Wednesday, August 17th, 2011 
In reading and reviewing McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, I couldn’t help but think about the practice of art in the city of Detroit. Wark’s title refers to the Situationist idea of deconstructing the process by which nature has come to be overwritten by culture particularly in the urban environment. This in part entails the recognition that:
“The conceit of private property is that it is something fixed, eternal. Once it comes into existence it remains, passed in an unbroken chain of ownership from one title-holder to the next. Yet in the course of time whole cities really do disappear. We live among the ruins. We later cities know that cities are mortal.” (29, emphasis added)
In the case of Detroit “the course of time” has progressed rather quickly, basically with the onset of post-Fordism in the early 1970s, though some commentaries rightly see the seeds as having been planted in the suburbanization of the region that began soon after the Second World War. This reversal of the conceit of private property provides the basis for what I have called the art of the commons, art that is neither public nor private but that exists in a space in between. And many of the practices that comprise this work have something in common with what Wark tells us about the Situationists. In this post, I will reflect on the Situationist understanding of psychogeography as it appears in Detroit art work. Part II will similarly examine derive and detounement and part III will analyze the gift and potlatch.
In the “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” the Situationist theorist Guy Debord writes that psychogeography concerns the study of “specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals.” One of the more well-recognized mappings of the ghost world of Detroit is the one undertaken by Tyree Guyton on the city’s East Side in the form of the Heidelberg . . .
Read more: Beneath the Pavement, the Beach! — Detroit Art from a Situationist Perspective, Part I
Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 
 In a recent post, Jeff frames the troubling inflexibility in contemporary American politics in terms of our fallibility as political actors, and the need to recognize it, concluding: “Compromise between two fallible competing opinions is a virtue. Compromise of a perceived truth is a vice.” This leads me back to the thought left open at the close of my last post. There, in the context of my skepticism about the deployment of the trope of “growing pains” in political affairs, I called into question the “epistemic certainty” that such a narrative entails. Fairly often, we hear that such certainty is impossible: this position can be called one form of “political fallibilism.” In this first sense, “political fallibilism” means something like the conscious cultivation of not being too certain about things political, about one’s views of what is, but also about what must be done. That is, one knows that no matter how right one is, one is at least a little bit wrong. And one knows that, however much one knows about what is happening, there is even more that one does not know, and probably still more that one doesn’t know what one does not know.
We can call this first form of political fallibilism, as our sitting President has, self-conscious humility. Jeff has highlighted what is good and worthy in this practice, especially when compared with strident ideological inflexibility. This argument has also been forcefully put forward in a long-standing controversy about the existence and nature of an “Obama Doctrine.” Some commentators approve of this policy, and others don’t; all agree that the Administration is trying, anyway, to strike a balance between “realism” and “idealism,” between Kissingerian realpolitik and George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” In other words, the Administration’s policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and more recently (and more tortuously) in Libya, is all about recognizing political fallibilism, even if not always put expressly in those terms. More recently, over the past weeks, with the circus over the debt ceiling . . .
Read more: Two Forms of (Political) Fallibilism
Monday, August 15th, 2011 
On Friday, I intended to use some posts from the past to illuminate the political events of the week, but found myself writing about more private problems, about the human condition and my own incapacity in understanding it. Today, I return to more familiar terrain, thinking about the changing American political landscape.
Viewing the Republican presidential debate in Iowa on Thursday, I was reminded why the 2012 election is so important. What the Republicans propose on the economy, on American identity and principles is strikingly different from President Obama’s promise and performance. Day to day, it has seemed that Obama is losing his focus. But I am convinced that he is accomplishing a lot and that the alternative is stark. In April, I presented my guide for judging his Presidency. I think it still applies.
Trying to figure out the stakes in an election requires understanding the issues, and judgment of Obama’s leadership and the Republican alternatives, but also, and perhaps more importantly, it requires an understanding of imagination. Governor Paul LePage of Maine gave clear expression of the right-wing imagination when he ordered the removal of murals celebrating labor at the Maine department of labor – not fair and balanced. These murals are not even particularly provocative. Images of the banned murals were presented in a post by Vince Carducci.
