Lefebvre's Lament

"Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter." -Edward Abbey

I’m teaching an undergraduate class this semester on globalization, consumerism, & sustainability. I’ve structured the class as a seminar, heavy on reading, discussion, and writing with no formal lectures and no exams. I’ve utilized this format in two previous classes. The first time it went ok, but not great. The second time, it worked beautifully. Using this strategy in undergraduate classes reveals quite a lot about the ways in which the conventional educational model circumscribes the possibilities of active learning, and about the cultural consequences of passive learning.

In all three classes students have been initially confounded. Most of them have been conditioned to accept a hierarchy of knowledge that is legitimized through institutional endorsement. They display a deep suspicion of their own knowledge, experience, and opinions, believing the only person in the room qualified to talk authoritatively, or indeed talk at all, is the one standing up front. They generally accept this unreflexively, ready to absorb a one-way flow of information without question. It appears a self-evident truth that the person behind the podium is unequivocally qualified to be there and deliver all manner of pronouncements while those sitting are unequivocally not so qualified. Why else would the political anatomy of the classroom take the form it does?

This is the principle challenge of teaching in this format, and one that tells us a lot about social conditioning. It is symptomatic of a social formation in which certain kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing are valued above others; in which knowledge backed up by the credentialing apparatus of formal institutions is not only authoritative, but authoritarian. In other words, this differential valuation embeds the notion that formalized institutional knowledge is superior, and conversely that experiential knowledge is inferior. The societal result is a populace convinced that their own experiences—and the insights and working knowledge thus acquired—are worthless because they are not confirmed by the recognition of the formal merit system. The end result is a kind of systemic paralysis in which the undertaking of any action must first be legitimized by institutional knowledge—a kind of uncritical deference that operates at the intersection of distrust and authority. It operates at every level of social life. Indeed it has thoroughly colonized the lifeworld itself, to the point that the general populace lives in a state of constant uncertainty and doubt, uncertain as to whether it can trust its own intuition (intuition being equated to a sort of superstition), a society composed more or less of automatons. This finally yields what Henry Lefebvre called the “Bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.”



By way of illustration, a student approached me after class recently. I had just handed back the students’ first set of critical notes, an exercise in which I ask students to engage with the readings in a reflective manner. It is a highly flexible exercise, intended to generate creative responses (another mode of engagement that is seemingly foreign to many students, programmed as they are to carefully follow detailed instructions rather than improvise. In this general mode of existence, being correct is valued above being creative. Accordingly then, what students most fear is being incorrect, a state of being which is inherently prohibitive of creativity. It is not only students though, and this is the larger point. Their teachers are generally cut from the same cloth. As Jim Harrison wrote of the academic mode of intellectual production, “it is concerned above all else with being correct"). I emphasize to students that I do not want to see summaries of the readings, but critical engagements that can and do often bleed into that feared and oft disparaged territory known as opinion. This particular student had done a bit too much summarizing, and I made this clear in my grading comments. I wrote that next time I’d like to more of her own original thought, less summarizing. “I’m just don’t feel qualified to give my opinions” she said, at which point I encouraged to trust her experience and observations as a human being who inhabits the same world as those who presumably speak more authoritatively than she by virtue of their formal credentials.

However, there is one arena, and only one, in which the citizen (the student, the parent, the lover, the friend) may feel confident, and that is the arena of consumption. Which is I suppose a fortuitous confluence as far as my objectives for this particular class are concerned. So knowledge about the inner workings of the world we collectively inhabit (the world of nature, the world of physical bodies, the world of governance, and finance, and law) are left to an oligarchy of experts, to whom we must defer, while the outer manifestations of the world of commerce are democratized—the hollow “democracy of goods.” We can all be experts on different brands of footwear, but the important decisions are best left to the experts. We lack even a modicum of confidence when comes to matters of the observable world, but we are all supremely confident in issuing our opinion on which is the best brand of whitening toothpaste. And, perhaps most tragically of all, it is in conflating such acts of choice with freedom that we have perhaps irrevocably cheapened, if not entirely emptied the latter term of any vital meaning. Is a “freedom fighter” someone who is fighting to protect his/her “right” to choose between coke and pepsi? What kind of right is that? What kind of freedom? This is what I see as the ultimate consequence of an educational system that actively encourages students to doubt themselves, to refrain from issuing a statement until they can cite sources (issued of course by experts) by which that statement may be substantiated. Until that time, they are encouraged to provide their informed opinion in consumer surveys, so that corporate manufacturers and service providers might “better serve us.”



And so Lefebvre’s designation—a bureaucratic society of controlled consumption. It is bureaucratic because deference to expertise is the modus operandi, so much so that it has penetrated even the most trivial arenas of daily decision making. Thus we have people constantly fretting about what to eat and what not to eat (“They used to say eggs were high in cholesterol, now they say their high in omega 3 fatty acids. I don’t know whether to eat them or not!;” “Butter or margarine?”), or how much exercise they should get, and what kind, or whether paper or plastic is better, or whether this or that thing is carcinogenic, etc. etc. This is a condition that another prominent social theorist, Ulrich Beck, calls the risk society: a society characterized by a kind of totalizing internalization of pervasive risk. The resulting mode of engagement is one that requires constant recursive-ness—“Hold on, let me look that up online. Ok, we can do that. Wait, let me check one more source. No, never mind, we better not do that. Or should we? Oh goddamn, give that glass of wine.”

It is a society of controlled consumption because the same recursive-ness, the perpetual cross referencing, produces patterned modes of consumption informed by the often contradictory and thus disorienting pronouncements of the experts. It is, as I have already said, a sort of societal paralysis in which no one is quite sure what to do or who to trust—but most certainly, not yourself.

