The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins 9780823276332

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The Hawthorn Archive

The Hawthorn Archive Letters from the Utopian Margins Avery F. Gordon

Fordham University Press New York 2018

Copyright © 2018 Avery F. Gordon All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other — except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937230. Printed in China 19 18 17

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A Note about the Archive This book contains a selection of items from the Hawthorn Archive. The Hawthorn Archive is an imaginary and real infrastructure for intellectual work. It might best be conceived as an idiosyncratic methodology for a research-based writing practice whose main collaborators over time came from a segment of the contemporary art world and whose motivation has been to find some shared language for the marginalized utopian elements found in a variety of resistive and defiant activity in the past and in the present. The focus of the book is a kind of consciousness I call being in-difference and how it can be developed and sustained in practice. Being in-difference is a political consciousness and a sensuous knowledge: a standpoint and a mindset for living on better terms than what we’re offered, for living as if you had the necessity and the freedom to do so. By better, I mean a collective life without misery, deadly inequalities, mutating racisms, social abandonment, endless war, police power, authoritarian governance, heteronormative impositions, patriarchal rule, cultural conformity, and ecological destruction. The book’s modes of inquiry and presentation fuse critical theory with creative writing in a historical context: fact, fiction, theory, and image speak to each other in an undisciplined environment to better understand the ways — some ordinary, some not — people have learned to live within and against all those systems of domination which, despite their overwhelming power, never quite overtake or become us. The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins takes a form that is neither quite academic nor artistic but something in between, a form borne of failure and a form that itself fails in many crucial ways. In the few pages that follow, I provide some context for its form and touch on some of its key themes. For readers who would prefer to begin in the world of the Hawthorn Archive, skip ahead to the contents page.

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the story of the failed academic book After I finished writing Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination in the mid-1990s, I started two large projects. One was a study of capitalist culture designed to take shape as an exhibition styled for a natural history museum under the presumption that capitalism was extinct, which was somewhat inspired by the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California. Poorly conceived as a single-author project and struggling to hold on to the fantastic presumption at its heart, it died quickly and was superseded by my involvement in the antiprison efforts spearheaded by Critical Resistance, although there is something of a long-lost remnant of it in the Hawthorn Archive, including its antiquated stylistics. The second project was a relatively normal academic book with the working title In the Shadow of the Bottom Line, whose purpose was to redefine what utopian thinking and practice has meant and could mean if, for example, slavery and prison abolition or the Jubilee antidebt movement were specimens or exemplars of it. This project was prompted in part by questions left open at the end of Ghostly Matters and by the dominant left intellectual discourse at the time, which presumed that political disobedience was either dead or ineffective —“merely utopian” it was said — and which mirrored the triumphalism of the New Right’s “End of History” claim made famous by Francis Fukuyama in 1992. The diagnosis of a closed political universe as the pinnacle of critical thought and capitalist world civilization seemed to me profoundly wrong, inaccurate, and disconnected from what was happening in the world. Although a challenge to traditional left political models and expectations, arguably there was more resistance by diverse peoples across the globe than at any other time in modern history, a condition that, in my view, only increased subsequently, as the title of Notes from Nowhere’s 2003 book about global anticapitalist struggles, We Are Everywhere, announced. At the time, I was struck by how unprepared so many radical intellectuals were to see, much less treat as theoretically valuable, what seemed to me, a historical moment that might have sparked their political imaginations. One problem that surely contributed to this disconnect was the conventional definitional meaning of the term utopia: the future perfect no-place imagined as a little nation engineered by white middle-class reformers and peopled with homogeneous populations without conflicts or complicated psychic lives. I was interested to know if the utopian could be made to mean something else, something more useful than the “merely” in a significant period of political-economic retrenchment and resistance to it. And, so first I went looking in the Western history and theory of utopia for a utopianism that didn’t inhabit the anxious ambivalence that the Marxist dismissal of utopian socialism as nothing more than a kind of “mish-mash” had passed on to generations of radical critics as sophisticated common sense. (It was Engels who called utopian socialism a “mish-mash”: he’s going to put socialism on a

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scientific footing and mish-mash will not do.) What I found was a definitional world or discourse of utopia with a deeply racialized historiography and a narrowly exclusive set of literary, aesthetic, philosophical, historical, and sociological references. The Marxist tradition was only one intellectual origin point of the problem and in fact was more tolerant and inviting than its crankier heirs let on. The limitations of the historical and literary boundaries of the referential field were very publicly exposed in 2000 when the New York Public Library joined forces with France’s Bibliothèque nationale to mount a large exhibition, online archive, and publication program.1 Quite strikingly, Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World treated the genocidal settler colonialism that founded the so-called new world as a successful utopian enterprise while absenting entirely what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker call the “manyheaded hydra” of the seventeenth-century “revolutionary Atlantic.” The many-headed hydra — slaves, indentured servants and maids, prisoners, conscripts, pirates, sailors, religious heretics, woodcutters, water carriers, prostitutes, indigenous peoples, commoners, runaways, deserters, and vagabonds — all those and their descendants who dared to challenge the making of the modern world capitalist system were completely invisible, buried under the weight of a triumphant modernity and the specter of Stalinist social engineering. The libraries reflected the state of the field. The utopian as we have come to know it includes the French and American Revolutions, but not the thirty-year war waged by the Black and Red Seminoles against the United States or any subsequent Fourth World refusals.2 It includes Karl Marx, who absolutely hated the idea, but not Christian Priber, a German socialist exile who joined the Cherokee Nation in 1736, was captured by the British because he refused to declare loyalty to them or the French, helped to unite the Southern Indian Nations in what was then Cherokee Territory, and later died in a South Carolina prison. The utopian as we know it includes: the English craftsman William Morris but not the African American worker, the self-named “Black Bolshevik” Harry Haywood; the philosopher Ernst Bloch’s dreamy anticipations but not the writer and theorist C. L. R. James’s philosophy of happiness. The utopian as we know it includes feminist Frances Wright’s failed and deeply flawed abolitionist experiment at Nashoba in Tennessee in the 1820s but not one example of any instance of marronage in the entire Americas. Brook Farm and numerous white middle-class separatist communities are part of its known legacy but not the multicultural Combahee River Collective or the many coalitional collectives like them. The utopian as we know it includes Ursula K. Le Guin’s off-world anthropology but not Toni Cade Bambara’s in-the-here-and-now community studies.3 The examples can be multiplied. After spending a good amount of time in these archives, it became clear that there was an exclusionary zone of tremendous magnitude and that it was precisely in that zone or blind spot where we might find, if we were prepared to or anticipating it, those “fugitive moments of comprehension” that could yield a genealogy of and paradigms for more adequate histories and theories of the many real and imaginary strivings for a

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livable and humane social existence.4 For in that zone of exclusion, we find a utopian thought and practice which is as transnational as it is local; which is as oriented to the present and the past as it is to the future; which is as comfortable with wild speculation as it is with collective movements; which substitutes complexity for perfection; which privileges diversity over homogeneity; which treats the self and society as equally important objects of social transformation; and which offers enriched and inclusive notions of freedom, sovereignty, and happiness. In that zone of exclusion, the utopian is a standpoint for the here and now — not only the future — which registers and incites the works, the thoughts, and the better worlds inhabited by those who always, as Raymond Williams put it, “meanwhile carry on.” I thought then and still do think that we need a better vocabulary for naming and describing the alternative lives we could be living and that at smaller scales many of us already do. My intention was to excavate what I started calling the other utopianism and its distinct onto-epistemological affects, tracing its historical roots in slaves running away, marronage, piracy, heresy, witchcraft, vagrancy, vagabondage, rebellion, solder desertion, and other often illegible, illegitimate, or trivialized forms of escape, resistance, opposition, and alternative ways of life. This other utopianism produces “temporary autonomous zones,” to use Hakim Bey’s phrase, that look less like the traditional rural separatist community (although these have been reemerging in new ways throughout Europe) and more like what sociologist Asef Bayat calls the “quiet encroachment” of the world’s urban poor, creating new life-forms in the interstices of organized abandonment by the state. This other utopianism is marked by a rejection of individualization as subjectification with its attendant consumerism and by cooperation oriented toward the “human strike.”5 This other utopianism is immanent, often modeled best by those bound in place and time and lacking the capacity to escape, such as prisoners. This other utopianism creates feral economies that are based on not working as we know work as a means of exploitation and alienation, local bartering, unauthorized trading, theft, and nonstandard currencies, all of which displace the productivist ethos Marxism and socialist traditions have long favored. This other utopianism is characterized by both direct action against and nonparticipation in liberal democratic state politics, by various forms of refusal, including the boycott and the occupation without demands. This other utopianism, audacious in its assertions, gestures toward an alternate universe or civilization, long in the making, emerging out of and receding back into the shadows as needed, sometimes linking its varied traditions and strands in solidarity and fellowship, sometimes badly internally broken. Needless to say, the relatively normal academic book on the other utopianism with its encyclopedic references, case study laboratories, and theoretical genealogies failed to materialize. It failed to materialize as utopian studies and actual self-described utopian experiments grew, making more room for what Davina Cooper calls “everyday utopias” and for a much more sophisticated and flexible notion of the utopian.6 It

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failed to materialize as Ruth Levitas and Erik Olin Wright, two important senior scholars in my field, gave sociology a strong mandate to make utopia a legitimate object of study if not to itself become a utopian science.7 It failed to materialize as queer studies embraced the term with vigorous attention.8 It failed to materialize as a mini academic industry developed that was far more willing to embrace a language of utopianism to describe the new anarchism, horizontalism, and immanent politics that emerged out of a major cycle of global social movement activity oriented around the Zapatistas, the anti- and alter-globalization movement of movements, and more recently the various commoners and occupados. It failed to materialize despite these important political and scholarly developments because I was spending a lot of time researching, writing, and teaching about imprisonment and war escalated and — even in the company of determined and inspiring prison abolitionists — I found it difficult to focus on the utopian as a relatively normal scholarly project in that situation, which felt like triage. It took me longer than it should have taken to realize — in retrospect it’s easy to laugh about it — that all the detours and difficulties I had getting a secure grasp on the utopian project was exactly the utopian practice I was trying to understand and find a language for. But even this belated recognition didn’t yield the coherence and comprehensiveness expected of a relatively normal academic book and a start-and-stop approach that produced fragments and repetition was exacerbated to the breaking point by working increasingly in a segment of the art world whose mode of production requires everything to be written faster, shorter, and with a lot fewer footnotes; sometimes, I think, not even written to be read in the way scholars read but rather to be contemplated like an interesting object. (It would take a long essay I am not competent to write to intelligently assess the contradictory nature of writing in and for the contemporary art world today. As someone who is neither an artist nor an art historian, critic, or curator, I have enjoyed being welcomed as an outsider and being spared the need to become a knowledgeable insider. The sophistication of research-based art practices, the horizontalization of conceptual theoretical work, the widespread self-organization of artists for learning and publication, and the active politicization of many artists create spaces for productive conversations and collaborations with others, such as myself. In the best of circumstances these conditions permit something of pioneering art educator Adrian Rifkin’s “gestural pedagogy,” which is based not on “enforced information” [hierarchical inequality] or “equality of knowledge” [sameness] but rather on an “equivalence of ignorance.” That’s to say, one brings something without requirements to the meeting where what’s shared is the interest in whatever occasions the meeting in the first place.)9 In the end, whatever else was pushing and pulling, I think the normal academic book failed because the representational form I had chosen was not right. It was not, I hesitate to say, utopian enough, even though some would claim that both its grandiose ambition and its continuous failure to materialize were perfectly paradigmatically utopian.

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this is only a letter: a failure of form The Hawthorn Archive was invented as a mode of production suitable both for the way I was working with others and for representing or perhaps merely conjuring, no longer something as identifiable as “the other utopianism” as a scholarly object, but what I started to call after Ernst Bloch’s idea of the utopian surplus, the utopian margins. As I hope you’ll see, what’s there in those utopian margins is a “collective intelligence gathered from struggle” or a subjugated knowledge that sometimes speaks its own language but almost always exceeds the contingent socioeconomic conditions and geopolitical locations in which it arises. What’s there in those utopian margins is a poetic knowledge, to quote Aimé Césaire, “born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.” What’s there in those utopian margins is ex-centric, or what some people mean by queer, a kind of qualitative difference Herbert Marcuse described as scandalous and Robin D. G. Kelley calls surrealistic. What’s there in those utopian margins has a complicated temporality in which ideas and actions in the past or the yet-to-come are sometimes articulated as if in the present tense, as if they required the power of a narrated story told to you now, urgently patiently. What’s there in those utopian margins are true stories, sometimes only found in disorganized documentary fragments if one is prepared, as Colin Dayan puts it, to “imagine what can’t be verified.”11 Why represent this utopian surplus as an archive? To represent this surplus or excess in the form of an archive was first of all to embrace, with a little humor, the impossibility of such a thing — the impossibility of my doing it; after all, the learned specialization and collection that characterizes most archive projects was precisely what I couldn’t manage to do — and the impossibility of the idea itself. For the idea that the Hawthorn Archive would be deliberately unfinished, obscure, nonlinear, with no directions or blueprints, to better reflect both the actual state of most archives and the nature of this one’s specific activities and collections was to presume a form can function as a literal representation of a concept and thus to reintroduce a positivism of perfection into the very process of trying to eliminate it. (Or to introduce a madness that could not end well, a warning made most efficiently in the one-paragraph short story by Jorge Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” which tells of an ancient empire where, led by the ambitious cartographic guild, “the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection” that the map of the empire eventually covered the entirety of the empire itself.) The whole project, which I hesitate to even call a methodology, was always much more disorganized and ad hoc, really. Although perhaps legitimately it could be considered artistic research in Maryam Jafri’s sense of opening “up a fantastical space where imprecision, ambiguity and contradiction — the very things that the natural or social sciences avoid — come into play.” The question of what is and what isn’t artistic research is a highly debated one among artists, curators, critics, and scholars and not taken up here. Suffice to say, Jafri’s warning against “reducing the artistic process to

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mere research” and her admonition that “even in our so-called documentary era . . . research must operate at the levels of both content and form. It must push the medium further,” should equally be applied to scholarly research.12 It’s not only that the project is more disorganized than an archive normally is or should be, it’s that perhaps the Hawthorn Archive is poorly named in the first place. Despite the great love I have for libraries, for old places and for what Carolyn Steedman means by “dust”; despite my abiding excitement in finding the traces of the missing that archives can yield; despite my genuine respect and admiration for the work of historians, radical librarians, and community-building archivists;13 and despite the appeal of the critical questions that have been put to the archive over the years and the impressive artistic portfolio of these questions,14 the Hawthorn Archive is not really an archive or principally about the archive. In its own world, this is very clear. While it has a library and collections, it also has members and a society and relationships with other entities, some of whom challenge the distinction between the real and the imaginary, and a system of refuge and so on. The Hawthorn Archive is something other than what we normally take an archive to be, different even from those radical archives whose purpose is precisely to decolonize the archive and its disciplinary functions.15 Out here, in this prefatory world, it was always only a perhaps overly complicated way of saying something simple: “Look. Here. They’re wrong. We do know how to live better. We have pretty good answers to different questions. We’ve been at it a long time.” And to encourage those of us involved in social struggles against the range of powers arrayed against us — such powers including ourselves — to see our capacities as capacities and to take autonomous self-direction and self-determination seriously. In this sense, it was important to try to represent the utopian margins as a mode of living, to treat the subject neither as an external analytic object nor as merely dream, hope, or fantasy. This meant shifting the balance so that the demanding and demonstrative language of diagnosis and critique receded somewhat and a different sensibility could emerge, one in which the traces of ideas and actions in the past or the yet-tocome appeared as if in the present tense, or in which traces of ideas and actions in the present came to appear as if in the past. To track down those traces entailed playing with storytelling and narration, drawing on the power of story, while staying firmly on the factual side of the fact/fiction border. Finally, this meant that the writer — me — had to be situated in the story and in the project and not just standing outside of it. The letters and file notes and internal memos — the archive apparatus — were one means for conveying a larger collectivity and a larger ongoing process bound by public and private relationships; an image of a community of intellectuals, artists, and writers working and living in-difference, of not waiting for another world but of being already there. As Subcomandante Marcos emphasized about the Zapatista use of the communiqué: “I know that this is a theme worthy of pages, but since this is only a letter, I am making points to be developed on other occasions or to provoke debate and discus-

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sion.”16 The items presented here from the Hawthorn Archive are, in this sense, only letters, an attempt to convey a sense of other occasions, of conversations and solidarities unfolding, unfinished, points and lines and relationships to be developed, going here and there, crossing worlds where we are, as James Baldwin used to say, better than what they think we are. Of course, an origin story for the Hawthorn Archive had to be created, which is not this one, obviously. That story, such as it is, can be found in the files pertaining to the agent known as “C.” And now we potentially enter a reflexive spiral that’s perhaps not so interesting and in any event causes continuity problems, on top of the already problematic fragmentation, repetition, and ill-fitting form, which is why the Hawthorn Archive, in order to do its work, must remain elusive, vague, secretive, a place that emerges and recedes in practical relationships with others.

NOTES 1. See Schaer, Claeys, and Sargent, Utopia; for a popular version of the same historiography, see Tod and Wheeler, Utopia. 2. For two sophisticated and eloquent elaborations of indigenous refusal, see Couthard, Red Skin, White Masks, and Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus. 3. Drawing a distinction that should probably be questioned, I am mainly not referring here to what counts as utopian literary fiction, in which case the significance of writers such as Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler is well-established. Although I should note that Delany, like Toni Cade Bambara and for similar reasons, rejects the utopian label: “I don’t think SF can be really utopian . . . even [in] an anarchistic utopia.” Delany, “On Triton and Other Matters,” 302. 4. The original phrase is “the pasts’ fugitive moments of compassion” and belongs to Howard Zinn. I found it in Lubin, Geographies of Liberation, 13. 5. Bayat, Life as Politics, 43–65. On the human strike, see Parti Imaginaire, “Comment Faire?”; Tiqqun, How Is It to Be Done?; and Fontaine, Human Strike Has Already Begun. 6. Cooper, Everyday Utopias. See also Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. Tom Moylan’s work has always been an exception to the limitations of the field. On “critical utopia,” see the new edition of his 1986 Demand the Impossible. For the inclusion of the Black Panther Party, see Boal et al., West of Eden. 7. Ruth Levitas’s Utopia as Method was the distinguished career culmination of one of the founders of Utopian Studies and the author of the early and influential The Concept of Utopia. Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias also reflects long-standing work from the collaborative Real Utopias Project begun in 1991. 8. Queer studies has been an active academic arena for developing a sexual utopianism, productively engaging questions of affect and temporality, particularly as rendered in poetry, theater, performance, and literature. Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia is best known, but see also Dolan, Utopia in Performance; Snediker, Queer Optimism; Freeman, Time Binds; Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure; Halberstam, “Charming for the Revolution”; and Angela Jones, Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias.

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9. Personal correspondence. See also Rifkin, “Inventing Recollection” and “JR Cinéphile.” 10. Robinson, Black Marxism, xxx. 11. Césaire, “Poetry and Knowledge,” xlii; Kelley, Freedom Dreams; Dayan, “Paul Gilroy’s Slaves, Ships, and Routes,” 9. 12. Jafri, “Through, Around, and Against the Document,” 33. The tensions and challenges of working within and across academic and artistic research practices and institutional locations are evident in this book, without, in my view, being satisfactorily resolved. 13. See especially Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings; Cvetkovich, Depression; and Cvetkovich, “Cruising the Archive.” See also the work of radical librarians and archivists such as Colmenar, Anguera, and Kumbier, “Liberating Information”; Drabinski, Kumbier, and Accardi, Critical Library Instruction; Kumbier, Ephemeral Material. See also the website Radical Reference at www.radicalreference.info. 14. The literature here is vast. See Buckley and Violeau, Utopie, for early artist material. Merewether’s collection The Archive contains excerpts from art critics, such as Hal Foster’s widely cited essay; from major philosophical figures, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s magnificent essay, “The Rani of Sirmur,” Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur; and from the most influential artists on this question, including Renée Green, Allan Sekula, and the Atlas Group. See also Spieker, The Big Archive, which revisits Sekula’s question about the constitutive role of the archive in modernist and contemporary art, famously delivered in “The Body and the Archive”; Steedman, Dust; Farge, Le Gout de l’archive, Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism; and the Chimurenga Library at http://chimurengalibrary .co.za. For two archival-style artists’ projects dealing with the kind of radical multicultural utopianism the Hawthorn Archive promotes, see the projects organized and hosted by the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest at www.joaap.org; Hickey, Guidebook to Alternative Nows; and the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination at www.labofii.net, and their User’s Guide to Demanding the Impossible at https://demandingimpossible.wordpress .com. 15. See by contrast Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani’s enormously important Index of the Disappeared, ongoing since 2004, which is an actual archive of disappearances since September 2011, including “detentions, deportations, renditions, redactions.” See Ganesh and Ghani, “Introduction to an Index,” and the listing at www.kabulreconstructions.net/disappeared/. 16. Subcomandante Marcos, Conversations with Don Durito, 92.

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Contents Introduction

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I. the scandal of the qualitative difference

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meditations on the term utopian; embracing the “mish-mash”; becoming unavailable for servitude; organs for the alternative; struggles with friendship; collaborations with Céline Condorelli; a word about the Hawthorn Archive

II. a means of preparation

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first principles subjugated knowledge; an unreadable map of the world in crisis; feral trade; a failed attempt at colonization; nonparticipation; the story of Eliza Winston who ran away; sympathy for deserting soldiers; being the leader you seek

III. the exile of our longing

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some questions about haunting and futurity; why the “P” is wrong in PTSD; doing time; the photograph and the prop; keywords for reading Colin Dayan; a blow at organized power; ghosts in the cinema studio

IV. perception of the subjectivity of the so-called object

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a return to first principles; on the wings of red arrows; failure to communicate and some letters from prison; another ghost story involving colonial soldiers captured by Germany in World War I; reimagining the workhouse; Jan’s spoon; the prisoner’s curse; a picture of abolition; Natascha’s drawings

Acknowledgments

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List of Images and Items

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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HA

Hawthorn Archives To: undisclosed list Subject: book _____________________________________________________________________ Dear friends, Will whoever is interested, please look over the attached short introduction to the publication of the letters and documents from the archive that I’ve put together? Any comments, corrections, revisions are welcome. You should have received the contents list separately. Thanks again to C for suggesting such a volume. There is still a little time to remove or add items if you send them along with instructions. The publication should be available within the next six months. We can revisit the question of distribution at that time. And remember, we’re cooking soup on Saturday. in solidarity and fellowship, ag

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Introduction The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins consists of items produced or collected by or deposited into the archive while I have been its organizer or keeper. These items include complete and incomplete files, various notes, correspondence, reports, internal memos, short essays for other publics, books, copied pages from books, photographs and other images, films, and other miscellany, including Tshirts and furniture. For those new to the archive, it is named after the forest tree, not the famous American author Nathaniel, as is commonly presumed and misspelled, even in archive documents. A very old tree known for its longevity and native to northern Europe, North America, and Asia, the hawthorn tree goes by other names, including the May tree, and is favored by witches and those internationalists who celebrate the first of May. Surrounded by a great deal of ancient lore, among other medicinal, alimentary, and aesthetic uses, the hawthorn tree was once said to be able to both protect the border to the world of the dead and heal a broken heart. The Hawthorn Archive houses an incomplete and disorganized intellectual history of a somewhat-but-not-entirely-random selection of radicals, runaways, deserters, abolitionists, heretics, dreamers, and liberationists who at some point stopped doing what they were told they had to do, stopped thinking what they were told they had to think, and stopped being available for things they had no design in making or controlling. What’s distinctive about the individuals and projects given a home at the archive is that they are committed not just to radical critique —“to illuminating what is repressed and excluded by the basic mechanisms of a given social order”— but to embodying, partially as best as they can, some of “the means by which society can be rendered adequate to the full breadth of human potentialities.” Defined equally by what/who they refuse and what/who they embrace and side with, these individuals and projects are part of a set of parallel universes of living otherwise which have existed — some for a very long time — on differential but proximate planes. To be clear, the Hawthorn Archive is not a library or a research collection in the conventional sense. It is vaguely modeled on those amusingly named literaryhistorical-philosophical-artistic academies — such as the Intrepidi, the Animosi, the Aborigini, the Dissonanti, the Oscuri, and the Timidi — that flourished in Europe, especially Italy, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and which were dedicated not to organized schooling but rather to providing a hospitable and comfortable environment for thought, conversation, writing, painting, drawing, experimentation, invention, friendship, and political conspiracy. Possessing neither a beautiful old building nor wealthy patronage, and often itself on the run between countries without legal papers, the archive assumes different forms and assembles relationships with individuals and other entities as needed and desired, collecting and disseminating knowledge,

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initiating projects and participating in projects initiated by others. The archive is also not a commune, although its members, agents, and friends are bound by ties of solidarity and fellowship in all their endeavors and work toward commonistic goals. After a lengthy period in which it was left unattended and was even more difficult to access than usual, the archive was reopened with a new keeper, in the course of which new collaborations, initiatives, and activities were undertaken. Because I will be replaced soon by another and each keeper is responsible for initiating activities and determining the specific form new collections take, which is why they range from exceedingly detailed to nonexistent, the question arose as to whether it might be useful to publish a selection of the letters and other items produced by and for the archive during this period. As is normal at the archive, there was considerable deliberation about the publication project. Some couldn’t see the benefit of having these fragmentary bits and pieces placed in a book or wondered exactly who would have the patience to sort through it all. Others didn’t care about whether it was useful or not but did feel the publication project was unseemly —“vanity” was the precise word used — as my reports, writings, and public appearances dominate, a function in part of my poor performance as archivist, in itself a function in part of my constantly running away, the latter being everyone agreed nonetheless completely understandable and acceptable. The issue of the archive’s separatism and whether it should even fraternize with people who are not known friends or friendly strangers has also been an ongoing one, as is clear from some of the included file notes. In the end, it was decided that notwithstanding these legitimate reservations, it was worthwhile to prepare a selection of archive materials for those who might, in encountering them, find something of value for themselves or, failing that, simply find proof of the archive’s existence. In consideration of the reader, the files have been mostly cleared of the piles of routine correspondence, notes, drafts, personal asides, journal entries, stray recipes, directions, train tickets, boarding passes, doodles, bank statements, etc.— in short, of everything one wades through in a normal archive in the hope of finding something of interest to a public audience. The items, all cleared for release, have been organized into four major collections (or sections) that aim for some thematic coherence. Section I, “the scandal of the qualitative difference,” takes its name from a phrase the philosopher Herbert Marcuse used —“the qualitative difference”— to define the nature of the deep systematic change he associated with refusal, liberation, and the growth of “organs for the alternative.” The importance to the archive of “the qualitative difference” and Toni Cade Bambara’s abolitionist notion of “becoming unavailable for servitude back stiff with conviction” are clear throughout the archive materials presented in this book. Section I includes some background on the Hawthorn Archive and a set of early reports in a popular education format on the concept of the utopian, as well as a large dossier on friendship. Section II, “a means of preparation,” takes its name from the description politi-

introduction

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cal theorist Cedric J. Robinson gave of the source of the Black Radical Tradition, as he elaborated it. “In the daily encounters and petty resistances to domination, slaves had acquired a sense of the calculus of oppression and its overt organization and instrumentation. These experiences lend themselves to a means of preparation for more epic resistance movements.” The section elaborates on preparation as a name for the immanent and practical means by which intelligence and organization are collectively mobilized to avoid and abolish various forms of enslavement and enclosure. The thematic core is various instances of fugitivity or running away — from slavery, capitalism, war, state repression — and revalorizing an activity normally considered criminal, childish, or cowardly. The elaboration of the abolitionist imaginary continues in the various reports on soldier desertion and nonparticipation and in the materials — some loaned, some deposited to us — on slavery, feral trade, and being the leader you seek. Also included is a completely jumbled file about the brief period of Dutch colonization in northeastern Brazil under the governorship of Johan Maurits. Section III, “the exile of our longing,” takes its title from a phrase used by the legal scholar Patricia Williams to describe that “meandering stream of unguided hopes, dreams, fantasies, fears, recollections” that were displaced and appeared as phantoms in her grandmother’s home and in the place or “room” that is racism. Section III revisits some questions about haunting and futurity and the place still and moving images place in the contexts that preoccupy members of the archive: imprisonment, colonialism, war, the occupation of Palestine, and refugees (in this case during World War II). The section presents several shorter fragmented items, several hurried replies to requests made to the archive for one thing or another, including an agent profile and two files that deal with psychiatric problems or problems caused by psychiatrists — treating the effects of the occupation of Palestine as PTSD and the invention and application of the Thematic Apperception Test in the United States and the Congo. The section includes a discussion of prisoners and time and a special report written on Leon Czolgosz, the young anarchist and steelworker who killed US President McKinley. Finally, Section IV, “perception of the subjectivity of the so-called object,” takes its title from a statement made by curator Anselm Franke that accompanied his request for information on Czolgosz and why Thomas Edison made a film about his execution at Sing Sing prison in 1901. “What happens if the term animism is no longer used as an ethnographic category, but is turned onto Western modernity itself? The concept then opens up a very different set of problems, at the core of which lies not subjectivity of perception but perception of the subjectivity of the so-called object.” Section IV provides an analytic summary of the notion of utopian surplus, which Ernst Bloch argued is a “real and objective possibility” that “surrounds all given existence.” The items in this section elaborate that surplus in the context of the ways confinement has long been a handmaiden to power and a crucial technology for securing social order and in the subjugated knowledge of prisoners and those confined by the state, whether prisoners

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of war or so-called ordinary criminals or the range of individuals who were sent to the workhouses from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Each section has a detailed contents summary and a list of files contained therein. The sections can be read sequentially, but there is no linear narrative argument, so equally they can be read haphazardly, as suits one’s interest and available time. As the items included in this volume are of a wide variety of types, where possible and excluding facsimiles of the originals, some standardization of the items has been introduced for the reader’s convenience, including cross-referencing notes to other files or collections where this might be worthwhile, endnotes, a bibliography of references, and a list of images presented, which can be found in the back with further acknowledgments. The Hawthorn Archive can be contacted for further information on files and items mentioned but not included in this collection or for deposit instructions. I warmly thank all the agents, friends, and collaborators at the archive and beyond for their incitement, contributions, and fellowship.

introduction

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I. the scandal of the qualitative difference meditations on the term utopian; embracing the “mish-mash”; becoming unavailable for servitude; organs for the alternative; struggles with friendship; collaborations with Céline Condorelli; a word about the Hawthorn Archive utopian | running away | Hawthorn Archive | Céline Condorelli | Céline Condorelli | popular revolts | B (the city) | utopia | popular education formats | exercise | a sentimental story | popular education formats | being in-difference | Toni Cade Bambara | the scandal of the qualitative difference | Herbert Marcuse | The Great Refusal | California | Herbert Marcuse | friendship | working together | Céline Condorelli

utopian | running away | Hawthorn Archive | Céline Condorelli correspondence, miscellaneous notes, commissioned report, recipes, Agent Directory Date: xxxxx File note: There is a considerable correspondence between A and C which seems mostly to concern practical business related to work projects and the intellectual exchange of ideas, although an intimacy runs through them that is particularly noticeable in the file utopian | friendship | working together | Céline Condorelli. Most of this correspondence has not been cleared for release. In addition to the important report filed by Agent C in response to our request some time ago, the file contains brief bits of information on the history of the Hawthorn Archive.

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HA

mid-winter Dear C,

I hope you returned safely from your travels. I’m still planning on visiting you shortly and hopefully the cold winter weather will not prevent the crossing. I’m so looking forward to seeing you. In the meantime, I’m writing you about the large archive project in which some of us are involved. I received the message that you’ve agreed to help. Thank you so much — we need it. I don’t know if you’ve spoken with him about it, but recently your father, who could be enjoying a quieter life at his age, has been working with the most incorrigible neighboring Academias — the Intrepidi, the Animosi, and the Fantastici. I think only someone with his steady patience and mischievous humor would be welcomed by these ancient troublemakers and enjoy it. Ask him about the experience; it is teaching him to be quite an engaging raconteur. I’m afraid that what we would like you to do is far more challenging and possibly even dangerous. We would like you to figure out how to create some kind of record or documentation of the city of Berenice so that it will not be completely lost to us, while nonetheless keeping the city relatively hidden or at least keeping us relatively hidden from it. Not easy, I know. And it is in fact the somewhat complicated requirements around visibility that explain why we felt not identifying you or the city by name was best for now (although we are mindful that these requirements could change in the future). At this point, the documentation can be, probably should be, minimal, ephemeral even. I’m not sure that documentation is even the right word, frankly. Also, I should say that there’s been some disagreement on this end over whether the documentation itself should also be kept hidden; on this question, we await and will accept your judgment. I’ll try to give you some background. The most famous description of the city was written years ago by an Italian writer, in his youth a military objector, communist, and agronomy student, who became a fabulist ethnographer of the hidden parts of stories and the memory of things he loved. You may recall it: I should not tell you of [B], the unjust city, which crowns with triglyphs, abaci, metopes the gears of its meat-grinding machines. . . . Instead, I should tell you of the hidden [B], the city of the just, handling makeshift materials in the shadowy rooms behind the shops and beneath the stairs, linking a network of wires and pipes and pulleys and pistons and counterweights that infiltrates like a climbing plant among the great cogged wheels. . . . Instead of describing to you the perfumed pools of the baths where the unjust of [B] recline and weave their intrigues. . . . I should say to you how the just, always

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cautious to avoid the spying sycophants and the . . . mass arrests, recognize one another by their way of speaking, especially their pronunciation of commas and parentheses; from their habits, which remain austere and innocent, avoiding complicated and nervous moods; from their sober but tasty cuisine, which evokes an ancient golden age: rice and celery soup, boiled beans, fried squash flowers. . . . In the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right — and of being more just than many others who call themselves more just than the just. This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment; and the natural desire of revenge on the unjust is colored by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do. Another unjust city, though different from the first, is digging out its space within the double sheath of the unjust and just [cities]. . . . I must also draw your attention to an intrinsic quality of this unjust city germinating secretly inside the secret just city: and this is the possible awakening — as if in an excited opening of windows — of a later love for justice, not yet subjected to rules, capable of reassembling a city still more just than it was before it became the vessel of injustice. But if you peer deeper into this new germ of justice you can discern a tiny spot that is spreading like the mounting tendency to impose what is just through what is unjust, and perhaps this is the germ of an immense metropolis. . . . From my words you will have reached the conclusion that . . . [B] is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all the future [Bs] are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable.

Confined, wrapped one within the other, inextricable. The specter of an always already contaminated justice, shadowed and bound by the very thing it is committed to correct and eliminate. This is B’s powerful conceit or curse or essential truth, depending on your point of view. I still remember very well when many influential so-called radical thinkers believed that the idea of the impossibility of justice was a critical notion. The making of impossibility rather than justice the measure of critical adequacy would have been merely a surreal episode in the history of intelligent academic ideas gone off-course, except that this way of thinking really took hold among political philosophers, theorists, artists, curators, and assorted intellectual/cultural types in many different cities and got a kind of second wind as political authority became more transparently corrupt and repressive, and frustration, anger, despair, and fear became more widespread. At the time, some felt that the whole idea was just a dressed-up way of justifying political absenteeism and self-advancement, and a rather self-serving (and tasteless) definition of sophistication. A harsh judgment, perhaps too harsh, but when faced with the often arrogant expressions of the idea it certainly felt that way, since it was almost always articulated by those living in a world of relative privilege, which was defended energetically when threatened.

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In any event, the people who held fast to this idea became more and more separated from those of us who “meanwhile carried on” as Raymond Williams used to say. Carried on regardless of the fact that justice is a living idea that is stitched and unraveled and then is stretched again between moving points, to use Italo Calvino’s words. We proceeded as best as we could along the breaks in the concept, revising, mending, correcting, and then amending the revisions, letting go and picking up the stitches, while always being guided by the basic value of fairness that the term justice acquired late in its life. With practice and a belief in the power of poetic language, we began to develop a better vocabulary for justice. But we wouldn’t have been able to do that if we hadn’t heeded the Italian writer’s final warning about the historical laws that govern B and that keep its futures enclosed in a series of presents that can never break the inevitable restoration of the rule of the unjust. Perhaps I’ve told you that I began to consider running away when I saw this vision as an illusion, one that made invisible the many spaces of autonomous life existing between or within — wrapped, confined, crammed — the succession of just and unjust cities, spaces I inhabited or certainly was aware of. And I finally left when I was persuaded that, illusory or not, B was trapped in that dialectic and might remain so for the foreseeable future. As it turned out to be. I can tell you more about the larger scope of the archive when I see you. For now, perhaps it is enough to know what motivates, more or less, our documentary interest in B. I say more or less because several of us, including me, think this interest may be too narrow and is likely to blind us to more surprising, important and beautiful aspects of what’s become, as forecast, “an immense metropolis.” That’s why we’re asking you to help. We trust that you will see more than we do, see better than those of us who have clung to this pithy story our dear friend gave us now many years past. I did hear that it’s possible still to eat the most perfect rice and celery soup. (I never agreed with the evaluation of it as “sober.”) Perhaps you can find out, if you don’t know already? If you decide to travel to the city, we’ll help in whatever way we can. But please be careful. I’m not sure how safe it is at present. If you have other needs or questions, please let us know. Also, it should go without saying that if you don’t want to do this assignment, just say so. We’ll find another part of the archive in which you’d prefer to be involved. You know how to reach me. Love, A on behalf of the Hawthorn Archive

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mid-winter Dear A, I am so sorry we didn’t get to meet, and that your trip had to be postponed. Next time will work out, no doubt. Meanwhile I wanted to thank you for your letter, and confirm I would gladly take part and do what I can to help with the Hawthorn Archive. I have wanted to do something about the situation in B for a while, and it was really hard to figure out not so much what to do, but how to do it. I couldn’t think of a better way to start than joining you in this endeavour. I will be ready to set off by the beginning of next month, but before I do so, it would be good to get a better sense of the archive project as a whole, and what it is that you are trying to do with it, also for me to be clearer about what I am getting myself into! I will await your answer and be ready to start in a few weeks. . . . In anticipation, Love, C

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HA

mid-winter Dear C,

Yes, I was disappointed too that the trip was delayed and I missed seeing you. You send good news in accepting our assignment and we are grateful that you can depart so soon. Thank you. You’ve asked for more information about the Hawthorn Archive. Briefly. . . The Hawthorn Archive is very old, having begun long before I became involved in it. It’s possible that it’s as old as the 12th century. It seems to emerge and recede in the tracks of the various Euro-American social struggles against slavery, racial capitalism, imperialism, and authoritarian forms of order. (There’s a timeline I can show you if you come to the office.) Because it has assumed different forms over time, sometimes more rooted in place, sometimes more itinerant; because there has often been a premium on secrecy given the fugitive nature of its activities and the people involved in it; because it has always been most concerned to find, promote, and keep safe the subjugated knowledge of the Nobodies, anonymous ordinary people who leave few written records of their own; and because the people most responsible for the archive seem never to prioritize proper record keeping, the actual information about the archive itself is sparse and unreliable. This is, in fact, one impetus for asking you to make a report on B. I think I’ve told you that I became involved in the archive because I had been collecting written and visual documents, first-hand stories, fictional literature, and scholarly research on utopian societies and plans for them, on imaginary places, and on the various theories that justified or underwrote what broadly speaking went by the name the utopian. I started this work during the Fourth World War Against Humanity when the situation, a “strange modernity,” as Subcomandante Marcos observed at the time, looked very bleak. The worldwide concentration of great wealth and financial power produced a corollary expansion of dire poverties and surplus populations of people treated as social waste, such as the landless, the homeless, and the imprisoned. Extraction and exploitation continued, laying waste to parts of the world that previously had been spared and seriously damaging the world’s ecology. The contraction of democratic controls everywhere and of the short-lived welfare state where it existed was delivered with the massive expansion of police power. Counterinsurgency became the norm, as did the doctrine of permanent war, and relentless destructive expansionist ground wars were waged by the North starting first against Western and Southern Asia and then moving into large swaths of Africa where people hadn’t recovered yet from the First World War Against Humanity. There was consequently a growing stratification of people both within and between nations and a general feeling of the breakdown of community, accompanied both by an increase in people on the move and by an ideological onslaught against anything common,

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public, not bought and sold, not useful to the powers that be that itself constituted a clear cultural front in the war. This was a scene of barbarism without doubt. But, it seemed as if the resistance and opposition to the war — pockets to be sure — were invisible: acknowledged grudgingly by critical intellectuals but trivialized to the point of disqualification. There were legitimate reasons to assess some of this resistance complacent and inadequate to the powers arrayed against it, but these reasons were often put into the service of dismissal rather than constructive engagement. One difficulty here was that some of what was called resistance wasn’t merely individual or collective acts of opposition or disapproval. In part out of enraged necessity, given the futility of rational or moral appeals to responsible political, economic, and military authorities, and in part out of a capacious and willful desire to begin again, the resistance deepened, moving beyond opposition per se to articulating other ways of living. These other ways of living were variously inchoate, incipient, emergent, and in rare cases mature. Efforts to describe these unruly desires and unmanaged life worlds faltered: faltered for lacking a language for describing, analyzing, and historicizing them; faltered too often on the accusation of utopianism, a terrible almost criminal error for many radicals. I was disturbed by this situation and spent a couple of years researching the history of the utopian (and the history of the accusation) and came to many conclusions some of which I described in two reports that I attach, including that a fundamental problem was that in the entire history of the utopian as we knew the term the most important and wide reaching radical movements and bodies of radical thought and practice were simply absent. The archive had long been dealing with the intellectual aspect of the problem, trying to put the missing pieces back into play and to discover or invent the languages required. And so it was relatively prepared for what the Fourth World War Against Humanity produced: a wave of people becoming in-difference, running away, no longer living as obedient subjects to the world capitalist system, and forming autonomous zones. This wave also produced several related archives, institutes, and academies, some in solidarity with the Hawthorn Archive (such as the September Institute), some opposed or merely competitive. It was to one of these related projects that the keeper at the time went, with our good wishes and then appreciation for the wonderful bread we would get from them on their baking days. You know it! I was the likely candidate to take her place but I was coming and going a lot and my decision to stay for good had repercussions I hadn’t anticipated (stories for another occasion) and it took me a long time to settle in, to make new friends, and reactivate the archive in the new conditions. Which brings me to the request for the report on B. The reactivation of the archive involved bringing older material out of storage and collecting and producing new material. For reasons that I mentioned, the archive has always been ambivalent about and incompetent at recording its own history. Now, the people from B feel

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it is important that we document it and that we create memories of the place from which we ran away and to which we became in-difference. Understandably at first, we needed a total break. Now, we are growing more and more distant from B and some believe this makes it increasingly difficult for us to know whether it is as distant from us as we are from it. They think this is a destabilizing situation, in part what the Italian writer warned against. Others are concerned, not yet alarmed I think, over what it means that members of the archive are worrying over a warning they were meant to have escaped. “Maybe B is closer than we think,” they are murmuring, still thankfully somewhat apathetically. Yet others, on occasion me, roll their eyes and shout in a friendly voice at whoever will listen: “don’t complicate things!” Notwithstanding these internal debates (which I wouldn’t take too seriously anyway because archive members are an argumentative lot and these kinds of discussions come and go and are remembered and forgotten in no kind of predictable pattern at all) we are in agreement that, being connected to us but also an outsider, you will be able to bring some needed perspective to the project. I repeat what I said in my last letter: we look to you to help us see beyond our narrowest interests. I thank you again for agreeing to participate, and wish you Godspeed and safe travels. When you’re finished and ready to send things, be back in touch. Love, A on behalf of the Hawthorn Archive

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late winter Dear A, I am currently, as you must be also, glued to newsfeeds coming from B. I am supposed to be leaving on Wednesday to start on the project, and now reality has exceeded our most unreasonable expectations. It’s impossible at present to know anything for certain, but the old order of injustice is currently being replaced. We don’t know yet how or by what, but we can for the moment behold this newfound optimism. I do not know — hence my writing to you — whether there is any sense in my going now. How can I engage in a meaningful way with events unfolding so quickly? Do I stay at home and watch the news? Should I leave? Should I wait? For what? I am thinking very much about coming to your house one evening three months ago, saddened after finally meeting the two people whom I had wished could lead B in the right direction, or at least offer some political hope. They said they no longer believed that the people from B would ever rebel and reclaim social justice, and overturn the oppression. I hope very much that they will be proved wrong in the coming days. Meanwhile as I read and wait for news, letters, and messages coming from B, I hope, I rejoice, I sway, I despair, I shudder, I worry. Even if I am not there, I try to stay with it. I know which side I’m on, at least. I will of course let you know how things develop, and if I am able to get on that flight. In haste, Between hope and fear, C

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utopian | Céline Condorelli | popular revolts | B (the city) commissioned report, Agent Directory Date: xxxxx

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utopian | utopia | popular education formats keyword brief external prepared by AG Date: xxxxx File note: In the reactivation of the archive during the late twentieth century, several briefs on the question of the utopian were prepared and publicly distributed. Only a few remain and even these seem to be missing major parts of themselves. Early on, the report writers appeared to have lost interest in the conventional scholarly debates. This is understandable given that we were searching for others like us and for those ideas and examples that could give us historical, conceptual, and motivational substance and we were either invisible to or dismissed by most scholars. For myself, I stopped writing these kinds of reports because using the word utopian made many friends uncomfortable and the more I qualified it and tried to justify using it by applying it to theorize a subjugated knowledge of political thought and practice that had been treated as unworthy of historical notice, much less theoretical leadership, the more the word itself took up all the attention. Since my investment in the word itself was half-hearted at best, the report writing seemed a waste of good time and was abandoned. Although it’s worth mentioning that one very good use of the Bambara report was Renée Green’s 2005 film, Something More Powerful Than Skepticism, which is available from the September Institute.

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Utopia usually refers to the imagination of a perfect society, based on the inventor’s social critique of her own society, and often set in the future or in a world markedly different than the writer’s. Coined by Thomas More in 1516 in his famous Utopia and derived from a play on two Greek words, “good place” and “no place,” utopia and its variants, utopian and utopianism, are almost always associated, even when the specific vision is considered appealing, with the impractical, the unrealistic, and the impossible. For some, utopia and utopianism are extremely dangerous types of authoritarian thought or social engineering. Utopia is both a positive descriptor and a dismissive epithet and modern debates “around utopianism developed historically from its rejection.”1 Utopias and utopian thought take many forms, including the hundreds of intentional or separatist communities created in many countries. The most well-known form is the genre of European and American literature — conventionally starting with Thomas More and including feminist writers such as Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin — that creates and peoples a distinct world in which the problems and limitations of the writer’s existing world are exposed and overcome.2 Contemporary scholars tend to distinguish between the commonplace and somewhat restricted definition of utopia as a fictional place and the broader meaning of utopia as the wish for, description of, and attempt to create a better and good society. When treated as a general feature of human thought and practice, utopia and the utopian tend to be situated in a much longer history, predating the publication of More’s Utopia and extending beyond the parameters of Euro-American civilization. Even though there is a great deal of “confusion about exactly what makes something utopian, and disagreement about . . . why it is important,” utopia persists as a term which powerfully conveys the desire for “a better way of being and living.”3 Utopias and utopian thinking contain a diagnostic and an imaginative component. Based on a critical diagnosis of existing political and social arrangements and the values that underlie them, utopians always offer alternative ideals and claim these are realizable, often describing new institutional arrangements for doing so. Typically, Western utopians find their contemporary society exploitative, authoritarian, unequal, and alienating and seek to replace the ruling economic, political, military, social, gender, sexual, and knowledge arrangements with ones that promote a harmonious, egalitarian, and selfmanaged well-being. Utopians practice a politics of everyday life, placing a premium on inventing and describing social arrangements designed to create an environment in which latent capacities for individual happiness can be fulfilled. Perhaps the most characteristic feature of utopian thought and practice, and the reason why it is often dismissed or trivialized, is its emphasis on our imaginative capacity to conceive of and practical ability to construct another, better world in the spaces of the old. Notwithstanding the genealogy of the word, most utopians are distinguished by their willful insistence that the good society is not a no-place but one that we have

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the human and material resources to build in the present. Indeed, a significant number of individuals called “utopian” by their contemporaries or subsequently do not call themselves by the name. They reject the effort to repress and stigmatize their ideas and projects, which the attribution utopian too often signaled. Charles Fourier is perhaps the most well-known example. In the socialist tradition, the tension between the good place and the no-place has been particularly acute. The nineteenth-century socialist thinkers Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen — nominated as utopian socialists despite their rejection of the name utopian — were notoriously dismissed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for being unscientific and naïve. For Marx and Engels, these utopians failed to understand the primacy of capitalist society and its binary class antagonism and failed to accord the proletariat its appropriate historic role as revolutionary agent. Accused of misunderstanding historical materialism’s basic assumptions about human nature, about historical development, and about large-scale social change, the utopian socialists were branded idealists both for their vision of a cooperative, pleasurable, and nonpatriarchal society and for their presumption that people possessed the autonomy to imagine and construct small-scale versions of societies free from domination. Historically, Marx and Engels were the most influential critics of utopianism and established the principal terms by which utopias and utopian thought are criticized. The main line of criticism is suspicious of an individual’s or group’s ability to think and act independently of, and ultimately to transcend, the law-like dictates of the capitalist system. The question of whether individuals are so tainted by the degrading social conditions to be eliminated as to make all efforts ultimately corrupt, if not futile, has framed the ongoing stigmatization of the utopian in this tradition. At the same time, socialists, socialist-feminists, and Marxists have been some of the utopian’s greatest defenders and theorists. Herbert Marcuse spoke for many when he rejected the oft-heard epithet “That’s merely utopian” as a management device designed to suppress critical thought and liberatory practice. Following Ernst Bloch, the utopian is conceived as an active “principle of hope,” found in various situations in which individuals and groups anticipate in thought or practice their rejection of the totality of the existing society and their dreams for a better one. While oriented toward the future, socialist and Marxist utopians are concerned with how to use everyday “resources of hope” to defeat the omnipresent cult of TINA — There Is No Alternative — and to establish an alternative reality principle in which “The dream is real. . . . The failure to make it work is the unreality.”4 A multicultural radical tradition with a many-headed hydra has long been absent from the domain of the utopian as this has been constructed in Western thought. The legacy of this exclusion has left us with a racialized map of utopia which includes, for example, the English craftsman William Morris but not the African American worker known as the “Black Bolshevik” Harry Haywood, or numerous white separatist com-

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munities but not one example of marronage in the entire Americas. This multicultural radical tradition is distinctive. It has always presumed another world is possible because it has had to, because in having to, it looks backward and forward at the same time. This multicultural radical tradition speaks in the future perfect tense — it will have known what is possible today, yesterday, tomorrow. This multicultural radical tradition will have been our utopian tradition.

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utopian | exercise | a sentimental story | popular education formats drawing, note, public statement Date: xxxxx File note: A Sentimental Story was sent somewhat mischievously by Leon Golub in response to a conversation provoked by Eduardo Galeano’s short story “Celebration of Fantasy” in The Book of Embraces about a boy whose imaginary watch keeps good time.

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Alastair Reid writes for the New Yorker but rarely goes to New York. He prefers to live on a remote beach in the Dominican Republic. Christopher Columbus landed on this beach several centuries ago on one of his excursions to Japan, and nothing has changed since. From time to time, the postman appears among the trees. The postman arrives staggering under his load. Alastair receives mountains of correspondence. From the U.S., he is bombarded with commercial offers, leaflets, catalogues, luxurious temptations from the consumer civilization that exhorts him to buy. On one occasion, he found in the mass of paper an advertisement for a rowing machine. Alastair showed it to his neighbors, the fishermen. “Indoors? They use it indoors?” The fishermen couldn’t believe it: “Without water? They row without water?” They couldn’t believe it, they couldn’t comprehend it: “And without fish? And without the sun? And without the sky?” The fishermen told Alastair that they got up every night long before dawn and put out to sea and cast their nets as the sun rose over the horizon, and that this was their life and that this life pleased them, but that rowing was the one infernal aspect of the whole business: “Rowing is the one thing we hate,” said the fishermen. Then Alastair explained to them that the rowing machine was for exercise. “For what?” “Exercise.” “Ah. And exercise — what’s that?”1

I quite like this Eduardo Galeano story entitled “Alienation/3” from The Book of Embraces even if Galeano may be exaggerating when he claims that “nothing has changed” since Christopher Columbus mistakenly landed in the Dominican Republic on his way to the East.2 Clearly, his point is to draw a direct connection between the conquest of the so-called New World and the contemporary capitalist “consumer civilization” capable of reaching Alastair Reid as he hides out on his remote beach. Galeano’s “nothing has changed” is one of those positivistically false yet socially true statements that force us to think about how we think about historical continuity and rupture, particularly in the context of inventing or disseminating theories that attempt to narrate the times and the world we’re living in and through. Given the premium on novelty in popular and academic theories of globalization, what does Galeano’s “nothing has changed” mean or signify? I take Galeano to mean that the legacies of conquest remain alive, that the conditions of its possibility and renewal have not been eliminated, and that the fundamental terms of order we live with today cannot be disassociated from their older origins: the Euro-American-centric will to minority rule by force, the exploitation of individuals as

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labor or raw material for private gain, the ongoing state sanctioning of bondage, the racialist and caste schemata that invent peoples only to treat them as worthless abstractions, the disregard and disrespect for a shared environment and for the autonomy of cultures, the presumptive entitlement to subordinate and manage women. For the majority of the world’s people and certainly for those who are dispossessed, taxed, exploited, and aggrieved, the distinctions between imperialism and neoliberalism, between colonialism and occupation, between slavery and debt bondage, or between the modern capitalist world system and the postmodern capitalist world system are differences of degree, not kind. When Galeano says that nothing has changed, he means to get us to focus on the long-standing terms of order that create unequal and unjust relations between the powerful and the powerless in and between rich and poor nations alike. Particularly for US citizens, the allegory asks its readers to begin not in the New Yorker but on a Caribbean island where, with a shrug, folks will tell you that since Columbus arrived, nothing much has changed. Catching that shrug, catching the knowledge in the gesture and in the tone of voice is crucial because you can see and hear in it a familiarity with something else that hasn’t changed much: the ongoing intellectual trivialization and invisibility of subjugated knowledge, of knowledge from below. Always in Galeano’s writing — of whatever genre — ordinary people, like Reid’s fishermen neighbors, are given intellectual leadership. Of course, sometimes they use it wisely and sometimes they do not. But, in Galeano’s universe, where, as he explains in “The Origin of the World,” the world was made by atheistic, anarchistic, and stubborn bricklayers but credited to a damning God, it is always the standpoint of those bricklayers that provides the overarching diagnostic and imaginative framework.3 Galeano helps to highlight the difference between being an object of the application of theory (whether that application is intelligent or stupid) or, in the same vein, being the human consequence of a theory’s greater ambitions and being treated as a theorist. To be treated as a theorist in the way I mean it is to credit subjugated knowledge as an important and valuable source of theory itself — not as raw data to be worked over by a superior mind, even a sympathetic one; not as a particularistic or specialized case to be managed by the self-appointed overseers of the bigger picture; and certainly not as an anomaly or as a counterfactual example to be ignored or trivialized into insignificance. To be treated as a theorist is to be presumed capable of producing generalizable and authoritative knowledge, knowledge that is considered essential to understanding, knowledge that commands respect, knowledge that has power. So as not to be misunderstood, let me be clear that I am not suggesting that subjugated knowledge arrives unmediated as adequate theory by way of clever fishermen or rebellious bricklayers or radical shoemakers. (Although I just might make such a suggestion in certain circumstances.) I’m also not just talking about fishermen, bricklayers, and shoemakers. I’m thinking here also of someone like the great scientist Vandana

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Shiva who is rarely treated as a theorist, even though any understanding of globalization would be woefully inadequate without her thought, behavior, and writing.4 I am talking about a standpoint that guides the critical thinker in how she takes, gives, and disseminates her lessons. From this standpoint, in which theory is not the exclusive preserve of the academic elite, the critical thinker takes the “side” of “the excluded and the repressed” to “develop insights gained in confrontation with injustice, to nourish cultures of resistance, and to help define the means with which society can be rendered adequate to the full breadth of human potentialities.”5 This is a particularly acute challenge for Marxists, world-system theorists, and for many critical scholars because their definition of analytic adequacy relies on a notion of systematicity that is invested in being able to claim they’ve got the big picture covered. In certain critical intellectual circles, it’s always “the big picture”— and with globalization it’s the biggest picture imaginable, the whole world — to which all other concerns and thought are held accountable. Of course, the issue isn’t whether there’s a larger context to local or national affairs to be grasped. The issue is whether globalization is as truly global, as it were, and as capable of determining social developments and social trajectories as many presume. I put it this way because the general truth about globalization that Galeano’s story most highlights for me is the incompletion of globalization. Everyone knows there is resistance to globalization, even if they mistakenly believe it began in Seattle and in the 1990s. The domination and resistance paradigm has become one to which even those who effectively care little about popular resistance and much more about how domination works must nod, sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes dismissively. In its Manichaeism, the paradigm is entirely compatible with those theories of globalization that essentially mirror how the thing itself is supposed to operate — seemingly with total abandon. By contrast, Galeano’s story suggests that the terms of order, however malicious and domineering, are never complete or coextensive with “the world.” Galeano is the self-described joint founder, with Miguel Mármol, of Magical Marxism, whose method consists of applying one half reason, one half passion, and a third half mystery to the problems of our world. For Magical Marxists, evidently, the parts exceed the whole. Galeano’s fishermen live where they say they don’t know what exercise is. Where they live, the idea of exercise, an obsession in my overweight country, is unthinkable. It’s unthinkable because a life of hard physical labor makes it irrelevant, if not obscene. It’s unthinkable because the fishermen take their life pleasures elsewhere. “Without water? . . . And without fish? And without the sun? And without the sky? . . . Rowing is the one thing we hate.” On this remote island, the New Yorker is duly represented, the mail from the rest of the world arrives, First World intellectuals are available to explain stuff, and everybody knows what Columbus’s discovery led to. On this remote island, at the moment, the fishermen aren’t rebelling or resisting or protesting the structural adjustments of an imported exercise regime. They are living alongside such a regime

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but not in it. It is powerful but its power doesn’t overcome them. It is neither the sum total of who they are nor who they can become. To mistake the conceits of authority and the ambitions of the powerful for the realities of people’s worldly existence is a grave error. It is an error contradicted by the history of slave abolitionists who conceived an exquisite and enduring theory and practice of freedom while enslaved. It is an error contradicted by the history of Linebaugh and Rediker’s “many-headed hydra”— that late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century “multiethnic class” or multitude of sailors, pirates, slaves, commoners, prostitutes, maids, prisoners, conscripts, and religious heretics, whose labor, idleness, rebellions, philosophy, culture, migrations, and depredations were central to the rise of the modern global economy. It is an error contradicted by the early World Social Forums where, on the ground where the process gained its energy, its force, and its significance, what was most evident was the widespread belief in and behavior organically rooted in the idea not that “Another World Is Possible,” as the official theme had it but that another global civil society is precisely what the World Social Forum actively and democratically represented and helped to articulate and expand. It is an error contradicted by all the occupados and indignados and communards who continue to lend energy and momentum to the alternative lifeworlds that today’s many-headed hydra build.6 Of those late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century sailors who were part of the many-headed hydra, Linebaugh and Rediker write: “When sailors encountered the deadly conditions of life at sea, they had an alternative social order within living memory.”7 It was part of what they knew, part of how they lived their lives, part of how they loved, part of how they sang and wrote; it was a part of them. It was also the object of severe repression and what Linebaugh and Rediker call a “severity of history”— a legacy of invisibility to history and to historians. The existence of an alternative social order within living memory is as true today as it was then, and it is as dangerous today as it was then. It is also incomplete, not in charge yet, and subject to the repression of states and intellectuals too. But it’s far more widespread than most people think. And it is certainly not merely a local or even a transnational “resistance.” A living alternative social order, glimpsed here and there outside the purview of the New Yorker, deeply rooted in everyday life, is a constitutive part of our globalized world. From the kind of internationalist standpoint Galeano represents, that living alternative social order is not only an essential feature of our world, it is its future.

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utopian | being in-difference | Toni Cade Bambara keyword brief external, audio cassette, films on VHS, research notes, copies of articles and pages from books Date: xxxxx File note: One of several extant briefs on the question of the utopian. It introduces and defines two terms of great importance to the individuals and projects associated with the archive: being in-difference and the abolitionist imaginary. This brief centers on Toni Cade Bambara. Toni Cade Bambara was a black writer, filmmaker, community activist, and teacher who died from cancer in 1995, at the age of fifty-six. This brief examines Toni Cade Bambara’s utopian thought, particularly the remarkably rich vocabulary she gave us for describing and analyzing the sensuality of social movement and the day-to-day practice of instantiating an instinct for freedom. Most people treat the utopian as an ideal future world, which at best provides a beacon of hope and at worst reflects an unrealistic fundamentalism bound to failure. But Bambara acted and wrote as if the utopian were a standpoint for comprehending and living in the here and now. Consequently, she produced an extraordinary example of how to combine complex and acute social analysis with a vision of how some people have lived and do live today that is a model for how all of us could live. Without ever abandoning a strong sense of the past and the future, she always asked us to keep focused on where we live now, insisting that history is only ever made in that conjuncture. Bambara always maintained that the spirit of making history must be tied to, indeed generated from, an uncompromising diagnosis of the deathly apparatuses of power. Indeed, what seems most characteristic of Bambara’s work is the way in which she patiently yet urgently called her audiences and the people who inhabited her imagined worlds to see how the devastations and afflictions to which we are too routinely subjected require from us “something more powerful than skepticism.”

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In 1982, shortly after the publication of The Salt Eaters, Kay Bonetti of the American Audio Prose Library interviewed Toni Cade Bambara in her home in Atlanta. Bonetti asked Bambara, “Would you be comfortable being called something like a utopian writer? Being seen in that tradition?” Bambara responded: Oh, absolutely not! No, I don’t identify with the utopian literature tradition. There are several features of that kind of literature. One, it takes a satiric stance about the current society. I’m not so much satiric. I’m critical but not satiric. For satire, you need a certain kind of sneering temperament, and that’s a little removed from me. Another feature of the utopian literature is that it presents a vision based on the assumption that the reader and writer share a common set of values. I do not identify with the values of most utopian literature. I mean it does not speak to the world as I know it. It certainly does not speak to the international scheme of things. Another feature of utopian literature is that it doesn’t look at process, it doesn’t attempt to look at this new society as part of a historical continuum, and I find that a little stupid. And finally, its most characteristic feature is that it’s very futuristic looking. I’m also future-oriented, but it has to do with memory, with what I know is possible because it already happened. People need not be corrupted or perverted because I know in the past people were not. So my glance is both a back glance as well as a flash forward. No, I wouldn’t identify myself as a utopian writer.1

By the utopian literature tradition, Bambara is referring primarily to the distinct genre of European and American fiction, running from Thomas More to Ursula K. Le Guin, which creates and peoples an imagined world in which the putative problems and limitations of the writer’s existing world are overcome. Bambara’s critique of this literary tradition, however, is applicable to the range of projects — both in writing and in doings — to which the description “utopian” can and has been applied. It is especially relevant to the field of utopian studies broadly construed, which has played a major role in constructing what the utopian means and who and what counts as an instance of it. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Western historiography of utopian thought and practice and the contemporary field known as utopian studies is a decidedly Eurocentric and racially exclusive construction. It is a field dominated by a limited and often formal definition of the utopian, and it is a field in which the definition of failure and success borders on the perverse, treating the brutal settler colonization of the Americas as a successful utopian enterprise, but relegating the long history of the “manyheaded hydra” of the revolutionary seventeenth-century Atlantic to invisibility and irrelevance.2 It would take a book to elaborate persuasively how and why the utopian is constructed as it is, and that is not my intention here. Moreover, the characteristic meanings and reference points attached to utopian thought and practice in the West raise the question of why I would want to associate Toni Cade Bambara with a tradi-

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tion she not only rejects for good reasons — not the least of which is that it can’t recognize her at all — but which she’s also clear she doesn’t need. “I do not identify with the values of most utopian literature. I mean it doesn’t speak to the world as I know it.” The utopian as we primarily know it has missed the opportunity to chart a richer and more adequate history and theory of our real and imagined strivings for a livable social existence. This missed opportunity is a blind spot. However, there is always something living and breathing in the place blinded from view. In the place blinded from view is the tradition of black struggle and radicalism as Toni Cade Bambara knows it, conjures it, invents it, and pushes it along, taking up her role as a politically engaged radical critic. The world Bambara knows and imagines replaces the fantasy of a common culture realized as nation or state, magically preestablished, and founded on good rules given from above, with complex individuals centered in communities negotiating inevitable contradictions and a hostile environment. In this world, there’s a premium on truth and finding a better language than “mercantile” English.3 In this world, there’s a rich living history, filled with legends of people who can fly and walk across the water and who can also organize meetings and grassroots organizations. In this world, freedom is not something that awaits us in the future. Rather, it is grounded in what we are capable of, the possibility of which we know from who we are — always better than what we’re told we can be — from what we remember about what’s already happened, and from what we do when we act upon these capabilities. In this world, the instinct for freedom is the antithetical core of culture, where the seeds of opposition grow into something much more powerful than skepticism.4 The world Toni Cade Bambara knows, peoples, and describes could be a model for making utopian thought and practice more “usable,” a favorite word of hers. In making this argument, I don’t want to tie her back to a tradition with which she doesn’t identify, but rather to identify a few elements of what the utopian tradition could mean if we looked at some of what’s been in its blind field. That we need an adequate utopianism — precise in its diagnoses, inventive in its political-aesthetic form, expansive in its vision, courageous in its anticipations, reflexive in its prefigurations — I take not only as a given, but as one of Toni Cade Bambara’s most consistent and challenging claims. In my view, it is not the need for utopianism that is questionable. Rather, it is with what words, ideas, traditions, sources of authority — in short with what practical spirit — such a utopianism is created and maintained that’s at stake.

you can hear the voices “You can hear the voices long after you turn the final page,” writes Farah Jasmine Griffin. “Toni Cade Bambara’s extraordinary ordinary people — streetwise, sensitive, and complex — taunt, tease, and haunt: Don’t you want to be free? Yes, You. Freedom. What are you going to do to be free?”5

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Yes, You. The “Don’t you want to be free?” and the “What are you going to do to be free?” go hand in hand. Not only because it’s a serious responsibility to want to be free, but because wanting it really — not just intellectually or abstractly or for somebody else, but you wanting it as if anything else would be unheard of — is already about what you are doing. On the call — Yes, You — and on the inextricability of wanting and doing, Bambara is adamant and uncompromising and also very understanding, that is, both knowledgeable and sympathetic. The taunting, teasing, and haunting question “Don’t you want to be free?” presumes that somewhere you do want it, and if you don’t then why don’t you, exactly? As teacherly as it sounds, “What are you going to do to be free?” presumes you can be doing something, and if you don’t know what that is, you best find out. What is involved in wanting and doing freedom? The heart of Bambara’s contribution to utopian thought and practice is contained in the answer she gives: To want to be free, you have to live and act as if you are free to live, right now, right this minute, in the midst of all the life-threatening forces arrayed and ready at hand. “Then he straightened, back stiff with the conviction that he, like many others going home now, was totally unavailable for servitude.”6 I’ll try to explain what I think she means.

FACE UP TO WHAT’S KILLING YOU “She was turning the bend now, forgetting to not look, and the mural the co-op had painted in eye-stinging colors stopped her. FACE UP TO WHAT’S KILLING YOU, it demanded. Below the statement a huge triangle that from a distance was just a triangle, but on approaching, as one muttered ‘how deadly can a triangle be?’ turned into bodies on bodies. At the top, fat, fanged beasts in smart clothes, like the ones beneath it laughing, drinking, eating, bombing, raping, shooting, lounging on the backs of, feeding off the backs of, the folks at the base, crushed almost flat but struggling to get up and getting up”(16).7 Virginia, the organizer’s wife, passed it quickly, “because she’d been leaving since the first day coming, the day her sister came home to cough herself to death and leave her there with nobody to look out for her ’cept some hinkty cousins in town and Miz Mama Mae, who shook her head sadly whenever the girl spoke of this place and these troubles and these people and one day soon leaving for some other place” (7). On this day, having absentmindedly crushed the vegetables in her untended garden, “Virginia had no energy for a smile or a wince. All energy summoned up at rising was focused tightly on her two errands of the day” (4), both of which are oriented to getting Graham, her organizer husband, out of jail and both of them out of town. Because at this point in the story, Virginia just wants out. Away “from the farms, the co-op sheds, the lone gas pump, a shoe left in the road, the posters promising victory over the troubles” (9). Away from an “imprisonment” she had come to measure “by how many times that same red-and-yellow jumper met her on the road, faded and fading some more”

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(9). Away from land grabs and mining companies, corrupt governments, opportunistic preachers, tobacco sheds, and the troubles. Away from the men waiting patiently in her garden, ready to help, away from the choir women and their “Everything all right?,” away from the discipline, consciousness, and unity taught at the co-op school, away from the bound-to-come weariness of always creating something from nothing. All “she wanted was the thing stitched up, trimmed, neat, finished. Wanted to be able to say she asked for ‘nuthin’ from nobody and didn’t nobody offer up nuthin.” No attachments. No responsibilities. “Pay the bail and unhook them both from this place” (7). Virginia wanted only to get out of “this place,” which became her “situation,” knowing well enough that there was something rude about treating other people’s home as “this place.” This place, her situation, killing her with isolation, loneliness, the struggles “WE CANNOT LOSE” (17), and the notion, trapping her like a vise, that home is what makes you stay and fight. Virginia has no intention of staying. She has a plan, her own freedom plan, an honorable one with a long history. Running away. And isn’t that what she thought initially made her fall in love with Graham? “It was his would-be-moving-on clothes that had pulled her to him. But then the pull had become too strong to push against once his staying-on became clear” (14). So, baby at her breast, men in her garden waiting patiently, she’s focused on her errands, clear in her mind that she is taking charge, facing up to what’s killing her, and finally doing what’s needed to be done to improve her situation. The first errand is visiting Reverend Michaels before the men come with the surveyors and the bulldozers to get the granite. Virginia just wants “to hear him say it — the land’s been sold. The largest passel of land in the district, the church holdings where the co-op school stood, where two storage sheds of the co-op stood, where the graphics workshop stood, where four families had lived for generations working the land. The church had sold the land. He’d say it, she’d hear it, and it’d be over with. She and Graham could go” (15–16). And he does tell her, indirectly of course: “ ‘Wasn’t me,’ he stammered” (18). Virginia hears what she thinks she has wanted to hear — the land’s been sold. But does she walk on out smiling to herself, feeling free to go? No. An anger or a force Virginia had no time to understand compels her, and she grabs a ruler and brings it down on the reverend’s chair and then on his arm, dropping him and the chair to the floor. He’s stunned “in disbelief. But, it’s nothing like the disbelief that swept through her the moment ‘we ourselves’ pushed past clenched teeth and nailed her to the place, a woman unknown. Seeing the scene detached,” this unknown Virginia, the one who at the co-op school had never learned to speak her speak, surprises herself, hears herself both laughing and shouting: “And what did the white folks pay you to turn Graham in and clear the way? Disturber of the peace. What peace? Racist trying to incite a riot. Ain’t that how they said it? Outside agitator, as you said. And his roots put down here long before you ever came. . . . Thirty pieces of silver, maybe?” (18).

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The story comes both fast and slow to a close. Jake, Boone, and the kindly patient men are waiting for her, now that she’s ready to go and see Graham. In the car, they are talking, excited and explaining, and Virginia hears them: “Mother Lee who’s secretarying for the board has held up the papers for the sale. We came to tell you that. . . . We’re the delegation that’s going to confront the board this evening. . . . They never intended to dig the wells, that’s clear. . . . That was just to get into the district, get into our business, check out our strength. I was a fool. . . . Well, . . . can’t you read? That’s what our flyers been saying all along. Don’t you read the stuff we put out? . . . We ain’t nowhere’s licked yet, though. . . . Listen, we got it all figured out. We’re going to bypass the robbers and deal directly with the tenant councils in the cities, and we’re . . . and you tell him . . . just tell him to take his care” (19, 22–23). “Don’t talk the woman to death,” says Boone for the second time. Virginia is listening enough to speak to them for the first time. “There’s still Mama Mae’s farm,” she says with a smile (22). But she’s remembering the last time she saw Graham and what she’s going to say to him now “and how to explain this new growth she was experiencing.” Not like the “old dread,” not like “the baby; more like the toenail smashed the day the work brigade had stacked the stones to keep the road from splitting apart. The way the new nail pushed up against the old turning blue, against the gauze and the tape, stubborn to establish itself” (20). She’s trying to get a hold of it but she can’t quite yet. The “it” is still a memory of trying to come through “the shell” but not quite having the words for her feelings, only broken threads and words “bouncing out in a hopeless scatter of tears and wails until something — her impatience with her own childishness . . . made her grab herself up” (21). This is what she remembers — grabbing herself up “and trying to get to that place that was beginning to seem more of a when than a where. And the when seemed to be inside her if she could only connect” (21). And she does connect, remembering a when, getting the words, as wishes, into herself as what she knew exactly now to tell Graham: “The bail’d been paid, her strength was back, and she sure as hell was going to keep up the garden. How else to feed the people?” (23).

are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? That’s how the story ends. Virginia doesn’t even say these words to Graham. She just remembers, connects, and gets ready to. We do not know if the community will save their land or if the hook-up with the tenant councils in the city will succeed. We’re certainly not led to believe that the forces of “savage developmentalism” have been conquered or that corruption in churches has been eliminated or that poverty and its issue has disappeared.8 We do not know if Graham is released from jail, much less that

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prisons are abolished. We do not know what Virginia will or won’t do next. She’s not a New Woman in the Promised Land whose future is secured. She’s just a young woman who has found a strength already within her — that is, a memory — to transform the place she was stuck in and running away from into a home. At the end of the story, all that seems to happen is that Virginia goes to see her husband in jail and decides to stay and keep up the garden. That’s it. It takes Velma all three hundred pages of The Salt Eaters just to answer the question that the healer Minnie Ransom asks on the first page, “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” At the end of that story, Velma, a fighter who is much more experienced than Virginia but who has tried to kill herself, just barely says yes to Minnie Ransom’s question. “The healer’s hand” touches a “vital spot” and finally Velma responds. But even then, “she was still trying to resist, still trying to think what good did wild do you, since there was always some low-life gruesome gang bang raping, lawless, careless pesty last straw nasty thing ready to pounce, put your total shit under arrest and crack your back.” It’s only later, “years hence,” when Velma is able to make a story of it, able to retrieve it as a memory, that she “would laugh remembering she’d thought” barely saying yes “was an ordeal. She didn’t know the half of it. Of what awaited her in years to come.”9 The what’s-to-come, Sophie Heywood warns, will be a trial because the what’s-to-come involves what Velma doesn’t understand yet — which is how a politically astute, hardheaded, critical, organizationally competent, knows-her-history, tough fighter is healed by another woman who needs her own guide to conjure the spiritual power she can wield. But the what’s-to-come doesn’t arrive, only the ending as it is. Velma answers yes, lets go of Minnie’s hands, gets up off the stool on which she’s been sitting for three hundred pages, and “throws off the shawl that drops down on the stool a burst cocoon.”10 At the end of The Salt Eaters, environmental racism and corporate pollution have not been eliminated, the bus driver Fred Holt’s friend Porter is still dead from exposure to state-sponsored radioactivity, police brutality remains a hazard of an active protest life, the enraging and exhausting gendered division of labor within grassroots movements lingers, intimacy in love is still a difficult achievement, and careerism and opportunism are as much a concern as the need to overcome the split between “race, class, and struggle” and the “spirithood arts”— this split being only one instance of the “demonic” binary model of thought in which we’re often paralyzed.11 In other words, nowhere in any of Toni Cade Bambara’s writings is there the usual utopian scenario. No one is ever transported to a perfect world where all problems are solved, where the past is over, and where the future is all sweet perfection neatly organized according to rules that sound nice on paper. Bambara does not create pictures of perfection, only stories of living otherwise with the degradations and contradictions of exploitation, racism, authoritarianism — what she calls the psycho-

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pathological world of lies and inhumanity; stories of living better than all that.12 These are not American-dream stories — all “innocence and clean slates and the future.”13 In Bambara’s stories, a different type of anticipatory consciousness is expressed, oriented toward the future, but not futuristic; that is to say, it doesn’t treat the future as either an off-world escape or a displaced fetish. This anticipatory consciousness involves dreaming, but it also involves risks — Use extreme caution, Those Bones Are Not My Child warns at the start. Like the storytelling form in which Bambara always presents the dream of better living, this anticipatory consciousness “confronts, pushes you up against the evasions, self-deceptions, investments in opinions and interpretations, the clutter that blinds, [and] that disguises that underlying, all-encompassing design within which the perceived world — in which society would have us stay put — operates.”14 In this anticipatory consciousness, confronting “the clutter that blinds” and binds allows you to get a certain distance or detachment from where you’re told to stay put. This anticipatory consciousness is intensely in the present tense, moving back and forth between memories of what has come before and what is to come next, folding itself into sensual stories of movement, social movement, individual movement. The emerging place that is inside Virginia that is more of a when than a where and Minnie Ransom’s “Everything in time”15 speak not only to the importance of time in Bambara’s conception but also to the supreme importance of taking your time. Bambara has spoken eloquently of how she was given permission by her mother, by her daughter, by her friends, and by herself to daydream, to imagine, to know her work and do it, to change, and to take her time to learn how to “practice her freedom daily.”16 Bambara passes this permission on to her characters and readers as a right and a necessity, graciously, with a casualness her mother passed on to her, tenaciously, with the knowledge that the historic denial of this permission is a form of spirit murder. And so people — ordinary “folks . . . who’ve been waiting in the wings”17— take their time to do what they need to do to face up to what’s killing them, and others wait, instantiating a type of self and other-directed love that’s free of any guilt over taking time. And that’s because in Bambara’s world, there isn’t a finite block of time out there that we all have to compete for. In Bambara’s world, permission replaces competition.18 You have to take your time and take it in your own way. In Bambara’s world, unlike the “motif of [our] excessive society . . . there is . . . enough . . . space, livelihood, validation for all.”19 Minnie Ransom can wait, although at moments it does strain her, while Velma takes her time deciding whether she wants to get well or not. It takes Velma a long time to make that decision, remembering and forgetting her life and the history of the people who surround her. The older men and women wait patiently for Virginia as she learns that she has a time of her own, a when that enables her to find a different place to live right there where a moment ago she could only meet the “same red and yellow

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jumper on the road.” We and everyone around them must wait for Spence to negotiate the time lost between his return from Vietnam and the present, as he confronts the possible sources of his son’s disappearance and the surprise of the aching loneliness and grief it produces in him. We also must wait for Zala as she struggles with the haunting time — sharp, anxious, suspicious, delayed (He should have been here already!!)— that has her bound to making every single moment a terrible struggle to make her rage and her guilt into a power capable of getting her son back or at least getting an accurate explanation for his absence.20 The structure of all of Bambara’s novels and many of the short stories consists in a relay between the present and the past, between the trouble afflicting you right at the moment and what else is going on around you, between there being no time to waste at all and the necessity of taking your time. It’s not simply that Bambara doesn’t have a linear sense of time, as many have pointed out. It’s that she describes the meeting of collective forms of time — what she calls “Black Family time”— and individual forms of time. This meeting of the collective and the individual produces that abolitionist time of both acute patience and urgency which Martin Luther King Jr. tried to explain to the white moderate in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Abolitionist time cannot wait for the “right” time, nor for others to decide when those who are “harried by day and haunted by night” can have their time.21 In abolitionist time, nothing is inevitable except the struggle to make “now the time to make real the promise of democracy,” to make time one’s “creative ally.”22 Abolitionist time is a type of revolutionary time. But rather than stop the world, as if in an absolute break between now and then, it is a daily part of it. Abolitionist time is a way of being in the ongoing work of emancipation, a work whose success is not measured by legalistic pronouncements, a work which perforce must take place while you’re still enslaved. Urgency and patience forged in the crucible of a historic struggle. A struggle for what? For Virginia to find her when? For Velma to get up off the chair? Well, yes because what’s at stake in taking your time to face up to what’s killing you is nothing less than the revolution in selfhood or subjectivity that, for Bambara, is the root of being capable of living better than is expected of you. And living better than what is expected of you is revolutionary; it is about changing how life is lived in the here and now. And that takes time. Time, Bambara says, we have. “That, of course,” she wrote in “On the Issue of Roles,” is an unpopular utterance these days. Instant coffee is the hallmark of current rhetoric. But we do have time. We better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. Mouth don’t win the war. . . . Neither does haste, urgency, and stretch-out-now insistence. Not all speed is movement. . . . It is so much easier to be out there than right here. The revolution ain’t out there. Yet. But it is here. Should be. And arguing that instant-coffee-ten-minutes-tomidnight alibi to justify hasty-headed dealings . . . is shit. Ain’t no such animal as an instant guerrilla.”23

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it’s so much easier to be out there than right here It’s so much easier to be out there than right here.24 Bambara knows this very well, it is what her healers know, and it is what the truth and justice fighters who change, who find wholeness — integrity, honor, health, responsibility — where before there was disconnection, find out.25 As Bambara states: One of the greatest afflictions in American society for both the teacher/student and the writer is the affliction of disconnectedness. The separation between the world of academia and the world of knowledge that exists beyond the campus gates, the seeming dichotomy between politics and ethics, the division between politics and art, [between materialism and metaphysics] etc. . . . In this society, forgetfulness is a virtue, amnesia is a virtue. . . . And we carry this habit, this outlook, into our daily lives. This is extremely dangerous. So, I teach about the necessity of being connected, and about the necessity of resurrecting the truth about our experiences (and revising the texts) in this place called America.26

The truth of our experiences: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well,” Minnie Ransom, “fabled healer of the district,” asks Velma Henry, fabled wornout activist. “ ‘Are you sure, sweetheart? I’m just asking is all.’ . . . ‘Take away the miseries and you take away some folks’ reason for living. Their conversation piece anyway.’ ”27 Minnie Ransom must ask Velma this question fifty times, repeating it over and over again, trying to make Velma hear the real import of the question: Are you ready to be better? Do you want to eliminate your own misery or do you need it to live? These are profound, difficult, and delicate questions that get to the heart of any radically emancipatory enterprise. What do you really want? What is involved in achieving what you want? What’s the cost of taking away the miseries? What’s the cost of holding on to them? What Bambara wants is revolution. Revolution involves a “free society made up of whole individuals.” Such a revolution begins, Bambara states, “with the self, in the self.” The self is, for her, “the basic revolutionary unit” and consequently it must be “purged of poison and lies that assault the ego and threaten the heart, that hazard” couples, families, movements, and communities.28 Bambara utilizes a type of base/ superstructure model here and elsewhere in which, though recursive, the individual is the basis upon which kin groups, communities, and entire societies rest. She thinks from the bottom up, always, and at bottom for her is the complex person. This selforientation is not personal identity in the narrow sense at all. “A new person is born when he finds a value to define an actional self and when he can assume autonomy for that self,” she writes. Assuming the autonomy to create a new person, from the bottom up, out of the messy, complex, and willful people that we are and will remain, is to assume the power to make history. For, as Bambara states, making history involves

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refusing to act “like we were just symbolic personae in some historical melodrama.”29 “Afford . . . choose . . . Always the choice” are her carefully selected watchwords.30 And, so Bambara focuses her creative energy — her power — on showing the damage caused by alienation from creative labor, alienation from economic and political power, alienation from history, alienation from truthful knowledge, and alienation from ourselves. And on showing the intimate, sensual, and embodied process which heals that damage, from the bottom up, from you to the world waiting for you to be ready. This healing is absolutely crucial, a necessary part of creating free individuals and a free society now, when we need it. There is no free society without free individuals, Bambara says — or as Mrs. Sophie Heywood “counseled”: “Have to be whole to see whole.”31 And so, individuals will have to be healed — it can’t wait until later, it can’t be done in a minute, and most importantly, it can’t be done alone.

the dream is real, my friends Always in Bambara’s stories, the community must be present for this transformative act of healing, of liberation, to take place. The community must be present for three important reasons. First, the community must be present because you can’t do it alone, it’s too difficult. It is difficult because “it’s so much easier to be out there than right here.” And it’s so much easier to be out there than right here because people often hold on “to sickness with a fiercesomeness.” Bambara continues: So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe. . . . For people sometimes believed that it was safer to live with complaints, was necessary to cooperate with grief, was all right to become an accomplice in self-ambush. They were proud, frequently, the patients that came to Mrs. Ransom. They wore their crippleness or blindness like a badge of honor, as though it meant they’d been singled out for some special punishment, were special. Or as though it meant they’d paid some heavy dues and knew, then, what there was to know, and therefore had a right to certain privileges, or were exempt from certain charges, or ought to be listened to at meetings. But way down under knowing “special” was a lie, knowing better all along and feeling the cost of the lie, of the self-betrayal in the joints, in the lungs, in the eyes. Knew, felt the cost, but were too proud and too scared to get downright familiar with the conniption fit getting downright familiar with their bodies, minds, spirits. . . . Took heart to flat out decide to be well and stride into the future sane and whole. And it took time.32

It’s so much easier to be out there than right here, where, given all the unrelenting taxations on you, you have a right to what’s familiar, to what’s safe, to what you’ve come to rely on to keep you as sane as you are. You have paid your dues, you fight the

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good fight, you deserve to feel you’re special. It is so much easier to hold on to the familiar costs, the cooperation you’ve trusted in the past, than to let that go, let go of a pride hard-won and rarely given, let go of the fear that raises the defenses that are your known strength. In a passage remarkable for its seeming counterintuition, Minnie Ransom says, “There’s nothing that stands between you and perfect health, sweetheart. Can you hold that thought?”33 You usually can’t. The immediate reaction, full of charged resistance, is almost always, “Are you crazy? What’s standing between me and perfect health is the obvious reality of the sick world that’s made me ill in the first place.” For Bambara, healing is the process by which you hold that counterintuitive thought and overcome the resistance to a truth that doesn’t so much set you free, as set you up to practice a freedom that improves upon use. But this resistance is fierce, rooted in a selfprotectiveness that feels absolutely essential, and so you’re going to need some help. In fact, you cannot do it on your own. The magic — and there’s no other word for it — of the healings which Bambara demonstrates is effected by the complex of power that comes from a concentrated meeting of healer, sick person, and the group. As Levi-Strauss famously described, healing is not a strictly speaking individual or dyadic process.34 It is absolutely essential for the group’s love, patience, concentration, and belief in the power to heal to be there, even if you don’t entirely believe in it or you’re not entirely aware of its presence, as Velma is not. Without the group, the healer and the other individuals present in your circle have no power, nothing to draw on to help you out. And like any other analytic and creative production, you want to be healed by tools and methods capable of doing and not botching the job. Therefore, the second reason the community needs to be present is because the community is where “the dream is real,” where the only “unreality” is “the failure to make it work.”35 The heart of the two-parts-that-go-together dream, which is a “chorus,” is that: one, “exploitation and misery are neither inevitable nor necessary”; and two, it is possible to “rise above” one’s training, “think better than” one’s “been taught” and defiantly behave accordingly.36 This dream is not, in Bambara’s hands, phantasmatic or elusive or something people only experience while they’re asleep. This is not a dream of color blindness, of homogeneous self-contained alien societies, of perfect and perfectly conscious individuals, or of genocidal settlement masquerading as democratic freedom. Bambara’s dream of a world in which exploitation and misery are neither inevitable nor necessary, a world in which we are better than we’re expected to be, sounds simple, simplistic even. But to me, it is a profound standpoint, a utopian standpoint, magical in its ability to suspend common disbelief, passed down to her as the community’s teaching and tradition. The community means everything to Bambara, and thus it is the focal point of her imaginative attention, a place she speaks from and speaks to, inventing it as often as describing it. The community is what’s needed for healing. The community is the

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source of the history and the memory and the now of what’s possible because it’s already happened there. The community possesses a special way of seeing, a second sight, in which the dream is real and the only unreality is the failure to make it real. Many individuals, Bambara writes, spent a great deal of time, energy, and imagination encouraging and equipping me to practice freedom in preparation for collective self-governance. . . . I became acquainted with Black books that challenged, rather than mimicked, White or Negro versions of reality. I became acquainted with folks who demonstrated that their real work was creating value in the neighborhoods — bookstores, communal gardens, think tanks, arts-and-crafts programs, community organizer training, photography workshops. Many of them had what I call second sight — the ability to make reasoned calls to the community to create protective spaces wherein people could theorize and practice toward future sovereignty, while at the same time watching out for the sharks, the next wave of repression, or the next smear campaign, and preparing for it. Insubordinates, dissidents, iconoclasts, oppositionists, change agents, radicals, and revolutionaries . . . studied . . . argued . . . investigated. They had fire, they had analyses, they had standards. They had respect for children, the elders, and traditions of struggle. They imparted language for rendering the confusing intelligible, for naming the things that warped us, and for clarifying the complex and often contradictory nature of resistance.37

Toni Cade Bambara rejects those Western utopian traditions “wherein people cannot be a higher sovereign than the state.”38 Instead, in Bambara’s vision, people in community are a higher sovereign than the state or the market or the media or the academy. It is the sovereignty of people conducting the “daily rituals of group validation,” based on a second sight, that create a “liberated zone” right there where they are “penned up in concentration camp horror.”39 This liberated zone is inhabited by bold insurgents and quiet plodders, by those who are always out in front and those who want to hide, by adept healers and those who need some healing, by patient teachers and impatient learners, by people doing more than their best and others doing less. In this liberated zone, democratic, antiracist community values, whether in culture, in politics, or in housekeeping, are practiced as sovereign and for future sovereignty. In this liberated zone, the morning how do’s, the borrowing, the helping out, the “that’ll be enough now” matter — they matter because they are valued as the values we want to live by. In this zone, some women want to run away, and some men need to be told to stay put. In this zone, some people just need to figure out how to get up off their chair and others are busy with meetings and keeping more lists of things to do than they’ll ever accomplish. There’s an effort to resolve conflicts with respect and care, and there are breaks that cannot be repaired. In other words, in this liberated zone, there is the ongoing meeting of those who believe the dream is real, of those who might be

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persuaded, of those who don’t care all that much, and of those who oppose you all the way. The community is not a panacea for all ills, but it is the place where Bambara locates the practice of freedom, the second sight that gives us the knowledge that we have the sovereignty, the authority, to free ourselves on our own terms. Thus, Bambara rejects those Western utopian traditions which are rooted in the assumption that the powers that oppress us are not only bigger than us, as the spatial reasoning has it, but also the source of who we are and even what we are capable of. As Cedric J. Robinson succinctly put it, “We are not the subjects or the subject formations of the capitalist world-system. It is merely one condition of our existence.”40 To understand as embodied knowledge, that is to say, to live by what this statement means, is to hold to a reality principle that runs counter to everything we are taught by all rulers, most scholars, and many radicals. To be intimate with this thinking is to hold to a reality principle in which the dream is real and the only unreality is the failure to make it work. In Bambara’s conception, the dream that is real is both deeply subjective and it is also a supremely material way of conceiving our relationship to the systems that attempt to control and dehumanize us. Listen to the following exchange between Bambara and Kalamu ya Salaam: KS: What you were talking about was not so much what others do to us and how others do it to us, but rather what we must do for ourselves. TCB: Yes. KS: The colonial response: First, you have colonialism and then you have anti-colonialism, which is still not affirmative of yourself because you’re just reacting to your oppression and are still using colonialism as a reference. TCB: I think that’s the politics of despair and I don’t ascribe to that at all. There was something before colonialism and there is something that persists in spite of it. It’s that core that interests me. Colonialism was just a moment in our history. It’s a very temporary thing. KS: What you’re saying then is that as long as we consider colonialism the major aspect of our reality we have in fact missed, TCB: . . . we have in fact collaborated . . . KS: . . . with colonialism because then we are implicitly saying that’s where our history started . . . TCB: . . . saying that this is our reality. It’s not our reality. . . . To constantly be looking at . . . how [we are boxed in on all four sides] . . . is to stay in prison, is to collaborate with your captors, indeed, is to lend them energy, which is the same thing as providing them with the power to keep you locked in.41 Refusing to provide them with the power to keep you locked in. The dream is the art of making things and relationships of value without believing that the rulers

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can successfully and completely rule you. The dream is about being unavailable for servitude, back stiff with conviction. The dream is neither cynical nor naïve toward power, it is in-difference to it. To live in the reality of the dream, you not only need to be different, you need to be in-difference. In-difference to the lure and the pull of the sacrificial goods and promises ubiquitously on offer and also in-difference to the familiarity of being sick of it all. To be in-difference is to refuse to be intoxicated with the deathly, to stop loving that which you claim to despise. To be in-difference is to practice freedom in preparation for collective self-governance. To be in-difference is to believe that we are better and more human than the reactive subjects of a variety of abusive arrangements of power and authority. To be in-difference is to see all the ways in which many people for as long as anybody can remember resist the degradations imposed on them, and to see what those great and small acts of resistance teach us about the fragility of power and the ease with which it can fail to achieve its ends. To be indifference is to always notice first “the core” that was before and that persists and that will remain later. To be in-difference is to see as real, as reality, that many people not only resist, but also build worlds that live by better and more just and equitable rules, rituals, and relationships. To be in-difference is to refuse to collaborate by lending energy to that which oppresses you. To be in-difference is to be ready, in a moment, to let go of what’s merely seemed a superficial or temporary investment in the way things are. In short, to be in-difference is to find the work of “revolution irresistible.”42

to make revolution irresistible And thus, we come to the third and final reason the community must be present in the healing process. The community must be present because without it, you’ve got no place to go when you’re better. Being well in the way Bambara means it, as an act of emancipation or liberation, brings a responsibility with it. “ ‘Do we want to be well?’ The answer tends to be ‘no!’ To be whole — politically, psychically, spiritually, culturally, intellectually, aesthetically, physically, and economically whole — is of profound significance. It is significant because there is a correlative to this. There is a responsibility to self and to history that is developed once you are ‘whole,’ once you are well, once you acknowledge your powers.”43 There’s a great force, Bambara is suggesting, that comes from refusing to cooperate with grief, from insisting on the capacity and the right to be better than and in a sick society. This is the power of in-difference: the capacity to let go of the ties that bind you to an identification with that which is killing you, to assume a freedom or an autonomy you can own because you are one of its most important sources, and to share it with others so that it is usable, not simply a private possession. The power to be in-difference is a world-making power, the power of freedom — the freedom to create an alternative civilization right in the here and now, right there in the same place where greed,

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abusive authority, and all sorts of biological and social determinisms reside. The power of in-difference is more powerful than skepticism for the simple reason that it attaches you, not to what you hold in contempt (as cynicism does), but to that liberated zone where the daily practice of freedom constitutes the grounds for sovereignty and for a livable life. The something more powerful than skepticism is guided by vigilance in the pursuit of a freedom you’ve already begun to taste. Freedom? Yes. You. Don’t you want to be free? Freedom is what Bambara, the dreamer, the organizer, and the bad housekeeper, is after.44 What does she mean by freedom? Freedom means facing up to what’s killing you, healing the damage, and becoming in-difference to the lure of sacrificial promises of moneyed or exclusive happiness and the familiarity of your own pain. It means facing up and out with analytic precision, creative determination, and sympathetic understanding for yourself and others, with tenderness, as Herbert Marcuse advised. Freedom, Bambara insists, is a process. It is not the end of history or an elusive goal never achievable. It is not a better nationstate however disguised as a cooperative. It is not an ideal set of rules detached from the people who make them or live by them. And it is certainly not the right to own the economic, social, political, or cultural capital in order to dominate others and trade their happiness in a monopolistic market. Freedom is the process by which you develop a practice for being unavailable for servitude.45 It is an uneven process, not very linear, always looping around, catching us at different moments — facing up, healing, becoming in-difference, experienced in-difference. The practice of freedom is difficult and it can be overwhelmed by despair and depression, but it is also joyous for it is, in short, the process by which we do the work of making revolution irresistible, making it something we cannot live without. Then he straightened, back stiff with the conviction that he, like many others going home now, was totally unavailable for servitude. Being or becoming totally unavailable for servitude, as Bambara herself declared, was the work she took on as her own and for us. Making revolution irresistible. This is how we make the best history we can now, which is only ever when we have a chance.

