Ragman's Circles

Originally Posted on December 10, 2015

[NB: Please answer this one-question survey before reading this blog, so that your responses will not be biased. Thank you for your cooperation. For the correct answer, see below.]

In both the formal and informal media, questions have been raised about the quality and effectiveness of UW-Milwaukee’s upper administration. In order to explore the full range of possible opinion, please respond to the following question. You may select more than one answer.

Which of the following terms describe your opinion of the upper administration of UWM?

A. Cowardly

B. Unqualified

C. Dishonest

D. Incompetent

E. All of the above

Thank you for your cooperation. Your input is highly valued!

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I. Locked out of Chapman Hall

On Wednesday, December 9, at 2:30 p.m., UWM Students for a Democratic Society held a small (fewer than 50 people) protest on Spaights Plaza. In addition to SDS student leaders, faculty speaking at the rally included AFT 3535 President Richard Leson, UWM-AAUP President Rachel Buff, and SDS faculty advisor Annie McClanahan.  The rally had been announced on social media roughly 10 days before the Thanksgiving break and was scheduled at this time on this date so that it could culminate with a march to Chapman Hall (home of UWM’s Office of the Chancellor and Office of the Provost), where the Support Team for the Chancellor’s Campus Organization & Effectiveness Team (CCOET) had been scheduled to hold one of its regularly scheduled biweekly meetings at 3:00 pm.

On the way to Chapman Hall at around 3:20, we encountered a tenured UWM faculty member who had gone over to attend the open meeting on behalf of his/her department. Here is what that faculty member reported as ensuing upon attempting to enter Chapman Hall to attend the CCOET Support Team meeting:

I was able to open the back door, where I was immediately confronted by two security officers (one blocking the door, and one a few paces behind him in the corridor).  The second officer  asked me in a challenging tone, “Do you have business  here?” I replied yes, that I was there to attend the CCOET meeting. She responded, “The budget meeting has been cancelled. There’s nobody up there. You should follow the other gentleman who just left and go.” (I did vaguely notice someone walking away from the building as I was approaching.) I replied, “The meeting has been cancelled?” And the first security office stated that yes, the meeting was cancelled due to “possible activities that might occur associated with the protests taking place” (as best as I can remember the exact procedurese).

So I left, noticing as I did that there was a UWM patrol car waiting to the east on Hartford, and a police or security officer in front of Enderis Hall observing from across the parking lot and speaking into a shoulder radio.

When a group of 20 or so students, faculty, and staff arrived at Chapman Hall just before 3:30 (full disclosure: I was one of that group) we found UWM police officers stationed in the parking lot and around the buildings, along with members of UWM student services stationed on the sidewalk in case they were needed.  When student leaders tried to enter Chapman Hall, they found that the doors to the University’s administration building had been locked.  After knocking a few times, and trying various student and staff IDs on the security swipe unit outside the door, the protest disbanded and people went back to their daily lives, literally and metaphorically locked out of and by the administration of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

II. Downsizing by Survey

When I returned to my office, I found an email from the Secretary of the University to the UWM faculty list, with the subject “Faculty Survey for Academic Reorganization.” The email was coincidentally (?) time-stamped at 2:17 that afternoon, 13 minutes before the announced start of the UWM SDS protest rally.  The message read:

Dear Faculty member,

During the listening sessions and in subsequent discussions, CCOET has received a number of suggestions for reorganization of academic and administrative units on the campus. These suggestions have been published on the website but, as we continue to discuss options that both strengthen the academic mission of UWM and make economic sense, we are anxious to explore the full range of possibilities.

We are asking you to please take this brief survey by clicking on the link below. If you have additional ideas on how the combination of either academic or administrative units will benefit our mission in the future, please share them with the CCOET committee in this survey. This survey will close on Monday, December 14th.

https://milwaukee.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_7UoTqwZtO4OTAAR

Sincerely,

CCOET Co-Chairs

Ignoring the bizarre capitalization in the salutation and the failure of CCOET Co-Chairs Bob Greenstreet and John Reisel to sign their names to this message, the timing and justification for distributing the survey seem curious.  Acknowledging that CCOET has already published on its website numerous “suggestions for reorganization of academic and administrative units on the campus,” the CCOET co-chairs express that they are “anxious to explore the full range of possibilities,” perhaps because they have not gotten the suggestions they were looking for on their website.

