Posted on August 7th, 2011 in musings and tagged democracy, leadership, politics
Wandering through the archives of this blog, I found a post I wrote just a few days after Obama was elected in November of 2008. I recognized in it the feeling of momentousness with respect to the election of Obama, but what I had forgotten was the sharpness of my skepticism and frustration around American politics. Not surprising, of course, given how spectacularly bitter that 2008 campaign season was—and here we are again at the beginning of the next one. At that time I wrote:
Apparently, I sober up pretty quick, because, while Obama’s achievement is impressive, it must be understood within the context of a demonstrably corrupt and increasingly militarized and corporatized neoliberal political system. Yes, Obama won — and I may take pleasure at that because I support the winning side this time — but he won in no small part because of his superior gamesmanship, by playing the game better than his opponents. The rules of this political and electoral game have absolutely not changed. A more productive “hope” we might have now is that under this new leadership there might arise the possibility to change the nature of the American political system. Will Obama work to change the rules of the game now that he has been elected? Will the Clintonites with whom he is apparently surrounding himself change the rules? Will they change the rules (as Bush did) to consolidate and secure power, or to distribute power? Emerging from the hazy warmth of the election, I ask: With this incredibly significant democratic event, how do we leverage this slight shift towards the Center-Left to do the work that needs to be done in order to (re)build a civil society where economic and social justice extend to all of our fellow citizens? How can we work to open up authentic spaces for participation, discourse, and difference?
2 plus years on, in the putrid wake of the recent debt-ceiling debacle, there’s not much to feel optimistic about when it comes to government and its so-called leadership around the really pressing, urgent problems we face. The dysfunction is structural, embedded in the fabric of our political culture and possibly in the very strain of “representative” democracy that is our system of governance. The current political paradigm is one of extreme polemics and banal partisanship, a context that prohibits politicians (with few exceptions) from creatively addressing any of these systematic problems. Understanding our current political situation in terms of paradigms is useful because, as Thomas Kuhn has so aptly pointed out in the history of science, the dominant paradigm constitutes the frame through which we view (and subsequently make) the world. It is only through a profound shift in the dominant paradigm that truly new approaches and methods can be developed—that is, entirely new worldviews which might completely recalibrate our relationship to the world and each other.
We heard much in last few weeks about the “leadership” of the respective parties within congress, and Obama and his administration count among that “leadership” cadre as well. Sometimes the term was used descriptively to refer to the senior members of the Senate or the House; sometimes it was used pejoratively as jibe to force the other side live up to what is implied by the designation. Regardless, the more I heard about—and from—the “leadership,” the more hollow it sounded. Not only are these political actors constrained by the current, death-embracing political paradigm, but they are also lacking so many qualities that might lead to innovative approaches to our most urgent problems: empathy, humility, an understanding of genuine collaboration, ecosystem awareness, critical consciousness, a willingness to fail productively (and on and on perhaps). In a recent interview, Otto Scharmer of Theory U fame (I borrow “ecosystem awareness” from him) has this to say about leadership:
Today, if you talk with leadership practitioners, everyone gives you the same thing—which is change and institutional transformation. Everyone. What is that? If you unpack that, what is the nature of change? Well, it is transforming consciousness. Because change essentially is helping people to see the bigger picture, to see that they are part of a bigger picture. You level people up from a more narrow, egocentric perspective to a perspective where you take into account the views of other stakeholders, and maybe even of the larger ecosystem that you are a part of. So, real change practitioners, institutional leaders today all deal with consciousness. You deal with the transformation of who man is in consciousness. That’s what change work is about.
It’s possible that government may yet have a role to play in such transformation—but it’s so hard to see on the macro level, within the monolith that is the American national political system where brute force and gamesmanship (theatrical or not) make up the modus operandi. The change work that Scharmer describes, if it is to be meaningful, will have a profound practical impact on people’s lives, but it will also dwell in the realm of consciousness where the first steps toward a paradigm shift must occur.
