http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/velez/velez12-14-07.asp

The recent spike in interest in backyard gardening, carbon footprints, local food, biking to work, etc. is a sign of an important, if still incomplete, change in consciousness, even if it took $4 gasoline to jump start it. Yet there is something I find obnoxious about the proliferation of articles and books on how to green your lifestyle (admission: our collection of “green living” books takes up more a shelf). A too-easy example is a recent NY Times article about the green honeymoon trend, but like a lot of this stuff it seems to be mostly about letting people feel not only less guilty but even self-righteous about consuming. There is clearly a huge market out there for this stuff. And some of it put out by the same people who brought you ag-as-usual, like Monsanto-owned Seminis, which sells seeds to retailers like Burpee, Jung, and Johnny’s (not to mention to the nurseries whose starts we can pick up at the farmer’s market) for us to plant in our sustainable backyard gardens.

Cox clearly favors a quantitative critique in the article, but I am also somewhat cautious about the cultural imaginaries I am mobilizing in my fascination with backyard gardening. The rhetoric of self-sufficiency is has culturally deep roots, and they aren’t particularly progressive. I know I’ve talked about this with Bonnie before, but I perceive a link between the peak oil movement and a millennial-survivalist Americanism that goes back at least to the 1740s (and whose history is fascinating and not just “good” or “bad”). Even the use of the term “urban homestead” is weird – homestead is largely defined in this country by the congressional act that privatized public, formerly Indian lands and, currently, by the rule that allows you to pay less property tax for a house you live in. That settler imaginaries are powerful, even to people who should know better, is illustrated by the Iowa City New Pioneer Co-op’s line of “Be a Pioneer” t-shirts, on sale less than 75 miles from the state’s only recognized Indian nation. My point is not to dismiss backyard gardening as neo-colonial but to think through and be critical about the various reasons why I find it so compelling.

I completely agree with Claire’s point that growing your own food is a potentially transformative experience, one that allows points of entry into many interrelated parts of the environmental & social catastrophe. One starting point for activism that reaches out from the garden might be to pressure Burpee, Jung, Johnny, and others to do what Fedco did and drop Seminis seed, rather than personally choose not to purchase from them. I find myself wishing that Cox had titled his article “Turning Your Lawn into a Garden Won’t Save Us” because that gets to the heart of the question – how to connect the absolutely necessary personal transformation to a project of broader cultural, social, infrastructural, and economic change.

agree

The discussion around individual vs. collective action is obviously important…we have been thinking through and operating within the notion of “micro-publics,” or, in the extreme, the social as inflected in the individual. We are specifically interested in how what has been termed here as an ‘individual solution’ operates politically. It is especially noteworthy that you (publicamateur) reference ‘form of living’ as an example of individual experimentation as the notion of the “art of living,” is a driving concern of ours. Richard Shusterman’s Practicing Philosophy has an interesting take on all of this discussing whether Foucault’s aesthetic self-fashioning was merely “radical chic” or something more substantial. Shusterman answers in the affirmative:

“…[Foucault was not self-indulgent] because he saw the ‘private’ self as intrinsically a site and political battleground of the political. This self is both the effect and the enduring, reinforcing presence of the socio-political forces that constitute and shape us as individual subjects. Just as socio-political institutions mold us into disciplined, docile selves, so the ‘normalized’ selves serve in turn to reconstitute and sustain those very institutions.”

Forms of living, even when undertaken at the individual level, are still operating socially, if not collectively. The key then is following through with making public in as many appropriate contexts as possible this artful living so that it might become collectively or collaboratively pursued- something you address quite nicely within the notion of public amateur…

brianholmes says:

“Of course one can imagine what some will say: “There are no individual solutions to social problems. We are being lied to and only with a broad collective program can we start doing the obvious and effective things: eliminating automobiles, reestablishing local food-supply lines, creating durable rather than deliberately short-lived goods, and so on.”

That is true, but obviously there are many ways to generate what can be recognized as social solutions. If we are thinking that there is nothing to do until we can get a large enough group to do it with we are just throwing down more obstacles. What would be large enough to qualify as not an “individual solution”? What is a significant size? 2? 3? 20?

For many of us whose subjectivities were formed in practices favoring individual sensibility and action, the jump to collective action may be across too broad a gap. A gap in which all we can see are inherited, conventionalized forms of collective action: strikes, demonstrations, cooperatives, collectives, movements, etc. These forms may be familiar but remote from our own experience. What’s more, we may not really be able to believe in them precisely because of this combination of familiarity but inaccessibility. Even if they do appear as compelling goals we may have no idea how to bring them to life, to our lived life.

