Art and the World Economy

by
Brian Holmes & Claire Pentecost

Municipal statue, city of Finicke, Antalya province, Turkey
(all photos CP; published in catalogue of 11th Istanbul Biennial)

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An old man with a hearing aid stands with his back to a low wall, juggling a profusion of juicy oranges and bright red tomatoes. One by one he plucks them from the air and sets them down in perfect pyramids, orange and red. The juggler is the neoliberal ideologist Friedrich von Hayek, who thinks that that to act in a world of commodities, all you need to know are their prices:

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they make speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number or important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.1

On the other side of the wall is a garden crossed by winding paths. Here and there, gold coins lie scattered on the ground, as if devoid of any value. A bespectacled man in a woolen suit is watering a row of beans in the sun. His name is Karl Polanyi, and he reflects aloud on the history of the industrial revolution:

The middle [or trading] classes were the bearers of the nascent market economy; their business interests ran, on the whole, parallel to the general interest in regard to production and employment… On the other hand, the trading classes had no organ to sense the dangers involved in the exploitation of the physical strength of the worker, the destruction of family life, the devastation of neighborhoods, the denudation of forests, the pollution of rivers, the deterioration of craft standards, the disruption of folkways, and the general degradation of existence including housing and arts, as well as the innumerable forms of private and public life that do not affect profits.2

Both these men were economists, and both became famous in the wake of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Their ideas developed in opposite directions, and over the long run, it is the former with his principle of ignorance who has been vastly more influential. Could the latter have anything to say to us today, in the wake of yet another global crisis? Do artists, curators and intellectuals need to think about what they are doing in the world economy?

The Crystal Casino

After many long walks, drives and conversations in the prodigious city of Istanbul, we set out to discover where the tomatoes and the oranges come from. We thought we might also see how the phantasmatic juggler operates in one of the world’s most prolific gardens. This quest led us down the Mediterranean coast to Antalya, the fastest growing province in Turkey, the center of the country’s tourist industry and the leading producer of hothouse vegetables for export. On these coastal plains we found acres of crystal palaces: the older glass-paned and newer plastic-wrapped greenhouses of the global horticultural industry. Feeding on the same sunny clime were stretches of condominiums for vacationers, shopping malls, and clusters of five-star hotels including replicas of the Kremlin and the Topkapi Palace.

At first glance the scene was uncannily similar to one we had investigated a few years earlier in the Spanish coastal province of Almería. But with significant differences. The Spanish horticultural industry had shallower roots in both time and space. There it had mushroomed in a compressed twenty-year period so that there were none of the older glass and steel palaces erected in Antalya in the 1940s and 50s; rather we saw uninterrupted stretches of flat white reflective plastic roofs stretching into the distant haze. In Spain the vegetables were grown not in local alluvial soil but in packs of imported substrate, regularly cleared and trashed in dumpsites – pesticides, herbicides, plastic and all. The draining of the regional water table to make all this gardening possible in an arid, semi-desert landscape had brought the region much closer to the brink of ecological collapse. And the precarious labor was supplied by migrant Africans, mostly working without papers and suffering the bigotry inflicted on foreign workers worldwide. In Turkey seasonal labor is drawn from the villages of eastern Anatolia, under conditions largely unknown to us, surely not without their own forms of suffering and discrimination.

In both countries we were struck by the singular views of intensive horticulture abutting luxury tourist destinations, locals struggling to make a living through a global export system in unobscured proximity to golf courses, upscale shops, restaurants and marinas designed for the mobile upper classes of globalization. Such a composite offers a perfect example of what we have come to come to think of as an aesthetics of visible blindness: the capacity of select groups to enjoy the fruits of globalized capital while ignoring the price paid in drudgery and insecurity by others. In Spain we had wondered what kinds of dark glasses the tourists must wear, not to see the damaging excess of the real-estate boom, the unsustainability of swimming pools and golf courses springing from the thirsty desert, the conditions of brutal labor exploitation rivaling those of the nineteenth century. Such a blindness is structural: it’s part of what keeps the whole system going even when it’s clearly headed for social and ecological disaster.

Our guidebook on the trip to southern Turkey was written not only by Hayek and Polanyi, but also by the generous Istanbulite sociologist Zafer Yenal, who had given us the name of a grower so that we might see something more than the astonishing view from a rental car. Equipped only with a bad map and a vague idea of our informant’s territory, we lucked into the right village and spoke his name at the local café. Hospitable cell phones immediately went into action and five minutes later we were having coffee with Mikhat, a distinguished tomato producer, and Aydin, the owner of an orange grove and also the muhtar, or village headman. Aydin had taught himself English from a dictionary while working in the greenhouses, and now served us as an excellent translator, with plenty of his own opinions.

The two of them spent their Sunday afternoon giving us a tour of the typical production chain in Antalya. We visited the family owned greenhouses and orchards, the washing and sorting facility, the box folding plant and warehouse. The closest we came to the beginning of the line was a high-tech seedling company. But a full mapping of the production chain is impossible for those who are directly involved. The growers don’t decide what they will plant. In what is called a “buyer-driven market,” the exact patented varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other vegetables grown are dictated by an increasingly consolidated oligopoly of transnational distributors and intermediaries who deliver fresh and processed produce to supermarket shelves. Control of the type of seeds actually in circulation, limited to relatively few out of the vast diversity cultivated through the history of human agriculture, amounts to mastery over the most basic form of shared intellectual property. These gigantic distant players also determine just what other imported inputs – pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers – will be used by small producers throughout the Mediterranean. Such conformity is mandatory if they want to enter the market, and the producers themselves have no bargaining power over the price of these necessities.

Last on our tour was the wholesale depot where teams of kerchiefed women packed produce for shipment and where we sat in the office of the local buyer for a taciturn cup of tea. This buyer marked the end of what could be seen of the production chain from a producer’s vantage point, being the nearest representative of the price mechanism signaled by markets in Istanbul, Russia, Europe and beyond. We were witnessing the scene of our guidebook outlined by Friedrich von Hayek:

The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.3

Hayek believed that human productivity was most effectively coordinated by the market mechanism, registering changes in the availability or need of products across the earth. Fluctuating prices took the place of knowledge, because the chance to make a profit by selling high or buying low signaled exactly where resources could be allocated most efficiently. There is an eerie correspondence between this theory and the way things really work. What small producers are able to know is indeed reduced since they choose neither the seeds nor the chemical inputs or even the type of bee used to fertilize the plants in the greenhouses. On the selling side of their business they “watch merely the movement of a few pointers to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.”

In this way they become like players sitting at a roulette table, watching the spinning numbers that will determine how well they fare in a given year. “We are farmers, gambling is what we do for a living.”4 For both inputs and outputs the farmers are deeply integrated into the global food market, and since they have no control over the price of either, their sense of working blindly has intensified as world food prices and petroleum-based input prices oscillate erratically on the readouts of the electronic markets, climbing one year to the heights of prosperity, falling precipitously the next. Whether or not they can make meaningful adjustments to global markets affected by fluctuating demand, oversupply, natural disasters, changing standards, currency exchange rates and commodity market speculation makes the difference between whether they will go bust, hit a jackpot, or just get by. In this way, we discovered, the lives of villagers trying to join a world of consumer abundance are affected by the wild hopes and deep anxieties of what the political economist Susan Strange long ago called “casino capitalism.” With its elegant greenhouses gleaming in the sun alongside the debt-financed palaces of postmodern tourism, Antalya appeared as the land of the crystal casino.

No Accounting For Taste

We spent the night in the town of Finicke, whose main street is adorned with monuments to the magnificent orange. One shows a globe on a pedestal; on top of this concrete world stands a girl holding an orange out to the sky. Producers of all kinds of things want to offer their goods to the world market, and why shouldn’t they? Though the present level of global integration is unprecedented, oranges have been coveted treats in northern climes for centuries. The oranges we brought back from Antalya were some of the best we ever tasted: juicy, sweet and full of complex flavors. We wish we could say the same for the tomatoes, whose flesh was hard and flavorless despite their deep red color and impeccable round design. Are the orange trees holdovers from an older horticulture, unlike the tomato seedlings nurtured in mass-produced plastic trays? Are they less subject to the distortions of just-in-time production? Is it easier to breed an orange for long distance shipping than to breed a packable tomato retaining the tenderness and flavor we recall from our childhoods? Is it a matter of luck? Of preference? Or some kind of obscure gamble with the intellect, the heart, the bank account and the senses?

These questions can be existential ones for those who try to place themselves as tasty products in the world vitrine. While grateful for the chance to travel, exhibit and present in far-flung locales, many of us grow uneasy when self-performance on the art circuit turns into a contest to raise your own price as a signifier of others’ intelligence, passion, perversity or secret foreknowledge of upcoming trends. In financialized economies where speculation on the future values of the sky above can wreak havoc with the ground beneath your feet, it’s quite hard to believe that artistic expression is not just standing in for something bigger to come – like a gigantic hotel, residential complex or entertainment district that will wipe out the gritty neighborhood whose vibrant local life inspired you. We’ve thought about these problems for years, while trying to develop other contexts for the expression, reception, elaboration and understanding of art practices.5 And when food prices spiked with the commodity bubble of 2008, then plunged again after farmers around the world had been lured into costly investments, we found it even harder to keep our desires focused on the next invitation to Asia / Latin America / Western Europe / the Middle East. We too felt like cherry tomatoes on a roulette wheel spinning wildly out of control.

In Antalya province at the site known as Yanartaş arises the famous Mount Chimaera, known since late Antiquity for its flames that flicker in the night, for its literally burning ground. Historical sources cite this geothermal wonder as the origin of the myth of the Chimera, a fire-breathing hybrid of lion, goat and serpent; while the natural explanation describes exhalations of methane from metamorphic rocks. This mythical and real place reminds us of contemporary Chimerica, the hybrid continent we try to call home. For the last ten years its Eastern workers have produced nearly everything its Western consumers crave, while the East side lends back to the West the money received for the floods of goods, in order to keep the wheels of industry turning.6 This unusual geographic phenomenon, characteristic of the global division of labor and power, has been one of the mysteries of late Neoliberalism. What kept mankind alive on its disjunctive territory, from Chicago to Shanghai, was a system of exchange whose human foundations no one cared to know, as long as the volatile prices added up to profits for politicians and businessmen on both sides. The lure of gain stoked a decade of unsustainable development, reflected outside the centers of accumulation by the ugly mirrors of impoverishment and war. Meanwhile, those tastes that market researchers can exhaustively account for – consumer drives and investor appetites – sucked the juice of life from two vast populations, while setting the stage for an economic collapse on a scale last seen in the 1930s. The natural explanation in this case was not metamorphic but mathematical.

