We are a group of writers, teachers, artists, researchers, and farmers. In this hearing, we will use the court as a theater to build public understanding. All people and living beings are potential plaintiffs.

-MONSANTO-
What is the awareness of their technologies in an average community? Is it possible to live for one day without the products of this company? Are there any areas of life not touched by their brand?

Evidence and testimony will be presented highlighting the impact that the Monsanto corporation has on our food, farms, communities, and ecosystems.

YOU are invited to review the research on Monsanto through shared testimonies and argument.

Please join us in this liberating exchange!

WHEN: January 28, 2012, from 11 a.m. until 3:30 p.m.
First session 11-12:30: Second session 2-3:30

WHERE: Lesar Law Bldg Courtroom, SIU, Carbondale, IL

WHY: To raise awareness of the research on Monsanto’s existing public record, and to accumulate evidence on the impact of their products and policies on life- within our community, nation, and biosphere.

Monsanto operates within the letter of the law of our land and often in coordination with the State. We ask then, should there be a higher law or moral order?

Free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Sponsored by the SIUC Fine Arts Activity Fee and the Student Activity Fee administered by the Graduate and Professional Student Council and supported by AndAndAnd (documenta(13).

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.

Antonio Machado
Proverbs and Songs 29

The poet offers us an idea: we have no path except by walking; the activity itself makes the path. In reality, for better or worse, many paths do exist; we find ourselves on them all the time. Given the pace of change in our society, it’s fair to say that many paths were cut when conditions of life were very different. They are navigating an environment that no longer exists. What’s more important is that most of the roads easily available to us are made by forces well beyond our control, forces of indoctrination into a culture that does not care about life. Even though they may seem benign enough, most of them lead to catastrophe: the catastrophe of a ruined earth.

Let’s call the act of following these ready-made paths tourism. Tourism is a path produced for us to distract us from the way things actually work. If I go take the sun on the “Mexican Riviera” on the coast of the Yucatan, I will be offered many touches of traditional Mexican culture, perhaps thatched cabañas and tiled floors, adobe walls painted yellow and blue, and certainly many forms of tequila and lime. I am not likely to go to the other side of the highway to see the undernourished neighborhoods of the peasants who have come from the rural places to work in the resorts. Nothing at the resort will induce me to ask why the peasants are leaving their villages and farms to live in crummy settlements and do menial jobs. Tourism takes us to a landscape of signs with disappeared referents. These are usually signifiers of difference that have been familiarized enough to become pleasant sedatives. The very real existence of places, cultures, people is distilled into signifiers that can be exchanged on a market.

Tourism is offered as an escape from the trials, monotony, and anxiety of daily life. It is the antidote for careerism, another path that is being constructed for us all the time, enlisting us into practices that are destroying our planet. What’s important to realize is how thoroughly tourism, as the participatory form of spectacle and consumption, has become the condition of daily life. We don’t have to leave home to walk the path of tourism, but ultimately this path of least resistance is designed to keep us from knowing where we actually live.  The tourism of everyday life may include signifiers of place but paradoxically, the overall effect is to make us forget that we live in a place, a place called Earth. Forgetting that we live in a place allows our economic system to go about its business of expropriating the world’s resources.

Why would we want to take the road that doesn’t exist? The road that is only our moving bodies and senses? So that we can find out where we live.

2. territory

“[It] is not a question of communication or something to be rationally understood, but a question of changing our minds about the fact of being alive.”

John Cage

Continental Drift is a collective and mobile project of inquiry. We aim to explore the five scales of contemporary existence: the intimate, the local, the national, the continental and the global. Within the mesh of scales, we want to understand the extent of our interdependence, how any action we may take has effects on and is shaped by all of these scales at once. We attempt to understand these dynamics so that we can understand the meaning of our own actions, the basis for an ethical life.

For example, simply consider eating, the heart of culture. We prepare and share food on an intimate level, with friends and family. We obtain it on the local level, but it may have traveled across the nation or continent or even across global distances before it gets to us. That delivery is made possible by the coordination of vast systems of production, labor, transportation and fuel systems, all regulated and often subsidized by national structures, further moderated by international corporations and treaties. When we learn the details of how our food gets on the table we start to ask: is there a better way of doing things? Is it right that my food is grown by migrants with no rights, little pay and debasing conditions? Is it right that our food system depends on unsustainable amounts of toxic inputs and fossil fuels? From here we may look for alternative forms of production and distribution or we may have to start creating those alternatives ourselves. Clearly, finding out about our world has implications for our ethical consciousness and will not make things easier for us.

