Mary Gillis: Studio Views

This past February I was asked to write an introduction for an exhibition at Gladden Space, a new gallery in Lansing, of work by the artist Mary Gillis. I first met Mary many years ago when she had a studio near my house in Royal Oak. I acquired a work on paper of Mary's for my office when I was a corporate guy. (The other piece was a print by Richard Serra.) The director of the gallery, Ian Stallings, is a pretty interesting guy, a transplant mostly recently from San Francisco where he had been doing high-end design work and repping artists, as well as creating artworks of his own. It turns out I had met Ian a few months previous at the 10th anniversary gala for the Broad Museum at Michigan State University where he serves as a board member. All-in-all it was a good experience and I am especially happy with how the essay turned out.

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The sociologist Erving Goffman, in his famous study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, distinguishes between what he terms the “front stage” and the “backstage” of our social interactions. The front stage is where we consciously present ourselves to others, especially in our formal, public relationships. The backstage is the zone of the more personal, a place where we may, among other things, prepare for our front stage presentations. A gallery exhibition is a front stage: the work on view has been curated from a larger set of objects and installed to represent a particular point of view, be it to show a unified body of work, the evolution of a process or idea, or an artist’s development over time. "Mary Gillis: Studio Views" gives us a rare glimpse into all of this. The studio is an artist’s backstage, the place where ideas and processes incubate and develop and ultimately take shape in works of art that are intended enter the public domain. A visit to Mary Gillis’s studio offers an opportunity to glimpse the backstage of her creative process. 

Her current studio located on the second floor of an older brick building in a light industrial area south of downtown Lansing with a view of a bend in the Grand River. It is divided into several smaller spaces, some having different elevations. Works from various series, from different periods, and in various stages of completion can be found within proximity of one another. Some of the space is devoted to production, some to storage, and some where Gillis is working out how to present certain works when they are to be exhibited or enter a collection. Amidst the diversity of materials, scale and subject there is a sense of a dialog of elements feeding off one another and thereby informing Mary’s ongoing creative practice. 

In the catalog to a 2018 exhibition entitled, "Metalscapes," at K.OSS Contemporary Art in Detroit, Gillis notes: “My work historically shows a balance of movement versus stasis.” Juxtapositions permeate Mary’s work, between the loose brush work contained within geometrical forms, between abstract and more representational imagery, between paintings and sculptures that combine manufactured elements with expressive handwork. 

True to her penchant for experimentation with various media, in 2016 Mary began using recycled highway guardrail. This unexpected material offered a pronounced sculptural element and with-it surprising opportunities and references. 

In contrast to the exposed brick of much of Mary’s studio is a pristine white wall upon which is a new series that harkens back to the late 1970s when she lived and worked in Venice. The original works were large drawings made by building up layers of pastel and then removing the pigment with an eraser to create skeins of calligraphic gestures. 

“The Venice series of drawings on paper, were influenced by the movement of the surrounding waters of Venice, and the exuberance of my 25-year-old self-discovery in the luxury of a studio in the Palazzo Grassi situated on the Grand Canal. The drawings evolved into works on canvas, later exhibited at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York.” – Mary Gillis.

The current iteration reproduces the imagery on aluminum panels, where we see her original gestures on a high-tech substrate, the personal touch with the manufactured product. 

Blue is an important presence in Mary’s palette, especially in the recent “441” paintings but also across many of other works. On one level, this reflects the environment in which Mary works, with the Grand River within eyeshot of her studio, but also the Great Lakes which have such a major impact on our local consciousness. On another level, the fluid brushwork in the paintings, contained as they are in horizontal bands, registers a broader recognition of the nature/culture divide, juxtaposing the desire to impose order on seeming chaos, both physically and expressively, concerns that have long occupied the artist. 

An almond-shaped image is found in many of Gillis’s works. This image is often associated with the intersection of overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. The image actually dates back at least two millennia to Euclidean geometry, and perhaps even earlier to Pythagoras, where it is known as the ichthys (fish) or in Latin the vesica piscus (fish bladder). (Turned sideways the ichthys is also the “Jesus fish” icon that emerged in the 1970s in charismatic Christianity.) Other associations read the symbol as the dividing cell, the process of one becoming two and the opening through which the lifeworld comes into being. While not necessarily a conscientious reference to these associations, the form resonates along similar lines in Mary’s work that signal emergence, such as the paintings titled Breaking Through and Amphibious.

The form is also evoked in the form of the Valais blacknose sheep that occupies the center of the Mary’s most recent painting Juliet Goes to Italy. Juliet appears isolated on an expanse of ground suggesting the ancient walls of Italy, warm in the undertones and textured with age. The lamb is a favorite image to Mary and she deliberated for months about placing Juliet center stage. 

With this exhibition, a portion of Gillis’s work leaves the backstage of the studio to enter the front stage of the gallery. For the moment, the artist’s work is done. It’s now the public’s turn to take up the conversation.

Richard Serra (1938 - 2024)

Richard Serra at the Detroit Institute of Arts, October 28, 1982. (Photo: Vince Carducci)

RIP sculptor Richard Serra. One of my first pieces as an art writer was on Serra, who had come to the Detroit Institute of Art in the 1980s after they had acquired one of his sculptures, Mozarabe, currently installed in the sculpture garden at College for Creative Studies. I got the assignment and was working at my day job when I got a call at my desk. The voice on the other end said, "This is Richard Serra. Do I know you?" I told him that I was assigned to cover his lecture for Detroit Focus Quarterly, the publication of the nonprofit arts space I was associated with. We agreed to meet at the museum before his lecture where we had a conversation. He invited me to be his guest at the patron dinner being held in conjunction with the lecture. I hadn't been to one of those things at that point and declined, not only out of anxiety but because my grandfather was in the hospital and I needed to see him before visiting hours ended. (Click here for a PDF of the article, and remember I was pretty much just a kid when I wrote it.)

