The Spectating Class: On the Tenuous Connection Between NBA Home Court Advantage and Riots/Revolutions.

At the risk of sounding boring and academic, I’ll start with a bit of Kant (it may or may not get better, proceed with caution). On viewing the French Revolution, Kant believed that those who saw the conflict between the ancien regime (or the aristocracy) and the ascendant capitalist class made the crucial difference. He, if memory serves, detested the Terror and violence, but thought that the assent given by Europe and the people of France to the guillotine represented a sea change that no amount of propaganda or military force could overturn.

Philosophically, the role of the spectator – the ones on the sideline who make up civil society and whose assent is necessary for the governing classes – has a long history in determining the eventual outcome of events. For much of the late 20^th century, fans have believed the same of professional sports leagues – especially in soccer (futbol) and basketball. In my home sports city of Seattle, the Seahawks and the now defunct Sonics had incredible home field/court advantages due in part to a raucous fan base (though they lost, I still get chills from this clip, so up it goes) that needed only a reciprocal respect to explode. This is a generalized fact across sports.

Of course, reasons for home field advantage vary from travel fatigue to role players breaking daily routines to food poisoning to hometown fans. Hometown fans, any hometown fan will tell you, are the dominating factor – though long suffering cities such as Cleveland, Detroit and Seattle show that skilled players and competent front offices are necessary as well. Fans give the players energy, help swing referees decisions to the home team, and – especially in the NBA and MLB – sometimes are able to use trash talk to get into the heads of opposing players.

The Sonics no longer play at the Seattle Coliseum (or in Seattle) and numerous other old and loud stadiums have similarly been vacated or torn down in the name of bigger corporate profits. Modern players like Dwight Howard decry the lack of noise during the regular season, ignoring two crucial changes the last twenty years have wrought: 1) the fabled drunken ‘blue-collar’ fan has been pushed to the upper deck or couch while that old layabout, the corporate ‘fan’, sips $15 dollars beers and makes deals on the ubiquitous Blackberry while quietly hogging the lower levels. 2) Dwight Howard himself has not given any sort of commitment to the Orlando fan base, the spectators the home team desperately needs, that he’ll be there if the lock-out ends – instead, he stokes fears that he will follow Shaq, Lebron and other high profile players who flee their adopted cities for more money or exposure elsewhere. At Madison Square Garden – home of the NBA’s Knicks and the NHL’s Rangers - the new plan is to have the players enter the court through luxury boxes rather than at mid-court, upsetting a half century of tradition and fan involvement in the pace and feel of the game . What we have been witnessing, and I’m certainly not the first to comment on this, is the erosion of the place of the spectator in the place of sports. In sports, this has occurred through public (largely) and private spending on new arenas so that business elites and those with disposable income can get closer to the action.

At this point, I’ll return to my (speculative) corollary to the wave of riots/revolutions around the world. There have been numerous books and articles tracing the arrival of the spectator onto the political scene and the almost immediate attempts by the governing and capitalist classes to manage – rather than destroy - that same spectating class. Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is just one of these histories.

While there is a long history of riots since the 18th century, some recent US riots/uprisings, specifically Watts and Detroit in the 1960s, have been brought up as corollaries to what has happened in London (Paris, too, sometimes creeps into the discussion). Commentators, as is their wont, have commented that these were prime spurs to LBJ’s Great Society and led the way to some really innovative attempts to reorganize the structural inequality of urban life in the early 1970s (the briefly encouraging attempts to humanize black welfare mothers was one such effort). These died a quick death. Brixton in ’81 was a similar spur to police reform (and a good excuse to post this prophetic song). In most instances of riots, the lowest classes strike out for bread, dignity, the temporary glee of a civil society made to confront a fraction of the terror they experience in daily life, etc. In revolutionary situations, rage and organized resistance meet in a crisis of legitimation for the political class and we sometimes get something like we’ve recently seen in Egypt.

