Good afternoon, beloved —
You’ll recall that a few weeks back I’d made the assumption that you were finding the length of these dispatches irritating, and promised you they’d be shorter in future. Apparently I was wrong. As a group, in so many words, you’ve made it quite clear to me that you prefer the screeds, and so screeds is what you’ll get, as long as I’m able to knock ‘em out. Selah.
A couple of things on my mind this week:
— As many of you know, I’ve long been really encouraged by the convergence of lightweight digital fabrication technologies with so-called open-source construction systems. Though I don’t think I quite understood, until seeing Joseph Grima’s great Adhocracy at the Istanbul Biennale a few years ago, just how many such schemes there were — none of which seem to be compatible with one another — I remain convinced that a mature open building framework will allow untrained people to build useful, ecologically sound structures themselves, quickly, at relatively low cost and with a minimum of energy and waste.
Nurri and I spent the day yesterday putting these ideas to the test. Our friends Sara and Debbie invited us to join them and a small team from Architecture 00 (including WikiHouse designer Alastair Parvin) in helping to build a WikiHouse in the countryside west of Rugby, and so that’s what we did. The important thing to note is that most of the fifteen-odd people on site had no significant previous experience of construction or building; the intelligence, as it were, resided in the thousand or so components themselves, painstakingly devised and CNC-milled. All we had to do was hammer them together, according to instructions just about as simple as those that accompany any flat-pack Ikea or Muji furniture.
But first we had to figure out how to work as a group: just over a dozen people, few of whom knew each other at the start of the day. This is always fascinating to watch sort itself out in flat groups, where there’s no formal hierarchy to call upon. In my experience — it was true for Occupy Sandy and it was certainly the case here — what very often happens is that a small group of folks working on a given task have its logic just about worked out for themselves when someone else shows up with a “suggestion.” Maybe this someone claims to speak from experience, maybe they’re appealing to some other form of authority, but it’s only rarely the case that their suggestion is self-evidently a methodological improvement. And so you down tools and consider the problem collectively.
Of course, it’s generally the case that someone, or even a few someones, points out that things were already working smoothly, that the proposed improvement is no such thing, and that there’s little profit to be found in wasting time or energy learning that the hard way. Especially when this person is younger, though, or a woman, or not overtly a member of whichever group constitutes a local demographic majority, or is simply possessed of a different cognitive style, they’ll generally get talked over and ignored.
Eventually the group is forced to acknowledge the error, but even this most often happens tacitly; only rarely does anyone involved — least of all the bright spark with the disruptive suggestion — come out and say, “Huh, you were right all along, I’m sorry for wasting everyone’s time.” Again, I saw just this sort of thing happen with OS, with frustrating regularity, and I also saw it happen yesterday.
In both cases, the saving grace was that the project involves such an interlocking ecosystem of different kinds and scales of tasks that there is always something useful to do, even for people who’d become so frustrated with the process of achieving consensus that they needed to go off and work on their own for awhile. As a general principle, this suggests to me an effective way of mitigating some of the frictions that invariably seem to arise in nonhierarchical collective action.
Yesterday, as well, there was also a decent amount of friction at places where the idealism of open-source construction brushed up again the institutionalized practices of building in a formalized culture. Though Alastair insists that WikiHouse was designed to exceed standard tolerances for structural integrity, the local council, encountering something profoundly unfamiliar to them, insisted on modifications before they’d approve the plans. These modifications involved manually drilling a grid of holes into cross-bracing members and reinforcing the structure by screwing them together; given that waiting for a stock of drilled components to build up constituted the main bottleneck in the flow of effort, I’m not sure I can fairly judge WikiHouse on speed of construction. (I will say that there was an acute irony in pencilling a grid onto precision-milled plywood pieces and then hand-drilling them, with a fraction of the speed and precision a numerically-controlled tool would have brought to the task.)
But to me, the most important lesson I learned had to do with what we might think of as the social etiquette around the act of construction. Sara, Nurri and I couldn’t help but notice that the site owners — complete strangers to us, whose farmhouse we’d after all volunteered our own labor to help build — neither welcomed us to the effort particularly warmly, nor thanked us at day’s end. In itself, that’s OK: I drew crucial insight from my few hours of work on their project, insight that would have been very difficult for me to get any other way. The karmic scales, in that sense, are balanced. But what it highlighted for me was how displaced this particular communal act of construction had become from the folkways that used to govern such efforts just about everywhere — the rituals that mark the inception of a shared investment of energy and effort in the raising of a structure, and upon completion consecrate it for dwelling and use.
This was something I felt was badly missed in Rugby yesterday. So I’m going to recommend to Alastair that WikiHouse plans include a literal cornerstone element, to be inscribed with the names of everyone who worked on a raising. We’ve done things like this to recognize those involved in the collective effort of building since there were buildings, and it feels absolutely vital to me if we’re going to profit from the binding of information-technological method into our standing lifeways.
— Finally for this week, something far less pleasant: I can’t remember the last time a newspaper article made me feel as hopelessly choked with rage and despair as this one by Rukmini Callimachi in Friday’s New York Times.