House Trailers

I was driving down I-40 the other day thinking about house-trailers and old trucks and how such things relate (negatively) to bourgeois sensibilities and proprieties. My wife and I lived in a trailer for a time in the Texas Hill Country. I remember sitting in the real estate office in Fredericksburg when Joe, the rental property point-man, first told us about the trailer.

“I mean, you may not want to live in a trailer . . . but it’s been well maintained by a sweet elderly German-Texan woman for years. I mean, it’s real nice . . . for a trailer. Her husband died a few years back and she’s all alone out there in Cherry Springs [an unincorporated community in the middle of nowhere, 17 miles from the nearest gas station]. She’d really like to have somebody living in it.”

It was the cheapest housing we could find, so we decided to give it a look. Now, I wouldn’t even be writing about this if not for the fact that over the course of my young life I had developed an aversion to house trailers. That aversion is not an uncommon sentiment among the middle class, or middle class aspirants (to say nothing of the upper class, for whom that aversion becomes something more like contempt). This is to say that house trailers (now euphemistically referred to as manufactured homes) are thoroughly stigmatized in our society. I often wonder now, later in life, how this came to be and what it means in terms of class formation and differentiation in our country. It appears obvious—there exist multitudinous derisive references in popular culture to trailers and their denizens. These images and references most often suggest that these are the habitations of that liminal category of fallen white people known most commonly as white trash. They are classified as such because they have failed, in the eyes of their detractors, to exhibit the ambition and drive for material success that is the sine qua non of the white middle class. They fall between the cracks precisely because in our hierarchical system of race/class designation, these people don’t act and look the way white people should in a society whose normative values are determined by an upwardly mobile middle class whose identity as such is symbolized by the things they own—by their stuff—which is in turn influenced by the advertising and marketing apparatus of multi-national corporations who rely on just such middle class aspirations to swell their profit margins.



Well, in my evolving struggles with questions and material realities of class distinction, I have come to perhaps romanticize house trailers, as well as those who choose to live in them despite all manner societal pressures ensuring them that to do so is to be relegated to marginal status, as a sort of site and practice of resistance to bourgeois hegemony. (But nobody would choose to live in a trailer, you object. But alas, that is only a reflection of your very own indoctrination in the ideology of middle class propriety). Yes, it is a romanticization, perhaps one grounded in my experience as a disaffected member of the privileged middle class whose tastes and preferences and values determine what is acceptable and unacceptable, what is moral and amoral in our society at large.

I do not wish to engage in a navel-gazing exercise enumerating my bona fides, but my childhood experience irrevocably shaped my current views on such matters, and so I can’t really talk about this subject without exploring that fact. My father grew up in the kind of abject poverty endemic to the Cumberland Mountains. So did my maternal grandfather. Both of them were determined to rise above the squalor they grew up in, and each managed to do so, in a purely material sense. Not by getting “edumacated” and finding respectable, good paying office jobs (my father dropped out of school in the eighth grade), but by working their asses off in the building trades (my father trained in vocational-technical school as a stone mason, my grandfather as a self-taught carpenter after a stint as owner of a full-service filling station). So in a way, they kept one foot firmly planted in a reality that fed their inherited working class sensibilities, as “working men.” This came with an in-built contempt, especially in the case of my father, for the rich and well-to-do—for those who inherited their wealth or attained it through means other than the sweat of their brow. This kind of sentiment was perpetually expressed throughout my childhood. In other words, I inherited a contempt for the rich. Even so, through my years as a young adult, I absorbed all the messages constantly streaming into and shaping our collective consciousness through media and societal institutions that reflect bourgeois “values.” I became an aspirant. I went off to college—the first in my family to do so—and became convinced for a time (though never entirely) that aspirations toward a middle class existence, one instantiated most saliently through material acquisition and status as a “professional,” was what life was all about. But, as my childhood had prepared me to do, I began to question the legitimacy of such truisms after being exposed to socialist, anarchist, post-colonialist or otherwise dissenting currents of thought and art.

So by the time I had migrated to the Texas Hill Country and was considering living in a house-trailer for the first time since I was a toddler, my aversions were somewhat tempered. We moved into the house trailer. It was the first place we lived independently (the two of us, together) after college. Our landlady, Cora Dieke, was indeed sweet and nurturing, as Joe back in the real estate office had assured us. It was an altogether satisfying existence. The trailer met our needs quite well, though it did get a little hot in the Texas summer heat. Since that time we have moved around quite a lot and we have never again lived in a trailer. We are now three-time homeowners (perhaps the most enduring mythological construction of middle class propriety and arrival). But I think back often to that trailer in Texas, and the sense of relative freedom that attends trailer living. First off, being much cheaper than “conventional” housing, trailers open up possibilities for engaging in the market economy on one’s own terms. What I mean is that buying a home on the conventional market binds one to the market economy in a kind of perpetual debt-peonage. At that point, one must work nearly incessantly as a wage earner in order to keep up with mortgage payments, and car payments (since the house is rarely located in an area amenable to any form of transportation other than the personal automobile), and equip the home with all the latest appliances, glossy magazine and catalogue derived decorative embellishments, entertainment centers, etc. And this is the good life, or so the popular mythology would have us believe.



While living in the third house we “owned,” we struggled to make a living as small market gardeners. We rather quickly realized that such a choice was incommensurate with the demands of mortgage payments based on market prices reflecting the normative status of an upwardly mobile class of homeowners. Such people do not typically work as farmers. It dawned on me one day that we might be able to make a go of such a life only if we purchased the cheapest land we could find and plopped a trailer down on it. Maybe we could slowly build a “real” house ourselves (I also inherited a good bit of skill in the building trades) without accumulating debt in the process.