The place where we live is the place where all these scales meet to sustain us: I call this place the territory. The territory is a complex phenomenon. Physically it is a modest radius around our homes, a space we can traverse, if need be, on our own two feet. But it is much more than that: it is the matrix for our connection to others and to the earth. Thanks to globalization it encompasses the near and the far. It is the extent of all that is enlisted to sustain our lives: the path of the water that comes to our glass, the path of the waste we produce, the labor of many, many people. It involves these and other concrete things, but is also driven by abstractions. We collectively constitute the territory every day; it is an outcome of our perceptions, our imagination and our actions. Generally we constitute it in an unconscious way, but when we stop to study it we realize that we have agency in determining its form and parameters.

3. method

“Celestin Freinet established the Modern School Movement in 1926…. He developed three complementary teaching techniques: (1) the ‘learning walk’, during which pupils would join him in exploratory walks around town, gathering information and impressions about their community (a pedagogical application of the dérive…). Afterwards the children would collectively dictate a collective ‘free text’, which might lean to pretexts for direct action within their community to improve living conditions (local councils were particularly wary of Freinet’s pupils); (2) a classroom printing press, for producing multiple copies of the pupils’ writings and a newspaper to be distributed to their families, friends and other schools; (3) interschool networks: pupils from two different schools exchange ‘culture packages’, printed texts, letters, tapes, photographs, maps, etc.”

Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton
Translator’s note to Felix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies

The name “Continental Drift” conjures the legacy of the dérive—translated as “drift”—the Situationist name for a certain performative surrealism of the mid 20^th century. A dérive is an unplanned journey through a landscape in order to provoke refreshed experiences of the environment. Our process may loosely borrow inspiration from this precedent, but has not been modeled on it. To varying degrees, our journeys are purposive investigations, even as we open ourselves to the unexpected. While the Situationist dérive was a specifically urban experience, we are intent on going to the edges of urban centers and beyond in order to recognize the ways that cities are always a part of larger domains. Practicing in small groups we definitely conjure a territorial intimacy, but the point is to think beyond that as we go.

In his essay, “Theory of the Dérive,” Guy Debord writes about “psychogeographical attractions,” “antideterminist liberation,” “behavioral disorientation,” “the discovery of unities of ambiance,” etc. The emphasis on an enrichment of perception makes it primarily an aesthetic project albeit with the political implication of denormalizing a relation to the city. I personally approached the Continental Drift project articulating an intention, among other things, to make research an aesthetic encounter, i.e., something experienced with the entire sensorium and something that demands expression. But that is not an end in itself. One of the things I like about Freinet’s learning walk is that it is part of a larger process that includes experimentations in communication, exchange and action.

This idea of the drift has proven to be very captivating to people’s imaginations, and why not make a project that stimulates the imagination? The problem is that the “continental” modifier is often dropped from the overall concept, leaving too much room to isolate and fetishize the attractions of drifting, cut adrift if you will, from the cohering metaphor and the imperative to keep larger perspectives actively in sight. Our metaphorical referent, “continental drift,” denotes a theory addressing the historical position and movement of the earth’s landmasses. The hypothesis that continents drift dates back to Abraham Ortelius in 1596 (making it provocatively coterminous with the era of western imperial expansions or what we now think of as globalization). The idea was subsequently developed by many people, most notably Alfred Wegener in 1912 who proposed that present-day continents once constituted a single landmass which split, setting its parts loose to drift slowly across the globe. Only in the 1960s was the notion geologically accounted for with the development of the theory of plate tectonics. The original supercontinent is now called Pangaea and its fragments are drifting still.