About a hundred and fifty years ago, Marx described the commodity as that product of human labor whose exchange value, seemingly animated with a life of its own, acts to render invisible the social relations that produced it. About twenty years ago, some inglorious number-crunching quant invented a meta-commodity called the “collateralized debt obligation” (CDO). It’s a derivative contract whose price is determined by a statistical analysis of the behavior of underlying assets, which in this case are not things but the ability of borrowers to pay their loans. What these meta-commodities did was allow banks to sell to distant investors the revenue expected from payment on home mortgage loans, so that the bank which initially did the lending got its capital back from thin air, and could immediately go out looking for more borrowers on the ground. To make the deal sweeter for the distant investors, the loans were split into tiny fractions and recombined with hundreds of others, so that the risk of any single failure to pay was diluted by the hundredfold. Meanwhile other quants calculated the statistically average rate of bankruptcy on the housing market, which was considered to have the regularity of a natural phenomenon. Another kind of derivative, known as a “credit default swap” (CDS), was sold as insurance on this risk, and indeed on many others, in combinations and hybrids that defy the imagination.

The brilliance of the math and its perfect correspondence with the laws of financial nature omitted just one tiny detail, which was that this circular, self-reinforcing system entirely transformed the markets it was supposed to regulate and stabilize.7 Prices rose from the ground like tongues of fire until they reached trembling heights: cut off from all connection with the underlying capacity of the borrowers to pay, the flame fell back to earth and burned everyone it touched. As foreseen, the default insurance went into effect, but for losses exponentially exceeding what had been judged possible in nature. And then, metamorphosing from the joyful illusion that it once seemed to be, the fabulous Chimerican prosperity of the early 2000s turned into a monstrous creature, rampant in every country on the face of the earth.

We do not know exactly where the current crisis will lead. But what we have been foreseeing for the last several years is “Continental Drift”: a rearrangement of the unlikely bicontinent in which we briefly lived, the decline of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the beginning of far-reaching changes in the geopolitical order.8 Rather than speculating right now on what those changes may bring at the global level, it may be more useful to draw some conclusions about the relations of art and economics in the period we have just lived through.

From the current economic perspective, growth is the only measurable good, making the signs of rising profit into the one convincing form of beauty. Wall-to-wall computers, flashing LEDs, gleaming glass and glittering buildings are among the finest sights, but the highlight in the flesh is always the person on the stage, the speculative performance. You too can be a top-value signifier, seemingly animated with a life of your own. And a world-class museum can become the gateway of real-estate paradise, if the bar is more spectacular than the paintings. Since your price is moving upwards on the market, why not let gentrification be your derivative? Very few people involved in contemporary art actually think this way, but very many of the funding decisions in the cultural world are made on exactly this basis.

Where the commodity as described by Marx acted to conceal the social relations of labor that produced it, the meta-commodities of our time act to conceal the collective deliberations that create the environment in which any labor, leisure, productivity or culture can take place. The government of human affairs has been privatized by the calculations of a supposedly natural law. The veil over all this is what we’ve been calling the aesthetics of blindness. But if that is the case, those of us working art face one very important question. How could the veil be lifted?

Touching Ground

Let’s look through the spectacles of the man watering the beans in the garden, with gleaming coins scattered here and there as though devoid of any value. Polanyi’s major work, The Great Transformation (1944), retraces the rise and fall of the gold standard, which served as the global medium of exchange during the period of the British Empire. More profoundly it studies the belief in a self-regulating market, elevated to the status of a natural law whereby supply and demand automatically find their proper equilibrium. The self-regulating market is the underlying structure designated by Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand, then later by Hayek’s more pragmatic image of the telecommunications system. Looking further, Polanyi observed that the fundaments of human existence – labor, or the health of our bodies; land, or the cyclically recurring growth of the natural world; and the human institutions of governance, including money itself – were treated as freely available resources by the capitalist market which invested no care in their reproduction over time. Labor, land and money are “fictitious commodities” by Polanyi’s account, because their actual origins and destinies lie outside the market, even though the market depends on and depletes them. The Great Depression and the World Wars are historical examples of the price ultimately paid for their neglect.

The persistent recourse in economics to the illusion of a natural market law serves to justify the core functions of labor and resource exploitation, while the investment of financial signifiers with supernatural powers acts to distract from the many crimes that accompany the system (or some would say, provide its very basis). These include imperialism, or the plunder of distant territories by force of arms; enslavement, or the physical coercion of human beings against their will; the formation of monopolies and oligopolies, permitting the fixing of prices in markets closed to the entry of smaller producers; and more recently the reign of mass deception, whereby will and desire themselves are reshaped by the media bombardment of manipulative messages. The grip of the natural law delusion is what gave Margaret Thatcher her hour of credibility, adamantly repeating “there is no alternative.” It’s remarkable that since the present round of computerized and networked financial innovation began in the mid-1970s, the ranks of the number-crunching quants and the formulas they employ are drawn largely from theoretical physics, reinforcing the economists’ claim to be describing unequivocal phenomena of nature.

What makes Polanyi so interesting is his refusal of this natural market law. Yet unlike communist planners of the early twentieth century (to whom neoliberals automatically reduce any proponents of an “alternative”) he did not believe that human needs and possibilities could be calculated by a central agency. He understood the dynamics of human societies to be the result of three quite different fields of organization, each of which does not function according to any inherent natural law, but instead by the more-or-less conscious development of ad hoc principles that gradually work themselves into a sustainable balance. The first of these broad fields of human interaction is exchange, which occurs in a bewildering variety of forms across history, and not only as the reductio ad absurdum of human relations to monetary mathematics. The second, still quite apparent to the citizens of modernized societies, is redistribution as it is carried out by a centralizing administration. In recent history this was the welfare-state function, largely banished by the class politics of neoliberalism. The third domain of social coordination, almost as ignored by official scholarship as it is by market fundamentalists, yet one which still pervades and supports contemporary life, is reciprocity: the informal circulation of services, privileges, favors, care and support between individuals, families, clans, friends, voluntary associations and identity groups. It was a notion of open-ended reciprocity that prompted a Turkish sociologist to share his rural contacts with us, that made those contacts treat us as guests to whom they offered time, information, openness and a splendid local lunch. In many more incalculably extensive ways, it is reciprocity that undergirds and makes livable the harsh inhabitation of a world ruled by market numbers.

By recognizing these three fields in their heterogeneity and in the specificity of their mutual interaction it is possible to go beyond the eternal quarrels of the liberals, the communists and the anarchists, each of whom insists on the preeminence of just one field: the market, the state or voluntary association. Unfortunately, they cannot even adequately describe the real workings of their single sphere of interest, since society is always constituted by particular combinations of all three. Rather than operating within or against an idealized totality that does not exist on its own, one finds more chances in navigating between existing realms whose specific relations can be played against each other, and changed for the better.

This multidimensional understanding of society provides the tools to draw up much more useful maps of complex situations, including multiple roles for art. When the market is invested with a superhuman accuracy of judgment, critics and institutions too often validate only what it has already validated. In this scenario the artists become like our counterparts the horticultural producers, conforming their inventions to signals from a distant empire of finance. But neither would it be satisfactory to have the state manage what kind of art will be produced and experienced. Nor is it enough to have an art with no relationship to exchange or redistribution. Art is a shifter between the three broad fields of interaction, dramatizing insufficiencies, suggesting possibilities, escaping deadlocks, opening utopias and bringing overly theoretical principles back home to lived experience. As cultural producers we want to bring this full range of possibilities into play – in order to touch the ground, to regain some contact with the fundamental conditions of existence.

Sixty-five years ago, in a phrase whose timeliness verges on the uncanny, Polanyi wrote that “the trading classes had no organ to sense the dangers involved in the exploitation of the physical strength of the worker, the destruction of family life, the devastation of neighborhoods, the denudation of forests, the pollution of rivers, the deterioration of craft standards, the disruption of folkways, and the general degradation of existence including housing and arts.” The sentence strikes home in a world marked by climate change, financial crisis and war. If exactly the same problems are facing us today, then isn’t this what art most urgently needs to become: a sense organ of humanity, a space in which to perceive and express the transformations that human groups are unleashing upon themselves and their environments? A space in which to inquire about the creation of value, the roots of conflict, the sources of vital energy, the paths toward better ways of living?

Of course, much of artistic production already does that, but in contexts made confused and ambiguous by the operations of financialized taste. What is finally becoming more obvious today, in the context of the triple crisis – economic, ecological and geopolitical – is that mainstream cosmopolitan culture has been largely absorbed into a predatory system of capture and manipulation, instilling commercial ideologies and prosumer drives and generating multiple forms of self-interested blindness even in the spaces devoted expressly to vision. The resulting breakdown of the human ecology, or lack of sense in world affairs, is provoking a widening crisis of legitimacy. This explains the election of a relatively idealistic figure like Barack Obama, or at a smaller scale, the selection of a group like WHW to curate the Istanbul Biennial. The question is what to do with the opportunities offered by this legitimation crisis.

Some practitioners have recognized that if art is to play any autonomous role in the shaping of contemporary sensibilities, it should be developed and evaluated within spaces of reciprocity where the predatory functions have no hold, whether these are private spaces, self-organized associations, informal networks of exchange or independent media projects. We are not just talking about strong images emerging from circles of peers under particularly turbulent social circumstances, which can now capture lots of attention on the markets. If art is to escape overcoding by existing value-forms, it must be created along with philosophical concepts and forms of social practice that are resilient enough to preserve their integrity despite the existing norms and functions. State institutions – not to mention corporate sponsorship – cannot be trusted to provide the context of art production, for one simple reason: the current panorama shows the extent to which they have failed. Yet at the same time, many positive developments on the cultural landscape show that artists, critics and curators who have developed strong networks of reciprocity can also find allies in both state-redistributive and market-exchange institutions, in order to develop singular and transformative proposals and to distribute them widely.

In our view – and this could be our polemic – the forces of reciprocity are not politically alive enough in art today. If we have worked with activism, and if we have developed autonomous critical initiatives like Continental Drift, it’s clearly for this reason, to engage in productive dialogues with other initiatives that have opened breathing spaces instead of just adapting to their instrumentalization. Today under the pressure of a triple crisis that will no longer go away, but only continue to morph into successive forms, it is necessary for artists, intellectuals and curators to develop higher levels of ethical exchange before engaging with the compromises of the state and market spheres. Not to maintain a politically correct consensus or some vain illusion of purity and self-sufficiency, but to find the precise resources that are needed to open up intense and problematic spaces of perception, revealing in advance the further conflicts and collapses which await and threaten – while in the best of cases offering broader perspectives, sweeter affects, clearer concepts and more generous actions in reality.

