Ladies Sing the Blues

One of the great experiences of my time in the graduate program in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research was a class I took with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall on representations of race and gender in American culture. One of the key things to come out of that class was the essay "Peter Williams's Black Humor," which was published in the New Art Examiner (November/December 2001). The following essay from that class was published in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, but the link to it no longer works. 

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A fabulist or one of the more flatulent members of the so-called rock-critical establishment might write something to the effect that the blues was born at the crossroads between West Hell and Diddy-Wah-Diddy. A more down-to-earth genealogy is contained in Zora Neale Hurston’s work from the Federal Writers’ Project in Florida. Collected in the volume Go Gator and Muddy the Water, this research into the folklore of the Deep South offers an essential introduction for listening to the music performed by Black women between the two World Wars.

In the title essay, Hurston writes:

Folklore is the boiled-down juice of human living. It does not belong to any special time, place, nor people. No country is so primitive that it has no folklore, and no country has yet become so civilized that no folklore is being made within its boundaries.

Comparing the folk legends, stories and tunes collected in Go Gator with the recordings of blues, jazz and pop artists, such as Memphis Minnie, Victoria Spivey and Ethel Waters, shows how the tropes—i.e., the boiled-down juices—that registered the pains and pleasures of Black life in the South made their way out of highly segregated communities into the mainstream of American culture. In the process, grassroots traditions in the public domain were transformed into copyrighted commercial products, with anonymous work songs, such as “Mule on the Mount,” serving as precursors, in terms of themes, structure and rhythm, for such chart-toppers as Ethel Waters’ “Am I Blue?” of 1929.

The topology of the female blues singer comprises a cultural geography that extends from small-town fairs, tent shows and juke joints to urban vaudeville, cabaret and Broadway revues. Once the music moved off the plantation and out of the bayous and swamps, a process of professionalization ensued. The folk tunes Hurston collected in “The Jacksonville Recordings” are identified as to genre and regional origin only. The compositions of the professional recordings are credited to specific composers. In the cottage industry of the early blues many singer-songwriters can be found, including Ma Rainey, Memphis Minnie and Victoria Spivey. In the more popular genres, as exemplified by Ethel Waters, the division of labor of the culture industry was strictly maintained, with performers and composers serving distinct functions in the production process.

Memphis Minnie is probably closest to the purist’s definition of a country blues singer. She was born in Louisiana in 1897 and came up the Mississippi River to Chicago where she lived until her death in 1973. She typically accompanied herself on a National Steel guitar and performed with the likes of Big Bill Broonzy and Bukka White. By contrast, Victoria Spivey’s work shows more of a jazz influence, especially in terms of its instrumentation, often featuring the classic New Orleans ensemble that includes banjo, tuba, cornet and clarinet that prevailed before Coleman Hawkins established the saxophone as a legitimate jazz instrument. Both singers share an earthiness in terms of suggestive lyrics and naturalistic performance styles, which was not unusual in what were then known as “race” records.

As a “cross-over” artist, Waters’ performances are more refined than either Memphis Minnie’s or Spivey’s in several respects. Among the telling differences is a vocal technique that includes the smooth rolling vibrato of traditional European singing. Another is the use of standard popular music compositions that reflect her access to a broader audience. And another is the presence of large-orchestra accompaniments of well-known leaders such as the Dorsey Brothers and Duke Ellington.

Regardless of the aesthetic hierarchies one may erect, Black women performers of the era may all be gathered under the appellation that Harlem Renaissance philosopher and poet Alain Locke identified in 1925 as “The New Negro.” Moving beyond reactive concepts of race-pride and race-consciousness, The New Negro for Locke “wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings.” In keeping with Locke’s prescription, the bawdy narratives of Black female singers—and the raucous rhythms and tonalities of brothels, saloons, and other social spaces previously hidden from so-called polite society—became openly traded cultural commodities.

