Tuesday 07.10.07 – Constituent Imagination – Radical Research
Comments Off on Tuesday 07.10.07 – Constituent Imagination – Radical ResearchTuesday 07.10.07 – Constituent Imagination – Radical Research
1. about this Tuesday 07.10.07
2. about Constituent Imagination
3. about the Contributors
4. Bridging the Praxis Divide – Benjamin Shepard
5. Fragments on Machinic Intellectuals – Jack Bratich
6. Links
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1. about this Tuesday 07.10.07
What: Panel / Discussion
When: Tuesday 07.10.07
Where: 16Beaver Street, 5th Floor
When: 7:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all
Please join us for a discussion of the new book Constituent Imagination:
Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press). This
collection of essays examines the relationship of radical theory to
movements for social change, and, in the process, redefines the nature of
intellectual practice. Discuss various projects of autonomous knowledge
production and political research with editors Stevphen Shukaitis, David
Graeber, and Erika Biddle and contributors from the book, Jack Bratich,
Ben Shepard, and Kevin Van Meter.
Hope you can make it. Please note that this event will take place on the
5th floor.
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2. about Constituent Imagination
Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization
Edited by Stevphen Shukaitis + David Graeber with Erika Biddle
http://www.constituentimagination.net
What is the relationship of radical theory to movements for social change?
In a world where more and more global struggles are refusing vanguard
parties and authoritarian practices, does the idea of the detached
intellectual, observing events from on high, make sense anymore? In this
powerful and unabashedly militant collection, over two dozen academic
authors and engaged intellectuals—including Antonio Negri and Colectivo
Situaciones—provide some challenging answers. In the process, they
redefine the nature of intellectual practice itself.
The book opens with the editors’ provocative history of the academy’s
inherent limitations and possibilities. The essays that follow cover a
broad range: embedded intellectuals in increasingly corporatized
universities, research projects in which factory workers and academics
work side by side, revolutionary ethnographies of the global justice
movement, meditations on technology from the branches of a Scottish
tree-sit. What links them all is a collective and expansive reimagining of
engaged intellectual work in the service of social change. In a cultural
climate in where right-wing watchdog groups seem to have radical academics
on the run, this unapologetic anthology is a breath of fresh air.
Includes materials from Brian Holmes * Ben Holtzman // Craig Hughes //
Kevin Van Meter * Antonio Negri * Colectivo Situaciones * Gavin Grindon *
Maribel Casas-Cortes + Sebastian Cobarrubias * Angela Mitropolous * Jack
Bratich * Harry Halpin * Jeff Juris * Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma * Ben
Shepard * Kirsty Robertson * Bre * Anita Lacey * Michal Osterweil + Graeme
Chesters * Dave Eden * Uri Gordon * Ashar Latif + Sandra Jeppesen *
CrimethInc Ex-Workers Collective
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3. about the Contributors
Stevphen Shukaitis is a research fellow at the University of London, Queen
Mary and member of the Autonomedia editorial collective.
David Graeber is an anthropologist and activist living in New York. He is
the author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and Towards an
Anthropological Theory of Value.
Erika Biddle is a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective and the
Institute for Anarchist Studies and is managing editor of Perspectives on
Anarchist Theory.
Jack Z. Bratich is assistant professor of Journalism and Media Studies at
Rutgers University and is the author of Conspiracy Panics: Political
Rationality and Popular Culture (forthcoming).
Benjamin Shepard the author/editor of two books: White Nights and
Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic
(1997) and From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in
the Era of Globalization (2002) has worked with ACT UP, SexPanic!, Reclaim
the Streets, Times UP, the Clandestine Rebel Clown Army, the Absurd
Response Team, and the Housing Works Campaign to End AIDS.
Kevin Van Meter is a member of Team Colors, a New York based collective,
which, in both workshops and articles is seeking to address ways to
explore strategic interventions in everyday life.
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4. Bridging the Praxis Divide: From Direct Action to Direct Services and
Back Again — Benjamin Shepard
In recent years a new breed of organizing has ignited campaigns for peace
and justice. Many of these campaigns utilize innovative approaches to
organizing diverse communities against a broad range of local and
transnational targets including global corporations and organizations such
as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund
(IMF). According to the Institute for Policy Alternatives the Global
Justice Movement (GJM) has had its greatest policy successes when matching
it burlesque of protest with practical policy goals. While the movement
has had policy success in areas including slowing and shifting debate
about “Fast Track” trade negotiations, compulsory licensing, debt
cancellation, and through corporate campaigns such as the work of
Rainforest Action Network, 1 there have been many areas in which the
movement has failed to match its rhetorical goals with clearly outlined
achievable goals. While this limitation may result from challenging a very
large target, it also results from ideological conflicts within this
movement of many movements, herein referred to as movement of movements
(MM).2 Perhaps this movement of movement’s greatest strengths is a focus
on creative expression3 and praxis, rather than iron clad ideological
certainly. Naomi Klein’s now famous essay, “the Vision Thing,” elaborates
on this theme.4 Anarchists have worked with liberals; queers have
organized with environmentalists; and in homage to a respect for diversity
of tactics, great things have happened through the savvy deployment of
multiple approaches simultaneously. Once secretive policy meetings have
become occasions for carnivalesque blockades, while the discussions inside
become subject to newspaper accounts around the world. Yet work remains.
While diverse groups have collaborated in direct action not enough of
these groups have worked to advance workable alternative proposals to the
current model of neoliberalism, especially in the North American context.
Tensions around the role of the welfare state, movement organizations,
service provision, electoral politics, political compromises, and
proximity to political power have emerged sources of significant
ideological tensions. Still the GJM churns forward.
What has been put forward is a “no” to neoliberalism and a prefigurative
“yes” to community building. This elliptical disposition is embodied in
the Zapatista call for “One No and 1,000 Yeses.” At its core this
expression aims at creating a new relationship to power and democracy.
This new politics begins with a single “no,” a “ya basta!” to the neo
liberal economic trade and social policies embodied in the NAFTA accords
in 1994. Refusal starts as a statement of rebellion and survival in the
face of a future denied; it is then transformed into a series of yeses,
encompassing encounters with new political spaces, strategies, dialogues,
and a new political project creating a new kind of autonomy.5 The
movement’s vitality is found in this open democratic call for a
multiplicity of voices, grievances, and approaches connections, all
loosely coordinated within a democratic call to action.