This possibility seems borne out by this very poorly designed survey, which as of this moment is still available online. (A more permanent link to a pdf of the survey is available here: CCOET Faculty Survey)

As UWM Professor Emerita Nancy A. Mathiowetz explained in a December 9 letter to UWM Chancellor Mark Mone, about an online UW System survey distributed to the people of Wisconsin last week, the CCOET survey suffers from the same fundamental flaw of producing a “self-selected sample.” The CCOET survey is aimed at UWM faculty but there is nothing to prevent anyone from inside or outside the university from clicking on the link and responding. Nor is there anything to prevent people from responding multiple times.  Such a major flaw makes it impossible to draw any reasonable conclusions from its results.

Perhaps to try to weed out responses from the wrong population, the survey begins by asking respondents to select their Academic unit/department affiliation. Unfortunately this allows individual opinions to be correlated to specific units; and because some units have only a handful of faculty members, this identification runs the risk of identifying the opinions of individual responders. Perhaps the presumed reason is to allow the CCOET co-chairs to correct for bias or for people advocating selfishly for their own interest. But given that the survey also asks for answers based upon one’s professional expertise in later questions, this seems problematic—especially in that it would imagines expertise in terms of self-interest rather than collective interest.

After listing UWM’s 14 schools and colleges, the first question asks, “In your opinion, what is the ideal number of schools/colleges for UWM to have?” This is a preposterous question, which provides no real context or content about these 14 schools and colleges, such as relative size, budget, and organization. Furthermore it is absolutely meaningless, if not fundamentally insulting, to ask about the IDEAL number of schools and colleges in the face of our radically less than ideal situation, what Chancellor Mone described in founding CCOET UWM’s “precarious fiscal situation.” When does CCOET, or the Chancellor, imagine we will be in an IDEAL situation?

The next question similarly provides little context or content, asking “Would your current unit/department benefit from enhanced formal or informal instructional or research collaborations with other units (unit = other schools or colleges)?” What kind of benefit does the question refer to? What would “enhanced” collaborations mean? “Enhanced” with financial incentive? What would be the teaching, research, or service conditions under which “formal or informal instructional or research collaborations” would be enhanced?  How can anyone provide an informed answer to such a vague and uninformed question?

Finally, the survey asks, employing the passive voice habitually used by administrators and others in power to conceal their agency and erase their responsibility, “Should a reorganization take place affecting your Unit/Department, which (if any) Units/Departments should be grouped together with you? (see list below) Note: You may select more than one.”

What is this question asking?  It is almost incoherent, with no meaningful context, made all the more so by the implicit threat and likely fear and uncertainty created by asking people to contemplate their unit/department being reorganized or merged with others.  The uncertainty and precarity of the current situation of being a faculty member at UWM is only heightened by the ambiguity of the final “you,” which could undoubtedly mean either the “individual you” or the “collective you” (your department or unit). Is this asking which of your colleagues you would like to be grouped with should a reorganization take place affecting your unit or department? Or is it asking which units or departments could be usefully or positively combined?  It is impossible to know.

Just like the previous question about enhanced collaboration, the complete absence of context or content makes any responses to this question totally meaningless. For example, faculty in some schools have higher teaching loads than others—who would willingly choose to be grouped with such a department without knowing if it would impact teaching loads, research support, service expectations, degree of self-governance and control over curriculum?  Indeed the only thing certain about this question, and the survey itself, is that it is certain to intensify the unease and anxiety that is widespread among UWM faculty about the impending decisions by the Chancellor and his hand-picked team about how to deal with the $15 or $20 or $30 million “structural deficit” with which we are being terrorized.

If the aim of this survey was to remind faculty that their role in this process is primarily as anonymous respondents to incompetent surveys or anonymous commenters on the CCOET website, or to worsen the already gloomy and downright funereal mood of faculty on campus, congratulations Chancellor Mone and your appointed CCOET co-chairs! You have accomplished your goals!