From the anonymity of Southern Negro folklore evolved a legion of cultural producers who are still known to us, whose expressions, cathartic and otherwise, established a recognized place in our cultural history. Their emergence constituted an important moment in America in which as Hurston writes in her essay “Art and Such”: “The Negro’s poetical flow of language, his thinking in images and figures, was called to the attention of the outside world.”

Notes on Invisible Man

I was asked by Cary Loren of the Book Beat to write something about Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which was this year's WDET Book Club summer read. It was published on the store's Backroom blog on July 15, 2020.

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At the end of June, Stephen Henderson on Detroit Today announced that this year’s WDET Summer Book Club selection would be Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Published nearly 70 years ago, Invisible Man was Ellison’s first and only novel to appear during his lifetime. (A second, Juneteenth, was published posthumously in 1999, condensed by the executor of Ellison’s literary estate John F. Callahan from some 2000 pages of notes the author had written over a 40-year period; a longer version, titled Three Days Before the Shooting…, was published in 2010.) Invisible Man won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, the first book by a Black author to do so, and it remains relevant to the current day.

Invisible Man traces the story of an unidentified narrator as he journeys from the South of his youth up to Harlem as a young adult and his many, often fantastic encounters along the way, chronicling his quest for an authentic self-identity and thus “visibility” within the consensus—which is to say white, middle class, and heteronormative—culture of midcentury America. Much more than a coming-of-age story, Invisible Man addresses social, political, and cultural issues of race and racial oppression that have confronted African Americans from before the founding of the Republic up to the present. Indeed, the novel’s climatic event reads as if it could have been ripped from yesterday’s headlines covering the Movement for Black Lives.

Yet, Ellison always insisted that Invisible Man was not a “protest” novel along the lines of Richard Wright’s Native Son. Invisible Man eschews any connection with a political ideology—the organization known as the Brotherhood that appears throughout the novel’s second half is a thinly veiled critique of Communism, which Ellison personally rejected, as just another form of exploitation of Blacks ultimately not that far removed from the more obvious types of racial oppression. If anything, Invisible Man is more closely aligned with the individualistic ethos of postwar Existentialism and its precursors, most particularly Fyodor Dostoevsky. (To be sure, in his 1981 introduction to a later edition of the book, Ellison specifically cites Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground as a model with the opening of his book “I am an invisible man” mirroring the Russian classic’s first sentence “I am a sick man.”)

Although hailed by many, including novelist Saul Bellow and critics Irving Howe of the Nation and Orville Prescott of the New York Times, at the time of its publication, Invisible Man was criticized by a later generation of Black scholars for not being revolutionary enough in its emphasis on individual self-actualization as opposed to more clearly aligning itself with the greater struggles of the Black community. Feminists have also criticized the book for its lack of positive female characters and certainly several passages of Invisible Man are jarring to contemporary eyes in that regard. Still, Invisible Man has much to recommend it for contemporary readers, particularly in light of recent events across the country and the world, making it an appropriate, provocative, and inspired choice for this year’s WDET Summer Book Club.

First Tragedy, Then Farce, Then What?

This review was posted on Popmatters on June 29, 2020.

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One of the most often-cited quotations of Karl Marx is a riff on the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel that all world-historical facts and personages appear twice, to which he adds: 'the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce'. This observation first appears in 1852 in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in reference to, in the first place, the tragedy of Napoleon Bonaparte's seizure of absolute power in France in 1799 and, in the second, the farce of his nephew Napoleon III enacting a similar power grab in 1851. However farcical it may have seemed, the point for Marx was to reveal the bourgeoisie's directive, 'that in order to save its purse it must forfeit the crown', that the pursuit of profit rendered all other things moot, including the sovereign legitimacy of government itself.

Noted art historian and critic Hal Foster picks up on the notion to illuminate our current situation under Donald Trump, that:

[M]any American plutocrats regard the trashing of constitutional laws, the scapegoating of immigrants, and the mobilizing of white supremacists as a small price to pay for even more capital concentration through financial deregulation, tax cuts, and corrupt deal-making.