Almost without exception only a minute portion of those spectating are able to participate in changes - significant to cosmetic – necessary to restore some sort of equilibrium through which a ‘return to normalcy’ might allow commerce to resume. Those who acted – including most cops, it should be noted – are left out of the decision making. Modern revolutionaries and rioters alike resume lives marked by this suffocating and oppressive normalcy (the event of the revolution is obviously a separate thing from structural revolution, especially in a globalized market economy). Police repression and violence against poor black and youths in London is certainly not going to abate following these past nights (though we might see the real life Robocops that Detroit once dreamed of. Those who flooded Tahrir Square in Cairo knew/are finding that eliminating a leader doesn’t change the economic and political conditions they are governed by. Revolutionaries, at least, get to move closer to political action, even if they’re still not playing on the same courts.

Given the ‘political’ options available in Europe and North America, the average spectator could be excused for feeling a bit like the average NBA fan: fierce loyalty to a team whose owner and players may or may not exhibit any empathy or even sympathy beyond platitutdes. Forced even out of arenas and onto couches (of course, we’ve recently learned that sitting will kill us), able to comment on the state of affairs through Twitter, Facebook and comments sections, but thoroughly unable to modify the behavior of any of the actors. Kept in the dark about the important financial and political matters that determine what our lives look like, we make judgments without knowing the history or ramifications of those judgments. Meanwhile, the arenas continue to fill with the wealthy, the poor riot outside and most people simply want to enjoy a game in the midst of people they like and an inexpensive beverage of their choice. 

Reading Denning, Shouting Crass

Do They, in fact, owe Us a living?
Crass, in their highly imitable fashion, pose a fundamental question for our time: do ‘they’ owe ‘us’ a living? We’ll assume that the ‘they’ in question refers to capitalists or those in power – the Man, as it were. The ‘us’ is a bit more ambiguous – Crass don’t appear to be referring to the working class or, more generically, ‘the people’. The lyrics refer to those in school who are constantly shit on, those who become outcast over time, the scapegoats, and the teeming masses constantly attacked for their vice-ridden ways by media elites and politicians. It seems apparent, then, that they are demanding a living for the social rejects, those who become principal targets for attack when the economy is down or disaster strikes, and for those who unable or unwilling, for a myriad of reasons, to assimilate into society. We could call these the unemployed, the underemployed, the never employable as well as the rejects and burnouts (and anarcho-punks). After describing the players, they then claim that it is self-evident that these same, those wit limited organs for self-defense or advocacy – and thus not the working classes, especially in the early 1980s when the attack on said class was still in its birth pangs – are owed a living by society.

Failing Academic Infrastructure

While bemoaning the current state of the academic job market with some friends, it occurred to me that this market is exhibiting many of the same characteristics as urban areas in the US: it was built in the post-WWII boom, wasn't built for this many people, and is facing massive budget shortfalls for the foreseeable future.

Many cities in the US experienced a burst of infrastructure spending following the war as the US economy assumed the number one position in the world. As urban renewal spread throughout major urban centers, new roads, highways, public transit systems, water and utility provisions, and large scale engineering projects were funded by combinations of federal, state, and municipal funds. However, the explosive growth in the numbers of people moving to cities - not to mention who it was that was moving to and from cities (thus changing the tax structure of many municipalities) - has largely proven too much for an infrastructure unprepared for these influxes. Traffic nightmares, crumbling roads and bridges (especially you, Minneapolis!) and an inability to procure or use the right fixed equipment decreases the quality of life for many - though obviously not all - of those who inhabit or work in urban areas.

In the same way, a nascent US higher education system emerged from the post-WWII era. Strengthened by a burgeoning industrial-military-academic complex (Eisenhower included 'academic' in his original draft, but omitted it his speech), the GI Bill, and, in the 1960s and 70s, the Baby Boomer's entrance into college, higher education was extended in unprecedented and exciting ways. Many would would not have dreamed of a college education in the 1950s now consider it a right of passage - a necessity to participate in the professional job market. As the neo-liberal era winds down, without bringing any of the promised benefits to 90% of the US population, a tottering education complex appears, to those of us faced with the prospect of an academic career, on the verge of failure. Education, once a blessing, has become an albatross around our neck. All that had been promised to us as kids - get an education and you'll always be in demand - is now verifiably false. Urban life and academic life - both signs of booming prosperity - reveal the depth of the problem facing the US far better than Wall Street or the Dow Jones.