So I think we need to respect these forms that mediate between the individual and the social. If I am moved to try some action or refusal or form of living, the thought that “I’m just an individual and individual action is what we must surpass,” can be deeply disempowering. I think it much better to take the actions, risk exposing my aims and methods and of course do it in a way that creates some level of visibility and exchange. In that kind of framework my action has the possibility to become part of broader social effort and perhaps even evolve into collective action. Think for instance of Cindy Sheehan in the context of protest.

brianholmes says:

“Today on his blog, the No Impact Man is talking about his invitation to appear on not one but 2 TV channels. For all those who are disgusted with a media-driven society, this immediately looks bad; but isn’t the whole question one of successfully navigating through all the shoals and reefs that the experiment puts in your way? To do so successfully is to help build up a kind of social knowledge.”

Although I respect people’s divergent choices in dealing with media, I think media purism begins to seem like a good way to stay marginalized. I certainly don’t think everyone should stage the performance of her experiment for mainstream media; even as we suffer unprecedented monopoly of big media, other networks of visibility and exchange have proliferated offering many ways to produce sociality in knowledge and activated desires. There are countless people and groups who have been doing “no impact” experiments for a long time and many much more radical than noimpactman’s (see for instance the Allium Collective’s electricity fast for much more explicit political content). It just so happens that noimpactman is conducting his in a mainstream publicity hook-up and doing it now, in the midst of an explosive reality-check on the human involvement in earth’s systems. The pervasive expression of anxiety and calls for action we now witness is long overdue and comes upon us with the force of the repressed. It’s such a relief to me that big media’s fortress of denial has begun to show it’s breaches!

brianholmes says:

“Everybody knows you can “cash in” on your personal challenge by taking to the media, and thereby becoming important, gaining a certain kind of privilege. But everybody also knows that so doing, you can lose the gaze of those who matter in the long run, those who helped you begin your personal experiment, and who helped you believe that it was not just personal, that it could be shared and thereby have a meaning.”

That may be true for activists, but for people who really don’t have a clue about activism, or whose identities disallow or refuse that paradigm, or who have no sense of a group that helped them start their experiment, the predicament is different. It’s more a question of how to make the first step, a step that begins as individual action and moves to the social. It certainly seems possible that for many only by taking that step, using whatever media and communication they understand, can they develop engagement and experience the potential of a shared project.

brianholmes says:

“All of this seems like more than a “case study,” because it’s pretty hard to keep the case at a distance and not apply it to one’s own quandry. Both a predicament and a paradigm, I’d say….”

This is my point. And from what I read in the comments on noimpactman’s blog this is what many people are doing. Any new paradigm in the making has to pose predicaments. The predicaments expose more and more precisely just what has to change. In the field of shared knowledge clearer predicaments may attract clearer experiments. So forth!

Of course one can imagine what some will say: “There are no individual solutions to social problems. We are being lied to and only with a broad collective program can we start doing the obvious and effective things: eliminating automobiles, reestablishing local food-supply lines, creating durable rather than deliberately short-lived goods, and so on.” OK, for sure, I believe that, but the whole problem of transmitting the desire for change seems to be the primary one. How do people tear themselves away from the daily routines where abstract social power structures become singular and concrete? How do they maintain a commitment over time, despite the welter of judgments, opinions, directives and “truhts” to which society subjects us? The self-experiment puts these questions on view, out in the public. It puts them to the risk of the TV cameras as well. Today on his blog, the No Impact Man is talking about his invitation to appear on not one but 2 TV channels. For all those who are disgusted with a media-driven society, this immediately looks bad; but isn’t the whole question one of successfully navigating through all the shoals and reefs that the experiment puts in your way? To do so successfully is to help build up a kind of social knowledge. I constantly see that at work among activists. Everybody knows you can “cash in” on your personal challenge by taking to the media, and thereby becoming important, gaining a certain kind of privilege. But everybody also knows that so doing, you can lose the gaze of those who matter in the long run, those who helped you begin your personal experiment, and who helped you believe that it was not just personal, that it could be shared and thereby have a meaning. All of this seems like more than a “case study,” because it’s pretty hard to keep the case at a distance and not apply it to one’s own quandry. Both a predicament and a paradigm, I’d say….