But Foster goes a step further than Marx. In this age of fake news, alternative facts, and the shameless proliferation of what philosopher Harry Frankfurt terms outright 'bullshit', Foster asks what comes next when even farce has been rendered farcical, when no attempt is made to cover up the lies, the self-dealing, and other nefarious deeds? That thought provides the inspiration for the title of Foster's new book What Comes After Farce?: Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle.

The book comprises 18 short texts, the initial iterations of many which first appeared in the London Review of Books, Artforum, and October, the influential journal of contemporary art, criticism, and theory Foster co-edits. Written over the last 15 years, the essays, which Foster terms 'bulletins', explore various issues of and responses to the political culture and cultural politics of the present.

The book is divided into three sections, the first of which considers the uses and abuses of trauma in the wake of September 11. One of the guiding spirits here is German political philosopher Carl Schmitt, known for his analysis in the 1922 book Political Theology of the state of exception, the unforeseen emergency, provided for in Article 48 of the Weimer Constitution, that enables the executive branch to assume sovereign power in order to ensure political and social stability and which Adolf Hitler invoked in suspending democratic authority to establish the Nationalist Socialist government. Embraced by far-right conservatives of the George W. Bush administration under the guise of the 'unitary executive' and the War on Terror, the Schmittian will-to-power has been deployed to great effect by Trump's operatives where emergencies are fabricated via social media, sometimes semi-daily, to provide cover for all manner of appropriations—of capital, of public resources, of human rights, of common decency, and more.

The second section examines ways that neoliberalism—contemporary capitalism's forfeiture of the crown in the interest of securing the purse—has altered what philosopher and critic Arthur C. Danto terms 'the artworld', i.e., the network of institutions (museums, galleries, the market) and agents (curators, gallerists, artists, and yes, art historians and critics) that constitute the field. Possessing a breathtaking erudition that he wears lightly, Foster in a few pages dispatches in turn with the commodification of the art object, the dissolution of the original, the temerity of curation, and the arrogance of architecture. A highlight of this section is the last essay on Chicago-based artist Kerry James Marshall. From a close reading of a single painting, Foster unfurls a magisterial, wide-ranging argument for Marshall's work as a counterpoint to the artworld's diminished state via 'a portal to another way of seeing and being (together)'.

The son of a lawyer, Foster went to private school in Seattle with Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The final section of What Comes After Farce? deals with the brave new world that geeks such as Gates have wrought, the post-human supplanting of 'wetware' with the technics of cybernetics, the artificial intelligence of algorithms, the mechanic vision of surveillance apparatus, and the gamescape vistas of virtual and augmented reality. Starting with the rudimentary programming of the image of the player piano in the fiction of William Gaddis (whose hole-punched scrolls were the forerunners of lines of digital code), Foster moves through progressive iterations of instrumental vision and comprehension whereby human subjectivity has been called into question. The essays in the section consciously interlock, particularly in the discussion of German filmmaker Harud Farocki and his influence on media artist and theorist Hito Steyerl and American geographer-turned-photographer Trevor Paglen.

A counterpoint is offered with the example of installation artist/sculptor Sarah Sze, whose intricate works are composed of actual and fabricated pieces of consumer culture such as safety pins, string, wire, plastic, appropriated photographs, lighting, and other mixed media that complicate the experience of material fact and symbolic representation. The model worlds Sze creates are admittedly utopian, but raise important questions with respect to accepted ways of comprehending the contemporary environment in all its complexity, making them valuable in Foster's estimation.

Foster ends many of the essays in What Comes After Farce? with a series of questions rather than providing hard and fast prescriptions. Having submitted the evidence as he sees it, Foster calls upon the reader to consider their own assumptions and make their own conclusions. The final essay stakes out a position to move past what French philosopher Paul Ricoeur terms 'the hermeneutics of suspicion'—that the representations we encounter, Foster's included, are not telling us the truth—characterizing a lot of criticism, especially of the academic variety.

