Jeff Ferrell is currently a professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, TX, where he is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He has been teaching University-level courses in criminology and sociology since the late 1970s. He has also written a large number of journal articles on countercultural topics, including: Peter Kropotkin, street gangs, graffiti (a subject he returns to repeatedly through his career) and Critical Mass (cf. Bipedal, By Pedal). In 2001 Ferrell left a tenured position at Northern Arizona University, moved to Fort Worth, and for two years took up scavenging found materials before finding another academic appointment. The result of this interim lifestyle was Empire of Scrounge.
Empire of Scrounge is a scholarly book, written by a professional scholar, based upon the life experiences of the author. Ferrell creates the impression that he was not living the life of a scrounger for the purpose of doing field research. Instead, Ferrell was living off of his scavenging out of necessity, taking metal to the scrap yard, holding frequent yard sales, keeping items for his own use. Ferrell would use any means at the disposal of the scavenger underground to extract value from his found objects, and it was through this resourcefulness that he was successfully able to make a living off of finding and sorting valuable garbage.
The Empire that Ferrell refers to is not a geographical location but rather a social undercurrent that operates beneath the cultural consumerist surface, a necessary underlay to hegemonic modes of being and acting. In the sense that it is not really a place but an underlying social mode, Ferrell’s Empire is akin to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's terrorizing security state the Nobel laureate called Gulag Archipelago - except that the empire exists in the contemporary consumer society rather than the totalitarian society of Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Empire of Scrounge may be understood as bound by real geography (wherever conspicuous consumption is mandatory to the maintenance of middle-class status) but it's appearance is concealed by dominant forces.
Much of Ferrell’s book is composed of anecdotes of his forages through the Fort Worth neighborhoods, searching for discarded wealth. Ferrell often traveled through his city via bicycle, recalling the search activities of 1920s German master of found-material-art (and cyclist), Kurt “Merz” Schwitters. Ferrell describes encountering others who pursue similar lifestyles, and occasional contact with the people who are leaving the discards. These encounters range from friendly to hostile, but when Ferrell discusses how opening a trashbag can lead to unpleasant social revelations, this hostility is understandable despite its absurdity. Much of the book are journal notes about great finds, and sometimes Ferrell just goes into lists of objects and book titles. Other sections on the book are reflections upon the social significance of the things he finds, including ammunition and the still-packaged gifts of a baby shower. People expect their secrets to be carried by sanitation workers into an anonymizing whirpool of consumer-culture exhaust but instead Ferrell, a trained sociologist and criminologist, looks through it and ultimately comments upon it in a book.
Much of the book is about the marginal social world and sub-economy that has emerged around the practice of trash-picking. In some parts of the world, scouring garbage for neglected wealth is a very common practice, in a society where middle-class consumerism is dominant, the practice is deviant. The author discusses, via citing thinkers such as SituationistRaoul Vaneigem, and cultural theorist Michel De Certeau, how scrounging leads an individual to engage with the city in a different way from those who create scroungeable waste. The author also discusses the large tangle of bylaws urban areas are enacting to criminalize the practice of garbage-picking and resale (Fort Worth, for example, has strict laws regarding yard sales).
Ferrell’s book is about the author making his living, but much of it is also about his observations of what he finds while scrounging. His observations are supported by citing a wide range of literature, including Jacques Derrida, Guy Debord, and the Anonymously penned hobopunk novel, Evasion. To evoke another literary source that is (unfairly!) not given any consideration in Empire of Scrounge The author is reminiscent of the character Christie Logan, from Canadian author Margaret Laurence’s novel The Diviners. Logan is a trash collector who ‘divines’ knowledge about his condescending neighbors through the refuse they put out. Ferrell does similar work in Empire of Scrounge, demonstrating an ability to read discarded refuse as texts and to make discarded objects valuable again on multiple levels of meaning.