The name of our project—conceived by Brian Holmes—invokes the idea of continents in motion to point to the late 20^th century phenomena of continental integration and the rise of continental blocks as powerful units in the machinations of globalization. Our project began in 2005 as an effort to understand these and related movements in a series of stationary (not mobile in the physical sense) seminars at 16Beaver in New York and later one in Zagreb, Croatia. In 2008, feeling the need to focus on the vast unknowns of our own region, the U.S. Midwest, and responding to a suggestion attributable to our friend Brett Bloom, we joined a more or less local cohort to take the seminar on the road with the “Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor.”[i] Since then Brian and I and many others have pursued our desire to feel out the extensions of our territory by connecting with a changing roster of participants in ongoing explorations of the Midwest as well as Continental Drifts through parts of Argentina and China.[ii]

Although the word “drift” inevitably directs us toward the Situationists’ dérive, I think Freinet’s idea of the learning walk is more relevant to what I personally am trying to do. I want to learn the nature of the territory in all its expanded dimensions. I want to learn it with similarly inquiring people. I want to make some kind of “text” with my interlocutors. And I want what we make to inform solidarities with the potential to act for change.

4. digestion

“I would say that we have to work into economic theory not only the circular flow of exchange value which is important but also this one-way throughput of matter and energy –the digestive tract as well as the circulatory system –because it’s that that ties us to the environment.”

Herman Daly
The Developing Ideas Interview

One of the developments that has driven the American industrial system of agriculture into far-flung corners of the globe is genetically modified soy, corn and canola (with many more GM commodities in the pipeline). GM is the quintessential industrial agriculture: it is not just a product, it is a production system that depends on corporate suppliers all the way down the line. By far the biggest-selling “innovation” in GM agriculture is Monsanto’s Roundup Ready corn, soy, canola and cotton. These crops are engineered to be resistant to Monsanto’s proprietary glyphosate-based herbicide called Roundup.

In the industrial GM system, the farmer buys the seed, paying a technology fee for its use and signing away all rights to save seed for the next harvest, or trade it, or sell it or give it away to others. The farmer also buys the herbicide from the same company. The system takes knowledge and agency out of the heads of the farmers and dramatically restricts it to the labs, factories, and law offices of corporations and banks. The package is sold as a time and trouble saving method. The farmer forfeits the study and understanding of delicate ecological balances and more complex methods of protecting crops from pests and weeds through soil maintenance, selective breeding, and crop diversity. Instead, the farmer can spray the herbicide liberally on his field without having to take care that he not damage his investment, and likewise not having to take care for the environment which includes beneficial microbes, water systems, resistance-evolving weeds, wildlife and human children. Significantly, these crops are only cost effective when sown in a monocrop arrangement, which requires petroleum-based synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and petroleum-based machines for sowing, spraying and harvesting.

How is it that we can engineer a food system, allegedly about sustaining life, which is as much as anything else a killing system? How can we pour literally thousands of toxic chemicals into our environment and not think we will be poisoning ourselves as well as all that makes our existence possible and palatable?

This is precisely the kind of separation and contradiction that drives capitalism. Capitalism is deracinating: it must separate anything of value from its roots in order to convert it into a sign that can be efficiently circulated and exchanged. It reduces both needs and desires to a system in which the fungible and often proprietary signs of value trump the organic ecology of values.  In this deracinated circular flow, the ultimate sign is money, which is the ultimate sign of equivalence. This is efficiently paralleled by informationalism, a paradigm in which all value is reduced to an isolated register that can be exchanged as pure signs. In these ways capitalism and its companion informationalism are constitutionally deterritorializing.

Continuous with our agricultural system, our food paradigm reduces the value of a food to those elements that can be easily read as quantifiable information. As far as nutrition goes we are trained to think in terms of a handful of vitamins and minerals. So you can grow acres of corn which is deemed to be all the same in quality, process it so as to extract exchange value in forms such as oils, starches, sugars, and materials that can be used industrially for glues and plastics as easily as for food ingredients, reconstitute some of those ingredients and as long as you add certain readily identifiable vitamins and minerals, voila! It serves as food. But it ignores the complex nuances of human digestion, and does so tragically in light of the disease and misery propagated by the “American diet.”

5. organism plus

“Darwin proposed a theory of natural selection and evolution in which the unit of survival was either the family line or the species or subspecies or something of the sort. But today it is quite obvious that this is not the unit of survival in the real biological world. The unit of survival is organism plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself.”

Gregory Bateson
Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Bateson made this point in a 1969 lecture called “Pathologies of Epistemology.” Any perceptual or intellectual separation between myself and the environment that sustains me is a grave epistemological mistake producing fraudulent or misleading categories. Earlier I defined the territory as the matrix in which all the scales of our existence come together to sustain (or undermine) life. The expanded unit of survival—organism plus environment—may serve as another way of conceiving the territory.