It was also during this time that I was reading of good bit of literature in one of my favorite genres of fiction—Southern Gothic and derivative strains of contemporary literature sometimes known as “grit lit.” Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and their heirs apparent: Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, William Gay, Chris Offut, and a whole slew of writers based in the American west who write in a similar vein.



Inspired after reading some of Annie Proulx’s short stories, I ordered an anthology titled The Best of Montana’s Short Fiction, edited by William Kittredge and Allen Morris Jones. I was really interested in reading a short story that is a beautiful compliment to Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain”—Kim Zupan’s “The Mourning of Ignacio Rosa.” The collection contains several other excellent stories as well—Pete Fromm’s “Hoot,” and Chris Offut’s “Tough People” really stand out to me. But the main reason I bring it up is because of the image on the collection’s cover. It is a photograph, the dust jacket credits tell us, by Paul Edmondson. Roughly one third of the frame features an image of a woman’s figure from the waste down, standing in the open doorway of a “vintage” trailer in a blue paisley summer dress and block-soled sandals. The trailer is polychromatic, soft pastel-green and creamy white, accented by aluminum trim and black hardware. Both the main door and the screen door are standing open, with the interior side of screen door composing the left third of the frame. The screen door’s frame is made of plywood, with the screen in its lower half accented and reinforced by aluminum grillwork. I’m not sure why, but that photograph is very evocative to me. It seems to convey an ease-with-the-world kind of freedom—no posturing, no pretension—that just couldn’t be duplicated in an analogous image of a conventional house (think 50s era photos with the impossibly perfect lily-white family posing in front their new suburban house).

Ok. So what? First, another little vignette featuring a trailer. So, I was recently over at the house of friends for our weekly band practice session. Before we started playing I noticed a painting-in-progress on the easel of my band-mates wife, a multi-talented artist whose aesthetic sensibility is akin to my own. It is a painting of a house-trailer. It is one of those late 60s/early 70s models from back when trailers actually displayed some stylistic sophistication (or at least so it appears from my contemporary vantage). It looks a lot like the house trailer where my wife and I lived in Texas. I found myself irresistibly drawn to this painting—I think it is beautiful. It was an aesthetic response that I’ve had trouble nailing down. Is it reflective of some innate romanticizing tendency that refracts my middle class ennui? Is it reflective of an incipient aesthetic sensibility (that I am becoming increasingly aware of now, but that is decidedly new)? If so, where does this sensibility come from, seemingly all of a sudden, and what does it mean?

There is in fact a larger body of contemporary art (including in my definition of art both visual and performance art, especially music) that conveys a similar aesthetic, and to which I am also drawn. It is in fact the same aesthetic that populates that genre of literature sometimes referred to as “grit lit” that I mentioned earlier. It is embodied in a full-blown revival of outsider art styles in the fashion of Howard Finster et al. In fact, I think Finster can be thought of as one of the central iconic figureheads of this “movement,” and as a sort of heir to the counter-sensibility that Elvis and Sam Phillips helped bring about in the 1950s, one that went a long way toward dislodging staid white middle class virtues. Indeed, Elvis is a frequent subject in Finster’s paintings. It is also embodied in the music of a performer like West Virginian Hasil Adkins, who’s electrified, raucous, and often vulgar music was never included in any of those arcane museum-piece folk-song anthologies that have fueled waves of urban folk revivals. Some call it “primitive,” but that term is always and forever a degrading one, recalling as it does colonialism and its legacy of subjugation and domination, of the colonizer’s condescending and contemptuous gaze. The folk song collector and the primitive “folk art” collector both embody the colonizing impulse, seeking to galvanize a kind of counter-modern authenticity, but an authenticity that was already pre-determined in the bourgeois imagination. No, it’s not primitive—neither the art of Hasil Adkins nor Howard Finster. Their work is as modern as modern can be.



So with all these converging images and encounters it seems I’m nostalgic for house trailers. To return to the beginning, while I was driving down I-40 the other day, I was thinking how I might like to live in trailer again. There was uncertainty in the consideration, but it is undeniably attractive to me. What troubles me most is that I wonder if this desire, if you can call it that, derives from the same kind of identity-formation-via-commodities that I see as such a plague. You can be whatever you want now—you just have to buy it. In such a social reality, wherein agency is located largely in one’s ability (one’s “freedom”) to consume, lifestyle choice by way of stuff becomes the primary locus of identity. Class identity, ethnic identity, regional identity—all these are subsumed under lifestyle identity. I find this all a little troubling. Do such phenomena signal the final triumph of the ethic of consumption over the ethic of production (the latter being a time in which one self-identified by kind of work one did)?

I can’t help but place my desire (even if it is a desire I am unlikely to act on) in a position that is antagonistic to such processes, and certainly one that is antagonistic to standards of middle class propriety and comportment. For if I chose to live in a house trailer I would be exiled from bourgeois society, which is maybe what I most want. Not because I am seeking authenticity (as the cultural studies police would no doubt have it), but because I am tired of all the bullshit. Tired of keeping up appearances in a TV and glossy magazine fantasy-world that is all appearance, parading in the guise of “values,” or “morals,” or “ambition.” No place where people have ever lived their daily lives in the history of humanity has ever looked so perfect as that Country Living spread that people struggle to recreate in their homes. It is folly, and it is a ruse that keeps those selfsame people tethered to this vampiric economic machine that daily feeds on their life-force for its own sustenance. And I would be exiled because I failed to conform to the model of middle class respectability that takes as its benchmark these holographic images of non-reality that people everywhere attempt to emulate.