Obstacles to the practical ‘winnable win’ which organizer Saul Alinsky
suggested is essential for group cohesion,6 are many. Some argue that an
era of corporate or ‘primitive’ globalization7 has rendered efforts at
local organizing obsolete. Others suggest that the neighborhood is still a
primary tactical site for movement attention.8 As ‘convergence’ actions
against global summits, meetings and conventions have increased; much of
their suspense has diminished, especially in the North American context.9
While the rhetoric, ‘shut down the IMF,’ ‘abolish capitalism’ functioned
as a broad critique. This framework was not matched with a set of
strategies that produced results. As the War on Terror has translated into
a war on dissent, the efficacy of broad convergence demonstrations has
been vastly reduced in North America. Momentum and resources for social
justice campaigns at home dwindled.10
Along with these transformations the link between a theory of action and
practical tactics that helped create change became a chasm. As the
refreshing spirit of engagement and problem solving movements faded, the
movement’s praxis waned. The MM faces a praxis divide between its theory
of action and political power capable of transforming lives. In response
to this divide a number of movement activists and theorists suggested that
more dramatic, well-researched, tactical approaches to targeting local
targets could help infuse an ethos of success into campaigns for global
justice in North America.11 Such thinking harkens back to the notion that
‘all politics is local.’ The result is an organizing framework that
involves identifying local needs, some of which involve transnational
economic circumstances. Advocates suggest translating movement goals into
clearly identified manifestations of global problems is an effective
approach to organizing for social change. After all recent years have
witnessed neighborhood actors in fields as diverse as urban housing,
labor, gardening, anarchist, and public health fields using both
disciplined research and community organizing tools to create wins. The
GJM has something to learn from them.
Burning Ambitions and a Praxis Divide
Many of the tensions within the GJM arise from a difficulty reconciling a
series of lofty goals with the prerequisites of a system of global
capitalism. This tension is complicated by dueling ideological conflicts
between radical and liberal approaches to social change activism – the
reform vs. revolution challenge that has long accompanied movements for
change.12 Yet few social movements are able to remain entirely outside of
a policy framework of the provision of services. The challenge for many
involved in the Northern American GJM involves reconciling a struggle
against unbridled capitalism and a practical need for immediate limited
reforms necessary to make the rules of global capital more humanitarian.
Much of the literature on the movement reveals an opposition to the work
of nongovernmental organizations.13 This is understandable. The
hierarchical nature of many organizations is worth addressing and
improving. Yet these limitations do not preclude the need for both direct
service organizations and grassroots groups to handle both the short and
long goals of movements. Dynamic movements need both people in the
streets, at the negotiating table and providing services.14 Each have a
role in a movement built on respect for a diversity of tactics. After all,
in these quiet days before the revolution, people get a little hungry.
People need food and shelter and medicine. Low-income people depend on
NGOs and non-profit organizations to provide vital services, including
clean needles, dental dams, stem kits, housing, food and healthcare. From
the Settlement Houses to the Civil Rights Movement progressive reforms and
social programs only gain strength with the support of social movements.15
Victories such as Seattle set the stage for these forms of social change.
16
Unfortunately the North American GJM has earned few of these wins of late.
One explanation for these limitations is the movement lacks of a coherent
overarching theoretical framework with which to propel itself forward. 17
According to this view action is privileged over theoretical debate. Thus
intellections fail to play a coherent role in the MM. Critics of this view
suggest that theory emerges from a coherent model of action, not vice
versa. 18 Steve Duncombe suggests that it is not a lack of theory as much
as a lack of appreciation that sometimes there is more to theory than
talk. Theory may not be lacking as much as that critics are looking at it
too narrowly. “[P]erhaps a different type of theory is simultaneously
being created, and importantly, employed by this new movement,” Duncombe
notes. “What I’m talking about here is praxis, or what I’ll call, sans
Greek, embodied theory. Embodied theory arises out of practice, the
activity of engaging in the world, of coming up to solutions to problems
and working out their resolutions.” 19 Thus, “All successful theory is
lived theory.”20
ACT UP and LIVED Theory
In the case of ACT UP, its theory, “ACTION =LIFE” and “SILENCE = DEATH”
propelled a generation of actors. For many involved a system of silences
allowed business as usual to create conditions for a deadly epidemic to
progress unchecked. Many in the group assumed that participation within
this system was tantamount with complicity. For others this adherence to a
notion of pure refusal smacked of social purity. 21 While members of the
Treatment and Data affinity group advocated ‘drugs into bodies’ regardless
of the means others suggested that negotiating access to experimental
drugs for some but not all created another form of social and cultural
apartheid. Long before the GJM calls for respect for a diversity of
tactics, members of ACT UP went their separate ways over some members
compromising with drug companies.22 Yet the group continued with some
staying in the streets and others finding a place at the negotiating
table. Members of the Treatment and Data Committee rejected the notion
that the scientific establishment should be viewed simply as enemies. Mark
Harrington, a founder of the Treatment Action Group, reflected on his
first meetings with drug company members he had zapped in previous years:
“At the time, I would just say that it was clear from the very beginning,
as Maggie Thatcher said when she met Gorbachev, ‘We can do business.’”23
Rather than cower or scream Harrington sought common ground when he met
representatives of big science. The result was more rapprochement and
dialogue.24 Given the urgent need for results; many favored a pragmatic
compromise rather than ideological purity.
Yet there was more to the group’s work than difficult compromises. A
second example is instructive. Jim Eigo, who was arrested during the first
AIDS related civil disobedience in the US recalls one of many occasions
when ACT UP members advanced an effective alternative policy. Much of this
work was based on a high level of research, a vital part of the group’s
approach. Initially ACT UP’s Treatment and Data Committee applied its work
to local issues, by identifying local hospitals which received federal
research funds for AIDS research and targeting them. From here, Eigo
helped advance one of the group’s greatest achievements. He explains:
In February 1988, on behalf of my affinity group, I wrote a critique of
AIDS research at New York University (NYU). We delivered copies to NYU’s
AIDS researchers. One suggestion of our (fairly primitive) critique was
that the federal AIDS research effort initiate “parallel trials.” A drug’s
major “clinical trials” gather data on a drug’s effectiveness in human
subjects. They’re very strictly limited to people who meet rigid criteria.
We advocated parallel trials which would enroll anyone with HIV who had no
available treatment options.
In 1988, an overwhelming number of people with AIDS were routinely
excluded from trials due to gender, illness, or conflicting medications.
Data collected from parallel trials, while not clean enough to secure a
drug its final approval, would yield a wealth of data on how a drug worked
in the target population. Our group sent our critique to Dr. Anthony
Fauci, head of the federal AIDS effort. In a few weeks, in a speech in New
York, Dr. Fauci was using several phrases that seemed lifted from ACT UP’s
critique. But one he rephrased: “parallel trials” had become “parallel
track.”25
As the story of parallel track suggests, ACT UP found much of its greatest
success from advancing a well-researched, practical working strategies.
