underground women (part 1)

the paper that i was writing was so difficult in part because it has nothing to do with my current work. it was a bit of a fossil from my ma. the person it was about, however, was a fairly interesting woman, so i'm glad that i did finally finish it.





her name was ethel mairet, and she was an early twentieth century british handweaver. that doesn't make her sound like the most interesting person on earth, and i have to admit that i liked her at least in part because she was a no-apologies crotchety old bag who liked her dogs and her cats more than the people around her. in any case, she ran a weaving workshop for some time, was briefly married to ananda coomaraswamy, who is himself a fascinating case study, she helped to teach gandhi how to weave, she traveled all over, married a second man 15 years her junior, divorced him, and spent most of her time at a loom simultaneously griping and weaving. in any case, i liked her because her story completely upsets the new categories of art history - she had an interracial marriage, but was liberally racist, she was middle class but liked to pretend she wasn't, a feminist and submissive wife - in other words a category stumper, a boundary blurrer.





the one friend she was able to maintain was marianne straub, herself a weaver, though she trained more in the technology of weaving than in the use of wool and colour. straub was eventually responsible for some of the weavings used as fabrics in the london underground, which was, at least for the first three quarters of the twentieth century a beacon for modern british art in a way that blurred boundaries of its own - craft, design, high art. it would make an interesting case study for the subversion of the white cube space of the gallery....





...the idea of hand-designed work that would then be taken up by industry and mass-manufactured was the goal of both ethel mairet and marianne straub. they both saw it as a way of controlling capitalism, of adding a human element to the disembodied industry of textile production. neither, of course, saw the current move of textile production to sweat shops and offshore free trade zones, though both would have been horrified but probably not surprised at the complete separation of production and consumption (mairet actually predicted such an outcome during her travels with coomaraswamy in sri lanka where british imperial pressure was moving textile production from a community craft to a factory-based system of production).





neither of course did mairet or straub predict the links between computer coding and weaving - the binary code of programming actually follows the logic of weaving, visible, i think, in some of these weavings.





in terms of the tube as a moving gallery, the map of the london underground might be a case in point.





designed by henry beck, it's actually based on an electric circuit diagram, abandoning scale and geographic convention in a diagrammatic outline that actually inspired a whole series of other art works, like scott patterson's great bear (actually in the saatchi collection),





of course a geographically accurate map had to be made...





and the following rather lovely tale of the moquette seating on the london underground, borrowed from taxloss at this isn't london:





""Moquette" is the robust, deep-pile material used to cover the seats on the London Underground and on London buses.
For many years these seats were simple wooden benches. When the decision was made to upgrade to padded seats, the Royal Geographical Society despatched explorers to points throughout the British Empire to find a material tough enough to withstand the rears of thousands of Londoners.
The breakthrough was made by Sir Magnus Larchwood in south-west Africa. In 1923 he discovered a species called the moquette (a relation of the meerkat) that had checked fur in a variety of striking colours, notably orange, purple, blue and brown. A trade in the moquette was set up and Tubes were furbished with their hides.
Sadly, such was the demand for moquette skins that the native population quickly dwindled. The ranks of this noble beast were further eroded after the second world war when they fell prey to Wrigley's Disease, a malady spread by discarded chewing gum. The last moquette died in captivity at the Royal College of Fashion in 1974 during a desperate attempt to equip the new Jubilee Line. "





in actual fact, it was something more like this:

"Following the formation of the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933, Frank Pick, the charismatic vice chairman set about creating a distinctive corporate identity for the new company including commissioning freelance designers to create customised seating fabrics. Pick, now London Transport's Chief Executive and his Publicity Officer, Christian Barman, invited established artists and textile designers to submit their ideas for new seating upholstery. These designers had no specific experience of designing moquette fabrics but Pick wanted to persuade the manufacturers and designers to work together to produce not only hard wearing, but also aesthetically pleasing materials. Their brief was to design fabrics that responded well to artificial light and patterns and which took into account wear and tear and soiling. The first four artists commissioned were Marion Dorn, Norbet Dutton, Enid Marx and Paul Nash and the new moquettes produced were predominately geometric and utterly contemporary – truly cutting edge design overthrowing all the floral patterns previously produced. This tradition has continued today with moquette designs by such textile designers as Marianne Straub and other 70’s, 80’s and 90’s designs still distinctive in every commuter’s memory."

strindberg and helium

i'm desperately trying to finish a paper - hence the complete lack of posts. but in times of paper burn out, there is really nothing better than a little strindberg and helium...

misereeeeeeeeeee...

leftist totalitarianism?

this just came in on the undercurrents listserve:

Capitol bill aims to control ‘leftist’ profs
THE LAW COULD LET STUDENTS SUE FOR UNTOLERATED BELIEFS.