Many years later, when I was living in New York and working on my MA at The New School, I went to his opening at Gagosian Gallery, which was kind of a coming out party for the New York art world after September 11. Serra's show had been postponed as his studio was in the frozen zone of lower Manhattan in the wake of the World Trade Center attack and he was unable to move his sculpture that was supposed to be part of the exhibition. The opening was over the top. There was a cornucopia of food and drink, something New York galleries rarely did especially when it came to the great unwashed. Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg were there as was Gwyneth Paltrow. The artist Alfred Leslie was also having a show in Chelsea a couple of blocks away and he ditched his own opening to attend the Serra event. I literally ran into Julian Schnabel coming out of one of the sculptures. (I made him say "Hi" first 😉) I wrote about the show for Sculpture Magazine (September 2004, pp 72-73), a pretty decent piece of writing if I have to say so myself. (Click here for a PDF of the article.)

I love his work and was fortunate to have one of his prints in my office when I was a corporate exec.

The Street Portraits of Carlos Diaz

Photographer Carlos Diaz approached me a while back about writing something for a show he was mounting at the Detroit Historical Museum of images he took in 1984 during the Detroit Tigers run up to winning that year's World Series Pennant. I've known Carlos for many years, almost back to when he first started teaching at College for Creative Studies 40 years ago. In 1991, I wrote a review for Detroit Focus Quarterly of an installation he did at the Pontiac Creative Art Center called The Unemployed Auto Worker. I also included it in an exhibition I curated that year at Buckham Fine Arts Project in Flint. (The other artists in the show were Robert Bielat and Lynne Avadenka.) I like to rib Carlos about that review as it was initially pitched to Artforum when I was doing reviews from Detroit for them. The review focused on issues of class raised in Carlos's installation, which went against the grain of so much contemporary art of the period that foregrounded identity politics, as it continues to do. The Artforum reviews editor sat on the piece for months until he declared it "stale" and therefore too far past its prime to be published. That seemed like bullshit to me, having waited similar periods for reviews to see the light of day at Artforum, Art in America, and other art magazines I had written for. The editor sidestepped the issue of class in our conversation, but coincidentally my career at Artforum ended after that. (Click here to read the article, which was published in Detroit Focus Quarterly.) At any rate, below is the essay I wrote for the Detroit Historical Museum exhibition, which is on view until November 17, 2024. I thank Carlos for the opportunity to do this piece and for permission to reproduce his work. (All images Ⓒ Carlos Diaz.)

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Carlos Diaz, Residential Parking Lot and Modern Coliseum, Detroit, MI, 1984.

A Professor Emeritus of Photography at College for Creative Studies, Carlos Diaz has focused his lens on the world around him for more than four decades. In addition to a sustained and distinguished career as a practitioner, with many exhibitions and inclusion in museum collections to his name, he has mentored several generations of students onto professional success, many to national acclaim. The photographs in this exhibition were taken in the fall of 1984 when a young Diaz, not long out of graduate school at University of Michigan, obtained his first full-time teaching job and relocated to Hamtramck. The setting for these images was the three home games played by the Detroit Tigers in pursuit of the World Series Championship, which they won. The Tiger baseball season of that year was a galvanizing one for the city, not unlike this past fall and winter with the Detroit Lions nearly clinching the NFC Championship and a first-time trip to the Super Bowl.

An abiding concern for Diaz has been what he terms his “interest in the fluidity of history and memory, the connections between people and place.” The relationship between photography and memory is one often considered in the literature on the medium and with the fortieth anniversary of the Tigers’ triumph, the photographs in this exhibition provide an apt occasion to reflect on the connection.

In talking about his work, Diaz speaks of the moment early on in his development when he first saw the work of Diane Arbus, whose photographs often surveyed the margins of society. With that encounter, he recognized that photography could be more than documentary. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” Arbus once observed, a comment about all that we don’t know about the subject of an image beyond what is visible within the frame. In the mid-1980s, Diaz explored this notion in a series titled “Unknown Landmarks,” where he went around the city with an 8x10 view camera searching locations and taking time to frame and consciously photograph otherwise mundane locations to question what might constitute the significant places and events we choose to remember, and more important those that are chosen to be memorialized from an official perspective.

One of those images, Residential Parking Lot and Modern Coliseum, Detroit, MI, 1984, is in this exhibition. It depicts Tiger Stadium just visible behind a commercial building in the background, with an alleyway between two Corktown houses in the foreground leading the eye to it. It is significant that Diaz used the medieval Latin spelling of “colosseum” in the title, connecting the now-gone ballpark in Detroit with the famous ruin in ancient Rome. The image evokes memories of spectacles – past and present – that have always been part of the public consciousness, fables of legendary contestants, victories and defeats, and the joys and disappointments of spectators, and the ultimate transience of those events and experiences, destined to be replayed again and again in different forms and different places and times.

Street photography, the genre of which Diaz’s 1984 Tigers World Series portraits are a part, seeks to capture chance encounters, typically in public places, rendered as “perfect moments.” It differs from documentary photography, which often operates with a predetermined message as in Jacob Riis’s late 19th-century photographs of the squalid conditions of the inhabitants of tenements in New York City in How the Other Half Lives. It is similarly distinct from photojournalism, which also tends to work in public places but with the intent of capturing perfect moments in the form of newsworthy events. For photojournalism, a perfect moment in October 1984 was Tigers right fielder Kirk Gibson swatting his World Series clinching home run in game 5. And yet, street photography can never be entirely free of the medium’s traditional documentary foundation as what Susan Sontag, in her famous book On Photography, terms “a trace, something stenciled directly off the real.”

In Diaz’s street photographs, it’s often the incidental that constitutes the perfect moment, details that evoke collective memory that may or may not have become part of “official” history. In a photograph in which the ballpark figures prominently, there is a billboard on the right promoting radio personality Dick Purtan, who was once one of America’s top on-air celebrities and who just a few years before had moved from his longtime spot in AM radio to the easy-listening format of “Cozy FM.” Still living, Purtan retired from the public airwaves in 2010. To the left is an ad for the Detroit People Mover, which had begun construction the year before and began service in 1987. Rendered idealistically in the ad, the Detroit People Mover promised to be a solution, if admittedly modest, to the city’s public transit woes, still yet to be satisfactorily resolved.

Carlos Diaz, Cap, Button, and Bumper Sticker Vendor, Detroit Tigers Stadium, 1984 World Series, Detroit, MI, 1984.

