Click on the image to view it full size.

Hoxton is considered a “cultural quarter” of London, meaning there are some interesting artists and arts organizations doing things in the area. The surrounding area is also becoming a high tech industry hub. But I just found out that from the mid 1600s to 1902 it was home to the largest collection lunatic asylums, with one of the largest asylum on Hoxton Street, where currently the local community college and a gallery is located. I made the above image of Hoxton street few days ago. Towards the center of the image you can see the Turkish market that has a green sign and striped overhang next to a sign that reads “coral”. We shop at the market almost daily for random veggies. Further down the road to the left end of the image, just to the right of the men working, there’s a Monster Supplies Shop. Full of wonderful monster supplies, behind the shop the “Ministry of Stories”.

The following brief account of history of Hoxton was taken from: http://www.realhoxton.co.uk/history.htm

Early Hoxton

Hoxton takes its name from Hogeson, first recorded during the Domesday survey of 1086, shortly after the Norman conquest.

Not much is known about very early Hoxton, although during Roman times the nearby Ermine Street (now the A10) was a major thoroughfare through the city, running from Bishopsgate, on to Tottenham, and then out of London to Lincoln and York. Back then, the area was heavily wooded with flood plains surrounding the River Lea.

Tudor Hoxton

Right up until 1822, Hoxton was part of Shoreditch Parish, spreading from Bishopsgate into the City, and dominated by the Parish church of St. Leonard, dating from 1160. The church is mentioned in the song “Bells of St Clements” (Oranges and Lemons).

During Tudor times, Hoxton – just outside the northeast city wall – was still countryside, a large expanse of fields and trees. Away from the dirt and squalor of the City, but close enough for leisure pursuits and a short commute to work, it was popular with the gentry, ambassadors and wealthy immigrants looking for a better quality of life. So much so that by 1601 there were over twenty houses along Hoxton Street, even though Queen Elizabeth I had banned new buildings within three miles of the city.

Hoxton Street was at this time known as Pimilco Path, probably taking its name from the local publican Ben Pimlico. Bacchus Walk, just off Hoxton Street, marks the spot of one of the area’s main attractions of the time, the Pimlico Pleasure Gardens, just one of many public gardens in the area at this time. Modern-day Pimlico derives its name from the area, its gardens being reminiscent of those once found off Hoxton Street.

The sprawling Hoxton Fields to the north and west of Hoxton Street were often used for archery practice, still a common form of civil defence. It was here on 22nd September 1598 that the playwright Ben Jonson (Shakespeare’s main creative rival) killed actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel, with Johnson only escaping a hanging by proving he was able to write, and therefore worth sparing! The location where this happened is marked by a plaque on Arden House in nearby Pitfield Street N1.

Being outside the jurisdiction of the City, the area was also home to bawdy inns, bordellos and bull baiting, the rich and the poor often living within close proximity. It also proved popular with actors, including William Shakespeare, who lived nearby.

The two first purpose-built theatres in Great Britain were in nearby Curtain Road, with a young Shakespeare writing for and acting in both. One of these theatres, simply called ‘The Theatre’, was home to at least three Shakespearean premieres, including the first ever performance of Romeo and Juliet in 1597.

The Gunpowder Plot, a Catholic conspiracy to blow up the Houses of Parliament on 5th November 1605 with 36 barrels of gunpowder, was discovered in Hoxton Street. It was here on the 12 October 1605 that Lord Monteagle received the letter unmasking the plot, which led to the capture of the plotters, including Guy Fawkes. The location of Lord Monteagle’s house on Hoxton Street – now modern flats – is marked with a brown plaque. The true story of how involved Monteagle was in the plot himself may never be known.

The lunatic asylums

By the end of the 17th Century the wealthy estates in Hoxton were being broken up, with many of the large houses being used as mad houses and almshouses for the elderly or infirm.

Hoxton House on Hoxton Street was turned into a lunatic asylum in 1695, becoming the biggest in Hoxton before closing in 1902. Owned by the Miles family, it had extensive grounds that stretched between Pitfield Street and Kingsland Road. The only remains of the house are at 34, close to Hackney Community College. Built on the site of the Jews’ burial ground, it may mark the southern limit of the asylum at its greatest extent.

By the early 18th Century, nearly all of London’s private lunatics were accommodated in Hoxton. In 1819, of 1551 certified lunatics in private housing, Hoxton House held 348, and the two other major asylums in Hoxton (Whitmore House and Bethnal Green House) held much of the remainder.

