of a mass industrial consumer utopia. In the 1950s and 1960s, television was a relatively stable system, drawing an increasingly suburban and decentralized population into a homogenized national imaginary. The advent of cable TV and programmable VCRs in the 1970s offered the opportunity for time shifting and what McKenzie Wark in his new book terms the “disintegrating spectacle,” the way in which control has become atomized and diffused yet more difficult to circumvent. This is represented today by such technologies as social media, wireless communications, and the Internet.

Against the relentless tide of 24/7 production and consumption, Crary proposes that we reclaim sleep as a site of unregulated desire, a mode of resistance to the rational calculation of the market, a state in which we might imagine “a world without billionaires, which has a future other than barbarism or the post-human, and in which history can take on other forms than reified nightmares of catastrophe.” Going to sleep presupposes that one will arise anew the next day, refreshed and with the hope of new possibilities. As the web of 24/7 gets harder and harder to escape, sleep becomes as good a place as any to kickstart the opposition. So, workers of the world — go to bed!

This article was first published in Motown Review of Art.

McKenzie Wark

Accelerationism

There’s a lively debate going on about ‘accelerationism’. As Reza Negarastani has suggested, it might be a way in which big picture speculative thought about historical circumstances has returned after the decline of Marxism. It began with the somewhat hallucinated texts of Nick Land, which saw capitalism as a sort of alien species invading human time from the future. Land’s texts are a sort of clinging to the fuselage of ‘late’ capitalism as it accelerates toward an alien becoming, where capital and tech supplant the human as a new mode of being.

Land at his best was our Rimbaud, our Artaud, our Chtcheglov, and needless to say such a visionary writer has at once attracted a certain fascination and also some strong denunciations. Benjamin Noys coined the term ‘accelerationism’ to cover both Land and other writers who take off from Deleuze and Guattari into a kind of historical thought without negation, where capital mutates into something else out of its own affirmative workings. The writing of Hardt and Negri might also be considered ‘accelerationist’ in this sense.

Personally, I find any speculative historical thought to be of interest, particularly at a time when capital-H-History has been considered off limits. My books of the last decade, A Hacker Manifesto (2004) and Gamer Theory (2007), were ‘accelerationist’ avant-la-lettre. Hence I welcomed the chance to revisit the positions of those earlier books in response to the ‘#Accelerate’ text by Alec Williams and Nick Srnicek, and at a recent forum organized by Gean Moreno in response to the excellent issue of e-flux he edited on Accelerationism. My contribution to that forum is here, and you can read the contribution by Steven Shaviro here.

 

Cruise Control

McKenzie Wark

01. Its striking that most ideas about accelerationism – pro and con – assume that capitalism is always more or less the same thing. It can affirm itself, speeding up, becoming something else in the future. Or it can be negated, overthrown by something else. But capitalism itself always seems to be the same thing.

02. But is it? Is this still capitalism? What if it was something worse? As I have argued elsewhere, we could imagine the commodity economy passing through three stages already: the enclosure of land, the mass production of the thing, and the commodification of information. Each stage is a distinct private property form, producing a successive polarization of classes, of owners and non-owners.

03. The transformative possibilities change with each stage of development of the property form. Land enclosure produced reactive and utopian peasant resistance. The mass production of the thing as commodity produced both the radical and reformist labor movements. The new forms of exploitation layered on top of these ongoing ones is producing new kinds of contestation and accommodation.

04. The new stage of commodification is less about extracting surplus value from labor as extracting surplus information from play. It extracts value by offering information for free, but extracting more information in return – surplus information.

05. But this new form of the commodity economy does not go unchallenged. The counter-currents it produces may not however be adequately captured by the category of ‘politics’. Maybe the struggle is, as Bogdanov would say, between commodification and the possibility of better forms of organization. The problem of organization is at once one of resources, techniques, human and inhuman forces, affect and information.

06. Is it not strange that so much of what was once forward-looking leftist discourse is now longing for the past? It wants its October a second time. Or: It wants a Christ-Lenin-messiah. It wants leaps and events. It wants an autonomous sphere of political action at a time when any such autonomous domain seems clearly not to exist. The problem of modes of organization must be posed again, and outside the domain of political theory.

07. Of course political theory is preferable to the apolitical theory that caved in to the language of ‘there is no alternative’. But our alternatives must be based on an analysis of current forms of commodity relation, not on ahistorical, philosophical understandings of eternal capitalism. We must restart what Castoriadis called the imaginary institution, by which organization finds the phase changes implied in its own form.

08. By their rhetoric you shall know them. The talk these days is of disruption, creation, destruction. The old language of the avant gardes and revolutionaries is now the province of Silicon valley publicists. So we need a careful analysis of that language – and we need a new avant garde. Its clear that this is a commodity economy busy cannibalizing its own means of subsistence. It has run out of ideas. The task of the neo-liberal state is to destroy the social so that it may be commodified, even though this will result in less efficient and effective forms of organization. So: let there be iPads in the charter schools! The result will be less effective, and more expensive, which is of course the goal.

09. The ruling class of our time is a rentier class. It is not actually innovative and disruptive. It is not accelerating anything. Technical innovation pushed commodification onto a new, more abstract plane, that of information. But the plan is mostly to rope off and sustain quasi-monopoly rent seeking behavior in those domains. The ruling class of our time – what I call the vectoral class – wants information to be a mode of organizational control, not really of ‘innovation.’

10. The challenge to this baroque order is entirely within its relation to its material conditions of existence, at the base of the stack. Negation always comes from below. There is no negation from above. There is no other domain of absolute alterity which will rend judgment against Gomorrah. There is no communism as avenging angel of pure universal equality. There is no absurdist leap into the unknown. What calls the vectoral class to account is the now systematic quality of its own disorganization. First but not last on the list: ever rising levels of atmospheric carbon. What will spark a disruption is a leap in food prices, not philosophy or art.

11. The commodity economy is not what Althusser called an ‘expressive totality’, infecting any and everything with its poison touch. It isn’t everything. It isn’t even all capitalism, but rather a heterogeneous mix of commodity and non-commodity organizational modes. The commodity forms themselves also differentiate into at least three historical forms, making land, capital and then information into forms of private property. Since capitalism is not a totality its negation is not total either. One needs a language of organization that is both more abstract and more specific, which articulates together heterogeneous forms and goals. In this respect at least the legacy of Laclau, Mouffe and Stuart Hall is still with us.

12. Critics of accelerationism might say that I too lack faith in a total negation. Yes, indeed. But this clears away what Debord called the “silly chatter of optimism” and opens the space of strategic thinking. The most difficult thing for any organizational thinker is to organize the orderly retreat. In many respects orderly retreat might be our task at the moment. Which is not to say one lets go of utopian imagining, even if it is the queer cosmos of Charles Fourier to which one turns rather than the exterminating angels of Saint Paul.

13. So a qualified accelerationism, then. One which does not accept that capitalism is either ahistorical, or that its acceleration is actually ‘progress.’ But which does not put too much faith in the past or in a mystical other. The challenge is to do better with the various infrastructures to hand in organizing the world.

14. There is a certain charm to the language of what EP Thompson called exterminism. After two millennia of failure as the abstract thought of a human centered world, perhaps philosophy could simply skip that part and become the thought of a world without us. But perhaps the problem is not with correlationist philosophies but with philosophy tout court. If the philosophers were going to save us they would have done so already. Its time for quite different kinds of organization of thought in other webs of relation to the world. The problem of thought is an organizational one. Let us be done with the spectacle of master thinkers.

15. There’s no going back, then. We need a new temporal jazz connecting pasts-presents-futures. But let’s think in a more plural fashion with those actual others who think that temporal jazz. Let’s put accelerationism together with the afrofuturism of Kodwo Eshun, the gender de-engineering of Beatriz Preciado, the techno-feminism of the late Shulamith Firestone and many others. Let’s try to think at scale again, and with a certain historical legato. Certain accelerationist comrades have resorted to rather shopworn modes of abstracting from differences. We need rather a new kind of abstraction, one which does not flatten such differences by simply reasserting the old patriarchal norms. Asking dad to plan a future for us isn’t going to fly. There can be no large-scale planning base on an abstracted rationality of the old type. Infrastructure hence forth has to be a big mesh of little things rather than a little mesh of big things. We have so destabilized the bedrock on which infrastructure rests that it is becoming increasingly failure-prone.

16. But accelerationists like Williams and Srnicek are right to ask that we think at scale again. The enemy certainly is. Philip Mirowski has given us their plan: first, lie about the reality of climate change for as long as it will work. Second, cap and trade to create a new market without changing the commodity form. Third, geo-engineering to counter-act the effects of atmospheric carbon without reducing emissions. Their solution, in short, is more and more of what ails us. There is nothing that they won’t sacrifice to private property, including life itself.

17. Biopower is not the state’s primary object. Yes, states are arming themselves against their own populations; states are conducting surveillance of their entire populations. But what this means is that the state is preparing to defend property against us, if necessary. Which is after all the first and last mission of the state. You can smell the fear. This is a ruling class that, in its quiet moments, knows it has failed its historical task and is preparing for the worst.

18. Our task then is the hardest one: orderly retreat. Even if this bankrupt and enervated form of organization based on commodification were to disappear tomorrow, the material conditions of existence are still against us. If you want a past historical hook, its not the storming of the Bastille, it’s the retreat from Moscow. Let’s have done with the Jacobin model of politics, that invariant center of all Francophile theories of action. If one must stick with a francocentric world, let’s read Clausewitz or Fourier, who flank it on either side, and displace action from an imagined political to more infrastructural questions.

19. Can we build on the weak power of weak social links? Can the boredom, indifference, opacity and ambivalence of abstracted sociality become a positive force? Can we be datapunks? Here’s three gigabytes, go form your own society! Can we be metapunks? Can we manage our own metadata, and build transversal organizations in the shadows of the proper channels? Can we be a vast and anonymous support group for those who are prepared to put their bodies in front of pipelines? Can we be infrapunks, builders of tiny bits of a the structure of another life?

20. Can we have done with contemporary art? If one can make a living at it, good luck to you. We all have our day jobs. Can we treat the successful artist as just another person with a day job and ask that their real work be something else? Actual art in our time is organizational or not at all. It proposes organizations of resources that partially decommodify while working within real constraints. Contemporary art is just useless things for useless people. Take the hedgies’ money, if you can get it, but never their sense of worth. Our model must be Asger Jorn, who took the money from his collectors and with it funded the greatest avant gardes of postwar Europe.

21. The avant gardes that Jorn supported were precarious ones. Here in the overdeveloped world, this is now a general condition. The ruling class wants to collect the rent but it doesn’t want to employ anyone. Business as usual requires less and less actual labor, whereas a qualitative shift towards a post-carbon mode of production would keep all of busy for decades. But such a shift, waged against a ruling class now in possession of a state that makes few structural concessions to us, would require organizing a social movement of many components.

22. If we are to properly name the apparent ‘politics’ of the times, it isn’t neoliberal, its fascist. Consent is only secured by designating out-groups to hate. The offerings of the times are so paltry that they can only be made to seem meaningful by making others suffer something much worse. Its time for a new popular front against fascism. What could our place be in such a larger movement?

23. Like postfordism and late capitalism, ‘neoliberal’ is a poor name for the current mode of production. It draws attention to an old feature, not its new ones. It properly names only a feature of the state. The liberal state disciplined the market; whereas it’s the market that now disciplines the neoliberal state. We need a new language to describe emergent forms of commodity economy. Its not neo anything or post anything. Its not late capitalism or cognitive capitalism. Modifiers won’t do. Its based on an ontological mutation: the historical production of the category of information. We need to dig deeper into past languages to come up with new languages to describe it. We have been reading the same old books for too long.

23. The historical production of information as an ontological reality is a product of the organizational challenges of the cold war. Its interesting that both the Soviets and Americans with their different modes of production both arrived at it. The historical production of the reality of information is independent of strictly capitalist relations of production. But for the moment the promise of another mode of organization is still trapped in the commodity form, even if it’s a rather new and strange commodity form, one already organized outside strictly capitalist forms of the mass production of the thing.

25. The new form of the commodity – information – is producing new kinds of class relation. Here the avant garde finds its classic role available to it again: to experiment with the forms of everyday life of an emerging class. One can no longer quite say: workers of the world unite! We have a world to win! Maybe, with Michele Bernstein, we could say “monsters of the world unite!” Or perhaps:  Datapunks of the world untie! We have a world to lose!

William Milberg

Hobsbawm's 20th Century: Closing Comments

I am honored to have been asked to offer closing words for this memorial event celebrating the life and work of Eric Hobsbawm. This is a New School event, and not by coincidence. As Dean of The New School for Social Research, I want first to thank Ira Katznelson, for bringing Eric Hobsbawm to us when Ira was Dean here years ago. Eric’s legacy will always be part of ours. He was our own too.

I want now to speak about the legacy of Eric Hobsbawm at the NSSR, both about how his presence in these halls strengthened us at the time, and how today it challenges us as our unique graduate faculty of social sciences moves ahead in this strange 21st century.

I was lucky to sit on a few dissertation committees with Eric, so I had a chance to watch his great mind at work and to observe up close his supervisory style. Perhaps not surprisingly, he liked supervising students in economics, my own discipline. My recollection is of someone who showed great joy in helping young scholars and mentoring in the best sense of the word — that is, not dictating answers and methods, but by taking the students’ work very seriously, posing detailed questions, and listening carefully to the answers. Students felt respected and challenged at the same time – just the right combination needed to nurture serious and engaged scholarship from an advanced graduate student preparing to enter the world of ideas as a professional.

I realize that Eric would greatly resist ideal-type theorization, that his work represents a strong testament against the use of ideal types as the basis for shaping knowledge in the social sciences. So Eric would likely not be pleased to know that his career at The New School, in its own way, generated a problem of “the ideal type.” Today a “Hobsbawm-type appointment” is the name we use at the New School for a long-term but part-time appointment, wherein a world-class scholar teaches every other semester or so and yet plays a major role in the intellectual life of the university, through teaching, faculty seminars, and supervising students.

We are constantly searching for candidates for a “Hobsbawm-type appointment.”

A key to the “Hobsbawm-type appointment” as a model for success for the university is that the scholar fit the ethos of The New School. The New School faculty is full of smart and interesting, even radical, critics of capitalism, for sure, but this is not the only or most important way that Eric’s scholarship connects to our ethos. And while he wrote — like many of our scholars do — about the political and class implications of the international movement of people, money and things, this also was not what put him so seamlessly into the intellectual life of the New School.

The key from my perspective was the way he engaged with history. He saw it, at the same time, as social and as grounded, operating “from below” in the culture, concerns, and rebellion of the working classes, and also as the work of states, systems, and leaders, coursing through civil wars and imperial geo-politics. This integration of micro and the macro forces, always with a focus on human freedom and, as Barbara Fields noted, human dignity; this insistence on a deep connection of the fine-grained, sometimes first-hand, knowledge, with the overriding macrodynamic of society — this is how we at The New School connect to Hobsbawm the historian.

And what about the New School of the future? What lessons did we learn from having Eric Hobsbawm as a colleague that might help us as we move forward? Hobsbawm wrote extensively about the legacies of colonialism and imperialism and the failings of capitalism in the 20th century. Toward the end of the last century, his warnings and predictions came to sound unrealistic. Capitalism had triumphed with the collapse of the Soviet Union and velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe. This, combined with the apparently overwhelming forces of international interdependence, as people and culture, goods and capital moved across international borders at a greater rate than ever before. More recently, and against great adversity, democracy has been in clear ascendance, with democratic transformations in Latin America and then across the Arab world. All this was greased by the wheels of technological change, and in particular the digital revolution, which radically changed the way we communicate, do commerce, and even the way we see and read.

These triumphs filled the imagination of many with great, sometimes utopian, hopes. Capitalism’s triumph over socialism would solve problems of efficiency and individual motivation. Globalization would lead to an equality of opportunities to work and unprecedented consumption possibilities. Democracy would satisfy the innate desire for individual freedom. And the digital revolution would greatly expand access to information.

Today, not long past the apparent triumph of capitalism, globalization, democracy and IT, these social changes leave us far from the utopian hopes, and with a strong residue of economic stagnation, income inequality, political mayhem, refugee crises, terrorism and counter-terrorism. Capitalism’s triumph has pushed us into a series of economics crises. Globalization has brought many out of poverty, but has also left and often created enormous pockets of destitution and despair. Democratic revolts have left, deep unresolved conflicts and a new list of failed states. And IT has brought nearly-boundless access to information but also a perilous specter of government and corporate surveillance.

This residue left in the 21st century by the ascent of capitalism, globalization, democratization and digital culture often goes unreported and is certainly undertheorized. We find ourselves again in a moment where the ethos of questioning, critique, and radical alternative narratives is essential. This is the challenge that Eric leaves us with at The New School: How to resist the utopian narratives, continue to build alternative theory and narratives that connect the micro and the macro dynamics of social change and that appreciate that the residue is often the main event.

I want to thank you all for holding this conference here at the New School: the Hobsbawm family (Marlene, Julia and Andy), Anya Shiffrin, Jessica Hejtamanik and the organizers of the conference, the amazing lineup of speakers and jazz performers who we have heard from today, and this audience of friends and admirers. I can’t tell me how many people have reached out to me in the last few weeks as the conference approached to tell me precisely this: How Eric Hobsbawm’s books transformed them at important, formative times in their lives, and opened their eyes to a new way of thinking about history. The New School benefitted when Eric was here and we continue to benefit today from having had Eric in a “Hobsbawm-type appointment.”

Thank you.

Presented on October 25, 2013. To watch the video of this event with comments by Jeremy Varon, click here.

Mailed remembrances of former New School students of Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm as a teacher and a person was not that much different from Hobsbawm as a historian and scholar. He was eloquent, full of energy, yet generous with his knowledge and time and humble in his daily interactions. His writing likewise had this energy, passion, generosity, and intimacy.

Perhaps the reason was that Hobsbawm was deeply embedded in the history he was researching and teaching. For, him, history was not only an academic discipline. He was — through his curiosity, empathy, and imagination — a part of history: a primitive rebel in England, a part of the crowd, if not a sans-culottes in the French Revolution, a communard of the 1871 rebellion, a worker on strike in Saint Petersburg, a persecuted Jew struggling against fascism, a third-world revolutionary.

Hobsbawm was a part of a tradition that read, popularized, updated and articulated Marx via the thinkers of the Second International, the historiography of the Annales School, and his vast knowledge of world history. He was a rebel at heart who expressed his desire for change through writing and teaching.

I had known the work of Eric Hobsbawm long before joining the New School as a graduate student. New Left intellectuals and activists, including people of my generation in Iran, were reading him high despite his official membership in the Communist Party of Great Britain. We found him to be accessible, creative and thought provoking. Our respect for him was legendary.

I still vividly remember reading and discussing Marx’s Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations and Hobsbawm’s excellent introduction to it in the early 1970’s. I would not be exaggerating to say that his non-determinist and Hegelian reading of Marx changed my view about history long time before I met him. Due to Hobsbawm’s original reading of Marx, I, and many people of my generation, rejected the notion that modes of production inexorably succeeded one another; rather, his made by people seizing new destinies, in concert with economic forces..

Eric’s teaching was not limited to the classroom or his office hours and lectures. I and fellow graduate students also had informal Tuesday luncheons at the Center for Studies of Social Change, and sometimes we were chatting with him about the world events at the center’s kitchen. His office doors were always open to us. Throughout, we never had the feeling we were talking to one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, but with a comrade who was genuinely interested in us. Eric Hobsbawm’s greatest virtue, as I experienced the man, was his humility.

Behrooz Moazami, Associate Professor of History and Director of Middle East Peace Studies at Loyal University, New Orleans

* * *

I was a student of Sociology and Historical Studies at the Graduate Faculty from 1989 to 1998 when I had the good fortune to take courses with Eric Hobsbawm and to interact with him informally. Eric was an extraordinary lecturer, routinely displaying his encyclopedic knowledge of global history in diverse settings. I recall being awestruck alongside my dissertation advisor, the late anthropologist William Roseberry, with Eric’s extraordinary knowledge of Latin America, as we perceived him as primarily a historian of Europe. In this context, Eric routinely read and commented perceptively and sympathetically on my work on labor in Chile.

For someone of such great intellectual stature, Eric was a mild mannered and jovial person. He often threw in jokes and chuckled in the middle of his lectures, grinning and waiting for the audience to laugh along with him. Because we knew he had been a jazz critic earlier in life, a fellow graduate student and I asked if he wanted to go to a jazz show with us. This lead to regular visits to the local jazz spots when Eric returned each fall. Eric was a towering intellectual figure as well as a lot of fun to be around. I feel very privileged to have had the chance to study with him and to get to know him.

Joel Stillerman, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Grand Valley State University

* * *

I had many wonderful teachers at the Graduate Faculty and among them was Eric Hobsbawm. When I arrived to the program in Historical Studies in 1995, the offices were still on University Place, a very casual lounge-like environment, and I recall students referring to Professor Hobsbawm as Eric, which struck me as a bit informal for a scholar whose reputation in the Midwestern provinces, from where I hailed, placed him at just about pantheon level. I was never chummy with Prof. Hobsbawm but held him in the “old school” regard as esteemed teacher. I had the last-chance privilege to be a member of his final course at the New School, based on his book that had just come out, “The Age of Extremes.” The lectures were held in Swayduk Auditorium in the old 65 Fifth Avenue building, now gone and, I suppose because of its absence, missed with some measure of nostalgia.

In any event, he would sit at the table onstage waiting for class to begin, with a bottle of Snapple not far from his fingertips, an unseemly pedestrian tableau. The lectures were as you would expect them to be: engaging and unforgettable, lilting and rich. The stage was stormed by all of us at the end of the last lecture — it was a remarkable moment. He returned in subsequent years to deliver lectures to the New School community, and there was a small black market trade in cassette tapes of those lectures. I have them all.

What struck me most about Professor Hobsbawm was a certain modesty about his status as teacher. I recall one faculty member raising a question about the state, or immigration, or the state and immigrants, and Professor Hobsbawm stood there onstage, quiet for what seemed like a very long time, pensive, and said, “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.” That was a big lesson for me. If he didn’t know, he didn’t have to pretend to know, or find some filler around the question. It was okay to defer until more thought could be given to a matter, and it was okay to say “I don’t know.”

These many years down the road I teach his work, ever relevant, his 1973 article on peasants from the charter issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies, and his work on nationalism, and on and on. The New School Ladies’ Auxiliary, of which I am a member, has had “How To Change The World” on its discussion list for about a year now, if only we could all find ourselves in the same place at the same time. This memorial might just be the place.

Barbara Syrrakos, Department of History, The City College of New York

* * *

I had read Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution in the late 1960s — and learned from it a lot that was never taught in the public schools, nor in my two years of college. Through the many twists and turns of my active revolutionary life from my high school years through the late 1980s, I ended up at the New School, first as a temporary office worker in the sociology department, later as an administrative assistant at the Center for Studies of Social Change, with which Eric and Historical Studies were affiliated. I entered grad school, studied Spanish to learn more about Cuba, and took every class that Eric taught in those years, including a methods class with Louise Tilly.

My first meeting with Professor Hobsbawn, however, had been during a visit to his office to ask him to sign a petition for an acquaintance who had been framed for rape and beaten to a pulp by the police in an Iowa meatpacking town. He looked at the photo of my young friend and immediately said that the fact that he was a bilingual meatpacker helping immigrant workers to know their rights, made him realize what had happened. He signed the petition right away.

A few years and some classes later, when I asked Eric for a recommendation, he would write that I was a true organic intellectual. I figured that most academic institutions of those days, the 1990s, would immediately feel I was not THEIR kind of academic, so I used the recommendation as an introduction when I went to Cuba on my first research trip, but put it away in some safe place, and never used it to obtain academic employment. Now, as a new retiree looking forward to writing
the history for which I have accumulated file cabinets full of research, I appreciate so much more Eric’s encouragement, his immense output of historical writing, as well as his life-long commitment to building a new, humanitarian world based on the principles of justice.

