the Public/Private divide and Political Subjects - 2006/05/10 13:29First, I’d like to thank Alice for her introduction and for providing a focus for this dialogue. I am interested in how each paper engages subjective evidence or self-referentiality in relation to collective production. I am also extremely glad to be in an international, or possibly trans-national, dialogue around what Alice has called “the public and private divide” and “the question of self-determination”. I’m interested in how our situated-ness (in terms of nation-states and in relation to globalized economies and information spaces) affects our sense of public/private. Not only how the state regulates behaviors and imposes norms but also how ‘we’ as citizens or denizens fail to take responsibility for what we know. If ‘Information’ is “ that which reduces uncertainty,” (Claude Shannon) and “that which changes us,” (Gregory Bateson) then ‘denial’ is that which protects us – and the public secret.
In her post Joline Blas has posed the question “Is there a relation between public secrets and private property”. Certainly. Where, traditionally, we have understood the political subject through the figure of the citizen of a sovereign nation-state -- in our world at this moment the figure of the citizen is eclipsed by that of the consumer—the most powerful minority in a world population dominated by other figures: the refugee, the homeless, the prisoner, the HIV positive, the addict, the squatter, the internally displaced, the migrant, the impoverished, queer, black.. These figures – regarded as marginal – have, as Giorgio Agamben says, “become now the decisive factor of the modern nation-state by breaking the nexus between human being and citizen.” In Agamben’s analysis – the state can only assert its power and affirm itself by separating “naked life” or biological life from its “forms-of-life” or social and political agency – reducing the subject to a biological entity a – bare life preserved only as an expression of sovereign power – This is the purpose of the prison and the detention center, the role of the displaced persons camp, the homeless shelter, the concentration camp… For Agamben, intellectuality and thought – which I see as equivalent or necessary to “self-representation” and self-articulation” - are forces that reunite life to its “form” – its identity, subjectivity, political agency and power of choice.
Each of our three papers addresses self–referentiality, storytelling, dialogism and collective self-representation (all methods for collecting subjective evidence that emerges from the private or personal) as means of resistance. As critic Catherine Stimpson points out, "Doing Cultural Democracy demands...the incessant recognition of the moral, cognitive and cultural lives of others …" Any adequate expression of the condition of contemporary culture requires that a plentitude of voices speak directly from widely differing contexts about their own socio-ideological situations. What I know from speaking with the addicts and incarcerated women is that they not politically enfranchised and their statements are not acknowledged as information -- either in Shannon’s sense or in Bateson’s sense. Theirs is information that must be ignored, denied, repressed -- otherwise someone would have to do something about it. I am interested in discussing how subjective data that emerges from the voices of the disenfranchised – prisoners, drug addicts, immigrants, refugees – these are the denizens – the new political subjects – the majority can attain the status of public information.
Walter Benjamin wrote -- “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.” “The state of exception is the temporary suspension of the rule of law that is revealed instead to constitute the fundamental structure of the legal system itself” [Agamben] – Consider the current political movement around immigration, guest workers, and detention -- consider Guantanamo and the permanent “global war on terror” -- post-Katrina “reconstruction” and like three strikes and your out and the California state prison media ban – emergency measures in the “war on drugs” and the “war on crime” that violate human and civil rights. How could we not think that a system that can no longer function at all except on the basis of emergency would not also be interested in preserving such an emergency at any price? ---This is the nature of the Public Secret.
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Alice Ming Wai Jim
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Re:the Public/Private divide and Political Subject - 2006/05/12 08:18Sharon, your comments about definite connections between and public secrets and private property bring to mind the context in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside where the gallery I work for is located. This area has been for over two decades predominantly portrayed as a war/drug zone and as the city's skid row. As the city grows, real estate companies have entered as key players, they emphasize not so much this state of emergency you speak about, but also the need to work towards the beautification of the city (Vancouver hosts the Olympics in 2010), though they are really referring to unaffordable luxury housing or gentrification, which for many critics merely excacerbate social problems. Inherent to property then is clearly economic issues. Could you please comment on how disenfranchised groups fare given their lack of economic backing in countering this permanent state of emergency both inside prisons and outside, where public space is increasingly being sacrificed for private gain? What can we do about this? Another question may be: how is cultural democracy to be achieved when economic incentives cater to primarily corporate interests?
Post edited by: ajim, at: 2006/05/12 08:22
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Sharon Daniel
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Re:the Public/Private divide and Political Subject - 2006/05/14 12:42Alice’s question about how disenfranchised groups fare in rapidly diminishing public space reminds me of a photograph that a friend emailed me from Sydney, Australia. She had taken a picture of herself in the mirror in a restroom at the Sydney railway station, bathed in a strange, intense blue light. She later discovered that this light is used in all public facilities in Sydney to discourage injection drug use in public. In light of this particular wave-length it is impossible to identify a vein.