By JAMES VANLANDINGHAM
Alligator Staff Writer

TALLAHASSEE — Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out “leftist totalitarianism” by “dictator professors” in the classrooms of Florida’s universities.

The Academic Freedom Bill of Rights, sponsored by Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, passed 8-to-2 despite strenuous objections from the only two Democrats on the committee.

The bill has two more committees to pass before it can be considered by the full House.

While promoting the bill Tuesday, Baxley said a university education should be more than “one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom,” as part of “a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.”

The bill sets a statewide standard that students cannot be punished for professing beliefs with which their professors disagree. Professors would also be advised to teach alternative “serious academic theories” that may disagree with their personal views.

According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities.

Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule” – for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class – would also be given the right to sue.

“Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,’” Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue.

Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, warned of lawsuits from students enrolled in Holocaust history courses who believe the Holocaust never happened.

Similar suits could be filed by students who don’t believe astronauts landed on the moon, who believe teaching birth control is a sin or even by Shands medical students who refuse to perform blood transfusions and believe prayer is the only way to heal the body, Gelber added.

“This is a horrible step,” he said. “Universities will have to hire lawyers so our curricula can be decided by judges in courtrooms. Professors might have to pay
court costs — even if they win — from their own pockets. This is not an innocent piece of
legislation.”

The staff analysis also warned the bill may shift responsibility for determining whether a student’s freedom has been infringed from the faculty to the courts.

But Baxley brushed off Gelber’s concerns. “Freedom is a dangerous thing, and you might be exposed to things you don’t want to hear,” he said. “Being a businessman, I found out you can be sued for anything. Besides, if students are being persecuted and ridiculed for their beliefs, I think they should be given standing to sue.”

During the committee hearing, Baxley cast opposition to his bill as “leftists” struggling against “mainstream society.” “The critics ridicule me for daring to stand up for students and faculty,” he said, adding that he was called a McCarthyist.

Baxley later said he had a list of students who were discriminated against by professors, but refused to reveal names because he felt they would be persecuted.

Rep. Eleanor Sobel, D-Hollywood, argued universities and the state Board of Governors already have policies in place to protect academic freedom. Moreover, a state law outlining how professors are supposed to teach would encroach on the board’s authority to manage state schools.

“The big hand of state government is going into the universities telling them how to teach,” she said. “This bill is the antithesis of academic freedom.”

But Baxley compared the state’s universities to children, saying the legislature should not give them money without providing “guidance” to their behavior.

“Professors are accountable for what they say or do,” he said. “They’re accountable to the rest of us in society … All of a sudden the faculty think they can do what they want and shut us out. Why is it so unheard of to say the professor shouldn’t be a
dictator and control that room as their totalitarian niche?”

In an interview before the meeting, Baxley said “arrogant, elitist academics are swarming” to oppose the bill, and media reports misrepresented his intentions.

“I expect to be out there on my own pretty far,” he said. “I don’t expect to be part of a team.”

House Bill H-837 can be viewed online at www.flsenate.gov.

************************************************************************************

in a sense, watching what is going on in the states right now is frightening, but in another it has a sort of car-crash fascinating quality. how has the right managed to so powerfully mobilize the language of 1990s identity politics and minority rights?

i've been re-reading brian massumi's parables for the virtual for a reading group, and herein might lie some sort of answer for why the right has been able to mobilize language so much more (a)effectively than the left. massumi suggest a sort of affective resonance that spreads through the use of language and performative movement - actions and words that don't always match, but leave a radical openess into which political interpretation (often controlled by conservative news reports, civil society etc.) can be injected. the following is his description of why ronald reagan managed to be a popular politician in spite of some ... ah ... flaws.