Besides all that, you can pull a trailer up just about anywhere. Back in high school my favorite television show was Northern Exposure. Chris, the poetic and pensive disc jockey of Sicily, Alaska’s only radio station, was my favorite character—a sort of hero (or counter-hero) in the facile way that TV drama characters can be. He lived in an airstream trailer parked beside a river. That seems pretty ideal to me. So I sometimes dream of a similar arrangement (even down to the gig as a disc jockey come to think of it), though in a warmer climate.

Judge Holden in Afghanistan

I read a few pieces recently about American soldiers in Afghanistan killing civilians and cutting off their fingers for trophies. This is obviously disturbing. It is also confounding in a more deeply troubling way--where does the impulse for such perversion and depravity come from? Of course, we all know that war begets atrocity, that the seduction of violence often yields the suspension of restraint necessary to the observance of basic decency and goodwill. We also know that this is not the first time that American soldiers have taken body parts as trophies (see photo below from WWII). The desecration of the body is indeed a common practice throughout the history of warfare. In our daily thoughts, however, we need to believe that the "better angels of our nature" are more enduring. That humanity is capable of love and fellowship and mutuality; that we can strive toward understanding and tolerance; that honoring the basic bodily dignity of our fellow human beings is an in-built trait that has perforce aided in our evolution and survival as a species. That war is but an aberration. But news of acts such as these force us to question anew the verity of these more hopeful intimations.



In processing this story as best I could I couldn't help but compare this kind of depraved brutality to the gruesome violence depicted in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and wonder if its basic themes do not indeed speak some unbearable truth. This book--while pure genius--is probably the hardest book I've ever read (harder than The Road--which I was reluctant to read for a long time, largely because of my experience with Blood Meridian). In an interview with literary critic Harold Bloom he went so far as to say that Blood Meridian is not only the ultimate western, but the ultimate dramatization of violence (in both instances meaning that its insights and the truths plumbed therein are so profound that it cannot be surpassed in its representation of these, that it stands as the final word). Be that as it may in terms of representation, we have been reminded numerous times in our post-9/11 world of the seemingly ineradicable ubiquity of insensate violence, especially among representatives of our country (though we certainly have no monopoly). This is to say nothing of the upwelling of hate that has recently erupted in popular discourse and related actions--sentiments that gestate the kind of psychic distance and differentiation that allows dehumanization to emerge. The long bloody 20th century provides us with plenty examples of the consequences. It appears to this writer that McCarthy's kind of nihilism might be well-placed after all, and not just some idiosyncratic quirk or a novel literary device.

The theme of the book, some say, is regeneration through violence--the way that violence, or more properly the culture of violence, are so deeply embedded in the American experience that it comes to be who we are as a people, our most defining trait; a quintessential characteristic forged most saliently in the march of westward expansion. The frontier was always a bloodbath. As McCarthy writes, "This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war." This is of course the natural territory of the western, an underrated and under-appreciated genre in literary circles. Some larger truths about who we are or might yet be lie entombed there nonetheless. One consequence being that such a historical reality will inevitably give birth to unimaginably abominable creatures like Blood Meridian's main protagonist, Judge Holden, and that the dark lust for violence will always be with us. The continuing popularity of violence in films and gaming testifies to this, even if it is reduced to vicarious experience. We haven't been desensitized to violence so much as continually habituated to it, one generation to the next, so that when soldiers cut the fingers off of civilian victims in Afghanistan it reminds us more of the hyper-realities of on-screen interfaces than serving as cause for self-examination.



Judge Holden (known more often simply as the Judge) is the embodiment of this appallingly grotesque sensibility of violence, or unrestrained violence itself--indeed, violence deified. It is appalling not in its gratuitousness, but in its grounding in the familiar instrumental rationality and philosophical sophistication of Holden. Consider the following passages of the Judge holding forth:

"It makes no difference what men think of war . . . War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."

and

"Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard . . . trial of chance or trial of worth all game aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all . . . This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination."

Divining with the severed fingers of deceased victims is as macabre an image as any imagined by McCarthy. In the concluding chapter of the book, the Judge and one remaining companion, an orphaned young man from Tennessee known as the kid, ride onto the north Texas plains where they encamp with a group of scavengers collecting the bones of slaughtered buffalo. Some among them notice and inquire about the Judge's necklace. It is made from the severed ears of the selfsame Apaches whose scalps he'd traded for bounty in northern Mexico. The final scene paints an image of the Judge dancing with nothing on but a hat among other dancers to fiddle music in a north Texas saloon and brothel. The dance, says the Judge, "is the warrior's right." "He is a great favorite" among the dancers writes McCarthy--"He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die." Maybe the Judge will always be with us.

Festival Days

Last weekend I attended the Lake Eden Arts Festival (LEAF) in Black Mountain, NC. Being there, amid all that creativity and expressive freedom, got me thinking about many things related to the role of the festival, general merrymaking and conviviality in human life. As for the personal experience, there were the expected yet unpredictable moments of catharsis--the musical brilliance and exuberance of the Canadian trio Nightingale, the pure contagious energy of a late night swing band, the Sunday morning New Orleans brass service led by Big Sam Williams, formerly of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Then there were the dances, the lakeside fire show, the parade, the informal and impromptu assemblies of musicians and performers here and there, costumed revelers everywhere. Just the shear joy and communality of the festive moment. Then also the more mundane yet defining aspects of festival attendance--the abandonment or relaxation of bodily barriers and pretenses and functions, dirty children (and adults), common bathroom facilities, unkempt hair and clothing, etc. In short, a time for the temporary suspension of social conventions for the indulgence of carnal pleasures. This is in itself liberating of course, and that is part of what inspired me to write about it.



