I am often accused of being an optimist. I write “accused” because I take it as a mistaken characterization. I think it suggests that I am naïve and unrealistic. And as it happens, I don’t think I am naïve or unrealistic, and don’t feel particularly optimistic. I actually have a rather dark view of the human prospect, one of the reasons I am more conservative than many of my friends and colleagues. That said, I do know why people think I am an optimist. It is because I understand my intellectual challenge to be to find the silver lining within the clouds, to try to find ways in which it may be possible (even if unlikely) to avoid the worst. Thus, my study of the politics of small things, which started with the proposition that after 9/11 “it hurts to think,” and also thus, my investigation in my new book of the possibility of “reinventing political culture,” showing that political culture is not only an inheritance that constrains possibility, but also one that provides resources for creativity and change.

In Reinventing Political Culture, I make two moves: I reinvent the concept of political culture and I study the practical project of reinventing political culture in different locations: Central Europe, the Middle East and North America. I plan to use the book to structure a deliberately considered debate early in the new year.  At this year’s end, I thought I would highlight some past posts which examine the power of culture and the way I understand it pitted against the culture of power, which also exemplify the course we have taken this year at Deliberately Considered and a road we will explore next year.

First, there is the link between small things and the power of culture. In a small corner of Damascus we observed people creating an autonomous world for poetry. Clearly the present revolution there is not the result of such activity, though it did anticipate change. But I think such cultural work makes it more likely that the post authoritarian situation will be democratic and liberal.

I am convinced that art as art, rather than art as propaganda is crucial to the power of culture. Quality rather than political purpose, conveying a partisan message, is the fundamental basis of the power of culture. The independent value of cultural work makes it most politically powerful, informing our understanding of the world, helping us see alternatives. This is the case near and far, now and then.

Yet, I know that the instrumental use of cultural quality, wit for example, can be powerful, most clearly revealed in satire. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have helped me survive our maddening times. I became a Daily Show – Colbert Report junkie as a way to maintain my sanity after the re-election of George W. Bush. But Colbert and Stewart’s shows are so powerful because of the excellence of their work itself. Thus a cultural highpoint in television history was Stephen Colbert’s White House Press Corps roast of President George W. Bush (video below). He speaks truth to power, on the cultural grounds of humor. A big surprise is how this humor still is so important during the Obama years.

I think when it comes to the power of culture text is more important than context. But context still can matter. Much of what we say makes sense only when we consider where we say it and with whom. Thus I appreciate the posts by Vince Carducci on Detroit, its art scene and its meaning.

Vince and I disagree about the role of propaganda in art. He thinks, drawing upon his readings of the Situationists, and other radical cultural theorists that all art is one kind of propaganda or another. I think, drawing upon such imaginative writers as Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, that art, when it is art, is not propaganda. I know that I am shaped in my judgment by my intensive experience in the culture of Central Europe, while he is shaped as he is by his experience in his home town, as its troubles intensely reveal  the crisis of global capitalism and its culture. I think that neither of us knows the truth, that our debate opens deliberate consideration of the power of culture, as an alternative to the culture of the powers.

This has been an ongoing debate this year at Deliberately Considered in the posts linked here but in many others. I hope we will continue in the New Year. Do have a happy one. I am not particularly optimistic, but, as Leszek Kolakowski once put it, I “hope against hopelessness.”

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 Project. Guyton objectively and subjectively marks out the territory of his experience over the years of the neighborhood where he grew up.

The objective might be best represented in the form of the polka dot, which Guyton uses to delineate physical space and to unite the public sphere of the street with the private domain of homes long since abandoned.

An example of the subjective is Soles of the Most High, a tree clad with scrap wood on its trunk and festooned with shoes hanging from its crown.

“Shoe trees” have a number of interpretations, from simply banal evidence of practical jokers tossing footwear out of their owners’ reach, to more sinister explanations of gangland territory marking rituals to folklore legends of serial killers using them as trophy displays of their victims. In Guyton’s case the tree takes its inspiration from the artist’s grandfather, Sam Mackey, a descendent of slaves who helped start the Heidelberg Project in 1986 and who had told Guyton of lynching trees from his youth in the rural South where all that passersby could see were the soles of the victims’ shoes dangling overhead. (For more on the visual representation of lynching in Guyton and other contemporary art, see chapter 6 of Dora Apel’s Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob, Rutgers, 2004, which has a detail of Soles of the Most High on its cover.)

Embedded within this apparition is the psychogeographical trace of the exodus that took African Americans from sharecropping peonage in the Jim Crow South to “free” wage-labor in the factories of the Promised Land in the North, a redemption that turned out to be only too short-lived as the sense of terroir established in neighborhoods such as Heidelberg disintegrated under post-Fordist deindustrialization and urban disinvestment, which has ironically opened up vast tracts of abandoned land in Detroit that are fertile grounds for the practice of the art of the commons.

Coming next, part II: Derive and Detournement in the art of the commons.