Drama radiation

We were talking this morning and decided that the ability to turn little things into big things would make an awesome superpower. In the graphic novel its origin would be a secret behaviorist experiment gone terribly wrong, releasing drama radiation that transforms our hero/ine from a mild-mannered mensch with a good sense of perspective into a molehill-busting mountain-maker.

Who knew a Geiger counter could detect drama radiation?

This is just a sketch – I could use some help with character development. Incidentally, one of my stupidly proudest possessions is the first dozen or so issues of the Incredible Hulk comic book, including this origin scene, which I avidly collected as they were translated and released in Italy in the early ’70s.

Hubert Harrison at Temple

At the conference I met Jeffrey B. Perry, whose work is on the history and consequences of white supremacism. Jeffrey is currently doing a lecture circuit with his talk and slide presentation on “Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918.” He is at UMass-Boston this afternoon and will be at Temple University in Philadelphia on Thursday. See his website for details.

Although I’ve got some self-taught familiarity with the more famous players in the history of critical race theory, I had not heard of Hubert Harrison until running into Jeffrey between conference sessions. The Columbia UP page for Jeffrey’s book on Harrison offers this compelling capsule:

Hubert Harrison was an immensely skilled writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist who, more than any other political leader of his era, combined class consciousness and anti-white-supremacist race consciousness into a coherent political radicalism. Harrison’s ideas profoundly influenced “New Negro” militants, including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, and his synthesis of class and race issues is a key unifying link between the two great trends of the Black Liberation Movement: the labor- and civil-rights-based work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the race and nationalist platform associated with Malcolm X.

The foremost Black organizer, agitator, and theoretician of the Socialist Party of New York, Harrison was also the founder of the “New Negro” movement, the editor of Negro World, and the principal radical influence on the Garvey movement. He was a highly praised journalist and critic (reportedly the first regular Black book reviewer), a freethinker and early proponent of birth control, a supporter of Black writers and artists, a leading public intellectual, and a bibliophile who helped transform the 135th Street Public Library into an international center for research in Black culture.

Jeffrey has also edited and introduced a collection of Harrison’s writings among numerous other scholarly contributions. His is clearly an extraordinary labor of love and honor.

We met up when my early Sunday morning panel was letting out and his mid Sunday morning talk was about to begin. I was struck by his passion and immediate self-identification as an independent, working-class scholar. I was also struck by his assumption that he had been placed disadvantageously on the program because he was an outsider bringing unwelcome knowledge. He saw a pattern of marginalization there. In contrast, I thought my paper had gotten dumped into the Sunday whatsits (Sunday is when most conference participants leave, so those panels are often loosely organized and sparsely attended) because I had submitted it solo and it hadn’t matched up at a glance with the main themes of the conference.

I suggested to Jeffrey that putting together a coherent panel and targeting it to the conference rubric might be a way to achieve a more favorable placement and reception for his important work. His dismissal of this unsolicited advice was firm and monosyllabic.

I’m glad to know about Hubert Harrison and grateful for Jeffrey’s work.

Networks, scale, sustainability

This morning at the Rethinking Marxism conference we went to a panel on “agrifood alternatives” (F6 on your programs). The talks were interesting, and the Greek guy actually talked to the audience about what he knows rather than reading a paper, which was nice. I had to step out for the one on family farm feudalism, but Rachel, who grew up on a family farm in family farm country, said she got it wrong by reading the organization of farm labor through a formalistic egalitarian ethic rather than understanding the trade-offs, reciprocities, constraints and affordances of the cultural form ethnographically.

One of the issues for the panelists was the sustainability of independent organic farming. There seemed to be some agreement between the two practical panelists that smallholder farming was only sustainable with substantial exchange networks enabling distribution of knowledge, goods and labor. This has historically been true, of course; either holdings are large enough to integrate essential resources and functions, or smaller units have to find ways to pool. Over lunch we talked about things like churches, Granges, barn raisings, guilds, Rotary Clubs and so on as this kind of partial or comprehensive networking institution for local communities. Tocqueville’s ’secondary powers’ and Durkheim’s ‘professional ethics and civic morals’ are examples in different contexts of the idea that there have to be ways of organizing community effort and resource between the household and the state.