The basic foundation for the Jim Crow laws that segregated the races in the American South, according to At the Dark End of the Street author Danielle L. McGuire (and a number of her sources), is a fear of sex. In particular the driving fear was of the races mixing, of the pure white blood becoming polluted by impurities from inferiors. This fear was the surging undercurrent to those laws that organized southern society into a racially tiered hierarchy. Riding that current was the fear of the supersexualized black stereotype, the the black man of the white imagination who is driven by a violent lust for white women and the insatiable black woman with little concern for public morality - such representations of the other served as sufficient grounds for maintaining racial segregation and oppression in the American south.
The History of Sexuality, a three volume text by French philosopher and cultural theorist Michel Foucault, describes how sexuality has been historically constituted as a domain and a director of social power. Much of Foucault’s text is focused upon how thinkers of the Classical world discussed sex and its proper conduct with regards to a good life. Foucault’s analysis described examples of how numerous writers of the past constituted the sexual life of the subject as productive of a good citizen and good societies. In other words, sexuality and a socially imposed sexual conduct can be the means by which a population is organized, which is, in a sense, what was at play in the American south under Jim Crow. Danielle L. McGuire’s book, At the Dark End of the Street, describes a weaponized sexuality, where the protection of the chastity of white women became the pretense by which black men were brutalized by whites and the rape of black women by white men was a means of repression against the black population. I’m not sure if sexuality really was the basis for segregation but McGuire’s text has convinced me that it was a means for the establishment and maintenance of power in southern society.
McGuire’s text approaches the history of the Civil Rights Movement from an angle that was previously unexplored in the civil rights literature. At the Dark End of the Street contains numerous accounts of black rape, murder and oppression and the hands of southern whites, and the frequent repetition of the crimes (in a sense) as law officials and the courts let white criminals walk free. Furthermore, the book also contains numerous accounts of black men sentenced to death for crimes against white women when there was often minimal evidence that a crime even occurred. Rosa Parks, frequently portrayed as the mother of the Civil Rights Movement, and is often remembered as a tired woman on a bus who just couldn’t bear to move all the way to the back, was actually an investigator sent to Abbeville, AL. by the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP to shed light on the matter of the rape of Recy Taylor. Taylor was kidnapped and raped by four white men and while she could identify her assailants to police, they lived unpunished for their crime. McGuire asserted the frequency of such occurrences in the south, with rapists often being released after insisting that their victim was a prostitute. Agents of the freedom movement sought to oppose these crimes in court, but before they could proceed they needed an impeccable example of black womanhood, because black women were assumed to be guilty of immorality, of enticing white men in some way.
While rape was a weapon in the arsenal of white repression against black populations, so was the city transportation system. Black bus riders in Montgomery and other southern cities were often forced to stand, even if seats were empty, according to the rules of conduct. Bus drivers were often cruel and verbally abusive to the riders, many of whom were the black women who worked as domestic help in affluent white households, who were forced to pay at the front but board at the middle door. Drivers would sometimes force black passengers to pay at the front, then quickly close the door and drive off before the patron could board. Furthermore, passengers who did not comply were arrested, detained, and frequently subject to sexual abuse administered by the police. The author thus describes a network of oppressive forces made up of the transportation system, white employers, law enforcement, and the courts, all of which are driven by sexual fears whites had of the racialized other.
Rosa Parks became the mother of the freedom movement because she was already an experienced civil rights activist (she was involved in the movement since the 1940s) and her reputation was beyond reproach, not simply because she chose to resist unfair rules of bus ridership. She was far from the first woman to disobey the orders of a bus driver, many others entered that realm ahead of her and it was their testimony of the cruel treatment they received by transportation officials and then police and the courts that prompted her to follow. It was her activist-honed bravery and her impeccable character that made her an icon for a movement that was already gaining in strength. With the momentum gained by Park’s action (supported by countless southern women who were vocal about their experiences) the Civil Rights Movement entered its best known phase, beginning at the end of 1955 with the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
At the Dark End of the Street is not just about Rosa Parks path from the investigation of unpunished rapes of black women by white men to her arrest on a Montgomery bus, although one of the book’s strengths is that it returns the depth to a woman who has largely been reduced in the popular consciousness to an image and a short anecdote. The book adds these dimensions to Parks by contextualizing her work as an investigator, and by contextualizing those cases in a society that is steeped in the politics of sadistic and racialized sexuality. McGuire’s text also recalls how other black activists formed organizations like the Sojourners for Truth and Justice to protect “black womanhood”, and it contains practical reversals of racial stereotypes, describing incident after incident where white men behaved as violent sexual predators of vulnerable black women.