At the northern end of Hoxton Street stands the Shoreditch workhouse, or St. Leonard’s Offices for Relief of the Poor, built in 1863, with two more stories added later.

Victorian Hoxton

Wealthier Hoxton residents were driven away to the new ‘suburbs’ during the early Victorian era, leaving Hoxton as a poor area full of dirty, noisy slums. Industrialisation and the completion of the Regents Canal in 1820 meant building materials could be shipped into the area quickly and easily, and between 1831-1851 the population of Shoreditch doubled, making the area around Hoxton one of the most densely populated in Europe.

Now a centre for furniture making and the shoe trade, the area was also still a focal point for actors and entertainment. The famous 4000-capacity Britannia Theatre was located at 115-117 Hoxton Street from 1841-1900, the site being marked by a plaque today. Built on the site of the former Pimlico tea gardens, entry was cheap, food and drink served inside, and 3-4 plays performed a night with variety acts in between. Charles Dickens regularly visited the theatre and even compared it to the Scala in Milan in his novel The Uncommercial Traveler. The theatre was damaged by fire in 1900, became a cinema in 1930, and was finally destroyed during the Blitz.

Another building unfortunately seriously damaged during World War II was Pollock’s Toy Theatre Shop at number 73 Hoxton Street. Founded by John Redington in 1851 and run by Benjamin Pollock and family it sold traditionally printed children’s card theatres, with novelist Robert Louis Stevenson a regular customer. The shop – the last of its kind in London – was the origin of the phrase ‘Penny Plain, Twopence coloured’.

The grade II listed building at 130 Hoxton Street is Hoxton Hall, another famous theatre. Built in 1863 as a MacDonald’s Music hall, it is a fine example of an unrestored saloon-style theatre. It lost its license in 1871 because of “Police complaining”, later being used as a Quaker meeting hall, and now a community theatre and arts space.

Another places well worth a visit on Hoxton Street are the gardens gardens laid out by the Hoxton Trust at the northern end of the street. Centrepeice is a clock tower from the City of London Union Workhouse in Homerton, recently restored – and toilets designed for an oilrig!

Hoxton today

After the war, manufacturing developments led to many smaller industries moving out of Hoxton, but by the 1980s a new generation of young artists – looking for cheap workspace – started to move in. Pubs and clubs opened around Hoxton Square to cater for the creative crowd, bringing with it a vibrant arts community, new money and regeneration.

Hoxton Street, however, has the feel of a real, close-knit London community – and one with an amazing past at that.

The essay that discribes the process involved in The Circulation of Knowledge Archive was released on 127prince.org in six section. All six sections have been posted.

http://127prince.org/2011/07/12/the-circulation-of-knowledge-dustin-ohara/

http://127prince.org/2011/07/19/the-circulation-of-knowledge-part-two-of-six-dustin-ohara/

http://127prince.org/2011/08/05/the-circulation-of-knowledge-part-three-of-six-dustin-ohara/

http://127prince.org/2011/09/04/the-circulation-of-knowledge-part-four-of-six-dustin-ohara/

http://127prince.org/2011/09/20/the-circulation-of-knowledge-part-five-of-six-dustin-ohara/

http://127prince.org/2011/10/02/the-circulation-of-knowledge-part-six-of-six-%E2%80%93-dustin-o%E2%80%99hara/

[googleapps domain="docs" dir="present/embed" query="id=dd52fq6v_365gmpgnkdp&size=l" width="700" height="559" /]

Slides and links for a lecture on the internet and video, in Film & Digital Media 136A: Experimental Cinema / Spring 2011

history of the internet video
1993 news report about the internet
clay shirky on the colbert report
shirky ted talk
qwiki.com
we live in public
The Waffle Shop
popcornjs
right wing duck

I’ve spent the previous few weeks or so exploring online historic archives of regional maps and photographs going back the last hundred and fifty plus years. I’ve been collecting these various materials and archiving it myself. Meanwhile I’ve been meeting with various faculty members and discussing our ambitions. With Warren Sack, I am part of a small group that’s exploring the idea of narrative intelligence. For some fifteen years Warren has been invested in making computers tell stories. He has given us the challenge of writing the “grammar” of what we as individuals want to communicate with our current research. Needless to say our conversations tend to push my mind in a really productive way.