Eloise Linger, Ph.D, 1999, Sociology and Historical Studies; 1992 M.A. in Political Science, The Graduate Faculty at the New School, just retired from the Department of Politics, Economics, and Law, SUNY College at Old Westbury

* * *

When, after a twenty year career in law and banking, I returned to school for a graduate degree in history at the Graduate Faculty at the New School, it was my good fortune to enroll in classes taught by Eric Hobsbawm, as well as with Louise Tilly and Margaret Jacob. One early assignment was to explore the work of a particular historian & when I mentioned to Professor Hobsbawm that I was intrigued by the writing of British historian Frances Yates, he said to me, “Then you’ll have to go to the Warburg Institute in London.” I responded, “What’s the Warburg Institute?”

The following summer, when I found myself at the Warburg Institute — with which Yates was affiliated for 40 years — I discovered that her personal papers had never been examined. This discovery let to my M. A. thesis on Yates’ unpublished writings, which, in turn, led to my book, the first biography of Yates, Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition (Ibis Press, 2008).

It is not an overstatement to say that my encounter with Eric Hobsbawm & the Graduate Faculty changed my life.

Marjorie G. Jones, J.D., M.A.

McKenzie Wark

A Working Class Hero(ine) is Something to Be.

Its been a bizarre kind of self fulfilling prophecy. Mark Fisher called out the leftish commentariat for their barely restrained petit bourgeois moralism, and for his troubles has been hit by a wave of – petit bourgeois moralism.

What set this off was the spectacle – there’s no other word – of comedian Russell Brand tearing strips of the respectable British TV talking head, Jeremy Paxman. Fisher correctly points out that class is what is at stake in the whole performance. Paxman can barely suppress his incredulity that Brand would deign to edit an issue of the New Statesman when he has clearly not attended the right schools. Fisher found it rather cheering to see the Brand the class outside give Paxman a verbal going over.

Turning to the post-game commentary, Fisher finds over and over the same “snarky resentment” and “witch-hunting moralism.” Brand is a noisy interruption, lacks the proper diction, shows signs of mental instability and a poor upbringing. Not that Fisher wants to defend everything Brand might say or do. As Fisher writes: “It is right that Brand, like any of us, should answer for his behavior and the language that he uses. But such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance…” As they say in the movies: nobody’s perfect.

Fisher’s main point is that supposedly left commentary has lost all contact with the working class. It’s a form of affordable dissent, liberal and bourgeois. It knows nothing of the solidarities of class. Its tone is that of the school teacher, the psychiatrist or the administrator – when not that of the priest.

There’s a consistent set of rhetorical devices at hand: The first is to individualize and privatize everything. Everything is about personal success or personal failure. The second is to make thought and action seem difficult, and beyond the reach of ordinary folk. The people need some nonprofit functionaries to swoop in and tell their story and organize their misery for them. Third, the propagating of guilt. Everyone is supposed to feel bad about their little ‘privileges’, while the truly staggering inequalities of wealth and power go largely unmentioned.

Seen from an American perspective, it is remarkable that Fisher still has some residual sense that culture is an arena in which the rival structures of feeling of class might contest for the assent of a people. There is some residual sense there that while the long counter revolution that Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair presided over has done its best to erase working class sentiment and self-knowledge from the face of the earth, it is not entirely gone.

In the United States its hard to detect much sense of class feeling ever finding its way into popular culture other than indirectly, as allegory. For a few seconds in the first of the Hunger Games movies, the coal mining people of District 12 rise up as one and confront their oppressors. But its only for a few second, and those a half-assed quote from Battleship Potemkin. Only individual struggle can be acknowledged, or at best the romantic couple.

Perhaps one could propose a sort of speculative sociology as to how class feeling was erased from American popular culture. It was alive and well, if in the margins, of American cinema of the 30s and 40s. But that was before McCarthyism put an end to the popular front. It was alive and well in African American popular music, but that was before the fatal mugging of the Civil Rights movement. Paul Gilroy has a rather sad account of how rhythm and blues became obsessed not just with cars but with expensive ones.

More subtly, there was a closing off of the culture industries to talent from below. Expensive graduate schools are now the pathways into art, journalism, or publishing. Even in music, the gutter crawling fuck-ups who once delighted us with their sheer survival instincts are more or less a thing of the past. Stand-up comedy is a bit of a hold out, offering occasional glimmers of proletarian life. But mostly, the arts both fine and popular are a genteel affair.

Gone too, or almost gone, is bohemia, that place outside the conventions of petit bourgeois morality, where those of different classes, genders, sexualities, different everythings, rub shoulders, and a few other body parts, and make their own lives. Bohemia is never the same if you claw in from below as it is if you swan in from the top. Its much better, if you are in a scrape with the law, if a well placed phone call from someone very important can get you quickly released. Stewart Home’s book Tainted Love is a moving account of what bohemia can do to those who try to navigate it without a parachute. But there was a sense that bohemia at least confronted the classes with each other. And every now and then someone would claw their way all the way up through it. One such, I suspect, was Russell Brand.

There’s a fine expression of what working class experience is like in America today in the work of the film maker (and my Lang College colleague) Laurie Collyer: Sherrybaby (2006) and Sunlight Jr (2013). These are not Pretty Woman style Princess-in-disguise stories, where the working class woman turns out to be Julia Roberts all along, safely one of us once she learns the codes. Nor are they Mildred Pierce style stories where the uppity woman is put back in her place by tragedy caused by her neglect of her motherly duties. They are stories of everyday struggle, without Production Code morality. And they are a rare exception. Collyer’s protagonists are working class heroines, whose triumph is in getting by.

There was a certain wisdom in the slogan of Occupy Wall Street: “we are the 99%.” It focused attention on the question of class rather than the question of privilege, or what is the same thing in right wing language, “the cultural elites.” But there’s work to be done to loosen the choke-hold of petit bourgeois moral superiority as the default language of leftish life. (Even Zuccotti Park had its psychogeography of intra-99% class fissures.) Fisher rightly calls out the rather sad will to power of such talk: as if there were some moral nation where the guardians of all that is proper in speech and demeanor might rule.

This is not to say that one should embrace racist or sexist or homophobic speech and acts. Rather its to say that the struggles around all of those ‘intersectional’ issues have their own inflections in working class cultures, which do not always need to be lectured at from without. For it is a simple fact that most of the 99% can acknowledge that, in the words of that other great Occupy slogan, “Shit is fucked up and bullshit.” That shit requires attention in not only its variable detail but entire, and in what Fisher calls the “atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity.”

 

Eli Zaretsky

Rethinking the Split Between Feminists and the Left

The recent death of Shulamith Firestone marks a milestone in the history of second wave feminism, and encourages an historical perspective. Firestone was one of the most inspired and original political intellectuals of the sixties, and a founder of the modern feminist movement. I can speak personally here of the impact of Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex (1970) on my own life. When I first read the book, upon its publication, I immediately recognized that its portrait of a universal system of male domination rooted in the family was both the most important challenge to the Marxism that had shaped my worldview, and an equally important corrective to its blind spots. My 1972 book, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life began as a review of Firestone’s work and proposed both to answer and to learn from it.

In a recent New Yorker (April 15, 2013) Susan Faludi provided a powerful and moving account of Firestone’s brief, brilliant career and its tragic aftermath.Firestone was only twenty-five years old when she published Dialectic of Sex. When she died last year, at the age of sixty-seven, she was alone, impoverished, forgotten and had been diagnosed as schizophrenic for decades. In recounting this tragic story, Faludi touches on a related topic, the split in the US between women’s liberation and the New Left, a split in which Firestone participated. For those who are too young to remember, or who have not read this history, the New Left arose in the early sixties in Britain, France and the United States, and was an effort to create an enduring radical presence, one that surpassed traditional liberalism and that did not succumb to tragic problems of Communism. Women’s liberation began in the late sixties as part of the New Left, but then split off creating a separate or autonomous women’s movement, which generally does not identify itself as part of the Left. In my view this was one of the most important, if not fully understood, stories of recent US history.

As I see it, it is partly thanks to this split that there is no Left in the United States today. We do, of course, have protest movements of all sorts, but no Left in the more emphatic sense of a social and intellectual tendency capable of understanding American capitalism as a whole and critiquing it from an egalitarian point of view. To be sure, the late twentieth century witnessed the global defeat of the Left, within which the split between radical feminism and the New Left was simply one moment. Nevertheless, in my view it was a significant moment, at least in the United States, and is worth reconsidering. While some today think of the New Left as a brief explosive upheaval, which burnt out by 1968, the New Left had its roots in a preexisting radical tradition and a small but significant minority shared its goal of creating a permanent radical presence — a Left — in the United States. The defeat of that effort, which played itself out during the 1970s, has been important to the triumph of neo-liberalism, the drastic growth in inequality, the evisceration of public life, and other obviously problematic features of today’s world. For many young people, figures like Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, are what they know of a Left. For someone like myself, who can still remember what a Left means, this is an incredible loss.

Closely related to the absence of a Left in the broad sense is the decline of a radical tendency within feminism; just compare Firestone’s Dialectic, which came out of and partook of the New Left, to the current feminist best-seller, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, which reflects the merger of feminism with business culture. Many figures have argued that the New Left’s critique of bureaucracy and its antinomian individualism contributed to a new spirit of “lean,” just-in-time,” post-Fordist consumerist capitalism. Similarly feminism has been adapted by neo-liberals to justify the destruction of traditional (no doubt, patriarchal) cultures, the integration of low-skill women’s labor into global labor chains and even the US wars in the Middle East.

One of Faludi’s main contributions to understanding this history lies in showing how truly mad the psychological milieu in which Firestone operated was. Both Firestone and her contemporary, Kate Millett, author of Sexual Politics, were driven out of the women’s movement by feminists who accused them of being male-identified, “unsisterly” “leaders.” According to Faludi, hierarchy was anathema to many radical feminists, who saw leadership as oppressive and male, and sisterhood as a community of equals. Firestone ran afoul of this egalitarianism. A practice known as “trashing,” a term that signified cleaning the ranks, resonated with the Maoist sensibilities of the time. In Faludi’s words, “Like a cancer, the attacks spread from those who had reputations to those who were merely strong; from those who were active to those who merely had ideas; from those who stood out as individuals to those who failed to conform rapidly enough to the twists and turns of the changing line.” Although Faludi does not discuss this, “trashing” also included an attack on women who remained in heterosexual relationships, i.e., women who “slept with the enemy.” The early women’s movement was committed to what was soon termed “the woman-identified-woman.”

To be sure, such extreme egalitarianism was not unique to the early women’s movement. It could also be found in the New Left, the old Left, and the Occupy movements today. American culture is deeply shaped by Puritanism, and the American Left reflects this. American Leftists invented such concepts as “white chauvinism,” “sexism,” and “the personal is political,” while the European and Latin American Lefts were more likely to focus on structural issues per se. While “trashing” occurred in the mass feminist movement, best represented by Betty Friedan and NOW, it was more intense in the “sects.” In addition, some advocates of women’s liberation condemned trashing. For example, in a 1970 address, “Divisiveness and Self-Destruction in the Women’s Movement,” Anselma Dell’Olio, the founder of the New Feminist Theater, warned that women’s “rage, masquerading as a pseudo-egalitarian radicalism under the ‘pro-woman’ banner,” was turning into “frighteningly vicious anti-intellectual fascism of the left.”

Understanding Firestone’s milieu helps establish the mentality in which the advocates of women’s liberation decided to split with the New Left and pursue a stand-alone feminism. Although the leading forces in this split were the radical feminists, almost all feminists on the Left, including socialist feminists, shared the goal of a stand-alone women’s movement. To be sure, a small mixed left continued until roughly 1980. For example, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, led by Michael Harrington, worked in alliance with labor unions, was a powerful presence within the Democratic Party, and was explicitly feminist; Gloria Steinem was a founding member. Nonetheless, most radical women put the bulk of their energies into stand-alone women’s organizations, which in effect meant that less and less energy went into building a mixed left.

In Faludi’s account, which follows canonical texts of the period such as Ruth Rosen’s The World Split Open or Alice Echols’ Daring to Be Bad, feminists left the Left because of the intransigent sexism of New Left men. Here are Firestone’s words, published in the Guardian in 1969:

We have more important things to do than to try to get you [i.e., men] to come around. You will come around when you have to, because you need us more than we need you. . . . The message being: Fuck off, left. You can examine your navel by yourself from now on. We’re starting our own movement.

In support of this view, Faludi provides many still-horrifying descriptions of Firestone and other women being shouted down at male dominated New Left events.

In my view, it is important to understand in its full complexity women’s motivations in leaving the left. In reading a statement like Firestone’s one might reduce the motivation to anger and irrationality; many did at the time. However, not only is there an obvious experiential truth to the perception of men’s obtuseness, as one who was there I can testify to the sexist assumptions that prevailed among New Left men. At the same time, a moment’s reflection will convince the reader that it is an inadequate explanation. At root, the explanation minimizes women’s capacity to build the kind of mixed Left they wanted. It emphasizes women’s strongly negative experiences of working with men but it does not call attention to women’s powerful positive wish to be in an all-woman movement. Whatever failings the men of the New Left had, and they were many, it is far more reasonable to conclude that women left the Left because they wanted to, than because male sexism drove them out.

Why did women want to leave the Left? The 1970s was a period in which what Marx called “the constant revolutionizing of production” was sweeping away such “ancient and venerable” institutions as the traditional family, as well as the community networks and forms of solidarity associated with the New Deal. Not just women and homosexuals, but sons and fathers and husbands as well were released from the family’s grip. Women left the New Left because they wanted to be with other women, because they wanted homosexual relations alongside heterosexual ones, but also because they felt, as long-time peace activist Barbara Deming wrote to a gay male friend and colleague, David McReynolds, “our lives, women’s lives, are not real to you (and to men generally) — except in so far as they support the lives of men.”

The costs of this split were great. In her own diary Deming called the split a “tragedy,” which in my view is partly true. The consciousness of the great early movements of the 1960s was based on a shattering of social identity and a reaching out at the deepest possible level to achieve solidarity with people utterly unlike oneself. Thus New Leftists, typically, did not advocate “student power,” or other reforms that reflected their supposed interests, but rather argued that they could not be free so long as blacks were subjected to racism in Mississippi, or so long as peasants were being napalmed in Vietnam. By contrast, the identity politics that fueled women’s liberation counter-posed the fight against one’s own oppression against what was perceived as the oppression of others. Anyone reading the literature of women’s liberation will find statements like that of Cathy Cade, a lesbian documentary photographer who explained, “in the black movement I had been fighting for someone else’s oppression and now there was a way that I could fight for my own freedom.” Or the feminist collective that proclaimed, “the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” Or Mimi Feingold: “women couldn’t burn draft cards and couldn’t go to jail so all they could do was to relate through their men and that seemed to me the most really demeaning kind of thing.”

If we read these statements with an historian’s gift for empathy, and especially pay attention to the last one, we can see that they mean that women historically subordinated themselves to others — not just men, but also to children and old people and the sick and the dying. Women sacrificed to give the socialist movement its ethos, to build the civil rights movement in the South, and to support the draft-age men who refused to fight in Vietnam. Above all they sacrificed to maintain the family, the institution that Firestone identified as the core of human oppression, not just of women, but of all human beings. To be sure, Firestone was one-sided in her attack on what she called “the biological family,” and theorized as the root of the “power psychology.” The family can be a salvation as well as a source of darkness and inequality. Nonetheless, it was right and good that the reliance of the family on women’s nurturant and “giving” qualities end and that these responsibilities be shared by both men and women. Women’s liberation was a way of saying that women would not be the sole givers and caretakers anymore.

Finally, let me address one last question. Many have argued that the true birth of identity politics in the 1960s and 70s was in the Black Power movement, and not in women’s liberation. It is true that Black power preceded women’s liberation, and that it had elements of identity politics in it, including a break with the universalism of the civil rights movement. Nonetheless, there was a basic difference. The civil rights movement was not simply a movement for rights, but also aimed at destroying a racially organized state, namely the Jim Crow South. As a result, the civil rights movement was the expression of a group struggling collectively for its rights as a people. This gave black power a different valence than the other movements of the sixties such as the student movement, the antiwar movement and women’s liberation. Black people decided that they wanted to be part of America, but that was at root a choice. Some currents of feminism — cultural feminists — do think that women can be seen as a separate nation, but most women do not agree. For that reason the break with the New Left should be seen as a strategic diversion in the history of the Left and not as a final divorce.

Mark Frazier

John Dewey in China

When I’m in China, conversations with friends and colleagues often begin with their asking about the name of my university: Why is it called “The New School?” Most are not familiar with the university, but when I mention the name of John Dewey and the intellectual spirit associated with the university’s founding in 1919, there’s an immediate connection. Dewey traveled and lectured in China beginning in 1919, just as The New School was being established, and just as Chinese intellectuals were engaging in unprecedented forms of public engagement and education.

For Chinese intellectuals and students today, 1919 invokes the stirrings of the “New Culture Movement” and the foundations of the Chinese revolution more broadly. The New Culture Movement is closely associated with what became known as the “May Fourth Movement,” so named for the student protests in Beijing on that day in 1919 to reject the humiliating outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. The protest was over the terms that allowed Japan to retain territorial concessions that had been negotiated before the war by a discredited president of the fledgling Republic of China. (The Qing dynasty had fallen in 1911-12.) But the May Fourth Movement was less about geopolitics and much more about the vibrant intellectual pursuit and experimentation with new ideas–anarchism, Marxism, socialism, and much else.

John Dewey arrived in just a few days after May 4, 1919, and would spend the next two years teaching and lecturing at Chinese universities. Dewey had been invited by his former student at Columbia, Hu Shih, by then a prominent leader in the New Culture Movement. Hu, like others in the movement, advocated the wholesale rejection of Confucian culture and practice–first and foremost the educational precepts that stressed the close engagement with Confucian and other classical texts. In its place, Hu and those who would become the presidents and chancellors of China’s leading universities adopted many of Dewey’s ideas about education and its roles in constituting citizenship, democratic practice, among much else.

Several scholars have examined closely Dewey’s China lectures and his writings from China there in 1919-1921. What impressed Dewey perhaps most was the self-organization and mobilization under way in Chinese society at the time. As he wrote (pp. 97-8) in one of several essays during his time in China,

American children are taught the list of ‘modern’ inventions that originated in China. They are not taught, however, that China invented the boycott, the general strike and guild organization as means of controlling public affairs.

Dewey’s lectures were generally well received, in part because so many of the competing intellectual and ideological camps in China at the time could read his texts as supportive of their positions. But Dewey’s call for gradual reform over radical social change was seen as insufficient in the eyes of many among his audiences. Indeed, Dewey rightly predicted that Bertrand Russell’s arrival in China in the fall of 1920, to deliver lectures on Bolshevism, would far eclipse Dewey’s in their popularity. Mao Zedong never attended Dewey’s lectures, but would have been quite familiar with Dewey’s ideas from the intellectual circles in which he traveled the early 1920s. Many years later, Mao would proclaim that “Practice is the sole criterion of truth”– a quotation that “Maoists” in the 1960s would repress (along with Dewey’s ideas). Deng Xiaoping strategically revived Mao’s slogan in 1978, and it became one of the mantras of his developmentalist reform program that followed. Dewey’s works are widely read on Chinese campuses today.

Chiara Bottici

What's Left After Penis Envy?

I am teaching a course called “Feminism and Literature” at the New School that explores how literature can articulate feminist claims in the public sphere. One of the problems we discussed is whether the language we are currently using, as well as the imaginary that sustains it, are actually adapted to this task. In order to debate the issue, one of the classical texts that I assigned to my students was Freud’s essay on “femininity.” I chose this text because I wanted my students to be aware of the risks we take when we look at femininity (and female sexuality) from the point of view of masculinity (and male sexuality); Freud’s idea that women have to go through a phallic phase in order to become truly feminine – and that, as a consequence, they have to abandon their childish clitoral pleasure in favor of a more mature vaginal one – seemed to me rather questionable. Is it true that the clitoris is an “atrophied penis” and that it is only by abandoning “wholly” or “in part” the pleasure that comes from it that a “normal femininity” can be developed? Are not the clitoris and the vagina just two names that we assign and use to separate what is actually part of the same unitary body? These are the sorts of questions that I was hoping the text would raise (and indeed it did), and that would lead us to quickly dismantle Freud in favor of a more complex view of female sexuality. In particular, I was hoping to get rid of what seemed to me the most untenable of his positions: the idea that the small size of their so-called atrophied penis (the clitoris) is at the basis of a fundamental and inevitable penis envy in women.

The discussion was heated, indeed, and it was as a consequence of it that one of the students brought to the attention of the class the project of Sophia Wallace (see video below), a New York-based artist who is engaging with this very issue. As a versatile street artist, Wallace managed to bring her “cliteracy” outside of museums, within the concrete, lived space of the streets and within the immaterial space of the internet. She wanted to raise consciousness about the ignorance still surrounding this invisible object: “the clit.” In her own words, what she wanted was for people to begin to talk about the clitoris “on equal terms” with the penis. And indeed this is what she achieved. By showing its “true anatomy” (apparently discovered only in 1998) with installations and performances, she has confronted us with the fact that women bodies, which are constantly sexualized in a number of ways, are never shown as possessing that “little button” (which, however, as we read, is more akin to an “iceberg”). Moreover, she brought to people’s attention important pieces of information. For instance, besides the fact that the “unerect clitoris could be up to 9 centimeters long — longer, as some have described it, than an unerect penis,” I have also learned from “cliteracy” that if you have been the victim of a clitoral mutilation, there are just a few surgeons who claim to actually be able to repair it. (For a BBC radio broadcast about this surgery, click here and advance 14 minutes.)

Well done: she managed to make her point. But how? And at what price? Unfortunately, at the price of reinforcing, while apparently criticizing, precisely those established prejudices that she wanted to dismantle: Why indeed, do we have to talk about the clitoris on “equal terms” with the penis? Can’t we talk about it on “equal terms” with itself? Why insist so much on its measurements, on its penis-like shape, and on how “big” it is? Would it not be worth talking about if it were small? And also: Why do we need cowboys (and cowgirls) riding on a golden sculpture of the clitoris in order to draw attention to it? Why all this masculine language to make it visible?

In short: is she not still implicitly suggesting that the penis remains the yardstick according to which we measure what is worth talking about and what is not? Admitting that there is still a lot of ignorance about the clitoris and that we want to raise consciousness about this conspicuous lack, can’t we do it in different terms?

I have taught Freud’s text because I wanted to criticize Freud on women’s supposed penis envy, but I came out of our class discussion thinking that perhaps Freud was not totally wrong: perhaps women (or at least some women) do have penis envy. Or better: we live in a society where women still feel that it is only by speaking in those terms that they will be heard. Currently 200,634 people tagged the project with an “I like it.” I wonder how many of them are actually affected by “penis envy.” And, if not: what is left after penis envy?

Jeremy Safran

Who's Afraid of Sigmund Freud?

For decades psychoanalysis dominated professional approaches to mental health in the United States and had an influential impact on our culture. Starting in the late 1960s, however, psychoanalysis has become increasingly marginalized. Here, I will argue that psychoanalysis has always contained both subversive and conservative threads. As the historian Nathan Hale argued, Americans modified psychoanalysis to solve a conflict between the more radical implications of Freud’s views and the conformist pulls of American culture. This process of domestication enabled Americans to enthusiastically embrace psychoanalysis for a period of time. But they did so at the cost of transforming psychoanalysis in ways that ultimately contributed to its decline. Yet, ironically, the current marginalizaton of psychoanalysis may contain the seeds of a more radical psychoanalysis that serve as a healthy and constructive counter-cultural force moving forward.

* * *

There are many reasons for the decline of psychoanalysis in America. During its heyday in the 1940s until the late 1960s, psychoanalysis earned a reputation as a conservative cultural force with a tendency towards orthodoxy, insularity, and elitism. Over time, it became widely perceived as a somewhat esoteric discipline with limited interest in grappling with the concrete problems afflicting people in their everyday lives and in understanding the social and political factors contributing to poor mental health. Thus, some dismissed psychoanalysis as a self-indulgent pastime for the well to do.