I've been reading a whole lot lately about what might broadly be called cultural resistance. All of these readings invariably include discussions about Carnival and other such festive events and routine merrymaking and the central part they have played in fomenting cultural resistance and rebellion through their function of temporarily inverting the social order, thus providing a glimpse of what an alternative society might look like, or else as a forum for creatively articulating hidden criticisms. In this way the festive moment is one that has been central to the emancipation, temporary and otherwise, of the human spirit, especially of those who suffer and struggle as a result of oppressive social hierarchies. Not to suggest that many of the attendees at LEAF are in any way oppressed--they (we) most decidedly are not generally speaking, and are in fact quite privileged to be there at all. Which is another of the things that got me thinking. What role do festivals play now, having become such highly commodified, largely middle class experiences? Is this simply another example of how capital has managed to colonize every aspect of social life? Is it an expression of the gentrification of the festive occasion? I wondered often while there (though while greatly enjoying the whole thing), is it possible to have some approximation of the festive occasion that is not commodified? Is there still any revolutionary potential in festivity?



Coincidentally I've also been reading The Hobbit with my oldest son, the starting point for our ambitious plan to read all of Tolkien's tales about Middle Earth (mostly my idea I admit, but one my son now shares my enthusiasm for). In The Hobbit, a great deal of space is devoted to descriptions of merrymaking of various sorts. Indeed festivity provides a pretty regular backdrop to his tales (in The Hobbit anyway) and not infrequently plays a direct role in the plot. A favorite passage from the book attends Thorin's final conversation with Bilbo as he lays dying. In the equality of death Thorin finally comes to understand the wisdom of hobbits and among his last words to Bilbo are these: "If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."



Of course, festivals have perhaps always been necessarily commodified on some level, as the bringing together of the accoutrement of celebration in massive quantities has its attendant costs. In its history though, those costs have often been accepted without much concern for recompense. In the various Cofradia-sponsored ritual celebrations common in much of Latin America, the bulk of such costs were often shouldered by the Mayordomia, a burden that shifted annually, but one that was accepted without qualm. Indeed, it was considered quite an honor to be the sponsor of a village Saint's Day celebration, a position which carried with it certain prestige. These and similar events and their collective planning, alongside more quotidian but essential daily activities (largely centered around food production, preservation and consumption) and religious life, formed the axes around which village life revolved. Similarly, in discussing pre-capitalist habits of consumption, work, and notions of the good life in late Medieval/early modern England, David Graeber states, ". . . the typical reaction to economic good times, even among urban craftsmen and most of the proto-bourgeoisie, was to take more days off . . . When the Land of Cockaigne was translated into reality, it was in the form of popular festivals like Carnival; almost any increase in popular wealth was immediately diverted into communal feasts, parades, and collective indulgences." This quote reminds one of the Les Blank's films about Cajun Mardi Gras, especially the suggestive title of the first in this series, Spend It All.



So what changed? In the case of Latin American festival occasions, it was pressure from first the Catholic Church, then Protestant missionaries, that diminished the role of the collective festival celebration, replacing it with a more familiar individualistic sensibility grounded in the nuclear family unit. The sponsorship of such events, in addition to their being idolatrous/heretical and indulgent, placed unnecessary economic burdens on sponsoring families--resources that should be better placed in securing the economic well-being of the nuclear family, or so the reasoning went. In England, similar pressures came from the so-called "Reformation of Manners," wherein the emergent Puritan merchant class and their ecclesiastic counterparts were able to impose their values on the populace at large. Relating both cases to the ascendancy of capitalist modes of production and social relations, I return to Graeber, who states, "One of the processes that made capitalism possible, then, was what might be termed the privatization of desire." That privatization displaced the extended community and replaced it with the nuclear family as the primary locus of economic and social activity. As June Nash noted in her study of Bolivian tin miners, "The nuclear family has been analyzed as a compliment to industrialization . . . the nuclear family, because of its mobility, can conform to the vagaries of changing jobs . . . because it is a small, self-sufficient unit dedicated to aggrandizing its own consumption ends, the nuclear family creates dependency of a woman and her offspring on the male breadwinner and thus ties a man to his job." In so doing, communal ties are sundered and with them, the spirit of conviviality, of connectivity, that fuels communal celebrations.



So then, what if any comparison can be made between the festive occasion as it was observed traditionally and its contemporary manifestations? I am under no delusions that LEAF is a contemporary equivalent to Carnival, but some elements of the former do inform the latter, especially as far as the body is concerned. David Graeber, in a wonderful essay on the Reformation of Manners as this affected changing popular attitudes concerning the body as the locus for the observance of interpersonal communication and social hierarchies as these articulate emerging notions of private property offers some insight here. Using an older anthropological distinction between "joking relations" and "relations of avoidance," in the former the body is conceived as continuous with the world around it, "constituted mainly of substances--stuff flowing in or flowing out." In contrast, the body in relations of avoidance is just the opposite--the body shut off and guarded, the body as property. It is this distinction, argues Graeber, that allowed the ruling classes to imagine themselves as socially superior to the masses, motivated as they presumably were by a more basal and primitive carnality (notions that translated only too easily into the racialized discourses of colonial subjugation). So it was a matter of comportment largely, the conventions for which were established and upheld by the elites themselves. The joking body was the equivalent of Bakhtin's grotesque and/or carnivalesque body. It was the carnivalesque body that became the target of the middle class reformers zeal, and later, the other-ized locus justifying the colonizer's covetous desires. Graeber again: "Essentially it came down to the attempt, largely on the part of the middle class religious authorities [with the support of the merchant middle class], to improve the manners of those below: most of all, by eliminating any traces of the carnivalesque from popular life. . . among their targets [were] 'actors, ballads, bear baiting, bull-fights, cards, chapbooks, charivaris, charlatans, dancing, dicing, divining, fairs, folktales, fortune-telling, magic, masks, minstrels, puppets, taverns and witchcraft.'" As Peter Linebaugh continues in similar fashion, reformation focused on "the elimination of cakes and ale, the elimination of sports, the shunning of dance, the abolition of festivals, and the strict discipline of male and female bodies." Especially female bodies. More or less all forms of merrymaking thus became the target of reform, which sought to replace them with Weber's Protestant work ethic. Importantly, Graeber argues, these competing notions of comportment accompanied the generalization of relations of avoidance as the transition to capitalist social organization required the internalization of social relations based on private property. The body was thus necessarily the first site of conquest. In such a way the body was readied for the emergent regime of labor discipline, a process that complimented the enclosure of the commons. The result, as Linebaugh puts it, was that "The land and the body lost their magics."