Ultimately, the text describes the movement as a site where individual women could find pride in their race and gender, and attain a sense of personhood in a society that was structured to deny such status. Endesha Ida May Holland, for example, went from working as a prostitute to becoming an SNCC activist, stating that “the movement said I was somebody; I was somebody, they said.” McGuire uses court decisions as markers of progress, as a chapter is devoted to the first trial where white men were given life sentences in the south for the rape of Betty Jean Owens, and the book’s final chapter is about the trial of Joan Little, a woman of poor repute who killed jailer Clarence Alligood in self defense after he threatened her with rape during her detainment. Little was acquitted at trial and McGuire’s book includes a political cartoon at the end of the chapter that features and illustration of Joan Little standing over a knocked-out allegorical figure of ‘Dixie Racism’ in a boxing ring.
At the Dark end of the Street has received a number of accolades since its publication. It has won the 2011 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians and the 2011 Lillian Smith Book Award from the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries. The book contains a detailed index, detailed endnotes, and a bibliography that is subdivided into publication types. The book also contains many black and white images of the people whose stories populate the text (many of these images also appear on the book website.)
Just before the start of the 1960s, and into the first couple years of the decade, a number of books were published that took a critical eye to American society during one of its most prosperous periods. Such books included The Organization Man(1956)by American sociologist William H Whyte, that critically analyzed the behavior of American corporate executives, The Death and Life of Great American Cities(1961) by freelance writer and urban critic Jane Jacobs, that critiqued the contemporary design of urban centres and their effect on quality of life, and Rachel Carson’sSilent Spring (1960), a book that inspired the environmental movement with its descriptions of the harmful ecological effects of certain industrial practices. Growing Up Absurd (1956), Paul Goodman’s 300 page discussion of contemporary life and its effects on burgeoning masculinity in mid-century America may be added to this list, especially as it played a role in inspiring the radical 1960s.
Paul Goodman (1911-1972) was a radical leftist intellectual polymath who left behind a large body of literature when he died. He was a prolific writer who had produced a number of works of fiction, drama and poetry. Most of his work, however, was critical commentary and cultural analysis, on a myriad of subjects, delivered from a far-left perspective. Goodman has been mentioned in Andrew Cornell’s article A New Anarchism Emergesas one of the writers who kept American anarchism vital during the mid-century period when far-left politics were at a low ebb in the United States. Goodman wrote for a number of leftist magazines, publishing articles in which he discusses the mass media, sexuality, politics, social behavior, and the arts. Out of Goodman’s large bibliography, Growing Up Absurd is probably his best known work, and the text that gave the author his reputation as a first-rate social critic.
In this book, Goodman identified a decline in the possibilities for young men in the United States during the 1950s. Much of his analysis is focused upon what he considered to be the poor quality of employment positions that were available to young men at that time. Goodman argued that, while a young man (the author operated under the presumption that masculinity was at stake, young women, according to the author, may still find life satisfaction in motherhood) may have opportunities open to them, the capacity for these opportunities to offer life satisfaction to them is nonexistent. Many work occupations were/are unskilled or driven by business principles that empty them of their apparent usefulness because they become isolated from Goodman's thesis for the text is that there were few avenues for an adult male to realize their masculinity in 1950s American society.
Goodman also argues that society has (essentially) become a machine of interactive mechanisms oriented towards production, and this has resulted in a withering of the aspects of life that once gave it meaning including community, education, and democracy. Because Goodman was primarily focused on the effects of this society upon the quality of life for young men, he determined that delinquency, gang life (cf. Street Corner Society by William H Whyte for more concrete analysis of this social phenomena), and the arts (as represented by the Beats) became the major realms in which young men may find community and self-satisfaction. That young men would turn to such outlets in order to feel useful is problematic to Goodman, however, who explains his sympathy to the need of youth to feel useful as they become adults, but also argues that such outlets in fact interrupt development and maintain the subject’s adolescent state.