This open-ended conclusion draws us back to the book's introduction in which Foster, reflecting on the etymology of the word farce, which originally signified the comic interlude of a religious play, describes it as a kind of in-between state, suggesting the possibility of another, perhaps more felicitous time to come, as he intimates in his observations on Marshall and Sze later in the book. That Foster maintains this perspective in light of what he presents in the rest of What Comes After Farce? is indicative of the sensibility typically attributed to Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, namely of a pessimism of the intellect but an optimism of the will. In these seemingly darkest of times, it may just be the best shot we've got.

On Pynchon and Monk for International Book Day

For International Book Day, April 23, 2020, Cary Loren of The Book Beat asked me to do a kind of "Desert Island" thing. I focused on the one book and the one record that I couldn't live without. I want to thank Cary for the opportunity. It was fun. To everyone else, support your local bookstore.

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Because of my writing and research, I don’t get to read much fiction. This even though I have long had the suspicion that I might be smarter if I did. Fiction seems to get at truths that are more deeply felt than the social science I need to read in order to keep up. One exception is Thomas Pynchon. I pretty much read everything he puts out, ridiculously long or thankfully short. I bought the Penguin edition of 1984, published in 2003 to mark George Orwell’s centennial, simply because Pynchon wrote the introduction. (I have to say, though, that in that case I prefer Orwell’s nonfiction, particularly his essays and the classics The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.) 

Pynchon’s masterwork, of course, is his third novel Gravity’s Rainbow, which I have read a number of times since first encountering it in the mid-1970s. Gravity’s Rainbow is for me one of the essential American novels, on the order of The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, On the Road, and Beloved. (To that list I would now add The Overstory by Richard Powers.) Novels that for me come at crucial times in American history, books that seem to capture the spirit of the nation at a turning point, for better or worse. 

If On the Road (which Pynchon cites as a Great American Novel) can be said to mark the birth of postwar counterculture, then Gravity’s Rainbow may be read as heralding its demise. Gravity’s Rainbow registers the rise of the military-industrial complex, which emerged from the ashes of the Second World War, and it presages the ultimate defeat of the Romantic imaginary that was the counterculture's wellspring. (That defeat is more directly addressed in Vineland, which not coincidently is set in 1984, the year Ronald Reagan was reelected, as well as Inherent Vice, the psychedelic-noir whose main character, the drug-addled Doc Sporto, stumbles through the beach communities of LA oblivious to the fact that the sun is setting on the hippie Elysium.) Gravity’s Rainbow is not an uplifting book, but as the critic Richard Poirier wrote, it “caught the inward movements of our time.” It’s a book I can’t imagine not ever having read or living on without.

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I have a fairly respectable record collection—close to 3000 titles combining vinyl and CDs, covering a broad spectrum of genres. But if I had to pick one record that I couldn’t live without, it would have to be Thelonious Monk’s Straight, No Chaser, first released in 1967 on Columbia. It’s one of the first jazz records I ever heard, having checked it out from the Roseville Public Library when I was in junior high and studying with Motown baritone sax player Lanny Austin at Detroit Wayne Music Studio, located at the time on Gratiot near Seven Mile. 

The vinyl pressing I currently play has been in my collection for nearly five decades, since I was a freshman in college. It still sounds great even if it’s showing a few signs of wear. (There is a certain element of the sound that’s attributable to the upgrades in my playback system over the years. While I’m still using the same Pioneer turntable from the 1970s, I’m pushing the sound through a McIntosh tube preamp/solid state amp hook-up to power Mirage bipolar speaker towers at 150 watts a channel at 6 ohms. But that just makes it all the easier to appreciate the performances, which continue to satisfy.)

While signing with Columbia offered Monk a broader audience and a mainstream imprimatur, that catalog, especially the later recordings of which Straight, No Chaser is among the last, was for decades underappreciated. Part of it may have been that for more than a decade Monk worked with the same sax player, Charlie Rouse, whose fame never reached that of Monk’s earlier collaborators—Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, all of whom went on to legendary solo careers. There is also the fact that much of the catalog reworks compositions Monk recorded during his heyday as the High Priest of Bop. Then there’s the fact that Rouse tended to play sharp, which may have annoyed some of the more “refined” listeners. But to my ear, every one of the tracks on Straight, No Chaser is about as perfect as they can be. In addition to the title track, there’s the homage to Duke Ellington, “I Didn’t Know About You,” and the stunning stride-inflected solo rendition of Harold Arlen’s “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.”