A major aspect of the moment captured by Diaz’s World Series photographs is the carnivalesque atmosphere that surrounded the ballpark on game days, when the intersection of Michigan and Trumbull and the surrounding neighborhoods bustled with activity. Conspicuous among the people Diaz photographed are vendors hawking their wares, including popcorn, peanuts, and other food items at prices that were likely lower than similar items available inside the ballpark, as well as a variety of Tigers-branded merchandise, all of it undoubtedly unauthorized by the team’s management. There is a photograph that focuses on a makeshift parking lot, one of many that would pop up for home games, providing locals an opportunity to take in a little cash off sports fans on their way to the stadium visible in the background. These images reflect a spirit of do-it-yourself entrepreneurialism that once ruled on the streets around the stadium.

Carlos Diaz, Detroit Tigers Fan, 1984.

And then there are the fans. A notable image captures a fan blowing a hunting horn and wearing a batting helmet; he holds up a makeshift placard that reads “Trammel, Morris, MVPs” with another, “Tigers Win Debate,” strapped around his neck. (Tigers shortstop Alan Trammel and pitcher Jack Morris were inducted together into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2018.) Another depicts a crew of three self-assured adolescent boys striking a pose, arms folded, looking straight into the camera, wearing matching caps with “The A-Team” printed across the crown.

In this age of the ubiquitous selfie, the perfect moment appears to be not an appreciation of an event but the tagging of one’s presence for which the event serves merely as a backdrop. With this series of photographs, Carlos Diaz turned his camera away from himself to bear witness to some perfect moments of a few glory days gone by.

Shane MacGowan (1957-2023)

Shane MacGowan, Moscow, 2010 (Image: Redageg, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Shane MacGowan, genius bard of Éire, has died at the age of 65. When my daughter was an undergrad at U-M, I took her to see the Pogues. MacGowan passed out after the third song and the band carried on nonetheless. Not long after that show, the band got together and kicked MacGowan out. He later did a couple of solo records, the first of which, The Snake, I reviewed for New Art Examiner. Below is the text of that review, published in the November 1995 issue. Go raibh suaimhneas síoraí air ("Eternal peace be upon him.")

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The Snake

Shane MacGowan and the Popes

ZTT/Warner Bros Records, 1994

 

Reviewed by: Vincent Carducci

New Art Examiner, November 1995 

 

On a tour of North America several years back, Dublin poet Michael O'Siadhail spoke of what he termed the "mythic homeland" of the Irish. Drawn in images from the western provinces—craggy, windswept coast­lines and dewy, bucolic farmlands—this pastoral dissimulates the harsher realities of present-day Ireland: a nation struggling to maintain its identity in the face of the hegemony of the European Economic Community; a place of political "troubles" in its war-­torn north and economic impover­ishment in its urbanized east.

Both at home and abroad, the Irish have served for centuries as the orig­inal Other of the Anglo-Saxon; and the stereotypes with (dis)respect to them—profligacy, drunkenness, bel­ligerence, etc.—have permeated the master narrative of the English-speaking peoples. Following a logic similar to that of critic Brian O'Doherty, who as an artist assumed the identity Patrick Ireland to rebuke WASP prejudice and protest British occupation in Ulster, several musicians of Irish descent formed a group they called Pogue Mahone (Gaelic for "kiss my arse"), which embraced a semiotics born of prejudice as their political riposte. The Pogues, as they came to be known, and in particular frontman Shane MacGowan, spliced elements of the Gaelic tradition onto the present in order to deconstruct the banality of bourgeois refinement and register a counterhistory of life at the margins of the Empire.

 

With this new disc, MacGowan indisputably establishes who was the driving force of the Pogues' project. Finally given the boot by other members of the band because of his inability to adapt to the stric­tures of the concert-hall grind, MacGowan returns—not in recovery, never having been in denial, which is to say about as close to existential authenticity as it gets—with a new motley crew (including Sinead O'Con­nor and Johnny Depp) to continue reconfiguring the mythic homeland of the Gael in the Postmodern world.

 

As with his previous recordings, MacGowan eclectically fashions old and new, original and appropriated, into a palimpsest of sound. Selections on The Snake from the Irish folk tradition include the paean to drink "Nancy Whiskey" and rebel songs "Roddy McCorley" and "The Rising of the Moon." The originals and a cover of "Her Father Didn't Like Me Anyway" further reveal what Jean-Francois Lyotard terms the "minor narratives" of the disenfranchised and the demimonde. 

 

With a rockier feel than earlier efforts, brought about by a more prominent use of electric guitar and full drum kit, The Snake celebrates MacGowan as an exemplary "autochthon" (defined by Deleuze and Guattari as "the native who can speak to the experience as lived"), cussing and fighting, guzzling poitín, and clinging firmly to the Auld Sod against the impending tide of deracination of the self, threatened by an increasingly mobile and elusive global elite, which administers its new power from nodes on the Information Superhighway.

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LL Bean Double-Coding

I got the new LL Bean Summer Men's catalog in the mail recently and had to do a double take. At a quick glance, it appeared to portray an interracial gay couple holding hands and walking their dog on the beach. A closer look showed that the two men were actually walking side by side with their hands appearing to "accidentally" overlap. Ironically, Leon Leonwood Bean's granddaughter Linda Lorraine Bean is a virulent anti-LGBTQ-rights activist, having used her inheritance and political influence to support campaigns to overturn laws that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination based on gender and/or sexual orientation. Love the tag line: "Feel Great Out There"

Grace Lee Boggs's Next American Revolution

In 2011, I wrote of review of Grace Lee Boggs's book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, for the current events blog Deliberately Considered, published by my New School dissertation advisor Jeffrey Goldfarb. The blog is no longer active, having morphed into the New School e-pub Public Seminar, which Jeff also founded. I have been co-teaching a class at University of Michigan titled "The Egalitarian Metropolis," which uses Detroit as a case study as part of an urban humanities project. As one might imagine, Grace is an important thinker whose work is relevant to our discussions. The book was published before the 2013 Detroit bankruptcy and the city's subsequent recuperation under the reinvigorated forces of capital. But I wanted to reproduce my review, with a couple of minor corrections, for the record. (Click here to read the original post on Deliberately Considered.) I also reproduce a video of Grace in conversation with world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein, which took place in 2010 at the US Social Forum in Detroit.