Polemics aside, we’ll close with an attempt to answer this essay’s recurrent questions. They have to with the origins of taste, the creation of alternatives, and the place of perception in artistic expression. Since one of the problems we’ve identified is an excess of economically animated forms and performances – a visible blindness – our research will shift further toward a tactile dimension.

Worlds At Your Fingertips

In a memorable passage from an unfinished book, a philosopher performs the simplest experiment in perception: touching one hand with the other. Maurice Merleau-Ponty worked in the tradition of phenomenology, trying to provide a philosophical definition of the primary scientific act: the clear and distinct perception of an object by a subject who stands outside it, exterior to what is being perceived. But when your fingers touch your own fingers, perception doubles back on itself and the subject becomes inseparable from the object. In this common experience the scientific mind must confront its own presence, its pulsating inherence to the phenomena that it wants to put at a distance. Like the casting of a gaze, touching involves the expression of a desire to know the world that is indissociable from whatever we will ultimately know of it. Yet there is a still more common and more poignant experiment in perception: one hand touching someone else’s, my hand touching yours. It is through this common experience that one discovers other worlds.

The self-reflexive turn of phenomenology shows that expression – and along with it, the vast material of spoken and written language – is an irreducible part of perception.9 Consequently, the upsurge of the new and the encounter with the other can only be sensed in historically shared frameworks of words, ideas, artworks, urban forms etc, themselves existing flush with perception and in intimate contact with its proliferating differences. To perceive is to constitute the object with the quality of your own attention, but also to be constituted by it: perception is a self-affecting movement that changes the very nature of one’s sensorium, while spilling over through language, gesture and affect to others who also perceive, reflect and evaluate. In this way sense is made. Overflowing from each body in the world, the reciprocal relation of perception and expression gives rise to cultural experience: crisscrossing artifacts of sensate desire, overlaid upon each other in complex patterns that point beyond whatever they designate, toward the depths and the horizons of the worlds we constitute together.

Merleau-Ponty called this intertwining of perceptions “the chiasm” – a Greek word designating a point of crossover between two flows. An example would be the optic chiasm, where the nerves coming from the left and right eye cross and intermingle before vision separates again into different areas on the right and left sides of the brain. We have yet to find Lake Chiasma on the natural landscape, but we know this feeling of plunging into and emerging from intertwining perceptual worlds.

The emphasis on perception could evoke practices of a documentary nature: attempts to film, photograph, sketch, graph, record, speak or otherwise represent the world. Such practices are extremely important, because they offer a chance to begin overcoming the blindness of contemporary society. Yet we must take one further step toward a politics of perception. In a critique of phenomenology and specifically of Merleau-Ponty, another philosopher shows that what is never taken into account by the scientific gaze is the human imagination. What happens, asks Cornelius Castoriadis, when we focus our attention on dreams, on delirium, on hallucinations? When last night’s dream is taken as a valid object of perception, “all of philosophy is knocked out of order.”10 Yet dreams and visions, like images themselves, are also common phenomena. They are the bearers of their own particular kind of truth and capacity to change the world.

There is a name for the insurgence of the image as a productive force in human thinking: the radical imagination. Castoriadis defines it as “the capacity to posit that which is not, to see in something that which is not there.”11 This imagination is not only visual: it is auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory, it is sexual and affective, it touches other people. Here is the intersubjective force that transforms our relation to nature. Those who proclaim the inexorability of market law do not only refuse to perceive its obvious failings; they also try to cover up the human potential to see what is not there, to express an aspiration. The politics of perception is inseparable from a collective exercise of the radical imagination. As Castoriadis explains: “I call autonomous a society that not only knows explicitly that it has created its own laws but has instituted itself so as to free its radical imaginary and enable itself to alter its institutions through collective, self-reflective, and deliberate activity. And I call politics the lucid activity whose object is the institution of an autonomous society.”12

Polanyi wrote the history of the self-regulating market up to its first culmination in the mid-twentieth century, showing that its claim to a basis in natural law was fictive, and that under the cover of this fiction it destroyed the traditional institutions on which it was based in reality. He called for the creation of new institutions, which could successfully re-insert or “re-embed” the world market into a tissue of acknowledged interdependencies that would stabilize it and keep it from exerting its most destructive effects. Today we are light years from that kind of wisdom. Yet it is still possible to conceive another society, not by the appeal to natural law but by the exercise of the radical imagination, and by its transformation through a political process into collective institutions.

Museums in the overdeveloped countries are still primarily used for historical conservation and the validation of isolated personal expression, though they are increasingly becoming sites of social design as well, launching pads for new product-behaviors.13 But what contemporary societies more urgently need are experimental institutions where the perception of lived environments, the creation of tastes and values and their codification into laws and definitions of reality can all be played out again in concentrated symbolic forms, which include contestation, ambiguity and internal contradiction. It is the artists’ intervention on powerfully articulated symbolic material that can touch others, elicit responses and open up a space of reciprocity for many different uses of the radical imagination.

An international exhibition or biennial can be this stage or arena, a time made of many temporalities, a place where many places and their inhabitants come to meet. This does not mean that everyone will agree. In an age marked by extreme exploitation, environmental destruction and violent conflict, it’s likely that they won’t. But the exhibition can also be a place to sharpen new symbolic weapons, or to shift the terms of old arguments. Instead of instilling preprogrammed behaviors in a manipulative way, it allows for self-conscious experimentation with the orientations of one’s own perception, and for debate about the possible worlds that are bodied forth in images.

We were touched by our visit to Istanbul, and by our glimpse of a life out in the countryside that we could never have imagined – despite its arrival in bits and pieces to faraway supermarkets. As in the naïve image of the girl standing on a globe and holding the fruit of her local culture up to the sky, we wanted to offer some food for thought in return: a glimpse of the kinds of knowledge that artistic practices can bring, a feel for singular situations whose life on the ground can never be communicated by the abstract movements of a pointer on the dial of the global markets. To engage with this knowledge, rather than ignoring it, is one way to contribute to a systemic change. Maybe it’s another kind of gamble, but this is what we are looking for in art today: a politics of perception.

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Notes

I live in a laptop, I live in the Internet, I live in airplanes and airports, I live in my library, in radio broadcasts, I live in my camera and often in other people’s cameras. As much as these virtualized sites levitate and excite me, I suspect they are eroding my vitality. Even as they put me in proximity to a wide variety of realities, they make others elusive. All these life-links occur in a similar kind of time. Perhaps I could call it info-time: the time it takes for information to travel electronic connections, for books to arrive by UPS, for jet fuel and other forms of credit to burn. Perhaps most attenuated of all is the time it takes me to comprehend what I am receiving.

There is so much to understand and it all feels so urgent. Urgency occupies a very tight temporal zone, and I find it spatially cornering as well. In the field of urgencies I have so many ways to contemplate my world at a distance, distance determines the macro and there is also a distance in the abstraction that delivers the micro. I am missing the velcro, the experience that sticks, the tactile weave of loops (needs? desires?) and hooks (invitations? exigencies?) that orient me both physically and conceptually.

In fact, I live in the Midwest, a real place. Here burdock grows vigorously in “disturbed soils.” The seeds of burdock are not airborne but are designed for contact: covered in microscopic hooks, they stick to passing loopy textures (fur, hair, cloth) to be dispersed further down the path—loosened in another touch between mobile and sessile. Growing up in Georgia, we knew “beggar’s lice,” a similar hitchhiker on socks and sweaters that became a toy or miniature building block for tiny worlds in our fascination. Legend has it that burdock inspired the inventor of velcro, George de Mestral of Switzerland. Burdocks, stickweed, tick trefoil, a panoply of hooking seed designs populates temperate, tropical and subtropical zones of the globe. How do I know this? I live in a computer, a library, a world of stories. Living in layers of narration is rich and pretty inevitable for the humans. But signs abound that we have lost touch with something.

The designers of our government’s interrogation policy (the one that advocates torture as a counter-terrorism necessity) cite Jack Bauer more than they do the U.S. Constitution. Who is Jack Bauer? The fictional protagonist of Fox television’s “24,” as in 24 hours, the always urgent time frame in which Bauer must prevent terrorist attacks, mostly by torturing suspects into giving up silver bullet answers. How do I know this? From books and news articles. People in power operate in a selective and sensational media world, a spectral bubble where they cannot feel the consequences of their own acts. Having little power myself (despite inexplicable privilege), I am eager to understand consequences.

So this summer we took to the road with Continental Drift, our ongoing collective learning seminar (see 16beavergroup.org/drift) on a 10-day trip through what some have begun to call the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor, planning a sequence of events and meetings in Champaign-Urbana, Chicago, Milwaukee, and many towns westward in Wisconsin.

[map by Sara Kanouse]

One of the themes of my attention that evolved as we traveled together through the Midwest was people’s hunger for reality, for making lives in which ineluctable reality is the teacher. We encountered a variety of attempts to localize, to build collective knowledge and purpose through material and social engagement, through specific experience and experiments that necessarily unfold in time and place. The localization I am seeing coexists with global awareness and habits of broad-based connection. At the same time it is also about overcoming parochialism. Maybe I should call it relocalization, because it is about repositioning the local, with sophisticated insight into how the local fits into larger schema.

At the Frederick Douglass branch of the Champaign public library we met with members of the C-U Citizens for Peace and Justice, a group formed around the unfinished business of a former manufactured gas plant that left a legacy of cancers and displacement in a poor black neighborhood. Criminal environmental degradation unfailingly occurs in the spaces of segregation. This is one of the ways the wealthier beneficiaries of industrial progress are protected from its ongoing catastrophe; from Bhopal to Aniston the worst side effects (so far) happen elsewhere to the seats of power. At our meeting Professor Ken Sela summed up the objective thus: if you want environmental sustainability work for social justice. As long as we segregate the risks and rewards of environmentally toxic industrialization, sustainability remains a specious marketing idea.

At Growing Power, the last farm in Milwaukee, we saw a 20-year-old, intensely local experiment in community development, food security, vermiculture and radical permaculture. The nine greenhouses and grounds combine the year-round cultivation of fish, sprouts, greens and other horticulture in intensive, low-impact systems that maximize local resources. Those resources are not only material—composting wastes from local breweries and coffee roasters for instance—but also social, including training programs for low-income youth and immigrant populations, and maintaining relationships throughout the region to produce and distribute healthy food.

Will Allen, founder and director of Growing Power, Milwaukee, WI

When I asked Julie, our guide, about a comprehensive training document, she replied that although they do make handouts for their courses, their approach emphasizes the coordination of the needs and surpluses specific to local contexts. There is no master manual, because a Growing Power type operation in another city would have to be different. But the model is inherently transferable. Will Allen, the founding director of GP is invited all over the world to advise urban agriculture projects; the Milwaukee site is visited by international delegations all year long. The experiments constantly unfolding in situ are undertaken in full cognizance of local and global problems begging for solutions.