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utopian | the scandal of the qualitative difference | Herbert Marcuse pedagogical memo: five (and a half ) lessons on utopian thinking Date: xxxxx File note: The voice of the text suggests it was originally prepared as a letter or as a motivational speech; the audience to whom it was directed (the you) is not specified, but it seems to include several presumably fellow Marxists. The picture of helplessness with which it opens dates it as having been written before the insurgencies associated with the Movement for Black Lives. An addendum was attached — The Great Refusal | California | Herbert Marcuse — which is now included as a separate item in the utopian collection. The report belabors a point that may seem obvious now to anyone consulting our archive: we are not nor have we ever been fully assimilated subjects of the world capitalist system. To refuse to live as if there is no other choice shifts the terrain of struggle to the more difficult and delicate work of living autonomously. Whether it is imposed on you by the impossibility of being assimilated and rewarded by the dominant order or chosen by you against all the odds, this life requires an embodied in-difference Herbert Marcuse called “organs for the alternative.” In case it bears repeating, this embodied in-difference is a lot easier to talk about than to become; moreover, once it becomes you then you lose interest in talking about it in this way. Also attached to the essay was a single sheet of paper — unfortunately now removed — with the following statement attributed to Herbert Marcuse: “For example, not every problem someone has with his [sic] girlfriend is due to the capitalist mode of production.”

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the missing story Utopias have something to do with failure and tell us more about our own limits and weaknesses than they do about perfect societies. Even if one insists (as I do) that you can’t fail unless you try to succeed, the idea is an uncomfortable one and seems to redirect objective inquiries (about social and political difficulties, for example) back into psychological vicious circles which turn on the desire to lose, or an innate pessimism, or inferiority feelings and paralyzing preconceptions. These unpleasant psychological vices presumably turn out to be my own, although they might cast some doubt on the whole Utopian enterprise itself, insofar as that aims inveterately at passing your conceptual and imaginative time among a host of unrealizable representations. —Fredric Jameson, “Utopia and Failure”

Utopia: failure, psychological vices, unrealizable representations. I start here too since I start with a disappointing confession, which is that I had hoped to have a really good story for you. I had hoped to give you an engaging narrative with characters, setting, and a plot that would show you, and not just declare abstractly, something meaningful about utopian consciousness as it is realized and practiced by people living now or in the past. I wanted to give you a good story, for one thing, because when you mention utopia, most people, even those sympathetic to hearing the word spoken, immediately want a very practical example or evidence or explanation — a story — that will make them believe you are not just wasting their time with impossible fantasies, faraway lands with seas of lemonade, unrealistic futures, or worse, tyrannical delusions and evil social experiments.1 The utopian has a bad reputation in many circles, especially radical intellectual ones, and like most people, radical intellectuals sometimes give their prejudices a rest within earshot of a moving story that speaks to them, as if person to person. After all, even radical intellectuals know that the story is not only the point. The story is the mediated meaning of the point, the culture of the point, the source of the point’s believability and its persuasive power. The story — even if it’s a lie or a clever trickster tale — is what produces the truth. And whatever intelligent scholars think these days about the nature of truth, I’ve never encountered one who didn’t strive to achieve it, whatever her or his version of it was. So, truth be told, I also wanted to give you a good story because I wanted to have and hold a good story myself. I love a good story. The story has always been my joy and my reason for writing, the reason I’m on the case. The story is what inspires me and needs to be told again. The story is the medium by which I pick up a bit of what’s out there in the world, carry the weight of its injuries and inspirations, and then

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put it down in writing, always trying to remember to carry others along so that the work can reach toward you without your suffering all the trials and tribulations of the weighing and the subtracting of the weight. As Italo Calvino put it in the first of the Six Memos for the Next Millennium he wrote just before he passed away: “My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.” Removing the weight is important to the working method of writers like me — hanging somewhere between social science and literature — because if you don’t remove the weight; it’s too easy to feel, as Calvino put it, that the “entire world is turning into stone.”2 All this is fine and good, but I really don’t have a good story to give you. I am utterly certain that there are many really good stories out there — too many in fact. But, the freedom to find one with a passionate attraction to me or to find one to which I am passionately attracted has eluded me so far. Rather than passionate attraction, there’s been a lot of hesitation and second guessing and, worse, a growing distrust in all possible and probable solutions to the problem of finding the right story which, as you can imagine, has only compounded a somewhat inchoate fear of commitment to these possible and probable stories and thus to solving the problem of the missing story. And therefore I’ve been waiting, waiting for the right conditions, waiting for the next thing or what we call the future, waiting for the right story to arrive, as if unbidden, like falling in love before you know any better. And it’s probably no surprise to report that all this waiting has made me depressed, and frankly it’s embarrassing to be depressed when you’re supposed to be writing about utopian consciousness because aren’t utopian thinkers supposed to be fearless and bold and doggedly optimistic and maniacally convinced of nothing else than that they’ve got a story — the best story in the world in fact — to tell right this minute. Now my filmmaker friend, Wellington John Bowler, thought that the story of the missing story was itself a pretty funny story. When I told him with a straight face and much pathos of my predicament, he said, laughing his head off: “That would make a great film, what a wonderful idea for a character! A serious soul trying to write a book about the power of the utopian impulse wanders around depressed, missing all the action, driving herself to distraction and her friends into alternating fits of smug amusement and nurturing concern.” “But I don’t want to write that story,” I whined. “Well, then,” my wise young friend concluded, “you better get yourself into another story.” And thus lesson one: utopian thinking almost always begins with what you’re missing and the terrible weight of that loss — the “exile of our longing”— but you can’t get very far unless you lighten up and draw upon whatever other resources you have for being less afraid of what you seek to know and possess.3

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the simple intuition, a question of standpoint If we are looking for one position from which this work of struggle and renewal has already begun, it is this: that since there are many peoples and cultures, there will be many socialisms. —Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope

The simple intuition that started the whole thing is that there is something terribly wrong with the picture of helplessness and total social control by remote powers that so characterizes intellectual discourse today. The world is rapidly changing, everyone seems to agree, and for the worse, say a sizable minority. This sizable minority has produced some exceptional critiques of global capitalism’s human and environmental degradations and its ideological trickery. It has also reinvigorated an older language of and hope in the social change potential of crisis, predicting that finally capitalism in its mature form has arrived or conversely that the end of capitalism is now finally in sight. To be sure, there’s plenty of head nodding at the obvious and widespread resistance to the powers that be. But this resistance is (a) described in qualified and ultimately trivializing terms — merely this or that ultimately futile, contaminated, complicitous, or disorganized example of cultural reaction — or (b) duly noted and then ignored because important thinkers have more important and theoretical things to think about or (c) so romanticized as to be unrecognizable as social struggle. My purpose here is not to assess the strengths and weakness of what’s arguably a historically remarkable moment of varied opposition worldwide but to try to access the deep longings for and the traces of lives lived otherwise and elsewhere than in a closed universe of dominating economic and political powers. Clearly these desires and alternative life forms are embedded in this resistance, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly. And yet, we seem to have such an underdeveloped and unmoving vocabulary for these longings and these lives, for how people comprehend in a practical embodied way the otherwise and elsewhere. Radical intellectuals have highly developed skills in and comfort with critique, with knowing what’s wrong with the governing terms of order, with what the problems are. Our first words are often, “The problem is . . . .” We also use a set of abstract concepts, such as social justice, antiracism, liberation, women of color, freedom, equality, socialism, that function as shorthand for that elsewhere and otherwise, its histories and its cultures. But to my mind, there’s a certain emptiness or otherness in the ways these vocabularies work, the way they work in the world, and the way they work on us. They antagonistically point to a blind spot, but they are less successful at evoking or conjuring what stands, living and breathing, in the place blinded from view. Take, for example, J. K. Gibson-Graham’s description of socialism in their important exposé

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of “capitalocentrism”: “a great emptiness on the other side of the membrane, a social space where the fullness of capitalism is negated.”4 Socialism: a great emptiness, a negation. There are good reasons why, for example, we can say a lot more about Jubilee 2000 or its later incarnations in Strike Debt as an anti-debt initiative and why it’s important (also what its limits are) than we can about the nonfinancialist future it imagines and wants.5 Very good reasons, but still . . . I am looking for this shadowy or marginal utopian place, to find a vocabulary for it and how it works, to find and express the fullness of its life-world. On the empirical and historical grounds that it does most certainly exist, that as Toni Cade Bambara’s Grandma Dorothy told her, “Of course we know how to walk on the water, of course we know how to fly,” and on the hunch that, appearances to the contrary, the time is (always) right.6 To see what’s standing in the place of a blind spot, one either needs to develop or already have a standpoint for doing so. And I’ve noticed that a good many of our best critics share with the apologists and triumphalists a standpoint on the world that’s very seductive and influential, but which is also a trap, something that holds you in place. This standpoint rests on a belief in the power of global capitalism and its corollary orders to define the very terms not only of what is given, but what could be given as well. Let me give an example. In 1998, Immanuel Wallerstein published a small book, based on the Sir Douglas Robb lectures he delivered in New Zealand, entitled Utopistics: Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century. Although Wallerstein thinks that “the last thing we really need is still more utopian visions . . . dreams of heaven that could never exist on earth,” he does believe the time is ripe for what he calls Utopistics. “Utopistics is the serious assessment of historical alternatives, the exercise of our judgment as to the substantive rationality of alternative possible historical systems. It is the sober, rational, and realistic evaluation of human social systems, the constraints on what they can be, and the zones open to human creativity. Not the face of the perfect (and inevitable) future, but the face of an alternative, credibly better, and historically possible (but far from certain) future.”7 The reason the time is ripe for utopistics is because we are living in a historical moment Wallerstein calls “transformational TimeSpace”—“a long and difficult transition from our existing world system to another one or ones.”8 Wallerstein predicts this transition will last for around fifty years, but he can’t predict whether the “outcome will be better or worse.” He’s “neither optimistic nor pessimistic,” just trying to be “realistic.”9 What’s key to Wallerstein’s utopistics is that “it is only in moments of systemic bifurcation, of historical transition, that the possibility [of establishing . . . overall goals]” for a world system “becomes real.”10 As one of the conceptual inventors of world systems theory, Wallerstein is very clear that a fundamental transformation in a world system is not a normal occurrence. Upheavals, what he calls medium-run changes, swings, revolutions even, are normal

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to the operation of a world system. But, for Wallerstein, there are only two “moments of transition” in a system, two moments in which the system itself is undergoing a fundamental change to its basic function and core identity. These two moments are its beginning and its end.11 (I leave aside the question of whether it is ever possible to make these distinctions other than retrospectively.) In these extraordinary periods of transition, something special happens, Wallerstein argues. What is special is that the “free will factor,” which is normally severely constrained by the imperatives of the system itself, becomes more prominent, more determinant. As Wallerstein argues, “I say that when systems are functioning normally, structural determinism outweighs individual and group free will. But in times of crisis and transition, . . . the ‘free will’ factor will be at its maximum, meaning that individual and collective action can have a greater impact on the future structuring of the world than such action can have in more ‘normal’ times.”12 For Wallerstein, the free will factor is the extraordinary opportunity for individuals to “understand the nature of our structural crisis,” to therefore make “choices for the twenty-first century,” and to “struggle” for the realization of these choices, “without any guarantee that we shall win.”13 The free will factor, then, is the capacity for rational thought and action in circumstances where the outcome of such thought and action is not predictable, but sensitive to intervention. The circumstance or unique condition under which individual and group free will can outweigh structural determinism is whether the capitalist world system itself is in crisis or whether it is functioning normally. You can see then that it’s basically up to the system when the free will factor and thus utopistics can have any meaningful impact on the system itself. The precision is important here. Wallerstein cares about systemic change, systemic change is what he’s after. He emphatically does not think that the world capitalist system is a fair, democratic, and peaceful system. He doesn’t think that everything basically always stays the same or that individual and group action doesn’t really change anything. He is, however, establishing the criteria for and aims of utopistics, and he is also arguing that the free will factor is normally subordinated to a superior system with greater scope and authority. What’s the problem? The problem is not entirely with the conceptual language of historical systems. A vocabulary that aims to describe large-scale patterns, often of long duration, is helpful for describing social forces which appear removed from everyday life and which function exactly as if they were remote controls.14 Many of us are very reasonably attracted to the idea of a big system out there that determines or creates what seems like an almost invisible bubble, context, or underground fault line that contains us or moves us around without our permission. For those who recognize the especially insidious bootstrapping quality of most US ideologies of individualism, the System, like the Man, is a very potent and effective way of identifying real and meaningful constraints on us.

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I also don’t think the problem here is entirely, as Fredric Jameson writes, “in the philosophically correct use of the concept of totality,” by which he means “something that by definition we cannot know” as opposed to “some privileged form of epistemological authority” which “enslav[es] others.”15 Jameson is right, in my view, to argue that “the thinking of totality itself — the urgent feeling of the presence all around us of some overarching system that we can at least name — has the palpable benefit of forcing us to conceive of at least the possibility of other alternate systems.” The problem with the privileged system at the heart of Wallerstein’s type of utopistics is that it does not function as merely a philosophical or an empirical mistake. It is a standpoint toward power and resistance to its abuses that has intellectual authority and that produces a political culture in which the operations of this world capitalist system are the ultimate measure of critical adequacy. What’s of specific concern here is the troublesome way in which such a system draws the attention of the analyst constantly toward it. The world capitalist system prevalent in Wallerstein’s utopistics yields a preoccupation with and an investment in its fate, regardless of how strict an adherent one is to world systems theory per se. Such an investment is a standpoint tied directly to the question of fate, by which I mean, tied to asking what is fated for us, to asking who cares about our fate, and to asking to whom our fate can be entrusted. And this standpoint is the standpoint of the life of the system. The life of the system pulls us in tow and sometimes in thrall. The life of the system is the source of analytical attraction and cathexis. The life of the system is the source of intellectual and political authority. The life of the system sets the fundamental parameters for what is to be known and what can be anticipated. The life of the system is the measure of our freedom, the author of the effectivity of our will. In other words, Wallerstein’s free will factor has little instinct for freedom. Its instincts and impulses are always contained by a system that dominates us so thoroughly that only it decides when we can “have an impact” on “restructuring the world,” which is always relegated to the future. Only from the standpoint of the life of the system could we derive a notion of freedom — the free will factor — so carved out of its very image and so beholden to the system for its effective exercise. Only from the standpoint of the life of the system would we need its sovereign authorization to direct our fate. Such a standpoint has many costs. One of these costs is the loss of a freedom and autonomy that utopian thinking cannot and does not, in practice, do without. So, lesson two: there is a delicate balance between understanding and conveying the magnitude and import of longstanding, patterned, and real abusive power systems, and believing in them. This is the balance between fate (or faith perhaps) and fatalism. In other words, beware becoming invested in or in love with that which you claim to despise and which you claim you want to abolish.

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obstinacy and bad facticity History is calling us to rule again and you lost dead souls are standing around doing the freakie dickie . . . never recognizing the teachers come among you to prepare you for the transformation, never recognizing the synthesizers come to forge the new alliances, or the guides who throw open the new footpaths, or the messengers to end all excuses. Dreamer? The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality. —Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

“From the beginning,” Herbert Marcuse wrote in 1937, [critical theory] did more than simply register and systematize facts. . . . Its impulse came from the force with which it spoke against the facts and confronted bad facticity with its better potentialities. . . . It opposes making reality into a criterion in the manner of complacent positivism. . . . When truth cannot be realized within the established social order, it always appears to the latter as mere utopia. This transcendence speaks not against, but for, its truth. The utopian element was long the only progressive element in philosophy, as in the constructions of the best state and the highest pleasure, of perfect happiness and perpetual peace. The obstinacy that comes from adhering to truth against all appearances has given way in contemporary philosophy to whimsy and uninhibited opportunism. Critical theory preserves obstinacy as a genuine quality of philosophical thought.16

We’ve all had, I’m sure, experiences where the reaction to an obstinate claim of “bad facticity” is not that we’re annoyingly or delightfully stubborn, but rather that we’re crazy. Crazy in the colloquial sense of the term and crazy in the psychoanalytic sense, in which all obstinacies are familiar repetitions of the things we’ve grown fondly accustomed to disliking. Herbert Marcuse’s idea of obstinacy as a “genuine quality of philosophical thought” is comforting in such a context, since feeling like you’re crazy can indeed make you crazy. When Marcuse rejects a certain kind of reality — the complacent positivist type — as the standard for telling the truth or knowing what is given, he is objecting not to descriptivism per se, nor to the mistake of confusing appearances and essences. He’s not just worried that all positivisms lack explanation — lack an ability to say why something is meaningfully so — and he’s not just worried that we won’t dig deep enough to capture the systemic or structural foundations of what appears to us as given. Marcuse is objecting to a social realism, or a reality principle, whose facts are shorn of their “better potentialities,” by which he means facts and truth regimes in which “is” is separated from “could be.” What does it mean to confront bad facticity with its better potentiali-

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ties? Marcuse means something that can be stated simply and that is also a definition of moral calculus: all critiques, all judgments of what’s wrong or bad imply a judgment of what’s right or good. “You can’t know what’s wrong with what is if you don’t know what could be instead” is its commonsensical formula. Marcuse’s concern here is with the consequences of separating the factual from the ethical or the political. When shorn of their better potentialities, the truth cannot be realized at all in those social facts; they are not reliable or good facts that can be supplemented by what they are missing. Rather, for Marcuse, they are analytically deficient or, in his terms, “bad facts.” Critical theory rejects all social facts and all knowledge systems — whether nominally Right or Left — which lack calculations of moral sufficiency or deficiency, which stand outside the “could be,” because they do not tell the truth. Indeed, the “impulse” of critical theory, Marcuse states, “comes from the force with which it speaks against” these facts. Let’s presume that Marcuse means something more than the rather important point that the truth is not a positivistic construct, but an ethico-political one. “When truth cannot be realized within the established social order,” Marcuse continues, “it always appears to the latter as mere utopia”— such appearance, Marcuse insists, being very much an instance of bad facticity. What does he mean by “mere utopia”? Mere utopia is what we conventionally take utopia to mean: nowhere we can really live, the impossible, the unrealizable future, unrealistic dreams, a luxury for those who can afford to be impractical, “a breeder of illusions and therefore, inevitably, of disillusions.”17 The merely utopian is a powerful and established reaction formation quite familiar to us in a variety of social contexts. We hear it in the parent’s anxious and disciplining “No” response to a child’s extravagant or unruly wishes; we hear it in our intimate’s protective and hesitant response to our most vulnerable dreams; we hear it in the policymaker’s calculated and restrained response to invention and creativity; we hear it in the scientist’s genuine and limiting worry over the probability that grand schemes for social change inevitably go very wrong; we hear it in the long-time activist’s weary and controlling response to less experienced enthusiasms; we hear it in the critic’s tolerant and dismissive evaluation of what’s really most important and urgent. The merely utopian is familiar. And we almost always know that we are struggling over the truth when we confront it, and that such a struggle is inextricably bound up with the question, not simply of what is real or realistic, but with the question of what is possible, what could be. In these struggles, the sense that our possibilities are being contained and that the reaction contains a fear of loss — sometimes in ways that are very clear to us, and sometimes in ways that are far more vague and elusive — alerts us to the repressive and managerial function of the merely utopian. When truth cannot be realized within the established social order, it always appears to the latter as mere utopia. The utopian is not what’s impossible, Marcuse is saying; the utopian is what is rejected as bad facticity, not real, not possible. That’s why it

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often appears as the “merely.” To adhere to the truths contained in the utopian’s bad facticity against all appearances is what Marcuse means by obstinacy, which he strictly distinguishes from whimsy or opportunism. Obstinacy may be irritating, but it is necessary for preventing the merely utopian from being used to disqualify or discredit the elsewhere or otherwise that we know — sometimes as craziness, sometimes as elusive desire, sometimes as our most prized possession — but that we do know is realistic and possible. Or, lesson three: in order to even approach utopian thinking we have to stop associating the utopian with the impossibly idealistic (or with its evil materialist twin, the “never enough”) and using it as a weapon against others and ourselves. We’ll have to learn to be more comfortable with bad facticity.

bad subjects, the freedom instinct, and the deviation Both in the West and the world beyond, the socialist impulse will survive Marxism’s conceits just as earlier it persevered the repressions of the Church and secular authorities. The warrant for such an assertion, I have argued, is located in history and the persistence of the human spirit. As the past and our present demonstrate, domination and oppression inspire that spirit in ways we may never fully understand. That a socialist discourse is an irrepressible response to social injustice has been repeatedly confirmed. On that score it has been immaterial whether it was generated by peasants or slaves, workers or intellectuals, or whether it took root in the metropole or the periphery. —Cedric J. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism

When he wrote the 1937 essay “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” in which he made the “merely utopian” remarks, Marcuse was still quite concerned to establish the objective grounds for the socialism he sought. The visible struggle he’s having distinguishing between good facts and bad facts was part of his fight against German fascism and the need, as he saw it, to expose National Socialism as the corruption that suppressed the better truths of a democratic socialism. By 1964, in the swell of postwar affluence and US global power, Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man, certainly gave up on the Western industrial classes as the privileged agents of history and almost despaired that the “needs which demand liberation” were being permanently eliminated through organized repressive desublimation. But by 1969, he saw these needs arise again in what he called “The Great Refusal,” the variety of First and Third World opposition to “the massive exploitative power of corporate capitalism” and its “liberal realizations” that had been gathering steam in the postwar period.18

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What impressed Marcuse about this opposition was the radically utopian character of its demands, not so much a “different road to socialism as an emergence of different goals and values, different aspirations in the men and women who resist.” He began An Essay on Liberation with this description of the Great Refusal: In proclaiming a “permanent challenge,” . . . the Great Refusal, they recognize the mark of social repression, even in the most sublime manifestations of traditional culture, even in the most spectacular manifestations of technical progress. They have again raised a specter (and this time a specter which haunts not only the bourgeoisie but all exploitative bureaucracies): the specter of a revolution which subordinates the development of productive forces and higher standards of living to the requirements of creating solidarity for the human species, for abolishing poverty and misery beyond all national frontiers and spheres of interest, for the attainment of peace. In one word: they have taken the idea of revolution out of the continuum of repression and placed it into its authentic dimension: that of liberation.19

For Marcuse, it was the refusal of progress and well-being on capitalist terms, with the miseries and divisions those terms entailed, and the embrace of a postnationalist solidarity that took the resisters out of the “continuum of repression” and into the “dimension of liberation.” The refusal of an order that seemed to be “delivering the goods” and the demand for something more announced socialist desires and visions unrecognizable and unacceptable to most Marxists. This great refusal announced an emphasis on idealism and subjectivity, also troublesome for Marxists, which influenced Marcuse deeply and was the impetus for writing the little book. Marcuse readily acknowledged that “the radical utopian character of their demands far surpasses the hypotheses of my own essay.” More to the point, the “radically utopian” demands of the counterculture and the Black Power, Third World Liberation, women’s and students’ movements led Marcuse to confront the fact of Marxism’s problematic marginalization of what he called “the idealistic deviation” known as “the subjective factor.” In locating the transition from repression to liberation in the subjective factor, as we’ll see, Marcuse became not just more tolerant but an active supporter of bad facticity. What else but bad facticity should we call his attempts to establish “a biological foundation for socialism” in the instinct for freedom, in a work dedicated, no less, to those “militants” who dared to take “the life of human beings out of the hands of politicians, managers, and generals”? To be clear before going further, Marcuse’s writings and thoughts about political consciousness and subjectivity are lengthy and complex and I am not offering a comprehensive interpretation, which would require greater attention to Marcuse’s reliance on the notion of false needs, to his influential analysis of “repressive desublimation,” to his difficulty in resolving the problem of the relationship between necessity and freedom, and to his life-long grappling with the objective/subjective, good

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fact/bad fact binaries. I have selectively taken from Marcuse what is useful for my own purposes, although I hope I have captured the spirit of Marcuse’s intentions in these works. Moreover, I think it is worthwhile to linger with Marcuse’s uninhibited enthusiasm for utopian subjectivity, derived almost entirely from the inspiration he took from a variety of social movements viewed as “incompatib[le] with traditional forms of political struggle” because he was so criticized for it.20 More than just criticized, he was patronized to the point of having his thoughts on the matter disassociated from his recognized contributions and dismissed as indulgent romanticism best ignored.21 Marcuse took the desire for radical social change very seriously and dedicated An Essay on Liberation to the motley crew of the Great Refusal precisely because he was dismayed and angered both by the state’s anticipated response and by the intellectual condescension, which he rightly viewed as itself a potent accomplice to the repressive state. In my view, when reading Marcuse begins to embarrass you, when you’re taken beyond wanting only to argue with him, this is exactly the moment when you need to pay attention. In An Essay on Liberation and “The End of Utopia,” Marcuse lets loose, forgets for the moment about repressive desublimation and the one-dimensional man and goes after this instinct for freedom by following the deviant path of subjectivity, by following the bad subjects. And to what end? “To lay bare and liberate the type of man who wants revolution, who must have revolution because otherwise he will fall apart. That is the subjective factor, which,” Marcuse cautions, “is more than a subjective factor.”22 In An Essay on Liberation, to put it quite simply, Marcuse is trying to show that a new society requires new people who can bring it into being: “new institutions and relationships of production must express the ascent of needs and satisfactions very different from and . . . antagonistic to those prevalent in exploitative societies.”23 If we do not, Marcuse warns, “wish to stop at merely improving the existing state of affairs,” we must “accommodate . . . the extreme possibilities for freedom . . . the scandal of the qualitative difference.”24 What got Marcuse in trouble with those who thought he’d gone too far following those bad subjects was not the idea that a free society would be radically different than or antagonistic to the one in which we currently reside. Nor did he get into trouble for arguing that in the making of a free society, “what is at stake are needs themselves.” What got Marcuse into trouble was, first, his claim that work on the subjective factor was one of the “chief tasks of materialism today.” And second, he essentially defined the subjective factor as the process by which an unfree actor is changed in the here and now so that she or he vitally needs to be free and acts on this need today — not later, not after the revolution, not when the system says it is ok, not after the time is right.25 In other words, not the world system’s own rational actor, the free will factor, but the subjective factor, the process by which the willing subject changes itself and its way of existence. This change in the subject constitutes what Marcuse calls “the instinctual

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basis for freedom.” The instinct for freedom Marcuse describes is not a dependent rationality. Its oppositional consciousness does not derive from the logic of the system. Quite the contrary, the instinct for freedom is “the environment of an organism which is no longer capable of adapting to the competitive performances required for wellbeing under domination, no longer capable of tolerating the aggressiveness, brutality, and ugliness of the established way of life.”26 And when this organism follows the instinct for freedom — or what Fred Moten calls the “freedom drive”— adapting to it, making of it a home, Marcuse continues, “rebellion would have taken root in the very nature, the ‘biology’ of the individual” and our way of existence is changing.27 What I find compelling in Marcuse’s idea of the subjective factor is his unabashed enthusiasm for liberation and his passionate insistence that the instinctual basis for freedom — the ways in which the need for freedom without exploitation and misery, expressed in our aspirations and behaviors — can and must become our “second nature.”28 To become our second nature, we require what Marcuse called sensory “organs for the alternative.”29 This is quite an interesting and unnatural biology, as cultural and political resistance is its antithetical core; not a very disciplined science, and certainly not, I think, sociobiology with its emphasis on adaptation. Indeed, Marcuse uses the word biology to “designate the process . . . [by] which inclinations, behavior patterns, and aspirations become vital needs which, if not satisfied,” will cause us to “fall apart.”30 Human nature is always changing. But changing what feels natural to us and what we privilege and recognize as authority; changing the very skin that envelops our first reactions, or the behaviors we repeat automatically, or the calculations and sacrifices that define our very sense of survival — these changes are slow and painful. These changes are met with powerful social and psychic resistance. These changes make us feel as if we are falling apart. Switching the electrifying poles that carry the currents of value so that we experience falling apart entirely differently — so that our entire sensitivity apparatus recoils at what it previously loved — this is what it means to work on the subjective factor. And this work is individual and collective, a form of solidarity. “Socialist solidarity,” Marcuse declares, is autonomy: self-determination begins at home . . . that is with every I, and the We whom the I chooses. And this end must . . . appear in the means to attain it . . . in the strategy of those who, within the existing society, work for the new one. . . . [The] existential quality [of the new Form of life] must show forth, anticipated and demonstrated, in the fight for their realization. Exploitation in all its forms must have disappeared from this fight: from the working relationships among the fighters as well as from their individual relationships.31

Work on the subjective factor, the deviation, is not the work of normal science, social or natural. Indeed, Marcuse is aware of the strain he’s putting on the meaning of the word biology to use it as he does: the word is always followed by a question mark. There’s no mistaking the antipositivism in Marcuse’s organs for the alternative, a hall-

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mark of the older tradition of utopian socialism, notably its feminist strand, that Marx and Engels so famously sought to supersede.32 And Marcuse certainly reverses Marx and Engels’s logic, which required that the path to socialism proceed from utopia to science. It will, it must, work the other way around, Marcuse suggests. Marcuse might have used the word culture instead of biology, but it was already overtaken by his old colleagues and made an unrelenting source of corruption and complicity. It would be left to Marcuse’s African contemporary Amílcar Cabral to name the freedom drive culture. The word biology suffices then to capture what Marcuse is aiming for: how to cultivate and liberate the instinct or drive for freedom. Cultivating an instinctual basis for freedom is about identifying the longings that already exist — however muted or marginal or extreme — and turning these longings into “vital needs,” into things that we cannot and will no longer live without. Cultivating an instinctual basis for freedom is about acquiring the sensual knowledge that our survival depends on sacrificing only what is blocking the satisfaction of those vital needs, without which we would otherwise fall apart. Cultivating an instinctual basis for freedom is about being obstinate that survival is a condition that does not exist when it is obtained at the expense of the suffering of others or of oneself. Cultivating an instinctual basis for freedom is about cultivating an individual and collective indifference to all the promises of happiness, worth, and freedom that deliver their opposites or morally degraded versions of themselves. Cultivating an instinctual basis for freedom is about creating a solidarity in which consciousness of “the heritage of oppression” is accompanied by “understanding” and “tenderness towards each other.” Cultivating an instinctual basis for freedom is about the “ingression of the future into the present.”33 “We must accommodate . . . the extreme possibilities for freedom . . . the scandal of the qualitative difference,” Marcuse demands. Cultivating an instinctual basis for freedom, then, is the delicate and difficult process of making the qualitative difference possible and realistic, a part of who we are as a people and accepted as reality instead of rejected as the merely utopian. In other words, we have to make room for the active presence of this “extreme” instinct for freedom, which is a scandal because it achieves a qualitative difference that is everywhere denied as existent or even possible. And thus lesson four: a practical utopian consciousness is scandalous, which no doubt accounts for the tremendous repression and shame that it attracts. This practical consciousness is a standpoint, a way of seeing and being from the point of view of the qualitative difference. From this standpoint, the cultivation of the instinct for freedom is a necessary condition for effective social change, for changing our way of existence. From this standpoint, the systems that dominate us are only, as Cedric J. Robinson reminded us, “one condition of our existence.” From this standpoint, utopian thinking doesn’t wait for authorization from a superior system or a higher power to direct our fate. From this standpoint, we authorize ourselves — a monumental act of freedom in the authoritarian world in which we live.

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And thus lesson five: the utopian is not the future as some absolute break from the past and the present, out there. It is in us, a way we conceive and live in the here and now, all those things we are and we do that exceed or are just not expressions of what is dominant and dominating us. An excessive, scandalous difference, the utopian exists when there is no painful split between the dream world and the real world; when revolutionary time doesn’t stop the world, but is rather a daily part of it; when needs and desires and investments are already being reengineered; when a second nature or a sixth sensory organ has already grown and taken root. As a way of conceiving and living in the here and now, the utopian is the articulation of social movement in the general sense of the term: the ongoing building of an alternative civilization, with its own reason, its own home, and its own systems of value.

the problem of the repetition and projection of our deformed and repressed social habits . . . again To summarize, Wallerstein’s Utopistics relies on systemic contradiction to generate and warrant a rationalistic will to change. Marcuse and many theorists subsequent (and prior) to him have rightly found this model of social change and its historical materialism deficient, for some of the reasons I’ve already given. Marcuse offers a richer and more insightful conception of the utopian because he insists that changing “the system” requires deeply changing people. The subjective factor — the instinct for freedom — is neither residual nor epiphenomenal; it’s part of the historical material. Nonetheless, Marcuse’s approach has been criticized for not explaining very well how it is exactly that an instinct for freedom can organize a new way of existence if our current existence is thoroughly contaminated by the “aggressiveness, brutality, and ugliness of the established way of life.” Critics have found Marcuse’s claims unrealistic because they seem to rest on an unevidenced and theoretically unwarranted libidinal individualism. Both Wallerstein’s and Marcuse’s models of utopian thinking are important ones. But their limitations have fueled a suspicion toward the utopian, even among those sympathetic to it, which must, in my view, be overcome. Here is Frederic Jameson describing this sympathetic suspicion: “If you know already what your longed-for exercise in a not-yet-existent freedom looks like, then the suspicion arises that it may not really express freedom after all but only repetition; while the fear of projection, of sullying an open future with our own deformed and repressed social habits in the present, is a perpetual threat to the indulgence of fantasies of the future collectivity.”34 Jameson captures quite elegantly the contradictory feelings that generate reservations about the autonomy of the utopian. I say “autonomy” because utopian thinking is not dismissed

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out of hand, but its relative autonomy is. By autonomy, I mean independence, capacity for leadership, self-determination. Even under sympathetic conditions —“your longedfor exercise”— a ubiquitous complicity takes intellectual and emotional precedence. At the core of these reservations and anxieties is the presumption that, as Jameson goes on to state, “freedom . . . by definition and in its very structure, cannot be defined in advance, let alone exemplified.”35 Freedom is what we fight for, but not what we possess now. Freedom is what we will acquire at some future time when the battles are won and when the systemic supports for new needs, desires, people, and institutions are established. Jameson is essentially arguing that the utopian is always paralyzed — spooked, some would say — by what represses and oppresses us. Inevitably trapped by that which presumably motivates it in the first place — the need for a freedom that’s missing or that there isn’t enough of — the utopian drags the suspicion along with it that it is never itself. This is a very sophisticated and persuasive position, especially since it is usually accompanied by the sine qua non of critical adequacy: a description of the systematic and all-encompassing nature of the power or powers that dominate, including the variety of resistance and opposition. In this position, ambivalence toward freedom supposedly protects its integrity. One consequence is that as a rule, the utopian always is deferred into the future: later, maybe, we’ll know the difference between freedom and repetition. A second consequence is that there’s an analytic, affective, and practical split between the diagnosis and space of what’s wrong (that is, the injury, the violence, the dehumanization, the exploitation, the bondage) and the space of what’s good (that is, what’s humane, sustainable, emancipated, liberated, free). My somewhat obstinate view is that there can be no utopian thinking under this presumptive segregation. The utopian is not only or merely a “fantasy of” and for “the future collectivity.” It is not simply phantasmatic or otherworldly in the conventional temporal sense, although it is otherworldly in the sense in which Ernst Bloch spoke of the utopian margins, as if they were the doors or passageways to other better worlds (see utopian surplus | red arrows | a cultural theory of value | Ernst Bloch). To treat the utopian as a way of conceiving and living in the here and now, is to accept that, like us, it is inevitably entangled with all kinds of deformations and ugly social habits. That it is our self-appointed duty to protect the future from our “deformed and repressed social habits” is more accurately viewed, I think, as the conceit that legitimates the deferral and disqualification of the utopian.36 For one thing, and to put it crudely, if we could protect future generations thus, we would not be in this contradictory predicament at all. Whatever else, utopian thinking requires a different approach than ambivalence to the problem of repetition and projection, so that legitimate concerns about the sufficiency of our ideas and behaviors do not block utopian thinking by further repressing it, but rather, to use a much-maligned word, liberate it so that it may be in charge of itself.

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but how do we know for sure? where are the guarantees? For all these utopians . . . socialism is . . . a mere accident. . . . Each one’s special kind of absolute truth, reason and justice is . . . conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and . . . intellectual training . . . . Hence from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic . . . mish-mash, allowing . . . the most manifold shades of opinion . . . critical statements, economic theories, [and] pictures of society. . . . To make a science of socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis. —Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

The scandal of the qualitative difference is what Marx and Engels tried to avoid by making socialism into a science rather than into what Engels called a utopian “mishmash.” The scandal of the qualitative difference is also what Charles Fourier, whom Engels thought exemplary of the mish-mash problem, tried to avoid, both by publicly censoring his wildest ideas about passion and sex, and by making a science of passionate attraction and the Harmony it would produce. For both Engels and Fourier, social science was the key to “accommodating the extreme possibilities of freedom”— even if in Fourier’s case the social science was a cosmological, classificatory one designed to destigmatize and institutionalize sexual and other emotional “manias” and the joys of pear-picking, and thus quite different from Marx and Engels’s science of historical materialism. There’s much more to say about Fourier who was an astounding critic of Western civilization’s “savants” and a remarkable thinker in so many ways. And about Engels too who, as an aside, I hate to hold responsible for only popularizing a collaborative idea not only because Marx had a lot to do with it but also because Engels was always having to be responsible for him. Engels did Marx’s empirical research for him, wrote many of the texts with short publication deadlines, took care of him financially, endlessly deferred and stroked the other’s ego, and suffered Marx’s patronizing disdain of his relationship with Mary Burns, showing cruel insensitivity toward Engels’s feelings when Burns passed away. Nevertheless, it was Engels who concocted the science/utopia distinction in the 1880 text. Engels’s critique of Saint Simon, Owen, and Fourier is, quite frankly, not very persuasive. It is widely known that he admired these three, and mostly what he had to say about them in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is laudatory. The reasons for his ultimate dismissal of them are in the text: they misunderstood the laws of historical materialism and were too subjective; they were prehistoric; they did not adequately valorize class conflict and the inevitable destiny of the proletariat; and they wanted to liberate all humanity at once. But the reasons don’t add up and Engels knows this, which is why he just throws up his arms — metaphorically — and cries, out with the “mish-mash”!37 Nonetheless, with both Engels and Marx and

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Fourier, the recourse to social science was at the heart of their grave mistakes, the glue that held their respective projects together and the glue that kept them stuck. But there’s perhaps a more sympathetic, if still cautionary, point to be made here. Even though Engels’s science/utopia distinction became, in the hands of those infighting, sectarian Second Internationalists, a weapon to wield against internal dissenters and heretics and to pass down as Marxist political culture,38 and even though Fourier’s calculus of the Destinies, based on his science of “absolute doubt” and “absolute deviation,” became the major reason he was dismissed as a lunatic, the whole promise of social science, for them, was that they believed it would guarantee the possibility of a less alienating and more fulfilling collective life. The irony is that Engels lived more of such a life and, although it’s purely speculation on my part, I think he could do so because of his attachment to poetry (which was the form his earliest antimerchant radicalism took), to social activism, to ethnography, to Mary Burns, the Irish working-class woman with whom he lived for many years, and to taking care of others and redistributing his wealth. But this life was not enough for Engels; he required other guarantees for what makes change desirable, possible, and real. He found this guarantee in scientific laws and these shrank the vision he collaborated with Marx to produce. Today, we can measure this shrinkage more easily: the disregard for nonindustrial labor by peasants, slaves, indentured servants, and women, the world’s majority; the limitations of an exclusive focus on class and class struggle, rooted in a two-class model; the economism that prevented a more complex engagement with gender, sexuality, culture, race, language, history, and everyday life; the refusal to entertain the idea that their European world was not the only one or the only valuable civilization. By contrast, Fourier’s vision was much greater: wild, imaginative, funny, and quite brilliant about the need to institutionalize not ideal individuals but good conditions for the shared and equitable expression of our complicated and unruly passions and needs. But he lived the life of the isolated visionary — lonely, bitter, and demanding of others, especially of those who most loved and respected him. Nothing was ever enough for him and his actual life was as far from his vision of Harmony as it could be. Harmony was literally the place he exiled his longings. And, in that diaspora, he too needed to establish the guarantees missing in his own life and in the real world, which so frightened him. But there are no guarantees. No guarantees that the time is right (that is, no historical laws); no guarantees that just a little more misery and suffering will bring the whole mess down; no guarantees that the people we expect to lead us will (that is, no special privileged historical agents); no guarantees that God, Newton, or the Genome Project are on our side; no guarantees that we can protect future generations or ourselves from “our deformed and repressed social habits,” if we just wait long enough or plan it all out ahead of time; no guarantees that on the other side of the big change, some new utterly unfathomable-but-worth-waiting-for happiness will be ours. Neither normal nor maniacal social science can give us a secure guarantee or even a secure cal-

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culation of the probabilities. The search for the secure guarantee responds to a basic need that should not be trivialized, but the secure guarantee often requires a complicated contract. One reason utopian socialists are almost always dismissed as simplistic is because, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, they carry on regardless of this contract, with perhaps more simple beliefs. Or, with something which good magic can make seem so simple: the suspension of disbelief. And so we return, at the end, to the problem of fate (or perhaps faith). There are no guarantees of coming millennia or historically inevitable socialisms or abstract principles, only our complicated selves together and a reliable reality principle in which the history and presence of the instinct for freedom, however fugitive or extreme, is the evidence of the utopian’s possibility because we’ve already begun to realize it; begun to realize it in those scandalous moments when the present wavers, when it is not quite what we thought it was. There are no social scientific guarantees, only the active and intelligent use of what Marcuse, in an effort to invalidate the opposition of reason and imagination, called “our faculties of freedom.”39 No guarantees, just an obstinate wish that we shift our critical gaze toward that utopian place or structure of feeling where the instinct for freedom resides. Why? In the end, or maybe it’s just the beginning, the point of such a shift is not to deny in an act of willful disregard the calamities of abusive authority, the alienations of exploited labor, the violence of dictatorial ideas, or the dehumanization of our capacities and habits. The point is to expose the illusion of supremacy and unassailability dominating institutions and groups routinely generate to mask their fragility and their contingency. The point is simply to encourage those of us who see ourselves as politically engaged radical intellectuals or social change activists to be a little less frightened of and more enthusiastic about our most scandalous utopian desires and actions. Knowledge for social movement ought to move us as well as educate us, and for this it requires a particular kind of courage and a few magic tricks.

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utopian | The Great Refusal | California | Herbert Marcuse addendum, pedagogical memo, film stills, photographs Date: xxxxx File note: The Marcuse reading group was dissatisfied with the pedagogical memo and felt there was a little more to say and wanted to add an addendum. Since they were a motley crew who spent a lot of time in California trying to abolish the military-security-prison complex, they were especially keen to situate the Great Refusal in a context that led directly to themselves.

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(left and middle) Film still. Herbert’s Hippopotamus, directed by Paul Alexander Juutilainen, 1996.

(below) Ashley Hunt, 955 men and 55 women, Metropolitan Detention Center, Los Angeles, California, from the grounds of the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art looking north.

Herbert Marcuse was living in California when he wrote An Essay on Liberation, his analysis of the worldwide opposition to capitalist life forms that reached a peak in 1968. He had moved from Brandeis University to San Diego in 1965 to take a position as professor of political thought in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California. Conservative, white, with heavily policed borders to the south, San Diego was nothing like the liberal Jewish intellectual culture of East Coast Brandeis. It was one of the main centers of the US military-industrial complex, anchored by a large conglomeration of aerospace and weapons manufacturing companies and the US Navy. San Diego’s population and wealth has been defined by being the homeport of the US Pacific Fleet, which today provides support for 57 ships and 180 tenant commands, 3,000 contractors, and 5,000 naval families in residence; overall the base includes 2,000 acres of land and 326 acres of water.1 The University of California, San Diego was established in 1960 on the site of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and it became the premier science and engineering research campus in the University of California (UC) system on the basis of extensive military or military-related research contracts, no doubt encouraging Marcuse’s early grasp of the constitutive importance of militarism to capitalist expansion and to capitalist knowledge: the Vietnam War was only one instance in an increasingly visible crisis. Notable in passing is that Allan Sekula’s installation Aerospace Folktales — narrating a story of unemployment, based on his father having been laid off from the aircraft giant Lockheed — was first exhibited at the University of California, San Diego in 1973. We tend to associate California student radicalism during this era with UC Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement, and then-Governor Ronald Reagan’s now infamous sending of troops against the People’s Park protesters on the campus and in the city in 1969, but there was considerable antiwar and antiauthoritarian oppositional activity to the south in Los Angeles and among the students at UC San Diego and San Diego State. This was reflected in the campaign the American Legion (the country’s largest veterans’ organization, an influential conservative and largely anti-Semitic political force who were fundamentalist supporters of the Vietnam War) launched in 1968 to force UC San Diego Chancellor William McGill to fire Marcuse, who was routinely described in the news as the “thinker” of the student movement. Wearing his uniform, Legionnaire Harry Foster told a local television news reporter: “They had the riots in France . . . and Marcuse was there. . . . They had the riots . . . in Berlin and Marcuse was there. Wherever this radical New Left appears, Marcuse is always in the background. We are convinced that he has to convey some of his ideas directly to the students and therein lies the danger of Marcuse to the University of California.” To his credit, Chancellor McGill deflected the attack, even after they offered him $20,000 to buy out Marcuse’s contract. The publication in 1964 of One-Dimensional Man brought Marcuse considerable public attention. The book was a remarkably prescient analysis of the “insane reason-

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ableness” of the unfreedom that characterizes capitalist democracies and of the closing of “the universe of thought and behavior” upon which the capacity for negative critique and opposition depends. In the swell of US postwar affluence and the reworked “manifest destiny” for the New American Century, Marcuse focused on the “comfortable and liberal realization of corporate capitalism” and on “its economic and military hold in the four continents, its neocolonial empire, and, most important, its unshaken capacity to subject the majority of the underlying population to its overwhelming productivity and force.”2 To put it too simply, in One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argues that the technical capacities of advanced capitalist society have produced what he calls technological irrationality — formerly unthinkable in Marxist terms — and new forms of social control embedded at the level of psychosocial needs and organized through repressive desublimation. The buy-out or buy-in of the Western industrial working classes through what we now call the “Fordist bargain” was already in Marcuse’s thinking a holistic, material, psychosocial, economic, and political condition, requiring him to give up on this class as a privileged agent of revolution and historical change. Actually existing socialism was equally implicated in different ways, continually “deflected from its original goals” to the point of no return. In 1964, Marcuse warns that we are already forced to buy more and more of our existence — as the realization of capital — on the market. The universe is not yet totally closed, but Marcuse is very worried that total enclosure is coming, that we will invite it as a friend — or, more accurately, a sexual partner — and then we will have not one world but a one-dimensional world in which we no longer can distinguish between what “enslaves” us and what we most cherish and desire. One-Dimensional Man turns out to be an analysis of modern enslavement that makes an argument against the integration of all those not-yet assimilated “outsiders” and “minorities” and thus an argument against a liberal race politics that was nonetheless still dangerous enough to generate massive police reaction, as well as a plea for what he called the Great Refusal: “the protest against that which is.”3 At the time, what student and grassroots readers took away from books, they often put on posters or billboards. The tag line of One-Dimensional Man indicates its standpoint, nowhere near the middle-class sociology of David Riesman’s equally famous 1950 The Lonely Crowd. The tagline of One-Dimensional Man was: “Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.” The longer passage continues: “The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear — that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.”4

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If the view from outer space — untethered and unmarked by the military-industrial complex that enabled it — was an iconic image of the Northern California “whole earth” counterculture, the view on the ground — (grass)rooted and indelibly marked by that which made you a recognizable outsider or a troublemaker — was the signifier of the Third World or internationalist political culture that shadowed it.5 What was distinctive to this political culture, which was internationally oriented but locally situated and rooted in a historical critique of colonialism and imperialism, were the nonnationalist, multicultural, humanistic, and participatory democratic assumptions that guided its analysis, prescription, organizational alliances, and everyday life practices.6 It was here on the ground and in practice as an intellectual and a teacher that Marcuse took the intellectual and political standpoint that would be seriously articulated in An Essay on Liberation, in part as an effort to prevent it from being trivialized and treated with condescension. Marcuse’s students were thus amused that such a sophisticated and learned man’s office was filled with over twenty kitschy figurines of hippopotamuses in a variety of garish colors and poses. His former students Peter Zelin and Doug Kellner recount that Marcuse told them that he loved the “bizarre” hippos because they “embodied the reality of absurdity and the immense possibilities of the imagination.” And why not too the somewhat illicit pleasures of dancing in the swirling river and rolling in the muddy grass, big bold pink mouth wide open with enormous teeth used only for fighting, at which the hippo, it turns out, excels. By 1969 when An Essay on Liberation was published and Marcuse’s always-open office door gave him a perfect view of the May 8 UC San Diego student occupation of the administration building in Revelle Plaza, the Great Refusal appeared to have arrived. Marcuse had moved to California in time for the Watts Rebellion (1965) and all those that followed — Cleveland and Omaha (1966); Newark, Detroit, and Minneapolis (1967); Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, DC (1968); and Stonewall in New York City (1969) — and he saw in Third World Liberation in Asia, Latin America, Africa, in the youth counterculture and in the Black Power, women’s, and student’s movements, amid all their differences, disagreements, and inevitable limitations, the “outline of the limits of the established societies, [and] of their power of containment.” Their opposition to corporate capitalism was, he thought, “radical and total.” From the enclosures of one-dimensionality, the “new sensibility” refused the delivery of the goods (an expression Marcuse liked to use), returning them, recoiling from the so-called freedom from scarcity they offered and rejecting the new necessities they entailed. The Great Refusal was certainly cultural, but it was not merely a counterculture. The Great Refusal was a demand for another form of life, one “worth living.” A life worth living would require, Marcuse argued, new “organs for the alternative,” an idea that remains perhaps even more true today than it did when Marcuse had to unexpectedly confront the extent to which technological and consumer abundance

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was a source of enslavement, trickery, and deformation of human life, an idea counterintuitive to traditional Marxist thinking about necessity and freedom. A good part of An Essay on Liberation is a reminder that the militants must find a way to live prefiguratively. New organs for the alternative emerge in the collective practice of creating an environment in which “the repressive rationality that has brought about . . . industrial society becomes utterly regressive” and a “new relationship between sensibility and a radical consciousness” becomes the basis for a new form of life.7 Obviously, the “new sensibility” is not merely a set of disembodied ideas and certainly not an identity in the commonly used sense. It is you becoming something else, something less poisonous, less obscene, less indentured. It is you speaking a different kind of language, breathing with organs for the alternative. The ferment of refusal continued and it was not genteel or earnest or naïve or mercantilist or on its way to becoming hippie-rich but gritty, angry, at the very far edge of respectability and repressive tolerance: The Black Panthers exercising their right to bear arms and serving breakfast to neighborhood schoolchildren; Jonathan Jackson storming the Marin County Courthouse and the worldwide organization in support of Angela Y. Davis; George Jackson’s letters from and organizing in Soledad State Prison; the Attica Prisoners Rebellion and the ones that followed; the renegade Vietnam Winter Soldiers, radical feminism, and sexual liberation; the American Indian Movement; the Young Lords; MOVE; Earth First!— all of which were met with violent suppression of the rebellious and the expendable without mercy. In many ways, the California of the 1960s and early 1970s that is the background reference for Marcuse’s Essay ends in the mid-1980s when President Ronald Reagan puts in place the last infrastructural elements for the mass imprisonment of poor people of color, shut out of the legal new economy and abandoned by the society to the state police.8 Marcuse arrived in California when it was rich and the capital of the militaryindustrial complex. By the time he died in 1979, the expansionist nationalist economy was in recession and California was about to become the capital of the prison security complex where containment or enclosure in a total institutional world took a more brutal form for too many. But it would be unwise to localize too much both the promise and the containment of this particular moment. The instinct for freedom without exploitation that Marcuse so beautifully essayed — the effort to abolish misery beyond all frontiers, to achieve peace, to make a life worth living for the majority — is very old. There were many Great Refusals before the 1960s. There were even Great Refusals of capitalism before it arrived. And there will be more to come, always on their way from some place in you or out there in places you’ve been told can’t possibly exist.

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utopian | friendship | working together | Céline Condorelli correspondence, conversations, notes, charts, photographs, images, desk and chair, Agent Directory Date: xxxxx File note: An official note is made by MG of a certain level of tedium in editing and refiling the multiple versions of the conversations and in locating the accompanying correspondence, which was not actually in the Agent Directory because the letters, apparently, were never sent, and in reproducing the working together images, which were originally available only temporarily online. About the conversations: Céline Condorelli, after having done the archive a big favor (see utopian | running away | Hawthorn Archive | Céline Condorelli), asked to have a series of conversations as part of a larger project on friendship she was working on. Many conversations were had in different cities, some face to face, some at a distance, some by the sea, some by the river. In the end, after various transcriptions, editing, and rewriting, three were created for public distribution. Condorelli’s interest in friendship emerged out of a set of nine public arts projects she and artist Gavin Wade organized between 2003 and 2009 under the general title of Support Structure, each one expanding the collaborative participants beyond each other. The ninth project resulted in the co-creation, with Simon and Tom Bloor, Ruth Claxton, James Langdon, and Gavin Wade, of the artist-run Eastside Projects in Birmingham (UK) currently directed by Gavin Wade. The tenth and final project was a book, with many contributors, produced with Gavin Wade and James Langdon, entitled Support Structures. The often invisible or taken-for-granted support and support structures essential to cultural production, especially in artistic contexts where self-organization and individual authorship are the norms,

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is the specific context in which Condorelli was thinking about friendship, since it is, she argues, “a fundamental aspect of personal support, a condition of doing things together.” Friendship remained unnamed or unidentified as a specific phase or theme throughout the Support Structure project and yet was necessary to it, mimicking the general form support structures and support personnel often take. As Condorelli has noted, the friendship project constituted, in effect, the missing chapter in the book, Support Structures. As a project, it aimed not so much to restore visibility to what was hidden, but rather aimed to approach what had seemed at the time too difficult to hold as a singular subject or object of attention. Translating Hannah Arendt’s definition of culture into a definition of friendship —“the company one chooses to keep in the present as well as the past”— Condorelli cuts into the question of friendship across three lines of approach: friendship as a practice of relating to and associating with other people you like and value; friendship as a practice of relating to and associating with issues and ideas you like or value, or, as she puts it, friendship as a way of “befriending” an issue; and friendship as a condition for working, a necessary component of the mode of production, the “how” of how we work, whether that work is individual or more recognizably socialized. In each of these lines of approach, Condorelli treats friendship as an “essentially political relationship . . . of allegiance and responsibility.” Her primary interest in friendship is not therefore personal but in friendship as a labor process: a “condition of work” that “might never be the actual subject of the work” but is “a formative, operational condition” of it. In The Company She Keeps, Condorelli describes her method of working: My practice, like that of many others, often involves putting fragments in relationship with each other, so that the cumulative sum of these things — words, ideas, conversations — somehow proposes something that each part alone could not. . . . I find my position by collecting and navigating through material, and I try to make work that speaks in the same way. . . . I work by spending time with things I have collected, with the references that I carry along, with the numerous voices — of friends, acquaintances and peers — that are part of the process of developing work. . . . Perhaps this is a way of working that creates close ties and connections between things, people and myself, and more often than not this feels like a friendship of sorts.

Gathering fragments along lines of solidarity, working together and yet also quite alone, this is my method too and the theme of the thin strand of correspondence from me to Céline.

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HA Dear Céline, I’m still not able to travel and have not returned. There’s little I can do about it at the moment and so I feel somewhat trapped. Had a particularly rough morning, which was somewhat mollified by reading Mary McCarthy’s exasperated, amused and also familiar exclamation in her letter to Hannah Arendt: “All this has been so distracting that I still have my last chapter to write.” She’s referring to the willful and helpless photographer she’s hired, a young woman with an “imperious will directed toward unachievable ends” obsessed with a rather “unhappy love affair with a married man.” Bureaucratic problems of border control with a state that has outsourced its operations charging considerable sums of money while prohibiting any contact with an actual human being are less entertaining and make for less interesting letters. Your patience with my complaints and worries is appreciated. By the way, what was Mary McCarthy photographing, do you know? About our project. I confirm that we’re in agreement that the general aim is to circumvent the exclusionary foundations of Western notions of sociality that restrict friendship and its affectionate equality to white male citizens or treat it as a philosophical abstraction removed from everyday life practice. After our last conversation, I promised that I would do a little bit of reading about friendship and be in correspondence with you. I’ve started by picking up on some of what you raise in your conversation with the philosopher Johan Frederik Hartle and in your comments on Hannah Arendt and the “thinking-business” she and Mary McCarthy did “for and with each other.” I will write again tomorrow. In the meantime, I leave you with a beautiful phrase that Virginia Woolf uses in A Room of One’s Own when she famously finds that “Chloe likes Olivia” and sets about to see how Mary Carmichael will write, as a literary event, “those unsaid or half-said words, which form themselves, no more palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when women are alone.” As soon as I’m free to leave, I’ll let you know. Much love, A

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Conversation 1 Avery: You have been thinking about friendship quite a bit, have written on it, including publishing a conversation with the philosopher Johan Frederik Hartle. Why? Céline: As you know, I’ve had a long-term interest in support and support structures. I believe friendship to be one of the most fundamental forms of support in practice. When I was working on my book Support Structures friendship was opening up all kinds of questions but it was too big of a subject for me to address in one chapter. The primary motivation for writing the texts you mention was to start to directly explore the idea of friendship. I started by looking at how it appeared in philosophical discourse and immediately I encountered two hurdles: first, no women philosophers have ever written about friendship — which is still unbelievable to me. And second, all these beautiful philosophical texts written by men explicitly exclude women and slaves from the realm of friendship. Hauke Brunkhorst describes the ancient philosophical model succinctly: “In friendship and in politics, the citizens must, in a double sense, be free. They must find one another of their own free will, and they must be just as free from the cares of daily survival — and thus from labor — as they are from the will and commands of a master. Therefore, they can be neither slaves nor women. Only on the basis of manhood, affection, and property is a ‘complete,’ ‘good,’ and ‘self-sufficient life’ possible.”1 So, to begin, I had to ask how I could work with the conditions given to me, and whether I would need to invent a discourse of friendship based on those amongst the excluded. Another aspect that was important to me was to address friendship in action, to think about it as a practice. The philosophical tradition demands defining what friendship is in theoretical or abstract terms, but I was interested in how to be and work in friendship, in inhabiting it as a condition. I’ve been thinking about friendship on two levels that I’m not sure can be entirely reconciled. One level of it is as a way of associating yourself with other people. The reason why we’re sitting together talking is also because we are friends: and we’re working together at the same time. Another level has to do with friendship as a way of associating yourself with ideas or befriending issues. What Hannah Arendt called “this thinking business” (her description of the work that she and Mary McCarthy did individually and in relation to each other) is done from a position of closeness to something or someone and it requires a proximity that I believe is fundamental. In other words, there is intimacy in relationship to people, as well as in relation to issues, that I would call friendship. What ideas, issues, and people do we want to spend our time with? [Céline holds up a book.] Why did you bring this book to our conversation?

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Avery: I brought John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger’s Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation because when I read your interview with Johan Hartle to prepare for our conversation, I was interested in your remark that philosophers had excluded slaves from the domain of friendship. Of course, in most slave-holding societies, slaves suffer various civil and social disabilities; a slave holding society in general treats the slave not as a friend but as property or labor or stranger or barbarian. In a slave-holding society such as that in the United States, the slave was treated as a complete nonperson — a nonhuman human being — and was legally prohibited from free association, from kinship, from reading and writing and so on. Of course, slaves did form chosen associations, maintain friendships and families, and lead literate lives, despite the legal prohibition. John Hope Franklin was one of the most venerable African American historians and this book is a careful and detailed account of how slaves managed to run away, where they went, who helped them, how they avoided capture or failed to do so. It makes abundantly clear how necessary friendship and friendly support was for both surviving and, if undertaken, escaping successfully from plantation life. Friendship, working well together, helping out, solidarity, keeping secrets: these were crucial aspects of African American slave culture because the absence of public recognition and support (worse, its criminalization) meant that you had to create your own systems of support within your own cultural milieu. Imagine it: you’ve been taken captive and brought to a place where the state and the society are organized to keep you enslaved and so they cannot be trusted with your well-being. This is a dangerous situation and one in which something of what you’re calling friendship and support is utterly essential, and necessarily secret, visible only to those who can be trusted. Necessary for teaching or learning how to read and write or for marrying or maintaining kinship relations or keeping your old name still spoken. Necessary for stealing some food for the road or turning a blind eye when someone else does. Necessary for all that’s involved in getting on and traveling the “underground railroad,” the network of routes, safe houses, and assistance that black and white abolitionists maintained. It’s interesting also to note that the most active white antislavery abolitionists were the Quakers, the Society of Friends. The Quakers called themselves “Friends” because they believed in equality of persons — they were levelers. It meant something that they called themselves the friends of slaves and at the same time we must ask why the enslaved and oppressed require, in effect, these special “friends” they have not chosen freely. Women, slaves, the lower classes, migrants — the exclusionary foundations of Western notions of sociality are clear. And yet in many ways these groups provide one of the richest archives of friendship practices throughout

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history. Friendship has been treated by philosophers as an abstraction, and primarily as a cipher for theories of the political, which make it fundamentally exclusionary. By contrast, we are speaking here of ways of thinking about friendship that begin from the practical activities of those excluded.2 Céline: I had an intuition that it’s exactly among the excluded that more interesting models of friendship in practice can be found. Looking for women’s friendships, for instance, I found them among the suffragettes, and I also looked for models of friendship in my work on the Commons. In both cases, friendship works as a modality of social change, which can produce other forms of doing things, and these are more than just about work. The suffragettes were, or became, friends in their struggle to change women’s conditions, which is something we could call work — but also and mostly this was about how they wanted to live, and how they wanted other women to be able to live. I went looking for mentions of friendships through letters and documents and again did not find it discussed explicitly, yet something that became apparent was the warmth of the dialogues, the clear solidarity imbedded in the acting together, the small gestures of personal kindness included in what I would call a larger care toward women’s conditions. It struck me how few individuals emerged from the movement as clear representatives or spokeswomen, which was also true in relation to the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, where solidarity rather than hierarchy predominated. Avery: Nineteenth-century women’s friendships were an important research topic for early second-wave women’s historians — in part because the intimate and elaborated world of women’s friendships was essentially a public secret. People knew but didn’t know that friendships kept nonworking women from going mad in their restricted private lives, kept working-class women from disaster and drowning in work, and provided a respectable cover for lesbian women to love and live together. Women’s friendships were also important to the second wave because they were perceived as antipatriarchal, a way of shifting one’s investments and attentions away from a male-centered existence and way of life. Here, too, we find other references or models for thinking about friendship . . . Céline: . . . with people who are subject to exclusions and restrictions of various sorts, like the women who fought against nuclear militarization with knitting and face paint, and the runaway slaves who formed their own self-governed communities. Avery: You are referring to the maroons, escaped slaves and their descendants in the West Indies, Central, and South and North America who formed independent settlements, and the Quilombos, the settled African runaways in Brazil who also welcomed other oppressed people. Yes, the maroons and the Quilombos also

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model a particular kind of utopian politics based on solidarity and horizontal relationships. Pirate societies such as the “pirate utopias” described by Hakim Bey or pirate culture aboard ship as described by Marcus Rediker have interesting and elaborate friendship systems and rules for maintaining solidarity and equality in piracy that don’t fit into Plato’s, Derrida’s, Agamben’s, or Blanchot’s schemes of things. One of my favorite examples is Jacques Rancière’s “bad” workers — all those militant poets, artists, and workers in the 1830s and 1840s who formed small friendship circles, hanging out together and trying to figure out how to lead a life in which they didn’t have to be a worker. Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France is my favorite book of Rancière’s. It’s a carefully researched and beautifully written book and it’s also a mischievous one. Rather than finding one’s freedom or liberation in the degraded terms in which you are oppressed, these workers rejected the whole worker ideology that dominated political thinking then and still does to a large extent. They said: we want to paint, to write poetry, to philosophize, to wander around thinking about the world, thinking about beauty, thinking about whatever comes into our minds. I’m very interested in the politics or more precisely the onto-epistemological affects — the lived political consciousness — of dis-identification. That’s to say when you dis-identify with what they want or expect you to be (whoever the “they” may be in any given situation) with whom, then, do you make friends or common cause? What options are available to you? You mentioned the suffragettes earlier — women rejecting traditional domestic roles and fighting for the right to vote and to work and to own property. Although many of these women were imprisoned and force-fed when they went on hunger strike, because they were — in the main — educated and from the middle and upper classes, their imprisonment was temporary and obviously political. And like other political prisoners, prison helped provide a context for further solidarity and organizing. By contrast, at the very same time, poor women who refused to identify with and perform the roles assigned to them as either good workers, good mothers, or moral women were sent to workhouses for confinement and “correction.” We know far less about how these nonconformist women related to each other in the workhouses and debtor prisons. Did they befriend each other or not? How did they talk to each other and about what? What “thinking business” might they have done with each other? To answer these questions requires invention, since there are no records they or others left and any records they did leave must be read carefully. For these women to get out of prison they would have had to persuade the authorities that they were “corrected.” This would have introduced an additional element of dissimulation into their lives

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and into the archive that we, today, must read around. Rancière’s bad workers were, well, at least recognized as workers. These women did not even have that recognition. Céline: To return for a moment to Proletarian Nights, how did they form their little society? Did they all work to survive? Avery: They worked. They were plumbers and cobblers and tailors and bakers and shoemakers and the men who emptied the sewers. They met at night, often staying up all night, drinking and talking and writing, which is why Rancière called the book La nuit des prolétaires — the night of the proletarians. Céline: What’s beautiful about that is the suggestion that friendship is a way of doing intellectual labor together, as well as an escape from work, in order to become more than one’s work, more than a worker. Avery: I agree. In effect, they were developing and modeling a way of living that was designed to abolish the divisions between mental and manual labor and between productive and unproductive work that are organic to capitalist work relations. And at least in Rancière’s very specific political interpretation in the 1980s, they were also . . . Céline: They refused to be defined by just being a worker. Avery: Exactly. And, in this sense, they also refused to be — for intellectuals — an easy model of the politicized or militant worker and offered a more complex and richer model for what worker solidarity means. Céline: Who’s the friend of the bad worker? Avery: The other bad workers!! [Laughs.] So far, our experimental laboratory for theorizing friendship includes women, slaves, runaways, and pirates of all genders and sexualities. I’d like to add another reference. You know sociologist Asef Bayat’s book, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East? He uses the term “quiet encroachment” to describe the cooperative activities among the poor in the world’s largest cities, such as Cairo, where poor people must take care of themselves because the state has abandoned them. Bayat says that quiet encroachment doesn’t call attention to itself and is oriented around ordinary practices of everyday life. Quiet encroachment is an important model of cooperation; it’s definitely a support structure or set of support structures, and it certainly involves a certain degree of friendliness in our expanded terms. Céline: Well it’s very real and pragmatic. These are small and immediate actions that don’t have to do with a higher level of awareness of politics, but rather with accomplishing specific tasks and surviving today and tomorrow.

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Avery: I think that Bayat’s point is that there is a highly developed awareness of politics and this awareness in part produces the specific “quiet encroachment” models by which people get what they need and help each other out. In Cairo, for example, five friends, relatives, or neighbors can help a family build an illegal apartment in two evenings without being caught. It takes a great deal of knowledge to make this happen hundreds of times all over the city: practical building knowledge, knowledge of the city and its resources and housing policies, and political knowledge too. The political awareness is embedded in an attenuated form in these other knowledges and in the common practices shared by people who are usually not (yet) organized as political actors. Bayat says that much of the preparation for organized collective mobilization is invisible, but is happening nonetheless. As if all of a sudden, there are a million people in Tahrir Square, which happened right after he published the book. People asked: “How could that have happened?” But of course that’s the whole point of quiet encroachment: you’re not announcing the preparation because you don’t want to, or you don’t even know you’re preparing (yet). Céline: The preparation is not announced in the terms of traditional politics. It’s just there as a support structure, and that’s another really interesting model for thinking about friendships offered by the excluded. Of course, this doesn’t undermine but rather sidesteps how important male friendships are, or the friendships of the powerful. These offer more potential for us here. Avery: They offer more potential if you’re interested in upsetting the order of things, because a certain kind of male friendship is also one basis for the perpetuation of unequal power and authority. A certain kind of male homosociality, the old boy’s club, characterizes intimate circles of power where men make deals and trades and promote their friends and enjoy a comfort among themselves — and sometimes play scary games with each other too. And the Manichean notions of loyalty and inclusion that divide the world into friend or enemy is most assuredly a legacy of the great institutions men have invented and forced upon the rest of us — the monastery, the monarchy, the military, the prison, the factory. Céline: We’ve traced a nice line here, in order to look at friendship as a model for working together. And the route to follow is exactly through those friendships that are excluded from the friendships of power, which is why the friendships among women, slaves, and castaways are good pointers, good models. In all of these descriptions — whether it’s the bad worker, the nineteenth-century woman, or runaway slaves — friends help each other out, and in doing so also make common cause. Friendship is essential to understanding these cooperative relations and at the same time inseparable from taking sides in the issues at stake, so that they are all forms of personal and political friendships. I would say

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in the cases we discussed, friendships work on both levels, which is interesting to me because perhaps that means they can provide real models of resistance to a system. Befriending issues is also the point at which the scale of friendship gets larger, at which while still being an elective affinity and working on a personal level, it also has consequences on a larger scale. Avery: The bad worker, the runaway — we haven’t yet talked about imaginary friends, of which I have many. I think we would both agree that all friendships involve a degree of fantasy or imagination, and some might say that the best friendships are those where the attachment to the fantasy is greatest. What about the imaginary friends we invent? Céline: I have some of those too, but they are usually historical figures, like El Lissitzky, with whom I have a really good friendship [laughs] in my mind. Avery: Lissitzky is an inspiring friend to have! I have many friends who are characters in books and have been so for a long time. When I was a child, my first friends were imaginary and they were very dear to me. I don’t think I would have survived the rather difficult family life I experienced without them. Even as a child, they were considered “childish” and then later a pathology, but I was very loyal to them. Others were inventions or people who lived in my dreams. They’re still important to me, and raise this question: to whom are you talking when you are thinking? Who is your audience, your immediate interlocutors?

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HA Dear Céline, I can’t do much with the philosophical discourse other than read it as poetry, carrying off an evocative phrase or image as needed. I leave this domain to you and Johan. I am struck, though, at least in the classic Western texts, how much friendship is the form by which, as Brunkhorst writes, the “good life” is articulated: “the deliberative choice of living together” as free and equal outside of the obligatory bonds of family and nation. There is much to unpack here in the values attached to the freedom to choose enclosure in family and nation. I was intrigued to find several prominent anarchist philosophers treating friendship as a radical model for governance and social organization via this same philosophical tradition, including Banu Bargu and Todd May in a collection on The Anarchist Turn. I note that these essays seem more tied to an older Western philosophical tradition than they are to anarchism’s own theoretical tradition and they seem to have missed altogether the earlier feminist efforts, from Virginia Woolf to Sasha Roseneil and her research on the women of Greenham Common. While I find Bargu’s efforts to develop commensality as a form of commons and ultimately communism suggestive, it still seems very far removed from the experience of political solidarity and belonging that led the great social historian Raphael Samuel to describe the Communist Party (of Great Britain) as a “society of great friends.” Friendship remains, in these accounts, too distanced from everyday life practices, including work and political activity, and thus at a remove from how relationships and society are made and conducted at scale. It seems to me that friendship is anything but abstract: it exists precisely as the things one does and feels with others and we are held accountable as a friend on these terms. We make friends with small gestures and we lose them that way too. A kindness that didn’t mean much to you but provided what was needed to another; an unexpected and delightful companionship in books you like to read, in complaints you like to make, in games you like to watch and trips you take; a valued conspiracy against your boss or against those who threaten to take your power and wealth. Friends are made like this, just as they are lost by forgetting one too many times to show up on time, or because you are disagreeing more than agreeing about things, or because you didn’t say enough or said too much, or because you fell in love with someone else and everything changed, or because you moved far away and couldn’t be there, or because your friend stole something of yours they shouldn’t have, or, if you’re young and still in school because your best friend all of a sudden stopped talking to you and started acting with a cruelty that set your spine straight after you finished weeping. (Although I have no experience whatsoever with it, it’s clear that the spread of vir-

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tual social networking, Facebook friends, and in general the possibility of having an intense relational life through electronic devices and in contexts in which one avoids encountering the other person face-to-face makes my views here old fashioned, if not obsolete, as Sherry Turkle makes clear in Alone Together, a much more critical assessment than her previous books, of the sociopsychological impact of illusory companionship.) There seems to be a general difficulty in grasping friendship as a subject in and of itself. When friendship is tied too tightly to the “good life” as a conceptual abstraction, it becomes remote and impossible in the conventional utopian sense of the term. It becomes what Roland Barthes in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Georg Simmel in “The Sociology of Sociability” call respectively “pure” friendship and “the pure essence of association.” For Barthes, pure friendship is to be distinguished from the field of affectivity that is, as Barthes likes to put it, the desire for a specific friend. Barthes seeks purity because it releases him from the field of affectivity, which embarrasses him since it is, he thinks, located in the field of the imaginary. For Simmel, pure friendship is to be distinguished sharply from friendship as a sociological object, which is rent through with an “ulterior interest” Simmel wants to disappear. I think we will speak more about Barthes, but suffice to say, none of this pure friendship or sociality works at all. Barthes speaks of nothing other than the field of affectivity and his desire for the pleasure of the privileged special relationship to another. He is completely disinterested in the communal or common or abstract and only in specific desires aroused by specific individuals. Simmel ties himself up in knots and ends up grasping at straws. I think his thoughts on the stranger and on the “many possibilities of commonness” are more nuanced and helpful, although this would take us into the terrain of hospitality and beyond. In our next conversation, I would like talk more about the relationship between friendship and work and to pick up on some threads from your discussion with Johan Hartle. Specifically, I want to push on the associative nexus that ties production or work to cooperation, friendship and commons, and makes of friendship a model of autonomous or self-organized production, whether it emerges from the Marxist tradition that Hardt, Negri, and Virno derive from Spinoza or from different anarchist traditions. Why I want to push here may be in part a function of my general crankiness around philosophy but more seriously relates to the problem of theorizing from practice. We already know that all work involves cooperation and affect to varying degrees and intensities: whether this work is friendly or makes friends and of what kind has to be determined. Pat O’Connor notes that “historically, in most societies, friendship had nothing to do with affection; a friend was a protector or someone useful to whom one sold one’s allegiance in return for favours for as long as the favours lasted” (p. 123). This “used to be” is a misnomer and the complications of class, gender, and race are nowhere more evident than in the contrast between the absurdly

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romantic notion of women’s friendship as sisterhood propagated by Janice Raymond or the equally romantic notions of the multitude as “infinite friendship” proposed by Hardt and Negri and the terrifying description given by Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth of the “landscape of affective labor in the information economy,” in which the “incitement to friendship papers over the grim competitiveness of the job market.” I worry a bit over the extent to which you are restricting considerations of friendship to work and at the same time restricting work to that of the noninstitutionally employed intellectual and artist. So the sociologist in me wants to push a bit here and ask about whom are we talking and with what consequences? I would also like to come back to this statement you made in The Company She Keeps — “the activity of spending time with things that I consider part of the process of making work allows other forms of friendship not dependent on reciprocity to exist . . . by way of which I can befriend Arendt’s thinking and work with it” (p. 19) — and especially on what the idea of friendship without reciprocity can mean. Something happens at this point in your conversation with Johan, which unsettles. He is, I think, responding very perceptively and also gently to what you are not saying, to what perhaps you are even hiding (p. 20–21). He says “grace” and you say, “we are responsible for our choices and actions.” He speaks of “unconditionality” and “sensuousness” and you speak of “power” and “doing” and “politics.” He says, “friendship might be about shared loneliness rather than overly explicit togetherness.” You say, “I would support the necessity of a certain estrangement behind lack or need.” He says, “mutual support in situations of lack and need.” You say, “reciprocal estrangement on the basis of which we can be friends.” He is melancholy: friendship “reflects a lost authenticity.” You are determined: you do not “choose” “solitude.” This exchange between you, the reciprocal exchange of words and ideas and a certain care for thinking through and pushing on what’s not being said, is, to my mind, the moment in the text when you become closer friends than you were before. I will try to see whether there are any ethnographies or histories specifically on friendship. Once you start looking, of course friendship is everywhere, but dedicated studies are few and far between. Much love, A

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Conversation 2 Céline: In our previous conversation, we searched for models of friendships, and found clues in the shadows of the friendships of powerful men, violent nations, and dominant institutions. We also traced the exclusive nature of the discourse on friendship to its historical exclusion of women and slaves, who in turn pointed us toward the places in which people who work together toward change cooperate and support each other, and undertake the titanic tasks of altering the order of things, often through intimate associations and small-scale closeness. Following this discussion of what happened in the shadow of famous men, we arrived at sites in which friendship designates both “being close to” and “making common cause.” These “other” friendships do not treat friendship as an objective, but rather as a condition: they are not the strategic means-to-ends tools that are called upon by friendly nations, the friend of the museum, or the friend/enemy dichotomy to achieve other ends than friendship itself. In this regard, it seems fundamental to me to try to address friendship on its own terms and therefore in friendship, in the action of befriending. While both the philosophical and political traditions would demand an abstract reflection on the nature of friendship, which in turn requires taking a somewhat external position (the friend rather than my friend) I would like to argue against it. Again, to refuse the exclusions inherent in the terms as given, as we discussed previously, toward inventing new ones, but also to refuse the idealized position that presumes an objective, neutral place from which to speak. Now that you and I have found a site for this possibility, I need to ask: what could it mean to want to work in friendship? Avery: It is interesting that you put the topic in these terms because in many ways much of what friendship in practice means for most people is exactly what their work is not. Many of us have friends at work, or friends from work, but friendship is usually separate from the workplace and the conditions under which most people work, for the obvious reason that for most people work is hard or unpleasant. Friendship usually names the set of pleasures, activities, associations, and relationships that we have or engage in when we are not working. And my sense is that friendships often end or become strained, and thus more distant, when they become too much effort or work—when there’s too much responsibility and not enough fun—or when the affective terrain becomes too fraught and painful. Also, most people do not choose, in any meaningful sense of the word, with whom they work. More than anything else, I associate friendship with choice: with those elective affinities we make with others, over and above the contexts—some not chosen like the workplace or the family—out of which these elections are made. That said, there are many examples of work collabora-

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tions started by friends, or long-standing warm friendships that result from work collaborations. Céline: You have several friendships that are based on action, in which you work together with others, like your radio show with Elizabeth Robinson, or the many political actions you have been part of through the years. You seem to be surrounded by an enormous amount of solidarity. I can relate to this in relation to the Eastside Projects founding collective and particularly to Gavin Wade, with whom I’ve been working since 2003. But we call each other collaborators, not friends. We work extremely well together and there’s a closeness, a specific kind of trust, pleasure, and care, but we do not engage in the activities that are commonly associated with being friends—like eating together or hanging out. We just work, that’s what we do together, and that’s what we do well. Avery: What does that mean then about what distinguishes friendship from working collaboratively or cooperatively? The enjoyment, respect, care, and responsibility to another person that we associate with friendship are there between you and Gavin, and you’ve chosen to work together, to make a voluntary fellowship or association. You have a very good and very friendly working relationship—perhaps it is even a model of working together as a form of friendship. But I still think there’s a difference that I don’t want to belabor, but also don’t want us to forget: for the vast majority of people, work is drudgery or merely a requirement for earning money to live, and not a source of pleasure, identity, self-development, or social purpose. Céline: You and I are also in a way dealing with the changing nature of work, especially in relation to what has come to be designated as immaterial labor, and would have previously just been called intellectual work. If friendship is regarded as being outside work in the productivist sense, then perhaps working in friendship is a way of claiming space to work outside production? If the premise of working in friendship is valid as a desired condition, then in that condition friendship is as much about producing itself as it is about producing the work: the “working in friendship” is also a way of doing. What I mean is that regardless of what one is working on—creating artworks, books, etc.—one of the main things being developed is the friendship itself, a form of life that cannot be totally capitalized upon and is therefore slightly in excess of work as we know it. Avery: Again, sorry it’s the sociologist speaking, the majority of intellectual work, or what you’re calling immaterial labor—a concept I completely reject by the way since labor is by definition material—occurs in institutional contexts with little autonomy and a good deal of hierarchical command and control. I’m speaking here of everyone from the armies of special effects workers, who make friends while they are working eighteen hours a day in jobs they can be fired from if

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they refuse to make work their life, to university professors and teachers like myself with significant degrees of control at work. In fact, the simultaneous disappearance of the independent intellectual—particularly in journalism and literature, the fields I know best—and the proliferation of a cultural proletariat or precariat, is notable, and means that friendship networks are both more and less important as a means of survival. What you mean by friendship isn’t, but friendship can and is capitalized upon all the time. I agree with you that working in friendship also produces the friendship—that’s a nice way of putting it—and that working in friendship could be a way to work outside of productivist demands. The question for me would be the conditions under which a nonproductivist working-in-friendship takes place. Céline: There is another aspect to this, because we are talking about work that doesn’t necessarily supply something. Much cultural labor is work that no one is asking for directly; and its production is always hard to justify within the rhetoric of need or even want. I just don’t think culture can ever win if forced into the business-led arguments of “cultural industries,” and I really dislike arguing values (conceptual or aesthetic) in relation to value (economic)—something that is especially common and disturbing in higher education. This leads me to think of working in friendship—particularly in culture but not exclusively—as elective in more than one sense of the term: as in people choosing to work together; and in the sense of choosing to add things to the world that have no immediate, instrumental function. Functions might be gained, and that is an important aspect to making things, but they have to be modeled into existence to be capitalized upon in the first place, even if they are just adjustments to existing conditions. And in some ways I think this may have something to do with the refusal of work, with refusing work on the terms in which it is given to us. I would certainly say that my practice is in part born from a refusal to be employed, which results in my working all the time, but also not having a job, if you know what I mean. In the Fordist sense I am a very bad worker. So let’s consider friendship and the bad worker within the dominating ethics of labor. Do you think that has changed? Avery: Yes, I think there has been some change, or at least more recognition of the significance of forms of political organization, identity, and solidarity—such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity—that are not based on being a worker or on class in the orthodox Marxist understanding of that term. To some extent, the opposite critique is made today: that not enough attention is paid to class and workers and economic realities, and that politics has been “reduced” to “identity politics” or cultural performances. I’m less interested in these namecalling turf battles than in the very old question of how to create societies where exploitative soul-deadening appropriative work is replaced with something

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more meaningful, and where greed-based economies are replaced with shared (common/communistic) ones. The question of what kind of work constitutes something more meaningful has been widely contested, with art often proposed as a model, much to the chagrin of actual artists. What’s been dealt with less is the investment in a work-based or productivist identity, which I think is still very embedded in radical political cultures, in the art world, and in our affective and desiring selves. It’s still hard for many people, especially intellectuals and professionals, to conceive an emergent future without work. I don’t mean a future without activity, without things that we do or make, but without this centrality of work to who we are, to our place in the world, and, as Kathi Weeks persuasively argued, to our notion of the good society. In William Morris’s 1890 utopian novel News from Nowhere, a man gets on a boat on the Thames and lands on the other side, in a future world in which Morris’s vision of a socialist society exists. At the heart of the vision is the autonomous cooperative craft worker. Most artists would find this model of work-become-art old-fashioned and irrelevant to current conditions, but there’s also an element of laziness in Morris that is almost completely absent among artists today. Laziness in the sense that Paul Lafargue, Marx’s Cuban-born son-in-law, meant it when he wrote Le droit à la paresse from Saint Pélagie Prison in 1883. You are not the only person working all the time without a job. What does this mean? Céline: It is still really difficult to picture what our expanding notions of work might mean, but we can certainly thank socialist feminism for transforming the idea of what counts as labor, in a time when work still corresponded to the waged production of material goods. People around me—peers and friends—are obsessively trying to grasp the specificities of immaterial labor in a society still dominated by the idea of material production, but at least I can now feel and articulate the parallels between the problems of the underemployed and those of the overworked. The issue that dominates my social context is not in fact people’s right to work, but on the contrary, the effort to secure some measure of freedom from work, when work seems to monopolize all the time and energy of most of the people I know and care about. I am surrounded by the overworked, while in my twenties I was surrounded by the underemployed, but both conditions then and now equally dominate our social and political imaginaries. I very much relate to Jean-Marie Vincent’s argument that the problem is not “simply to liberate production, but it is also for humanity to liberate itself from production by no longer treating it as the center of all social activities and individual action.” Avery: Yes, to be liberated from production in this sense is what I was trying to say before. Jean Baudrillard already made this point in 1973 in The Mirror of Production. And last time, we talked about Jacques Rancière’s worker-painters and worker-poets from Proletarian Nights and their dis-identification with work.

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The stark choice of these two poles you’ve identified—underemployed or overworked—registers a larger crisis in the organization of capitalism today and the stratifications or divisions it continually produces. To refuse the choice is already to begin to work differently. The question for me is whether one has the privilege to refuse the choice because your economic means of survival—your money or property—is not dependent on your labor, or whether you refuse the choice because you’ve got no other economic means of survival, no other options for getting in. It’s not always this clear-cut, and both situations can be routes to making refusal a political choice, an experiment in an alternative autonomous way of living, but their conditions and itineraries are not the same. I don’t mean to take us away from talking about artists and writers and cultural work, or to trivialize the difficult circumstances in which artists work, but it’s important to me to keep the larger context of work close by, so that political strategies and social futures do not exclude the most aggrieved. I’m re-reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book by James Agee and Walker Evans that still excites me. James Agee was a writer and Walker Evans a photographer, and the two men accepted an assignment to write a magazine story on southern sharecroppers for Fortune magazine. They spent two summer months living together with very poor tenant farmer families in Hale County, Alabama, where Evans took photographs and Agee wrote, often wildly late at night. It was an extremely important experience for them both and they returned with far more than a magazine article chronicling the hard daily lives of sharecroppers. Agee imagined he would write a trilogy of works, and Evans’s Farm Security Administration photographs, which he had been making since 1935, were the subject of a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938, the first exhibition MoMA held devoted to a single photographer. To this day, it remains an unusual work: an ethnography that’s simultaneously extraordinarily detailed, poetic, critical, subjective, self-reflexive, and passionately committed to presenting poor people in all their complex personhood. There’s been nothing like it written since. Walker Evans’s description of Agee’s writing practice gives insight into the struggles that produced Agee’s way of seeing, which seemed to require thousands and thousands of words to express. Evans, by contrast, hoped that he could tell the story without ever having to use any words at all. This book is endlessly fascinating to me as a model for artist/ writer collaborations and as a model for sociological writing. I wish I could write something like it, with all its excesses and faults. Céline: It is interesting that they structured the book with a first part consisting just of the photographs and a second part just text: they didn’t try to weave both together. So in a sense there isn’t a dialogue in the work and both did what they do: taking photographs or writing. But they did the book together, which could

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only have happened because they made that journey together, as well as living with the families, which must have changed both their lives. They were lucky it worked out! As somebody who is involved in working in culture and often with a lot of other people, I would say that one needs to want to spend time together with someone in order to work with them, or else life turns into a nightmare. One of the most important things I’ve learnt through all these years of doing exhibitions is that it is more critical to choose to work with people I actually want to spend time with, than to choose to work with people just because they are interesting or talented or intelligent. These are not exclusive qualities, of course, but there is a question of hierarchy of choice that is crucial. Which is why thinking of “the company one keeps” is quite important to me and has impacted my life. In “The Crisis in Culture,” Arendt wrote that the cultivated person is “one who knows how to choose his company, among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.” There are people who I think are absolutely brilliant that I never want to work with again. Avery: This is a very perceptive description of the way Agee and Evans worked together. The dialogue isn’t in the work, the work is the result of a working and living together that was also separate: autonomy and cooperation. I’m very sympathetic to what you say about the company one keeps. Throughout the history of culture, there are many intellectual friendships that center on doing intellectual work together. You’ve written about Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy and their doing “this thinking business together,” which didn’t mean that they wrote together. It meant that they were each thinkers and they did their thinking for each other, even though they didn’t think alike. They were real friends to each other—they called on one another for help when it was needed, they spent holidays together, they confided private feelings and experiences, etc.—but the heart of their intimacy and their friendship was this thinking together that was their work. I suspect many writers and artists have such friends and that in many circumstances the choice of friends will seem odd from the outside because, as you say, desire and personality and something incalculable, or even irrational, is at work in making and keeping friends, especially ones with whom you are also working. Céline: There is a very particular intimacy that you describe here, and also a difference between doing the work together and doing it for and with each other. There is also in friendship an element of taking sides, of making common cause, a sense of solidarity, or being loyal—not just to people, but to the causes they embrace. This certainly applies to our encounter; as listening to the talk on imprisonment you gave in Cairo and before that reading Ghostly Matters opened up a whole world of issues that I would not necessarily have encountered and that have become dear to me.3 Not only did we start talking and thinking

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together in that way, but subsequently when I met and started working with Marco Scotini I knew that I had to arrange for you both to meet, because you were already in a certain sense allies in the world. I don’t know if you will or will not work together, but that political friendship is already there. [Pauses.] Could you tell me something about getting close to issues, the intimacy and responsibility that comes with that? Can you relate to what I call “befriending issues”? Avery: [Smiling] I would certainly love to do something with Marco and the Disobedience Archive and I feel like the ground has been prepared in such a friendly way, and not only by you.4 The friendship/work/political networks that entangle me with Marco are very dear to me and it is true that on the rare occasions when we encounter each other, it is like a meeting of two experienced diplomats representing a larger alliance left at home! I think “befriending issues” is a very nice term or concept for addressing the proximity or distance we have to the material on which we’re working. I see it also as a question of standpoint: how do we make common cause with the subjects we’re studying, and at the same time make common cause with the people who are subjected to various depredations and aggravations? I’ve been thinking about this problem for a long time, because I’ve been concerned with what Cedric J. Robinson shorthands as “the nastiness” and how to write about it without doing violence again of a different sort. My book on haunting emerged from this problematic and from looking for a language or a vocabulary that could grasp what happens when force and meaning collide. At the time, there was already a very active critique of the assumption embedded in positivistic forms of thought that distance was necessary to produce accurate and valuable knowledge. The rejection of detachment and the conceit of a so-called objective knowledge were central to feminist and black studies whose critiques seriously challenged the epistemological rules governing scholarly knowledge. Once the critique was made, the question emerged starkly: what should we do now?5 What does it mean to make common cause with political repression or widespread disappearance—subjects about which I was researching and writing? For example, I started taking women fiction writers from the Southern Cone seriously as theorists and methodologists because they were forced to invent a language that could represent, literally conjure, political disappearance: a frightening and also surreal situation in which people would be there one minute and gone the next, having been kidnapped/captured by state-sponsored death squads, taken away to secret prisons where they were tortured and often killed, all the while the state denying that anything had happened. In Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, Michael Taussig insightfully called the state of knowledge in a society of terror such as this “epistemic murk.” These women, Luisa Valenzuela especially, understood that the political system itself was ir-

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rational—hysterical—and was producing a haunted society full of specters. How do you get close to that which is very dangerous and will kill you? The writers developed a mode of expression—poetic, surreal, coded—that enabled them to broach the truth of disappearance without (they hoped) being disappeared themselves. This mode of expression was not only antipositivist, it was also quite unlike political critique, and their political credentials were often questioned. Yet, I think it was more accurate and more truthful than either of those two forms of discourse. All this I explain best in Ghostly Matters, where my language is more precise. But just to say, being willing to get close to how power works is not an easy thing to do; consequently scholars and thinkers have invented formulas to make it easier, and to make it easier to communicate publicly, and distanced critique is one of them. It has its purposes. We should remember also that getting too close is not always good either: one has to be able to get close and also get away; otherwise you lose perspective of another sort. I think that befriending an issue, or making common cause, requires a certain standpoint that is, in the deepest sense, sympathetic. My guiding principle for this kind of friendship I take from the anarchist writer Chuck Morse: “It is the task of the radical critic to illuminate what is repressed and excluded by the basic mechanisms of a given social order. It is the task of the politically engaged radical critic to side with the excluded and the oppressed: to develop insights gained in confrontation with injustice, to nourish cultures of resistance and to help define the means with which society can be rendered adequate to the full breadth of human potentialities.” There are limits to working by this instruction, and sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don’t, but that’s my guiding principle. Céline: It was very clear in your work The Workhouse, in which the voices of people who had hardly been registered by a system that was effectively set up in order to shut them up, a system of isolation and repression, were actually able to speak through your work. Suddenly those absent voices became present in the immediate and very sensual realization that those women could be talking to us. Avery: Maybe in a way it’s necessary to imagine being friends with, for example, the women confined in the workhouse. But only if you remember that you’re not in fact their actual friend, except in the intangible intellectual sense; more distantiation is the last thing that a prisoner needs. When I teach about imprisonment in my undergraduate classes, I ask the students what it would mean to treat the prisoner as a beloved, as a friend, or as a relative they love and care for, because for most students—unless they already have had personal contact with a prisoner—it’s not real. They can’t conceive of it if it hasn’t or isn’t happening to them or their families. Sadly, every year more students do have imprisonment as part of their family experience. It is in part a provocation that pushes them to

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see the dehumanization embedded in criminalization—how it makes a person into a nonperson—and that challenges them to return the stranger to the status of a person. They need friendship, love, or family—something they experience as personal—to effect that transformation. But, unless a prisoner is your actual real friend, it’s important to recognize that in this context friendship is a conceit, a construct, which can also obscure the fundamental difference between being free and being caged, and the differences in authority and social status entailed. Céline: And to understand the responsibility that comes with that position, so that to make common cause—just like any form of friendship—is not a choice that could be or should be made lightly.