III. Correct Answer to the Above Survey

As I have been urging for nearly a year on this blog and on formal and informal media, the correct answer to this survey is that UW-Milwaukee faculty must immediately and without qualification take back their university from its Republican-appointed managers. The UWM Faculty Senate should immediately demand that the Chancellor disband CCOET and activate the statutory Faculty Consultative Committee for Financial Emergency, so that an elected faculty committee, not a hand-picked team of administrators and administrator wannabes, can determine the true state of UWM’s financial condition and devise the best way forward for the faculty, staff, and students of the university–not for its administration. In addition the Faculty Senate, as well as all campus governance groups, should issue immediate statements of no confidence in our chancellor. Failing this, we will all continue to be locked out of Chapman Hall, and the administrative takeover of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will be a fait accompli in all but name.

Originally Posted on December 18, 2015 by rgrusin

Last Thursday, December 10, I blogged about how, on the previous afternoon, 20-25 UW-Milwaukee students had been locked out from Chapman Hall, the university’s administration building, where they had marched from a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) rally to deliver a list of budgetary demands to UWM Chancellor Mark Mone. Ironically or not, on Friday December 11, the Board of Regents passed a resolution “to reaffirm its commitment and support for the principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression.”

As is often the case with such resolutions, however, this one was passed mainly to specify the situations in which free speech could be suppressed, as this paragraph makes clear:

The freedom to debate and discuss the merits of competing ideas does not mean that members of the university community may say whatever they wish, wherever they wish. Consistent with longstanding practice informed by law, institutions within the System may restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests, or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the university. In addition, the institutions may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt ordinary activities. But these are narrow exceptions to the general principle of freedom of expression, and it is vitally important that these exceptions never be used in a manner that is inconsistent with each institution’s commitment to a completely free and open discussion of ideas.

According to the UW Board of Regents, university administrations retain the right to “restrict expression” that is “directly incompatible with the functioning of the university” or that may “disrupt ordinary activities.” In the University of Wisconsin System, business as usual trumps free expression. By the logic of this resolution, locking the doors of the building that houses the offices of the Chancellor and Provost was an exemplary administrative action by UWM.

On December 17, at the final Faculty Senate meeting of the semester, UWM-AAUP President and faculty senator Rachel Buff called out Chancellor Mone about this cowardly (my word) behavior, emphasizing that he had shut out the very students he should be supporting–those who cared enough about the future of the university to want to present their views directly to its chancellor. Not unsurprisingly Buff’s challenge prompted a flurry of defensive maneuvers by members of the upper administration: Chancellor Mone was in Madison at a meeting; Vice-Chancellor Laliberte had met with the students before the rally; Provost Britz was in a budget meeting in the building; and so on.

But the claim on which their lockdown seemed to depend was their fear that as many as 500 students were planning to enter the administration building. Both Chancellor Mone and Vice-Chancellor Van Harpen relayed this intelligence to the Senate in defense of their actions. Amazingly they based this data on the fact that they had noticed that more than 500 people had been invited on the SDS Facebook event page. They were merely being prudent by locking down the administration building against 500 angry students.

Sadly, the UWM administration does not have a clue about how social media works. At the end of 2015 there is not a single Twitter account to be found among Chancellor Mone, Provost Britz, or Vice Chancellors Van Harpen, Laliberte, or Luljak (although the UWM communications czar is the only one of the five to have a Facebook page). Perhaps if there were more social media savvy among the UWM administration, someone might have known what anybody who has posted an event on Facebook knows–that inviting 500 people to an event does not by any stretch of the imagination mean that 500 people will come! Indeed there were no more than 50 or so at last week’s SDS rally, and less than half of that number walked over to Chapman Hall.

Just as last June an ironic tweet about “armed insurgence” earned me a visit from two UWM police, so inviting 500 people to an event on Facebook prompted UWM Chancellor Mone and his cabinet to lock down Chapman Hall. As harmful as the actions of this administration continue to be to the students, faculty, and staff of UWM, actions like this seem as incompetent as they do malicious. In light of this kind of behavior it is difficult not to wonder if Chancellor Mone is in over his head.