In western Wisconsin we visited many people applying the skill of commitment to long-term processes in a particular place. Growing fabulous children and vital communities, finding ways to lessen the American burden on the rest of the world takes time. We saw this at the Holm Girls Dairy, a family farm run by Sara, Erika, Andrea, Laura, Rachel, and Mary, and their parents Doran and Mariann. Originally from the area, they were living in California when they decided to buy a defunct dairy farm in the late 90s. They have spent the last decade improving the soil and cultivating organic pasturage for their herd of 70 or so charismatic Jersey heifers. They are part of the Cooperative Regions of Organic Producer Pools (CROPP), known perhaps to you the conscientious buyer as Organic Valley. CROPP is an example of a new existential scale: networks connecting one localized form of integrity to another.

In the anarchic process of planning our drift, we didn’t decide to focus on resistant practices of food production and distribution. In the end almost half of our planned events and many of our ad hoc stops revealed ways that food is organizing new approaches to natural and social interdependency. I think we drifted this way because food is currently one of the most invigorated and invigorating vectors for expanding autonomy. Creating a mutually beneficial, sustaining relationship to the natural world and to other humans requires us to engage in many kinds of time. Most valuable things in nature and human development can’t be rushed. Worms make perfect soil from plant-based garbage. You can set up optimum conditions for them to do their job, but in the end it takes as long as it takes.

In his 1994 book A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, landscape historian J.B. Jackson elucidated the degree to which community, or richness of place, is a function of both space and time. Community as defined by place is aggressively marketed to us, because that seductive fiction can be packaged as real estate by opportunistic developers, one of the forces that makes place-based community suspect . Time, on the other hand, is sold to us in the form of technological devices to speed things up, or at least relieve the drudgery of survival in a punishing world. We can also buy time in the form of lower-status, lesser-paid labor. But the kind of time required for a livable world can’t be bought.  We have to make it ourselves, in collective experiments, with no guarantees. We can continually work on creating optimum conditions, but it takes as long as it takes.

Not all our events were food related (though most included potluck). In Chicago we invited author and filmmaker Sam Greenlee to a public screening of the 1973 film “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” adapted from Greenlee’s 1966 book of the same name. A Chicago native, Greenlee spent 1957-65 in the Foreign Service “rubbing shoulders with successful revolutionaries in the new states of Africa.” His fictional protagonist is the first black man recruited to the CIA, where he is basically shelved for five years. But his training in counter-insurgency is not lost on him; he returns to Chicago posing as a social worker in the rising black bourgeoisie while secretly organizing street gangs to prepare for disciplined armed revolt. Acerbically funny and breathtakingly radical, this work basically shut the door on Greenlee’s employment and further publishing opportunities, though it hasn’t stopped him from writing and from fearlessly speaking his mind. In the Q&A Greenlee mentioned that while his character could infiltrate the world of Washington yes-men, a street gang is almost impossible for outsiders to infiltrate because you have to be “from the neighborhood.” Faking a sympathetic ideology, idiom or style is not enough. He didn’t have to point out that the U.S. faces a similar obstacle to infiltrating terrorist organizations today.

Author and filmmaker Sam Greenlee speaking at Back Story Cafe

But to recognize the tenacious power of premodern foundations of identity—clan, turf, religion, race, ethnicity, nationality—is not the same as advocating such identifications as a fitting solution to the devastating deracination that afflicts us all, in different ways, today. The draw of such structures reflects a desire for traction in shared lived experience. But the choice is not between the twin alienations of insular protection or rootless anomie. The current gravitational pull of localized experience gathers extended connections in a deeply textured world. Drifting or settled, let the hooks and loops multiply.

keeping the message close to the ground

For a photographic record of the Continental Drift through the MRCC, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/27761309@N04/collections/

To download a copy of the book we made together about the drift, see
http://www.heavydutypress.com/books/library

Note: This essay was first published in Talking with your Mouth Full: New Language for Socially Engaged Art, published collaboratively by Green Lantern Press and Three Walls, Chicago. It’s sort of my definitive statement to date on the artist as Public Amateur.

In Jack London’s story, The Lost Face, two wanderers find themselves in hostile territory, on the brink of starvation. They are captured by a prosperous, belligerent people who shelter them briefly until deciding the beggars would be put to best use feeding the local hunger for spectacle. The hero of our story—I can’t remember his name, so let’s just call him Damien—watches his companion undergo gruesome torture for the clan’s entertainment and solidarity until the poor man is mercilessly exterminated and the crowd turns to him. “Wait! I know a secret potion that protects a man from death. If you give me time to prepare it, my own execution will serve to show that it works!”

Like wealthy headmen everywhere, the chief had everything he could possibly want; the only thing he feared was death. He loved the idea and for weeks, Damien demanded various ingredients and conditions. An elite circle of most loyal insiders studied his arcane procedures to learn and possess the secret. Damien enjoyed their luxury entertaining them with novelties and tales, while they provided him whatever resources he ordered to create the fabulous elixir, including a workshop, servants, the ministrations of women, and sweet time to let the ingredients age properly. The chief grew moody and at last exploded with impatience and suspicion. “Good news!” replied Damien, “everything is ready! Let’s prepare a feast for the great occasion. Tomorrow after just one swallow of this brew, I will bare my neck for you and when you bring the ax down with all your might the whole crowd will see it spring back from the force of life within me.”

The chief spared nothing for the next day’s show of his glory. At the height of the festivity, Damien sipped from the great stew of magic and knelt to lay his head on the block before the chief. The ax came down before the hushed crowd and Damien’s head rolled before them, severed in an instant.

1.
One way or another all artists are socially engaged. However individual artists choose to acknowledge their engagement, artists generally expect and are at least nominally accorded more than the common share of autonomy. Autonomy is always conditional, always a negotiation. A persistent feature of artistic practice is that it resonates primarily in the realm of the symbolic. Often the presumed autonomy of the artist is symbolic, or imaginary.

This is not to say merely symbolic. Or merely imaginary. The symbolic has force, and it is as powerful as ever. We live in the age of semiotic capital. Information drives the economy. Innovation in financial instruments creates money from debt. Computer modeling earns a killing for hedge fund directors. Knowledge and the semiotic systems that convey it are understood as material value, not only to the knower but also to the owner, the buyer, the hoarder, the company with a good legal team. Those who create enough money don’t have to possess knowledge, they can own it. They can fund research at public universities and filter the findings to the mainstream press. The image they create of the knowledge they own is the basis for new money. Perception moves the stock market. Imagination moves armies and creates wealth.

Many activities of this kind are now loosely categorized as “creative industries” and they are. Creativity takes as many forms as we strive to give it. The terms of the artist’s autonomy have been mystified for many generations. The artist’s autonomy has been defined as autonomy from the world, from daily life, from solutions to real problems haunting the collective. This symbolizes a freedom to be beyond social engagement. Like the American farmer, the whistleblower, the person of conscience and other icons of individual freedom, the artist marches to a drumbeat that is valorized while marginalized.

2.
This essay has its origins in an effort to theorize a paradigm of the artist well under way in practice. Under this paradigm the artist serves as conduit between specialized knowledge fields and other members of the public sphere by assuming a role we call the Public Amateur.

As such, the artist becomes a person who consents to learn in public. This person takes the initiative to question something in the province of another discipline, acquire knowledge through unofficial means, and assume the authority to offer interpretations of that knowledge, especially in regard to decisions that affect our lives. The point is not to replace specialists, but to enhance specialized knowledge with considerations that specialties are not designed to accommodate.

Specialization has brought about marvelous achievements. But under increasing complexity and fragmentation, the need for overviews of how vectors of power-knowledge intersect has become more imperative than ever. Our culture asks too high a price of society when it insists on narrow professional specialization. Conforming to this demand divides our intellect from our emotions, our imagination from our efforts, our pleasure from our worth, our verbal and analytic capacity from other creative talents, and our ethics from our daily lives. The result is frustration and disempowerment for the individual and shortsightedness for society as a whole.

In putatively secular societies such as ours, appeals to notions of the scientific have justified authority for some time. It doesn’t matter if these appeals make sense under scrutiny, only that they convey an effect of rationality. This permeates strategies on work, health, sexuality, family, economics, resource management, urbanization, leisure. Now that rational and scientific claims compete more than they unify, and divergent assertions of prescriptive knowledge can all cite someone’s science, how should the lay public evaluate contradictory claims, supposedly based on a common system of verification? Authority itself is in fragments, and worse: it is corrupt.

Sensing, if not being told outright, that modernity has produced immeasurable threats, an increasingly confused and phobic public is accused of irrationality. Affected parties are often deemed incompetent in matters of their own vulnerability. They lose an essential part of their cognitive sovereignty.

3.
Do I believe Monsanto’s scientifically based claim that pesticides and transgenic foods are safe to ingest, and controllable in the environment? Do I trust United States Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency and Food & Drug Administration systems of review and approval for new technologies? What goes on inside these proprietary brands and sanitary acronyms? Who works there? Where do they get the information they use to determine our future? Are there disagreements in the process? Who makes the final decision?

Questions like these generate metaknowledge, that is, knowledge about knowledge. It’s a level of understanding that can provide a basis for evaluating the circumstances that produce expertise; sort out contradictory findings and claims; and incorporate that which scientific epistemology is designed to exclude: human desires, feelings, and values.

I need to know a lot more than what the authorities are telling me, i.e., I need to create knowledge about the knowledge in question. To do this I have more tools than ever before:  libraries, the internet, films, news services, public interest groups, advertising, the freedom of information act, freedom of speech which protects my right not only to say what I want but also to hear and read what others say. And more and more, I have access to evidence that authoritative knowledge, speaking for us, serves itself first. The rest of us are collateral damage in the war of profit making.

It’s not enough to have all this. I need to learn ways to use it. I need new forms of literacy to comprehend all that is available to me. I need to devise a criterion to organize the metalanguage.

4.
In the beating heart of daily life, people find signals in the noise; wittingly or not, they privilege one signal over another and make decisions based on belief, compromise and contradiction.  Ultimately what each of us does to get through the day, and how reconciled we are to the options available to us, depends on what we care about. This aspect of survival proceeds in the realms we name ethics, aesthetics, philosophy and love. These are things that organize our being.

If I have no clear reference points in these realms, the metalanguage becomes its own circle of hell. I’m informed, terribly informed, festering with other brains in the vat. I show signs of info-dementia:  isolation, frustration, nostalgia, blame, disorientation, paranoia, paralysis. The third chakra, locus of initiative and purpose, becomes soft, as soggy as a sponge.

