The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins

489 Pages·2017·107.28 MB·English

by  Avery F. Gordon

The
Hawthorn
Archive

The
Hawthorn
Archive
Letters from the
Utopian Margins
Avery F. Gordon
Fordham University Press
New York 2018
Copyright © 2018 Avery F. Gordon
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Printed in China
19 18 17 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
A Note about
the Archive
This book contains a selection of items from the Hawthorn Archive. The Haw-
thorn Archive is an imaginary and real infrastructure for intellectual work. It might
best be conceived as an idiosyncratic methodology for a research-based writing practice
whose main collaborators over time came from a segment of the contemporary art
world and whose motivation has been to find some shared language for the marginal-
ized utopian elements found in a variety of resistive and defiant activity in the past and
in the present.
The focus of the book is a kind of consciousness I call being in-difference and
how it can be developed and sustained in practice. Being in-difference is a political con-
sciousness and a sensuous knowledge: a standpoint and a mindset for living on better
terms than what we’re offered, for living as if you had the necessity and the freedom to
do so. By better, I mean a collective life without misery, deadly inequalities, mutating
racisms, social abandonment, endless war, police power, authoritarian governance, het-
eronormative impositions, patriarchal rule, cultural conformity, and ecological destruc-
tion. The book’s modes of inquiry and presentation fuse critical theory with creative
writing in a historical context: fact, fiction, theory, and image speak to each other in
an undisciplined environment to better understand the ways — some ordinary, some
not — people have learned to live within and against all those systems of domination
which, despite their overwhelming power, never quite overtake or become us.
The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins takes a form that is nei-
ther quite academic nor artistic but something in between, a form borne of failure and
a form that itself fails in many crucial ways. In the few pages that follow, I provide some
context for its form and touch on some of its key themes. For readers who would prefer
to begin in the world of the Hawthorn Archive, skip ahead to the contents page.
v
the story of the failed academic
book
After I finished writing Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagina-
tion in the mid-1990s, I started two large projects. One was a study of capitalist culture
designed to take shape as an exhibition styled for a natural history museum under the
presumption that capitalism was extinct, which was somewhat inspired by the Museum
of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California. Poorly conceived as a single-author
project and struggling to hold on to the fantastic presumption at its heart, it died
quickly and was superseded by my involvement in the antiprison efforts spearheaded
by Critical Resistance, although there is something of a long-lost remnant of it in the
Hawthorn Archive, including its antiquated stylistics.
The second project was a relatively normal academic book with the working title
In the Shadow of the Bottom Line, whose purpose was to redefine what utopian thinking
and practice has meant and could mean if, for example, slavery and prison abolition
or the Jubilee antidebt movement were specimens or exemplars of it. This project was
prompted in part by questions left open at the end of Ghostly Matters and by the domi-
nant left intellectual discourse at the time, which presumed that political disobedience
was either dead or ineffective —“merely utopian” it was said — and which mirrored
the triumphalism of the New Right’s “End of History” claim made famous by Francis
Fukuyama in 1992. The diagnosis of a closed political universe as the pinnacle of criti-
cal thought and capitalist world civilization seemed to me profoundly wrong, inaccu-
rate, and disconnected from what was happening in the world. Although a challenge
to traditional left political models and expectations, arguably there was more resistance
by diverse peoples across the globe than at any other time in modern history, a condi-
tion that, in my view, only increased subsequently, as the title of Notes from Nowhere’s
2003 book about global anticapitalist struggles, We Are Everywhere, announced. At the
time, I was struck by how unprepared so many radical intellectuals were to see, much
less treat as theoretically valuable, what seemed to me, a historical moment that might
have sparked their political imaginations. One problem that surely contributed to this
disconnect was the conventional definitional meaning of the term utopia: the future
perfect no-place imagined as a little nation engineered by white middle-class reformers
and peopled with homogeneous populations without conflicts or complicated psychic
lives.