In the years since that first listening, I’ve acquired most of the Columbia catalog either on vinyl or CD, as well as recordings from the earliest days on Blue Note, Prestige, and Riverside to the last ones made in the early 1970s and released on Black Lion before Monk stop performing publicly. But Straight, No Chaser is still the one I go to the most.

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For a more in-depth and wackier reflection on Gravity's Rainbow, go to my blogpost on it.

You can also check out my review of Robin D.G. Kelly's biography of Monk at PopMatters.com.

The New Economics of True Wealth: A Review of Plenitude by Juliet B. Schor

Before founding The New School online publication Public Seminar, sociologist Jeffrey C. Goldfarb put out a precursor titled Deliberately Considered. Through Jeff, who was my dissertation advisor, I have contributed to both publications. In thinking about recent reporting on how one of the unintended consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the clearing up of the atmosphere, I recalled Juliet Schor addressing the issue in her 2010 book Plentitude: The New Economics of True Wealth.  I reviewed that book for Deliberately Considered and discovered that I had never published it on my own blog. I'm doing that now. Certain aspects of the argument are indeed prescient. In particular, the way in which community has been foregrounded in the recent pandemic points to how we might enjoy ourselves and each other more by settling for less.

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“Austerity” is a watchword in the media these days in both domestic and international economic news. The recent downturn, the story goes, has meant that governments can no longer sustain entitlement obligations or take on any more debt. So too must citizens reduce their expectations and assume more personal responsibility, accepting less in return.

In her book Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, economist and sociologist Juliet B. Schor presents a different narrative, one that suggests the current environment is an opportunity to live a more satisfactory, which is to say richer, life. She offers a solution to the “work-and-spend” dilemma of modern consumerism she initially described in her 1992 bestseller The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure and continued in the follow up The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need of 1999. Her thesis rests on four principles: freeing up time by reducing work hours outside the home, shifting that free time to more self-provisioning, developing low cost, low impact but high satisfaction consumption, and reinvesting in community and other forms of social capital.

Why “Business As Usual” No Longer Works

One of Schor’s main assertions is that we must find another way to define wealth and well-being because, in a phrase, there is no alternative. The supposedly endless cycle of material expansion that fueled economic growth as part of what historian Lizabeth Cohen calls the “consumers’ republic” of the postwar era has been exhausted in America at least. Double-digit unemployment, evaporating home equity, and eroding pension balances have taken the gloss off the consumer spending that accounted for between two-thirds and 70 percent of the US economy in recent years.

But more than that, business as usual (or as Schor refers to it “BAU”) has run into another, less malleable barrier: the environment. Mainstream economics has by and large failed to account for the environmental effects (so-called externalities) of growth, a charge many progressives will no doubt find familiar. In particular, Schor debunks the Environmental Kuznets Curve that projects a bell-shaped ratio of economics to environment, that poor nations pollute until they reach a certain level of wealth, which they then use to buy ecological amelioration. The math has never worked in reality, Schor asserts, as every scientifically accepted measure of environmental degradation continues to rise, threatening impending disaster.

Whether anyone not already attuned to Schor’s sensibility will be persuaded by “Plenitude” is debatable. Going back to the Progressive Era, “the good life” in America has been defined by the potential of an unlimited horizon of material comfort, a central ideological construct of modernity that is still hegemonic despite the strains of recent contradictions. Even those who embrace choices such as conscientious consumption of both the green and blue varieties may not be able to picture themselves canning vegetables and living in DIY yurts, two of Schor’s examples of the new economics of plenitude (which seem like very old-fashioned economics to me).