Sometime before the quarter got started I received an email from an undergraduate student from the film and digital media department. In the email Dan expressed that he wanted more hands on experience “doing something.” We’ve managing to get him independent credit to work with me for the quarter. While riding the bus, I ran into another undergraduate student named Dan (but for the purposes of distinction we’ll refer to him as Daniel). Daniel was in some previous classes I had TAed. I told him about the idea of joining us and he jumped on board. Initially to make this happen I was instructed to write a syllabus laying out the progression of their time on a week by week basis. Writing a syllabus proved to be a meaningful exercise in rethinking the pragmatics of what we are actually doing.

On my own I have been meeting with Dee Hibbert-Jones, I’m collaborating with her on the a few different efforts, one such effort is the start of a research center for art as social practice. Under this effort we care preparing a project called talk sandwich, that is a lunchtime activity of using the sandwich as a metaphor for arts education in the university. With Dee’s background in sculpture, her perspective has helped me reevaluate the materiality of my practice. How will ideas take shape? What will the form of my strategies look like? Simultaneously I’ve been TAing for the “3D foundation” art class. This has energized my curiosity with notions of space, place, or site and situation. Down this line of thinking I have been reading the philosophic geographer Ti-Fu Tuan’s book Space and Place. There is a section in the book that uses the body and our instinctual spatial sense as a way of considering knowledge.

During this time, in addition to exploring online archives, I have been going on walks surrounding three community gardens. During these walks I’ve usually had a camera with me and have been using it to look at the physical forms and patterns of the neighborhoods. 

Yesterday I met with Santa Cruz mayor Mike Rotkin. He was amazingly accessible, he literally came over to my home for an hour an half discussion on local politics. In preparation for this meeting he pointed me to a book called “The Left Most City: Power and Progressive politics in Santa Cruz” At the library I found the book siting next to Rotkin’s PhD dissertation about local Santa Cruz politics from 1970-1982. The book goes into some interesting detail about the various groups (socialist-welfare, socialist-feminists, and environmentalist) and how they found common ground in creatively crafting Santa Cruz policy that was in antagonistic negotiation with the growth coalition and its legacy of business leaders. Mixed with personal stories and anecdotes the conversation with Rotkin loosely sketched out the defining issues and strategies of the last 30 plus years of regional politics. Following the conversation I went on a walk across town and noticed that I looked at the city in slightly different way. . . understanding the places I was passing through as embodying the narrative of choice, struggle, and creativity of Santa Cruz.

manholes from a recent walk

The following morning I met with Dan and Daniel at my home. Over coffee we briefly discussed the issues I had uncovered through the readings and the dialogue with Rotkin. Specifically we talked about how the progressive coalition leveraged a number of point, most notably local agriculture as a way of combating further development and growth. We then walked to the nearby community garden. Arriving at the garden marked the beginning of our adventure. We ended up talking with a wife and husband that were visiting a friend. After talking about who they were, she mentioned the lighthouse field as a special place, so we decided to walk to the field. At the field we found two women training as boxers with each other. We observed them boxing for a moment, then continued along until we came up to a man that was sitting at the park table. We listened to how he was “loosing faith with humanity one person at a time.” He then proceeded to tell us about his faith in Christ. Eventually we parted ways, and encountered a number of folks coming and going in the nearby parking lot. Back into the neighborhood we met a man working on his motorcycles. We talked with him for sometime about his passion for bikes and the last ten-fifteen years of his life.

In total our encounters took up the better part of three hours. The community gardens have become a geographic focal point as both a metaphor and literal expression of the wider human ecology of Santa Cruz the place, and its unique attempt at rethinking ideas of growth. We are now looking into soliciting interviews with the gardeners themselves and more encounters with the neighbors adjacent to the parks. All of this material is being collected and turned into a variety of media, printed map-collages for each garden neighborhood, distributed video installations in and about the garden neighborhoods, and an online map of the findings.