Parallel track was most certainly one of a thousand ‘yeses’ the group
would put forward. A large part of the group’s influence on federal and
state AIDS policy stemmed from its strength as a worldwide grassroots
organization. Members were well aware that part of their power emerged
from a consciousness that AIDS was an international problem; their local
response addressed conditions of this larger problem. Much of this
mobilization occurred within a 1001 local skirmishes, at hospitals, a
schools, boards of education, and even department stores – anywhere the
homophobia, sex phobia, racism and sexism that helps AIDS spread reared
its head.
A Different Kind of Theoretical Framework
To bridge the GJM’s praxis divide, many have come to look back at a number
of classic community organizing approaches. According to Robert Fisher US
based community organizing can be distinguished between social welfare,
radical, and conservative approaches to social change practice. 26 For
Jack Rathman approaches to purposeful community change work within can be
broken down into three distinct communities: urban, rural, and
international. 27
These approaches are divided into three additional categories of practice:
locality development, social planning/ policy, and social action. Locality
development assumes that social change takes place through the active
participation in local decision making to determine goals, tactics, and
strategies for action. The style is deliberatively inclusive and
democratic.28 Social planning / policy involves the process of
identification of social problems, assessment of their scope, data
collection, and solution on a governmental policy level. This style is
deliberately technocratic and rational. Community participation is often
minimized. Professionals are thought to be best able to engage in this
mode of social change practice. While community participation is not a
core ingredient of this approach differing circumstances and problems may
require differing levels of community involvement. After all, garnering
maximum civil involvement or successfully carrying out a protest
demonstration against a carefully chosen target in the policy food chain
requires a great deal of calculation. Thus means are logically connected
to intended ends.29 In this respect policy and planning are linked with
the third appellation of community change work: social action based
practice. This type or community organizing assumes there is an aggrieved
section or class of the population that needs to be organized in order to
make its demands heard to the larger society. Classically stemming from
the 30’s and 60’s, this mode of practice involves a range of
confrontational techniques including: sit ins, zaps, demonstrations,
boycotts, marches, strikes, pickets, civil disobedience, teach-ins, and
festive carnivals. The aim of these practices is for those with little
financial power or access to use ‘people power’ to apply pressure or to
disrupt carefully chosen targets. In this respect even social action
applies a rational theoretical analysis to its practice. Social action
based practice was first advanced by the Settlement House Movement. Saul
Alinsky built on this model. His work was followed by the writings of
Burghardt; Fisher; Piven and Cloward. In recent years social action
movements have moved beyond many of the traditional models to expand
strategies and targets.30
Social Action from Housing to Direct Services
For AIDS activists involved in the AIDS housing movement in New York City
advocacy involves a healthy combination of locality development, social
planning/ policy, and social action constellations. Given the enormity of
their tasks these actors make use of every tool they can use. For Housing
Works, like the Squatters of Amsterdam and the Sem Terra land occupants in
Brazil, a single sentiment drives their work: everyone deserves a roof
over their head. Housing is a human right. The New York City AIDS housing
and advocacy organization Housing Works locates itself within this ethos.
According to their mission, “the purpose of Housing Works is to ensure
that adequate housing, food, social services, harm reduction and other
drug treatment services, medical and mental health care, and employment
opportunities are available to homeless persons living with AIDS and HIV
and to their families.” The group is committed to reaching its ends
through: “Advocacy that aggressively challenges perceptions about homeless
people living with AIDS and HIV, both within their indigenous communities
and in the larger society,” and “Direct provision of innovative models of
housing and services.” Thus a diversity of tactics for Housing Works
bridges includes a range of tactics from direct action to direct services.
In New York City, where gentrification has put housing costs beyond the
reach of many working people, the AIDS crisis compounded the problem as
people who were once able to house themselves fell ill, lost their jobs,
faced eviction, entered the homeless population, and gridlocked the
hospitals. Keith Cylar, co-founder of New York’s Housing Works, described
the challenges faced by social workers as the AIDS crisis emerged:
There was a gridlock in the hospital system… For me working in the
hospital… I couldn’t get people out of the hospital because they didn’t
have a place to live. We’d get ‘em well from whatever brought them in; but
then they wouldn’t have a place to live. They’d stay in the hospitals and
they’d pick up another thing and then they’d die. Remember, ‘88, ‘90, ‘91,
’92 – New York City literally had hospital gridlock, that was when they
were keeping people on hospital gurneys out in the hallways. That was when
people were not being fed, bathed, or touched. It was horrendous. You
can’t imagine what it was like to be black, gay, a drug user, transgender,
and dying from AIDS. So housing all of a sudden became this issue. ACT UP
recognized it and formed the Housing Committee.31
Here service delivery became a necessary goal to save the lives of people
with HIV/AIDS in NYC. Charles King, another co-founder of Housing Works
recalls:
You know, there were several of us in ACT UP, somewhat separately who had
been passing homeless people in the streets. And in the late ‘80’s was
when you started seeing the cardboard signs that said, ‘Homeless with AIDS
Please Help.’ I was a poor student so when I passed someone who was
homeless on the street, I would given them a quarter. When I passed
someone and they had a sign that said they had AIDS, I gave them a buck.
But really hadn’t figured what to do with that. And it sortov crystallized
when we attended the Republican Convention in New Orleans in 1988. And
those of us that went spent the week hell raising there and organized a
New Orleans ACT UP while we were there. And some of the folks who were
there became very, very involved in what we were doing, who were
demonstrating with us all day every day, as it turns out were two homeless
men. And when we got ready to leave asked if they could come back with us.
And we were very cavalier about yea, things were better in New York. When
we got back here and tried to help these guys get thing together, we
realized that things were much better for people with AIDS who were housed
but if you were undomiciled you might as well still be in Louisiana.
And so we organized the Housing Committee of ACT UP. We spent the next
year and a half very aggressively challenging the city around homelessness
and AIDS and its responsibility. Ginny Shubert had filed a lawsuit, Mixon
vs. Grinker, to establish the right to housing. I like to think of it as
the best lawsuit we ever lost… We won it all the way up to the state court
of appeals. We lost it there but basically if forced the production of
almost all of the AIDS housing that now exists in New York City.
Anyway, Ginny had started that lawsuit at the Coalition for the Homeless.
And the Housing Committee of ACT UP actually did its first direct action
in support of a plaintiff in that lawsuit to get the city to file an
injunction to take this person out of the shelter. So to fast forward, we
saw Dinkins as our great hope. Ginny had actually drafted his position
paper on homelessness and AIDS. And as soon as he was elected, he
repudiated his position and adopted a modified version of the Koch plan
which was literally to create segregated units in the armory shelters,
indeed running a curtain down the middle of the shelter, with people with
AIDS on one side and other people on the other. No one would do anything.