The fact that psychoanalysis came to be seen this way is ironic. Although Freud initially began developing psychoanalysis as a treatment for patients other physicians had been unable to heal, his ambitions quickly extended beyond therapy and into the realms of social theory and cultural critique. Though he and other early analysts came from medical backgrounds, Freud welcomed the contributions of those with diverse, non-medical training to the evolving discipline. Moreover, many of the early analysts, including Freud, were members of an emerging, educated Jewish professional class, whose upward mobility was enabled by the open, politically progressive policies of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the turn of the century.

Western European Jews at the turn of the century formed a unique group of marginal intellectuals. Alienated from traditional Judaism while not fully accepted into European society, they developed a skeptical point of view, which critiqued, but also contributed in constructive ways, to the very culture from which they were partially estranged. The early analysts thus tended to be members of a liberal, progressive intelligentsia. They sought social acceptability, but at the same time tended to question prevailing cultural assumptions. Their critical and in some respects subversive stance went hand in hand with a broader vision of progressive social transformation.

Psychoanalysis began in part as a radical critique of the illness-producing effects of social suppression and, most especially, the psychological repression of sexuality. Freud was deeply interested in broad social and cultural concerns. He was also critical of the trappings of the physician’s privilege, supporting, until the end of his life, free psychoanalytic clinics, payment on a sliding scale, and the ability of those without medical training to practice psychoanalysis. Many of the early analysts were indeed activists. Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s closest colleagues, founded a free clinic in Budapest and passionately defended the rights of women and homosexuals. Karl Abraham, Ernst Simmel and Max Etington set up a public psychoanalytic clinic in Berlin in the 1920s that became a bastion of social and political progressiveness, influenced by left wing, socialist thinking. Prominent analysts such as Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Otto Fenichel became well known for their socialist or Marxist commitments and their fusion of psychoanalysis with a politics of social emancipation.

Another example of this longstanding tradition of the intersection between psychoanalysis and social, political and cultural concerns, is the productive collaboration that took place among psychoanalytic thinkers such as Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, and the tradition of critical theory emerging out of The Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Marcuse in particular continued to synthesize Marxist thinking, critical theory and psychoanalysis in his writing throughout his career. Both Adorno and Horkheimer synthesized psychoanalytic thinking with critical theory in their analyses of the way in which American consumerism, popular culture, and the mass media manufacture false needs that perpetuate the capitalist system. They drew attention to the way we are socialized into believing that if we drink the right beer or wine, drive the right car or wear the right clothes, we will find love, happiness and contentment.

In contrast to writers such as Fromm and Marcuse, many of the European émigrés who became most influential in the development of American psychoanalysis as a therapeutic modality, downplayed their progressive and socialist leanings so as not to arouse suspicion among their American hosts, fearful of ideologically dangerous foreigners. The intense anti-communism of the McCarthy era further created pressure on these emigres to decouple psychoanalysis from Marxism and downplay their politics more generally so as not to jeopardize the future of psychoanalysis in North America. (Herbert Marcuse, integrating psychoanalysis into critical theory, was a notable exception.) They thus kept their political views to themselves and focused on establishing psychoanalysis as a profession.

* * *

The professionalization of psychoanalysis within the United States, starting before the émigré phenomenon, in many ways succeeded. During the early 1920’s, when psychoanalysis was beginning to take root in the United States, the American medical profession was struggling to upgrade and standardize medical training. The American physicians who played a dominant role in developing psychoanalysis were concerned about jeopardizing the future of the profession by training candidates who did not have a background in medicine. In 1938, the American Psychoanalytic Association made the fateful decision to restrict formal psychoanalytic training to physicians. The concern with protecting the professionalism of psychoanalysis contributed to its elitist character, privileged scientific respectability, and discouraged innovation. Over time, as medicine consolidated its elevated status within the healthcare professions, and psychoanalysis became established as a subspecialty of medicine, the social prestige of the psychoanalytic profession grew as well. For residents training as psychiatrists, the rigorous, time consuming process involved of psychoanalytic training, also fed the sense that psychoanalysis was an elite subspecialty within psychiatry. Chairs in most major psychiatry departments were psychoanalysts and most psychiatry residency training programs provided at least some training in psychoanalytically oriented treatment.

The United States became the center of the psychoanalytic world and massive effort and resources went into psychoanalytic training and the development of the field. Psychoanalysis thus emerged as a lucrative, high prestige, and socially conservative profession, attracting candidates who most often had greater interest in becoming respected members of the establishment than in challenging it. Psychoanalytic practice itself adopted a narrow, technical approach, with rather inflexible ideas about correct and incorrect technique. Psychoanalysis as a whole became a purveyor of conservative American middle class values rather than a culturally subversive force. Mental health, by extension, tended to be defined in terms of conformity to those values.

With the rise of biological psychiatry in the late 1970s, and the explosion in the development of new psychotropic medications, psychoanalysis grew less fashionable within American psychiatry. Over time, training curricula within psychiatry residencies shifted away from introducing residents to the basics of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Concurrently, the number of psychiatry residents applying for training in psychoanalytic institutes dramatically decreased. In 1979 the American Psychological Association formally established a division of psychoanalysis – Division 39. In the mid-1980s Division 39 filed a class action suit against the American Psychoanalytic Association, arguing that the refusal to admit psychologists as candidates within psychoanalytic training institutes was a violation of the antitrust regulations since, by establishing a monopoly of the field of psychoanalysis by physicians, they were preventing fair competition for clients by psychologists and depriving them of their livelihood. Ironically, by the time the lawsuit was settled, market forces were already opening the doors of psychoanalytic training institutes to psychologists, since as the number of candidates seeking psychoanalytic training continued to dwindle, traditional institutes became eager to recruit psychologists.

* * *

In the last twenty years many of the more significant and innovative contributors to the development of American psychoanalytic theory have been psychologists. This new breed of psychoanalytic theorists and researchers has played a vital role in transforming psychoanalysis into a less insular and more intellectually vital discipline, grounded in an appreciation of contemporary developments in a broad range of social sciences including psychology, sociology, philosophy, political science and philosophy. But ironically, they function on the margins of mainstream American psychology and have little influence in academia.

Because pursuing formal psychoanalytic training in today’s culture is less likely to be a pathway to professional prestige or financial success, the typical candidate is more likely to be drawn to the field for intrinsic reasons. Especially given the increasingly marginal status of psychoanalysis within the general culture, and within mainstream clinical psychology, those attracted to the field are less likely to buy into prevailing cultural and professional values and assumptions and are more likely to approach things from a critical perspective. Thus ironically, the marginalization of psychoanalysis provides a potential catalyst for innovative thinking. In this respect, important aspects of the emerging sensibility in contemporary American psychoanalysis may be closer in nature to the sensibility of the early psychoanalysts than that of American psychoanalysis during its heyday from the 1940s to the early 1960s.

Given the current marginalization of psychoanalysis, it is not surprising that the general public tends to have a limited and often caricatured understanding of it. Psychology undergraduates typically receive very little exposure to psychoanalytic thinking, and when they do it is not unusual for them to be taught to think of it as a discredited pseudoscience. Psychoanalysis is more likely to be taught in the humanities than in psychology. And when it is taught it tends to be done so in a purely academic fashion, disconnected from therapeutic considerations, clinical practice, and lived experience. There is a tendency, moreover, for the media and entertainment world to equate psychoanalysis with Freud, and to assume that the value of psychoanalysis is inextricably linked to the validity of all of Freud’s ideas.

Freud was one person writing in a particular historical era in a specific culture. Some of his ideas were more valid in their original historical and cultural context. There are dramatic differences between the psychoanalysis of Freud’s time and that of today, in North American and elsewhere. For example, contemporary American psychoanalysis has a greater emphasis on the mutuality and intersubjective nature of the therapeutic relationship, as well as the role of flexibility, creativity and spontaneity in the therapeutic process. And, contrary to the common misconception, there is actually a substantial and growing evidence base for the effectiveness of psychoanalytically oriented treatments.

In the United States, psychoanalysis has evolved under the influence of a number of characteristic American attitudes, including a tendency towards optimism and an ethos of egalitarianism. Important as well, many of today’s leading analysts came of age during the 1960s, when traditional social norms and sources of authority were routinely challenged. In addition, prominent feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have challenged many of the patriarchal assumptions implicit in traditional psychoanalytic theory, raised important questions about the dynamics of power in the therapeutic relationship, and reformulated psychoanalytic thinking about gender. Another influence has been a postmodern sensibility that challenges the assumption that we can ever come to know reality objectively, maintains a skeptical attitude towards universalizing truth claims, and emphasizes the importance of theoretical pluralism.

Unfortunately, many people in the broader mental health field and the general public are unaware of these changes. While there are many valid critiques of psychoanalysis in both its past and current forms, its decline is also attributable to the fact that important aspects of the psychoanalysis sensibility go against the grain of a number of American cultural biases. These include an emphasis on speed, pragmatism, instrumentality, and an intolerance of ambiguity. While these emphases certainly have their value, they can also be associated with a naïveté that underestimates the complexity of human experience and the difficulty of change.

American culture, moreover, tends to gloss over the more tragic dimensions of life and espouse the belief that we can all be happy if we only try hard enough or adopt the right “quick fix.” This leads to the pathologization the inevitable anxieties and sorrows of everyday life. A therapeutic culture has emerged that employs techniques and medications for the purpose of manipulating one’s internal experience in order to produce a sense of well-being. But this therapeutic culture is disconnected from broader ethical and philosophical questions regarding what actually constitutes the “good life.” And it is also disconnected from broader social and political contexts. In our American “can do” culture, the failure to be happy is a moral failing. If we are all equally free to pursue “the American dream” then differences in opportunity available to different social classes are irrelevant.

Psychoanalysis originated in a continental Europe that had experienced centuries of poverty, class oppression, political and religious persecution, and international conflict and civil conflict, culminating in two calamitous world wars and genocidal violence. Freud once maintained that the goal of psychoanalysis is to transform neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness. While some have argued that this statement is a reflection of the fact that Freud was not a particular cheery fellow, I think this is a profound misreading, Essentially Freud believed that therapeutic change involves coming to terms with and accepting the existential suffering that is an inevitable part of life.

Although American psychoanalysis tends to be more optimistic and pragmatic than its European counterpart, it still retains many of the traditional psychoanalytic values such as the appreciation of human complexity, a recognition that fulfillment is not necessarily the same as a superficial version of “happiness,” and an appreciation that change is not always easy or quick. At a time when mainstream psychology and psychiatry are promoting the beliefs that short term cognitive therapy or the latest psychiatric medication can cure whatever ails you, the reminder that things are not quite so simple can be a welcome antidote to our cultural narcissism.

Public Voices

For Gender and Sexuality Studies: A Manifesto

We write as members of a group of faculty from different parts of the New School who are working to return graduate-level gender and sexuality studies to the university. Our project is an unusually collaborative one, drawing on the work of colleagues from a wide range of programs and disciplines. Our aim in posting this piece is to start a conversation about these matters right away, even while our proposed program is still in the development process. What interests us is discussion about what we see as the powerful case that can be made for the intellectual and political importance of gender and sexuality studies not only in general but at the New School in particular.  We invite responses from anyone in the larger community who is interested in weighing in.

Let us start with some reflections about what is distinctive about the New School.

One of the founding myths of our university is that it places social research in the service of liberating and transformative social action. Over the nearly one hundred years of its existence, the New School has retained its commitment to social research while at the same time growing to incorporate serious concerns with the humanities and the arts, international relations, and fashion and design. Throughout this period of development and change, the university has stayed faithful to its appealing insistence that its intellectual emphases derive their point and importance from their relevance to productive social engagement and action.

Against this backdrop, a strong – even overwhelming – case can be made for including the study of gender, feminism and sexuality in the New School’s different divisions and departments. There are currently more than four hundred programs in the US offering different undergraduate and graduate degrees on these topics, and the question is often asked how the New School, of all places, can fail to have such a program. Of course, the mere success of an area of study is not an argument in its favor. Centers and departments devoted to “women’s studies,” “gender” and “sexuality” come under attack from various directions.

Some critics allege that the institutional recognition of scholarship in a given area is in tension with effective action and, further, that anyone who hopes for a society in which oppressive gender categories no longer function has good reason to object to situating these programs within our universities. But a line of criticism that turns for its apparent interest on opposing disciplined thought to effective action can carry little weight at the New School.

A more challenging criticism of programs dedicated to gender and sexuality comes from critics who maintain that any intellectual rationale there once was for such programs has by now expired. This basic criticism comes in different forms. Some of its advocates claim that in accommodating the study of, for instance, women and men, colleges and universities are simply entrenching pernicious social categories that ought to be overcome and thereby contributing to the very forms of oppression that they are supposed to be combating. Others, striking themes associated with third-wave feminism, argue that we are already in an era that is post-gender and that therefore ought to be post-feminist.

These critiques merit serious and respectful response. But they do not undermine the case for the study of gender and sexuality at colleges and universities. Nor, for that matter, do they undermine the especially strong case that can be made within the setting of the New School in particular.

Theorists and scholars may fruitfully differ in their degrees of skepticism about gender, arguing about the prospects for forms of social life that no longer place individuals under gender headings such as “women” and “men.” While some people who experience dysphoria with regard to their gender classifications express dis-ease primarily not with oppressive gender norms and the social significance of sexual characteristics but with certain aspects of their anatomy, others find intensely liberating the idea that the gender categories imposed on them are merely “performed” and can therefore be rejected. Yet, for all of the complexity of the issues, there is no doubt that today gender classifications continue to play a fundamental role in the organization of different societies and, by the same token, that these classifications make a significant contribution to individuals’ social experience in respects that cut across contexts and communities, even while differing in their contributions in ways that reflect individuals’ positioning in terms of, for instance, race, class and religion.

The pervasiveness of gender-based social organization, in its intersections with modes of social organization according to race, class, religion, etc., is reflected in the value of gender-conscious research across the disciplines. This includes work in history, philosophy, literature and the study of languages that inherits methods from feminist and queer theory; it includes artistic productions that give expression to the insights of this body of theory; it includes work in the social sciences that incorporates feminist and queer theory in its conception not only of appropriate methods, productive modes of analysis but also of fruitful topics and questions; it includes a rich array of social policies and modes of social intervention (e.g., microloans) that recognize the distinctive role of women as social agents; and it includes work in design and fashion that engages with feminist and queer theory, addressing and challenging not only the impact of gender striation on artifacts and forms of spatial organization but also prevalent assumptions about the social meaning of embodiment. To summarize, the value of work that takes seriously the social reality of gender gets registered in all of the disciplines that are currently and historically prized at the New School.

When the argument for gender and sexuality studies at the New School is laid out in this way, it seems odd – not that a new case should be made for introducing these studies, but rather – that they don’t already have a place of undisputed prominence within the university. The history of gender studies at the New School is in fact a complex and somewhat vexed one. From 1994-1998, the then Graduate Faculty (now the New School for Social Research) was home to a two-year Masters in Gender Studies. This program had tracks in all of the GF’s individual departments and was ultimately shut down, despite huge student interest and clamorous student protests, in part because there was not adequate faculty interest in offering courses along the different tracks. With hindsight, it seems scandalous that the response to institutional obstacles was plain defeatism and not a push toward reinvigorating Gender Studies by reorganizing it along institutionally more workable lines.

It has taken more than a decade for the sense of loss to register fully. One clear sign of the turning of the tide is the return in 2010 of Gender Studies in the form of an undergraduate minor, with its home at Lang College, which is open to undergraduates across the university. This quite new project already has great student and faculty interest and participation. (The success of the enterprise is in large part due to the energy and efforts of its founding director Ann Snitow.) Another sign of the timeliness of this proposal is the level of graduate student interest in theoretical and practical questions about gender and sexuality. Signs of this interest include, e.g., the NSSR Philosophy Department feminist reading group and student organization PSWIP (People in Support of Women in Philosophy), the NSSR Psychology Department LGBTQ Journal Club, the interdepartmental NSSR French Feminist Theory reading group, the NSPE Writing Program gender/feminist reading group and the cross-divisional Global Gender and Sexuality Project (NSSR/NSPE).

This is a very concise statement of our reasons for believing that the study of gender and sexuality is intensely pertinent and that it has a special pertinence to the mission of the New School. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and reflections.

Alice Crary, Associate Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research

Lisa Rubin, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Assistant Director of Clinical Training at The New School for Social Research

Elaine Abelson, Associate Professor of History at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College

Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research

Margot Bouman, Assistant Professor of Visual Culture, Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, The New School for Design

Leslie Kaplan

"All My Life I Have Been a Woman" and Other Excerpts

With Amelia Parenteau, Leslie Kaplanread the following excerpts from her plays after she gave the eighth William Phillips lecture on November 5, 2013 at Theresa Lang Student and Community Center/Arnhold Hall of The New School.

All my life I’ve been a woman

 

all my life I’ve been a woman

a woman

all my life

does that sentence seem

odd to me

no

sometimes

sometimes it seems odd to me

all my life

I’ve been

a woman

 

how can you talk that way

all your life you’ve been a woman

how can you say that

 

I’m saying it, that’s all

 

but you don’t realize

how can you say that

calmly

 

it’s not sure I’m saying it calmly

 

you’re saying it

calmly

if not you’d be climbing up a wall

 

a wall ?

 

yes a wall

you can’t say that

« all my life I’ve been a woman »

 

I can’t say it ? I can’t say it ?

I’m saying it

all my life I’ve been a woman

I’m saying it

 

if you say it

if you say it

 

O.K., then if I say it

 

if you say it

nobody will understand you

 

it’s impossible to understand ?

 

I said One cannot understand you

 

I don’t understand

 

what don’t you understand

 

what you are saying

I don’t understand what you are saying

 

I think you don’t understand

yourself

 

true

I don’t understand myself

all my life I’ve been a woman

what a huge sentence

 

huge ?

huge ?

what do you mean, huge ?

 

that sentence has such potential

so many possibilities

that sentence includes

I’m saying : includes

so many other sentences

 

O.K.

but

a blender

liberates a woman

 

oh no

not that

no

 

yes yes yes

a blender

liberates a woman

 

I’m saying all my life I’ve been a woman

that sentence is huge

huge

huge

and you

your answer is

a blender

 

yes

a blender

that’s right

a blender

 

I’m leaving

you’re too limited

 

you’re leaving me ?

why ?

 

I’m leaving you

you’re too limited

I am in front of a huge sentence

huge

all my life I’ve been a woman

 

I just wanted to talk to you about blenders

 

blender

schmender

 

don’t you think household items

are important ?

 

I’m in front of that sentence

all my life I’ve been a woman

I’m in front of it

got it ?

in front ?

 

aren’t you interested

in carrot scrapers ?

carrot scrapers

have changed my life

 

have they changed your life

or have they changed life ?

 

they have changed my life

the vegetables are perfectly scraped

I save money

I save time

 

I’m talking about a huge

sentence

in front of which I am

all my life I’ve been a woman

 

all the little vegetables are respected in their diversity

potatoes

carrots

leeks

fenel

egg plants

zucchinis

turnips

all those little veggies

 

you’re the vegetable

 

the blender also changed my life

a simple purée is much more

than just a simple purée

 

you’re really limited

purée

 

to blend

to crunch

to cut

to slice

to press

and juices

ah juices

 

what about juices

 

they are infinite

 

trivial

you are trivial

I talk to you about a huge sentence

all my life I’ve been a woman

and you answer with the infinity

of juices

 

apples

pears

bananas

strawberries

ah strawberries

citrus fruits

oranges

lemons

fruits

vegetables

mixtures

infinite

infinite

infinite

 

trivial

trivial

trivial

all my life I’ve been a woman

that’s something else for infinity

that’s something else

 

and soups

 

what about soups

 

broth and soup

soup and broth

in the singular

in the plural

infinite liquid

liquid infinite

the liquid penetrates you

fills you up

flows into your intestines

flows in your veins

becomes your blood

your identity

tell me which soup you eat

and I’ll tell you who you are

it warms you up

that soup

it cools you too

sometimes

gaspacho

cucumber soup

eat your soup

I’m enthusiastic

soup is total

 

is it sexual ?

 

of course it’s sexual

it’s total

it’s sexual

proof being

when you don’t like soup

you’ve got a problem

and

who says problem

says sex

all problems

are sexual

at bottom

 

everything is sexual

even masturbation

is sexual

 

masturbation

or mastication ?

 

masturbation

is sexual

mastication as well

fellatio

sodomy

sexual

to go in

to go out

to go up

to go down

to run

to stop

to pant

to dream

to dream is totally sexual

when you say, I’m dreaming

or : Pinch me, I’m dreaming

it’s totally sexual

to pinch

to shake

to tickle

to hit

to tremble

to shiver

to die

***

Louise, she is crazy (translated by Amelia Parenteau)

 

There are those days when everything seems flat

flattened

a puddle

 

everybody feels that

 

I don’t care about everybody

I’m talking about myself

there are those days

when I feel so insignificant

nearly nothing

 

everybody feels that

 

I don’t care about everybody

I’m talking about myself

for me, there are those days

where I say to myself, the proof

that a women doesn’t amount to much

is that God isn’t married

 

what do you mean? what do you mean?

 

the proof that a women doesn’t amount to much

is that God isn’t married

 

nonsense

you are really depressed

 

of course I’m depressed

how can you not be depressed

is God married

yes or no?

 

maybe He’s married

maybe He’s not married

God does what He wants

 

God-is-not-married

if God were married everybody would know about it

God is not married

 

He isn’t?

 

God is self-reliant

 

if you get married

you aren’t self-reliant?

I don’t see God as single

 

you don’t?

if you get married, you depend on someone

God doesn’t depend on anyone

 

God is love

 

of course

God is love

 

God is love

He depends on those He loves

 

on those He loves

or on those who love Him?

 

on those who love Him

and on those He loves

God needs us

 

He needs us?

He is all-powerful

He doesn’t need anybody

 

God is all-powerful

but He isn’t crazy

 

God isn’t crazy?

maybe He’s crazy

maybe He’s not crazy

God does what He wants

 

do you give Him

a capital H?

 

of course

I give Him

a capital H

 

God isn’t crazy

God speaks to me

 

He speaks to you? He speaks to you?

sure He does

 

God does speak to me

I hear Him

 

what do you hear?

in what language does He speak to you?

 

He speaks to me in a very beautiful language

with exquisite words

 

exquisite words? exquisite words?

you make me laugh

you give me a good laugh

in what language does He speak to you?

 

a better language than yours, in any case

 

God speaks Latin

everybody knows that

 

He speaks to me

He speaks to me specifically

He says, My little chicken, My chickie

***

Move the sky

 

I am in love but I prefer breaking our relationship

That way he’s not the one who leaves

 

I prefer staying with some one I don’t love

That way I don’t suffer if he goes away

 

I prefer living with someone I despise

That way I’m not afraid he doesn’t love me

 

I prefer ruining my life

That way I don’t regret anything

 

I prefer fretting my heart out

That way I accuse no one

 

I prefer saying nothing

That way I stay with my longing

 

I prefer failing

That way I don’t make anyone jealous

 

I prefer looking awful

That way I have my revenge

 

I prefer being ugly

That way my mother hates me

 

I prefer being stupid

That way I disappoint

 

I prefer making mistakes

That way I reassure every one

 

I prefer being stupid

That way, it’s over, I’m stupid

 

I prefer living with a sick person

That way I know I’m in good health

 

I prefer working with fools

That way you can see where the ideas come from

 

I prefer hiding

That way nobody can find me

 

I prefer breaking every thing

that way there is nothing left

 

I prefer living on nothing

that way I keep every thing

 

I prefer giving orders

That way I am sure I am free

 

I prefer hurting

That way I can see hate in the other

 

I prefer humiliating

That way I am the queen

 

I prefer destroying the other

That way I am safe

 

I prefer nothing goes on

That way I’m not afraid something will happen

 

***

people always say monkeys look like human beings

I think it’s silly

 

yes but

frankly

frankly

 

what, frankly

 

that little monkey

he is the exact copy of my brother

 

you exaggerate

 

not at all

I don’t exaggerate at all

 

how can you say that

a monkey is a monkey

O.K., he’s cute

but nevertheless, he’s a monkey

 

do you see his ears?

 

how could I not see them?

that’s all you can see

 

well, my brother has the same

 

the same?