Prior to his appointment as Chancellor, Mark Mone’s highest administrative position had been as Associate Dean for Executive Education & Business Engagement at UWM’s Lubar School for Business. With such limited academic administrative experience–never having served as department chair, dean, or provost–it is easy to understand why he shows so little willingness or facility to collaborate with faculty, staff, and students in the face of our current economic crisis. His insecurity and inexperience are also evident in his refusal fully to inform faculty and staff about the details of UWM’s budgetary situation, or in his fear of empowering an elected faculty committee to try to devise a vision or plan for how to go forward in the face of the university’s purported structural deficit.

In an administration-centered university like UWM, students are customers, staff are interchangeable, and faculty make up a faction that needs to be managed and controlled. It is therefore no wonder that a Facebook event inviting 500 people to a rally is a terrifying and incomprehensible enough prospect to lock down Chapman Hall. But perhaps we should look on the bright side. After all, in light of the recent Regents resolution, it would be hard to imagine a clearer expression of the UWM administration’s reaffirmation of its support for “the principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression” than locking the doors of Chapman Hall to prevent two dozen students from expressing themselves.

One of the reasons I have been interested in the development of object-oriented ontology over the past several years is that I have been working on and off since the late 1990s on what might be characterized as a media-oriented or mediation-oriented ontology.  As early as 1996, in the essay “Remediation,” which Jay David Bolter and I published in Configurations, we wrote that “Media function as objects within the world–within systems of linguistic, cultural, social, and economic exchange” (349).

Later in the same part of the essay we further elaborated the ontology of mediation: “As we know from a visit to any traditional museum, the space between viewer and canvas is controlled, institutionalized, and policed as a special, real kind of space, which people walk around or wait before entering. In our own time the colonization of museum space has been extended to the space between a photographer or videographer and the object of her mediating technology. When a tourist is taking a photograph or making a video, for example, we treat the line of sight between the camera and the object as if it were a real obstruction: we walk around it, bend under it, or wait until it is gone. We make these gestures not only out of politeness, but also to acknowledge the reality of the act of mediation that we are witnessing. In this case, the act of mediation functions in a system of pedestrian traffic circulation like a tree, a wire, or a traffic light (which is also an act of mediation whose reality we acknowledge). Mediations are real not only because the objects produced (photos, videos, films, paintings, CD-ROMS, etc.) circulate in the real world, but also because the act of mediation itself functions as a [Latourian] hybrid and is treated much like a physical object” (349-50). Some of the rhetorical qualifications in this passage (as in much of Remediation) derive from the compromises of co-authorship.  In the years following our publication of Remedition my own characterization of the reality of mediation has been and continues to be more direct.

A somewhat more direct characterization can be found in my 2001 lecture entitled “Screen Space, Collage, and the Remediation of Modernism.”  The piece is obviously dated, but its argument that the development of digital media screens echoes Clement Greenberg’s account of the development of modernism still seems to have some merit, especially in light of the ways in which our new media have left the picture plane of the computer screen and moved into the world–whether in mobile devices, the proliferation of public screens, and even the internet of things.

I’ve never published the piece, but in looking back over it recently it occurred to me that I might post it here in case it would be of interest to anyone.  Rather than attempt to update the talk to take account of recent developments in philosophy, media theory, or media themselves, I thought I would simply post it as a pdf here in its 2001 form.

Screen Space

Attached is a pdf of my talk at the 2013 Annual Conference of the Society for Media Studies, delivered on March 9, 2013, at a session entitled “Primordigital Cinema.”  Enjoy.

Post-Cinematic Atavism

Here’s the accompanying powerpoint:

Post-Cinematic Atavism–SCMS

(For @aaronsw)

While watching the NFL playoffs on TV this weekend I was stunned by the following commercial, which affected me so strangely and powerfully that I had to write this blog entry in an attempt to explain.

Although this Sprint commercial clearly piqued me, I did not immediately know why. It took me a moment to figure out that it had something to do with the “thinking-feeling” of watching the commercial in the mediational “stimmung” that has emerged in the wake of Aaron Swartz having hanged himself on Friday, January 11 (Massumi, “The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens”).  Swartz’s suicide was apparently a depressive reaction to what Lawrence Lessig called “prosecutorial bullying,” his ongoing prosecution by the Justice Department for attempting to download thousands of articles from JSTOR, a non-profit academic database whose holdings were available (mainly to academics) through paid subscriptions from university libraries. Hacking JSTOR, like most of Swartz’s online actions, was done in the service of a fundamental commitment to open and universal access to information, sloganized by Stewart Brand in 1984 as “information wants to be free.”