Cultural works that don’t depict a specific worldview offend the Tea Party imagination. And work that can’t be supported through the market, following Tea Party wisdom, is without real value. The cultural and market fundamentalism present a major civilizational challenge.
While this challenge must be met rationally, politics isn’t and shouldn’t be only about reason. Feelings, along with imagination, also are of telling import, as James Jasper explored in a post last Spring.
I feel strongly about the Tea Party, as the Tea Partiers feel strongly about their commitments. I know this is important. How the . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: The American Political Landscape
Friday, August 12th, 2011 
The summer is winding down. And a dramatic one it has been on the personal front: one wedding and two funerals.
My mother-in-law, Frances (Tiny) Gruson died yesterday. The funeral is on Sunday. She lived a long life, ninety-six years. She was in slow decline for the last ten, rapid decline in recent months. She experienced the gift of the full cycle of life.
Casey Young, my niece’s daughter, Tiny’s great granddaughter, was not so fortunate. Hers was a life that was meant to be, but wasn’t. She died in June, mysteriously during her afternoon nap, at twenty-one months. A century ago, what Casey’s mother and father are going through was a most difficult part of the human condition. Now, thanks to advances in modern medicine and health care, it feels like a moral outrage, a direct assault on meaning, unbearable for those who were the closest to Casey, extremely painful for the rest of us. We don’t know what to do, as we muddle through. We are overwhelmed with grief, trying to find a way to continue.
In the meanwhile, I put a book to sleep. I had to proofread the galleys of Reinventing Political Culture, which will be published at the end of September. I was involved in a minor controversy at The New School, taught my class in Wroclaw, and as the readers of Deliberately Considered know, I have been working constantly to keep this experiment in deliberate public reflection and discussion alive, trying to turn it from the more personal blog that it was to a more cooperative online magazine, as was my plan from the beginning.
And then, in the middle of the personal chaos and the professional ebbs and flows, my son Sam and Lili Lu were married. Now they are in the northern paradise of the Fjords of Norway. Their happiness, along with the great joy of being together with our family to celebrate, lifts our spirits. But it does not balance out. And I realize as a man of many words that I have little to say, other than to report the facts.
Thursday, August 11th, 2011 
Let us call experience seniority. And let us mean by this that people who work over extended periods of time develop, ripen, face the hard knocks of life day in and day out, and that they usually gain from the experience.
To be experienced is to have spent the time, paid the dues of the job, learned what it takes, put out the raw energies and skills required. And more: to be experienced means that one has internalized all these things, and that one can bring to the everyday situation of work an array of competencies that the inexperienced are unaware of. That is why this precious game of life requires the serious engagement with it. Engagement brings, even if only eventually, an enlargement and a subtilization of competencies, things that one has in one’s hands, in one’s plan for the day, in one’s skill set, in one’s general work habits, all which add up to becoming experienced.
But consider: “senior” in America typically means old people, not only not at the top of their game, but also not necessarily competent. In the right-wing attack on seniority in the public sphere, and unions more generally, seniority translates into deadwood. Now every institution has some tiny percentage of deadwood in it, people who have disengaged from their work experience. But to assume, for example, as Republican state legislatures are in the process of doing, that teachers with years of experience are the deadwood whose seniority rights have to be eliminated (meanwhile ignoring the administration deadwood), is sheer folly. It completely ignores how those experienced teachers incorporate a reservoir of potential mentoring and actual “how-to” knowledge. It is a way of promoting inexperience at the cost of experienced professionals. And isn’t that what the mad-hatters’ Tea Party celebrates in politics as well: lack of political experience as a qualification for office?
Seniority in the workplace means that the years and decades you have put in paying your dues to the job count for something in the work community, and that a larger and deeper outlook and ability is something . . .
Read more: Have You Ever Been Experienced?