 

the same ears

I’m telling you

 

it’s not because you think

I’m saying because you think

they have the same ears

that there is a real likeness

a true likeness

a deep likeness

 

the face is the same, too

all creased, crumpled, worn

when my brother was a baby

my mother left him with me all the time

I was so annoyed

he was all creased?

yes all creased

all crumpled

he looked like a little old guy

the monkey looks just like that

 

no, it’s not the same thing

we are human beings

absolutely not the same thing

 

That might not be true

 

of course it’s true

you can’t compare

 

of course you can compare

every body compares

 

to compare is not scientific

a monkey is limited, a limited being

 

limited? limited?

you make me laugh

have you seen Nenette

the way she wipes the widow

crr crr crr

she takes a Kleenex, she wipes the window

crr crr crr

and that little monkey

look at him

look how delicate he is

how graceful

he plays

he hides

 

You ‘re talking rubbish

You say “he plays”, “he hides”

You are projecting, projecting

 

I am not projecting

I am watching

He is very concentrated

he plays he hides

he wants to find out

he explores

his forehead is all creased from paying attention

 

bullshit

he has creases, his skin is creased, that’s all

you know there are nations

and not just any

the great Chinese nation for example

who eat monkeys

 

that’s disgusting

 

why disgusting?

they are animals

 

it’s disgusting

it’s as if you were eating

I don’t know

it’s as if you were eating

an ancestor

 

an ancestor?

an ancestor?

 

do we go back to monkeys, yes or no

you are not going to repudiate Darwin, evolution

science, progress

I will never eat a monkey

 

don’t say a monkey

you should say : eat some monkey

use a partitive, a partitive preposition

some cake, some pie

it’s not a personal problem

between you and the monkey

 

look, a monkey is too near

you cant’ t eat it

 

no

you have to eat it

it’s obvious

you have to

you have to eat monkey

otherwise

 

otherwise

 

otherwise you are going to mix every thing up

you are going to lose your marks

 

we are in times of confusion

where marks…

where marks….

 

Where marks?

 

Marks are unsteady

Wobbly

They disappear

Nobody knows where they stand

 

In any case

A monkey is a monkey

 

Have you seen his hands?

 

Of course I’ve seen his hands

 

He has a thumb

 

Yes, it’s true

He has a thumb

 

And his feet

 

What about his feet

 

You’re not going to call them paws

Paws are coarse

Thick

Animal

 

O.K, OK. They look like feet

 

So?

 

So what?

 

Come on, doesn’t it make you feel nervous?

Dizzy?

Do you see a difference?

 

I see little difference

Very little difference

That’s why you have to eat him

McKenzie Wark

The Forces of Reproduction

“Humanity does not exist under the sign of the divine… but of the monstrous.” 

— Béatriz Préciado

“Read, this!,” he said, thrusting a soiled photocopy of a typescript into my hands. “It will change your life!” Then he disappeared back into the public toilet he was cruising. This was my introduction to the works of Foucault. It was an ‘amateur’ translation, made by a self-described “nasty street queen.” And it did change my life, after a fashion. The most interesting books for me are always works of low theory. They may be written by people schooled in the high theory of the seminar room, but they take those sorts of intellectual resources and apply them directly to life.

Testo Junkie by Béatriz Préciado is such a book. It’s a little rough and raw, but its brilliant. I never met Béatriz Préciado, and its unclear what pronoun would have been best, so I’m going for s/he, which cleaves the whole problem at a stroke. After this book came out, its author started using the name Paul B. Préciado.

S/he grew up in the dying days of Franco’s Spain, where s/he was educated by Jesuits. Préciado’s first psychoanalyist explained to at age 14 that s/he wanted to “arm wrestle God.” S/he has traveled through at least four cities, three languages, and two genders. S/he met Derrida while studying philosophy at the New School, while he was writing about St Augustine, whose Confessions about changing faith reminded her of contemporary writings about changing genders. S/he lived in Paris for a while, then got a PhD in architecture from Princeton, which later became her first book, Pornotopia.

In Testo Junkie, s/he documents a short period of life when s/he took testosterone, and builds out an astonishing conceptual frame for thinking what that experience might mean. Its not a memoir. It may be a study of emotions, but only those ones that are not private. It is a “… a single point in a cartography of extinction.”

Préciado is not sure if s/he is “a feminist hooked on testosterone, or a transgender body hooked on feminism.” As for testosterone: “I take it to foil what society wanted to make of me, so that I can write, fuck, feel a form of pleasure that is post-pornographic, add a molecular prosthesis to my low-tech transgender identity composed of dildos, texts, and moving images; I do it to avenge your death.”

The death is that of French autofiction writer Guillaume Dustan. The book hovers between a memorial for him, and a celebration of her relations with writer and film maker Virginie Despentes: “fucking her is harder than factory work,” but s/he comes to be “covered with my feminism as if with a diaphanous ejaculation, a sea of political sparkles.”

The bulk of the book is not about such things. It is rather about what one can think by extension from such experience. It is about mapping  the commodity economy centered on the management of bodies, sexes, identities, or what Preciado calls the “somatico-political,” of how it finds itself both making and made over by “the sex-gender industrial complex. ” Its an exercise in what Bogdanov calls substitution, building a metaphoric account of how the whole world is made out of one’s own experience of labor.

The most interesting kind of labor is now that of the “production of the species as species.” The key objects to the sex-gender industrial complex are synthetic steroids, porn and the internet. What results is a pharma-porno-punk hypermodernity. It was hidden under the Fordist economy and now revealed by the latter’s displacement onto the parts of the world. In what the Situationists usefully called the “over-developed world” of Europe, America and Japan, this hypermodernity now emerges as the engine of commodification.

“I look for keys to survival in books,” Préciado writes. Scattered in Testo Junkie are useful lists or writers and artists for anyone who feels they need similar keys to survival: Jean Genet, Walter Benjamin, Monique Wittig, Susan Stryker, Edmund White, Faith Ringgold, Faith Wilding, Jill Johnson, Valerie Solanas, Silvia Federici, Ellen Willis, Kathy Acker, Sandy Stone, Shu Lea Chang, Diane Torr, Del LaGrace Volcano, Pedro Lemebel, Michelle Tea. As in any low theory book, the reading list is determined by a need to survive rather than disciplinary boundary keeping. What is of interest is how s/he pulls it off.

Testo Junkie goes far beyond a narrative account of the affect of a queer, bohemian experience. It starts producing its concept: “There is nothing to discover in sex or in sexual identity; there is no inside. The truth about sex is not a disclosure; it is sexdesign. Pharmaco-pornographic biocapitalism does not produce things. It produces mobile ideas, living organs, symbols, desires, chemical reactions…” Its not about the personal affects so much as the systematic effects that produce them.

Nor is all this something imposed entirely from without on some pre-existing natural body or sexuality. If there’s an agency within the system, its not identifiable with a natural body. But there is nevertheless an agency that could have a politics, in and against the mesh.  “What if, in reality, the insatiable bodies of the multitude – their cocks, clitorises, anuses, hormones, and neuro-sexual synapses – what if desire, excitement, sexuality, seduction, and the pleasure of the multitude were all the mainsprings of the creation of value added to the contemporary economy? And what if cooperation were a masturbatory cooperation and not the simple cooperation of brains?”

There’s a challenge here to rethink what labor is in the twenty-first century. “The raw materials of today’s production process are excitation, erection, ejaculation, and pleasure and feelings of self-satisfaction, omnipotent control, and total destruction.” The production of sex-affect is now the model for all other kinds of production. “Sex is the corollary of capitalism and war, the mirror of production.”

But rather than labor power or the general intellect, Préciadio identifies that which is both producer and produced, the agency of the system, as potentia gaudendi, or orgasmic force, a capacity for being excited, exciting and being-excited-with. Capital is about “the transformation of our sexual resources into work.” Capital tries to privatize potentia guadendi but it exists really as an event, a practice, or perhaps an evolutionary process.

I’ll come back to this potentia gaudendi later. For now, its crucial to grasp that for Préciado, it does not exist outside of techno-science. It isn’t a natural core. In this regard its different to the sexpol of Willem Reich and all that descends from it. The market isn’t an outside power repressing or even making work some natural given sexuality. Nor is the body even a coherent unit within this economy. “The sexual body is the product of a sexual division of flesh according to which each organ is defined by its function.” Here s/he sounds like Friedrich Kittler’s media archaeology, but of all of the sex-organs rather than just the sense-organs.

Others have written about how the internet changes certain things about the commodity form, including me. Préciado connects it to two other regimes: pharmacology and pornography. The pharma part includes the production of the Pill, Prozac, Viagra, while the porno part is a corresponding shot list of blow jobs, penetrations, spit-roastings and so forth. What the internet plus pharma and porno produce is an distinctive kind of control of women’s bodies, while being attentive to the ejaculatory function of bodies coded as male.

To the extent that pharma-porno capitalism produces objects, they are just props for producing subjects. Those subjects are less coherent than they appear. Its more a system of plugging pills or dicks into mouths, dildos in vaginas, inserting silicone into breasts or transferring skin and fat from arms to make penises, spritzing images at eyeballs – and introducing hormones to bodies of all kinds.

It’s a squishy version of Deleuze’s ‘control society’ thesis: “A politically programmed ejaculation is the currency of this new molecular-informatic control.” This is the age of the soft machine. There’s a new regime of power more sophisticated than what Foucault called the disciplinary. “The body no longer inhabits disciplinary spaces but is inhabited by them.”

There are certain tensions in this system. On the one hand, these are technologies which have the potential to disassemble gender binaries, but on the other, there’s a massive effort to produce and reproduce exactly those binaries. Pharma-porno capitalism fabricates the idea of a naturalism of sex and gender all the better to make tech that approximates that idea. All the better to sell image and chemical props to make bodies appear as if they follow the codes.

The sex-gender distinction, Preciado usefully reminds us, did not originate  in feminism or the trans-community, but in the biotech industries. By producing a conceptual distinction between bodily sex and subjective gender, a whole industry could then emerge in which the one could be technically re-aligned with the other. But to be clear, Préciado does not think that the lack of naturalism of the trans-body in any way disqualifies it. All bodies lack this naturalism, and that’s no bad thing. S/he is not against the techno-body, which may have as yet unexplored affordances. Rather, s/he is against the commodification and disciplinary control of the techno-body.

The existing sex-gender industrial complex produces and reproduces bodies according to a Platonic ideal of male/female forms. These are produced, varied, but also policed by the production of normative codes of gender aesthetics, of recognition etc, which allow subjects to default towards identities as male or female, hetero or homo, cis or trans. Sex assignment procedure for Préciado are based not just on external morphology but also reproductive capacity and social role –a shifting and unstable terrain anchored by a relentless production of images that reduce the messy nodes of both sex and gender to a binary form.

All kinds of codes are invented and re-invented for every sexualizable zone of the Platonic ideal of the body, but the anus has a problematic status in this schema: “it creates a short circuit in the division of the sexes. As a center of primordial passivity and a perfect locale for the abject, positioned close to waste and shit, it serves as the universal black hole into which rush genders, sexes, identities, and capital.” No wonder ass-fucking is one of the defining genres of internet era porn, the site at one and the same time of all kinds of fantasies of male power and domination and of the ever present possibility of their destabilization.

Platonic sexual ideals of male and female are in ever-increasing need of tech and image props. Far form being ‘natural’, heterosexual reproduction is part of a vast technical apparatus. There is no bare life, there is only a bare techno-life. (As Bottici might say as well). Heterosexuality is a politically assisted reproductive technology. (While its not part of Préciado’s beat, any cis-woman who has negotiated a ‘birth plan’ with a hospital will have a lot of thoughts about this!). Already by the end of the 50s, the supposedly natural reproductive system was becoming something else. Formula replaced or supplemented breast milk. Oral contraceptive pills were poised to become one of the most commonly ingested prescriptions of them all.

Préciado’s thinking builds here on Teresa de Laurentis, and her critique of second wave feminism’s naturalizing of femininity. Under the universality of the category of woman a host of other things are hiding as we now know, from race and class to technologies for producing and sustaining genders. De Laurentis introduced the provocative concept that there are technologies of gender. Gender becomes real when a representation of it becomes a self-representation, and those representations are industrially produced.

There’s a tension between the pharma and porno wings of the sex-gender industrial complex. Image production has at its core a relentlessly Platonist ideal of two genders, and spends quite a bit of time exposing and categorizing ambiguous images in between. But from the point of view of medical, rather than media, production, the category of gender reveals the arbitrary and constructive character of biomedical interventions.

For example, hormone therapy is used to treat ‘hirsuitism’ in women. There are standard tests for how hairy is too hairy, and these allow women access to hormone treatments to reduce things like facial hair. But the scale of hairiness is not an objective constant. The white female has a different standard of hairiness than, say Jewish or Hispanic ones. Medical-technical regimes are complicated applications of boundaries to bodies.

Another kind of example: the different legal-medical regimes that apply to getting a nose job versus a dick job. Your nose is your private property. If you think it is too big or too broad or something, that’s your concern, as are any complicated racialized assumptions about the Platonic form of perfection of the nose. But if you want a dick job, that’s something else. Removing one, or having one constructed on your body, is not a matter of the body as your private property. It’s a matter of your body as a thing whose normative sex and gender is assigned by the state.

Bodies are not such coherent things, then. They are fabricated in meshes of images, tech, laws, and so on. “We are not a body without organs, but rather an array of heterogeneous organs unable to be gathered under the same skin.” Pharma-porno gender is not just an ideology or an image or a performance. It gets under the skin. It’s a political technology, “and the state draws its pleasure from the production and control of our porngore subjectivity.”

But its capital and tech rather than the state that most interests Préciado. “These artifacts (us) can’t exist in a pure state, but only within our enclosed sexual techno-systems. In our role as sexual subjects, we’re inhabiting biocapitalist amusement parks. We are men and women of the laboratory, effects of a kind of politico-scientific bio-Platonism.” S/he usefully extends what is basically a Foucauldian way of thinking onto new terrain, where commodification and power meet.

In some ways this is a book about what Lyotard called ‘libidinal economies,’ which now work on digital and molecular tech that produce sex, gender, sexuality and subjectivity. The pharma and the porno parts of this economy work in opposition as much as together. Porn is mostly propaganda for Platonist sex division. (There are of course niche tastes. One wonders what s/he would make of Mark Dery’s essay on decapitation porn.) Gender-codes are continually mutating, distributing and redistributing, if mostly curling around the same bifurcated distribution.

But when it comes to pharma, there are only techno-genders, of increasingly ambiguous kinds. Lance Armstrong and F2M transmen are the product of the same kinds of hormones from the same kinds of labs. Préciado wrote this book while taking testosterone. S/he thinks of herself as neither testogirl nor technoboy, but a port for inserting the hormone. S/he is aware that testosterone isn’t masculinity. Her self-directed endocrinal reprogramming only makes sense together with a certain political agenda. S/he is doing it outside of any medical regime, because to partake in that is to give one’s body over to the state’s decisions about what your sex and gender are or should be, and what technologies will ‘properly’ align these divergent parts of the state’s own property.

However, to do so is to risk getting caught in another disciplinary net – the one strung to catch ‘addicts’. If her testosterone-taking is not sanctioned by one kind of medicalized discourse, it risks another. If s/he want to convince a doctor that there is a misfit between her sex and gender, there’s a regime to deal with that. But if s/he wants to remain ambiguously between genders? If s/he want to take hormones for aesthetic reasons? And what is at stake in taking a drug which transforms the physical body as its direct goal and subjective feeling only secondarily, rather than the other way around? What, in other words, is at stake in the industrialization of the hormone?

The unconscious and the hormone are discovered around the same time. The former is about linguistic signs, but the latter about chemical signals in the body. The study of hormones – endocrinology – is a part of the founding or refounding of a wide range of knowledge on an ‘episteme’ of communication and information. There were some bumps along the way, as with any new science. (Even Bogdanov fell for some total pseudo-science about monkey-glands as a way of promote longevity and vitality.) In retrospect the surrealist monkey-gland moment in endocrinology actually did foreshadow what the field’s ambitions were, if not its methods. “Hormonal theory represents another form of mass communication.” Hormones act at a distance – they are a kind of telesthesia. As such they can act to ‘discipline’ a body without having to restrain it.

“Hormones are bio-artifacts made of carbon chains, language, images, capital, and collective desires.” They are part of a genealogy of the techno-molecular control first of women (the Pill) now of men too: Testosterone, Viagra, etc. All sorts of bodies can be produced via artificial hormones, but they are still organized around the Platonist binary. Interestingly, the FDA at first rejected the Pill. The early versions suppressed menstruation altogether, which was too radical a technical reprogramming of gender. It was approved  once the period cycle – or something mimicking it – was restored by lower dose formulations.

If Préciado wants to go beyond Foucault’s thinking on the disciplinary apparatus, s/he also wants to go beyond Judith Butler’s thinking about gender performativity. Gender isn’t just performative at the level of gesture and language, but also via a kind of biomimicry or biodrag. There’s a molecular dimension, the pharma dimension. Perhaps we all do biodrag, a mimesis, more or less parodic, of the Platonic gender ideals, propping up our bodies with chemical assistance as much as dress codes.

These relatively new kinds of molecular power modify bodies themselves as living platforms: “We are certainly still confronting a form of social control, but this time it’s a matter of control lite, a bubbly type of control, full of colors and wearing Mickey Mouse ears and the Brigitte Bardot low cut look, as opposed to the cold, disciplinary architecture of the panoptic illustrated by Foucault.” Weaponized adorables for grown-ups. The movie Sucker Punch could well be a kind of weird Hollywood allegory for all that.

In a nightmare image, Préciado writes of “a new type of high-tech heterosexuality…: the techno-Barbie, remaining eternally young and super-sexualized, almost entirely infertile and non-menstruating but always ready for artificial insemination and accompanied by a sterile super-macho whose erections are technically produced by a combination of Viagra and audio-visual pornographic codes…” Which suggests to me that there are no cis-gender bodies, as the term implies that one could be ‘on the side’ of a pre-given standard, when all such standards are now products of a sex-gender industrial complex. The innovation of Préciado’s work is to insist so thoroughly that all of sex, gender and identity are on the same level, all produced industrially, and by the same systems.

Préciado does not mention hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women, but one could add that to this picture. The next frontier for the sex-gender industrial complex is probably marketing hormones to men without undermining their sense of masculinity. The masculine body has its own honor-codes of supposed naturalism. Taking steroids to improve athletic performance is somehow always ‘wrong’, even if Viagra can now be an accepted chemical modification of the male body for improving sexual performance.

For Préciado, liberal feminism made a pact with the state and the pharmacology industry. It is not that defending Planned Parenthood is a bad thing, but that the unexamined component is the hormonal transformation of the body. Préciado is also wary of feminisms that are complicit with the state, including on issues of pornography. It hardly bears repeating that when states increase the policing of pornography it is usually images of non-normative sexualities that are criminalized or excluded.

“Pornography is sexuality transformed into spectacle.” It is now the paradigm of culture industry. “The culture industry is porn envy.” Porn is the management of the excitation-frustration circuit.  The culture industry now wants to produce the same physiological effect. Porn may have more to do with freak shows and the circus than cinema. “Paris Hilton represents the zenith of the sexopolitical production of the luxury white heterosexual technobitch.” But it only appears that s/he is living a reality-tv life of languid uselessness: her whole life is under surveillance. Pornography is doubled by scrutiny and control of the affects and discharges of bodies.

Porn is regulated by a kind of “Spermatic Platonism” in which only the cum shot is real. Porn produces the illusion of potentia gaudendi, when excitation is actually a more or less involuntary response. However, “pornography tells the performative truth about sexuality.” One can claim that the sex in porn is merely performed and is thus unreal, or that the bodies are unreal, but this very unreality is precisely the Platonist normative forms around which the whole sex gender industrial complex is made to circulate.

Not only sex but labor is becoming pornified. We are all coming to work in a porn factory fueled by bodily fluids, synthetic hormones, silicon, stimulants, mood regulators and digital signs. Sexual labor transforms potentia gaudendi into commodities. If one were to look for what Gramsci would call the organic intellectuals of labor now, it would be among pornographers and sex workers. Sex workers are still the ’other’ to most respectable people, but perhaps a wider definition of sex work would help. On a spa day with Virginia Despentes, Préciado discovers the erotics of the personal care industry. Perhaps some people would just rather have the actual massage than the happy ending, but in a way its all sex work. Or perhaps, to riff off Préciado’s line of thought further, we should think about both sex workers and ‘gender workers’ as on a continuum in the industrial production of bodies and their identities.

Préciado calls this a pornification rather than a feminization of labor. The concept of a feminization of labor assumes certain things about femininity. For one thing, it “omits the cum shot.” And it still buys into Platonist gender absolutes. Affective labor is a girl thing; effective labor is a boy thing. Flexibility as a girl thin; stability as a boy thing.

Préciado is also hostile to the ‘cognitive’ or ‘immaterial’ labor thesis that bedevils the thought of the inheritors of Italian workerist theory such as Moulier Boutang, Lazzarato, or Hardt and Negri. “None of them mention the effects on their philosopher’s cocks of a dose of Viagra accompanied by the right image.” Perhaps this is a time of übermaterial, not immaterial, labor.

And it is not a ‘sexual division of labor’ but a pornographic one. The term ‘sexual’ in sexual division of labor silently sanctions a hetero view of reproduction, as if it goes without saying that only hetero reproduction is normal. It also takes the asymmetries of the hetero sex act as the norm. The list of body types that can be penetrated includes at least the bodies of cis-females, trans-females and gay men. The sexual division of labor concept also leaves out the technical apparatus within which it is produced.

There is no immaterial labor, nor is there a ‘general intellect’. There is general sex. This might be another name for the potentia guardini, the  “the impulse for communal joy that travels through the multitude, convulsing the totality of excitable producer-bodies of capital.” Modernity is the sexualization of the domestic and the domestication of the sexual. The sexual-domestic coupling has mostly taken place under the sign of private property. (Infidelity is theft). But there’s another side —  potentia guardini – that which is both produced by, and enfettered by, the sex gender industrial complex.

Can we just admit that ‘immaterial labor’ was a terrible, useless concept? What is refreshing about low theory is that when it works it starts from actual experiences, then it appropriates and adapts concepts to fit the articulation of the experience. Its always a kind of détournement or high-jacking of high theory for other purposes. As such it tends to shun what might otherwise be endlessly productive research programs just for lack of evidence that their conceptual objects actually correspond to anything. Hence Préciado pretty ruthlessly cuts through some decades of social theory.

S/he doesn’t see psychoanalysis, as traditionally understood, as all that much help either: “The father and mother are already dead. We are the children of Hollywood, porn, the Pill, the TV trashcan, the internet, and cyber-capitalism. The cis-girl wants to transform her body into a consumable image for the greatest number of gazes… She wants her pornification… to transform her body into abstract capital.”

‘Queer’ too is becoming commodified, and critical thought and practice has to move on. But it has to steer away from both the apocalyptic temptation (speculative realism) and the messianic temptation (leaping communisms). “Let us be worthy of our own fall and imagine for the time left the components of a new porno-punk philosophy.”

Préciado’s program is to transform minority knowledge into collective experimentation, to work for the common ownership of the biocodes. Like Suely Rolnik, s/he sees psychiatry as a foreclosing of aesthetic responses to creating subjectivity. S/he puts gender dissent in an aesthetic context, rather than one of dysphoria, pathology etc. S/he compares her taking of testosterone to Walter Benjamin taking hash, or Freud taking cocaine, or Micheux taking mescaline: a protocol for experiment not sanctioned by the state or the professions, and to be understood more as the construction of situations in everyday life.

“Political subjectivity emerges precisely when the subject does not recognize itself in its representation.” That break creates the space not just for another kind of representation, but another life. Its time, s/he says, to become gender pirates or gender hackers: “We’re copyleft users who consider sex hormones free and open biocodes.” S/he calls for a “molecular revolution of the genders,” There’s no natural or private acts to which to return.

Praxis, then is “… a matter of inventing other common, shared, collective, and copyleft forms of the dominant pornographic representations and standardized sexual consumption.” Those who are its objects can become its subjects. The organic intellectuals of such a movement are pornographers and sex workers as theorists. And as for practice, “… since the 70s, the only major revolution has been carried out by gays listening to music while getting high and fucking.”