At one point in the struggle over Mixon vs. Grinker, a gay man with AIDS
actually testified that homeless people with AIDS were actually better off
in the shelters. And it was sortov devastating to hear this.
I actually remember a meeting on a Wednesday night the day or the day
after his testimony that we met in an apartment on Eighth Avenue and 23rd
street. And people were just so discouraged. And we started talking about
it and decided that if the people that we cared about were going to be
housed then we’d have to do it ourselves. And the only thing that we
agreed upon was that we were going to start this new organization. And
that it was going to be called Housing Works.
>From their beginning Housing Works approached their task with this sort of
audacity. Keith Cylar recalled that the Housing Works took the approach
that if no one else was going to house drug users with AIDS then they were
going to do it:
To start off with the Housing Committee of ACT UP was amazing fun. I
remember when we were trying to get HASA working, back then it was called
the Division of AIDS Services. And they had a bunch of new hires, like
sixty new employees but hadn’t given them any desks or workspace. So they
were just spending their days sitting in a classroom. And so we organized
this action. The union was picketing. We organized this action. Eric
actually drove the truck where we brought a bunch of desks and chairs and
phones into the middle of Church Street in front of HRA and handcuffed
ourselves to them. I loved the chant. The chant was probably one of the
best that we ever created. It was: ‘The check is in the desk and the desk
is in the mail.’ (Laughs). Our HPD action was another amazing one. On Gold
Street they have revolving doors. We went around on a Sunday night and
picked up a bunch of abandoned furniture on the Lower East Side and Monday
morning took it down to Gold Street stuffed the revolving doors with
furniture trying to deliver it to furnish housing for people living with
AIDS.
So, the actions were fun. The actions were creative. We saw success at the
margins. But at the end of the day, the truth of the matter is that AIDS
housing providers did not want drug users. Homeless providers didn’t want
people with AIDS. And so even if government had been willing to take on
its part of the responsibility, their probably wouldn’t have been
providers who were willing to do it with people who we were trying to get
housed.
And I think the way we brought that spirit of creative action into housing
works was in how we designed the programs. Take, our first scattered site
program. Our housing contract around the country had some preclusion about
drug use, requirements around being clean and sober. And we demanded and
demonstrated for a contract that would require us to take people who were
still using drugs. What everybody else in the country was precluding, we
decided we would fight for.
Cylar recalled the ways that the radical approach to social service work
at Housing Works actually overlapped with a form of direct action.
“[N]obody knew how to treat an active drug user. No one knew how to deal
with an active person who was dying from AIDS and HIV and they didn’t want
to confront that… And here we were saying, ‘Fine, everybody that you can’t
work with in your program, I want. I want to work with them and I’ll find
ways to move them.’” While other providers viewed drug users as problems,
Cylar explains, “They were people. They were wonderful people and they had
lots of stories. They had lots of life and they had lots of wisdom.32 Over
the years since then Housing Works has housed over 10,000 people. Yet many
other homeless people have remained marginalized.
New York City AIDS Housing Network and Human Rights Watch
After Housing Works was born the notion of housing homeless people with
HIV/AIDS emerged as a social movement goal in itself. The core argument
became “Housing is an AIDS Issue, Housing Equals Health.” In linking
housing and healthcare AIDS housing activists linked the co-epidemics of
homelessness and AIDS into a struggle to house homeless people with AIDS.
Since the epidemic’s earliest days homeless people with HIV/AIDS in New
York have been placed in Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel rooms. Yet even
this remained a battle.
To guarantee a right to shelter for homeless people with HIV/AIDS, housing
activists fought for the creation of the New York City Department of AIDS
Services (DASIS) within the city Human Resources Administration (later
renamed HASA) in 1995. They also fought for a law passed in 1997, referred
to as Local Law 49, that guaranteed people with HIV/AIDS the legal right
to be housed by the city within a day of a request for housing placement.
Yet the fact that the law was on the books did not ensure its
implementation. The spirit of the local law would not find its full
expression for another five years. Integral to this was the work of the
New York City AIDS Housing Network (NYCAHN), whose watchdog role brought
their volunteers into the streets outside New York City’s welfare centers
for nearly two years. NYCAHN members ensured that either people with AIDS
got placed that day, or else lawyers, politicians, and newscasters would
be notified that the city was violating the law.
In a campaign reminiscent of the 1960s National Welfare Rights
Organization campaigns,33 NYCAHN workers spent well over two years
monitoring the city’s compliance with this local law. The core organizing
principle remained the demand that the City of New York obey its own law.
By the end of the campaign in 2001, the city was compelled to do just that
– some four years after the local law’s passage. In this interview, NYCAHN
co-founder Jennifer Flynn. She is accompanied by homeless advocate Bob
Kohler. They explain how they forced the city, mayor, and welfare offices
to obey the letter and spirit of Local Law 49. The campaign involves
elements of legal research into the workings of the cumbersome public
welfare bureaucracy and the determination to make it work; it included the
willingness to be there through cold Winter nights, hot summer days.
Activists had to be smart about a media strategy that highlighted these
wrongs: they had to build support on the grassroots as well as with policy
makers as well as to be willing to make use of direct action. Much of the
interview begins where Charles King and Keith Cylar leave off. I began the
interview by asking Jennifer Flynn (JF) what the conditions were like for
people with HIV/AIDS ten years ago. Flynn explained:
Well, prior to the early 1990s, people with AIDS [PWAs] lived in the
shelters like homeless people in New York do. In New York State we have an
interpretation in our constitution that gives us a right to shelter.
However, there was a tuberculosis outbreak in the shelters. People living
with compromised immune systems in the shelters were dying. So there was a
court case, Mixon vs. Grinker. That court case said that shelters are not
medically appropriate housing for people with compromised immune systems.
As result of that, the city really did start to send people to single
occupancy hotels, the same hotel system we use now.
So throughout the 1990s PWAs, when they identified themselves, were being
sent to these hotels. But from there, there really wasn’t anywhere else to
send them, until 1993. Bailey Holt House was really the first AIDS housing
residence that was created (on the East Coast). Housing Works was started
in1990. And then a few other organizations were created. There was an
initiative that was created through HRA/Welfare in New York, the
Department of Health, specifically to provide housing for people with
HIV/AIDS who were suffering from tuberculosis… And a lot of this housing
now started as a result of those funding streams.
Then in 1994, when [Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani came into office… it was the
first time that social services across the board were cut… Straight up
every single social service program was being cut. That led, in 1995, to
this kind of unified cry out for attention to fight back those cuts. And
that led to the 1995 Bridges and Tunnels action.34
It happened because all social services were being slashed. There were
also a few high-profile police brutality cases. And people really thought
that was result of the policies of the Republican mayor, which they were.