Grace Lee Boggs has taken part in just about every progressive movement in modern America – civil rights, labor organizing, women’s rights, global justice, and more. At 95 and now often confined to a wheel chair, the Detroit-based activist and visionary shows no signs of slowing down, at least intellectually. Her new book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century sets out her ideas for making real that other world the slogans tell us is possible. Indeed, based on her experience as recounted in her book, that world is already happening and in some of the most seemingly unlikely of places.

Along with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, Boggs was a founder of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a theoretical perspective within the American left that in the 1940s identified the Soviet Union under Stalin as constituting an example of state capitalism, i.e., a system in which the state functions in essence like a gigantic corporation, therefore keeping conventional capitalist relations of production and labor alienation intact. (By contrast, the then prevailing Trotskyite view labeled it a “bureaucratic collective,” a new form of political economic organization that while not purely capitalist was not strictly speaking socialist either.) The Johnson-Forest Tendency is also identified with the emergence of Marxist humanism, which takes its inspiration from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, several essays of which Boggs, who holds a PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr, was among the first to translate into English. Today the bottom-up orientation of the Johnsonite view lives on most closely in autonomism. And indeed, autonomist leading light Antonio Negri’s co-author Michael Hardt blurbed the book’s dust jacket as did Robin D. G. Kelly and Immanuel Wallerstein.

Boggs, the daughter of early twentieth-century Chinese immigrants, begins by setting out the problem and the opportunity for those of us living in the end times, that is, in the wake of the Apocalypse of the modern capitalist world-system that was the 2008 economic meltdown. And there are arguably few better places in the Western world from which to view the devastation than postindustrial Detroit. Yet, Boggs argues, “the D,” as it is known especially to the young folk now that the “motor” of the Motor City has run out of gas, isn’t a site of despair but of hope.

From the abandoned zones of modernity new forms of life have sprung up: urban farming in the shadows of factory ruins, a system of solidarity economics where big box retailers fear to tread, and grassroots arts movements that stress community participation and the development of a new image ecology in place of the ideological emptiness of solipsistic modernist aesthetics. All of this activity is informed by what Ezio Manzini of the international consortium Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) calls “cosmopolitan localism.”

“Living in the margins of the postindustrial capitalist order, we in Detroit are faced with a stark choice of how to devote ourselves to struggle,” Boggs writes. Rather than remediate a deteriorating system, Boggs sets out ideas for starting anew. In addition to local supply chains of food and other goods and services, a radical rethinking of education is in order. The system currently in place is obsolete, she asserts, having been designed to train young people to become willing cogs in a social, economic, and political machine that no longer functions. Taking a cue from one of her philosophical influences, John Dewey, Boggs proposes an experience-based pedagogy based on the civil rights movement model of Freedom Schools, put into practice in the form of Detroit Summer, which holds workshops and other participatory educational programs.

Traditional social movement theorists, not to mention cynics, may view all of this as marginal at best. And yet what Boggs is talking about is essentially a new form of post-party politics. Given the current state of the union, it’s an idea well worth considering.

 

Grace Lee Boggs and Immanuel Wallerstein in conversation - 2010 from Moving Images on Vimeo.

Fuel for Thought: Climate Change as Class War

The Orroral Valley Fire, Australia, January 2020 (Photo: Nick D, CC BY-SA 4.0)

 

I was asked by the Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America to review this book on climate change by Syracuse University geographer and Jacobin contributor Matt Huber for their publication Detroit Socialist where it first appeared. Below is a edited version of my review, which appeared in the New School journal Public Seminar. (Click here for the Detroit Socialist version and here for the one on Public Seminar.)

 

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A recent survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication shows that 72 percent of Americans, believe that climate change is real with an almost equal number concerned that it will harm future generations. While the climate movement finally appears to be winning the war of ideas, it is still losing the battle for securing the planet. After a brief pause due to the global COVID-19 lockdown, carbon emissions are again on the rise, having reached record levels in 2021 according to the International Energy Agency.

 

Syracuse University geographer Matthew Huber traces the origins of the climate crisis and proposes a plan of action in his new book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022). Huber, a frequent contributor to Jacobin and other journals, argues that climate change is first and foremost a class issue that pits the interests of capitalists over everyone and everything else, sacrificing the planetary future in the process. He proposes to mobilize the working class not just in resistance but as the most viable agent of change.

Huber offers a class-based analysis of the ecology, and the ownership of the material means of production, from resource extraction to the centrality of carbon-based fuels in the global industrial complex whose productivity has been progressively leveraged over the past 150 years by electrification. He criticizes what he sees as the underlying assumptions of current environmentalism to set up an agenda for a broadly based working-class approach to meet the challenges of a warming planet.

That capitalism is the primary driver of climate change has been largely acknowledged in recent times among academics and policymakers, as well as some elements of the popular media. Understanding the relationship between capitalism and the climate is thus the first step toward constructing what Huber terms a “proletarian ecology.”

Climate change, or more accurately planetary warming, is inextricably tied to the development of modern capitalism, which has consumed more and more energy to expand its industrial base and pursue greater profit. This is particularly true since the mid-twentieth century in what is termed “The Great Acceleration,” whereby the deleterious effects of capitalist-based growth have become increasingly evident across the planetary environment. The increased emissions from industrial production are at the root of emissions in all other sectors of the capitalist economy—transportation, construction, commercial, residential, etc.—as they depend on industrial products for their capacity to function. Electricity is the primary power source for industrial production, and the US Energy Information Administration estimates that some 60 percent of all electricity is generated from fossil fuels, primarily natural gas and coal.

Control of this production system is in very few private hands, which Huber, following London School of Economics sociologist Leslie Sklair, identifies as “the transnational capitalist class.” Huber devotes Part I of Climate Change as Class War to several of these bad actors and the ways in which the material conditions of the climate are all too often obscured. It is well researched and provides concrete detail to what ecosocialists such as John Bellamy Foster, Ian Angus, and McKenzie Wark, following Karl Marx in volumes I and III of Capital, term the “metabolic rift,” the disconnect between the environment and human, and in particular more radically capitalist, interventions that have interrupted its natural cycles.

Recognizing that the climate crisis has its material foundations in the capitalist system of production, Huber asserts that tackling the problem requires changing how production is organized. That necessitates a struggle for power against the transnational capitalist class who are reaping the rewards of environmental degradation at collective expense. So far, efforts toward that end have met with limited success.