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011 
The strength of the United States, Barack Obama said during his Presidential campaign, lies neither in its arsenal nor in its banks, but in the ideas that have defined its history. Max Weber and Alexis de Tocqueville would have recognized this as no mere rhetorical gesture. To simplify, the institutional apparatus of the country rests on the concepts of equality and freedom. In the United States, equality and freedom are not simply ideas in a book, de Toqueville argues, but instead, are the root of everything. The judicial, economic, educational, and religious systems are largely governed by these ideas, which throughout history have been progressively institutionalized, internalized, always emphasized, and of course sometimes distorted. The country largely revolves around principles such as economic, religious, and cultural freedom and the principle of equality before the law. This leads me to wonder, might the U.S.’s greatest strengths also be its most significant vulnerabilities?
 As a foreigner, I am sometimes mystified, and sometimes awed, by the radical consequences of the foundational freedoms in the U.S.. For instance, the freedom to say anything, including, to cite a recent Supreme Court decision, the freedom to hurl anti-gay slurs at mourners attending a funeral. Even such speech acts are protected under a firm system of liberties, the firmest that I know of. On the other hand, I am also bemused when friends at a restaurant divide the bill to exactly reflect what each one of the eaters has consumed, dollar by dollar, with due attention to the price of each and every item. A “depraved taste” for equality, de Tocqueville would say.
De Tocqueville argues that liberty and equality are always in tension in America; economic liberty, for example, may go against the principle of equality, as it often does. Or, vice versa, the push for equality may curtail some liberties. But the system, he adds, has built-in mechanisms designed to keep the needed equilibrium in place. Again, I am being schematic: of course the system is more complex and there is more to America’s history than . . .
Read more: Thinking like a Terrorist
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
I have been on the road much of the past month. This weekend I was involved with my son’s wedding. Sam and Lili Lu were married on Sunday, now off to Oslo and points north for their honeymoon. I have been in deep family mode. It has been hard to fit in a week in review post, but now I can offer some thoughts about the past few weeks at Deliberately Considered and in the world.
Oslo. I was in Wroclaw at the time of Anders Behring Breivikis’s atrocious act, ironically, the city where he may have bought chemicals for his bombing. A Polish visitor to the Institute, an alum, had worked in Norway. His first concern was to confirm that a friend, who called and left a message on his cell phone the day of the massacre, was ok. Upon speaking to his friend, our Polish colleague reported that “everyone” in Norway is relieved that the despicable act wasn’t the work of an Islamic radical. In my class on media and crisis, we discussed this judgment. A majority thought this relief was based on an understandable desire to not have Norway drawn into the conflict of civilizations narrative, but then a student from Albania (an historically Muslim nation) spoke. For her, the early reports of the fanatical anti-Muslim commitments of Breivik were deeply troubling, part of a larger civilizational whole.
When I came home, I discovered that the talking heads on conservative talk radio and Fox News were denouncing the idea that Breivik was a Christian xenophobe, representative of a deep cultural problem. I also heard about the new project to build the “ground zero Mosque.” The absurd side of our academic discussion was revealed.
Economic Crisis. Trying to explain the American debt ceiling crisis to Europeans is next to impossible. In the Euro zone, the economic crisis is the result of a fundamental problem. One currency is being used in a diverse set of nation states, each with independent economic . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Democracy in Crisis
Thursday, August 4th, 2011 
 This past weekend, the second group of students graduated from the 4-month intensive course at the Film and Journalism School Haiti Reporters in Port-au-Prince. The school opened its doors in October last year. It is the brainchild of the Dutch documentary filmmaker and journalist Ton Vriens and is sponsored by the Dutch human rights group ICCO, the Dutch ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Turtle Tree Foundation, and American companies such as Tekserve and Canon USA.
The school offers hands-on media training that gives students the skills to handle professional video- and photo cameras, and editing software. In addition, the curriculum offers courses in entrepreneurship, web design, writing, and media ethics. One of the goals is to prepare students to become community journalists, enabling them to tell the stories of the small communities around them. Ideally, the graduates would not only witness the development and reconstruction – or lack thereof – of their country, but also investigate and critically reflect upon it. Not only as community journalists, but also as civic journalists they could start making products that can function as forums for discussion and that can build up both their own as well as others’ social capital in the process.