On a leisurely walk later in the day, I was thinking about how all of this can be discussed in relation to Warren’s challenge of thinking about the grammar of one’s project, for the purpose of authoring a system that could dynamically generate an infinite number of variations. Answering this question has lead me to think about the situation in a number of ways. First I’ve conceptualized our efforts as a kind of social cartography that attempts to blur cultural and civic possibilities of media.  From possibly more of a formalist perspective I’ve been thinking about Ti-Fu Tuan writing and concepts as a possible grammatical strategy for mapping out notions of growth and the various political coalitions, affinities, and antagonisms along side the personal stories and anecdotes we encounter on the street. From a more experiential perspective I’ve began to think of process as developing a map of pedagogical praxis outside the walls of the classroom. This trajectory of thought is directly connected to the whole de-materializing of the art object line of thinking that is often discussed within current art as social practice circles. How this “grammar” is actually written in JSON for Warren’s AI planners is an experiment I am looking forward to jumping into.

landscape from walk

Simultaneously during these walks I have been coming across a number of other thoughts. While walking along mission street, I came upon an empty field that had a large rental sign at the edge of the sidewalk. The thought is to cover the rental sign with a new slick sign for the “eco-friendly state of the art laundromat” and have some clotheslines and a few water buckets and washboards scattered about behind it. The laundromat would be marketed as being open for use during certain hours so people could actually gather and wash their laundry together. I see this gesture as being related to David Robbins’s notion of concrete comedy, and my ongoing interest in domestic space and the habits and material that define it.

I feel like things are moving along nicely, I’m looking forward to continuing with an engaged exploration of town and its many personalities. As for working with Dan and Daniel, I’m excited to refine our sense of method, while remaining open to the creative tangents that will naturally expose themselves along the way. Specific to the encounters we’ve been having with people I think the idea of method can be talked about in relation to idea of non-directional listening. Of course we establish a foundation to the exchange, but how we respond to where they choose to take it is where non-directional listening comings into play. I have some anxiety surrounding the effectiveness of how this material will actualize itself. How to communicate the layers of entangled themes and situations? But it will work itself out as a natural part of the process.

“In the hands of this criticism categories like sculpture and painting have been kneaded and stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity, a display of the way a cultural term can be extended to include just about anything. And though this pulling and stretching of a term such a sculpture is overtly performed in the name of vanguard aesthetics — the ideology of the new — its covert message is that of historicism. The new is made comfortable by being made familiar, since it is seen as having gradually evolved from the forms of the past. Historicism works on the new and different to diminish newness and mitigate difference. It makes a place for change in our experience by evoking the model of evolution, so that the man who now is can be accepted as being different from the child he once was, by simultaneously being seen — through the unseeable action of the telos — as the same. And we are comforted by this perception of sameness, this strategy for reducing anything foreign in either time or space, to what we already know and are.”

It seems Krauss is establishing a historical project that is building off of notion of ideology as a kind of system of thought. Such an ideological system makes up the structural anatomy of Krauss’ “conditions of possibility.” The possibility of meaning, knowledge & culture – all deceivingly universal terms for how we perceive the world.

“Yet I would submit that we know very well what sculpture is. And one of the things we know is that it is a historically bounded category and not a universal one. As is true of any other convention, sculpture has its own internal logic, its own set of rules, which, though they can be applied to a variety of situations, are not themselves open to very much change. The logic of sculpture, it would seem, is inseparable from the logic of the monument. By virtue of this logic a sculpture is a commemorative representation. It sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place.”

Such a notion of monument, place, and history are in direct conversation with Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” and the shifting role of art. “…the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art has its basis in ritual… Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”

“With these two sculptural projects (Gates of Hell 1880 & Balzac 1891), I would say, one crosses the threshold of the logic of the monument, entering the space of what could be called its negative condition — a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place. Which is to say one enters modernism, since it is the modernist period of sculptural production that operates in relation to this loss of site, producing the monument as abstraction, the monument as pure marker or base, functionally placeless and largely self-referential.”

“In this sense sculpture had entered the full condition of its inverse logic and had become pure negativity: the combination of exclusions. Sculpture, it could be said, had ceased being a positivity, and was now the category that resulted from the addition of the not-landscape to the not-architecture. “

“Our culture has not before been able to think the complex, although other cultures have thought this term with great ease. Labyrinths and mazes are both landscape and architecture; Japanese gardens are both landscapes and architecture; the ritual playing fields and processionals of ancient civilizations were all in this sense the unquestioned occupants of the complex.”

“The expanded field is thus generated by problematizing the set of oppositions between which the modernist category of sculpture is suspended. And once this has happened, once one is able to think one’s way into this expansion, there are — logically — three other categories that once can envision, all of them a condition of the field itself, and none of them assimilable to sculpture.”

“From the structure laid out above, it is obvious that the logic of the space of postmodernist practice is no longer organized around the definition of a given medium on the grounds of material, or, for that matter, the perception of material. It is organized instead through the universe of terms that are felt to be in opposition within a cultural situation.”