I love this line in particular, as it could have come from my A Hacker Manifesto: “Power experienced slippage; it shifted, throughout the previous century, from the earth to manufacturing, then toward information and life.” But Préciado opens up a space for thinking that last bit – life – in a fresh way. Desire and sexuality, like information, or even as information – defy ownership: “my possession of a fragment (of information, desire, sex, gender) doesn’t take it away from you.” Sharing multiplies desire, sex and gender.

But the idea of sexual liberation is obsolete. There’s no pre-existing natural state of sex that is repressed, as we all learned from Foucault, whether from a ‘street’ photocopy or in grad school. Now we have to think about how to hack pharma-porno domination from within. Préciado has some slogans for it, each of which could equally well name a punk band or a conference: FreeFuckware! OpenGender! BodyPunk! PenetratedState! PostPorn! There is monstrous fun to be had. There are new bodies and their relations to sexdesign.

In the wake of Louis Althusser, there was a time when it became compulsory to always privilege the relations of production over the forces of production. The specifics of technical change fell from view. But there was a trade-off, in that relations of reproduction came into view, and with them questions of women’s unpaid labor, the gender division of labor and so forth. However, I think that Préciado opens up another path, following in the wake of Donna Haraway instead. That would be to ask about the forces of reproduction. Then we would not always be relegating questions of gender and sex to some place outside of technical questions. Then one might also start to ask (with Jason Moore) what reproduction might even mean in the era of metabolic rift.

 

Emanuele Castano

The Attack on Empathy

I feel for Jeremy Rifkin. In 2010, Rifkin, a public intellectual and best-selling author, published a remarkable book titled The Empathic Civilization. In it, Rifkin argues (1) that humans are soft-wired for empathic feelings toward others and that (2) this potential has to be fostered if we are to survive, as a species, on our precious little planet. The book is a tour-de-force, in which ideas, data from various disciplines and anecdotes are built upon to make a case for empathy. Rifkin is not always very precise, or even correct in reporting scientific findings, but by and large his thesis holds. Empathy is good for you, and for others, and as a society we should do our best to foster it. Yet, Rifkin’s ideas have been the target of a rather intense attack by several eminent scholars, notably psychologists Paul Bloom and Steven Pinker, and philosopher Jesse Prinz. What’s not to agree with in Pinker’s ideas?

Bloom, Pinker and Prinz, echoed by New York Times’ columnist David Brooks, do not think that we should rely on empathy to build a better world. Let’s review some of their ideas.

A good start is Brooks’ article. The article elicited a host of reactions among readers and, not surprisingly, among scholars who formally study empathy. These scholars saw decades of research findings dismissed in an 800-word piece destined to a reading public of hundreds of thousands. Brooks builds his argument “against” empathy from Steven Pinker’s last book (The Better Angels of Our Nature) and a chapter by Jesse Prinz, titled “Is Empathy Necessary for Morality.” The latter is a concise piece, which can be easily read over a 6 oz cup of coffee. Pinker’s is an 800-pages book, which deals with much more than this specific question, and requires a several gallons of coffee, and a great deal of determination, to be conquered.

What can be found in these readings? I found partial relief from the dismay I felt reading Brooks’ piece. In Prinz’ piece, I found relief simply because he is clearly wrong. In Pinker’s, I found relief because the analysis is much more complex, and his conclusion more open-ended, than they appear in David Brooks’ framing of them. First, let’s focus on Prinz, who argues that empathy is not only mal-suited to boost moral behavior, but actually detrimental to it. Prinz, a philosopher, builds heavily on psychological research to boost his argument, but he settles early-on for a rather narrow definition of empathy. Specifically, he reduces empathy to catching the emotion of another person and the feeling of distress at witnessing another’s person suffering. Granted, the term Empathy has been used to mean a host of different things, and disagreement exists among researchers, mostly psychologists. Yet, one thing we would likely agree on, is that reducing empathy to catching another person’s emotion, or experiencing personal distress, is unwarranted and inappropriate. Particularly if it is done without discussing the many other dimensions. In The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, leading scholar Daniel Batson enumerates eight different dimensions of Empathy. For our purposes here, it is best to juxtapose the Personal Distress dimension Prinz favors, to that of Empathic Concern, or Sympathy: feeling for another person who is suffering. While decades of empirical research have shown Personal Distress to have a negative relation to prosocial behavior, and a positive relation to antisocial behavior, it is Empathic Concern and the cognitive aspect of Empathy, Perspective Taking, that give Empathy its good name. These two have been shown to do a great deal of good to interpersonal and intergroup relations.

What about Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. After examining our inner demons, Pinker turns to (expanded) Empathy as a candidate to explain the decline of violence in human history (i.e., the focus of the book). Pinker does not make Prinz’ mistake. He acknowledges the complexity of the concept, and he differentiates between two types of prosocial behavior: that born out of the need to relieve our own distress when witnessing the suffering of others, and that born out a more altruistic, better “angel,” namely Empathic Concern (which he, as other empathy scholars, calls sympathy). Pinker does conclude that we cannot rely on Empathy to better our world, but he does so based on his skepticism that the circle of empathy can be expanded to include, well, everybody. In so doing, he takes a stab at Jeremy Rifkin’s claim that to save our planet and ourselves, we have to recognize and foster our inner Homo Empathicus.

These ideas were echoed in a piece by Paul Bloom, that appeared in The New Yorker earlier this year. He, too, takes a stab at Rifkin’s call for extending the boundaries of empathy so to include all human beings, and the bio-sphere… Bloom:

Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family—that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.

Bloom, too, is rooting for norms over empathy. It seems difficult to disagree with Bloom, too, right? How can we feel for EVERYBODY? There is plenty of work suggesting that we curtail empathy in a variety of contexts, precisely because (psychologically) we cannot afford to continuously feel others’ pain (I have written about this in a chapter for the Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology). Also, empathy can have some paradoxical effects. Anecdotal evidence tells us that donations to help a specific child afflicted by a rare yet curable disease will pour in. But a call for funds to conduct research on the disease that is casted in more abstract terms will be much less successful. Stalin is reported as saying “A Single Death is a Tragedy; a Million Deaths is a Statistic.” This is known as the “identifiable victim effect” and it is supported by psychological experiments.

On the bases of this kind of paradoxes, and on the fact that it seems unlikely that we can extend our empathic feelings to the whole humanity, Pinker, Prinz and Bloom, among others, argue at worst that empathy can in fact be damaging, and at best that it should “yield to reason” – as Bloom puts it.

Reason, and norms, can certainly inform our practices, and there is little doubt that both have been powerful forces in bettering the world we live in. But somehow pitting empathy against reason and norms, seems highly misconceived. We have long distinguished between conventional and moral norms, and psychological research findings confirm that these are two separate domains, that even young children can easily tease apart. For conventional norms, empathy clearly seems unnecessary. Empathy, however, is much more of an integral part in the development of moral norms. And I would also contend that the norms would not be compelling were they not linked to empathic feelings. I am a pro-choice individual, but I can only maintain this position by convincing myself that the fetus is not quite human – at least not in the early stages. My anti-abortion counterpart puts the fetus squarely within humanity, and this motivates his moral position. The difference is precisely in whether or not we include the fetus within the moral community of beings to which we extend empathic feelings. Abortion opinions are likely to be part of a broader ideological self-positioning, religious beliefs, and other self-definition at the collective level. Yet, when one scratches the surface, it really boils down to whether or not you empathize with the fetus.

Support for gay marriage is another case in point. Surely, it is mostly framed in terms of “protecting the family as nature intended” versus “guaranteeing equal rights to all.” Yet, here as well, the issue is whether you consider gays as fully fledged (not flawed) human beings, and thus include them in the same moral community as heterosexuals. Senator Portman (Republican, OH), fought same-sex marriage for years, but he changed his mind after his son came out as gay. He was somehow forced to either include homosexuals in the same human community in which he was, or to exclude his own son from it – and he got his priorities right.

Ultimately what we think the limits of empathy are depends on whether we side with Pinker or with Rifkin on the question of the relationship between empathy and social categorization.

Pinker argues that empathy stops at the border of our in-group, which is basically the family and close friends, with whom we share a communal relationship. Beyond that, we’d better rely on other “angels,” such as a moral code. Rifkin, in The Empathic Civilization, argues that we are soft-wired for an empathic connection, and that empathy is precisely what is needed to break down ethnic, religious, and other social divides, so that prosocial attitudes and behavior can be extended to outsiders. I do not think we are ready to adjudicate between these two views, but I am skeptical that we can build a better, more peaceful and moral society by simply relying on moral codes, with no empathic concern for the well-being of those that are outside of our socially constructed in-groups.

Take the European Union, for instance (coincidentally, a topic on which Rifkin wrote a remarkable book). It is true that common laws and regulations have fostered unprecedented integration among European countries. Yet, when confronted with important crises, the Union vacillates, and there are serious concerns about its capacity to weather these tumultuous times. A mutually reinforcing common European identity and a cross-nation extension of empathic concern for the welfare of other European citizens, appear to be the missing soul, or, to keep with biblical references, the missing angel.

Cinzia Arruzza

Public Shaming? On the NYC Teen Pregnancy Prevention Campaign

Unexpected or amusing experiences on the NYC subway are not infrequent for those who travel every day, in jam-packed trains, from one corner to the other of the city. The biggest shock I have had in my three years of using NYC public transit was a few months ago when, jumping onto a train at the last second, I saw the most incredible poster. It was a picture of a crying toddler of color with the words, “Got a good job? I cost thousands of dollars each year.” While I was still recovering from the shock, my eyes fell upon a similar poster of a little black girl that read, “Honestly Mom… chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me?” As I soon found out, these two posters were part of the Teen Pregnancy Prevention campaign organized by the Human Resources Administration of the New York City Department of Social Services and strongly supported and defended by Mayor Bloomberg.

This advertising campaign is a perfect example of the entrenchment of inequalities around class, race, and gender, revealing the way they are covered up by a discourse appealing to personal responsibility. Indeed, the message conveyed by the campaign is, first and foremost, that you need to have money in order to have the right to have a child. If you are poor and nonetheless have a child, you are responsible for his or her future unhappiness, poverty, and social failure. Moreover, poverty is presented as the outcome of teenagers’ individual reproductive choices rather than being presented as the concrete material condition in which they are already living and in which they are compelled to make their choices.

It is also striking that in the posters there is no mention of social services or of abortion rights. The whole problem of teen pregnancy is reduced to a matter of individual choice, where girls are to be considered responsible for their sexual behavior. As a consequence, these amount to the communicative tactic of public shaming.

The number to text provided by the posters does not offer any information about social services or possible help; it is only meant to inform about the connection between teen pregnancy, poverty and low education. And, what is even worse, it gives the possibility to participate via text messages in a game around a pregnant teenager, Anaya, and her boyfriend, Louis. They face a series of challenges from name calling i.e. public shaming, to losing their best friends. Effectively, the advice provided by the campaign posters and website is: finish high school, get a job, and get married before even thinking about having a child. The teen pregnancy prevention campaign becomes in this way, an opportunity to reiterate sexual norms and naturalize marriage.

Finally, and most importantly, the prominent use of children of color in the campaign is fundamentally racist, as it targets the racialized groups where the rate of teen pregnancy is higher, while at the same time stressing personal responsibility. The unavoidable message, then, is that racialized people are losers, and that both poverty and teen pregnancy is not only their choice, but also their fault.

This campaign has been strongly criticized by a number of organizations and public actors, such as Planned Parenthood of NYC.

The anti-teen pregnancy campaign is evidence of what we might call a more general “double standard policy” concerning gender and sexual issues. Indeed, while in NYC formal rights are increasingly granted to women and LGBTQ people, the substantial rights granted to them vary enormously according to their class position, their ethnicity, and even their geographic location within an urban space, which is heavily divided along class and race lines. This double standard results from granting women and LGBTQ people formal rights without real resources for equality. The adoption of anti-harassment policies, quotas, anti-discrimination policies, legal gay marriages, and so on, has opened the possibility for at least a partial emancipation of women and LGBTQ people. However, these policies have not been accompanied by changes in workplace relations, proper childcare programs, or other decisive interventions aimed at granting substantial equality.

The city spent about two years and over $400,000 producing the campaign: providing real social services would have been a much better use of this money.

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Thanksgiving, Kugel, and Cornbread Stuffing

Thanksgiving is a special holiday, the great American secular celebration: a common ritual, eating of a turkey dinner, almost universally practiced, in all the nooks and crannies of the social landscape. Indians may not be very enthusiastic. The return on their historic hospitality was not very good. And those who are concerned about the Native American place in the national story may have their critical doubts, but still just about everyone takes part, or at least is expected to take part, including me. A conversation I had with a good friend earlier in the week reveals what it’s all about.

My pool at the Theodore Young Community Center will be closed from Thursday through Sunday. Knowing the pool would be closed, I made sure I went today and earlier in the week. I chatted with Beverly McCoy, the receptionist and social center of gravity there, about the upcoming holiday. She explained her preparations.

Today she is driving to her son and his family in Central Pennsylvania. Yesterday and Monday, she was preparing, doing her packing and making the cornbread stuffing, a must for her African American family. Thanksgiving wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without Bev’s down home stuffing, a specialty of the South.

I have a similar but slightly different expectation at my Thanksgiving dinner at my sister in law, Geraldine’s, place in Brooklyn, across from the museum. She and her husband Bernard will cook the dinner, but one of the necessities is prepared by my other sister in law, Lana, the kugel (the traditional Jewish noodle pudding). As Beverly’s Thanksgiving requires her cornbread stuffing, ours wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without Lana’s kugel.

My daughter Brina felt this deeply when she was spending her junior year abroad in Paris. When the program director organized a potluck Thanksgiving dinner for the Brown students studying there years ago, Brina immediately thought of the kugel, which was a big success, even as it puzzled the French Thanksgiving guests, a sweet dish that wasn’t dessert. And as it happened, Brina met her future husband that year, and now, living in Paris, when she and her family and an American friend and her family prepare a Thanksgiving meal, alas not on Thursday because it is a work day, Brina never forgets to prepare the kugel, following Lana’s recipe.

There is a vision of America that imagines a country of similar small town values, common religious practices, a common cultural identity, as Norman Rockwell immortalized in his famous depiction. But the painting Beverly, with her family, and I, with mine, paint in our actual practice is more interesting and realistic. There are common values, but there are as well differences. Sometimes the differences present serious problems, but on Thanksgiving we symbolically transcend these. Turkey and kugel, Turkey and cornbread stuffing, turkey and many other national, ethnic, and regional specialties define the holiday and the plural identity that America is.

(This version of this post was originally published November 23, 2011 on DeliberatelyConsidered.com)

Esther Kreider-Verhalle

Black Faces, Red Skins and White Celebrations

In the country where I grew up, the Netherlands, Saint Nicholas’ yearly visit is a hugely popular celebration, rich in rituals and designed to make children happy. Three years ago, the celebration came to New York, where I now live. It seemed only logical to expose my half-Dutch children to this cherished tradition.

A large group of Dutch parents and children gathered at New York’s The Netherland Club. While awaiting the arrival of “the holy man,” they all happily sang the traditional songs about “the bishop,” who, as it is told, hails from Spain and makes his yearly trek to the Netherlands on his white horse with his servants. The lyrics: “His servant stood laughing and told us,” “Those who are sweet will get candy, the others will get spanked.” And: “Even though I am black as soot, I mean pretty well.”

All had been peaceful at the Netherland Club until a number of black-faced minstrels came out of nowhere, ramming on doors and throwing candy into the room. My three year old ran out of the room in utter fear, settling in a hiding spot, somewhere under a table in a closet with the doors closed. The show of well-intentioned fun by a bunch of guys in funny suits, donning afro-wigs and red painted lips was completely lost on my son, forcing me to reconsider the meaning and symbols of the tradition.

The celebration of Saint Nicholas, or Sinterklaas, by the Dutch and a couple other low countries goes back to the Middle Ages. In fact, it is this long-bearded holy man, the patron saint of children, who was the model for Santa Claus. Over time it has resulted in a feast where adults dress up as the bishop and as his assistants, his Zwarte Pieten (Black Petes), to surprise children with gifts, or exchange poems and small presents among adults. But the rituals that accompany the tradition have evolved over time. While children have always been led to believe that the Saint truly exists, in the not too distant past young children were also warned that their bad behavior could result in being dumped in a burlap bag to be hauled off to Spain. Poor manners could also lead to punishment by a rod made of branches.

Once upon a time, the Saint had a Moorish servant, a Muslim from Arab or African descent, but in the 19th century, a popular book by a Dutch schoolteacher gave the servant stronger black characteristics; an ink black face, the afro wig, thick red lips and golden earrings. It was and is a typical caricature of an African slave, a stereotype of a black person and, combined with the white bishop, a symbolization of the white master and his black servant. More lore was added along the way. The Saint also suddenly ended up with his own private steamer, which he used for his yearly travel to the lowlands.

The saint himself, his entourage and his paraphernalia, obviously are elements of a social construct. As far as is known, Nicholas, the man, originally lived in Myra, what is currently Turkey, and never during his life came close to Spain. The development of the myth reflects moments in the social and cultural history of the narrators of the story; from the colonial slave trading past of the Dutch empire to the invention of steamships.

More recently, Zwarte Piet supposedly has also evolved from being plain dumb and barely able to speak a full sentence, to being quite an accomplished events manager who no longer kidnaps naughty kids or hits them with rods. If this sounds upsetting, strange traditions are in no way unique to the Dutch.

One should not underestimate the alarming activities of for example the explorer Christopher Columbus, whose arrival is celebrated on the official holiday of Columbus Day. As it turned out, the man was strongly in favor of slavery and exploitation, and set off the extermination of the indigenous people of the Americas. The celebration of the even bigger event of Thanksgiving becomes mainly peculiar when asked what is really being celebrated.

The Dutch are in good Caucasian company when it comes to the need to rethink past behavior. The conservative American political commentator Charles Krauthammer described the decade long discussion about changing the name of Washington’s football team, the Redskins. Even the president has weighed in (he would change the name) and, in a notable bi-partisan moment, Krauthammer agreed with Obama:

Why? Simple decency. I wouldn’t want to use a word that defines a people – living or dead, offended or not – in a most demeaning way. It’s a question not of who or how many had their feelings hurt, but of whether you want to associate yourself with a word that, for whatever historical reason having nothing to do with you, carries inherently derogatory connotations.

In the Netherlands, the Black Pete controversy is emerging with a new urgency. This year, a team of researchers for the United Nations got involved after they received a complaint about the racist character of the celebration and decided to look into the matter. Many Dutch are up in arms, and have a hard time with this “foreign interference.” In addition to pro Zwarte Piet online petitions, protests are becoming quite aggressive, most disturbingly in the form of intimidations at the address of the researchers.

While the discussion about dressing up in blackface is an annually returning ritual, this year’s reaction by the Dutch politicians about all the commotion seems rather representative of the public’s reaction in general. Prime Minister Rutte does not consider Sinterklaas and his black underlings an issue for discussion for his government, nor do the members of Parliament want to spend time on the matter. “Zwarte Piet turns out to be black, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” says the prime minister. As one commenter in the blogosphere said, “Just invite President Obama over for dinner on the 5th of December. But we all know they ain’t gonna do that; they ain’t that dumb.” The government’s answers to the researchers at the United Nations have been another sign that Dutch leaders are not able to relate to the core of the issue. The government report says:

The Dutch government sees the Sinterlaas festival as a traditional children’s festival. The focus is on Sinterklaas as a figure who hands out presents, and the festival is celebrated in many different ways by different people. The government is aware that people’s opinions about this festival differ. The role played by “Black Pete’ is sometimes a subject for public debate. … People who feel they have been discriminated against can report this to their local anti-discrimination-office. Most of these reports concern discrimination on the grounds of race.

The fact that also this year the majority of the Dutch did not see the need to make changes, gives a fair reflection of the state of affairs of racial sensitivities. The majority of Dutch will explain that they are in favor of egalitarian values and that any perceived racism in their national custom is unintentional. After all, they will explain that the soot on the face of the servants happens to be there because they deliver the Saint’s presents by lowering themselves through dirty chimneys. Which doesn’t clarify the afro-wig, nor the lack of soot on their clothing. Then, they explain, it is all harmless fun anyway, because Dutch children do not necessarily make the connection between Zwarte Piet and the negative representation of a black person in the form of a racial stereotype.

Dressing up as a caricature of a dark-skinned slave in a country that has a history of slave trade and colonization is tolerated. Is it subconscious racism, a state of cognitive dissonance? If the schoolteacher in the 19th century would have drawn the caricature of a greedy Jewish boy with a large hook-nose and a violin, or an unwashed Gypsie, in rags and with golden teeth, would those stereotypes also be accepted?

I have learned that it is not easy to explain the Dutch tradition outside the Netherlands, especially in my kids’ classrooms. Their classes truly reflect the diverse community that New York City’s borough of Queens is, with children from all over the world. The teachers invite parents to share the stories and rituals of their specific traditions, especially when it concerns major celebrations. Together with my Mexican friend, who married a Dutch man, we baked piles of pepernoten (tiny ginger cookies), showed a puppet of Sinterklaas and brought images to color. We left the black puppets home and never mentioned that the very nice man’s helpers are his servants, who are as black as soot, don’t speak in sentences and are generally kinda dumb.

The handing down of cultural tradition from one generation to the next is crucial for the existence and survival of communities. But when the values of the cultural tradition do not or no longer represent all members of the community, or strongly differ from values of other befriended communities, something is off. I strongly believe that a change would do Sinterklaas good. To my surprise and disturbance, this isn’t obvious in the Netherlands.

Vince Carducci

The Aesthetics of Civil Society

University of Illinois Chicago political scientist Kelly LeRoux (who got her PhD at Wayne State University here in the D) and co-author Anna Bernadska recently published a study, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, that shows a positive correlation between participation in the arts and engagement with civil society. They analyzed more than 2700 respondents to the 2002 General Social Survey, conducted biannually by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and generally considered one of the primary sources of data on American social trends. Their analysis found that people who have direct or indirect involvement with the arts are more likely to also have direct participation in three dimensions of civil society: engagement in civic activities, social tolerance, and other-regarding (i.e., altruistic) behavior. These results hold true even when factoring in demographic variables for age, race, and education. Most studies on the social impact of the arts address economics and related externalities such as improved educational outcomes and general community well being. (See, for example, the work of Ann Markusen of the Project on Regional and Industrial Economics at the University of Minnesota summarized in my blog post here.)

The study by LeRoux and Bernadska is different in that it empiricially investigates ties between the arts and citizenship. Instead of seeking a market rationale for arts patronage, the authors stress the benefits for civic virtue. The study is also noteworthy because rather than looking at the direct impact of community and other arts projects, such as mural painting, theatrical productions, and the like, it takes an audience-studies approach more typically associated with media and communications analysis. It’s important to note that the authors demonstrate correlation not causation. In statistics, correlation establishes the dependence of certain variables on one another, which is useful in predictive modeling. But the relationship, either positive (the more of one variable, the more of the other) or negative (the more of one variable, the less of the other), doesn’t necessarily mean that the one is specifically the cause of the other. There may be other factors at work (called intervening variables) not measured in the analysis. While that may be the case, the study is still useful in suggesting additional ways in which the arts benefit society. Not the least of these is the development of the critical function, which is fundamental to the advancement of discourse and building consensus on matters of common concern within the public sphere, which civil society theorists see as key to a viable, participatory democracy. Indeed, German social scientist and political philosopher Jurgen Habermas in his important study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (MIT: 1991 [1962]), cites the development of the field of literary criticism and aesthetics over the roughly 150-year period in Europe starting in the late 17th century as laying the groundwork for citizens to think independently and thus reflect upon their role in society and ultimately act as political agents. More recently, French philospher Jacques Ranciere in books such as The Future of the Image (Verso: 2009), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Continuum: 2010), and The Emancipated Spectator (Verso: 2011), has established the link between aesthetic practice and political action. This also explains why anti-democratic forces in American society have worked so hard, starting with the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s, to eliminate public funding for the arts. It turns out, that Big Bird really is potentially subversive.

Hugh Raffles

One Thing Becoming Another

When Huizi the rationalist visited Zhuangzi to express his condolences for the recent passing of Zhuangzi’s wife, he was shocked to find the great Daoist sage sprawled on the ground happily beating out a rhythm on a tub and singing with gusto. Stop this scandal! Huizi demanded, outraged at his friend’s disregard of decorum.

