Publishing

Planting Trees in the Margin

     Magnanimity shifted quickly into a menacing authority: “so you have these family recordings from your childhood? You publish yourself and your friends? Where is the criteria? Where is the value here? Why should we listen to this?” No other questions were asked, no interpretations were offered about the form or content. The critique ended abruptly, the room’s attentions moved on to a preppy, alert looking abstract painter from Windsor. On the long walk back to her cold flat, the young woman decided that she would drop out of this art school. She also decided in the same instant that although she will continue to make work as she knew how, she would avoid placing it at the feet of these kinds of people.

     It was not a surprise that immigrant, working-class women had no value, she understood social hierarchies already. When her aunt worked cleaning the house of a famous architect, she was only allowed through a discreet back door. What came as a shock is the implication that people and their ideas only have value if they are selected and made visible by gatekeepers. Self-validation is not possible since there is no intrinsic value in art and ideas. The young woman’s professors wanted visibility in the competitive London art scene, and therefore considered its criteria as absolute: stories are pre-sorted by hierarchy. Visibility by selection is total. The irony that her professors were cosplaying a counterculture did not change this fact. No matter how misogynist, racist, classist, nationalist, and petty the values of the London art scene were, it was a natural event – gale-force winds – simply naïve to turn against them. Conforming to the whims and arbitrary judgments of the gatekeepers determined material well-being: great tides of money flowed through these institutions. By doling material rewards, art was competitive, and this competition took the form of intense social combat inside the classrooms, on the streets, and in the backrooms and showrooms of art. Students from the most prestigious art schools locked up their work after repeated incidents of vandalism by jealous peers. Mostly everyone followed this orchestration, shaping themselves into the mold, willfully destroying their own imaginations and brutally attacking their peers. When the young woman returned to pack up her studio at school, she could hardly believe what she saw: several of her works had been destroyed, torn, trampled. Other works had been stolen, almost nothing remained. If her work was so threatening to become a target, didn’t that indicate value?

Visibility ≠ Value

Hegemony cultivates stunted imagination as a powerful weapon against the formation of anything that threatens constructive change. The forced suppression of imagination has been expressed often and in many ways. Marc Fisher’s term Capitalist Realism describes our condition as the inability to imagine anything outside capitalism.[1] Antoni Gramsci observed that “common sense” is accepted as “eternal truths” while conditioning mass resignation and passivity through the uncritical acceptance of a constructed social structure.[2] Grace Lee Boggs urged us to reimagine everything, “we must think beyond Capitalist categories.”[3] Angela Davis during an interview on Al Jazeera said “in imaging the future, it cannot be a capitalist future, it cannot be a future that is based on the exploitation of others.”[4] Psychoanalyst Stijn Vanheule: “Not only is there little public discussion on alternatives for the free market, this model has pervaded our social-cultural life.”[5]

     The culture industry plays a significant role in the diffusion of a constructed ideological “realism” masquerading as common sense. Guy Debord framed the Spectacle’s tautological production of the visible: “what appears is good; what is good appears.” Passive public acceptance of what is visible, and thus what is imagined, is the governing strategy of a hegemonic order such as capitalism. Confusing visibility with value, we witness a curator declare that he was never really into On Kawara until he saw his show at the MOMA. Canonization guarantees visibility, visibility is the exchange of inconvenient inherent value with convenient use-value. Presence or absence of inherent value is inconsequential since visibility itself is the only criteria that matters, exchanging anything real with idle idol.

Idle Culture

Idle talk is talk without the burden of content. Idle culture is idling a bus, the engine runs, burning fuel, generating pollution. People jump on the bus, (that is, the bandwagon), lured by idol, that is: brand-forward promises of titillating newness as a salve for pain and emptiness. Onboard, people are separated from their cash and/or their attention span and the bus circles slowly, and then stands still, engine spewing smoke. No one feels better about themselves. People eventually exit the bus and stand in line to wait for a newly redecorated idle bus, recycled from busses driving slowly around in circles, alternating between periods of idling to pick up more followers. Official capitalist culture is an unfathomably large parking lot for idle culture, meaninglessness raised to idolatry. Authentic culture exists as a marginalized body, outside the closed circles (and resources) of parking lots. Authentic culture is strategically welcomed in mainstream idling as inoculation, but only after it has been killed and formalized, that is: processed for entertainment. Entertainment is culture without the burden of content. Byung-Chul Han, channeling Heidegger, writes: “Entertainment is an unburdening of being that generates pleasure.”[6] In capitalist culture, entertainment is visible, pleasurable, and the only thing that matters. While some may protest the inclusion of capital “A” art in this formulation, the New York Times and other papers of record have long ago, and ontologically correctly, merged art reporting into the “Arts and Entertainment” category.

