Workshop #7

We began the evening listening to Frank O’Hara, the celebrated poet of mid-century New York, gossipy genius, conduit between writers and artists — was his body a public space? — and author of long, beautiful, capacious poems. We heard him recite two short ones at a 1964 SUNY Buffalo reading (“Naptha” and “Poem [Lana Turner Has Collapsed]”); then we read “Why I am Not a Painter” from the page.

My hunch is that the relationship between painting (Mike Goldberg’s) and writing (O’Hara’s) that O’Hara articulates in this didactic poem exemplifies a way any one of us might gracefully, productively position our own work within the context of what Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer call the “culture industry.” I asked that we at least try to connect the poem to that essay in our discussion and, while Philip made a gallant effort to do so, the jury is still out on the connections between the poem and the essay.

No one brought the objects to “show and tell” but we had a very good discussion about the ways that objects mediate our relations to others. Initially I was disappointed. I had imagined that — at least as relief from the avalanche of books and text objects that have been flooding our room with language — we would enjoy some convivial, close silence as we passed the objects, glowing with their auras of meaning, amongst us and appreciated their power to mediate and connect without language or reading. I accused the class of failing. But Beth pointed out, and then Colin elaborated on, the fact that we all came in clothes and these were textless objects that communicated whole volumes, accomplishing exactly what I had hoped. Further, it was pointed out that textless objects are also read, that the codes of visual communication are language-like. There may not be so big a gap between the well-made books we’ve been considering and the successful textless object that mediates our relations as it moves among us. Colin attempted to “read” Philip’s glasses, for example.

The power of objects to organize a group’s ideas and feelings with great quickness and visceral pull became our segue into conversation with our special guest, Laurie King, one of the prime movers at Jobs With Justice in Portland. Laurie talked about a three-story tall inflatable rat that Jobs With Justice sometimes uses at rallies. The rat is shared amongst various activist groups and stands for whomever is the target of protest. Laurie has also used large puppets (a la Bread and Puppet), banners, and costumes to create a sense of play and what she called “a plot” at Jobs With Justice actions.

Laurie said public protests need to have a plot, and she described one middle-of-the-night gathering at which ten carloads of Jobs With Justice sympathizers orchestrated a Keystone Cops-like obstruction of the employee parking lot at a business that was hiring replacement workers during a struggle with their regular employees. By blocking access to the protected lot, they forced the replacement workers to park near another group of protesters who were then able to talk with them and educate them about the lies and tactics of management. Laurie emphasized the importance of playfulness and a sense of pleasure and play in these interactions. She (and Dave King, Laurie’s husband, who also organizes and takes part in these actions) said they were able to get replacement workers to quit the job by opening their eyes to the bigger picture, and that this was only possible because they treated them as allies and not enemies.

Laurie told us that organizing large groups requires lots of face-to-face meetings and personal contact. She feels that e-mail does not motivate crowds; phone calls are better, but nothing can replace a face-to-face appeal. Her greatest resource is a data base of contacts and years and years of sustaining those relationships by working together in person.

We considered the difference between labor organizing and the network of Latino organizers at work on immigration issues. In particular, Latino organizers use the church and radio effectively to get all ages and families to protests. We wondered whether there’s any radio we’d listen to, and Dave proposed KBOO.

Regarding the police, Laurie said she works with them when the context demands and without them when that’s appropriate. For example, immigration rallies often bring undocumented workers out, so you want the police engaged as allies; otherwise you risk arrest and, for the undocumented, expulsion. On this note, we also remembered that police arrive at many of actions very open and available for person-to-person relations, but then the order comes: the mask goes down, the face disappears, and the police become a faceless battalion. This is a painful, dehumanizing moment for the police as well as for their targets. In the context of our class, it reminded us once again of the importance of symmetrical relations: as a person you can productively interact with the police as people; but if the police become a battalion, you need to also become a battalion if you want to relate productively to them.

We closed the evening with Theodore Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s essay, “The Culture Industry” (which is a chapter of their 1944 book The Dialectics of Enlightenment). Colin contextualized it with some background about their work in the 1930s in Frankfurt, then their exile to New York as the Nazis came to power, and the larger purposes of their work — which was the hope, on the part of what became known as “the Frankfurt School,” to rescue centuries of European humanist thought from the horrific ruptures of two murderous World Wars.

Colin said the essay describes a condition that is also known as “late capitalism,” wherein revolutionary consciousness is made impossible because the idea of revolution has been usurped and neutralized as just another consumer choice, safely within the system of capitalism. He also pointed our attention to a series of dichotomies Adorno and Horkheimer used in their essay, among them “amusement” and whatever is not amusement; “purveyors” of culture and “the proletariat,” or what they also call “the mass;” and “business” which emerges as an operating principle eclipsing its opposite, “expression.”

The class wondered what could comprise a desirable, productive position for working within the monolithically bleak, totalitarian circumstances Adorno and Horkheimer described. We dug around in their essay for details of an Eden — a lost, golden past from which we seemed to have been permanently expelled — that included such things as “art,” “truth,” “true language,” “serious music,” “gusto,” and “style” (to list some of the words they gave to what the Culture Industry destroyed). We all felt the bleakness and totality of their essay was impressive but, ultimately, disabling.

Marcus drew our attention to aspects of the culture industry that might now be undermined by peer-to-peer, user-made cultural work. Adorno and Horkheimer describe “few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points,” a circumstance that is changed today. Marcus passed out statistics showing 26.6 million blogs on a growth curve turning exponentially upward. Philip, playing devil’s advocate, wondered aloud if anyone reads these blogs.

Colin reminded us that the prison Adorno and Horkheimer describe is constituted by a culture industry that invites us into repetitive, isolating relations within which we can never conceive of ourselves as subjects in social solidarity with other subjects; we glue our faces to the tube(s) and go to sleep happy. If indeed the path out of this prison is to create relations that connect us as subjects (that is, as individual people) in solidarity with other subjects, the radical democratization of production — no longer three channels; now 26.6 million blogs — might not mean much. Today we isolate ourselves within our own production, just as muffled and removed from the subjectivity of others, just as unable to shape social solidarity. In essence, the industrial efforts of the culture industry have been replaced by a pervasive cottage industry in which we produce our own prisons.

Eliding many important parts of the evening’s discussion, we closed on an optimistic note about the importance of reading and listening. The radical act now is to listen, to pay attention. Plenty is being said, but when it arrives in the ears and minds of peers — of other subjects — it becomes the site of something quite explosive, a node of social solidarity. If Adorno and Horkheimer are right that “the might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds,” maybe it is possible for us to recover that space as a site of play and inter-subjectivity.

Finally, will we work together on a gathering of people? Please use the comments section of this blog entry to make your proposals. Or e-mail all of us.

Please read the excerpt from Raymond Williams’s winningly small and pragmatic book, Communication, to see what another kind of Marxist does in the face of the same conditions that compelled Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s essay. Beth will provide an introduction to the book for us, and the rest of you should be ready to point us toward an especially wonderful line or passage either in the Adorno/Horkheimer text or in Williams’s. I will — yes really and actually — go around the table and ask each one of you to read us your selection. Next class is Monday November 27. See you there.