Zhuangzi was unmoved. “You’re wrong,” he retorted. “When she first died, do you think I didn’t grieve like anyone else?”

“But,” he continued, “I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there’s been another change and she’s dead.”

“It’s just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter.”[1] It’s just like the progression of the spider and fly: flight, web, dust.

This is a famous story, nearly twenty-five hundred years old, the subject of endless commentary. Daoist in detail but far-flung in sensibility, more familiar now but still hard to fully grasp. From substance to substance, from substance to body, from connection to affection to reflection to celebration, all substance, constantly unfolding, flight, web, dust, one thing becoming another “in a ceaseless adventure.” [2]

But even if death is not for mourning, even if it is part of life and therefore a source of joy, even if…. It nonetheless brings sorrow when it comes too close. Perhaps, Zhuangzi seems to be saying, there are two deaths in each one: grief and joy, mourning and celebration. The death in which a part of us dies too with every loss, and the death that is a death of cosmic transformation in which the world and the web are endlessly remade. [3]

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Jan Sawka: The Power of the Not So Powerless

The following lecture was prepared for delivery at the symposium “Jan Sawka: The Artist’s Role in Changing the World” presented by The Paul Robeson Galleries, Gallery Aferro and the Newark Arts Council, Saturday, November 16, 2013, in conjunction with the exhibition at the Gallery Aferro, “Reflections on Everyman: the Work of Jan Sawka.”

I have crossed paths with Jan Sawka three times, although only one of these times did we meet.

It was at a low moment in Polish history, the early 80s. It was in his small apartment on 58th street in Manhattan, in very cramped living quarters, with Sawka, constantly working, drawing and painting, even while the family entertained guests. In the midst of the domestic, he created his own world, responding to life’s public and private absurdities, and tragedies, with his imagination and craft. The intensity of the moment, during the weeks after the declaration of martial law in Poland, the repression of the first nationwide popular social movement in the former Soviet bloc, a labor movement of workers moving against the workers’ state, Solidarność against the Polish Peoples Republic, was very much matched by the intensity of his artistic concentration. That is what I saw in those dark days, and that is what I think we observe in this exhibit, in each of his works, in his life work.

Today, our paths cross for the third time. Fortuitously, without knowing that we met long ago when she was the child in a very adult room, Hanna Sawka asked me to present a talk that illuminated the political context of her father’s art.

Jan Sawka and I first crossed paths when the Communist order appeared to be a permanent part of the order of things, when there seemed to be two kinds of modern orders, Communist and Free, or from the other point of view, Socialist and Capitalist, Progressive and Reactionary, Soviet and American, locked in permanent competition, with nuclear weapons assuring that neither side would decisively prevail.

Here, I respond to Hanna’s request by considering the politics of Sawka’s art and the art of his politics at the time of our three encounters.

* * *

Though we may have, I don’t remember meeting Sawka in the 70s, when I first visited The Polish People’s Republic. We were very much in the same social world. I had discovered, and was systematically studying, a theater movement in Poland, Polish Student Theater, and he was the premier visual artist of these theaters. Among other things, I collected his posters. These did not only inform about the specific performances, but also depicted and extended their spirit and their relationship to art and authority, presenting the most serious challenge to the order of things, very much anticipating the logic of the Solidarity movement and the collapse of the regime, before it seemed rational to even imagine it.

It was revolutionary art with a human face.

“Revolutionary art with a human face” has had special qualities. Although the art speaks for itself apart from its political and social context, the context reveals the power of its meaning. It had a geopolitical dimension, embedded as it was in the logic of the Cold War, but its local qualities, the details of the struggle, along with the details of the art were especially important, with a power that moves beyond the circumstance of creation.

(By the way most recently one of those theaters performed here, Akademika Ruchu, and at the beginning of next year perhaps the finest of them all 8th Day Theater will be performing at my institution, The New School for Social Research.)

Two classic essays by Sawka’s contemporaries, one Polish and one Czech, illuminate the political power of this art at the moment of its creation. Adam Michnik’s “The New Evolutionism” provides the larger context, while Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” reveals the specifics of the struggle up close. Michnik’s article explains the revolutionary strategy, later called the strategy of the self-limiting revolution, or the revolution of anti-politics, Havel’s explores its phenomenology.

“The New Evolutionism” was written in 1976. It explored the means for a political transformation in the socialist bloc, noting that the revolution from below of 1956 in Hungary failed, as did the reform from above of 1968 in Czechoslovakia, proposing a gradual long cultural march, an evolution from below.

Work to take zones of autonomy, apart from the corrupted state ideological apparatus and make them better, reform them so that the logic of alternative cultural models, alternative ways of thinking and doing, are established in a delimited space, not directed toward authority, not directly challenging it, but in a stylized fashion ignoring it. Direct the art to the audience, ignore authority.

Look at the work of Sawka at that time and realize how his was a part of this new evolutionary struggle. Consider how western alternative culture shaped his sensibility and continued to influence him throughout his career, as it shared the sensibility. His work with the Grateful Dead thus reveals continuity, even as the political and cultural change contexts change. The Dead and the Deadheads were new evolutionists of sort. Turn on, tune in, drop out, has significant meaning beyond drugs.

Sawka demonstrates Michnik’s program. His work does not illustrate a social and political change. It is the change, as it depicts it. The main political meaning is not in the content of the artwork, though it has that, but it’s in the form of the art where the real significance lies. The art itself.

I saw a progression: from my Polish research and engagement in the alternative cultural world, to the democratic opposition before Solidarność, to Solidarność, above and underground, to the collapse of communism. From the works of art, graphic and theatrical, to the association around the art, and like associations not connected to art, to the collapse of an Empire, which was inconceivable before it happened. To appreciate experienced connections between the art and the politics, let’s turn to Havel.

Who is Havel? And how is he connected to the world of Sawka and Michnik?

I often explain to people who are ignorant of Polish culture and politics that Adam Michnik is the Polish Vaclav Havel. Havel is better known in the U.S.: the dissident superstar, first president of Czechoslovakia, renowned absurdist playwright and regular contributor of The New York Review of Books. But the explanation is not entirely accurate. Michnik has been an activist, public intellectual, journalist and historian. But he is not an artist. Perhaps here I should say that Havel is the Czech Michnik + Sawka, the theorist and artist of the new evolutionism, most beautifully realized in “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel was in a sense a combination of Lech Walesa, Adam Michnik and Jan Sawka, revealing a less developed oppositional world.

Nonetheless, in his essay all the multiple vocations and talents of Havel are evident. He opens by telling the story of the greengrocer who refuses to put the sign “Workers of the World, Unite!” in his shop window, highlighting the basis of the power of the Communist regime and its greatest vulnerability.

What could happen to the greengrocer? He may lose his shop. His children may not gain access to limited schooling opportunities, from pre-school to university admission. His plan to vacation on the Black Sea may become impossible. Friends might become reluctant to associate with him, perhaps even his wife. His life could fall apart. On the other hand, if he persists and if those around him support his seemingly meaningless gesture, the whole order of things could be challenged.

The issue is not that the greengrocer and those around him believe or don’t believe in the regime, but what he does in a limited public space. But what he shows. The same holds true in theater, on canvas, on the shop and factory floors.

In Sawka’s case: to understand the power of his artistry back then remember how grey the communist city was. There was little or no neon, no commercial advertising. Shop signs on the beautiful main squares of Wroclaw, Poznan, Warsaw and Krakow were blandly lettered “meat,” “shirts,” and “bread.” Spontaneity, the sociological condition of the streets, was strictly prohibited. I myself was once arrested for an unauthorized waving of a colorful flag in public. And then note Sawka’s public art and understand its import.

Not showing attachment to political absurdity, living according to one’s own principles, as Havel puts it, “living in truth,” could change everything, and it did. Living according to one’s truth, acting as if one lived in a free society, constituted freedom.

Another character in Havel’s essay is an experienced brew master, more concerned with the quality of his craft and product, than party directives and five year plans. For his commitment to craft over ideological cliché, he is demoted, as Sawka was exiled. Showing commitment to art, against ideology and cliché, Havel maintained in 1976, is the real ground of the power of the powerless.

The real power, then, is in the art against ideology, against cliché. The power is not only negative, in the saying no, but in the cultivated capacity to say yes, to show alternative commitments and ideals, to imagine and create alternatives. Not pro or anti-Communist, but a-communist, not pro or anti-capitalist but a-capitalist. Human.

Did you ever wonder why totalitarians bothered with artists such as Sawka? Why they didn’t just leave him and his idiosyncratic images alone? They were viewed and appreciated by a small minority of the public. They would have little impact on the broader population. The logic of a repressive tolerance applied, and it was no doubt utilized in Poland back then to some degree, Poland and Hungary with their reputations for being more liberal, less repressive. But when the power of the powerless was extended by the power of art, a line seems to have been crossed in Sawka’s case.

The power of showing moved from one side of the iron curtain, to the other and back, as Sawka’s career reveals. The boldness of the expression, the power of the craft spoke to actually existing liberal democratic capitalist societies, as it did to previously existing socialism.

The simple act of living in truth, in Havel’s sense, was a key to the progression of the democratic opposition in the late seventies and throughout the eighties, when Sawka and I actually met. Sawka through exile and emigration turned off the censor and directed his attention away from the authorities and toward his public, as this became the great shift in his native land, and he created works to the multiple publics, from West to East, and from East to West, to South.

While he was not a propagandist or, in the Marxist sense, an “engaged” or “organic” artist, he was politically involved and his unique independent visual vocabulary brought independent power to his more directly political work. This is how to appreciate his Solidarity poster, sponsored by the AFL-CIO, a work that shares elements with Everyman piece of this exhibit. The poster was used to raise funds in support of Solidarność in the West. This campaign was probably part of a clandestine support by the CIA of the labor movement. Something I vaguely suspected at the time, as I myself was involved in supporting the labor movement, especially after it was forced to go underground. But just because the struggle was embroiled in geo-politics, and Sawka and most democrats, including me, knew which side of the struggle we were on, the struggle involved much more than the fight between the Communists and the anti-Communists.

“The masses are in solidarity with the movement Solidarność.” “Under its banner, a better day is on the horizon.” “Solidarność is the leading light.” “Solidarność leading to a happy tomorrow.” All such clichés are not in this work. Rather there is an attractive composition, suggesting hope and solidarity, in subdued tones, gradually moving from dark to light. I see it as an anti-political political poster, a poster of the new evolutionism, revolutionary art with a human face. Hope imaginatively tempered with realism.

The poster is more subdued than one might expect in an explicitly political work, especially from an artist who is not shy to use bold primary colors in his work, to play with child like images as he confronts very difficult problems, such as he does in his monumental “My Europe.”

This is a piece that has the quality of a magnum opus. It is piece by a citizen of Europe from Poland, personally at the center of the great sufferings of his nation. It is not nationalist in any way. Rather, it is a mournful reflection on national experience on the European killing fields. I read the first post-communist minister of culture, Marek Rostworowski’s reflections on the work, as I prepared this lecture. It helped me appreciate the power of the work.

He described his encounter with Sawka’s “My Europe,” as he experienced it in Seville, Spain, as “a space conquered by the means of his banners…leaving a vivid memory of nightmare and hope.” He describes each banner, from “The Field” which mournfully depicts a nation of suffering, with Catholic in its major register, but with a strong minor Jewish key, “a huge, populated space on which three 
funeral ceremonial ribbons have fallen. Above – the 
ribbons burn with colours like prayers; below – they
 carry some charred icons of faith in One God: the Bible
- in the middle; a cross, a rosary and the Virgin with 
Christ- to the right: the tablets of the Ten Commandments and Star of David- to the left.” He moves on to a banner on Katyn, the grounds upon which the Polish intellectual elite was murdered by the Soviets, to the flag of the Home Army, the largest military resistance of Nazi occupied Europe, to flags depicting the Communist occupation and visions of the end of occupations.

Unbearably heavy experiences, confronted with the gentle touch of Sawka’s art, making the experience of his work non-didactic.

As Rostworowski put it poignantly:

Sawka has imagined all this and presented it in such a simple manner that one might be tempted to call it childish, had it not been for the studied gradation of colours which support the boldly splashed vivid colours; of lines where these colours meet, had it not been for the consciously sparing artistic expression.

Noting that the works depict “the history of a lost Polish generation – the so called “generation of Columbuses” who having survived two occupations, were discovering a new world,” he concludes by observing that:

Sawka’s childhood and young age were, from the very beginning, immersed in the zone of red colour. He returned to his country after the red zone had been torn by Solidarność, although for some time- in the fire of martial law- there were unsuccessful attempts to weld it back together. The idea of invasion and transformation contained in the seven banners and two sequences seems to refer to dramatic events for Europe and mankind in the twentieth century, of which Poland has become a symbol.

Yet, now as I encounter Sawka in this memorial exhibit, Poland is no longer at the center of the world’s attention, as it was during the days of Solidarność, during its repression and at the moment of its victory. And the memory of the political experience of those times is fading. Sawka’s work though moves beyond those times and circumstances. The work stands on its own, apart from its politics.

I think this is a consequence of his talents and accomplishment, but also of the power of the not so powerless aesthetic, which returns to the political.

This brings me to his Jerusalem Peace Monument, a beautiful and powerful piece, which hits close to home. I am struck how closely this project is informed by the ideas of Michnik and Havel, and the early art of Sawka. To be clear, the design has value beyond the politics, elegant and powerfully rooted rods come together abstractly, crowned with religious symbolism, but the politics is familiar. There is no political program, rather understanding is realized in the design and by all who may support its making and may enjoy it.

In the context of ever increasing tensions among the Abrahamic faiths, where too many believers are committed to their monotheistic belief as the true one, and in which many politicize the truth, Sawka shows an alternative, a breach, a crack in the ground, with delicate reefs of Jewish, Christian and Muslim understanding depicted.

One of the ironies of history is that the city of peace is anything but. Holy War and extreme antagonism among the faiths have been the rule, making it a hard city. Claims to Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State or the Holy City of Al Quds are not reconciled, but in the Monument they would be. In the city with sharp daily antagonism and tension, it would be an oasis, a platform for something else. It cannot create a settlement, but on its grounds a little piece of settlement is realized. This is the politics of the new evolutionism, creating an evolutionary front. It is a powerful example of the power of the not so powerless.

Susan Yelavich

Tiny Instruments Hit a Profound Chord

Last summer I was fortunate to be among the faculty of the Democracy & Diversity Institute in Wrocław, Poland, organized by Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS). Friendships were forged, ideas were tested, and disciplinary lines constructively crossed, all of which I’d been prepared for and had been looking forward to experiencing as the sole faculty member from Parsons among colleagues from the New School for Social Research.

What I hadn’t expected was that I’d develop a deep affection for the music of toy pianos. Specifically the toy pianos played by Małe Instrumenty (Small Instruments), a band started in 2006 by Paweł Romańczuk with Marcin Ożóg, Tomasz Orszulak, Jędrzej Kuziela and Maciej Bączyk.

Yes, toy pianos. Including a plastic Barbie piano, which, Paweł explained, has a very good sound, in contrast to their sole Communist-era piano called Precision whose keys emitted static.

I would never have found Paweł, much less met him, had it not been for the generosity of Agata Ganiebna, a highly respected musical and theatrical producer and friend of the Institute. She took me to what a New Yorker might call a loft, but was actually two small rooms squirreled away in a cavernous, nearly deserted building that was once an Odd Fellows Lodge, designed by Adolf Rading in 1926.

I knew Rading’s work. He was a member of the Deutsche Werkbund that had designed the housing estate where our Institute was housed and where we were living. I was, however, completely unprepared for the sounds that were being produced inside Rading’s Lodge that day. Yet, despite the incongruence of the nearly dead building and the living breathing sounds I heard, there was a fitting symmetry between Małe Instrumenty’s miniature pianos, children’s music boxes, and hand-made instruments, and Rading’s humbled work of early 20^th century modernism.

For all that, Małe Instrumenty’s sound is anything but modest. Their renditions of Chopin’s mazurkas, nocturnes, etudes, and Polonaises are extraordinarily rich and moving, variously evoking the solemnity of chimes, the clarity and lightness of bells, and the rhythmic swells of klezmer. (Play video below to hear an example of their music.)

Interestingly, when I shared their music with Nora Krug (a German-born Parsons professor of illustration), she said the Chopin CD reminded her of the sound of icicles breaking in the Black Forest. Heresy? Chopin is nothing if not Polish. In fact, it’s not the composer but the instrument she was hearing. The toy piano has a legitimate German heritage as an invention of a German named Albert Schoenhut (1848-1912). The designer of these miniature up-rights and baby grands emigrated from Wurtenberg to Philadelphia in 1866, where he established his eponymous company. (Most of Małe Instrumenty’s instruments bore his moniker.)

Małe Instrumenty is a cosmopolitan cultural phenomenon, one that embraces Wrocław’s layered (and sometimes painful) history as a city once German (Breslau) now Polish; a city that, until Hitler, boasted the third largest population of Jews in Europe; a city that will be the Cultural Capital of Europe in 2016.

Dziękuję Agata! Dziękuję Małe Instrumenty!

Paul A. Kottman

What is Shakespearean Tragedy?

An excerpt from “What is Shakespearean Tragedy?” forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy

The question “What is Shakespearean Tragedy?” can understandably prompt one to start listing distinctive features of various plays by Shakespeare — as if a successful enumeration of its characteristics would amount to an understanding of the genre….

…However, rather than approach Shakespearean tragedy as the sum-total of certain features or “facts,” or as a generic object of study, I propose that we see Shakespearean tragedy as a discrete form of art — as the birth of a distinctive art form, the same way we think of “painting on canvas” or “symphonic music” as art forms that arrived on the world stage at a particular place and time.[1] Whereas a “genre” purports to be a collection of objects that share common, taxonomically graspable features or techniques, there is no exhaustive list of features that ‘add up’ to Shakespearean tragedy — since, for a start, it is up to us to discern, decide, or debate, what will even count as features of this art form. Moreover, if Shakespearean tragedies all shared certain inherent, generic characteristics, then it would be difficult to distinguish between Macbeth and Hamlet and Othello — but of course we all know that each of these is an entirely different play; each brings to light new features or expressive possibilities for Shakespearean tragedy, helping us to better discern the art form as such, to better see its purview or expressive task. Shakespearean tragedies show what they are, as an art form, in light of one another. For the same reason, though it is unconventional to say so, we should probably regard Shakespearean tragedy not just as a finite, canonical collection of plays by William Shakespeare [Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear and so forth] but as a novel, modern artistic practice — instanced with special power in a range of works by Shakespeare, but still practicable by others afterwards. Shakespeare may have been the first, or the most successful or the most indispensable, to work in the medium of Shakespearean tragedy, but he was not the last.[2]

To see Shakespearean tragedy as art form, then, is to see it a practice that, having originated somewhere and sometime (with Shakespeare, in this instance), takes on a life of its own by generating new features, techniques and characteristics — thereby resisting any final taxonomy, at least so long as the art form remains vital as a human practice. If to delimit a “genre” is to circumscribe a domain of objects or experiences according to constitutive traits or attributes, then art forms or practices take it upon themselves to “work through,” or make sense of, their own socio-historical and material pre-conditions — as if expressing a newly discovered need for such sense-making.

All this gets me to the question that I really want to raise in this brief essay: What does the art form of Shakespearean tragedy “work through,” respond to, and make sense of?

In what follows, I will propose at least one answer to this:Shakespearean tragedy works through the loss of any “given” — nature, or God, or “fate” — that might explain human societies, histories, actions, destinies, relationships and values. Shakespeare challenges us to understand tragedies not as responding to existential facts (desire, or mortality) or historical situations (Henry V’s invasion of France, or the fate of the Roman republic), but as responding to the fact that there are no givens that fully govern our activities. At the same time, Shakespearean tragedy works through the loss of social bonds on which we depend for the meaning and worth of our lives together — showing those bonds to be, in spite of that dependence, fully dissolvable. In this way, Shakespearean tragedy helps us make sense of how we interact one another — without the help of any Archimedean standpoint, with only the interactions themselves as sources of intelligibility and meaning. In Shakespearean tragedy, our actions (must) explain themselves…. To say it all at once: Shakespearean tragedy displays our provisional self-determination as subjects in the world — while at the same time asking us to see our actions as intelligible, as somehow meaningful, as something more than the vanity of “so-and-so” doing “this-or-that.” The loss of “givens” (the death of old gods, the devaluation of our highest values) that Shakespeare “works through” does not leave us with a desperate nihilism — but rather with the sense that it is precisely this loss of “givens” that, finally, allows us to see ourselves as provisionally free in the world, and as reckoning with the implications of this new self-understanding….

NOTES

[1] Having said this, I must quickly add that I am not concerned with establishing which play is the “first” Shakespearean tragedy, any more than I would want to fix a precise date or origin for painting on canvas, or for orchestra music. Such matters are subject to debate, and we can change our minds about the particulars. The larger point is that every artistic medium emerges historically — it was not always “there” — and unfolds through a certain historical development that can be examined. Which means the point of “changing our mind” about the particulars, or dates, would be the new historical-self-understanding such a change of mind would amount to (and not just a different chronology).

Gema Santamaría and Elzbieta Matynia

Interview with an Expert on Violence

In late September the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, which I direct, arranged a talk by Anabel Hernández, a Mexican journalist and courageous writer whose book, Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords And Their Godfathers,has just been published in English by Verso. I had heard about Hernandez and her work, but I thought a better person to moderate the evening would be our doctoral student in sociology, Gema Santamaría, who works on problems of violence in Mexico. I had gotten to know Gema quite well during our Democracy & Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, where I taught a seminar called Romancing Violence. I knew that though born in Nicaragua she wanted to work on Mexico, where she grew up. I could see that she is a brilliant student and I learned that she is also an accomplished poet. So I thought that she and Anabel – who had not been at the New School before — would make a good team. We had a full house that night, and though some people had to stand on the sides of the Hirshon Suite, nobody moved. Anabel gave an engaging though disturbing presentation, analyzing the tight linkages between Mexico’s political class and its drug economy. Gema was a graceful moderator, and when necessary an on-the-spot translator. After the lecture, some of us went on talking over supper at a nearby Thai joint. Gema pulled from her bag a piece of paper and said she had brought something for me. I glanced at the page, and asked whether I could read it aloud so that Anabel could hear it.

I read Gema’s poem:

Interview with an Expert on Violence

So, tell us,

what is the wound, what is its color,

what is the color of the wound that follows

from the closed fist

from the closed anger

of the one against another

the one that is a fire,

the other that is an abyss,

the other that will

from now on

be known as “the victim.”

 

What is the fear, what is the rhythm,

what is the fear’s rhythm

is the mouth bitter,

is the tongue drier

when the fear crawls like an injured

rabbit

like a tense, intimate, trembling rabbit?

 

And the eyes?

Do they close at the blow,

do they stare at the blow,

do they stare at the nightmare

do they think in the caprice

of day and night

of darkness and light

wanting to escape it,

like the dreamer that witnesses the dream and dreams of herself saying:

“now, open your eyes.”

 

And the knees?

Is it true that they lose control,

that the bone is no longer a stone

a stone that allows to stand up,

that it fills up with water,

with tender, bloody water,

until the legs go strayed,

missing, disjointed,

organs-orphans,

the liquid substance of cowardice.

 

And the stomach?

How long does it revolve,

How long does it tremble,

how long, until it becomes

a long knot of nausea?

 

And the sound of the scream?

The sound that is born in the heat

of the knives,

in the heat of the face that faces the knives,

what does it say?

does it

say?

 

Tell us

 

What is the smell of death?

What is the weight of death?

Where do you write death?

Where do you understand death?

 

What is the name of your next article?

Leslie Kaplan

Writing Moves the Sky

First of all I would like to thank the New School, and Edith Kurzweil who invited me to this eighth William Phillips lecture and gave me the opportunity to come to the prestigious New School.

My father Harold Kaplan was a great friend of William Phillips, who published his first short story, The Mohammedans, in Partisan Review, in 1943, and later his Paris Letters, and many other pieces, and I always heard about Partisan review and William Phillips at home.