Indeed, the fundamentals of plenitude are largely compatible with austerity. Working less and therefore spending less seem to go hand in hand in either scenario, and we must take it on faith that because they are of our own choosing we will somehow enjoy them more. Of the four principles, the reactivation of community seems to be the most compelling. And to give Schor her due, many of the tactics of plenitude she describes are being practiced in local communities, such as Detroit and other inner cities, that have been abandoned by consumer society and left to their own devices. In that regard, “plenitude” may be in store for us all.

To the Vector the Spoils

Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? is a sequel to McKenzie Wark’s highly regarded 2004 book A Hacker Manifesto. Like its predecessor, Capital Is Dead surveys the mental, social, and physical environment in which the means of economic accumulation and thus power have radically shifted, in which value no longer resides in owning the means of production but in controlling flows of information. Wark picks up the narrative begun in A Hacker Manifesto in which conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie has been superseded by the domination of the hacker (creators of new concepts and connections) by the vectoralist (so named for their control of the networks through which information flows in space and time). The latter not only capture the physical output of the former’s labor, but appropriate their very being, as well. And it isn’t just workers who are being subordinated, it’s traditional industrialists, too—Facebook has a market value of some $550 billion, nearly 10 times that of General Motors, with a fraction of the employees and virtually none of the infrastructure.

Coming a decade and a half after A Hacker Manifesto, in a brave new world dominated by platforms such as Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb, and marked by anxiety in the Age of the Anthropocene, Capital Is Dead eschews digital utopianism for a sense of urgency that recognizes things have gotten serious. An important part of the book is its critique of what Wark terms ‘genteel’ Marxism, the truly academic ruminations, emerging out of the 1970s with the failure of the New Left, of often-tenured ‘radicals’ ensconced in university comparative literature, philosophy, and cultural studies departments, or what she has time and again referred to as ‘hypo-critical theory’. Instead, Wark offers ‘four cheers for vulgarity’ (the vulgar always goes a step too far) that originates not just from below but from ‘below the below’. Here Wark follows John Bellamy Foster, who in Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature and other books, argues that the error of Western Marxism of the genteel variety has been its focus on dialectics to the detriment of consideration of the material. Like Foster, Wark retrieves the lineage of left materialists, such as mid-20th-century biologist Joseph Needham and contemporary science and technology scholar Donna Haraway, who have embraced the science that critical theorists have rejected. This work is summarily recounted in Capital Is Dead but gone into greater depth in Wark’s earlier book, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene.

A major question is that of the book’s title: In what way can we say that capital is dead, especially in light of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the aftermath of which British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once proclaimed that ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalism? Wark’s answer is to engage in a thought experiment in which she reviews the various modifiers that have been appended to the word capitalism—‘disaster’, ‘neoliberal’, ‘postfordist’, ‘necro’, ‘communicative’, ‘surveillance’, ‘platform’, et. al—terms that take capitalism as an eternal concept, or perhaps more accurately as a kind of undead. (In fact, ‘zombie’ is yet another modifier appended to the concept of capitalism in recent times.) Wark takes a flamethrower to these ideas through a reading of Marx that burns away the metaphors of phantasmagorical fetishes, such as the commodity form, the spectacle, and false consciousness, that have occupied much critical theory to date in order to get down to what is generally referred to as the ‘base’, although not the one typically taken as situated in the economic means of production but instead the one at the root of what Marx in the less-often read Volume III of Capital refers to as the ‘irreparable rift’ in what he terms ‘the universal metabolism’ of nature.

The ‘metabolic rift’, as it’s come to be known among ecotheorists, is Marx’s premise that humankind’s original disruption, to use the term in its contemporary business sense, is the extraction of the Earth’s organic and inorganic resources for circulation in closed systems that don’t reconnect with their point of origin, AKA the linear economy of make, use, dispose. The metabolic rift widened with the agricultural revolutions of 19th century that drove the need for artificial fertilizers to forestall soil depletion. Advances in agricultural productivity at the time also released cadres of labor to fuel the growth of industrialization and urbanization, further widening the rift. For Wark, the metabolic rift from feudal agriculture to capitalist manufacturing has now entered a third phase: vectoralist information, the privatization of codes and data of every form, including genetic. The distinction Wark makes of the vectoralist class vs. the capitalist is its power not to actually own anything but to simply extract enormous profit from various flows of value. (Think of platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, or TaskRabbit where the majority of costs are carried by the users on both sides of the equation or Facebook, where users entertain one another and the data derived are then sold to advertisers.)