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HA Dear Céline, Today, I am reminded of Johan’s proposition in your published conversation that “Friendship could . . . be conceived of as the reflection of a lost authenticity” (p. 21) because an anxious melancholy or perhaps an uncomfortable envy has descended upon the writing. I brought it on myself by getting completely absorbed in Sheila Rowbotham’s engrossing biography of the remarkable English poet, philosopher, mystic, anarchist, socialist, communist, pacifist, environmentalist, vegetarian, and sexual freedom fighter Edward Carpenter. I’ve skimmed it before but I start to read it again, now quite carefully word for word at least until it starts to agitate me, because I think that I might find in it some ideas for thinking further on the question of friendship and how we live together. I want concrete details, to find the language we’re looking for out of the experiences of people struggling to find another way to live. I want details and then I become completely overwhelmed by them. Page after page, I can’t keep track of all the people in his life or remember their names, except for George Merrill, his great love. Nor can I quite hold onto the endless group activities in which he’s engaged or the prolific stream of letters, poems, articles, and books he’s writing. What a life, I think, so intellectually free, so full of possibility and forward movement, creative, sensual, passionate, even though I also know that loneliness, danger, and his own unsettledness dogged him at every turn. Rowbotham shows Carpenter, not distracted by professionalism or personal ambition or celebrity, committed to and adept at the art of living, an art rooted in work and communal living (which you would appreciate) and obviously enabled by an income that gave him confidence and comfortable entitlements. What a life, I think with some regret at the paucity of my own in comparison. My self-centered reaction is partially an artifact of the 600-page biography, which by nature is marked by overabundance. It’s so completely the opposite of the biography Régine Robin described wanting to write, ages ago, in a stunning lecture I heard her give, of a woman who left nothing but a set of incomplete diaries for a few years of her life. I don’t blame Rowbotham. She’s writing Carpenter’s story and it could be that I’m reading into it because I am reading the book precisely for this purpose but Carpenter seems to have been especially talented at making friends or at least creating what we would call today a community around himself. He withdrew, he faltered, he bored easily, he regretted sometimes all the invitations he issued and the hosting work it caused. He was even at times insincere. But it is clear that friendship, association, sociality (not Simmel’s pure sociality but his ideal sociality), rooted in working with your hands and being outdoors, are the forms through which Carpenter imagined and enacted his politics, a politics itself organized around the centrality of fellowship and what Fourier called passionate attraction.

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It’s all very English, very late nineteenth century including the letter writing and the florid expressions of affection and feeling, very well-off bohemian. Rowbotham describes the feel of it well: “The utopian aspirations to live the future in the present tended to be couched in terms of spiritual enthusiasm. The fervid dedication of oneself to a cause seemed to dissolve all boundaries between individuals, and while this was not a sexual connection, it could generate a climate of intimacy. . . . Part of Carpenter’s appeal lay in his ability to touch on this rapturous idealism” (p. 219). Perhaps it’s the overwhelming detail, but it all makes me feel somewhat forlorn now, excluded from an intimacy or an enthusiasm or a dedication that others seem to have. Two moments pull me out of this imaginary tailspin and restore a sense of equilibrium. The first is a photo of Carpenter’s writing hut at Millthorpe, where he went to escape the busy crowded noisy house and where he famously wrote the fourvolume prose poem Towards Democracy (1883–1902). The poem is difficult to read seriously today, although it is a great rousing rejection of capitalism and economics (“all the books of political economy ever written, all the proved impossibilities are of no account”) and in Part I a wonderfully serious call for “the free sufficing life — sweet comradeship, few needs and common pleasures — the needless endless burdens cast aside not as sentimental vision, but as a fact and a necessity existing.” I love the tiny hut and am impressed by the ruggedness of writing in such spare conditions — bare wooden walls, hard chair, small table, no heat, no electricity, paper and pen. It really is a simple hut set in the wood. It doesn’t appeal to me — I’d rather be walking if I’m going to be outdoors and cold or comfortably close to the coffee pot if writing indoors — but it does amuse me because it puts me in the mind of a determined child running away to the backyard. And I sit a bit straighter because when I ran away as a child, staying in the backyard was out of the question. It was too close to what I needed to get away from. I got on my bicycle and went at least as far as my friend Jill’s house, and sometimes much further than that, often hiding in the park until it closed. The second sobering moment comes about halfway through the book at the end of the chapter entitled “Defending Wild Women.” The chapter combines an examination of Love’s Coming of Age, Carpenter’s complex and contradictory meditation on sex and “the woman question” as they were being debated in socialist circles at the time with a frank discussion of his relationships with his many women friends, some of whom you would know of, such as the South African writer and antiwar activist Olive Schreiner and the feminist suffragist Isabella Ford. Carpenter admitted that he had “excellent and life-long friends among women; but the romance of friendship and love has always gone out . . . to companions of my own sex” (p. 227). Rowbotham is an astute interpreter of how this played out among his middle-class women friends: depending on many of them for keeping his household and larger friendship network going and yet holding them at a certain distance if they needed him too much; supportive provided that they didn’t “bother,” “boss,” “interrupt,”

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or “inconvenience” him or get in the way of “male comraderie”; close and communicative only when they were creative, interesting, and had their own projects. Rowbotham tells a poignant story about Carpenter’s friendship with Kate Salt, who was “dogged by feelings of inadequacy and an overwhelming sense of inferiority froze her own talents, surrounded as she was by busy achievers” (p. 224). Carpenter, she writes, “genuinely longed for her to find something she wanted to do: ‘It’s not enough that you shd. be interested in us but we must be interested in your work.’ But the brutal truth was that he evaded the burden of insecurities she plied him with because he was not that interested” (p. 225). Busy achievers never are. Carpenter might have kept his middle-class women friends at a certain distance, been inconsistent in his attentions, and even at times rude and badly behaved, but he did maintain real friendships with them and kept them in his letters. By contrast, working-class women, who surrounded him and whose work was crucial to the socialism he championed, were “outside his compass.” They appear, Rowbotham writes, “through tiny peep holes” and “in scattered throwaway references in the correspondence of others.” These women’s “views and sentiments,” their stories, are of no interest to Carpenter at all, and their “world that grew gossamer-like about his own in the Cordwell Valley” unseen, not even a glimpse casting a shadow (p. 228). In the end, I’m not sure how this emotionally driven reading of Carpenter’s life will fit into our conversations. It’s a good reminder of the difficulty of theorizing friendship from the complication of experience and thus the appeal of more abstract and to some extent more elegant approaches. It’s also a good reminder that there must be a different affective basis for the utopian imaginary we’re working with, a different structure of feeling for being able to live the future as the present than one dominated by melancholy or lost authenticity or envy or regret or inadequacy, otherwise we are left with nothing but the exile of our longings. It’s also a good reminder of the essentially exclusive nature of all friendship and friendship circles and the important and mystifying role it plays in consolidating class power. Let’s talk about the hidden injuries of class and Raymond Williams next time. Much love, A

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Conversation 3 Céline: In our previous conversation, we talked about how a certain kind of old boys’ club, of male homosociality, characterizes the intimate circles of power; it is usually called friendship. It lives within this overpowering notion that politics is based on the division between friends and enemies. While it is useful to undo the romantic ideas we might have about abstract or philosophical notions of friendship, we have somehow inherited this legacy, what you call “the great institutions that men have invented and forced upon the rest of us: the military, the monarchy, the monastery, the prison, and the factory.” Could you tell me something about the friendships we don’t want? Avery: I was referring to the interlocking organizational positions of the power elite and the intergenerational socialization process of elite reproduction. The pipeline from family to school to intraclass marriages to the right schools for the children to begin the process again; vacation communities, tutors, internships, auditions, judge clerkships, the right letters of reference, the calls that can be made on your behalf, and so on: the entire process of elite reproduction is completely dependent on friendship of a certain sort and on the cultivation of personalistic relationships. Friendship is not only a pleasure, an autonomous zone, and sometimes a weapon of the weak, but also an important modality by which the powerful privatize access to public employment and public authority and reproduce their entitlements and those of their friends and family members over time and across distances. [Avery shows Céline a picture of one of the diagrams that sociologist G. William Domhoff, author of Who Rules America?, now in its seventh edition, has posted on his informative website.] Recently, as I think I mentioned, I was reading Raymond Williams’s remarkable essay on “The Bloomsbury Fraction.” Reading this essay pulled me out of the self-absorbed angst Carpenter’s biography had produced. Williams’s tone is surgical and diagnostic, but I can hear him on every page struggling to keep the class bitterness at bay. The purpose of the essay is to take issue with Leonard Woolf’s claim that the Bloomsbury Group were “always and fundamentally a group of friends” whose “roots and the roots of our friendship were in the University of Cambridge.”6 It’s a long essay that begins with Williams pointing out that Cambridge, which he knew well, is not just a place they went to school together but a powerful social and cultural institution, whose inclusions and exclusions have for centuries played a formative role in reproducing English class and status hierarchies. He argues that the Bloomsbury Group were not merely a group of friends but a fraction of the English ruling class, a “civilizing faction,” he calls them. Williams is interested in how this group of creative, critical intellectuals

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recognized and defined themselves in terms of friendship, while also criticizing the restricted terms in which a society is viewed as a group of friends and relations. He sees the aesthetic and nostalgic power of friendship for them, and for those on the outside looking in at them at the time or later, and he also sees the social power that is mystified or hidden by the beautiful group of friends—each a special and interesting person, each committed to the autonomy of the creative individual. It’s a smart and hard, harsh even, critique of personal conscience and style as the limit of a liberal politics steeped in what Williams calls “critical frankness.” Here’s how he ends: “At its best it was brave, in its own best terms. . . . Yet after so much saying, there were no riots. Because for all its . . . valuable eccentricities, Bloomsbury was articulating a position which, if only in carefully diluted instances, was to become a ‘civilized’ norm.” This civilized norm was, in a nutshell: “all the best people secure in their autonomy or personal conscience but turning their free attention — their social conscience — this way and that, as occasion requires . . . to secure this kind of autonomy, by finding ways of diminishing pressures and conflicts, and of avoiding disasters.” Williams continues: “In the very power of their demonstration of a private sensibility that must be protected and extended by forms of public concern, they fashioned the effective forms of the contemporary ideological disassociation between public and private life. Awareness of their own formation as individuals within society, of that specific social formation which made them explicitly a group and implicitly a fraction of a class, was not only beyond their reach; it was directly ruled out, since the free and civilized individual was already their founding datum.”7 The Bloomsbury Group does not see itself as seeking social power. Quite the contrary, they were critical of various abuses of power, whether by government men or industrialists. Yet, Williams’s point is that they develop a politics and an aesthetics too that takes their class privileges and social status completely for granted. It’s so taken for granted they don’t even recognize it: Cambridge, where we met and became friends for life. It’s this blindness that sutures the split between their private lives as a group of friends — each one interesting and creative and defined by their interests and talents — and the social origins of these very individuals whose private lives would matter socially, publicly. How Williams ended up in Cambridge is a completely different story, even as he too was asked to play a certain kind of civilizing role. He was a scholarship boy from a working-class family in Wales — his father a signalman on the railroad — and he struggled his whole life with the ways in which he was part of Cambridge and never one of them, writing about these struggles in his novels, my favorite being Border Country, which is very much about his father. In other words, friendship is not innocent.

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Céline: This raises questions about friendship in relationship to rights, both given and acquired. Avery: If I can stop the question here because I had been thinking about another example of the complication of friendship when we take race, class, and gender into account and it specifically addresses the relationship between friendship and rights. The example is from The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor, an enormously creative and important book, and one that deeply inspired me, written by Patricia Williams. One of her goals in the book is to write stories that show how the formalism of the law misses too much of what’s important about the injuries of race and gender. In the chapter “The Pain of Word Bondage (a tale with two stories),” she’s looking for an apartment and so is her colleague Peter Gabel, an influential figure in critical legal studies. They’ve both recently moved to New York City and in fact are co-teaching a contracts class together. Gabel “handed over a $900 deposit in cash, with no lease, no exchange of keys, and no receipt, to strangers” who in the course of a couple of “pleasant conversations,” he decides, are friends or friends enough to make a lease unnecessary. “Too much formality,” he tells her: a “handshake” and “good vibes” were enough. Williams signed a carefully negotiated finely detailed and printed lease. She thinks: “There was absolutely nothing in my experience to prepare me” for the “happy ending” that Gabel experiences when, as he anticipated, the owners show up, give him the keys, and welcome him to his new apartment. They both seek a “measure of trust between strangers” in establishing the best relations possible in their new housing situations, yet they approach the same goal completely differently. For him, informality is a way to minimize his power and authority, to create a semblance that equality presumes, or, as is often the case, pretends. For her, formality is a way to avoid the usual “greeting” she receives as a black woman: to be treated, not as a friend or as a safe stranger, but as “unreliable, untrustworthy, hostile, angry, irrational, and probably destitute.” For her, the memory of the refusal of many landlords to sign any binding lease with black tenants to avoid any obligation or responsibility is the operative context for insisting on everything in writing.8 The second story and a complicated analysis of these contrasting incidents follows as Williams asks why rights are important to the dispossessed, important to those who cannot depend on the social mechanisms of informality and trust, who cannot expect to be treated as social equals or even with a certain degree of friendliness. Her answer, and here I simplify somewhat, is that it’s not a matter of distinguishing or choosing once and for all between needs and rights, both of which she acknowledges are unstable and indeterminate and yet extraordinarily binding at the same time, nor of dismissing the important cri-

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tiques of rights-based politics, many of which were advanced early on by critical legal scholars, such as Gabel. Rather, it is a question of what political mechanisms are possible when your experience is the denial of both formal rights and needs. For most dispossessed and subjugated people (and Williams is specifically talking about the experience of Black Americans), asking for your needs to be met has been a “dismal failure as political activity” characterized by “random insulting gratuities.”9 “Forgotten . . . as individuals,” the needs of “slaves, sharecroppers, prisoners” have no status or standing in the social-political sphere: the condition (poverty, disenfranchisement, exploitation) may have need of being modified or eliminated but the person is of little interest. “For the historically disempowered” and for those who, like Williams’s great great-grandmother, have been treated as object-property, she argues, “the conferring of” formal “rights is symbolic of all the denied aspects of their humanity: rights imply a respect that places one in the referential range of self and others, that elevates one’s status from human body to social being.” Rights are “the magic wand of visibility and invisibility, of inclusion and exclusion, of power and no power . . . the marker of our citizenship, our relation to others.”10 Williams is no simple rights enthusiast. For her, the political task is neither to embrace nor to reject rights. Rather, it is to “see through . . . them so they reflect a larger definition of privacy and property.”11 In this larger definition, “privacy” is not “exclusion” but “regard for another’s fragile mysterious autonomy.” In this larger definition, private property rights become “civil rights . . . the right to expect civility from others.” This civility has gravity: it is that referential respect or recognition, which rights promise to confer in principle if not in practice. This civility is not individualistic or nepotistic or intimate. In fact, it can be completely impersonal and formal, whether that formality is registered in the language of contract, obligation, legal right, or is registered in the mannered epistolary language between friends that was common in an earlier letter-writing era and which we will see in Jilali’s letter to Roland Barthes and in which Barthes will find his ideal utopian discourse. This civility or friendliness makes self/other and friend/enemy distinctions inoperative. In making these distinctions inoperative, this notion of civil right works to undo the fundamentally exclusionary or proprietary nature of all rights. In keeping with a notion of rights not tied to private property and in a gesture of graciousness and generosity that seems perhaps the essence of friendliness if not friendship, Williams proposes that we not “disregard rights” but rather “give them away,” give them away to any and all, making them not the bearers of an entitlement to value or to be valued but the conduit for spirit that animates. In a beautiful call for the abolition of private property so characteristic of her, Williams concludes: “Un-

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lock them from reification by giving them to slaves. Give them to trees. Give them to cows. Give them to history. Give them to rivers and rocks. Give to all of society’s objects and untouchables the rights of privacy, integrity, and self-assertion; give them distance and respect. Flood them with the animating spirit that rights mythology fires in this country’s most oppressed psyches, and wash away the shrouds of inanimate-object status, so that we may say not that we own gold but that a luminous golden spirit owns us.”12 Céline: Friendship, then, works as a modality of social change, which can produce other forms of doing and thinking, while it can and does of course reproduce powerful models that are hard to undermine or even see. But if we are speaking here of ways of thinking about friendship that begin from the practical activities of the excluded, I would like to ask you about your radical utopians. Avery: In the ancient Western philosophical texts, friendship—the “deliberative choice of being together” freely and equally without the bonds of obligation that family and politics require—is the form by which the “good life” is often rendered and is the basis of the exclusions we’ve been talking about. There’s a similar impulse in feminism and more recently among anarchists to treat friendship as an alternative model for social organization. I wonder, however, whether friendship can stand up to being such a model. I think we need to break down the terms of this equation of friendship and the good life, or friendship as the utopian. I like the way Roland Barthes struggles with this in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. In a little section entitled “Friends/Les Amis,” he writes: “He is looking for a definition of the term ‘morality’ which he has read in Nietzsche . . . and which he puts in opposition to ‘morals’ but he cannot conceptualize it; he can merely attribute it to a kind of training ground, a topic. This ground is from all accounts that of friendship, or rather (for this word is too stuffy, too prudish): of friends.” This little section is an attempt to parse what Barthes calls friendship as a “pure topic” from the singularity or originality of a friend and your desire for him or her, which encompasses “the minor rites of friendship,” and “the thousand vicissitudes of friendship.” It’s a bit convoluted and connected (as was Simmel’s similar tortured attempt) to the ancient philosophical tendency to try to identify a friendship not bound by various debasements or ulterior interests or by embarrassing affectivities, the latter Barthes’s specific worry here.13 Barthes tells us that this is the last entry he wrote for the book, as a kind of dedication, but it’s incomplete and unsatisfactory. He doesn’t find what he’s looking for until some fifty pages later in the section entitled “Lettre de Jilali”: I send my greetings, dear Roland. Your letter gave me great pleasure. Yet the latter affords the image of our intimate friendship which is in a sense without

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defects. On the other hand, I have the great joy to answer your serious letter and to thank you a thousand times and from the bottom of my heart for your splendid words. On this occasion, dear Roland, I shall speak to you of a disturbing subject (as I see it). The subject is as follows: I have a younger brother, a student in the third-form AS, a very musical boy (the guitar) and a very loving one; but poverty conceals and hides him in his terrible world (he suffers in the present, “as your poet says”) and I am asking you, dear Roland, to find him a job in your kind country as soon as you can, since he leads a life filled with anxiety and concern; now you know the situation of young Moroccans, and this indeed astounds me and denies me all radiant smiles. And this astonishes you as well if you have a heart devoid of xenophobia and misanthropy. Awaiting your reply with impatience, I ask my God to keep you in perfect health. (Delights of this letter: sumptuous, brilliant, literal and nonetheless immediately literary, literary without culture, every sentence emphasizing the pleasures of language, in all its inflections precise, pitiless, beyond any aestheticism but never—far from it—censuring the aesthetic (as our grim compatriots would have done), the latter speaks at the same truth and desire: all of Jilali’s desire (the guitar, love), and all the political truth of Morocco. This is precisely the utopian discourse one would want.)14

Jilali is asking Barthes for a favor in a postcolonial context in which there’s no social equality or social solidarity, and in which possibly money has been exchanged for sex between them. Nothing in this discourse would ordinarily be considered utopian. What then is it that makes this not only utopian, but, from Barthes’s point of view, the kind of utopian discourse “one would want”? I don’t think we need to answer that question so much as let it sink in a bit. In any event, Barthes gives his own answers here and there, including in the diaristic/novelistic text Incidents about his time living in Morocco in 1968 and 1969. What it does for me is direct our attention toward a different model of politics and the utopian and of the role of friendship in them. When friendship is sustained in the vortex of the troubled intersection of sexual desire and colonial power, then you are no longer in a philosophical discussion, but in some other shadowy utopian discourse, the one Barthes wanted. Céline: Is friendship a model for politics, for solidarity, for equality? Is it a model for civility? Maybe you could talk about this in relation to the situation of runaway slaves who formed their own friendship communities? Avery: I think friendliness as a condition for an equitable and just political life makes more sense than conceiving friendship as a model for reasons we’ve been discussing. Respect and a certain trust is involved, dependability too. As I suggest-

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ed earlier, certainly friendliness as civility, as an articulation of a nonproprietary civil right, breaks with the self/other, friend/enemy distinctions that dehumanize our relationships with others and characterize state politics as we know them today. Fugitive or runaway slaves rarely ran alone. They often traveled in groups of kin, friends, or acquaintances. They had to help each other and they depended on the help of others to forge papers, to arrange transport, to acquire food, supplies, weapons, lodging, hiding places, sometimes work, and to remain safe from capture. Some slaves ran away for a day or two or to the woods nearby; others ran farther to nearby towns or “North”; yet others formed their own maroon settlements or communities.15 There are many stories or many stories we can imagine from scattered sources, but I’ll relate one, that of Eliza Winston because the archive has a file on her (see running away | US slavery | preparation | Eliza Winston). Eliza Winston travels by steamboat with her owner, his wife and child from Mississippi to Minneapolis, Minnesota, a free state. She meets and befriends a free black woman by the name of Emily Grey who is politically active in the abolitionist movement, along with her husband Ralph Grey. Emily introduces Eliza to Mrs. Gates, a white abolitionist, who arranges for a lawyer and for the abolitionist judge to hold a hearing to request her emancipation, which was granted. The abolitionist press spread the word and report on the hearing and the events surrounding it. What happens to Eliza after she is freed, we don’t know, although we do know that all the individuals involved who helped her continued to do the same for others. The networks and social relations that enabled Eliza Winston to run away all involved a degree of trust and friendliness in the way we’ve been speaking of it. What I’m calling friendliness is an element, perhaps a kind of skin or structure of feeling in that sedimented set of social relations and social knowledge I describe as “preparation.” For Eliza to pack clothes for a northern winter while still in Mississippi and to meet Emily Grey required donations from her friends who might have sewn or stolen the extra clothes, required keeping shared secrets, required someone to have already made a reliable enough connection to Grey that it could be passed on to Winston and recognized by Emily Grey. For Emily Grey to openly and yet clandestinely work with white abolitionists and judges, who were able to hide Eliza at various points and get her out of town after the hearing and the white riots that ensued required safe houses, and back doors being opened without danger of finding the police there, and a reliable system for recognizing dissimulation without exposing it. And so on. The social networks that were sustained and the detailed tasks accomplished by abolitionists and runaways relied on what you call friendship as a support structure or

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what I’m calling organized friendliness or preparation. It’s important to be clear that the white lawyers and judges are not Eliza Winston’s or Emily Grey’s friends—there is neither personal intimacy nor social equality between them. But they play a friendly or supportive role in the black-led abolitionist efforts, which relied too on a certain friendliness to both acquaintances and strangers. Organized friendliness: situational kindness means everything in these situations, even if it is never enough. There is another aspect to the question of friendship for runaway slaves or any fugitive, which I would like merely to mention by way of conclusion. And that is the sorrow of leaving one’s friends behind. As much as a fugitive needs organized friendliness to make the escape and may then in the process make new friends, she or he has also to carry the sadness of losing the loved ones left behind. Here’s Frederick Douglass: “It is impossible for me to describe my feelings at the time of my contemplated start drew near. I had a number of warm-hearted friends in Baltimore—friends that I loved almost as I did my life—and the thought of being separated from them forever was painful beyond expression. It is my opinion that thousands would escape from slavery, who now remain, but for the strong cords of affection that bind them to their friends. The thought of leaving my friends was decidedly the most painful thought with which I had to contend.”16

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II. a means of preparation first principles subjugated knowledge; an unreadable map of the world in crisis; feral trade; a failed attempt at colonization; nonparticipation; the story of Eliza Winston who ran away; sympathy for deserting soldiers; being the leader you seek running away | first principles | discourse of struggle | subjugated knowledge | global capitalism | A World Map | enclosure | commons | feral trade | nonparticipation | the yardsticks | strikers rebels escape artists | marronage | Brazil | Maurits Script (2006) | US slavery | preparation | Eliza Winston | war | soldiers | The Logic of the Birds | Palestine | being the leaders you seek

running away | first principles | discourse of struggle | subjugated knowledge fragment of a longer analysis, copied pages from book Date: xxxxx File note: If there is one methodological orientation that most characterizes the work of the Hawthorn Archive, its collaborators, and its friends, it is the attempt to excavate, produce, display, and properly value subjugated knowledge. The file contains a fragment of a longer analysis, which gives a definition of subjugated knowledge and at the end describes briefly why sometimes this knowledge must be invented or made up.

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running away | global capitalism | A World Map correspondence, map, artists miscellany, Agent Directory Date: xxxxx File note: Letter from archive colleague Ashley Hunt requesting text to accompany A World Map: IN WHICH we see . . . a very large map that is drawn or painted with the assistance of the local community of artists, students, and activists in which it will be situated and used for research and organizing. The letter sent in reply to Hunt expressing appreciation for his work as an abolitionist artist and teacher is missing, possibly stuck in the library’s copy of B. Traven’s novel The Death Ship, quoted by Hunt and a favorite of ours too.

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Dear Avery, You might recall that our paths crossed because of mutual companions in thought and struggle, the kind of intersections that bring us out of the cover of our institutions and into the clearings of community for new thought and action. We had a wonderful meeting with your students where we spoke of the dreams that only ever have the real power to stop the terrible. It was a dreamy day in which we warded off the muting overwhelm of the terror’s recollection with accounts of promise, resistance, wise struggle, and the overturning of the hierarchies of knowledge that help to disguise the terror’s progress. It was a day in which the careful use of word and image, of listening and showing, of sharing what we’ve found and what others have taught us might move us to action. We considered the differences between analyzing problems, fighting them, and nourishing a life beyond and without them, and we handled with hostility and incredulity the disguising of privileges as rights and subordination as moral failure. Pushing against the edges of our own disciplines into which neither of us fit so neatly, we talked of landscapes and laws, prisons and the people who manage those buildings, those imprisoned within them, and the communities in which their families are in so many respects also imprisoned. We spoke of people pushed out of livable spaces and pushed out of political spaces policed as if they were but trespassers. What shall be our relationship to the forgotten? We have asked this together, asked of those whose stories are made lost, hidden, illegible, but need their place to be marked and held nonetheless and the urgent role for research, invention, imaginings, poems, pictures, fictions and translations that give new life to quiet testimonies. In the future I think we’ll talk more about the ethics of this kind of work and the accusations that are often leveled at it, as well as about a recent project of mine in an old abandoned prison in Turkey that might interest you. Now I write to ask if you would be able to provide some words to accompany a map I have made of what’s not there but is so present — a territory without geography or which crosses any geography; bodies of law and concept that build and fortify borders, which cross them and make natural the forms of domination that constitute them, inscribing their order into ordinary law, subjectivity, organization and our daily system of thought. The map, a continuation of the Corrections Documentary Project with which you’re familiar, will appear in the Atlas of Radical Cartography being put together by our friends over at the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. We can confirm at the next daydreamers’ meeting? Thanks. In fellowship, Ashley

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A World Map in which we see circle, square, line, arrow, letter, brown, blue, green, purple, yellow, orange, black. At first, before I can read any of the words, it’s all design and color. I appear to be looking at a diagram of a very large, complicated machine.1 It could be a model for Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin’s crisis energy machine. Isaac is a renegade scientist living in the vast city of New Crobuzon in a world invented by China Miéville.2 Isaac has discovered how to harness the energy of crisis. “It’s in the nature of things to enter crisis, as part of what they are,” Isaac says, glossing Marx. And just in time, too, because New Crobuzon’s police state is threatened by predators it previously controlled. Once used to drug ordinary people’s dreams, the giant moth-like beasts, now freed and on their own, amoral and with only an insatiable desire to feed on those very same nightmares, are far more deadly than organized crime and their former state bosses. A World Map in which we see Ashley Hunt’s conceptual map of the processes and forces of globalization — the name for the shape the capitalist world system began to take in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It turns out to be a crisis machine after all. The map charts the sociopolitical mechanisms by which capitalism has been attempting to solve its most recent large-scale accumulation crises. The world capitalist system is driven or powered by the need to accumulate and monopolize resources, exploitable labor, and consumer markets, always more and more. The accumulation of these means to private wealth is at the same time the accumulation of private, usurped, dis-representative power, always more and more. Thus, the dispossession, appropriation, enclosure, redistribution, privatization, and destruction of public wealth and infrastructure; the undermining of popular power and the dismantling of civil rights; the manufacture and management of servile knowledge; and the imperial expansion of military means and authority. Thus, as always, the arising, the movement, of dissenters, renegades, rebels, deserters, mutineers, abolitionists, resisters, maroons, insurgents, agitators.

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YEARNINGS FOR FRIENDS FEATHERS SCIENCE JUSTICE, Issac and his gang battle the beasts and the state, which by now has violently suppressed the striking Kelltree dockworkers and smashed the underground paper to bits, killing its editor too. They receive needed and important assistance from a strange and dangerous entity, the Weaver, who speaks an attenuated poetic tongue and who recognizes fellow spinners in this anarchist band. Weavers maintain the web of the universe, without beginning or end, complicated, beautiful, torn, the rip widening. THIS WEB THE WEFT IS INTRICATE AND FINE THOUGH TORN. . . . I HAVE BOUNDED UNSEEN UP TANGLING WIRES OF SKYNESS AND SLIPPED MY LEGS SPLAYED WILLY-NILLY ON THE PSYCHIC DUNG OF THE WEB-REAVERS THEY ARE LOW CREATURES AND INELEGANT AND DRAB WHISPER WHAT HAPPENS MR. MAYOR THIS PLACE TREMBLES. . . . INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE FIBRES ARE SPLIT AND BURST AND A TRAIL IS TORN ACROSS THE WARP OF THE WORLDWEB WHERE COLOURS ARE BLED AND WAN I HAVE SLID ACROSS THE SKY BELOW THE SURFACE AND DANCED ALONG THE RENT WITH TEARS OF MISERY AT THE UGLY RUIN WHICH STEMS AND SPREADS AND BEGINS IN THIS PLACE. . . . A World Map in which we see the warp of the weft. As a whole, the map is unreadable. It makes me dizzy. Whether you stand facing it mounted on a wall with its handwritten artisanal script or whether you look at it electronically with its neat typeface, you can’t take it all in at once. You start eye-level and you’re in predatory lending and debt leverage, but you can’t see criminalization disappearance internment dispossession institutionalization. Move to the right, flight dispersion; to the left, division of labor. Look up, frontier space cooptation austerity; look down, theoretical Rights formations of empire. SOCIAL DEATH disintegration state property empowerment subsistence abuse bare life well-being. Exclusion sovereign power declarations ghettoized space deprivation workers grassroots security war war war war war welfare warfare private private private security stability safety development nationalism dispossession deindustrialization enclosure accumulation movement free market refugee camp privilege culture migration subjugation appropriation corporate bodies total ALIENATION. You step back and you see the general shape of the machine but its entangled processes and its concepts recede from view. You lean in and you’re awash in concepts and arrows going somewhere you’re not exactly sure where. Pushed into flight stuck in space. Without beginning or end, cause and effect indistinct. The map gorges on language, is satiated with concepts. It’s hard to add more words: more words shrink in the face of it, mere fodder in the map’s complex of lines and arrows. Falling crisis absorption expansion emptying . . . the map is unreadable as a whole. This is an artifact of the machine itself, not a flaw in the artist’s rendition. It

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might account for why Hunt exhibits the map in public locales, keeping up a running, participatory conversation with the artists, students, and activists who help install it. How else could one map the machine without being consumed by it? It also gives you some idea of what it means to be enclosed in such a rent, the misery, the ugly ruin, the plunder. A World Map in which we see MUST TURN MAKE PATTERNS HERE WITH AMATEURS UNKNOWING ARTISTS TO UNPICK THE CATASTROPHIC TEARING THERE IS BRUTE ASYMMETRY IN THE BLUE VISAGES THAT WILL NOT DO IT CANNOT BE THAT THE RIPPED-UP WEB IS DARNED WITHOUT PATTERNS. A World Map in which we see the catastrophic pattern of abandonment, the coordinated and organized setting aside of people. Abandonment is a core feature of the expansion of a parasitic security/war economy increasingly dependent on confinement and the warehousing of surplus labor, that is, of all the world’s people for whom no room will be or can be made in the so-called free capitalist economy. The abandoned, their anger and their political demands — having had their poverty and resistance to the saturation policing directed interminably toward them criminalized — are removed by the state to remote and fortified prisons or camps where they are made civilly disabled and socially dead. Movement from ghettoized communities to prisons/camps. Movement from abstract though still valued labor to caged threat. The map seeks its pattern in the gains and losses of accumulation by dispossession, a “history of blood and fire,” and sets in its center the twin figures of the prisoner and the refugee. The one stuck in space and the other pushed into flight; the one a ward of the state and the other stateless; the one confined and the other running and hiding to evade capture; the one whose labor is already obsolete, used up, and the other whose labor is cheapened and on the brink but still of some utility. Both homeless and stranded, both spoken of almost exclusively in the idiom of social death, both subject to the abstractions of racialist ontology, both coming together now converging in that terrible place where you’re abandoned but never ever left on your own. Rigorously coordinated and organized, abandonment always involves the state, the police, the army, and the deployment of the deadly police power it abrogates onto itself: when the state abandons you, it never lets you out of its sight. A World Map in which we see outlaws and fugitives. The criminal, the migrant, the refugee, the prisoner: figures of crisis, in most maps they always appear last or not at all. Hunt puts them first, acknowledging their important place in the regimes for accumulating wealth and power, charting the displacements that are increasingly their permanent condition. Both hidden away and spectacularly solicited as objects of tax-

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able fear, those abandoned to the police state and its carceral complex normally appear as giant ghostly abstractions, specters whose intentions are vague and menacing. But the prisoner, migrant, or outlaw poor are not abstractions. They are our brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, foes, strangers, neighbors. They are we who walk the arrows’ routes, who live in the enclosed squares, who trace the shape of the circles. They are we who carry the map’s colors. They are we who tire and get up again and again. They are we who shout and we who keep quiet. They are we who are laughing big tomorrow but weeping yesterday. They are we who are busting out of every part of the machine. A World Map in which we see LOOK AT THE INTRICATE SKEINS AND THREADLINES WE CORRECT WHERE THE DEADLINGS REAVED WE CAN RESHUFFLE AND SPIN AND FIX IT. . . . WIDE COLORFLOW COME AND LET US SLIDE DOWN LONG FISSURES IN THE WORLDWEB WHERE THE RENDER RUNS AND FIND ITS LAIR.

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running away | enclosure | commons | feral trade conversation, popular education presentation, video, foodstuffs, artists miscellany, Agent Directory Date: xxxxx File note: Two separate sets of talking materials were edited and combined for filing. The first consists of a secretly filmed conversation with Natascha Sadr Haghighian, an active and important member of the archive, made for Anton Vidokle’s Night School at the New Museum in New York City. Entitled “Sleepwalking in a Dialectic Picture Puzzle,” the three-day seminar was partially held as mobile conversations in Whole Foods, the very large upscale organic supermarket next door to the museum in the Bowery. Natascha’s original intention was to hold the entire seminar in the supermarket but when they refused to grant permission, the conversations took place there clandestinely, while walking using wireless microphones and a spy camera operated by Angela Anderson. Natascha wanted to understand what it meant that Whole Foods was appropriating for commercial profit a set of radical ecological and political ideas and how these kinds of contradictions impact political agency, especially political agency of an everyday kind. I was interested in radical movements and practices: when, where, and how people oppose and defy capitalist norms and try to live their lives differently from the given terms of order. As she described the conversations, “[We] spoke about subjugated knowledges and the relationship between research and the ability to act . . . theory in everyday life. . . . We considered the apparitional state of realities with no place in the politics of representation as a force of agency and change. As we wandered through sections of the store, a selection of objects and functions served as coordinates for our conversation.” There was some walking involved, as is often the case, and some escape routes were mapped. Natascha sent artist, trader, and founder of the Bureau of Inverse Technology Kate Rich to the archive for participation in her Feral Trade Café in Nottingham shortly thereafter. A request was made to bring provisions for the café’s week-long breakfast, lunch, coffee, tea, and wine service, sourced through Rich’s Feral Trade networks, and to provide a popular educational presentation for local commoners that might provide theoretical grounding for feral trading. Both requests were honored.

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Temporary Feral Trade Café in Newcastle

contextualizing events within political struggles1 One of the main questions you sent me in preparation for our conversation concerned the extent to which radical and subjugated knowledges tend to be reappropriated from their guiding motivations toward other ends — in this case, for corporate profits. We could approach this problem in at least two different ways. One is to focus on what can be seen and what cannot be seen in the deeper meanings of the ecological and the organic while one is shopping or sitting and having coffee or a meal or just browsing in the megastore. Another way is to focus on the history of struggles that have helped to shape the present moment and that are also erased in the store’s bright lights and signage. As you pointed out, Whole Foods is full of quite striking signs addressing the shopper, such as “Power to the People” or “Local Organic Sustainable.” It is also an intensively narrativized place: everywhere there are placards with information and little tales giving a story about how to understand the source of the products on display — their mode of production and distribution — and how to interpret your consumption experience. Michael Pollan called this elaborate interpellation and double fetishization of the commodity “supermarket pastoral.”2 I say “double” because it is not merely that the commodity mystifies or hides the social and labor relations that produced it — it still does that — but it also makes a fetish of the process by which the commodity is made to appear to us as a reflection of our desires. These narratives recognize, to appropriate and marketize, that Whole Foods coexists alongside collective movements and everyday life practices that are far more radical and oriented not toward reproducing capitalist economic and ideological relations but toward creating alternative ones. Whole Foods and other “industrial organic” purveyors coexist alongside the local farmers’ markets, many of which have been around for a long time and are highly valued local institutions. In these markets, sellers are local or small regional growers and they often have strict controls over what can be sold, prohibiting, for example, food produced with genetically modified seed. The farmers’ market represents the local sustainable-scaled sector of the organic food chain and reflects the traditions and values of the organic farming movement as it emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s. At our local market, most of the farmers, fisherfolk, and ranchers would not even like to be called an industry, given that word’s connotation of big business, monopoly, and production for profit. In effect, their movement made possible industrial organic — the Whole Foods model — and what we increasingly see in large supermarkets. My simple point is that industrial organic grows at the same time as local and sustainable production and distribution does too, as explosive battles over seeds occur globally, and as struggles for environmental justice and against environmental racism continue and expand, linking food issues to the politics of waste and garbage. What is

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characteristic of many of these movements — and I’m thinking here especially of the example of the farmers in India and Vandana Shiva’s research foundation and seed banks, Navdanya — is that they model new political-economic formations and processes grounded in complex understandings of knowledge and culture. And they try to create and practice alternative noncapitalist ways of living, eating, and cleaning up after ourselves that are creatively and strategically responsive to the state of social struggles. They may be a good example of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s cultural and intellectual commons or commonwealth. You can see Whole Foods and Navdanya as contradictions — certainly Navdanya is a negation of much of what Whole Foods is and represents. You can also see them as distinct, part of multiple universes that exist on differential and proximate planes. The corporate model is far more dominant than that of indigenous seed banking, so the question then becomes: How do we shift the balance toward common seed banking and away from finance? In these struggles, which are struggles over fundamental values and practices, it’s essential to recognize, as Massimo De Angelis writes, “the simultaneous presence of war and peace, capitalism and communism, enclosures and commons, rat race and community, capital’s measure and measures emerging from horizontal relational processes, value practices geared to accumulation of money and fragmentation of the social body and value practices geared to the living, nurturing and enjoyment of convivial life.”3 If we eliminate ourselves from the terrain of struggle as an already existing outcome, we cede before we even begin.

monopolizing and appropriating subjugated knowledges Yes, ok, let’s go back to the supermarket. The corporate organic supermarket with its elaborate signs, symbols, and figures such as “Rosie the Chicken” create a story, or a set of understandings that exclude more accurate and challenging ones. For example, as you pointed out, there is a sign that reads “Power to the People” but no sign or placard explaining Whole Foods’ antiunion policies or that Whole Foods owes its existence to those individuals who, in 1969, occupied an abandoned plot of land in Berkeley, California, that had been the subject of stalled development plans, called it “People’s Park,” and then started growing food and vegetables to give away for free. The popularization of organic food and healthy eating did not trickle down — it trickled up. For example, the central argument that prompted Frances Moore Lappé to write her best-selling and vegetarian-oriented Diet for a Small Planet, published in 1971, was that hunger, famine, and food insecurity were not caused by overpopulation in the Third World, at the time the reigning eugenicist argument, but by meat-centered food production and distribution methods that benefit the few in the First World. It was her argument that scarcity was created for profit and her claim that we lacked economic

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and political democracy that captured people’s attention, and which she brought forward as she continued her work.4 In other words, what’s hidden behind the “Power to the People” sign and the lifestyle politics Whole Foods promotes is the far more radical critique of what Vandana Shiva calls the “Lifelords”: those companies and individuals whose aim is to privatize and sell the common means of life, including food and water. Behind the lifestyle politics and the signs that announce it is why the mayor of Philadelphia authorized the bombing of the revolutionary group Move in 1978, which killed seven adults and four children, and why the United States government declared Earth First! a terrorist organization. The FBI’s 2002 statement on ecoterrorism, which names the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front as “special interest extremism” and “a serious terrorist threat,” may be misinformed in attributing to these groups an interest in resolving only “specific issues rather than effect widespread political change,” but their historiography is more accurate, correctly noting that the ELF was founded by members of Earth First! The February 2009 Terrorist, Insurgent and Militant Group Logo Recognition Guide, a small handbook produced by the Department of the Army for training purposes, also identifies the Animal Liberation Front, Earth First!, and the Earth Liberation Front.5

dig out the dirt behind the smooth façade any effect? It’s interesting that you use the word dig because I would like to talk about the Diggers; but first I’ll address your point that revealing the hidden facts of the place is a traditional critical approach that’s often ineffective in producing action or change. You’re right, of course, nothing is automatically changed by traditional methods of exposure or by untraditional methods either. What matters is the nature of the encounter with what you call structure and what Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye called succinctly “the thing” and what that encounter prompts or provokes. Here, I think it’s a question of haunting as much as a question of history. Raising the specter of People’s Park, of the bombing of Move, or the political repression of the Diggers not only provides information, it also creates a connection across time and space so we who are living now can work to put an end to the conditions that repeat and thus haunt. The revelation, such as it is, gives notice of the liens that make putting that “Power for the People” sign up in a megastore even possible. I am interested also in time itself, the feeling of it and how it becomes part of the form or skein of social struggle, which I find difficult to express in abstract or academic language. We tend to call this time-form memory and even if these memories of resistance and knowing otherwise are intensely constructed and staged, they nonetheless create a force field that connects through time and space to others, and to a power that is constantly denied and said we do not possess: the power to create life on our own terms and to sustain that creation. This force field

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is a kind of insight or second sight, a real capacity, and it also changes one’s perceptual boundaries and political compass at the same time. It enables being in-difference, which is not an absence of caring but rather the presence of a modality of engagement that is autonomous and creative with regard to what you’re aiming to achieve, and not derivative of what you’re aiming to replace. To put it differently: we reach back to honor those who came before and to bring the struggle forward. As we go forward, we have to make it ours and it will differ from the past, as Angela Y. Davis has beautifully shown us over her long life. The forks in the historical road are always there, it’s a matter of whether we take them or not. To take them, we have to accurately recognize our capabilities, especially those that are denied and discouraged. Many people know how to live without private property and how to build and maintain social relationships not based on exchange value. The crucial question is how invested are you in the system’s lures, promises, and rewards? Adrian Rifkin captures the desiring element at play here perfectly: “Context was, and is now, a matter of projection, the projection of a desire to live decently through our practices, onto a screen of historical values that appear to lead back up to us.”6

yes, hear what the apparitions have to say The Diggers, or the “True Levellers,” as they called themselves, were anarchist, communistic, radically self-governing commoners who appeared among a series of radical groups, including the original Levellers and the Ranters, who were active during the English Civil War in the 1640s and 1650s. You sent me a quotation by Michael Taussig that described the person whose sovereign life beyond utility results in being branded as hysteric. Certainly, to call sexual libertarians “Ranters” (the Diggers were found guilty of being Ranters as well, even though they did not favor sexual liberty) is to brand them as hysterical. The idea of sovereign life beyond utility expresses well what the Diggers aimed to achieve.7 The activities and views of radical seventeenthcentury popular groups during the English Civil War may seem an obscure reference for us today, but as the historian Christopher Hill suggested many years ago, there is a reason for their periodic resuscitation. There were . . . two revolutions in mid-seventeenth-century England. The one which succeeded established the sacred rights of property . . . gave political power to the propertied (sovereignty of Parliament and common law, abolition of prerogative courts), and removed all impediments to the triumph of the ideology of the men of property — the protestant ethic. There was, however, another revolution which never happened, though from time to time it threatened. This might have established communal property, a far wider democracy

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in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic.8

The Diggers were part of this second revolution, part of a fork opened in the historical road, which has been erased from an official English history that celebrates the benefits of capitalist parliamentary democracy over monarchical absolutism. The Diggers were called by that name because they believed in equality of persons — in the leveling of inequalities and indignities between rich and poor and between the powerful and the powerless. And because they formed cooperative communities to prevent the enclosure of common land and the further privatization of property in England, a point to which I’ll return. They would dig up common lands to create growing fields, the produce of which they would give away for free, inviting others to join them. The Diggers were set upon by the police, the state, and the local landowners and eventually their movement was destroyed. The ideas that guided them never disappeared, finding expression today in the strong movements to stop the privatization of water, air, and the little public land that’s left and among those who seek a true economic and political equality. The Diggers produced several declarations and manifestos. It might make a certain point to read from one of them in Whole Foods, where only a faint trace of them can be seen. “A Declaration from the poor oppressed People of England directed to all that call themselves, or are called Lords of Manors, through this Nation; that have begun to cut, or that through fear and covetousness, do intend to cut down the Woods and Trees that grow upon the Commons and Waste Land” was written by Gerrard Winstanley and published in 1649. Gerrard Winstanley called himself a True Leveller, distinguishing himself from John Lilburne and other more moderate Leveller leaders. The Diggers were a much smaller group in the not-very-unified Leveller movement, which historians now understand to have consisted of at least two wings: a moderate constitutional wing led by John Lilburne and John Wildman, and a more radical wing situated in the New Model Army and among the general population, especially in London. Among the more radical Levellers and the Diggers, the fight had been and continued to be for the eradication of private property and of the tyranny of political rule by the wealthy and the powerful. Parliament, the army, and the disposition of the country’s property were all to be fundamentally leveled, with no status distinction between rich and poor, noble and commoner. The declaration is signed with about twenty names; approximately two hundred people occupied Saint George’s Hill immediately before the declaration in Surrey was given: We whose names are subscribed, do in the name of all the poor oppressed people in England, declare unto you that call your selves lords of Manors, and Lords of the Land. . . . That the Earth was not made purposefully for you, to be Lords of it, and we to be your Slaves, Servants, and Beggars; but it was made

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to be a common Livelihood to all, without respect of persons: And that your buying and selling of Land and the Fruits of it, one to another is The Cursed thing, and was brought by War; which hath, and still does establish murder and theft, In the hands of some branches of Mankinde over others, which is the greatest outward burden and unrighteous power. . . . For the power of inclosing land, [privatizing public or common land] and owning Propriety, was brought into the Creation by your Ancestors by the Sword; which first did murder their fellow Creatures, Men, and after plunder or steal away their Land, and left this Land successively to you, their children, And therefore though you did not kill or theeve [although they did!] yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the Sword; and so you justifie the wicked deeds of your Fathers; and that sin of your Fathers should be visited upon the Head of you, and your Children, to the third and fourth Generation and longer too, till your bloody and theeving power be rooted out of the Land. . . . And to prevent your scrupulous Objections, know this, That we Must neither buy nor sell; Money must not any longer . . . be the great god, that hedges in some, and hedges out others; for Money is but part of the Earth; And surely, the Righteous Creator . . . did never ordain That unless some of Mankinde, do not bring that Mineral (Silver or Gold) into their hands, to others of their own kinde, that they should neither be fed, nor clothed; no surely, For this was the project of Tyrant-flesh (which Land-lords are branches of) to set his Image upon Money. And they make this unrighteous Law that none should buy or sell, eat or be clothed, or have any comfortable Livelihood . . . unless they bring this Image stamped upon Gold or Silver onto their hands.9

In 1649, the Diggers denounce concentrated power, private property, and the capitalist money economy, which is not yet dominant but is in the process of becoming so. They clearly saw that violence and war establish so-called free capitalist economies and they will shortly denounce, equally vigorously, the police power of the state and its right to hold to itself a monopoly over the use of force, which Cromwell will establish as the defining feature of parliamentary capitalist democracy. There is another contemporary lesson of a different sort in the history of the New Model Army and the remarkable agitation and ferment of democratic ideas from its “masterless men,” Hill’s term for those displaced by enclosure.10

a coin is a powerful combination of a valuable material carrying an icon Precisely. It’s the turning of that graven image — money — into a deity or a god that they’re trying to warn us against. And so they call first for the common land to be named what it is: a commons, a property to be used and shared, not available for en-

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closure or private appropriation and use. They lost this fight. They also called for true equality — the leveling of status differentials. “Therefore we are resolved to be cheated no longer, nor be held under the slavish fear of you . . . seeing the Earth was made for us as well as for you: And if the Common Land belongs to us who are poor oppressed, surely the woods that grow upon the Commons belong to us likewise: therefore we are resolved to try the uttermost . . . to know whether we shall be free men, or slaves.”11 They lost that fight too.

it’s all there — you just have to listen to it It’s all there, including the analytic core of what’s become the reemergence of the commons as a social goal and political watchword for a profoundly radical environmental politics, where environment is understood in the broadest possible sense, that links a critique of private property, consumerism, and money worship to self-organized democratic governance without war, without policing, and without the tyrannical state.12

abstract concepts never forget how they connect to life Agreed. There are various understandings of the commons, not all of them of this type. Following the tracks of the Diggers and the maroons, commons or commoning as a political framework, however, opens onto a fundamental critique of racial capitalism and how we can get to “our outsides,” as Massimo De Angelis puts it. That’s to say, how we can develop the in-difference to capitalist life forms we’ve been discussing and cultivating and live together autonomously, given the persistence of old and the creation of new enclosures. Here, the commons is not only about institutionalizing discrete types of property ownership, such as open source, or specific forms of economic production, such as cooperatives. And it is certainly not about promoting a return to a traditional rural way of life or one nostalgic for the good old days that never existed. Here, we’re responsible for thinking through the quotidian or everyday life of property relations: the how and what and who of work, knowledge, culture, play, food, water, trash, transport, and so on. Here, we think anew and develop new practices of taking, giving, sharing, directing, ordering, supplying, transporting, building, and so on in a context in which their dominant organization is unsustainable and unlivable for too many, and in a (the same) context in which many of us are already doing it better and more equitably, even without enough support. In this political framework, the commons provokes the immodest question: how should we live? There is a certain absurdity in asking how to live when one already knows, and many of us do, and a

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certain absurdity in having to answer the question over and over again. This condition of knowing what life is for, as the participatory architect Mathias Heyden says it with a certain tone of voice, but having to act like one does not know, of repeating the question again and again can be frustrating and can also lead to it becoming more and more abstract — a kind of condensation that covers up a certain embarrassment or perhaps boredom with the repetition. One must tread carefully here and remain patient with the question, which repeats not because we’re stupid but because of what we’re “up against,” to use De Angelis’s words, and remain patient with the seemingly simple answers we’ve been carrying around and passing down for a very long time.

operational representations Although the commons is not a new idea by any means, the contemporary radical commoning I’m referencing emerged in the early struggles against neoliberalism in the alter-globalization movement. The language of enclosure and commons was most dramatically resurrected by Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) whose struggle in the early 1980s was directly related to the expropriation of the Indigenous communities’ resources — land, oil, electricity, labor — and whose organizational form was communal, developing the traditional Indigenous governance assemblies in original ways. To provide a little background, Mexico has one of the largest Indigenous populations in Latin America. Chiapas, where the Zapatistas emerged, was especially significant because although it is still one of the poorest states in Mexico, it produces over half of Mexico’s hydroelectric energy, close to a quarter of the country’s electricity, and it has enormous oil potential, which combined with that of Guatemala could exceed that of Saudi Arabia. The majority of indigenous people in Mexico live on communal land — ejidal — that had been constitutionally guaranteed to them and to campesinos (peasants) until 1992 when then-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari altered Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution to enable the sale of collectively held land to advance the enclosure acts that were passed in the build-up to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Article 27 was won during the Mexican Revolution and in fact was one of the key demands made by leaders of that revolution, such as Emiliano Zapata. Article 27 declared that the Mexican people were owners of the lands and waters of the country. It led to an agrarian reform to redistribute land held by private landowners in a semi-feudal system and set up a new system of communal ownership that had been extended over the years. The changes that Salinas made allowed for the privatization of communal land holdings and he made them in the name of modernizing Mexico, of bringing the “traditional” Mexican countryside into the orbit of globalized capitalism. The state assigned a market value to ejido lands to allow them to be effectively privatized and to bring Mexico’s property laws into line with its NAFTA partners, the United States and Canada. As you might already know, it was

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at this point in January 1994 that the small, internationally unknown (and dismissed by Mexican urban radicals) Zapatista movement declared war from the Lacandon jungle and began the issuance of a series of communiqués using the language of enclosure and commons. The Zapatistas were especially inspiring to the group of theorists and scholaractivists associated with The Commoner and Midnight Notes, who, in my view, have undertaken some of the most politically and theoretically rich rethinking of the commons and commoning: Massimo De Angelis, George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici, John Holloway, and Peter Linebaugh. The Midnight Notes Collective published a special issue in 1990 on “The New Enclosures” that opened up an important framework for understanding what was happening in this particular phase of capitalist expansion. The “new enclosures” was the name they gave to the wave of primitive accumulation that characterized the regime or phase of capitalist expansion that began in the late 1970s. In using this language and in calling out or signifying the figures of the reorganization in their old names — pauper, street peddler, vagabond, criminal, stranger, rioter — and in calling the alternative to privatization and nationalization they offered the “last Jubilee,” the historical resonance was critically clear. Remember, the term enclosure was used in the sixteenth century to describe the strategies English landlords employed to eliminate communal property and expand their holdings. It initially referred to the abolition of the open field system and the literal fencing-off of the commons, land to which public access and use rights were attached. The first wave of these enclosures in the late 1400s was a response to a crisis in feudal authority from below driven by peasant resistance, uprisings, and a vast heresy movement across Europe, detailed brilliantly by Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch, as well as a crisis in authority from above. In England, the asset stripping of the Church of Rome, which included the taking of church land, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the subordination of the church to the king, threatened to satisfy Henry VIII’s absolutist ambitions and checkmate the nascent bourgeoisie’s power before it had been securely established. Despite the détente between monarchy and landlords, and then later between parliament/bourgeoisie and king following the settlement in the English Civil War, enclosure continued well into the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, England had enclosed or privatized virtually all its older public common lands. As it continued, it became clear that enclosure was not merely a technical operation: it was a means of accumulation whose outcome was wealth acquisition on the one side and dispossession on the other. The appropriation of public and commons land, the commercialization of agriculture, and the establishment of an export-based and imperial economy had tremendous social consequences: not only the destructive transformation of rural village life but the creation of a large mobile poor population turned into vagabonds and beggars. Those who weren’t shipped off to the United States and the Caribbean as indentured servants via a series of Poor Laws

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were turned into wage laborers, “free” now from the fetters of traditional life to enter industrial life. Marx had identified the enclosures as a crucial stage in the creation of industrial capitalism: the mechanism by which a population of people newly displaced, disgraced, and desperate became available to be accumulated as labor power. This original or what he called “primitive” accumulation was, in his view, a singular event. But Marx was wrong in two ways that the new enclosures made abundantly clear. First, he was wrong about the significance of the English enclosures. Though they were extraordinarily destructive for English peasants and of traditional rural life, they were not sufficient for the development of industrial capitalism. Capitalist expansion was impossible without the African slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, a multinational effort. Marx was also wrong to think that once this originary accumulation process was complete, it would not repeat. Primitive accumulation — the originary constitutive violence of capitalism — repeats and is a permanent feature of it. It is not a one-time process. In setting the term on this path of constitutive violence, “primitive” came to refer not only to the barbarism or savagery at the heart of capitalism but also to the centrality of the very division of the world into primitive and civilized, developed and undeveloped that was so important to imperialism and the various forms of neocolonialism that followed it.

all kinds of colonization Social-spatial enclosures have been used to establish control over territories and people for a very long time and continue to do so, a process that typically involves the reorganization of property relations and the destruction of collectively held land, although it can also involve the taking of private property. Enclosures are maintained by physical boundaries — those original fences — by armed and police forces and by social, political, and economic traps, what the geographer Clyde Woods called “trap economics.” Enclosure is also applied to thought and culture and to make an almost unbelievable world sensible, desirable, and justifiable. There are many spatial forms of enclosure, including colonization, slavery, reservations, prisons, ghettos, company towns, gated communities, just as there are many mechanisms by which wealth and human capacity is extracted for private gain. Thus, the examples that Midnight Notes gave in 1990 — structural adjustment produced land loss in Africa courtesy of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; homelessness in the United States in response to debt defaults; massive displacement and migration in China following the opening of China to capitalist development — had their histories, known to some and not others. Histories that continued to unfold as enclosure became a sophisticated managerial and military tool for further extractions, for policing and incarcerating surplus poor people of color in the

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United States and unwanted refugees and migrants in Europe, for segregating and preventing physical and social movement in what Mike Davis called the coming “planet of slums,” and for innovations in the ongoing counterinsurgency laboratories the United States and Israel were operating in Iraq and in Palestine, respectively. Similarly, the general patterns they identified — eliminating public or communal control over the means of subsistence; seizing or mortgaging land for debt; intensifying insecurity and precarity and thus mobility of labor; the collapse of functioning compromise systems, such as capitalist democracy; the spiraling mutation of human beings and human habitats — have remained operative and multiplied since then. Woods describes the destruction and dispossession central to the trap economics of neoliberalism as “asset stripping the public commons.”13 Asset stripping, whose history he traces to the destruction of the English commons, refers to selling or moving businesses to maximize short-term profits, to transferring state assets to private interests, to the dismantling of the welfare state and the reduction or elimination of public benefits, such as health care and education. It refers to the stripping of the environment and the stripping of people of their rights and powers. In sum, Woods writes: “A key pillar of neoliberalism . . . it refers to a new state philosophy and a practice of global wealth redistribution that are based, among other things, on the privatization of publicly held assets and the deregulation of corporate practices.”14 Asset stripping is a kind of social cannibalism or state-sponsored dispossession connected to what we’ve called abandonment. Woods’s model for asset stripping was post-Katrina New Orleans where assets were stripped from “racially enclosed communities,” forming a relatively direct line from the plantation as a paradigmatic “asset stripping enclosure institution” to the destruction of perfectly good public housing for gentrified redevelopment in New Orleans. In fact, Woods argues that “the plantation social-economic model is the neoliberal ideal,” thereby producing the new nomenclature: “neoplantation/neoliberalism.” Woods’s keen analysis shows how asset stripping and enclosure describe well the interconnected process by which poor people of color — mostly black in New Orleans — are stripped of education, housing, food, work, health, public social benefits, civil rights, and civility. What the example of New Orleans shows and what the Diggers several hundred years earlier also understood is that enclosure is not just about land or water or even labor in a simple sense, but about the broader array of resources and capacities being taken, contained, fenced in, and transformed into uses counter to humane purposes. It may start with land, but it does not end there nor is enclosure restricted to property in a narrowly defined sense.15

necessary changes in this society what the language should be The renewed call to the commons has been a response to these extensive and extreme forms of privation and deprivation. In The Beginning of History, which makes

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a passionate case for working out the alternative to capitalist life in the “doing,” Massimo De Angelis, the editor of The Commoner, writes: “Capital generates itself through enclosures, while subjects in struggle generate themselves through commons. Hence ‘revolution’ is not struggling for commons but through commons, not for dignity, but through dignity. . . . Life despite capitalism, as a constituent process, not after capitalism, as a constituted future state of things.”16 The point here is an important one. Every “mode of doing,” De Angelis notes, has a “social character” or a commons, the question is what mode of sociality predominates. In capitalist societies, we are “pitted against” one another and money is our common currency, controlling and commanding us. “This upside down world,” De Angelis writes, “the other side of which is generally analyzed in terms of commodity fetishism, alienation, and abstract labor, is at the same time a world in which the relations between commons and communities are disjointed, because for capital what is common (the product of social production) can only appear as private, as appropriable, as the means of accumulation, as the condition for some . . . to take advantage of other[s].”17 Life despite capitalism organized through commons joined in community, a constituent process, in which we are not enclosed by values and modes of being together based on money and exchange values, status hierarchies, violence and force, alienation, racialization, and discipline to externally imposed standards — these are the broad terms for the autonomy or being in-difference that we always instantiate at livable scales.18

talking about the end of capitalism It’s time to say something about Feral Trade which, among other things, is a good example of the détournement or rerouting of the process De Angelis describes since rather than capital appropriating what is common to accumulate private wealth, Feral Trade involves commoners gathering foodstuff based not on exchange value but on their community networks and individual “carrying power.” Feral Trade, conceived and managed by artist Kate Rich, is a grocery business that imports and trades goods outside of commercial import/export systems. Friends, acquaintances, and colleagues collect items and carry them in their baggage, the “main unit of mobility.” As she describes it, “freight methods include visiting lecturer, film transport, polar expedition, long distance romance, custody battle, vacation, residency travel,” and more.19 Feral Trade first started in 2003 when Rich delivered a “socially networked supply” of thirty kilograms of coffee directly from a farmer’s cooperative in El Salvador to Bristol that was arranged entirely by e-mail, text messaging, and mutual acquaintances, “harnessing the surplus freight potential of existing travel.” Out of this first trade, Feral Trade has expanded or “permanently drifted” into an “underground freight network with trade routes across the UK, Europe, Middle East, Asia and the Americas.” Coffee is still a main component of the trade, which now includes tea, olive oil, salt, chocolate, mescal, what’s needed to make Cube-Cola, an open source cola Rich produces, “tur-

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meric, grappa, electric rice cookers and wild grown antidepressants: goods which if not strictly necessities are still entangled in the needs of the networks, both cultural and social.” A shipment might run like this: Right now I am shipping 6 bags of green tea from Fujian province to MoMA in New York, via around 5 other institutions and private homes in China, UK and USA, which are acting as depots or transit points. Another pack of tea arrived from India to my flat in Bristol and then toured the Lake District before passing back through my flat and departing for Heathrow Airport, where it had touched down from India weeks before, to fly to New York in someone else’s baggage. Both these shipments were actually super-efficient. The products got delivered to their exact destinations, they were enjoying . . . fruitful passage, hitchhiking on existing travel or at the most diverting their couriers a couple of blocks, an efficiency along completely different lines than streamlined or containerized cargo.

Feral Trade is obviously not free trade, that euphemism for the deregulation of financial markets and social states and the extension of debt traps to poor countries offered in the name of self-discipline and structural adjustment. Neither is it Fair Trade, which despite its initial promise of linking producer independence, environmental sustainability, and dietary health, has become embroiled in the kinds of bureaucratic regulatory processes of certification and control that benefit the industrial organic sector and large corporate buyers and source producers, and in relation to which Feral Trade is completely other. Here’s Rich’s description of how Feral Trade differs from Fair Trade. She’s in conversation with Matthew Fuller for Wired: MF: The relation to the commodities and goods circulated is particular in experiential terms. These things are lugged, smelled, they leak sometimes. They have heft, they are packed in with clothes that perhaps take on their aroma. Couriers get a sense of the sheer mass of stuff, the physicality of the matter that is being hauled around the planet in ways that are . . . phenomenal, sensual, annoying or exhausting, and ecological. KR: It’s commodity trading as supermaterial, carried out at the scale of the human. The work factor is part of the promise of Feral Trade. Unlike Fair Trade, which invites you to view a photo of a happy farmer on the package as your means of participation in trade justice, with Feral Trade you actually have to throw your body in and participate in the manual activity of lugging oil cans or agave bottles through airport lounges. Which people are surprisingly happy to do.

The participatory and poaching element is key in making visible and tactile the normally invisible and distant crisscrossing routes and networks that move goods, people, information, and ideas, whether these be legal commercial trade routes, illegal commercial trade routes, passenger routes, inspection routes, tax collection routes,

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banking and tribute routes, military routes, postal routes, nomadic routes, migrant routes, pilgrimage routes, pirate raiding routes, or political escape routes. The participatory and poaching element is key also in the way Feral Trade Courier, the online live shipping database for the movement of feral trade, treats the courier system as a system of capillary transport lines “without any actual infrastructure,” by which Rich means “no wages, uniforms, fleet, schedules, forms to fill out (other than the online courier report which is entirely voluntary and subjective), warehouses, scripts or protocols aside from normal social ones.” Of course, there is an infrastructure and it has a resemblance to or a resonance with both the US nineteenth-century antislavery underground railroad and the twentieth-century sanctuary solidarity railroad that assisted Central Americans fleeing political persecution in the crucial role of individuals creating and maintaining safe passage through circuitous routes that were known and also clandestine. The waybills reflect the fugitivity of off-market freight systems and perhaps more important the trade as a set of social transactions. Feral Trade Courier includes waybills that describe and archive the transit of each object or shipment. They are quite unlike ordinary waybills in that they combine detailed logistical information on the movement of object/shipment — including dates, times, locations, payments, senders, receivers, maps, quantities, and so on — with anything else the couriers would like to add, which includes photographs, stories, complaints, problems, disasters averted, and messages to other couriers and to Kate. They remind me of the route maps the bus drivers in the West Bank collectively drew and annotated for Maryam Griffin’s wonderful study of mobility and movement in the West Bank in which there is no route without the culture of cooperation that makes a system out of the precariousness of road and journey. Each Feral Trade Courier waybill constitutes a collective biography of the diasporic object/shipment told in fragments by its various couriers who in the process appear only as temporary agents of the process being described and archived. A “riot of data” is how Rich describes them, which I take to mean that the waybill invents a new language for a trading system that in being feral moves on its own poached shady tracks against the savage currents of the free trade market.

the contradictions of theory in struggles Kate’s project sets me thinking about trade and supply routes, about what a history of radical traders and trading routes would look like and how it would crisscross the history of piracy, radical sailors, and longshoremen, while also including what women carry around from place to place smuggled in their handbags. We’re in Newcastle and I pause to ask the audience to tell me more about the keelmen, those highly skilled boatmen who moved coal from the riverside to the ships on the River Tyne and whose reputation for militancy, independence, and fighting the navy who seemed always to be trying

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to capture and press them into service preceded them. But that conversation will have to wait for another time. Rich is particularly interested in “the load-bearing capacity of the network — how can it handle materials?— along with an interest in the agency of things, which effectively hands off subjectivity to the travelling grocery object.” It is on that note that I conclude with a passage from a magnificent novel that situates the agency of things in the political context with which I began, in which at the archive we always begin again, in which going feral becomes another vocabulary for running away, sometimes in place, sometimes across great distances, into another form of life. The novel is entitled Iron Council; it is the third novel in China Miéville’s science fiction/fantasy series about the city-state New Crobuzon, after Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Iron Council is about the building of a railroad across a desert wilderness, which New Crobuzon initiates in large part to wage an expansionist war. At its center is the train, the great symbol of the nineteenth century industrial revolution. Three individuals — Judah, a scout for the railroad, Ann-Hari, a prostitute working along the railway lines and towns, and Uzman, a slave (known as a Remade who has become FRemade) — work together to lead a revolution in which the railroad workers get rid of their bosses, free the Remade slaves, and hijack the train. They face a fundamental question of what to do with the train when the railroad police are at their heels. An argument and a debate ensues between Ann-Hari and Uzman. Uzman wants to stay and fight. Ann-Hari wants them to go far beyond the borders they know. Uzman tells them that whichever way they see it, whatever they claim to themselves, Ann-Hari is telling them to run. That’s not the answer. . . . —Ain’t running, Ann-Hari says. —We’re done here. We’re something new. —It’s running, he says. —Utopian. —It’s something new. We’re something new, she says, and Uzman shakes his head. —This is running, he says.20 ... She points into the darkness of the tunnel where the work continues. . . . We unrolled history. We made history. We cast history in iron and the train shat it out behind it. Now we’ve ploughed that up. We’ll go on, and we’ll take our history with us. Remake. It’s all our wealth, its everything, it’s all we have. We’ll take it.21

The strikers of the Iron Council join her and Miéville writes: Their wealth and history is embedded in the train. They are a town moving. It is their moment in iron and grease. They control it. Iron Council. The motion of the council begins. It is the same motion that has brought them so far. . . . It

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is exactly the same motion, and it is utterly new. The urgency is drunken. The pace faster. . . . As the rails come clear, ground clean by weight of the train, the men and women take them up again. . . . Miles of track, reused, reused, it is the train’s future and its present, and it emerges a fraction more scarred as history and is hauled up again and becomes another future. The train carries its track with it, picking it up and laying it down: a sliver, a moment of railroad, . . . leaving only its footprint. . . . The perpetual train deviates, west-northeast. Into wilderness where there is nothing, a new unmapped place. The train is going feral. . . . The perpetual train has gone wild. The iron council is renegade.22

You’ll have to read the novel to find out what happens to the Iron Council. The last words of the novel, which are not as transparent as they might seem, read: We come back again, again, again. Years might pass and we will tell the story of the Iron Council and how it was made, how it made itself and went, and how it came back, and is coming, is still coming. Women and men cut a line across the dirtland and dragged history out and back across the world. They are still with shouts setting their mouths and we usher them in. They are coming out of the trenches of rock toward the brick shadows. They are always coming.23

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running away | nonparticipation | the yardsticks | strikers rebels escape artists internal report, photograph of wall Date: xxxxx File note: It goes without saying that commoning and noncapitalist economic relations are crucial to everyone associated with the archive and to the work of the archive itself, which is based on cooperation and income sharing. Because it goes without saying, it’s completely taken for granted and usually discussed in practical terms, the most urgent one being how to source income and housing while running away and developing a practice of nonparticipation. The limits of running away or the boundaries of how far one can run are clearly marked in this formulation and in the race-classgender experience of it, notwithstanding the fact that no one runs alone and the larger the collective of runaways and deserters the greater the distance that can be covered, or, the more organs for the alternative that can be grown. Running away, living apart, squatting, commoning, feral trading, bartering, self-managed currencies, human, debt, labor, knowledge strikes, boycott, divestment, nonpolicing, throwing your shoe at an occupying president — the ways of nonparticipation are many. Indeed, the range of actions, thoughts, inactions, and unthoughts that might be said to be instances or examples or forms of nonparticipation in the given order of things is large and varied and difficult to summarize simply. To say that nonparticipation always entails participating in one way or another in something else is decidedly unhelpful, if accurate in the epistemologically technical sense and a good reminder that the yardsticks matter a great deal, perhaps are all that matter. The principle of communal luxury doesn’t unify the diversity but it does bring it closer together, at least providing an esprit de corps. This file includes two short reports for internal use, one failing to classify types of nonparticipation and the other on the principle of communal luxury. It also includes a somewhat random selection of quotations that were stuck up on a wall near to where students sit and study. All the timely notices for events, housing, borrowing things such as books or cooking pots, etc., have been removed with the exception of the notice from Droits Devant!! for their regulars to join with the new Nuits Debout assemblies if they can get there and the page taken from Critical Resistance’s report on the Oakland Power projects since people still needed those.

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Hawthorn Archives To: undisclosed list Subject: nonparticipation ____________________________________________________________________ Hello to everyone on the potential classification project. Here are my thoughts after the first preliminary meeting, bringing newcomers up to speed and reporting back on the assignment I was given. We can discuss at the next meeting, along with any other reports circulated. (Will permanent war deserters send a word on their recent successful deployments to the First Nations?) The request from the Museum of Non Participation, which I’ve already dealt with, raised again the question of what nonparticipation is, what we mean by it, what is its relationship to other adjacent or even allied concepts, such as escape, running away, marronage, fugitivity and abolition, and whether in fact we do have a considerable collection of materials on it. Once again, the suggestion was made that there might be some utility in trying to prepare a clear definition that could then be used to classify existing activities and materials more carefully and to encourage further collaborations, deposits, projects and so on. My understanding is we agreed that we didn’t need or want a clear definition, that it wasn’t our job to prepare one for others and that we had other ways of reaching out to friends, comrades, and possible collaborators. But the matter wasn’t settled and a few of us were asked to delve a little further into specific questions, in my case, to try to distinguish between types of nonparticipation that embody a logic of protest and those that don’t, this subject reflecting the upsurge in recent arrivals to the archive. Unfortunately, as soon as you start to try to hold this distinction steady to explain it, it begins to fall apart. At first, it seems clear that forms of nonparticipation that embody a logic of protest are actions, almost always used in combination with other activities, whose purpose is to force a governing, corporate, judicial, or patriarchal authority to do something it has thus far refused to do: stop waging war, pay higher wages, hire better people, convict a criminal, release a criminal, control the police, build houses, restrain greedy landlords, permit a contact visit, stop building prisons, change, modify, eliminate a law, share power, stop deporting people without visas, govern responsibly, end an occupation, provide free healthcare, redistribute money, tell the truth, be fair, be inclusive of difference and dissent, fix the train tracks, regulate banks, open free schools, pay respect, etc. Then it becomes necessary to admit as protest actions those that don’t want to make clear demands to the authorities that nonetheless take form or shape as collective visible mobilization in public places, such as the various Occupy encampments; public actions with unusual forms, such as the 1969 hex thrown on the stock market by a faction of the women’s liberation movement; various collective witnessing, such as Witness Against Torture and on and on into a mess of generalizations, qualifications, exclusions, insults, and errors. Types of nonparticipation that do not embody a protest logic are even trickier to describe because they’re often not calling attention to themselves and since they could have once embod-

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ied such a logic but may no longer do so. Take, for example, Graciela Carnevale who was part of the Rosario Avant-Garde Art Group (Grupo de Arte de Vanguardia de Rosario) active in Argentina in the mid 1960s. The collective organized several highly politicized audience interactive events, including in 1968 the famous exhibition Tucumán Arde (Tucumán is Burning), until 1969, when to protest state censorship and repression they went silent and abandoned art. Tucumán, in the north of Argentina, was historically a site of intense labor struggles over sugar, until many of the mills were closed in the late 1960s when Onganía’s government cut price supports that created widespread immiseration. At the time of the exhibition, the covert urban counterinsurgency war had already begun and would lead to the 1974 siege and slaughter in the “holy war” waged by Isabel Perón’s army against the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo. Graciela Carnevale did not return to working as an artist until the 1990s, although she did maintain over that time at some danger to herself the group’s archive. After twenty years, a refusal to work, in this case to make art, is no longer a protest, but a way of living. Or, take the example of Can Masdeu, the self-sustaining commune on the outskirts of Barcelona who bake bread on Fridays. When the abandoned leper hospital was initially squatted by the Barcelona activists and neighboring elderly gardeners in 2001, they considered the reoccupation as a political act of withdrawal from the real estate and privatization politics of the city. Today, their complex collective life cannot be adequately described as protest even though they continue to participate in direct actions nor as an instrument for any political ends other than the noncapitalist life they are leading. Here, means and ends are deeply and satisfactorily intertwined and the relational negativity of the “non” irrelevant or inoperative. We could include also the important work being done to teach people in communities enclosed by the police how not to call them for help and to provide operating in-time infrastructure alternatives, a good example of building in-difference from the ground up. Here, too, we see the long history of protest against police power in black communities especially in the United States and the United Kingdom as an always present and available background for direct action or nonparticipating action as needed. And then, there are types of nonparticipation that do not embody a logic of protest but might do so in the future or for a specific moment or if provoked. It’s worth remembering that nonparticipation or partial nonparticipation is a condition imposed on millions of people in the world who do not participate in many organized forms of social, economic, political, and cultural life because they are excluded from them. These individuals, their families, and their communities fend for themselves along the escape routes and autonomous zones they control and inhabit. They build their own “illegal” housing, create their own “illegal” economies, often grow, make or scavenge their own “illegal” food and clothing, maintain their own “illegal” transportation systems, and school their own “truant” children. They have their own lawyers, dispute resolution mechanisms to avoid the police, teachers, engineers, plumbers, bankers, drivers, cooks, day care directors, journalists, musicians and so on. They poach on existing institutions and infrastructures, engage in feral trade, depend on permanent and temporary social, cultural, religious and familial networks as needed, and refuse to share or open projects to everyone all the time. It is not an easy life by any means (a crucial reality that differentiates these social net-

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works from the “utopian planning” and “shadow state” Jonathan Michael Feldman proposes). But, the responses by the world’s majority to being abandoned by the state — the escapes — certainly constitute a political strategy in the general sense. In Life as Politics, Asef Bayat calls “social nonmovements” these “collective endeavors of millions of noncollective actors, carried out in the main squares, back streets, courthouses, or communities” often without specifically articulated ideologies or leaders (p. ix). The way of life of the urban dispossessed, what Bayat calls the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” is an alternative to revolution, insurrection, and organized social movement reform when these are unavailable, too dangerous, or undesirable. Quiet encroachment “describes the silent, protracted, but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertied, powerful or the public, in order to survive and improve their lives” (p. 56). By survive and improve their lives, Bayat means acquiring autonomy and redistributing social goods, the two main goals of nonmovement movements. Unlike protest, quiet encroachment is oriented toward immediate “redress” (p. 59), by which he means that rather than mobilize publicly and visibly to pressure authorities to meet demands, quiet encroachment practices its claims. In other words, nonmovement movements tend to build houses rather than attend meetings to strategize demanding for housing, except or until meetings become necessary, a point never predictable in advance. And this is also Bayat’s point. Nonmovement movements go along like this and then, often it seems to the outsider by surprise, mobilize themselves in more conventional political terms of protest, the preparation for which becoming visible, sometimes even to participants only at the moment of enunciation. This is preparation as we’ve used the term at the archive: “Actual (even though quiet and individualized) defiance by a large number of people implies that a massive societal mobilization is already under way” (p. 24). When patience in daily struggles reaches its limit, when something out there (like war, interstate conflict, a new government) impinges in ways it hadn’t before, when something closer in makes people want to scream (like another police killing), when networks get enlarged and solidarities are extended (like the strikes by the unions seem relevant again) whenever whatever . . . then nonmovements’s oppositionality can be activated in a different way, more public, more like protest. But here, it is important, crucial, not to measure quiet encroachment by whether it turns into or is a step toward collective mobilization as that is defined by the US-European post-World War II social movement model. That’s not the standard by which we judge. For us, nonparticipation as a means to a better way of living is what’s crucial. The question for us is what is required to stop appealing to the system itself for redress, to stop believing the forces that are killing you can/will save you? What is required for being ready and available at a moment’s notice to live autonomously from the system one wants to abolish? Nonparticipation to achieve participation in the given terms of order is not our goal although as everyone here always insists, thoughtfulness is necessary to assess when withdrawal and separation is an abdication of a responsibility to struggle — merely a reaction — and when it is the only thing possible. The case of prisoners is obviously relevant and important since they are the other large group of people systematically and legally denied participation in social, political, and

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economic life. Living in prison — in a cage — requires special skills, difficult to acquire, that are always nonparticipatory: it’s not possible to live in there on their terms, which is why prisoner protests often take the form they do — hunger strikes, self-immolation, sewing one’s lips closed as they have been doing for years in the offshore immigration prisons Australia runs. You can begin to see why the experiences of people for whom protest and existential liberalism are rarely viable options have extremely important lessons to teach us. By existential liberalism, I mean people for whom protest or critical exposé are important to their identity and their weekend plans but not a necessity because if the demands aren’t met it really doesn’t matter, doesn’t negatively impact their lives or change anything they’re doing or planning on doing. There’s a lot of work involved in living independently from the system you hate or that hates you and it requires mindfulness and divestment. I propose that we not get too involved in parsing the term nonparticipation except in so far as it might help us keep track of those moments and practices in which there is an active ongoing starting again “all at once, as if born of some underground region of civilization,” as if a counter-world. Let’s return to the radical traditions and the vocabulary closest to us, to running away and the preparation for it, to fugitivity, and to abolition as the watchword or keyword for a “sense of urgency, relevance, or potential for the future.” Abolition has acquired “accretions” of meaning over time since it named the movement to abolish the transatlantic slave trade. As Robert Fanuzzi confirms, these “accretions remind us that ‘abolition,’ the byword for finality, is at bottom the symbol for urgent democratic social and political change that has not yet occurred.”

Hawthorn Archives To: undisclosed list Subject: the yardsticks _____________________________________________________________________ Hello. For the upcoming meeting, a brief report on the idea of communal luxury. DB reminded us that at the end of the day what matters is that “we have to be clear about the yardsticks we are applying,” a phrase that sounded like one of his usual malapropisms, but which he was quoting. In a set of conversations clearly never meant to be made public (Greta Adorno took notes and it’s her transcription that was published) that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had in 1956 to discuss the possibility of writing a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto, Adorno says: “How would it be if we were to formulate some guiding political principles today?” Horkheimer replies: “If we are to present ourselves with such ambitions, we have to be clear about the yardsticks we are applying, otherwise Marx will keep reappearing at the seams. We want the preservation for the future of everything that has been achieved in America today, such as the reliability of the legal system, the drugstores, etc. This must be made

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quite clear whenever we speak about such matters.” Adorno assents, provided “That includes getting rid of tv programmes when they are rubbish.” This made everybody laugh and start talking at once since Marx only ever appears on the seams here, we are abolishing the whole criminal injustice system, we have our own drug suppliers, we are not happy with the “etc.” and think trashy tv programs are the least of our problems. In the call to the 2015 Annual American Studies Association Annual Meeting, written by the Association’s then President David Roediger, whose theme was “The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance,” two meanings of misery are given. In the first misery refers to the onto-epistemological-affective experience of what Roediger calls “material want,” understood to be produced by the stratifications and depredations of racial capitalism and its attendant political orders. This is the most common use of the social term in which misery conjures a situation of unrelenting deprivation and unhappiness. Roediger uses the word heartache. Heartache or heartbreak, bleak sadness hardened to a bitter or weepy edge, one lives with a sense of being trapped, confined, crushed under the weight of conditions you can’t change or that seem impossible to lift; the bonds of necessity making it impossible to get any breathing room. Think of Dickens’s descriptions of meeting the men and women kept in solitary confinement at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia in his 1843 travelogue American Notes with their trembling hands, broken hearts, and “lonely years.” Or remember Toni Morrison’s description in The Bluest Eye, one of the most powerful representations of the misery whiteness brings in its wake, of the furniture on which young Pecola’s life rests: “conceived, manufactured, shipped, and sold,” Morrison wrote, “in various states of thoughtlessness, greed, and indifference” (p. 35). Here, misery conjures an existential condition of deprivation and containment perhaps more powerfully than terms like exploitation or oppression, despite the latter’s more obvious attribution of external systematic causality, because misery seems so personal, so much what happens to a living breathing person; seems also so readable off the body and immune to quantification and measurement by technocratic specialists. A broken heart, a hopeless soul, a head hung low: when confronted, one is forced to ask whose lives are miserable, in what specific ways, and most importantly, why? The second notion of misery referenced in the call is “miserablism,” which Roediger attributes to the surrealist movement, its most ambitious theorist he says, and which is characteristic of social formations themselves, not individuals or groups per se. The most concise definition of what I presume Roediger means to get at here is by the contemporary radio pirate and anarchist Ron Sakolsky in “Anarcho-Surrealist Poetics,” a chapter of his book Creating Anarchy: “Miserablism is a system that produces misery and then rationalizes it by perpetuating the idea that such misery comprises the only possible reality.” Roediger mentions that the artist André Breton used the word miserablist and the reason why is because it had been used before in a context that Breton would have been familiar with and which Kristin Ross helps makes relevant for us in Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (as does Adrian Rifkin in an earlier 1987 and later 2016 work). That context is the Paris Commune of 1871, in which,

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you will remember, for seventy-two days, from March 18 to May 28, “a worker-led insurrection transformed the city of Paris into an autonomous Commune and set about improvising the free organization of its social life according to principles of association and cooperation” (p. 9). What’s important about the Commune for our purposes here is not so much the aspect of insurrection itself, although the role of the radical and antiauthoritarian Garde Nationale and their mutinous actions has important lessons for today that have not been fully explored, including by Ross. But that’s another story. The Commune, as participant and resident historian Arthur Arnould described it, was “something MORE and something OTHER than an uprising” (p. 36). That something else Ross describes as “a set of dismantling acts directed at the state bureaucracy and performed by ordinary men and women” (p. 65). The Commune’s dismantling acts were grounded in a diagnostic or analytic principle articulated by the egalitarian teacher Joseph Jacotot (and later by Lauryn Hill) — everything is in everything — and affirmed a politics and a principle that Ross entitles her book: “communal luxury.” (Rancìere’s book on Jacotot is in the library, for those interested.) The phrase “communal luxury” first appeared in the April 1871 Federation of Artists’ Manifesto, the handiwork of poet, fabric designer, and radical teacher Eugène Pottier, who most famously wrote L’Internationale and died penniless like his box-maker father. The key statement from the manifesto reads: “We will work cooperatively towards our regeneration, the birth of communal luxury, future splendors and the Universal Republic” (p. 65). Communal luxury is obviously neither capitalist nor bourgeois extravagance nor is it what Ross calls “utilitarian.” Although the term emerged out of the struggles by artists and art educators, it’s not restricted to narrowly construed aesthetic contexts or public art projects nor is it a synonym for beauty. The artists themselves, in close collaboration with teachers and other intellectuals, are involved in their own dismantling acts. As anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus pointedly put it: “Ah, if the painters and sculptors [and we can add the educators too] were free, there would be no need for them to shut themselves up in Salons. . . . They would burn all the old barracks of the time of misery in an immense fire of joy, and I imagine that in the museums of works to be preserved, they would not leave very much of the pretended artistic work of our time” (p. 92). Communal luxury is meant to be, and it’s the strength of Ross’s book that she uses it this way, the politicaleconomic principle for “a new humanity, made up of free and equal companions,” to quote Reclus again, “oblivious to the existence of old boundaries, helping each other in peace from one end of the world to the other” (p. 14). Communal luxury is the principle/infrastructure that replaces “the old barracks of the time of misery.” Misery and luxury are well-chosen terms. As Ross explains, “At the moment in mid-April when the manifesto was composed, the phrase served to expressly counteract and defy the abject ‘misérablisme’ of Versaillais depictions of Parisian life under the Commune” (p. 100). The communards were the subject of a relentless propaganda campaign by the state, the army, and the church, which had two main goals. The first was to immediately disrupt efforts by the urban Parisians to reach out to the traditionally conservative rural peasants and small farmers by convincing them that “the Commune, were it not defeated, would seize their land and divide

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it up among themselves” (p. 100). “Partageux,” the communards were called as an epithet, the term meaning a person who believes in the equitable distribution of wealth, land, and property and deriving from the French verb partager, to share. The second broader goal of these depictions was to “create, more generally, the certainty that sharing could only mean the sharing of misery” (p. 100). The charge that the communards were offering only a life of shared poverty and unhappiness while only a Christian capitalist state with a command and control central army could provide a life of wealth and well-being bore repeating since it obviously strained the truth of working people’s experience. And indeed, it had most recently been rehearsed in the wave of militancy in France and among the Chartists in England in the 1830s and 1840s, as well as three hundred years earlier against those, many peasants themselves, in revolt against enclosure, privatization, and hierarchical political authority. Not to put too fine a point on it, as Ross points out, four years after the Commune was destroyed, the French state was condemning communal property in colonized Algeria in the same terms (p. 134). The accusation is a familiar one, still today, and then as now it had powerful traction. Paris had been under a brutal siege by the Germans for four months. Food was scarce, including bread, and hunger widespread. The bakers had refused to bake at night until working conditions improved and the shoemakers, because they prided themselves on their independence and radicalism as everyone at the archive learns as a child, refused for the duration to fix anybody’s shoes unless persuaded it was essential. A large number of the city’s workers were completely involved in self-governing not working for others. The city’s routes of movement were disrupted, cut off by blockades everywhere, and surrounded by the three armies at play: the Prussians, the radical national guard — the army of the Commune — and the remnant of the French regular Army camped outside the city at Versailles. Schooling was in disarray because of the participation of so many teachers, especially women, in the new autonomous government. And so on. This was the heady complex and shifting context in which the artists had the audacity to counter the propaganda of “misérablisme” with the idea of communal luxury. As Ross writes: “ ‘Communal luxury’ countered any notion of the sharing of misery with a distinctly different kind of world: one where everyone, instead, would have his or her share of the best” (p. 100). The refusal to accept the higher authority of the state, the church and the Army; the refusal to participate in the miserablist terms of life on offer; the daring creation, without anyone’s permission but their own, of a self-governing noncapitalist city; and the insistence not only that ordinary women and men knew what was best for themselves but that they also deserved the best, a best reaching for its own more equitable and more free terms. The audacity of the experiment and its assertions in practice no doubt accounted for the brutality and the severity of its suppression, in which its participants were massacred, imprisoned or banished from France, in some cases permanently. The Commune was a short-lived government but the political principle or “imaginary” of communal luxury remains as a counterpoint to the misery produced by “senseless luxury,” as

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William Morris called capitalist wealth, which never exists without enslavement of one sort or another. Everything is in everything. Today, this diagnostic principle seems very familiar to critical scholars as intersectionality, even if it is too often shorn of its original attachment to the ideal of equality and the abolition of private wealth, without which as Jacotot insisted, there could never be any true emancipation. What might it mean to re-familiarize ourselves with the political principle of communal luxury? It might give to the very old demand “we want more” — memorably represented in Peter Watkin’s six-hour experimental film La Commune (Paris 1871) and later in Teresa Konechne’s stunning student-produced film This Black Soil about the best of everything the black residents of Bayview, Virginia, wanted once they had successfully prevented the state from putting a prison in their small community — a very different kind of quality or value, one rooted in solidarity and egalitarianism rather than in individual ambition or aggrandizement and heartbreaking misery. Communal luxury: a good yardstick to apply.