I was interested to know if the utopian could be made to mean something else,
something more useful than the “merely” in a significant period of political-economic
retrenchment and resistance to it. And, so first I went looking in the Western history
and theory of utopia for a utopianism that didn’t inhabit the anxious ambivalence that
the Marxist dismissal of utopian socialism as nothing more than a kind of “mish-mash”
had passed on to generations of radical critics as sophisticated common sense. (It was
Engels who called utopian socialism a “mish-mash”: he’s going to put socialism on a
vi a note about the archive
scientific footing and mish-mash will not do.) What I found was a definitional world or
discourse of utopia with a deeply racialized historiography and a narrowly exclusive set
of literary, aesthetic, philosophical, historical, and sociological references. The Marxist
tradition was only one intellectual origin point of the problem and in fact was more
tolerant and inviting than its crankier heirs let on. The limitations of the historical and
literary boundaries of the referential field were very publicly exposed in 2000 when
the New York Public Library joined forces with France’s Bibliothèque nationale to
mount a large exhibition, online archive, and publication program.1 Quite strikingly,
Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World treated the genocidal set-
tler colonialism that founded the so-called new world as a successful utopian enterprise
while absenting entirely what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker call the “many-
headed hydra” of the seventeenth-century “revolutionary Atlantic.” The many-headed
hydra — slaves, indentured servants and maids, prisoners, conscripts, pirates, sailors,
religious heretics, woodcutters, water carriers, prostitutes, indigenous peoples, com-
moners, runaways, deserters, and vagabonds — all those and their descendants who
dared to challenge the making of the modern world capitalist system were completely
invisible, buried under the weight of a triumphant modernity and the specter of Stalin-
ist social engineering.
The libraries reflected the state of the field. The utopian as we have come to know
it includes the French and American Revolutions, but not the thirty-year war waged
by the Black and Red Seminoles against the United States or any subsequent Fourth
World refusals.2 It includes Karl Marx, who absolutely hated the idea, but not Christian
Priber, a German socialist exile who joined the Cherokee Nation in 1736, was captured
by the British because he refused to declare loyalty to them or the French, helped to
unite the Southern Indian Nations in what was then Cherokee Territory, and later died
in a South Carolina prison. The utopian as we know it includes: the English craftsman
William Morris but not the African American worker, the self-named “Black Bolshe-
vik” Harry Haywood; the philosopher Ernst Bloch’s dreamy anticipations but not the
writer and theorist C. L. R. James’s philosophy of happiness. The utopian as we know
it includes feminist Frances Wright’s failed and deeply flawed abolitionist experiment
at Nashoba in Tennessee in the 1820s but not one example of any instance of marron-
age in the entire Americas. Brook Farm and numerous white middle-class separatist
communities are part of its known legacy but not the multicultural Combahee River
Collective or the many coalitional collectives like them. The utopian as we know it
includes Ursula K. Le Guin’s off-world anthropology but not Toni Cade Bambara’s
in-the-here-and-now community studies.3 The examples can be multiplied.
After spending a good amount of time in these archives, it became clear that there
was an exclusionary zone of tremendous magnitude and that it was precisely in that
zone or blind spot where we might find, if we were prepared to or anticipating it, those
“fugitive moments of comprehension” that could yield a genealogy of and paradigms
for more adequate histories and theories of the many real and imaginary strivings for a
a note about the archive vii
livable and humane social existence.4 For in that zone of exclusion, we find a utopian
thought and practice which is as transnational as it is local; which is as oriented to the
present and the past as it is to the future; which is as comfortable with wild specula-
tion as it is with collective movements; which substitutes complexity for perfection;
which privileges diversity over homogeneity; which treats the self and society as equally
important objects of social transformation; and which offers enriched and inclusive no-
tions of freedom, sovereignty, and happiness. In that zone of exclusion, the utopian is
a standpoint for the here and now — not only the future — which registers and incites
the works, the thoughts, and the better worlds inhabited by those who always, as Ray-
mond Williams put it, “meanwhile carry on.” I thought then and still do think that we
need a better vocabulary for naming and describing the alternative lives we could be
living and that at smaller scales many of us already do.