I observe that many people embrace authoritarianism in the vacuum of trustworthy authority. Religion and other forms of spirituality are natural antidotes. Seeing that the rational professions have failed us, they say, in so many words, “Enough with brains. Religion can at least reinforce what I care about, with all the affirmation of a distinct community, and a clear system for living.” For many, the third chakra, mapped on the body at the region of the navel, hypertrophies, relieving reason of all but the most trivial duties. My gut tells me this is the right thing to do. My gut tells me you are wrong. My gut sticks to my decisions, I am a decider. A firm decision leapfrogs years of contemplation.

5.
The artist finds herself alternately feted, ignored or scorned by the followers of the gut. Whichever befalls her, she lives like everyone at the mercy of erratic transmissions from the vat-bound brains.

Despite the professionalization of the artist, she does what she does because she loves to do it. The amateur moves from a similar impulse, hence the name. The amateur has transparent relations to her object. She approaches and ultimately appropriates the object of knowledge out of enthusiasm, curiosity or personal need. She learns outside the circuits of professional normalization and reward, things the artist was once presumed to resist.

Anyone can develop expertise and, if motivated enough, can even become an authority. The amateur can be as narrow as the specialist or as amorous as the polymath lover of knowledge. The category of the Public Amateur is not confined to artists. It’s a growing polyglot array of people who want to operate equally from the gut and the brain.

Theoretically, everyone now has tools to constitute some kind of audience; any amateur can choose to test ongoing learning in public. It’s more difficult for professionals to learn in public because they must protect their authority, which in most fields is not served by saying, “I don’t know” in a spotlight, or by openly performing a spastic struggle to understand something. People acutely aware of the failures of authority do this all the time.

Heartbroken parents of autistic children seek out experiments, theories and findings not favored by the medical establishment. The more public their efforts the more likely they are to find each other, compare their questions and experiences, exponentially further their learning. They are forming a new authority, a collective one based on the continuous trial, error, inquiry, and search conducted by a wide range of people. The credibility of this authority is tested by the members of the voluntary collective, people like themselves who have a lot to gain or loose. Their affiliation is based on positions, not identities.

Hackers and other open source contributors produce knowledge by synching their efforts outside the offices of corporations and universities. They have constituted an autonomous value system outside the values concretized in copyright and profit maximization. In the eighties and nineties people with AIDS educated themselves and hacked the health system to redesign the clinical trials and treatments that meant life or death to them. More recently, people sickened by lifestyles of convenience structure their own experiments in living sustainably. They publish their trials and errors on websites, in books and magazines, speak and listen in public to clarify problems, exchange solutions, and build purpose.

6.
To some extent art always inhabits the plane of metalanguage because of its relationship to the symbolic. When actions are called art, they resonate with heightened symbolic capacity. Art is subject to interpretation and value judgments, connecting us to the realms called ethics, aesthetics, philosophy and love. This is part of the purpose of calling something art.

Artists are expected to have publics, however small or large, but for better or worse, they are not expected to know much. An artist who wants to perform learning can leverage whatever claim to a public she is able to accrue, and initiate processes she hasn’t mastered, putting the very notions of professionalization and credibility on the stage. This is an activation of metalanguage, something that artists do all the time. When I perform the acquisition of knowledge in the symbolic resonance that is art, I am inviting new conversations about knowledge itself. By placing this activity in the realm of aesthetics, I subject it to our questions about what we care about.

Let’s have a conversation about this love affair we are having. Let’s have a metaconversation. Metaknowledge comes about between people. It’s conversational. The value and meaning of the art our culture has developed is purposefully debatable; it flourishes between people. When the artist publicly conducts research using new guidelines and criteria, she launches the project of research itself into conversational reevaluation.

7.
Artists are not expected to know much, but they are expected to feel and to sense. They are allowed to engage whatever range of the human sensorium is necessary to them. Even when some theories of modernism attempted to purify a given medium from all reference to more than one sensing capacity, the achievers of such a feat were presumed to channel their entire sensibilities into these media-true forms. In the hands of the artist, metalanguage exceeds the literally and exclusively linguistic. Proust convinced us to smell the asparagus in our urine.

The worlds conjured by artists have always been freighted with values. These normative investments have been located or dislocated in the broad shouldered, soft-featured, evasive figure of beauty. Recurrently critics and audiences attempt to simplify the problem of the criteria (and purpose) of art by narrowing it to the pursuit of beauty. But this simplifies nothing. Often assumed to be a universal, beauty, whether narrowed to an idea of visual pleasure or expanded to the essence of the good and the true, is as subject to debate as any other value.

Beauty is still invoked as though it solves the thorny issue of discerning the value of works of art. When people talk about a return to beauty, no matter what else they are saying, the message includes a wish to dissociate aesthetic evaluation from other questions of social value. None of the many transient forms of beauty can spare us the further work of evaluating how the values inherent in any concrete example of beauty fix different kinds of makers and audiences in different relations to power, in different relations to material and symbolic resources.

8.
The 20th century is a story of artists rebelling against beauty and its alienation from life, only to have their gestures put though a strainer to isolate an anorexic aesthetics: a revised beauty purged of heterogeneous notions of value. When the vitality of a given art movement is irresistible, the strainer refines what can be softened into the morphing shape of beauty, leaving the rest for the historians and social scientists.

In the 1980s and 90s, a generation of artists once again turned our backs on beauty which at the time was being celebrated as stridently irrational. Under that particular wave of anti-aesthetics, we made works informed by the hermeneutics of suspicion. A paranoid epistemology made sense, given the opportunism and corruption flaunted by authority. We believed that the critique of power could deliver us from the catastrophes unfolding around us. Then we found ourselves caught in a routine of unveiling truths about our enemy, as we watched an economic and political system validate whole new levels of violence.

At the end of Jack London’s tale, the people see that their chief is either a greedy fool or himself a con man, probably both. He is forced into exile, or maybe executed, I don’t remember. I’m interested in the question beyond the point where the chief loses face: what new forms will organize the people and their wealth?

Proliferating sharper tools of outrage is not insignificant, but focusing on the failure of authority to produce a more livable world has not in itself produced a more livable world. In compensation, critique offers a sense of mastery. Attached to our skills, we find ourselves nourishing a detached metaknowledge that becomes its own circle of hell. Here we catch ourselves preempting every glimmer of emergence. An exhausted metaknowledge demands reinvention and something more: if we want to remake our world we have to turn our sensors away from failure and nurture the clumsy initiatives that offer new ways to be. The paranoid epistemology gives way to an epistemology guided by receptivity.

9.
The 20th century is also a story of artists crashing the division of labor that organizes different forms of intelligence into specializations.  What history has named conceptual art is one example. Explicitly articulating an array of new criteria, these artists navigated a channel of aesthetics breaching the usual quarantine of human capacities: thinking-feeling, verbal-visual, critical-inventive, analytical-creative, activism-art. Perhaps most importantly these artists disturbed the division of artist from audience, soliciting new aesthetic invention on the part of those engaging their works.

I’ve been told that artists should just be artists, and activists should just be activists, because otherwise we get bad art and lame activism. Such prescriptions reinforce the preference for recognized forms of mastery while pre-empting emergence and ignoring the fact that art, activism and other living forms require continuous renewal.

The “other” is an accident which one sometimes wishes to avoid. The other is a hazard, the constant proximity of chance, because the other cannot be predicted or controlled. The intolerance of seemingly incommensurable systems is a form of defense against the other.

10.
“You see, it was the eclipse. It came into my mind in the nick of time, how Columbus, or Cortez, or one of those people, played an eclipse as a saving trump once, on some savages, and I saw my chance. I could play it myself, now, and it wouldn’t be any plagiarism, either, because I should get it in nearly a thousand years ahead of those parties.”

So speaks Hank Morgan, an invention of the American writer Mark Twain, a Yankee thrust from 1890’s Connecticut into King Arthur’s Court, 528 A.D. As an unexpected stranger from another time, he can hardly account for his oddity, and so evokes the usual homicidal suspicion. Awaiting his execution, this pragmatic man of industry calculates that there will be a solar eclipse the next day, and sends notice to the King that he is a magician more powerful than Merlin, and he will destroy the sun if he is not treated accordingly. Among the skills he brings from the future is hard-nosed business sense, and he negotiates not only his life but also appointment as “perpetual minister and executive” to the King. Armed now with worldly powers he proceeds to modernize the kingdom, introducing electricity, telephone, typewriter, schools, newspapers, advertising, soap, gunpowder and more. His great knowledge and his insistence on business earn Hank the moniker of “the Boss.”

He does most of this covertly, so as not to arouse the hostile defenses of local institutions. But in the Boss’s view, the biggest obstacle to delivering the people from poverty and fear and into industrialized, capitalist democracy is their own lack of readiness. What holds them back is their subservient acceptance of King and Church.

Complications inevitably ensue until the Boss and his band of loyal followers, despite electrified fencing and Gatling guns, find themselves trapped in a bunker, well defended but unable to conquer. Wounded by a knight, Boss Hank is finished off, and perhaps also saved, by sorcery: Merlin hexes him to sleep for the next 13 centuries. He will wake again in the stream of modernity.

11.
Culture may do little more than stall whatever makes people want to kill each other. And symbolic formulations are always enlisted on the way to the slaughter. Twain wrote his book partly to ridicule the influence of Sir Walter Scott, whose romantic concoctions of medieval chivalry he blamed for the Confederate War.  Twain believed in the power of ideas. So much so that the first thing Hank Morgan does as a minister in King Arthur’s court is set up a patent office: innovations and the folks who dream them deserve to prosper through commercial exploitation. One of the fondest ideas of Twain’s age was the promise of education, technology and free enterprise to alleviate human misery.

Now, with over a hundred more years of future heaped on our heads, one of the most frightening ideas of our age is the current consensus that defective education, unregulated technology and prodigious enterprise are hurling us into a future where we will scramble for the humble survival skills of a distant past. Technology is still invoked as though it will solve the thorny issue of environmental risks, natural resources and the distribution of both. But it’s never so simple. Subservient to authority systems mystified as rational, we the people lack the readiness to fulfill modernism as an egalitarian truce, or to move beyond it. But one thing is for sure: the Public Amateur is not aiming to wake up as the Boss, nor as his complicit jester.

When asked about possible incentives that might cause North Korea (or Iran) to end its nuclear ambitions, John Bolton (then as the U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security) famously replied, “I don’t do carrots.” Carrots as in sticks and carrots, of course, in this case leaving only the sticks, as in the big-stick, unilateral “diplomacy” that characterizes U.S. dealings with the rest of the world.