I was born in Brooklyn, in 1943, but brought up in Paris. Before the war, my father was studying French literature at the University of Chicago where he had a scholarship. He started working for the radio in 1942, in The Voice of America (La voix de l’Amérique), with André Breton and Pierre Lazareff, and afterwards was sent to Algiers, where he was when I was born.

Then, at Liberation, he decided to stay in France. He had my mother come with me, I was two years old, and he worked at the American Embassy in Paris for twelve years. My two brothers were born in Paris. I went to a French school and then to college in France, and I stayed in France after my parents left on other missions. And so I write in French, I am a French writer, of American origin, even if I have always thought, without really knowing what that meant, that underneath my French, English continued to exist.

My interest in language probably came in part from my family environment. My parents were second generation Americans, their own parents were Jews who had fled the Tsarist Empire. The journey of my grandparents, both on my father’s and my mother’s side, I found described in a book that I read as a grown up, World of Our Fathers, by Irving Howe, which was very important for me. I also discovered that my great grand uncle, Jacob Denison, was a writer in Yiddish, and had founded an orphanage in Warsaw after the First World War. He is buried with his two friends Ans-ki and Jacob Peretz, in the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, miraculously preserved. Two years ago when I went to Poland for the first time with one of my plays that was being put on there I read some verse of the Dibbouk over his tomb.

My two parents loved literature and ideas; our house was full of books, novels, poetry as well as political essays. When I was a child my father was attaché culturel and he had an important role as a go-between for American and French cultures. But the fact that I was bilingual also played a great role, being a little American in Paris, and having two languages, one for home and one for school. And there also was a lost language, Yiddish, since my mother spoke Yiddish with her mother when we visited her in the summer in New Jersey, when the family went back to the United States on “home leave.”

So the relationship between words and things, the act of naming, was not a matter of course, it was questioned. This is probably how the arbitrary character of language but also the playfulness contained in words could strike me all the more. I have told this story in a fragmentary autobiography, Mon Amérique commence en Pologne, My America Begins in Poland. The strangeness of language, of words, of meaning: but writing always seemed the thing to do, to be a matter of course.

Then, the Sixties: the movement of those years. I studied philosophy and history, passionately, and I took part in the student movement, in the movement against the war in Algeria, against the war in Vietnam, and afterwards, I was influenced by the Cultural Revolution in China, of which I knew nothing in reality. I joined the French ranks of Maoïsts because of the idea of an alliance between manual and intellectual workers. I took part in what was called the “mouvement d’établissement” and I went to work in a factory in January 1968. I lived through the May ‘68 events in an occupied factory, and I continued to work in a factory for about two years afterwards.

The experience in the factory was a radical one. It became the substance of my first book, L’excès-l’usine. And it questioned how to write. I did not want to write like Zola. I wanted the factory to appear as something astonishing, banal and at the same time surprising, shocking.

My experience at the factory put every thing into perspective. And first of all, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, language. Language, the most common of things, what men and women have, at the beginning, in common. I mean that EVERY THING could be, had to be, thought differently. Words for the most ordinary things no longer seemed to the point, effective. You work, really? You eat, really? You live, really? In order to say anything at all, first you had to invent.

You could make a speech, but that didn’t account for anything-except for the ability to make a speech. When I started to write this experience, I tried to render physical sensations: I wanted to write what was outside, but also what one had inside, in one’s head. This was in opposition with naturalism and determinism, where things and beings, are supposedly in their rightful place, correspond to their definition.

It was only afterwards that I realized how “the factory” and the world “under the sky of the factory,” questioned everything, contaminated everything. And, one had to acknowledge it, this could empty experience, make experience something empty.

Take the word pace, in French: cadence, I think of the word because I recently read an article on factories in China. What does it mean to keep the pace on the assembly line. Those words mean nothing, or almost. Becoming the pace of the assembly line would be more correct. You can also talk of an infernal pace, “No more keeping an infernal pace!” was a slogan in May 68. Alienation of experience, how a real experience becomes unreal, how language becomes false, a lie: This question belongs to everybody, which is why a naturalistic vision, where words are reduced to a social, a psychological, etc., origin, has never suited me.

This question still exists in my work today in different forms, of course: novels, theatre, poetry, essays. And it seems to me the question of the “factory” is always connected with a research both on language and on madness. Do we speak/ think/ write, do we talk to each other as if we were in a factory? Or do we do so otherwise? Is a sentence open or closed? Do we live inside language as an alienated consumer or as a free man/woman? Do we assemble our sentences together without thinking, as if we were making manufactured objects? Do we address a person or nobody at all? Do we want to crush the person we are talking to with words? Do we want to have the last word? Are we present or absent to ourselves?

And when we speak of “madness,” what are we talking about? Is it a place, a situation, a way of behaving which are “mad”? Is language mad, has language become mad? How can we fight, with what forms can we fight the attempts to make everything trivial, to promote anecdotes, clichés that are empty and aggressive, even murderous, clichés that could be the present form of the “opium of the people”?

The experience I had of psychoanalysis also was a decisive one. A passionate interest for the Unconscious has never left me, and I have always tried to find ways of writing that take the Unconscious into account. I have written a novel, The Psychoanalyst, and I have tried to work out the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature.

Psychoanalysis and literature are of course two experiences with language, with words, which take words seriously and explore them in all directions. Psychoanalysis separated from psychiatry with Freud’s discovery of the Unconscious, and with the method of free association that Freud invented: not an a priori explanation involving some ready-made knowledge about the patient, but a form of listening, available, “floating” says Freud, where something surprising, unexpected, emerges, precisely the Unconscious. In the same way literature is not made with generalities, explanations, proclamations, but with details, surprising details that can appear insignificant but which question the usual and routine ways of thinking, ready made speeches, all different forms of stupidity, of “accepted ideas” (Flaubert), all “frozen words” (Rabelais).

For a writer as for a psychoanalyst, language is alive, always addressed, even if it is “to no one,” and it has multiple levels. As a writer, I am interested in what is real, what comes as a surprise, and what questions. As I have said, I try to place myself aside from naturalism, determinism. The character is not a “case.” In my novel The Psychoanalyst, the patients are “heroes”: heroes of thinking, who confront the conflict between their desire for truth and their passion for ignorance (Lacan), like Oedipus, and like every one. The psychoanalyst is not the one who knows every thing, but a man or a woman who searches with his patient. And in the book, there is the psychoanalyst Simon Scop, and his patients, but there is also Eva, who is the second most important character, who comes from the French banlieue, the poor forgotten suburbs, and who interprets her life with the help of Kafka.

The way I see it, psychoanalysis and literature share a democratic vision of words, not a technocratic one, outside all dogma. And in this sense I agree with Nabokov who made fun of psychoanalysis, and claimed seeing no interest in a practice that consists in applying Greek myths on the genitalia of a certain number of people… And literature is not made with good feelings or good intentions. But psychoanalysis and literature aim, through the attention they pay to words each in their way, to do away with forms of alienation. That is, to make things more open, to help us be more available, more present, to the world, to encounters, to chance, as Freud says. They are both ways of practicing astonishment. Psychoanalysis and literature have in common their refusal of categories, compartments, cases.

Taking words seriously, every word, and the words of every one, is a way of asserting, and maintaining, that language is the first and primordial social link. It is a way of being heedful of drifts toward forms of totalitarianism that are always possible. Bureaucracy, situation of neglect, of “desolation” (Arendt).

But it is also a way of being heedful of the display of hollow individualism, of trivialization, of the reign of the anecdote: whereas a detail is a condensation, a flash of reality and points to a meaning, not the meaning, but a meaning, the anecdote promotes empty words, aims to occupy space for nothing, just occupy for occupying. In this sense, psychoanalysis and literature take into account the person as a singular entity, but are each in their own way, the opposite of an individualism that brandishes empty words.

And each in their own way, they have to do with art: they go with awakening, thinking, working “one by one”: a psychoanalysis is an encounter, and it is always a particular person, at a particular moment of his or her life, who encounters a work of art. They are two different forms of experiencing what is the exception, not the rule (Jean Luc Godard). Two forms of experiencing singularity, that recognize that anguish is far from being the evil that has to be done away with, as in the dream of a pill that would finish all mental suffering, but is on the contrary what makes us human, “the divine part of man” (Heitor de Macedo). Two ways which we try, as Rilke put it, to “create things out of anguish.”

So, in a sense, at the outset of my desire to write, there was something that questioned what is “normal,” what is supposed to be normal and banal, and that reveals itself as not at all normal, but on the contrary, strange, even “mad.”This double questioning, on language and on madness, continues to drive me to write.

Recently I was rereading for the millionth time Stavroguine’s confession in The Demons (The Possessed) and I noticed a detail I had never seen. It’s at the beginning of the chapter, Nicolas Stavroguine arrives in the monastery and asks to see the starets with whom he has a rendez-vous. A monk takes him there, through corridors and corridors, and this monk, who is impressed, intimidated by Stavroguine, who is a prince, the son of Varvara Petrovna, etc., chatters endlessly, asking Stavroguine all sorts of questions. Stavroguine stays silent, lost in thought, or maybe irritated by the questions. Then, writes Dostoïevski, the monk, “receiving no answer, showed himself more and more respectful.” And there, I stopped reading. “The monk, receiving no answer, showed himself more and more respectful.” In one line all condensed, Dostoïevski gives us the obsequiousness of the monk, the contemptuous indifference of Stavroguine, and the relation between the two, the link, the dynamics of the link: the cringing respect, voluntary bondage as La Boëtie put it, brought forth by absence of answer, silence.

Why am I telling you this detail? This tiny detail in the entire story of The Demons ? Well exactly because it’s a detail, a crumb, a flash of reality which I hadn’t noticed before, which can be the mark of a detail, but which, once you do notice it, reveals itself as obvious, with enormous implications. You can see the mechanics of authority fall into place, you can see them function, you can see the Super-ego, obscene and ferocious as Lacan puts it, you can see Big Brother. The detail is a condensation of reality, it is the very substance of literature. I believe it is what we learn by reading Dostoïevski (and of course many others). No ideas but in things … as said William Carlos Williams.

But if I speak to you of Dostoïevski, an author who is part of my making, it is also because reading him, though I did not formulate this right away, the reader is confronted with characters who speak all the time. Literature is a way of staging thought, the search for a point of view on the world. And with Dostoïvski, that goes through speech, dialogue and monologue.

Inside the Dostoïvskian narrative, there is always a staging of speech, a constant drama of words themselves. And this makes obvious the importance of language and speech, the dangers of a way of talking that is seductive or murderous, the possibility of empty speech. All this is always present in Dostoïevski’s novels. The question: “what are words?” is always there, at work. Its presence questions the text, the reader, the spectator.

As it is said in Hamlet :

_What are you reading my Lord?

_Words, words, words.

In this respect, the Notes from the Underground is an exemplary text. The narrator develops a long monologue where he is forever going back over his hatred and his despair. “I am a sick man… I am a mean man… I don’t even know at all what is my sickness… .” He can’t extricate himself. This first part of the story is terrifying, and light is shed on it when we read the second part of his story, which is no less terrifying.

In this second part the narrator tells of an event that took place before: he committed a murder, he sent back a very young woman, a child, to a brothel. We then understand the first part: he has done something that is irreparable, and now without a relationship to another, his life no longer has any firm footing, and he is himself under the curse of emptiness, of absence of meaning, of absurdity.

As you well know, Dostoïevski confronted the question of modernity and of anguish that goes with it, the question of “If God doesn’t exist, then all is allowed?” But, that is the point: he kept the question open, by refusing a cynical solution. Is it because he believed in God? I would rather say: because he believed in the human fact of speech, of language, in the necessity of acknowledging the other who is speaking, with whom you are speaking. Even while following the twists and turns of how one can try to deny this fact, to avoid acknowledging the other, denying him, killing him, and, first of all, precisely, paradoxically, with words.

What are words, what is language and speech, what are the grounds for a true way of speaking, a way that does not fall into emptiness: this question is not new, Aesop already said that the tongue can be the best and the worst of things.

But in our modern times it is rendered more acute by the fact that the market is more and more powerful. I will of course recall Mallarmé for whom literature was a way of restoring their meaning to words, a purer meaning, to the words of the tribe, « donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu », of preventing words from becoming « des pièces de monnaie usées qu’on se repasse en silence », worn out coins that we pass on back and forth in silence.

Our time certainly pushes this question further still, by emptying words of their meaning and by promoting what I have called a « civilization of clichés », where words have become advertising slogans and are used to sell anything and everything. Clichés, certainties, « received ideas » have of course always existed. Flaubert even made a comical Dictionary with them, in which every word, any word, can become a cliché. Flaubert begins with Abelard, Apricot, Absalom, Academy…Beneath their apparent bourgeois good-nature, and their quiet emptiness, these « received ideas » are ways of knocking out the other with peremptory statements, given as obvious facts, so called neutral, in fact very aggressive.

But in our time things go very far. Society is always threatened by the impoverishment of language, by simplification, by codes, by conventional, conformist ways of thinking. Under a “soft” appearance, this is a prescribed way thinking, it’s a way of forbidding us to think in any other way.

Thinking with “received ideas”, with “clichés” is a way of getting rid of the anguish that is part of the human condition, part of language: where there is language, there is conflict, there is certainty and uncertainty… and confronting uncertainty, taking upon oneself to deal with the infinite of words, to deal with anxiety, is always more difficult than having closed certainties.

In our world, language is often considered a simple, neutral, tool, made for communication. We erase the gap between the person who is speaking, who is stating something, and what this person is saying, the statement itself, we erase the fact that words have multiple meanings, and are always addressed. This double fact is the nature of language. What is promoted is a false idea, the notion of simple, plain, communication, that goes through or not, and if it doesn’t it’s a purely technical problem.

This is a way of seeing that comes from advertising: a smooth world, filled with living dead, with zombies. Words become products, slogans, wrapped up in cellophane. We live in a world where speech in public places is constantly degraded, where advertisement and television have an enormous impact on culture, where we face, as Serge Daney, a French critic and essayist, put it, the “marketing of the individual and loss of experience.” Talk shows, reality shows, “live” broadcast, narcissism, ours is a self-centered world, where the disclosing of little secrets without any importance, anecdotes, trivia are presented as culture.

Advertisement is a self-referring system, what advertisement advertises for, first of all, is for advertisement itself. For a world that is beautiful, good, true, genuine, sincere and authentic… and clean, a world made at the snap of a finger, with no relation at all to time or space. Our world promises something “unlimited without any commitment whatsoever”, as I read recently in an ad for a cell phone subscription: empty all-mightiness. For advertisement there are only two options: either you have the product, the object, or you don’t, the world is binary, it is divided in two… and the rest of the world equals zero, advertisement goes with a latent but total aggressiveness, it does away with the Other and others.

That is why it is urgent to question language, speech, speech in public places, how speech is treated. I will quote William Carlos Williams, in his forward to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl : “Every man is defeated, a man if he be a man is not defeated.” But then, who is this man who is not defeated?

My hero: Kafka, who wrote in his Journal (1922): “To write is to jump outside the line of the assassins.” Example of this prodigious jump: “one morning after a troubled sleep Gregor Samsa woke up changed into an enormous vermin.” Here is a jump, a jump into fiction, which we can appreciate maybe all the more if we remember that Kafka’s father had insulted his son’s great friend, the actor Löwy, who played in Yiddish, and had called him precisely “vermin”. Kafka takes this insult, this word, and with his particular genius, transforms it, makes a real insect of it, something the reader considers with dread, and, of course, pleasure.

This sentence of Kafka’s has always seemed to me to be the very definition of what writing is, and more specifically, the writing of fiction. “To write is to jump outside the line of the assassins”: the assassins, contrary to what one might believe, are those who stay in line, who follow the usual way of things, who repeat and start over again the bad life as it goes.

What do they assassinate? The possible, every thing that could begin, tear away, change. Kafka says that writing, the act of writing, is putting a distance with this usual way of things, the distance of a jump. He says, to write is to jump outside, to jump elsewhere. That implies something you can stand on, and words are that, they allow you to stop and grasp where you come from, where this world comes from, this old world of assassins. If you only say again, repeat, start over… you never extricate yourself, where is the point. Jumping is an act, an act of thought, a breaking, it’s not a simple accumulation, a linear process, you continue, you continue, and things change by themselves. No. You have to work loose, to move.

The above lecture was given at Theresa Lang Student and Community Center/Arnhold Hall on Nov. 5, 2013, in honor of the late William Phillips, editor of Partisan Review for over 60 years. After the lecture Leslie Kaplan read excerpts from her plays, which are about language, our society, and madness. You can read them here.

McKenzie Wark

How to Beat Writer's Block

These games are offered as solutions for two kinds of problems. One is writer’s block. Let’s be done with the waiting for ‘inspiration’. Let’s just get to work. All one has to overcome is one’s resistance to labor. The other problem is the opposite: our facility with writing, but always writing the same thing. Let’s be done with our habits of thought! These cures are not miracle cures. One still needs a room of one’s own. None of them are original. They are all based on classic avant-garde gambits. The wager is that the avant-gardes invented nothing, but merely discovered certain parameters to the labor of writing. They are playful parameters. The labor of writing, when it forgets its objective for a while, can become playful for a while, and in becoming playful, productive.

Arthur RIMBAUD / DERRANGMENT OF THE SENSES.

Go wild, cut loose. Be done with middle class life for a while. Don’t work. Fuck the wrong people. Get high. At the very least, get high.

Comte de LAUTRÉAMONT / DETOURNÉMENT

Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it. Take a passage, say from a writer about play. Copy it, but correct it. Ideas can improve. Copy another passage, and improve it. Erase the false idea within the copied text, and insert the corrected one.

Ray ROUSSEL / HOW I HAVE WRITTEN SEVERALLY

Take a word from a text to hand that has homophones: like sight / cite / site. Or some puns: site / sighed. Write a story or nonfiction passage that uses these terms as their narrative devices or conceptual architecture, but withhold the original homophones or puns.

Hugo BALL / RANDOMNESS ENTERS THE LANGUAGE

Take a text, maybe one you like. Cut it up into little pieces. Put the pieces in a bag. Draw the pieces out one at a time. Arrange them however you want. You can select words from the pieces or rearrange them to forma actual sentences, so long as the first choice is random.

Bob DESNOS / THE REVERIE

Read some texts. Choose carefully. Something you want in your unconscious. Find a quiet, dimly lit place. Don’t fall asleep, just half asleep. A state of reverie. In that state, dream of words, maybe the words you read earlier. Write whatever comes to you. Or speak them and record them.

André BRETON / THE EXQUISITE CORPSE

You probably know this classic, so here’s a twist. Its best with three players. Take some texts, maybe about play, or surrealism. Cut out a sentence, place it face down. Tell the others just the last word. The next player cuts out a sentence, revealing only the last word, and so on, until you have a paragraph, or a page.

Harry MATTHEWS / TWENTY LINES

Based on a remark by Stendhal, ‘twenty lines a day, genius or not’. Only in the age of the word processor, let’s speed up! Can you write twenty lines in twenty minutes? How about ten? The key is ‘genius or not’. Concentrate on making quota, think of nothing else.

George PEREC / OULIPIAN CONTRAINTS

Make it easy by making it hard! Write a paragraph without using the letter ‘e’. Oh, you managed it! Now write another. Take a sentence from a book about play. Change every noun with the one in the dictionary five entries later. Write a sentence with three words, followed by one with five, one with seven, one with nine, then go back to three, then write every sentence with odd numbers of words only. Or: make up your own constraints.

Gertrude STEIN / WORK IS WORKING

Write a sentence claiming X. Write a sentence refuting X. Write a sentence reconciling X and not-X. Write a sentence refuting the reconciliation. Write a sentence claiming X.

Sam BECKETT / LESS IS LESS

Take a paragraph. Theory writing is a good start. Replace every word with the simplest one you can. Replace words with Norman or Latinate roots with Saxon ones. And not too many. And no dependent clauses.

William BURROUGHS / THE CUT UP

Take some pages, of your writing or someone else’s. Cut the pages into four rectangles. Rearrange the rectangles. Write what you find as (more or less) consistent sentences. If not satisfied with the result, print out these new pages, cut them up and try again….

George BRECHT / ALEATORY FLUXUS

Take a pair of dice. Make each side of the dice correspond to a decision. Roll the dice, write your fate. The sides can correspond to anything. Topics to write about, flavors or argument, texts to détourn. Places in a text to cut-up. Games can be metagames. The metagame might as well be a game of chance. But unlike dada chance, this chance can have a little more structure.

Julia KRISTEVA / ABJECTION OBJECTION

Take a sentence, identify the object and subject of the sentence. Find the third term – the abject – which is excluded by the split between object / subject, but which somehow messes with the difference.

Guy DEBORD / DETOURNÉMENT REDUX

Ideas improve. The improving of ideas can improve. Take not just one but several texts from which to copy. Combine and juxtapose. Détournement may have sub-rules. Maybe the reversal of the sense of a copied sentence is not the only kind of détournement. Maybe copying both major and minor texts together might be productive, and the minor ones might contribute a particular flavor.

Kathy ACKER / PLAGIARISE YOURSELF

Write in the first person, or through a character as if that character could be you. Find some other texts written in the same first or third person. Mix in these fictional texts with your autobiographical texts. Create a self that is neither self or other. (I is another).

Sharon MESMER / FLARF

Take some texts, maybe about play. Select some words from the text. The stranger the better. Use combinations of those search terms to mine google for strange texts, things you would not otherwise know existed. Select the most interesting and use as your raw material. Any other game rules can now be applied to this material.

Ken GOLDSMITH / CONCEPTUAL WRITING

Writing could just be a practice of turning into strings of letters whatever happens. Write a sentence about each of the objects around you that includes its color and texture. Copy out the text of everything around you that has writing on it. Write down everything you overhear everyone saying around you. Maybe limit that to everything you hear or see that contains the words ‘game’ or ‘play.’

John KINSELLA / SPEED FACTORY

For two or more players. Player 1 writes exactly 300 words. Player two writes the next 300. A bit like exquisite corpse, but you can see all the past text, and instead there is a time limit. If Player 2 does not finish within the time limit, skip to next player. It is especially fun to end your 300 words in the middle of a sentence.

McKenzie WARK / WRITING METAGAMES

Make up your own rules! Combine rules from one or more game, in combination or sequence. Invent new ones. Play off the affordances of your environment or devices. But remember: process is all; intention is nothing; and product just is what it is.

 

Originally presented at the Games as Inquiry event at the Gray Center at the University of Chicago.

 

Do you have other games you have come across, or invented? Please share!

 

 

 

 

Cinzia Arruzza

The (Sad) Story of (Banksy’s) Beaver

You may not be aware that the beaver, this unlucky, little, cute rodent, has suffered a long history of oppression and exploitation. On the American continent, the beaver, a traditional source of clothing and food for native people, became soon after the arrival of the European colonizers a main object of trade in the increasingly flourishing fur trade industry. Beaver pelt even led the English and the French to a brutal commercial war that ended up with the depletion, over-exploitation and over-starvation of beavers. Nonetheless, beaver hats remained quite a fashionable piece of clothing from 1550 to 1850.

As usual, colonization and exploitation were accompanied by a symbolic misrecognition that has lasted up to the present day. You may remember, for example, Jodie Foster’s 2011 movie, The Beaver, where a hand puppet named… The Beaver (I know, sorry!) turns from a cute, friendly fetish helping the main character, Walter, to recover from his severe depression, into a sort of manipulating and cruel incubus taking over his entire life. But there have been many precedents of this cultural devaluation of beavers.

Even Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks the champion of subaltern people, wrote a little fable, “The Fable of the Beaver.” It runs like this: “The beaver, pursued by trappers who want his testicles from which medicinal drugs can be extracted, to save his life tears off his own testicles.” What?!? Translation: the Italian Socialist Party was unable to oppose a serious and effective resistance to the rise of Fascism, and its tactics amounted to a series of self-neutering mistakes.

OK, but then why, of all animals, a beaver? It is because beavers had been extinguished in Italy since the 17^th Century, as a consequence of indiscriminate and intense hunting. As a matter of fact, Gramsci’s Fable contributed to an Italian popular imagination that beavers are fundamentally stupid, idiotic animals, responsible for their own extinction.