There was resistance of course--always there is resistance. In the colonial context this resistance is represented in literature and art by the likes of Shakespeare's Caliban, who in Sylvia Federici's estimation represents "not only the anti-colonial rebel . . . but the world proletariat and, more specifically . . . the proletarian body as a terrain and instrument of resistance to the logic of capitalism." And here the festive body figures centrally. Again, Graeber: "Festivals had once been moments to define a community of equals: now, after they had been pulled out of the fabric of everyday life and challenged from above, the definition began to acquire a whole new meaning. Like Carnivals on the Continent, they came to commemorate a golden age when, it was imagined, equality and physical happiness were not yet things of the past."



So, are we to imagine the contemporary festival as some expression of this same tension? Clearly, though standards of comportment are considerably relaxed today compared with those of the Early Modern period, they still exist in a similar tension between competing ideologies. One element often lending counter-cultural movements their gravitas, after all, is their insistence on subverting conventional ideas of comportment. So are men with long hair, women with unshaven armpits and legs (to use perhaps too trite examples from the U.S. context) equivalent expressions to Bakhtin's carnivalesque or Graeber's joking body? How could they be otherwise? And herein lies the power of the festival, even today, however commodified it may be. I suspect that many young festival attendees are the same individuals who might otherwise be engaged in yet another kind of festival--the festival of resistance. As I drove into the festival and parked the car, while walking back to the camping area I noticed stacked in the back of a pickup truck, backpack frames for giant puppets, a stock feature of contemporary protest events since Bread and Puppet Theatre started using them in the 1960s.



Though LEAF is anything but a subversive event (even if it is one that is heavily policed, not unlike other such festivals, i.e., Bonnaroo), it nonetheless contains elements of subversion, if for no other reason than its genealogy in the lineage of the festive moment. Too, such non-political festivals might perhaps be seen as a kind of muster for their more explicitly political counterparts. How else to account the common presence of giant puppets and people on stilts.

Whippoorwills

Last night I heard a whippoorwill's melancholic song issuing from the woods to the immediate east of our house. It is a rare occurrence anymore, to hear whippoorwills, at least compared to my memories growing up on Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau and the north Florida piney woods. Memory is an imperfect and highly selective instrument, but as best I recall, hearing whippoorwills was a common part of the aural ecology of my childhood. Having lived in a number of rural and semi-rural localities since then, mostly in the upper south, it occasionally dawned on me that I wasn't hearing whippoorwills as often as I should be. Ornithologists tell us there is good reason for that. Whippoorwill populations have declined 57% in the last 40 years. The annual rate of decline for Tennessee has been as high as 5.8%. I take this last statistic from a book by local nature writer Stephen Lyn Bales, Natural Histories: Stories From the Tennessee Valley. In it Bales goes on to discuss general decline in songbird populations of the eastern woodlands. Definitive attribution for the decline is difficult to discern, but is relate to habitat destruction along all points of the birds migratory routes. Deforestation of Latin American winter habitat, says Bales, is a big part of the problem, and goes on to cite some statistics for Guatemala, the amorphous Amazon, and Venezuela. "Why such deforestation?" asks Bales. His answer, without any further support or elaboration: "human population growth is the probable cause . . ."

The Malthusian bogey-man rears its ugly head again. It is puzzling to me that writers such as Bales can so casually yet confidently issue such uninformed and purely conjectural statements. What Bales fails to recognize is that while deforestation and population growth are certainly problems, there is no 1:1 correlation between the two. Deforestation for the purposes of supporting a growing mass of presumably ecologically illiterate swidden horticulturists pales in comparison to rates of deforestation for the purposes of feeding the consumption patterns of populations in the Global North. This is not the forest clearance of peasant farmers, but of multinational corporations feeding the bloated global economy. Global demands for "exotic" timber products, coffee, bananas, and crops for biofuels (palm oil) are hardly driven by growing rural populations in exporting countries. Indeed, in those countries the bulk of the rural population is displaced in the wake of corporate-led and financed deforestation, forced into the swelling urban slums of Guatemala City or Caracas as "free labor" to toil for meager wages in abysmal working conditions in yet other industries feeding yet other consumer demands in the Global North (cheap T-shirts for example).

