Good morning, beloved -
Crikey, I’m writing to you from another airport: Warsaw, this time. This being on the road thing is getting a bit old, to be honest, and I’m looking forward to a few solid months at home with Nurri and the cat and my book. Blessedly, I don’t have a thing on the calendar until the Berlin International Literary Festival in September. What’s going on at this very moment, though, is that it’s been a big week, and there’s a lot of ground to cover.
— Much though it sometimes pains me, I try really not to be at all topical in these dispatches. This is primarily my (futile) gesture against the culture of the hot take, and the closely related notion that we’re obligated to both hold and publicly perform an opinion on each and every matter of concern that arises.
But this news, I just can’t resist commenting on. Friday’s US Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, and particularly the wording of Justice Kennedy’s opinion, has reduced me to a sniveling mess. It’s a great moment to be alive, both to witness the arc of the moral universe actually bent toward justice, and simply to know that millions of couples now find themselves validated in one of the most basic and fundamental expressions of their love. I don’t know how anyone with a beating heart can consider that love, or the literally global wave of celebration that followed instantly upon the decision’s announcement, and think for a second that this was anything but the correct and only possible result.
We know, of course, that the right to marry was not bestowed out of largess but fought for, and it’s been interesting for me to see how attitudes toward marriage equality have shifted among the gay and lesbian people I know best since my activist days of the early 1990s. The wing of the Queer Nation I was then allied to constructed same-sex marriage as something unacceptably modeled on an alien sexual ethics, a self-mutilating act of assimilation to an enduringly hostile culture. (Or “Ass Immolation,” as the Day-Glo stickers put it.) By this logic, a protean queer sexuality demanded different and better institutional expressions than the few impoverished channels straight people seemed content to channel their life force into, with all the hypocrisy, neurosis and self-denial that went with them. This sexuality was Nietzschean, Sadeian, Deleuzian even…and nothing as hopelessly mired in Pauline misogyny or Augustinian self-loathing as traditional marriage could possibly contain it. (And why, particularly, would any sane woman want to get married, when doing so historically meant becoming the chattel property of another?)
I saw the point in 1991, and I see it now. But it’s mighty hard to remain satisfied with relatively abstract arguments like these when confronted with the overwhelming reality of simple human joy. To me, it’s that joy that answers any and every resistance to the notion of same-sex marriage, whether it’s Antonin Scalia’s from the curdled hatecrypt he calls a soul, or a biker-jacketed activist’s from the utopian ramparts of some Interzone of the erotic imagination. That joy? That’s it, that’s the law, that’s the whole of the law. What could possibly be more beautiful? Congratulations to everyone newly free to marry — and equally so, profound thanks to everyone who fought so hard and so untiringly for this moment to be realized.
Bonus historical fact: like any good anarchist structure, circa-1990 Queer Nation SF was organized into voluntary and autonomous affinity groups. The two most excellently named of these were inarguably T.O.F.U. (“Tough Oriental Faggots United”) and N.O.O.D.L.E.S. (“Number One Oriental Dyke Lesbian Empowered Sisters”).
— My talk here in Warsaw was kind of a travesty. I think there may have been twelve people in the audience, which was something of a minor heartbreak after last week’s overflow crowd in Berlin. You charlie mike nonetheless, obviously, and give it your all each and every time no matter how many seats remain empty, but the experience is both more draining physically and much less fulfilling emotionally than presenting to a full house.
So my fondest memory of Warsaw will probably remain lying sprawled atop the enormous communal table in the forecourt of Lev Rudnev’s PKiN, or Palace of Culture and Science, with a few shots of terrible “premium” vodka warm in my belly, gazing up at the building’s looming Stalinist-Gothic bulk. It was past ten o’clock at night but the sky was just coming full dark, neon signage made a bright discordance against the dowdy building’s stone lintel, and there was the happiest babble spilling from the complex’s multiple bars. Architects and urbanists like to talk about “activating space,” but it’s not at all an easy thing to achieve, and this space got it deliciously right. It was one of the happier moments of my last month.