Presumably the stick works through fear. Often the left also thinks this is the best approach to getting what we want. But spending valuable energy echoing the daily messages of hopelessness only overwhelms most of us and paralyzes the best intentions.

So I was disappointed to read an article (Turning Your Lawn into a Victory Garden Won’t Save You — Fighting the Corporations Will) on Alternet by Stan Cox . Apparently Cox doesn’t think we should do carrots either.

He asserts that the swell of interest in growing food at home is misleading people into thinking they are doing something about the world food crisis and keeping them from getting down to the real work: fighting the agribusiness corporations. He is absolutely right that our entire commercialized food system needs a major overhaul. But where do we start? What is going to motivate people? I started researching the corporate control of agriculture about ten years ago, and started looking at people’s efforts to create an alternative food system about halfway into that. In the beginning, I found that most people are so out of touch with how food is produced that they don’t even know how to start thinking about it, so often they would rather not. The global food system is an incredibly confusing and daunting subject—like many of the problems that confront us today.

But I have also seen surprising change in a short time, specifically an increase in the number of people interested in where food comes from and the detrimental consequences of our current system. Ten years ago people really didn’t want to hear about what I was learning; today most listeners are eager to know more.

One of the great things about food is that it is immediate, so deeply integrated into our daily life, there are countless entry points to making changes. And the food system is so intricately related to so many other aspects of our lives – energy consumption, health, global relations—that increased awareness of food issues opens up consciousness of related questions, and the desire to take action.

But Cox explains to us that backyard and even frontyard gardening “won’t make a nick in the food crisis” because “the world’s diet is mostly grains and 75% of the world cropland is devoted to grains and oilseeds.” He goes on to calculate what a negligible contribution would be made to diets if everyone in the nation used half their yard to grow vegetables–as though the effects of these kinds of actions can be simply quantified. He then describes how the conveniently stored nutrient qualities of grains made accumulation of surplus possible and so gave birth to markets “which allowed the prosperous to exercise control over society’s have-nots. Eventually, states used control over grains to exert political power over entire populations.” Enter industrial agriculture under capitalist logic and we are as good as slaves.

After dating our grain-based oppression back to at least the Pharaohs, he adds that because of grains, we have been destroying biodiversity and “living with the resulting soil erosion and water pollution” ever since “the dawn of agriculture.” If grains have been oppressing us for “10,000 years,” you might think we could put quite a high value on learning how to grow some other things for ourselves. But the author can only think on the monumental scale—a few broad strokes reduce the history of agriculture to an inescapable trap, and the only solution is to somehow up-end this 10,000 year old tyranny in one insurgent leap, also offered in a few broad strokes:

“Whatever its benefits, replacing your lawn with food plants will not give Big Agribusiness the big poke in the eye that it needs, nor will it save the agricultural landscapes of the nation or world. To do that, the big-commodity market must be not just modified but overthrown.”

But given the rest of the article, perhaps the most confused statement is this:

“Only when we get more people back on the land, working to feed people and not Monsanto, will the system have a chance to work. Most home gardeners know that the root of the problem is political, but the agricultural establishment would like nothing better than to see us spend all of our free time in our gardens and not in political dissent.”

Where do you start to “get more people back on the land working to feed people and not Monsanto?” Why not in our yards? What kind of experiences are going to let people know if they are even interested in how their food is grown, much less getting back on the land and working to feed people? Unfortunately, other than fighting to get a better farm bill passed in five years, Cox doesn’t offer one concrete suggestion as to how people might launch the overthrow of the big-commodity market that he is advocating.

I realize that Cox is writing from a sense of frustration. As a participant in Fritz Haeg’s largely symbolic project (Edible Estates) of converting a few American front lawns from pesticide-dependent, water-wasting grass into aesthetically pleasing vegetable gardens, he has been placed in a position of advocating such changes on a personal level. He feels this is not enough and of course, in itself, it isn’t. But rather than trivializing the possible effects of behavioral change as “good vibes” and brandishing the stick of the enormity of the problem, he could spend some energy elucidating the way small, symbolic projects are just a part of a larger movement for changes in the food system, a movement which is already happening.

Perhaps Cox, a long time gardener, plant breeder and political writer, takes for granted in his own life the effects of growing a vegetable garden at home, and doesn’t imagine the lives of those for whom it may be a new endeavor. For many it may be the start of understanding how food is actually produced (and what life is like for those who do this for a living), what temperature and weather really mean to our sustenance (climate change is intricately related), a taste of autonomy (there are alternatives to shopping), a compost (how much value we waste and the absurdity of landfills), physical activity (obesity 1.1), pesticides (why should I poison the food I am making, the ground where my kids play), new forms of exchange (trading information and harvest with friends and neighbors), empowerment (if I can do this, why not that?), a different relationship to dirt (good dirt is a precious thing to be cultivated!).

Why should we assume that time spent gardening (organically!) is time detracting from being in the public arena fighting corporations? It is at least safe to assume it is not time spent burning fossil fuels, watching garbage on television and movie theatres, shopping, punching buttons on video games and other personal electronic devices, stewing in hopelessness about personal and global problems. I venture that it might even be safe to assume that growing a garden is more likely than many things to lead to the next steps “into the public arena” such as getting involved in a local farmer’s market, food coop, community supported agriculture, renewable energy projects, larger scale urban agriculture projects, agriculture programs in schools, campaigns to create support for small organic farms, campaigns to reform the farm bill, campaigns against pesticides and untested genetically modified foods, prosecution of criminal corporate acts…all those specific things that just might add up to a better food system and healthier people.

I’m not interested in picking on Stan Cox in particular (he did some fine reporting on the Steve Kurtz case). I do think we need to learn to read a familiar kind of cant for tendencies that are not just disempowering but are actually distortive. In as far as the point of Cox’s article is to alert us to how much in our food system needs to change I have no disagreement. But why undermine one of the things that might attract us into making those changes? Why load on more disempowering fear and discouragement? Why shouldn’t we do carrots?

Last week, The Public Square in Chicago, along with ITVS hosted a screening of King Corn, made by Aaron Woolfe, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis. They had invited me, along with the fabulous LaDonna Redmond, to make comments after the feature length video and then take questions on the issues raised.
(For what it’s worth, after the film there was barely half an hour left for comments and discussion. Do programmers think audiences simply cannot tolerate an event longer than 2 hours? What do you think?)

The Genre
The film is another example of a growing genre, the documentation of a self-initiated investigation that combines in varying proportions personal narrative and focused research, often anchored by a gesture or act that loosely qualifies as an experiment relevant to the motive question.

Viewers may recognize the strategy promoted largely (no pun intended) in the work of Michael Moore whose style is notoriously aggressive and often criticized for being emotionally manipulative. His 1989 pioneer example is “Roger and Me” in which he tries to get a meeting with CEO Roger Smith of General Motors to ask him why the world’s largest corporation is abandoning the people of Flint, Michigan. Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me” (2004) is a precedent specifically regarding the question: what the hell are we eating and what is it doing to us?, taking the form of what turns out to be a health-endangering self-experiment. In books and articles, the food writer Michael Pollan (interviewed in King Corn) has used this structure beautifully, organizing his research with experiences initiated specifically for the purpose. So he has grown GMO potatoes in his vegetable garden, bought a calf as an investment and followed its life in the meat industry, traced the origins of variously typical American meals he has consumed, and procured a meal with the least commercial mediation possible (a contemporary hunter gatherer adventure). [See Playing God in the Garden, Power Steer, The Omnivore's Dilemma]

What is being generated here is reflexive knowledge. It is framed by a subjectivity, that of a specific learner, who responds to what she learns with reflection and new questions. It is not framed by the conventions of objectivity that traditionally certify truths.

Our guides are generally nonspecialists whose interests, methods, and priorities are more or less visible; we can evaluate them according to our own values, accept or reject their premises and findings accordingly.

Though they undoubtedly operate from their own bias, ideally they have no professional involvement in the material, thus nothing to protect in the substance of what they discover. The heart of the research is guaranteed not so much by authority but by experience that we more or less witness. Anyone could attempt to reproduce it, including us.

King Korn
The basic structure of King Corn is thus: when we realized how much of our diet consisted of corn, we decided to go out to Iowa and grow an acre of corn ourselves, to find out what goes into this crop and how it gets into so many of our foods…

The two filmmakers who actually appear in the film, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, met as undergrads at Yale. Regardless of what a Yale degree may actually indicate about the bearer’s intelligence, these guys are smart enough not to act like people approaching an Ivy League research paper. I imagine they knew quite a lot about the food and agriculture world before starting this practical investigation, but they seem to make a point of putting it aside once the videotape rolls. The outcome is a credible record of an ignorant everyman’s education in contemporary agriculture.

Cheney and Ellis had discovered in the course of their friendship that they each had great grandfathers who lived and farmed in the same county in Iowa, neatly providing a setting for their Green Acres research drama (in fact, the anchoring locale is a town called Green). This gives the story a backdrop of destiny, if you like that sort of thing, and/ or a returning-to-roots narrative.

On the odyssey of the pilgrim researcher, many experts are consulted. In the set up they visit a lab where they have their hair analyzed to get the data version of the typical American eater. Yup, the hair speaks counter-intuitive truth to reason: a diet of soda and hamburgers and snack foods delivers what they suspected: the main ingredient in their hair is corn. Look in the bioinformatic mirror and you read what you eat/are.

One of the strengths of the film is their respect for the Iowa farmers they encounter. They don’t assume anything about their informants’ lives, opinions or class affiliation. They refrain from interpreting and judging what they learn, but the knowledge they acquire complicates the decisions they have to make. And despite their restraint, those complications are ethical ones.

Their strategy is to participate in the existing system. They try to keep it simple; for instance, Cheney and Ellis plant the bioengineered corn seed that everyone around them is planting (Liberty Link tradename, Bayer CropSciences), and they eschew taking on transgenic agriculture as an issue. The corn they grow is inedible before processing in a factory or by an animal’s body, and an increasing share of it is destined for fuel. The prices for a bushel of corn the year they are growing it (2005) are not reflective of current prices. 2005 yielded the largest corn harvest in U.S. history and granaries were already full with mountains of surplus sitting under tarps outside. For years, overproduction has kept the prices of the big commodities (corn, soy and wheat) low, lower than the cost of producing it. Farmers supplying these commodity chains would not survive if not for massive government subsidies (our tax money). The surplus of corn is what has driven the switch to cheap corn syrup as a ubiquitous ingredient in processed foods, and corn as a major ingredient of livestock diets. Sodas and other drinks sweetened with high fructose corn syrup are leading culprits in the diabetes epidemic, and corn-fed beef is the source of hamburgers containing mostly fat, as well as environmentally disastrous confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). These and other social/environmental problems are fairly well explored in King Corn.