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running away | marronage | Brazil | Maurits Script (2006) annotations, script, notes, pages copied from books, bad copies of paintings and maps, entrance ticket to Mauritshuis, artists miscellany Date: xxxxx File note: The file consists of a cut-up copy of the written script for Maurits Script (noted as MS) attached to which is a jumble of notes, pages copied from books and articles, and poorly reproduced images of paintings, drawings, tables, maps, and film stills. The notes, images, and extracts from various texts respond to, as annotations, the written script for artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s two-channel video work filmed in the Golden Room of the Mauritshuis, focused on the brief period of Dutch colonization in northeastern Brazil under the governorship of Johan Maurits van Nassau (1637–44). The state of the file suggests a work-in-progress that was never finished. It is not clear who prepared these materials and for what purpose. There is no correspondence to or from van Oldenborgh or Emily Pethick, who wrote the introduction to the published script. Nor is there any indication that the compiler of these annotations ever saw the finished work as exhibited; no mention is made of the second channel and I have found no analysis of the film as a work of art in the archive. Given the importance of the maroons to our archive, I suspect that the last items discussed would have been the starting point for a more coherent text, if that was intended, but I cannot say for certain. The best clue as to the file’s intellectual purpose is found in a note attached to this statement in Pethick’s introduction to the published script: Maurits has often been credited as being an early modernist ruler and humanist. When he went to Brazil he took a team of artists, geographers and naturalists with him to document the newly conquered lands. His victorious story was written after his return to the Nether-

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lands by the historian Caspar Barlaeus, creating . . . an “official” history — one that did not fully acknowledge all aspects of his governorship, such as his dealings with the slave trade. Van Oldenborgh created a film script that pieces together excerpts from . . . different sources from the period, creating a narrative that blends the official history with other “unofficial” accounts. The attached note reads: We face here the same old problem of what happens when there are no written or visual accounts of our history, no official or unofficial records of the workers, healers, and rebels who came before us. Where are the voices of those who are spoken of but do not speak in these records — the sugar cane workers, the quilombos, the settled and unsettled indigenous peoples, the dancers and healers, the European women who made inappropriate marriages, the mercenary soldiers, or the “scum of Holland”? We are returned again to Michel Foucault’s definitional distinction between two types of subjugated knowledge. The characters in Maurits Script — the enlightened governor of the Dutch colony; his ambitious secretary; the ideologically rigid minister to the West Indies Company in Pernambuco; the bad-tempered Portuguese priest/chronicler; the clever and ruthless planter/trader/businessman; the professor specializing in hagiography; the directors of the West Indies Company; and the elite political councils answerable to them — give access to the first type of subjugated knowledge, which exposes and deconstructs the institutional discourse of Dutch colonialism, particularly its selfpromoting humanism. In this critical operation, exposing a set of colonial fictions that masquerade as historical fact yields a different set of inventions, here performed and refracted by the performers for the camera. Access to the second type of subjugated knowledge poses additional challenges to the work of representation since it cannot be found within the interstices of official discourses. In this case, the problem of a lack of official records is compounded since we are dealing not with living people (with whom, in principle, we could try to speak) but with people and places long gone. To find the fragments of this second type of subjugated knowledge requires a different kind of invention, one that carries the traces of the history that dismissed it in the first place toward something else, toward something in excess of the mode of production through which it appears to us. (See utopian surplus | red arrows | a cultural theory of value | Ernst Bloch.)

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Tentative balance sheet of Netherlands Brazil and West Africa, 1644. Expected increase and military expenditures figures do not total.

failure After Maurits’s departure in 1644 the Dutch rapidly lost control and finally lost the colony to the Portuguese in 1654 (MS, 4).

Werner Sombart has cited the formation and activities of the Dutch West India Company (WIC) as proof of the emergence of a new type of aggressive and plundering bourgeoisie. While it lived up to this billing in its early years, it was later to prove a disappointment to investors and patriots alike. (RBl, 187) The Dutch quickly discovered the pitfalls and dangers of colonial rule. In addition to the ever-present threat of a European rival, Dutch Brazil suffered from hunger, local uprisings, ethnic conflict, and runaway slaves; a strained relationship between colonial administrators and metropolitan governing bodies; and, in the end, a lack of support from the political elite at home that led to its downfall in 1654. (MvG, 9) From the outset the rebellion was strengthened by the adhesion of Indian and black commanders who had never reconciled themselves to the Dutch. The Portuguese had been in Brazil for well over a century, and the colonial social formation incorporated several thousands of Indians and free blacks . . . the former organized under their own chiefs and the latter with their own brotherhoods. In 1646 the black captain Henrique Dias led a column of 330 blacks, while the Indian Felipe Camarão led 460 Indian fighters; together they comprised nearly a quarter of the Portuguese forces at this time, and proved militarily very effective. (RBl, 198) Little is known about Henrique Dias’ origins. At least two narratives from the period call him an ex-slave. . . . Duarte de Albuquerque Coelho stated that Dias was already free when he presented himself in 1633 to fight against the Dutch. . . . He came to be referred to as the Governador dos Negros (Governor of the Blacks) . . . in official documents, after 1636. In April and May 1638, his troops participated actively in the defense of the city of Salvador from attack by the Dutch Prince Johan Maurits of Nassau. It was as a reward for these services that he received the royal favor of minor nobility from Felipe III. (HM, 8) Taking prisoners to be enslaved was one of the objectives of African wars, dividing captives as slaves among soldiers was one of the principal forms of compensation

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for the companies fighting in Pernambuco. . . . Along with . . . slaves and freed slaves fighting in the two armies, slaves also served as support workers for military units and, when captured, such slaves could also be sold for the benefit of their captors. (HM, 13)

Note: The situation was made even more complicated by people moving between the Portuguese and the Dutch armies having to make careful calculations about which side would make for a winning allegiance and spinning dissimulating stories designed to save their lives. On October 14th, thirteen Mina blacks . . . escaped from Recife, and crossing the Rio Capibaribe at low tide at night, reached with their arms the camp of Henrique Dias . . . and his soldiers wanted to take them and kill them. [The Mina blacks] said that they had escaped from the Dutch to serve in the war with the Christians, for which they requested to be taken to Governor João Fernandes Vieira. . . . When presented . . . [they] told him how many relatives of theirs were ready to come to us; however, it would not be delayed many more days, even though some were reluctant, because the Dutch had put the idea in their head that the Portuguese delivered all the negros that came to them to the savage Tapuias, and to the Brasilianos . . . serving under . . . Camarão, so they would eat them broiled and boiled; but if they knew that among us they would be treated well, and we would not kill them, they would come little by little. Hearing this Governor João Fernandes Vieira made Captain of the most valiant of them, and ordered them delivered to the Governor of the Blacks Henrique Dias, so as to serve in his Regiment. (Frei Callado, cited in HM, 13–14) The participation of Indians and blacks in the “liberation” struggle was subsequently to be the subject of much mythopoeic celebration by colonial and Imperial ideologists; an Enrique Dias regiment formed part of the Brazilian armed forces for over two hundred years. But both the Portuguese and the Dutch were most careful not to attack the institutions of slavery. Some individual slaves were offered manumission if they would become soldiers, but the mass of slaves were kept hard at work. As the revolt unfolded it sometimes afforded slaves the opportunity to escape; quilombos of slaves who had freed themselves in this way formed in the interior, such as the famous black republic of Palmares. But these fissures in the slave system were no part of the plan of either side in the conflict. (RBl, 198–99)

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slavery Instructions concerning the politics of the regions in the West Indies, both those that have been conquered and those still to be conquered: The Brazilians and those indigenous to the land will be left in their freedom. They will not be turned into slaves, but will be governed alongside the other inhabitants. —Heeren XIX, West Indies Company (MS, 19) The Portuguese are much better slave traders than we are. —Director of Angola West Indies Company (MS, 15)

The Company’s abstention from the slave traffic had been gradually and pragmatically eroded. In the first place, the WIC had to deal with the problem of 2,336 slaves found on board captured Spanish or Portuguese vessels in . . . 1623–37 which had been sold . . . to raise prize money. Once it was in control of a part of Brazil, it needed to take more deliberate steps to acquire slaves. . . . Labour constituted a critical bottleneck, the more so as enslavement of Indians was more effectively banned than in the past. As a report to the Heeren XIX in 1638 succinctly noted: “It is not possible to do anything in Brazil without slaves.” (RBl, 193, 195)

Note: The prince patiently explained the problem to the Heeren XIX. Let me repeat again. Poor colonists are not adequate for a colony like Brazil. . . . Take care to colonize Brazil with men who dispose of resources — men who can buy blacks in order to establish cane plantations. To the capitalist all doors would be open. (RBl, 197) This Company, which had failed in its grand object of seizing Brazil or destroying the Spanish Empire in the Americas, was subsequently to find its main business in the slave traffic which it had started out by repudiating. . . . After the revolt in Pernambuco the WIC supplied slaves to the Caribbean and to Spanish America. Indeed, some Dutch leaders apparently believed the acquisition of the asiento was satisfactory compensation for the loss of Brazil. (RBl, 203, 212)

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daily life the order of things The Portuguese . . . being traitorous and malicious people. . . . The Jews ruin the traffic, suck the blood of the people . . . violate the Company. . . . The French too rebellious and insolent. —Vincent Joachim Soler (MS, 14, 18)

Note: Usual racist stuff here. Soler didn’t like the Guineans, Angolans, Cape Verdeans, or people from around the Congo River either and added them and their children to the classes of “inferior people” he encountered. Indians gain some grudging respect for their hatred of the Portuguese and their skill as soldiers — more it seems than his daughter, the adulteress. The blacks mix like dogs. . . . They are cunning . . . wicked . . . have little skill in being good . . . lascivious, drunken and will dance and steal. They are insensitive to punishment, which is a monstrous thing. I visited four that had been tortured on the wheel. Each had received twelve strokes of the whip and one of them did not even open his mouth nor let out any sigh. (VJS, 41, 43–44)

Note: A “natural” insensitivity to pain and punishment is perhaps the racial fabrication most important to the early criminal anthropologists’ effort to identify and classify criminal man. To this day, they have understood nothing at all about the nature of a silence that could quiet fire and bear the lash.

Our people, like the Portuguese recently decided that it would be a good idea to put certain signs or marks on men, women, and children by using a hot iron on the chest or on the neck. If they run away from their masters (which frequently happens), the field captains in charge of finding them are able to recognize them as soon as they lay their hands on them. They tie their hands behind their backs and hand them over to their owners in return for a fixed reward. They are welcomed back with many a sound beating. —Zacharias Wagener (MS, 16)

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the calculus or measure of distance from here to there

The mills are built like this . . . being more or less one pistol shot away. Zacharias Wagener, Thierbuch, Plate 102.

daily life practical affairs Cannibalistic tendencies cut it up into small pieces eat raw and some roasted gnaw the flesh off the bone with teeth devoured grinding into powder diluting with water swallowed drink hair digested eats as much as can belly. —Johan Maurits, Jacob Rabe, Zacharias Wagener (MS, 9–10)

These were vitally important practical affairs. They were also ritual events . . . rites of conquest and colony formation, mystiques of race and power, little dramas of civilization tailoring savagery which did not mix or homogenize ingredients from the two sides of the colonial divide but instead bound Indian understand-

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ings of white understandings of Indian understandings of whites. The colonists’ appropriation of Indian cannibalism was one such metaritual. (MT, 109)

Also in dreams their interpreters are well respected. —Jacob Rabe (MS, 9) Whatever it meant to Indians, cannibalism for colonial culture functioned as the supple sign for construing reality, the caption point without which otherwise free-floating signifiers wandered off into space as so many disassembled limbs and organs of a corpus. Cannibalism summed up all that was perceived as grotesquely different about the Indian as well as providing for the colonists the allegory of colonization itself. In condemning cannibalism, the colonists were in deep complicity with it. Otherness was not dealt with here by simple negation, a quick finishing off. On the contrary, everything hinged on a drawn-out, ritualized death in which every body part took its place embellished in a memory-theater of vengeances paid and repaid, honors upheld and denigrated, territories distinguished in a feast of difference. In eating the transgressor of those differences, the consumption of otherness was not so much an event as a process. . . . In this manner colonization was itself effected. Ascribed to Indians, cannibalism was taken from them as a cherished dream image of the fears of being consumed by difference. . . . Just as important was the erotic passion this gave to the countermove of devouring the devourer. Allegations of cannibalism served not only to justify enslavement of Indians by the Spanish and Portuguese from the sixteenth century onwards; such allegations also served to flesh out the repertoire of violence in the colonial imagination. (MT, 104–5)

artists architects scientists historians The bridge . . . the bridge . . . the bridge . . . the bridge . . . the bridge . . . despair the bridge. —Johan Maurits, the Political Councils, Frei Manuel Calado, Heeren XIX West Indies Company (MS, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19) Don’t think that Government is a matter of fortifications and ramparts. —Johan Maurits (MS, 12) Note: They’re obsessed with the bridge — who’s building it?

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It should be stressed that any seventeenth century prince yearned to be considered a philosopher and patron of the arts, literature and science. (DMT, 7) Since the Dutch had sent spies to north-eastern Brazil a few years before to gather information for their planned invasion, once the area was occupied it would be natural for them to be extremely interested in specialist reports in a wide range of fields. . . . These reports were no mere interesting descriptions of exotic animals and plants or “barbarian” peoples. Rather, they were the best, if not only, available source of reasonable trustworthy information. As such, they not only became an essential instrument for tactical and strategic assessment of conquest and colonisation, but also an active . . . component of the colonists’ own universe as they were exceptionally greedy for the novelties which surpassed even the wildest imagination. (DMT, 7) Contrary to the opinion of countless authors . . . Wagener does not prove to be one of the most accurate observers. (DMT, 17)

Note: But he is a skilled plagiarist: the eight human figures in the Thierbuch are copies of Albert Eckhout’s paintings; “not to mention the fact that no less than nineteen botanical species depicted by Wagener appear in these same oil paintings and/or in Eckhout’s still lives of the plants found in the New World” (DMT, 18).

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Note: Robin Blackburn erroneously credits this painting to Eckhout — one of three made of the visiting Sonho emissary given the name “Don Miguel de Castro” possibly by Jasper Beckx in 1643 or 1644, then in the service of Maurits, and possibly to display the beaver hat and the silver sword gifted by Maurits to the Congolese ruler in exchange for two hundred slaves, a silver bowl, a necklace, and future good trade relations (see Françozo in MvG, 110). After the Dutch left Brazil, along with the Portuguese, they continued to meddle in the “aristocratic civil wars.”

Thanks to a militant Afro-Christian popular religious movement led by a prophetess, Beatriz, who claimed that Jesus had been born in the Kongo, Kongo was eventually to achieve a semblance of its former self, but this was a peasant movement opposed to aristocratic strife. The Kongolese capital never again became an effective administrative centre capable of helping either Portuguese or Dutch, or of furnishing them with the stable commercial conditions that were best for the slave trade. (RBl, 205)

runaways If they run away . . . which frequently happens. —Zacharias Wagener (MS, 16)

Note: Before the great slave revolts in the nineteenth century, about which so much has been written, the most effective form of overt resistance to slavery was selfemancipation, “flight and the establishment of runaway communities called variously mocambos [mu-kambo in Ambundu means a hideout] or quilombos” (SBS, 205). Although the Palmares maroons in Pernambuco were the largest and most renowned, there were many others. Roger Bastide notes that “the entire region of Campo Grande and São Francisco was overrun with fugitive Negroes, who posed a constant problem to the settlers” (RBa, 193), and names over one hundred communities. There was an especially high level of resistance in the Minas region because of the gold mining and the severe repression of runaways; chroniclers noted the “omnipresence of prisons with fortress-thick walls” in the ancient towns of Minas Gerais (RBa, 192). At Minas, the mocambos were “well-organized” and numbered around twenty thousand “who had flocked from every corner of Brazil, from São Paulo and from Bahia . . . joined by a number of mulattoes, criminals, and brigands” (RBa, 193). Palmares was not regarded as an ordinary mocambo. By 1612, it had a considerable reputation. . . . [In part because although its founders were likely Bantu-speaking people, it welcomed everyone who managed to escape.] The Dutch viewed it as a “serious danger.” . . . Increasing palmarista militancy after 1630 can safely be associated with slaves who took advantage of the Dutch presence to escape and who eventually found their way into Palmares. (RKK, 17, 176) 6,000 near Gurungumba 5,000 near Santo Amaro 1500 houses four smithies well-kept lands all kinds of cereals beautifully irrigated with streamlets every kind of vegetable knew how to store them against wartime and winter communal Ganga-Zumba treated with respect keepers of law the second city a queen trained

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to fight extensive defense network weapons forged rob the Portuguese of their slaves now there were ten population mainly of those born in Palmares free commoners. (RKK, 177–80; SBS, 219–22)

Note: In January 1643, under Maurits’s watch, Rudolph Baro is sent for a second time with several Tapuyas inland to search for silver mines and unknown tribes to capture and assimilate. He fails to find silver or Indians but finds the Palmares. Baro boasted in his diary that he had conquered and destroyed the “large” Palmares and Barlaeus spread the lie (see BNT, 20; RKK, 177). Hired by the Portuguese after twenty years of trying, it was the Paulistas who, ruthless and skilled at jungle warfare, on November 20, 1695, finally crushed the Palmares and put Zambi’s head on a stick “to kill the legend of his immortality” (see RKK, 187). Note: In 1667, the Dutch took Surinam. War continued well into the late eighteenth century. The maroons of Surinam were the largest of all the independent runaway societies and the most long lasting — their descendants are still alive today. Ayako was made overseer of Plantation Waterland. . . . It was at the time they were marching the slaves each day to dig the canal at Para. The work was too heavy. It was there that they couldn’t take it any more. So they made a plan and escape. . . . Ayako ran away to seek his older brother, Lánu. He found him and saw that he had been well taken care of by the Indians. . . . Lánu had a serious talk with Ayako, saying: “I shall never return to where there are whites, but if you wish to go take [liberate] people, you may. But never will I and the whites meet again.” He also warned Ayako, “When I die, do not ever tell the whites that I have died.” . . . Lánu prepared Ayako to go back to the plantation, for he was a great óbiama. . . . After they escaped, they lived for a long while at Matjáu Creek before coming further upriver. The Indians had helped Lánu and Ayako near there. That whole area, from Matjáu Creek to Balén to the mouth of Sara Creek, has belonged to the Matjáus ever since. . . . From there [Matjáu Creek], Ayako returned for a second time to their old plantation to liberate people. Lánu again prepared him. There had been a great council meeting in the forest. . . . From the forest the Matjáus sent word to the Wátambíi slaves, saying that they would leave marks, or blazes, on the path, as they continued to walk south, for them to follow; that at such and such a time, they must burn their own plantation; that if they could kill the white man, they should, but if not, just leave. When it got to be late at night and the white man was asleep, the Matjúas prepared their magic [óbia] and brought it to them, to give them stout hearts. The óbia consisted of . . . [leaves and other ingredients are mentioned, accompanied by a request not to print it in “my book”]. (Tebini and Otjúju in RP, 48–49, 51, 54)

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key to annotations BNT Teensma, “Mission of Rudolph Baro.” CRB Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil 1624–1656 DMT Teixeira, “Natural History of Dutch-Brazil,” Thierbuch, “Autobiography of Zacharias Wagener.” HM MT MvG RBa RBl RKK RP SBS SM VJS

Mattos, “ ‘Black Troops’ and Hierarchies of Color.” Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. Groesen, Legacy of Dutch Brazil. Bastide, “Other Quilombos.” Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery. Kent, “Palmares.” Price, First-Time. Schwartz, “Mocambo.” Mintz, Sweetness and Power. Soler, “Brief and Curious Report of Some Peculiarities of Brazil.”

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A shadow in the forest. Film still. Quilombo, directed by Carlos Diegues, 1984.

running away | US slavery | preparation | Eliza Winston correspondence, old newspapers, photographs, a bell rack, annotations, explanations Date: xxxxx File note: The items and annotations contained in this file are more extensive than those sent to the Museum of Non Participation. They tell the true story of Eliza Winston, who sought her legal emancipation from enslavement in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the summer of 1860. In this true story, the theme of preparation appears prominently. One meaning preparation has here is described well by Cedric J. Robinson in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition: “The Black Radical Tradition was an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle. In the daily encounters and petty resistances to domination, slaves had acquired a sense of the calculus of oppression as well as its overt organization and instrumentation. These experiences lent themselves to a means of preparation for more epic resistance movements.” In Eliza’s story, preparation is the name for the practical means by which intelligence and organization (the “top eye”) are collectively mobilized by the enslaved and the legally free to avoid and abolish slavery. These questions are asked: What’s involved in running away? What needs to be in place? To what place might it take you? What’s suggested is that African-becoming-American slaves who ran away in an earlier era, also known as fugitives, and their friends might provide a model for other kinds of running away, emerging in and around other radical traditions, especially as more and more people need escape routes from situations in which both living and political struggle as we’ve known it are not possible. What’s implied is that preparation also refers to the structure of anticipation and expectation — the intellectual, historical, political, and personal investments — of any research and any story told.

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HA To the Museum of Non Participation Dear colleagues, I write to respond to your recent inquiries. To answer your first question, the Hawthorn Archive holds many collections on the long traditions of nonparticipation including: on boycotting people, places, countries, businesses, things, buses, relationships, extra work and various meetings; and on work, tax, debt, bank, sex, gender, school, testing, human and hunger strikes (including the often insufficiently credited teenage strike against the family dinner). Also covered are: not voting, not watching television, not speaking, not answering questions, not going to work today or tomorrow, not driving, not banking, not dieting, not listening to authorities, not social networking, not doing what you’re told, not thinking what you’re told to think, not being who you’re told you are, and not being who you’re told to be. Disobeying the rules, not shooting, shouting “not in our name,” refusing to show up, exposing secrets you’re supposed to maintain, keeping secrets they would like to possess. Bartering, unauthorized and feral trading, creating your own money, theft, piracy, banditry, sabotage, poaching, giving things away for free, being absent without official leave (AWOL), deserting, running away, marronage, separatism, resettlement — the range of actions, inactions, thoughts, un-thoughts that might constitute nonparticipation recognized by the archive is varied and extensive. However, it should be noted that the Hawthorn Archive is not a library or research collection in the conventional sense and thus access, as you put it, to our collection or collective is not possible at this time. The answer to your second question is yes and enclosed you will find a small contribution to the temporary installation of the Museum of Non Participation at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The archive holds a special place for runaways — for those who run away from slavery and indenture, from war and conscription, from oppressive states and state-making projects, from bad families and homes, from the promises of civilization and its correctional technologies, and from being ruled by others. (Attached is an additional document on soldier desertion, which may interest you.) Since we treat running away as a type of political nonparticipation, we thought the enclosed items about fugitives in Minneapolis and St. Paul might be appropriate for the installation of your museum in Minneapolis, where as you will see in an earlier era, strangers were welcomed. Instructions for the return of these items are included. If you have further questions, please reply directly to me. Best wishes and solidarity, Avery F. Gordon

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Item: The Winslow House’s visitor log for July 12, 1860. Col. Richard Christmas, Mrs. Richard Christmas (his wife), their child, and nurse arrive with many other Mississippians. This page of the large register was burned, the only one, and historian William Green doesn’t know why. They say Eliza Winston was the second of three slaves to escape between August and early October in 1860.1 They must mean that she was the second of the three reported in the newspapers to have publicly requested their emancipation before the local courts. Joseph Farr, a boatman who came to Saint Paul in 1850 at age eighteen and worked with his uncle the barber William Taylor, remembers the “good many” runaways they met and helped, including the nameless girl who was hidden in the ice cream shop on Fifth Street until her homesickness became too great. Or the “finelooking, well-dressed” “young fellow” who turned out “was a girl” and cried and cried when they got off the boat but then showed their mettle by trusting a Frenchman who hid them in the woods not too far from his house for a couple of weeks until they could make their way to Canada via Chicago.2 Item: Minneapolis State Atlas, August 22, 1860: A CHATTEL ASKS FOR FREEDOM! Usually there is a lot of walking involved, but Eliza came to Saint Anthony on the riverboat with Colonel Richard Christmas, a planter from Mississippi. He says that normally he didn’t bring his slaves with him during his regular summer visits but his wife was sick and needed Eliza to look after her and the seven-year-old child. The habeas corpus examination that was held on August 21 on the second floor of the Hennepin County Courthouse and presided over by Judge Charles E. Vanderburgh was chaotic and crowded with political agitators. Apparently, the large number of lawyers and “friends of lawyers” involved in abolitionist activities in Minneapolis led to the use of the writ of habeas corpus as a common strategy for assisting fugitives. In neighboring towns like Saint Paul controlled by proslavery officials, running away without the involvement of lawyers was more common, “simpler,” than appearing before a judge to request legal emancipation.3 The late afternoon (5 pm) hearing was brief. Citing the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which extended the rights and enforcements given to slave owners in the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, the colonel’s lawyer argued that he retained his property rights in Eliza in whatever state he visited or lived: the lawyer claimed that both rights and chattel were the colonel’s personal possessions. Eliza’s lawyer, the abolitionist Francis R. E. Cornell, replied by reading aloud from Article 1, section 2 of Minnesota’s relatively recent 1857 state constitution: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the state.” Taken and sworn on August 24, 1860, Eliza Winston’s deposition was validated by the judge and she confirmed by voice her preference for “freedom in Minnesota to life-long slavery in Mississippi.” The judge, as it happens Cornell’s law partner, then declared Eliza Winston “free” “to go where and with whom she pleased,” the limits of said freedom remaining, as always,

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unstated. For his part, the colonel took the verdict in stride. Several newspapers reported that he assured his sympathizers that he had “plenty more of them in Mississippi.”4 Item: Eliza Winston’s sworn statement given to J. F. Bradley, Justice of the Peace, Hennepin County, and published in the Falls Evening News of August 28, 1860. It should be noted that the court records were not made public. Eliza Winston’s statement and those of others involved in the case — such as abolitionists William Babbitt, Ariel S. Bigelow, and Deputy Sheriff Joseph H. Canney — were published in the newspapers. A couple of days after Eliza Winston’s habeas corpus hearing, Jane Swisshelm, the militant white abolitionist and journalist who established four antislavery newspapers in her lifetime, wrote in the St. Cloud Democrat newspaper that “By this craft, we have wealth.”5 She knew the phrase from The Acts of the Apostles, chapter 19:25: “Whom he called together with the workmen of like occupation, and said, Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth.” Jane Swisshelm’s first newspaper, the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter, was established in 1848, an auspicious year. When she moved to Minnesota, she started the St. Cloud Visiter and after Sylvanus Lowry’s proslavery “Committee of Vigilance” attacked her office and dumped her printing press into the river, she started the St. Cloud Democrat. Her final newspaper, the Reconstructionist was closed after she attacked Andrew Johnson, whose Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had hired her as a clerk after she had publicly called for the punishment of the uprising Dakota Sioux in 1862. Losing her government job in the process, she eventually moved back to Pennsylvania, where she was born in Pittsburgh on December 6, 1815, and wrote a memoir, Half a Century, in which she appears to have never felt the need to account for the political position that enabled her at the same time to be a retributive settler and a fervent antislavery activist. By this craft, we have our wealth. There was an important local dimension to this general statement about the political economy of slavery made by Swisshelm. It was straightforward, really. Escaping the summer heat, wealthy southern tourists from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Missouri “rode comfortable steamboats upriver” and brought with them their enslaved valets, maids, nurses, and cooks. Minnesota’s constitution prohibited slavery and indenture but many benefitted from the profitable tourist industry. White Minnesotans argued and fought among themselves about this situation, the details of which matter less than the three general positions in their debate, which were as follows. One, some Minnesotans wished they too could openly hold slaves and thus took a position sympathetic to the southerners; two, a larger group thought slavery was wrong but business interests took precedence and thus they tolerated it in their so-called free state with greater or lesser degrees of individual conscience; and three, a small number of radical abolitionists were adamantly opposed to slavery in Minnesota and elsewhere and kept up a noisy antislavery direct action campaign. Where the Indigenous Mdewakanton Dakota Sioux stood in this conflict, we do not know; the 1862 uprising had related but other causes. Apologists

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and Republican liberals alike hated the radicals and “vilified” them as “fanatics.”6 The specter of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and armed rebellion only ten months earlier hovered uneasily even this far north. Item: Advertisement by William Taylor, June 5, 1851. WILLIAM TAYLOR. Barber and Hair-Dresser, has built and fitted up a SHAVING SALOON, on Third Street, next door west of the new post office in Saint Paul, up to the increasing luxury, style, and elegance, of the growing metropolis of Minnesota, where he will be very happy to serve citizens and strangers in Saint Paul, in every branch of his business, according to the best of his ability. They were prepared for her arrival. William Taylor, James Hywadin (another barber), young boatman Joseph Farr, and the cook David Edwards had been successfully stowing away and sneaking off fugitives from the steamboats for quite some time. They “had a man on the river named Eugene Berry . . . and he used to take care of the [runaways coming] out of Galena,” the hub between Saint Louis and Saint Paul. Their agent up at “Galena was a man named Johnson and,” as Farr tells it, “he used to get up to all kinds of schemes to get the slaves away . . . disguis[ing] them as well as he could and get[ting] them aboard the Dr. Franklin . . . [where] Berry would take charge of them and stow them away among the freight.”7 It was a lot easier and safer for folks to ride on the boats than walk the long distance with all its hazards of recapture, hunger, frost, snakebite, and broken feet. This was surely one reason why the sensible and tactical Emily Grey never joined any of the white abolitionist societies — all their noisy protests at the docks only drew attention where it wasn’t needed. It was perfectly obvious from the signs that they were happy to serve strangers in every branch of their business. They were prepared for her arrival. Eliza Winston met Emily Goodridge Grey, a free black seamstress (and avid kitchen gardener) who was twenty-six at the time in Saint Anthony where Mrs. Grey and her husband Ralph Toyer Grey (another barber) had lived and worked on Main Street at Jarrett House.8 They could see Winslow House in the distance from their backyard. Emily remembers that the spring of 1857 when she arrived with several others to join her husband who went to Saint Anthony in 1855 was exceptionally rainy, which made the journey difficult. Emily was the daughter of the remarkable and somewhat flamboyant barber and builder William C. Goodridge, a well-known abolitionist activist in York, Pennsylvania, her birthplace. Emily and Ralph Grey were politically active in the antislavery movement and Frederick Douglass counted Ralph, who is remembered as a “fine public speaker,” as a friend.9 Emily introduced Eliza to Mrs. Gates, the white abolitionist who arranged for the complaint, and it was a good thing too that Emily went out to Lake Harriet with the Sheriff and his thirtyman armed escort because Eliza, fearing that the move from Winslow House to Mrs. Thornton’s was prompted by suspicions of her impending escape, really needed to see a friendly face.

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Among the free black men and women who ran the underground, many were barbers and seamstresses. We shouldn’t forget barber William Armstrong who had a shop in the old Saint Charles Hotel at Marshall and Wood Streets in Minneapolis or Callie House, the Tennessee seamstress who later during Reconstruction founded the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association. Or James J. Campbell, Abram Reyno, Benjamin Rochester, and Stephen R. Buck, barbers all working around Saginaw, Michigan, where Emily’s brothers ended up.10 In the barbershops, men could openly love to gossip, arrange music gigs, and handle other business, which was especially useful in Minneapolis where a surprising number of barbers were also musicians, including William Taylor himself who was a popular violin player and singer around town, owing at least in small part to his being rather handsome and easygoing. In the barbershop men could gather and sharpen razors without undue scrutiny or visible political purpose. The seamstresses followed another assemblage moving politely, gracefully, and fashionably between domestic social worlds carrying needles and secrets sewn in the lining of good dresses. They were prepared for her arrival. They read and they talked among themselves and they welcomed strangers, to the best of their ability. Item: Two runaway notices from Loudoun County, Virginia, 1827 and 1828. In one notice, the owner wants his property back and in the other the jailor is looking for the owner of property he’s acquired. In both notices, the women’s clothing is described in detail.

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A “liberal” reward is posted for Matilda and Maria who escaped from William Chilton’s kitchen in Leesburg. Matilda is small and Maria has large feet and gray eyes. Dangerously, both women can read and write well. Chilton believes they have a pass and moreover that they can pass as white women if not “examined” carefully. The women are prepared. They have taken several high-quality hand-sewn dresses, presumably made by their own hands, including a full mourning dress, and at least two bonnets, one black and one with a colored ribbon band. It’s the mourning dresses that will be the best disguise; slave women are not permitted to grieve in public. As of August 17, 1827, Matilda and Maria were still at large, carrying their secrets and their hats. Godspeed. Sarah Ann Payne, with an injured thumb, and wearing only a cotton housedress —“cross barred with a blue and white stripe”— was captured somewhere unstated in Loudoun County, Virginia. The jailers want her owners to come and pay the charges for keeping her there and “take her away.” She told the jailers she was free, so maybe no one is coming. It’s been almost a month. She told the jailers she’s from Fredericksburg and before that Alexandria. Maybe she was making her way south to Southampton County to join up with the Turner rebels. Maybe she wasn’t expecting to need a nice dress. Item: A photograph of cotton pickers in Pulaski County, Arkansas, taken by Ben Shahn in 1935 for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. The young woman in the center reminds me of Lois’s friend Mildred — with whom she spent her off days — who smoked and drank and leaned forward when she smiled at me just like that with shrewd laughing eyes.

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They were prepared for her arrival. She was prepared for their assistance. Eliza Winston was thirty years old when she came to Minneapolis. They said her “round full black face” showed “signs” of a “rough life” and that she “cussed” “sometimes.”11 This face is familiar. We know this story too: of being an object of property and subject to lying promises and extravagant theft. The Liberia part is more distinctive and tragic, as her testimony describes. My name is ELIZA WINSTON. . . . I was held as the slave of Mr. Gholson of Memphis, Tennessee, having been raised by Mr. Macklemo, father in law of Mr. Gohlson. I married a free man of color who hired my time off my master, who promised me my freedom upon payment of $1,000. My husband and myself worked hard and he invested our savings in a house and lot in Memphis, which was held for us in Mr. Gholson’s name. This house was rented for $8 per month. My husband by request went out with a company of emancipated slaves to Liberia, and was to stay two years. He went out with them because he was used to travelling, and it was necessary to have some one to assist and take care of them. When he returned, my master was to take our house and give me my free papers, my husband paying the balance due, in money. My husband died in Liberia, and my master Mr. Gohlson got badly broken up in money matters, and having pawned me to Col. Christmas for $800, died before he could redeem me. I was never sold. . . . I will say also that I have never received one cent from my property at Memphis since my husband died. . . . When Mr. Gholson married Mr. Macklemo’s daughter, I went with my young mistress. I became the slave of Mr. Christmas seven years ago last March. They have often told me I should have my freedom and they at last promised me that I should have my free papers when their child was seven years old. This time came soon after we left home to come to Minnesota. I had not much confidence that they would keep their promise for my mistress has always been feeble. . . . But I had heard that I should be free by coming to the North, and I had with my colored friends made all the preparations which we thought necessary, I had got a little money and spent it in clothes, my colored friends gave me some good clothing, and I came away with a good supply of clothing in my trunk, sufficient to last me two years and of a kind suitable to what we supposed this climate would be. The trunk containing this clothing was left at the Winslow House when we went to Mrs. Thornton’s, I was taking only one calico dress, besides an old washing dress. After I got to St. Anthony, I got acquainted with a colored person and asked her if there were any persons who would help me in getting my freedom. I told her my whole story. . . . I thought I had a right to my clothes because they did not come from my master or mistress and I purposed to carry away at different times when I should not be suspected, some portion of them. I fixed upon the coming Sunday when I would leave.12

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Eliza Winston didn’t leave that Sunday but later after the Colonel moved the family and Eliza from Winslow House to Thornton House on Lake Harriet, possibly with the intention of isolating Eliza and making it more difficult for her to contact others and to leave. The hearing was brief but chaotic and crowded with agitators. After the court hearing, the proslavery owner of the Winslow House, C. W. McLean, provoked concerted gang raids on William King’s State Atlas newspaper offices, on Ralph and Emily Grey’s house in Saint Anthony, and on abolitionist William Babbitt’s house where an armed and very pregnant Mrs. Babbitt fought back with the help of her neighbor Daniel Elliot who was very badly beaten. The violence against the persons, homes, and printing presses of the abolitionists went on for several days with lawyer Babbitt the target of pernicious sabotage and name-calling: they called him “Eliza” in the street as if it were an insult. On October 19, Eliza Winston gave a short speech to the Hennepin County antislavery society. No transcript or summary report of this speech has been found. Between the hearing on August 21 and the speech on October 19, we presume Eliza Winston was resting, maybe at the home of the agent known as Professor Stone where Babbitt had taken her during the white riots after the hearing. Possibly too, she was trying to collect the clothes she had meticulously gathered, her only personal possessions, and whose whereabouts clearly concerned her. After that, we don’t know. She said she wanted to return to her house in Memphis and work as a nurse, marrying again “a free colored man” if she could. War was declared six months later, on April 12, 1861. The Confederate soldiers came after Emily’s father with a vengeance, scattering her sister Mary and three brothers — all photographers — to Michigan. They were somewhat prepared for that too. Item: Cabinet Card, 1883, Goodridge Brothers Studio, East Saginaw, Michigan, with Wallace L. Goodridge, William O. Goodridge, James H. Morris, Arthur Brown, camera equipment, gentlemanly props, including a dog, a painting, a walking stick, and several very good suits. Emily Goodridge’s three brothers — Glenalvin J., Wallace L., and William O.— moved to Saginaw, Michigan, when the war started.13 Brothers Wallace and William opened a photographic studio in an attractive brick building at 220 South Washington Street, which prospered until Wallace died in 1922, William having passed away in 1902. Wallace L. and William O. Goodridge were not politically active like their father and sister Emily. They were pioneering African American photographers whose documentation of the lumber industry, logging camps, and city architecture was recognized during their lifetimes, even if it appears that Saginaw officials used their photographs without attribution to illustrate published histories of and advertisements for the city.14 The Goodridge brothers’ technical and aesthetic innovations are quite interesting but not relevant here. It’s what happened to the first-born son, Glenalvin, that merits mention.

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Item: Unidentified Mulatto Man with Horse, before 1851. Quarter-plate self-portrait daguerreotype by Glenalvin J. Goodridge. William A. Frassanito Collection.

It was Glenalvin who first developed an interest in photography when he was a young schoolteacher, an occupation he continued to practice on and off throughout his life. He took instruction from an itinerant photographer named Joseph Reinhart who stayed on a while in York renting rooms in China Hall, the large building in the town center owned by his father, the extravagant barber, abolitionist, entrepreneur, and property owner, William Sr. When Reinhart left, Glenalvin took over the studio rooms and began to work as a daguerreotypist, one of the very few African American photographers known to be successfully working before 1850. He trained his brothers, built a thriving business, married into the other well-off African American York family — the Greys — bought property, had children, managed the 1857 economic crash in which Glenalvin and his father lost most of their real estate, and survived competition from Philadelphia photographers moving west, even opening a new studio branch in nearby Columbia. And then in February 1863, five months before the Confederate army arrived and occupied York, forcing the Goodridge family to begin preparations to leave, and after a trial which it took the jury two days to decide, Glenalvin J. Goodridge was convicted of the rape of Mary E. Smith. He was sentenced “to undergo an Imprisonment in the Eastern Penitentiary in the City of Philadelphia in Separate and Solitary Confinement at labor in the Cells and work house yards of Said Prison for and during the term of five years.”15 Of the men who were released from these solitary confinement cells, Charles Dickens observed that their hearts were broken and their

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hands trembled, the latter, among other things, a serious occupational hazard for a professional photographer.16 It seems to always come back round to this fact: respectability cannot be relied on for protection from captivity and confinement. Glenalvin’s father launched an extraordinary campaign on behalf of his son which eventually did result, after an initial refusal by the judge to reconsider, in Governor Andrew Curtin pardoning Glenalvin on the grounds that “he would not have been convicted if he had been a white man and if he had been a democrat.” Nonetheless, the Governor released “the man of good education and a good teacher” from prison three years early on the express condition that he leave the state of Pennsylvania.17 Banished, suffering from the tuberculosis he got in prison, heart broken, hands trembling, he followed his younger brothers to Saginaw, and died in Minneapolis four years later with sister Emily close by. Item: “The bell rack. Contraption used by an Alabama slave owner to guard a runaway slave. This rack was originally topped by a bell that rang when the runaway attempted to leave the road and go through foliage or trees. It was attached around the neck as shown in the picture. A belt passed through the loop at the bottom to hold the iron rod firmly fastened to the waist of the wearer. In the accompanying photograph, Richbourg Gailliard, assistant to the director of the Federal Museum and also a wellknown young Mobile Alabama artist poses to show the use made of the bell rack.”18

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In addition to the photographic archive, there is a considerable historical record of the Grey and Goodridge families, including corroborated first-person accounts. As postemancipation documents, they are not bound by the same need for stealth and secrecy that runaways, maroons, outlaws, and their friends and supporters required. Generally speaking, fugitives don’t dare keep records, especially forged ones written illegally twice over by a slave. You could get the bell. Captured by the police, “When we got about half way to St. Michael’s,” Frederick Douglass writes in his autobiography, “while the constables having us in charge were looking ahead, Henry inquired of me what he should do with his pass. I told him to eat it with his biscuit, and own nothing; and we passed the word around, ‘Own nothing;’ and ‘Own nothing!” said we all. Our confidence in each other was unshaken. We were resolved to succeed or fail together. . . . We were now prepared for any thing.”19 Item: A photograph of the knees and feet of a couple of cotton pickers standing in the road in Lehi, Arkansas, taken by Russell Lee in September 1938 for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information.

Usually, there’s a lot of walking involved, but not always. Always, nonetheless, there is preparation, preparation for being a fugitive, preparation for fugitive justice, preparation for something other than being “stranded between grievance and grief,” to quote Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman.20

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“By 1787,” Best and Hartman write, “it had already become too late” for “making right” the wrongs of slavery, for “restoring what has been destroyed, or giving back what has been taken.”21 The year 1787 is a date of convenience: from the very start, the injuries and the losses cannot be “undone,” which strands the slave between “grievance and grief; between the necessity of legal remedy and the impossibility of redress . . . between the unavoidable form of the ‘appeal’ and its ultimate illegibility and insufficiency.”22 Best and Hartman, who are examining the possibilities for redress and reparation, describe this in-betweenness as a “political interval . . . between the no longer and the not yet” and argue that it is “not only the governing trope of the captive’s complaint” (and the “hour of the captive’s redemption”) but “the master trope of black political discourse.”23 This political interval has, they continue, a “long history of failure” and it is also a “representation in miniature of fugitive justice.” Best and Hartman want to question the kinds of “political claims . . . [for redress or reparation that] can be mobilized on behalf of the slave (the stateless, the socially dead, and the disposable) in the political present,” and following David Scott, they “caution us to tread carefully when writing histories of dispossession in the space of the interval” that also “squarely engage the problem of ‘futures.’ ”24 If I understand their intentions correctly, this caution stems, in large measure, from the limitations the law and the state place on political claims-making; stems from the impossibility these limits impose on achieving a nonfugitive justice (and on a blackness that always already carries the “signature of state violence” and thus a fugitive or criminalized identity); and stems, too, from the complicated ways people and politics with the best intentions nonetheless get trapped and immobilized in these very impossibilities. I would like to take another look at that interval from the standpoint of the runaway. The runaway begins as a fugitive, an outlaw, although they don’t necessarily end there. The runaway begins as a fugitive, but for the interval, a moment of indeterminate duration, they are not immobilized by the law, by the state, or by state-imposed identifications. The runaway is on the move carefully, secretly, and single-mindedly with whatever combination of excitement and anxiousness each individual brings to it. The runaway is on the move and it’s what that mobility or movement inaugurates in its refusal to tolerate any longer the conditions of life as given that matters, that changes things. In the interval between the no-longer and the not-yet, running away takes place. Or, we could say that running away moves from the no-longer to the not-yet: from no longer staying put and putting up with what exists to something else, something hopefully better. What happens between the no-longer and the not-yet articulates or makes real those “wildly utopian” and “anticapitalist aspirations” that Best and Hartman call “black noise” or, following Robin D. G. Kelley, “freedom dreams” that are “inaudible and illegible within prevailing formulas of political rationality.”25 Into the wild then, the runaway runs despite or because of the cautions and warnings, toward signs that they can read, top eye open, with what Ernst Bloch called, with

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his characteristic vernacular, “participating reason,” which he defined as taking things “as they go, and therefore also as they could go better.” (Participating reason Bloch opposes to “contemplative reason which takes things as they are and as they stand.”)26 The runaway escapes, carrying some clothes, a little food, maybe a forged pass, a name, a cousin’s hand, and a forward dream that guarantees nothing but changes that interval between the no-longer and not-yet. Even for those who don’t go very far (maybe just next door) or who lay about without going anywhere, running away changes the interval, changes the feel or existential quality of it, changes its political meaning, changes even, I think, what appears as a hard distinction or unreachable distance between the no-longer and the not-yet. Running away changes the interval because of the preparation involved, which brings the not-yet squarely insistently into the nolonger, pushing it out the door. Slaves and captives always run toward that shorthand for what we call freedom — a flawed too-late-to-make-it-right-freedom — in a context in which it is a criminal act to imagine yourself as something other than their property or a property over which they have dominion. Slaves and captives always run toward a flawed too-late-to-makeit-right-freedom in a context in which it is a criminal act to run, to move, to take off, to do anything whatsoever without their permission. Slaves and captives run even knowing that there are injuries that never heal right and broken hearts that no amount of social justice or peace can ever entirely fix. Slaves and captives run away entangled in a mix of possibilities and impossibilities that they accept as mostly out of their control. Running away can happen in an overdetermined instant or be slowly plotted. Like Sethe who recognized a man’s hat and heard little hummingbird wings and said no no no no no before she flew. Or, like Eliza methodically squirreling away clothes for work and special days and a winter cold she could only imagine, patiently and repetitively waiting in the woods behind the house, and after a while going back in then going back out again each time Mrs. Christmas heard someone approach the boarding house. Or, like Maria and Matilda carrying full mourning dress the better to pass as white ladies. Or, like Sarah Ann with her carefully plotted genealogical and geographical claims to free status. Or, like Bood with his reputation for artful cunning and missing big toenails. It can happen in an overdetermined instant or be slowly plotted but always there is preparation, honed knife sharp in the crucible of trying to live with the ways they are trying to kill us. Running away takes a lot of courage, thought, and help from others to do it. Nobody runs without preparation. The preparation can be vague and disorganized or too managed to hold up to the end; it can be unfinished, so much still left to do; it can rely on strangers and friends whose motivations and skills won’t always be dependable; the preparation can be perfect but still you get caught. The quality of the preparation matters, especially if there’s a lot of walking involved, because being in the preparation for something else marks the moment when their permission doesn’t matter anymore;

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marks the moment when you’ll never return even if they take you back; marks the moment when something else has to be next; marks the moment when the not-yet is already here because you’ve become unavailable for servitude back stiff with conviction. Running away not only requires a powerful critique of dispossession as an old and flexible mode of appropriation but also a certain being-in-difference. Running away is a process of being or becoming unavailable for servitude in the broadest sense of that term, a consciousness and a continuum of actions, of coming and going, of trying to find a way of living on different terms, whose outcome is unfortunately never given in advance. It’s extremely difficult to let go of living on their terms, to let go of the bad and the good and find another way. It requires a certain degree of embodied in-difference or organs for the alternative that conviction or rhetoric alone does not yield. It requires a certain practice or preparation in property relations with which we are often less familiar. Own nothing, own nothing, own nothing said we all. We were now prepared for anything.

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running away | war | soldiers commissioned report, film, instruction manuals, emergency telephone numbers Missing addendum on Abel Gance, J’accuse (1938) and Susan Sontag’s terrible misreading in Regarding the Pain of Others of Gance’s film and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, which led her to take the erroneous position that “no one believes war can be abolished today.” Date: xxxxx File note: Absent without permission, what does it mean when a soldier runs away, not furtively, but as an outlaw, a fugitive? The report contains a few brief thoughts on disobedience, desertion, and other promising conduits to abolishing the disposition to war. It should be noted that war deserters may or may not take personal or political vows of pacifism. The question of the use of violent tactics and weapons in political struggle is a matter not taken up in the report that follows, which is regrettable. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to reach any kind of agreement on this question and in fact it has been difficult to get anyone to discuss it seriously. The strong feeling that armed struggle against the state has been a failure and remains an inappropriate means for creating a nonauthoritarian and nonmilitaristic society silences even a tentative reopening of the question, even among people who approve of, within certain limits, the throwing of the odd Molotov cocktail and inner-city youth car burnings. Here, the experiences of the South Africans, the Six Counties of Ireland, and the Zapatistas have been enormously important and influential. At the same time, the vast expansion and extension of military and police power worldwide and its organized and systematic use against dissenters and would-be dissenters makes peaceful protest increasingly irrelevant, futile, and dangerous, a highly contradictory situation. Hiding behind a phalanx of well-armed police and soldiers, governors, rulers, and bankers become almost completely insulated from the needs and demands of the people they are supposed to represent and can thus ignore them with impunity. In this context, many struggle on, albeit with little hope for redress or real reform while others increasingly give up or retreat into fantasy worlds in which armies of the good defeat armies of the bad. What the situation suggests, however, is that a renewed discussion about what we used to call revolution is desperately needed; that such a discussion needs to address directly how this vast apparatus of military and police power can realistically be attacked and defeated. It is clear that it cannot be defeated without a vision of life without it, which entails a critical analysis of how capitalist life depends on it. Moreover, it cannot be defeated without the refusal and desertion of the large number of men and women who make their living working for it and without whom it would not exist or function. The avoidance of these difficult questions of vision and strategy, not to mention the self-satisfied attitude of the professional protester and the middle-class critic who are not terribly inconvenienced if nothing is won until it’s almost too late, only exacerbates a situation in which day by day the faint promise of the democratic state disappears.

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They marked the ten-year anniversary of the conquest of Iraq on March 19, 2013, the aerial bombing campaign having begun in fact twenty years earlier in 1991. Notwithstanding the large-scale withdrawal of troops in 2011, the United States still effectively occupies much of that country, which it has destroyed beyond imagination. Operations in Afghanistan and drone war in Pakistan mindlessly continue, and militarism, especially counterinsurgency policing, becomes more and more the normal mode of social management everywhere. In addition to the new war fronts opened by the Western powers in Africa and Syria, the US military and security budget plans for further escalations. At approximately 623 billion dollars, it represents a nation attached to war and repressive policing as a mode of life.1 The United States is by far the largest and wealthiest war society in the world, but the disposition to war is widespread. Everywhere we see the increasing similarity between war and policing, especially to quell or prevent dissent. Everywhere we see the escalating and intensified use of captivity and confinement as handmaidens to war, not only in the US-led global war on terror and its prisoners of war (who do not officially exist) but also in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Chechnya, where the strategic goal is to turn peopled lands into giant detention camps, encircled, guarded, inescapable, shorn of all social life. In such a context, it makes perfect sense to want to escape from war, captivity, and occupation. In such a context, the need for the soldiers and the police and the ordinary conscripts in these wars to stop, to desert, to runaway, or to refuse to participate is also great. In most countries, military personnel who leave their unit or assigned place without permission are considered AWOL — Absent Without Official Leave or absent sans permission (Canada) or être en absence illégale (France) — and they become deserters if they have not returned, have not been apprehended, have not been accounted for, have been found captive by the enemy, or have been immobilized, in a hospital for instance. The United States, however, makes a very specific distinction, encoded in the punitive articles of the Military Code of Justice, between absence without official leave, being AWOL (Article 86), and desertion (Article 85), which is important for reasons I’ll return to highlight shortly. In the United States, on the thirty-first day a soldier or officer is absent without official leave, and once the paperwork arrives from their unit to a central office, the Deserter Information Point (USADIP), they are administratively classified as a deserter. Then their names are entered into the national crime database, and they can be apprehended by both military and civil police. This administrative status has limited legal standing, however: a soldier must still be tried and court-martialed to be convicted as a deserter. To be guilty of the crime of desertion, it must be shown that the soldier was absent without permission and intended to remain absent permanently. Theoretically, an individual can be absent for one hour and be charged with desertion or be absent

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without authority for fifty years and never be guilty of desertion. Intent to remain away permanently is the defining criterion. As the Punitive Articles state, “The intent need not exist throughout the absence, or for any particular period of time, as long as it exists at some time during the absence.” Prompt repentance and return do not mitigate the existence of even a momentary will to escape for good — either in thought (let’s blow this joint, you say emphatically one day) or in feeling (whispered unsettled dissatisfaction) or by action (packing up your stuff in a huff, destroying or removing your uniform, buying a ticket to somewhere else, joining another army). The military reserves the right to presume or impute this intention on the basis of circumstantial evidence and quite intelligently also holds that military personnel can be found guilty of desertion even if they are not entirely absent from military jurisdiction and control. The punishments reflect the importance the armed forces place on this intention. In wartime, the maximum penalty for desertion is death, while never more than eighteen months of imprisonment for those convicted of merely an illegal or unauthorized absence.2 There are always soldiers who leave without permission and who desert. Sometimes in great numbers, certainly in numbers almost impossible to count with great certainty. In recent history, and taking a US-centric sample, the Vietnam War is perhaps most emblematic, where the 100,000 US soldiers discharged for absence offenses were only the official record of a much larger refusal. In addition to the thousands of draftees who fled or hid to avoid conscription (over 60,000) and to the over 1,000 reported incidents of fragging — soldiers killing their superior officers — it’s estimated that during the Vietnam War, there were 1.5 million “AWOL incidents” and that “at the peak of the war, an American soldier was going AWOL every two minutes, and deserting every six minutes.”3 The desertion rates were highest in the US Civil War, the first truly industrial war, where, when the United States had a properly named War Department, over 200,000 soldiers deserted, some several times over; in 1862 alone, 180,000 listed Union soldiers couldn’t be found in a war whose actual desertion rate was a remarkable 45 percent.4 World War I is notorious not only for the millions of civilians and soldiers slaughtered but also for the British, French, and German practice of executing deserters or in the case of France an entire regiment of Algerian riflemen — 10e Compagnie de 8 Battalion du Regiment Mixte de Tirailleurs Algériens — who refused an order to attack in Flanders in December 1914.5 In the uniformly popular World War II, thousands of deserting German soldiers were executed for treason; in only three years of direct combat engagement, 40,000 US soldiers went AWOL, a substantial proportion court-martialed (21,049) and imprisoned, and one (Eddie Slovik) executed. It is estimated that by 1941, 450,000 Red Army soldiers had deserted. In the forgettable Korean War, another 20,000 men were reported AWOL each month.6 By the first quarter of 2006, officially 8,000 US and 1,000 UK soldiers had deserted from the occupation war in Iraq. The number of US soldiers fleeing US-led

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wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Central Asia between 2000 and 2006 was estimated at between 22,000 and 44,000.7 The US Defense Department was particularly concerned as the numbers (up by 27 percent in 2006) and accompanying vocal opposition continued to rise, led by a newly emboldened soldier activist corps from Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), Veterans for Peace, and the Military Project with their newspaper GI Special. The GI Rights Hotline reported that about 30 percent of their 33,000 callers were asking about being AWOL. Conscientious objection applications and soldiers seeking asylum in Canada increased, as did court-martial and prison sentences for desertion for refusal to go to Iraq and Afghanistan or for refusing combat and military policing once there.8 Some of the more well-known of these soldiers and conscientious objection activists were Aidan Delgado, Jeremy Hinzman, Brandon Hughey, Pablo Paredes, Jose Vasquez, and Geoffrey Millard. The first officer to refuse deployment to Iraq, Ehren Watada’s highly publicized trial ended in a mistrial while Camilo Mejía completed a prison term. RAF doctor Lt. Malcolm Kendall-Smith was court-martialed. Subsequently, AWOL rates have been on the rise, increasing by 234 percent from 2004 to 2010.9 According to military.com, more than 20,000 “soldiers have been dropped from the rolls as deserters since 2006.”10 The pretrial solitary confinement — and torture — and the thirty-five-year sentencing of Chelsea Manning for leaking military documents and secrets reflect the military’s fear of dissent within.11 After a harrowing six years in prison, President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence on January 18, 2017, days before he left office. She is scheduled for release in May 2017. The case of Robert Bergdahl is probably the most recent and celebrated case of a soldier charged with desertion — even after the United States traded five Taliban members for him. Naturally, the army commissioned a study to determine the cause of and to prevent rising desertions. Its authors, Ramsberger and Bell, were perplexed over the “counterintuitive finding” that those who volunteer to join the armed forces are more likely to be deserters than conscripts are. They might have been perplexed because they failed to note that the authors of a 1954 study on “Delinquency in the Army” found a similarly “puzzling” tendency for “volunteers rather than draftees” to go AWOL as well as those with the least education, the lowest “aptitude,” and the highest rates of premilitary and intra-military “delinquency.”12 But this is hardly surprising at all. The post–Vietnam War US all-volunteer army is a mercenary army of the poor, as most imperial, state, or crown armies have been, whether they are nominally free or conscripted. It is a truism that those who control warfare and its use rarely, if ever, fight themselves. The force of war —“that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it”— has almost always this double element of the initial conscription or exploitation and the subsequent subordination to the order of weapon, defeat, mutilation, and death.13 Despite the ideological bluster — which is primarily for the benefit of the country’s legislators, the Armed Forces’ bankers — the US

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Army’s soldier base is maintained by it being the wealthiest and only functional (and popularly legitimate) social welfare department of the United States, infamous for recruiting with false promises of good easy money, of affordable housing, free healthcare, and subsidized pricing for consumer goods, of portable education and skills training, of a life safe from saturation policing and prison, and notably, the promise of avoiding war and killing itself.14 Most armies, even avowedly mercenary ones, promise rewards for the risk of death and the deprivations, bodily and otherwise, of war — heroism, honor, duty, patriotic service, manhood, the thrill of victory. But only the United States believes itself now capable of waging war without casualties, by which it means by such technological asymmetry or superiority of weaponry that it can magically (“precision targeting”) cause death, misery, and destruction only to the forever growing and mutating enemy or to those collectively punishable guilty innocents known as collaterals. Pernicious and mad (they also believe they can conquer the weather), they call this RMA, a revolution in military affairs, and if it weren’t so tragically dangerous one might find its fantasies of domineering grandeur farcical.15 The recruitment process, then, trades on the fantasy of American military omniscience, its new revolutionary creed, and an incredulity one can only describe as willful ignorance, the ubiquity of video gaming and Hollywood action films notwithstanding. It promotes the illusion of a freely made contract that is belied by the entire socioeconomic context of abandonment or accumulation by dispossession that produces the contract in the first place. The voluntary is a cruel shadow of itself in the world’s largest and most powerful authoritarian institution where it enlists absolute submission to a hierarchical and nightmarish bureaucratic structure of command and obedience designed to create human machines that will conquer and kill at the behest of their master, with no thought of their own. Because it can hide all the lies from the public far more easily than it can hide them from those it recruits, thanks in part to the collusion of the mass media and the civilian government, the US military has intensified its hold on its so-called volunteers. AWOL soldiers who surrender or who are captured are no longer released but remanded under custody to their unit. Soldiers whose enlistment terms are complete — who have fulfilled the obligations of their contracts — are subject to the “stop-loss provision,” which permits the armed forces to order them to remain in active duty until otherwise released, and criminalizes noncompliance with the stoploss or stop-movement order. During the 1990 Persian Gulf War, the armed forces first used the stop-loss power granted to it during the Vietnam War. It was activated in 2002 for the Reserve and National Guard and is currently in effect for all military personnel.16 Specialist Blake LeMoine, who was in prison for insubordination, called the military enlistment contract a “slave contract.” And recall that in the United States, slavery was never entirely abolished; it is constitutionally enabled for prisoners, for those convicted of a crime. A sergeant who served twenty years in the army and was captive to it described himself under stop-loss as a “prisoner of war.”17 The terms — in

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their entirety — of military rule and war conduct for the soldier have exposed to some of those blind to it previously the nexus of enslavement masquerading as freedom that has characterized the United States since its inception. Most soldiers go AWOL because they’ve had enough killing or because they just want to go home — to a real bed, to dry socks, to waking up when they feel like it, to friends, family, and lovers. Sometimes the heat or the cold, the noise or the quiet gets to them. Sometimes they’re always scared, sometimes something spooks them and the fear is new and unbeatable. Sometimes there’s an opportunity and it’s too tempting to pass up. Sometimes money is involved. Sometimes they get pissed off about how they’re treated and it’s the last straw. Sometimes they can’t see the rationality or the morality of the war’s purpose any longer; sometimes their side is losing and they want to get out while they’re ahead. Despite the graffiti message commonly left by World War I soldiers in the trenches — Mutiny is the Conscience of War — most soldiers are not mutineers, that is, collectively organized rebels. There is a long and inspiring history of the ones who were — from Caesar’s Gallic conscripts to the Sepoy guard to the Kronstadt sailors to David Fagan and the Black “Smoked” Yankees in the Philippine-American War to US soldiers in Vietnam with their more than 140 underground newspapers to the Israeli Refuseniks today.18 Subject to “the enormous condescension of posterity,” to quote E. P. Thompson, the mutineers were nonetheless unusual for being or becoming active political opponents not just of the war they were soldiering in but of war in general and sometimes even of militarism itself, as is true of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans Stand for Standing Rock, the more than one thousand person peace militia deployed to muster with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe water protectors fighting the Dakota Access pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.19 The soldier who lays his gun down and refuses to fight, who disobeys unconscionable orders, or who expropriates military means to be freed from military authority ought to be acknowledged, honored, and encouraged. Wars cannot be fought without soldiers, who are rarely warriors in the mythic sense but are usually, whatever their zeal or reluctance, the disposable tools of generals, kings, princes, bankers, businessmen, presidents, senators, and other powerful agents. The soldier who deserts and refuses deserves understanding, refuge, political mobilization, tenderness, or gifts of wild imaginings of other possibilities for them, without question. In Tahrir Square, you might have seen what Paul Amar described as the “look of unenthusiastic resignation in the eyes of the Amn al-Markazi [Central Security Services] soldiers as they were kissed and lovingly disarmed by protesters.” Unenthusiastic, of course, because their fate in the complicated tripartite military-police-security structure in Egypt was quite unclear. Sympathy, understanding, and kisses even for the deserting soldier, yes. However, it’s my view that we need a more expansive definition of desertion, one that goes beyond the actions of combat soldiers in recognizable military engagements and moves

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toward an understanding of desertion as the process by which militarism and the disposition to war is abolished. Trade wars, king’s wars, genocidal wars, religious wars, Indian wars, civil wars, colonial occupation wars, world wars, counterinsurgency wars, anticommunist wars, crime wars, security wars, and so on — almost by necessity, soldiers and dissenting populations refuse one war at a time, the one they’re in the middle of. But what happens when war never ends, when it becomes permanent? Despite the quite sobering recognition that with very brief exceptions war has been a serial but continuous activity in human history, it’s arguable that what is characteristic of the post–World War II period is the establishment of a permanent war economy and forms of militaristic rule compatible with formal Western-style political democracy. The United States has led the way in developing this form of governance and it is currently the world’s largest and most aggressive military power. It is also a country that has almost always been at war of one sort or another, a country whose wealth and power was initially acquired by conquest and enslavement and renewed after World War II through a vast military-industrial complex, a country with a profound militaristic economy and culture. Permanent war economies and societies require permanent wars and in the post– Cold War period the invention of perpetual wars has been a distinctive and characteristic trend. General wars without end, waged against ever-shifting spectral enemies, driven by ideologies of order and counterinsurgency and policies to contain and quarantine the effects of global poverty — this type of permanent warfare Subcomandante Marcos called the Fourth World War against humanity. Permanent war is, in one view, a return or revenge of the Hobbesian state of nature, the putative cradle of Western civilization. As Hobbes wrote: “So, the nature of War consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.”20 When Virginia Woolf gave the answer — eliminate the disposition to war — to the question posed to her in Three Guineas of how she thought war could be prevented or when Seymour Melman promoted conversion as an analytic and oppositional framework to permanent war economies, they each were referring to the ways in which “The War Is Not Only Military,” to quote Subcomandante Marcos’s description of the Fourth World War, and to the socioeconomic, cultural, and political support and drives which enable and centralize militarism. There are many complex and complicated implications to the claim that war is not only military. One of the complications relevant here is that for the United States, war is difficult to differentiate from policing and policing difficult to distinguish from war.21 The ideological rubrics of order, security, and counterinsurgency, the personnel, the level of excessive force, the use of saturation techniques, the constant intimidation, the sophisticated domineering weaponry, the malleable law that regulates each, the targeted populations, the economic and political motives and racialist ontologies that drive the whole regime are so enmeshed and entwined it is difficult to tell them

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apart. This is at least one reason why it is a terrible mistake to think that terrorism is better considered a crime problem, to be handled through so-called criminal justice rubrics, that is, by the police and prisons. The global war on terrorism, the permanent security war the United States continues to lead today, is modeled on the previous wars on communism and on crime, and each is waged not for a peace but to perpetuate a vigilant alertness to an ever-expanding, spectral terror that knows no boundaries and must be fought anew, recreated each day. Hence, the significance of the criminalization processes to inventing and characterizing the enemy, the rejection as obsolete of the laws and rules of modern post-Westphalian war and their replacement by modes of punishment and the rule of administrative security answerable only to the sovereign police state, and the indefinite imprisonment of the enemy or his entire land. Hence the necessity of insisting that peace is more than the absence of military wars narrowly construed; that it is qualitatively different than Kant’s laudable but limited version of Perpetual Peace; and that opposing specific wars and war in general requires honorable terms that establish an alternative order to a warfare or police state. To end the permanent security war known as the global war on terror, to achieve a real peace and not war by other means, it will be necessary to abolish the global security apparatus that wages it and to begin to uproot the deeply entrenched disposition to war that sustains and articulates it. We will need to permanently desert. There are two joined elements to permanent desertion: refusal and running away. First and foremost, the permanent deserter refuses the entire war apparatus and its accompanying benefits, ideologies, and technologies of improvement. The deserter must refuse the war and its peace, its mode of destruction and its mode of production. The permanent deserter refuses to participate and to collaborate with the military authority and all its proxies, including the police. This means that the permanent deserter refuses to be represented by the military or its agents, refuses to respect its putative right to represent the citizen, the nation, you. Refusal of this type involves in-difference. In-difference is a mode of insubordination, to use a term familiar to soldiers, in which you break your affective and effective attachments to the powers that be and begin the practice of becoming unavailable for servitude. To be in-difference is to refuse the lure of the promises being offered — national security, police power, capitalist democracy — and the familiarity of your own complaints. To be in-difference is to refuse to be intoxicated with the deathly and to sever your attachment to that which you claim is intolerable. To be in-difference is to refuse to provide them with more power than they already have. Being in-difference is a prefigurative consciousness, in which you inhabit the anticipatory as daily life, both as preparation for self-governance and as an important measure of permanent desertion itself. In-difference refusal is negative — no stop-loss — but it is also by its nature immanent. Every captive knows that you have no other choice but to free yourself while still

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enslaved or confined. And thus the temporality of in-difference refusal is well suited to perpetual war: always now, not later, because later is a possible but not a terribly dependable outcome. The spatiality of in-difference is well suited to permanent war too: wherever you are, everywhere, including right under their noses. The United States is right to think that you can be a deserter even if you’re still under military jurisdiction, just as it makes sense in a context of permanent war to think that all of us, not just soldiers, need to consider deserting. Once you’re this far into refusal and noncompliance, then you’re almost always also running away. Conventional notions of bravery make us think that running away is an act of weakness and cowardice. But, in the abolitionist tradition and among the maroons (and to some extent among pirates too), running away and helping others to run away are acts of enormous risk and courage. Running away is when you take refusal on the road. When you run away, it’s clear there’s no turning back. They may capture you or kill you, and they will try, but you’re never going back on your own. Your head is turned in another direction. You’ll never face them, eyes averted or straight on again. You are standing down and not getting up. Their “commandments, interventions and interferences” have lost their legitimacy and their claim.22 You’re on the run now, on the run from the war machine and its social order. On the run from being a soldier or a civilian, two sides of the same militaristic/patriarchal relationship of representation, sides determined in advance by others, sides which cede to the state and its appointed military authorities the power to maintain a social order and contract corruptly founded on the disposition to war. Permanent deserters, like other fugitives in the abolitionist tradition, never run without preparation or without a plan for something else. Regardless of how elaborate or minimal the preparation and plans may be, being in plan for something else marks the moment when the something else becomes necessary, uncompromisable, uncorruptable. When the something else becomes what we need to live without which we will fall apart, as Marcuse so precisely put it, then the something else has become organic, part of our organs for the alternative. Running away in this sense is what distinguishes being absent without official leave (AWOL) and permanent desertion. When you’ve run away, their permission or authorization doesn’t matter anymore. You’re not planning to return. You’re on your own with whomever else you gather around you or connect with. Permanent war, permanent refusal, face to face, on the run, backs turned, stiff with conviction.

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running away | The Logic of the Birds | Palestine | being the leaders you seek correspondence, inventory, conversation, cloaks, books, binoculars, banners, photographs, fossils, film, Agent Directory Date: xxxxx File note: The materials artist Sarah Beddington asked to deposit were received and filed as she requested. The cloaks are available for loan so long as they do not suffer too much wear and tear. The package arrived with an additional item, a small bit of raw footage from Beddington’s feature-length film about displacement and migration in Palestine that featured the following dialogue: 00:08:42 Fadia: What about hawthorn trees? 00:08:46 Blind man: There were some but they were outside the village. 00:08:52 Fadia: But why do they call us from Sa’sa’: “The Family of the Hawthorn”? Blind man: Because of the mountain. They say it’s because of the mountain. An assortment of walking boots, packs, water containers, portable food, and directions for avoiding capture left by others are stored nearby, along with a copy of the indispensable Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh.

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Sarah Beddington c/o Hawthorn Archive Dear Avery, Following on from our recent trip to Palestine together, I hope you will consider taking into safekeeping a parcel containing the objects listed below. Together they comprise documentation of a longer journey I made with others between 2012 and 2015. As you will recall, I was invited to go to the West Bank of Palestine by the curator and writer Yazid Anani and Birzeit University Museum. It was suggested that I devise an artistic intervention in the landscape around Jericho in the Jordan Valley as part of the fourth edition of Cities Exhibition, Jericho: Beyond the Celestial and Terrestrial. I initially spent six months researching there in 2012 and the following list of objects and relics date partly from this period while others relate to the public performance that emerged toward the end of that year and which finally evolved into a film, completed in 2015, that included further journeys, chance meetings, walks, and conversations. If there is room in the collection, please file the items listed below as both reference material and, in the case of the film, the voice recording, and possibly the cloaks, as available for lending. I include some images that, I hope, give a clearer idea of what the package would contain. The inventory is listed in categories rather than by the actual number of items I would send. I look forward to hearing from you. Yours gratefully, Sarah

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INVENTORY 1. Fossil The fossil was found in Palestine on a stone-terraced hillside no longer cultivated; an egg-sized relic once submerged under a vanished sea. These two shells, forever clamped together, fit perfectly into the palm of my hand — comforting for reminding me of a time long before any human conflicts took place over this land. 2. Binocular viewer I made this object in Palestine using found plastic drainage tubes and photographic transparencies (11 × 5 × 3 inches or 28 × 13 × 7.5 cm) in 2013. A black-and-white photograph from 1917 shows a springtime procession that took place annually between the twelfth and twentieth centuries from Jerusalem to the shrine of Nebi Musa in the desert close to Jericho. A color photograph from 2012 shows a line of people hiking in the Palestinian landscape. When viewers hold the device up to their eyes, the two images, and eras, appear to merge into one. 3. Paperback book I came across this Penguin classic edition of The Conference of the Birds while thinking about the importance of the eastern Mediterranean as a major highway for bird migration and for human journeys of pilgrimage, exile, and return. The cover is worn and the pages are much annotated with pencil and marker pen. The Conference of the Birds is a twelfth-century Persian Sufi poem by Farid ud-Din Attar that describes a spiritual migration of birds setting out on a journey in search of a leader only to reach the conclusion, after crossing a landscape full of hardships, that collectively they are their own leader. 4. Photographs (a) and (b) These two photographs show a group of costumed actors mostly from Ashtar Theatre and Birzeit University leading the public walking procession of around one hundred people up Wadi Al Auja at the edge of the Jordan Valley, in the West Bank of Palestine, Area C, which is under Israeli military and civil control. They paused at selected locations to read extracts (in Arabic) from The Logic of the Birds, the translation of the Arabic title, Mantiq al-Tayr, before leading us to the source of the spring where we shared a picnic and flew bird-shaped kites at sunset. 5. Two banners I was inspired to make two banners in blue and red cotton velvet with silk embroidery thread (98.5 x 47 inches or 250 x 120 cm each) after seeing archival images of the Nebi Musa procession. The embroidered Arabic calligraphy on the blue one

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reads: Mantiq Al-Tayr or The Logic of the Birds (see photograph a). An accompanying red banner is left blank.

6. Thirty cloaks I designed these costumes which, in addition to representing the birds, were intended to evoke past, future, and science-fictive narratives. Made from cotton, in shades close to those of the desert landscape, they are embroidered in Arabic on the back with the names of different birds, both local and migratory. 7. Film The Logic of the Birds (Mantiq Al-Tayr), 2015, 18 minutes, HD video, color with surround sound was produced by Birzeit University and supported by the British Council. Everyone involved in the performance felt it important to restage it and make a film that captured a trace of the human presence in the seemingly (but never) empty landscape. By working with a mythological story in the reality of occupied Palestine, I hoped to offer one of many possible scenarios that could reactivate past stories hidden just out of sight, while also opening a space for reflection on a potential future. In the film, the land itself becomes the main character while any sense of reenactment is ruptured by sounds of the contemporary actuality, such as that of an F16 fighter plane passing overhead. I will send you both a copy of a promotional poster used in Palestine in 2015 as well as a digital file of the film itself. 8. Sound recording A Re-Imagined Landscape was a conversation between myself and Raja Shehadeh — the Palestinian writer, lawyer, and human rights activist — which introduced a public discussion at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, Palestine, in January 2013. Raja read extracts from his books, including A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle, and we spoke of how to try and think beyond human-made fractures in the landscape, and how extreme this imagining might need to be in order to envisage any possibility of a unification of land and people.

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a means of preparation

Photograph (a)

Fossil and paperback book

Binocular viewer

Thirty cloaks

Film

Poster

III. the exile of our longing some questions about haunting and futurity; why the “P” is wrong in PTSD; doing time; the photograph and the prop; keywords for reading Colin Dayan; a blow at organized power; ghosts in the cinema studio haunting | trauma | Deir Yassin | Unmade Film | colonialism | Roland Barthes | Congo TAT | Vincent Meessen | the ghost on the ramparts | “Anything but Utopian” | doing time | the photograph | extraneous persons | Colin (Joan) Dayan | animism | a blow at organized power | Leon Czolgosz | what’s there waiting for you | Cinecittà | Clemens von Wedemeyer

haunting | trauma | Deir Yassin | Unmade Film correspondence, notes, interview transcripts, symptom list, deposit of Orlow’s book Unmade Film Date: xxxxx File note: The artist Uriel Orlow sent a request, an interview with Dr. Ghanadry, and other materials. Lamentations were made for the building of Kfar Shaul, a psychiatric hospital dedicated initially to treating suffering Holocaust survivors, on the ruins of the village of Deir Yassin, whose inhabitants were massacred in April 1948 in the ethnic cleansing and occupation campaigns. Condolences for the dead and the displaced were inscribed in our register. There was general interest in and admiration for his Unmade Film project and its engagement with complex questions of dispossession and historical erasure. The question as to what exactly was wanted from us (and what part of us) was asked, as it is every time a request comes in. Some reluctance to confront “the terrible stories” that “reside in the stones,” as the Voiceover puts it, was expressed by a few weary combatants in this struggle.

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HA Dear Uriel, Thank you for your request and the items you sent. I shared them with a few others at the archive who take an interest in the psychosocial impact of war and other types of state-sponsored violence. Please excuse the fragmented nature of my reply but given your deadline, the complicated issues the materials raise, and our normally slow procedures, it was not possible to do more than send you back some notes on our initial thoughts. I hope you find them of some use. For your information, the words and phrases in the subheadings and in the last section on rearranging the symptomology are from the interview between yourself and Yoa’d Ghanadry of the Palestinian Counseling Center, Jerusalem or from the meeting you had with several psychologists at the Al-Amari Refugee Camp in April 2013. The exception is the statement “the jail stays inside you” which was made publicly by Ziad Abbas of the Middle East Children’s Alliance on Palestinian Prisoners’ Day on April 17, 2013. To protect the anonymity of the psychologists, the words and statements have not been individually attributed. All the documents you sent, including the correspondence between us, will now become part of the archive files, as we discussed. Should you wish to send further materials of any kind to be held alongside these, you are very welcome. Please be reassured that they will be kept safely and respectfully. In any event, be in touch if you have further need. Best, Avery

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the same chain The psychologists are responsible for helping individuals suffering from an ongoing violent and unjust sociopolitical-economic condition to which they also are subjected and from which they too suffer. For everyone, the suffering is bearable sometimes and at other times it’s too heavy and it begins to break the person carrying it. Everyone knows that the patient and the therapist/doctor are in the same situation, the same mise-en-scène, and there is no analytic-ethical distance: the diagnosis and treatment must work for the doctor too. Almost everyone also knows (whether it’s acknowledged openly or not and even if you have to push a little to get the militants to admit it) that dealing with the suffering person by person with the individual care and attention each deserves and requires is part of the political struggle for decolonization, not a luxury for the few or a shame upon the weak. This is a different chain or connection than the one that links the Nakba and the occupation to the Holocaust. That chain — fiery red with the strangling decisions and choices and other parties that the chain continually mystifies or erases altogether — fixes “victim” to “victim” returning always as if by necessity to an impossible beginning that didn’t start there anyway. Yehudit Kirstein Keshet argues that the chain has become a Dybbuk and its “possessive spirit” is like a hungry ghost who can never be sated or appeased, ever more malevolent and dangerous. The chain that attaches the Palestinian psychologist and her patients is woven of different material that must forge connection under conditions of continuous dispersal, exile, and blockage. This chain is thus intimate and fugitive while at the same time more historical. In Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions, Stephen Frosh explains the historical disturbance: “The traumatic event is not symbolised. . . . This means that it is inaccessible but also that it keeps coming back, disrupting everything, a threatening hollow at the heart of whatever is held dear. It ceases therefore to be history at all, in the sense that it is never properly represented; it is rather an unrecognised past that saturates the present, with both individual and social-historical significance. . . . ‘The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.’ ”1

we are not post anything! [Laughs] . . . the ‘P’ is wrong The psychologists are forced to work with a language and a diagnostic system not of their own choosing. Only words that get paid are permitted. Someone looked it up. DSM-V Criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: “The person has been exposed to a traumatic event. . . . The traumatic event is persistently re-experienced in one (or more) ways. . . . Numbing of responsiveness. . . . Duration of the disturbance . . . more than one month. . . . Specify if: Acute Chronic with Delayed Onset.”

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The “P” is wrong. This is clear. There is no one traumatic event. (As Sarah Beddington pointed out, the “P” is wrong in another basic way since there is no “P” in Arabic.) The catastrophic event called the Nakba began before 1948 and the dispossession and disenfranchisement produced by it actively continues today through occupation, colonization, and apartheid. (No one wanted to have a long discussion about the DSM and the contradictory politics of medicalization or what happens to the meaning of genocide, war, domestic violence, factory explosions, natural disasters, or heteronormativity when their effects can only be legitimately discussed in these restricted terms of individual pathology and disorder. Later, we did refer to the importance of war trauma for Freud and the role he played in legitimating the punishment and treatment of World War I soldiers suffering from it and also to the role the Holocaust has played as the paradigm for defining trauma and PTSD in academic and clinical studies of it. Reference was made to the scholars Ruth Leys and Cathy Caruth and to Harun Farocki’s 2009 video installation Serious Games III: Immersion. Someone offered to look again at the archive’s files on World War I soldiers.) The “P” is also somewhat confusing or misleading given the usual psychological definition of trauma, which is always in effect after the fact, later, post, lagging, and yet never post at all. In the classic psychoanalytic conception, trauma not only misaligns our perception of time, history, or event, it is itself a misalignment of the temporality of experience, since trauma is characteristically experienced belatedly, afterward, unexpectedly. Belatedly because trauma is produced by the repression of the shocking or horrible experience, whose displaced repetition one experiences later: a traumatized person or society is stuck in a past “never properly represented” that repeats as a present that can never end. Trauma thus attaches you to what can’t be forgotten or forgiven. It attaches you not to the repetition of a memory of a terrible horrible shocking event or experience but binds you to the repression of it. This repetition of and libidinal investment in the repression fastens the future — what comes next — to the trauma, which is what never ends, what can’t end, what you don’t (unconsciously) want to end. In this sense, trauma is never “post.” In this sense, trauma is a deeply regressive and repressive state — an awful predicament for both individuals and societies — a fatalistic and aberrant condition because seemingly interminable.

the trauma and the life are going on at the same time We backed away from the word trauma, even though some people the psychologists are helping are suffering from it and sympathetic understanding is warranted. Maybe for the Palestinian psychologists haunting, in the specific way we use it, is a better term because for us it is precisely that sociopolitical-psychological state when

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something else, or something different from before, feels like it must be done. (We reserve for another occasion, when other archive members can be present, the discussion of Fanon, the long history of the politicization of psychiatry and the specific place of Algeria in the Palestinian struggle.) Haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with or when their oppressive nature is continuously denied. Haunting is not the same as being traumatized, although haunting can emerge from trauma or end in it. What’s distinctive as we understand it about haunting is that it’s an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely. Haunting describes those singular and repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when you lose your bearings on the world, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind field comes into view. Haunting alters the experience of being in linear time (past present future) and it raises specters or ghosts who appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer contained, repressed, or blocked from view. Haunting is thus one way we’re notified that what’s been suppressed or concealed is very much alive and present, messing or interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and enclosure ceaselessly directed toward us. Haunting always registers the harm inflicted or the losses sustained by past or present social violence. But unlike trauma, haunting produces a something to be done. A domain of turmoil and trouble, haunting is that moment of however long duration when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and the rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when easily living one day and then the next becomes impossible, when the present seamlessly becoming the future gets jammed up and something must be done about it. In contrast to aberrant mourning, traumatic paralysis, or dissociative repetition, haunting is an emergent state: the ghost arises, carrying the signs and portents of a repression in the past or the present that’s no longer working. The ghost demands your attention. The present wavers. Something will happen. What will happen, of course, is not given in advance, but something must be done. This emergent state is also the critical analytic moment. When the repression isn’t working anymore the trouble that results creates conditions that demand re-narrativization. What’s happening? How did it come to pass? What does it mean? When the repression isn’t working anymore the trouble that results creates conditions that also invite action. What do I do? Can you help? Will it get better? A contest over what’s to come next or later, futurity is imbricated or interwoven into the very scene of haunting itself. This understanding of haunting registers and evokes the lived meeting, in their historical time, of the organized forces of order and the aggrieved person when con-

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sciousness of that meeting is arising, haunting, forcing a confrontation, forking the past and the future. At this meeting point — in the gracious but careful reckoning with the people, places, histories, knowledges, memories, ways of life, and ideas that are living and breathing in the places hidden from view — the elements of a practice for eliminating the conditions that produce the haunting in the first place are located. Like the psychologists, we care about ending suffering, not merely diagnosing, justifying, or witnessing it. For us, haunting alights on that moment or process when the next or what’s-to-come is grappling with and emerging out of a comprehension that the repression is failing, that it is not inevitable, not fatal, not one’s fate. Something is being freed and there’s a reach for it. The reach is key. The something to be done is not ever given in advance, but it can be cultivated toward more just and peaceful ends. This emergent rather than fatalistic conception of haunting often (to the extent that it is or is becoming an explicitly subversive or rebellious consciousness) lends the something to be done a certain retrospective urgency: the something to be done feels as if it has already been needed or wanted before, perhaps forever, certainly for a long time, and we cannot wait for it any longer. We’re haunted, Herbert Marcuse reminded us, by the “historic alternatives” that could have been.

we have to think again of how to arrange our symptomology Macaulay Plan D a father is beaten by a soldier a brother is imprisoned it’s impossible to find any family without a history of somebody going to prison wounded or beaten by the soldiers the jail stays inside you it’s an achievement to have a normal death and not be killed people are angry he is helpless she is helpless we feel helpless “It’s forbidden!” people are humiliated at checkpoints I have to leave early because I have a checkpoint I was feeling humiliated again and again and again anxious more than depressed investing most of your energy trying to survive economically emotionally the majority are in a bad situation

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no political hope you don’t dream you have a dream you have things you want to do you think about it but you cannot do it there are obstacles frustration touches the sky like you are not a human anymore they don’t see you you don’t exist it’s like a prison here a prison here a prison here and it’s not connected together now Gaza and the West Bank are like different countries there are no lands and houses and so they are forced to go to Shuafat camp and there is nothing no man no authorities nothing nothing nothing the mediators are Palestinian people people are always losing you cannot start a country with Gaza killing the collective resilience is being affected creatively coping with situations which are not normal refusing to cope it took more than 45 minutes to do the coordination between the Palestinian authority and Israeli authority 10 children were burned alive 60 children watching the fire station is two minutes away walking distance people are ordered to destroy their own houses or pay tens of thousands of shekels for them to do it if you go to a Palestinian shop you find most products are Israeli World Bank policy increase prices don’t have good salaries import export we don’t control the waters where’s your airboat? where is your sea? without the basics bank loan infrastructure olive trees buying stuff through Israeli ports pay the taxes agents there is abuse people killing each other all the time the continuous situation of occupation family structure shaken you don’t feel a man a mum is crying because her child committed suicide sexual violence against women and children immobilized live in fear you’re afraid your turn how to think about the future children flashbacks stuttering bedwetting nightmares children learn happy enjoy go to school do things

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they are suffering also peace agreement We are fucked! six thousand years of culture and they say you’re not ready for democracy It’s crazy! It’s crazy . . . [laughs] [laughter] the trauma and the life are going on at the same time I’m cooking fish today if anyone wants to come we need freedom!

Rearranging the symptomology to yield a better vocabulary for describing the onto-epistemological affects of continuing dispossession, enclosure, and disregard. Rearranging the symptomology to recognize what John Berger calls the “stance of undefeated despair” (the “familiarity . . . with every sort of rubble, including the rubble of words” and the grief over cruelty and injustice that is “without fear . . . resignation . . . defeat”) that is so essential to the carrying on regardless that the struggle for emancipation and happiness requires. Rearranging the symptomology so that life can go on. Coincidentally, we’re cooking fish today if anyone wants to come! [Laughter.]

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haunting | colonialism | Roland Barthes | Congo TAT | Vincent Meessen inventory, books, articles, correspondence, announcements, notes, films, videos, photographs, drawings, personality tests, writing exercises, Agent Directory Date: xxxxx File note: The inventory was found in a box file marked “To Do” along with the book accompanying the exhibition produced for the Belgium Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale Personne et les Autres edited by Vincent Meessen and Katerina Gregos. The title reflects the political standpoint of the exhibition in which Meessen transformed a single showcase into a collective project excavating the liens of colonial modernity and its emancipation projects.

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Inventory 1. Lengthy correspondence with Vincent Meessen (VM) about a visit, consisting (in addition to practical arrangement details) of seven questions and answers exchanged on: (1) colonial blind fields, (2) ghostly matters, (3) the present (vis Carl Einstein, African Primitivism), (4) sociography, (5) montage-based constructivism, (6) politics of the proper name (vis Tshyela Ntendu’s multiple signatures), and (7) André Ombredane, the Congo TAT, and La Poule d’Ombredane. Copious notes on 1, 6, 7. 2. Folded A4 sheet announcing Vincent Meessen and Tshyela Ntendu, Patterns for (Re)cognition 28.09.2013–17.11.2013 Rooms A–E. 3. Copy of Kathrin Langenohl’s essay “Congolese and Belgian Appropriations of the Colonial Era: The Commissioned Work of Tshelantende (Djilatendo) and Its Reception.” Sent by VM to accompany his “speculation” about Ntendu having signed his work with forty different spellings of his name, a question, VM says, of the “politics of the proper name”: “how the multiple signatures of Ntendu could be approached as a mode of writing oneself inside the commissioned works under colonial rule and as a way to create multiple identities.” Langenohl’s last point is highlighted by the Hawthorn Archive: “The commissioned works by Lubaki and Tshelantende were not the earliest artistic responses to the conditions of modernity. To treat them as the beginning of African modernism reduces them, defining them too strongly in terms of Europeans’ reach. Their predecessors were the murals, which can be read as acts of emancipation. Paintings on paper produced for a European market may rather have primarily constituted an opportunity to make money” (167). To imagine that Ntendu might have viewed the watercolors — valuable to the Belgians as cultural capital — as merely a means to make money is key. Not only in reminding us again that the cultural patrons and anthropologists never saw that the Congolese artists would have had independent intentions and an independent cultural and philosophical imaginary of the West. But also in giving us a way to read the nature of the multiple identities staged in the various signatures, including the possibility that they produced a certain distantiation from his communal self, which carried a public responsibility to others in his milieu. Perhaps Ntendu was saying to the Europeans: “You can buy something by me but you cannot buy me.” “You want a specimen of Africanness — here’s several all by me. Find the authentic one. HA HA!” 4. Statement by Roland Barthes from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes: Qu’est-ce qui limite la représentation?— What limits representation? Brecht had wet laundry put in the actress’s laundry basket so that her hip would have the right movement, that of the alienated laundress. Well and

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good; but stupid too, no? For what weighs down the basket is not wet laundry but time, history, and how represent such a weight as that? It is impossible to represent the political: it resists all copying, even when you turn yourself out to give it all the more verisimilitude. Contrary to the inveterate belief of all socialist arts, where politics begins is where imitation ceases.1

Statement appears as part of a prompt in a writing exercise given in archive writing workshops. It is normally used to begin with some difficult questions concerning the relationship between cultural and political representation: what is intolerable and for whom? How should the intolerable be represented? How to represent what’s unacceptable — what you/I/we can’t live with? How do you find out? What exceeds wet laundry that the word time here names? What kind of time oppresses? What kind of time liberates? Statement also appears in short video Incipit by VM where Etienne Minoungou — the Burkina Faso actor, theater director, playwright, and narrator of Vita Nova — reads it with a wink and a nod while holding a boom-mounted microphone. 5. Copy of Vita Nova, directed by Vincent Meessen (2009), 30 minutes, and copious notes. Stunning film that takes its point of departure from the cover photograph of the 1955 issue of Paris-Match in which a young cadet from Burkino Faso, Diouf Birane, is shown giving a military salute and in relation to which Roland Barthes wrote his famous 1957 essay deconstructing French colonialism, “Myth Today.” With the help of Etienne Minoungou, Meessen goes looking for Birane. Having passed away, he finds Issa Kaboré, a fellow student of Birane’s who is also featured in the same issue of ParisMatch but in other photographs. A story of colonial hauntings, Barthes’s grandfather Louis Gustave Binger — explorer, colonial officer, member of the Colonial Academy of Sciences, first governor of Côte d’Ivoire — makes an important appearance, unsettling Barthes’s silence on his family’s history. Richly researched and perfectly scripted, Vita Nova asks: What’s the difference between silencing a historical past and silencing someone’s existence? Told from the point of view of the young cadet now grown into an old man, the film begins in a broken song that is also a rhyming slip of the tongue, and a correct mistake, as Kaboré replaces the opening words of “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem —“Allons, enfants de la Patrie” (Arise, children of the fatherland) — with “Allons, enfants de la tyrannie” (Arise, children of the tyranny). The film ends with this answer to the questions it poses: “In order to establish the roots of historical truth documents should not be raised as witnesses but as voices. Paris-Match had silenced the troop child’s past but not his existence. Barthes granted him a future. That future was our present.” 6. In-progress, 19:59 minute version La Poule d’Ombredane by Vincent Meessen; copies of pp. 49–51 in Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida; book by Edgar Morin, Cinema,

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or The Imaginary Man, with yellow stickies on pages 150, 152, 177, 186, 192–93, 249, 254; Science Is Fiction, a collection of twenty-three black-and-white films by Jean Painlevé; République de Cote-d’Ivoire Ministère de l’éducation nationale, Programme d’éducation télévisuelle, Bibliographie analytique des recherches effectuées sur la psychologie de l’enfant africain francophone: 1968–1980, vol. 5. UNESCO. The film is focused on André Ombredane (1898–1958), a French psychologist who introduced the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) to the Congo and who conducted a series of experiments in the 1950s that involved soliciting the reactions of the Congolese to the screening of various films, including a Jean Painlevé film accompanied by music, a film by Jacques Cousteau, La Chasse sous-marine, and a British missionary film shot in Ghana (then the Gold Coast), The Good Samaritan. Apparently, Ombredane gave a lecture to UNESCO describing the reactions to the screenings. Meessen’s initial link to Ombredane is through Barthes’s references to Ombredane’s chicken (la poule d’Ombredane) in which, according to Ombredane or possibly Edgar Morin, on seeing the Painlevé film, the Congolese audience seemed most interested in the tiny chicken crossing the village square in a corner of the screen. Vincent wonders what kind of “scientificity” could be produced with these experiments and puts them to the test of their own “unthinkability.” The black-and-white images flicker and dance creating multiple corners on the screen, crisscrossing the colonial blind fields VM always so deeply perceives. I never noticed the reference before VM pointed it out, even though it introduces the discussion of the punctum, which I have studied carefully. I must have forgotten it in an act of avoiding it. In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes: “In Ombredane’s experiment, the blacks see on his screen only the chicken crossing one corner of the village square. I too, in the photograph of two retarded children at an institution in New Jersey (taken in 1924 by Lewis H. Hine), hardly see the monstrous heads and pathetic profiles . . .; what I see, like Ombredane’s blacks, is the off-center detail. . . . I am a primitive, a child — or a maniac; I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own.” The racist and ableist elements are obvious and hardly need mention and Barthes’s presumption that Africans, children, and maniacs dismiss knowledge and culture is patently stupid. The point about the chicken interests me though. The chicken is not a mere off-center detail, but a major figure in Yoruba creation myth (the five-toe chicken scratches the earth into existence) and an important currency in Congolese culture. The chicken appears in a very large number of the stories told to Ombredane when he administered the Congo TAT: they are used to pay restitution, to feed important guests, or celebrate important occasions, and so on. The chicken is a major clue or actor in a story neither Ombredane nor Barthes seem to understand at all. Perhaps the pointing and vocal interest in the chicken in the corner of the screen is best read as a refusal to participate in the terms of study, which is not what Barthes meant by the punctum but might resonate with the colonial

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prisoners of war whose laughter broke or mocked the scientific authority that sought to capture their voices. 7. Note from VM: “Elaborate on TAT. It was widely discussed in French colonial psychiatry in the mid-1950s. Contextualize this weird scientific object. Relate to bigger context of the role of psychiatry in colonialism and confinement. Talk about Fanon. Alice Cherki, one of Fanon’s former assistants at the Blida clinic, told me Fanon planned his own TAT in reaction to Murray and Ombredane. But it was 1956 the year he declared his work impossible in those conditions and joined the FNL.” 8. A variant of the TAT developed by Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan in 1935 given to five distinct groups of Congolese, then of the Belgian Congo, in order to assess the personality test on societies based on a “musico-choreographic” versus “arithmo-geometric” schemas of psychosocial organization. The Congo TAT consists of seventeen images, ten of which were made by Belgian artist Jean Duboscq, selected to meet four criteria: “assimilable” to the Congolese imagination; sufficiently enigmatic or ambiguous to facilitate projection; sufficiently incomplete and fluid to call out situations and experiences in process such as watchfulness, escape, reflection; able to elicit certain themes, especially death, evocation of ancestors, leopard men, problems of work, and relations with whites. Four hundred stories were recorded using a modification of the original Murray technique. In the Congo TAT the rule of silence was “categorically rejected” and the examiner prodded the subject along with who what how why then questions to prevent the refusal to participate or manage bad-tempered participation, a problem Ombredane considers one of “misrecognition.”