In the daily practice of Haiti, this is all easier said than done. While it would be a challenge to give a similar 4-month crash course to any group of young people, trying to do it in Haiti exposes one to the country’s idiosyncratic trials.
Haitian media – they mainly exist in the form of radio and newspapers – have a long history of being mere tools to earn and secure political power. Only in the 1970s, still under Duvalier’s dictatorship, did one radio station start to air local and international news in Creole, the language of the majority of Haitians, instead of French, the language of the elite. It took until 1986, the year of Duvalier’s fall, before journalists enjoyed a meaningful freedom of the press and played a supporting role in the newly developing civil society. The military coup of 1991 . . .
Read more: Haiti Reporters
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011 
Like many, I have serious reservations about elements of the debt deal. But from a standpoint concerned only with the legislative process, the debate in Washington has not been “business as usual.” In recent months we have witnessed two primary, parallel attempts at compromise: The “Gang of 6” in the Senate, and the Obama-Boehner-Cantor talks at The White House. To me, the failure of the “Gang,” and the ultimate success of the White House talks, is a sign that our government is undergoing a significant shift in the way it legislates.
Change in the legislative paradigm is not a radical event – it has been the norm in our Congress’ history. Compromise, specifically over “perceived truths,” as Jeffrey Goldfarb notes, is the heart of the legislative process. Among the oldest approaches to compromise was John C. Calhoun’s “doctrine of the concurrent majority,” where the goal of legislation was to accommodate all ideas. During the “Golden Age,” Henry Clay championed the idea that “all legislation…is founded upon the principle of mutual concession.” Now, Obama’s inability to strike a “Grand Bargain” should not be seen as an unqualified failure; grand bargains can only be made within a legislative framework where both sides are willing to sacrifice equally, a point I will return to shortly.
Turning to the present day, we find two curious episodes in the Senate. First, we have an attempt by the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to cede portions of the Senate’s power to the Democratic President. The Senate has always fiercely defended its own sovereignty with a ferocity that can only equal debates over world-shattering policy changes. William S. White, perhaps the most eminent scholar on Senate history, noted that it is “harder to change a [standing] rule than to vote to take a country to war.” For McConnell to suggest that the Democratic president takes the reigns is a clear act of desperation, a sign that the existing framework of compromise familiar to McConnell no longer applies.
Second, we have the “Gang of 6.” . . .
Read more: Bipartisanship’s Last Stand: What does the Debt Deal mean for Legislators?
Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011 
In Israel, for over three weeks, there have been demonstrations initiated by young people. They were first directed against the high cost of living, but they seem to be developing into something much larger, a movement for a systematic social change, addressing the growing disparities between rich and poor and the difficulty of living well, concerned about issues of social security and the deterioration in the provision of education and health care. What had begun with a consumer uprising against the high prices of cottage cheese over a month ago, leading to a boycott on dairy products (since in Israel they operate as a cartel, not open for competition), appears to be the beginning of what Rosa Luxemburg describes as ”an exercise in democratic action.” I observe the exercise as an Israeli living in Berlin, basing my commentary on newspapers, blog posts and conversations with friends at home.
The “cottage cheese revolt” is no trivial or accidental thing. Israeli dinner tables usually contain this staple, together with a salad. The most popular cottage cheese, Tnuva, has an illustrated home on its package and a well known advertising trope: “the cheese with the home.” Fighting for home is not only for affordable housing or the cost of living. The protesters also talk about the quick decline in the freedom of speech and of the Israeli democratic system under the current government. However, the demonstrators delay, for the time being, what they see as “political demands” for possible negotiation with the government. They fear this would compromise the call for “social justice,” and more immediately, could scare off some of the right-of-center demonstrators. According to Ha’Aretz today (August 2), “a document setting out the demands of the tent protesters in the areas of housing, welfare, education, health and economic policy is being drawn up by the movement’s leaders.”
The tent city in Tel Aviv . . .
Read more: The Tents Movement Uprising in Israel
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