“I have been insisting that the expanded field of postmodernism occurs at a specific moment in the recent history of art. It is a historical event with a determinant structure. It seems to me extremely important to map that structure and that is also important to explore a deeper set of questions which pertain to something more than mapping and involve instead the problem of explanation. These address the root cause — the conditions of possibility — that brought about the shift into postmodernism, as they also address the cultural determinants of the opposition through which a given field is structured. This is obviously a different approach to thinking about the history of form from the of historicist criticism’s constructions of elaborate genealogical trees. It presupposes the acceptance of the definitive rupture and possibility of looking at historical process from the point of view of logical structure.”

Chapters 6 – 9 cover a rather expansive array of people and their conflicts, women’s rights, native Americans and Mexicans and the expansionist ideal of manifest destiny, and the civil war, slaves, and black Americans. Collectively these different stories enforce Zinn’s thematic thread of class struggle and the political struggle between ruling elites.

“Emma Willlard told the legislature that the education of women ‘has been too exclusively directed to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty.’ . . . Reason and religion teach us, she said, that ‘we too are primary existences. . . not the satellites of men.’” (118)

“Indian removal was necessary for the opening of the vast American lands to agriculture, to commerce, to markets, to money, to the development of the modern capitalist economy. Land was indispensable for all this. . .” (126)
Previous tactics for Indian removal involved mostly relocation, but “Jackson’s 1814 treaty with the Creeks started something new and important. It granted Indians individual ownership of land, thus splitting Indian from Indian, breaking up communal landholdings, bribing some with land, leaving other out—introducing the competition and conniving that marked the spirit of Western capitalism. It fitted well the old Jeffersonian idea of how to handle the Indians, by bringing them into “civilization.”(128)

“Speaking of California, the Illinois State Register asked: ‘Shall this garden of beauty be suffered to lie dormant in its wild and useless luxuriance?. . . the hum of Anglo-American industry would be heard in its valleys; cities would rise upon its plains and sea-coasts, and the resources and wealth of the nation be increased in an incalculable degree.’ The American Review talked of Mexicans yielding to “a superior population, insensibly oozing into her territories, changing her customs, and out-living, out-trading, exterminating her weaker blood. . .’ The New York Herald was saying, by 1847: ‘The universal Yankee nation can regenerate and disenthrall the people of Mexico in a few year; and we believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.’” (154-155)
The Reverend Theodore Parker, Unitarian minister in Boston, combined eloquent criticism of the war with contempt for the Mexican people, whom he called ‘a wretched people; wretched in the origin, history, and character,’ who must eventually give way as the Indians did. Yes, the United States should expand, he said, but not by war, rather by the power of her ideas, the pressure of her commerce, by ‘the steady advance of a superior race, with superior ideas and a better civilization. . .’” (156-157)

“Harriet Tubman, born into slavery, her head inured by and overseer when she was fifteen, made her way to freedom alone as a young woman, then she became the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. . . always carrying a pistol, telling the fugitives, ‘You’ll be free or die.’ She expressed her philosophy: ‘There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive. . . .’” (175)

“Spirituals often had double meaning. The song ‘O Canna, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan’ often meant that slaves meant to get to the North, their Canaan. . .
‘No more peck o’ corn for me, no more, no more,
No more driver’s lash for me, no more, no more. . . .’
Levine refers to the slave resistance as “pre-political,” expressed in countless ways in daily life and culture. Music, magic, art, religion, were all ways, he says, for slaves to hold on to their humanity.”(179)

“As the tension grew, North and South, blacks became more militant. Frederick Douglass spoke in 1857: ‘Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. . . If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lighting. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concede nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. . .’”(183)

“John Hope, a young black man in Georgia, who heard Washington’s Cotton Exposition speech, told students at a Negro college in Nashville, Tennessee: ‘If we are not striving for equality, in heaven’s name for what are we living? I regard it as cowardly and dishonest for any of our colored men to tell white people or colored people that we are not struggling for equality. . . Yes, my friends, I want equality. Nothing less. . . Now catch your breath, for I an going to use an adjective: I am going to say we demand social equality. . . I am no wild beast, nor am I an unclean thing.
Rise, brothers! Come let us possess this land. . . Be discontented. Be dissatisfied. . . Be a restless as the tempestuous billows on the boundless sea. Let your discontent break mountain-high against the wall of prejudice, and swamp it ti the very foundation. . . ‘”(209-210)

A People’s History if the United States, by Howard Zinn chapters 1 -5

“It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.