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9.

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10. “Thematic Apperception Test Manual” by Henry A. Murray, MD, and the staff of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, 1943. The test consists of showing a person a series of images and asking them to tell a story about each one. There were thirty-one images, each person to be shown a total of twenty in two sessions, ten in each. Five minutes were allowed for each story. The test purportedly uncovered personality and unconscious motives, the rationale being that: if the pictures are presented as a test of imagination, the subject’s interest, together with his need for approval, can be so involved in the task that he forgets his sensitive self and the necessity of defending it against the probing of the examiner, and, before he knows it, he has said things about an invented character that apply to himself, things which he would have been reluctant to confess in response to a direct question. As a rule the subject leaves the test happily unaware that he has presented the psychologist with what amounts to an X-Ray picture of his inner self.

How is that possible given that the examiner can cut off a story that’s become too rambling, ask for plot details, and remind the subject their imagination is being tested when they get too detailed? Telling more than one story for a single picture was especially undesirable and prohibited. Subjects were given comments after the first round to prepare for the second: there was no outcome; you left the narrative hanging in the air; you spent too long or not long enough; you told more than one story for each picture; you didn’t explain yourself; make it more exciting; make it more like a dream or a fairy tale. By all accounts, everyone dreaded the Blank Card, no. 16, which demanded that you first picture something before telling a story about it. 11. Christiana Morgan was an artist and a nurse’s aide whose psychoanalysis with Carl Jung between 1926 and 1928 produced visions she experienced in a semi-hypnotic state, over one hundred of which she recorded in unpublished notebooks. Forty-four of the drawings were used by Jung in the seminars he held between 1930 and 1934, some of which are published in the two-volume Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934, edited by Claire Douglas. They resemble the Congo TAT images far more than the ones she selected or drew for the creation of the Thematic Apperception Test. Until the 1943 version of the Test Manual, she had been named as the senior author of the test, as well as the first author of the article she coauthored with Murray, “Method for the Investigation of Unconscious Phantasies,” originally rejected by Ernest Jones when it was submitted in 1934 to the International Journal of PsychoAnalysis. According to Claire Douglas’s biography of Christiana Morgan, Morgan and Murray maintained a lifelong and tormented love affair. She drowned herself on a trip with him to Saint John Virgin Islands on March 14, 1967. In an article on “Christiana Morgan’s Visions Reconsidered,” Douglas writes: “In the circle of women around Freud and Jung, there were a few special women. . . . Of

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these women, perhaps the one about whom the least is known is Christiana Morgan. Jung took Morgan’s visions as a gloss for his own conceptual scheme and presented them to his students as a demonstration of his interpretive method of amplification. For four years, he explicated and elaborated her visions through a line-by-line discussion of some of them, giving them everything he had — quite often to their detriment . . . despite the brilliance of the theoretical flights it permits.”2 Very similar situation to Sabina Spielrein, who was also caught in a triangular affair with Jung and Freud. At first the love letters:

Then once the desire sated and the connection exploited, the dismissal:

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12. Give me a picture that goes with your story.

“The bull said . . . Drink again.” A drawing by Christiana Morgan of one of her visions.

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13. Tell me a story that goes with this picture.

Thematic Apperception Test 3BM drawn by Christiana Morgan and one of the three Murray TAT images used by Ombredane in the Congo TAT.

14. Copy of the Thompson Modification, Charles E. Thompson’s 1949 adaptation of the Morgan and Murray TAT for American Negroes. The modification consists entirely of replacing the white figures in the pictures with “Negro” figures. Thompson kept the woodcuts taken from Lynd Ward’s 1938 Madman’s Drum, abstract, eerie, and strange. 15. Copy of Edward T. Sherwood, “On the Designing of TAT Pictures, with Special Reference to a Set for an African People Assimilating Western Culture.” The article was published immediately upon receipt by the editorial office because “the Editor has traveled through the Swazi country and has seen the cow’s skull lying on the roof of the Queen’s abode.” In addition to the Congo and American Negro modification, the TAT was adapted for Hopi and Navajo children by W. E. Henry in 1947, for the Zulu

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in South Africa by S. G. Lee in 1953, for Micronesian peoples in the Western Pacific by Lessa and Spiegelman in 1954, and for the Zwazi by Edward Sherwood in 1957 as part of his doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago. Sherwood is the only of these scientists, including Murray, to show any interest in the problem of picture design. Possibly owing to his training by W. Lloyd Warner, the socioanthropologist who started life as a socialist actor, Sherwood sees the TAT series “like a questionnaire.” The visual representational criteria are more elaborate. Sherwood describes thirteen of them. Perceptual vagueness, as in a dream state, and incompleteness are the most important. The image must evoke, not instruct. The subject must tell, not read. The image must compress and condense a large volume of meaning that, as in a dream remembered, will provoke narrativization. Sherwood is very thorough but misses everything important in what he sees in the images: 1. A young man in shabby Western clothing, holding a flashily equipped bicycle, one foot on the pedal. . . . 2. A mature woman with an infant bound on her back, her hand on the shoulder of a school-age child, who might be of either sex, holding books. Background: urban shanties. 3. A crouching figure, unclear as to sex and clothing, one shoe apparently missing. Background: unclear. . . . 6. An adolescent or young adult, unclear as to sex, sits at desk, apparently studying one manuscript book and writing in another. Wears overcoat and cap or beret, suggesting cold. Background: suggestion of gloomy interior of school or other institution. . . . 9. At night. An elderly man holds a white goat by the forelock with one hand. . . . A younger man, seated on a box, watches. Background: fire in perforated paraffin tin, high fence and rooftop, suggesting urban slum setting. 10. Two male figures face one another beneath a tree, each with his right arm raised. Background: two small figures running and a suggestion of more trees. 11. At night. Two male figures walking on the sidewalk under a street light. A police-type van drawn up at the curb with a figure suggestive of a white policeman emerging from it. Background: urban slum.3 Sherwood exposes the limits of an imaging system designed to reveal personality rather than exposing the socioeconomic-political conditions that produce us as persons or nonpersons, as personalities. Picture number 10 should prompt, Sherwood argues, a fight or a salute or a reach for fruit from a tree. What would be obvious to many others, of course, is that they are running, escaping, preparing for some other possibility of measuring our dreams, wishes, and fantasies, hidden and boldly open.

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16. Quotes from Frantz Fanon, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” in Wretched of the Earth: Because it is a systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity, colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: “Who am I in reality?” The defensive positions born of this violent confrontation between the colonized and the colonial constitute a structure which then reveals the colonized personality. In order to understand this “sensibility” we need only to study and appreciate the scope and depth of the wounds inflicted on the colonized during a single day under a colonial regime. We must remember in any case that a colonized people is not just a dominated people.4 The resistance of the forests and swamps to foreign penetration is the natural ally of the colonized. Put yourself in his [sic] shoes and stop reasoning and claiming that the “nigger” is a hard worker and the “towelhead” great at clearing land. In a colonial regime the reality of the “towelhead,” the reality of the “nigger” is not to lift a finger, not to help the oppressor sink his claws into his prey. . . . This is where non-cooperation or at least minimal cooperation clearly materializes.5

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haunting | the appearance of the ghost on the ramparts | “Anything but Utopian” | doing time fragments of questions and answers, one letter (remaining correspondence missing) Date: xxxxx File note: The sources of the fragments of questions and answers combined here are several; this particular combination appears to have been collated for this collection. The largest source derives from questions posed by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ines Schaber, and Anselm Franke, friends of the Hawthorn Archive, for participation in a seminar they organized entitled “Who’s There?— An Interrogation in the Dark” held at United Nations Plaza in Berlin. The title of the seminar was taken from the first part of Thomas Keenan’s Fables of Responsibility. On the first evening of the seminar, the section of his book in which the question “Who’s there?” is posed with reference to Shakespeare’s play Hamlet was read aloud, along with an interview Haghighian conducted with Keenan, a very important thinker for and collaborator with the seminar organizers. Several questions were posed and answered; the lines from Hamlet, previously rehearsed, were performed rather dramatically. Other material written to address the relationship between haunting and futurity was added. Taken as a whole, it offers some further thoughts on haunting, politics, and the patient urgency of abolitionist time. The something to be done that haunting provokes is elaborated and the way that some prisoners do time suggests a way of thinking about futurity when the whole modern capitalist moral ideal of progress, planning, and taking advantage of opportunities is worthless.

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Question: The darkened border that Thomas Keenan talks about in Fables of Responsibility where the political becomes negotiable because it is a place of nonknowledge and nonrule seems to be a location where one possibly meets ghosts. Could you introduce the sphere in which the ghost appears/is able to appear and why you needed to speak to it? How do you “know” the ghost? How do you get in contact with it? And, lastly, what does the conversation with it produce for you, for us, for the ghost? Answer: Normally the first encounter is with the ghost’s frightening, out-ofplace presence. If you speak to the ghost, it is usually because it is interfering, interrupting, demanding that you deal with it. In other words, the ghost gets in touch with you. It’s important not to underestimate the pain, the trouble, and the fear that specters cause. The ghost arises and there is contact but there is also possession and willfulness. Remember, haunting occurs and ghosts return, erupt, or appear when repression or concealment isn’t working any longer. To use the Hamlet example you introduced: something is rotten in the state of Denmark and it has begun to smell. That’s why ghosts are troubling and, as Shakespeare has it, “dreadful.” They return for a reason, with a reason of their own. One needs to be careful in calling or cultivating the ghost, who cannot be so easily controlled. Recall that at the end Hamlet, the stage is strewn with the dead, the innocent and the guilty alike, and this is the work of the ghost too. As I understand it, haunting is neither a condition of invisibility or unknowability per se nor a solely epistemological constraint, that is, an acknowledgment that people are often blinded or haunted by the discourses they inhabit. For me, haunting is a social process in which force and meaning meet in ways that it is not unreasonable to call super-natural. In that meeting, haunting refers or directs us to what is living and breathing in the place blinded from view: people, places, histories, knowledge, memories, ways of life, ideas. To show what’s there in the blind field, in the ostensible darkness, and to bring it to life on its own terms (and not merely to light or detached scrutiny) is perhaps the “radicalization of enlightenments” with which I’ve been most engaged and which a certain understanding of haunting can assist. At the same time, the point of making contact with ghosts or reckoning with haunting is to eliminate the conditions that produce hungry, angry, unrequited ghosts in the first place. One hopes that the conversation with ghosts, if one can keep it to that, would help in that process. But, as I’ve tried to suggest here and elsewhere, the contact requires care and the outcome is never given in advance because to begin, the ghost needs to be treated respectfully (its desires broached) and not ghosted, abandoned, or disappeared again in the act of dealing with a haunting. Yet, at the same time, the ghost cannot be permitted to take everything over, a complicated requirement that’s especially pertinent with the living who haunt as if they were dead, those individuals and groups subjected to the social and civil death sentence. (See utopian surplus | the prisoner’s curse | at the hem | it could be you.)

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This is perhaps where I have a different sensibility than the one you’re drawing on from Keenan’s Fables of Responsibility. I don’t want to make of this difference a major conflict or disagreement, but I do want to explain it. I think this difference starts with my not knowing of any place without knowledge or rules — however vague, disorganized, or seemingly inapplicable they are — and my not knowing how one can do or have negotiation and reappropriation (politics) in such an empty place. I’ll come back to the question of the political. First, let me reread the whole of the opening scene of Hamlet, since that has become an important text for us and since what I see there is not darkness, although it is dark and cold on the ramparts of the castle at Elsinore. The play begins with a normal changing of the castle guard that’s been charged by the fact that for two nights Bernardo and Marcellus, ordinary soldiers, have seen a ghost in the King’s war armor, the armor he wore recently in his imperial war on Norway. The greetings are routine. Bernardo has come to take Francisco’s place on the watch and when he arrives he doesn’t see him and asks: “Who’s there?” He asks because he senses someone is there, perhaps Francisco but also perhaps already the ghost. If there were no one there, there would be no need to ask. Francisco answers, “Nay, answer me,” and Bernardo responds as a loyal soldier or king’s guard would: “Long Live the King!” The guard changes and Francisco leaves. Horatio and Marcellus enter. They have told the gentleman Horatio about the ghost and “Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy.” But he has come to see for himself “the dreaded sight twice seen of us . . . that if again this apparition come, He may approve our eyes and speak to it.” Horatio is skeptical: “Tush tush, twill not appear.” They sit and as Bernardo starts to recount the story of what they’ve seen, the ghost appears. Marcellus says, “Thou art a scholar. Speak to it, Horatio. Looks he not like the King?” And indeed, it does: “Most like,” Horatio says, “it harrows me with fear and wonder.” The King has reappeared. He wears his battle gear. It harrows with fear and wonder. And “it would be spoke to,” Bernardo says. “Speak to it, Horatio,” Marcellus implores. And Horatio tries, but quickly realizes that he has perhaps offended the ghost for he has demanded of him not only what it is —“what art thou that usurp’st this time of night”?— but demanded that the ghost should speak —“By heaven, I charge thee, speak!” The ghost does not answer directly, will not yet speak directly to these men, his loyal guards. But the ghost is doing its work and delivers the message it bears as Horatio, Bernardo, and Marcellus try to figure out why the ghost has appeared, now upon its third time, circling the ramparts, clad in armor prepared for war. Marcellus and Horatio are rightly convinced that it has something to do with the preparations for war that are going on in Denmark: “is the main motive of our preparations, the source of this our watch and the chief head of this posthaste and rummage in the land.” For the King of Denmark has recently killed Fortinbras, the King of Norway, and taken land as the spoils. Fortinbras, son of the dead king, has “sharked up a list of lawless resolutes”

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(formed a mercenary army) to win back the lands his father lost. This young Fortinbras is not King of Norway, his uncle is, just as Hamlet’s uncle is now King of Denmark. And we begin to see why the king has returned — not just to have his death avenged, but to convince his son, a scholar not a soldier, to do as the young Fortinbras and make war. “This portentous figure comes armed through our watch so like the king that was and is the question of these wars.” It is cold and dark and a ghost appears for the third time. Contact is made. Horatio shows it the courtesy he believes the ghost deserves for it must be looking for a path to the afterlife, he first presumes: “If there be any good thing to be done, that may to thee do ease and grace to me.” And again demands that the ghost speak: “If thou hast any sound, or use of voice, Speak to me: Speak to me: If thou art privy to thy country’s fate, O speak. Stay and Speak!” Even though he later regrets “to offer it the show of violence,” Marcellus tries to strike the ghost king with his spear to make it stay and speak. The ghost will not answer the demand that he speak, but his message is delivered. As Horatio says, “This bodes some strange eruption to our state.” This eruption has everything to do with war and kings and the sons of kings. The scene concludes with a beautiful description of the rising sun: “look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill” and a decision to tell the young Hamlet what they have seen for “this spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.” And indeed, it does. We should not forget that Hamlet’s father, the former king, stalks his son by turns terrifying and goading him to take revenge upon the king’s murderer, his brother, and to make war and not appease Fortinbras the younger. In the process, the ghost drives his son Hamlet mad who passes on the same fate to the young Ophelia. The ghost king, though beloved by his son and the object of a terrible misdeed and much greed, is nonetheless hungry and vengeful and sets in motion the destruction of his entire house and kingdom. It is dark and cold. Who’s there? Two soldiers changing guard to the king’s castle, and then another and his companion, a gentlemen scholar. Who’s there? A ghost appears. This is the ghost’s third visit. Before the curtain’s rise, the ghost has already been there. Who’s there? Before the curtain’s rise, a soldier is standing sentry on the ramparts of the King of Denmark’s castle while the new usurper king plans for war. Who’s there? It is cold and dark. The curtain rises. The scene is crowded with people, talk, action, intentions, confusions, and impending war. A ghost appears. The ghost has designs upon the living. The living are powerful and their grief and grievances are intricately bound up with war, rule, and territorial conquest. The ghost appears. Something must be done. One of the great lessons of Shakespeare’s play is that haunting can misdirect you as much as direct you, can lead to greater tragedy, not less. The something to be done that haunting provokes is not ever given in advance, but it can be cultivated toward more just and peaceful ends. To achieve more just and peaceful

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ends involves reckoning with the ghost graciously and carefully. This is for me the terrain of responsibility. I’d like to distinguish the something to be done from how Thomas Keenan defines responsibility in Fables to try to address the question of the political more directly. If I understand him, responsibility names a basic epistemological or existentialist condition in which there are no essential, natural, unchanging, or divine grounds that justify or legitimate action and thus guarantee the morality (the rightness or wrongness) of actions or thoughts. Rather, these grounds are constructed or made (up) and can always be questioned and deconstructed. In the Keenan text you presented, and for many others (Alain Badiou today is this position’s most persistent if also sophisticated practitioner), it is the questioning of the grounds themselves that constitutes politics, which is why Keenan calls for a “politics of difficulty.” In other words, the claim is not just that the grounds are made up and can be questioned, but that they should be questioned. And continuously, as the very reason politics exists, as what distinguishes formal democracies or autocracies from a true democratic politics. I think we should take Keenan at his word: “Ethics and politics only come into being or have any force and meaning thanks to this very ungroundedness. We have politics because we have no grounds, no reliable standpoints. . . . ‘Deconstruction’ is not offered here as an antiauthoritarian discourse, an attack on grounds, but as an attempt to think about this removal as the condition of any political action or . . . as the condition of democracy.”1 We can take for granted now the basic epistemological point — the rules and assumptions by which we live are made up and thus can be unmade — and can also respect the value Keenan places on questioning the given rules and assumptions as essential to a democratic politics, although I disagree that we don’t have any reliable grounds or standpoints, reliable being all we can expect and itself a rather contingent state. That itself deconstruction is not an antiauthoritarian discourse seems also today uncontroversial, although when Gayatri Spivak first brilliantly elaborated the point it was decidedly a critical one.2 My concern is very simple: it is that this definition of politics is too limited. It may be a self-serving politics for philosophers or intellectuals or those whose power and authority rests on their ability to articulate their complex thinking in languages valued and recognized as complex; it may be a politics especially suited for those whose basic needs are secured by state, market, or inheritance and who do not experience life as a battle to hold some steady ground against everything constantly unravelling. Either of these limitations are clearly open to debate, but what seems certain is that it is a notion of politics removed from the realm of constituted political power. It’s essential to read beyond the first three lines of the play. That’s to say, as much as anything else, we have oppositional or “democratic” politics because of the will to power, because kings and their equivalents and states and elites are in need of other people and things to be controlled on their behalf. Which is why for

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many people — maybe most people — politics are something they try to avoid; hoping instead not for greater participation in it but for greater responsibility on the part of those who enjoy it and make of it a vocation. I tend to place greater emphasis on solidarity, mutuality, and competent action than on ungroundedness in thinking about politics and responsibility. For me, responsibility means accepting the consequences of what you do or enable or what is done in your name, it means accepting the strands of complicities in which we are all woven. Responsibility often involves leadership, even if you’re just leading yourself, and it always involves holding the trust of others competently and fairly. Certainly, in collectively self-managed contexts, leadership is accountability to yourself and others.3 Responsibility means that others can trust in you and depend on you to do something for them: to protect them, to represent them, to support them, to leave them in peace, to keep or give things away without aggrieving them, to be or work or exist on your own without suffering them. In the context of haunting, responsibility means directing the something to be done toward eliminating the conditions that produce the haunting and the ghosts in the first place. Responsibility in this context is a condition of abolition democracy. I’ll say this more personally and shift the terms a little. The hostile circumstances of my upbringing made me value difficulty and struggle and what Keenan eloquently calls “intolerable complexity.”4 It took a long while for me to realize that this political and intellectual position made me very attached to my own unhappiness — not to the unhappiness of others, of course, that would have been ideologically unacceptable. It also made me attached to a rather harsh — sectarian even — politics, which had no capacity for tenderness or sympathy. Many of you will know the Marxist/Leninist political tradition to which I’m referring. And then I started to see how much this was a way of avoiding responsibility for developing a politics of happiness, as C. L. R. James called it, and a practice of fellowship that was capable of meeting my criteria for solidarity and for nonsacrificial freedoms and that could be tested on myself as well. And tested on myself it needed to be because what could it mean to forward a politics from which I myself was exempt? I do not mean at all to dismiss deep suspicious questioning of the order of things and persons, only to ask that we consider what investments are attached to that questioning and consider that there are times when it is necessary to stop just at the brink of “intolerable complexity.” Question: How do your thoughts on urgency as presented at the Summit on Non-Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture held in Berlin in May 2007 possibly relate to a radicalization of enlightenments? It’s important for us to link theoretical discussions with very practical questions of political practice/activism. It seems that with the concept of urgency you are trying to provide a conceptual tool for this link but also an interruption of a regular/everyday activity. Could you talk about the gaps between theory and practice and how to work within the gap?

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Answer: I will answer at length to this question and along some perhaps oblique tangents. At the summit, each day three people were asked to present a concept under the rubric “Urgent Thought.” In choosing the term urgency, I wanted to offer an alternative to the popular use of the idea of a state of emergency or exception, which, in my view, has, in reappropriating a legal mystification used by the state, drawn attention away from the extent to which militarism, captivity, and dispossession are the norm, norms maintained in large measure by the production and manipulation of crises and emergencies.5 By contrast, urgency — something must be done now or else — is at once a pressing condition in need of redress at this very moment; a desire, urging insisting compelling; and a mode of representation and appeal, to urge or to incite. Urgency has been a vocabulary of militancy, a pedagogy of sorts, and a political orientation that’s been used by critics, dissenters, and activists, especially in the Anglo-American context, to signal that waiting for recognition, revaluation, redress, or fundamental change is no longer acceptable. At the summit, I was trying to describe a critical urgency that emerges out of the political tradition of abolition and its temporality. The specific context was the struggle radical students and teachers have in the university managing the gap between theory or idea and practice or behavior: for younger students, how to get something more meaningful than preparation for submissive citizenship masquerading as individualism without failing to get the certificate that enables gainful employment. For graduate students and faculty, how to gain or keep a place in the university, however precarious and corporatized those places are now, to contribute to the work of producing independent critical knowledge, without being taken over by the academy’s labor regimes and disciplinary structures. Obviously institutional realms determine the specific nature of the demands and the struggles — whether these are in higher education, the art world, journalism, or community advocacy, to mention realms relevant to this audience — but everyone has to live and work in the gap between theory and practice, between the ideas we have and what we are able to make of them as an embodied life. For self-identified radicals, there are at least two broad issues here. One is how attentive you are to the instantiation of your ideas in practice, including your own practice. Or, what is the degree of separation between what you think or say and what you do? The second is how capable you are of recognizing in another’s practice ideas that might be better than yours? I will return to the idea of urgency and its temporality but first I want to go back to the sphere in which the ghost appears. “Social theory is concerned with the historical alternatives which haunt the established society as subversive tendencies and forces. The values attached to these alternatives . . . become facts when they are translated into reality by . . . practice.”6 In the epistemological instruction Marcuse gave at the beginning of One-Dimensional Man, the “historical alternatives” haunt not only because they represent other possibilities,

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other better presents and futures, but because “the values attached to these alternatives . . . become facts when they are translated into reality by . . . practice.” That real alternatives (what Marcuse means by historical) are already here, embedded in subversive tendencies and not impossible or awaiting the future-to-come, can be profoundly unsettling. This knowledge makes the present waver, makes it not quite what we thought it was. This living knowledge is a power on its own, the object of a great deal of repressive activity by states, civil societies, and families. Antonio Negri figured the intimation of this power in an essay entitled “The Specter’s Smile,” his critical response to Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, answering, before it was posed, Derrida’s question of why Negri wants to “bring ontology into it,” why he wants to “recover the full concrete reality of the process of genesis hidden behind the specter’s masks.”7 Negri’s answer is given in the following story: In Alexis de Tocqueville’s Recollections, we’re told of a day in June 1848. We’re in a lovely apartment on the left bank, seventh arrondissement, at dinnertime. The Tocqueville family is reunited. Nevertheless, in the calm of the evening, the cannonade fired by the bourgeoisie against the rebellion of rioting workers resounds suddenly—distant noises from the right bank. The diners shiver, their faces darken. But a smile escapes a young waitress who serves their table and has just arrived from the Faubourg Saint Antoine. She’s immediately fired. Isn’t the true specter of communism perhaps there in that smile? The one that frightened the Tsar, the pope . . . and the Lord of Tocqueville? Isn’t a glimmer of joy there, making for the specter of liberation?8

The waitress, of course, is not a ghost, but rather a servant. And she smiles the smile of the servant who has suddenly and unexpectedly appeared as a secret agent, exposing nothing more but nothing less than the existence of another intelligent world her employers do not and cannot own or dismiss. (Herman Melville rendered this smile in a most complete and frightening way in his 1855 short story, Benito Cereno, about a slave rebellion on a Spanish merchant ship.) This smile is scandalous and unsettling because it carries what Marcuse called a qualitative difference that inheres in both the intimation and the reality of liberation. I’m not sure that this smile refracts a true or more authentic communism, but I feel sure that it is part of the abolitionist imaginary. While describing how the meaning he gives to messianicity differs from Walter Benjamin, Derrida parenthetically gives one of his most pithy definitions of the spectral: “the experience of the non-present, of the non-living present in the living present, of that which lives on.”9 The dangling phrase, added as a supplement to the experience of the nonpresent in the living present, suggests that the nonpresent is the past: something that is over or past nonetheless lives on. And yet Derrida is speaking of the future, of the what’s-to-come. Moreover, he rejects strongly — his tone is adamant — the presumption made by Fredric Jameson that “the messianicity and spectrality . . . at

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the heart of Specters of Marx” is “Utopia or Utopianism.” Derrida doesn’t like this at all! “Anything but Utopian” he cries in italicized letters.10 The reason why he doesn’t like it is, he says, because messianicity for him is “inseparable from an affirmation of otherness and justice” while the utopian, taken in its most ordinary and taken-for-granted meaning, presumes the presence of a perfect world, a world in which there is no otherness because no difference in Derrida’s sense; a world where there would be no justice because there would be nothing to correct, to restore, to rebalance. This simplistic definition of utopia is a ruse — Derrida never rests with simple definitions. What’s at stake here for him (and it is confirmed and corroborated by the angry tone throughout the whole essay about Marxism and the “sons” of Marx) is a notion of the “power” of the “affirmation of an unpredictable future-tocome” that remains independent of what Derrida euphemistically calls “determinate historico-political phases.” In other words, any politics or desire of the future that is more concrete or specific than the “universal, quasi-transcendental structure” Derrida calls “messianicity without messianism” must be rejected. And what is this universal structure? It is deconstruction, which, according to Derrida, accounts for “disastrous historical failures” and thus effects a “repoliticization.”11 Or, as he says, “the limit to calculability or knowledge is . . . for a finite being, the condition of praxis, decision, action, and responsibility.”12 Although Derrida frames his discussion as a question of ontology: “What is to be said about philosophy as ontology in the inheritance left us by Marx?”13 His answer is epistemological, a return to the basic and, for Derrida, most important fact of life: the limits of knowledge and the role of thought and philosophy in demonstrating this fact as praxis, decision, action, responsibility. With epistemology it is possible, necessary even, to affirm otherness. Awareness of the limits of knowledge, awareness of the impossibility of knowing it all, and awareness of the dangers of being a know-it-all are certainly important conditions of a just praxis, even if they are not sufficient in and of themselves, as I suggested earlier. Ontology, by contrast, takes us onto the terrain of subjugated knowledge and to the person and their being. Persons are not merely mortal (finite beings) but complex individuals who cannot be approached or treated justly if there is an absolute necessity to affirm their otherness. Quite the opposite is needed by them and by us. We’re haunted by the historic alternatives that could have been and by the peculiar temporality of the shadowing of lost and better futures that insinuates itself in the something to be done, sometimes as nostalgia, sometimes as regret, sometimes as a kind of critical urgency. When the something to be done becomes urgent, it feels as if it has already been needed or wanted before, perhaps forever, certainly for a long time. When the something to be done becomes urgent, we feel as if we can’t wait any longer for things to change, the fierce now, but of course one does wait, sometimes patiently, sometimes not. This waiting peculiar to urgency is what Raymond Williams described

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as carrying on regardless detaching the exigency from presentism (ahistoricism) in order to situate the urgent or the emergency simultaneously in the past, present, and future; and to insist crucially on the necessity of the something to be done retaining an important measure of independence from immediate crises and from the terms in which these crises are given and made. Remember that Raymond Williams was talking about people who carry on regardless of the predictable and recurring obituaries of socialism and its promise of an equitable alternative to capitalist life. To quote the long passage: Every few years some people announce that socialism, finally, is dead. They then read the will and discover, unsurprisingly, that they are its sole lawful heirs. Socialists meanwhile carry on. All too often indeed we carry on regardless. We are so used to the parting shots of a long line of careerists and compromisers that we often fail to notice quite different voices which are addressing a genuine crisis: always, in practice, a crisis of change. The parting shots are heaviest when there has been some notable failure. . . . It’s as if socialism were some unchanging entity, a perfected and timeless system handed down by its pioneers, and now, look, it has gone wrong and must be abandoned. But socialism, in spite of some of its propagandists, has never really been of this kind. It has been a movement of many different kinds of people, in very different historical situations. It has repeatedly overlapped with other . . . movements: of democratic advance, of social welfare, of national liberation. Its most distinctive vision has been of a society in which people are free to identify and relate, in their own places, beyond the rule of capital and its agents. Yet both analysis and vision have occurred under definite historical pressures and within clear social and historical limits.14

The something to be done is almost always responding to an urgency — a situation that requires immediate attention. Nonetheless, it must be approached with a temporality that’s autonomous and self-directed toward ends and aims not wholly given and certainly not given permission by the system’s logics or crises but rather invented elsewhere and otherwise. Taken in its entirety, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail — written in 1963 to expose the inadequacies of the white moderate response to the civil rights protests then disrupting a large part of the US South — is one of the most concise and eloquent elaborations of what I mean by critical urgency. It is a remarkable letter, written with a keen self-awareness of writing from prison as a civil disobedient. It is most famous for King’s distinction between a negative peace (order) imposed and a positive peace (justice) acquired and for his articulation of intersectionality and fellowship. Perhaps the most memorable statement of the letter is: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”15 You might recall that King addresses the accusation that the

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protests in Birmingham and elsewhere are both “unwise and untimely,” the latter of particular interest for us here. To the demand that the movement wait for “gentler” authorities to give their approval for desegregation, King replies: “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ ” King makes two important points here. The first is that the powerful rarely give up their power and so must be fought tooth and nail for it. The fight must be inaugural, not reactive; that’s to say, it must go after the root cause, which entails vigilance in not mistaking causes and symptoms, which will require, in King’s case, rejecting moderate reformism or what’s colloquially known as liberalism in the United States. The second point is that the movement’s time — abolition time — is based on the temporality of the racial order as seen from the point of view of those waiting, with tired feet or restive rage, from the start for it to end: “We have waited,” King writes, “for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights.”16 This collective waiting as social struggle is a carrying on regardless, which sometimes erupts with a great “unreasonable impatience,”17 but which must always, as King also makes clear, operate carefully in the gap between means and ends, between ideals and practice, between their time and your time. In this, I think, Williams was also right to see that a certain melancholy or what John Berger calls “undefeated despair” is bound to the work of carrying on regardless: to keeping urgent the repair of injustice and the caretaking of the aggrieved and the missing; to keeping urgent the systematic dismantling of the conditions that produce the crises and the misery in the first place while at the same time instantiating in the practice itself the slower temporality of the wait and the distinct onto-epistemological affects of autonomous, independent, participatory thoughtful practice. This particular combination of acute timeliness and patience, of there being no time to waste at all and the necessity of taking your time, is characteristic of the abolitionist imaginary, which has guided the worldwide movements to abolish slavery and captivity, colonialism, imprisonment, militarism, foreign debt bondage, and to abolish the capitalist world order. Abolition recognizes that transformative time doesn’t always stop the world, as if in an absolute break between now and then (our older revolutionary model), but is a daily part of it, a way of being in the ongoing work of emancipation, a work that inevitably must take place while you’re still enslaved, imprisoned, indebted, occupied, walled in, commodified. Everybody works and lives in the gap, the question is what you’re doing there. Abolitionists are learning how to become unavailable for servitude back stiff with conviction, to use Toni Cade Bambara’s words. Being or becoming unavailable for servitude takes a certain amount of time and trouble and one reason why is that, among other things, it involves cultivating being in-difference, an ability to be in-different to the system’s own benefits and its own technologies of improvement. As I’ve tried to suggest, this kind of in-difference is an important political consciousness and existential bearing or standpoint and it is also a conceptual measure of abolition itself. It is key to

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closing the gap or living in it in such a way as to anticipate, inhabit, make the world you want to live in now, urgently, as if you couldn’t live otherwise, as if you have all the time in the world. This is the place where many of us falter again and again and the gap overcomes us. This is the place where being book smart doesn’t always give you an advantage; often it just gives you more alibis for why it’s necessary for you to remain stuck and attached to what you think is wrong. This is the place where you have to draw on something that is not-yet quite there or where you have to find the knowledge you seek further afield. Question: What fields are you thinking of? Answer: I was thinking about how some prisoners do time and what that teaches us not only about the gap between theory and practice you’re asking about but also about the gaps in time that structure our thinking about deep social transformation. Around the prisoner, the past, present, and future — indeed time itself — looms large in many complicated ways. Perhaps the most obvious or seemingly definitive is the way in which the law renders punishment in units of life-time, giving time to be done in the present and taking away a life with a future, with the right to a future time, or futurity. There is, in fact, a whole anthropology of “people without future” embedded in the culture of poverty assumptions that justify mass imprisonment as poverty management. In this criminal anthropology, people without future have no capacity for deferred gratification, no willingness to wait for their place, no traditions of saving for later, no capacity to reason anger, an emotional state connected to a primitive past, and so on. People without future are suitable, in this schema, for confinement in an institution that controls both space and time. And, of course, the daily life of the prison is organized like a sadistic Tayloristic time/motion laboratory: regular and surprise head counts (usually five to six a day, at the military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba they were head counting every two hours); meal and shower times designed for maximum inconvenience (always too early) and for maximum control over fraternizing; the routine exercise of internal discipline not only by the temporally disorienting solitary lockdown but by the extrajudicial extension of the prison sentence. All this and more presents the prisoner with an immediate question each must confront, a something they must do for themselves: how to do the time, how to serve the social death sentence? (See utopian surplus | first principles | discourse of struggle | methodology of imprisonment.) Dylan Rodriguez writes: “[The] prison’s logic of death exterminates time as we know it. Bodies fill up spaces that have been . . . constructed within a . . . time . . . alienated from history.” Part of the “terror of the prison regime” is the “endless sameness . . . that convinces the imprisoned that their very subjectivity is in question.”18 As Ray Luc Levasseur writes: “It seems endless. Each morning I look at the same grey door and hear the same rumbles followed by long silences. It is endless.”19 In the prison, state power renders the distinction between illusion (“It seems endless”) and reality

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(“It is endless”) into a weapon to force the prisoner to serve the time, to assume this alienation. Rodriguez continues, “tremendous human and technological energies pour into the apparatus for the express purpose of making time happen,”20 of giving some semblance of futurity to the endless present of prison time, that “painful” time Maryland prisoner Q calls “the dragon.”21 The prison regime makes time happen by organizing the routine of everyday life — daily counts, meals, showers, exercise, work, study, television, interaction with others — according to the overarching principle of absolute obedience and compliance to its authority, its dominion. If you’ve never been in a prison, especially a US maximum security prison (or lived in a police state), it’s difficult to describe this intense combination of bureaucratic routine and arbitrary authoritarianism. At that maddening intersection, state violence and state power congeal most acutely in the everyday life of the prisoner and for those trying to make contact from the outside. This intersection marks the institutional limits of prison time — they always decide the time. “The word recently has altered since they took you,” John Berger writes. “Tonight I don’t want to write how long ago that was. The word recently now covers all that time. Once it meant a few weeks or the day before yesterday.”22 Thus “prison time implies a qualitatively different conception of historical possibility and political agency.”23 For one thing, prison does not permit the type of political activism and civil disobedience that’s nominally legal on the outside in the United States. There is political organizing and collective resistance in US prisons, as well as jailhouse lawyering, study, and peer political education. But it takes place without permission: neither organized nor individual resistance is permitted under any circumstances. In US prisons, this interdiction is violent and carried out under the threat of and with enhanced punishment and discipline: isolation or lockdown, extended sentences, psychotropic drugs, physical and psychological abuse, withdrawal of reading and writing privileges, and so on. In these circumstances, oppositional politics tend to hover at two poles. At one end and quite rare in the highly militarized US prisons, open insurrection and rebellion where an attempt is made to take control over the prison, such as famously at Attica. At the other end and far more common, what James C. Scott describes as the “infrapolitics” characteristic of situations of extreme domination. Here, turning an obedient face to power hides the “transcripts” of rebellion and resistance produced and shared among the subordinate.24 This tendency makes the recent organizing within and against solitary confinement in the California prisons and the organizing against labor regimes in prisons across the country all the more extraordinary and significant. To achieve a measure of agency and possibility at either of these scales, it is necessary, as Q puts it, “to redeem time” or “master the present.”25 This redemption involves refusing the death sentence and its doom, involves refusing to be treated as if one was never born, fated to a life of abandonment and spectrality. In Benjaminian fashion, Q says: “If I can master the present, I will have used my time to redeem time. Then I

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can go back and offer something to people who never had to be in that situation.”26 Back into the stream of time, redeeming time means first and foremost refusing to serve time, to become its servant. Wayne Brown argues that one must choose between “doing time”— what Q means by mastering or redeeming it — or serving it. Serving time, he says, is “when time begins to do you.” Time begins to do you when you get “overwhelmed” by the “sentence.” Q says: “You can actually go insane. You get caught up in this time zone.” Gary Huffman adds: “It’s where your mind jumps time.” And Donald Thompson warns, “Sometimes you come back, sometimes you don’t.”27 To come back, to refuse to be a servant to the time, to refuse to live in the time zone of social death, prisoners grasp or forge a relationship to futurity that’s very complex, especially for those on death row or for those who will spend their entire lives in prison. One element of this complexity is the process by which each individual restores his own civil life or citizenship in the prison. Prisoners are citizens in the sense of members of the social community despite how they are treated and the capacity to act on this presumption is essential for being imprisoned but not living in its time zone. “I’ve seen guys who as soon as they get their sentence from the judge, they take it as a literal meaning. They don’t have enough insight to know that when the judge says ‘life,’ he’s not talking about your natural life. They assume they’re ‘powerless,’ ” John Woodland says. Well, Charles Baxter replies, “a lot of those individuals was locked up before they actually got locked up in prison.”28 Redeeming time by being or becoming unavailable to serve it as it is given returns us to the abolitionist imaginary and to a more fugitive, resistive, idiom of social life in which the prisoner, fungible property of the state, a Nobody in Subcomandante Marcos’s terms, confiscates the authority to speak and to act for him- or herself, without waiting for permission to do so.29 This being or becoming unavailable for servitude finds expression as everyday life, as art and literature, as radical thought, and as organized resistance and rebellion. Sometimes, as for poet Asha Bandele, it takes expression as a defiant and despairing phrase your husband with a life sentence ends every meeting, letter, or phone call with: “See you in a minute, baby, see you in a minute.”30 As the core of this process of redeeming time is the enormously difficult and unending work of learning to refuse to allow the prison to be the sole authority of one’s life or, as Gregory Frederick puts it, to “live in prison without allowing the evil of prison to live [in you].”31 If there is one clear lesson that prisoners who refuse the social death sentence teach, it is that to redeem a future, a life, out of a space of living death requires an integrity and fortitude that’s impervious to the contingencies of institutionalized dehumanization and domination. It requires, you could say, a leap of faith or fate. As Nawal El Saadawi wrote in her Memoirs from the Women’s Prison: “From the moment I opened my eyes upon my first morning in prison, I understood from the motion of my body as I was rising and stretching the muscles of my neck and back, that I had made a firm decision: I would live in this place as I had lived in any

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other. It was a decision which appeared insane . . . for it would cancel out reality, logic, the walls and the steel doors.”32 The capacity to find and make a space of freedom in the space of death is to carry on regardless, patiently, urgently, as if there’s not a moment to waste. To carry on regardless in this way, to act as if you are free when you are not, is certainly idealistic, in the best sense of being guided by ideals and ethical principles, and it is also a bit crazy, as El Saadawi suggests, but it’s not, in my view, naïve. I think of it as a rather impressive example of abolitionist radical thought in practice — a working-out of an alternative to the social death sentence in the doing of the sentence, forging something else there in the crucible of its sustainability and reality. Urgent patience: abolitionist time is a way of being in the ongoing work of emancipation, a work never measured by legalistic pronouncements, a work that inevitably must take place while you’re still confined. Prisoners who are abolitionist leaders inside, who model a respected political agency, have a disciplined patience and politeness unlike any other I know. Patience because, in order to master a time that’s always trying to do you in, to make you its servant, you need the discipline to control your reactions to the unending assaults on you. You need to cultivate a being in principled and durable in-difference to the regime’s power. Politeness because, as formerly incarcerated Stephen Jones always says, to retain one’s dignity and a communal humanity living in a crowded cage at gunpoint, regulated by the presumption that you are no better than you’re being treated, it is essential to treat others with a courtesy that restores civility to the very place where by definition it has been withdrawn. Question: Where does beauty (finally) come into play with this? Answer: Ha! A trick question from the artists to the intellectual. Let me rephrase it with a trick question from the intellectual to the artists. Finally, where does happiness come into play with this? I will let John Berger answer for me: “Most prophecies, when specific, are bound to be bad, for, throughout history, there are always new terrors — even if a few disappear, yet there are no new happinesses — happiness is always the old one. It is the modes of struggle for this happiness which change.”33 Or, “This can be put the other way around: on this earth there is no happiness without a longing for justice. Happiness is not something to be pursued, it is something met, an encounter. Most encounters, however, have a sequel; this is their promise. The encounter with happiness has no sequel. All is there instantly. Happiness is what pierces grief.”34

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haunting | the photograph | extraneous persons | Colin (Joan) Dayan correspondence, keyword inventory, notes, essay, agent profile, Agent Directory Date: xxxxx File note: David Scott at Small Axe requested material on Colin Dayan’s “distinctive way of thinking.” As was explained in the letter to him accompanying the rather fragmented, personal, and possibly useless items eventually sent, there is an extensive collection of her books and essays in the archive’s library, but surprisingly virtually no sustained commentary. Some notes and other materials were eventually found after some delay as they were in the Agent Directory whose collections are normally confidential. Our policy of not releasing the names of our agents or personal information about them except under special circumstances or with their permission was explained. Three items were sent and are included in this file; the letter explaining all this is redundant and thus is not included. The first item is the profile from the Agent Directory. The second — the essay titled “the photograph”— was meant to be given to Dayan but was left in the files by mistake. The third constitutes a selective bibliography or what Scott named an “inventory” of keywords. It remains unknown whether any special use was made of the passages excerpted from her texts other than assistance for study or references for other writings by members of the archive. Given its format, it’s possible that they were made by the Poetry or the Captioning Division, who often organize their readings of dense texts into keyword sections rather than analytic summary. Because at the time the materials needed to be sent the poets had gone for a long walk and the staff of the Captioning Division were on strike, I could not confirm attribution and now it seems a rather moot issue. As per usual, Scott was invited to contribute further donations to be held alongside these with assurances of their safe and respectful keeping.

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agent profile Colin (Joan) Dayan came to our attention because she kept asking dangerous questions about how we “speak about the multiple forms of unfreedom, the archaic vessels for new terrors that we confront today.”1 She was contributing to a genealogy we recognized and were also fine-tuning that connected certain forms of unfreedom — slavery, colonization, captivity, confinement/imprisonment, civil and social death — across time, locale (national boundaries), and organizational/institutional forms. She was creating this genealogy by exposing the legal and other socially powerful fictions that justify and make reasonable racialized violence and various forms of dispossession. More than exposé, the genealogical work treated the historical roots of the present seriously, not by mimicking the method and style used by the traditional literary or social historian but by pioneering a method that she called “literary fieldwork,” which enabled her to make contact with the lingering remains of the past and the mystified elements of the present. Her willingness to traffic with spirits and ghosts, as well as dogs (although dogs are outside our zone of reference) — the engagement with the whole problematic of haunting and ghostly matters — gave to “literary fieldwork” in culture and law also a somewhat distinctive, queer, or creole character.2 It’s clear that from an early age, she is brave and adventurous and sometimes reckless and that Thomas was right to warn her about deliberately calling the ghosts since calling ghosts on your own is dangerous, even if you’re only curious to see the “steam and shadow.”3 Uniquely, Colin (Joan) Dayan has given us a potent, profound, and beautiful theoretical vocabulary or language for what she calls “servile law” and its rituals of expulsion and dehumanization. By following three main groups of people who are both made into themselves and transformed into something else by/in law — slaves, criminals, and prisoners of war — she demonstrated that the work of servile law is to make and unmake persons, to create new classes of “extraneous persons” out of situational exigency and the material of the old.4 Pioneering something like a spiritualist historical materialism, she was able to track the cultural life of civil and social death as it made its way along the routes of Atlantic modernity. A remarkable detective of this servile law, Dayan made the crucial contribution to our understanding of the legal justification and thus the normalcy or reasonableness of the prosecution of the Global War on Terror by showing its roots in US prison law, specifically in the Rehnquist court’s evacuation of the traditional meaning of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. By replacing the notion of punishment with the notion of administrative security, she demonstrated, the court offered a model for White House lawyers in need of naturalizing extreme forms of violence and dehumanization as normal responses to “security” needs. “The object of penance, the person to be judged, or the thing to be punished — the law performs rituals of knowledge,” she asserted, and we remain deeply grateful for Dayan’s precise excavation of these rituals.

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A brilliant essayist, she has also always clearly worked as a writer committed to “imagining what can’t be verified,” a method of research and writing that’s particularly cultivated and well respected at the archive.5 She was keenly aware of what’s sacrificed when verification procedures are trivialized or rejected out of hand that rely on what’s imagined or on impossibilities or on things that everyone says don’t or can’t possibly exist or be true (like ghosts and zombies), and her writing embodied this awareness in practice. On occasion, she quoted the philosopher Giorgio Agamben on the necessity of “returning thought to its practical calling”6 and we think that the way of seeing connected to this imaginary of possibility and impossibility was the practical calling to which she referred. More than anything else, she came to and kept our attention because the critical questions she asked were motivated by — and the critical answers she gave in reply were measured by — an ethical-political-practical concern for the “extraneous” people most aggrieved by those unfreedoms and terrors. In this her concern was genuine, not a pose or a style to be worn or discarded as whim or instrumental interest dictated, and at the same time it steadied independent of pressures to manipulate it into intellectual simplicities. All the various reasons that explain why this agent became known to us initially explain still why she has remained a most valuable member of the Hawthorn Archive and a precious friend.

the photographs (for Colin) The photographs are missing. None of the published memoirs include any photographs.7 There must have been hundreds of them (“boxes upon boxes,” she says) taken by the father, of the mother, of the child, of trees and landscapes, of various paintings and valued objects. There are several specific photographs of the mother mentioned: with her toe bent, on her honeymoon, with blown hair, seated, in various outfits, many with her smoking or holding her cigarette. Always beautiful, the grown child says. Usually posed or “affected,” but not always. Yet we could not find one anywhere. The field photographs taken later (?) in Haiti for her do not concern us. They are documents of a different kind of research inquiry. The photographs are missing. They are also tokens and harbingers of what is missing or lost, what prompts the woman to be looking at and for them. Underneath a photograph of a Belgrade photographer with a very old standing box camera taking portraits, John Berger writes: “A friend came to see me in a dream. From far away. And I asked in the dream: ‘Did you come by photograph or by train?’ All photographs are a form of transport and an expression of absence.”8 Photographs always harbor this promise of taking us somewhere again or anew and the paradoxical quality of presenting what is absent, possibly lost or dead. However, the precise meaning of the present absent thing or person photographed — what Barthes calls the “spectrum” to register

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the spectral ghostly quality of the photographic referent — is never given in the photograph per se; it arises only in the situated or contextualized encounter with it.9 Sometimes the context or situation overwhelms the photograph or the photographic relation, as in Edward Said’s definition of exile in After the Last Sky as “a series of portraits without names, without contexts. Images that are largely unexplained, nameless, mute.”10 When Said was a consultant to the United Nations International Conference on the Question of Palestine in 1983, he commissioned Jean Mohr to prepare a series of photographs of Palestinians to be exhibited in the entrance hall in Geneva. Said and Mohr were not permitted to accompany the photographs with any text for fear it would offend certain member states. Eventually the photographs were hung with minimal information — only the country or locale where they had been taken was noted. The collaboration between photograph and text that is After the Last Sky emerged to correct this censorship. In this poignant book, Said aims to represent the complexity of Palestinians’ existence in the context of their simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility, in the context of his own history and exile, and in relation to Jean Mohr’s photographs. Said cannot escape this laden context — it’s too much to bear, really. And although it is possible that the conflation of photography and exile is just a grammatical mistake, it doesn’t matter because the experience of dislocation is the same. “I cannot reach the actual people who were photographed, except through a European photographer who saw them for me.”11 Said sees and writes about all the photographs as if they were very far away: a complex reality and experience is represented, yes without doubt, and also a certain distance that cannot be shortened, yet. Her context is equally displaced and heartbroken. The mother has “dismantled” her “life” and she is looking for a “past” that can “cohere” and a “narrative that can tell her” who she is. She’s beginning to feel as if she’s a “copy of what I still don’t understand.” She is looking for herself and for her mother, searching for “a person I could know, a reason for my unease or some promise of the future.”12 She is searching for amends, perhaps even for an object or image that might provide it. On a November evening, not long after his mother had died, Roland Barthes is sorting through her photographs. He is also looking for himself and his mother. None of them were “right,” he says, by which he means that none of the photographs gave him either the “sentiment” or the “remembrance” necessary to conjure his mother or to provide an image for his grief capable of “accuracy” and “justice.” Mostly, the photographs of his mother as a girl remind him of his “nonexistence.” Typical for Barthes, he melodramatizes: “The time when my mother was alive before me is — History (moreover, it is the period which interests me most, historically).” He begins to look for his mother’s familiar belongings — a chair, a hairbrush, a handbag — and in this way, he insinuates himself into the photographic frame. Sometimes, something more happens: a photograph of his mother embracing him when he is still a boy awakens in him her scent and the memory of the feeling of the fabric of her dress. But still, he is

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missing something or rather missing her: “According to these photographs . . . I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I . . . missed her altogether. It was not she, and yet it was no one else. I would have recognized her among thousands of other women, yet I did not ‘find’ her . . . I recognized her differentially, not essentially.”13 Barthes finds the essence he is searching for —“the truth of the face I had loved”— in an old slightly worn photograph of his five-year-old mother with her brother in a covered glass greenhouse. Finally, he finds an image for his grief. He even gives it a title: “The Winter Garden Photograph.” Barthes also discovers the mechanism of his impossible science of photography, a science he hopes can understand the singular affective power of the photograph. The mechanism is animistic, a kind of spirit possession, Dayan might say. Barthes writes: “I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation. The photograph is in no way animated . . . but it animates me.” This “affective intentionality . . . steeped in desire, repulsion, nostalgia” and its impolite existence “for me” is the photographic element Barthes calls the punctum and which he distinguishes, in his now classic formulation, from the studium, with its more studied delivery of information and meaning. The punctum “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” The punctum arouses the still image so that what is in its blind field, the absent or lost or hidden person, thing, or event comes alive and touches us with more than mere meaning; it touches by what Barthes means when he uses the word “essentially.” The touch of the punctum is not gentle. It does not merely differentiate, it wounds. The wounding is Barthes’s principal interest in photography: “to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think.”14 The punctum — the animating detail or spirited element possessed by the photograph — is “never itself.” The punctum is never itself in the sense that “it is what I add to the photograph that’s already there” and in the sense that it has “the power to transmogrify itself and to transport you.” More like a shifting elusive idiosyncratic medium, the essence yielded by the punctum is assembled (it is a composition) and yet arrives as if by a ritual incantation: I see, I feel, I notice, I observe, I think. For our purposes, Barthes makes a remark about accessing the punctum that’s intriguing and possibly relevant. He says that the punctum is revealed to him not when he’s studying the photograph, holding it in front of himself looking, but later when he remembers it or when he “think[s] back on it.” He concludes: direct vision engages the photograph in an “effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum.”15 This is the ostensible reason why Barthes refuses to include the Winter Garden Photograph in his book, which includes many other photographs. Despite the significance of this photograph to Barthes and to the book’s key mystery and scientific discovery, he insists that it only “exists for me. For you, it would be nothing . . . for you, no wound.”16 Barthes’s explanation can’t be entirely trusted on this point. As Vincent

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Meessen has shown in his 2009 film Vita Nova about the famous cover photo of the 1955 issue of Paris-Match depicting a young cadet from Burkina Faso (Diouf Birane) giving a military salute at the Palais des Sports, Barthes deliberately hid the identity of his grandfather when he published his famous essay on this photograph and the mythologies of the French empire as well as when he published a photograph of his grandfather in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. There Luis Gustave Binger — West African explorer and colonial officer, the first governor of the Côte d’Ivoire, which he claimed for France, founding member of the French Colonial Academy of Sciences, the figure for whom the city of Bingerville was named — went unnamed. There Luis Gustave Binger is identified only as one of “the two grandfathers,” his photograph captioned with notice of his boredom, his living “further and further ahead of time,” thus disrupting the dinner hour and clearly causing a terrible inconvenience to everyone, and with this damning sentence: “He had no part in language.”17 Her photographs deliver neither the mother nor memories she’s never experienced, nor a theoretical key for inventing a new impossible science. There is no punctum, no animation, no affective intentionality in them: disappointment, sadness, lifelessness are their currency. The descriptions of what our friend sees in the photographs are painful to read. Mother and daughter “look uncomfortable,” “strained,” and “stunned.” Despite her beauty, the mother’s face “looks dead.” Wearing a tutu, foot en pointe, the child’s fingers are “disconnected and limp. There is no life in them.” Nor in her eyes which “seem unfocused . . . because of something inside . . . that comes out as a blur.” Mother and daughter “both looked stunned” in the photographs the father took of them together separate, “staring inward upon nothing.”18 She’s using the photographs as props or prompts for stories after which she hungers. But, perhaps she is looking too directly. Or perhaps these photographs are like the “objects, heavy with memory” that are carried around in exile and carefully installed in every new home, objects Said describes as “encumbrances,” “frozen,” a property owned by the past, not the person.19 The mother cannot be found in these photographs. In theory, the mother might be found in a different set of photographs, but that’s beside the point. She must find another way to herself and to her work. Her mother does have a part in language, a language that animates the daughter much like Barthes’s photographic punctum: Incantations, sayings, parables, tales, allusions, curses, secrets, whispers, calling out, provoking, creole, stories, lies, make-believe. She does not, I think, become her mother at all. Rather, she learns to speak some of her mother tongue for herself and for others who need it.

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Keywords an epistemology . . . that joins I . . . discovered vodou and nothing was ever the same again. . . . It was then that I discovered the force of the gods and the life of the spirit, and then that I knew that vodou was not just a discipline of faith, but an epistemology that joined thought to political action.20 that takes and gives language If there is something about the Special Management units in Florence that makes me mute, I find a voice, a way of speaking about the unspeakable, in the law.21 If . . . the rules of law have formed a philosophy of personhood, then we must understand the underlying term person. I anchor my understanding of person . . . in its expropriation and transformation through legal discourse. . . . In order to reveal how law can create persons at the same time as it renders them dead, I grant language a materiality, an almost ethnographic intensity through a series of encounters I call “legal ritual.”22 that performs rituals The underlying compulsion of ritual, whether it is legal or religious: to keep the spiritual and material in suspension. . . . The object of penance, the person to be judged, or the thing to be punished — the law performs rituals of knowledge. Before the state can punish, it must appear to know what is being judged.23 that desires In order to write the book as I envisioned it I had to destroy chronology. . . . I felt that only then could the enormous achievement of Haitians in preserving their history be told. I wanted somehow to introduce history-making as something akin to and inseparable from ritual, its repetitions over time, its attention to details that wreck any totalizing view or smug assurance. . . . I also wanted to question generic divisions such as fact and fiction.24 with interest I am less interested in how the enlightenment and the philosophers of modernity, whether called Habermas or Du Bois, Hegel or Douglass, crafted their analyses out of the “brute facts of modern slavery” . . . than in how slaves and their descendants reinterpreted and revealed what white enlightenment was really about.25

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motived What I aim to do is question the spirit of law . . . to ask how law encapsulates, sustains, invigorates philosophies of personhood . . . not to spare . . . readers the experience of lingering phantoms that guarantee a politics that is both rigorous and visible, what Peter Geshiere calls “the modernity of witchcraft.”26

idioms of servility application The language of the law, amid the . . . spectacle of chain gangs, control units, and executions, preserves the memory of slavery. . . . A seemingly vague phrase, a general conceptual structure, an impersonal tradition, gains concrete significance and even a power to summon practice, through its history of applications. . . . Narratives of the past, once remembered in law, demarcate a semantic genealogy of slavery and involuntary servitude. . . . I remember seeing, as a child growing up in Atlanta, men wearing zebra stripes working along the highway.27 embodiment Not that I question that the dead shall be raised with bodies. Once you create the category of the stigmatized, even as a fiction, the legal embodiment remains: not only as fragments of words sustained through time as precedent, but the bodies of those made visible again in the flesh by these fictions of law. These shades of a type of body . . . remain so powerful, or rather so markedly indigestible, that opposing terms such as “deficient” and “normal” can be joined, their distinctions blurred as the intact person turns into the senseless icon of the human.28 metamorphosis If the law creates persons much as the supernatural creates spirits, then such newly invented entities are not what we assume. A series of metamorphoses, both legal and magical, transform persons into ghosts, into things and into animals. But these terms — person, ghost, thing, animal — which we assume to have definite boundaries, lose these demarcations.29

spirits unwieldy dialogue The dualist opposition between divine power and sorcery seems to have been much more fragile and vulnerable to reversal than standard accounts might otherwise sug-

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gest. . . . The superstitions, demons, and witches of pre-Reformation Europe, transported to the island by provincial priests, resulted in narratives at least as bizarre as the zombie spirits purported to be part of the spiritual surround of what later became identified as black folk belief. The tense, unwieldy, and silenced dialogue between spirits straddling both white and black worlds produced unlikely reversals: a reversability that must be understood as shaking up the very definition of Western modernity.30 ancient modes ancient modes of proof, the current jural doings are pervaded by an essentially superstitious and irrational spirit. . . . The irrational haunts the civilizing claims of the reasonable.31 The haunt of Guantánamo Bay where the spirits of persons lie dead.32 dispossession possession The legal history of dispossession as a continuum along which bodies and spirits are remade over time. . . . The dispossession accomplished by slavery . . . became the model for possession in vodou: turning a person not into a thing but into a spirit, filled with thought, armed with personality. In Creole, lwa is the term for both law and god. Those dispossessed by the loi d’etat when possessed by their lwa communicate across species boundaries, breaking down and challenging legal taxonomies.33 supernatural justice The world where civil bodies, legal slaves, or dead felons are made is one where the supernatural serves as the unacknowledged mechanism of justice. From its beginnings, law traded on the lure of the spirit, banking on religion and the debate on matter and spirit, corporeal and incorporeal, in order to transfer the power of the deity and the dominion of the master to the corrective of the state. These rituals . . . became critical to the ideology of democracy and liberty . . . and shaped a genealogy of property and possession essential to America’s social memory.34

the prisoner inscription of race The consequences of attainder, once transferred to the colonies as tradition and precedent, insured that a novel genealogical inscription of race could be got from an old language of criminality and heredity. . . . The historical forms of sacred authority and servile law underwent a continual process of redefinition as they resonated with the demands of domination, the struggles within slavery, and the transatlantic domain of punishment and possession.35

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outside the pale Once convicted of a crime, the criminal is no longer a person, but “the slave of the State.” . . . Civilly dead, the inmate exists outside the pale of human relation and empathy. The prison walls circumscribe the prisoner in a fiction that, in extending the bounds, the balls and chains of servitude, becomes the basis for the negation of rights, thus reconciling constitutional strictures with the codes of slavery.36 caught in phrases In a penal system that has become instrumental in managing the dispossessed, the unfit, and the dishonored, such phrases as “minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities” or the “basic necessities of human life” prompt us to reconsider the meaning of “human.”37 emotional scar When does an emotional scar become visible? To make it visible is to stigmatize, yet only certain kinds of stigmatization are recognized: those that accord with the substandard of what prisoners are assumed to be. They are all bodies. Only some are granted minds. And who is to decide? The unspoken assumption remains: prisoners are not persons. Or, at best, they are a different kind of human: so dehumanized that the Eighth Amendment no longer applies.38 extraneous persons Hyperlegal negation of civil existence to be made superfluous outside the pale of human empathy.39 names Who gets banned and expelled so that we can live in reasonable consensus? Let us name them now: Criminals, Security Threats. Terrorists. Enemy Aliens. Illegal Immigrants. Migrant Contaminants. Unlawful Enemy Alien Combatants. Ghost Detainees. These are new orders of life; they hover outside the bounds of the civil, beyond the simple dichotomies of reason and unreason, legal and illegal.40 worse There is something worse than enslavement: the haunt of the self made extinct, turned loose to roam outside of society, bereft of intimacy and affiliation. . . . Subordinated and expelled from society, they take on new shapes: humans, things, dogs, and spirits. How much can you take from a person?41

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reading reduction One has only to read the 1685 Code noir of Louis XIV, the collection of edicts concerning “the Discipline and Commerce of Negro Slaves in the French Islands of America” or the harsher West Indian slave codes to understand how what first seemed phantasmagoric turned out to be a spectacle of servitude. Such surreal precisions in human reduction (how best to turn a man into a thing), just as other legal permutations on the categories of monkey, man, horse, and negro, demonstrate how inordinately natural — pushed to such extremes that they appeared as if unnatural — the claims to persons and property actually were.42 generality Within the walls of the prison, what some might judge to be the debris of a culture is perpetually “re-amalgamated.” The residue of past methods of punishment is systematized in order to insure that powerful images of vagrants, social outcasts, and misfits can be transmitted to a receptive public. The generality of “the criminal type” is all that matters.43

cruel and unusual argument If there is something unique about contemporary punishment in the United States — practices anomalous in the so-called civilized world (the death penalty, prolonged and indefinite solitary confinement, use of excessive force and other kinds of psychological torture) — that special thing can be found in a colonial history of legal stigma and obligatory deprivation. The argument of legitimacy, security, and necessity . . . in . . . the Court’s recent Eighth Amendment decisions summon in new places and under new guises this older genealogy of slavery and civil incapacity.44 guise of care In the Black Code of Georgia (1732–1899), assembled by W. E. B. Du Bois for the Negro exhibit of the American section of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 . . . an overseer or employer might inflict “unusual” or “inhuman” punishments, but the question remained whether this treatment was “cruel.” The particular acts of cruelty were listed: “unnecessary and excessive whipping, beating, cutting or wounding or . . . cruelly and unnecessarily biting or tearing with dogs . . . withholding proper food and sustenance.” In the very act of curbing gratuitous and extreme cruelty, the meaning of “human” is held in suspension for the slave for whom the use of whips cudgels, and

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dogs was not only possible but expected. This commitment to protection thus became a guarantee of tyranny, and the attempt to set limits to brutality, to curb tortures not only allowed masters to hide behind the law but also ensured that the guise of care would remain a “humane” fiction.45 perfection The Rehnquist court’s Eighth Amendment cases prepared the ground for the verbal quibbles, fastidious distinctions, and parsing of definitions that characterize the recent memoranda prepared for the “war on terror.” The legal decimation of personhood that began with slavery has been perfected in the logic of the courtroom and adjusted to prisoners. This reasoning — so long ignored, except by corrections officials who learned how to manipulate legal language — was carefully studied by the White House lawyers.46 vital remains Is there an afterlife of ostracism? . . . [In] the words of people who have been exiled to the solitary holds of our prison system . . . we hear the vital remains, the accountability, intelligence, and consciousness of persons who, though suspended within a living death, survive mental torture to speak to us, just as the detainees testifying from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib have re-entered the public sphere, in spite of the distortions of the media, the lies of the US president, and the complicity of its citizens, who in their silence abet the legal terrors committed in their name.47 rises up The ghosts of the ancestors always return. What is abused and damaged rises up to haunt. Persons judged outside the law’s protection and marked as enemies of the community resort to an alternative understanding of law. Degraded and socially excluded, they interpret legal precepts and proscriptions for themselves and reconceive the rules: not the opposite of law but its haunting.48 The white dog.49

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haunting | animism | a blow at organized power | Leon Czolgosz correspondence, biographical note, photographs, drawings, prison card, pages from execution log book, Edison film missing (alternative location: US Library of Congress), Agent Directory Date: xxxxx File note: “What happens if the term animism is no longer used primarily as an ethnographic category, but is turned onto Western modernity itself? The concept then opens up a very different set of problems, at the core of which lies not subjectivity of perception but perception of the subjectivity of the so-called object,” Anselm Franke writes. This statement separately accompanied a request, included here, to explain who Leon Czolgosz was and why Thomas Edison made a film about his execution at Sing Sing prison in 1901. Request honored.

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October 2009 To the Hawthorn Archive Dear Avery, As you know I already have caught fire over the topic of animism for five years now — a term of great importance in nineteenth-century colonial discourse on the mental life of so-called primitives, and their mysterious forms of mediality. Two contemporary and several historical writers have led me on this path — Michael Taussig and yourself included. It is in your sociological theory of haunting that you describe the effects of a peculiar decision Sigmund Freud made with regards to the design of the unconscious. And while his conception of the psyche, and even of psychoanalysis itself certainly bears animistic traits, in which forces of animation and haunting play a major role, you pointed to his decisions to cage in this collective, social and historical dimension of the unconscious, having had a lasting and compromising effect on the emancipatory politics of psychoanalysis. Only the private container of the individual, oedipal psyche counted in Freud’s system, which thus itself becomes haunted by politics. The concept of animism in Freud is invoked as a form of distributed consciousness that the phylo- and ontogenesis of “civilisation” has had to overcome. Here, as in the overwhelming majority of modern authors, the concept played the role of a negative foil: animism is the name for a primitive, superstitious, erroneous and nonscientific condition of the past that has to be left behind. It is corresponding to the description of the “horrible mixtures” primitives make between signs and things that Bruno Latour put forward in his writings on modern science, mediation, and fetishism. And yet, it is always at the same time acknowledged by most classical authors as the common denominator, as the “origin of religion” for instance — as if to refer to some primordial and irreducible sociality and a potentially anarchic and ungoverned mediality. The concept, I began to realise, really acts as a border-making device: it enacts a scission between the self and the world, between the human and nonhuman, between the subject and object, by conjuring up a spectre of a transgression, a nondifferentiation. It acts like powerful fiction, like an optical device that produced a certain split vision of all things nonmodern, all things concerning the social architectures of mediality and collective politics — a vision that in itself seemed to legitimize and necessitate colonial conquest and a certain disciplinary policing of social and psychological boundaries. And as you have demonstrated so well, it is at the policed margins of societies, and through careful examination of the historical and political content of any aesthetics of liminality, that we begin to see the shape of repression and violence, and observe the haunting return of social facts, relations, and medialities that have been rendered speechless. This exhibition on animism, and the accompanying book, tries to invert the gaze, to abandon the ethnographic or pathologizing use of the concept, and rather to

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look at what it can say about the architecture of modernity; and about the changing formations of modern power, that is now so focussed on producing and mobilising subjectivity, seemingly embracing on the slick surface of LCD screens the previously suppressed animistic relationalities, but foreclosing their collective dimension. Our task was not to ask then (as the overwhelming accounts of any ethnographic “animisms” have done) how a certain individual or group of people arrives at the mysterious subjectification of nonhuman entities — but to ask, for instance, how that status of being a subject is being distributed and withdrawn. To ask then, not what differentiates the (nonanimate) “object” from the (animate) “subject,” but to continue the Marxist investigation of how subjects are being turned into “things.” And to trace this discourse of reification while mapping onto each other mass media, psychology, and the “maps” of colonialism. The optical device “animism” could be turned around, just as in the seventeenth century the telescope had been turned upside down to become the microscope. Thus used, “animism” acts as an ontologically anarchic point of departure that allows one to inquire into boundary-making mechanisms and the architecture of mediality they yield without reproducing their underlying assumptions. Without any prior assumption as to what “souls” can do, it is easier to show that ontological partitions of modernity act as a formation of power, and perhaps to understand better the current mutations of power in its relation to subjection. In conceiving of this exhibition, it has furthermore been fascinating to me to speculate on the role that technology and the spectacle of media technology in modern mass culture has played as a stage for the return of suppressed animisms, or as Taussig has it, of the (always-animistic) mimetic faculty. Looking at the way in which modern mass media, and particularly the animated and moving image, has reflected symptomatically the measures of engineering in the modern psyche, we have turned to Thomas A. Edison — the infamous inventor and businessman who was so influential at a time when the United States turned from a frontier colony to gradually become an imperial power on a global scale. What about these early motion pictures by the Edison corporation? What about that perfidious piece showing the “Ghost Dance” performed as a spectacle in Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West Show”? And what about electricity, that ultimate animating force of modernity? One of the earliest Edison films shows a reenacted execution in an electric chair: the film in fact was something like an advertisment for this product of the Edison enterprise. But who is the person being executed, being turned into a lifeless “thing” by that force that animates industrial capitalism? I wonder if you can share with us your general thoughts about animism and capitalism and also if you have any information about Leon Czolgosz, the man represented in this short movie, Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison, dating from 1901. yours, Anselm

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Buffalo Department of Police card for Leon F. Czolgosz, 1901

T. Dart Walker, Assassination of President McKinley, ca. 1905

Detail of James Connaughton’s Execution Log Book 1896–1897. Sing Sing prison.

“Old Sparky,” Sing Sing prison’s electric chair, ca. 1900. Prisoner’s name unknown.

Leon F. Czolgosz, a twenty-eight-year-old anarchist and steelworker who often used his mother’s maiden name, Nieman, shot President William McKinley on September 6, 1901, in the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley, who died eight days later, is best known for having been assassinated and for starting the Spanish American War, presumed to be the first US imperialist war. (This presumption was wrong. The war to annex northern Mexico had been completed in 1848, fifty years earlier, and the United States had long waged war against the resident indigenous sovereign nations, believing it had won that war by 1890 when the frontier was officially closed. The Spanish American War was one in a long line of interventions in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, many of which preceded the issuance in 1823 of the Monroe Doctrine, which claimed Latin America and the Caribbean basin as the United States’ sphere of influence. A State Department list shows, excluding those against indigenous tribal nations, “103 interventions in the affairs of other countries between 1798 and 1895.”)1 Very little is known about “the young man with the girlish face,” as he was described by Emma Goldman. One of seven children of Polish immigrants, Czolgosz was born in Michigan and lived and worked in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. It was said he was estranged from his family and solitary, spending his free time reading socialist and anarchist newspapers. He was accused by the editors of Free Society: A Journal of Anarchist Communism of being a government provocateur, but Emma Goldman, who inspired him, and who Czolgosz met very briefly, dismissed the charge and wrote eloquently about the young man who killed the “president of the money kings and trust magnates.”2 Leon Czolgosz moved to Buffalo in August and on that September day waited in the receiving line to greet McKinley. Rather than shake the president’s hand, he shot him twice at point-blank range with a .32 caliber revolver. He was immediately captured by the secret service agents and military police who beat him almost to death. Between the angry crowds, the police, and the prison guards, by the time Czolgosz arrived at Auburn Prison via the Erie County Women’s Penitentiary on September 27 to be executed by electric chair as punishment for his crime, he was barely alive himself, unable to stand, moaning in pain. Czolgosz said nothing at his trial and refused to cooperate with his assigned lawyers, but moments before his death on October 29, strapped into the large electric chair, he was reported to have shouted out: “I killed the president because he was the enemy of the good people! I did it for the help of the good people, the working men of all countries!”3 Czolgosz’s brother Waldek and brother-in-law Frank Bandowski were witnesses to the execution, but they were not permitted to take away Leon’s body. After his brain was autopsied (no doubt to confirm the noted criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s theory that “there were a greater number of ‘lunatics’ and ‘indirect suicides’ . . . among anarchists than among ordinary criminals”),4 sulfuric acid was placed into his coffin to

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destroy the body, his letters and clothes were burned, and his remains were buried on the prison grounds. McKinley’s assassination ignited another violent wave of antianarchist and antiradical hysteria against those heard or known to be critical of McKinley and especially of his war. This included the arrest of Emma Goldman, the tarring and feathering of Reverend Joseph A. Wildman by his own congregation, several near lynchings, and numerous mob attacks that forced individuals and families to flee their homes. With the desecration and burial of Czolgosz, the vigilantism momentarily quieted, but “America’s ongoing antiradical bloodlust” persisted in various forms, aided and activated by Edwin S. Porter’s widely viewed film of Czolgosz’s execution and others such as D. W. Griffith’s The Voice of the Violin (1909).5 Leon Czolgosz was the fiftieth person to die in the electric chair in the state of New York. Edwin S. Porter’s reenactment of his execution for Thomas A. Edison Inc. marked the culmination of Edison’s opportunistic involvement in electrocution. The first electric chair was built by Harold Brown, then secretly employed by Thomas Edison, and introduced at Auburn Prison in 1890, replacing hanging as the principal form of capital punishment. Although Edison claimed to oppose capital punishment, his desire to crush his competitor George Westinghouse was stronger. The War of Currents was aggressively prosecuted by Edison, who ran a smear campaign against Westinghouse and his AC current, which included setting up a 1,000 volt Westinghouse AC generator in New Jersey and publicly executing a dozen animals, the better to discredit it, which garnered considerable press coverage and lead to the new term electrocution to describe death by electricity. A skilled political operator, Edison not only lobbied the New York legislature to select AC for use in electrocution but managed to get Fred Peterson, a doctor hired by Edison to build him an AC chair, appointed to the committee, which unsurprisingly selected the AC voltage electric chair. Despite the fact that for years, people referred to the process of being electrocuted as being “Westinghoused,” George Westinghouse did not support capital punishment, refused to sell his generators to prison authorities, and funded the legal appeals of the first prisoners sentenced to death by electricity. In the end, Thomas Edison lost the War of Currents, but the battle confirmed his great talent for maximizing profits and monopolizing intellectual property. The sober representation of Czolgosz’s execution — swift, seemingly without pain or bodily mutilation, a model of rational efficiency — was in sharp contrast to the reality of electrocution and to the far more graphic 1903 Edison depiction of its use to kill Topsy the elephant. But, then, Execution of Czolgosz, with its touted panorama of Auburn Prison, was less an argument for or against electrocution than it was an example of electricity in the service of the restoration of a social order momentarily disrupted by the death of the president of progress, industry, and empire by a self-proclaimed anarchist. Both Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville in On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France in 1833 and Charles Dickens in American Notes in 1842 had offered a very different impression of that panorama, finding the Auburn system of silence and hard labor inhumane.

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By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, grievously troubled over his usurpation of the divine powers of creation, has been replaced by Edison’s Tower of Light, blinding in its scientific harnessing of what Henry Adams called electricity’s “occult mechanism” to capitalist expansion and social order. As one nineteenth-century observer remarked, “The old world of creation is, that God breathed into the clay the breath of life. In the new world of invention mind has breathed into matter, and a new and expanding creation unfolds itself. . . . He [man] has touched it [matter] with the divine breath of thought and made a new world.”6 This new world was conspicuously displayed first in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and then at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, both important industrial cities, each fair designed to celebrate a phase in the conquest of the Americas. Chicago, in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival, debuted the installation of the 82-foot-tall Edison Tower of Light, its 10,000 light bulbs flashing in concert with the 90,000 bulbs and 5,000 arc lamps lighting the grounds, which was built to 391 feet in Buffalo. This dazzling display of invention illuminated its automachinic wonders — the first electric chair among them — and the appropriate instruction to be made of them. Inspired by the living ethnological villages French anthropologists helped design to represent the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, Chicago hired Harvard’s Frederic Ward Putnam to design the Midway Plaisance. Set at an angle to the White City, the Midway’s living museum of “primitive” peoples was conceived to enable visitors to measure progress toward the electrified idea of civilization displayed in the White City. It’s worth noting that the segregationist schooling faltered on at least two fronts. First, the Midway became the amusement center of the fair. George Ferris’s great wheel was there and because the ethnological villages were also concessionary businesses, they offered more exotic and enticing entertainment than the more “civilized” and Victorian White City. Second, despite Frederick Douglass’s participation as Haiti’s representative, there was organized opposition including a boycott by African Americans to their racist exclusion, led by the great antilynching agitator, Ida B. Wells. Black radicalism and cultural hybridity, even if consistently disavowed, have remained two key modalities by which white supremacy and segregationists have been continuously challenged and sometimes even undone. Electricity was a key technological and symbolic medium by which modernity’s presumptive progress was articulated, which was reiterated at the Pan-American Exposition where it was explicitly tied to service in justifying the Monroe Doctrine, the Spanish American War, and US global expansion. As President McKinley said in the final speech he gave before being shot by Czolgosz: “The Pan-American Exposition has done its work thoroughly . . . illustrating the progress of the human family in the Western Hemisphere. . . . The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem.”7

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By 1901, “American capital was no longer a middling mercantile player in a global economy commanded by imperial European powers. Now it was a robust industrial society voraciously appropriating a vast but disparate labor force which required cultural discipline, social habituation, and political regulation.”8 The social and human terms of this advanced society were deadly: a finance-controlled monopoly capitalism rooted in patriarchal militarism and white supremacy. The US nation-state will also, in time, be secured by regimes of punishment and imprisonment whose origins in the aftermath of the Civil War determined its trajectory and the fate of black Americans who today remain the disproportionate object of state violence and its legal sovereignty in matters of life and death. Cinema played an important role justifying and normalizing this way of life. Thomas A. Edison Inc.’s propaganda films for the Spanish American War made by William Paley for the Pan-American Exposition and for McKinley’s presidential authority (his inauguration, death, and funeral) are only the most literal examples of Edison’s particular contribution to this cinematic project.9 Arguably it’s also the case that, in all these films, what’s notably absent and repressed is just as significant: black soldier resistance and desertion and the ongoing guerilla insurgency in the Philippines; the courageous movement to stop the lynching epidemic that terrorized black men, women, and children from 1892 to 1902; and the organizing by workers against the degradations of capitalism and the founding of the US Socialist Party in 1901 and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905.

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ELECTROCUTION OF CZOLGOSZ. Unhonored [code for telegraphic orders]. A detailed reproduction of the execution of the assassin of President McKinley faithfully carried out from the description of an eyewitness. The picture is in three scenes. First: Panoramic view of Auburn Prison taken the morning of the electrocution. The picture then dissolves into the corridor of murderer’s row. The keepers are seen taking Czolgosz from his cell to the death chamber, and it shows state electricians, wardens, and doctors making a final test of the chair. Czolgosz is then brought in by the guard and is quickly strapped into the chair. The current is turned on at a signal from the warden, and the assassin heaves heavily as though the straps would break. He drops prone after the current is turned off. The doctors examine the body and report to the warden that he is dead, and the warden in turn officially announces the death to the witness. Class B 200 ft. $24.00.10 Anselm Franke asks: “What happens if the term animism is no longer used primarily as an ethnographic category, but is turned onto Western modernity itself? The concept then opens up a very different set of problems, at the core of which lies not subjectivity of perception but perception of the subjectivity of the so-called object.” A perception of the subjectivity of the so-called object is exactly what Execution of Czolgosz does not animate or conjure. Only the object and something of the objectifying forces that created it are there. Not because “passing from life to death, the figure on the screen . . . revers[es] the normal animating process by which cinema works its magic.”11 It’s not a question of cinematic form per se, whose effectivity and residual melancholy is precisely that it can pass in both directions — from death to life and life to death — simultaneously, in time and across time. It’s a question of whether there is to be found even a trace of sympathy for “the young man with the girlish face, about to be put to death by the coarse, brutal hands of the law, walking up and down the narrow cell, with cold, cruel eyes following him, ‘who watch him when he tries to weep.’ ”12 It is a question of whether we are invited to contemplate, touch even, the force that “induces . . . a man to strike a blow at organized power.” This is the animating power the state tried unsuccessfully to kill and which, notwithstanding the objectification of Leon Czolgosz, the solitary anarchist with a girlish face, remains still, barely, a trace reaching across time to me, to us, today.

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haunting | what’s there waiting for you | Cinecittà | Clemens von Wedemeyer conversations, field notes, photographs, props, video, conversation, artist miscellany Date: xxxxx File note: Two photographs led Clemens von Wedemeyer to us. One of the use of Cinecittà film studios to house refugees after what’s known as World War II; the other of a five-thousand-person strike at the gates of the studios in 1958. The Hawthorn Archive was only a tangential participant in Clemens von Wedemeyer’s broader project The Cast — that resulted in a large exhibition at MAXXI Arte in Rome in 2013 and a book — and in the Teatro Valle Occupato, with which The Cast was connected. But the archive took a keen interest in the possibility of the emancipation of the worker actor called an extra, given its larger concern for “extraneous persons,” and in continuing conversations with Clemens von Wedemeyer.

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Refugee camp in Studio 5 Cinecittà. Film still. Umanitá, directed by Jack Salvatori, 1946. Courtesy Instituto Luce Cinecittà.

Refugee camp in Studio 5 Cinecittà. Film still from weekly newsreel Nel mondo del cinema Cinecittà risorge, 1947. Courtesy of Instituto Luce Cinecittà.

Strike by film extras outside Cinecittà, 1958. Courtesy Instituto Luce Cinecittà.

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Cinecittà on a rainy summer day.

Film still. Clemens von Wedemeyer, Procession, HD video, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

afterimage — workshop The society of statues is mortal. One day their stone faces crumble and fall to earth. A civilization leaves behind these mutilated traces like the pebbles of Petit Poucet. . . . An object dies when the living glance trained upon it disappears. —Chris Marker and Alain Resnais1

Everyone here knows that Mussolini personally attended the opening of Cinecittà in 1937 with his son Vittorio and Luigi Freddi, that there was already a significant popular film culture in the towns, churches, and universities, which the one thousand government-sponsored film theaters opened between 1937 and 1940 along with the church cinemas significantly strengthened;2 that from 1960 on Fellini directed all his films in Studio 5; and that Cinecittà’s heyday in the 1950s and 1960s when it was known as the Hollywood on the Tiber and films such as Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur, and Cleopatra were made there is over, is past. The rich history of Cinecittà gives way to what today is a scene of quiet crisis and ruin. Our guide points out the car window. “These are dying studios,” he says sadly, as we approach the workshop where dozens of props and statues have been left outside as if awaiting imminent transport to the set or somewhere else. Since the 1980s when half of Cinecittà was sold to build a commercial center — Cinecittà 2 — few films are produced at the studios anymore. There are still moments of wonder — touching the walls of the spectacular ancient Rome set for the television program and feeling soft plastic or foam, not stone or brick — and tremendous respect for the mostly unnamed men and women whose skill and effort create what Calvino described as “the gate into the impossible and unbelievable.” Between 1936 and the beginning of World War II, Calvino’s small town of San Remo screened twelve films a week and the author “went everyday sometimes twice” believing that “cinema was the world itself.”3 This belief was, of course, always a powerful illusion. Today, it haunts and perhaps also taunts the great city of cinema. If you begin with Cinecittà, as Clemens does, it is impossible to broach the history of Italian cinema outside of its political-economic context. This context is overwhelming and everywhere visible in the abandoned and empty studios, in the broken-down outdoor sets, in the statues and props left outdoors as if ready and waiting to be picked up for the next job, in the emptiness of the studio streets. You don’t need to be an expert in the economics of film production to understand what’s happening. The contours of the crisis are familiar from within whatever

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sector you’re working or not working: profiteering, de-skilling, displacement, outsourcing, structural adjustment, and austerity, masquerading as the only realistic responses to a crisis whose causes are always misdiagnosed and whose nature is treated as a necessity rather than a set of calculated, organized, and interested choices. The political economic context is overwhelming and unavoidable, but I lean away from it because it’s too easy to get pulled in and trapped in its language or in anger at it when all you want is to find a way to get rid of it and get something better. I am thinking about Clemens’s interest in the cinematic memory props hold, provoke, and conjure. We write to each other earlier asking how to find and represent what is living, however spectrally or disjointedly, in objects, in architecture, and in old places with many layers of history.4 I’m always looking for what is living and breathing in the blind field on the presumption that there is always something there, if you know to look for it. When I see the abandoned and closed workshop, I’m reminded of Toni Morrison’s warning that while the past can be seized in the instant in which a sign of it appears — in a moment of profane illumination, to use Walter Benjamin’s term — it can also seize you first. “I was talking about time. . . . Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. . . . But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the . . . picture of it — stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there. . . . I mean, even if I . . . die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.” “Can other people see it?” asked Denver. “Oh, yes. . . . Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. . . . And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. . . . The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there — you who never was there — if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you.”5

Clemens: Paolo Caffoni and I came across a large workshop run since the 1940’s by the D’Angelis family who built props and sculptures for films made at Cinecittà. The workshop doesn’t look like a workshop but like a huge storage room — it’s filled with big sculptures, many of which are copies of museum originals, mostly gods and religious figures. The statues were made as props for films. Normally, the props are destroyed after shooting, but these were saved. Seeing all the

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sculptures connected me to the films in which they were used and made me think about the materiality of the memory of films and what objects or props activate these memories. The workshop seemed to be the real memory of Cinecittà. There are more figures in the workshop than people working in the studios today. In the 1970s, there were many workshops like this at Cinecittà. They took photographs of the sets and they collected the props that were designed by them or by other designers and in this way made an archive of the history of Cinecittà. Look, here are the lamps Passolini used in Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). When I spoke with Mr. D’Angelis, now in his eighties, and said that with films today — or even with the Italian Neorealists who filmed on location and in the streets — such workshops are no longer necessary, he replied: “If you want to make a film, you need a camera and if you have a camera you want an actor and then you want a sculpture in the background and so on.” Two weeks after we made the digital scans for Afterimage the workshop was closed down on the grounds that it was structurally unsound and unsafe for habitation. Until a few months ago, the D’Angelis family were not permitted to enter and they needed to get back inside. Given Mr. D’Angelis’s age and the uncertainty about whether Cinecittà will be sold off or turned into a hotel or a parking lot, the question of how the workshop will continue is unresolved. But, I didn’t want merely to film the melancholy and dusty atmosphere of the workshop. The idea of Afterimage evolved from a sign that was posted in the workshop by Mr. D’Angelis’s father: “Appreciate the material and the time.” Avery: In Afterimage the present confronts the past. You render the disappearance of an older mode of filmmaking with its emphasis on the materiality of the set and the props, and in the case of Cinecittà a film studio that also specialized in fictionalized historical films, with new digital technologies of film production. The ghostly figure that moves through the workshop rooms filled with body part moulds and resting statues moves, as you say, as if he or she were in a computer game. The ghost in this machine, however, has a will to create something out of the surplus of hands and heads and arms and legs resting or waiting in the workshop. You’ve said that this ghost is looking for something or perhaps looking for what I’ve called a “something-to-be-done,” as all ghosts are. What is the ghost looking for? Clemens: First of all, the point of view of the film is subjective. We move through the space so, it is us: we are the ghost. We don’t know what we’re looking for when we enter the workshop, but we are fascinated. We look at all these props and we wonder why we don’t have a body, as everyone seems to have one. It’s obvious that the ghost would like to have a body of its own, not just an eye. The hands and surplus sculpture parts are a way to start to build the body. The ghost is looking for a form because it is still invisible.

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Avery: I wonder what the statues and props say to each other in the night or standing around outside the workshop where they’ve been stranded? What would we hear if we could listen in? I think you are suggesting that we listen for the sounds, the images and the stories of the abandoned studio’s mode of production: the work of the workshop, the work of the prop, the work of the workers, the work of the extras and all those extraneous persons and objects who become the mementos of the history of cinema while at the same time they are forgotten by those who profit from it or who see only technology, aesthetics, ideology or celebrity.

the beginning — archive of the casting As if it would be time itself like ancient leaves, where time was material and the ground were still sand or gravel over which I walked once again along these sculptures. —Clemens von Wedemeyer6

Clemens: The Beginning: Living Figures Dying started as a research project to find a way to work with sculpture in film and then I thought it could be more than preparatory research but a work in itself. The film is focused on the relationship between actors and sculpture in film. Andrei Tarkovsky once said that film is a sculpture in time, but if you remember that an actor is “cast” by the director and that a sculpture is “cast” by the artist, you begin to see both the relationship and the tension between actor and sculpture.7 Paolo Caffoni and I collected around seventy films concerned with Italy, actors, and sculptures and for the montage I selected excerpts mostly from films that interested me, such as Journey to Italy by Roberto Rossellini (1954), October by Sergei Eisenstein (1927), Beauty and the Beast by Jean Cocteau (1946), Contempt by Jean-Luc Godard (1963), Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl (1938). La Verifica Incerta by Alberto Grifi and Gianfranco Baruchello (1965) was a reference for the editing, although two of the most important references for me — Statues Also Die by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais (1953) and Last Year at Marienbad by Alain Resnais (1961) — are not included. There are many strange films about sculpture, including Blind Beast by Jasuzo Masumuru (1969), a Japanese horror film about a blind sculptor who falls in love with a woman and at the end they both turn into sculptures and die in his studio. Avery: A variation on the Pygmalion story and its many tales of the consequences of men acquiring the female objects of their desire by making things of women or by transforming women into things who cannot speak or speak for themselves.