It was also that he was talking about cutting welfare in a way that
predated federal welfare reform. He talked about changing welfare. One of
the first things he did when he came into office was try to shut down the
city agency that provided welfare benefits, including housing for PWAs,
the Division of AIDS Services. And there was an enormous outpouring of
anger over that, and he was stopped in a number of different ways. First
he was stopped because of the publicity. ACT UP had been doing a lot of
organizing against Giuliani around his attempts to dismantle DASIS, which
would have resulted in homeless PWAs going back to the shelters…
So some members of ACT UP made some calls to other organizers throughout
the city. I think that the first call that they made was to Richie Perez,
who was at the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights. He’d been
organizing this coalition of parents whose kids had been killed by the
police and had looked at some changes in policing that were resulting in
increased cases of police brutality in New York City… ACT UP had a
history of doing Richie Perez type of direct action… Then they brought in
some other groups, such as Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence,
Coalition for the Homeless surprisingly, Urban Justice Center. At the time
also there were huge cut to public education. So CUNY students were
organizing. In the months before April 25th, 1995, they had had ten
thousand students just descending on City Hall. New York City hadn’t seen
those numbers in a few years. It was pretty remarkable. So they brought in
the CUNY students… Then those groups kind of morphed into SLAM.
So there was a complete shut down of the East Side of Manhattan. ACT UP
and Housing Works had about 145 people arrested at the midtown tunnel, the
one that goes to Queens. And Community Against Anti- Asian Violence took
Manhattan Bridge. And the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights. The
CUNY students took the Brooklyn Bridge. Coalition for the Homeless and
Urban Justice Center actually had homeless people getting arrested, I
guess on the Williamsburg or the Manhattan Bridge. And the entire East
Side was tied up for a good two or three hours as a result of that… We
beat back a lot of those cuts that year but never really got back to the
point before. The other thing he kept doing in every budget was to do away
with the Department of AIDS Services. He really hated it… He was always
trying to weaken the welfare system, anyway. And he hated that there was
this separate agency that served PWAs.
To buttress DASIS, ACT UP partnered with a broad based coalition to help
pass the Local Law 49. Flynn explains:
It was like as soon as he decided to dismantle DAS as soon as he came into
office. City Counsel member, particularly Tom Duane, and his then chief of
staff who was Christine Quinn and Drew Cramer, who was in his office,
started to write the legislation. And they really worked to pass that
legislation in the next two years. I think they have a lot to do with it
but I think, I mean Tom Duane was essentially a member of ACT UP so it
kind of came from ACT UP. People say that it was an insider strategy, but
Tom Duane really was not an insider kind of guy at that point. His power
really came from ACT UP. It was a grassroots strategy. He was able to say
to other council members ‘If you don’t sign onto this, I will have 1,000
people at your door in the middle of the night.’ They knew that that was
possible. They were people who had money and resources that they should be
afraid of. Then by that point there were AIDS service organizations, who
came to the table.
There was this huge march across the Brooklyn Bridge in 1996, the year
before the law was passed. It was organized by ACT UP and Housing Works.
About 1,000 people marched across the bridge. About 300 people stood
outside of the gates of City Hall waiting to get in. And they really were
sick people with AIDS. I guess it was early 1996 so people were looking
sick. I think there was the contempt case. There was a ruling on Hannah
vs. Turner in 1999. We felt that the city had violated the ruling, which
meant providing same day – meaning 9 to 5 PM – emergency housing
placements to everyone who qualified and everyone who requested it. A lot
of AIDS service organizations had started to get tired of it… People had
begun to be sick of it. It wasn’t playing well anymore.
We needed to do something so we begged Armen Mergen, who was the lawyer
from Housing Works, and he kept telling us that it wasn’t enough. He had
this whole theory of why it was a difficult case. It went through the
court of appeals and he was very concerned about it. But finally, he took
the 17 people that we gave him. We sent more. [T]hat legal strategy alone
could not have worked. It worked purely as the perfect storm of an
organizing strategy, having a testimony people who were affected, and
having your [Kohler’s] testimony.
And it was also using everything together. It was sort of targeting
Giuliani, directly trying to make policy changes. Also, everybody wanted
to be the one who solved it. At some point, there were like insider
lobbyists, who were hired by these big AIDS service organizations, who
kept telling me they had met with someone in Giuliani’s office and they
were going to fix it tomorrow. I think that probably helped. And I think
the legal strategy helped. The leadership development and organizing
helped. The monitoring – just standing there with a moral purpose. Its
also one case where it was so clear that we were right. There just isn’t
any gray area about that.
The wins would build on each other. “Other people could just go to a
welfare center and track complaints. And it always fixed something. Even
if the whole problem wasn’t getting fixed, you got the doors on the
bathrooms stalls,” Flynn explains.
“But once you get one win,” Bob Kohler recalls, “then you want more. Once
you got a water-cooler and doors then you keep going. And it shows you, we
got that.”
Community Gardens and a Struggle for Healthier Neighborhoods
Throughout the years of Housing Works and NYCAHN’s work a community garden
movement gained steam in New York City, its aim to make streets and
neighborhoods healthy places for joy and connection. I came into the
gardens direct action movement in March of 1999, during the organizing to
stop the auction of 114 community gardens. Throughout that spring, garden
activists from the More Gardens Coalition and the Lower East Side
Collective Public Space Group had been engaging in a theatrical brand of
protest, which included activists dressing like tomatoes and climbing into
a tree in City Hall Park, and lobbying dressed as giant vegetables. The
state Attorney General even noted that the reason he put on Temporary
Restraining Order on the development of the garden lots was because, ‘a
giant tomato told me to.’ All these actions seemed to compel neighborhood
members to become invited to participate in a process of creating change.
Faced with a gentrification and globalization process that was
homogenizing and privatizing public spaces at an astounding rate, garden
activists dug in to defend their neighborhoods through a wide range of
tactics. As with Housing Works and NYCAHN their campaign involved a savvy
use of research with an engaging model of protest.