Goodman’s text basically predicted the youth culture of the 1960s. Growing Up Absurd analyzed the socio-cultural conditions that gave rise to the Hippies, and what’s more Goodman’s political writings contributed to a body of far-left literature that influenced the New Left. Goodman calls for a restructuring society oriented away from the technocratic strictures of isolated production towards the building of communities that enhance the experience of living. It appears that many of the conditions Goodman described have continued, possibly even accelerated, where a division from work and community has lead into crises like the currently ongoing financial meltdown and a Graduate student bubble. Numerous other crises of youth have emerged with the acceleration of the consumer society as individuals try to construct their identities based on brand associations and through image manipulations via social media. All of this suggests that Growing Up Absurd can be read as a text that divined the cultural ground for the new social forms of the 1960s, but also that aspects of the text are still relevant as cultural analysis.
The Best of Temp Slave is an anthology of writings that were originally published in the well known Temp Slavezine. The zine, which focused on labour issues pertaining to temporary contract work, was edited by Jeff Kelly, who also wrote much of its content (using the alias Keffo) and, by extension, the content of this anthology. In addition to publishing his own writings, Kelly also published material by other frustrated temps, and other well known zine writers, including Pete Jordan (AKA Dishwasher Pete, editor of the zine Dishwasher and author of the book Dishwasher: One Man’s Questto Wash Dishes in All Fifty States), and Debbie Goad (who published the zine, Answer Me with her husband, Jim Goad) who had temp experience.
The original zine ran, according to zinewiki, from 1993 into the early 2000s, although I cannot find a reference to the exact number of issues. It had a peak circulation of 3000, which is quite high for a zine, and was notorious enough to be mentioned in numerous articles about temporary labour as well as in books like Naomi Klein’sNo Logo. Furthermore, Re/Search Publications head, V. Vale interviewed Keffo for volume two of his Re/Search Zines book, and the zine even inspired a Temp Slave musical that was performed in 2001. Temp Slave was successful enough as a zine to have been a conditioning force upon a larger zine-making practice during the 1990s zine golden age.
Temp Slave was about work and the workplace, but it was not, however, a zine for Marxist critique of labour from the perspective of a temp worker. Instead, it was a forum for temps to vent their derision for an exploitative and humiliating system of labour. Many of the written pieces that appear in the book are humorous in their spiteful portrayals of office decor, staffing company personnel, management and permanent workers. Sabotage is a persistent theme of the book and many of the articles give specific examples of workplace pranks and vulgar dialog spoken to freak out the permanent staff.
A number of the pieces also convey the angst of having skills that aren’t utilized by the basic work, of having talents that far exceed their job requirements. In The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells, the author discusses an emergent (now emerged) white collar proletariat, for the information age, that does reception work and data entry. These jobs are not entirely unskilled as they involve computer and information literacy as well as strong communication skills. The Best of Temp Slave does include accounts of industrial work and other assorted positions (like the Shopping Mall Santa) but most of the stories pertain to office settings. The Best of Temp Slave (along with a thematically similar - although not identical - publication, Processed World) thus captures the frustration of a largely educated underclass who occupy the lowest positions of the office without much opportunity for advancement. The temp is an outsider to the social world they work in, and their status as temp maintains that social and professional position.
Many of the authors in The Best of Temp Slave speak harshly of the staffing companies that keep their clients in a precarious crisis of low-wage officer work alternating with periods of unemployment. While the authors are frustrated with these positions, where they’re treated as disposable, there is the potential that the heavy deferment to staffing agencies is causing a crisis. A report about employment in Toronto last year determined that too many jobs are short contracts, the fluctuations in unemployment statistics likely relate to the availability of temp work from month to month, and Toronto has one of the highest unemployment rates out of large Canadian cities. With fewer and fewer available permanent positions, the tides of temporary positions has become a serious issue.