Wark employs a rhetorical style in Capital is Dead that is clean and direct, belying the erudition upon which it is grounded and in contrast to the aphoristic approach of A Hacker Manifesto. Indeed, Wark notes that Capital is Dead is ‘summing up or maybe concluding things that I have been working on for a long time’. Her forthcoming book Reverse Cowgirl strikes out in a new direction in the form of an autoethnography of the evolution of her identity as a transgender woman. (Full disclosure: Wark served on my dissertation committee when I completed my PhD from the New School for Social Research.)

When it first came out, a number of reviewers of A Hacker Manifesto (myself included) questioned the dialectic of hacker and vectoralist as potentially obfuscating capitalist relationships that continued to hold sway, if perhaps in a different register. With Capital is Dead, Wark firmly establishes the usefulness of those terms to describe a truly new, more pernicious apparatus of exploitation. Yet I’m still not sure this new relationship means that capital is dead. The tech industry, self-avowedly capitalist to its core, operates on ‘progressive ephemeralization’, a concept originally expressed in R. Buckminister Fuller’s book Nine Chains to the Moon, first published in 1938, where he notes technology’s ability to do ‘more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing’, a fulfillment of the Communist Manifesto where capitalism’s revolutionary power to wash away all things in its relentless search for profit is summed up in the famous phrase: ‘all that is solid melts into air’.

Be that as it may, things do seem to be different now and for a great many they are demonstrably worse. Whatever one calls it, Wark’s attempt to think outside of orthodoxy, to transform the language by which we understand our current moment, commands our attention. 

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This review was posted on Popmatters on January 14, 2020.

Ode to Joy

Recently, artist Mary Fortuna published an album of photographs on Facebook of the retirement party held in 2006 for long-time Detroit News art critic Joy Hakanson Colby. At the time, Nick Sousanis, known these days as author of the award-winning graphic novel Unflattening, ran an online publication called thedetroiter.com. (Since defunct and its content taken offline and archived.) He asked me to write an essay in honor of Joy for thedetroiter.com, which he posted in full on Mary's thread. I had forgotten about it and reading it now 13 years later, it holds up pretty well. I reproduce it here for the record.

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I was honored to be one of the 200 or so members of the Detroit art community who celebrated Joy Hakanson Colby on July 11 at Lola's in Harmony Park, marking her retirement from The Detroit News after serving as art critic there for 60 years. The depth of Colby's impact on the Detroit art scene was evidenced by the mere fact of who showed up to offer her best wishes as she embarks on the next chapter in her life. The gathering was "completely 'A' list" as former Cranbrook sculptor-in-residence Michael Hall put it, as he made a sweeping gesture with his hand from a perch at the crowded bar.

Colby herself was the epitome of the artworld doyenne, accepting the tribute being lavished upon her with an aura of serenity worthy of the Dalai Lama. Dressed in an oriental-style silk jacket of saffron (the Buddhist color of spiritual tranquility), black slacks, and black flats, and a large white flower pinned to her left shoulder, she looked every bit the aesthetic sage as she peered owlishly at well-wishers through her signature oversize-lens glasses. She was unruffled even when Detroit Institute of Arts Director Graham Beal, who started off the speeches, cloddishly said not once but several times that he wasn't mentioned in a recent Metro Times article Colby wrote looking back on her remarkable career. (In fact, there’s a whole paragraph on Beal’s directorship.)

