Questions for Brian Holmes

Interview by Tom Vandeputte and Sidsel Meineche Hansen (2015)

We’d like to ask you a series of questions that have to do with knowledge production, experimentation and learning in groups. First, what is your understanding of the crisis of academic institutions, considered in the light of your analysis of neoliberalism? And how do you see the possible role that academic institutions or self-organized forms of inquiry could play in this context?

It’s now obvious that neoliberal entrepreneurialism and the concept of investing in one’s own human capital through education have been the templates for a total makeover of academic institutions. On the one hand, the student becomes a client demanding personalized services in exchange for cash payments (or really, for loan transfers that mortgage his or her future); and on the other, the professor becomes a producer of intellectual property, exercising intellectual activity for a profit in which the university shares, and which soon becomes its raison d’être. After the Occupy movement, and as a part of its fundamental critiques, I retraced the way that this total makeover unfolded in the United States in a text called “Silence=Debt,” which you can easily find on the web. If you read that text to the end I think you’ll start seeing how far down this neoliberal pathway universities in Europe have gone on in the wake of the changes orchestrated by the Bologna Process. You may not have the same tuition levels, or student loan scams, or even the same structural incentives to produce intellectual property; but generally speaking, the old concepts of universal knowledge and maintenance of the democratic public sphere are being eroded, destroyed at the foundations and then cleared away, while some humanistic facade remains floating in the glow of the spectacle society. For the governing logic of the present, knowledge is a pure instrumentality bound to ownership rights, and education is a personal investment that has to cash out in the future. Continue reading →

Workers, Community and the Environment

Compass members Borcila and Holmes at the conference put together by Railroad Workers United, along with Tom Shephard of Southeast Environmental Task Force and Lora Chamberlain of Chi Oil By Rail

Extreme Energy: The Burning Issues

Chicago is the rail hub of North America: a dangerous crossroads in the age of explosive Bakken crude. Every week some forty oil trains come rolling through the city’s most populated neighborhoods, each with an average of a hundred tankers. The tankers are filled in the shale oil fields of North Dakota. They bear the red hazmat placard #1267. Maybe you’ve seen them?

Since the raging fire that destroyed the Canadian town of Lac Mégantic two years ago, we know these bomb trains are a potential catastrophe. And that’s about all we know. Proposed regulations have been gutted by industry lobbies. The explosions have continued, as nearby as Galena, Illinois. But neither the government nor the corporations will provide information about the trains, their routes or their destinations. Nor will they disclose their “worst case scenarios.” Everything that matters is kept strictly secret.

The oil trains are just one symptom of what some people call “the extreme energy economy.” In Chicagoland we directly experience the frenzied rate at which fossil fuels are extracted, transported and burned. Our region is home to three of the biggest refineries of Canadian tar sands oil — Exxon in Joliet, Citgo in Lemont, and BP in East Chicago — brought here through a series of pipeline expansions that have stealthily replaced the controversial Keystone XL. The region is crisscrossed by railcars, barges and trucks carrying petcoke, a highly carcinogenic byproduct of the tar sands oil. How can ordinary people learn to recognize and denounce these energy extremes?

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excerpt from Watersheds

“They say it’s a joke they say it’s a game.” The slogan was launched on the Chicago streets by the group We Charge Genocide, in the middle of a demo demanding reparations for victims of police torture. The folks on the street chanted those words, we hurled them out of our mouths in staccato bursts, while looking round at the passers-by who pretended not to notice. What the chant means is either enigmatic, or it’s painfully obvious. There is a kind of disdain that minimizes a death or a beating or a torture or a life sentence for black people in the name of lawfulness, efficiency, morality and humanist ideals. That kind of disdain has made democracy impossible in the US – and other places too.

Our group, the Compass, allowed two main tracks to run parallel for years. Bioregionalism on the one hand, minority rights and prison solidarity on the other. We were ecologists and social justice people, not the same thing but at the same time. The divide ran less between the members than inside each one, a split in a collective personality. At a meeting in the city of Madison the group decided that the split could be overcome. Political ecology begins when we say “Black Lives Matter.”