For many of us, we have too much education - as universities and colleges cut back on class sizes and tenure track positions, re-evaluating what is necessary when budges are taken up administering education, we find that competition for incredibly difficult and low wage work is fierce, to put it mildly. Too many people have entered this market but, because of the demands of student loans, rent and credit cards, we can't pull out. In an era of economic expansion, such as the 1950s and early 1960s, highly skilled or trained individuals such as ourselves would be in fine position to place ourselves in a good market or create new ones. As the economy contracts, and information is no longer as valuable a commodity as it was even ten years ago, we face an inhospitable future unless we - along with others whose economic outlook is similarly dire, make our own future: that is our only future now - to make it ourselves.

On Radical and Rogue Archivists

Victor Serge is among the first of the radical - not rogue - archivists. After the Bolsheviks took power, he was tasked with sorting through the vast files on snitches, provocateurs and double agents. There was a vast wealth of information that had to be sorted, interpreted, and assimilated in some way to maintain the Revolution. Properly understood, this meant absolvement, prison or death, depending on circumstances, for those who had insinuated themselves into revolutionary circles in order to betray them. A mass of information was suddenly at the disposal of Bolsheviks and action was absolutely necessary for the survival of proletarian state.

Recently, a massive trove of information has been released by Wikileaks concerning US war and diplomatic policy and operations. The reaction to these releases has been moderately interesting, having elicited a mostly normal range of reaction: calls for Assange's head from the right-wing of the US, cries of hypocrisy from the 'international community', and uneasy lecturing on the need for the openness of information in a modern democracy from the 'left'. Among many, though, the question remains - so what? 'Anonymous', a nebulous group of cyber activists, took up Assange's and Wikileaks cause through online sabotage to limited effect. As the hacker magazine 2600 tried to show, however, these attacks are largely counterproductive. Rather than crippling Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, it creates the conditions under which they become sympathetic entities.

Overshadowed in all of the hubbub is the fact that very little of what has been made public in these cables is either surprising or new. Perhaps they confirm something about what many had thought about the way the US saw its role in the world, but as a pure release of information, there is little to keep it from dissipating into the ocean of information that the internet makes available - like a rock thrown into a lake. The reaction by the US state does also reveal something about information, in that this is one of the few times that the US has not been the aggressor in an information war and, as such, we see how it defends itself when provoked. Beyond that, it does not seem out of the question to wonder what use will be made of the bounty of information available to anyone who seeks it.

In a recent conversation, my neighbor, Jimmy, and I were discussing this very problem. Information exists, what was necessary, he thought, was for someone to draw a line between what the information is and what it means - that the US backs up dictatorships and uses international democracy as a ruse for its own ends. This, though, misses the essential element that Serge and the Bolsheviks implicitly knew: information, even if it reveals state machinations, is worthless without an institution in which to put that information to use. While our own times are far different than the Red Terror, that does not mean that its lesson are then consigned to the dustbin. If it is correct to say that information wants and needs to be free, and that it must be corralled and made to reveal its secrets, those secrets change nothing unless they are made to work within an organizational form.

Another step, though, must enter: Serge writes in What Ever Radical Should Know About State Repression that, "Nothing great is achieved without disinterestedness. And the autocracy had no disinterested supporters" (68). It is arguable that inertia is a defining characteristic of human life: unless it is made evident that a transformation of a given is not only necessary but also possible, very few people willingly engage in a course of action to address that given - whether that be picking up clutter, introducing more a more efficient operating system or changing the shape of a state. You could call this inertia 'disinterestedness'. If there is an active core on multiple sides of an issue, how those who are disinterested lend their support decides the issue. In the US, the conditions under which last three characteristics might provoke radical transformation are absent or weak. So, the question becomes, how are they installed?