The title itself ought to have functioned as some kind of trigger warning — “ISIS Enshrines A Theology of Rape” — but the details that followed were worse than anything I had imagined. From its very first sentence, the piece felt to me like it teetered uncomfortably on the edge between straight reportage and a kind of unsavory zest. You could certainly read it as simply naming a structured series of vile acts for what they are; you could also think of it as a heartbreaking accumulation of trigger words and images, expressly designed to short-circuit the higher centers of consciousness. In any event, whether that was Callimachi’s intent or not, it was certainly the effect on me; by the piece’s end I wanted nothing so much as to run off to join the YPG myself, like this was 1936 and I was dropping out of City College to go enlist in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. This pathetic fantasy was the only way I could balm or salve the otherwise unendurable fact that somewhere on Earth there are men doing these things to women and girls, right now, in real time, and there’s not a gotdamn thing I or anyone else can do about it.
Whatever problematic impulses toward white-knightery may have been bound up in my reaction, the pattern of facts Callimachi established in her piece did shift something in me. It did what none of the lurid beheading videos that came before were evidently able to, which was convince me that if ever there was a situation that justified the application of military force, it was this one. (OK, I’ll ‘fess up. My original feelings were less articulate, less clinical and distanced, something a whole lot closer to Brando’s Kurtz: “We must kill them, we must incinerate them, pig after pig, cow after cow, village after village, army after army…”)
I think anyone with even a modicum of sophistication has to wonder if they’re getting played at a moment like this, especially when the Times is involved. (I’m not frankly sure that anything at all could have frustrated the Bush Administration’s determination to invade Iraq, but if anything lubricated broad elite acquiescence to that invasion, it sure as hell was Judith Miller’s reportage in “even the liberal New York Times.”) And I would be the very first person to agree that this is in large part a catastrophe of America’s own making — that ISIS simply would not exist as a force in the world had it not been for previous bouts of American adventurism.
But none of that speaks to the moral imperative this moment presents us with, which is doing something practical to end these men and the misery they sow. It really is only the Kurdish militia that are doing anything like that at the moment (and even so, having the living shit bombed out of them by the US-allied Erdogan government). It doesn’t help my romance for them that the horizontalist YPG apparently elect their officers, just like the POUM militia Orwell joined, nor that women constitute a combat-hardened militia of their own, and not a mere “auxiliary.” (My onetime NYU instructor Mick Taussig complicates the story here.)
I guess thoughts of my relation to organized violence are weighing disproportionately on me because this week marks the twentieth anniversary of my departure for Basic Training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. I always say, by way of rationalizing my choice, that I enlisted in the Army at a time when American imperialism had a different character than it does now, being mostly expressed through colorably defensible peacekeeping, nation-building and stabilization missions. And no, I don’t really buy that myself, but it sounds better than the truth, which is that as my first marriage fell apart, I desperately needed to prove myself against an index of manhood as seemingly objective as Special Operations qualification standards, and wasn’t going to let anything as silly as, say, heartfelt politics or, y’know, profound spiritual belief get in the way of that deeper drive.
At any rate, in five years in uniform I never came even remotely close to anything resembling combat. My best buddy Kirk, it is true, jumped into Haiti with the 3rd Special Forces Group, but that wasn’t much of a conflict, and in any event he’s not me. I did come within a day or so of being deployed to Kosovo — which was indeed a shooting war at the time, or enough of one to make my parents nervous — but wound up being sent to Korea instead. Until the day I got my DD-214 in the mail, I suffered nothing worse from my time in the service than boredom, a broken toe and a case of the crabs.
So even after my little exercise in applied psychology, I have no idea how much of the fulminating rage I feel for ISIS is merely bravado and bluster. I have no idea what I would do or feel if someone handed me a ticket to Rojava tomorrow, complete with old fatigues, a new pair of boots and a letter of introduction. I suspect that even if the disgust I bear for the kind of men capable of the deeds described in Callimachi’s piece could overwhelm the elemental revulsion I now feel toward just about any sort of violence, my forty-seven-year-old body would refuse to cooperate. But maybe that too is just a rationalization. I can’t imagine history ever providing us with a better example of an avowedly democratic-socialist and communalist fighting force, nontrivially composed of women, arrayed against an entirely literal, institutionalized and actualized rape culture.
The bottom line is that there must be concrete, practical things I can do to support the YPG/YPJ, and I need to look into them. There remains the inconvenient reality that they are openly at war with a declared American ally, and therefore that any attempt to support them risks running afoul of the draconian US laws regarding support for “terror” organizations. That’s obviously a place I really don’t want to find myself. But to have to look back later on and admit that I was so cowed by fear for my own comfort that I wouldn’t even commit myself in the most trivial way, at a moment when braver people are putting their lives on the line to fight the evil they perceive in ISIS? Uh-uh. That’s a nonstarter.
As ever, I hope that you remember to be kind to yourself, and have enough left over to take care of the ones around you.
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 42 of Sunday, 16 August 2015, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