Corn Currency
Since the film was made we’ve witnessed an unprecedented rise in the price fetched by grain commodities, particularly corn, wheat, soy, and increasingly rice. Now we are also witnessing skyrocketing food prices worldwide; consequent riots about the decreasing accessibility of food have broken out in Egypt, India, Indonesia, Haiti, Morocco and other parts of Africa. Elsewhere there are long queues for bread or grain and many nations are curbing the export of staple grains. Of course the deep dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels makes food vulnerable to rising oil prices. Other factors such as major droughts in Australia and China may implicate climate change. Another reason is that as affluence increases in developing nations like China and India, the demand for bread and for grain-fed meat is also rising. Worldwide, stocks of surplus grains are at an unprecedented low. And then there is the sudden demand for biofuels, especially corn-based ethanol. The reckless policy of U.S. government to subsidize this folly has thus far been unquestioned. Because farmers can get so much more for corn than they did in the past, they are planting even more corn, diminishing the acreage available for growing things that people actually eat.

Last week at the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council’s annual summit, I heard Jim Braun say a few interesting things about this rise in prices. Braun, a former farmer, and now a Springfield lobbyist with the Illinois Farmer-Consumer Coalition, took issue with currently popular attributions of rising food prices to farmers being paid more. According to him, the farmer’s average share of revenue from a box of corn flakes is $.05 cents. With wheat at $4.00 a bushel, farmers earn about $.01 from each loaf of bread. So farmers could get paid three times what they are getting now and the loaf would cost 3 cents more to the consumer. Reminds me of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group of mostly immigrant tomato pickers in Immokalee County, Florida who spent years getting Yum Brands (parent of Taco Bell) to the table to discuss improvements to their condition. Getting an agreement for Yum to demand that tomato plantation owners pay workers one cent more per 32 pound bucket(!) was considered progress.

Where does the money go?

blogger’s delinquency: although posted in march 08, this was written in october 07

Last week I went with a couple of friends to the Renaissance Society in Chicago to see a new piece by Steve McQueen called Gravesend, a 17 minute video (transferred from 35 mm film, projected in a HUGE dark space) about coltan mining in the Congo.

The poster essay [see Renaissance Society website] written by Hamza Walker describes the film as “unapologetically abstract” and “resolutely purged of any information illustrating economic links….”

I feel unapologetically bothered about such an artistic strategy.

I’ m sure many will find the piece beautiful. In the most arresting sequences we see or barely see in the dim light, miners (black), shoveling in a chiaroscuro pit. We see close-ups of their hands (black) picking little bits out of muddy clumps or out of walls or breaking larger clumps with a hammer, again to pick the bits from the chunks and wash them in a stream…. And then we see close-ups of industrial processes, preternaturally clean, featuring a robotic arm seizing and repositioning what look like coltan ingots to further, in mechanical rhythm, a process we don’t understand. Linking the shots of hands groping mud and the machinic purity, nothing more than a black and white animation of squiggly lines based on the currents or geographic track of the Congo River. After the precise robotic sorting of ingots, we will soon restart the loop back at the mine, after stopping for a ponderous sunset over an industrial harbor, ostensibly referring to the English town of Gravesend, from which the narrator of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, relates his tale. No additional contexts along the supply chain. Not an abstract peek at that terribly abstract thing, the markets trading coltan futures and other derivatives, nor, more concretely, the parts that go into cell phones and computers or the hands that assemble those goods, nor the price, feature and brand wars that keep cell phones “moving” in the market, nor the mountains of phones abandoned for new models. Outside of the camera’s tight frames on the bodies laboring in shadows and their eager hands, nothing about the decades of war and atrocity in the scramble to control the mineral resources of the Congo.

That job is left to the curator’s essay (Walker’s) which does provide some history and general details about the Democratic Republic of Congo and the economics of coltan. So, the division of labor referenced in McQueen’s film – both obliquely and obviously– is reiterated in the gallery: artist will do the resolutely purified positioning of parts and curator will do the heavy lifting of background explaining and connecting to lived histories in our world now. This is not the only place that conventional divisions of symbolic labor are observed.

I appreciate an artistic practice that declines the duty of informing. After all, information is everywhere and the urgent need seems to be how to get it to matter to people. If the information is there already, why should an artist spoil his art with it? Better to make something that motivates people to find out more, absorb such knowledge, come to their own conclusions regarding what to do about it.

But is this the only option? A friend that went to the show with me said that maybe the artist wanted to be sure not to slide into documentary forms. On that matter Walker’s essay says:

While its unembellished footage brings it into a discursive relationship with documentary and other forms of reportage, Gravesend above all else is a poem, and an epic one at that. Strikingly beautiful, and supremely ambitious, it is a highly formal meditation that speaks by looking.

Another division of labor. Why does the artist add his heft to the well guarded boundary between documentary and poem? That’s obvious enough; in most people’s minds documentary and reportage are jobs: toiling, grunting and sometimes even paid labor that must adhere to a form set by the social, a form that clearly sets out information and obviates or disguises bias by obeying conventions that certify objective or at least reliable information. The poem is the inspired offering of a special individual, moved by a refined sensibility to give form to elegant perceptions regardless of the object being perceived. The poem glimmers and radiates; the document hopes to shed light. It’s assumed that these polar pursuits–the documentary and the poem–loose status by sliding toward each other. The poetic documentary finds its credibility compromised. The poem with a job to inform is déclassé, forfeiting much of its prestige.

The only problem is that none of this is really true anymore. The degree to which such pure categories existed was the degree to which we wanted to believe in them. That was relatively easy during the swells of modernism in the last century, but now a rigid adherence to such divisions is more forced than ever. The conventions of documentary objectivity have never been entirely stable to begin with and for years now practitioners have been quite consciously reinventing the form along with our expectations of certifiable truth claims. Scores of media makers take on documentary subjects and methods while simultaneously interrogating the form itself, inflecting it in idiosyncratic ways. The issue for viewers is shifting from a position of accepting or not accepting a delivered truth to examining their own media literacy [and how what we perceive acquires meaning]. Given the endless proliferation of competing truth claims in our media environment, it becomes incumbent on viewers to develop their skills at evaluating both information and opinion and in the process to grapple with the ethics implied in their response.

One of the more perverse aspirations of some threads of high modernism was the constitution of pure visual experience. In certain frames this was the ultimate poetry for visual artists and apparently the criterion is still meaningful to some as this passage from Walker’s essay suggests:

Over and above any socio-economic and political machinations, Gravesend favors discreet outward appearances. For McQueen, the facts of the matter are visual and visual alone as Gravesend’s stunning production values attest. He insists that Gravesend “first and foremost is about looking,” even at the expense of knowing what we are observing. Textual footholds are dismissed; no maps, no dialogue, no villains, and no experts.

According to Walker’s statement, it seems the artist of this poetic product has taken on himself a “just the facts” protocol much more exclusive than those embraced by most artists dealing with complex contemporary issues and the feelings attached to them. It is rare that an artist desiring to further the discourse about a given issue and unafraid of being contaminated by a whiff of documentary, would take on a method that is visual and visual alone.

Why do some artists continue to restrict themselves to a set of parameters that is artistically exhausted and perhaps even morally complicit with the status quo? With or without stunning production values, insisting that the facts of any matter are visual alone is a position that studiously avoids the troubling questions about that matter. In this case the artist proves to us that he commands the resources to travel to presumably remote mines in the Congo, gain access to high tech manufacturing schemes, and insist on visual perfection. The subject matter of the film—an historic situation that is complex and tragic—elevates his work from mere poem to “epic” poem. The film depicts an implacable system containing human and nonhuman parts but ultimately not subject to human agency. The system is beyond our comprehension and within it no victims or villains muss the abstraction. The messenger of this cosmos is beyond good and evil and depicts his subject in the same mirror.

The complex concatenation of systems that describe the economic life of coltan is full of winners and losers, more and less numbing or fatal. Finally we the viewers, typically in the US or UK or EU, are lumped with the winners. Though the stakes for us are debatable, we gain from not thinking too precisely about practices that treat products depending on coltan mining like infinitely replaceable, always obsolete technology, i.e., garbage. Like the profiteers in the supply chain, whether they are war lords who manage labor with the end of a gun, or corporate executives who do business obtaining the mineral blindly through “opaque” brokers, we are not to be interrupted by moral considerations of the violence that makes our consumables not just available but affordable, finally dispensable.

But in the gallery, the high ground we are offered is to be beyond good and evil. In the art world, for artists, institutions and viewers, this buys prestige. When a definition of prestige is consistently more amenable to the interest of winners than losers we can only suspect its underpinnings.

There are many good reasons to eschew the haggard forms recognized as photographic “documentary.” Especially when we meet these images in the field of consumption instead of in the context of specific cases made by human rights organizations to stimulate action. That is a world in which visible evidence still can put people on the spot, and in many cases is required in the long slog for influence. But beyond the specialized propaganda wars of NGOs, corporations and governments, conventional documentary makes many of us feel powerless: either guilty and hopeless, or, if we are equipped with a sophisticated critique of the form, effectively off the hook.

Perhaps this aspect of documentary is part of what moves McQueen to maintain the high art fortress intended to protect his work from such a dreary fate. He has gone to great trouble to make a work about a deeply troubling subject, a world inextricably shadowing our daily life. Even though I am critical of the strategy, I don’t really want to judge his intentions.

I’m not looking for art whose methods and purpose can be collapsed to a function of conveying information. But neither am I interested in works that collapse their possibilities into the narrow spectra delineated by a false opposition between the documentary and the poetic. The kind of creativity that intrigues me rejects both of these well-trodden options in order to explore the huge and murky territory not defined by either.

Does your mom send you newspaper clippings? Has she transferred this impulse to the quicker clicker, namely email?

My mom regularly forwards various email messages that have been sent by friends or acquaintances of hers. I received this from her several months after it had made the rounds in the spheres of easy forwarding. To this one I was moved to write a response and hit “reply-all.” Here I post the original circular followed by my response.

The Forwarded Message
Subject: A TALE OF TWO HOUSES
Here’s some interesting information.
You can check this out on Snopes.com under “The Story of Two Houses”

House #1 A 20 room mansion ( not including 8 bathrooms ) heated by
natural gas. Add on a pool ( and a pool house) and a separate guest
house, all heated by gas. In one month this residence consumes more
energy than the average American household does in a year. The
average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2400. In
natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 20 times the
national average for an American home. This house is not situated
in a Northern or Midwestern “snow belt” area. It’s in the South.