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Clemens: In general, statues do not speak. In fact, there’s very little spoken word in The Beginning: Living Figures Dying, only the cry at the beginning from Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts (1963) —“destroy, destroy, kill them all”— and the line from Godard’s Le Mépris (1963): “Remember, men were not created by the gods, rather men created the gods.” Avery: The question of religion and the mythic is hovering around your project. Do you know the little story of “The Origin of the World” told by Eduardo Galeano? It’s a story about an anarchist and atheist worker just out of jail after the Spanish Civil War. His son, a Catholic, is worried for his father’s soul and asks him, weeping: “ ‘If God doesn’t exist, who made the world?’ ‘Dummy,’ said the worker, lowering his head as if to impart a secret. ‘Dummy. We made the world, we bricklayers.’ ”8 Clemens: The question is always how or when do we start to believe in something? Avery: Like who has the power and the authority to create a way of life? And, what happens when this power of divinity or creation, which is usually reserved for gods and powerful men, is usurped by those to whom it has been refused but without whom no such power could be exercised? In The Beginning when the statues come alive, they are monstrous, things out of the control of their makers and one feels instinctively that the actor was perhaps right to have been a bit afraid, to have felt themselves in the presence of the uncanny, at one and the same time compelled and repulsed. Perhaps also one feels with resignation even that their destruction is justified or required. And yet, the statues never really speak or have their say. In this, would you agree that they never become actors, but only remain a kind of excess, an extra?

procession — working conditions I was in a room that had no windows. It felt uncanny, but at the same time familiar. I moved about slowly, in pitch darkness. My hands touched a wall and followed it, but the wall was never-ending. In other films of mine, in dreams . . . I would fly away to freedom. This time . . . it was an enormous struggle getting off the ground. Finally, I made it, and there I was hovering thousands of feet up in the air. Glimpsing through gaps in the clouds at the landscape beneath me, I thought I saw the university campus. It might have been the hospital. No, it looked more like a prison, or a nuclear fall-out shelter. Eventually, I realized what it was. It was Cinecittà. —Federico Fellini9

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The university, the hospital, the bomb shelter, the prison — now I am in my element. Clemens tempts me into this conversation by telling me about a protest by extras that occurred at the gates of Cinecittà in 1958 and about the use of the film studios to house refugees after the war. Scene 1. Shortly after filming for MGM’s Ben-Hur began in May 1958 — at the time the most expensive movie with the largest and most extravagant sets and props ever made — 5,000 people, mostly unemployed (disoccupati), traveled to the south of the city with the hope of finding work as extras. Only 1,500 were let inside. Angry at the Italian Christian Cinema Association (Associazione Cristiana Cinematografica Italiana, ACCI) who had deceptively recruited about 10,000 people for work on Ben-Hur, charging between twenty and one hundred lire a person, they tried to force their way through the gates. The police were called and they responded in great force violently attacking the demonstrators, including with water hoses, who eventually escaped to the lawn in front of the Cinecittà gates. Ten people were injured and twenty arrested. Producer Sam Zimbalist, who condemned the police violence, told L’Unità: “We fully realize that these people need to work, but we aren’t a charity organization. People are hired to meet production requirements and in agreement with the trade-union organizations.” Except that Zimbalist and the public authorities were well aware that the extras were not unionized, that their day-to-day hiring was organized, like on the docks, by foremen, some honest some not, and that various “cinema pirates” including the ACCI and the Union of Italian Manpower — Entertainment Federation (l’Unione forze del lacoro italiano — Federazione dello spettacolo) created “fake” trade union associations demanding exorbitant kickbacks for the right to work.10 Clemens is working with a group of the Teatro Valle Occupato collective, who took over the oldest theater in Rome in June 2011 to prevent it from being privatized and to “denounce the state of emergency of Italian culture and politics.”11 Some of the group will appear in Procession. I attend one late afternoon meeting at the theater. I’m only partially paying attention but from the edges, I hear their most urgent question: what is the relationship between their struggle and the film, which focuses on the 1958 incident? Clemens answers that it’s their discussion of this question that he would like to film. Scene 2. Clemens is more interested in the protest by the extras than in the use of the studio as a refugee camp: understandably, after making the film at Breitenau, he would like to “focus on another topic.” The disregard for the refugees’ situation at the time and later the camp’s historical erasure make it difficult to strike the appropriate balance between overstating it, centering it where it’s not the main subject, and neglecting it. As Noa Steimatsky writes:

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[The refugees] were the survivors of local bombardments or of distant death camps, displaced persons who had been in transit for years, torn from communities, from towns and homes that no longer existed, families who had lost everything, children who lost everyone or had themselves been lost . . . some of them were quite literally identity-less, the youngest, whose names it was difficult or impossible to recover. In this placeless place, enclosed by walls, they were gathered within structures that had once served for colossal reconstructions of everything from Roman temples to luxurious boudoirs. The miniature phantom city, once a workplace and factory of dreams, was now ravished, deserted, and transformed into a strange location — painfully real and ghostly, an echo of the life outside in the bare beginnings of the reconstruction of what remained of Europe.12

Clemens: It’s ironic that they put the largest refugee camp in Studio 5, which Fellini would later famously occupy. There’s a kind of implosion: a reality enters the place of fiction that makes it impossible to produce films because there’s a real scene present that cannot be removed or ignored. It would be strange, I think, to reenact the Cinecittà refugee camp in Studio 5 as a staged fiction film today. Given how little attention was given to the refugees’ terrible living conditions at the time, to tell the story inside the studio today would be to tell the story as if it were always already known: all we could say would be “here’s the attention that wasn’t given before.” Avery: Steimatsky reminds us that Hannah Arendt described the European refugee camps as “sites of ‘manufactured irreality’ ” that were, as all prisons are, designed to keep unwanted or extraneous people out of sight.13 The lack of attention was deliberate. Widespread displacement and dispossession was to be confined, in this case, in a place that, when it’s open for business, excels at creating illusions, at working the borders between the real and fictive, excels at manipulating presence and absence. The important postwar history of refugees and migrants from within and outside of Europe remains relatively unknown. The period in the 1960s and 1970s when workers from Southern Europe — Italy, Spain, Greece — migrated north as “seventh men” for work in France and Germany is almost completely forgotten. Today, in Fortress Europe, where work is scarce and fear a valuable currency, migrants are mistaken in a different mode: hypervisible as scapegoats and as objects of xenoracist moral panics.14 Clemens: Attention to the actual situation of migrants could be a way to tell the story. Avery: I wanted to ask you what you thought of Steimatsky’s criticism of the Neorealist filmmakers for refusing to engage with the refugees living at Cinecittà and thus with a crucial aspect of poverty and social life in postwar Italy? Their neglect, he argues, implied “that a purer . . . reality was to be found out in the

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streets rather than among the ruins of the Fascist state studio and its contrived apparatus of fictions . . . [when] in fact, reality was being constructed, quite literally, out of the colossal sets and ruinous remains of that apparatus.”15 They were, of course, aware of the situation at Cinecittà. As Steimatsky shows, the journal Film d’oggi launched a fundraising campaign for the “hungry children” and Cesare Zavattini sent one kilogram of sugar.16 Clemens: It’s difficult to judge. It’s true that Neorealism quickly became the mainstream direction in Italian cinema — already in the 1950s Passolini had critically declared the era of Rosselini over. The arrival of the Americans changed everything. They thought they were like the glorious Roman empire and could produce films on an economic and cultural scale that would reflect the triumphalism of the United States and Hollywood. Which brings us back to the extras. The films were filled with armies of extras, disoccupati, waiting like the stevedores, for work at the port of entry. Avery: And filled with actors and statues. Unlike most statues, the extra moves but does not speak. Once the extra speaks in front of the camera, it is no longer an extra, but an actor, right? Clemens: Yes, the extra is in an in-between zone. Avery: Elements of the history are almost unbelievable, including the role of Studio 5, or, the fact that once allotted a small roofless space in a soundstage, the refugees furnished their living space with scavenged leftover props, sets, and equipment, or, that some of the 700 refugees still living at Cinecittà once film production restarted in 1949 might have “been among the 14,000 extras” in Quo Vadis (1951) by Mervyn LeRoy. One of the more sinister episodes in Cinecittà’s history involves the role of the US Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB) in occupying Cinecittà and in assuming the right to “regulate and control all aspects” of Italian “film production, distribution, and exhibition.” According to Steimatsky, no one was “surprised” “that the liberation/occupation of Italy was . . . also an American business opportunity” and that the PWB worked closely with the Hollywood studios, but the Italian Film Board was reportedly “stunned” when chief of the Allied Control Commission (ACC) in Italy Admiral Elery Stone told them: “The so-called Italian cinema was invented by Fascism. Therefore it must be suppressed . . . [and] the instruments that have given body to this invention. All of them, Cinecittà included.” The original two refugee camps — one for people from Italy and its colonies and the other for everyone else — were run by the ACC.17 The story of the refugees and the extras bump into each other. The few photographs, newsreel images, and film stills from Umanità (1946), the one fictional film made by Jack Salvatori about the camp, don’t settle the unsettled

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border between reality and fiction. “Refugees caught in an apparatus of fiction,” Steimatsky captions one of these images, an aerial shot of people living in Studio 5, the double-entendre clear enough.18 Clemens: 1958. Inside a film set, a Roman procession scene is being rehearsed. Outside the set, many extras wait, demonstrate for work and are dispersed by the police. We see that it is a historical scene told in the present. At the end, a sculpture is carried outside in a procession. I became interested in the story about the protests of the people trying to get hired as extras for the filming of Ben-Hur in part because my diploma film, Occupation (2002) was a story about extras and so this one felt as if it were one of a kind. I wanted to connect what happened to the extras in 1958 to what is happening today in cultural work and this lead to the collaboration with Teatro Valle Occupato. The idea was to bring into the film a conscious voice of being a cultural worker. Berardo Carboni from Teatro Valle and I described it as telling the story of the emancipation of actors. I thought that the restaging of the spontaneous protest of scammed extras in 1958 would only be relevant if we could show the differences from and similarities to the crisis today. The activists from Teatro Valle are working to improve the situation of cultural workers and to stop the privatization of cultural places and keep them open for the public, including by introducing new cultural commons laws. Of course, in 1958 the extras had different backgrounds. The collaboration with Teatro Valle could reveal the differences between these situations. Mostly unemployed, the extras are seen as fighting only for the day and for their immediate need, not in the name of the community. And the casts of the two films give a clue to understanding the differences in time and in their perception: in The Beginning the sculptures don’t speak and in Procession the actors raise their voices. On the other hand, there is Cinecittà as a location, which in its history became a mirror of cultural-political life in Italy and an object of fiction. We are building a model of a film studio inspired by Cinecittà in my atelier because it was not possible in my situation to film in the actual studio city. Avery: Which is the opposite reason why Fellini, who “effectively took up residence” in the cinema city, built a model of Cinecittà at Cinecittà for the making of Intervista, his 1987 film about the studio. He writes: “I could have taken a series of shots of Cinecittà from a helicopter, but the result would have been an aerial view of the place and therefore too real to be effective. No, I wanted to do Cinecittà in a different way: by using the model, I was able to reroute the avenues of pine-trees, give the tarmac roofs a different colour, and make the buildings all the same grey colour as though they had come out of a child’s model village kit.”19

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remains — throwing stones It is clear from the outset that cinema had a special relationship with belief. . . . The cinematographic image, in contrast to the theatre, showed us the link between the man and the world. . . . The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us. . . . The link between man and the world is broken. . . . What is certain is that believing is no longer believing in another world or in a transformed world. . . . We must believe in the body, but as in the germ of life, the seed which spits open the paving-stones, which has been preserved and lives on . . . and which bears witness to life, in this world as it is. —Gilles Deleuze20

The story goes something like this. Deucalion, son of Prometheus, warned by his father that Zeus would send a punishing flood to cleanse the world of the Pelasgians who had angered the God, built a chest and nine days later with his wife-cousin Pyrrha was delivered to Mount Parnassus, the only survivors. Alive, but lonely, they sought help from the oracle of Themis. Because they had been obedient and humble, she answers instructing them to veil their heads and cast their great mother’s bones behind them. Pyrrha thinks that to follow the literal instruction would be disrespectful to her mother’s spirit and they interpret the command to mean that the earth is their mother and her bones are stones. The stones Deucalion threw behind him became men and the stones Pyrrha threw behind her became women and as stone became flesh so too did the earth generate new forms of life that the flood had destroyed. Avery: What is the significance of the Deucalion and Pyrrha story to you? Clemens: The story intrigued me because I wondered why I hadn’t heard it before and why it wasn’t more well-known. What interests me about it is the ambiguity and the direction of the stone throwing. To throw a stone at something or someone is a violent act. Deucalion and Pyrrha throw the stones behind them without looking back; their faces are hidden. The gesture is like this. [Clemens mimics the movement.] It says “forget about it, that’s behind me” and yet their throwing of the stones prepares the future. I was interested in how to make the camera move with this same gesture. In Procession, the camera moves backward so that everything appears to happen in front of it. In temporal terms, the camera moves back to the future, which is an active way of leaving things behind. But it’s not always a brighter future. Avery: And also a way of making something new. Deucalion and Pyrrha are literally making a new world.

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Clemens: After speaking with the Teatro Valle Occupato collective, I saw how important it is to reanimate the old as it is dying. Many of the older generation involved in the heyday of Italian cinema are dying and the stories are disappearing. The Teatro Valle Occupato presents another possibility for doing cultural work in the current crisis. I wanted to transfer this spirit to the exhibition as a whole so that the story of the emancipation of the figure of the nonspeaking extra and the sculptural prop would have a contemporary resonance. At the end, the actors might speak. Avery: At the end, we’re in the company of the stones that inaugurate new life and of some remains of the research that accompany the exhibition. We started with the ghost and the ghostly object in the ruins of the workshop. Then we entered an archive of the casting of the statue or stone, which lead us to the procession of workers, props, and extras that constitute the disappearing world of film production. Now, at the end, we return to the beginning, to a story about the origin of human life from stone, and to what, at this point in our history, we are capable of believing in. Clemens: The ending could be the beginning. The itinerary of the exhibition can be inverted. You can look out the window but to exit, you must walk back through the exhibit. Avery: And start again. . . . Always we begin again.

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IV. perception of the subjectivity of the so-called object a return to first principles; on the wings of red arrows; failure to communicate and some letters from prison; another ghost story involving colonial soldiers captured by Germany in World War I; reimagining the workhouse; Jan’s spoon; the prisoner’s curse; a picture of abolition; Natascha’s drawings utopian surplus | red arrows | a cultural theory of value | Ernst Bloch | first principles | discourse of struggle | methodology of imprisonment | prisoners of war | going home | The Halfmoon Files | the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | research notes| Ines Schaber | the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | timeline | the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | Frederick Krop | the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | Vagabond Congress | the workhouse | Jan’s spoon | Natascha Sadr Haghighian | the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | letter from Klara | the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | Daydreamers declaration | the prisoner’s curse | at the hem | it could be you | police power | bruise blues | abolition feminism | friendship | working together | Natascha Sadr Haghighian

utopian surplus | red arrows | a cultural theory of value | Ernst Bloch keyword synopsis, popular education format, T-shirt Date: xxxxx File note: This file contains a short précis on Ernst Bloch’s suggestive idea of the utopian “surplus,” which came to have an important resonance for the archive’s sense of itself as existing on the utopian margins. Long past the days of the report writing on the utopian concept, the synopsis was prompted by a request from Anselm Franke, a frequent visitor to the archive and collaborator. (See letter from Franke in haunting | animism | a blow at organized power | Leon Czolgosz.) Over several years, Franke organized a variety of activities — exhibitions, conferences, books — to explore the way that animism, as a ghostly haunt, can generate a critical questioning of modern Western separations between the subjective and the objective, nature and culture, things and actors, world and imagination, while keeping in mind Harry Garuba’s concerns in his essay “On Animism, Modernity/ Colonialism, and the African Order of Knowledge.” On this occasion, the request was to address the relationship between animism and capitalism, which was approached, naturally, from the point of view of what animism might have to do with refusing or abandoning capitalist social relations, values, and subjectivities and with being in-difference to it; there being nothing much I could add to the existing analysis of the fetishism of the commodity form or the existing analysis of the commodification of the old arts requiring knowledge of fetishism, such as witchcraft. The file also includes a neatly folded small blue T-shirt generously donated by artist Erik Goengrich.

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I am intrigued by Anselm Franke’s statement that it is “now clear that the modern arrow of time has changed directions. The future is no longer a white sheet of paper awaiting our projective prescriptive schemes and designs, and the past is no longer the archaic animist ‘stage’ . . . which must be surmounted. . . . The future is now behind us, and the past approaches us from the front.”1 This future is haunted, Franke suggests, by an archaic animist past, which now has gotten in front of it. What if the modern arrow of time was never modern, to steal Bruno Latour’s formulation? Or, what if it’s not only the case that “not all people exist in the same Now,” to quote Bloch, but that dreams themselves “want to drift,” or, still another way, there were always other arrows, such as Bloch’s red ones that carry the utopian surplus found in culture across time and place as if they had an agency of their own? About a different arrow, a blue feather arrow being made in the Amazon forest, Michael Taussig writes: “It is as if the arrow is thinking . . . the methodical work of a magic at once technical and aesthetic.”2 Yes, this is one way to ask the question: What thinking does the arrow carry in its forward motion? Most Westerners and those who consider themselves modern or postmodern still believe, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, in a monotheistic and monochromatic one-world with one acceptable way of life, a life that a linear progressive history has delivered to us, as inevitability, as gift, or as a bad spell that seems impossible to undo. In this one-world, it is possible to imagine other worlds and other beings, but they are not considered realistic, only culturally real, which is a reality of a lesser sort inhabited primarily by artists, writers, and musicians. By contrast, animists or those who are comfortable with animism, either in its epistemological or spiritual forms, admit the existence of multiple universes, or at least admit the existence of one other multibeing world — the spirit world.3 Not only do animists or animist sympathizers commonly see things as they really are, they also, to quote Ernst Bloch, “put at least as much trust in these things’ ability to be other than they are.”4 Perhaps the word admit with its connotation of having to concede to another’s demand for acknowledgment is the wrong word. It doesn’t convey the nature of the trust or belief in contexts where it is culturally and socially acceptable, necessary even, to communicate and negotiate with the spirit world. This is one reason why, in a little section of The Principle of Hope entitled “Putting to Sea,” Bloch writes: “The will [of the child and the adult fantasist] destroys the house in which it is bored and in which the best things are forbidden . . . . Build[ing] in timeless history . . . its mountain stronghold in the clouds or the knight’s castle in the form of a ship.”5 Taussig complicates the ship’s agency in the story when he treats Traven’s death ship and not Traven as the storyteller, as does Marcus Rediker, the historian of maritime radicalism, in his history of the slave ship. Here, I want to focus on this will and the situation in which the best things are forbidden or in which, to quote Bloch again, “what exists cannot [possibly] be true.” This will or willful spirit that Bloch feels certain is with us from birth appears

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in several guises that he names the Not-Yet, Hope, Anticipation, Front, or Forwarddreaming. For those unfamiliar with him, Bloch wrote thousands of pages attempting to produce, in the form of a very opinionated encyclopedia of daydreams and other fabulations including artworks, a philosophy of what his translators awkwardly call a “living theory-practice of . . . comprehended hope . . . the unbecome . . . as it develops outwards and upwards.”6 Bloch’s project is exceedingly ambitious, a bit like a mad scientist experiment and, to me, simultaneously beautifully poetic, incomprehensible, and hilarious: so many exclamation points, italicized words in capital letters, and wild phrasings announcing his political declarations and passionate attractions, the evocation of Fourier deliberate.7 Mixed into in this mystical/Marxist cauldron is something we might call the cultural theory of value. To be honest, I’m not sure how well this term holds up, but the point of the term isn’t to analogize the labor theory of value but rather to supplement it. The labor theory of value is essentially a theory that explains the production of profit and the wealth and power accumulated by it as theft: theft of the worker’s time, skill, effort, and soul. The simple version of Marx’s labor theory of value is that the source of wealth generated in commodity production is the labor used to make the commodity. Because the exchange value of the commodity exceeds the cost of producing it, there is a surplus and this surplus produces wealth for the owner of the labor power. There are more sophisticated equations and further complications. And there are also other factors necessary for the private accumulation of wealth and power — monopolies, rents, subsidies, financial instruments, state power, medias, armies, and so on — but all these involve theft as well. The problem with the labor theory of value isn’t the general idea that private wealth is produced by theft, which is inarguable. The problem with the labor theory of value is the way it sutures Marxism’s requirement that we find in the capitalist mode of production also the values, terms, and the timetable for abolishing it and living differently to Marxism’s longstanding stigmatization as utopian of any will to change that claims to come from outside the current epoch or the given mode of production. By contrast, Bloch not only embraces the wildly utopian, he also rejects the notion that culture in its varied forms is “wholly” circumscribed by its “transient existential basis” and by “ideology.” Instead Bloch proposes that “something” he finds in culture (hence the cultural theory of value) and calls a “plus”— a surplus —“moves above and beyond the ideology of a particular age.” This surplus “persists through the ages, [even if] the social basis and ideology of an epoch have decayed and remains as a substrate that will bear fruit . . . for other times. This substrate is essentially utopian, and the only notion that accords with it is the utopian-concrete concept.”8 Bloch’s cultural or utopian surplus idea is something like Toni Morrison’s notion of the collectively animated worldly “rememories” that are always waiting for you, regardless of whether they belong to you or not. And indeed, for Morrison individual memory

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is congealed social memory in a way not dissimilar to the way Marx understands the commodity as congealed labor.9 I take Bloch to be saying more than past ideals or dreams of a life without misery, exploitation, abusive power, enslavement, subordination, and so on persist through time, arriving as always unfulfilled (the not-yet) or as a kind of repressed preconsciousness of what’s to come.10 He seems to want to say that what is passed through time and across worlds — by the red arrows — is a surplus; not merely the ideas themselves as ideas or tradition, but something excessive, something in excess of their mode of production, their imperfect realization, and their incompletion in their own time or later in the time we encounter or receive them. This surplus is “concrete”: it represents the actual better dreams and values held by people and it also produces value, although exactly how or whether it is to be calculated at all is unclear. There are no mathematical formulas for it that I know of. I see the utopian surplus as the accumulated cultural archive of that “qualitative difference” Marcuse thought scandalous because it aimed at deep systemic change or what he described as “authentic liberation.” Regardless of its calculability, the concreteness of the utopian surplus is underscored by Bloch’s use of the term substrate, which signals that he is talking about a living environment or culture, a kind of other world in which humans live, not always harmoniously to be sure, with utopian spirits or perhaps live concretely as utopian spirits. Bloch writes: “all given existence and being itself has utopian margins which surround actuality with real and objective possibility. Consequently, every work which represents and informs this possibility . . . is full of augmented horizon problems.”11 In part, these horizon problems arise from the liminal nature of the possible. That’s to say, some of what’s possible — let’s just call it the surplus — has already been accumulated, is already here as real objects or in real subjects — and some of it is a not-yet or an anticipation carried through time by red arrows and drifting dreams. I should pause to say that whatever kind of agency the red arrow possesses, I am without doubt exaggerating and embellishing it. Bloch doesn’t write much about the red arrows; in fact, it’s possible that the red arrow is an invention, attributed to Bloch in The Principle of Hope, by one of Bloch’s earliest and most devoted English-speaking scholars, the indefatigable Douglas Kellner. I have pluralized the arrow on the principle that there are many socialisms and to more accurately reflect the varied and diverse sources of the cultural archive that produces the utopian surplus. Bloch is looking for a philosophical language for this utopian surplus or these utopian margins. The search to give voice to a “field of questions that lies almost speechless in previous philosophy” is filled with an understandable tension between what’s present and what’s absent, what’s past and future, and what’s historically material and what’s idealistically possible. From Bloch’s point of view the greatest blockage comes from the fact that, despite various “patrols” and “expeditions into terram utopicam, there is something broken off about them” and thus “what Has Been overwhelms

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what is approaching, the collection of things that have become totally obstructs the categories Future, Front, Novum.” Bloch continues: “Only thinking directed towards changing the world and informing the desire to change it does not confront the future . . . as embarrassment and the past as spell.”12 The treatment of the future as an embarrassment and the past as spell still, in my view, remains profoundly ingrained in anticapitalist critical thought and political culture, even if Franke is right that “the modern arrow of time has changed directions.” Here, in Bloch’s formulation, the future was always already an approach, not a blank page or space. Bloch’s challenge is to articulate a language for the better, more desirable future, for “the unclosed space for new development in front of us,” out of the existing or having-existed utopian thought and practice he sees almost everywhere: in individual daydreams and in ordinary life; in literature, visual art, music, and popular culture; in political movements and theories; and in experimental or separatist societies and communities. Like many of us, Bloch struggles here with how to grasp or measure the degrees of separation from the past, including separation from the past tense of the degraded present we are looking to eliminate and leave behind. Clearly, the not-yet has a past and is inflected by it. The future is also, Bloch says, “in the past,” in the sense of the kind of temporally discontinuous historiography envisioned by Mary Gentle in the extraordinary Ash or, perhaps more familiarly by Walter Benjamin, a temporally discontinuous historiography in which the future can also significantly change the past. It is important to Bloch that the not-yet, however much we can only access it through past or present forms, retains a certain degree of autonomy from the past and the present and that we support and nurture this autonomy, not constantly try to undermine it with our fear of the unknown. The future not-yet approaching forward dream is about the “unbecome” becoming itself. Or, to ease the anxiety this kind of thinking causes critical minds, we could say that the utopian surplus has its own surplus, its own excess, that spills over the margins or the borders we can see or access at any given moment. I think this is what Bloch means by anticipatory consciousness — a consciousness of a “utopian destiny” that is both in us and outside of us, zooming backward and forward on the wings of red arrows. Bloch’s philosophy of the future is a phenomenology of the spirit that “makes no peace with the world as already given.”13 In what is perhaps my favorite sentence of his, Bloch writes: it is “a question of what things, men and works are in truth, [as] seen by the star of their utopian destiny and their utopian reality.”14 Bloch’s favorite writers were Hegel and Karl May: “ ‘There is only Karl May and Hegel,’ he once said, ‘everything in between is an impure mixture.’ ”15 And it’s true that Bloch’s phenomenology of the spirit (and his often questionable taste or judgment in culture) does seem channeled by his love of adventure stories of all kinds. As Adorno cuttingly remarks about Bloch’s book Traces, “The title . . . mobilizes for the purposes of philosophical theory the primary experiences derived from reading Red Indian stories.”16 Given Adorno’s

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use of the disrespectful term “Red Indian” and the implication that there’s something childish about stories of Indigenous peoples, he probably also didn’t approve of the adventure story told of Bloch smoking hash with Walter Benjamin to encourage better daydreaming.17 I like that story and in my version what Bloch saw lounging around stoned with Benjamin was the beautiful star of utopian destiny that he determined to follow “upward and outward” until the end of his days. The willingness to travel is important. Bloch argues that we ought to replace the phenomenology of the spirit that makes peace with the world as already given with the “phenomenology of change and the changeable [that] travels through the world in order to trace and advance what is not-yet present in the world.”18 What is not yet present in the world lurks in the utopian margins, inevitably a haunting and melancholy place. The drifting dreams of the “more human,” or what Bloch called, following Novalis, the “intractable blue,” flash and shine “what is missing,” the characteristic modality of a ghost. But Bloch does not leave it at that. Always, “there’s more here than meets the eye,” the more leaving “traces” that produce the feeling, as Adorno put it, that “something is really there” or “in the process of becoming.”19 Or, as Bloch would have it, in the utopian margins things are other than they are. In the utopian margins, the truth of people and things is seen from the perspective of the better we are capable of — the beautiful star of utopian destiny — not merely from the perspective of what we’re told is necessary and inevitable. In the utopian margins, there is an accumulated excess or surplus available to help make living more sustainable, more sociable, more anticipatory, and to help with the scandalous shape-shifting — the subject work and public works — necessary for any change that will make a qualitative difference. The utopian margins are a liminal space where delicate and difficult crossings, transformations, and transfigurations take place. For the utopian margins are not only where we can see that things are other than they are. It is where we become something other than we were, where we develop new forms of life, where we grow those organs for the alternative. “This is the point at which speculative thought seeks a foothold,” Adorno cautions, or radical thinkers lose patience, and perhaps rightly so. But to find a foothold in the utopian margins may yield a stronger imaginative foundation than is often credited. “For more than two thousand years,” Bloch writes, “the exploitation of man by man has been abolished in utopias.” In utopias, “stupidity [has] lost its privileges,” and “millions of people [do] not allow themselves to be ruled, exploited and disinherited for thousands of years by a handful in the upper class.” In that place of excess animated by the utopian surplus, “the vast majority” do “not put up with being the damned of the earth” and “revolutions” outnumber “wars” and succeed in “abolishing rather than exchanging the oppressors.” No one is “hungry”; work is not “compulsory”; things are “held in common” and are “distributed equally.” There are “magic tables,” useful “imagination machines,” farming methods capable of growing healthy “moun-

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T-shirt made by Berlin artist Erik Goengrich and sent to the Hawthorn Archive along with a drawing entitled Surplus Utopia Mundaneum.

tains of cheese,” as well as “fairytales” and “wonderlands” and “wishful times” that “sparkle.”20 To be sure, the utopian surplus includes ominous seas of lemonade, copulating planets, great fetishes, maniacal orders, obvious lunacies, and a host of runaways, deserters, maroons, pirates, separatists, anarchists, revolutionaries, free prisoners, and other fellow travelers who come and go as it pleases them. The spirits that animate a noncapitalist life arise out of this great and ancient accumulation of excess, the utopian surplus, whose spirits we need more than ever today.

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utopian surplus | first principles | discourse of struggle | methodology of imprisonment fragment of a longer analysis, copied pages from book, letters Date: xxxxx File note: The copied pages from a book include a brief explanation of what’s meant by a methodology of imprisonment and are a fragment of a longer analysis originally attached to running away | first principles | discourse of struggle | subjugated knowledge. The letters were selected together with Natascha Sadr Haghighian and were accompanied by a set of drawings she deposited at the archive (see utopian surplus | friendship | working together | Natascha Sadr Haghighian). Four of these letters are included in Part IV: one in this file and three in the file utopian surplus | the prisoner’s curse | at the hem | it could be you. The letters display a radical methodology of imprisonment. In this file is an excerpt from a letter Rosa Luxemburg wrote to her friend Sophie Liebknecht from Breslau prison on May 12, 1918. Her friend collected and in 1923 published a set of letters Luxemburg sent from prison between July 1916 and October 1918, the proceeds going to support the impoverished Sophie and her children. Prison was a major part of Luxemburg’s life. As a student, she fled Warsaw in 1889 to avoid being imprisoned for her role in organizing a general strike under the auspices of the banned and later broken Proletariat Party. In 1897, she moved to Germany where she was imprisoned for her political activities on three relatively brief occasions between 1904 and 1906. And then, after founding the Spartacus League with Karl Liebknecht in January 1916, she was imprisoned for two and a half years for her antiwar activities, first at Posen and then at Breslau. She was released from prison shortly after Karl Liebknecht on November 8, 1918, and then she and Karl Liebknecht were arrested, tortured, and executed on January 15, 1919. At Breslau, Luxemburg had two rooms, a desk, and a substantial library. She wrote and received letters almost every day. She also received visitors, with whom she was often permitted to walk outside. She sat in her wicker chair looking at the sky, describing in detail the weather, the changing state of the trees, the visiting birds and their songs. She asked for and received many items she needed from friends, including literature and news, and always had enough food, even if the prison food was abominable as everywhere. In fact, she asked letter writers to send food instead to her lover Leo Jogiches or to her dear friend and comrade Karl, whose prison experiences were in marked contrast; Karl had been thrice a prisoner of war, conscription being the cruel punishment for his refusal to fight for the state. Luxemburg produced a prescient analysis of militarism and several important analyses while in prison, but she never wrote about imprisonment itself.

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Her experience contrasts with the anarchist Alexander Berkman who spent twenty-one years in Western Pennsylvania Penitentiary, most of it in solitary confinement without visitors and limited access to mail, for his attempt in 1892 to kill the capitalist Henry Frick, who he considered responsible for the massacre of striking steelworkers at Andrew Carnegie’s plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania. There were other anarchists and radical trade unionists in the prison and by keeping Berkman in solitary prison officials believed, as is their wont, they could prevent him from organizing the men in prison. Berkman published his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist in 1912 as an analysis of the prison. Between 1893 and 1897, he also produced clandestinely, along with his friends and fellow anarchists Henry Bauer and Carl Nold, a remarkable set of small magazines, which they called booklets, each 3 x 5 inches in size. As Miriam Brody explains, these little magazines, which analyzed the prison and the larger problem of crime and punishment in a capitalist society, were produced through a complex communication system that started with a kind of telephone system — in which they would speak to each other through empty water pipes from their cells to the cells directly above and below, each message passed along from one cell to another — and was later developed into a system for smuggling messages across the prison, with the help of a friendly prisoner able to move about the prison known as Horsethief. Horsethief provided paper too — wrapping paper from the broom shop where he worked — a rare commodity in the prison where reading and writing were mostly prohibited. A message would be carried to a workroom where it could be carried further along by someone else. When completed, the little booklets were hidden under the floor of the broom shop and then mailed outside by a guard who was paid for his service. In the end, sixty booklets were produced by these three men who were never in each other’s presence in the damp prison, known for its corruption and cruelty. The twenty-five surviving booklets or small magazines the men called Prison Bird or Jail Bird have been collected, translated, and edited by Miriam Brody and Bonnie Buettner in Prison Blossoms: Anarchist Voices from the American Past. Alexander Berkman was released from prison in 1905 and sent to a workhouse for one year, an experience he found worse than prison. As he wrote in Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist: “Accustomed to prison conditions, I yet find existence in the workhouse a nightmare of cruelty, infinitely worse than the most inhuman aspects of the penitentiary” (482). In 1901, Emma Goldman, who regularly wrote to Berkman, visited him at the prison, presumably allowed in, Berkman notes, because “they didn’t recognize” her. The long letter, dated December 20, 1901, and addressed “Dearest Girl,” was written in part to apologize for his being unable to speak in her presence: “The sight of your face after all these years completely unnerved me. I could not think, I could not speak.” And in large part to discuss the “dead president” and what the men in prison think about the “Shock at Buffalo,”“out of hearing of the guards,” and Berkman’s views on Leon Czolgosz’s “attentat” and Goldman’s support for the young anarchist with the girlish face. He doesn’t approve —“I doubt whether it was educational”— and believes his “own act as far more significant and educational than Leon’s.” Although Goldman thought both efforts “utterly useless,” their friendship remained steadfast.

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utopian surplus | prisoners of war | going home | The Halfmoon Files illustrated essay, film, film stills, postcards, police photographs, books Date: xxxxx File note: The document in this file is an illustrated montage of some points of engagement with Philip Scheffner’s 2007 film, The Halfmoon Files, about the Halfmoon prisoner of war camp in Wünsdorf, Germany. The camp was an important site for anthropometric research and propaganda during World War I. The film is a ghost story and conjures several connections to related stories and to questions of racism, imprisonment, and war that the text offers in response. Victor Serge’s 1930 fictionalized autobiography, Men in Prison, a contemporaneous account of being in prison during World War I, provides a kind of guide along the way. The Halfmoon Files is a carefully constructed film about captive soldiers haunting the archive of cultural knowledge. The ghosting of the one made ghostly is a representational problem Scheffner’s film exquisitely avoids: it never for a moment loses sight or sound of those men as it exposes the exclusionary forces that produce their archival disappearance. In this way, it is both an exemplary ghost story and an exemplary model for stepping carefully in the archives. The first draft of this document was written for a program of events connected to an exhibition organized by Britta Lange and Philip Scheffner titled The Making of . . . displayed at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin from December 15, 2007, to February 17, 2008. The exhibition stunningly disassembled Scheffner’s film. An audiovisual landscape in which sound flowed in and out of rooms and corridors, where film and light were projected and arrested, the exhibition recalibrated the centrality of the moving image in cinema by making the movement of sound and the call from afar of voices more eerily dominant, especially after dusk. The exhibition showcased Scheffner’s work as a sound artist and Lange’s scholarly research on science in the German World War I prisoner of war camps while the lecture series raised questions about German colonialism and cinema, music and militarism, and the problem of the archive. The final text was prepared to acknowledge the beauty of this film and to ensure that in the event it was lost or damaged beyond repair there would be somewhere at least a record of Mall Singh’s desire to return home.

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Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007.

Postcard. Wünsdorf, Germany, 1916.

“What kind of film do you want to shoot?” “It’s a ghost story.” —Amit Dasgupta to Philip Scheffner, The Halfmoon Files

Reflecting in part its substantial financial and cultural investments and an attempt to undermine steady British incursions, Germany signed an alliance agreement with the Ottoman Empire in August 1914. That November in Constantinople, a call to jihad was issued against the French, English, and Russian “enemies of Islam” as well as a call to the North African, African, and South Asian soldiers of the French and British armies to desert and defect to the German army. As part of this war strategy, Germany maintained special prisoner of war camps for captured colonial soldiers, as they were called, that permitted Muslims to observe religious practices. The first mosque built in Germany, in July 1915, was at one of these prisons, the Halfmoon camp in Wünsdorf, on the outskirts of Berlin. An official postcard depicting the mosque was commissioned and thousands printed. During this imperialist and unpopular war, there was widespread desertion by soldiers everywhere (including by German soldiers) but little defection to the German army. As Scheffner notes wryly, while the propaganda effort failed, the prisoner of war camps succeeded in capturing the interests of German scientists, cultural anthropologists, and musicologists, as well as the company (Deutsche Kolonial-Filmgesellschaft, DEUKO) charged with making promotional films for German colonialism targeted to a domestic audience.1 The largest and most enduring of the research projects conducted in the camps was by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, founded in 1915. With a staff of more than thirty linguists, musicologists, and anthropologists, the commission sought to record systematically the prisoners’ languages and to create out of the 250 different peoples at the camps what technical director Wilhelm Doegen called a “Museum of Voices.” They made 1,650 shellac recordings, many of which are housed today in the Berlin Sound Archive at Humboldt University. This archive and the recordings of the captured soldiers prompted Scheffner’s film. There were two thousand Indian soldiers at the Halfmoon camp — mostly Sikhs, but also Gurkha, Hindu, and Muslim soldiers — and seven hundred recordings were made there alone. One of these recordings was made on December 11, 1916, at 4 pm by Mall Singh: There once was a man. He ate two ser of butter and drank two ser of milk in India. He joined the British army. This man went into the European war. Germany captured this man. He wishes to go to India. He wants to go to India. He will get the same food he had in former times. Three long years have passed. Nobody knows when there will be peace. In case this man is forced to stay here for two more years, he will die. If God has mercy, he will make peace soon and this man will go away from here.

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The archives at Humboldt contain the original handwritten coding forms with name, date, village and district of birth, place of schooling, knowledge of European music, knowledge of musical instruments, languages spoken, date of recording, and the name of the recording technician and supervisory official. “Archive number PK619. Mall Singh. Sikh. Age 24. Village Ranosukhi District Firozpur State Punjab. Landowner. Speaks Punjabi. Doesn’t play a musical instrument. Doesn’t know European music.” There are no images in the sound archive, although everyone recorded was also photographed frontally and in profile.2 “One thousand six hundred fifty faces that have somehow disappeared,” Scheffner says. They reemerge in other archives detached from their voices; they reappear in the film, looking for their owners. Mall Singh. Wants to go home. The Halfmoon Files is a search for Mall Singh and other prisoners whose names, faces, and stories have been lost. The Halfmoon Files is a history of the prison camp and the anthropological and biometric research that took place there. “Everyone is working together — scientists, camp administration, and filmmakers,” the narrator reports, to create the perfect set or setting for the measurements that will contribute to the racial science that is busily inventing a visual and analytic language for understanding the culturally inferior and the enemy. The Halfmoon Files is a story of Wünsdorf today, with its haunted houses, tourism, and redevelopment schemes. The city of Wünsdorf itself is an archive of military history, used by the military between 1910 and 1994, when it was demilitarized and slated to become a model green city. Germany’s first “city of books,” Wünsdorf houses thirteen antiquarian bookshops that sell, among other titles, books of racist cartoons and scholarship, produced for the war and then for the postwar “Black Shame” campaign against the twenty-five to forty thousand African soldiers of the Allied occupation stationed along the Rhine.3 The Halfmoon Files is also the account of Scheffner’s failure to get permission from Indian authorities to film in India and what that failure yielded. The Halfmoon Files is all these stories interwoven, held together by the aural and visual notes and the blank spaces that crisscross the narrative strands with pathos and not a little absurdity. About the film, Nicole Wolf writes: “The colonial plan to produce knowledge by measuring, numbering, categorizing, codifying the exotic is undermined . . . not by means of a counterstatement, but by displaying historicity otherwise.” The cinematic language of this historicity is the ghost story as told, which I cannot reproduce for you here. As told, the ghost story sounds as much as it shows: “tones, voices, crackling, and rustling — beside, with, behind, or without an image.” As told, the ghost story arrives as history does, all at once or from a distance, always within the skin of an experience that one names one’s life. As told, the ghost story is then and now. As told, the ghost story is sensuous knowledge, holding carefully to the displacement and loss that war and captivity deliver. As told, the ghost story creates space for what is missing. “This space is located,” Scheffner said, “between sound and image. It’s at the same time an

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imaginative as well as an analytical space. It’s a space where ghosts appear and move around. It’s a beautiful space.”4 As told, the beautiful ghost story catches my breath and then more calmly invites me to add to its already burdened archive of subjugated knowledge.

this is a true story

Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007. Sun and moon lighting up the sky, reflected in the river. Life is but a fleeting moment in time. This life is but an illusory dream, lulling like a river. Life is but a fleeting moment in time. Listen, listen respected Sirs. As far as memory serves me right, let me tell you what the old men narrated. Please forgive me if I make mistakes or forget anything. A very old man told me this tale. He saw it with his own eyes. This is a true story. —Bhawan Singh, The Halfmoon Files The scientists are not interested in personal stories. The unforeseen is not desired. It endangers scientific comparability and creates additional work. . . . The scientists are not interested in the personal stories of their object of study but they depend on the stories that are told to them. —Philip Scheffner, The Halfmoon Files

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We could spend all our time between the scientists and the other main storytellers present in the film: with Mall Singh (“There once was a man. This man went into the European war”), with Bhawan Singh (“Listen, listen respected Sirs. . . . Let me tell you what the old men narrated”), and with Philip Scheffner who, with the remains of their voices, is searching for Mall Singh and who delivers to us the stories that are The Halfmoon Files. We could spend all our time here with the storytellers talking about storytelling. I start here for one reason. Almost everything about the beauty and grace of this film begins with its standpoint, its unwavering gentle care for the fate, the destiny, of Mall Singh and the other men. Many other things are discussed and analyzed. Certain mysteries are solved. Kaiser Wilhelm did see ghosts, for one. And other voices are raised. But the film would not be able to carry its story so weightlessly, without this singular and abiding attention — like one would pay to a loved one or a dear friend — to looking after and settling lost accounts. Storytellers often lend themselves to the stories of others but it is rare for the documentarian to work so hard to reverse the normal scientific relationship of exchange, which more commonly exploits a dependence whose existence and cost remain repressed. The scientists are not interested in the personal stories of their object of study but they depend on the stories that are told to them.

the stairway of progress In 1930, the revolutionary anarchist Victor Serge published Men in Prison, an autobiographical novel (“everything in this book is fictional and everything is true,” he claims) about his first term in prison in France from 1912 to 1917. Early on, Serge describes “the stairway of progress”: We climb a long staircase. We are in one of the medieval towers of the Conciergerie. . . . In earlier times they used to put their victims “to the question” on the rack in the cellars of this very tower. Today they apply Bertillon’s scientific system upstairs. This is the stairway of progress. . . . [It leads to] well-lighted rooms of the anthropometric service. . . . The clerk, attentive but with perfect professional indifference, measures the prisoner’s skull, foot, hand, forearm; notes the scars and the tiniest marks on his body; examines and records the exact color of his eyes, the folds of his ear, the cut of his lips, the shape of his nose; gently takes his fingerprints. I observe these automatons, noting that they are free men occupied in compiling an exact scientific description of the prisoner: me. They don’t notice me at all. They ignore me. For this man who, with three rapid, deft movements, stretches my forearm out on a kind of short measuring rod, I don’t exist. There is nothing in front of him but a forearm, so many inches long, bearing this or that peculiarity. Two numbers, ciphers to be entered, in the same place, on a file card. Each

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day, the man enters these numbers several hundred times. He has neither the time nor the inclination to look at faces. . . . After these silent manipulations, the measured subject lands in front of the photographer’s lens. The same indifferent hands raise the subject’s chin, place the back of his skull against a mental stanchion, hang a plate bearing a number on his chest. A violent flash of light startles him as the camera operator releases the shutter. A gallery of lost souls. There are only two or three varieties of expression: animal passivity, confusion, humiliation — each modified by anger, despair, defiance, or . . . sullenness, depending on the case. Experienced prisoners have explained to me the way to fight the camera, to fool it.5

In Serge’s book, the war forms a surreal context in which the routine of prison life, with its characteristic combination of bureaucracy and arbitrary authority, rulebound procedure, and capricious brutality, goes on as if the war wasn’t happening or didn’t matter. Serge writes, “In the Mill, six hundred men continued their senseless round, attesting to the permanence of order — stronger even than a social cataclysm. We formed an unbelievable island, cut off from the movement of history.” That “as if” is an extremely fragile fiction, of course. The guards are getting more and more ner-

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vous, since the “German advance on the Marne has come almost within artillery range of the prison.” The prisoners, too, are “terrified” of being bombed, the fear spreading “from one man to the next.” Although some of them are also excited at the prospect that “the cannon,” as Serge calls it, will destroy the prison and free them. This situation is made even more unbelievable by the fact that the prisoners are strictly forbidden from knowing anything about what’s going on in the outside world. As Serge writes, “We were the only men on earth forbidden to know about the war. . . . No one was to know anything about it.” This interdiction is enforced with ridiculous interrogations and serious punishment: The Warden, angry, was drumming on his desk with nervous fingers: “You seem well-informed, Rollot. Where do you get your information?” Silence. “You better learn to answer when you’re spoken to. Where did you get your information?” “From the moon, Warden, Sir.” “Oh, so it’s that way! . . . The black hole until further notice.”

This interdiction doesn’t stop the men from knowing — Rollot had heard about the bombing of Reims Cathedral and had told Serge and the others. Or from listening for the war in the sounds of “squadrons of airplanes fl[ying] over the prison on the way to Paris” or in the “rumblings” “drifting” from the nearby town of the “La Marseillaise” sung by “delirious crowds,” or “sudden train whistles” “filled with departing soldiers,” or the “muffled playing of bands.” The prohibition against knowing about the war doesn’t stop the prisoners from constantly discussing it “in whispers” and from getting news “through unknown channels” of “conquered cities, lost and destroyed”; of battles won, lost, and surrendered; of enlisting friends and comrades, and of “a million corpses piled up in the valley of bones at Verdun.” News comes too of France having “avidly absorbed the new strength of Canadians, New Zealanders, Hindus, Senegalese, Portuguese,” some of whom, like Serge, will find themselves men in prison, perhaps even in Wünsdorf at the Halfmoon camp. The prohibition doesn’t stop the prisoners from hopeful dreaming, from taking sides on whether revolution will take the Russian empire, from finding reasons for living “through the double smokescreen of war and administrative stupidity.” The war, too, brings new prisoners, deserters from the French army who describe the horrors of the front, and who find prison — for Serge a symbol of a brutal society — a relief from the war’s scene of death, throwing, Serge admits, the prisoners’ “whole notion of life” “into disorder.” The war brackets everything that happens in Men in Prison, including its last scene when Serge is finally released from prison. My blue tweed suit feels strangely light. With unexpected ease I rediscover pockets and the stance of a free man, hands in pockets. . . . I am dressed again.

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. . . These brown castoffs at my feet belong to Number 6731. . . . Dawn is breaking. . . . I feel free, sure of myself. . . . The keys turn. . . . A gray form stands out there against the now bluish darkness ahead of me . . . very tall and very strange, like a barbarian in his shadow-colored overcoat, leather-belted, crisscrossed by the straps of the heavy musette bags hanging at his hips. The soldier’s bony face, his piercing eyes, . . . surges up before me for an instant under the dented helmet which bears, gray against gray, an incendiary grenade. . . . The first man I meet at the threshold of the world is a man of the trenches.

Like the machines that produce them, the prisoner and the soldier are never far apart. Released after five years in prison, Serge was expelled from France and went to Barcelona where he participated in the syndicalist insurrection in June 1917. He wanted to go to Russia to join the revolution but found himself again imprisoned, this time as a Bolshevik, in a French prisoner of war camp. Ironically, his first contact with Bolshevism was in that prison. He was eventually traded as part of an exchange (the French received in turn an officer held by the Soviets) and made his way to Petrograd in 1919. The two world wars form the bookends of Serge’s life as a revolutionary and of his extraordinary and powerful writings, with their intense combination of “prophetic vision” and “reportage.”6 Running through them is “the social view of the totality of a world organized for the purpose of repression and finding its ultimate expression (and the source of its own negation) in the brutality of prison and war.”7 After ten years of various types of captivity and many file card numbers assigned to him, the stakes of that repression were clear to Serge: “The regulations could be summed up in three peremptory words: Living is forbidden! But is it possible to forbid living men to live? With all the weight of its mighty edifices . . . the . . . prison affirms that it is possible.”8 It was against this possibility that Serge struggled his whole life. In Men in Prison, long sections of which read as if it were written in a prison today, what looms large is the defeated state of the struggle in 1914, war displacing the movements he’d been part of, war pitting a vast array of poor and working men against each other. The mark of prison. The mark of war. He can’t get away from it.

mismeasurement Represented in our prisoner camps are a sheer vast magnitude of the most different races. . . . A visit to some of these camps is as rewarding for a practitioner as a trip around the world. —Felix von Luschan, Director of the Berlin Ethnological Museum in 1917, The Halfmoon Files

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Film still. The Halfmoon Files, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007.

By 1912, when Serge was convicted of being an accomplice to armed robbery in the popular trial of anarchist Jules Bonnot and his companions (although many considered them bandits who were only stealing what was already theft, i.e., private property), criminal anthropology was sufficiently established to make anthropometric processing routine in French and US prisons, so much so that experienced prisoners had already developed transferable techniques for resisting it. In the late 1880s, many American prisons instituted Alphonse Bertillon’s system of identification, which included recording precise measurements of an individual’s height, weight, and body dimensions accompanied by frontal and profile photographs, and which promised to “preserve a sufficient record of a personality to be able to identify . . . at some future time . . . proof of identity.”9 In 1896, New York, home to two of the most important of the new model penitentiaries, Auburn and Sing Sing, required that all persons sentenced to prison for more than thirty days be measured and photographed according to this system and “the records carefully maintained and catalogued.”10 By the late nineteenth century, scientific theories of race and human type and their attendant methodologies of measurement and classification had become the primary academic and intellectual framework for investigations into poverty, the so-called lower classes, crime, madness, and social disorder. The concept of evolution had profoundly transformed Western thought, giving biological and racial natures to a vast array of human behaviors. In the United States, some of the “leading eugenics adherents and experimenters” seeking to “ ‘improve’ the human race” and “eliminate ‘poor’ and ‘inferior’ tendencies” “through controlled breeding” were “prison research directors, physicians, psychologists and wardens.”11 Extending Franz Gall’s phrenology to the search for the predictable signs of criminality, anthropologists such as George

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Combe and Paul Broca and physicians such as Cesare Lombroso measured the skulls of executed criminals, attesting to their distinctive shape and feature, while modern scientifically inclined prison wardens, such as the warden at Philadelphia’s Eastern Penitentiary, began routinely to collect and publish phrenological data. Noteworthy was the phrenologically inclined reform warden of Sing Sing’s women’s prison, Eliza Farnham, who published a new edition of Marmaduke Sampson’s Rationale of Crime and Its Appropriate Treatment, Being a Treatise on Criminal Jurisprudence Considered in Relation to Cerebral Organization in 1846 with an introduction she contributed and with a set of prisoner portraits she commissioned from Mathew Brady.12 At Joliet Prison, Ohio State Penitentiary, Indiana Reformatory, Blackwell’s Island Workhouse and Penitentiary in New York City, and San Quentin in California, to name a few, the laboratory study of living prisoners was supported by the prisons themselves, worked into their daily operating procedures, and reported on in great detail to eager popular and specialist audiences. Such study was also energetically pursued by doctors, sociologists, and civil servants, the case of Arthur MacDonald, a specialist in “pauperism and crime” at the US Bureau of Education, especially noteworthy. MacDonald was hired by Commissioner of Education William T. Harris to research how education could prevent “pauperism and crime,” but set up a laboratory for anthropometric research, having been influenced by Bertillon and Lombroso. He was fired when he was exposed lobbying Congress for his own laboratory to study “abnormality and criminality” that would report directly to the Interior Department.13 This brief account addresses neither the details and distinctions nor the relations between Bertillon, Galton, and Lombroso, all key figures in the development of criminal anthropology. These are brilliantly treated by Allan Sekula in “The Body and the Archive.” In an attempt to understand photography as a modern capitalist system of representation, Sekula was the first to excavate the double logic of the photographic archive in which “every proper [bourgeois] portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police.”14 As subject, the police/prison photographic archive and its architects produce complex relations of culture and social regulation, political issues still relevant today that Sekula’s erudite treatment of these figures critically accesses. What’s equally striking is that from the point of view of the prisoner, these analytic distinctions and theoretical differences mattered little. The outcome was the same: mismeasurement. “They don’t notice me at all. They ignore me. . . . I don’t exist. . . . There is nothing in front of him but a forearm, so many inches long. . . . Two numbers . . . on a file card.” What Serge’s account makes vivid is that the police headquarters and the prison were open laboratories for the scientists and bureaucrats to test their theories and systematically to advance their own interests, in the case of Bertillon keeping control of the Paris Prefecture of Police which he presided over beginning in 1893. What all this scientific and organizational activity meant for the prisoners was that their technologies of resistance to the “anthropometric service”— whether that service was

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congealed in the camera, the file cabinet, or the measuring rod — had to remain agile and alert.

intrinsic inferiority

Wünsdorf prisoner of war camp. Hindu temple in the Indian barracks, 1914–1916. In most cases crime can be shown to run in the blood. —Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Crime and Automatism”

There have been many arguments throughout history justifying existing or new hierarchies of people as proper and inevitable. Biological justification was a relative newcomer. But it arrived with the authority of Western science as the unquestioned standard of Western civilized knowledge and with the burden of imposing intrinsic inferiority on despised groups that precluded redemption by conversion or assimilation. Prescientific Western theorizing tended to attribute the hierarchy of peoples they mistakenly believed to have discovered rather than invented to God’s will or to the superiority of military might. But in both situations, the inferior could be redeemed either by religious conversion or in the case of the war captive by assimilation to the conquering tribe, empire, or group. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in The Mismeasure of Man, his well-known study of the role of the biological sciences in the making of racial knowledge, scientific

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racial knowledge is both fraudulent and racist. The biological determinism upon which it rests suffers from a set of “deep and insidious” epistemological errors, including reductionism (or the explanation of complex and often random phenomena by “deterministic behavior of the smallest constituent parts”); reification (or the conversion of abstract concepts or relations, such as intelligence, into fixable, quantifiable forms or things); dichotomization (or the division of continuous reality into binaries); and hierarchy (or the ordering of things by ranking them in a linear series of value).15 We know that these are not merely philosophical errors but are also sociopolitical modalities of knowing by which certain truths are established and empowered and others dispossessed and subjugated. Until the 1960s, science both produced much of official and authorized knowledge of race and it also provided justification for the propriety of racial rankings that were widely shared and promulgated by others. Today both natural and social scientists understand more accurately that races are artifactual constructs or what Cedric J. Robinson calls “forgeries of meaning,” invented categories of social knowledge that nonetheless have factual weight in the lives of individuals and groups. And yet, in increasingly sophisticated varieties, racial determinism continues to be used as a social weapon of validation and denigration.16 As Gould pointed out, the repetition of major episodes in the resurgence of racial science “correlate with episodes of political retrenchment” by the state, with social unrest, or when the seizure of power by the powerless threatens ruling elites and their proxies.17 It’s worth noting that the three focal periods of Gould’s study — 1870 to 1920, the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the late 1980s to mid-1990s — are also notable in the US history of mass imprisonment as a modality of social control and socioeconomic governance. Between 1870 and 1920, African Americans became, for the first time, the predominant prison population, following the Black Codes and the rise of convict leasing. The attempt to use imprisonment to achieve the ends of a recently outlawed plantation slave system was a defining moment of American imprisonment and its centrality in the lives of African Americans. The law and order campaigns of the 1960s and early 1970s and the quelling of the prison rebellions set the terms for the normalization of imprisonment as a crisis management tool that was secured with the big prison boom that began in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs and continues today. For our purposes, what’s crucial about the biological determinism at the heart of racial science is its fungibility or generality. Biological determinism is a general theoretical proposition: the groups to whom it is and historically has been applied may be races, as we understand that term today, or classes, sexes, ethnicities, or certain groups of people — prisoners, the poor, radicals, heretics, “our” enemies. As Gould insightfully writes: “Particular bearers of current disparagement act as surrogates for all others subject to similar prejudice at different times and places. In this sense, calls for solidarity among demeaned groups should not be dismissed as mere political rhetoric, but rather applauded as proper reactions to common reasons for mistreatment.”18

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Lombroso’s theory of the criminal man was probably the most influential doctrine to emerge from the anthropometric tradition and significantly directed the development of criminal anthropology and its impact on the prisoner. In the United States, extensive classification experiments testing Lombrosian theories were conducted in prison, under the assumption that this was where criminals or “criminaloids” were most concentrated and conveniently located.19 Lombroso’s basic claim, discovered in the course of trying to identify the anatomical differences between the criminal and the insane and based on thousands of measurements of convicts living and dead, was that criminality was innate.20 Where Oliver Wendell Holmes had claimed in “Crime and Automatism” that in most cases “crime can be shown to run in the blood,” Lombroso was more certain that in all cases, the criminal qua prisoner displayed nothing more and nothing less than his nature.21 Lombroso’s criminal type was the prototypical natural-born criminal. Lombroso’s criminal anthropology rests on three core presumptions that summarize its racialism. First, like most Western forms of racism, Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal relied on a fundamental but specious distinction between the “civilized” and the “savage.” There were precursors to the division of peoples into savage and civilized in the prototype of the barbarian, the foreigner, and the infidel, particularly as these terms developed during the Roman and Ottoman empires. But, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the English elite first imposed the idea of a less-than-human savage on the unmanageable Irish who were viewed as lazy, filthy, superstitious, disobedient, and given to stealing, amorality, and crime, barbarous traits that constituted the antithesis of civilized man bound by law, and that explained the need for English dominance. These same characteristics were used to classify Africans and later African Americans as savages during the following three centuries. The critical difference between earlier and nineteenth-century ideas of savagery was the latter’s scientific justification.22 Thus, when Lombroso thought he found apish atavism in criminals — individuals who were arrested in their evolutionary development and were more properly classified as primitive — he drew on a long-established Western division between savage and civilized peoples. Racial classification always combines division (or difference) and hierarchical ordering and Lombroso’s thinking was consistent in its supremacist logic. He suspects that there is a criminal type or a criminal man and the heads speak to him of this truth, but insufficiently. He seeks other proof. Where, he asks, do we find evidence of criminality as typical or characteristic behavior? The answer — given to him by his study of the research of his ethnological colleagues Josiah Nott, George Gliddon, Louis Agassiz, and Samuel Morton — was among so-called primitive peoples: among Africans, particularly the Dinka of the Upper Nile, Native Americans, and the Romany (or gypsies).23 This makes sense to Lombroso, for in tying criminality to savagery he is able to racialize criminality — to give it a racial nature — in specific and comprehen-

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sible geopolitical (colonialist) terms and also to give the criminal his or her proper place as a lower or inferior order of species. An aberration in the civilized world, the criminal primitive could only be an evolutionary throwback, a kind of feral child. Needless to say, the association between criminality and savagery has long outlasted Lombroso’s rather clumsy proofs. The second core assumption of Lombroso’s criminal anthropology was his unshakeable belief that a member of the criminal race could be identified by certain visual signs or stigmata. Once Galton began photographing the facial features of known criminals, Lombroso followed, adapting photographic composites into his work. Members of the criminal race had thicker skulls and simpler cranial structures, longer arms, receding foreheads, asymmetrical faces, scant beards, wooly hair, swollen lips, twisted noses, “precocious wrinkles,” darker skin, inverted sex organs, and so on.24 Lombroso was particularly obsessed with prostitutes, whom he considered the template for all primitive women, and he studied their feet with great fetishistic interest. The visual stigmata giving the telltale signs of the criminal man or woman were not only physiognomic; social or cultural traits also constituted visual stigmata of sorts. L’uomo delinquente spoke his own language incomprehensible to others, gestured excessively with his hands, and showed a marked lack of sensitivity to pain, a characteristic seemingly common to hard laborers and slaves as well. Tattooing, of which Lombroso made a special study, was particularly noteworthy for combining insensitivity to pain and childish attachment to adornment. While the whole notion of the visual stigmata of the criminal may seem silly today, it is not. This branch of criminal anthropology, which barely differs from its late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century versions in its racial profiling, is influential in gang policing, with its vast and Kafkaesque photographic and informational archives, and underwrites all current and planned security and surveillance systems, from routine DNA identification to eye scans, which promise predictive preemption of dangerousness. Seemingly easy identification of an individual’s race — the experience of knowing it without doubt or effort or even knowledge of knowing it — is central to racism and to how groups of people can be classified, surveyed, and disciplined. The criminal needs his or her stigmata too and Lombroso was one of the first to provide it. The third and perhaps most general feature of Lombrosian criminal anthropology is its treatment of criminality as part of the criminal’s very being, as a mark of his or her ontological status. Today, we would call this essentialism, the claim that groups of people possess as their essence certain characteristic features that make them what they are. To treat some practices or qualities as constitutive conditions of a group’s being is not only a form of reductionism but also an injurious constraint on people’s capacity to self-determine, to decide who they are and what they want to be, whether as individuals or as collectivities. In my view, it’s a form of racism when these ontologies are hierarchically ordered or when, as cultures of difference, they are fatally combined with

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technologies of power. The prisoner assumed the status of a distinct species, whose ontology — what they were, what they are, what they could be — was reduced to their essential criminality, all inside them as their basic primitive nature. Lombroso was extremely influential in defining the criminal as a dangerous person who was born that way: a throwback to the savage apish past in our midst, a kind of ghost of our ascent into civilization. The lower species being of the criminal qua prisoner permits treating them without the same moral or ethical considerations given to putative equals. However crooked the anthropometric “stair of progress,” the prison was never only a laboratory for the study of the origin of the prisoner, the etiology of criminality, or a convenient location to create an archive of the world’s languages and music repertoires. Scientists also used the prison as an unregulated laboratory for the testing of drugs and medical procedures, for the development of birth control and sterilization procedures, for general methods of meeting eugenic goals including castration, and for research on commercial products such as perfume. Prisons provided a captive and free population of subjects for study, and they provided a population of individuals about whom little care was given for these were a species of people whose diminished freedom and availability for use was already given by their criminal nature. As Allen Hornblum shows in his harrowing book Acres of Skin about the use of prisoners for medical research and experimentation at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison and throughout the United States in the post–World War II period, for two decades after the establishment of the Nuremberg Code, which included regulations for it, medical research programs, including commercial pharmaceutical research, in prisons expanded rather than declined.

Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007.

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a man in prison an inmate I had crossed the invisible boundary. I was no longer a man, but a man in prison. An inmate. . . . I’m already in some sort of tomb. I can do nothing. I am nothing. —Victor Serge, Men in Prison

The preponderance of people of color in the prisoner population results principally from the fact that they constitute a disproportionate percentage of the poor and the vulnerable and a disproportionate percentage of political dissenters, rebels, and troublemakers, the two groups of people who everywhere and at all times constitute the vast majority of prisoners. Contrary to popular opinion, imprisonment is not primarily designed to prevent crime or protect us from society’s greatest dangers or even to justly punish wrongdoers. Imprisonment historically serves two major ordering functions — to manage socioeconomic crises and to manage political dissent — and ideologies of racism have played a crucial role in informing and justifying how these crises are resolved or managed.25 In 1880 as our criminal anthropologists are busy at work against a backdrop of labor struggles, significant external and internal migration, nativistic hysteria, white riots, and the epidemic lynching of black people, 26.4 percent of the US general population was foreign born or African American, while 50.4 percent of its relatively small prison population was from these two groups, the Irish the largest of the foreign born, replaced with Germans by 1917.26 Today, there are more than two million people in US prisons, more than 60 percent of them are racial and ethnic minorities, primarily African Americans and Latinos; in some states the percentage is even higher. When we link imprisonment and racism this way, we’re primarily explaining who is likely to become a criminal and thus a prisoner, and why and how these individuals, their families, and their communities are both organized into prison and abandoned by it as well. It is my view that racism not only explains who is most likely to become a prisoner but also what the prisoner becomes. As Serge observed: “I had crossed the invisible boundary. I was no longer a man, but a man in prison. An inmate.” Racism is not merely external to imprisonment and prisoners are never only racial subjects, in the sense in which we commonly use the word race. As I’ve been suggesting, one of the major contributions of criminal anthropology was to treat the criminal man and woman as a distinct and inferior race — the criminal and thus also the prisoner since in almost all penal systems of which I’m aware, save one very important one, it is impossible to become a prisoner without first becoming or being made into a criminal. Formal arrest, trial, and conviction may be lacking, but imprisonment without accusation and attribution of criminality rarely, if ever, exists. Even in countries, unlike the United States, that recognize the category of a political prisoner (and this is a fraught

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category in the best of cases), the political prisoner too has been accused or convicted of criminal acts, usually treason. This is the nature of or the revenge of the rule of law. My point is that imprisonment itself is a medium of racialized state-craft and prisoners are usually, and certainly in the United States, considered in law and in social practice an inferior race. The artifactual carving up of human differences into distinct groups whose worth is ranked hierarchically, the assignment of innate and ontological characteristics to these groups, the othering, denigration, stigmatization and the “vulnerability to premature death” that accompanies such a ranking — in short the state-sponsored “coupling of difference and power”— this regime of fate has been applied to the prisoner as a class.27 The two fatal couplings of power and difference are themselves intertwined in especially destructive ways for people of color. This is particularly the case for African Americans because of the legacy of chattel slavery and the fact that attempts to be something else than a slave as that was defined legally and socially — such as running away or reading and writing — were capital crimes, thereby making the very act of being yourself — a somebody not contained by the law’s ontology — a sign of one’s essential criminal nature. As the history of prisoner resistance shows, when the prisoner refuses to conform to the expectations of what a member of such a race should be, they become a fugitive and even more intensely criminalized. The haunt of slavery is rank in US prisons. Today it is illegal to try to be something other than a criminal if you are a prisoner and the escalating number of disobedient prisoners in solitary lockdown, long terms distended even further is bitter proof. I had crossed the invisible boundary. I was no longer a man, but a man in prison.

the accidental enemy There once was a man. . . . He joined the British army. This man went into the European war. Germany captured this man. He wishes to go to India. . . . Three long years have passed. Nobody knows when there will be peace. In case this man is forced to stay here for two more years, he will die. —Mall Singh, The Halfmoon Files Every Sikh is given a number. . . . Mall Singh has number 75. —Philip Scheffner, The Halfmoon Files

There is one type of prisoner who is not legally designated criminal, indeed, whose very identity as prisoner depends on the absence of any taint of criminality. And that is the prisoner of war. In the crossover between The Halfmoon Files and the development of criminal anthropology, the distinction between the subject of the prison

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Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007. Anthropologist Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt’s doctoral thesis on the racial elements of the Sikhs was based on measurements of seventy-six prisoners held at the Halfmoon camp. In 1926, Eickstedt made his first trip to India — to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal — where he took 706 photographs of types, body measurements, and what he called ethnographic-geographical subjects. The Andaman Islands served as a penal colony starting in 1789 and beginning in 1858 the British used the settlement to confine mutineers, rebels, and anticolonialists.

(the criminal) and the object of war (the enemy) gets muddled and complicated. It is arguably the case that one major trend in the history of both ordinary and political prisoners across the West is the attempt to criminalize the enemy, to turn those who threaten or who might threaten the terms of order and profitability into outlaws and outcasts, delegitimating their ideas and banishing them in the same operation. The social and legal nomination of criminality has a long and stubborn history and the poor, the foreigner, and the rebellious have borne the brunt of it. In the United States, the history of the construction of the criminal and the production of what seems now a permanent captive population is inseparable from a long series of wars and their looming enemies: Indian wars, civil wars, anticommunist cold wars, wars on crime, wars on drugs, wars on terror. If on the one hand we have the continuous criminalization of the internal enemy, the history of the category of the prisoner of war moves in the other direction, over time establishing that the prisoner of war, though a prisoner, is not a criminal and in principle not even an enemy. In the early history of warfare, there was no recognition of a status of prisoner of war, for the defeated enemy, considered the property of the victor, was either killed or enslaved by him, or, when circumstances permitted, ransomed. Mercenaries, if they were lucky, simply changed employers. In general, complete destruction of the enemy was the goal, and the norm, even for the Romans,

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who were nonetheless the first to perceive the economic value of prisoners or captives taken in war. This value lay in the fact that in being captured, they could be enslaved. As long as it held a mercenary or pecuniary interest for the captor, the prisoner of war might not be killed but have his death sentence commuted to slavery. (See utopian surplus | the prisoner’s curse | at the hem | it could be you.) Indeed, the main route to enslavement has always been capture in war or through armed force, and this triangular and moneyed relationship between war, captivity, and enslavement repeats itself throughout history.28 The development of a protectable prisoner of war, the “accidental enemy” to use Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s phrasing, developed in tandem with the increasing regulation of warfare. Contemporary international laws of war are relatively recent, their principles established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia established that prisoners taken during war should be released and sent home when the war was over. The first actual codes were written in the mid-nineteenth century, but it was not effectively until after World War II and the cumulative crises of the two wars and their millions of prisoners of war that the host of civil and legal rights we presume applicable to prisoners of war today were established by the two Hague and then the two Geneva conventions (1929 and 1949). Francis Lieber prepared the first substantial body of regulations covering the treatment of prisoners of war for President Lincoln in 1863 at the close of the US Civil War when thousands of war captives were held by the remains of the Union and Confederate armies. The core of these regulations were instructions on how to ensure that the prisoner of war, though “subject to confinement,” would not be subject to any other “intentional suffering or indignity.”29 Lieber’s regulations were influential in promoting the humanitarian treatment of the prisoner of war and in clearly distinguishing between the legitimate “innocent” soldier and the illegitimate one; by the latter Lieber meant those in rebellion or revolt against states, state-sponsored armies, and property owners. But it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, in 1762, formulated their conceptual or philosophical foundation, notably in the section of The Social Contract arguing against slavery in general and against Grotius’s argument for the right of war captives to be enslaved. Rousseau writes: “The aim of war is the destruction of the enemy’s state, in which one has the right to kill the defenders of the state, whom he encounters with arms in their hands; but as soon as they lay down their arms and surrender, they cease to be enemies; they become men and one has no longer the right to take their lives.” The soldier, Rousseau notes, does not fight for himself; he has neither the power nor the right to raise an army, and if he does, then he is not a soldier but a rebel or insurgent, a criminal in Lieber’s terms. The soldier is a lowly servant of the state, of its ambitions, its authority, and its monopoly over the use of force. More to the point for Rousseau, war is a relation between states in which individual combatants are only casually and

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“accidentally” enemies: “Individuals are enemies accidentally, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers.” The enemy soldier, then, is an accidental enemy, a temporary situational condition not even created by him — a temporary situational condition of forced conscription in which he rarely profits and in which the state has only a limited property interest despite its monopoly over the use of force. The moment the soldier lays down his arms or has them taken from him, Rousseau concludes, he ceases to be a soldier, an enemy, and becomes again “merely” a man. For Rousseau, the war captive has not only the right not to be enslaved contra Grotius. Once he lays down his arms he is neither soldier nor enemy and is thus entitled to something more than a negative or even positive right: he’s entitled to the restoration of fellowship conferred by the lifting of enemy status. Between Rousseau’s moral philosophical assertions and Lieber’s regulatory codes, we see the outlines of the three basic principles that run through the entire history of the development of the idea of the protected prisoner of war. The first principle grants certain rights to an individual made prisoner of war, either by capture or surrender. These rights entitle him to receive humane and considerate treatment by his captors; robbery and pillage, brutality, and torture are forbidden. The second principle establishes that the prisoner is a prisoner of the state, not the personal possession of the one who captures him. The captive may be forced to give his name, date of birth, rank, and service number and to be numbered in turn. But ransoming, at first a substitute for death for those with money or wealth and then a means of exchange for parties with prisoners to barter, is prohibited. The prisoner is not property; he or she is not for sale. The third principle attests that the prisoner of war, unless charged specifically with a war crime and provided that he is neither spy nor mutineer, is not a criminal and may not be punished as if he were one. This is crucial. There are no extant laws of war that treat war in and of itself as a crime. The question of what constitutes a legitimate act of war — when is war a war and not something else, like a revolution, uprising, armed struggle, mutiny, murder, crime, act of terrorism, and so on — is the main problematic that has dominated the history of the rules governing warfare. And this main problematic has been overwhelmingly characterized by an unrelenting effort to delegitimize and criminalize political opposition and social revolt from below, which was already clearly established in Lieber. Although Geneva has expanded the definition of war beyond situations in which recognized states make formal declarations of war or commit unequivocal acts of hostility and territorial aggression, the protections Geneva offers are only activated in a legally recognized state of war. Where war is recognized in international law, it is not a crime and the captives of such wars are not criminals. Which is one reason, in a nutshell, Virginia Woolf famously wrote in Three Guineas that if you want to know how to prevent war then you need to oppose the tendency toward war, the war for the preparation of war. Thus it’s equally important to recall that Geneva and the inter-

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national laws governing warfare never were designed to abolish war and its means of preparation or to make war a crime in itself or to treat peace as something more than the absence of war narrowly construed. Its purpose has been to regulate the prosecution of war in the interests of established states and in the hopes of minimizing its most obviously destructive elements. In this limited context, war is not in and of itself a crime and in principle the prisoner of war is not an ordinary or even an extraordinary criminal. He is an “accidental enemy”— an innocent man or woman, a fellow, a temporary captive, waiting to go home. The vast detail of Geneva’s rules and regulations is concerned with who exactly is entitled to claim prisoner of war status; with who, in effect, is entitled not simply to various rights but to the restoration of fellowship that the lifting of enemy status confers. The history of who has been excluded from this protection (spies, pirates, certain rebels, mercenaries, and children) and why haunts warfare today and directly impacts the invention of the alien enemy combatant. There is not space here to discuss the US government’s creation for the global war on terror a class of prisoners of war who are not prisoners of war, but these men in prison today hover ominously around the World War I Muslim and colonial soldiers in The Halfmoon Files, fraying further the edges of the distinction between enemy and criminal, extending the double racialization imposed on nonwhite prisoners.30

in case this man is forced to stay here for two more years, he will die

Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007.

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The thin and unstable difference between the enemy and the criminal is an old one, nowhere more evident than in the very notion of treason itself. Orlando Patterson described the slippage this way: “The one fell because he was the enemy, the other became the enemy because he had fallen.”31 This is Patterson’s summary description of the means by which the slave is rendered socially dead, the means by which the situational, contingent conditions of capture and bondage — however much foretold, however much a continuation of former miseries — lose their accidental quality and are rendered naturally given, an expectation arising as if from the very being of the person him- or herself. Patterson argued that across the range of different systems by which people have been enslaved and indentured, the principal common feature is the rendering of the slave as socially dead. By fallen, then, Patterson means having lost the right to belong. The living dead person exists in a liminal social state, lacking public worth, social standing, and honor, fallen outside the bounds of social recognition and acceptance, at the same time a degraded and dangerous entity, made all the more unsettling by the society’s utter dependence on him or her. Upon application, the social death sentence is always permanent in the sense that it is a condition or a taint that appears to always have belonged to the captive or the slave, his essential mark, the means by which he is recognizable. “The captive,” Patterson writes, “always appears as marked by an original indelible defect which weighs endlessly upon his destiny.”32 And in this way, the taint of social death is a potent legitimizing and racializing tool for the capture or imprisonment of people who otherwise might be your neighbors, fellow citizens/residents, or strangers. Orlando Patterson rightly called social death an “idiom of power” and he strikingly described how a society’s outsiders (foreigners, infidels, prisoners of war) and a society’s insiders (dissenters, criminals, deviants, the destitute) could be conceived as people who did not and could never belong. The one fell because he was the enemy the other became the enemy because he had fallen. The differences between the one and the other are real but thin and shifting and are like that menacing tape in The Halfmoon Files that snaps specter-like between the wind and the empty road trapping people who get caught unawares in it. We know little about the prisoners of war at the Halfmoon camp, but we know they were captives, accidental enemies far from homes already occupied by the European imperial powers. And as Gomes Eanes de Zurara, the fifteenth-century Portuguese imperial historian, librarian, and keeper of the archives, noted upon witnessing one of the first cargoes of slaves held at the Lisbon port: their most visible “shared feature, he wrote, was their grievously wept desire to go home.”33 There once was a man who went into the European war. Germany captured this man. He wants to go home. In case this man is forced to stay here for two more years, he will die.

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static in the sound archive

Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007. I can hear him even though he died in 1931. Ever since Edison’s invention, the dead can speak. —Philip Scheffner, The Halfmoon Files You soon learn to tell time by the sound of the prison. —Victor Serge, Men in Prison

Ever since Thomas Edison, condemned prisoners could be electrocuted. The first electric chair was built by Harold Brown, then secretly employed by Thomas Edison and introduced at Auburn Prison in 1890, replacing hanging as the principal form of capital punishment. (See haunting | animism | a blow at organized power | Leon Czolgosz.) After its effective use in World War I, in the 1920s many US states shifted to execution by lethal gas. Known in Germany by its commercial name Zyklon B, cyanide was soon to be used in Hitler’s gas chambers, “refin[ing] the technique that had been invented in US prisons.”34 Another important invention occasioned by Edison’s encouragement of electricity’s role in the service of order was electroconvulsive therapy, applied mercilessly to treat men who had been traumatized in World War I. “Painful electrical treatment,”

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as Sigmund Freud called it, was used not only in military hospitals but in the trenches at the front as triage, as an emergency procedure to restore the broken soldier to efficient use. Accompanied by cruel and harsh exhortations to return to honor, nation, and manhood, it was administered for the set of symptoms known as shell shock by psychiatrists such as Lewis Yealland, who believed shell shock to be nothing more than a euphemism for the despicable condition of male hysteria. Electric shock was also imposed as punishment for and in the service of eliminating resistance to the war, for literally remaking dissenters, rebels, and deserters into normalized, anaesthetized men of the trenches.35 Individual soldiers and soldiers’ councils routinely opposed and resisted electroshock and the various postwar court cases involving soldiers and doctors in Germany and France provide evidence of it.36 In one of the most celebrated inquiries, the Austrian War Ministry launched an investigation into whether army doctors tortured war “neurotics.” Freud testified in the case brought against Viennese professor of psychiatry Julius Wagner-Jauregg, and although he found “conclusive evidence of the final break-down of the electrical treatment of the war neuroses,” Freud nonetheless provided a perfect justification for its use. Freud writes: It was easy to infer that the immediate cause of all war neuroses was an unconscious inclination in the soldier to withdraw from the demands, dangerous or outrageous to his feelings, made upon him by active service. Fear of losing his own life, opposition to the command to kill other people, rebellion against the ruthless suppression of his own personality by his superiors — these were the most important affective sources on which the inclination to escape from war was nourished. A soldier in whom these affective motives were very powerful and clearly conscious would, if he was a healthy man, have been obliged to desert or pretend to be ill.37

Freud does not push the point that desertion and refusal to fight is a normal response to war. This may be in part because of the number of physicians and military officers who thought most traumatized soldiers “malingerers” and for whom electric shock was less treatment than discipline and punishment, of which Freud did not approve. There are very few “malingerers,” Freud asserts; illness is the “flight” route from the war. Neurosis — illness — is Freud’s only possible framework for understanding what war is, what it does to soldiers and what their resistance to it means. For him, illness is what justifies and legitimates the work of a physician, even if this work is to provide the “means” to “compel” the soldier back to “health,” back “into fitness for active service”; even if this compulsion will make him “ill” again since in being sent back to the fighting, he would “repeat the business afresh.” Freud struggled in his testimony to exonerate his friend, Wagner-Jauregg: If “this painful form of treatment . . . was used in the Vienna Clinics, I am personally convinced that it was never intensified to a cruel pitch by the initiative of Professor Wagner-Jauregg. I cannot vouch for

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other physicians whom I did not know.” And to relieve his colleague of responsibility for his actions: “The physician himself was under military command and had its own personal dangers to face — loss of seniority . . . — if he allowed himself to be led by considerations other than those prescribed for him.” Those considerations never included the men of the trenches. The scientists are not interested in the personal stories of their object of study but they depend on the stories that are told to them. Freud’s short and cold submission to the Austrian War Ministry ends dreadfully, wrongly thus: “With the end of the war the war neurotics, too, disappeared — a final but impressive proof of the psychical causation of their illness.” A gray form stands out there against the now bluish darkness ahead of me . . . very tall and very strange, like a barbarian in his shadow-colored overcoat. . . . The soldier’s bony face, his piercing eyes . . . , surges up before me for an instant under the dented helmet which bears, gray against gray, an incendiary grenade. . . . The first man I meet at the threshold of the [free] world is a man of the trenches.

what is a ghost?

Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007. What is a ghost? How does he live? How many types of ghosts exist? How does he become a ghost? This is what I will tell you. Lots of ghosts take the form of an old tattered rag lying in the street. It just lies in the street most of the time and people walking by get trapped in it. The ghost is constantly moving about. . . . He can go everywhere. —Bhawan Singh, The Halfmoon Files

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One of the difficulties for storytellers once ghosts are admitted is that, as Bhawan Singh recounts, they are everywhere and are constantly moving about. And so I end before we have even really got to the war itself, its senseless slaughter, its 56 percent casualty rate, its imperialist ambitions, its patriotic propagandizing, its yellow-faced factory girls, and the massive and widespread resistance and opposition it occasioned. Mall Singh was not alone in wanting to go home. I end before we have dealt with the extraordinary calling-up of the ghost army of the dead to abolish war by Abel Gance in J’accuse!; or with the complicated story that links the Kiel sailors’ mutiny to the German army’s incitement to Muslim soldiers to defect and to the Baghdad railway scheme; or with the Algerian riflemen of the tenth company of the eighth battalion of the French army who were shot en masse when they refused an order to attack in Flanders in 1914; or with Karl Liebknecht (thrice a prisoner of war) and Rosa Luxemburg, whose deaths and whose respective analyses of militarism and imperialism are frighteningly prescient and relevant still today; or with the sweeping arc of arrest and expulsion of early twentieth-century anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, along with “Wobblie” Bill Haywood, for conspiracy to oppose the war; or to the liens and blowback of the spoils of the Middle Eastern front in World War I, including nothing less than the creation of the modern country of Iraq and the occupation war that destroyed it, scattering its haunting remains across the mismeasured and mismade borders of countries and bad history. “There . . . are crossroads where ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the day.”38 These crossroads are where we sometimes encounter those animated signs Walter Benjamin thought yielded a profane illumination of our condition and the traces, however faint, of it being otherwise. The historicity that is the ghost story is given here in the historical material of the connections and disconnections across time that order what’s present and absent, then and now. The ghost story always drags its haunted and haunting remains with it — the violence, denial, and loss that made it and the longing, whether of the ghost or of the ghost storytellers, for some other kind of contact, some other kind of traffic. Sometimes this desire is fulfilled; sometimes it is not. “What is a ghost? How does he live? How many types of ghosts exist? How does he become a ghost? This is what I will tell you.” These are complex questions not easily answerable. One thing I can say is that the ghosts themselves will not help you find the answers unless you show respect for their fate, their destiny. For as much as the storyteller might have an interest in or even a need for the ghost story, the ghost always has his or her own designs, a strategy toward us. These designs are part of the traffic, part of the historical materiality of the story. But they appear in their own guises. In The Halfmoon Files these designs can be seen in the beautiful rustling trees that sway with time itself. In The Halfmoon Files these designs can be heard in certain voices. They can be heard in the pathos of Mall Singh’s recitation, his desire stumbling repetition:

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“He wishes to go to India. He wants to go to India.” They can be heard in Bhawan Singh’s griot craft struggling with the new technology, breathless rushing intonation into chanting. They can be heard in the stray fugitive messages, all staccato. They can be heard in my favorite theft of the power of the scientist’s phonograph, in that mad laughter after Chote Singh exclaims: “The German King is looking well after me. HA HA HA!” I end with that laughter because it seems to break the scientific relation of exchange that brings to us the voices in the first place, to thus fruitfully endanger scientific comparability, even if also creating a certain amount of additional work, like the film itself. This laughter registers an ontological and political challenge to the reductionism of rank-ordered species. This laughter boldly invites us into a better relationship to the destiny of the world’s peoples than the regime of fate and fatality racism and war install and enforce. This laughter is like a breath of fresh air. A ghost is like air. The ghost is constantly moving about. He can go everywhere.

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utopian surplus | the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | research notes | Ines Schaber field notes, photographs, books, articles, maps, films, brochures, Agent Directory Date: xxxxx File note: The artist Ines Schaber and I collaborated in the making of The Workhouse: Room 2, a large allied project of the Hawthorn Archive that attempted to represent some of what was in the utopian margins of an old German prison. Only a selection of the larger project is included in this volume, presented as separate files in Part IV for ease of access. The Workhouse: Room 2’s special section in the library has been dismantled and individual items, including films, returned to their original locations. Readers will find relevant bibliographic references included in this volume’s Bibliography. The report on the spoon found in the Henschel rubble has been moved from the Agent Directory and is also included. This item — research notes — offers my account of the conceptual orientation of the project, written during and after the work was finished. The account is interwoven with entries from my early field notes and taken together they provide some contextual legibility, albeit limited, for The Workhouse: Room 2 as it was exhibited in Kassel for dOCUMENTA (13).

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field notebook entry #1 these things, I feel them stir1

The visitors from the big cities remark on how beautiful it is. And it’s true that the Benedictines had a knack for choosing the finest locations for their monasteries, and this one too, sitting alongside the long River Fulda amid verdant meadow, its large stone buildings nestled in among the smaller village houses, farms, and woods makes a good impression. Slowly Ines shakes her head. No, no, no. It’s not beautiful, she says, it’s claustrophobic. I understand. I’m prepared for a haunted ruin of an old prison.

field notebook entry #2 the anchorage of a name

Breitenau has a very long history and a substantial historical scholarship about it, particularly covering the period from the opening of the workhouse in 1874 through the end of the National Socialist state in 1945.2 That historical archive is the context but not the proper subject of our project, which is more concerned with the historical

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alternatives that could have been taken but were not. The Workhouse: Room 2 is not a documentary exhibit and was never intended as such.3 Nonetheless the touchstones of that longer history — and its arc — were important to the project and thus a summary of Breitenau’s official history is useful. Breitenau is located in the village of Guxhagen, some 20 kilometers (about 12.5 miles) south of Kassel, Germany. In its walled center are the remains of a Benedictine monastery founded in 1113 by Count Werner von Grüningen. After dissolution in 1527, the monastery became an estate of the local aristocracy and eventually state property. By 1579, the original monastery church had been converted to use for storing agricultural produce and a large horse stable, a dairy, and the first designated prison were built on the ground floor. It was badly damaged by arson attacks in the seventeenth century during the Thirty Years’ War and vacant for much of the eighteenth century (notwithstanding Landgraf Moritz von Hessen’s scheme to develop Breitenau into “Colonia Hessorum”), beginning in earnest its long history as a place of confinement and correction in the nineteenth century. Breitenau’s workhouse was a latecomer, established well after imprisonment replaced banishment as the normal punishment in Europe and after the first workhouses were established on the continent following the criminalization of beggars as thieves in the mid-sixteenth century. It was used briefly to house 750 French prisoners of war in 1871. And in 1874 Breitenau opened as a workhouse and correctional facility for the rural poor, targeting beggars, vagabonds, and prostitutes; it remained a center for convict leasing until 1949. In 1911, the prison was modernized and a cellular system was designed to accommodate the isolation of “intractable” (i.e., disobedient) workhouse prisoners, as well as inmates from the Kassel-Wehlheiden Penitentiary. The changes at that time created the physical infrastructure for Breitenau’s use during the Nazi era and after when, between 1933 and 1934, Kassel’s police chief confined 470 men in a concentration camp for communists and socialists attached to the existing workhouse. Breitenau was also used to imprison Jewish people from Guxhagen and other neighboring villages during the 1938 pogroms and then as a temporary collection camp for Jewish people and those persecuted as Jewish before they were transported to other concentration or extermination camps. Breitenau was not an extermination camp, although many people died there. In 1940, the Kassel Gestapo attached a new work education camp (Arbeitserziehungslager) to the workhouse and, until the end of the war, imprisoned more than 8,000 people — approximately 2,000 German Gestapo prisoners and 6,500 foreign armaments and agricultural workers — primarily for running away or refusing to work as conscripted/slave labor or for associating with Germans or for other things too, such as singing the Internationale in the street, practicing astrology, or having sex with the wrong people. Approximately 25,000 foreign workers were housed in more than 200 housing units in Kassel itself, a major center for both the German army and its military industries.

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After 1945, Breitenau continued to function as a prison for homeless youth, for those with sexually transmitted diseases, and for “difficult girls,” with work remaining central to the correctional regime. From 1952 to 1973 Breitenau was known as the Jugendheim Fuldatal (Fuldatal Home for Young People) and by the late 1960s was the subject of intense public criticism, most notably by Ulrike Meinhof, whose journalistic exposé of the repressive treatment of the young women contributed to its being shut down in 1973. After 1973, Breitenau was a closed state psychiatric hospital, and currently it is an open residential treatment facility and rehabilitation center for the mentally ill, overseen by the Hessen State Welfare Organization. Since 1984, Breitenau has also functioned as a memorial, museum, and research center open to the public and directed by Dr. Gunnar Richter, its cofounder.

field notebook entry #3 Trying to describe it. Already an entity that has possessed him, it swells.

I gather this description of Breitenau from the little written in English about it that I read before I arrive and from the extraordinarily knowledgeable Gunnar Richter on my first visit. (Actually, it takes several people, including Gunnar, to check, correct, and make precise this information later, of course.) It’s not yet clear what I will do or write about. Initially, I try only to take the measure of the place; to get a feel for it, to begin to perceive the contours of the “subjectivity of the so-called object,” to see what is waiting there for me. From the very beginning, Breitenau presented itself to us through a set of provocative images, each of which prompted a specific mode of engagement with the place and with the questions of repression and representation it raises. Three were especially important to the overall structure and content of The Workhouse: Room 2. The first provocative image was the analytic construct that framed the invitation by dOCUMENTA (13) to work on Breitenau. All dOCUMENTA (13) artists and participants were taken to visit Breitenau, regardless of whether they were asked or encouraged to work specifically on or with it, because its chief curator, Carolyn ChristovBakargiev, viewed Breitenau as “the other Kassel” and as a “reference point”: a “ghost space . . . crucial to the exhibition’s overall narration, to the thinking process.”4 Kassel was a center of the German army and a vast armaments and munitions industry and was consequently almost destroyed by aerial bombing during World War II. After the war, it became or tried to become a model postwar German city. The art exhibition documenta is very much tied to this urban identity since Arnold Bode’s vision and design for it were part of the general effort to architecturally and socially rebuild a city that would be modern and forward-looking, shorn of its National Socialist past.

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Arnold Bode, the art historian who in 1955 decided to exhibit artworks that had been banned by the Nazis as degenerate, was himself fired from his job at an art teacher’s training college in Berlin shortly after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. The modernist investigative spirit of documenta was reflected in the Latin origins of its invented name — documentum: from docere (to teach) and mens (intellect). And, it was also shadowed by neighboring places such as Breitenau, which was the site of a terrifyingly repressive and certainly haunted girls’ reformatory, seemingly a throwback to an authoritarian if not also gothic past. In fact, soon many of the youth prisons across Europe would become the scenes of explosive rebellions against the constitutive violence the modernist postwar social order vigorously disavowed and denied, however unsuccessfully. In Germany, the youth prisons and reformatories became proto-organizing cells for the Red Army Faction: one destination for runaways or kids on remand was the underground that had in many cases politicized them. It was this context that reasonably led Christov-Bakargiev to describe Breitenau as Documenta’s “subconscious.” To address the relationship between Breitenau and Kassel, we thought it would be important to focus on what is in-between and to crisscross the natural, social, and historical landscapes that connect these places and that put each in the other’s shadow, in something like what Philippe Zourgane calls shadowgraphy, the visual methodology he used to represent the architectural free zones created by former slaves and their descendants in Reunion Island, his birthplace. Ines created a visual language for that in-betweenness by walking it and photographing it — eight of these large photographs constitute the main visual component of the exhibition — and by designing a display that forced a certain confrontation between what’s visible, what’s invisible, and what or who is in the shifting shadows. Ines took a keener interest in the relationship between Breitenau and documenta than I did; seeing Breitenau primarily as a prison, my interest was in the administrative or bureaucratic relationship between the city of Kassel and its rural prison, a political-economic relationship that conformed almost classically to the features of what we call the prison-industrial complex today. But we were united in trying to figure out how to find the subjugated knowledge, in the Foucauldian sense of the term, the old prison harbored. Breitenau had been almost completely erased from public memory by 1979 and since 1984 it has been known primarily locally or to a small number of specialist historians. Needless to say, once documenta takes an institutional interest in a place, what’s conscious and unconscious and what’s visible and invisible change: both the terrain itself and the politics surrounding it require paying careful attention to what the institutional interest demands and produces in its wake. In this context, the question of what it meant for us to be involved in bringing Breitenau to documenta, in making something of it visible there, hovered uneasily around the edges of the project and kept changing.