The evening was bittersweet. On the one hand, it was wonderful to have the feeling of community one rarely gets in Detroit these days. Seeing Bob Wilbert, John Piet, Stephen Goodfellow, Tyree Guyton, Niagara, et. al. in the same room was a happily surreal experience of Motor City artworlds colliding. Add to that collectors Gil and Lila Silverman, Frank and Shirley Piku, and Marc Schwartz, plus the blast-from-the-past of erstwhile Xochipilli Gallery Director Mary Wright coming out of hiding to take her place alongside one-time Birmingham neighbors Ray Fleming, Susanne Hilberry, and Corrine Lemberg. Then there was the younger set, DetroitArtsBlogger Ann Gordon and Metro Times Arts Editor Rebecca Mazzei. Also significant was the presence of people like Lester Johnson, Gilda Snowden, and Anita Bates, a testament to Colby's leadership, with her coverage of artists of color, in working to heal the near mortal wound racism has inflicted on Detroit.

And yet on the other hand, there was the underlying anxiety over an era coming to an end and what that might portend for those left in the bleak aftermath. (And that's before factoring in that Dick Cheney still runs the country.) In the last paragraph of her Metro Times article, Colby grimly, but no doubt accurately, observes that no one is ever again likely to have the opportunity to do what she's done during her time covering the art scene in Detroit. The Detroit News has a listing on JournalismJobs.com soliciting for a "fine arts writer," but that person will cover classical music, theater, dance, and opera in addition to the visual arts. Setting aside the implicit elitism built into that beat (something Colby herself certainly wouldn't countenance), it means that there won't be the kind of in-depth coverage of the art scene as in years gone by.

This is indeed a tragedy. I remember being a teenager in a working-class suburb of Detroit, picking up my family's copy of The News one Sunday, and seeing a huge spread about a group of artists who lived and worked someplace near downtown called the Cass Corridor. Through adolescent eyes I got a glimpse of the fact that art wasn't necessarily something old and fragile to be preserved in some musty museum and worshipped from behind a velvet rope. It was something the people in those photos, who lived in my very own town, actually did, probably even as I was sitting there reading about them. Even more important, it was something that I—traumatized as I was by having seen Fredrick Edwin Church's Cotapaxi a few years earlier and thinking I could never paint like that and should just give up now—could see myself doing. What are the chances of that happening to some other budding young talent with the flimsy "lifestyle" section of today's paper, filled as it is with celebrity gossip and reviews of video games?

To be fair, this isn't just Detroit's problem. All around the country, newspapers are cutting back local coverage of the visual arts, of all of the arts for that matter, in pursuit of higher profits squeezed from cost-cutting measures that include spreading newsroom staff (known to bean counters as "full-time equivalents" or FTEs) as thinly as possible. It's simply more economical to own a chain of newspapers and drop articles from around the network into the various "newsholes" (those pesky empty spaces between the ads). That's also why cultural commodities like CDs and DVDs, TV programs, and movies, which are nationally distributed, are more likely to be covered than local art shows. All the same, it's ironic because local art shows are something local media by default have an exclusive on—it's damned unlikely anyone is coming from New York or LA to review Douglas Semivan's upcoming show at Madonna University in Livonia, no matter how good it might be.

It's also important to recognize that the way media are consumed has changed. It's no secret that newspaper circulation has been declining for years, hence the decision to cut staff in an effort to outpace diminishing advertising and subscription revenues. It's also true that the readership demographics of most newspapers are increasingly skewing upward. Although there were a few youngsters at the Colby soiree, most of the people were of the "getting-long-in-the-tooth" persuasion, including me. I'm sure the same holds for the larger community that knows Colby's writing. More and more, younger people are turning to alternative media, like the Internet, to get the information they need. That's not something to be bemoaned so much as accepted and acted upon. (That said I wish to hell someone would show me how to make money at it.)

That's where something like TheDetroiter.com comes in. Right now, it's where the most in-depth coverage of the Detroit art scene is to be found. It's where our community, beleaguered as it is, seems to be converging. While it's entirely fitting that we look back in appreciation at what Joy Colby has done (and it's a lot to be sure), it's just as essential that we look to the future. The best way to honor Colby's legacy is to keep working at that which she so obviously cares about and to move the cause forward by any and all means at hand. And I bet if you were to ask her, she'd be the first to agree.