So Temp Slave deals with serious issues regarding work, but in a humorous way that details all of the opportunities for payback and the few consequences that result under such circumstances. Anyone conducting research on office sabotage should consult this book as its rife with examples, in fact, the book makes a carnival of the practice. Furthermore, the book is full of satirical illustrations and comics that lampoon the temp experience and the office work setting. Some are reminiscent of the kind of bulletin board humour that can be found in offices, but with a harsh... sometimes violent edge.
Collective Action, Opacity and the “Problem of Irrationality” is the third article I will have annotated from Vol 5, No 1 of the Journal for the Study of Radicalism. Author Davide Turcato, an independent scholar, challenges an assertion, that anarchist actions are often irrational eruptions, which is commonly expressed in anarchist scholarship. Turcato suggests that activity that appears as irrational to previous anarchist scholars is likely the result of planning that has occurred out of view. Anarchist planning is often unseen and therefore not a part of in the historical record. According to Turcato, this gap in the record has produced the stereotype of the irrational anarchist and has lead scholars such as Peter Marshall (who’s attempted to write a comprehensive history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible) and Eric Hobsbawm (the great Marxist historian who discusses the irrationality of anarchists in his work, Primitive Rebels) to take events as they appear, or to take the word of police or anarchist critics at face value because their words ARE the record. Like Gabriel, with his article, Anarchism’s Appeal to German Workers, 1878-1914, and Andrew Cornell with his article, A New Anarchism Emerges, Turcato is inventing new ways of looking at anarchist action and development.
Turcato is listed by the Journal for the Study of Radicalism as an independent scholar, however he has received a doctorate in History from Simon Frasier University. He has also earned a Govenor General’s Gold Medal award for his doctorate on Italian anarchism. Aside from a very strong interest in historical Italian anarchism, Turcato is a language engineer... I don’t really know what a language engineer is, however most of the scholarly articles that appear on his publishing record pertain to the deployment of language by digital technologies.
Collective Action, Opacity and the “Problem of Irrationality” proceeds from the assumption that social formations that appear to engage in irrational behavior to distant outsiders (such as historians) should rather assume to be operating on their own set of rationale. Furthermore, drawing from British historian E.P. Thompson’s studies of the 19th century Luddite movement, Turcato classifies 19th century European anarchism as an opaque movement, a social underground, that produced anarchist texts but not necessarily written evidence for specific actions.
Violent anarchist events from First of May celebrations in France, Italy, and Spain from the years 1890-1892 are used as case studies, by Turcato, to give substance to his new perspective on anarchist history. Turcato discusses at length these events to speculate on the underlying rationale that drove the spectacular irrationality that other historians have noted. The author closely investigates the actions of the Italian anarchist leader Errico Malatesta during these years to demonstrate patterns of activity and planning that suggest that events did not spontaneously erupt into violence but were rather crafted insurrections.
Turcato’s article is interesting because, through his study of Malatesta and his interrogation of the existing historical literature, he demonstrates how even historians and thinkers who are sensitive to anarchist politics, such as the Canadian George Woodcock, or the aforementioned Peter Marshall, reinforce the stereotype of the irrational insurrectionist. It is difficult for me to reconcile Turcato’s newfound rationality in anarchist activity with an understanding of anarchism that has, perhaps, been in part conditioned by the above authors to consider irrationality to be a component of anarchism’s appeal.
Recently the artist Shepard Fairey was beaten up by anarchists in Copenhagen, Denmark over a misunderstanding regarding the status of one of his public pieces. Fairey put a mural up on the side of a building that overlooks the demolition site for the ‘youth house’, a Copenhagen punk venue and activist meeting place that existed from 1982 to 2007. Fairey’s original mural looked like this:
Although according to news reports, it was vandalized by angry punks almost immediately and now looks like this (according to recent photos):
Furthermore, Shepard Fairey entered into dialogue with angry locals, in which he recieved a black eye:
The anti-Fairey activists felt that his mural was a city-sanctioned gesture to make amends to them over the loss of their meeting space via the work of a well-known American artist. Undoubtedly, European anarchists best know Fairey as the creator of this iconic image of president Barack Obama:
and therefore interpret the artist as little more than a propagandist for American power. According to Fairey, one of the street-toughs called him “Obama Illuminati”. The whole episode is unfortunate because Fairey was paying tribute to the house and local figures (who, according to Shepard, knew better) claimed that the artist was working in collaboration with the city as part of a strategy to erase ongoing conflict with the punks.