     Authentic culture – that is, culture stemming from spontaneous observation of the real in recognition of lived reality outside of and inconvenient for ideological expressions of self-preservation – exists and thrives on the margins. Culture on the margins takes pride in being, and living differently, in tune with a reality not constructed for use-value. By not “selling out” as it was once disparagingly called a long time ago, marginal culture refuses to sacrifice sense of self, developed ethical compass, commitment, health and well-being, and communal connections. Marginal culture refuses to negotiate with managerial HR. Marginal culture has exited Paulo Freire’s Wheel of Oppression, where the oppressed is enticed to wait for their opportunity to be the oppressor themselves: ticket masters gatekeeping on the idle busses of culture.

Cooptation and instrumentalization is the normal method of managing the marginal forms of life. This is done by carefully selecting, promoting, and rewarding symbolic examples of life on the margins, and re-representing these ideas as formalism, stripped of any threatening content. Solidarity among those on the margins is continuously threatened by the strategic use of violence with one hand, and reward with the other. The strategic lottery win that falls upon selected representatives amongst marginal culture offers evidence of the competition that exists to receive mainstream blessing and the material rewards it provides. Art institutions elevate those so anointed – lottery winners seasonally selected, (and increasingly tokenized for PR), thus celebrating and normalizing competition itself. The vast majority of life remains marginal. The ideas and movements bubbling continuously there are mined as raw material for the arts and entertainment industry that unambiguously represents the power and might of the capitalist ruling classes.

The Margins

bell hooks framed cultural hegemony as the intersection of class, race, and sexism.[9] Discourse on the other has been mapping further locations for exclusion, including ability/disability, mental health, nationality, geography, gender orientation, and religion among others. Art institutions maneuver and discipline via exclusion of those signaling one, two or more categories, in an ever-shifting spectrum of hate. Artists who have not won the lottery of life have nevertheless managed to transcend their “education” generation after generation, working with embodied wisdom and imagination, thriving on the margins. bell hooks’ lived experience taught her vital perspectives, identifying marginality as more than a site of deprivation, instead offering “the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.” Marginality is thus the source of power, invention and a “central location for the production of a counter hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives.”[10]

     The margins are usually thought in terms of “lack” in those without access to resources, visibility, influence, power, and so on. But to reconsider the margins is to reconsider value. The margin is a place for resistance, to imagine another reality where we have escaped the colonizer/colonized (bell hooks), oppressor/oppressed (Paulo Freire) equation. What the margins have with great abundance is diversity.

     The areas of greatest biodiversity in the world are from countries peripheral to power such as Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Vietnam, Thailand, New Guinea, Madagascar, Congo and South Africa. The zones with dynamic pollination are also peripheral to the cultural elite: from the lower classes, the partially employed, under-employed, banished deviants, neighborhoods of immigrants, peoples of color, self-organized communities, collaborative structures, co-ops, redistributive groups, collective natural resource management, collective creative production, low-rent alleys, and so on: all powerhouses of life. Whole countries, and even entire continents are filled with life on the margins of power. Capitalist institutions know this, and do most of their shopping amongst the margins, buying up gene diversity at deep, five-finger discounts for the strategic development of the center. Dreamers of better lives: postal workers, family farmers, artists without exhibitions, writers without agents, adjunct laborers, professors without tenure, laborers, all somehow alive despite the continual mining of their cores.

The margins also offer a different narrative than the center. For example, the margins of 13^th and 14^th century illuminated manuscripts often housed drawings that were not necessarily connected to the text. Drawings of fantastic creatures and monsters lived on the margins of these religious texts, inspiring the imagination, giving rest, or unlocking deeper meanings. These freely imaginative images offered a vibrant alternative to the main text.[11]

      Marginalia, a word first documented in 1804, refers to handwritten commentary in the margins of individual books.[12] Edgar Allen Poe said about marginalia “we therefore talk freshly – boldly – originally – with abandonment – without conceit.”[13] The margins offer possibilities of speaking inventively with less restraint.

     Torah editions such as Etz Hayim, Stone, Hertz, and Plaut, contain accompanying commentary compiled over different periods. These notes, or mefareshim, normally take up more space on the page than the biblical text itself. Commentary is the center of ongoing discussions on the Torah, shifting focus from the center to the margin, further complicating positioning, queries the human origins of the text. Commentary is the place to record dissent, offer alternative readings, translations, and build conversations, and renews its meaning generation after generation.