In order to unpack my affective response to Sprint’s “unlimited data pan” commercial, I need to detour through another recent television ad campaign, for Apple’s highly touted “Retina Display,” first unveiled for the iPad 3.

Apple’s advertisement deploys the 80s and 90s logic of remediation, simultaneously calling attention to and erasing the device’s technical mediation.  The narrative consists of two parallel assertions about mediation, each of which begins with a phrase (“when a screen becomes this good”) that names the aspect of remediation that sees each new media technology as improving on, and hence re-mediating, existing media technologies. Together these assertions replicate the double logic of remediation.

The first assertion foregrounds the hypermediacy of the Retinal Display screen, enacting a movement from the materiality of screenic mediation to the real:  “When a screen becomes this good, colors are more vibrant, words are pin-sharp, everything becomes more brilliant.” In moving from “vibrant colors” to “pin-sharp words” to the becoming brilliant of everything, the first assertion mingles perception, sensation, and affect with the technical mediation of the Retinal Display. 

The second assertion, however, suggests that the consequence of Apple’s improved technical mediation is not to emphasize mediation but to do away with it: “Because when a screen becomes this good, it’s simply you and the things you care about.”  What makes the Retinal Display “this good,” what results from its technical remediation, is the fact that it disappears.  Rather than colors or words or brilliance, the screen leaves only “you and the things you care about,” together without the mediation of image or text or luminosity.  

Like Apple’s earlier iPad Retinal Display commercial, Sprint’s commercial for its “Truly Unlimited Data” plan for iPhone 5 sets a tone reminiscent of 90s digital sublimity, here remediated for the rhetoric of 21st century social media marketing: “The miraculous is everywhere, in our homes, our minds.”  But where Apple’s retinal display commercial markets a media device, Sprint’s ad highlights sharing, connectivity, and data. “We can share every second in data dressed in pixels—a billion roaming photojournalists uploading the human experience.” 

Where the Retinal Display marketed the affective life of media, the Sprint ad markets the affectivity of our mediated lives.  Measuring experience in data and pixels, the Sprint ad is selling the sublimity of a life led online by billions: “and it is spectacular, so why would you cap that?”  During the montage, the words “unlimited” and “connect” flash supra-liminally on the screen.

Sprint’s “truly unlimited data” is attached to a specific device, the iPhone 5. Almost like the eye (or “i”) of God, “my iPhone 5 can see every point of view, every panorama, the entire gallery of humanity.” Where the Retinal Display is so good that it erases itself, the iPhone 5 generates the need to erase the embodied self by uploading human experience to the cloud.

What comes next is what threw me off, what stopped me in my affectively mediated tracks, particularly in light of Aaron Swartz’s suicide. The commercial’s voiceover ends as follows: “I need to upload all of me, I need—no, I have the right—to be unlimited. Only Sprint offers truly unlimited data for iPhone 5.”

Moving from the “need to upload all of me” (which echoes what Katherine Hayles has summarized as “Hans Moravec’s transhumanist fantasy that we will soon be able to upload our consciousness into computers and leave our bodies behind,” “Wrestling with Transhumanism”) to the “right” to “truly unlimited data,” the Sprint commercial remediates the cyber-libertarian belief in the universal political right of unlimited access to information as a consumerist right to an unlimited data plan. In the media “stimmung” generated by Aaron Swartz’s suicide, this transformation of a political ideal for which he (and indeed many others) lived and (sometimes) died into Sprint’s newest data plan for the iPhone 5 produced an affective thinking-feeling that a blog entry can only begin to explain. 

As Aaron Swartz’s courageous life and tragic death remind us, the data to which Sprint would sell us unlimited access is in fact severely limited, owned and protected by governmental and corporate institutions who choose precisely what we can access and what we cannot, what information is “free,” what can be purchased, and what cannot be accessed at any price.  Indeed the only “truly unlimited data” that might exist is that which Sprint and Apple, Facebook and Google, or state and federal governments obtain from us, as we take advantage of their “unlimited data plans” and free online services to “upload the human experience” to their databanks, where it can be mined for commercial and political ends.  