A major impediment, in Huber’s estimation, is the terrain upon which the struggle is being contested. The climate dispute is currently the purview of a professional class of intellectuals, technocrats, and other knowledge workers—the credentialed beneficiaries of postwar meritocracy—who rely on scientific knowledge, technological intervention, and “smart” policy recommendations to carry the day. Among this class, in Huber’s reading, there is the assumption that things will necessarily change for the better if only the “objective, scientific facts” could be properly communicated and accepted and remediating tactics put into place.

The pitfall of that strategy was succinctly summed up by Upton Sinclair more than 100 years ago: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Even more so, when the ability to accumulate immense wealth and power depends on blatantly ignoring facts and getting others to do the same. Communicating climate statistics or attempting to address so-called market failures through mechanisms such as carbon taxes will have only modest, and many would argue insufficient, effects so long as there are substantial financial gains to be made.

Another obstacle is what Huber terms the “carbon guilt” also associated with the professional class. On the one hand, there is the “anxiety of affluence,” the deeply rooted Puritanical reproach of consumer excess in American culture, and on the other the virtue-signaling of what is termed “the ecology of austerity,” the imperative to subsist on less, as summed up in the phrase: “Reduce, reuse, recycle.” This latter directive is particularly insidious in the way its emphasis on individual responsibility and restraint dovetails with neoliberalism, which emerged as part of the capitalist attack on workers and the welfare state coming out of the 1960s and into the present.

Furthermore, austerity ecology has little resonance among much of the working class, which during the past half-century has seen their share of the wealth from increased productivity stagnate and even erode while the social safety net has simultaneously been pulled out from under them. From that perspective, it can be argued that it is unreasonable to expect those who are living paycheck to paycheck, many of whom are only one major medical expense or household repair bill away from financial crisis, to voluntarily live lower on the food chain if that is even possible.

The remedy Huber prescribes is to mobilize workers with an appeal to material interests that expands upon the purely economic to embrace a broader ecological framework. This stems from Huber’s conception of the working class as those who are alienated not just from the means of industrial production but from the very natural conditions of life itself. This comes straight out of Marx’s notion of estranged labor as articulated in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: “The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labor is realized, in which it is active, from which, and by means of which it produces.” (Emphasis original.) Nature is what capitalism, at its most fundamental level, alienates the worker from and the foundation of Huber’s conception of the proletarian ecology, which includes anyone and everyone who derives their means of survival from their dependence on market forces.

As part of moving forward, it is important not to cast workers as the victims of some zero-sum game, as much of the climate debate, especially from the right, has heretofore done in the false dichotomy of jobs vs. the environment. In this regard, Huber holds up the Green New Deal as a model of how to address the twin objectives of inequality and climate action. He notes that the Green New Deal rejects austerity as a condition of repairing the environment, but instead sets out an agenda for a just transition to a sustainable future through a combination of economic, technological, and social initiatives that would ultimately benefit workers of all stripes.

In setting out his action plan, Huber takes a cue from longtime labor writer Kim Moody, who in On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Haymarket, 2017) identifies the supply chain as a potential chokepoint where workers may organize to disrupt the flow of goods, and thereby profits, as part of a rank-and-file tactic to win their demands and foster solidarity. Huber’s scheme is to move the disruption upstream to where the capacity to produce originates: the electricity grid.

In addition to being the source of much of capitalism’s ability to produce, the electric power industry is fairly well unionized when compared to other sectors of the economy, including renewable energy. It is also already subject in many parts of the country to public oversight when not publicly owned outright. It can thus serve as the cornerstone of a longer-term strategy to socialize and decarbonize the rest of the economy. If a move toward socialization can be achieved in this crucial sector, Huber surmises the potential for working-class power to expand as victories accrue and spread to other sectors.

Huber’s analysis of the links between capitalism and the climate crisis is compelling; he also offers an incisive argument as to the conundrums of current climate politics. However, there are questions that can be raised as to the efficacy of his proposed solution. First is the prospect of mobilizing electric power industry workers against their own union leadership, which like others in the age of diminished union power have sought to maintain relationships with owners in what some would say is a misguided attempt to forestall givebacks and other concessions. Then there is the single-sector strategy, which is liable to be nipped in the bud under what will no doubt be intense opposition from owners, investors, the government, and other powers of the transnational capitalist class. One may also question the prospects of expanding solidarity into the broader working population, which has largely rejected unionization over the past 50 years. (Though there are rumblings of that possibly changing, especially among younger workers, with the recent upsurge in organizing in the “meds and eds,” retail service, and supply chain sectors.)

Beyond what appear to be the unlikely prospects of it ever coming to fruition, one may also look askance with respect to the Green New Deal, as currently conceived, as a model for moving toward a truly just and sustainable future. Most obviously, the Green New Deal is aspirational, setting out a laundry list of desired outcomes without much in the way of concrete details as to how they might be achieved. It is also a capitalist solution to the climate crisis, essentially a neo-Keynesian program that proposes to muster government-led investment in green technologies and social-welfare programs to carry out its agenda within the confines of the market system. Its gesture toward the original New Deal of the 1930s might also be seen as flawed as there is much to suggest that it was the ramping up of production (and the attendant waste) in conducting the Second World War that ultimately “saved” capitalism not New Deal economics, which stumbled in 1937-38.

Climate Change as Class War does offer fuel for thought if only to clarify the irreconcilable conflict between our collective future and capitalism’s scorched-earth drive. Huber is essentially correct that the climate crisis is for all intents and purposes a class war, that of the transnational national capitalist class against the rest of us. There is no doubt that little will change without radical action. And the stakes are high: There is more than a world to win; there is a planet to lose.

Yaris Varoufakis's Novel "Another Now" Presages and Contests Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse

This review of Yaris Varoufakis's speculative novel Another Now was published by PopMatters on November 8, 2021.

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Almost immediately upon Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement on October 28 that his company was adopting the new identity Meta, Greek economist and political activist Yaris Varoufakis fired off a tweet, saying: “Hands off our mέta, our Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation https://metacpc.org/en/, Mr Zuckerberg. You, and your minions wouldn't recognise civilisation even if it hit you with a bargepole.” In Another Now (Melville House, 2021), a work of speculative fiction that is his first novel, Varoufakis offers an alternative vision to what he brands Zuckerberg’s “Technofeudalist” nightmare.