Alicia Garza, one of the founders of the movement, puts it like this: “”#BlackLivesMatter doesn’t mean your life isn’t important – it means that black lives, which are seen as without value within white supremacy, are important to your liberation.” Some would say that climate change makes every other issue pale by comparison. But black slavery, or the taking of life as a commercial object, started hundreds of years before the industrial revolution. The poisoning of the planet was built on the way our enlightened societies treat other human beings.

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Reading Michelle Murphy’s “Distributed Reproduction, Chemical Violence, and Latency”

Here is a link to article we read and discussed Sunday Feb 22, 2015.

In this article Murphy describes some of the transgenerational effects of chemicals from petrochemical processing plants along the St Claire River between Sarnia and Detroit. She uses infrastructure as an extensive term to connect industrial chemical production, assisted reproduction, and reproductive injustice. The petrochemical plants can be described as infrastructures for producing materials and fuels that assist normative reproduction, biological and social, babies and culture. The petroleum plants pollute water, soil, and sky with toxic chemicals that detrimentally shape the biological and social reproduction of communities along the river, particularly the Aamjiwnaang First Nation. The sedimentation of the pollution becomes a petrochemical infrastructure chemically shaping and structuring bodies, environments, and ecology.

In this post, I attempt to iterate some of our two hour discussion inspired by the article:

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Fiscal Year 2014 Annual Alternative Report

Chicago Torture Justice Participatory Memorial

read the full report

Dear Colleagues, Comrades, and Collaborators,

This introduction was written the day after the Grand Jury in Missouri failed to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Ferguson resident Michael Brown. Cities across the U.S. are erupting with expressions of raw and powerful emotions. We come together, yet again, in cultural and community centers, park houses and student unions, and other public spaces to talk, teach and feel with each other about the loss of yet another young Black life. Once again, we confront the national insanity of white supremacy and its institutionalization in a system of governance that depends on the uneven distribution of life chances.

Our daily political landscape is often rife with contradiction. The dizzying speed with which these contradictory moments unfold, where gains are often measured against profound loss, can be overwhelming: How do we remain alert to each new set of specifics, while also gaining a better understanding of the structures that penetrate and shape these events, the links between these events and the conditions of ordinary life, and the tactical opportunities each presents to forge new solidarities on the basis of our shared desire to re-make the world from the ground up? How do we respond to emerging events, often framed for us as “crises,” and remain committed to a process of careful and complete analysis of our collective situation? It’s the radical potential of collective praxis, its becomings and openings, that keeps us going. Committing to imagination and engagement seems like the only path away from despair.

This First Annual Alternative IDOC/IDFL report, chronicles work people in Illinois have done in 2014. Our collective labors stopped jail expansion in Urbana, supported people while inside and after release, fought for meaningful legislation to curb increased punishment, organized internationally against police violence, and worked hard to stop people from getting locked up.

By no means is this report exhaustive. Across Illinois many other groups – formal and informal – continue to push back.

To create this report, we asked Illinois based organizations and collectives to submit materials produced for an action, a project, an event, or a campaign in 2014. Every year the IDOC pumps out a report about how successful they are with our tax dollars. This year we want to celebrate our collective work to end our nation’s over reliance on policing, imprisonment and punishment and to acknowledge our shared desire to support people/ourselves inside/after release, to fight for self-determination and community control over the terms of “public safety,” and to forge a future free from the logics of incarceration.

with revolutionary love,

Erica Meiners & Amy Partridge
for P+NAP

Preface

This text was originally commissioned for inclusion in a volume of the Chicago Social Practice History series. Judged to be inadequately convincing in its thesis by series editors, it was axed. Being more of an exercise in genre evasion than in genre definition, the text is certainly fuzzy in applied terminologies.  But the action that took place during the period covered was never about defining a kind of art, at least not from the ground level. It was about struggling to make the city livable. That is what forced so many art workers in Chicago to think outside of conventional forms, and, ironically, what brought consequent outside attention to the many forms of politically engaged work happening in the city. Consider this a contribution to the social history of “social practice” in Chicago rather than to an art history.

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