Michael Shenker, a long time Lower East Side squatter and garden activist,
recalls four tactics used in the garden struggle in NYC. These included:
direct action, a judicial strategy, fundraising, and a legislative
approach. 35 Direct action combined with a joyous approach played out
through tactic including a ‘sing out’ disrupting a public hearing, as well
as an ecstatic theatrical model of organizing that compelled countless
actors to participate in the story themselves. The aim was to convey their
messages and engage an audience without being excessively didactic. Thus
groups such as made of range of crafty approaches engaging audiences in
playful ways with stories that seduced rather than hammered. This
theatrical mode of civil disobedience had a way of disarming people and
shifting the terms of debate. More Gardens Coalition organizer Aresh
Javadi explained this successful approach to bridging the looming praxis
divide facing the group:36
Theatre has always been a method, where going back to Iran, where troops,
singers, and theatre people would come and do the performance of Hussein,
where he is martyred. But when they did that they came from village to
village to village, they would tell the real stories behind what was going
on through theatre that was also interactive. So the whole village would
be singing and dancing with it back wards and forwards. So you were
absolutely ingrained in it. There was no one person to see and the other
person act. It opens you to all sorts of possibilities. Again, when you
see a plant or a vegetable, your automatically come back to a world of
childhood, cartoons, something that is not like the, ‘there is a protest
and they are against us.’ Rather the reaction is, ‘that’s so magical.
That’s so amazing on top on concrete.’ It brings you a recognition of why
it is that people care so much about green space when you can’t actually
take them to the garden. Did you see this over here – what it meant to
this woman, to this grandfather, this granddaughter, how much its improved
their health, their life? You can do that by having a flower dancing with
a giant tomato and then there is the action of someone trying to take that
away from people and people are willing to step up and move that. It
allows people to really engage and question their own intents. It’s a
very, very powerful thing that I will say again, Bread and Puppet and
other groups have utilized. But Bread and Puppet tend to be a little bit
darker. We are just like this is fun; its loving; and you are going to see
how passionate we are about that. The other aspect was that even during
the civil disobediences, we would have hats and colorful things. The
police sometimes didn’t even know what to do with the puppets. And they
would be like, ‘We can’t arrest a flower. (Laughs.) That’s not a person
that we can arrest.’
As with AIDS activists, the garden struggle is about life and community.
Aresh explains how he planted those seeds within his campaigns:
To me it was just like, how can we be a ‘Yes’ group. Yes, we agreed that
this needs to be approved. We never said, ‘no, you suck.’ We said, ‘Yes,
you can do the right thing, like the flowers, like the fruits, like the
yeses that have been created and brought forth in visual and even in food.
This is what we’re visioning and this is what we want – a celebration, a
bringing together of the spirits, and having the politicians just follow
what was right. And putting facts out. When we did a banner hang The
visual enhanced the words. We didn’t try and over state it or get wordy,
saying, ‘Oh well, housing vs the sunflower. Do you want a house or do you
want homeless children? We said, there it is: 10,000 vacant lots and they
are being given away to rich developers, while the community gardens that
could be there next to real housing, are being bulldozed. We were not
against real housing. Why not have these two balanced? And keep both of
them. We want both – real housing as well as real green spaces. I think
any time anyone builds over a piece of land, he or she should
automatically be adding community gardens with your money for the
community. The point is opening up spaces that are communal and cultural.
To me that’s the steps that need to be pushed forward.
The strategy was always to advance images of a healthier community.
“Sustainable healthier communities. From the Romans to the Greeks to the
Persians to the Chinese – they’ve always had spaces where people can
gather and be part of nature. And realize that we are nature – no matter
how much steel and concrete that break us away from that.
During the organizing to save the 114 gardens, we had moments where we
were in the gardens that were like a week away from being destroyed or
given away to some developer. And the children came and took the puppets
and automatically told the story. They would tell the story of the garden.
And they would say, ‘So why do you think we shouldn’t have housing right
there?’ And the other kids would say, ‘Look at that house across the
street. That’s not for us.’ And I had nothing to do with that scene. Yet,
these kids represent a future of why New York is going to be such an
amazing space.” The end result of this organizing was a compromise, which
helped preserve the community gardens in New York City.37
Art, Creativity and Victory in an Anti Corporate Campaign
The final case of this essay offers another example of the use of creative
direct action and community organizing yet in a strikingly different
context: the successful campaign by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
(CIW) for better pay from Taco Bell. Like the garden activists, this
campaign made use of a prefigurative organizing model. Long time organizer
David Solnit, who worked on the campaign, elaborates on this form of
organizing. “I think its essential to think below the surface, from the
gut, if we don’t learn to articulate the core roots of the problems we
face, we’ll always be on the defensive.”38
For some three years Taco Bell neglected the CIW’s simple request: an
increase of one penny per pound of tomatoes picked for their tacos. And
it’s no wonder, small wages translate into large profits. The demands of
migrant and immigrant workers, such as the mostly Haitian, Latino, and
Mayan Indian immigrants subsisting on poverty wages, who constitute the
CIW coalition, are a minimum priority for companies such as Taco Bell.
Poverty among migrant farm workers, such as the CIW, saves consumers some
$50 a year. 39 Thus, campaigns for worker wages face an uphill challenge.
At first Taco Bell refused to even acknowledge the CIW requests. Yet the
company reached out after the CIW staged a guerilla performance/
production of mock marriage of a tenfoot tall Queen Cheap Tomato and King
Taco Bell in the street facing their corporate headquarters in Irvine,
California.40
Fast forward five years. Facing a mounting boycott and pressures from
workers, students and activists around the world, Taco Bell agreed to the
core demands advanced by the CIW on March 8, 2005. The CIW could thus
celebrate what amounted to a complete victory against one of the largest
fast food corporations in the world.41 David Solnit suggests the campaign
be understood as a best practice example for a GJM facing a praxis divide.
Through its use of highly theatrical guerilla theatre, organizers involved
in the campaign successfully bridged the movement’s broad critique with an
effective organizing strategy and messaging. This also helped bring new
workers into the campaign. 42 After all Solnit suggests, “People join
campaigns that are fun and hopeful. It’s always been there – in the Civil
Rights Movement, art helped shut down the WTO.” This creativity helped
highlight the social and economic issues involved in their campaigns in
countless engaging ways. 43 These involved combinations of art, research,
well targeted theatrics, and grassroots, non-hierarchical organizing
utilized by the CIW. 44
A vital part of this consciousness raising included an engagement between
arts, playfulness and creativity capable of inspiring action. The CIW
explain: “By looking at the roots of the agricultural industry’s problem,
we were able to come up with a strategy to change the problems that we
face in our community. We do this through popular education: flyers,
drawings, theater, videos, weekly meetings, and visits to the camps. We
draw on the innate leader that exists in every worker.”45
Community building was also a vital element of the success of the
campaign. The CIW worked from their local bases to expand a series of
networks that allowed coalition allies to feel part of this community.