Cultures enforce norms and regulate socially unacceptable behaviors in public space in different ways. The need to conduct such behaviors in public spaces is almost always based on multiple forms of disenfranchisement – homelessness, poverty –- personal states of emergency.… This anecdote indicates that, in Sydney, there is a desire to limit certain marginal or socially unacceptable behaviors in public space accompanied by a willingness among the general population to acknowledge a problem and to share the responsibility, or at least the minor inconvenience, imposed by the solution. In the United States the methods of enforcement of norms and regulation of marginal behaviors are almost always punitive. The powers of enforcement are held by the agents of the state and the general population is expected to ignore or deny that there is a problem. There is no public space that is safe for the homeless, the addict, the mentally ill. They are always subject to the ‘state of emergency’ declared on any exception to the norms and requirements of the capitalist state. Their tactics for survival often lead to engagement with regimes of enforcement and subsequent incarceration. In this state of emergency much more than public space is being sacrificed for private gain…
Alice asked, “what can we do about this?” In my opinion, we must acknowledge the problem of marginalization and disenfrancisement and take the responsibility for the solution away from the corporate state. In part, this means imagining and then building a world without prisons because the Prison Industrial Complex is based on economic incentives that cater to corporate interests.
The ‘prison industrial complex’ is the quintessential embodiment of power and authority in capitalist America – a corporate/state collaboration designed to profit from the incarceration of marginalized communities on a massive scale, and to enforce their continual political disenfranchisement by law. The US constitution was designed to protect the rights and privileges of its authors (white, male, propertied citizens) at the expense of a host of ‘others’ (including women and people of colour). The legitimisation of the institution of slavery was at the heart of the formulation of the US constitution. The revolution of Jefferson, Washington and Madison was never intended to liberate the black slave, who was not seen fully as a person by society or by law. Racism and economic exploitation remain essentially intact as the legal system continues to create and protect a racially segregated society and the government manipulates the law to disenfranchise black citizens. The fundamental premises and goals of the institution of slavery are now realized though the agency of the US criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex.
The regulation of prisoners, their rights, and their living conditions are left to state governments who appoint governing boards to oversee prison administrations. This essentially leaves prisoner’s rights, or lack thereof, in the hands of politicians, prison administrators and guards – ‘interested parties’ who are economically dependent upon the growth of the prison industrial complex. A market economy for prisons has led to a market demand for prisoners (a strong lobby for ever-tougher sentencing to satisfy the need for more cheap labor and maintain the corrections economy). For example, inmates in state and federal prisons are often employed by private corporations for extremely low pay (less than 11 cents/hour 40% of which is deducted for restitution) and prisons are ‘serviced’ by giant corporations, like MCI and Marriott, with monopoly contracts for catering, telephone service and medical care. A prisoner in California may not phone her family unless the family is able to engage MCI as their long-distance telephone carrier -- and MCI charges seven times the going rate for collect calls made from California prisons. Over the past two decades, California alone has built 21 new prisons, spending roughly $4.4 billion on infrastructure, and an estimated $26.2 billion more to keep it functioning.
While prisoners in California are permanently stripped of their right to vote prison guards enjoy considerable political clout. Since prison populations are disproportionately comprised of people of color, the loss of voting rights means millions of black and brown citizens and their communities are effectively disempowered in the political realm. How, indeed, can there be cultural democracy when corporations who benefit from the enslavement and disenfranchisement of whole communities (defined by race and socio-economic status) are privileged as legal subjects.
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Reclaimthearts@hotmail.com
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Re:the Public/Private divide and Political Subjects - 2006/05/20 13:50Maybe before rattling on about our various theories of humanity, we should look at the corporations who are sponsoring this event.Hewlett-Packard is involved with all of its 'family foundations', after making mega-bucks supporting the Saddam Hussein regime in all of it's weapons, computer,training and support methods and contributing a few dollars of the blood money to artists to gain respectability as civilized 'arts supporters'. We should be discussing that phenomenon. I'd ask you to google up IRAQ,SADDAM HUSSEIN, WMD,HEWLETT-PACKARD and then tell us what you think. Fashionable cynicismis the rule of the day in Bush's America. It's a sad commentary on artists who take hush-money...James Brightwolf (You can Google me also.)
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Sharon Daniel
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Re:the Public/Private divide and Political Subjects - 2006/06/04 13:49reply to James Brightwolf (reclaimingthearts)
Perhaps, before making slanderous accusations against individual artists and scholars, you should take a deep breath, think about what you are saying, and to whom you are saying it. I am not taking "hush-money" from anyone. I am not receiving a penny for my contributions to the ISEA festival and I am certainly not being “hushed”. I am using the festival as an opportunity to present work that provides an in-depth critique of the corporate state. I have developed this critique through a sustained and committed engagement with individuals and communities who are most impacted by the injustice of the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex. My participation in ISEA is part of an on-going activist effort to inform the public about a corporate/state collaboration to exploit and politically dis-enfrancize impoverished communities of color. My paper and presentation will name many corporations and politicians who are implicated in this system of oppression. I have no intention of being “hushed”. Hewlett Packard’s involvement in Iraq is not my primary concern. I am not naïve enough to imagine that there is any pure, public space in which to engage politics or culture, but I am pragmatic enough to believe that artists and scholars should engage in theorizing about humanity – how else can we advance the cause of humanity. To reject theory is to accept reality as it is. I am not interested in “reclaiming the arts” I’m interested in what art can do to change the world we live in. ISEA is an artist run organization. The projects and papers that will be presented were peer reviewed by the community of participating artists and scholars. If you had proposed a project or paper for peer review you might have been given the opportunity to offer an effective critique of Hewlett Packard’s involvement in Iraq in the context of the festival. This, in my opinion, would have been a much more productive strategy than attacking your peers.