Posted on August 21st, 2010 in musings and tagged action, art, curating, manifesta8, theory
We were confronted by a loss of faith, a lack of meaning in things that we did, that we invested all of this time and energy and resources into. We felt that art was always instrumentalized to further the agendas of others. We felt trapped, centripetally pulled into a cyclical space of crisis, anger, and confusion. We kept spinning around and around…
Behind every corner, in every headline, underlying every panel discussion and infused in every officially important art exhibition, a crisis lurked. Look out! Duck! Stay sharp! You better think fast and deal. Put out that fire, or be consumed by the flames of this or that impending sociopolitical Moloch. The curatorial statement should be approximately 1500 words in length.
It made us angry. Everything’s so fucked up. There’s no way out. After all the posts-this and -that we’re left with the same old totalizing hegemony, the monolith of neoliberalism. Always banging our heads against it, doing the dance, going through the motions of being “critical.” We asked the “right” questions of the “right” people and they gave us the “right” answers. Impeccable performances every time. The opening was a ripping party.
We were confused. It didn’t seem to get us anywhere — the right questions and the right answers. Nothing changed. Same old criticality, different venue. We couldn’t get organized, couldn’t get clear, no time to reflect, to strategize…
Meantime, we had another crisis to deal with. Back at it. Where’s the thing this time? Istanbul? Berlin? Sao Paolo? See you next year at the fair. Did ya hear? The ultra-nationalists won another handful of seats in Parliament. Or was it the Congress? Europe’s fucked, man. These guys just hate immigrants. There’s an Egyptian artist I saw at the last one — made this project where he reimagined some department store chain as an Arab souq. No shit. We should propose a project about that… I know some artists from South Africa that live between New York and Brussels.
Stilled pissed off. That exhibition of political art got panned in the critical journals. The popular press ignored it. The Right continued to dominate the debate with racist diatribes. The Left shouted weak neoliberal platitudes bathed in the worn rhetoric of socialism. The next day another dozen exhibition announcements came through E-FLUX, all variations on the same theme. Same old criticality, different venues. What are we doing? Career’s going great, though. See the news about the earthquake in Haiti? I saw this artist from Haiti in the last biennale…
Posted on May 22nd, 2010 in musings and tagged action mill, anthropology, research, theory, value
‘Value’ is one of those terms—like ‘community’ and ‘sustainability’—that I feel I hear more and more in our contemporary lexicon, and as a term that is used often enough and in several different contexts, its invocation is somewhat vague and its meaning even less clear. But like ‘community’ and ‘sustainability’ and any number of other fashionable terms we might come across in political speeches or keynote addresses or advertisements, it is this lack of definition that makes the word ‘value’ and its attendant concept all the more compelling as a subject for consideration. For example (drawn from my experience), we in The Action Mill, the design studio I work with, describe earnestly the value that we provide to our clients and partners (and even the more amorphous public good) through the work that we do. This comes in part from the general feeling that 1) we are doing important work that pushes progressive social change and promotes nonviolent strategy, and 2) our work can be measured in terms of things like maximization of existing resources, earned (that is, free) media from compelling public actions, and the production of knowledge and social capital. Of course, there is also a point at which all of this ‘value’ has to be reified in monetary terms: we are a business and we charge fees for our services. It is in this last point—the price tag, to be gauche—where the questions around value arise. What determines value? Who determines value? How is value mediated or transferred? What do we talk about when we talk about value?
We won’t be so surprised to discover that there is no aspect of life that is not touched by such questions about value. What I mean is that once the urgency of such questions about value was pointed out to me, then the only surprise I felt was that of the “no shit” variety. In reading David Graeber‘s Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (2004), I’ve begun to understand how a solid theory of value is essential to penetrating so many pressing sociopolitical, cultural, and economical conditions. As Graeber notes, anthropologists have not been very successful in developing such a theory of value—which is why he takes up the task here—but they do seem best equipped to do so. (We certainly can’t allow the economists to have the final say about value!) Anthropology is a curious field with a curious history filled with curious people studying even more curious peoples doing very curious things. The theory and the jargon are dense, but what comes through with a bit of laborious study are many incredible insights that are obviously about the practices of traditional peoples but also importantly about how we might both understand ourselves (first world westerners) and subsequently imagine other ways of being in the world that deviate from our dominant ideologies and paradigms. Hence, Graeber reviews the literature on how key anthropologists and social theorists have discussed value in order to work toward his own theory.