There’s both some mythology and some truth to the idea that these kind of networking processes were self-organizing in traditional agrarian societies. When we say “capitalism” we are often using a shorthand to designate the kinds of networks that are created by markets. Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ points to a dynamic that is at least in principle self-organizing, albeit manipulable by savvy operators. The challenge for marxists and other critics of either system is to figure out how to make network formation more intentional and egalitarian, without losing the affordances (stability, prosperity) of the old self-organizing networks.

Off to another panel, on the economics of art.

The werewolf and the silver bullet: ANT/Gramsci, pt. end.

As I’ve said recently I quite agree with Duncan that “if intellectuals want to be politically useful in some way, as intellectuals, some of the more useful things they can do are 1) provide an adequate analysis of current social, economic and political conditions; 2) start generating concrete proposals for social, political and economic alternatives.” If we take these to be worthy goals, the blog medium is promising for both.

It should be noted that marxists have historically been reluctant to do 2), going back to the young Marx’s scathing and perhaps counterproductive dismissals of the ‘utopian socialists’ with their neat little plans for ideal worlds. In this sense although the communist telos remains definitive in marxism and creates some distinctive categorical limitations, marxism and ANT have been consonant in a theory of practice for which networks and structures must be actively assembled rather than posited as givens.

It is possible to extract just this sort of theory of practice from Gramsci’s journalism and prison notes; he does some of that work himself, although presumably his plan to turn the Notebooks into a finished text for the ages included more such. But the thing to remember is that Gramsci’s practice was praxis (it was theorized), so extracting the theory from it and setting it aside as a thing in itself is not (yet) gramscian praxis. Gramsci’s theory of practice emerges from and depends upon its actual deployments, in the same sense that Bourdieu resisted extractions of his theory from his concrete studies. There’s a certain amount of making it up as we go inherent in ANT/Gramscian praxis; as the Notebooks show, everything is in play, from popular literature to philosophy and from party politics to the organization of work.

Ultimately the point I want to get at with all this ANT/Gramsci stuff, and it may not be all that new or interesting, is that neither ANT nor Gramsci authorize a practice oriented toward killing the werewolf with the silver bullet. There’s no single, focused problem, nor is there a single, focused solution. Of course this does not mean that ‘it’s all good’ as we go about the business of making the world a more pleasant place, but it does suggest that a flexible, recursive distribution of analysis and action is more likely to move us along, because it’s the only thing that ever does.

ANT/Gramsci, pt. 6: Networks, nodes, relations, alliances

Because of the way the blog medium arose out of the interactive affordances of the internet, each blog, post and comment creates a node in a possible network of relations and alliances. Or they can just sit there doing nothing but taking up space.

Whether networks actually come of blogs depends to some degree on their content, and to a large degree on the work of authors and readers to create, maintain, intensify and extend links to other nodes. One of the first things I figured out is if I didn’t want to be just another odd online hermit muttering alone in my own cave, I’d have to go out and drum up business by finding other blogs with dimensions of affinity and making comments suggesting connections. (This can be a pleasure in its own right, of course.) Sometimes folks follow the trail of breadcrumbs and sometimes they don’t, sometimes they like what they find at the end and sometimes not. Over time, though, there tends to be an accumulation of readership and participation.

To shift metaphor, a blog is a bit like a gravitic mass. If it just sits in one place its pull is limited to the stuff that happens to wander by from the depths of outer space. But if it gets on a trajectory and visits other star systems it has a better chance of encountering capturable bodies, ranging from close orbiters to eccentric comet flybys; or even to get caught itself in a multi-gravitic system, like a group blog or a stable multiblog network. So anyway, dynamic motion and a certain weight of presence are important; connections don’t just happen because we’re nice people and our moms like us.