Varoufakis is the author of the best-selling economic analyses Talking to my Daughter About the Economy: or How Capitalism Works -- and How It Fails (Bodley Head, 2017), a history of capitalism, and The Global Minotaur: America, Europe, and the Future of the Global Economy (Zed, 2011), an analysis of the economic system from the 1970s to 2008 crash within which the US occupies a central role, He is also author of Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment (Random House, 2017), a memoir of his six-month crash-and-burn tenure as Greece’s Minister of Finance, attempting to resist the draconian terms being forced upon the country by the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (collectively known as “The Troika”) in 2015 to resolve its public-debt crisis.

In addition to serving on mέta’s Advisory Board, Varoufakis is currently a member of the Hellenic Parliament representing greater Athens. He is also co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), a pan-European progressive political movement, and Progressive International, an organization dedicated to uniting and mobilizing progressive activists and organizations around the world.

Another Now is a thought experiment disguised as a sci-fi narrative that ponders what a society might look like that balanced freedom and equality.

The narrator of the tale, Yango Varo, relates events that took place primarily from 2025-2035 as recorded in the diary of a woman who had recently succumbed to cancer. It concerns three friends, the diary’s author Iris, a radical contrarian living off a bequest from a hereditary peer; Eva, a former Lehman Brothers investment banker turned academic; and Costa, a computer engineer who made one fortune shorting high-tech stocks ahead of the dotcom bust in 2001 and another, even bigger fortune shorting financial services in the run-up to the mortgage-backed derivatives crash of 2008.

At his job, Costa's technological innovations were constantly being shelved by his employers in the interest of extending the life cycle—and revenue streams—of existing, less-effective technologies. Disaffected by this experience and enjoying the autonomy granted to him by his wealth, Costa sets out on a secret project to create a kind of Freedom Machine that would offer users the ability to experience an infinite horizon of pleasure, freedom not only from want but from every boundary one could imagine. The catch: the price of entering the blissful world of the Freedom Machine being that one could never leave it, a price he believed no one would be willing to pay. This refusal, Costa thinks, would be based on a recognition of the ultimate emptiness and futility of unending desire under capitalism.

To protect his project from being stolen by corporate hackers, henceforth known by its technical acronym HALPEVAM (Heuristic ALgorithmic Pleasure and Experiential VAlue Maximizer), Costa creates a security device that inadvertently opens a wormhole into an alternative reality, the “Other Now” of the book’s title. He begins communicating via batch-file messaging technology with someone in Other Now, who is in fact his Other Self, identified as Kosti. The messaging back and forth between Costa and Kosti, which soon brings in Iris and her Other Self Siris, and Eva and her Other Self Eve, provides an opportunity for Varoufakis to lay out how things might work in a world without capitalism, ideas he has put forth elsewhere outside the realm of fiction.

These include direct democracy applied to corporate governance in which each employee receives a single share of an organization’s stock and an equal vote in all decisions. Everyone also has a Personal Capital account from a central bank that has three buckets: an Accumulation fund based on their work income, a Legacy trust fund given by society to all at birth intended for retirement or extreme emergency, and a monthly Dividend from the state derived from a 5 percent tax levied on all gross corporate revenues. These policies emerged from the wreckage of the great disruptions set off by cadres of various techno-rebels in Other Now, which brought an end to capitalism in the wake of the 2008 crash and the point at which it diverged from the Our Now inhabited by Costa, Iris, and Eva, along with the rest of humanity.

The balance of the plot deals with the interactions between Costa, Iris, Eva, and their Others as they confront their existence—their aspirations and their discontents—in their divergent Nows. Other Now is not an unmitigated utopia, it turns out: corporations may have been democratized, capital markets and investment bankers may no longer exist, but patriarchy continues to hold sway. The shared prosperity of Other Now brings with it a renewed social conservatism. Shady characters continue to find ways to game the financial system even if their machinations are quickly uncovered and swiftly dealt with.

In the book’s final pages, the wormhole begins to deteriorate as corporate hackers are getting close to breaching HALPEVAM’s security device. Big Tech’s takeover of HALPEVAM would, of course, result in its total monetization, offering only short-term pleasures in pay-per-view until its customers are completely enmeshed in its experience, the very specter of the Technofeudalist nightmare Varoufakis abhors in Zuckerberg’s notion of the “metaverse.” What’s more, the ability of Our Now users to communicate with their counterparts (it goes without saying for a fee) would likely devastate Other Now, as well.

How the various characters respond to the impending doom is the denouement of Varoufakis’s narrative. In offering a glimpse of how things might be different, Another Now invites us to contemplate possibilities that are not without their challenges, but worth entertaining nonetheless.

 

 

Amy Taubin Interviews Todd Haynes

Todd Haynes's documentary The Velvet Underground screening at Outer Limits Lounge, 21 October 2021

The October 2021 issue of Artforum (which I wrote for in the late 80s/early 90s) has this interview with director Todd Haynes about his documentary on the Velvet Underground by Amy Taubin, critic and one of the early hangers on in the 1960s at Andy Warhol's Factory on Union Square. I loved the film and yes the centrality of Jonas Mekas, to whom the film is dedicated and who I got to meet at a party on the Upper West Side when I lived in New York, is right on. Mekas took Warhol to see a performance by La Monte Young, whose group, Dream Syndicate, at one point included John Cale, a founding member of VU. Young's trance music is said to have inspired Warhol's cinema verite, such as his famous 8-hour film of the Empire State Building. 

I saw Todd Haynes's movie at the Cinema Lamont screening outside in the yard behind the Outer Limits Lounge in Hamtramck, which seemed like an appropriate venue given the underground world the film attempts to capture. Some have criticized the omission of Doug Yule from the film, but I'm OK with it. As Haynes notes in the interview, he wasn't making the standard rock documentary but instead trying to capture the feeling of the avantgarde scene in New York at VU's inception. Yule wasn't part of that, having joined the group after Cale's departure.