I’m working my way through the text. I’ve got a ways to go. I’m doubling back and rereading a lot. So this brief post is a placeholder for more focused future writing where I can dig in and make more salient connections to other issues and projects I’m working on (e.g. what is the value in producing a large, expensive international biennial exhibition of contemporary art?!). The most basic definition the book begins with is that social theory has dealt with three different conceptions of value that converge in our present understanding:
1. “values” in the sociological sense: conceptions of what is ultimately good, proper, or desirable in human life
2. “value” in the economic sense: the degree to which objects are desired, particularly, as measured by how much others are willing to give up to get them
3. “value” in the linguistic sense, which goes back to the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1966), and might most simply be glossed as “meaningful difference” (pp. 1-2)
When we talk about value, as in my example above, generally all of these conceptions factor into the meaning of the term. It is Graeber’s task to chart these conceptions and their convergence in what ultimately is a very politically engaged project. (His commitment to theorizing and practicing a radical politics from an anarchist perspective is clear.) There are some real lucid gems in Greaber’s writing. In closing, I’ll drop two adjacent passages here:
The ultimate stakes of politics, according to Turner, is not even the struggle to appropriate value; it is the struggle to establish what value is. Similarly, the ultimate freedom is not the freedom to create or accumulate value, but the freedom to decide (collectively or individually) what it is that make life worth living. In the end, then, politics is about the meaning of life. Any such project of constructing meanings necessarily involves imagining totalities (since this is the stuff of meaning), even if no such project can ever be completely translated into reality — reality being, by definition, what which is always more complicated than any construction we can put on it.
Any notion of freedom, whether it’s the more individualistic vision of creative consumption, or the notion of free cultural creativity and decentering I have been trying to develop here, demands both resistance against the imposition of any totalizing view of what society or value must be like, but also recognition that some kind of regulating mechanism will have to exist, and therefore, calls for serious thought about what sort will best ensure people are, in fact, free to conceive of value in whatever form they wish. If one does not, at least in the present day and age, one is simply going to end up reproducing the logic of the market without acknowledging it. And if we are going to try to think seriously about alternatives to the vision of “freedom” currently being presented to us—one in which nation-states serve primarily as protectors of corporate property, unelected international institutions regulate an otherwise unbridled “free market” mainly to protect the interests of financiers, and personal freedom becomes limited to personal consumption choices—we had best stop thinking that these matters are going to take care of themselves and start thinking of what a more viable and hopefully less coercive regulating mechanism might actually be like. (pp. 88-89)
Posted on January 8th, 2010 in musings and tagged activism, art, philadelphia, taz, thinktank
Dilemmas—bona fide dilemmas—are tough. They present difficult decisions with less than ideal alternative choices to be made. Thinking about a potential dilemma in the making earlier today, I went back to a text I had written a few years ago for a Think Tank project that addressed another perceived dilemma. “The Insurmountable Dilemma of a Rooted Practice” was written and then read as part of a performance that I did with four other Directors at Artivistic in Montreal in October 2007. I have not previously made the text available, so I’ve decided to publish it here now. Past writings serve as a marker of a specific frame of mind—spatial, temporal, political, intellectual—and that is evident to me in this example. In some ways my thinking has evolved, but in large part the assertions and questions are still relevant for me.
The Insurmountable Dilemma of a Rooted Practice
1.
In early July of 2006, at the invitation of the Director of the Department for the Investigation of the Unmentionable, four individuals gathered at the corner of Coral and Hagert Streets in the Kensington section of Philadelphia—on the sidewalk, with lawn chairs, looking professional. I was there because I was one of them. I am one of them. They, or we—really, I and you—are the Think Tank that has yet to be named. I am the Director of the Department for the Investigation of Meaning. On the sidewalk in lawn chairs looking professional, we held the first Publicly Held Private Meeting.
As a matter of origins and motivations and ontological inquiries—as a provisional history of things that probably are not, nor never will be, historical—we might ask ourselves a few fundamental questions: Where were we? Why were we there? What did we see? What did we do? Or, rather, as a dialectical tactic, we might ask ourselves: Where were we not, and why were we not somewhere else? What did we not see, and what did we not do? We might ask ourselves. Just as likely, though, I might ask you, or you might ask me. (And, to be prudent, let’s not get caught up in the past tense—although we might get caught up in the past, in the memory, and in the remembering.)