While this structural homology between the cyber-libertarian belief in unlimited access to information and the  neoliberal marketing of unlimited data betrays the fact that both positions have their origins in classical liberalism, this shared intellectual genealogy must not be taken as equating the two sets of commitments.  For there can be no mistake.  It was precisely in the service of interests like those represented by Sprint’s “unlimited data plan” that the US Department of Justice and its corporate allies prosecuted Aaron Swartz to his death.  

If you Google the phrase “Romney’s path to the White House,” or if you have simply been paying attention to media coverage of the 2012 US presidential election, you will note that virtually all discussion of how Romney might actually win in November focuses on polling and the electoral college.  On first glance of course this makes absolute sense.  Reporters and pundits remind us that the race is about the Electoral College, that to understand who has the best chance to win, or how each candidate can win, we need to add up electoral votes to see how many different ways each candidate can get to the magical number of 270.  Thanks to interactive touch-screens featuring red-and-blue maps of the 50 (or mostly 48) US states, TV reporters like CNN’s John King or NBC’s Chuck Todd delight themselves (if not their viewers) by endlessly changing the color of various “swing states” to premediate the various combinations of states that could pave the way for Romney or Obama to win the 2012 presidential election.  And for most of these combinations, Ohio (or Florida) seems key.

As fond as I am of interactive electoral math and statistical sampling, our current obsession with polling too often detracts our attention from the factors or forces that shape or mobilize the voter sentiment that polls seek to capture.  Thus when I express concern about a possible Romney victory, I am reminded by my poll-obsessed friends that Nate Silver still shows Obama with a 70% chance of winning or with nearly 300 electoral votes or that Obama still leads solidly in Ohio and Florida, or that the reliable polls show the race to be much less close than the MSM headlines suggest, and so forth.  As if I don’t know those things myself.

But polls are at best measures or simulations or samples of where the electorate stands at a particular moment.   While it is true that sites like Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight or Sam Wang’s Princeton Election Consortium provide superb historical records of where the polls have been along with their forecasts of where the polls are going, what they are not equipped to do is to imagine or dare I say premediate the various potential affective formations that might cause the polls to move in one direction to the other.  That is to say, while such sites do an excellent job of premediating various statistical paths to the presidency, what they are unable to do is to premediate the affective paths, the potential electoral mood or stimmung, that might cause the polls to change, that might propel one or the other candidate to the presidency.

Which brings me to the question: What is Romney’s affective path to the presidency?

From the moment that Romney announced Ryan as his running mate with the retired battleship Wisconsin as their stage, my fear was that the only way a Romney-Ryan ticket could defeat Obama-Biden was to stir up a nationalistic, xenophobic, and fascist mood or structure of feeling among the electorate.  And we have seen signs of this at various times, particularly in Romney’s aggressive statements and speeches about Obama’s foreign policy, especially the way he jumped on the Obama administration in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Libyan embassy or his failed attempts to stir up xenophobic feelings about China’s trade tactics.

But in the aftermath of the debate, I see a slightly different version of this affective path emerging, one motivated less (or not only) by fear. Romney’s current affective path to the presidency passes more through a feeling of security in Romney’s leadership, as reflected in the latest Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll of likely voters in Colorado, Virginia and Wisconsin, which showed that in the aftermath of the first debate voters in those states felt that Romney, not Obama, showed greater leadership qualities.  Indeed this path is not distinct from the kind of nationalistic affect mentioned above.  The current controversy over security failures at the Libyan embassy could provide a way for  Romney to link voter confidence in his leadership with geopolitical insecurity or fear–particularly if we were to have an October terrorist surprise that could be used to intensify doubts about Obama’s ability to protect Americans from foreign threats as well as about his ability to lead the nation out of its ongoing economic crisis.