These networks helped transform an isolated struggle of one of the least
visible communities in the world into one of the most connected struggles
in North America. The CIW began by building an effective neighborhood
campaign and expanding from this base. As with ACT UP and countless other
labor struggles, a consciousness of the global dynamics of the struggle
helped cultivate a solidarity which invigorated the campaign. “[W]hen we
came to understand that the root of our problem was located at a much
higher level we knew would have to get our voices heard all across the
nation.”46 And momentum steamrolled. In many respects, the boycott built
on the vitality of the pre-9/11 backlash global justice movement political
agenda. In the summer of 2001 before the terror attacks the Harvard Living
Wage campaign galvanized the nation. US Senators, student activists, anti
racism and poverty activists found common ground and worked together to
fight for a social and political agenda that challenged the idea that it
is acceptable for workers to live in subpoverty conditions.47 The CIW
began their work within this same milieu.48 In the same way that the
Zapatista Movement built an ethos that allowed anyone with a computer to
become part of their community, the CIW invited citizens from around the
world to participate and feel part of their struggle. In this way
leadership and community emerged in bountiful ways. “Our network spread
and grew like wildfire. And suddenly wherever we would go and mention that
we were from Immokalee, it would illicit the reaction ‘oh, the tomato
pickers’ or ‘yo no quiero Taco Bell.’”49 Yet, for the campaign to sustain
itself through the years as much of the vitality of the global justice
struggle was overtaken by a push for permawar, the CIW built on an
approach that broke down the struggle into a series of Alinsky like
winnable goals.
Certainly art and culture helped this coalition stay engaged and move
forward. The CIW explain: “The corporations who we are fighting have
multi-million dollar advertising budgets, we the farm workers from a small
and resource poor community don’t have the same kind of access to the
media.”50 What the CIW had was a conscious appreciation of the
intoxicating possibilities of creative play. Combined with a willingness
to make use of the tools of popular education, story telling, art, and
joy, this spirit helped advance a viable winning alternative approach to a
winning organizing strategy. “We have to be creative about communicating
our story. Art, images, and theater played a very important role. We were
able to show through their use what the reality of our lives is really
like. We were able to catch people’s attention by making our marches and
protests colorful and fun. And through the images and signs we were able
to more effectively communicate our message to anyone who might have
driven by or seen us on the news or in the newspapers.”51
The result of the work was a successful prefigurative yes to community and
the rights of workers. The result is an inspiration and a future best
practice model for those involved within campaigns for global peace and
justice.”52 In many respects, the CIW, Housing Works, NYCAHN, and the
Community Garden Movement borrow from the same ethos. They show people
social change is possible through community building. Here, social change
is activism process, not a theoretical promise.
1Cavanagh, John and Anderson, Sarah (2002) “What is the Global Justice
Movement? What Does it Want? What is in It? What has it Won,” Institute
for Policy Studies. Washington, DC.
2 For an elaboration see: Tom Mertes (ed.) (2003) The Movement of
Movements: Is another world really possible?
London and New York: Verso.
3 For an example of the movement’s creative expression, see Notes From
Nowhere (eds.) (2003) We Are
Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism. London and
New York: Verso.
4 Naomi Klein (2002) “The Vision Thing,” in From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban
Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization. Edited by
Shepard, Benjamin and Hayduk, Ron. New York: Verso Press.
5 David Solnit (ed.) (2004) Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System
and Build a Better World. San
Francisco: City Lights Press: 215-20.
6 Alinsky, Saul (1971) Rules for Radicals. New York: Vintage Books.
7 William Sites (2003) Remaking New York: Primitive Globalization and the
Politics of Urban Community.
University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN.
8 Benjamin Shepard (2005) Review of Remaking New York. Urban Affairs
Review, (September): 106-8.
9 Certainly, the protests in Cancun in the fall of 2003 were profoundly
effective, far more so than the police crackdown in Miami during the FTAA
meetings. In many ways, the militarization of police have shifted the ways
we understand social protest.
10 See Benjamin Shepard. “Movement of Movements Toward a Democratic
Globalization,” New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture.
December 2004, 26: 3.
11 Eddie Yuen elaborated on this theme during the Spring 2002 release
party for The Battle of Seattle. New York: Soft Skull Press.
12 For a review of these ideological conflicts, see Robert Mullaly (1993)
Structural Social Work. Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart.
13 James Davis (2004) “This Is What Bureaucracy Looks Like: NGO’s and
Anti-Capitalism,” in Yuen, Burton-Rose, and Katsiaficas (Eds.) Confronting
capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement. New York: Soft Skull Press.
14 Martin Luther King (1964) “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in Why We
Can’t Wait. New American Library. New
York. King suggests the point of civil disobedience is to get policy
makers to the negotiating table.
15 See Addams, J. (1910/1998). Twenty Years at Hull House. New York:
Penguin and King
16 See Benjamin Shepard. Review of the Battle of Seattle: The New
Challenge to Capitalist Globalization. Edited by Eddie Yuen, Daniel
Burton-Rose and George Katsiaficas, Socialism and Democracy Vol. 18, #1,
Jan-June 2004: 258-65.
17 Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood and Christian Parenti (2002/4)
“Activistism: Left Anti Intellectualism and Its
Discontents,” in Yuen, Burton-Rose, and Katsiaficas (Eds.). Confronting
capitalism: Dispatches from a global movement. New York: Soft Skull Press.
18 Certainly, intellectuals and academics, including Douglas Crimp,
Michael Warner, Kendall Thomas, and others helped infuse a critical theory
into the work of ACT UP and SexPanic!; others, including Hall (2003: 80)
suggest they borrowed from ACT UP’s work to infuse its vitality into the
academic field of queer theory (see Queer Theories by Donald E. Hall (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan). Many activists suggest these theorists
retreated to the academy when things got tough with organizing. Certainly,
intellectuals including, Jeremy Veron, David Graeber,
Steve Duncombe, Kelly Moore, and countless others are frequent players in
GJM activist circles here in New York
City. Some suggest the movement was legitimated when former World Bank
Head, Columbia economist, and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz (2002/3)
seemed endorse many its claims in his work Globalization and Its
Discontents. WW Norton: New York.
19 Stephen Duncombe. “The Poverty of Theory: Anti Intellectualism and the
Value of Action.” Radical Society.
April 2003.
20 Ibid.
21 Stanley Arronowitz (1996) elaborates on Marcuse’s principal of
‘repressive tolerance’ in The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism.
Routledge: New York: 206.
22 For Sara Schulman, this period represented a fundamental Rubicon, which
resulted in a split among the group. See
Schulman, Sara (2002) “From the Women’s Movement to ACT UP: An Interview
with Sara Schulman” in From
ACT UP to the WTO
23 Steven Epstein (2000) “Democracy, Expertise and AIDS Treatment
Activism,” in Perspectives in Medical
Sociology edited by Phil Brown. Waveland Press: Long Grove Illinois, 614.