Thomas burst out of the Puerto Rican bar across the street sipping on a large bottle of beer that he was carrying in a brown paper bag. We were on the sidewalk in lawn chairs looking professional and he approached us without reservation, curious, amicable. He asked us what we were doing and wanted to know what kind of meeting we were having. We told him about the Think Tank that has yet to be named. We told him about how each of us was the Director of our own departments, and how that allowed us to reveal each of our own biases and positions. We told him about the Publicly Held Private Meeting, how we wanted to be out in the world and talk about the places we occupy and talk with others about these places too. We told him we were artists and that we were concerned about how our presence in the neighborhood might be doing harm to that place. Thomas immediately sat down and stretched out on the sidewalk. Animated, he listened intently and then told us about himself. I don’t remember many details about what he told us, but the exchange was profound, nonetheless. I remember the overwhelming sense of being in the right place at the right time and for the right reason. Thomas had sat down and stretched out on the sidewalk with us (albeit looking somewhat less professional and less peculiar) and he listened to us and looked us in the eye and we looked him back in the eye and listened to him.
Thomas got it. We were close to getting it ourselves.
2.
“You had to be there.” None of this is new or particularly interesting. “You had to be there.” Lest my account devolve into mystification: “You had to be there.” You weren’t there, so you don’t know. She [point to Meredith] and he [point to Jethro] were there—they know. As for you, you just weren’t there. None of you are from there. Where are you from? How do you decide where “from” is?
How do we decide where “from” is? As travelers, we ask and are asked: “where are you from”? I answer: I’m from the United States. I’m from Philadelphia. I’m from Fishtown. I’m from Palmer Street. I name a place. But it’s also about identity. Before we travel, we pack our bags: socks, shirts, pants, toothbrush, nail clippers… and identity. Our identity is in part localized in a place (places), in being “from” somewhere. This is turf, the ‘hood, the ‘burbs, the streets, ownership and agency, boundaries, roots, nomadism, isolationism, colonialism, cosmopolitanism, provincialism, us versus them, outsider/insider, trespassers and interlopers, homeboys and homegirls, hicks and city-slickers.
As an aside: Does my arrival in Montreal herald a sort of homecoming? My ancestors came through French Canada—one in particular, a minister name Beaudry, perhaps passed through this city in the early 19th century. Did you notice the Rue Beaudry, or the Beaudry metro stop?
Regardless of where we’re from, we’re all here now.
3.
“Ich bin ein Berliner!” I am a pancake! I am a jelly donut! Well, not exactly. On June 23, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy delivers a speech in West Berlin to an anxious yet enthusiastic crowd of West Berliners. Two years after the Wall was completed, they are still reeling from the fact that the waters of Soviet-style communism have risen up around them. Expressing solidarity with the West Berliners, Kennedy descends on the island, stakes the ideological flag of western democracy, and proudly declares himself a citizen of West Berlin: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Funny thing, though: in other parts of West Germany, a Berliner is a kind of fruit-filled pancake, a jelly doughnut. No big deal—Berlin, the world, knew what he meant. Still, it might not ever be enough to simply say for oneself: “I am from this or that place”—even if it’s only meant as a rhetorical gesture. There’s a whole host of other people who have a stake in where you’re from as well. So often, being from somewhere depends upon the consensual acceptance of a larger group of people who also claim to be from there.
The place where I now live: the neighborhood of Fishtown, in Philadelphia, on Palmer Street. I’m not really from there. I mean, I’m from there in that I was there before I was here and I’ll go back to there when I leave here—but I am not from there. You know what I mean? It’s not that I misspoke earlier when I said I was from Fishtown, but it’s complicated. Many of the families in my neighborhood have lived there for generations; homes are passed down from grandparents to parents to children; kids grow up on one block and buy houses on the next one over. I am not from there. I’m a newbie, the ones who are from there say. I am a jelly doughnut.