House #2 Designed by an architecture professor at a
leading national university. This house incorporates every
“green” feature current home construction can provide. The house is
4,000 square feet ( 4 bedrooms ) and is nestled on a high prairie in the
American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal
heat-pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the
ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F. ) heats the house in the winter
and cools it in the summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or
natural gas and it consumes one-quarter electricity required for a
conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected
and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from
showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then
into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land
surrounding the house. Surrounding flowers and shrubs native to the area
enable the property to blend into the surrounding rural landscape.

~~~~~
HOUSE #1 is outside of Nashville, Tennessee; it is the abode of
the “environmentalist” Al Gore.

HOUSE #2 is on a ranch near Crawford,
Texas; it is the residence the of the President of the United States,

My Two Cents on Two Houses

This definitely deserves a response:

1. Commending Mom
2. What does it change?
3. A little more information

1.
First of all, I would like to commend my mom for sending out this news that disturbed her personally. I called her a couple of weeks ago sometime after she had first received this message and it was the first thing she wanted to talk about. It really upset her.

One of the many great things about Mom is that she is willing to reconsider her opinion on the basis of new information. To the best of my knowledge she voted with the Republican party most of her life. However, observing the decadence and opportunism of the Bush administration she seemed to reconsider many of her previously held opinions.
Meanwhile she had been taking in the news about climate change and I remember that when she went to see Gore’s movie and heard Gore speak in person, she was not afraid to say that she was very impressed with his commitment to a real issue, although she had never been a fan of his in the past. So of course she was upset to read something that discredits Gore by illustrating the hypocrisy of his lifestyle.
This news item is meant to upset people who admire Gore and to provide ammunition to those who would like to distract from his message.

2.
But even if we take it at face value, what does it change? Does it change the evidence being reported everyday from an overwhelming number of credible sources that global warming is a clear and present danger for all of us?

Maybe Gore was just lucky to choose the issue of the natural environment some time ago as part of his political “brand.” When he lost the battle to claim the election of 2000, maybe he had nothing better to do than to revive the issue he had published a book about before he served as Vice President. Gore’s luck was to have done years of work and come out with a film just at the moment that a larger public began to realize that the overwhelming majority of the scientific establishment just might be worth listening to. Even as the leader of the so-called free world, who with arguably the most powerful position on the planet, and had done everything in his power to scuttle any evidence that might trouble the public’s dependence on a life based on cheap fossil fuels, had exhausted his own credibility in every way.

And then we learn that Gore doesn’t practice what he preaches. And Bush, the leader of the free world who until very recently was the number one opponent of doing anything on the side of innovation or re-envisioning our relationship to energy, has created for himself a model energy-efficient home.

If I were a Bush supporter I would be very troubled by the fact that this man doesn’t privately practice what he preaches. Interesting that more Bush supporters aren’t troubled by this bit of hypocrisy.

As someone concerned about the consequences of short-sighted environmental practices, I am furious that the President doesn’t preach what he practices. Especially since, as President of the free world, his preaching often becomes the basis for policy changes at home and abroad.

On the other hand, you could say this is consistent with Bush’s doctrine of privatization of everything, or every man for himself. The notion of a “public good,” what is good for the population in the long-term scheme, doesn’t interfere with his policy of promoting whatever short-term folly seems to be advantageous for himself and his small circle.

3.
There are a few details left out of the story:

The Gores pay quite a bit extra for the kilowatt hours because they are enrolled in a Green Power Switch program which means that the power they are buying is generated through renewable resources like wind and solar.

The Gores have been in the process of converting their heating system to geothermal and installing solar panels on their house.

The Gore household referred to consists of four structures with 20 rooms total. One of those structures houses the Vice-President’s Secret Service detail. Another his own think tank. Tipper Gore also runs an office out of the house. Most homes do not have to deal with such things. Yet the local utility has stated that smaller residences in Nashville use as much power as the Gore household. In other words the Gore residence uses less power per capita than many other large Nashville residences. Although Bush has entertained publicly at his ranch in Crawford, this house is his private getaway, not his primary residence and work place.

Then there is the question of just how much they are actually using. The AP quotes a spokes women, Laurie Parker, for the Nashville Utility as saying that The Tennessee Center for Policy Research made no contact with them. AP also claimed to have reviewed the bills and came up with an energy use figure some 15% lower. Perhaps they factored in the surcharge charged for using over 1,000Kw per month. MSNBC countdown pointed out that the GORE family voluntarily pays $5,893 extra for green power.

The founder and president of the “nonpartisan” think tank that created this story, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research is Jason Drew Johnson, formerly of the American Enterprise Institute which has received over $1.6 million from ExonMobil, and accordingly promotes the idea that global warming is not a real issue. For instance, last February, they were offering $10,000 to scientists and economists for articles that undermine a major climate change report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It’s interesting to see how many news organizations picked up on the report but failed to investigate further and ignored all or part of other relevant information:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200703010008
MSNBC’s Keith Olberman raised some of these points last February after the “two Houses” press release was issued, the day after Gore won the Academy Award:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/02/28/olbermann-on-gores-energy-use-setting-the-record-straight/

Almost all of our media is biased, lazy and/or blatantly corrupt. The burden is on us to consider where our news is coming from, the interests of who is generating it, and what is actually changed by a given story. Unfortunately we are so polarized that it seems most of us grab anything appearing to confirm our habitual positions.

So thanks for sending this along, Mom,

I have started following the story of Colin Beavan, ‘no impact man,’ a writer living in Manhattan. Along with his wife (a writer for Business Week) and daughter, he is attempting to live for a year with no or minimal footprint in terms of energy consumption and waste production, although his project guidelines include the energy to blog daily and publish a book at the end of the year. http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/

What i find so interesting about his project, is what it contributes to an aspect of our current state in an affluent, industrialized nation: self-experimentation becomes necessary because no one can trust the authorities or so-called experts.

Beavan indicates this in this passage:

“One really important point I want to make is that the science is confusing about a lot of this stuff. There are studies and counter studies. It’s easier just to consume less product than to try to figure out what is okay and what is not.”

Our condition of reflexivity at this point is such that the amount of commentary or information on what we do is overwhelming not only us, but it’s overwhelming the “experts.” The dams around science’s fantasy of objectivity are being breached. Science is more and more obviously driven by subjective interests. Even though technocratic knowledge still legitimizes a major portion of the spectrum of authority, our ability to rely on technoscientific pronouncements is crumbling under the weight of information and the light of examination. We have more tools for producing ‘information’ and fewer for making judgments; we have more networks for informing — press, publicity, publishing — so we have more opportunities for examination. The public, weary of conflicting authorities, constantly exposed to means of reporting on and reflecting on the claims of authorities, has to devise other means of producing information, i.e., their own experience, and also has to move further to self reliance, i.e., trusting their own observation, good “sense,” and decision.

What we have is the glimmerings of new kinds of subjectivity or person: a more and more fully autonomous subject. Someone who does some kind of work or experiment to produce knowledge of their own, and then feels they have some basis for making their own decision. There is almost no other choice when other authorities have lost all credibility.

This is not to say that the individual produces knowledge all by herself. In the course of creating and interpreting her own experience she avails herself of the immeasurable wealth of knowledge produced by other humans, which includes that put into transmissible form (reports, studies, journalism, fiction, film, press, etc,), as well as the feedback from other people in her face-to-face sphere. But in the end she is creating of herself a person who can trust her own resources to put it all together and accept the consequences of her own mistakes.

I love this part of what Beavan wrote in his March 20 post “I heareby sacrifice my teeth to the environment (kind of):”

“We’re moving and changing so fast that I may be making mistakes that we’ll have to correct later when some expert who knows a lot more than me tells me I’m an idiot, which of course I am because I’m just a schlub, like everyone else, trying to negotiate through spin and counter-spin to do the right thing.”

Of course he will make mistakes! He is on territory very inadequately explored or described; hence there is no other way to proceed into that territory. Trial and error. It’s always a collective thing, as evidenced by all the comments on his blog by people sharing their own experiments of the same order. I haven’t brought myself to make the moves he has made, but reading his trial and error gives me more confidence. He and his interlocutors are creating knowledge! Which includes mistakes — so that other experimenters can have the luxury to say, ” I’m not gonna make THAT mistake because I already KNOW about that one!”

As Beavan indicates, the experts contradict each other every day, so there is less and less reason to believe they can judge better than we can. Especially since, with information technology as it is, we are increasingly privy to all the information they use.

On Gut Reading

People are really freaked out now about the breakdown of authority but people are also showing each other ways to learn to rely on ourselves and each other. It’s a learning process, so we have to learn to love learning. And we have to be able to be wrong. At one point Colin Beavan locates his source of decision-making in his “gut.” Even thought i have an aversion to that concept, recently aggravated by Mr. Bush, our president, who likewise accounts for his disastrous decision meter, i understand that what one is often saying with that phrase is that they are relying on their own experience over conflicting information. Unfortunately the case of Mr. Bush is that his own experience is narrow and twisted even while so much of our fate depends on it, so it becomes inexcusable.

In this case Beavan produces a set of conditions in which we have what we need to assess the information he delivers, in other words, a respectable degree of transparency. We know he is getting a book out of this, but we also know that even he is not prepared for what he might learn by such an experiment. The conditions are such that we can examine his claims, query him when we see discrepancies and expect him to respond. Part of his motivation to respond truthfully is that getting a book deal is not just a promise of economic reward, but it is also a demand that the author live up to the terms of the experiment he is proposing; otherwise the book and Colin Beavan’s reputation as an author (an informant) are quickly discredited and become more garbage to our midden of confusing unreliable sources.

Experimental Forms of Objectivity

The promise of the fantasy of objectivity is that we will gain a broader perspective than what we currently have. This is called understanding, which is not opposed to knowledge but accompanies it when a transparently motivated inquiry is undertaken. Under the conditions Beavan has constructed, he is substituting something different from the scientific brand of objectivity, but which functions in the same way to broaden his perspective and to test his biases. His objectivity is in the rules that he set for himself: to live according to what we currently understand as a no- or low-impact existence, and in his commitment to follow those rules. The objectivity of this experiment is equally dependent on the assemblage of people, most of them anonymous to him and surely of widely differing opinions, who have become invested in the experiment he is conducting in public.

Even though he has his own interests in the project, we can take those into account, and can believe that he really is “a schlub like everybody else” IN THE AMBIT OF THE EXPERIMENT ITSELF. In other words, he really is starting this as another complacent, convenience-addicted consumer who just finally crossed the line so many of us feel everyday and may be able to tell us more about what is on the other side. This is information relevant to us, to the denizens of the everyday, who have to decide which toothpaste is best for us, if a company is capable of telling the truth about its own product, if one decision is more toxic than another, if we could stand to give up our cars…

Projects like this provide us with reality-based food for our IMAGINATION, which is actually at the source of all knowledge. The ability to think beyond one’s physically and historically limited self.