"The last story was of the brain. This one is of the brainless. His name is Ronald Reagan. The story comes from a well-known book of pop-neurophysiology by Oliver Sacks.

Sacks describes watching a televised speech by the 'Great Communicator' in a hospital ward of patients suffering from two kinds of cognitive dysfunction. Some were suffering from global aphasia, which rendered them incapable of understanding words as such. They could nonetheless understand most of what was said, because they compensated by developing extraordinary abilities to read extraverbal cues: inflection, facial expression, and other gesture - body language. Others on the ward were suffering from what is called tonal agnosia, which is the inverse of aphasia. The ability to hear the expressiveness of the voice is lost, and with it goes attention to other extraverbal cues. Language is reduced to its grammatical form and semantic or logical content. Neither group appeared to be Reagan voters. In fact, the speech was universally greeated by howls of laughter and expressions of outrage. The 'Great Communicator' was failing to persuade. To the aphasics, he was functionally illiterate in extra-verbal cuing; his body language struck them as hilariously inept. He was, after all, a recycled bad actor, and an aging one at that. The agnostics were outraged that the man couldn't put together a grammatical sentence or follow a logical line to its conclusion. He came across to them as intellectually impaired. (It must be recalled that this is long before the onset of Reagan's Alzheimer's disease - what does that say about the difference between normality and degeneration?)"

Massumi argues that Reagan politicized "the power of mime" - that in spite of his faltering health, his inadequate ability to give speeches, he was able to offer a wide enough appeal to win two presidential elections. Reagan was able to be an effective leader not in spite of, but because of the disconnect between what he was saying and how he was saying it, because both were held together by the affective timbre of his voice.

"Reagan," writes Massumi "operationalized the virtual in postmodern politics. Alone, he was nothing approaching an ideologue. He was nothing, an idiocy musically coupled with an incoherence. But, that's a bit unfair. He was an incipience. He was unqualified and without content. But, his incipience was prolongued by technologies of image transmission and then relayed by apparatuses such as the family or the church or the school or the chamber of commerce, which in conjunction with the media acted as part of the newvour system of a new and frighteningly reactive body politic. It was on the receivin end that the Reagan incipience was qualified, given content.... That is why Reagan could be so many things to so many people; that is why the majority of the electorate could disagree with him on major issues but still vote for him. Because he was actualized, in their neighborhood, as a movement and a meaning of their selection - or at least selected for them with their acquiescence....

What is of dire interest now, post-Reagan, is the extent to which he contracted into his person operations that might be argued to be endemic to late-capitalism, image- and information-based economied. Think of the image/expression-events in which we bathe. Think interruption. This of the fast cuts of the video-clip or the too-cool TV commercial. Think of the cuts from TV programming to commercials. Thisnk of the cuts across programming and commercials achievable through zapping. Think of the distractedness of television viewing, the constant cuts from the screen to the immediate surroundings, to the viewing context where other actions are performed in fits and starts as attention flits. Think of the joyously incongruous juxtapositions of surfing the Internet. Think of our bombardment by commerical images off the screen, at every step in our daily rounds. Think of the imagistic operation of the consumer object as turnover times decrease as fast as styles can be recycled. Everywhere the cut, the suspense - incipience. Virtuality, perhaps?" (pp. 41-42).

I don't find all of Massumi's writing convincing, but here, I think, there is something. It certainly explains why one of the most common responses I receive when interviewing people is that the left is "whiny," and they "complain too much." By reconstructing language/performance along such radically open lines (i.e. Anne Coulter freely making up lies about Canadian participation in the Vietnam War while wearing an expression of absolute intractibility) the far right has been able to gain a certain validity on very shaky ground (much like the American economy). While I'm not sure that Massumi's explanation is the only one in action, there is something to be said for the links between a burgeoning virtual/capitalist economy and those best able to function within it. In essence then, is there a leftist totalitarianism? Not of the "dictator professor" sort, but of a reliance on outdated methods of communication that cannot make the transition from an economy based on tangible possessions, to one based on intangibles and virtualities? And what might activists, left-wing academics, anarchists, and really anyone left (pun intended) do to counter this?