24 Ibid.
27 Jim Eigo (2002) The City as Body Politic/ The Body as City Unto Itself.
In From ACT UP to the WTO
25 Ibid. ACT UP members would eventually testify to congress on the issue
of parallel track. For a review of the
1989 Congressional hearings on parallel track in which Eigo spoke, see
Congressional Hearing on Parallel Track,
JULY 20. AIDS Treatment News. Published: July 28, 1989.
26 Rathman, Jack (1995) “Approaches to Community Intervention,” in
Strategies of Community Intervention Macro
Practice. Fifth Edition. Edited by Jack Rothman, John L. Erlich and John
E. Tropman. F.E. Peakcock Publishers,
Inc. Itasca Il.
27 Fisher, Robert (1994) Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in
America. Updated Edition. Twayne
Publishers. New York.
28 Ibid, 28.
29 Ibid, 30-1/35.
30 Lesley J. Wood and Kelly Moore (2002) “Target Practice – Community
Activism in a Global Era,” in From ACT UP to the WTO.
31 Cylar, Keith (2002) “Building a Healing Community from ACT UP to
Housing Works: An Interview with Keith
Cylar” by Benjamin Shepard. From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and
Community Building in the Era of
Globalization. New York: Verso.
32 Ibid.
33 See Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard (1977) Poor People’s
Movement: Why They Succeed, How they
Fail. New York: Vintage: 264-362.
34 See Ester Kaplan (2002) “This City is Ours” in From ACT UP to the WTO
35 Interview with the author 22 August, 2005.
36 Interview with the author 23 August, 2005.
37 See Spitzer, Elliot (2002) Memorandum of Agreement between Attorney
General and Community Gardeners.
Available at http://www.oag.state.ny.us
38 Interview with the author, 24 August, 2005.
39 Eric Schlosser (2003) Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in
the American Black Market by Houghton Mifflin New York City. P. 102-3.
40 “People Power: An Interview With David Solnit. News: A direct-action
organizer talks about waging commonsense social revolution,” Interviewed
by Katie Renz. Mother Jones Magazine. (22 March, 2005).
41 Ibid.
42 David Solnit (2005) “The New Face of the Global Justice Movement: Taco
Bell Boycott Victory – A Model of
Strategic Organizing. An interview with the Coalition of Immokalee
Workers,” truthout | Perspective Wednesday 24
August 2005.
43 Interview with the author, 24 August, 2005.
44 Solnit (2005) “The New Face of the Global Justice Movement”
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 See Benjamin Shepard. Review of The Betrayal of Work: How Low Wage Jobs
Fail 30-Million Americans, WorkingUSA: A Journal of Labor and Society
Spring 2004
48 Solnit. ‘The New Face of the Global Justice Movement.”
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
_____________________________________________
5. Fragments on Machinic Intellectuals — Jack Bratich
Excerpt:
There is a common complaint leveled at intellectuals today, lobbed from
both Left and Right, which says intellectuals are holed up in the ivory
tower. They are accused of being either elitist or reformist liberals,
out-of-touch Marxists or armchair activists. In each case intellectuals
are assumed to be isolated from everyday life. Over recent decades this
charge has been thrown by the Left against that all-purpose brand: theory.
Charges of obscurantism, jargonism, and armchair strategizing were leveled
at “posties” (postmodernists, poststructuralists, postcolonialists), yet
this specter of irrelevance obscures a larger trend taking place in the
U.S. academy: the growing corporatization of the university.[i]
According to Maribel Casas-Cortes and Sebastian Cobarrubias, in this
volume, the ivory tower itself has a mythic function, —erasing the
university’s immersion in historical processes. The increasing dependence
of universities on corporate and federal funding has created a set of
interlocking institutions that, if anything, makes intellectual work
extremely relevant to and integrated with pragmatic interests. Put simply,
we are in an era of embedded intellectuals.[ii] What can we make of this
new condition?
I address this question by evaluating recent tendencies in the academy,
especially in the field of communications studies. Using the theoretical
lens of autonomist Marxism, I examine intellectual labor, or the working
of the general intellect, as a means to think through these conditions and
offer some conceptual devices for understanding new potentials for radical
subjectivity. Given the prominence accorded by autonomists to
communication, media and information technologies in the new landscape of
labor, I will highlight the academic disciplines where these processes are
being studied and developed. Given the significance of communications both
as growing academic field and infrastructure for the General Intellect
(GI), as well as my own immersion in it, I concentrate on that circuit.
Embedded Intellectuals
Let’s begin with a recent public face of the embedded figure: the now
almost forgotten practice of embedded journalism. Brainchild of Victoria
Clarke, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, embedded
journalism involves integrating reporters into the very machinery of the
military (living with troops, going out with them on missions, wearing
military gear) during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While a few journalists
wrung their hands in disapproval, mainstream media welcomed this
innovation in wartime reporting. This new propaganda involved the state
merging with private sector consultants (the Rendon group, Burston-
Marstellar, the Bell Pottinger group) and professional journalism to form
a nexus that Guy Debord once called “networks of influence, persuasion and
control.”[iii]
As a mix of publicity and secrecy, this form of journalism recalls
another, older definition of embedded. It has a very specific meaning in
subliminal psychology research. Embedded refers to the hidden symbols,
voices, or messages buried in a text. The word “SEX” in the Ritz cracker
or the skull in the ice cubes of a Smirnoff print ad were embedded,
according to Wilson Bryan Key (author of those 1970s mass market
paperbacks on subliminal seduction in advertising). Even today, if you
take a Neuro-Linguistic Programming course or order a subliminal message
CD you too can learn to drop embedded commands into your speech patterns.
But this Tony Robbins spectacle of war journalism originally got it
backwards: rather than have the signifier disappear into the background (à
la the hidden penis in the Camel cigarette pack), the embedded journalists
took center stage, making their military handlers vanish and exert hidden
influence. Only now, as the very practice of embedded journalism has
become normalized, do we see it disappearing as object of scrutiny.
Another definition of embedded comes from electrical engineering and
computer architecture, where embedded systems refer to special-purpose
microprocessors that reside in other devices (like wristwatches, antilock
brakes, microwaves and cell phones). These are the applications that are
producing smart appliances, e.g., refrigerators that will tell you when
your milk is spoiled or when you are running low on beer.
Combining these notions of embedded we can think of journalism as being
embedded into an integrated circuit, where it becomes a component of a
strategic assemblage of vision machines, programmed info-flows and
material PSYOPS. One does not have to be in a desert to be embedded: it
can just as easily occur in the White House briefing room or at one’s own
news desk. Modifying Baudrillard’s assessment of Disney and Watergate, we
can say that embedded journalism arose to make us think that the rest of
mainstream journalism is not embedded.
Please access this rest of this article online at
http://info.interactivist.net/index.pl?mode=&issue=20070611
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6. Links
http://www.constituentimagination.net
http://www.akpress.org