This is my fear–that Romney is succeeding in presenting himself in the image of the stern but caring white patriarch that has been one of the leading affective manifestations of the American presidency.  Romney’s current strategy of projecting an affectivity of certainty, determination, and purpose irrespective of facts or consistency seems to be working in persuading voters that he, not Obama, is best positioned to lead the country through the next four years.  To counteract the intensification and amplification of this electoral mood the Obama campaign needs to fight Romney on affective not cognitive turf.  Pointing out the  inconsistencies in Romney’s positions on the issues, or even calling him out on the specifics of his lies, can work to reinforce the feelings of Obama supporters that they are right in preferring Obama over Romney but does little or nothing to change the mood of the electorate.

What then can be done?  For one, Obama needs to project his own counter-mood of leadership, underscoring in strong, unhesitant language the economic and geopolitical leadership his administration has provided in leading America out of the mess that Bush had left for him.  He needs to underscore in no uncertain terms how Obamacare and his position on tax fairness provides protection and security for the vast majority of Americans.  And the Obama campaign (including, I would argue, Biden and Obama in the coming debates) needs to return to the questions of Romney’s dishonesty and self-serving behavior, hammering home the failure to disclose his taxes, for example, and even perhaps creating some doubt about his beholdenness to the Mormon Church.

Where Kerry was Swift-Boated, Romney needs to be 1040ed.  Most of this work will need to be performed by surrogates.  But it needs to be performed. The strategy to derail the Romney-Ryan train does not lie in calling them out on the details of their lies, their inconsistencies, or their lack of specifics but on casting doubt on or better yet disrupting the affective narrative they continue to tell about their strong, paternalistic leadership.  A two-pronged affective strategy of presenting Obama as a firm but caring leader and making Romney and Ryan look self-serving and dishonest will help them to secure the support of women and minority voters, to weaken Romney’s support among independents, and consequently to pave an affective path to the White House that will manifest itself clearly and decisively not only in the mood of the electorate but in the electoral statistics, graphs. and maps that so many of us love so very much.

For the past few years I have been trying to think mediation, to move through or delve into the concept that is at the root of remediation and premediation, to think about what kind of action or event or thing mediation is—to understand what kind of work mediation performs.  My basic assumption or starting point is the idea that mediation should not, as it has in the history of Western thought, be considered as a secondary event or action, but rather as primary.  Mediation as primary then needs to be thought not as something that comes between two agents or objects or subjects that are already given, but as that which constitutes objects, agents, or events, as that out of which or through which or by means of which individual objects or entities emerge—mediation as a kind of individuation.  This mediation is also, as Latour reminds us, a form of translation, an action that transforms that which is mediated into something different from what it was, as an action that produces change.  This is not to deny that there are agents, objects, entitites, but rather to insist that they are themselves mediations, that is, that they themselves are transformations or translations of other objects, agents, forces, flows, and so forth and that it is only as they continue to be translated or mediated (at however slow a pace or long a scale, as say a piece of granitic gneiss or an ongoing event of erosion like the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River) that they continue to exist.

One way I am now beginning to think mediation is through the process of medi(t)ation, most specifically through the process of mindful breathing that is at the core of so much meditation.  For breathing is a wonderful example of the primacy of mediation, as well as the way in which mediation functions as translation. Is breathing a function of life or is life a function of breathing?  Both seem true—or they seem inseparable.  But it certainly seems to be the case that without breath there is no life.  But leaving that question aside for a moment, we can still see how breath functions as mediation in an interesting way, as a living organism’s mediation/translation between its individual life and the world within or among which it lives, moves, acts, feels, etc.  In breathing the body is itself a medium, which is involved with coming between the in-breath and the out-breath, the inhale and the exhale. One breathes in “air”; it is then taken into the blood, the circulation system, through the lungs; one exhales “air.”  But the air that is exhaled is different from the air that is inhaled; it has been mediated by the body, translated from oxygen to carbon-dioxide.  Meditation as mindful breathing is in this sense a becoming aware of mediation, a coming aware of the body as medium, of one of the many different ways that the body is a medium, and of the ways, therefore, that mediation is life, is primary, not a dependent, secondary concept.