(For some reason Moby seems to think being made of stars helps ya get hot babes.) Btw, from the standpoint of this analysis the current series of posts has been a fail, attracting very little traffic or commentary [thanks to you who did!] and no links. So far Dead Voles has had its biggest days with posts that can be interpreted as gossip. This too is community-building, albeit negatively. Rather than moaning about this the next step might be to reflect on what it is about that communicative mode that attracts attention and participation so well, then find a way to inflect the dynamic for good purposes.

As I’ve already mentioned, the blog medium is not well-suited to enforcing orthodoxy, but it can work well to assemble alliances of affinity. It’s a good way to find and hook up with people who share interests and agendas. This is both a strength and a weakness. Communities’ tendency to create and maintain narrow, exclusionary biases can just be amplified and propagated. But if the community affinities remain open to negotiation and revision there’s an opportunity for the whole to become emergently more than the sum of the parts. I’m afraid I’m not saying much more than the creation myth of Web 2.0 here….

ANT/Gramsci, pt. 5: Emergency!

I mentioned in pt. 3 that Gramsci’s goal of a homogeneous collective revolutionary consciousness might itself be what he called an ‘Enlightenment’ error. And in pt. 4 I poked some fun at the distinctive wigglings of Left intellectuals hoist on this petard. The problem is a fundamentally doomed and therefore frustrated command-and-control model of political action. With Actor Network Theory we get closer to something that can illuminate politics’ unintended consequences by showing how multiple actors in various modes at various scales bump and ooze their way into particular emergent configurations and trajectories.

Emergence is not linear. What you can hope for in non-linear dynamics is outcomes (themselves moments in longer-term emergent processes) somewhere within a range of possibility. Momentum builds, tipping points are reached, little causes produce big effects. In the more ‘ethnographic’ notes in the Notebooks Gramsci shows this happening for capitalism and begins to theorize it for communism. But because in the more synthetic notes he premises capitalism and communism as the procrustean beginning and ending points, there’s only so far he can get with it before defaulting to stretching and cutting expedients. This is a cautionary tale for ANT/Gramscian blogging praxis. The trick would be to keep your options open and your feet moving, that is, to build links across a range of sites and to nudge it all toward tendential assemblages with lots of little angular pushes. Sort of like herding cats.

Guest post: Chuck Dyke on Edgar Morin

By Chuck Dyke, Temple University. This is a draft of an essay scheduled for publication. All rights reserved.

NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT
The dread of nothing is pretty ironic. The average density of the universe comes out to a couple of hydrogen atoms per cubic meter, so almost nothing is what we’ve got: cosmic minimalism; a huge canvas with a few specks on it. Fortunately (one supposes) at small scales the specks aren’t spattered evenly. Some places the almost nothing has clumped up into the something.

In the same vein, they tell us that the whole shebang is just a particular configuration of the quantum vacuum. Then they tell us that the quantum vacuum, while being nothing, is far from being nothing. Nothing is unstable, so at incredible rates and in incredible profusion it reconfigures itself, as if there were a manic quantum Jackson Pollack in a meth frenzy: swish, swoop, splash and drip. Out of the frenzied blur of combination and recombination came space and time, the possibility of painting and sculpture, and the possibility of music – eventually. So here we are. And for all that, we’re still in the quantum vacuum; and as it expands, faster and faster, it appears, it gets ever more vacuous.

To help me think about vacua, voids, emptiness, and the meaning of nothing, I’d like to enlist the help of Edgar Morin. He’s not all that widely known or remembered these days. That’s a shame, since among writers of the 20th Century he may well provide more that we could profitably learn than most of the others. At a time when arguably the most critical problem facing us all is that of coming into some viable harmony with the planet we live on, I don’t think it would be wise to ignore one who has taken such a deep look at our place in earthly existence. Because his work is so wide ranging, I won’t embark on a silly attempt at a synopsis of his work. Rather, we’ll sample him, and dwell on a few passages useful for the route we want to travel. In fact, we’ll confine ourselves to one of the most central topics in Method: Opening [notes omitted].