By way of another body of statistics, in 2004 the 2.3 billion people of the Global South accounted for 3% of total global consumption while the 1 billion residents of the Global North accounted for 80%. The U.S., containing 4.6% of the global population, accounted for 33% of global consumption. Placing the blame for the decline in songbird habitat, tragic though that certainly is, on the presumed reproductive fecundity of brown people is an extension of same old colonial project that began some five hundred years ago. Such notions have yielded involuntary sterilization and "family planning" programs targeting marginal and "backward" populations--almost always the rural poor of color, or else the "otherized whiteness" of peripheral regions like Appalachia. The modernist body politic. Need someone to blame--blame "them," but not "us." It perplexes me that so many otherwise well informed and highly educated people could so utterly misrepresent reality in such ways. It is in part, I suspect, the result of the hyper-compartmentalization of knowledge that characterizes our contemporary world. Certainly population growth is a problem, but an idea that unfortunately nearly always carries with it certain colonial habits of mind.

It is well established that Thomas Malthus was a racist ("the father of scientific racism"), a fact that renders the implications of his ideas something altogether different than the pure detached scientific observations they are often thought to be. Indeed, it is one of the largely uncritically accepted legacies of dualistic Enlightenment thinking that it should be possible at all to separate the knower from the known. Context is everything, and Malthusian "science" should be understood in the context of its day, one in which Europeans were grasping in various ways to justify their subjugation of colonized peoples. Friedrich Engels, a firm believer in the managerial and liberatory potential of science, called Malthus's ideas "the crudest, most barbarous theory that every existed, a system of despair which struck down all those beautiful phrases about love thy neighbor and world citizenship."

Anyhow, back to the immediate matter at hand (though these other matters are hardly tangential), the whippoorwill at my window. It was glorious! A messenger from a dying world, bringing news that there is still reason for hope, a reminder that deep mystery and beauty still reside in our diminished world, but whose elusiveness also serves as a warning to the observant that we are fast approaching the precipice.

Theives and Scythes

My family and I own a small "farm" in northern Davidson County, TN, just north of Nashville. Its situated in the relatively rugged hill country of the northern Highland Rim region. In my observation hill country retains largely the same character as its more dramatic counterpart, mountains--socially, culturally economically, and agriculturally marginal, stubborn, resistant. The world over hill regions provide safe haven for autonomous types, in the anarchist sense (those who have little use for state-level government and who embrace their marginality as a form of self-defense). For a good book about this see James Scott's latest--The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, a study exhibiting Scott's characteristic erudition and brilliance. The region discussed traverses several nation-state boundaries, a sort of nether region called Zomia, which Scott describes as "a kind of transnational Appalachia." In the introductory chapter he states, "Most, if not all, the characteristics that appear to stigmatize hill peoples--their location at the margins, their physical mobility, their swidden agriculture, their flexible social structure, their religious heterodoxy, their egalitarianism, and the nonliterate, oral cultures--far from being the mark of primitives left behind by civilization, are better seen on the long view as adaptations designed to evade both state capture and state formation." A fitting description, I think, of not only mountain people, but hill people generally.

Anyhow, we worked this hill country farm for a few years, producing mixed veggies largely for a local market my wife and some other local farmers established in Whites Creek. We eventually quit for several reasons--trying to work a full-time job in addition to the full time job of farming proved to be more than I could handle. But I like to say that the main reason for our short tenure as farmers is related to social justice. I just couldn't countenance growing all that wonderful food just to sell it all to the urban green lifestyle bobo's who frequented the market. I thought, and still think, that growers of organic food should be more dedicated to issues of social justice if the movement/practice is to have any meaning beyond its potential to maximize profit. Pricing vegetables based on the going price of their equivalents at Whole Foods is tantamount to the gentrification of farming (which actually integrates quite nicely with other kinds of gentrification). I don't mean to generalize too broadly here--there are plenty of excellent farmers out there (several in Middle Tennessee) who attempt to mitigate this tendency as best they can while still attempting to make a living wage from their efforts. I understand the dilemma, though it was not one I could successfully navigate.

So anyhow, we moved away so I could return to school and have a more flexible schedule that might allow for a slow reentry back into farming (farmers are gluttons for punishment). We weren't ready to part with the farm though, so we rented it out to a young couple interested in continuing the farming operation. They did a great job in their one growing season there, starting a small CSA (which had always been ideal arrangement as far as my wife and I were concerned--food with a farmer's face on it, as the Japanese pioneers of the model like to say). They moved on after a season for reasons that reflect a larger reality facing would-be farmers. That is, land priced for its development value rather than its agricultural value (in Marxist terms, for its exchange value rather than its use value), is not amenable to farming on a small scale. In other words, we had to charge more for rent, to continue to pay our mortgage (I am a student, my wife a teacher, so we're pretty poor), than is reasonable for anyone aspiring to earn a living from the land. That's the real tragedy of the current situation. Those most willing and able catalysts of the small farm revolution are systematically shut out by a political economy that favors condominium or strip mall development over growing food. I began to wonder if entering small scale organic farming might not be limited to those with handsome trust funds (and I'll hold my tongue on the implications attending such a situation). It also made we wonder about the whole sacred American institution of property ownership. I think it's mainly a racket designed to shackle us to the market economy, to make wage slaves out of us (or salary slaves for that matter). Property ownership is overrated, if not a full blown epic myth.