My intention was to excavate what I started calling the other utopianism and its
distinct onto-epistemological affects, tracing its historical roots in slaves running away,
marronage, piracy, heresy, witchcraft, vagrancy, vagabondage, rebellion, solder deser-
tion, and other often illegible, illegitimate, or trivialized forms of escape, resistance,
opposition, and alternative ways of life. This other utopianism produces “temporary
autonomous zones,” to use Hakim Bey’s phrase, that look less like the traditional rural
separatist community (although these have been reemerging in new ways throughout
Europe) and more like what sociologist Asef Bayat calls the “quiet encroachment” of
the world’s urban poor, creating new life-forms in the interstices of organized aban-
donment by the state. This other utopianism is marked by a rejection of individualiza-
tion as subjectification with its attendant consumerism and by cooperation oriented
toward the “human strike.”5 This other utopianism is immanent, often modeled best
by those bound in place and time and lacking the capacity to escape, such as prison-
ers. This other utopianism creates feral economies that are based on not working as
we know work as a means of exploitation and alienation, local bartering, unauthor-
ized trading, theft, and nonstandard currencies, all of which displace the productivist
ethos Marxism and socialist traditions have long favored. This other utopianism is
characterized by both direct action against and nonparticipation in liberal democratic
state politics, by various forms of refusal, including the boycott and the occupation
without demands. This other utopianism, audacious in its assertions, gestures toward
an alternate universe or civilization, long in the making, emerging out of and receding
back into the shadows as needed, sometimes linking its varied traditions and strands in
solidarity and fellowship, sometimes badly internally broken.
Needless to say, the relatively normal academic book on the other utopianism
with its encyclopedic references, case study laboratories, and theoretical genealogies
failed to materialize. It failed to materialize as utopian studies and actual self-described
utopian experiments grew, making more room for what Davina Cooper calls “every-
day utopias” and for a much more sophisticated and flexible notion of the utopian.6 It
viii a note about the archive
failed to materialize as Ruth Levitas and Erik Olin Wright, two important senior schol-
ars in my field, gave sociology a strong mandate to make utopia a legitimate object of
study if not to itself become a utopian science.7 It failed to materialize as queer studies
embraced the term with vigorous attention.8 It failed to materialize as a mini academic
industry developed that was far more willing to embrace a language of utopianism to
describe the new anarchism, horizontalism, and immanent politics that emerged out
of a major cycle of global social movement activity oriented around the Zapatistas, the
anti- and alter-globalization movement of movements, and more recently the various
commoners and occupados. It failed to materialize despite these important political and
scholarly developments because I was spending a lot of time researching, writing, and
teaching about imprisonment and war escalated and — even in the company of deter-
mined and inspiring prison abolitionists — I found it difficult to focus on the utopian
as a relatively normal scholarly project in that situation, which felt like triage. It took
me longer than it should have taken to realize — in retrospect it’s easy to laugh about it
— that all the detours and difficulties I had getting a secure grasp on the utopian proj-
ect was exactly the utopian practice I was trying to understand and find a language for.
But even this belated recognition didn’t yield the coherence and comprehensive-
ness expected of a relatively normal academic book and a start-and-stop approach that
produced fragments and repetition was exacerbated to the breaking point by working
increasingly in a segment of the art world whose mode of production requires every-
thing to be written faster, shorter, and with a lot fewer footnotes; sometimes, I think,
not even written to be read in the way scholars read but rather to be contemplated
like an interesting object. (It would take a long essay I am not competent to write to
intelligently assess the contradictory nature of writing in and for the contemporary art
world today. As someone who is neither an artist nor an art historian, critic, or cura-
tor, I have enjoyed being welcomed as an outsider and being spared the need to be-
come a knowledgeable insider. The sophistication of research-based art practices, the
horizontalization of conceptual theoretical work, the widespread self-organization of
artists for learning and publication, and the active politicization of many artists create
spaces for productive conversations and collaborations with others, such as myself. In
the best of circumstances these conditions permit something of pioneering art educa-
tor Adrian Rifkin’s “gestural pedagogy,” which is based not on “enforced informa-
tion” [hierarchical inequality] or “equality of knowledge” [sameness] but rather on an
“equivalence of ignorance.” That’s to say, one brings something without requirements
to the meeting where what’s shared is the interest in whatever occasions the meeting in
the first place.)9 In the end, whatever else was pushing and pulling, I think the normal
academic book failed because the representational form I had chosen was not right. It
was not, I hesitate to say, utopian enough, even though some would claim that both
its grandiose ambition and its continuous failure to materialize were perfectly paradig-
matically utopian.
a note about the archive ix