The ongoing question is how to refine this definition in a way that encompasses our interdependence. It entails a deep study of the environment itself and an inquiry into the joints and ligaments between that environment and we organisms among other organisms, an inquiry into the processes that unify us. The question is how to grapple not only with the concrete attributes of these relations but also with the constitutive abstractions. It is tempting to conflate the territory with the intimate and the local scales because of their immediacy, but then we have omitted all the ways we are participating in the larger scales of our existence: the national, the continental and the global. The question is how to identify our roles within all the scales, which have a tendency toward abstraction. The question is how to grasp the abstract in the concrete and the concrete in the abstract.

Developing the concept of a comprehensive phenomenon he calls “mind,” Bateson frames relations of the concrete and the abstract as “eco-mental systems.” Further in the same lecture he elaborates:

“When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise ‘What interests me is me, or my organization, or my species,’ you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure. You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider eco-mental system—and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.”

In the end, the question is how to reterritorialize in ways that restore a coherent understanding of the values and detriments inherent in our practices. How do we constitute a territory that acknowledges the augmentation of ourselves by our environment? And then, how do we care for that territory? How do we constitute a territory that bears the marks of caring instead of the marks of wanton exploitation that we see all around us?

6. site/nonsite

“Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.”

Robert Smithson
Cultural Confinement, Artforum, October 1972

I really like this quote for reasons I will explain in a series of detours. I found this statement in the process of searching for a different Robert Smithson quote. In my original, certainly misremembered, citational destination, Smithson observes that because the artist is not in control of the value of the artwork, the artist is performing alienated labor. This idea has provoked me since I encountered it some 20 years ago. If we look at the artist as a contester of presumed values, isn’t it a contradiction to posit her as alienated from the value of her own labor? Do we confuse a specific quantifiable value with meaning? In other words, if artists are not adequately in control of the monetary value of their work, don’t they at least have some agency in determining notions of value in the field of meaning?

The story of artists trying to sort this out unfolds over many decades, to the point where many of us aspire to practice an intricate, processual and research-motivated version of art that resists evaluation by the prescriptive team of institutions and markets. The French artist Francois Deck talks about working in the moment “before value.”[iii] To me this means deferring that supposed endpoint of all efforts in our culture, the point where value is conferred and, conforming to the logic of capitalism, can be separated from vital activities in order to be circulated as capital, be that monetary or cultural. This is the force of alienation that potentially ambushes our every endeavor. I’ve come to see Continental Drift as a project inviting me to continually suspend the moment of value. I pursue it as a way to open up intense and problematic spaces of perception, or, to operate in the moment before value, an extended moment in which exploration of the territory connects me to vital and urgent questions about our collective existence.

Since my ruminations began, I have found the Smithson reference I was looking for:

‘The artist sits in his solitude, knocks out his paintings, assembles them, then waits for someone to confer the value, some external source. The artist isn’t in control of his own value.”[iv]

Here I think Smithson is referring to value as an amalgam of monetary equivalence, institutional validation and value-laden meanings. The artist’s isolation under conventional conditions of production denies her agency in the determination of value. The ability to approximate the value of one’s own work, artistic or otherwise, is what opens the possibility to affect the fundamental values and priorities of collective life. Indeed, in the same passage Smithson goes on to say,

“….art is supposed to be on some eternal plane, free from the experiences of the world, and I’m more interested in those experiences, not as a refutation of art, but as art as part of that experience, or interwoven, in other words, all these factors come into it.”

The desire to interweave art with experiences beyond art’s normative province is a desire to escape fraudulent categories. Separating the practice of art from other experiences of the world is tantamount to separating the organism from its environment, an epistemological move that drives us into pathogenic quarantines. Art is not the only “profession” that forces its practitioners into positions catastrophically isolated from broader experiences of the world. Positions we might call fraudulent as they perpetuate the misconception that we can separate the circulation of value from processes that connect us to each other and the earth.

The organization of knowledge into disciplines has accomplished dazzling things. But the deforming of disciplinary investigation into careerism inhibits access to the comprehensive perspectives so urgently needed as we confront unprecedented social and ecological dilemmas. Disciplinary foundations can still be productive but only if we develop the means to build connections between them.