I’d like to think there was nothing wrong with the talk itself, though. This is an iteration of the body of ideas I’ve been working through since last fall, the “Practices of the Minimum Viable Utopia” material, which I’m coming to think of as the first tranche of a full-fledged #SFUAB Survival Kit. We could see this as a conceptual toolbox or kit of parts for making just and sustaining urban cultures in a time when the neoliberal social contract appears unassailably dominant. Looked at another way, it’s taking the recent turn toward “urban commoning” seriously, and asking what kind of institutions might living in and with such a commons require.
As I see it, there are a couple of discrete components to this kit, only a few of which I’ve had the nerve to discuss in public so far. I’m reasonably comfortable exploring what might happen were we to organize our productive capacity in independent but networked neighborhood-scale workshops, and still more so trying to imagine how information technology might be used in support of broadly participatory budgeting and decision-making processes. These are clearly sprawling, open-ended topics, but they’re rooted in and therefore hinge more or less naturally off of the areas of endeavor I’ve spent fifteen years working in and thinking about.
As I get further afield, though, things get a trifle scary. My knowledge of some of the things I’m proposing is more a matter of what I’ve read, and less tied to the problems I’ve worked through in detail with my own head, hands and heart. And this is never truer than of the kit’s final component — the big one, the alternative conception of order maintenance that I’m calling the Public Defense.
There are two important inflection points that I perceive in the history of policing, see. The first comes with the 1829 founding of the world’s first professional public safety service, London’s Metropolitan Police, by Sir Robert Peel, and the second was the 1950 reorganization of the LAPD under Chief William Parker. Chief Parker’s innovations were the introduction of a militarized structure and culture, which went hand-in-hand with his department’s habitual recourse to recruiting veterans of the most clannish and tradition-bound of the uniformed services, the US Marine Corps; the departmental commitment to an aggressive public relations effort, particularly via the emergent mass medium of television; and the broad dispersal of patrol units in radio cars. (You could argue that this last made some sense against the low-density operational terrain of the Los Angeles basin, but as a more globally applied model I’d argue it’s been nothing short of catastrophic.)
As people who live and love in cities, we desperately need to reach a third inflection point. The trouble with the model of urban policing we inherit from Peel and (especially) Parker is that it constructs order as something that transcends the limits of the community itself, something which needs to be applied and maintained from outside. This is the logic of an occupation force, and it predictably enough results in hostility, mutual suspicion and outright oppression. By contrast, I believe that to be both effective and just, the maintenance of public order has to be immanent to the community itself, something it practices largely as an organic, autocatalytic and self-sustaining process. And I’m trying to imagine just what that would look like and how it might work, because however silly an exercise this might seem, the alternative is wholesale surrender to an emerging paradigm of predictive analytics and preemptive policing being promoted by the usual tech vendors and their amen chorus among a few big-city PDs.
I haven’t talked about the Public Defense in past presentations, I didn’t mention it in Berlin last week and I only barely alluded to it at the very end of my talk in Warsaw. Frankly, I’m petrified of broaching the topic of policing, without the slightest credential or obvious disciplinary justification to be doing so. For one thing, there’s just way too much grief, pain, anger and loss bound up in the subject to be cavalier about it. For another, it is without question an exceedingly difficult terrain for antiauthoritarian thought; you can be certain that whatever it is you wind up proposing, or even framing in thought, someone will brand you as an apologist for oppression and a useful idiot before your first sentence is halfway out of your mouth. I guess I just believe, though, that if we don’t have the courage to articulate different and non-controlcentric ways of doing order, we’ll wind up subject to whatever IBM wants to sell our cities and their police forces, with everything that implies for any notion of probable cause, the due process of law or our freedom to move and act. Can I ask for your help, can I ask you to think through these vexed and charged questions together with me?
And aw hell: RIP Patrick Macnee, one of the two indelible 1960s Spy Patricks (the other of course and to his great chagrin widely known as Number Six). Some mortifying proportion of my ideas of Britishness can probably be traced to his irrepressible turn as John Steed.
Be kind to yourself, and take care of the ones around you,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 32 of Sunday, 28 June 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. ◊