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field notebook entry #4 Ines decides to name the project The Workhouse: Room 2. The Workhouse: Room 2 is not going to be a museum or a memorial for those whom they tried to correct. Instead, we decide it will provide a hospitable space for the critical and imaginative thought and practices of bad workers, idlers, strikers, runaways, vagabonds, women who wear too much makeup, men who sing political songs in the street, and other individuals who don’t obey orders and don’t want or need correctional education. We agree that The Workhouse might not (should not?) yield anything productive at all, or may possibly yield a fictitious rendering of alternatives that could have been taken but were not. At a minimum, The Workhouse will constitute a different kind of labor from that which Breitenau conscripted and produced. The second provocative image Ines encountered on her first visit to Breitenau, which predated our official visit. Touring the building with Gunnar Richter, the director of the Breitenau Memorial, they entered a large wood-paneled unfurnished room on the floor above the chapel that was last used as a ballroom (festsaal) when the girls were confined there. Propped up against two walls, in a gesture uncannily similar to the way Ines usually displays her own large-scale photographs, were several simply framed enlarged photographs taken of the girls and attributed to Ingeborg Jüngermann, the warden or headmistress (Heimleiterin) of the girl’s reformatory from 1957 until her dismissal in 1973. Jüngermann was a noted authoritarian; Ulrike Meinhof called her a “sadomasochist.” She also had a strong interest in art history and was an amateur photographer and sketch artist. She took photographs of Breitenau, a couple of which were included in a history of the old monastery published in 1987. And she also appeared to have produced at least four captioned photo albums, the most comprehensive being a photographic account of the everyday life of the reformatory from 1957 to 1962 that shows pleasant images of work areas, such as the kitchen, the bakery, the toy and cardboard box workshops, sports events, dinners for official guests, musical and theater events, holiday gatherings, and so on. What a happy place Breitenau appears to be in these books of family photographs. The albums contain no photographs of the girls’ sleeping rooms, which locked from the outside, or of the “Iso,” the solitary confinement cell, or of anything else that might suggest why Jüngermann had a rule stipulating that it was forbidden to cry in your bed at night.5 The photo albums are held in the LWV — Landeswohlfahrtsverbandes Hessen (Hessen State Welfare Organization) — archive, the body responsible for Breitenau, and are considered Jüngermann’s personal belongings or personal possessions, which is unusual. Apparently, it’s not the norm to treat either documentary or police/surveillance photographs taken in prisons or reformatories in Germany as the personal possessions of the photographer or the warden, regardless of whether they are the same person or not as in this case. The special classification of the photographs as the

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personal property of the warden means that it is difficult to get permission to view them and illegal to reproduce them without the permission of Jüngermann and the individuals photographed in them, many of whom are still alive. However, the photo albums were not given to the LWV archive by Jüngermann or left at Breitenau by her in the files and taken by the authorities as institutional property. They were originally given to Gunnar Richter long after the reformatory was shut down by someone else to whom Jüngermann had given them and it was Richter who delivered them to the LWV in the belief that they would become public. When Richter enlarged and displayed some of the photographs of the girls, masking their eyes to protect their identity, it was a quiet gesture of defiance. Defiance of the secrecy and silence surrounding the girls’ reformatory and Jüngermann’s regime and defiance of the historical limits that restrict the official mandate of the Breitenau Memorial’s mission and activities to the Nazi era, the years between 1933 and 1945. It was a quiet gesture of defiance that his superiors tolerated until the various dOCUMENTA (13) curators, artists, writers, assistants, etc. (which included us) brought a level of public attention to Breitenau and its archive that was unwanted. Several months before dOCUMENTA (13) opened, the Hessen authorities confiscated the photos and removed all the desks, beds, sewing machines, and other traces of the girls’ existence that Richter had arranged in the old dormitories. Then, on June 6, 2012, the day dOCUMENTA (13) opened, they locked the doors that give access to these corridors and took the key away. No one would be permitted to enter. Even without any objects, the girls evidently could still be seen. The status of those objects today is almost beside the point. The artists have left, a new curatorial team is in place for dOCUMENTA (14), and the bureaucratic panic over the possible image damage caused by thousands of curious visitors and journalists is over. What’s conscious and unconscious and what’s visible and invisible change: both the terrain itself and the politics surrounding it. The photograph of the woman Ines started calling Klara became very important to her and Ines took it back to Berlin where she began to try to transform it into a conceptual image, an image that reflects on the conditions of its making and in doing so creates an alternative modality of visual representation. This was already to double or remake a transformation process started by Richter, which, notwithstanding its critical impulse and its responsible guardianship, nonetheless remained within a certain archival logic. Ines wrote to Klara about it. Here’s an excerpt from the letter.

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Dear Klara, Some time ago I saw an image of you in the former girls’ reformatory in Breitenau, which has preoccupied me ever since. . . . It portrays a scene of celebration, although you . . . don’t look happy. Your eyes have been masked with black tape. This act irritated me. The masking tape not only blocks my view of you, it also does not allow you to look at me, making it perhaps a symbol for the unresolved relationship between you and me, the viewer, who must relate to you through this image. The original photograph of you was taken without your permission. The masking tape, which makes you somewhat unrecognizable, is meant to protect your identity and to give you some anonymity. The photograph seems to imply that the face is the window to the soul and thus the viewer is supposedly able to access the person — you — through the image. But the masking tape hinders this access. There’s a certain ambivalence here: to exhibit, a disguise is required. But I wonder if this approach to the masking tape is taken too much from the side of the viewer? Couldn’t I understand this mask also as something that is used to confuse and to transform the gestures of identification, evidence, visibility? Isn’t the mask something the person in the image — you — are playing with or hiding with? Might you not have your own intentions, your own reasons for appearing as you do? Isn’t the making of things and persons visible above all a question of the position from which each of us sees and acts? At the end of the letter Ines tells Klara about a scene from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film, Strike. She writes: Here, it is not so much a question of representation but of how to overtake the camera as a system. A captured striker is photographed by the police and a classic “mug shot” of him is taken. But then, the photographed striker begins to move in split screen. He moves his head to the right and to the left, he looks around. The static position that is necessary for the capturing and comparing of criminal faces is suspended. The split between the frontal view and the profile opens and the film catapults us into an entirely different space. Is this position of the striker who is able to animate a different world from within the police surveillance machine and Eisenstein’s picturing of it a stance that’s interesting to you? I’m assuming it is. . . . Am I right? It would be beautiful to hear your opinion and your thoughts about it. With kind regards, Ines.

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field notebook entry #5 Sometimes the point is the sky streaked with the trajectories of thoughts someone scans and frowns at to see, to find, to hear. And it seems this has been the whole of her life and when the sky peels away, drops, and glides on a smooth wind she asks the bird, “Do you have a message for me?”

I’m sitting at the table, hands on the laptop, surrounded by books, boxes of folders, and the always-offered coffee and biscuits. Gunnar sits next to me, translating each workhouse prisoner’s file. He reads, he takes off his eyeglasses, he smiles, and says, “That’s interesting!” before telling me about Edith, Heinrich, Philipp, Georg, Karl, Mathilde, Erich, Hertha, Charlotte, Helmut, Johannes. He helps me pronounce the family and place names and the words that classify, categorize, narrate the file. We look up words in the dictionary, like workshy, one of Ines’s and my favorites. She comes into and out of the room. Sometimes we exclaim in unison — workshy! — and laugh. Sometimes we are sad and quiet and exhausted by trying to take in and hold the weight of each individual’s experience. Often, Gunnar remembers a person’s story from some other context, or explains things like how someone could be arrested more than one hundred times, or under what conditions a woman might be sterilized. Gunnar is very patient and cheerfully answers the questions I ask — sometimes the same ones two or three times — as if each question were new and important. I can’t read or speak German. I feel by turns ashamed and frustrated. I am enveloped in kindness and generosity. Gunnar will give away everything he knows and asks for nothing in return. Visiting scholars, professors, artists, filmmakers, curators, schoolchildren, and teachers are welcomed and treated politely when they visit Breitenau. This is to be expected. It’s the profound care for all those who have been cruelly confined and who died here that’s unexpected, exquisite, that seems to throw a gentle protective spell over the whole place. Gunnar becomes very important to the spirit of our project. Through Gunnar’s translation, guidance, teaching, and protection Breitenau is becoming a more hospitable place. Slowly, Breitenau seems no longer only a workhouse. It is becoming The Workhouse: Room 2. Gunnar gives away everything he knows and asks for nothing in return, and I start to worry that soon he’ll need help to hold that spell on his own and we will not be able to come to his aid. Klara’s photograph organized and drew to itself like a magnet the problem of the archival photographic image as evidence, as biography, and as testimony, the problem

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with which much of Ines’s artwork grapples. I grew fond of Klara and was pleased to have found a letter by her in our archives that provided a clue to how she might have answered Ines’s questions. (See utopian surplus | the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | letter from Klara.) But before I found that letter, I was most concerned with the third provocative image, which I encountered on my first visit. It is a photograph of a stone plaque made in 1951 outlining the notable dates in Breitenau’s history as it was known before 1979 when Professor Dietfrid Krause-Vilmar and his doctoral students at the University of Kassel, including Richter, following information given to them by Max Mayr, a former Buchenwald prisoner, found traces of a concentration camp outside the city and soon afterward found a large cache of custody documents. The plaque contains no references whatsoever to Breitenau’s use as a prison, workhouse, or Nazi camp or any mention of any prisoners ever held there. The period between 1927 and 1949 when thousands were imprisoned is referred to merely as a phase in the “architectural renovation of one of the most beautiful examples of Romanesque architecture in Hessen.”6 The prisoners who died there between 1927 and 1946 were moved from the cemetery that had been on the grounds and their custody documents had been well hidden, but the plaque was prominently displayed. It is a perfect specimen of historical erasure: a history of a prison that eliminates the prison and leaves only a disconnected set of dates marking changes in its aesthetic appearance. In its own way, the plaque too was a disguise functioning as an exhibit. The photograph of the plaque starkly posed the questions: what is the history of Breitenau? What “rememories,” to use Toni Morrison’s term, are left here, are waiting for us or for me? What’s living and breathing in the blind field? Answering these questions required, as with Klara’s photograph, finding a different critical measure than that used by the committed social historians who have done the hard work of excavating a history I can now summarize. The historians who discovered Breitenau were part of a transatlantic wave of social historians emerging out of the ferment of the 1960s, each national context yielding a distinctive and politically inflected focus. What these German historians were looking for and what they found was a part of their National Socialist past, a very recent past that had been suppressed and endlessly reiterated as the bane which a forward-looking modernist future must jettison and carry simultaneously. The memorial and research center created at Breitenau was reasonably dedicated to this purpose: remembering the crimes of the Nazi state in the service of never forgetting them. And although Breitenau is an unusual memorial of this type, in part because of these origins and the way they have been interpreted and developed over the years since its founding, it is nonetheless organized and defined by Breitenau’s specific role in the National Socialist period (1933–45). What I encountered at Breitenau and in the erasures of the plaque was something else, more like a palimpsest: layers of prison time, successive regimes of confinement

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and enclosure. Popular opinion teaches us that imprisonment is designed to prevent crime or to protect “us” from society’s greatest dangers, or to punish wrongdoers justly. But this is arguable. Historically, imprisonment serves two major ordering functions — to manage socioeconomic crises and to suppress actual and potential political opposition — and the rule of law has both legitimated and mystified the role of imprisonment by criminalizing the poor and the troublemaker virtually on demand. The long and almost continuous history of incarceration at Breitenau testifies vividly to this virtually universal pattern and constitutes an episodic map of some of the most important moments of social crisis in modern Western European history. Beginning with the first prison cell built on-site in the aftermath of the sixteenthcentury peasant rebellions that succeeded in dissolving papal and monastic power but failed to achieve their more radical leveling aims and taking its poorhouse/workhouse form in the wake of the enclosures, displacements, and labor agitation that threatened capitalist development in the mid-nineteenth century, Breitenau has confined rebel peasants, the rural and landless poor, the homeless, vagabonds, street musicians, disobedient prisoners, “incorrigible” criminals, political dissidents, cultural radicals, indentured and enslaved workers who refused to work, strangers/foreigners, despised racialized groups, the dispossessed, the socially stigmatized and troublesome nonconformist girls. One could say that Breitenau presents a kind of encyclopedia of the prisoner and of some of the figures most in need, from the point of view of the repressive state, of social control and disappearance. “Extraneous persons” is the name given by Colin Dayan in The Law Is a White Dog to those “subordinated and expelled from society” into the custody of the state’s hold. The patterns of extrinsicality (of not belonging, of outsiderness, or irrelevance, or unimportance), the “idioms of servility,” the statecraft that “makes and unmakes

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persons”: the whole panoply of “apparitional constructs” and hierarchies of belonging presented by Breitenau finds its outlines and its liens in the widespread use of imprisonment and state confinement elsewhere. Breitenau is connected, however historically and geographically discontinuously, to other prison regimes.

field notebook entry #6 I know this place. I recognize the dampness, the graffiti on the cell walls, the miserable beds, the doors that lock from the outside, the neat handwriting and bureaucratic vocabulary of the prison logbooks, the communal showers, the sound of condemned time, the face of the police photograph, the lingering taste of bad food, the smell of exclusion and stigmatization, and the sorcery of the law. I know this place as a fragment of the history of imprisonment as a technology of enclosure, an old but situationally specific means by which unwanted people, threatening ideas, and impermissible fellowships are criminalized and confined. To understand imprisonment as a medium of enclosure means understanding not only who is removed from civil society to the prison (African Americans or German vagabonds or North African migrants or French soldiers and so on), why these people in their specific time and place, and how their removal is accomplished. It also means reckoning with what the prison becomes in the process of enclosing them. The prison attempts to render invisible, illegible, inaccessible, and illegitimate precisely those ideas and practices that explicitly or implicitly challenge the dominant terms of order and that actively imagine life otherwise than how we are told it is or has to be, whether these are the cultivated ideas of the political dissident or the ordinary person’s practical solutions to poverty, dispossession, and oppression, which often includes theft and other crimes. Many of us are familiar with the mechanisms and the idioms of power with which this form of social disappearance is accomplished and with the repressive technologies practiced by and in prison. But something happens to the prison or is deposited there in this process. Because in bringing these troubling and troublesome ideas, their makers, and their users into its walls, the prison confines or encloses within itself the very things and people it is designed to kill or silence. (Which is one reason why, as the revolutionary Victor Serge put it after spending ten years in prison, “the regulations could be summed up in three words: ‘Living is forbidden!’ ”) The prison confines or encloses within itself the very things and people it is designed to kill or silence and it’s in this way that the prison becomes — against its own intention, as a mistake of sorts — a repository, an archive, or a kind of document of a subjugated knowledge that haunts it. This knowledge carries an important element of the feeling for justice — that is, a discord with the order of things. This knowledge embodies a reality principle —“what exists cannot be true”— that the philosopher Ernst Bloch called “hope.” And despite the prison’s attempt to shatter it into hundreds

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of fragments scattered through time, this ghostly knowledge and its trajectories of thought have a life, a presence whose traces can sometimes be glimpsed or felt precisely there in the place where they were wrongly presumed to have been safely isolated and caged. What is the history of Breitenau? What “rememories” are there? How to find the traces of the ghostly fugitive knowledge, which might render a representation of the prison’s archive of that which it thought it had corrected or at least silenced? We went looking for the fragments and fleeting messages the people confined at Breitenau left so that we might create not another memorial either to them or to the terrible things that happened to them there but might provide a hospitable place for this subjugated knowledge to reside temporarily in Kassel.

field notebook entry #7 before we anoint our right hands, betray ourselves with the ghosts who haunt the fringes of leaves and steal all sense, even the limits of our shadows.

In the meantime, there are more visits and steady research. The postwar Breitenau archives of the girls are off-limits for reasons I’m not sure I’m even allowed to mention. Ines is sleuthing after Pappenheim. I’m obsessed with the Peasant War and how wrongly Engels interpreted its failure and I can be heard lecturing about forks in the historical road not taken and capitalism’s arrival as counterrevolution to pre- or not-quite-yet-capitalist communistic struggles. We’re in Kassel at the LWV looking through the Arbeitshaus archives for photographs, for runaways, and for fugitive messages. Vagabond passbooks, convict-leasing contracts and arrangements, memos from Berlin, paperwork detailing extremely complicated administrative relationships with the city of Kassel and the state of Hessen. It’s too much. More and more, I’m drawn outside the prison to the margins. It’s like I’m running away from Breitenau too. The more Breitenau becomes The Workhouse: Room 2 the more it seems to become a shadow of itself.

field notebook entry #8 I write to Ines for focus — remind me again, please, of The Workhouse: Room 2’s rooms? I laugh when she replies because they are actual rooms: “There appeared a library, an archive, a kitchen, a garden, a cellar, and an attic.” I’m still thinking in terms of historical episodes. It’s too much. I try to make better sense of it all by rewriting the original 1951 plaque. I fail completely and am back where I started, smiling, with things that stir.

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In the end, the search or the conceptual work of making The Workhouse: Room 2 involved two main operations. The first accessed or animated an alternate world from within the institution of the prison/workhouse with its domineering idioms of power. This animation essentially involved overtaking the system, to use Ines’s characterization of Eisenstein’s procedure. To overtake a system like this requires knowing what’s outside of it — getting close to the part not contained or defined by it — and using that knowledge as the lever or the standpoint for both a precise diagnosis of the institution’s technologies of repression (because the institution’s terms are never adequate for critique) and for comprehending the other powers, visions, and worlds that coexist in its shadows. This meant effectively creating an alternative history of Breitenau whose notable figures, dates, and events only partially crossed those recognized by the historians. This meant creating a fragmentary history that was completely unmanageable in conventional scholarly terms. The second operation involved making this different alternate world legible in such a way that its visual and narrative modes of representation would not for a second time disappear those already ghosted and in such a way that we could access those utopian margins Bloch argued border “all given existence and being itself.” Not to put too fine a point on it, to search for and represent the landscape of the utopian margins of an old workhouse prison required a certain degree of invention and a willingness to treat that invention not so much as a dramatic struggle to expose dark secrets and terrible crimes but as a small labor of creative work. And so, some photographs were taken of the space in-between and captions to these photographs were written, setting them in an alternate history of Breitenau. Other objects, including a very large gray curtain were made, some letters and a declaration were found or written, a considerable number of tedious, boring, and sometimes stressful things had to be taken care of, and I retrieved some old items from the Hawthorn Archive.

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utopian surplus | the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | timeline

Date: xxxxx

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1230 Always we begin again. An old Benedictine saying. The cloistered, disciplined, obedient, silent, penitent, communal, monastic order is the model for Europe’s first prisons. Some say the monastery is the first prison. The Rule of Saint Benedict includes seventy-three chapters or “tools for good work,” including more than ten chapters of punishments and penalties. In 1230, a young nun thinks constantly about flight.

1643 The women are leading the struggles from the thirteenth century onward. It’s always already a question of good and evil and the criminalization of the heretic, witches all. In 1597, a new spin-house just for women opens in the Saint Ursula convent in Amsterdam, the city-state being the role model for the development of the workhouse in continental Europe. It’s common to accuse the nuns and the female residents of the convents of witchcraft and superstition and of unlawfully locking their doors in order to evict them and steal their property — a primitive accumulation. Once displaced, the women without men become the poor, are called godless and wanton, and then become piteously enclosed within the enveloping and severe hands of the workhouse. It’s said that it was the kitchen women who set the fire that burned down the spin-house in 1643 leaving only its gate, which for over one hundred years was praised for its beauty and for giving the later rebuilt workhouse the look of a “palace” fit for “princesses,” not a prison for the “detestable” and the “ugly.”

1524–26 Article 3. It has been the custom hitherto for men to hold us as their own property, which is pitiable. . . . We, therefore, take it for granted that you will release us from serfdom. The Twelve Articles issued by the peasants of the Swabian League are carried along in beer barrels and by believers, among them Florian Geyer and Thomas Müntzer “with a hammer” who preaches Omnia sunt communia! Everything belongs to everyone! Philip I Landgrave of Hesse, into whose possession Breitenau passes after dissolution in 1527, leads the mercenary army that slaughters six thousand peasants on the hill in Frankenhausen and ends momentarily the Peasant War and the two-hundred-year wave of struggles by the aggrieved against exploitation, misery, and subordination. Engels was wrong. The peasants are not “pre-mature.” For years, they have been waging communistic struggles. Capitalism is the reaction, the counterrevolutionary force. There’s a fork in the historical road. Everything that doesn’t happen now is crucial to the building of the workhouse. Some of what doesn’t happen here and now will happen later and elsewhere, like on Saint George’s Hill with the Diggers.

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The spirits of Wat Tyler, Joss Fritz, Thomas Müntzer, and all the witches are passed along. There’s a fork in the historical road, time is getting ahead of itself. Everything that doesn’t happen now is crucial.

1618 Following England and Amsterdam, the first prison workhouse in Germany opens in Hamburg with the motto labore nutrior, labore plector: “I am the one who makes my subsistence through labor, and I am the one disciplined by labor.” Martin Luther’s The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars: With a Vocabulary of Their Language provides detailed instructions for catching no-good-lying-cheating-impertinent beggars, vagrants, and wanton women and is, one could say, a kind of primer on capitalist reformation and its work ethic, which produces its own caste of heretics. Luther’s insistence on the problem of idleness is a ruse; it’s the specter of masterless men and women that’s the real threat.

1700 The workhouse is in transition. It is becoming a modern correctional facility, bare remnants of its miserly charitable spirit of giving alms and care for the unfortunate and the lonely remain. The workhouse is making progress. Everybody must work for their own good soul now. Weaving, spinning, sewing, tailoring, beating hemp, knitting nets, stockings, blankets, spooling silk, carding, dyeing, hackling, twining, fulling, picking oakum, making canvas, marble, sausages, shoes, and gunpowder, and polishing glass. The work of the workhouse is punishing work. When colonists begin sending large amounts of red and blue wood back to Europe from Brazil and Mexico, rasping is introduced because the cloth dyers believe grating the wood by hand yields better color, because no free workers will agree to do the awful work even if they love the new colors, because it can be done with shackled feet.

1782 Refusal to work is the primary form of resistance, but escape, riots, and organized revolts are common as at Newgate Prison in the year 1780. Despite the beating, flogging, and branding, despite the water diet and water hole, the dark cells and cages and being bound by chains and rope, the soldier Frederick Krop still refuses to work. Finally, on February 14, 1782, he escapes with three other men. Godspeed Frederick Krop.

1871 Free wage labor has supposedly replaced bondage and it becomes old-fashioned to speak of men and their masters. Two hundred and eighty thousand French troops

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are captured by the Prussian army and put to work burying the dead, farming, building roads, and erecting Torun´ Fortress, itself later to become the prisoner of war camp Stalag XX-A. Some 750 French soldiers are sent to Breitenau, whose workhouse will officially open three years later after the defeat of the Paris communards. It seems as if the prisoners of war are temporary, but thousands more of them will be sent there later. A bigger memorial will be needed than for the seven French soldiers who died.

1872 The district of Kassel purchases the former Breitenau monastery, Prussia having earlier returned the property to Hesse on condition that a workhouse be installed. The official archive begins in earnest. Records are kept systematically now: name, date, place of birth, reason for confinement. A story is told about each individual; some stories are more detailed than others, none is particularly understanding. As the workhouse grows, other records are added to the archive, which becomes large and will require management by a state bureaucracy and careful investigation by professional historians. The Breitenau archive never contains many photographs, but it always retains the institution’s changing same unconscious and holds a not-so-easily-accessible collection of stories, ideas, and other marginal and surplus things left by all the outlaws who have passed through it. The workhouse is an archive where secrets and hidden messages are deposited.

1914 After the French soldiers leave, policing of political dissidents and militant workers intensifies. The police are ambitious. Some are studying modern science. They want to create a visual encyclopedia of criminality with predictive powers. Races are born in the process. The anarchists get their own little encyclopedia and are displayed with the racial scientists’ keen regard for the indelible defects of their inferiors. By the time war begins again and the Parisian Chief of Police Alphonse Bertillon dies, his anthropometric system for identifying criminals is so widespread that experienced prisoners explain to the revolutionary and often-imprisoned Victor Serge the way to fight the camera, to fool it. The system appears to be failing. Ten years later, for a brief moment, another revolutionary is positioned in front of the police camera in Sergei Eisenstein’s film Strike. With cinematic montage, Eisenstein shows a subject who doesn’t only trick the camera but takes over the whole apparatus.

1906 In September, Sand and Worman run away from Breitenau in blue uniforms. A couple of years later, it’s still easy to escape with unified purpose. Heinrich the head

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gardener submits a bad-tempered report. He resents being accused of permitting prisoners to escape. He informs his supervisors that if they want a guard they should hire one. “My job is not to watch others work,” he explains. Heinrich the head gardener is not sympathetic to the prisoners. Harsher punishments are needed, he admonishes. The workhouse is a workplace.

1921 Ludwig Pappenheim makes his first Parliamentary speech in Kassel about Breitenau on March 16, 1921. It is an exemplary moment in the Weimar Republic. By 1933, his term as a critical reformist on Breitenau’s advisory board is finished and his criticism of its cruelty and “medieval mind” becomes personal. Convicted of blasphemy for encouraging freethinking and for being a Jewish socialist, in July he’s sent with malice to Breitenau as a prisoner, where he is tormented by the guards. In October, he is transferred to the Neusustrum penal camp in Emsland and on January 4, 1934, SS guard Johan Siems shoots Pappenheim in the back, claiming he was trying to escape. Johan Siems was doing his job. On a day in December 1933 when Pappenheim last wrote at length to his wife, the frost had set and he remembered the fir trees of Thüringen.

1929 Gregor Gog calls the First World Congress of Vagabonds and over three hundred gather in the Freidenker-Jugendgarten (Free Thinker’s Youth Gardens) on the Killesberg in Stuttgart behind the School of Fine Arts. The painter Hans Tombrock attends and a vagrant art exhibition is installed at the Kunsthaus Hirrlinger on Gartenstraße 7–9. Speeches are made about fraternity, home, land, capitalism, agitation, revolution, and the role of the artist in league with the homeless. Within three years, half a million people without homes will be wandering around Germany, some with passbooks in hand, making a vagabond life. By 1938, the Reich campaign against the workshy results in the arrest of eleven thousand individuals behaving in a “non-economic way.” With others labeled asocial, they are forced to wear a black triangle. In 1929, Willy Ackermann and Gusto Gräser, long-haired, sit close together talking of things they have and hold in common.

1930 The financial crisis and reforms that Ludwig Pappenheim fights for empty the workhouse. It’s in trouble. Yet again it isn’t making money. Threats of closure are issued. The workhouse requires prisoners to be a workhouse. It doesn’t have prisoners

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but it has a surplus of space and willing, soon-to-be-hungry employees. The National Socialists begin arresting people in the thousands: at first their political opponents — the socialists and the communists and the anarchists — and then almost everybody else they don’t like. The existing prisons are overcrowded. They need a place to put all these prisoners and troublemakers. The whole prison camp situation will become increasingly elaborated and complicated but early on a deal is made: bargain prices and a contract signed. It’s in the gray book. The workhouse is a workplace where collaboration is encouraged.

1933–45 Slave labor, transport in closed containers, and overseers create an analogy to the slave plantation. Three thousand files remain, one thousand reasons for arrest: sabotage, pretends to be ill, avoids work, wants to move on, tells fortunes, sings the Internationale in the street, has sex with people from another country, practices astrology, thinks he can do whatever he wants, stubborn, insubordinate, causes trouble, should be taught a lesson. The lesson is delivered with backbreaking work, beatings, and hunger. Jan van der Vlies has left his soupspoon; he’s made holes in it to catch a morsel of food.

1955 Still mourning the death of Emmett Till, black Americans, including many domestic workers, boycott the buses in Montgomery, Alabama, and walk to work. In Kassel, the women cleaners also walk to work. Hans Haacke took a photograph of them. Arnold Bode, who had been fired from his job at an art teachers’ training college in Berlin soon after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, tries to remove the taint of degeneracy from certain artworks. His exhibition design becomes legendary. There are continuities between the ruinous past and the postwar modern future and far less sleepwalking than imagined.

1969 At 9 pm on November 11, 1969, Hessian Broadcasting airs the first of a two-part documentary, thoroughly researched, they note, by Ulrike Meinhof on “Guxhagen: Girls in Corrective Training, a Home in Hesse.” It begins like this: “Anyone in Germany who knows this home, has been there, had anything to do with it, or heard of it is terrified. The person becomes very serious and says nothing more than: ‘Yes, I know.’ ” Meinhof makes a list. Smoking, talking while working, giving away or swapping your belongings, wearing your personal clothes except on Sundays are prohibited. As are

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bangs, make-up, writing, whistling, and listening to the radio (unless doing needlework). It is also prohibited to speak loudly, back-comb your hair, read magazines, not eat all your food at meals, have friends, and cry in your bed at night. Shoe shining is important. The girls are being trained for a working-class life of submission. A certain education is required. Living is forbidden.

1970–72 George Jackson ends his letters from Soledad Prison with the cry: “Seize the time!” Calls for a human strike against “Everything Is Work” multiply. Absenteeism is rampant. The men at Attica take over the prison in September 1971. A wave of prisoner rebellions sweeps Europe. The prison is failing to produce compliant workers and extraneous persons. Later, they will improve their techniques but for the time being the prison isn’t working. They can’t contain the rebels. The prisoners are talking and on the move. The boys at the Saint Paul prison workhouse in Lyon find the situation intolerable. They send for help. It arrives.

1984 Always we begin again. Gunnar Richter, Dietfrid Krause-Vilmar, and the other dedicated members of the Projektgruppe Breitenau begin to weave their protective spell over Breitenau.

n.d. The Workhouse is erected off-site. No lessons are taught, no cures administered, no transportation provided. There are no stupid rules, punishments, or chains of command. Photographic portraits are made by agreement only. Permission is granted to do nothing at all, to pretend, to move on, to think, to ask hundreds of questions to the point of annoyance, to revise, to wear your hair as you please, and to cause trouble. Daydreamers, strikers, idlers, runaways, travelers, agitators, blasphemers, and their workshy friends are welcome. A thousand welcomes are given to those who cry in their beds at night. Delicious richly thick soup is served. The Workhouse is not a workhouse.

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utopian surplus | the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | Frederick Krop Date: xxxxx

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A defaced and slightly torn page of a workhouse dietary guide. Back-side of page is handwritten. Part of a diary written on various scraps of cloth, hemp, bark from the rasping rooms, bone, and paper — newspaper, pages torn from the Bible, and other unidentifiable scraps of paper.

Rasping room, location unknown, found in France.

utopian surplus | the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | Vagabond Congress photographs, handwritten letter Date: xxxxx File note: One black-and-white photograph of two long-haired men sitting together under a tree talking in 1929 and one handwritten letter, somewhat faded, folded around the photograph. Date unknown. There are several other photographs, one letter only. Men like these were labeled “asocial,” rounded up by the thousands in the Reich campaign against the workshy, forced to wear a black triangle, and sent to work camps.

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Hi Willy, The journalist sent a few photos from the Stuttgart congress. Ana likes this one, she says that we are practicing the art of talking about what we have not yet experienced. She’s mad about philosophy right now — lots of mystical pronouncements at breakfast. Do you remember the fights with the communists over work? Such good friends and fighters against greed, exploitation, and soul-deadening work. They understood why we rejected all that and saw us as strikers, even though we didn’t have jobs and were more like on human strike. But in the end they always wanted us to be better workers. At first it was “join your militant brothers, take back your labor and the factories.” Hans and the other artists would silently shake their heads half smiling cigarettes dangling always so cool. We would laugh and slogan back: “Poetry not Factories!” And then the arguments would begin because they didn’t think that was funny and so it got serious and we would say that we’re not just alienated by selling our labor power, we reject being thought of only and always as labor or as a means or mode of production. We would say a radical alternative to the present system is to reject this whole system of value in which we’re only valued for what we produce or can make useful or can exchange with ourselves. It always heated up at the point at which we would look at them and see, a little sadly because they’re our friends, how stuck they were in the capitalist mind set, how attached they were to what they hated, how much of a disappointment we were to their ideals. I remember the usual shouting and Ana getting in on it this time because she hated the whole idea of progress and history marching along a linear path step by step. “No one in their right mind can presume that capitalism paves the way to human liberation if he looks at its history from the viewpoint of women,” she yelled over my shoulder. We were so angry and I remember you quietly saying that a dreamer always wants even more. You took me by the hand. “The more is what we do and share in common, our way of being more fairly together.” “Walk away,” you said, “that’s what we walkers, travelers, vagabonds do: head for the nearest tree.” It was shady and cool and the feeling of battle and defeat started to pass and we began to talk of what life is for and what it should offer us. We spoke of adventures and friendship, of unknown expectant pleasures and being led astray, of learning to forget as we get old, of roast pigeons and potatoes, and of library cities and nothing else but reading for weeks on end. We spoke of a happiness that cannot arise out of the misery of others, of all the clichés of poetry and love and passion to believe in again and again, and of the morning gate of the beautiful. We spoke of the hundreds of small and great pearls on the little-explored red thread of dream-utopia and of our practical ability to journey to the end where everything turns out well enough for the moment.

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A mood of melancholy blue, the light of late afternoon on a Saturday, out of time together and yet as always alone, missing something. I miss you. Ana says when the red arrows shoot across the sky, we will find each other again. A dreamer always wants even more. G

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utopian surplus | the workhouse | Jan’s spoon | Natascha Sadr Haghighian correspondence, photos, fragment of a metal spoon, some rubble from the Henschel estate, books Date: xxxxx

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HA Dear Natascha and Pola, I hope this note finds you both well. We’re busy at the archive, as we always are when war, misery, and corruption intensify and people can’t take it or fight it anymore and run away. The protests and strikes against the war mongering in the east and the austerity and border clampdowns in the north have provoked a goodly number to secede and then they often end up on our doorsteps, especially when they turn against the craven bankers. Some of these folks you would know, but there are others new to rebellion and to self-governance coming from all over now. In any event, I did have a minute to look into our old records of the deserters from what’s known as World War II or the Second Great European War (although I don’t know why they call it that, since Europe, such as it was, had been at war with itself and much of the rest of the world for hundreds if not thousands of years, but that’s another matter). The information is sparse but here’s what I can report. In addition to the archive’s own records, I consulted three studies on forced laborers in Kassel during World War II by Gunnar Richter, Heinz Wegener and Ewald, Hollmann, and Schmidt. The fragment of a metal spoon that you found in the rubble from the Henschel estate as you were excavating the trail looks very much like Jan van der Vlies’s spoon. I’m attaching a photo of it. You can see that he’s drilled his initials “JvV” into the spoon, which was a pretty clever way prisoners would identify their utensils to prevent others from stealing them and also make it a little easier to find something solid to eat in the horrible thin soup they served at all the work camps, and especially at Breitenau where Jan’s spoon was found. Jan van der Vlies was a Dutch worker who was captured by the National Socialists and first sent to Kassel to work as a slave. When exactly he arrived to the city and what precise work assignments he was given, I don’t know. (If this information is important to you, I know someone I could ask who might know.) It’s estimated that there were more than 25,000 foreign workers in Kassel. It’s a little confusing because the authorities distinguished among “forced,” “foreign,” and “guest” workers, but as far as we can tell, they were all unfree and in effect prisoners of war, regardless of whether they were captured as soldiers or captured to be put to work. These prisoners of war were used by the city, by large and small companies, by farmers and by individual households to do everything, including domestic service, baking, growing food, building weapons, tanks and roads, sewing uniforms, fixing windows, and maintaining all the prisons and camps in which they were forced to live, of which there were more than two hundred. Basically, the whole war society and war machine was dependent on the labor of these captives.

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You already know that the work was brutally hard and especially in the Henschel armament factories workers were forced to produce weapons under the dual threat of death. The first threat came from their National Socialist captors who threatened to kill them if they didn’t work and were in any event almost starving them to death (remember what happened with the Italians in 1945 at the end of the war?). The second threat came from their liberators, since the Allies were constantly bombing Kassel and all the places where weapons were being made. Even if the conditions had not been quite so deathly, still there would have been a lot of sabotage, open and infrapolitical refusal to work, insubordination, and running away. As it happened, they had a difficult time managing the whole operation. And, even though they used the classic prison divide and conquer technique of segregating the workers/prisoners by what they often mistakenly called race and nationality to prevent organizing and unity among them, they could not prevent significant resistance from occurring. We know about the resistance from the overall large number of German soldier deserters who, often prior to taking off, would turn a blind eye to pilfering or hidden weapons or even help civilians escape from custody, or at least look the other way. More directly relevant to your Henschel rubble were the punishment camps set up by Henschel & Son, especially the notorious Möncheberg camp with its isolation cells and escalating punishment levels. And, of course, the fact that 655 men were sent from Kassel to the Arbeitserziehungslager at Breitenau that opened in 1940 and that was attached to the already existing Arbeitshaus from the century before. Breitenau was where the Kassel Gestapo had sent the politicals — the socialists and the communists — in the early 1930s when they had already filled their jails. It was clearly where the most troublesome were sent as a warning to others, including to upstanding German citizens. (People still remembered what happened to Pappenheim.) And, they transported from B to the big extermination camps and everybody also knew that. Of the 655 workers sent from Kassel to Breitenau only 404 records remain and these show that the majority were sent from Henschel. There also appears to have been quite a bit of organizing or at least individual resistance among the bakers, which is interesting because they were also very active during the Paris Commune. As I said, I don’t know whether Jan was working for Henschel or not but we can presume that he was part of the contingent of 200 Dutch workers sent to Breitenau, some of whom were later handed over to the police because they weren’t responding appropriately to the prison’s correctional work regime, which also involved starvation and beatings. The Dutch workers were particularly active as resisters and organizers in the prisoner of war work camps and I heard that the city of Kassel kept special files on them and targeted them for surveillance and persecution. For this reason, we’re not sure what happened to Jan, although we hold his memory dear. I have a somewhat blurred photo of some Henschel prisoners holding their bowls and spoons while lining up to eat. In the photo, taken secretly by another Dutch worker,

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two men have left the line and are walking out of the frame, toward the viewer. One of the men has his head covered, making it difficult to see his face. I like to think that’s Jan starting his escape, dropping his spoon along the way to somewhere else, somewhere safer, somewhere more peaceful. Who your spoon belonged to and what happened to him, unfortunately I cannot say definitively. Perhaps as committed travelers follow the forks and winding routes on your trail, they will take their questions walking with them and find in that way of walking some of the traces, stories, memories, stray letters, sounds, and dreams that constitute the trail’s archeology of knowledge. As always, the Hawthorn Archive embraces you and as always I send you my love. Avery

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utopian surplus | the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | letter from Klara letter, photographs, materials relating to the mid-twentieth century Great Prisoner Uprising Date: xxxxx File note: Letter from Klara to three women who were sent to the Breitenau workhouse before 1949. The original letter to Klara from Ines Schaber mentioned in the research notes is missing. Great Prisoner Uprising documents are a selection found in France: several issues of Journal des prisonniers (“le seul journal interdit en prison”), including no. 23, a devastating critique of prison reform; Agence de presse Libération (A.P.L.) informations, no. 22 Special Attica; Atipaya, no. 5 special issue on the revolt and hunger strike at the Saint Paul boys prison in Lyon; “Cahiers de revendications sortis des prisons lors des récentes révoltes,” textes recueillis par le G.I.P.; G.I.P. Intolérable, no. 1 (Enquête dans 20 prisons); G.I.P. Intolérable, no. 3 (l’assassinat de George Jackson); Fortune News, n.d., pages of Angola prisoner’s dreams of running along a straight road; The Black Panther, special issue “What Does Attica Mean to Us?”; The Cell: Antonio Negri, directed by Angela Melitopoulos (2008). Uprising documents also include a dog-eared copy of Soledad Brother deposited by the abolitionist educator Stephen Jones, copy of interview with Jones folded inside; a small assortment of books: The Struggle Within by Dan Berger; When the Prisoners Ran Walpole by Jamie Bissonette; Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising by Staughton Lynd; Repression, Resistance, Social Transformation by Critical Resistance Attica Interview Project.

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Dear Mathilde, Hertha, and Eleonore, I got your names from a knowledgeable historian I met recently. I write to make your acquaintance and to tell you something of what happened after you left the workhouse at Breitenau, in the event this would be interesting or helpful to you in some way. The workhouse officially closed in 1949 but young women like yourselves were still sent there and for similar reasons — loose living, poor moral conduct, petty thieving, not working, traveling too freely, wearing too much make-up or conspicuous hair-dos. State officials gave the place a new name and attempted to get people to believe that the prison wasn’t a prison or even a workhouse anymore, but rather a place for education and reform. I was there and I can tell you this was a lie. No matter what name they called it, it was still a place for punishing and confining poor people who couldn’t or wouldn’t work, women who didn’t behave properly, and anybody without much power who couldn’t be controlled. I think it’s fair to say that whatever positive experience some women, including myself, were able to make out of being there, it was in spite of the prison not because of it. The treatment was miserable and the education, the centerpiece of the whole so-called rehabilitation effort, was appalling. There was no accurate presentation of the social, economic, and political conditions in which we were living and of how we might understand our own situations or deal with the damaging family situations in which we were entangled. There was no attempt to interest us in using our judgment or teaching us to question authority. Obviously, there was only suspicion in dealing with our feelings and fear in dealing with our desires or anything to do with pleasure or sex. Nothing about the education we were offered was designed to make it possible that a young woman could become more aware of her own dignity in existence and the part she could and should play in the creation of a better and more free life for ourselves and others. Ulrike, the journalist who came to investigate the place, called the whole regime authoritarian and fascist. She warned of the sadomasochistic atmosphere that prevailed and of the public’s complicity in it. “It would be wrong,” she reported, “to gloat over the horrors of this home and to cross yourself on how lucky you and your children are. Those . . . who feel a sense of recognition concerning their . . . own experience with education, either as a victim or an offender comprehend more than those who sniff unaffectedly.” No smugness — I appreciated that. I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know, especially given all the running away from Breitenau in your time and earlier. In any event, I’d be curious about your stories of being inside. After you were there and they started calling it a “home” (which gives you some idea of what a family meant to them), the whole focus on education became more prominent and I think they tried to mess with our heads more than in your day. Ulrike’s report says that there was neither the

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usual solidarity among the girls or resistance by them, not even the routine small stuff — like sneaking out to smoke or making up mean nicknames for the guards — that keeps a sense of purpose and humor alive. A lot of competition, bickering, backstabbing, snitching, and self-destructive behavior, such as jumping out the window to break your legs so you could be sent to the infirmary, serious self-mutilation and stuff like that. She’s not completely wrong and it’s true that the other German youth reformatories were definitely more involved than Breitenau in the prisoner uprising that was taking place when she visited us, but there were a few of us who enthusiastically joined it later after Ulrike took off. We were dealt with severely both by the state and by history so maybe you haven’t heard about the great prisoner uprising. From the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, prisoners in the United States and Europe rebelled with amazing organization and determination. The 1,000 men-strong take-over of the prison in Attica, New York, in 1971 was the largest and most impressive, but it was not an isolated event. From the boys in Lyon, France, to the hardened men in Boston, Massachusetts, to the political prisoners in Germany, a wave of revolts and strikes struck European and American prisons. The situation had become intolérable, as the French group put it, and the cry went up — SEIZE THE TIME! — which is how George Jackson would end the letters he sent out from San Quentin prison before they killed him. Everywhere the struggles inside the prisons were connected to the struggles taking place outside the prison and this connection radicalized the refusals and demands on both sides of the wall. Even locked up, we had some idea of what was going on outside: the widespread refusal of war and of all forms of social repression and also that young people were rejecting the so-called good life the establishment was offering to the middle class or as entry into it. We would get fragments of news of what was happening and sympathetic visitors would smuggle in contraband newspapers. It was incredible. At first we were inspired by the always striking Italians and we would whisper to each other in the shower when the matrons couldn’t hear us — liberare tutti! — and snap our fingers like we thought the stylish Italians did. Then we got wind of what was happening in America with George and Angela and at Attica and with the Black Power movement and things came into focus in a more serious way. More dangerously and increasingly with greater discipline, we would look each other in the eye and say, SEIZE THE TIME!, while trying to figure out what it meant to do that while being forced to sit quietly and sew. Most of us had been sent to the reformatory because we wouldn’t behave, because we were angry at the violence in our families and violent in turn, because we didn’t respect or trust adults and authorities, because we ran away to find a place where we could breathe, because we didn’t have any money and we stole stuff, because we were having sex and weren’t married, because we dropped out of the stupid schools we attended or didn’t attend enough, because we didn’t want to work at dead-end boring jobs, because we were “too smart for your own good,” because

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we were wild and didn’t want to be tamed. Some of us were tough and could give a good fight, some of us were poorly schooled but street smart, some of us had a rough but intuitively strong sense of fairness and of right and wrong. Things might not have gotten much further than our demanding better food, access to the library and to our own clothes, some basic respect, and to be paid for the work we were forced to do. We might not have ever really identified as prisoners and with men and women who we were taught were enemies and people we should be afraid of — threats to domestic and national security was how they put it. Except that all the social unrest made the prisons more visible. Except that they made criminals out of the radicals and then sent them to prison and when the political prisoners started arriving, everything changed. The political prisoners knew how to organize themselves and so we were about to get a real education for the first time. Finally, we understood that SEIZE THE TIME! meant first learning how to do your time inside differently than what the authorities expected and encouraged. No more snitching and bickering and fighting with each other. We took our lead from what was happening in the US prisons among African Americans where men and women who had been abandoned by the educational system, many of whom were learning to read for the first time, began to seriously and collectively educate themselves. They called it self-determination and it was obvious that it was exactly the opposite of the instruction in selfhood they were handing out in our modern reformatory. It was so exciting and many of us who had hated school became enthusiastic learners, finding the cooperative means to take the time and use it for emancipation and liberation. Together with the political prisoners, we came to understand how important captivity and confinement has been to the functioning of the capitalist state and the role criminalization has played in legitimating it. Together we came to understand — deep in our hearts — that it’s not only a question of controlling our labor (because, you know, they need it today and then they don’t need it tomorrow) or only a question of repressing actual and potential opposition, but a question of life and death and the always urgent need to refuse the criminalization of alienation, poverty, dead-end lives, broken hearts, and abandoned children. Those of us who participated in the prisoner uprising committed ourselves to abolishing all institutions of authoritative inhumanity. Those were George’s words and we believed in them, made them ours. They meant that we had to become different people than we were or were on our way to becoming. Not disciplined workers or well-behaved young ladies ready for marriage or unquestioning patriots. We would become someone else: someone able to connect their individual experiences to social causes; someone who, from within the cruel atmosphere of prison, would dedicate themselves to a dignified and cooperative life; someone who would work hard to achieve, as George said, “on a feeling level an existence contrary to violence.”

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It wasn’t easy. Demons were confronted, open wounds needed healing, new friends had to be made, challenging responsibilities for oneself and others had to be assumed, studies conducted and completed, discipline rehearsed and achieved. Together the time had to be seized nonetheless by each person on their own. Some never made it, but more of us did than is often assumed. The prisoner uprising played a background role in helping to close the girl’s reformatory at Breitenau and it also provoked a terrible reaction to restore law and order that in the United States contributed its part to the largest prison expansion the world has ever seen. The days of the workhouse are over; whether in America or in Europe, the prison is now a large and growing warehouse for all the disposable and unwanted people the wealthy societies have accumulated. I realize this is a long, complicated and somewhat despairing story and maybe I can write to you about it at another time. When the girl’s home was closed in 1973, I moved away and took what I learned about the importance of education and became a teacher. I’m nearing retirement now. I was in the area recently and curious about the old place, so I visited it. That’s when I looked for you and found your names. I was touched as well as a little amused to see a picture of myself leaning against the wall in the big room where we used to eat and be forced to attend miserable and creepy parties. My eyes had been covered gently with black masking tape to protect my identity. Of course, I knew it was me. The photograph made me smile. I looked like a bandit. I was only missing the rest of my band of fugitives. I imagined them arriving at any moment to greet me. Do write back if you wish to remain in touch. Fondly, Klara

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utopian surplus | the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | Daydreamers declaration manifesto, photograph, sewing machines Date: xxxxx File note: Fragment of a longer declaration about which little is known, including when it was written, to or for whom, and what larger whole it was part of. It begins with a statement by Monique Wittig, the griot for one of the great wars women fought against patriarchal rule, but who, as far as I’m aware, had little contact with the archive subsequently. The declaration was carefully typed but then haphazardly filed among photographs and copies of the twenty-first-century newspaper The Abolitionist, which served as a reminder of sorts, and moved to a more accessible location, along with the photograph of the room where Klara was forced to sew.

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There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent. —Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères

We know or sense that what is at stake is simply our life, which has become a plaything in the hands of politicians, managers, and generals. We want to take it out of these hands and make it worth living. So, there are no prisons, senseless wars, private banks, rigged elections, and corporate television. Exploitation, profiteering, racism, the abuse of power, and repressive schools for children are not tolerated. We are more disorganized and less efficient than some of us are used to or even prefer. We are proud of what we don’t have and never apologize for not asking permission from them to take what we need. What we need changes, sometimes merely with the seasons. There is routine disagreement about details and complete consensus on the basics, including acceptance of certain extravagances, frugalities, and eccentricities. In response to harmless demands, money is no object, the first answer is always yes.

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We try to provide a hospitable welcome for the castaways, runaways, strikers, idlers, organizers, wanderers, dreamers, and all those busting out of the enclosures. The list grows longer and as it does a certain imprecision is introduced that creates contradictions, misreadings, and fragile fellowships ever on the brink of breaking apart. Flags, banners, and other symbolic standards are frowned upon owing to their dubious political and aesthetic uses, but an exception is made for the Bundschuh flag in honor of the fondness some dreamers have for it, for the peasants who first raised it high to the sky, and for all the radical and workshy shoemakers who fly its colors and can’t be bothered to fix your shoes within the week. One philosopher we’re reading is searching for a philosophical language for what’s not-yet hope comprehended the unbecome outward and upward. He is not sophisticated about art. Exclamation points end many of his sentences, making them fun to read aloud, and he is sometimes incomprehensible. He makes us laugh and we love him too for his indefatigable spirit and shameless passion. The reality principle trusts in things’ and people’s ability to be other than they are from the point of view of the so-called given facts. The maxim of verification is simple: “A thousand years of injustice doesn’t justify one hour of them.” Period. The concrete knowledge of the spirit that makes no peace with the world as already given is more complex, for here it is a question of what things are in truth when seen by the star of their utopian destiny. To see things from the star of their utopian destiny makes the theoretically serious and the historically precise among us, even good friends, nervous. Some persuasion is reasonably required. Time is out of joint, moving forward and backward, making a mess of one, two, three. There’s a surplus of dreams and wishes and questions and sensible values and adventures and kindnesses and warnings and qualitative differences that are passed through time and across worlds. Imperfect, incomplete, persistent, defiant: this surplus is excessive, scandalous even. It refuses to stay put or to be calculated properly. We’re anticipating on the wings of red arrows. Ghosts and spirits live among us. Still much remains missing, lost, and unresolved. By now we’re used to it. There are melancholy feelings and flashes of intractable blue. Sometimes it’s the daydreamer — the one who carries and passes on the dream — and sometimes it’s history itself — what could have been, what still could be, what’s coming — that haunts and unsettles and frightens. The could-have-been-what-still-can-be is not a real person and it’s especially important to know the difference between a historical possibility and a living person with a history. Some daydreamers experience the not-yet as on-the-way-coming-along-soon. Then it’s felt in the future tense and they say they’re never going back to what they’ve already forgotten. Some daydreamers experience the not-yet as the could-have-beenback-then-ancient. Then it’s felt in the past tense as a loss of what they never had and

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they say they can’t ever see ahead. Some daydreamers don’t speak a word of their experiences. Each holds their unhappiness and their desires in the language of the time they inhabit, old, new, unspoken. Haunting always jams time, makes the present waver. We are walking the landscape. We are wandering in-between the country and the city, the ancient and the modern, the visible and the invisible, the beautiful and the ugly. We are cultivating the in-betweenness, slowing down enough to feel what’s uneasily there in between one place and another, one time and another, one image and another. It’s crowded here in-between, at times claustrophobic. The trees are no longer bare and what’s there in between you and me is shadowed by the green of spring leaves and a distance on the horizon that won’t be covered. Work meetings are improved by eating experimental orange cakes made in friendship. Some of us are still working way more than our theories prescribe and the issue is sometimes raised for discussion. If you push too hard here then you see how much our sense of self-worth still depends on working hard and on producing things, which even if they aren’t always useful or socially relevant are nonetheless visible for everyone, especially us, to see and count. If you push too hard here then you see how attached many intellectuals, artists, and political organizers are to the idea that they are completely consumed by all the work they have to do. If you push too hard on this have-to-do then the question of the nature of this requirement is opened sharply and certain fictions and fissures between people are exposed that are still difficult to talk about and change. The house is furnished in the color of waking dreams, expectant. We are almost there, but not yet. We are growing organs for the alternative and vegetables for dinner, getting dirt under our fingernails. We are following the star of utopian destiny: dreaming wanting more sweetly and with anger tough enough to swim through disappointments and ward of further dispossessions. We are remembering and inventing. We are almost there, but not yet.

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utopian surplus | the prisoner’s curse | at the hem | it could be you copied pages from book fragment of a longer analysis, three letters, one treatise, note from Natascha, book of poetry Date: xxxxx File note: The destiny or fate of prisoners in and of themselves, and as their fate is bound up with those of us who are not yet captured. The stance of undefeated despair, that grief over cruelty and injustice, which is, John Berger writes, “without fear, without resignation, without a sense of defeat”; that “stance towards the world” which is the basis for the carrying on regardless that the struggle for emancipation and happiness requires. The stance of undefeated despair, a position from which to carve out a livable life when everything is organized to prevent you from doing so, a mode of Salvage. Threads connecting the four overlapping but distinct forms of captivity and confinement prominent today. These four are the United States’ model of mass imprisonment of surplus racial and ethnic populations as a form of socioeconomic abandonment; military imprisonment in the course of permanent security wars; the European model of the detention of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants; and the Israeli model of occupation by encirclement and immobilization. In each of these forms or zones of captivity, the status of the worker, the enemy, the criminal, the stranger, the resident — and thus the prisoner — is being modified and mutated in profound ways. In each, recognizable dynamics of race and class power persist and extend in new directions. In each, the very physicality of the prison takes at the same time more extreme and more abstract concretization as isolation unit, as camp, as safe haven, as city. A few letters and one treatise held as threads to help link the socioeconomic dynamics of accumulation, dispossession, and political power to the dialectic of social death and social life that marks the life of the prisoner.

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On June 10, 2006, Mani Shaman al-Utaybi, Yasser Talal al Zahrani, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed — 3 of the over 450 prisoners of war then currently held incommunicado and indefinitely at the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay — hanged themselves in a conscious and coordinated act of rebellion. This was the second mass suicide attempt at the prison; in August 2003, twenty-three prisoners tried to take their lives. Three more prisoners would successfully take their lives: Abdul Rahman Ma’ath Thafir al Amri on May 30, 2007, Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi on June 1, 2009, and Inayatullah (Hajji Nassim) on May 18, 2011. In addition to the mass suicide attempts there were ongoing waves of hunger-to-the-death strikes, sometimes involving half the prisoners striking at once and massive resistance to the force-feeding which began in August 2005. On October 14, 2005, Juma Mohammed Abdul Latif al Dosari wrote a letter to his lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan and his interpreter Khaled, signed “Prisoner of Deprivation,” saying “farewell” and explaining why his lawyer would find him hanging in his cell, arm deeply cut but still alive. Al Dosari was kept in solitary confinement from the end of 2003 until his release in July 2007. He tried to kill himself many times but never succeeded. He transformed this letter into a poem entitled “Death Poem” published in Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak. The letter included here is part of a large Hawthorn Archive dossier on prisoners taken in the Middle Eastern front of the Western War on Terror currently in storage. The second letter is an excerpt created from two well-known letters written by Ulrike Meinhof describing her experience of Stammheim, the security housing unit or “dead wing” built for the Red Army Faction in Stuttgart, Germany, and meticulously studied by Michael Ryan. Natascha Sadr Haghighian pointed out that Germany later successfully exported the F4 type prison as a prototype for punishing political activism to Turkey to be used against the Kurdish independence movement, which resulted in intensive organizing and hunger strikes within those prisons. The fungible use of the accusation of terrorism as counterinsurgency to attempt to criminalize and delegitimize political beliefs and political actions questioning the terms ordering postwar racial capitalism is widespread and has been particularly well developed in the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and South Africa. Natascha left a note: “Ulrike Meinhof will not be rehabilitated like Rosa Luxemburg. There will be no official monuments or streets named after her. She will be remembered as a terrorist, not as the woman who exposed the deplorable conditions in Germany’s youth reformatories.” In these letters, Meinhof is suffering from criminalization and the effort to turn her from a political prisoner into an ordinary dangerous criminal. She is struggling at the brink of despair. On May 9, 1976, she was found dead in her cell, hanging by a towel formed into a rope. The nature of Meinhof’s death — suicide or murder — remains contested, even though the theft of her postautopsy brain by the authorities was verified by her daughter in 2002. The third letter is to Mr. Friedrich, the interior minister of Germany, and Dr. Schmidt, the president of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. It is from the Non-Citizens of the Refugee Struggle for

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Freedom, a “group of non-citizens who left [their] countries because of concrete political reasons.” The letter informs the German officials that the hunger strikers will no longer drink any water and that “it was you that made us to choose streets as our strongholds to reject our systematic death and struggle to achieve our rights.” They explain that “a lot of people are leaving their country of origin because of instable conditions . . . which have been imposed by you.” And they declare: “We are in front of your eyes in the extreme bad weather conditions and restrictions you posed, but you have chosen ignorance and now we shout out, that the responsibilities of consequences of what will happen are directly addressed to you. This is the last chance for the existing government to move toward our demand to avoid making a more shameful memory of itself in history.” Readers will note the similarity in expression —“we are in front of your eyes”— with the prisoner’s curse thrown by al Dosari. In 2011, over twelve thousand California prisoners, under the auspices of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition, began a hunger strike to protest the inhumane conditions in the security housing or isolation units and to effectively abolish the units and the politico-institutional culture that produces them. They issued five core demands: ending group punishment and administrative abuse; abolishing debriefing and gang status validation procedures; ending long-term solitary confinement; providing proper food and expanding privileges such as visits; and providing constructive programming, including educational programming. The inadequate response by prison officials led to an even larger strike on July 8, 2013, of more than thirty thousand California prisoners. The struggle continues and has expanded across the country. In “Moving Forward with Our Fight to End Solitary Confinement,” Todd Ashker — California hunger strike representative housed in the Pelican Bay security housing unit for over twenty years and founding member of the Pelican Bay Short Corridor Collective (now Prisoner-class Human Rights Collective) — describes in considerable detail and “onward in struggle and solidarity” the history and experience of solitary confinement, the state of struggle, and the ways in which solitary confinement and isolation are a “reaction of the prison system” and part of a strategy of dehumanization and depoliticization.

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Letter from Juma al Dosari, US military prison Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Excerpt from two letters written by Ulrike Meinhof, Stammheim Prison, Stuttgart, Germany.

Page 2 of “Moving Forward with Our Fight to End Solitary Confinement” by Todd Ashker, Pelican Bay State Prison, Crescent City, California, United States.

utopian surplus | police power | bruise blues | abolition feminism essay, photographs, sound recordings, film [in storage] Date: xxxxx File note: A version of this essay appears in an anthology edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin honoring Cedric J. Robinson who grew quite ill as I was writing it and who subsequently passed away on June 5, 2016. Cedric’s intellectual company and friendship was a constant in my life for almost thirty years. His ideas and his example as a person of impeccable integrity and humility I carry close to my heart and readers of this volume will have encountered his significance to many of us associated with the Hawthorn Archive. Cedric never liked to have too much attention directed at him, and he routinely deflected credit given to him everywhere else, especially to Elizabeth Robinson who does deserve a good share. So, the essay was written not about him but rather with him in mind, and with the anticipation of a conversation about it and especially about Richard Pryor that alas never occurred. The context of the essay is conversations I routinely have about politics and images or about the political and the aesthetic. In these conversations, the question, always urgent, of the representation of violence figures prominently while the specific figures vary depending on the moment and the place. Recently, in addition to discussions about the highly mediated pictures of the desperate refugee, a problematic and decontextualized image of refuge and fugitivity deserving of greater attention, the focus has been on Black Lives Matter, on the renewed popular attention to police violence and to antiblack racism, and on what this moment of ferment means now and might portend for the future. In these conversations, the youthful or newly converted enthusiasm for the struggle and for the possibility of change “now that we know,” to quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore, is inspiring. At the same time, the seasoned and the elders are also frustrated sometimes at both the historiography embedded in “now,” as in “only now?!” and at the comprehension or political epistemology

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embedded in “know,” as in, to quote Gilmore again, “know what?” In these conversations, important questions of political consciousness are being raised including the routes, visual and otherwise, by which, to quote Robinson in The Terms of Order, “the relationship between existential consciousness and truth systems” are disturbed and activated to abolitionist ends. These spirited conversations inevitably take us to the heart of how racial regimes operate and the conditions under which they change and might be abolished. Here is Robinson defining his generative concept in the preface to Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II: Racial regimes are constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power. While necessarily articulated with accruals of power, the covering conceit of a racial regime is a makeshift patchwork masquerading as memory and the immutable. Nevertheless, racial regimes do possess history, that is, discernible origins and mechanisms of assembly. But racial regimes are unrelentingly hostile to their exhibition. This antipathy exists because a discoverable history is incompatible with a racial regime and from the realization that, paradoxically, so are its social relations. One threatens the authority and the other saps the vitality of racial regimes. Each undermines the founding myths. The archaeological imprint of human agency radically alienates the histories of racial regimes from their own claims of naturalism. Employing mythic discourses, racial regimes are commonly masqueraded as natural orderings, inevitable creations of collective anxieties prompted by threatening encounters with difference. Yet they are actually contrivances, designed and delegated by interested cultural and social powers with the wherewithal sufficient to commission their imaginings, manufacture, and maintenance. This latter industry is of some singular importance, since racial regimes tend to wear thin over time.

With these conversations in mind, the essay engages an exhibition of three commissioned works by African American artist Glenn Ligon, entitled Call and Response, that was on display at Camden Arts Centre in London from October 10, 2014 to January 11, 2015, two of which — Untitled (Bruise/Blues) and Come Out #4 and #5 — reference a case of police brutality.

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police power Glenn Ligon draws on Steve Reich’s 1966 sound composition Come Out in two of the three works in the exhibition Call and Response. Reich’s piece was, in turn, based on the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of six youths arrested for murder in 1964. When James Baldwin wrote a story for the Nation in 1966 about the beatings and arrests that took place on April 17, 1964, he began not with Wallace Baker, Willie Craig, Ronald Felder, Daniel Hamm, Robert Rice, and Walter Thomas, the names familiar at the time as the Harlem 6, but with an account of what happened earlier in the day to Frank Stafford, a thirty-one-year-old salesman arrested and beaten badly by the police (he lost an eye), Fecundo Acion, a forty-seven-year-old Puerto Rican sailor, and two unnamed others who were picked up and celled together. Whether it is 1964 or 2017: even before we get to the names on everyone’s mind at the ever-repeating moment, there are always the ones who came before. This bears repeating given the initial general state of surprise in the United States and Europe at the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, and at the routine tactical behavior of urban police forces and the judicial system, which authorizes and protects them. Notwithstanding the mystifications of racism, the sanctioned ignorance, and the historical amnesia generated by ideologies of the “postracial” popular in the United States and Europe, police violence against people of color is routine. Eric Garner died on July 17, 2014, from a chokehold. John Crawford III was shot to death by police officer Sean Williams in a Walmart store near Dayton, Ohio, on August 5, 2014, for holding an air rifle in the store. Akai Gurley died in Brooklyn after he was shot by police officer Peter Liang on November 20, 2014, in the stairwell of a public housing project. Tamir Rice died in Cleveland, Ohio, on November 23, 2014, the day after he was shot by police officer Timothy Loehmann, accompanied by his partner, Frank Garmback. Tanisha Anderson was also killed in police custody in Cleveland in November 2014. Yvette Smith was killed by police on February 16, 2014, when opening her front door in Texas. In 2014, after NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo was not indicted for killing Eric Garner, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund tweeted the names of seventy-six unarmed men and women killed in police custody since the 1999 death of Amadou Diallo in New York City. The Guardian counted 1,140 people killed by the police in the United States in 2015, 578 of whom were white. As of the end of February 2016, another 167 individuals were added to the list.1 Baldwin too wonders at how anyone could be “astonished” or “bewildered” that three months later, on July 16, 1964, a white policeman named Thomas Gilligan shot and killed James Powell, a fifteen-year-old African American boy, in front of his friends, prompting a rebellion and spilling, as Baldwin puts it, “the overflowed unimaginably bitter cup.”

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The violence of racial regimes is axiomatic whether we are talking about the taken-for-granted social divisions and economic stratifications produced by racial capitalism or whether we are talking about the harassed everyday life of young people of color, especially in cities where, as Daniel Hamm said back in 1964: “They don’t want us — period!” The violence of racial regimes is axiomatic whether we are talking about the systems of mass imprisonment that are used to manage surplus, disposable, and politically troublesome populations or whether we are talking about the individuals, communities, and cultures vulnerable to intellectual trivialization and the continuum that runs from genocide to phased-in obsolescence. It takes enormous work by states, corporations, media and educational systems, civil society organizations, and individuals to keep racial regimes going and to transform them since they are, to quote Robinson, “forgeries of memory and meaning” and thus, despite appearances, fragile, always in danger of breaking apart. As he writes: The degeneration of racial regimes occurs with some frequency for two reasons. First, apparent difference in identity is an attempt to mask shared identities. . . . A second source of regime entropy ensues from the fact that because the regimes are cultural artifices, which catalog only fragments of the real they inevitably generate fugitive, unaccounted-for elements of reality. Abraham Lincoln’s insistence that fugitive slaves were “contraband” (in effect, property which had illegally seized itself) did not prepare the president for their role in subverting his war aims. Lincoln believed reuniting the nation did not require the abolition of human property. As fugitives, troops, and sailors, that same property disabused him of his delusional political program. This was an instance of what Hegel termed the negation of the negation, flawed or delinquent comprehension colliding with the real.2

Police power or the power to police is a crucial element in that work, which must by all accounts prevent that collision of delusion and reality Robinson describes.3 By police power, I don’t mean only police officers or police departments and their more spectacular violence. Police power is a mode of governance, the discretionary power to dispose of present threats to the social order and to avert future dangers to it. The responsibility of the power for the future is important — predicting dangerousness is one of its main functions. Police power is always anticipatory in this sense, and its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European theorists viewed it as a means to achieve a political ideal of a harmonious state, its interior affairs all in good order. Settler colonial regimes have been especially propitious laboratories for the development of a police power capable of effectively expropriating and protecting private property, including racial property such as whiteness, and protecting social order, as the case of the US demonstrates. In the antebellum United States, police power was an explicitly racial privilege. The state did not, in fact, hold a monopoly on the use of force, thus

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the right of slave owners and their deputies, such as slave patrols and labor overseers, to police at will and to usurp the judicial power to punish. In principle, police power defers or cedes the power to punish to the judge, although this principle, constitutional in nature, has a rather checkered history and one could argue that the prison, which concentrates police power, mocks the very principle itself.4 In the United States, this history has been passed down as the specific right of white property owners to exercise police power when threatened, colloquially known as “stand your ground.” As is well known, “line in the sand” and the Castle Doctrine were the legal grounds for the acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin; the genealogy of those legal rights is to be found in the post–Civil War history of the Black Codes, convict leasing, and lynching. Whether the individual right to bear arms is constitutional precedent or merely a practical requirement for exercising police power is a question for a legal scholar to answer. The political history suggests that the insistence on the right to bear arms is usually in the service of a struggle over the exercise of police power. This was the case in the American Revolutionary War against the British. And it was the position of the Black Panther Party made explicit on May 2, 1967, when several members of the party attempted to enter the California State Capitol building to oppose passage of the Mulford Act which had been designed to effectively end the Panther police patrols and, unable to enter, were famously photographed holding their weapons on the steps of the capitol building in advance of issuing a statement to this effect.5 More generally, this history has been passed down as the differential and restricted authority to determine what and who is a threat to the terms of order, in other words, to create crimes and criminals. Of course, black people are not, by any means, the only object of such condemnation, to use Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s apt word, though they are rarely exempt from it. Here, I note that police departments obviously do the bidding of other masters — Baldwin rightly called them the “hired enemies” of urban communities of color — and the price they charge is to demand exemption from being policed, which they are, save in those exceptional situations in which to save police power an individual police officer might need to be sacrificed. It’s for this reason that Nikhil Singh uses the phrase “the whiteness of police” in his seminal article, whiteness signifying here not the ethnicity of the individual members of police forces but the status that confers immunity from criminalization. These are complex issues. Here, I would like to emphasize the extent to which police power does the racial ordering work the state has formally outlawed in a post– civil rights or multicultural context in which we are, as the commonsense goes, postracial, the definitive proof being in the presidency of Barack Obama. I emphasize this for two reasons. One reason is the obvious implication that before we get to postracial in any meaningful sense, we first need to understand the extent to which racism operates precisely through the presumption that it no longer really exists; criminalization, par-

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ticularly given the elasticity the notion of security has acquired, is not the only means by which this presumption is reproduced, but it is a crucial and highly flexible one. The second reason is the further implication that any meaningful notion of the utopian must address this condition or at least emerge in relation to it.

bruise blues If we define the utopian not as it is commonly defined as a homogeneous perfect future no-place, but rather as a standpoint for living in the here and now, then we might find meaningful instances of it in the history of social struggle. In the US black radical tradition, the history of social struggle is, for obvious reasons, bound up with slavery and its afterlife, in which police power, unrelenting, is a continuous object of attention. In this context, the framework of abolitionism has political resonance, not as formal emancipation or liberal legal rights, but as what Toni Cade Bambara described as being “unavailable for servitude” in the broadest sense of what servility and availability mean. This struggle or process aims to establish the conditions of possibility for a free life for all, without misery and oppression. For abolitionists today, one of our most urgent demands is the abolition of police power in all its dramatic and routine manifestations. To view this demand as a political exigency and not “merely utopian” in the dismissive sense is exactly the kind of utopianism that radical abolitionists have historically modeled. This kind of utopianism has many sources, one of which the late social geographer Clyde Woods called a “blues epistemology,” by which he meant that “longstanding African American working class tradition of explaining reality and change.”6 Woods found its “trunk” in the Mississippi delta where the blues originated in plantation life to sound out its burdens and pains and simultaneously to “construct a vision of a non-oppressive society.”7 The both/and is distinctive to this praxis. For Woods, a blues epistemology “bridges the gap between the blues as a widely recognized aesthetic tradition and the blues as a radical theory of social and economic development and change.” It is an epistemology with “multiple roots and branches,” an “evolving complex of explanation and action that provides support for [sometimes conflicting] traditions of resistance, affirmation and confirmation.”8 A blues epistemology is signaled in Ligon’s Untitled (Bruise/Blues), two blue neon signs that correct Daniel Hamm’s slip of the tongue when he explained what he did to get the police to take him to the hospital for treatment when they refused: “I had to like open the bruise up and let some of the blues blood come out to show them.” Bruise blood or blues blood: from a certain point of view, the slippage is a recognizable improvisational phrasing. It can easily be picked up and passed on to the next player. Reich’s thirteen-minute sound composition performed originally at a benefit for the retrial of the Harlem 6 pushes this sentence to the point of utter col-

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lapse, where the rhythmic and narrative structure of a blues song or a blues theory is dissolved and one hears, if one can listen that long, only the echo of the original bruising.9 Come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show them come out to show

Come Out and Show Them! The abstraction works differently in Come Out #4 and #5 and its monumental silence makes it seem more like a memorial. Substituting the phrase “come out to show them” for the roll call of the names of the dead war memorials usually display, Come Out avoids the common and limiting presumption that only the dead can adequately figure or represent the violence of police power and avoids presuming that what happened is singular and safely in the past. Come Out, carrying its blues epistemology, presents us with refraining and shadow: the repetition of the phrase as singular incident such that it appears as density, structure, pattern; the shadowing of the phrase as multiple voices, some bright and loud, some inaudible, blacked out. Repetition, shadow, and the call to future action: Come Out and Show Them!

presence under pressure Show them what? Possibly what’s living and breathing in the blind field that racial profiling presumes and produces. Perhaps because I started with Bruise/Blues and had just come out of what I experienced as a memorial to the Harlem 6, I was predisposed to see Live, Ligon’s multichannel video work that removes the sound and disarticulates Richard Pryor’s 1982 performance, Live on the Sunset Strip, as the third response to the call of the same event.10 I found it a surprisingly beautiful rebuke to the criminal anthropology that underwrites police power today and whose origins are in nineteenthcentury racial science. As explained in the file utopian surplus | prisoners of war | going home | The Halfmoon Files, criminal anthropology’s most well-known inventors, such as Cesare Lombroso, found in their ethnology colleagues’ research into the racial ordering of Western civilization the support for their belief that the criminal — in whom

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Lombroso found traces of the “apish atavism” of our primitive past — was a distinct and inferior race of men and women. The implications of this scientific belief in innate criminality are significant for understanding the extent to which criminalization is a form of racialization. Race, in the sociological and the commonsense way we tend to use it, not only explains who is most likely to become a criminal, who is most likely to be criminalized, it also describes what the criminal becomes, that’s to say, a specific race of men and women. Or, to put it another way, police power produces race — it is a medium of racialized statecraft — as much as it relies on already existing racial categories. Natural-born criminals were imminently classifiable and thus logical subjects for surveillance: Lombroso and the early criminal anthropologists were convinced they could identify a member of the criminal race by certain visual signs or stigmata, such as longer arms, woolly hair, precocious wrinkles, excessive hand gestures, or the use of unintelligible argot. Lombroso was especially obsessed with prostitutes and anarchists. In the case of African Americans, the double racialization has been predictive to the extent that, in the United States especially, the criminalization of black people operates like a kind of laboratory for experimentation in procedure, legitimation, and management, thus enabling application to other groups. And, the double racialization has been ascriptive, that is, African Americans are treated as a criminal race, whose ontology — what they were, what they are, what they could be — is reduced to its essential criminality, their putative basic nature. This is one reason why criminal profiling is more or less the same as racial profiling, a brutal reduction of human differences into the evident visual stigmata of the body of the known criminal, a threat to the order of things. This is also one reason why all attempts to deal with police power — from stop and search to arrest to imprisonment — as if it were possible to reform it by eliminating its “abuses” of the “innocent”— is a trap and will fail. The parsing of the innocent and guilty is exactly what the power abrogates to itself. Its ideological legitimacy rests on its claim to make this distinction accurately, fairly, and justly, notwithstanding the fact that the whole history of crime belies this claim. Abolition starts elsewhere, politically, culturally, and aesthetically.11 There’s a certain erotic feeling in watching Pryor’s body in the dark with the sound off, especially watching him touch himself in that repetitive gesture when he moves his hand quickly back and forth from heart to crotch, which lends to the repetition of the phrase — come out come out come out to show them — a different meaning and complicates the heterosexual masculinity Pryor is famous for performing. The memorial is cold, this room is warmer. I’m remembering having seen this performance before or parts of it seem familiar, something is coming back to me. I’m loving those fabulous gold shoes set off by the yellow rosebud in the pocket of the red/orange suit, out of fashion color jumping up all over the place not as skin but as pure provocation to the self-determination of blaxploitation. I’m watching intently Pryor’s expressive face, full of frowns, rarely smiling, like a professor. You’d never know he was telling jokes unless

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you already knew or caught the funky chicken dance moves when even he can’t stop himself from laughing at himself, at you, at us. I’m caught up in those moments when lipreading, I can hear his voice: angry —“bullshit”; showing off —“motherfucker”; concluding the riff —“alright”; taking the piss —“holy shit!” I’m moved profoundly by the beauty of Pryor’s hands constantly fluttering here and there, etching an elaborate sign language, a poetry of call and response without spoken words, which reminded me of James Drake’s equally moving video installation Tongue-Cut Sparrows. (Drake’s 1998 work is based on the sign language women used to communicate with the men inside the El Paso County Detention Facility, who were almost entirely Latino immigrants serving time for violations of immigration rules. Drake had seen the women and then asked them if he could film them and if they would select a piece of literature and sign it to the men inside. They agreed.) The performance ends when Pryor steadies his fluttering hands, reaches into his pocket to light a cigarette and raises his fist. In that room surrounded by the celebrity famous for his critical and uncompromising words, now cut into scenes of silent gestures, the unique individual performer transformed into a set of disarticulated visual signs, the effect is exactly the opposite of the reductionism and dehumanization of the racial profiling Pryor understood all too well. Rather, there’s an exquisite delicacy of touch and being, what Bennett Simpson described as “the gritty particularity of presence under pressure.”12 Something we could maybe just call respect, in the capacious Zapatista sense of dignity, which is how the film Live on the Sunset Strip ends, credits rolling, with Aretha Franklin singing her famous standard of the same name. We might also see respect in the fact that Live begins and ends with the film Live on the Sunset Strip shown in its integrity on all seven screens, which enables the artist and the viewer who watches the entire installation to credit the makers of the film. It also reminds us that in the beginning and in the end there is a whole person before the cuts.

we are the ones we’re waiting for The Black Radical Tradition brings to the now ubiquitous images of the police killing black men and women something much more than dehistoricized calls to reform police departments. It brings the history and ongoing struggle against racial capitalism and the requirement to specify the nature of the radical thought that is adequate to confront what Cedric J. Robinson once called “the nastiness” that is everywhere too evident today. “The Black Radical Tradition,” Robinson wrote, “was an accretion over generations of collective intelligence gathered from struggle.” This collective intelligence harbored a critique of an entire civilization or way of life and in Robinson’s hands it presumed a commitment to an immanent politics in which the struggle to transform the world as we know it takes place through means that embody and instantiate the alternative values, practices, and institutional formats we desire and for which

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we bother to struggle. As Robinson never ceased to remind us, this tradition is as much an invention as it was a discovery of something already there and fully formed, even if part of the struggle was in fact to make it obvious that living and breathing in the enlightened civilization’s blind field was precisely that collective intelligence at work. The Black Radical Internationalist Tradition, to appropriate Barbara Ransby’s naming, is a living tradition, a moving tradition, that perforce changes and takes shape as it opposes and negates racial, class, and gender regimes that themselves mutate, including police power. One of the key watchwords of this tradition is movement.13 In the movement to abolish police power and the carceral state, abolition feminism has grounded a radical imaginary that forwards the tradition, that keeps it moving. Angela Y. Davis is the most well-known theoretical practitioner of abolition feminism, in whose hands Du Bois’s notion of abolition democracy becomes deeply intersectional and constructive: “[T]he prison is deeply structured by economic, social, and political conditions that themselves will also have to be dismantled. . . . Prison abolition is a way of talking about the pitfalls of the particular version of democracy represented by U.S. capitalism. . . . [It] requires us to recognize that . . . our present social order . . . will have to be radically transformed.”14 Abolition feminism is not a subprogram or an identity, it is a methodology or a practice, a way of seeing, thinking, and acting that above all makes connections. Abolition feminism makes analytical connections between seemingly disparate institutions, functionalities, and technologies of power and domination — imprisonment and debt, for example. Abolition feminism makes political connections between seemingly unrelated oppositional and resistant struggles — opposition to racialized policing in the United States and Palestinian self-determination, for example. And abolition feminism makes human connections — solidarity — between seemingly divided and disconnected peoples and places, between landless people and deserting soldiers, for example. As a methodology, abolition feminism treats race, gender, and sexuality as “forgeries of memory and meaning,” that is to say, as interlocking and normalizing constructs that are unsustainable fabrications and thus whose natural history is always falling apart. And abolition feminism embodies a way of being, working, and living — a version of the personal as political — that tries to be better than the petty ambitions, narcissisms, and sectarianisms that characterize too much political culture today. This feminism has a steady and sturdy moral compass that easily crosses national and nationalist borders, if it is not self-consciously internationalist, and which it uses as a guide while building the social, economic, and political infrastructure that makes a life without slavery, exploitation, confinement, and repressive normalization possible for all. This is the picture or the image of the radical abolitionist practice and the future it brings. It is not in the image of our being smashed up the side of the head or shot to death by the police. At the 2003 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre Brazil, Danny Glover ended his public testimonial with these words: “June Jordan said that we are

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the ones we are waiting for. There’s no one else but us. Myself, you, none of us are absolved of this responsibility. We are not Gods, but we are many. Since we are not Gods, we can be great and we can be a great many.” In his perhaps least-read book, An Anthropology of Marxism, Robinson reclaimed socialism for all those whom Marxism had excluded from its history and its future, including heretical women, slaves, peasants, nonindustrial workers, and intellectuals on the grounds that “a socialist discourse is an irrepressible response to social injustice.” Robinson found confirmation for these grounds not in “the fractious and weaker allegiances of class” but rather in a kind of divine agency. This divine agency is not a God, but, like June Jordan’s great many, it carries the power of the “history and the persistence of the human spirit” in the face of “domination and oppression.”15 As we face the challenge of realizing the political and aesthetic representation of this audacious power, we can draw on the great work and legacy of the Black Radical Tradition and Cedric J. Robinson’s crucial contributions to its inventions.

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utopian surplus | friendship | working together | Natascha Sadr Haghighian drawings, video, Agent Directory Date: xxxxx File note: Natascha Sadr Haghighian, a frequent collaborator and friend of the Hawthorn Archive, sent four drawings made in 2016 for deposit: Refugees leave the Holot Detention Center in the Negev desert after a court ruling; Crossing the Qalandia Checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem; Turning on the projector at Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol Station; and Detainees at the Willacy Detention Center in Raymondville which was closed after a prison riot in 2015. They came with a note attached: I would start by suggesting that we shift the theme from “Speaking from Prison” to “Speaking with.” We are not speaking from prison. To speak with would mean that we have to figure out whom we are with. Where is the prison today? Who are the imprisoned? What are their struggles? Where do we stand in relation to them? The prison today is Gaza and Syria and Israel, the latter who, having walled a good deal of itself in, is now planning to build another large fence from the new airport in the south to the Golan Heights to insure no “infiltrators” can arrive from Syria. It is the various so-called welcome centers, refugee camps, and detention facilities along borders, whether in Texas or Hungary or Calais or Berlin. It is so-called Black Sites no one is supposed to know about and the island fortresses we do know about in Cuba or Ceuta or in the part of Manus Island in Papua New Guinea or Nauru that is offshore Australia. It is the old-fashioned concrete buildings like the Pelican Bay prison in California where the men are so well organized. It is wherever Snowden is hiding and it is also the Ecuadoran embassy in London where Julian Assange has resided since July 2012. And don’t forget about abolition as our yardstick for analysis and solidarity.

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Hi. I realized I left a couple of items when I cleared the desk for you. Would you please file the celery soup recipe with all the others in the kitchen? Do what you will with the postcard of the chair that was taped above the desk. It kept Carla and I fond company putting together the book of letters from the archive, but we don’t need it anymore. Thanks. If you need anything as you settle into the job, you know where to find me. AG _________________________________________________________________ To make the celery soup you first gently cook a small onion or couple of shallots in a little butter until it is soft and translucent. Then add homemade chicken or vegetable stock or organic bouillon cubes; for four people, a liter and a half of stock should be enough. When the stock is hot, add some finely chopped celery, preferably the pale inner stalks. Everything with this soup has to be done with a light hand. So, not too much celery and don’t cook it too long. The celery should neither be raw nor soft but still have a little bite and the taste of fresh raw celery. Then add some cooked rice, a short grain like Arborio works best. Same principle applies here: not too much rice and cook only to warm it up — a few minutes at most. Taste for salt. To serve the soup, put into shallow bowls, top with a good amount of freshly chopped celery leaves, a filet of olive oil, some freshly ground pepper, and a shaving of parmesan or pecorino.

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Acknowledgments The components of this book have been produced over a lengthy period of time and in a variety of contexts. As listing everyone who deserves thanks would be unwieldy, with the reader’s understanding, I present an incomplete set of acknowledgments. I hope that some trace of the individuals and communities that supported the making of this book is visible in the archive documents themselves. First and foremost, the Hawthorn Archive acknowledges all those who deposited items and allowed them to be included in this collection. My deepest appreciation for your contributions and fellowship: Sarah Beddington, Brad Butler, Carla Cruz, Céline Condorelli, Colin Dayan, Anselm Franke, Erik Goengrich, Leon Golub, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ashley Hunt, Vincent Meessen, Noor Afshan Mirza, Museum of Non Participation, Christopher Newfield, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Uriel Orlow, Ines Schaber, Philip Scheffner, Pola Sieverding, and Clemens von Wedemeyer. Several individuals were vital in the making of the final book. Carla Cruz’s supportive work on the images, the initial book design, and on various conceptual and editorial aspects, was indispensable. Carla’s understanding for the project combined with her steady capabilities and good-natured aplomb made her an invaluable partner. I can’t imagine now having had to do the work without her. I thank Andrea Phillips for connecting us and also for her intellectual companionship and last-minute help with an editing mess. Maryam Griffin provided her characteristically able research assistance and a very helpful and astute read of the final draft; her company has kept me in good stead over many years now and I value it greatly. Verta Taylor and Maria Charles, two former department chairs in the Sociology Department at the University of California Santa Barbara, kindly facilitated my research time in Europe. Starting in 2015, a visiting professorship at the Birkbeck School of Law, University of London, sponsored by Sarah Lamble, Stewart Motha, and Patricia Tuitt, provided office space with a view of

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the British Museum, library privileges, and the pleasure of wonderful colleagues while finishing the book. For their careful and insightful readings of the book manuscript and for irreplaceable intellectual comradeship and friendship, I thank Brenna Bhandar, Ann Cvetkovich, and Macarena Gómez-Barris. The value of Roderick Ferguson’s friendship is immeasurable and his contributions to this book are etched into it. I’ve been having friendly and educating conversations with Les Back for a while and many were happily had about this book too. Sarah Beddington, Céline Condorelli, and Natascha Sadr Haghighian deserve thanks for patiently and smartly answering my many, sometimes tedious, questions about book production. Richard Morrison’s support for the unusual and creative aspects of this book was a constant. Many thanks to the staff at Fordham University Press for the attention they gave to the book. Ann-Christine Racette designed this handsome book, and I would especially like to thank her for her hard work and creative energy. I remain enormously grateful to Ines Schaber for the invitation to collaborate on The Workhouse: Room 2 for dOCUMENTA (13) and for the work we did together; I also acknowledge the American Academy in Berlin and Gunnar Richter and the Breitenau Memorial Museum for their support of our project. I was honored by the invitation to give the twentieth annual David Noble Lecture at the University of Minnesota and appreciative for the research opportunity and feedback it provided. The students in my Problems in Radical Thought seminar deserve special mention for having provided a hospitable environment for study and for always trying to practice what they learned, especially Noor Aljawad, Yousef Baker, Jordan Camp, Jonathan Daniel Gomez, Maryam Griffin, Matthew Harris, Beatrix McBride, Daniel Olmos, Steven Osuna, César (Ché) Rodríguez, and Carly Ann Thomsen. Anselm Franke’s invitation at a café in the 13th arrondissement of Paris for a conversation in Berlin launched a welcome into an art world for which I remain indebted. Involvement in No Alibis, a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB FM Santa Barbara 91.9, Critical Resistance, and the Institute of Race Relations in London has nurtured my intellectual and political life in ways that are precious and I thank all my co-conspirators in these endeavors. In addition to those mentioned, several more friends, colleagues, and comrades made a difference to how this book turned out: Carlos Alamo-Pastraño, Peg Bortner, Wellington John Bowler, Jürgen Bock, Yvette Christiansë, Jon Cruz, Colin Dayan, Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Fred Dewey, Discoteca Flaming Star (Cristina Gómez Barrio and Wolfgang Meyer), Hilal Elver, Denis Echard, Kodwo Eshun, Richard Falk, Renee Green, Craig Gilmore, Ruthie Gilmore, Gaye Theresa Johnson, David Lloyd, Lisa Lowe, Rachel Luft, Fred Moten, Phyllis Palmer, Kris Peterson, Emily Pethick, Colin Prescod, H. T. L. Quan, Janice Radway, Adrian Rifkin, Cedric J. Robinson, Elizabeth Robinson, Karen Russell, Anjalika Sagar, Eyal Sivan, A. Sivanandan, Denise da Silva, Nikhil Pal Singh, Mick Taussig, Alberto Toscano, Philippe Zourgane. Thank you.

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Chris Newfield and I have been writing books together in the same household for a long time. It’s hard to imagine doing so without him. With this book, he was uprooted constantly from his home by me. For that, his love of travel adventures, and everything else, I thank him. In the last phase of preparing this book, three great radical intellectuals died, individuals with impeccable integrity, sharp political acumen, deep knowledge, tough skin, generous spirits, and strong laughter. Their passing was a collective loss and also a personal one for me. This book is dedicated to them in the hope that their names will always conjure the better world they so uncompromisingly and beautifully essayed in their thought and in their practice: Phyllis Palmer (2014), Cedric J. Robinson (2016), Barbara Harlow (2017).

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Images and Items p. 13: Film still. Les Sentiers de l’Utopie, directed by Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan, 2011. Courtesy of directors. p. 16: Film still. Les Sentiers de l’Utopie, directed by Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan, 2011. Courtesy of directors. p. 17: Film still. Les Sentiers de l’Utopie, directed by Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan, 2011. Courtesy of directors. pp. 19–23: Céline Condorelli, Report on B. Courtesy of artist. p. 33 (top): Leon Golub, A Sentimental Story, 2003. Oil stick and ink on Bristol 8 x 10 in. Reproduced by permission of the Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts.

(detail) from the series Degrees of Visibility, 2014. Courtesy of artist. p. 78: Letter to the Hawthorn Archive from Céline Condorelli. Reproduced by Carla Cruz with permission of artist. p. 86: Céline Condorelli, Singular Study for The Company We Keep, 2013. Courtesy of artist. p. 90: Céline Condorelli, Singular Study for The Company We Keep, 2013. Courtesy of artist. p. 103 (top): Edward Carpenter, Unidentified Hut and Brook. Reproduced by permission of Sheffield Libraries and Archives.

p. 33 (bottom): Handwritten note from Leon Golub. Private. Reproduction by Avery F. Gordon.

p. 103 (bottom): Edward Carpenter, accompanying note to Unidentified Hut and Brook. Reproduced by permission of Sheffield Libraries and Archives.

p. 70 (top two): Film still. Herbert’s Hippopotamus, directed by Paul Alexander Juutilainen, 1996. Courtesy of director.

p. 112: Céline Condorelli, The Double and The Half (to Avery Gordon), 2014. Courtesy of artist.

p. 70 (bottom): Ashley Hunt, 955 men and 55 women, Metropolitan Detention Center, Los Angeles, California, from the grounds of the Geffen Contemporary of the Museum of Contemporary Art looking north

pp. 116–17: Pages on subjugated knowledge from book. Reproduced by Carla Cruz. p. 120: Ashley Hunt, A World Map: In Which We See . . . , 2004–12. Courtesy of artist.

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p. 125 (top): Film still. Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Sleepwalking in a Dialectic Picture Puzzle (with Avery Gordon), 2009. Courtesy of artist. p. 125 (bottom): Feral Trade Café, Newcastle, 2010. Photograph courtesy of Christopher J. Newfield.

52, August 18, 1827. Courtesy of Library of Virginia. p. 176 (right): Runaway slave notice published in The Genius of Liberty 12, no. 11, March 22, 1828. Courtesy of Library of Virginia.

pp. 148–49: Quotations on wall at Hawthorn Archive. Photograph courtesy of Carla Cruz.

p. 177: Cotton pickers, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Photograph by Ben Shahn, 1935. Library of Congress (LCUSF33-006028-M5.)

p. 155: Tentative balance sheet of Netherlands Brazil and West Africa, 1644, in C. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654. Photograph by Avery F. Gordon.

p. 180: Unidentified Mulatto Man with Horse, before 1851. Quarter-plate daguerreotype by Glenalvin J. Goodridge. William A. Frassanito Collection. Courtesy of William A. Frassanito.

p. 160: Zacharias Wagener, Thierbuch, Plate 102. Photograph by Avery F. Gordon.

p. 181: The Bell Rack on Model, Museum in Mobile, Ala. Photograph by Russell Lee, ca. 1937–38. Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-125130).

p. 163: Jaspar Beckx, Don Miguel de Castro, Emissary of Congo, ca. 1643. Oil on Panel, 85.6 x 73 x 7.3 cm. Courtesy of SMK National Gallery of Denmark.

p. 182: Cotton Pickers with Knee Pads, Lehi, Arkansas. Photograph by Russell, Mobile, ca. 1938. Library of Congress (LC-USF33-011620-M1).

p. 169: Letter. Courtesy of the Museum of Non Participation.

p. 199 (top): Photograph (a). Public processional walk in Wadi Al Auja, Palestine, 2012. Courtesy of Echo Pictures (Mu’ness Qatami).

p. 170: The Ectoplasm of Neoliberalism, 2015. Courtesy of the Museum of Non Participation.

p. 199 (bottom): Fossil and paperback book. Photograph by Sarah Beddington. Courtesy of artist.

p. 172 (top): Kidnapping Advisory Warning by the Boston Anti-Slavery Society, 1851. Library of Congress.

p. 200 (top): Sarah Beddington, Procession, 2013. Photograph courtesy of Sarah Beddington.

p. 172 (bottom): Runaway slave notice published in the New-York Gazette or the Weekly Post-Boy, December 25, 1766. From Hodges and Brown, Pretends to Be Free.

p. 200 (bottom): Thirty Cloaks. Photograph (b). Public processional walk, Wadi Al Auja, Palestine, 2012. Courtesy of Echo Pictures (Mu’ness Qatami).

p. 167: Film still. Quilombo, directed by Carlos Diegues, 1984.

p. 176 (left): Runaway slave notice published in The Genius of Liberty 11, no.

p. 201 (top): Film still. Sarah Beddington, The Logic of the Birds (Mantiq AlTayr), 2015. Courtesy of artist.

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p. 201 (bottom): Poster for screening of The Logic of the Birds (Mantiq Al-Tayr), 2015. Designed by Sarah Beddington and Yazid Anani. p. 217: Book cover. André Ombredane, L’exploration de la mentalité des Noirs congolais: au moyen d’une épreuve projective. Le Congo T.A.T. 1954. p. 218: “Planche 14 du Congo T.A.T.” André Ombredane, L’exploration de la mentalité des Noirs congolais: au moyen d’une épreuve projective. Le Congo T.A.T. 1954. p. 219: “Planche 1 du Congo T.A.T. (Dessin de J. Duboscq).” André Ombredane, L’exploration de la mentalité des Noirs congolais: au moyen d’une épreuve projective. Le Congo T.A.T. 1954. p. 221 (top): Letter from Carl Jung to Christiana Morgan, in Douglas, “Christiana Morgan’s Visions Reconsidered,” 12. p. 221 (bottom): Letter from Carl Jung to Christiana Morgan, in Douglas, “Christiana Morgan’s Visions Reconsidered,” 14. p. 222: Christiana Morgan, “The bull said . . . ,” in Jung, Visions. p. 223: TAT 3 BM, drawn by Christiana Morgan. p. 256 (top): Buffalo Department of Police card for Leon F. Czolgosz, 1901. Courtesy of Buffalo History Museum. p. 256 (bottom): T. Dart Walker, Assassination of President McKinley, ca. 1905. Wash drawing. Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-5377). p. 257 (top): Detail of James Connaughton’s Execution Log Book, 1896–1897.