My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the mapmaker’s distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological, it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.” (8)

At first glance I took issue with Zinn’s distinction between cartography as non-idealogical and history as ideological. On closer inspection I realize where I differ with Zinn is with his notion ideology. Zinn evokes a notion of ideology that is about conflict or “contending interests,” while I prefer to think of ideology as the foundation to a kind of conceptual thought language. Using the latter notion I would argue both cartography and history, under the banner of all interpretive gestures, are firmly grounded in an idealogical framework. But to his credit, the notion of contending interests is foundational to his agenda, an agenda that attempts to rethink the authority of power, irregardless of who happens to be seated there.

“My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of the states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the of the executioners.” (10)

This paragraph seems to establish Zinn’s agenda for the rest of the book. To examine the moments of struggle that are otherwise over looked in the telling of the established power’s story. And in doing so, understand the nation not as a unified entity by rather as a set of conflicting forces.

“Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality.” (57-58)

“Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.” (59)

“It was a problem for which the rhetorical talents of Patrick Henry were superbly fitted. He was as Rhys Isaac puts it, firmly attached to the world of the gentry,’ but he spoke in words that the poorer whites of Virginia could understand. …

Patrick Henry’s oratory in Virginia pointed a way to relieve class tension between upper and lower classes and form a bond against the British. This was to find language inspiring to all classes, specific enough in its listing of grievances to charge people with anger against the British, vague enough to avoid class conflict among the rebels, and stirring enough to build patriotic feeling for the resistance movement.” (68)

“ ‘The people’ who were, supposedly, at the heart of Locke’s theory of people’s sovereignty were defined by a British member of Parliament: “I don’t mean the mob. . . . I mean the middle people of England, the manufacturer, the yeoman, the merchant, the country gentleman. . . .’

In America, too, the reality behind the words of the Declaration of Independence (issued in the same year as Adam Smith’s capitalist manifesto, The Wealth of Nations) was that a rising class of important people needed to enlist on their side enough Americans to defeat England, without disturbing too much the relations of wealth and power that had developed over 150 years of colonial history.” (74)

Hierarchal power structures seem intrinsic to how we order our lives, granted there are times when it is appropriate for a given technical function, but as the foundational distribution of wealth and power it clearly is problematic. What I’ve missed with these excerpts is Zinn’s description of the tribal communities of native Americans, and how they operated in a much more communal non-hierarchal manner. That’s not to say they didn’t have hierarchal systems internal to their order, it just wasn’t the dominate organizing factor to how they lived. The history of imperialist nations on the other hand seems to be dominated by a notion of progress and gain that is fueled by the suppression of fellow sentient beings. As an reflection of this, it seems Zinn is arguing that our very notion of justice is a product of the historical conditions of economic production.

“Four days after the reading [of the Declaration of Independence], the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up on the Common for a military draft. The rich, it turned out, could avoid the draft by paying for substitutes; the poor had to serve. This led to rioting, shouting: ‘Tryanny is Tyranny let it come from whom it may’.” (75)

“Edmund Morgan sums up the class nature of the Revolution this way: ‘The fact that the lower ranks were involved in the contest should not obscure the fact the contest itself was generally a struggle for office and power between members of an upper class: the new against the established.’ Looking at the situation after the revolution, Richard Morris comments: ‘We the people of the United States’ (a phrase coined by the very rich Gouverneur Morris) did not mean Indians or blacks or women or white servants. In fact, there were more indentured servants then ever, and the Revolution ‘did nothing to end and little to ameliorate white bondage.’

Carl Degler says (out of our past): ‘No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class.’ George Washington was the richest man in America. John Hancock was a prosperous Boston merchant. Benjamin Franklin was a wealthy printer. And so on.” (84-85)

“In the Federalist Paper #10, James Madison argued that representative government was needed to maintain peace in a society ridden by factional disputes. These disputes came from ‘the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.’ The problem, he said, was how to control the factional struggles that came from inequalities in wealth. Minority factional struggles could be controlled, he said, by the principle that decisions would be by vote of the majority.

So the real problem, according to Madison, was a majority faction, and here the solution was offered by the Constitution, to have ‘an extensive republic,’ that is, a large nation ranging over thirteen states, for then ‘it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. . . . The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.’