Here's the official trailer:

Fear Factor, Revisted: On the 20th Anniversary of September 11

This Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center that set off the 20-year war in Afghanistan (with a side trip to Iraq) from which the United States has theoretically been extricating itself. (Whether we will ever be totally out remains to be seen.) I was living in New York City on September 11 (Brooklyn actually, Carroll Gardens to be exact) while getting my MA in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research. I wrote a first draft of this piece as part of a class I was taking with Christopher Hitchens, who soon after began using the term "Islamofascism" to stake out his position as a "left hawk," ultimately to advocate for regime change with the invasion of Iraq. (For my take on Hitchens, see my PopMatters review of his memoir, Hitch-22.) I updated the essay a couple of years later when Sherry Hendrick asked me for a contribution to Alley Culture AC News. It appeared in volume 6, number 2 in spring 2005 under the title "Fear Factor" and is reprinted below.

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World Trade Center as seen from Brooklyn on 9/11/2001 (Image: Michael Foran, Creative Commons CC-BY-2.0)

Before dinner on September 11, 2001, I walked from my apartment in Carroll Gardens to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights. Still dazed from that morning, I stood at the railing that overlooks the East River with hundreds of men, women, and children, watching the sunset over Manhattan.

It was nearing the end of a picture-perfect autumn day. The air was crisp, the sky a brilliant blue and nearly cloudless. There was nothing to suggest anything amiss but the hole in the New York City skyline where the Twin Towers once stood and from which an enormous stream of dark smoke now issued, billowing over the Brooklyn Bridge seemingly into infinity.

It was almost eight hours since the first tower collapsed; yet papers and other debris still fluttered down from above. A charred document settled beside me; I caught another in my hand moments later. Another came down behind me, and I turned to pick it up.

The first document was a foreign exchange letter between Citibank in New York and Bank of America in San Francisco, setting the currency rate in US dollars for a business deal going down in Australia. The second was a page from the balance sheet of an English automotive supplier, presented in pounds sterling as part of its Lloyd's of London proof of insurance certificate. I recognized these things as the mundane yet essential tools of empire, evidence of the global capitalist network within which New York City is a command center.

The third sheet gave me a chill. Through the scorched-brown tinge, I made out a webpage with information about an orthodontist practicing in New Jersey. Next to the doctor's name was jotted a note to look into whether it was the same person the note's author knew in high school.

Did whoever had written that note get out? I wondered. Did he or she have any idea what was happening at the time of the attack and in its immediate aftermath? What of the family and friends? What were they doing right now? Did they know anything more about the fate of this person whose perhaps last thoughts I held in my hand? In the flash of an instant, the day's global and personal implications crystallized.

Unease turned into dread over the next few days, not because I feared for my life; although, I did change subway cars one time when I noticed a gaunt olive-skinned man with a beard sitting across from me holding a backpack I could swear was ticking.

Rather, it was because the first order of business I heard Congress pick up when it reconvened wasn't to ask what the hell went wrong but to pass legislation protecting the airlines from lawsuits surely to result from lax security that let suicide pilots with box cutters get through undetected.

Even more unnerving was the President, who on TV vowed vengeance on our behalf while exhorting us to max out our credit cards as part of the newly declared War on Terror. But the War on Terror quickly turned into the Reign of Terror as compulsory nationalism replaced independent thought and the USA PATRIOT Act rendered notions like habeas corpus and due process quaint. As the first anniversary of September 11 drew close, Condoleeza Rice, then National Security Advisor, brought tidings of a fearsome new specter – Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud that could do more harm than 19 Jihadists with hijacked planes could ever dream of.

Through it all, the Homeland Security Advisory shifted between Yellow, a significant risk of terrorist attacks, and Orange, a high risk. We were encouraged to be ever vigilant, to take notice of and report any suspicious person, thing, or activity to the authorities.

In 1984, George Orwell writes about a country where perpetual war is used to foster hate and fear, allowing its authoritarian regime to control the domestic population. Is it paranoid to think that a collateral benefit of the Reign of Terror is to keep us in line while providing cover for tax cuts for the rich, giveaways to Big Business, and now perhaps a rollback of the New Deal to the days of the Robber Barons?

On November 3, 2004, I couldn't help noticing the pall that settled over Manhattan as people faced a reality more ominous than the one they awoke to on September 12, 2001 – where, in a strange land called Red State America, they so loved Big Brother they actually re-elected him.

Vince Carducci lives in exile on a small island off the coast of America.

RIP Peter Williams

Peter Williams (1952-2021) Photo: Kathy F. Atkinson

On August 19, we lost one of the great Detroit painters, Peter Williams. He had been in and out of the hospital recently and this time he didn't make it.

I remember meeting Peter when first he came to Detroit. At the time he was doing abstract paintings, kind of in the manner of Sean Scully, and quite frankly I wasn't particularly interested in them. As time wore on and he became increasingly embedded in the city, his work took on a more soul-searching character. He began to question issues of identity, all the while slapping on the pigment with increasing mastery.

My intersection with Peter's work was heightened by a class I took in winter 2001 with cultural critics Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall at the New School for Social Research in New York on representations of race and gender in American culture. One of the books we read was Constance Rourke's American Humor: A Study of the National Character, published in 1931. (It remains a classic and everyone interested in American folkways needs to read it.) In it, Rourke discusses the three archetypes of American humor: the Yankee peddler, the backswoodsman, and the minstrel. 

It was this last archetype that resonated with me in relation to Peter's work. It's important to note that Rourke's understanding of minstrelsy predates its appropriation by white culture particularly after the Civil War. Minstrelsy, in Rourke's view, was originally a subversion, a mechanism for enslaved Blacks to "put Massah on," much like the Cakewalk that made fun of white body carriage only to then be picked up by whites who weren't hip to the dis. I saw the reclamation and reversal of the white minstrel trope to be key to what Peter was up to and my suspicion was confirmed in conversations we had during a solo exhibition he happened to be having at Revolution Gallery. The result was the essay published in the November/December 2001 issue of New Art Examiner titled "Peter Williams's Black Humor." (I have uploaded a scan to Google Drive, which can be viewed here.) 

"Peter Williams's Black Humor" remains one of the best things I have ever written, though the beginning and ending were fucked up by bad edits in part because I was communicating from Brooklyn via fax with NAE literally as the smoke was still billowing over the East River in the wake of September 11. I was thrilled when the next year a reference to the article was contained in the catalog for the 2002 Whitney Biennial in which two of Peter's works appeared.

One of the saddest things about Peter's passing is that he was still on an upward swing. In 2020, he won an Artists' Legacy Foundation Award and more recently a Guggenheim. He also had simultaneous shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Trinosophes, and Paul Kotula Gallery. 