So when our "tenants" moved out (I have an aversion to the hierarchical relationship implied by that term, evident in its historical linkage to subordination), they moved to town, which unless you are growing food for other people seems the only responsible thing to do in this era carbon dependency and climate change. Deciding to live in the country just so you can take a piss off your front porch, as a good old boy back home waxing poetic about the pleasures of country life once told me, just doesn't cut it anymore. As Barbara Kingsolver wrote of the dilemma of owning rural land, "It seems to my husband and me that this farm is something we need to work hard to deserve . . . we recognize that it ought to feed people--more than just our family and those who come to our table." Amen to that. In the interim of the move they had no place to store the BCS walk-behind tractor they had received just months earlier as a wedding gift, so they left it behind in the shed at the back of the property. (They had the ceremony at the farm, a truly beautiful event that endeared the place to me that much more). In the meantime, the place began to acquire the look of an abandoned property. So one day some assholes decided to look around to see what they could lift. The brand new BCS, never used, become the primary object of their desire and they so they stole it. Seeking to maximize the return on their spree of theft, they also heisted a chain saw and a few good hand tools, including a wrecking bar I had borrowed from my uncle to build the shed and had been inexcusably tardy in returning.

This was of course a traumatic occasion. I've been the victim of random theft two times in my life (a beloved canoe and a push lawn mower), and though I was only an indirect victim of this act, I still felt violated in the way that theft makes you feel. The loss of the BCS was obviously the most egregious--the denial of a wedding gift (and a mighty generous and useful one at that).

A curious thing struck me about the theft though. Besides the BCS, the obvious prize, they took the chainsaw, a cheap Poulan, not a Skill or a Husky, and the wrecking bar. But curiously, they left a tool that is worth more, in pure monetary value, than all of those items they snagged as afterthoughts combined. It was a scythe from the Marugg Tool Company that my wife gave me as a gift for my birthday a couple of years prior. Marugg is a 130 year old tool company locate in Tracy city, TN, about an hour and a half south of Nashville, square atop Monteagle Mountain on the Cumberland Plateau's southern reaches in Tennessee. What was curious was why they didn't take it. They understood the value of a wrecking bar, but not a handmade scythe (the handle, or snath, made in TN, of Tennessee hickory, the blade hand-forged in Austria) assembled at one of Tennessee's oldest continuously operating businesses. I suppose I see their ignorance as emblematic of our time. Wrecking bars are, after all, something you can find at Lowes or Home Depot--a fairly common and recognizable commodity form, albeit a very useful one. The scythe, however, is an entirely different sort of creature, one that existed somewhere beyond the periphery of their frame of reference. It was an anachronism, and so, incomprehensible.

It reminds of another book I've been reading, one that refers to a litany of arcane terms used in late Medieval English to describe various rights and practices accompanying the use of the commons--pannage, estovers, agistment, assart, chiminage, firebote, housebote, ploughbote, turbary. It is a book primarily about the Magna Carta and its perversion over the years since its signing in 1215 at Runnymeade on the Thames, and especially modern interpretations that have left out its accompanying document, the Charter of the Forest, which protected the rights of the commons and commoners against the interests of monarch and capitalists alike. The author, Peter Linebaugh, heir to arguably the greatest social historian of all time, E.P. Thompson, writes of this this historical distortion and forgetting, "The appeal of the modern pulls against the veneration of the old." Indeed, even among thieves. Interestingly, in the glossary explaining the arcana populating the book appears the term villein, whose original meaning meant "a class of serfs or peasant occupiers, bondsmen who, according to the followers of Kett's Rebellion of 1549, were Christ's blood set free."

In starting this blog, I can't help but wonder what compels us to share the quotidian realities of life with others? Solidarity I suppose, maybe a simple inclination to share, or perhaps an earnest effort to rehabilitate the spirit of the commons. This blog is intended to be an ongoing exploration of the ways in which these quotidian realities are embedded in a larger socio-political matrix that can be either tyrannical or emancipatory, depending on orientation, inclination, or positionality. The politics of everyday life. An extended engagement with the various ways in which localized efforts toward autonomous, unalienated experience and social relations are tempered, in the post Zapatista-world, by the cultivation of broader interconnections and networks.

Besides these more theoretical considerations, it is also a place where a lover of seed saving, forest-skills, vernacular knowledge, and social movements can simply ruminate about such things as inspiration dictates. I suppose I'm interested in linking land-race plant varieties, wild mushroom hunting, and traditional music (among other things) to translocal struggles for global justice. I'm not yet sure what the precise linkage is between Morgan's Kentucky Butcher dent corn, morel mushrooms and, say, the Allianza por la vida y la paz in Guatemala's El Peten department, or PRATEC in the Andes; but I'm sure it's there. Such connections are suggested in la Allianza's campaign slogan of resistance to Plan Puebla Panama--"Agua, Maize, y Tierra son Nuestros" (water, corn, and land are ours). Or in Zambian's refusal of GMO corn shipments from the U.S. amid potential famine conditions. Or the Zapotec's refusal of the same. (More on each of these instances to come). It seems that there could be no greater symbol of resistance to the homogenizing spectacle and inverted truths of corporate economic globalization than the humble seed, saved and perpetuated across generations, or a meal gathered from the woods. But these are not only symbols of resistance, but the substance as well. So, subsistence, understood as the creative mutual labor essential to wresting life from the hands of global consumer society, is innately subversive. How else to account for the nation-state's (and the transnational corporation's) deep investment in and commitment to the elimination and/or assimilation of marginal subsistence populations?--the ongoing project of delivering such peoples from their backwardness, of integrating them/us ("we") into the master narrative of "progress." That may indeed be written as the central struggle of history attending the maturation of the modern world system--one that is still being written. From TVA's first hydroelectric project on the Clinch River in Anderson County, TN in the early 1930s to Three Gorges Dam in contemporary China; from the enclosure of the English commons to privatization of water in the contemporary world--the shadow history of modernity.

So, yes, the paper sack full of caseknife bean seeds my mother sent me in the mail, seeds she was given by her great aunt, is deeply political in its implications--linking generations and place and knowledge and genetic diversity against the alternative. These are much more than just beans.