Madison’s argument can be seen as a sensible argument for having a government which can maintain peace and avoid continuous disorder. But is it the aim of government simply to maintain order, as a referee, between two equally matched fighters? Or is it that government has some special interest in maintaining a certain kind of order, a certain distribution of power and wealth, a distribution in which government officials are not neutral referees but participants? In that case, the disorder they might worry about is the disorder of popular rebellion against those monopolizing the society’s wealth. This interpretation makes sense when one looks at the economic interests, the social backgrounds, of the makers of the Constitution.” (96-97)

Zinn establishes that there is no neutral player, that all participants (wherever their position) are invested in “a certain distribution of power and wealth.” This notion of social positioning segues interestingly back to a discussion of cartography, as an interpretative gesture of orientation. For instance I recently visited New Orleans, and when examining the tourist maps, readily available for free at hotels, there were neighborhoods clearly marked for cultural consumption and those neighborhoods left completely blank. We decided to walk into the “blank” neighborhoods, and found the housing projects, where mostly poor blacks live. One could discuss at length the reading of these neighborhoods as “blank” or as not having anything to offer, a fine example of an interpretative system for making sense of the world and our place in it.

“The Constitution, then, illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum or coercion, a maximum of law—all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity.”(99)

This paragraph sums up why critics of the current system are met with such grief by so many middle (working) class Americans. It’s true that capitalism has been very productive, and the latest gadgets seem to give a sense of rapid progress, a sense of progress that is tantamount to salvation! How often do you hear some version of the idea that technological innovation will solve our problems? Whether its some version of green washing, with “green collar” jobs bring the economy back, or fundamental techno determinists talking about the unbridled march of technology, both fail to acknowledge the social element. That we are people living together, and no matter how many solar panels you put on your roof or the amount of processing power you put into your computer our problems will always be negotiated through the (collaborative / competitive) labor of living. If anything new technology solves problems as much as it creates them.

“Were the Founding Fathers wise and just men trying to achieve a good balance? In fact, they did not want a balance, except one which kept things as they were, a balance among the dominant forces at the time. They certainly did not want an equal balance between slaves and masters, propertyless and property holders, Indians and white.

As many as half the people were not even considered by the Founding Fathers as among Bailyn’s ‘contending powers’ in society. They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they were absent in the Constitution, they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the woman of early America.”(101-102)

Zinn closes chapter five with a conclusion that segues nicely for chapter six (that looks like it will be focusing on issues of gender and possibly the emergence of feminist thinking). So while it is easy to consider these developments as attempts to resolve the problematics of an intrinsic human condition that is marching through a linear progression of history, there is another way of seeing it. As Zinn argues racism is not a “natural” expression of human relations, it is a way of justifying the ownership and sale human beings as slaves. That such modes of though are an expression of economic means. That gender and race issues are a product of an ideological system of interpretation that is an out growth of our economic mode of production. As the saying goes, we build the road and the road builds us. Further investigation into the dynamics of tribal communities might be a productive direction to look into.

addition information on Howard Zinn:

a conversation with history, Howard Zinn

democracy now, howard zinn & noam chomsky

Summer is here, and this means things are moving at a different beat. Helping to set the tempo, my friend Ted who posts at Bad Education, gave me a few books to read. The one I’ve spent the most time with so far is Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a wonderful collection of essays from the mid 1960′s. At first glance her writing style seems to put less weight on the macro-argument & instead invites the reader to indulge in the subtleties and texture of the situation she is illustrating. When you observe how gently Didion weaves together (seemingly disparate) memories and situations into the narrative of her argument, there is a sense that while the subject matter she is addressing is not intended to be read as a metaphor it still hints at something more illusive… a subtext of sorts. Didion says it best herself, in her essay On Keeping a Notebook, where she reflects on the gesture of keeping a personal journal/notebook.

“I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check, counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line “That’s’ my old football number” touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probably “The Eighty-Yard Run.” Nor is my concern with a woman in a dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper in a Wilmington bar. My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.
It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. (“You’re the least important person in the room and don’t forget it,” Jessica Mitford’s governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.) Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.
And so we do. But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with
meaning only for its maker.”