That is where, I believe, rogue and radical archivists come into play. 'Anonymous', in the aftermath of its negligible affect, wrote that what must be done now is to cull the information that Wikileaks made available, distill that, and then make that public. That is a good first step. As the mass of information that the internet and networked communication makes available has ballooned, the need for accessing and assimilating information has become more dire than ever. Installing that information into organizational memory so that it can be activated in the manifestation of that organization is now an essential activity of those who would understand themselves to be on the political left. What the organizational form with a shape to challenge for the support of the disinterested looks like is yet to be determined, though, here too, there are hopeful signs on the horizon in the shape of international student movements and the international workers fighting against austerity measures. For those to move forward though, critical and radical archival methods are a manifest necessity.

"The Great Octopus"

"The Bank of Italy [now Bank of America] has acquired through various ways much of the choice farming land of California and is still gathering it in. The great octopus is near to us... and ready for all and sundry of the unwary... As sure as they get their talons into you, you'll lose. Their policy was spawned by the devil and their chain of banks is, each one, a little hell" (124)- Building the Bank of America: A.P. Giannini

During the Depression, people accuse Giannini of being a power and land hungry tyrants. The author of this hagiography contends, however, that normal people - those who Giannini had built his bank with (a fine distinction, since East Coast banks dealt only with WASPs until Giannini made his bank enormous) - didn't feel the bank to be a monster ready to 'gobble them up'. Instead, they poured their money into it and took out loans. As if there was a different choice at this time.

And there we have it: finance and tentacles linked via Bank of America and its innovative turn to branch offices. The tentacles begin to stretch!

Tentacles

ECW:


It is interesting that you start off wandering through Rome and Bolgna – cities for whom state and church alone are allowed the heights of the city. In The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre writes of the monument – that human creation through which a populous memorializes the passage of time and celebrates the incorporation of the new into the already existing – that the monument is the cornerstone of communal life. It is both potent and necessary for the functioning of society. The monument towers over and structures the social being of a populous. While you wrote to me of the squat buildings proffering their allegiance to the Church, I was touring through the red natural arches of Utah. Here, millennia have formed delicate bridges, carvings, and windows upon a soil as austere as anything the banks of London could imagine. By 9:30, the park was swamped with admirers from all over the globe, observing the monumental grandeur of a different sort of passing of time. Here, in the vast, sublime – in the Kantian sense of the word – stretches of the US Southeast, state and church lose much of their meaning. There is simply too much space. The sky it too big. The land too unforgiving. Even the attempts to capture them through the image fail – it is impossible not to be dwarfed and made to feel inconsequential. Until you reach Vegas, that is.

You spoke briefly of letting the sword fall on a given tentacle if the opportunity ever presented itself. It seems to me that tentacular studies, should they ever amount to anything, are more about illumination. The question isn’t so much whether or not we can cut off parts of the tentacle. Rather, it is understanding that the tentacle isn’t just the hooked sucker, but entire system of networks that amount to a tentacle. Urban tentacles map terrain – a prerequisite to any kind of victory.

I’ve been thinking about military metaphors since an earlier conversation with you – are they at all appropriate when trying to think about the necessary steps towards an egalitarian future? Something that struck me while reading Lee Kennett’s A History of Strategic Bombing is the lag between the appearance of new war technology and the understanding of what that weapon should be used for and how. There are ironic sections wherein reluctant militaries decry air warfare, yet are pushed to accept it by a public that is becoming a force in policy decisions for the first time. Struggle and war are two different concepts, obviously. If we think of our Leftist past as a continuous struggle, which we’re encouraged to do by the very construction of our history, then war is but a brief moment in an ancient struggle. With the advent of a new logic of capital, that could be termed, following Castells, the Information Age, we again experience the lag between a new age and an understanding of how best to capture the new time. None of this is new, but presenting it again can sometimes be useful. Many of the tools at our disposal are relics from the 1960’s and previous ages, yet we are surprised that they no longer have the same efficacy that they once had. Well, the structuring logic of capitalism shifts, so the strikes and marches that were once direct blows are now glancing parries. Much of this stems from a failure to adequately understand the terrain that we are struggling on.