How do we decide where “from” is? Take a longer view, and maybe my neighbors are not really from there either. Previous waves of Europeans settled long before them—English, Scots, German, Polish. Plenty of streets are still named after those forgotten colonials. And, of course, before them were the native peoples, the Lenape, the Delaware, the Shawnee. Down where Shackamaxon Street dead-ends at the Delaware River, you might wonder in vain about how these indigenous tribes answered the question of where “from” is when they signed the treaty with the renegade Quaker, Billy Penn, Pennsylvania’s namesake and Philadelphia’s founder. It is a truism that the native American world view did not share in the European preoccupation with dominion over the land, with a totalizing ow nership per se. Who exactly is from Fishtown anyway?
Being both from and not from my neighborhood is difficult: Although I’ve only lived there a short while, I and many others have expended much energy and time organizing the community in advance of sustainable planning and development. We’ve advocated for open and transparent public processes and responsible and accountable governance. This activism has specifically focused on organizing community opposition to two Las Vegas-sized casinos that are planned to be built across the street from residential homes along the waterfront. It has been highlighted that many of us organizers are new to the neighborhood, new to Philadelphia in general—that is, not from Philadelphia—which is noted as a source of our irreverence for political authority and our “naive” belief in citizens’ rights to self-determination. Our allies are quick to embrace us, to laud our efforts. Our opponents, on the other hand, are quick to point out that we newbies are not from the neighborhood and have little stake in its future. From-ness is measured in longevity, and I’m holding on to the shortest straw.
How do you decide where “from” is? Furthermore, who, besides you, decides where your “from” is?
4.
Regardless of where we’re from, we’re all here now. Gathered together in this place we are a kind of occupying force, an assembly of emissaries—although, perhaps positioned at the more benign end of the spectrum of all possible connotations of the idea of occupation. It’s occupying nonetheless. It’s temporary, provisional, flexible, with purpose. At this moment, most of us are occupying the space between “from” and “not from”, between this collective “here” and our respective “there’s”. You and I—we—the Think Tank that has yet to be named—draw upon the places where we are from in order to interrogate, understand, engage, and activate the places where we are not from: this space right here, for example.
In the space between “from” and “not from”, we have these questions: What does it mean to export the local and site-specific? How can a practice rooted in a rich, nuanced interrogation of an intimately known place be relocated effectively to another, unfamiliar place? To what extent does such a localized art / activist practice rely on internalized assumptions about the valorization of indigenousness and the privileging of “authentic” spatial occupation? And what is “authentic” spatial occupation anyway? How can we even precisely locate indigenous? We worry over these problems, these difficulties. We have described this nagging feeling of failure in our work as the Insurmountable Dilemma of a Rooted Practice.
We go on anyway. Or not. Maybe we stop and start over somewhere else, or just stop altogether, leaving the traces of a question, a thought, a practice, for others to take up. If there is an intellectual—hell, even spiritual—model of praxis that we Directors embrace and perhaps ultimately corrupt, then it might the TAZ, the Temporary Autonomous Zone. The mystical theorist Hakim Bey cobbled together an account of the TAZ from stolen fragments: pirate utopias, Nietzche’s last mad musings, pagan carnivales, cybernetics, repurposed sufism, Situationism, etc etc etc. The TAZ is both singular and multifarious. It exists as a particular instance, but also describes a network of relations, an “occupation”, a rift, the tearing of space and its mending. The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Throw a party. Come together provisionally. Eke out a space of your own. Appear and then disappear. Embody radical, perpetual becoming. Terrorize the world with poetry. Transgress everything. Know that it will not last. Negate. Destroy to create. Escape to Croatan. Go away and never come back.
Hakim Bey tells us that the TAZ is like an uprising. It is a festival, a revelry that has been unloosed or forced to vanish from its traditional moment in time and space. The TAZ may appear freely and then dissolve itself to reform elsewhere and elsewhen. It possesses “a nose for the ripeness of events, and an affinity for the genius loci.” Attuned to the psychotopology of a place—the “flows of forces” and “spots of power”—the TAZ is rooted spatio-temporally, if only for a moment.
So let’s call this a minor uprising, stop for now, and see you again in the next place.
Philadelphia, 2007