I have kept a notebook for many years, I started as a child, but in college I began to keep one religiously. I have found that over the last couple of years my notebooks are lasting me longer and longer, I credit this to uploading more and more of my notes directly to the computer. I thinking blogging is an interesting exercise in relation to how Didion talks about the legibility of meaning. For instance while this blog is definitely more public then say my notebook is, I think its meaning (not to be mistaken with the meaning of a single post) can still only be understood by its maker… but this leads to a much longer discussion of the dynamics of authorship and readership and how the two are intimately connected.

Reading:

The Act of Study by Paulo Freire
I’ve heard Paulo Freire described as the John Dewey of the 2nd half of the 20th century, there are very few educators of similar statues. Freire’s writings (most notably, Pedagogy of the Oppressed) have inspired several generations of critical pedagogues. The act of study is a nice short introduction to the general tone and perspective of critical pedagogy as a praxis. Currently I’m interested in how such strategies can be applied to art and media education, as a kind of post-conceptual art practice that’s in productive relations-dissidence with broad notions of social justice.

Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind pages 21 – 34 by Shunryu Suzuki
After having a deep affair with John Cage and Allan Kaprow’s works, my interests eventually let me to the source of much of their thinking – Zen Buddhism. The excerpt selected from Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind, from a personal perspective represents my first steps in approaching Zen. From a more general perspective I think Shunryu Suzuki’s words are accessible to an open-receptive western mind, this is not always the case with zen texts do the historical linear coming from Japan.

Optional: the thesis prospectus might illuminate something, but if you’re really hungry for more, consider exploring the Kaprow and Dewey selections in the library folder.

Notes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3zBFT0QjzE

excerpts from John Dewey’s The Live Creature

“When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the fine arts. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doing, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience. Mountain peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations. It is the business of those who are concerned with the theory of the earth, geographers and geologists, to make this fact evident in its various implications. The theorist who would deal philosophically with fine art has a like task to accomplish.”

“In order to understand the aesthetic in its ultimate and approved forms, one must begin with it in the raw; in the events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man, arousing his interest and affording him enjoyment as he looks and listens: the sight that hold the crowd – the fire engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous holes in the earth; the human-fly climbing the steeple-side; the men perched high in the air on girders, throwing and catching red-hot bolts. The sources of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight of the housewife in tending her plants, and the intent interest of her goodman in tending the patch of green in front of the house; the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and in watching the darting flames and crumbling coals. These people, if questioned as to the reason for their actions, would doubtless return reasonable answers. The man who poked the sticks of burning wood would say he did it to make the fire burn better; but he is none the less fascinated by the colorful drama of change enacted before his his eyes and imaginatively partakes in it. He does not remain a cold spectator. What Coleridge said of the reader of poetry is true in its way of all who are happily absorbed in their activities of mind and body: “The reader should be carried forward, not merely of chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, not by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution, but by the pleasurable activity of the journey itself.” ”

“Flowers can be enjoyed without knowing about the interactions of soil, air, moisture, and seeds of which they are the result. But they cannot be understood without taking just these interactions into account–and theory is a matter of understanding. Theory is concerned with discovering the nature of the production. How is it that the everyday making of things grows into that form of making which is genuinely artistic? How is it that everyday enjoyment of scenes and situations develops into the peculiar satisfaction that attends the experience with is emphatically esthetic.”

“The nature of experience is determined by the essential conditions of life. While man is other than bird and beast, he shares basic vital functions with them and has to make the same basal adjustments if he is to continue the process of living. … The first great consideration is that life goes on in an environment; not merely in but because of it, through interaction with it. No creature lives merely under its skin; its subcutaneous organs are means of connection with with what lies beyond its bodily frame, and to which, in order to live, it must adjust itself, by accommodation and defense but also by conquest.”

“All interactions that effect stability and order in the whirling flux of change are rhythms. There is ebb and flow, systole and diastole: ordered change. The latter moves within bounds. To overpass the limits there are set is destruction and death, and out of which, however, new rhythms are built up. The proportionate interception of changes establishes an order that is spatially, not merely temporally patterned: like the waves of the sea, the ripples of sand where the waves have flowed back and forth, the fleecy and the black bottomed cloud. Contrast of lack and fullness, of struggle and achievement, of adjustment and consummated irregularity, form the drama in which action, feeling, and meaning are one. The outcome is balance and counterbalance.. There are not static nor mechanical. They express power that is intense because measured through overcoming resistance. Environing objects avail and conteravail.”

Some helpful links:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/

http://www.pragmatism.org/

DANM 203 http://benleedscarson.com/empiricism-neurosis/