The context for understanding opening is embedded in the following:

Thus, the key idea is evident: the environment is permanently constitutive of all the beings which feed in it; it permanently cooperates in their organization. These beings and organizations are, therefore, permanently eco-dependent.
But, in a paradox which is proper to the ecological relation, it’s in this dependence that the autonomy of these beings is woven and constituted.
Such beings can build and maintain their existence, their autonomy, their individuality, their originality only in ecological relation, that is to say in and by dependence on their environment; whence the alpha idea of all ecological thought: the independence of a living being necessitates its dependence with respect to its environment. (p. 202)

For example, the give and take between independence and dependence can go like this: The more I’m willing to engage with my natural environment productively, the less dependent I am on other humans and their institutions. I avoid these dependencies by opening up to the environment through my productive interaction with it – by gardening, for example. But then the wheel turns, I become dependent on the environment, the whims of weather, and so on. You can’t outrun the dependency no matter how hard you try to close yourself off from it. You can only create the illusion of independence. The alternative is to examine the patterns of interaction – the openings – that are ultimately inevitable.

ANT/Gramsci, pt. 4: Left intellectuals and the correct line

In a post at Crooked Timber on the history of the terms ‘politically correct’ and ‘liberal fascism’ John Quiggin writes

At least since the 1970s, the description “politically correct” or, in Australia, “ideologically sound”, had been used within the left to mock those who were excessively concerned with doctrinal and linguistic orthodoxy. The story of how “political correctness” turned from an inside joke to a Marxist-inspired assault on All We Hold Dear is reasonably well known. Bernstein traces its emergence as a pejorative to a conference by the Western Humanities Conference held, appropriately enough, in Berkeley.

Ha! I used to live just south of Berkeley, cosmic epicenter of well-intentioned impotent righteousness. In the comments John Emerson muses

The phrase I remember, used seriously within some Marxist groups, was “correct position”. It was used seriously by people who thought that solving the dialectical questions came first, and and that before these were solved, any political activity was opportunistic and doomed. It was used jokingly within this same groups by those of a more activist sort. One guy told me how, after a succession of Trotskyist splits, his group had ended up being of about 50 people in one room—but they had the correct position. And then he laughed uproariously.

I think that a lot of the ideologues of that time did not actually believe it, but just were trying to make a stand against the amazing sloppiness of the free-lance left.

Later the term “politically correct” came to be used internally to label the minute rules of cultural politics within the left. At the beginning the term was sometimes used by old-school macho leftists to ridicule the newer feminists and gay liberationists. But the personal cultural politics really did get extreme.

Scylla – sectarianism. Charybdis – sloppiness. With a touch of genius – both.

Can actor networks fix this? Well, given commitments to sectarianism or sloppiness, no. But otherwise a flexible orientation to alliances may offer both an analytical grasp on the conditions, configurations, operations, strengths and weaknesses of whatever situation one might want to change; and an activist grasp on actors likely to share and/or obstruct the agenda.

The new Dead Voles

Regular readers may notice that the blog template is new. The change is in honor of the blog’s new author! Asher Kay is stepping back from his own blog, spoonerized alliterations, where he’s currently going out in a blaze of glory. Asher has vowed never to blog again. In the past he has written with swashbuckling intelligence and blood-curdling wit on culture, politics and philosophy. I’m looking forward to seeing what he doesn’t write on here.

I’m really excited about it, but don’t tell Asher. He’ll just get a big head and strut around like he owns the place.

Tentative Album Cover

Comments are welcome. Does the finger look “just photoshopped enough”?