[Rumori] idea to port over to political domain?

[Steev Hise]

on Wed, 6 Jul 2005 Bob Boster told me:

->bb> One last swing at this and then back to work....

(Yeah I should be working too.  maybe I should just be dropping
this now. or taking it off list. does anyone else have any
opinion?  why do mailing list discussions always get so bipolar? )

->>annoyed. i'm already irritated when i travel and see armies of
->>other travellers toting the same Lonely Planet guidebook.
->
->bb> Remember, not every site of note, only every site where someone is
->recompiling the extant visual (or in our case audio) elements into artwork
->through OBSERVATION.

well, there's art and then there's art. just like there's
backpackers and then there's backpackers. i'm just contemplating
the 300,000 stickers being included with Lonely Planet
guidebooks, and thinking about how I used to think that everyone
who travelled "the Lonely Planet way" must be cool and
interesting, and then I found out that's not even close to being
true.

->>college degrees.  something about these yellow arrows bothers me
->>even more than the sprayed-on symbols announcing "this is my
->>gang's turf, members of other gangs, stay away or we'll knife
->>you."
->
->bb> I hate to pick nits, but why does one of these groups have any more
->"right" to adjust the physical world than another?  Disenfranchisement is
->not, in itself, a justification for ownership of "the commons" any more
->than being of the owner class.

well, first of all i wasnt saying i approved of the gang
grafitti, or that the "gang" should "own" the street to a greater
extent than the yellow arrowers. by definition the commons is
owned by everyone, right?  but i do think disenfranchisement IS a
justification, not for "owning", but for certain behaviors that
constitute struggles for control of, the commons - behaviors that
woudl otherwise not be justified.

   arguments against the commons always come from the owner
class. that's because they know they don't NEED a commons, they
already own or will own a corresponding private version of
everything. and to a certain extent that's true.  so isn't it
more important, given the world we live in (see below)  to
guarantee and fight for the rights of the poor and marginalized
to acccess the commons?

again i don't approve of gang grafitti. i don't approve of kids,
even poor kids, defacing the homes of poor working class
families. And I can imagine cool stuff to be done with the yellow
stickers. so I wasn't saying that ALL grafitti is better than
ALL uses of the yellow stickers.  I was just expressing a gut
feeling, that the project bothers me.

you're right, in theory - ideally, IMHO, the "'right' to adjust
the physical world" would come through concensus-based collective
decision making amongst members of the community where the
adjustment is to be made, and indeed everything would be in the
commons, except each person's toothbrush and other such
personal and in-use private property.

but we don't live in that kind of world right now.  so
compensatory behavior ends  up being more appropriate than in an
ideal world. just like, for instance, affirmative action.

->In fact, more "contamination" of the visual
->space by "non-native" visitors (although frankly, I wonder about the
->"street kids" thing...) is probably another productive Althusserian crack
->in the superstructure, regardless of the class association of the contaminator.

bob i hate to say it but this seems like a really priveleged
thing to say.  I'm not too up on my Althusser (isn't
'superstructure' just another word for culture?), but for me the
rights of the people who live (really live, not just own property
or do business there) in a place, any place, who make up a
community, the rights of those people to determine what happens
in that place should always take precedence over those of any
visitor.

an across-the-board valorization of "contamination" seems way off
the mark.  of course you put the word in quotes for a reason.
what is contamination? it's like "noise", right? and we here on
this list just love noise, right?  but even as someone who's been
described as a creator of "noise music" i've never approved of
ALL noise in ANY situation.

maybe i'd be happier with the yellow arrow project if it was a
rule that you could only put arrows in your own community or with
the consent of the community - but it's like what i think happens
with most "public art." some artist from outside the community
gets a grant to put some  sculpture in a park or street
corner and doesn't consult the people that live there, doesn't
know anything about the place, though he might think he does. why
should he get to crack someone else's superstructure?

over and out,

smh

Steev Hise |  steev at detritus.net | http://detritus.net/steev
Donate to the Computers for Bolivia Project: http://villaingenio.org/computers/donate.html
blog: http://steev.hise.org | gpg public key: http://steev.hise.org/gpgkey.txt
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"If only it weren't for the people, the goddamned people, always
getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren't for them, earth
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		-Kurt Vonnegut, "Player Piano"
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