It is in light of this long history of exploitation and symbolic misrecognition that we can better understand the sad destiny of Banksy’s little beaver. The story of Banksy’s beaver has three main phases that I will name Beaver’s Criminalization, Beaver’s Commodification, and Beaver’s Symbolic and Physical Murder.

Beaver’s Criminalization: on October 10 a little cute beaver appeared on the wall of a building in East New York. You can see it here. The stencil painting depicted the beaver intent in chewing a (actual) street sign, lying broken on the pavement. What was Banksy’s intention? A simple joke? An invitation to subversive rebellion? Or perhaps the beaver was a placeholder for Marx’s famous mole, chewing street signs instead of digging historical holes? Who knows? I am not an art critic. But for a literally minded member of the public like me, the message was clear: if street signs are down in East New York, it is the beaver’s fault!

Beaver’s Commodification: As if it were a natural process, soon after the appearance of the stencil beaver, East New York was suddenly invaded by hipsters, tourists, and tentative expropriators. On the very same day some people allegedly tried to chisel the beaver out of the wall. It was not out of love for art (or for beavers), but more likely out of love or need for money, keeping in mind that, to give an example, on September 2011 an original Banksy’s piece, Bird with Grenade, was sold for $228, 000 at Christie’s Post War and Contemporary Art Sale. Perhaps, it was in order to avoid transforming NYC into a fashionable outlet on a black Friday that Banksy anonymously sold a series of original signed canvases at $60 each in Central Park on October 13. If you are not among the few lucky buyers, you can still see the canvases here.

Anyway, some people from East New York took a more moderate position. Instead of chiseling out the beaver, they decided to charge visitors $20 to look at the rodent and take pictures. Honestly, they were absolutely right. Street art has traditionally denounced gentrification. The capitalist capacity of commodifying almost everything, however, has proved to be stronger than good intentions. Today, the presence of a Banksy’s piece on the wall of a building can very easily lead to vertiginous rent hikes, and, in general, street art presence is leading to increased gentrification. Since working class and poor people in non gentrified neighborhoods have notoriously rarely benefited from colonization by hipsters and other art-loving people, the East New York people were actually right in reclaiming at least a tiny piece of the cake. Perhaps Banksy agrees with me, as a video showing the transaction now appears on his website, together with the beaver.

Beaver’s Symbolic and Physical Murder: The poor beaver did not enjoy a long life, though. A rival unknown street-artist, who named himself Math, destroyed the beaver’s face on October 11, leaving the following message: “WE DONT NEED MORE RATS. MATH.” The disrespectful comparison of the beaver to a rat added insult to the injury, or better said: symbolic de-beaverization to physical destruction.

The moral of the fable? Even when street art struggles with its own contradictions and with those of NYC, the heart of global art commodification, we can be certain that the beaver will be the ultimate victim.

Virag Molnar

Writing on the Wall: Letters from New York to Berlin

One day I decide to walk down from Penn Station, where I get off the train, to my office at Union Square, determined to soak in all the text that I can see on the streets. The distance I need to cover is about twenty blocks, and I quickly realize that I will not be able to keep up the standard New York walking pace if I am serious about doing this; there is just way too much text to take notice of. First, I have to cut through Koreatown on 32^nd street, a particularly dense section of the city that is bewildering when it comes to the pervasiveness of written signs. I start to heavily filter out the onslaught of textual information, as the majority of the signs are printed in a Korean calligraphy that I find aesthetically intriguing but impossible to understand. I focus instead on the many bilingual signs that give away the mishmash of activities taking place in the area: special offers for eyelash extensions, unlocking cell phones, countless ads for hair and nail salons, acupuncture and holistic healing treatments, karaoke bars with parlors that can be rented for private parties, and the menus of Korean grill houses and mandoo joints where photos of the dishes help to decipher the Korean text. I am not fooled by fancy French names like Tous Les Jours that mimic French patisseries but are truly Korean establishments serving an almost exclusively Korean clientele. As a seasoned urban explorer I also search for more ephemeral and informal signs on lamp posts and electric junction boxes to find offers for English lessons and stickers with enigmatic tags while walking by the typical handwritten cardboard sign of a homeless woman curled up on the sidewalk asking passers-by for change.

As I turn south on Fifth Avenue, there is a temporary relief from the cornucopia of signs and makeshift advertisements for exotic ethnic businesses. The character of signage changes dramatically: it becomes larger, sparser, and more professional. The simple white-green color scheme of New York street name signs and the signature typographic design of the subway entrances dominate this section of my journey. But as I look over onto Broadway I also see the fading prints of old, by now defunct companies painted on the vast brick facades of warehouses that used to be part of the garment district but today mark a nondescript area that functions as a hub for an informal market in cheap jewelry, knockoffs, and fake designer items. Turning on Broadway at 23 ^rd street, I notice that the gigantic mural-like advertisements for recent blockbuster movies or national chains like JC Penney, which used to be hand painted with amazing precision by so-called “walldogs”, a peculiarly New York occupation, are now being increasingly replaced by large format, digitally screen-printed, mass produced billboard advertisements.

I am mentally exhausted and saturated with the myriad of messages that I strive to record and internalize by the time I reach my final destination on Union Square. This dizzy state reminds me of the pertinent observation made by the ingenious German sociologist, Georg Simmel exactly 110 years ago in his famous essay on the Metropolis and Mental Life. He suggested that the ability to develop a blasé attitude – i.e., to screen out and ignore the overflow of impulses that are produced by an intense urban environment – becomes an indispensable survival skill in a large city. And indeed, on a routine day I only notice a fraction of the “text messages” I am bombarded with in the city: either the ones that stand out due to their originality or surprise effect, or those that I find reassuring by virtue of their everyday familiarity. This is, of course, a commonplace fact to all those, such as advertisers or graffiti writers, whose expertise lies in the strategic placing of signs and texts in the urban environment.

In every city we are confronted with some mixture of commercial, political, and personal messages as we go about our daily business. Nevertheless, the particular combination of genres in specific neighborhoods, the relative weight of the commercial to the political and personal, the style and typography, the centrality and visibility, or the types of surfaces and urban structures that carry the text are always emblematic of individual cities.

In Berlin, for instance, political texts of all sorts, including old-fashioned anti-capitalist slogans, expressions of solidarity with anti-government demonstrators in far-away Istanbul, or simple stickers that try to deter tourists from particular neighborhoods (e.g., the “Berlin doesn’t like U” campaign in Kreuzberg) are still more ubiquitous and visible than in other cities. Similarly, there are entire genres of signage that remain prevalent in Berlin that have nearly vanished from other cities. Among these, the most typically Berlin-style writings on the wall are the ones that are painted in huge, monochrome, square-shaped letters in the uppermost section of expansive, empty facades, ensuring supreme visibility from great distances. As I regularly walked by one on Schönhauser Allee that read: “Diese Stadt ist aufgekauft” (this city is bought out), I always wondered how the text was actually applied to the wall. I was finally let in on the secret after watching a recent documentary, “Berlin spricht Wände”, produced by the East Cross Projects, namely by Markus Muthig (aka Emus Primus). Here it is revealed how the text is painted with rake-like brushes and real paint (white or black) letter by letter and upside down from the roof of the building.

 

 

Contemporary versions of the so-called “Sponti-graffiti” or “Sponti- sayings” – short, snappy, at times political, at times melancholic slogans, sprayed over walls, gates, bridges, or overpasses – also remain rampant across the city in Berlin while they have become rare to find in other cities. They still have surprising traction and symbolic power despite their simplicity and the overcrowding of the city’s visual space following the explosion of street art during the past decade. I certainly continue to be haunted by one that I spotted on an overpass on my frequent trips to the Open Walls Gallery in Stattbad Wedding, just a stone’s throw from the Wedding S-Bahn station. It was a funny-sinister call to “Tanz den Untergang mit mir” (Dance [into] the downfall with me) with a smiley to round off the statement.

The origins of Sponti-slogans can be traced back to the various student movements of the 1960s and the consequent rise of the Sponti-movement throughout the 1970s and 80s which tried to break with traditional forms of (Marxist) protest advocating spontaneous, ironic, site-specific urban interventions instead. Many Sponti-sayings were originally coined by provocatively and humorously altering well-known proverbs and expressions resulting in slogans like “Liberté, Egalité, Pfefferminztee” or “Auf deutschem Boden darf nie wieder ein Joint ausgehen” (“No joint should ever be put out again on German soil”) which was a malapropism for the widely used political slogan “Von deutschem Boden darf nie wieder ein Krieg ausgehen” (“No war should start again on German soil”). Sponti-sayings were disseminated not merely through mainstream media but also through the subversive medium of graffiti spread over the walls of buildings or even public toilets. Graffiti was indeed seen as an important tool to reclaim the city by “overwriting” its dominant text.

The Spontis had a lot in common with other contemporary avant-garde formations, most importantly with the Situationist International (SI) that was founded in 1957 and had close intellectual ties to French surrealism. Urban space was central to the social transformative aspirations of SI while urban interventions were integral to its tactical repertoire, in part owing to the influence of the work and personality of Henri Lefebvre, the most important figure of postwar French urban theory. Artists associated with SI were to “create situations” that critically transformed everyday life through constructing unexpected encounters by using strategies like dérive (drift) and détournement (diversion, semantic shift) and by upholding urban play as a free and creative activity. Examples for transformative situations included equipping street lamps with switches so that people can adjust the lightening as they wish, abolishing museums and distributing their masterpieces to Parisian bars, turning prisons into tourist destinations, and holding a monthly lottery in which a visitor could win a real prison sentence, or removing all information about departures (destinations, timetables) at train stations to facilitate dérive.

In fact, the Spontis and like-minded groups such as the West-Berlin-based Spassguerilla, which most closely followed in the spirit of SI in employing humor and irony as means of social critique, were often accused of being too frivolous and unserious by the more traditional protest movements. The explicit political content of Sponti graffiti has waned even further over the decades following the turbulent sixties, parallel with how it has become an established genre of urban popular culture.

At the same time, from the turn of the millennium there has been a sudden renaissance in urban interventionism, often referred to by the broad umbrella terms of street art or urban art. These labels are used to denote a very heterogeneous mix of practitioners, genres, techniques and more elaborate artistic agendas (or lack thereof). They include a wide range of subversive art practices and reinterpreted techniques from post-graffiti stencil art, wheatpasting, sticker art, redesign of street signs, guerilla knitting, flash mobs, street installations, culture jamming, subvertising to site-specific theater which all typically involve the surprising and interactive reframing of public spaces. And even though many of the active practitioners in this diffuse field of cultural production feel deeply ambivalent about the labels of “street art” and “urban art” that are indiscriminately attached to them, they all seem to be united in their effort to engage critically with cities and the spatialities of everyday urban experience. They tend to be less concerned with rallying around specific political issues than with intervening in urban spaces so as to question, refashion and contest prevailing norms and ideologies such as commercialization or gentrification, and to create new meanings, experiences, relationships and situations. (See Website of street artist, sp38)

The work of BRONCO in Berlin offers a distinctive example of this new brand of urban interventionism: one that also helps to revisit the power of text in urban communication in a time when interventionist practices are dominated first and foremost by the use of strong visual imagery or diverse modes of performance. And indeed, I came across BRONCO not by chance but because I was in search of forms of interventions in Berlin that used text as their primary raw material. I became interested in this genre after having discovered the work of the “Two-Tailed Dog Party” (Kétfarkú kutya p árt), which is the alter ego of a Hungarian urban artist and public provocateur active in the streets of Budapest. The Two-Tailed Dog Party turned to the most common tropes of everyday urban communication, including public notices, informal classified ads for small businesses, missing dog and cat signs and subverted them with the simple power of rewording to caricature the anomie, absurdity, and farce of contemporary Hungarian society and politics.

While BRONCO’s work is less intentionally political, it still attests to the intense and inventive use of text and language in European strands of urban interventionism. For instance, “Kapitulismus: Streetart is the gel in the hairdo of capitulism” can be seen as an homage to classic Sponti-sayings, showing how the spirit of Sponti lives on inspiring new forms of linguistic creativity and how it resonates with recent developments in the contemporary urban public sphere. In a similar vein, many of BRONCO’s texts reflect critically on today’s pervasive popular media culture and industry. Some, like the Shakira piece exposes the uncanny sexual overcharge of our uninhibited popular media flow; others such as the Heidi Klum cycle highlight the obnoxious idiocy of mediatized celebrity culture. By contrast, some draw attention to the poetic qualities embedded in iconic popular cultural productions like Star Wars, by taking Darth Vader’s wisdom about the order of the galaxy out of its original context and transposing it onto the walls of Berlin buildings. There are also recurring examples of ambivalent and (self-)ironic commentary on contemporary urban art itself. And some of the texts are just sheer funny. Compressed in each of them we can detect a story of a feeling, a mood, an experience. And they can create an epiphany or a moment of light-hearted fun for the unsuspecting city dweller who encounters them by accident.

The visual simplicity of the BRONCO posters is misleading. It is carefully calculated by ingeniously mixing distinctive genres and techniques: the linguistic style of Sponti on a wheatpaste poster rather than sprayed on the wall, a minimalist but eye-catching color coding and typography, and the keen eye of the graffiti writer that always seeks out the best spot in a given urban environment. It is through this effective combination that BRONCO’s “handwriting” stands out from the sea of urban text and grabs the attention of the idle passers-by, even after the posters slowly start peeling off the walls.

When Willi Hau published the first extensive collection of Sponti-sayings in 1981 under the title “Ich geh kaputt, gehst Du mit?”, nobody thought that the volume would go on to become an instant bestseller. Its resounding success probably owed to the fact that it captured and condensed the free spirit of youth culture of the times. Hence, I am curious to see how readers and the broader public will react to the works of BRONCO collected from the streets of Berlin and other German cities in this nice little volume.

Introduction to BRONCO: Werkverzeihnis 2006-2012, Berlin: Possible books (forthcoming).

Vince Carducci

Aesthetic Community in Detroit

In the Huffington Post, author and community organizer Yusef Bunchy Shakur and co-author Jenny Lee write: “Detroit is modeling life after capitalism.” One of the ways this is happening is through the work of artists who are helping to envision what that life might look like. These artists are constructing what the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere calls an “aesthetic community.”

The aesthetic community of Detroit is more than simply a collection of artists and other creative types working in the same location. It’s a community of sense, as Ranciere expresses it, which operates on three levels.

The three senses of aesthetic community

The first level of aesthetic community is a certain combination of sense data — materials, forms, spaces, etc. — that constitute the work. In particular in Detroit, this often consists of using recycled castoff materials, adopting makeshift techniques for fashioning them into artistic expressions, and doing so in locations that have been abandoned or otherwise marked by neglect. The notion of aesthetic community at this level comprises what Ranciere terms a “regime of conjunction,” that is, a bringing together of disparate elements into a meaningful whole.

The second level opens up a tension between this regime of conjunction and what Ranciere terms the “regime of disjunction.” The latter can be understood as the way the work points to that which is absent, specifically in the case of Detroit the sense of community dislocated as a result of the ravages of capitalism, the lack that registers the social, economic, and political deracination whose residue is emphatically apparent in the postindustrial wasteland of Detroit.

This aspect of aesthetic community is not the same as what another French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, terms the “inoperative community,” the longing for the original idea of community that was lost or broken in the transition to modernity, the dialectic of what sociologists term Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. That’s about Romantic nostalgia, the province essentially of so-called “ruin porn.” Instead, it’s what enables the third level of aesthetic community to come into play.

The third level of aesthetic community intertwines the “being together” of the first level with the “being apart” of the second level to produce a new sense of community, in the present and in its potentiality. It’s a recognition of what is, coupled with a prospect of what may be to come. It’s a sensibility, according Ranciere, which aesthetics shares with politics.

Some aspects of aesthetic community in Detroit

The Heidelberg Project

Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project has been extensively written about. Its significance as an expression of aesthetic community has been less remarked upon. As is well known, Guyton’s project reclaims a largely abandoned two-block area in a neighborhood on the city’s east side. Its primary materials are castoffs the artist typically retrieves from around the city. One of the elements, the polka dot, festoons buildings and the street, conjoining elements of a broken urban environment into an aesthetic whole. Other aspects point to the second level of Ranciere’s concept, for example, the flat cutout images of New York taxis spread around the project, serving the needs of a public that isn’t there but could be if the environment were different.

Over the 25 years of its existence, the Heidelberg Project has moved from being simply an art environment to a community activity and education space. Kids shoot hoops at the basketball net set up in the center of the street. A regular schedule of events is maintained, bringing people together under a  multicultural umbrella. The 2011 Summer Solstice celebration featured demonstrations of Brazilian capoeria, music, dancing, and food. A gathering later in the summer featured a spoken-word performance event and concert of funk, hip-hop, and electronic music. The Heidelberg Project also has a library and recently began an endeavor to promote local ecological and social sustainability.

The City of Detroit government has had an ambivalent relationship with the Heidelberg Project over the last 25 years, including bulldozing over sections of it on two occasions, only to see it rebuilt and expanded each time.These police actions and their ultimate futility point to a political aspect of the Heidelberg Project. Again, Ranciere provides insight into the discussion.

For Ranciere, “the essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space.” Its essence, he writes in “Ten Theses on Politics,” is to make manifest the disjuncture between the state as a site of power and politics as a field of action — a field Ranciere calls “democracy,” the space created of, by, and for the rule of the people and their claim to legitimacy, regardless of station. And so it is that the politics of aesthetic community are on view on Heidelberg Street.

Detroit Soup

Another example is the Detroit Soup project founded by artist Kate Daughdrill and musician Jessica Hernandez. Detroit Soup is a monthly dinner-fundraiser for creative projects happening in Detroit. It takes place in a donated loft above a bakery in Mexicantown on the city’s southwest side.  Attendees make a $5 contribution and share a meal made by volunteers. Artists and other individuals present creative projects, which are then voted on by the group. The proposal with the most votes gets the evening’s proceeds. Grantees usually return at a later date to present the results of their completed projects. The funding amounts are small, but the process entirely grassroots.

During the course of the meeting, other activities take place. The most important is bringing various creative communities into contact with one another, a process of transforming aesthetic community as an idea into a democratic community in fact. What’s more, similar fundraising initiatives have spread throughout the city, providing additional nodes in the social network and strengthening the mesh of interrelationships among cultural producers in the city.

Design 99

A group that takes a somewhat different tack is Design 99, the collaborative team of architect Gina Reichert and artist Mitch Cope. Design 99 was originally founded in 2007 as a design studio in a storefront now occupied by the community art space Public Pool. In 2008, the team began developing The Power House, which takes a modest wood-frame former drug house, redeemed from bank foreclosure for $1900, as the site for re-envisioning what was once a working-class neighborhood that in recent years had been devastated by disinvestment. The designation “Power House” has two connotations: as an experiment in energy self-sufficiency through its use of sustainable solar and wind technology, and as a dream space of aesthetic community, specifically, as a model for democratic action in Ranciere’s sense.

Not long after renovations began, neighborhood residents began to gather around, some taking part in the work and others simply watching and discussing the proceedings. Growing awareness of the project locally and internationally enabled the team to acquire additional properties in the neighborhood, and in 2009, Reichert and Cope founded Power House Productions, a nonprofit organization dedicated to managing a growing number of projects in the area. These include five houses currently undergoing renovations, several community gardens, back alley garbage pickup, and neighborhood watch programs. Future plans call for the development of formalized artist’s residencies, urban planning workshops, and facilities for various forms of cultural production.

Clearing a Path to the Future: Garbage Totem no. 1, 2011, by Design 99 envisions back alley clean-up as art (below).

 

Projects are also being undertaken in other parts of the city, one such being Talking Fence in the blighted Brightmoor neighborhood on the city’s northwest side, funded by Community + Public Art Detroit (CPAD), a program administered by College for Creative Studies (CCS). The 150-foot long structure runs around a residential street corner culminating in an archway that opens to a spiral seating area. The project plan is inspired by the “three sisters” method of agriculture used by Native Americans in which squash, beans, and maize are planted alongside one another. (The maize provides a structure for the beans to climb, the beans provide nitrogen to nourish the other two plants, and the squash spreads on the ground to suppress weed growth and serve as “living mulch.”) Talking Fence creates a space for collecting and telling stories, providing a venue for neighborhood elders to pass down local history to the younger generation. The construction was undertaken as a youth education project in collaboration with a teacher and students at a nearby high school. The project plan factored community participation as essential to its realization. This expression of aesthetic community is an example of the art of the common, that is, art that exists in its own space between the “certified” public sphere (what Ranciere understands as the dominion of the state) and the officially occluded private sphere. It constitutes an opening for community expression at the intersection of aesthetics and politics.

Edible Hut

One of the newest projects in the city is the Edible Hut by Mira Burack and Kate Daughdrill, funded by a $40,000 CPAD grant. Edible Hut combines elements of an outdoor sculpture, a neighborhood shelter, and a garden. It is being built by a team of artists, architects, community members, youth from the neighborhood, and teachers and students from the Nsoroma Institute, an African-centered K-8 learning community, and CCS. The structure is to be constructed in the Osborn neighborhood in northeast Detroit. Like Talking Fence, Edible Hut is intended to create a space of identity and inclusion, things Ranciere has identified as political aspects of aesthetic community. Moreover, it is a place for physical and spiritual sustenance beyond the pale of market exchange.

Envisioning a life after capital

Shakur and Lee’s HuffPost Detroit blog entry is an open letter to the Occupy movement. “Detroit has moved beyond protest,” they write. It has done so, they go on to say:

A version of this post appeared in Motown Review of Art.

Michael D. Hall

Snyder and Orr Suckerpunch the Arts in Michigan

In a nifty move right out of the Reagan Revolution playbook, the governor of Michigan and his hand picked bankruptcy fixer finally revealed their plan for monetizing the art collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The plan is brilliant in its simplicity and in its political nuance.

After months of hinting that the art in the museum was “on the table” for a liquidation that would generate cash to offset Detroit’s many debt obligations, the lords of the bankruptcy relented and “saved” the museum. Their idea basically runs like this: Art is worth money (they got an appraisal to prove it). People who like art have money. Thus, why not present the museum with a bill that would equate to the appraised value of its precious art and let the museum tap its rich friends across America for contributions that would pay the tab and keep the paintings on the Institute’s walls.

How perfect! How painless! How noble! This is the ideal “public/private partnership” we are always hearing about! In short, since elites like art and since the common working folk of the city are seeing their pensions cut, why not let the elites pony up for the city and the State in the interest of the “good of the many.” State to the museum: “You ‘Culture Vultures’ go have a bake sale – or whatever you need to do – and bring us back the ransom payment as specified. Thank you.”

The Snyder/Orr plan is the perfect product of the anti-culture, anti-education, anti-intellectual tone of contemporary American political discourse. As an artist and an educator, I recognize (and fear) the messaging in the “museum rescue” scheme that has been put forward in Michigan. My view of the plan contends that it is totally predicated on the belief that the public has no stake whatsoever in the art at the museum – or in the museum, itself, as a “public institution.” This seems curious in light of the fact that the three counties surrounding the museum recently voted in favor of voluntarily taxing themselves to provide substantial, ongoing financial support for the Institute – support that had been systematically withdrawn by several decades of art-hostile governors and legislatures in the state capital.

The political embrace of the arts that fired the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts in the early 1960s, has dramatically eroded and is presently at a new low. Reagan era antagonism toward public education and the arts now has a permanent face in our contemporary political conversation. “Culture” and the humanities have become the targets of a class envy that has been skillfully manipulated to fuel the anger component of the new American populism. A business driven consumer culture does not need art and there is a concerted effort afoot to rile up Detroit’s public against it. The drumbeat has been incessant: “Art or pensions – but you can’t have both!”

So the idea of “spinning off” the museum to a rich elite that can pamper itself with luxuries and baubles in gold frames is a perfect fix for the Motor City. Curiously, I don’t remember anybody suggesting that because Jay Leno is rich and likes cars, that he (instead of the government) should have bailed out G.M. Oh, yes, I forgot, that was about “jobs.”

The question, “who needs Picasso?” remains unanswered in the newly revealed Detroit bankruptcy plan. But one thing is sure, the governor and his team of practical problem solvers have sent a message that translates directly into: “Let them eat Dancing With The Stars!”