There was some comfort in knowing he was out there in the world, working away (he once claimed to be "hardest working artist in Detroit") and cutting through all the bullshit. I will miss him.

New Woman Behind the Camera

I wrote a review of The New Woman Behind the Camera for PopMatters. The exhibition surveys the work of midcentury women photographers now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and traveling to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. International in scope, the show presents the work of 120 women from 20 countries.

Dawoud Bey's American Project

My review of the 50-year retrospective of the work of photographer Dawoud Bey, who College for Creative Studies awarded an honorary doctorate to a few years back.

"Dawoud Bey's American Project," PopMatters, 19 May, 2021.

PopMatters Best Nonfiction of 2020

In December 2020, PopMatters published a list of the best nonfiction books of the year. Three of the books I reviewed were included in the list. I don't write much, but apparently what I do write seems to get some recognition. Since then, PopMatters moved to WordPress and the links from that roundup appear to be broken. Here are the current links to the reviews:

"Ignorance, Fear, and Democracy in America" on the Library of America's first of three volumes on the work of historian Richard Hofstadter.

Dora Apel's visual culture analysis cum memoir: Calling Memory Into Place.

"First Tragedy, Then Farce, Then What?" on Hal Foster's collection of essays What Comes After Farce?.

Downsizing Democracy

In 2002, I reviewed this book for PopMatters. The book by political scientists Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsburg (no relation to Notorious RBG, of blessed memory) takes note of judicial and executive appointments as the new battleground of partisan politics, given all of the other repressions of the democratic process. Since the publication of this book and my review, that point has only become apparent.

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In the 1970s, feminists rallied to the phrase, "the personal is political." In Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public, Johns Hopkins University political scientists Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg propose the reverse is now true. In an age when a president can be selected by judicial decree rather than popular consent, politics has become personalized. Government no longer operates on behalf of citizens but instead caters to individual "customers" with services geared to the needs of special interests.

This contrasts to the government of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which relied on the active participation of the public. For decades after the nation's founding, there was no professional civil service. The Federal government was staffed through the spoils system while many local jurisdictions used volunteers. Putting together large blocs of voters was the bedrock of political legitimacy. National turnout for presidential elections in the late 1800s, for example, averaged a whopping 80% of eligible voters compared to less than 50% today.

Voter apathy in the present is the product of the public's marginalization by our political leaders, Crenson and Ginsberg maintain. Quite simply, ruling elites don't need and don't want broad-based voter consensus in putting their agendas into action anymore. They now rely more heavily on lobbying and litigation instead. Negative advertising and other smear tactics of recent electoral campaigns are designed to discourage voting by members of the opposition, not rally the support of believers.

The roots of this dilemma date back more than 100 years. In an attempt to rescue government from cronyism and corruption, the Progressives created the civil service system (based on merit rather than patronage) and established regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve Board to oversee commerce and the economy. These moves were supposed to put government under the authority of politically neutral technicians who would act in the public interest rather than by party loyalty. Yet they had the perhaps unintended effect of disengaging the state from its democratic foundation. (If nothing else, old-time machine politics tied leaders directly to their support base, however venal the relationship.)

Further aiding the professionalization of the government bureaucracy were the Revenue Act of 1942 and the Current Tax Payment Act of 1943, which enabled government to expand without direct citizen participation. The first piece of legislation broadened the nation's tax base, doubling the number of eligible taxpayers. The second provided for withholding income tax payments in advance of year-end filing, providing for a more predictable, steady cash flow. Prior to their passage, government relied on revenues raised through various use taxes and debt issues, augmented by the voluntary support of primarily affluent individual taxpayers.

Mobilizing larger voter masses under the New Deal, in response to the economic crisis of the 1930s, also only went so far. Franklin Roosevelt courted blue-collar workers in the North, but he did not challenge the feudal system in the South. Agricultural labor was exempted from minimum wage laws and New Deal management was delegated to the state level, allowing public funds to be kept away from Blacks, to appease the landed aristocracy of the former Confederacy.

When Great Society liberals sought to expand the New Deal coalition by embracing civil rights, the stage was set for the "New Politics" of today. Mobilizing the Black vote pushed many Southerners, including Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, out of the Democratic Party and alienated northern working-class whites. This broke up the left's constituency and shifted the electorate rightward.

In the place of high citizen involvement, New Politics introduced what Crensen and Ginsberg call "interest-group democracy." Public interest law firms, nonprofit think tanks, and other advocacy groups funded by foundation grants, private contributions, and government contracts trade on insider information and peddle influence within the Beltway on behalf of a plethora of constituencies, which may or may not exist in the national body politic. The judiciary and executive branches of government are the primary battlegrounds of these much less public skirmishes. And within the more discreet corridors of power, partisan politics are still being waged.

The government bureaucracy tends to be staffed ideologically according to function. Departments devoted to social welfare (health, education, housing, urban development, the environment, etc.) tend to attract career employees with more liberal leanings. Departments involved with commerce, security, and the military tend to attract more conservative ones. Recent efforts to reduce "entitlements" and their governmental infrastructures have had the bonus effect of solidifying power for conservatives within the government bureaucracy, Crensen and Ginsberg claim.

Another area where partisanship is still at play is in judicial and executive appointments. With more and more policy decisions being made through litigation and lobbying, controlling judges, department heads, regulators, etc. has become all the more important. Approving nominees for these positions has broad implications on the direction of government for a public that for all intents and purposes is being left out of the loop. In the case of the Federal judicial bench, for example, this includes the power to set case law and influence legal decisions for years to come.

What's to be done about this dysfunctional situation? Unfortunately, Crensen and Ginsberg don't give much cause for optimism. The withdrawal of the average citizen from politics cannot be easily reversed. "If citizens are to be roused from apathy to action," they write in the conclusion, "someone in a position to arouse them must have an interest in doing so." But there isn't really anyone in power today whose interests would be served by doing that. The best they can offer is to lift the guilt laid on by moralists that the decline of mass democracy is simply the result of the couch-potato solipsism the nation has supposedly slipped into during the age of Beavis and Butthead.

Still, Downsizing Democracy is an important book. One that anyone wanting to understand the sorry state of the nation these days will want, even if all you can do is read it and weep.