In becoming aware of one’s breathing, however, one also becomes aware of the fragility of the living body and of the way it is knitted or stitched together by one’s breaths (and other bodily functions necessary for human mediation to continue).  For in attending to one’s breaths one comes to understand that breathing in and out is not a continuous, unbroken process, but rather that it is dependent upon the break, the shift in modality from inhaling to exhaling.  In attending to these breaks, these transitions or mediations from gathering breath into one’s lungs and bloodstream and then expelling it through one’s nose and mouth, it becomes clear that breaths are and must be stitched together in order for life to exist.  Put differently, breathing is a kind of  “stitching time,” to allude to the title of Erin Manning’s magical installation for the 2012 Sidney Biennale, on the top floor of a deserted building on Cockatoo Island.

Manning describes “Folds to Infinity,” the larger project of which “Stitching Time” is one manifestation as follows:

Folds to Infinity (2008–ongoing) features a textile collection made up of serged pieces of fabric, cut to the shape of hundreds of pattern pieces that connect through magnets, buttons and buttonholes to create constellations both architectural and wearable. The collection is presented in site-conditioned installations whose purpose is to rethink the relationship between fabric, the body and the environment. Participants are invited to explore how collective practices of folding-in, to create clothing, and folding-out, to create architectural environments, can provide a springboard for re-experiencing what a body can do. The emphasis on collective expression is always interwoven with an emphasis on re-examining the role time plays in creative encounters. Folds to Infinity is a slow piece that has evolved over many years through sewing circles in Canada, Australia and Finland. These sewing circles are weekly gatherings that have, over the years, become central to the art practice. They are not simply a preparation for the dissemination of the work – they are the ongoing genesis of a relational practice.

Although not explicitly concerned either with breathing or with mediation, the installation “Stitching Time” suggests to me precisely the workings of both.  The installation is made up of thousands of pieces of fabric, cut to the shape of the patterns that, stitched together, make the clothing that our bodies wear almost without any real a-wear-ness of their composition.  These pattern pieces are folded and draped and hung and gathered together with magnets and buttons and thread on a topology of netting that links the installation to the ship-mending history of Cockatoo Island. While one might suggest that these pattern pieces are the given primary materials which then are mediated by the artist, atomistic building blocks that precede the act of relation or mediation, this would be to overlook the fact that the pieces themselves have been stitched together in sewing circles by people whose embodied breathings in and out have themselves stitched together their bodily actions of folding and cutting and sewing. That is, these elements are themselves produced through the embodied, collective, technical mediation of the sewing circles themselves, which are also a part of a heterogeneous fabric of human and nonhuman mediation, the assemblage that Folds to Infinity stitches together.

Indeed the installation stitches together moments of mediation. By folding and linking these pieces of fabric both inward to make clothing to drape or swaddle individual bodies and outward to create an architectural environment that works to drape or swaddle the installation space so that multiple bodies can gather and disperse, circulate and rest, “Stitching Time” becomes itself a mediation of breathing, allowing visitors to enter, move, stop, and experience their own bodies and then exhaling them as they leave the installation space. Indeed temporality, like relation, is key to the mediation that “Stitching Time” performs.  Lit only by the changing natural light, the installation is far from static.  Shapes and colors change almost by the moment, remediating the architecture of the space to produce new and infinite relations among netting, fabric, and bodies.

“Stitching Time” achieves something like the aim of art that Henry David Thoreau sets out in Walden; or, Life in the Woods: “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”  By folding and stitching together fabrics, bodies, and space, “Stitching Time” does not simply “make a few objects beautiful,” but presents an installation of exquisite beauty that “paints the very atmosphere and medium through which we look,” live, and move—what Thoreau calls “the highest of the arts.”

On the day after the Nonhuman Turn conference I went for a walk up Lake Drive.  I had an experience that I often have; you’ve probably had it, too. Walking on the right of the sidewalk, I regularly have runners pass me on the left. Sometimes two or more of them run talking together; my body tracks them with my ears as they approach and then overtake me. Sometimes I catch the sound of feet on concrete just before a silent runner or two pass me by. But other times, and this is the experience that interests me, I find myself turning my body and attention suddenly to the left, with no perception or consciousness of the runner who suddenly emerges at my side and runs past. In these latter cases my body makes a nonhuman turn, prior to and independent of either perception or cognition, as I only become aware of the runner after my nonhuman turn.