The process we call Continental Drift is an attempt to penetrate disciplinary boundaries. I am an artist pursuing a collective form of self-education about the forces of production and consumption that shape our present and future, forces decidedly outside the traditional prospectus of art. Most significantly, anyone can do this. Art does not have to be the starting place, in fact, the idea is that anyone can and should step beyond their prescribed discipline or profession to walk paths that don’t yet exist, paths of connection. It doesn’t require any particular specialized knowledge or expertise, only the willingness to make a sort of dérive in the field of knowledge.

Endnotes

“Celestin Freinet established the Modern School Movement in 1926…. He developed three complementary teaching techniques: (1) the ‘learning walk’, during which pupils would join him in exploratory walks around town, gathering information and impressions about their community (a pedagogical application of the derive…). Afterwards the children would collectively dictate a collective ‘free text’, which might lean to pretexts for direct action within their community to improve living conditions (local councils were particularly wary of Freinet’s pupils); (2) a classroom printing press, for producing multiple copies of the pupils writings and a newspaper to be distributed to their families, friends and other schools; (3) interschool networks: pupils from two different schools exchange ‘culture packages’, printed texts, letters, tapes, photographs, maps, etc.”

Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton
Translator’s notes to Felix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies

We have just finished a month-long iteration of Continental Drift! This time in Argentina with the gracious support and participation of members of El Levante in Rosario and El Museo del Puerto in Ingeniero White. Graciela Carnevale, Mauro Machado and Lorena Cardena from El Levante organized many visits and encounters for our group (which also included artist Alejandra Madrid from Chile and Leandro Beier from Bahia Blanca). Highlights from Rosario:

• a review of the big cereal export operations as seen from a boat in the river (you can’t otherwise get near these securitized ports),
• meetings with urban growers and attendance at a local Seed Fair,
• an unauthorized tour of a copper mining port,
• a meeting with the director of the Museo de Memoria
• a visit to Sueños Compartidos who employ residents of villas miserias to build new housing, and
• meetings that brought together people from very different positions in social and economic production.

We drove through the pampas during soy harvest and visited with farmers and toured a sneaker factory to learn that an average of 700 pairs of hands touch a typical sneaker before it arrives in a store. We landed in Bahia Blanca to be hosted by the Museo del Puerto somewhere between an enormous petro-chemical plant, the port, and the “neighbors” –neighbors provide the interviews, historical objects of working class culture, and weekly pies and cakes that drive this deeply beautiful museum whose heart is a kitchen and large dining room. Among other things, we accompanied a group of school kids who had designed a tour searching for the border between their neighborhood and the satanic towers of the petrochemical complex.

We did a workshop about the drift in Buenos Aires and asked for suggestions from participants about walks we could explore in the city and thus spent two afternoons guided by enthusiastic locals in our collective experience of perception.

For more details of our itinerary as it unfolded, see Brian Holmes’ Continental Drift blog (in Spanish) (with photos by me).

Afterthoughts:
Home now and ruminating on the process – its limitations and potentials – I came across the above passage about the educational methods of Celestin Freinet and was struck by the parallels to our own methodology.

I also just reread Guy Debord’s Theory of the Derive. Our process of drifting certainly took a loose inspiration from the situationist concept but has not been modeled on it, so it is interesting to look at the 1958 text and ponder what has changed. The original derive was a specifically urban experience while we are intent on going to the edges of urban centers and beyond in order to recognize the ways that cities are always a part of larger domains. The exploration of scales and the interscale is key for us: the intimate or human-scale; the urban/regional, the national, the continental and the global: we live all of these scales simultaneously. While we practice in small groups and so conjure a territorial intimacy, the point is to think beyond that as we go.

Debord writes about “psychogeographical attractions”, “antideterminist liberation”, “the discovery of unities of ambiance”, etc. The emphasis on an enrichment of perception makes it an aesthetic project albeit with political implications in terms of denormalizing a relation to the city. I set out on the first mobile Continental Drift (through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor) with the intention, among other things, to make research an aesthetic encounter, something experienced with the entire sensorium. But that is not an end in itself. One of the things I like about Freinet’s learning walk is that it is part of a larger process which includes experimentations in communication, exchange and action.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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,

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.