It will never be possible to ‘cut off’ a tentacle, and to seek to do that today would be to try to turn back the hands of time. Instead, it is essential to understand that urban settings, such as San Francisco or Bologna, are not just physical locations, but also the length and breadth of its organization. So, SF is not just the Bay Area, but also the global interaction of certain types of venture capital. We often think of maps of cities or nations that are 2 or 3 dimensional, but we need to add the dimensions of time and virtuality as well, so that we can map out a 5-d tentacle (there are, of course, maps of transnational corporations, but these are limited because it is the type of capital, not the type of industry, that determines the essential shape of the tentacle).

You are precisely right that you can’t have just one tentacle. Instead, any urban area can be a hub or a node in a myriad of tentacles – major cities acting as both the hub and node of different types of capitals. These tentacles are not infinite, however. They are very finite, yet also difficult to grasp because we have not yet been trained to see them. It can sometimes be, too, that we can’t make out a discernable shape because we do not yet have the right means of identification at our disposal.

Rebecca Solnit, in Hollow City, describes the hordes of yuppies that swamped San Francisco during the 1980’s: people drawn to a newish form of capital (venture/knowledge based) whose relationship to the city is mediated by their relationship to work. They didn’t know the moral codes of the city and, more importantly, didn’t really care. Worse, there wasn’t anywhere to put these people. There was no urban infrastructure waiting to filled – instead, there was an older – oftentimes dismal – infrastructure whose operators and users had ceased to direct the city’s affairs. Ergo, the eradication of these older forms of public housing and social being in the name of the new productive class of workers. While there were at times effective protests, recognizing the scale and dimensions of the problem rarely happened. Protests, while inevitable, were just as inevitably fallible. In those places where it was successful, at least initially – like the Mission District – we can begin to theorize how to struggle against a particular tentacle that attempts to reorganize and redirect space.

The most terrifying part, which you allude to, is that the tentacle doesn’t think – it does not have a center that could issue commands to be relayed through points. Instead, it thrives on equilibrium, calibrating movements through a complex interplay of inputs and outputs. There is no overwhelming the center and redirecting the tentacles. So, what is to be done? I think that you are absolutely right when you say that no amount of observation or study could ever accurately ascertain the breadth of the problem and that to wait until the right line of attack appears is foolhardy. At the same time, history is littered with belligerents and foes unable to reconcile the gap between a former mode of struggle and a newer mode that had yet to properly develop. Unfortunately, both tendencies have many vociferous proponents who love nothing more than to argue against the other – forgetting that winning points against one’s own side means nothing when the struggle is being poorly waged. Action precipitates questions followed by analysis and, possibly, a form of struggle capable of both defense and offense. In the best of circumstances, praxis makes visible.

The Hunt in the Dark

"or they could use what the French called 'chasse obscure', in which the fighter pilot tried to find and attack his quarry in the dark" (Lee Kennett, 'A History of Strategic Bombing', p. 96). In this beautiful and terrifying book, Kennet traces the advance of strategic bombing from a fanciful idea, through the rise of public opinion and the masses, into the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden (where temperatures were over 800 degrees Celsius) and the 'tidal wave of fire' that swept Tokyo, and finally to the Atom bomb - which wasn't that much worse, initially, than a normal bombing run. While bombing was notoriously imprecise, defense against aerial bombardment was, at times, nearly impossible. Up to the 1940's, when the darkness had settled and the signals warned of approaching bombs, pilots would rise into the sky with only the help of searchlights on the ground. While it was certain that bombers were present, finding them was immensely difficult - thus the 'chasse obscure', or the 'dark hunt.' More often than not, these sorties were met with failure, yet every once in a while they produced a dramatic score, as suddenly machine guns unleashed their charges and flames erupted from a Luftwaffe engine (substitute also the British, Italian, French, and Austrian aerial forces).

That, it seems to me, sums up pretty well the experience of those who attempt to think the limits of our time and the prospects for a different world. Simply ascertaining the conditions of the times is only the beginning of the task. More often than not, thought and action are in a dark hunt for a target that must exist, yet refuses to reveal its essential mechanism. So, with the appropriate fanfare and lofty (read: pretentious) aspirations that the dark hunt entails, here goes another flight.