There are two ways in which this story links back to the content of the book Mayday: The Art of Shepard Fairey. The first is with regards to the defacement of the mural, the second is with regards to the intention to pay tribute. Mayday is the record of an exhibition (it’s not quite an exhibition catalogue) of Fairey’s work which was also the last of the Deitch Projects (a series of art exhibitions curated by Jeffrey Deitch). It is also a collection of Fairey’s recent works, from 2010, as well as numerous images of street art including new photos of publicly placed Giant posters and stickers. What dominates Mayday (a title that evokes a distress call, and the annual day of celebration for radical labour) are the portraits and images of tribute to Fairey’s influences.
Many of Fairey’s 2010 works, represented in Mayday, are portraits of revolutionary figures from art, music, politics and academia. Using the method of appropriating iconic images of images that served him well in the past (with the Obey Giant campaign and more recently with his ‘Hope’ image of President Obama) Fairey creates monochromatic (but vibrant) representations of his idols, including Iggy Pop, Cornell West, Neil Young, Debbie Harry, Grandmaster Flash, Keith Harring, Jasper Johns, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Woody Guthrie, Robert Rauschenberg, Nico, and a number of others.
Not all the images are portraits, however Fairey has found novel ways to pay tribute to his influences. First, the book’s cover image is one of many Flag pieces, paintings of the American flag, by the artist, which can, perhaps, be read as the artist’s reinterpretation of Jasper John’s famous flag works. One of Fairey’s flags is ‘MAYDAY Flag White’,
is a direct reference to John’s 1955 ‘White Flag’.
Another of Fairey’s flags, ‘MAYDAY Flag Black’ also refers back to Johns, but also to Black Flag, an LA hardcore band of the late 70s/early 80s that Fairey makes reference to on his blog posts and in other works. Most notable of these works is ‘Rise Above Control’ a bleak image of what may be an office or industrial building with the first line of this song:
printed on it.
All of Fairey’s gallery pieces are represented in the book as full colour images, and are often full page representations to render the detail of the collaged backgrounds legible. Much of Fairey’s post-Giant work has foregrounded symbolic imagery against a background of wallpaper or textile-esque patterns (with his Giant Obey signs embedded into them somewhere). In the Mayday works, he has also included fragments of newspaper headlines, and printed matter from other sources as well as, on the portraits, subtle references to the subject. Example: the portrait of Keith Harring includes his ‘radiating baby’ symbol,
and the Woodie Guthrie portrait includes collaged depression-era headlines. While Fairey flattens his subject matter through his design aesthetic, he brings depth to each image through his use of collage and background symbols.
I have mostly focused on the canvas paintings of Mayday, although the book contains works done in a variety of media, including stencil works, decorated leather jackets, posters, and street murals. What interests me about the murals that appear in this book is that he simulates the effect that they are images that have been layered on top of one another and then torn in parts to reveal different levels of imagery.
These murals evoke the registered structure of James Rosenquist’s large 1970s paintings, but in their simulated torn-ness they also evoke the work of Raymond Hains, Mimmo Rotella et al. and their ‘decollage’ technique of producing images from torn-up public posters.
In creating a sense of the layered and damaged images in many of his street murals, Fairey’s works acknowledge the public wall image as a site that accumulates new forms and therefore new meanings. The above mural is a Fairey collaboration with notorious graffiti artist COPE2, and the result appears as though COPE2 is painting over an existing image. Painting over is a gesture of disrespect in the graffiti subculture but with this piece it is actually the opposite. Still, this mural creates the appearance of such street-art communication, but other works of his accumulate other forms, and many of the photos in Mayday of Fairey’s ‘Giant’ posters show that they have been defaced in a number of ways, and images of a large mural painted by him show that they had parts painted over by other artists.