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Sing Sing Prison. Courtesy of Westchester County Archives. p. 257 (bottom): “Old Sparky,” Sing Sing Prison’s electric chair, ca. 1900. Photograph by William M. Van der Weyde. Digital positive from original negative. Courtesy of George Eastman House Collection. p. 258: Portrait of Leon Czolgosz. Harper’s Weekly, September 21, 1901. p. 263: Film still. Thomas Edison, Execution of Czolgosz, with panorama of Auburn Prison, 1901. Library of Congress. p. 265 (top): Refugee Camp in Studio 5 Cinecittà. Film still. Umanitá, directed by Jack Salvatori, 1946. Courtesy of Instituto Luce Cinecittà. p. 265 (center): Refugee Camp in Studio 5 Cinecittà. Film still. Nel mondo del Cinema Cinecittà risorge, 1947. Courtesy of Instituto Luce Cinecittà. p. 265 (bottom): Manifestazione di protesta delle comparse a Cinecittà — campo medio. June 9, 1958. Courtesy of Instituto Luce Cinecittà. p. 266 (top): Cinecittà. Photograph courtesy of Christopher J. Newfield. p. 266 (bottom): Film still. Clemens von Wedemeyer, Procession, HD video, 2013. Courtesy of artist. p. 287: T-shirt made by Erik Goengrich, 2012. Photograph courtesy of Carla Cruz. pp. 290–91: Pages on methodology of imprisonment in book. Reproduced by Carla Cruz. p. 292: Letter from Rosa Luxemburg to Sophie Liebknecht, May 2, 1918.

p. 294 (top): Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007. Courtesy of director.

p. 330: Corridor and doors. Breitenau Memorial Museum, 2012. Photograph courtesy of Christopher J. Newfield.

p. 294 (bottom): Postcard. Wünsdorf, Germany, 1916.

p. 333: Photograph of plaque with dates of interest in the history of Breitenau, 1951. Courtesy of Gedenkstätte Breitenau.

p. 297: Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007. Courtesy of director. p. 299: “Portrait Parle Class,” France, ca. 1910–15. Library of Congress (LCDIG-ggbain-09570). p. 302: Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007. Courtesy of director. p. 304: Wünsdorf prisoner of war camp. Hindu temple in the Indian barracks, 1914–1916. Stereoview. Neue Photographische Gesellschaft (NPG NPG 344). http://greatwarin3d.org/. p. 308: Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007. Courtesy of director. p. 311: Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007. Courtesy of director. p. 314: Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007. Courtesy of director. p. 316: Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007. Courtesy of director. p. 318: Film still. The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story, directed by Philip Scheffner, 2007. Courtesy of director.

p. 337 (top): The Workhouse: Room 2. View of installation at Handwerskammer Kassel dOCUMENTA (13), 2012. Photograph courtesy of Christopher J. Newfield. p. 377 (bottom): The Workhouse: Room 2. View of installation at Handwerskammer Kassel dOCUMENTA (13), 2012. Photograph courtesy of Christopher J. Newfield. p. 346: Handwritten letter mentioning Frederick Krop. Restored by Carla Cruz. p. 347: Rasping room, location and date unknown. Photograph by Avery F. Gordon. p. 349: Willy Ackermann and Gusto Gräser, at the Vagabond Congress, Stuttgart, Germany, 1929. Photograph from the collection of Klaus Trappmann. Edition Photothek XVII: Vagabundenkongreß Stuttgart Mai 1929, edited by Diethart Kerbs. Berlin: Dirk Nishen Verlag, 1986. p. 353: Soupspoon of Jan van der Vlies. Courtesy of Gedenkstätte Breitenau.

p. 322: Back wall and grounds, Breitenau Memorial Museum, 2011. Photograph courtesy of Christopher J. Newfield.

p. 356: Henschel Camp Kassel, Germany, 1942. Photograph taken by Dutch forced laborer in Richter, Breitenau, 115. Photograph courtesy of Pola Sieverding.

p. 326: Photograph of tree by Ines Schaber, 2012. Courtesy of artist.

p. 362 (top): Kassel, Germany, 2011. Photograph by Avery F. Gordon.

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p. 362 (bottom): Saint Paul’s Reformatory for Boys, Lyon, France, 1972. Photograph by Avery F. Gordon. pp. 363–71: “ ‘Seize the Time’: An Interview with Stephen Jones,” in Race and Class 53, no. 2 (2011): 14–27. Reproduced by Carla Cruz. p. 373: Exhibition of sewing machines and photographs, Breitenau Memorial Museum, 2011. Photograph courtesy of Christopher J. Newfield. pp. 379–86: Pages on the prisoner’s curse from book. Reproduced by Carla Cruz. p. 387: Letter from Juma al Dosari, US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, October 14, 2005. p. 388: Excerpt from two letters sent from solitary confinement on the dead wing by Ulrike Meinhof between June 16, 1972 and January 3, 1974. First letter from Meinhof, Everybody Talks about the Weather, 78-79. Second letter from Smith and Moncourt, The Red Army Faction, 272-73. p. 389: Nationwide Refugee Strike website, http://refugeestruggle.org/en.

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p. 390: Page 2 of “Moving Forward with Our Fight to End Solitary Confinement,” by Todd Ashker, Prisoner-class Human Rights Collective, formerly Pelican Bay Short Corridor Collective, March 30, 2015. p. 403 (top): Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Refugees leave the Holot Detention Center in the Negev desert after a court ruling. Drawing, 2016. Courtesy of artist. p. 403 (bottom): Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Crossing the Qalandia Checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem, 2016. Drawing. Courtesy of artist. p. 404 (top): Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Turning on the Projector at Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol Station, 2016. Drawing. Courtesy of artist. p. 404 (bottom): Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Detainees at the Willacy Detention Center in Raymondville which was closed after a prison riot in 2015, 2016. Drawing. Courtesy of artist. p. 407: Postcard. Chair designed for Sigmund Freud by Felix Augenfeld. Freud Museum London.

Notes | utopia | popular education formats 1. Sargent, “Utopianism,” 559. 2. See Moylan, Demand the Impossible; Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future; and Parrinder, Learning from Other Worlds. 3. Levitas, Concept of Utopia, 2, 7. 4. Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope; Bambara, Salt Eaters, 126.

| exercise | a sentimental story | popular education formats 1. Galeano, Book of Embraces, 162–63. 2. It is upon this mistake and the wish to go east that Andre Gunder Frank in ReOrient bases his critique of Eurocentric historiography and his revisionary case for the temporality and tendencies of world trade or what is more commonly known as globalization today. Important recent critical studies challenging Eurocentric histories of capitalism include Lowe, Intimacies of Four ¸ Continents, and Anievas and Nisancıoglu, ˘ How the West Came to Rule. 3. Galeano, Book of Embraces, 16. 4. See Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind; Biopiracy; Protect or Plunder?

5. Morse, “Capitalism, Marxism and the Black Radical Tradition,” 1. 6. See for example Colau and Alemany, Mortgaged Lives; Social Text Collective, Is This What Democracy Looks Like? 7. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 158. See also Rediker, Villains of All Nations; Slave Ship; and Outlaws of the Atlantic.

| being in-difference | Toni Cade Bambara 1. Kay Bonetti, “Interview with Toni Cade Bambara” (Columbia, MO: American Audio Prose Library, 1982). This interview was kindly brought to my attention by Linda Holmes. 2. A title and abstract survey of several years of the Journal of Utopian Studies yielded, with the exception of the few articles on Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, virtually no African American or Diasporic presence. On the broader historiography, see the classic work by Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World. There are very few exceptions to this rule. Francis Robert Shor, Utopianism and Radicalism in a Reforming America is the rare work

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that includes not only African American literary utopias, but takes a social movement perspective, locating “articulations of utopianism” and “radicalism” in “the shifting and contested political and cultural terrain where class, race, and gender come into play” (xv). Because, in the main, what we call today social movements are not included in the history of utopianism, Shor’s work represents an important departure. The other important exception is Maria Giulia Fabi, who has written a series of articles contesting the specious claim that African Americans produced no formal literary utopias or utopian texts so impoverished in their imaginations they needn’t count. She simply finds it unbelievable that “an oppressed population could be reduced to such a state of abjection as to lose the power to imagine and give fictional reality to visions of a better future.” Fabi, “Poetics and Politics of a Feasible Utopia,” 303. Rejecting this assumption, Fabi has retrieved African American utopian fictions from the dustbin of the archive, reading them not as failures, but as a distinct contribution to an extant genre of literature, particularly active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. See also Fabi, “ ‘Race Travel.’ ” 3. On the English language as a mercantile language, see Bambara, Salt Eaters, 235; and Chandler, “Voices beyond the Veil,” 347–48. 4. The phrase “something more powerful than skepticism” is from Bambara, Salt Eaters, 86. On culture as where the seeds of opposition grow, see Cabral, Return to the Source, 43. This study of Bambara was written before the theoretical analytic known as Afro-pessimism became a subject of attention and debate in black studies. Whether that debate should force a reconsideration of Bambara’s thought is beyond my scope here. To the extent that Afro-pessimism is an “attempt to frame a

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rage”— as the author of “Some curious things about ‘afropessimism’ ” incisively noted (http://cosmichoboes.blogspot.com /2009/05/some-curious-things-aboutafropessimism.html) — and given the insistence on the continuing struggle to abolish slavery, her absence as a figure of importance in their debates is notable. For key works in the debate, see Hartman and Wilderson, “Position of the Unthought”; Sexton and Copeland, “Raw Life”; Sexton, “Social Life of Social Death”; Wilderson, Incognegro; Moten, “Case of Blackness”; and Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness.” Larger questions about being, death, race, and modernity, pursued through a philosophical/ literary register are taken up by da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race; and da Silva, “To Be Announced”; JanMohamed, Deathbound Subject; Spillers, Black, White and in Color; Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”; David Scott, “Re-enchantment of Humanism”; Weheliye, Habeas Viscus; Wagner, Disturbing the Peace; and Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies. 5. Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Toni Cade Bambara,” 229. 6. Bambara, “Seabirds Are Still Alive,” 77. 7. This section paraphrases Bambara, “Organizer’s Wife”; page numbers for excerpts are given in parentheses. 8. See Quan, Growth against Democracy. 9. Bambara, Salt Eaters, 278. 10. Ibid., 295. 11. Ibid., 93; Bambara, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, 163. 12. On being rescued from the psychopaths, see Bambara, “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow,” 153; Claudia Tate, “Toni Cade Bambara,” 24; and Bambara, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, 139. 13. Morrison, “ ‘Five Years of Terror,’ ” 75. 14. Bambara, “Salvation Is the Issue,” 42.

15. Bambara, Salt Eaters, 295. 16. On practicing freedom, see Bambara, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, 174. 17. Claudia Tate, “Toni Cade Bambara,” 18. 18. On the ways in which this notion of permission is tied to fate and the question of love in the black radical tradition, see Gordon, preface to Anthropology of Marxism. 19. Adrienne Rich, “Credo of a Passionate Skeptic,” 10. 20. Zala and Spence are the main characters in Bambara’s posthumously published novel Those Bones Are Not My Child. 21. King, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 88. 22. Ibid., 92. 23. Bambara, “On the Issue of Roles,” 110. 24. There’s a correction, insertion from Fred Moten here: “But the specific genius of her utopianism is that she is out there in here.” 25. See Tally, “Not About to Play It Safe,” 145. 26. Chandler, “Voices beyond the Veil,” 351. The “between materialism and metaphysics” insert is from Bambara, “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow,” 154. 27. Bambara, Salt Eaters, 15–16. 28. Bambara, “On the Issue of Roles,” 105, 109. 29. Ibid., 109. 30. Bambara, Salt Eaters, 111, 105. 31. Ibid., 92. 32. Ibid., 107–8. 33. Ibid., 104. 34. See Levi-Strauss, “Sorcerer and His Magic.” 35. Bambara, Salt Eaters, 126. 36. See Bambara, “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow,” 154–55; and Bambara, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, 175. 37. Bambara, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, 173–74. 38. Salaam, “Searching for the Mother Tongue,” 58.

39. Bambara, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, 95. 40. Robinson, “Manichaeism and Multiculturalism,” 122. 41. Salaam, “Searching for the Mother Tongue,” 64–65. 42. Bambara, “Foreword,” xxxi. 43. Chandler, “Voices beyond the Veil,” 347–78. 44. On the housekeeping, see hooks, “writer to writer,” 234. 45. The interdependent relationship of enslavement and freedom is the core problematic of much of black studies and black radicalism. Although she didn’t use the language of fugitivity, Bambara’s notion of an almost continuous process of becoming unavailable for a variety of forms of servitude, particularly given the unfree terms of freedom we’re offered, is resonant with the more popular use of the language of fugitivity today. See Angela Y. Davis, Meaning of Freedom.

| the scandal of the qualitative difference | Herbert Marcuse 1. For the seas of lemonade, see Beecher and Bienvenu, Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. On modernist social experiments gone wrong, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State. 2. Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 3, 4. 3. The phrase is from Patricia Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 49. 4. Gibson-Graham, End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), 259. Gibson-Graham’s critique of the colonizing tendencies of capitalism as a conceptual given was enormously important, even if the “haunting” noncapitalist activities they identified had no names of their own. This situation was rectified in Postcapitalist Politics.

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5. See Strike Debt and the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual at http://strikedebt.org. See also Ross, Creditocracy, who in a most welcome and accessible way outlines the moral and economic foundations for a nonfinancialist future. 6. Bambara, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, 255. 7. Wallerstein, Utopistics, 1–2. 8. Ibid., 3, 65. 9. Ibid., 90. 10. Ibid., 2. 11. Ibid., 12. 12. Ibid., 64, 35. 13. Ibid., 88–89. 14. See Braudel, Wheels of Commerce, on the distinction between “material life” (“the stratum of the non-economy”) and capitalism. Braudel’s attempts to define capitalism by distinguishing between where it exists and where it does not is important. In the preface and introduction to The Long Twentieth Century, Arrighi provides an excellent summary of Braudel’s argument and a longer discussion. 15. Jameson, Seeds of Time, 69–70. 16. Marcuse, “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” 143. Thanks to Angela Y. Davis who brought this passage to my attention some time ago. 17. Wallerstein, Utopistics, 1. 18. Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, vii. 19. Ibid., ix–x. 20. Ibid., 89. 21. See Stanley Aronowitz’s essay, “The Unknown Herbert Marcuse,” a surprising example of this tendency given his more consistent positions. Douglas Kellner remains Marcuse’s most comprehensive and respectful commentator and scholar. See Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. See also www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/ Illumina%20Folder/marc.htm, Kellner’s web page on Marcuse, which includes,

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among other items, a stream for Herbert’s Hippopotamus, Paul Alexander Juutilainen’s film about Marcuse in San Diego. 22. Marcuse, “End of Utopia,” 74. 23. Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 4. 24. Marcuse, “End of Utopia,” 69. 25. This revolutionary futurity is, in Paulo Freire’s terms, a “pedagogy of the oppressed.” 26. Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 4–5. 27. Moten, In the Break, 7; Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 5. 28. Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 10. Although approached from the point of view of anthropological claims about the human species, Cosimo Quarta, “Homo Utopicus,” makes a related argument about the utopian as second nature. 29. Ibid., 17. 30. Ibid., 10. 31. Ibid., 88. 32. See Poldervaart, “Theories about Sex and Sexuality in Utopian Socialism” and “Utopianism and Feminism.” 33. Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 88, 89. 34. Jameson, Seeds of Time, 56–57. 35. Ibid., 56. 36. See Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” who makes a similar point when he distinguishes between those who are “firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins” and those who are only “nourished by the image of . . . liberated grandchildren” (255, 260). 37. See Gareth Steadman Jones, “Engels and the History of Marxism”; and Hobsbawm, “Marx, Engels, and Pre-Marxian Socialism.” 38. On the Second International, see Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism. See also Rosa Luxemburg’s letters to Leo Jogiches in Comrade and Lover, a tragic account of her terrible struggle with the

science/utopia divide as it took shape as the politics/life/love divide. 39. Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 31.

| The Great Refusal | California | Herbert Marcuse 1. See the CNIC Naval Base San Diego website at www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/ cnrsw/installations/navbase_san_diego.html. See also Killory, “Temporary Suburbs.” 2. Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, vii. 3. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 66. 4. Ibid., 10. 5. Diederichsen and Franke, Whole Earth. 6. See Prashad, Darker Nations; Young, Soul Power. 7. Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 30. 8. See Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis.

| friendship | working together | Céline Condorelli 1. Brunkhorst, Solidarity, 13. 2. For a similar effort, see the correspondence between Tara Bynum and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Most Affectionately Ever Yours,” inspired by Phillis Wheatley’s letters to Obour Tanner. 3. “Social Death and Doing Time,” a presentation at Contemporary Image Collective (CIC) in conjunction with the seminar “The Laboratory of Return/ Regimes of Extraterritoriality,” organized by Pericentre Projects and the Goethe Institute, Cairo, Egypt, January 2010. 4. Disobedience Archive is a curatorial project by Marco Scotini, which in its last two iterations was housed in a specially commissioned installation by Céline Condorelli: The Parliament (Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden, June–August 2012, and

Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, April– September 2013). The archive explores the links between contemporary art practices, film, and political action. 5. Important answers to the question among the next generation of sociologists were made by Ferguson in Aberrations in Black, “Of Our Normative Strivings,” and Reorder of Things, and Gómez-Barris in Where Memory Dwells and Extractive Zone. 6. Raymond Williams, “Bloomsbury Fraction,” 149. 7. Ibid., 168–69. 8. Patricia Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 146–47. 9. Ibid., 151, 164. 10. Ibid., 153, 165. 11. Ibid., 164. 12. Ibid., 165. 13. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 64–65. 14. Ibid., 111. 15. See Robinson, Black Movements in America; Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves; and Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles. 16. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 63.

| global capitalism | A World Map 1. Ashley Hunt’s map can be viewed online at www.ashleyhunt.org. Many words below are taken from it; the phrase “a history of blood and fire” is from Bonefeld, “Permanence of Primitive Accumulation,” 2; “plundered terms” from John Berger, “Dispatches,” 38. The map with an earlier version of this text appeared in Mogel and Bhagat, Atlas of Radical Cartography, 139–46. 2. Miéville, Perdido Street Station; the capitalized passages from the Weaver are at 478, 479, 482, and 800.

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| enclosure | commons | feral trade 1. The words in the subheadings belong to Natascha Sadr Haghighian. With her permission, they have been shortened and reappropriated. See, “Sleepwalking in a Dialectical Picture Puzzle, Part 1.” 2. Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 134–40. 3. Angelis, Beginning of History, 225. 4. See also Terkel, Hope Dies Last, 253– 61. On the social and political imperialist origins of famine and drought, see Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts. 5. See Jarboe, “Domestic Terrorism Section Chief”; Potter, “U.S. Army Lists Earth First! as Terrorist Threat”; and Pellow, Total Liberation. 6. Rifkin, “Really Something,” 72. 7. A Field in England, Ben Wheatley’s powerful 2013 film, captures very well a certain wildness and temporal jamming as did two earlier films which inspired it, Witchfinder General (1968) and Penda’s Fen (1974). On the latter see Evans, Fowler, and Sandhu, Edge Is Where the Centre Is. On the broader genre of “landscape eerie,” see Procter, “Towards a New Landscape Aesthetic”; and Macfarlane, “Eeriness of the English Countryside.” 8. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 15. 9. Winstanley, “Declaration.” 10. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 20. 11. Winstanley, “Declaration,” 34. 12. Linebaugh’s The Magna Carta Manifesto is a brief for this new communing — or perhaps we should call it even communism — that is connected but not bound to the old. See also Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind and Seed Keepers; Bollier, Silent Theft; Friends of the Commons, State of the Commons 2003/2004; Barlow and Clarke, Blue Gold; Barlow, “Our Water Commons” and Blue

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Covenant. 13. Woods, “Les Misérables of New Orleans,” 772. 14. Ibid., 775. See also Woods, Development Drowned and Reborn. 15. For a study of schooling with this broader notion of enclosure, see Sojoyner, First Strike. For a sophisticated analysis of the legal dimensions and politics of property, see Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property; “Possession, Occupation and Registration”; “Title by Registration”; “Critical Legal Studies and the Politics of Property”; “Property, Law, and Race”; and “Disassembling Legal Form.” 16. Angelis, Beginning of History, 239. 17. Ibid., 243–44. 18. Harney and Moten have proposed “the undercommons” rather than the commons. While I appreciate the relationship between the undercommons and the black radical tradition and the inspiration it has provided for many students and intellectuals, in the context of the discussion here, I prefer commons, even with its problems, which are succinctly presented by David Harvey in “The Future of the Commons.” I take for granted that parts of the undercommons exist on the utopian margins. See Harney and Moten, Undercommons. 19. In addition to personal communication with Rich, information about Feral Trade and quotations by Rich are from www.feraltrade. org, which also links to Feral Trade Courier; Kate Rich, “Feral Trade”; and Mollicchi, Fuller, and Rich, “What’s New with Kate Rich and Feral Trade.” Rich’s website is at http://bureauit.org/data/krcv/. 20. Miéville, Iron Council, 275. 21. Ibid., 283. 22. Ibid., 284–85, 286. 23. Ibid., 614.

| US slavery | preparation | Eliza Winston 1. Green, “Eliza Winston,” 112. 2. Swanson, “Joseph Farr Remembers,” 126–27. 3. Green, “Eliza Winston,” 117. 4. Ibid., 108, 110. 5. Ibid., 111. See Swisshelm, Half a Century. Biographical information retrieved from www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ USAswisshelm.htm. 6. Green, “Eliza Winston,” 111. 7. Swanson, “Joseph Farr Remembers,” 125. 8. See Cannon and Harpole, “Day in the Life”; and Grey, “Black Community.” 9. Grey, “Black Community,” 44. 10. On Callie House, see Best and Hartman, “Fugitive Justice,” 5. On the Saginaw barbers, see Kilar, “Black Pioneers,” 144. 11. Green, “Eliza Winston,” 116. 12. See the full text at the website of the Minnesota Historical Society at www.mnhs .org/school/online/communities/ milestones/ABOdoc2T_transcript.php. 13. On the Goodridge brothers, see Grey, “Black Community,” 44; Jezierski, “ ‘Dangerous Opportunity’ ” and “Glenalvin J. Goodridge”; Kilar, “Black Pioneers” and “Goodridge Brothers.” 14. See Kilar, “Goodridge Brothers,” 151. There are many photographs at www .saginawimages.org/cdm/landingpage/ collection/p16610coll2. 15. Jezierski, “Glenalvin J. Goodridge,” 44. 16. Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, 81–93. 17. Jezierski, “Glenalvin J. Goodridge,” 47–48. 18. See www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ 99615417/. 19. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 77–78.

20. The notion of preparation presented here might be part of assembling the radical immanent approach about which Denise Ferreira da Silva writes in “To Be Announced” and “Towards a Black Feminist Poethics.” And it might have resonance with Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller’s discussion of “prepatory time” in “Prison and Place” and the way Hawaiian prisoners understand it — not so differently from many politically conscious prisoners elsewhere — and use it as a strategy to avoid being “rehabilitated” as best as they can inside. See also Roberts, Freedom as Marronage; Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos, Escape Routes; and James C. Scott, Art of Not Being Governed. 21. Best and Hartman, “Fugitive Justice,” 1, 3. 22. Ibid., 3. 23. Ibid. See also the last words of Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection. As she explains to Wilderson: “It really is the pressing question of freedom. That’s why for me, the last lines of the book summon up that moment of potentiality between the no longer and the not yet. ‘Not yet free’: that articulation is from the space of the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth, and that’s the way it’s supposed to carry — the same predicament, the same condition.” Hartman and Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought,” 192. The interval as I’m describing it is different from the one Keeling finds in Fanon. Keeling, “ ‘In the Interval,’ ” 106. 24. Best and Hartman, “Fugitive Justice,” 5. 25. Ibid., 9. 26. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:4.

| war | soldiers 1. This figure is based on the Office of Management and Budget’s proposed defense budget for 2015, at www.whitehouse.gov/ sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2015/ assets/tables.pdf.

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2. See 10 U.S.C. § 47(X)(85) and Manual for Courts-Martial, United States pt. IV, ¶86e (2012). The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) can be accessed at http://usmilitary.about.com/od/ justicelawlegislation/l/blucmj.htm. The Manual for Courts-Martial is available at http://usmilitary.about.com/od/ punitivearticles/a/mcm.htm or in pdf format at www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/ MCM-2012.pdf. 3. Fantina, Desertion and the American Soldier, 153–55. 4. Ibid., 65. See also “Desertion in the Civil War Armies” at www.civilwarhome.com/ desertion.htm, an excerpt from Donald and Randall, Civil War and Reconstruction. 5. The British army shot 306 soldiers, several of whom were Canadian, Irish, and New Zealanders, while the French army killed 600 of their own soldiers. See the section “Shot at Dawn” in “Heritage of the Great War” at www.greatwar.nl/. 6. See Fantina, Desertion, 116, 134–35. 7. See Nichols, “8,000 Soldiers Desert during War,” and Moynihan, “1,100 Go AWOL since Iraq War.” Democracy Now reported: “The Pentagon is now estimating that as many as 40,000 troops have deserted the U.S. Armed Forces over the past six years” (www.democracynow.org/print.pl?sid=06 /08/11/1343256). Paul von Zielbauer, in “Army Revises Upward by 853,” reports the number is closer to 22,468 (excluding National Guard and Reserve), approximately 2,000 to 3,000 desertions per year, although he warns that the Army keeps correcting the wrong figures it releases. 8. See the Military Project (www. militaryproject.org), the GI Rights Hotline (www.girights.org), Iraq Veterans Against the War (www.ivaw.org), Veterans for Peace

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(www.veteransforpeace.org), Citizen Soldier (www.citizen-soldier.org), and the Center for Conscientious Objection (www.objector.org). 9. See “US Army Fights for Recruits as AWOL Rate Rises,” RT News, November 11, 2010, http://rt.com/news/us-armychiroux-awol/. 10. Baldor also reports that since 2001, 1,900 cases of desertion have been prosecuted by the US army, “despite the thousands of soldiers fleeing the service . . . in Iraq and Afghanistan.” See Baldor, “Army Data.” 11. See Tate, “Judge Sentences Bradley Manning to 35 Years”; Manning, “Subject.” 12. Osburn, Brown et al., “A Preliminary Investigation of Delinquency in the Army,” cited in Fantina, Desertion, 141. 13. The phrase is Simone Weil’s from The Iliad or The Poem of Force. 14. The US Department of Defense does not rely solely on US citizen volunteers; it recruits soldiers from outside the country. The extensive and growing use of private military contractors is well documented. See Scahill, Blackwater; P. Singer, Corporate Warriors. 15. See Rumsfeld, “Transforming the Military.” See also Project on Defense Alter native’s “RMA Debate” at www.comw.org/ rma/index.html. 16. In 2012, modifications to stop-loss were made but its basic features are still in effect. 17. See Laufer, Mission Rejected, 167; Martin, “Active Duty.” 18. On black American soldiers in the Spanish American War, especially in the Philippines, see Gordon, Keeping Good Time. 19. On Iraq Veterans Against the War, see This Is Where We Take Our Stand — a multipart film, directed by David Zeiger and Mike Majoros, of the Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan hearings held in March 2008 on

the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq — at http://thisiswherewetakeourstand.com/ ?p=53. Referencing the first Winter Soldier hearings in 1971 by Vietnam Veterans to speak out against that war’s crimes, this second hearing consisted of several days of testimony on war and occupation from soldiers having served in Afghanistan and Iraq. For news and sign-up instructions, including footage of the first deployment kneeling and asking the tribe elders for forgiveness, see the Veterans Stand for Standing Rock Facebook page at www.facebook.com/ events/1136540643060285/?active_ tab=about. 20. Hobbes, Leviathan, 186. 21. On the militarization of the police, see Bernstein et al. Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove; Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop; Graham, Cities under Siege; Khalilli, Time and the Shadows. On the police function of the military and the importance of counterinsurgency tactics, see United States Government US Army, Field Manual. 22. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 118.

| trauma | Deir Yassin | Unmade Film 1. Frosh, Hauntings, 123.

| colonialism | Roland Barthes | Congo TAT | Vincent Meessen 1. Barthes, Roland Barthes, 154. 2. Douglas, “Christiana Morgan’s Visions Reconsidered,” 7–9. 3. Sherwood, “On the Designing of TAT Pictures,” 170. 4. Fanon, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” in Wretched of the Earth, 182. 5. Ibid., 220.

| the appearance of the ghost on the ramparts | “Anything but Utopian” | doing time 1. Keenan, Fables of Responsibility, 3. 2. See Spivak, “Translator’s Preface” and Critique of Postcolonial Reason. 3. See Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership and “Preface.” 4. Keenan, Fables of Responsibility, 2. 5. See Klein, Shock Doctrine; Invisible Committee, To Our Friends. 6. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, xi–xii. 7. Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 258. 8. Negri, “Specter’s Smile,” 15. 9. Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 254. 10. Ibid., 248, 249. 11. Ibid., 221. 12. Ibid., 249. 13. Ibid., 214. 14. Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope, 288. 15. King, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 85. 16. Ibid., 88. 17. Ibid., 100. 18. Rodriguez, Forced Passages, 212–13. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 214. 21. Leder et al., Soul Knows No Bars, 86. 22. John Berger, From A to X, 10. 23. Rodriguez, Forced Passages, 214. 24. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. 25. Leder et al., Soul Knows No Bars, 86. 26. Ibid. Although the men’s discussion of doing time is generated by their reading of French phenomenological psychiatrist Eugène Minkowski’s 1933 book Lived Time — the reading Leder assigned for their class — it reflects more aptly on Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” This

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may in part be the result of Leder starting the discussion not by asking how they do the time but by asking a different but related question: “Where do prisoners live? In the present, the past, or the future?” The present is always the “most painful,” thus the need to master it; the past is the origin of their present circumstances (so they’re told) or what was better than the present; the future is what they must make in this mix. 27. Leder et al., Soul Knows No Bars, 86. 28. Ibid., 88. 29. The Time of Nobody is from the wonderful and clever novel about the search for “The Bad and the Evil” (the content of which is patently obvious even though it means different things to different people), jointly written by Paco Ignacio Tambo II and Subcomandante Marcos, Uncomfortable Dead. 30. Bandele, Prisoner’s Wife. 31. Frederick, “Prisoners Are Citizens,” 85. 32. Saadawi, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, 35. Many examples of this redemption of time are found in Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s two films about Khiam prison in southern Lebanon, Khiam 2000– 2007 (2008). 33. John Berger, “Against the Great Defeat of the World,” 1. 34. John Berger, “Ten Dispatches about Endurance,” 96–97.

| the photograph | extraneous persons | Colin (Joan) Dayan 1. Dayan, “Servile Law,” 90. 2. Dayan, “Dread and Dispossession.” 3. Dayan, “Looking for Ghosts.” 4. Dayan, Law Is a White Dog, xi. 5. Dayan, “Paul Gilroy’s Slaves, Ships, and Routes,” 9. 6. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 5. 7. Dayan, “Looking for Ghosts”;

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“Photo”; “Ghost Story Is Born”; and “Between the Devil and the Deep Sea.” 8. Berger and Mohr, Seventh Man, 13. 9. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 9. 10. Said, After the Last Sky, 12. 11. Ibid. 12. Dayan, “Photo,” 29, 35, 39. 13. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 64, 65, 65–66. 14. Ibid., 67, 20, 21, 26, 21. 15. Ibid., 45, 55, 53. 16. Ibid., 73. 17. Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 6. 18. Dayan, “Photo,” 39, 29, 39. 19. Said, After the Last Sky, 14. 20. Dayan, “Dread and Dispossession.” 21. Dayan, “Held in the Body of the State,” 201–2. 22. Dayan, “Legal Terrors,” 42, 47. 23. Ibid., 43. 24. Dayan, “Dread and Dispossession.” 25. Dayan, “Paul Gilroy’s Slaves, Ships, and Routes,” 9. 26. Dayan, Law Is a White Dog, xiii, xii. 27. Dayan, “Held in the Body of the State,” 183–84. 28. Dayan, “Servile Law,” 100. 29. Dayan, Law Is a White Dog, xvii. 30. Dayan, “Paul Gilroy’s Slaves, Ships, and Routes,” 9–10. 31. Dayan, “Legal Terrors,” 65. 32. Dayan, “Servile Law,” 96. 33. Dayan, Law Is a White Dog, xii, xiii. 34. Dayan, “Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies,” 54. 35. Dayan, “Legal Terrors,” 64. 36. Dayan, “Held in the Body of the State,” 225–26. 37. Dayan, Story of Cruel and Unusual. 38. Ibid. 39. Dayan, Law Is a White Dog, 72. 40. Ibid., 22.

41. Ibid., 20, xi, 93. 42. Dayan, “Legal Terrors,” 45. 43. Dayan, “Held in the Body of the State,” 210. 44. Dayan, Story of Cruel and Unusual. 45. Dayan, “Legal Terrors,” 49. 46. Dayan, Story of Cruel and Unusual. 47. Dayan, “Legal Terrors,” 71. 48. Dayan, Law Is a White Dog, 252. 49. Ibid.

| animism | a blow at organized power | Leon Czolgosz 1. Zinn, People’s History of the United States, 290. 2. Goldman, “Tragedy at Buffalo.” 3. Buffalo History Works; Buffalo Commercial. 4. Lombroso and Ferrero, Criminal Woman, 305 5. See Bryant, “When Czolgosz Shot McKinley,” 5–7; Porton, Film and the Anarchist Imagination, 16; and Vials, “Despotism of the Popular.” 6. Edward W. Byrn, quoted in Martschukat, “Art of Killing by Electricity,” 906, 908–9. 7. “Last Speech of William McKinley,” Buffalo, New York, September 5, 1901, www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/1900/filmmore/ reference/primary/lastspeech.html. Silent film of the president’s last speech is at www .youtube.com/watch?v=OtaGGG2uP7A. 8. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 92. 9. See Auerbach, “McKinley at Home.” The most comprehensive collection of Edison source materials is available from the Library of Congress: http://memory.loc.gov/ ammem/edhtml/edbiohm.html. 10. Edison film company catalog, www.loc .gov/item/00694362/.

11. Auerbach, “McKinley at Home,” 824. 12. Goldman quotes Oscar Wilde’s meditation on the death penalty, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written after he was released from Reading prison on May 19, 1897.

| what’s there waiting for you | Cinecittà | Clemens von Wedemeyer 1. Les statues meurent aussi (1953) by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais [original translation]. 2. Sorlin, Italian National Cinema 1896– 1996, 71. 3. Ibid., 73; Calvino, “Spectator’s Autobiography.” 4. For different approaches to the same question posed to the former monastery and prison Breitenau, see Muster (Rushes), directed by Clemens von Wedemeyer (2012) and the Hawthorn Archive files on the workhouse in this collection. 5. Morrison, Beloved, 35–36. 6. Excerpt from the first script for Procession written by Clemens von Wedemeyer. The text revises a monologue from Last Year at Marienbad (1961) by Alain Resnais. 7. “What is the essence of the director’s work? We could define it as sculpting in time.” Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 63–64. 8. Galeano, Book of Embraces, 16. 9. This story opens Fellini’s book Cinecittà and Intervista, his 1987 film about Cinecittà. 10. Argentieri, “Caricati dalla polizia a Cinecittà cinquemila disoccupati frodati da un ‘fronte del cinema’ con la promessa di lavoro,” 4. 11. See www.teatrovalleoccupato.it. 12. Steimatsky, “Cinecittà Refugee Camp (1944–1950),” 35–36. 13. Ibid., 35. 14. See Berger and Mohr, Seventh Man;

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Carr, Fortress Europe; Fekete, Suitable Enemy; Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method. 15. Steimatsky, “Cinecittà Refugee Camp (1944–1950),” 50. 16. Ibid., 28–29. 17. Ibid., 33–34 18. Ibid., 25. 19. Fellini, Cinecittà, 7–8. 20. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 171–73.

| red arrows | a cultural theory of value | Ernst Bloch 1. Franke, “Introduction.” 2. Taussig, “Stories Things Tell.” On the stories animals and forests tell, see Castro, Relative Native and Kohn, How Forests Think. 3. By epistemological animism, I refer to the use of the term animism as a critical device for questioning how colonialism and Western knowledge forms alter what can be known and how it is known. This is the sense of animism that organizes Franke’s work and though it is a practice, it is usefully distinguished from the work of, for example, the French ethnopsychoanalyst Tobie Nathan, who is a healer to people who believe in and live in cultures where the spirit world is real, not a metaphor. Isabelle Stengers, another important figure in Franke’s animism project, treats sorcery mostly as a metaphor and distinguishes between someone like herself for whom witchcraft represents an epistemological or political positioning and someone like Starhawk, about whom she writes, and for whom witchcraft/wicca is a practical craft and a spiritual practice. See Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism.” 4. Bloch, Philosophy of the Future, 96. 5. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:25. 6. Ibid., 9. 7. For his views on Fourier, see Bloch, Principle of Hope, 2:473–77, 545–61, 565– 70, 578–80.

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8. Bloch, Philosophy of the Future, 95. 9. On Toni Morrison’s historical materialism, see Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 164–69. For an afro-futurist approach, see Last Angel of History (1966), directed by John Akomfrah and Black Audio Film Collective. For a panAfrican approach to the general idea of the utopian surplus and time jamming, see the ongoing iterations of Chimurenga Library and Pan African Space Station whose guiding question is: “Can a past that the present has not yet caught up with be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative?” (www .chimurenga.co.za/archives/4910). See especially the double issue of Chimurenga nos. 12–13: Dr. Satan’s Echo Chamber, which conjures up and produces a remarkable world of its own and begins “humbly” enough with “the history of the Universe.” 10. Bloch does not endorse Jungian archetypes. His critique of Jung for producing a “stupefying” psychoanalysis in the service of monopoly capitalism and fascism is merciless. See Principle of Hope, 1:56–68. 11. Bloch, Philosophy of the Future, 96. 12. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:6, 8. 13. Bloch, Philosophy of the Future, 98. 14. Ibid., 111. 15. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:xix. 16. Adorno, “Bloch’s ‘Traces,’ ” 49. 17. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 1:xxii. 18. Bloch, Philosophy of the Future, 98. 19. Adorno, “Bloch’s ‘Traces,’ ” 49. 20. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 2:472–76.

| prisoners of war | going home | The Halfmoon Files 1. See “Historical Background” at http:// halfmoonfiles.de/en/4/film/home and Fuhrmann, Imperial Projections. 2. Otto Stiehl, the commanding officer at the Halfmoon camp and an amateur photographer, made at least one hundred photo-

graphs of the prisoners at the camp; the glass plates for these photographs were later found in the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin. In 1916, Stiehl published a selection of these portraits in a book, Unsere Feinde (Our Enemy Prisoners of War), forty thousand copies of which were widely circulated in Europe and the United States. In a later work by Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, the names accompanying each portrait were removed and numbers assigned. 3. See Wigger, “ ‘Black Shame.’ ” 4. See Wolf, “To be haunted” at www. halfmoonfiles.de/index.php?id=21; and Maria-Giovanna Vagenas, interview with Philip Scheffner at www.halfmoonfiles.de/ index.php?id=26. 5. Serge, Men in Prison, v. Remaining quotes in this section, unless otherwise indicated, from: xxii, 10–11, 53, 175, 177, 178, 180, 181, 250–51. 6. Richard Greeman, introduction to Serge, Men in Prison, xxiv. 7. Ibid. 8. Serge, Men in Prison, 53. 9. Sekula, “Body and the Archive,” 25. 10. Christianson, With Liberty for Some, 193. See also Bertillon, “Bertillon System of Identification.” 11. Christianson, With Liberty for Some, 190. 12. See Sekula, “Body and the Archive,” 13–14. 13. See Gilbert, “Anthropometrics in the U.S. Bureau of Education.” 14. Sekula, “Body and the Archive,” 7. 15. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 26. 16. See Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics. 17. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 27–28. 18. Ibid., 28. 19. See Christianson, With Liberty for Some, 192. 20. L’uomo Deliquente was published in Italian in 1876 and a two-volume French

edition, entitled L’Homme Criminel, in 1895. See Lombroso, Criminal Man, and Lombroso and Ferrero, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman. 21. Holmes, “Crime and Automatism,” 427. 22. See Hannaford, Race; McVeigh and Rolston, “Civilising the Irish”; and Allen, Invention of the White Race. 23. Louis Agassiz, a paleontologist by training, ended his career at Harvard University with a reputation as an anti-Darwinian polygenist. Daguerreotypes of slaves he took were found at Harvard’s Peabody Museum in the mid-1970s, bringing him to a much wider scholarly attention than he might have retained. In the 1820s and 1830s, Samuel Morton, a Philadelphia physician, following in the footsteps of Edward Long’s History of Jamaica (1774) which postulated a racial hierarchy situating Africans between Europeans and orangutans, collected and measured human skulls to confirm racial differences, ranking intellectual capacity based on brain size, and assigning first place to Europeans, the English in particular, followed by the Chinese and ending with Africans and Australian aboriginals. Josiah Clark Nott popularized this racial schemata in his second book with George Robins Gliddon, Types of mankind: or, Ethnological researches, based upon the ancient monuments, paintings, sculptures, and crania of races, and upon their natural, geographical, philological and Biblical history. Both Nott and Gliddon were heavily influenced by Morton, whose guidance led Gliddon, an Egyptologist, to insist that Egyptians were not Africans but Caucasians. Morton and Nott were active in proslavery expansionist politics, offering intellectual arguments and justifications to various buyers, such as US Secretary of State John Calhoun in his effort to make Texas as a slave state and

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to Henry Hotze, a Confederate propagandist. In “The Claims of the Negro, ethnologically considered,” an address before the literary societies of Western Reserve College at commencement July 12, 1854, Frederick Douglass critiqued this science as propaganda. 24. Christianson, With Liberty for Some, 191. 25. See Linebaugh, London Hanged; Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree; Morris and Rothman, Oxford History of the Prison; Ives, History of Penal Methods; Gottschalk, Prison and the Gallows and Caught; Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure; Hall et al., Policing the Crisis; Gilmore, Golden Gulag; and Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis. 26. Christianson, With Liberty for Some, 190. 27. “State sanctioned” “fatal couplings of power and difference” that lead some groups of people to become “vulnerable” to “premature death” is Gilmore’s definition of racism in Golden Gulag, 28. 28. For example, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, 86 percent of the Guantánamo prisoners “were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance when the United States was paying large bounties for apprehension of suspected Al Qaeda or Taliban supporters. Following the 2002 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the practice of ‘selling’ foreign nationals arrested in or near Afghanistan to the U.S. military for thousands of dollars in bounty money was commonplace.” Report on Torture, 8. The report contains a facsimile of a Psychological Operations flyer offering “millions of dollars” distributed by the US military forces in Afghanistan. 29. On the Lieber Code, see “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field (Lieber Code). 24 April 1863,” International Committee of the Red

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Cross (website), www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf. 30. On the making of the unlawful enemy alien combatant, a prisoner of war who is not a prisoner of war, see Olshansky, “What Does It Mean to Be an ‘Enemy Combatant’?”; Gordon, “United States Military Prison” and “Prisoner’s Curse,” 25–28. 31. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 44. 32. Ibid., 38. 33. Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” 262. 34. Christianson, With Liberty for Some, 203. 35. See Kaufman, “Science as Cultural Practice.” Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy — Regeneration (1991), Eye in the Door (1993), and Ghost Road (1995) — based on the experiences of British soldiers, including antiwar poet Siegfried Sassoon, at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh — brought the work of Lewis Yealland to popular attention. 36. See Kaufman, “Science as Cultural Practice”; and Lerner, “Psychiatry and Casualties of War in Germany.” See also Roudebush, “A Patient Fights Back” about the 1916 trial of Baptiste Deschamps for assault on Clovis Vincent, a superior officer and neurologist in Tours treating soldiers. He hit Vincent in an effort to refuse electroshock treatment. 37. Freud, “Memorandum on the Electrical Treatment of War Neurotics.” See also Ferenczi et al., Psycho-analysis and the War Neuroses. 38. Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 183.

| the workhouse | The Workhouse: Room 2 | research notes | Ines Schaber 1. The fragments of poetry throughout are from Christiansë, Castaway, 11, 34, 109, 22. 2. See Borstel and Krause-Vilmar, Breitenau 1933–1945; Richter, Das Arbeitserzieh-

ungslager Breitenau; Krause-Vilmar, Das Konzentrationslager Breitenau; and Ayaß, Das Arbeitshaus Breitenau. 3. Two points of information are worth noting here. First, the benches and the audio stations from The Workhouse: Room 2 were kindly donated and delivered by dOCUMENTA (13) to Breitenau and, along with the five sound files we produced, are displayed today at the memorial. Second, there is a rather complicated and sometimes confusing history of the documentary exhibits about Breitenau, which includes documenta in a starring role. To wit, a slide show based on the research of Gunnar Richter and the first documentary exhibition “Erinnern an Breitenau 1933–1945” (Remembering Breitenau 1933–1945) — organized by Projektgruppe Breitenau, led by Dietfrid Krause-Vilmar and to which Richter belonged — was first shown in 1982 in the context of Joseph Beuys’s Free International University during dOCUMENTA (7). In December 1982 both slide show and exhibit were installed as a permanent exhibition in Breitenau, shortly before the Gedenkstätte Breitenau was officially inaugurated in 1984. Twenty-five years later, in 2009, this first exhibition was placed temporarily in the attic at Breitenau, and a new permanent exhibition by artist Stephan von Borstel was installed. Also in 2009, early in the planning process, the dOCUMENTA (13) curators had the idea to invite artists and scholars to create a new display at Breitenau before this approach was abandoned. In 2012, a new version of the slide show with an English track became the centerpiece of Gunnar Richter’s installation in Karlsaue Park for dOCUMENTA (13). In a letter to me, Gunnar writes:

It is very difficult to summarize all the different information about the slide

show, Beuys’s FIU (Free International University), and the first exhibition, etc. The impulse to make an exhibition was the invitation to show my audio slide show in the FIU program. You’ll remember that I told you that as our plans for the exhibition became bigger and bigger, requiring more space and more time, in the end, we showed it at the Art Academy of Kassel. The slide show was not included in the official events of the FIU, and that is one reason why Carolyn [Christov-Bakargiev] invited me to show it now as part of dOCUMENTA (13). When I read Péter György’s Notebook (no. 016), The Two Kassels: Same Time, Another Space, I was astonished to find that

our exhibition “Erinnern an Breitenau 1933–1945” and the slide show had been announced in the FIU official program! 4. From the 2012 dOCUMENTA (13) press release, “the dance was very frenetic, lively, rattling, clanging, rolling, contorted, and lasted for a long time” (8). In addition to The Workhouse: Room 2, work specifically related to Breitenau at dOCUMENTA (13) was presented by Sanja Ivekovic, Marcos Lutyens, Lívia Páldi, Gunnar Richter, Clemens von Wedemeyer, and Judith Hopf, whose hanging glass bamboo forest was the only work exhibited in the Breitenau Memorial itself. 5. Information about Jüngermann and the photo albums is from Richter and Lívia Páldi, the curator who was responsible for many of the “Breitenau” artists and who herself, after extensive research, wrote and produced a radio play about Breitenau, “To Be Corrected,” which focused on the Jüngermann years and

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was broadcast on Hessen radio hr2 kultur on August 26, 2012. 6. As noted in Gunnar Richter’s slide show.

| police power | bruise blues | abolition feminism 1. Juzwiak and Chan, “Unarmed People of Color Killed by Police”; Swaine, Laughland, and Lartey, “Counted.” Because the US government has no comprehensive record of people killed by the police, the Guardian began the project to count the people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies and to tell their stories. 2. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, xiii–xiv. 3. See Bernstein et al., Iron Fist Velvet Glove. 4. See Singh, “Whiteness as Police”; Pasquino, “Theatrum Politicum”; Rigakos, McMullan, Johnson, and Ozcan, General Police System; Neocleous, Fabrication of Social Order; Wagner, Disturbing the Peace; and Dubber, Police Power. 5. To watch Bobby Seale deliver BPP Executive Mandate No. 1 outside the lawn of the California state house, see: www.pbs.org/ hueypnewton/actions/actions_capitolmarch .html. On the American Revolution, see Holton, Forced Founders. 6. Woods, Development Arrested, 16. 7. Ibid., 39. 8. Ibid., 20, 27. See also Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. 9. Reich’s Come Out is available at www. youtube.com/watch?v=g0WVh1D0N50. 10. This is not an unreasonable response given Ligon’s work and the making of Live for an exhibition with two major works in relation to the Harlem 6. But, it is also an

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analytic stretch. Glenn Ligon has a long engagement with Richard Pryor, including a series of neon color paintings made in 2004 that consist of words taken from Pryor’s stand-up routines, and thus there is another context for interpretation I ignore here. 11. Here the work of groups such as Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence are crucial for leading the way in finding alternative languages and practices to policing and incarceration. See, for example, Critical Resistance’s Abolitionist Toolkit at http://criticalresistance.org, or INCITE!’s Anti-Police Brutality Palm Card at www.incite-national.org/page/downloads. See also Richie, Arrested Justice; Lamble, “Transforming Carceral Logics.” 12. Evident, Simpson thought in Ligon’s Pryor paintings. See “Pryor Versions.” 13. At the conference “Confronting Racial Capitalism: The Black Radical Tradition and Cultures of Liberation”— held at the CUNY Graduate Center on November 20–21, 2014, and organized by Jordan Camp, Christina Heatherton, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore — Black Radical Internationalist Tradition was the term Barbara Ransby used in her presentation to signify and distinguish the specific standpoint represented there. At that conference, Cedric Robinson nominated the word ideology as the tradition’s key watchword. He said, “It’s not experience that frames our conduct but ideology.” 14. Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy, 72–73. See also W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America; and Lipsitz, “Abolition Democracy and Global Justice.” 15. Robinson, Anthropology of Marxism, 157.

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Index abandonment, v, 122, 136, 190, 238, 376 abolition: of prison, vi, ix, 118, 357, 366, 372, 396, 398, 400; of slavery, vii, 2, 3, 4, 32, 80, 110–11, 173–75; 179; term, 34, 120,146, 232–33, 239–40, 402; of war, 192–94 abolition democracy, 231, 392, 400 abolition feminism, 391, 400, 434 abolition time, 42, 236 Abu-Jamal, Mumia, 366, 384 accumulation: 120–21,127, 238; by dispossession, 122, 190, 383; primitive, 134–35, 137, 339, 383 Ackermann, Willy, 342, 350–51 activism, 67, 231–38, 377; methods and goals of, 391–92 Adorno, Theodor, 146–47, 285–86, 428n16, 428n19 African Americans: Bambara and, 34–49; and blues epistemology, 396–97; and friendship, 80; and Pan-American Exposition, 261; and photography, 179–81, 180f; and prison, 305, 363–71, 379–80; Robinson and, 391–401; and running away, 168–85; Thematic Apperception Test and, 223; and utopian, xiin3, 417n2 Africans: Dutch and, 163f, 164; French and, 213–25 Agamben, Giorgio, xiiin14, 82, 243, 426n6 Agassiz, Louis, 306, 429n23 Agee, James, 95–96

alienation, viii, 29, 68, 72, 121, 137, 238, 360; Bambara and, 43–44 anarchism: ix, xiin3, 16, 30, 121, 129, 150, 271, 287, 341, 343, 398; Berkman and, 289, 319; Czolgosz and, 259–63; friendship and, 87–88, 100, 108; Luxemburg and, 288; Serge and, 289, 302 animism, 254–55; Franke and, 4, 281–82; term, 253–55, 428n3 anthropometry, and prisoners of war, 297–308, 311f anticipatory consciousness: 193; Bambara and, 40–48; Bloch and, 285; Marcuse and, 63–65, 74 Arendt, Hannah, 76–77, 79, 96, 273 arrows, 282, 284 Ashker, Todd, 378, 390 asset stripping, 134–36 asylum seekers, 189, 376 Attica, 74, 238, 344, 357, 359, 363–66 Auburn Prison, 260, 263, 263f authenticity, friendship and, 100 authority: prison and, 290–91; Robinson and, 392; and utopian consciousness, 63; Wedermeyer and, 271 autonomy, 15, 129; Bambara and, 43–44; Jameson and, 64–65; Marcuse and, 50, 62; term, 65; Williams and, 105, 107 AWOL: versus desertion, 187, 194; rates of, 189

459

bad facticity, 57–60 bad subjects, 59–64 bad workers, 82–83, 93–94, 327, 349f; daydreamer manifesto on, 374; Germany and, 340, 342; Gräser on, 350–51 Baldwin, James, xii, 393, 395 Bambara, Toni Cade, 34–49, 57 banners, 197–98, 199f barbers, 175–76 Bargu, Banu, 87 Barker, Pat, 430n35 Barkley, L. D., 365 Barthes, Roland, 88, 107–9, 213–25, 243–46 Baxter, Charles, 239 Bayat, Asef, viii, 83–84, 145 Beaumont, Gustave de, 260 beauty, 240 Beddington, Sarah, 195–201, 208 being in-difference, v, xi, 16, 34–49, 129, 132, 137, 144, 185, 193–94, 236–37, 240 belief: film and, 276; as power, 56; Wedermeyer and, 271 bell rack, 181, 181f Benedictine monasteries. See monasteries Benjamin, Walter, 233, 268, 285–86, 319, 420n36, 425n26 Berger, Dan, 357 Berger, John, 212, 236, 240, 243, 376 Berkman, Alexander, 289, 319 Bertillon, Alphonse, 298–301, 299f, 302 Best, Stephen, 182–83 Beuys, Joseph, 431n3 Bey, Hakim, viii, 82 Binger, Louis Gustave, 215, 246 binocular viewer, 197, 200f biology: Gould and, 304–5; Marcuse and, 62–63 Birane, Diouf, 215, 246 Black Codes, 250–51, 305, 395 Black Guerilla Family, 368 Black Panther Party, 74, 363–65, 395 Black Radical Tradition, 4, 168, 396; Bambara and, 36; Robinson and, 399–401 blind spot, vii, 36, 54, 227

460

index

Bloch, Ernst, 26, 65, 183–84, 281–87, 334, 336, 428n10 Bloomsbury Group, 104–5 blues epistemology, 396–97 Bode, Arnold, 324–25, 343 Bonetti, Kay, 35 Bonnot, Jules, 302 Bood, 172f, 184 Borges, Jorge, x Bowler, Wellington John, 52 Braudel, F., 420n14 Brazil, 153–67, 155f bread, 15, 144 Breitenau, 322, 322f, 323, 326f, 330f, 431n3; experience of, 358–61; history of, 338–44; plaque, 332, 333f; as POW camp, 354–56 Breslau Prison, 288 Broca, Paul, 303 Brody, Miriam, 289 Brown, Harold, 260, 316 Brown, John, 175 Brown, Michael, 393 Brown, Wayne, 239 Brunkhorst, Hauke, 79, 87 Buettner, Bonnie, 289 Bureau of Inverse Technology, 124 Burns, Mary, 66–67 Butler, Brad, 169 Cabral, Amílcar, 63 Caffentzis, George, 134 Caffoni, Paolo, 268, 270 Cairo, 83–84 Calvino, Italo, 12, 52, 267 Campbell, James J., 176 Can Masdeu, 144 cannibalism, 160–62 capitalism: vi, 4, 95, 101, 147, 335, 339, 342, 350, 377, 417n2; animism and, 255, 281; Carpenter and, 101; coinage, 131–32; commons and, 124–41; cultural production and, 93–94; Diggers and, 131; future visions and, 16; global, 118–23,

120f; Italian cinema and, 267–68; Marcuse and, 50, 53, 54, 72–74; military and, 186; nonparticipation and, 142–52; permanent war and, 192; racial, 399f; Swisshelm on, 174; US and, 261–62 capital punishment, 253–63, 257f Carnevale, Graciela, 144 Carpenter, Edward, 100–2; writing hut, 101, 103f carrying on, Williams and, 235–36 Caruth, Cathy, 208 The Cast, 264 celery soup, 12, 406 Césaire, Aimé, x Chartists, 151 Cherki, Alice, 217 chicken, in TAT film, Africans and, 216–17 Chilton, William, 176f, 177 choice. See free will Christmas, Richard, 173–74, 178 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, 324–25, 431n3 Cinecittà, 264–77, 265f–66f civility, 110; Williams on, 106–7 Civil War, 179, 188, 262, 311–12, 395 class, and friendship, 80–81, 102, 104–11 cloaks, 198, 200f clothing, of runaways, 176f, 177–78 Cocteau, Jean, 270 coercion, 382–83 Colangelo-Bryan, Joshua, 377 collaboration: ix, 3, 95, 150; Condorelli and, 75–112; versus friendship, 91–92; Haghighian drawings and, 402–4 collectivity, 254; Attar on, 197; Bambara and, 42; prisoners and, 238 colonialism, vii, 30, 73, 135–36, 255; Bambara and, 47; and Congo TAT, 213–25; Dutch and, 153–67, 155f; Fanon on, 225; The Halfmoon Files and, 296; and police, 394 Combe, George, 302–3 Come Out (Reich), 392, 396–97 Come Out #4 and #5 (Ligon), 392, 397 commensality, 87 common cause, friendship and, 96–98

commons, 124–41 communal luxury, 142, 146–52 communes, 144, 147–52 communication, in prison, 289–90, 292, 399 community: Bambara and, 44–47; Diggers and, 130; running away and, 110–11, 164–65 company, Arendt on, 96 Condorelli, Céline, 9–17, 75–76, 79f The Conference of the Birds (Attar), 197 Congo, 213–25 Connaughton, James, 257f conscientious objectors, 189 contemplative reason, Bloch on, 184 Cooper, Davina, viii cotton pickers, 177, 177f, 182, 182f criminalization, 395–96 criminals: anthropometry and, 298–308; versus prisoners, 309–10; versus prisoners of war, 313; scientific racism and, 304–8 crisis, 122; energy of, 120 critique, 53; Bambara and, 35; Marcuse on, 57–58; prisoners and, 368; running away and, 185; and utopia, 25 cultural theory of value, 283–84 curse, prisoner’s, 385–88 Curtin, Andrew, 181 Czolgosz, Leon, 253–63, 256f, 258f, 289 Davis, Angela Y., 74, 129, 365, 369, 400 Davis, Mike, 136 Dayan, Colin (Joan), x, 241–52, 333–34 daydreams: Bloch and, 283, 286; manifesto, 372–75. See also dreams De Angelis, Massimo, 127, 132–34, 137 death: Dossari and, 387. See also social death death penalty. See capital punishment debtor prison, 82 deconstruction, 116; Derrida on, 234; Kennan and, 230 Deir Yassin, 205–12 Delany, Samuel R., xiin3 Deleuze, Gilles, 276, 382 Delgado, Adrian, 189

index

461

democracy: abolition, 400; direct participatory, 368 Derrida, Jacques, 233–34 desertion, 186–94, 295, 354; definitions of, 187–88, 191–92; Freud and, 317; prevalence of, 188–89 desire, 53, 129, 232; Dayan and, 247; and friendship, 96; Marcuse and, 60, 63 despair, undefeated, stance of, 212, 236, 376 destiny: Bloch and, 286; daydreamer manifesto on, 374. See also fate Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 207–8 Dias, Henrique, 156–57 Dickens, Charles, 147, 180–81, 260 Diggers, 128–31 disappearance, xiiin15; language and, 97–98 discourse, of struggle, 115–17, 288–92, 379–80 Disobedience Archive, 97, 421n4 dispossession, 183, 185; accumulation by, 383; Dayan and, 249; Deir Yassin and, 205 dOCUMENTA (13), 324, 328, 353, 431n3 Domhoff, G. William, 104 Dossari, Juma Mohammed Abdul Latif al, 377, 379, 383, 385–88 Douglas, Claire, 220–21 Douglass, Frederick, 111, 175, 182, 261 Drake, James, 399 dreams: Bambara and, 41, 45, 47–48, 57; Gräser on, 350; Hunt on, 119; Rabe on, 161; running away and, 183–84. See also daydreams Dred Scott v. Sandford sp, 173 Du Bois, W. E. B., 251, 400 Duboscq, Jean, 217 Dutch, and colonialism, 153–67 Eanes de Zurara, Gomes, 315 Edison, Thomas, 253, 259–63 education: Jones and, 366; Klara and, 358–59, 361 Edwards, David, 175

462

index

Eickstedt, Egon von, 311f Eighth Amendment, 242, 250–52 Einstein, Carl, 214 Eisenstein, Sergei, 270, 329 electricity, 255, 259–63, 316–17 Elliot, Daniel, 179 El Saadawi, Nawal, 239 enclosure, 124–41; term, 134–35 Engels, Friedrich, 26, 66, 339 environmental justice movement, 126–27 equality, 117; Diggers and, 129–31; friendship and, 109 erasure: Breitenau and, 325, 332; Deir Yassin and, 205; and refugees, 272 An Essay on Liberation (Marcuse), 71–74 Evans, Walker, 95–96 exclusion: zone of, vii–viii, 26, 121; from friendship, 77, 79–81, 84, 91, 104,108; and nonparticipation, 144; and race, 161, 293, 334; and rights, 107; and socialism, 401 extraneous people, Dayan and, 243, 250, 333–34 extras: strike by, 265f, 272–75; treatment of, 264 Fabi, Maria Giulia, 418n2 Fagan, David, 191 Fanon, Frantz, 217, 225 Fanuzzi, Robert, 146 Farnham, Eliza, 303 Farocki, Harun, 208 Farr, Joseph, 173, 175 fate, 56, 68, 380. See also destiny Federation of Artists’ Manifesto, 150 Federici, Silvia, 134 Feldman, Jonathan Michael, 145 Fellini, Federico, 271, 275 feral trade, 125f, 137–39 Ferreira da Silva, Denise, 423n20 Ferris, George, 261 fiction, v; characters, as friends, 85; necessity of, 154; A Sentimental Story, 28–32, 33f; and utopia, 25

film: and belief, 276; Italian industry, 264–77 food: bread, 15; cake, 375; cheese, 287; commons and, 124–41; of just city, 11; Luxemburg and, 288; Singh and, 295; soup, 12, 344, 406; workhouse and, 346f Foucault, Michel, 116, 154 Fourier, Charles, 26, 66–67 Frank, Andre Gunder, 417n2 Franke, Anselm, 226, 253–55, 263, 281–82 Franklin, Aretha, 399 Franklin, H. Bruce, 291 Franklin, John Hope, 80 Frederick, Gregory, 239, 363, 381–82 freedom: Bambara and, 36–38, 41, 45–48, 419n45; Jameson and, 65; Marcuse and, 59–64, 68; Sartre on, 363; Wallerstein and, 56 free will: and friendship, 79, 91; Marcuse and, 62, 72; Wallerstein on, 55 Freud, Sigmund, 208, 221, 254, 317–18 Frick, Henry, 289 friendship: Carpenter and, 100–2; class and, 80–81, 102, 104–11; Condorelli and, 75–112; definition of, 76; exclusions from, 77, 79–80, 84, 108; Haghighian drawings and, 402–4; rights and, 106–11; and running away, 110; types of, 88–89 Frosh, Stephen, 207 fugitives. See running away Fuller, Matthew, 138 future: Bambara and, 35, 40; Beddington and, 198; Best and Hartman and, 183; Bloch and, 285; Derrida and, 234; Franke and, 282; haunting and, 209; Marcuse and, 63; Vita Nova and, 215 Gabel, Peter, 106–7 Gailliard, Richbourg, 181 Galeano, Eduardo, 28–32 Gall, Franz, 302 Galton, Francis, 307 Gance, Abel, 319 Garuba, Harry, 281 Geneva Conventions, 313–14 Gentle, Mary, 285

Geshiere, Peter, 248 Geyer, Florian, 339 Ghanadry, Yoa’d, 205–7 ghosts. See haunting Gibson-Graham, J. K., 53–54 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 391–92 girls’ reformatory: Breitenau as, 325, 327–28; experience of, 358–61; Meinhof’s documentary on, 343–44 Gliddon, George, 306, 429n23 globalization: Frank and, 417n2; mapping, 118–23, 120f; resistance to, 31, 133–34 Glover, Danny, 400–1 Godard, Jean-Luc, 270 Goengrich, Erik, 287f Gog, Gregor, 342 Goldberg-Hiller, Jonathan, 423n20 Goldman, Emma, 259–60, 289, 319 Golub, Leon, 28–32, 33f good life, 108; friendship and, 87–88 Goodridge, Emily, 179 Goodridge, Glenalvin J., 179–80 Goodridge, Wallace L., 179–80 Goodridge, William C., 175, 180–81 Goodridge, William O., 179–80 Gould, Stephen Jay, 304–5 Gräser, Gusto, 342, 350–51 Great Refusal, 50, 59–60, 69–74 Green, Renée, 24 Gregg, Melissa, 89 Gregos, Katerina, 213 Grey, Emily, 110, 175, 179–80 Grey, Ralph, 110, 175, 179–80 grief, running away and, 177, 182–83 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 36 Griffin, Maryam, 139 Griffith, D. W., 260 Grotius, 312 Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, 364 Grüninger, Werner von, 323 Guantánamo Bay, 249, 252, 377, 385–88, 430n28 György, Péter, 431n3

index

463

Haacke, Hans, 343 Haghighian, Natascha Sadr, 226, 352–56, 377, 402–4; and commons, 124–41 The Halfmoon Files (film), 293–320, 294f, 297f, 308f, 311f, 314f, 316f, 318f Hamlet (Shakespeare), 226–40 Hamm, Daniel, 393–94, 396 Hammett, Samuel, 176f Hanashi, Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al, 377 happiness, 240; politics of, 231 Hardt, Michael, 88–89, 127 Harlow, Barbara, 291, 411 Harris, William T., 303 Hartle, Johan Frederik, 77, 79, 89, 100 Hartman, Saidiya, 182–83, 423n23 Harvey, David, 383 haunting, 97–98, 128, 209; Congo TAT and, 213–25; Czolgosz and, 253–63; Dayan and, 241–52; daydreamer manifesto on, 374; Deir Yassin and, 205–12; Franke and, 282; girls’ reformitory and, 325; The Halfmoon Files and, 293–320; Hamlet and, 226–40; Marcuse on, 232–33; nature of, 208–9, 227, 318–20; recordings and, 316; social death and, 384; and trauma, 209; utopia and, 65; Wedermayer and, 269 hawthorn tree, 195 Hawthorn Archive, nature of, v–xii, 2–3, 14–16,115, 171, 243 Haywood, Bill, 319 Haywood, Harry, vii, 26 Hegel, G. W. F., 285, 394 Heinrich, gardener, 341–42 Henschel & Son, 353–55 Herbert’s Hippopotamus (film), 70f here and now: Bambara and, 37, 40–41, 43, 48–49; and utopian consciousness, 64–65 Hessen, Moritz von, 323 Heyden, Mathias, 133 Hill, Christopher, 129, 131 Hill, Lauryn, 150 Hinzman, Jeremy, 189

464

index

Holloway, John, 134 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 304 hope, 53–54; Bambara and, 47; Bloch on, 26, 282, 334; daydreamer manifesto on, 374 Horkheimer, Max, 146 Hornblum, Allen, 308 Horsethief, prisoner, 289 Hotze, Henry, 430n23 how to live. See way of life Huffman, Gary, 239 Hughey, Brandon, 189 hunger strikes, 377–78, 385 Hunt, Ashley, 70f, 118–20, 120f Hywadin, James, 175 idealism: Carpenter and, 101; Fourier and, 67; Marcuse and, 60; and utopia, 25 imagination: Bambara and, 34; Marcuse and, 68, 73; and utopia, 25–26 Inayatulla, 377 Incipit (film), 215 in-difference. See being in-difference Intervista (film), 275 Iraq Veterans Against the War, 189, 191 Iraq War, 187–89 Italian film industry, 264–77; working conditions in, 271–75 Jackson, George, 74, 344, 359–60, 363–71, 379 Jackson, Jonathan, 74 Jacotot, Joseph, 150 Jafri, Maryam, x–xi James, C. L. R., vii, 231 Jameson, Fredric, 51, 56, 64–65, 233–34 Jilali, correspondent, 107–9 Jogiches, Leo, 288 Johnson, Andrew, 174 Jones, Ernest, 220 Jones, Stephen, 357, 363–71 Jordan, June, 400–1 Jung, Carl, 220–21, 428n10 Jüngermann, Ingeborg, 327–28

justice, 10–12, 17; Best and Hartman and, 183; Dayan and, 249; King on, 235 Kaboré, Issa, 215 Kassel, 323–25, 341, 354 keelmen, 139–40 Keenan, Thomas, 226–27, 230 Kelley, Robin D. G., x, 183 Kellner, Douglas, 73, 284, 420n21 Kendall-Smith, Malcolm, 189 Keshet, Yehudit Kirstein, 207 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 42, 235–36 King, William, 179 Klara, 328, 331–32; correspondence with, 329, 357–71 Konechne, Teresa, 152 Krause-Vilmar, Dietfrid, 332, 431n3 Krop, Frederick, 340, 345–47 labor, 94, 262; bad workers, 82–83, 93–94; enclosure and, 134–35; forced, 354, 369–70; friendship and, 76; Gräser on, 350; Whole Foods and, 127. See also strikes; workhouses Lafargue, Paul, 94 Lagenohl, Kathrin, 214 Langdon, James, 75 Lange, Britta, 293 language: Bambara and, 36, 46; Barthes and, 246; Bloch and, 284–85; commons and, 136–37, 139; Dayan and, 242, 247–52; daydreamer manifesto on, 374; and death, 379–80; and disappearance, 97–98; and justice, 12; and resistance, 53; and utopia, 25; and utopianism, 15 Lappé, Frances Moore, 127 Latour, Bruno, 254, 282 leadership, 195–201, 400–1 Lee, Russell, 182 Le Guin, Ursula K., 25 LeMoine, Blake, 190 LeRoy, Mervyn, 274 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee & Evans), 95–96 Levasseur, Ray Luc, 237

Levellers, 129–31 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 45 Levitas, Ruth, ix Leys, Ruth, 208 Liang, Peter, 393 liberalism, existential, 146, 186, 236 liberation: Bambara and, 41, 45–48; Marcuse and, 60–62; Negri on, 233; prisoners and, 239–40; from production, 94 Liberia, 178 Lieber, Francis, 312 Liebknecht, Karl, 288, 319 Lifelords, Shiva on, 128 Ligon, Glenn, 392–93, 397, 450n10 Lilburne, John, 130 Lincoln, Abraham, 312, 394 Linebaugh, Peter, vii, 32, 134, 422n12 Lissitzky, El, 85 The Logic of the Birds (film), 195–201, 201f Lombroso, Cesare, 259, 303, 306–7 Long, Edward, 429n23 loss: Marcuse on, 58; and utopia, 52, 56 Lubaki, Albert, 214 Luschan, Felix von, 301 Luther, Martin, 340 Luxemburg, Rosa, 288, 319, 383 Lynd, Staughton, 357 MacDonald, Arthur, 303 magic, 45, 68, 107, 165, 190, 248, 263, 282, 286 Magical Marxism, 31 Malcolm X, 369 male friendship, 77, 79, 84, 90f, 104; Carpenter and, 100–2 Manning, Chelsea, 189 maps, x; world, 118–23, 120f Marcos, Subcomandante, xi–xii, 14, 133–34, 192, 239, 290 Marcuse, Herbert, x, 26, 49, 69–74; criticisms of, 64; on deviation, 59–64; on haunting, 210, 232–33; on scandal of qualitative difference, 50–68, 284

index

465

Maria, 176f, 177 Marker, Chris, 267, 270 Mármol, Miguel, 31 maroons, 27, 81–82, 120, 132, 153–67, 182, 194, 287; and marronage, viii, 143, 171 Marx, Karl, 26, 66, 135 Matilda, 176f, 177 Maurits Script (film), 153–67, 167f May, Karl, 285 May, Todd, 87 Mayr, Max, 332 McCarthy, Mary, 77–79, 96 McGill, William, 71 McKinley, William, 256f, 259–63, 289 McLean, C. W., 179 Meessen, Vincent, 213–25, 245–46 Meillassoux, Claude, 380 Meinhof, Ulrike, 324, 327, 343, 358, 377, 388 Mejía, Camilo, 189 Melitopoulos, Angela, 357 Melman, Seymour, 192 Melville, Herman, 233 memory, 128–29; Bambara and, 35, 40; Morrison and, 283–84; Robinson and, 392 mental disorders: Fanon on, 225; posttraumatic stress disorder, 207–8, 210–12 Merrill, George, 100 messianicity, Jameson on, 233–34 Midnight Notes, 134–35 Miéville, China, 120–23, 140–41 migrants: and friendship, 80–81; prison and, 370, 376 military industrial complex: expansion of, 186; and permanent war, 192; recruitment, 190 Millard, Geoffrey, 189 Minkowski, Eugène, 425n26 Minoungou, Etienne, 215 Mirza, Karen, 169 miserablism, 147 misery, 147, 150 mocambos. See Quilombos modernity: animism and, 254–55; Subcomandante Marcos on, 14

466

index

Mohr, Jean, 244 More, Thomas, 25 Morgan, Christiana, 217, 220–21, 222f Morin, Edgar, 215 Morris, William, 26, 94, 152 Morrison, Toni, 128, 147, 268, 283–84 Morse, Chuck, 98 Morton, Samuel, 306, 429n23 Moten, Fred, 62 Moylan, Tom, xiin6 Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, 395 multicultural radical tradition, 26–27 Müntzer Thomas, 339 Murray, Henry, 217 Museum of Non Participation, 169, 171 mutiny, 191 Nakba, 205–12 Nassau, Johan Maurits van, 153–67 Nathan, Tobie, 428n3 Native Americans: and Standing Rock, 191; Thematic Apperception Test and, 223 Navdanya, 127 Negri, Antonio, 88–89, 127, 233 neoliberalism, resistance to, 124–41 Neo-realist filmmakers, 273–74 Newcastle, 139–40 Newgate Prison, 340 Nold, Carl, 289 Nolen, W. L., 368 Non-Citizens of the Refugee Struggle for Freedom, 377–78, 389 nonmovement movements, 145 nonparticipation, 142–52; definitional issues, 143; Fanon on, 225; museum of, 169, 171; Paris Commune and, 151; types of, 142–44, 171 Nott, Josiah, 306, 429n23 Ntendu, Tshyela, 214 Nuremberg Code, 308 occupation: Diggers and, 130–31; Teatro Valle Occupato, 272, 275, 277

O’Connor, Pat, 88 Oldenborgh, Wendelien van, 153 Ombredane, André, 216 One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse), 71–72 organic (industrial) sector, 126–27, 138 organs for the alternative, 3, 50, 62–63, 73–74, 142, 185, 194, 286, 375 Orlow, Uriel, 205–6 Oswald, Russell, 364 Owen, Robert, 26, 66 Painlevé, Jean, 216 Páldi, Lívia, 431n5 Palestine, 139, 195–201, 376; Deir Yassin and, 205–12; Haghighian and, 402, 404f; photographs of, 244 Paley, William, 262 Palmares, 157, 164–65 Palmer, Phyllis, 411 Pan-American Exposition, 261–62 Pappenheim, Ludwig, 342 Paredes, Pablo, 189 Paris Commune, 147–52, 355 participating reason, Bloch on, 184 Pasolini, P. O., 274 patience. See waiting Patterson, Orlando, 315, 379–80 Payne, Sarah Ann, 176f, 177 peace, types of, King on, 235 Pelican Bay Prison, 378, 390 Persian Gulf War, 190 Personne et les Autres, 213 Pethick, Emily, 153–54 Philip I, landgrave of Hesse, 339 philosophy, on friendship, 79, 87–89 photography: African Americans and, 179–81, 180f; Agee and Evans and, 95–96; Barthes and, 244–46; and criminal anthropology, 307; Dayan and, 243–46; Klara and, 328–29, 331–32; and prisoners, 303; and prisoners of war, 428n2 phrenology, 302–3 pirate utopias, 82

poetry, and trauma, 210–12 police: Czolgosz and, 256, 259–60; Diggers and, 130–31; enclosure and, 135, 144; expansion of, 186–87; Kassel and, 323, 327, 355; police power, v, 14, 71–74, 119–23, 143, 144, 193, 238, 392–98, 400; runaways and, 110, 140, 182; science, 293, 303, 329, 334, 341; violence, 40, 145, 272, 275, 391–401 politics: Barthes on, 215; Carpenter and, 101; definitional issues, 230; Derrida on, 234; friendship and, 76, 87–89, 109; of happiness, 231; Italian cinema and, 264–77; prisoners and, 238, 368–69; quiet encroachment and, 83–84; and responsibility, 230–31; scientific racism and, 305; yardsticks in, 146–52 Pollan, Michael, 126 Porter, Edwin S., 260 posttraumatic stress disorder: electroconvulsive therapy for, 316–18, 430n36; symptomology of, arranging, 210–12; term, 207–8 Pottier, Eugène, 150 La Poule d’Ombredane (film), 215 poverty: Agee and Evans and, 95–96; Jilali on, 109; military and, 189–90; and quiet encroachment, 83–84; Steimatsky and, 273–74 Powell, James, 393 power: Bambara and, 42, 44, 48; belief as, 56; friendship and, 77, 84, 104–11; Wedermeyer and, 271 practice, ix, 231–37; Bambara and, 41, 45–48; commons and, 126; friendship as, 79–81, 87; quiet encroachment as, 83–84, 145 preparation, 3–4, 46, 48, 84, 110–11, 145– 46, 193–94, 232, 314, 423n20; Douglass and, 182; Winston and, 168–85 present tense. See here and now Priber, Christian, vii primitive accumulation, 134–35, 383

index

467

prison, 70f, 74, 257f; abolition movement, 366, 400; Czolgosz and, 253–63; experience of, 388; functions of, 309, 333, 365; Goodridge and, 180; Haghighian and, 402; Hunt and, 119; Luxemburg and, 288, 292; methodology of, 288–92; versus monastery, 339; race and, 304–8, 365, 367; resources on, 357; Rodriguez and, 290; Serge and, 298–301, 309–10; suffragettes and, 82. See also under workhouse prisoners, 122; versus criminals, 309–10; curse of, 385–88; Dayan and, 249–52; doing time, 237–40, 360; Haghighian and, 402, 404f; and nonparticipation, 145–46; Palestine and, 206; and resistance, 238, 376–96; and time, 237–40; treatment of, 98–99; uprisings by, 325, 340, 344, 357–71, 362f prisoners of war: as accidental enemy, 310–14; versus criminals, 313; Dayan and, 242; experience of, 354–56, 356f; The Halfmoon Files on, 293–320; history of, 311–12 privilege: Bloomsbury Group and, 104–5; and education, 371; and refusal of employment, 95 Procession (film), 266f production: cultural, 75–76, 92–93, 275; liberation from, 94 progress, stairway of, 298–301 property, 129; Diggers and, 129–31; Williams on, 107–8 prostitutes, Lombroso and, 307 protest, nonparticipation and, 143 Pryor, Richard, 397–99, 450n10 psychoanalysis, 220–21 punctum, 216, 245 Putnam, Frederic Ward, 261 Q, prisoner, 238–39 Quakers, 80 qualitative difference, scandal of, x, 3, 50–68, 284, 286, 374

468

index

queer studies, x, xiin8 quiet encroachment, 83–84, 145 Quilombos, 81–82, 157, 164–65 Rabe, Jacob, 160 race: and colonialism and science, 213–25; and criminalization, 395; Dayan and, 249; Dutch and, 153–67; The Halfmoon Files and, 296; prison and, 304–8, 365, 367; Pryor and, 398; and rights, 106–7; Robinson and, 392; science and, 302–8; term, 309; Winston and running away, 168–85 Rancière, Jacques, 82, 150 Ransby, Barbara, 400, 450n13 Ranters, 129 rasping, 340, 347f Raymond, Janice, 89 reality principle, 40, 334; daydreamer manifesto on, 374; and liberation, 47; Marcuse on, 57 Reclus, Elisée, 150 Rediker, Marcus, vii, 32, 82, 282 refugees, 122; Cinecittà and, 264, 265f, 272–73; Haghighian and, 402, 403f; prison and, 376 refusal, viii, 67, 95, 151, 186, 193–94, 216–17, 359; cost of, 367; Fourth World, vii, xiin2; Gräser on, 350; Marcuse and the Great Refusal, 50, 59–61, 69–74; prisoners and, 239, 288, 340, 359; of war, 186–94, 316–18; of work, 93, 144, 340, 355. See also desertion; nonparticipation; running away Reich, Steve, 393, 396–97 Reinhart, Joseph, 180 religion: origin of, 254; Wedermeyer and, 271 reparation, 183 representation, 133–35; Barthes on, 214–15; in prison, 290; Schaber on, 329 resistance, 15, 31, 53–54; commons and, 133–34; Marcuse and, 59–64, 72–73; prisoners and, 238, 376–96; women’s friendships and, 81. See also struggle

Resnais, Alain, 267, 270 respect, 108–9, 399 responsibility: haunting and, 230; and politics, 230–31 revolution: Bambara and, 43, 48–49; Marcuse and, 60; Serge and, 301 revolutionary time, 42, 64 Rich, Kate, 124, 137–38 Richter, Gunnar, 324, 327–28, 331–32, 354, 431n3 Riefenstahl, Leni, 270 Rifkin, Adrian, ix, 129 Robin, Régine, 100 Robinson, Cedric J., 47, 59, 63, 97, 168, 305, 391–401, 411, 450n13 Robinson, Elizabeth, 92, 391 Rochester, Benjamin, 176 Rodriguez, Dylan, 237, 290 Roediger, David, 147 Rosario Avant-Garde Art Group, 144 Ross, Kristin, 147, 150–51 Rossellini, Roberto, 270, 274 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 312–13 Rowbotham, Sheila, 100–2 Ruffin, Thomas, 380 running away, viii, 3, 4, 9–17, 101, 110– 11, 140–41, 142–52, 171, 310, 323, 335, 355, 358; Bambara and, 38, 40; Bloch and, 286; commons and, 124–41; desertion, 186–94; in Dutch colonies, 157, 164–65; Jones and, 367; Klara and, 358; notices for, 172f, 176f; subjugated knowledge and, 115–17; Thematic Apperception Test and, 224; Winston and, 168–85; world map and, 118–23, 120f Russ, Joanna, 25 Ryan, Michael, 377 Said, Edward, 116, 244, 246 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 26, 66 Sakolsky, Ron, 147 Salaam, Kalamu Yalta and, 47 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, 133

Salt, Kate, 102 The Salt Eaters (Bambara), 36–40, 57 Salvatori, Jack, 274 Samuel, Raphael, 87 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 363 Sassoon, Siegfried, 430n35 Schaber, Ines, 226, 321, 327, 329 Scheffner, Philip, 293–320 Schweninger, Loren, 80 science: and colonialism, 216–25; Engels and, 66–67; and prisoners, 259, 302–3, 308; and prisoners of war, 295, 297– 301, 299f, 301–4, 311f; and racism, 304–8 Scotini, Marco, 97 Scott, David, 183, 241 Scott, James C., 385 sculpture, 267–70; and film, 270–71 Seigworth, Gregory, 89 Sekula, Allan, 71, 303 self-determination, 360, 366; Marcuse and, 62 A Sentimental Story, 28–32, 33f September Institute, 15 Serge, Victor, 293, 298–301, 309–10, 316 shadowgraphy, 325 Shakespeare, William, 226–40 Shehadeh, Raja, 195, 198 Shelley, Mary, 261 shell shock. See posttraumatic stress disorder Sherwood, Edward T., 223–24 Shiva, Vandana, 30–31, 127–28 Shor, Francis Robert, 417n2 Siehl, Otto, 428n2 Siems, Johan, 342 Simmel, Georges, 88 Simpson, Bennett, 399 Singh, Bhawan, 297, 318 Singh, Chote, 320 Singh, Mall, 293, 295–96, 310 Singh, Nikhil, 395 Sing Sing prison, 257f, 303

index

469

slavery: abolition of, 32, 80, 110, 173–75; Dayan and, 242, 248, 250; and friendship, 80; Maurits Script on, 154, 156–57; Patterson on, 381; prison and, 369, 379–80; versus prisoners of war, 312; stop-loss and, 190–91; Swisshelm on, 174; Winston and, 168–85 Slovik, Eddie, 188 social death: Meillassoux and, 380; Miéville and, 121; Patterson on modes of, 381–82; prison and, 379–80, 383–85 socialism: Barthes on, 215; Engels on, 66; Gibson-Graham and, 53–54; Marcuse and, 72; Robinson on, 59, 401; and utopia, 26; Williams and, 53, 235 social media, and friendship, 87–88 social nonmovements, 145 Society of Friends, 80 soldiers. See desertion; prisoners of war Soler, Vincent Joachim, 159 solidarity, 231; Condorelli and, 76; friendship and, 80–81, 109; Marcuse and, 60, 62–63 solitary confinement, 147, 180–81, 289, 310, 327; abolition movement, 378, 390 Sombart, Werner, 156 Spartacus League, 288 spectral: Derrida on, 233. See also haunting Spielrein, Sabina, 221 spirit(s), 282; Bloch and, 285; Dayan and, 248–49 Spivak, Gayatri, 230 spoon, Jan’s, 343, 352–56, 353f Stafford, Frank, 393 stairway of progress, 298–301 Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, 191 standpoint, 53–56, 117; costs of, 56; Marcuse and, 72–73; running away and, 183–85 Stanton, Edwin, 174 Starhawk, 428n3 star of utopian destiny, Bloch and, 286 Steedman, Carolyn, xi Steimatsky, Noa, 272–75

470

index

Stengers, Isabelle, 428n3 stop-loss provision, 190–91 stories, 51–52; Dayan and, 246; Thematic Apperception Test and, 216–25, 217f–19f Strike Debt, 420n5 strikes: Berkman and, 289; Cinecittà and, 264, 265f, 272–75; Eisenstein and, 329; Gräser on, 350 struggle: contextualizing events within, 126–27; discourse of, 115–17, 288–92, 379–80; and feral trade, 139–41; Jones and, 371; Palestine and, 207; prisoners and, 359; as terrorism, 128 subjectivity: Marcuse and, 60–62; of so-called object, 263, 279; status of being a subject, 255 subjugated knowledge, x, 30–31, 115–17; appropriation of, 126–28; definition of, 116; Maurits Script and, 153–67; prison and, 290–91; types of, 154 Swisshelm, Jane, 174 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 270 tattoos, 307 Taussig, Michael, 97, 129, 254–55, 282 Taylor, William, 173, 175–76 Teatro Valle Occupato, 272, 275, 277 terrorism: as control label, 128, 377, 384. See also war on terrorism Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): in Congo, 216–25, 217f–19f, 222f–23f; Thompson Modification (for African Americans), 223; visual representational criteria for, 224 This Black Soil (film), 152 Thompson, Charles E., 223 Thompson, Donald, 239 Thompson, E. P., 191 time, 128–29, 215; Bambara and, 41–42; Benjamin and, 268; Breitenau and, 339–40; daydreamer manifesto and, 374; Franke and, 282; Gentle and, 285; haunting and, 209–10; Jackson and, 359,

363; King and, 235–36; Marcuse and, 74; prisoners and, 237–40; urgency and, 235; Wedermayer and, 269 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 233, 260 Tombrock, Hans, 342 Tongue-Cut Sparrows, 399 top eye, 168, 172f, 183–84 transformative time, 236 trap economics, 135–36 trauma: Deir Yassin and, 205–12; and haunting, 209 Traven, B., 118, 282 trust, 106, 109; and running away, 110 Tshelantende, 214 Tucumán Arde, 144 Turkle, Sherry, 88 Umanità (film), 274–75 unavailable for servitude, 37, 48–49, 185, 193, 236, 286, 396 undefeated despair, stance of, 212, 236, 376 undercommons, term, 422n18 underground railroad, 80, 176; and feral trade, 139 unions. See labor; strikes United States: mass imprisonment in, 376; and military industrial complex, 186–94, 305; and Pan-American Exposition, 259, 261–62; police power in, 393–95; and postwar Italy, 274; slavery and running away in, 168–85 University of California San Diego, 71, 73 Unmade Film, 205–12 Untitled (Bruise/Blues), 392, 396–97 urgency, 42, 231; King and, 235–36; term, 232 Utaibi, Mani al, 377, 385 utopia: Carpenter and, 101; definition of, 25; Jameson and, 51; managerial function of, 58; Marcuse and, 57–58, 60–61 utopian: Bambara and, 34–49; concepts in, 24–27; Condorelli and, 75–112; criticisms of, 26; definition of, 396; Derrida on, 234;

Engels on, 66; as exclusive, vii–viii, 35, 417n2; friendship and, 108–9; Golub and, 28–32, 33f; Hawthorn Archive and, 9–17; Jilali on, 109; language of, 15; Marcuse and, 50–74; versus science fiction, xiin3; term, 24; Wallerstein on, 54–55 utopian margins, x–xi, 65, 281–87, 321, 336, 424 utopian surplus, 281–87; Haghighian drawings and, 402–4; The Halfmoon Files and, 293–320; methodology of imprisonment, 288–92; prisoner’s curse, 376–96; Robinson and, 391–401; T-shirt, 287f; The Workhouse: Room 2, 321–71 utopian vision, v, xi, 9–17, 13f, 19f–23f, 26, 32; Bloch and, 286–87; daydreamer manifesto and, 372–75; Gräser and, 350; Jackson and, 360; of just city, 10–12, 18–23; of life without war, 186; Marcuse and, 50–68, 232–33; Serge and, 301; Wallerstein and, 54–55; The Workhouse: Room 2 and, 336 utopistics, 56; term, 54 vagabonds, 340, 342, 349f Valenzuela, Luisa, 97–98 value, cultural theory of, 283–84 Vanderburgh, Charles E., 173 van der Vlies, Jan, 343, 352–56, 353f, 356f Vasquez, Jose, 189 Veterans for Peace, 189 Veterans Stand for Standing Rock, 191 Vidokle, Anton, 124 Vincent, Clovis, 430n36 Vincent, Jean-Marie, 94 vision. See alternative vision; utopian vision vital needs, Marcuse and, 63 Vita Nova (film), 215, 246 von Borstel, Stephan, 431n3 Wade, Gavin, 75, 92 Wagener, Zacharias, 159–60, 162, 164 Wagner-Juaregg, Julius, 317–18

index

471

waiting, 42, 234–35 Walker, T. Dart, 256f Wallace, Herman, 366 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 54–56, 64 war: abolition of, 192–93; desertion from, 186–94; Fanon and, 225; Freud and, 317; Hamlet and, 228–29; and haunting, 318–20; McKinley and, 259; permanent, 192; and trauma, 208; Woolf and, 313. See also prisoners of war Ward, Lynd, 223 Warner, W. Lloyd, 224 war on terror, 193, 377, 384; Dayan and, 242, 252 Watada, Ehren, 189 Watkins, Peter, 152 way of life: abolition feminism and, 400; bad workers and, 82–83; Carpenter and, 100; commons and, 132–33; De Angelis and, 137; Diggers and, 129–31; Engels and, 67; friendship and, 81; future visions and, 15; Marcuse and, 73–74; nonparticipation and, 144; prison and, 237–40, 260, 292, 298–301, 334, 366; quiet encroachment, 83–84, 145; Wedermeyer and, 271; workhouse and, 346f Wedermeyer, Clemens von, 264–77 Weeks, Kathi, 94 Wegener, Heinz, 354 West India Company, Dutch, 156–58 Westinghouse, George, 260 Wheatley, Ben, 422n7 Whole Foods, 124, 126–27 Wilde, Oscar, 427n12 Wildman, John, 130 Wildman, Joseph A., 260 Williams, Patricia, 106–8 Williams, Raymond, viii, 12, 53, 104–5, 234–35 Winstanley, Gerrard, 130 Winston, Eliza, 110–11, 168–85 “The Winter Garden Photograph,” 245–46 Winter Soldier, 423n19

472

index

Wittig, Monique, 373 Wolf, Nicole, 296 women: Carpenter and, 101; forbidden behaviors for, 343–44, 358; and friendship, 77, 80–81, 89; Gräser and, 350; reformatory for, Breitenau as, 325, 327–28 Woodfox, Albert, 366 Woodland, John, 239 Woods, Clyde, 135, 396 Woolf, Leonard, 104 Woolf, Virginia, 77, 192, 313 work, and friendship, 79–85, 88, 91–99 The Workhouse: Room 2, 98, 321–75, 321f, 373f, 431n3; conceptual orientation of, 321–37 workhouses, 289; diary of, 346f; women and, 82 working class: Carpenter and, 102; and friendship, 80–81 workshy. See bad workers World Social Forums, 32, 400 World War I, 188, 208, 293, 295, 319 World War II, 188 Wright, Erik Olin, ix Wünsdorf prisoner of war camp, 293–320, 304f X, Malcolm. See Malcolm X yardsticks, 146–52 Yealland, Lewis, 317 youth prisons, 325, 367; Breitenau as, 324, 327–28; uprisings in, 357 Zahrani, Yasser Talal al, 377, 385 Zapata, Emiliano, 133 Zapatista National Liberation Army, 133–34 Zavattini, Cesare, 274 Zelin, Peter, 73 Zimbalist, Sam, 272 Zimmerman, George, 395 Zourgane, Philippe, 325