was walking around the downtown Tour Bus kiosks basked in abandon on the Loop on a no longer unusually warm sun-lit sidewalks of North Michigan Avenue. I The month has been quiet, the Uber drivers Monday in December. The warmth was heavy and coming from strange angles, like all agree. those squiggly shadows of heat exploding from the radiator, but slower and bigger, A stanchion outside the tiny Garrett Popcorn oozing over the city like nuclear slugs. flagship store on 625 N. Michigan Ave LED Christmas lights sagged on the trees manages a growing line so vivacious it’s in the salty boulevard. The lights—and practically sexually awakened. So this is their Vitamin-D-deficient glow, which is where everyone is. There’s a fifteen minute less of a glow and more of an antiseptic wait to reach the only small counter in the lack of darkness—made almost no impression 800 square foot storefront. People stream against a blue sky that was at once too in and people stream out. Those that pale and too bright. (The blue was more manage to resist the current, fully intending like a gray, the same deep gray our parents to continue onward down the sidewalk, do and other property owners have all been make a face in anticipation. Like Odysseus, determined to paint every living room in commanding his crew to tie him to the America with. The people want gray. Gray ship’s mast while passing an island of Sirens, is the new black, the magazines report.) the smeller assiduously positions her nos- With more warmth and less goose down, trils so as to optimise direct impact of the the streets felt empty. Coats hung open, red smell onto and into her face holes, all while PAGE 2 PAGE Hop-On Hop-Off Big Bus Best Chicago her brain triangulates the nose-sidewalk- THE EGGSISTENTIALIST smell position to avoid breaking stride, and comes in town from Kansas City, she will continues onward. betting on that plane home with a bag of Garrett’s popcorn. Which is why Garrett’s Garrett Popcorn is legendary corn. It’s went ahead and opened a store at O’hare the Cadillac of corn. When the President airport, just in case. brings the Queen of England a two gallon tin of holiday popcorn as some postmodern And the smell really is divine: fresh joke on democracy and the fate of the caramel and sugar and butter and gourmet universe disguised as an official gesture liquid (never powdered) cheese. There’s of diplomacy, he brings Garrett Popcorn. nothing else you could really eat two Oprah has endorsed the corn on television. gallons of in 25 days. And if there is one Barack Obama gave some to Joe Biden for thing that makes Garrett, and Chicago Christmas. Sherri Shepherd of The View itself, singular in the popcorn arena, it’s gave it away to guests at her wedding. the mix. As with most gourmet popcorn Halle Berry has told the Chicago Sun-Times tins, you have your cheesy corn and you verbatim, “I don’t care if it’s six in the have your caramel corn, and sometimes a morning...It gives me so much pleasure.” plain buttered corn, each separated into deep triangles by cardboard. The separation Garrett leads the industry in culturally seems somehow natural, aesthetically at relevant gourmet popcorn. The Garrett least. But Chicagoans think bigger than brand has, however, gone through that that. In the 1970’s (as the legend goes) ironic transformation that is the curse of customers who would stop by Garrett’s institutionalization within a city. As an storefront regularly started buying a bag of historic—nay, legendary!—Chicago treat, the caramel, a bag of the cheese, and asking its primary market is, of course, people not for a third empty bag with which to mix from Chicago: tourists, celebrities (who them together. The mix became a staple are like perennial tourists, their home on Garrett’s menu and, needless to say, state being On Television); but mostly is still their best-seller. What people first regular tourists, as in, other fat people started calling the Downtown mix is now from other towns. Tourists will come in ubiquitously known as the Chicago mix. from Midwestern suburbia, some town where every Starbucks has a drive-through Chicago is not only home to the mix, but lane and it’s not scary to be a Republican to the very commercialization of popcorn in public, and, having been told by other itself. Popcorn was part of the Aztec diet tourists that they have to go to Garrett (and decor scheme), making it at least if they’re going to Chicago (or risk not 7,000 years old. (‘Years Old’ is a metaphor having properly consumed the tour, thus for obvious reasons, e.g. popcorn is not voiding their experience in the records of alive, but since alleged origins are in many those keeping track online), will wait in ways relevant to the parameters of property line for sometimes actual full blown hours. ownership, we will introduce the concept I lived in Chicago for three years before I here, with the Aztecs, because why not.) ever heard of Garrett’s, and two more years Chicagoan Charles C. Cretors invented passed before I ever tried their corn. But and patented the first commercial popcorn you can bet your Amazon Prime mem- machine in 1893, and in 1896 a German bership that when my roommate’s mom immigrant created CrackerJacks, the first gets people in Chicago fired up. Twinkies, invented by a baker in Schiller Park outside Chicago, was arguably 2013’s most highly anticipated comeback.1 Have you ever had a Chicago Style hot dog? I have been victim to shocking fits of passion (once at a cemetery) for having said It’s just a hot dog. This year, after a brutal summer of competing radio advertisements, we Chicagoans came together in arms to repeal the most evil genius dumbass law ever writ: the Chicago Beverage Tax.

in 1991, CandyLand, Inc., commercial snack food, now owned and MEANWHILE, a small family- managed by Frito-Lay (acquired by owned business based in St. Paul, Chicago-based PepsiCo in 1965) since 1997. Minnesota, currently owned and operated As a metropolis, Chicago has always by Brenda Lamb, registered the trademark been a metropolis of food. From corn to CHICAGO MIX® with the federal wheat to beef to candy to moonshine, government. (This was allegedly after industrial food processing is woven into having attended a popcorn convention the historical fabric of Chicago as a city in Chicago the year prior.) Candyland’s and an economy. The invention of the CHICAGO MIX® is slightly different John Deere steel plow in 1804 and the in recipe than the mix that Garrett and completion of several canals connecting G.H. Cretors sell from Chicago. The Chicago to the East, namely the Erie in CHICAGO MIX® consists of cheese 1825, logistically secured Chicago’s future corn, caramel corn, and a third corn of as the food capital of the Corn Belt. Sarah proprietary spices. But, ironically the mix Lee, Nabisco, Quaker Oats, Keebler, itself is irrelevant to trademark law and PepsiCo, Wrigley and Kraft, to name a few, thus irrelevant to the MIX as property. are all founded and headquartered in or It is the name alone—the words alone— around Chicago. Garrett Brands recently that matter, and specifically the word acquired Frango, a chocolate brand once CHICAGO. In 2014 Candyland, Inc. sued made and distributed in Chicago’s very Garrett for trademark infringement and own Marshall Field’s Department Stores in 2016 the case settled in Candyland’s downtown (acquired by Macy’s, Inc. in favor, making Candyland the official record 2005). Lance Chody, CEO and owner of owner of the CHICAGO MIX®. As Garrett Brands in the Sun-Times: “Frango legally settled, it is the word CHICAGO, is a perfect fit for our company’s portfolio, and Chicago-ness, that cannot be used by aligning well with our strategy to preserve anyone but Candyland, Inc. to refer to any and grow iconic brands that have historic kind of popcorn arrangement, whether that franchise value with a unique and storied

PAGE 4 PAGE past.” For better or worse, snack food 1. It was a simpler time... THE EGGSISTENTIALIST be Chicago Style, Chicago Mix, Windy of Candyland, has said that she chose to City Mix, Chicago Blend, Chi-Town Mix, call her mix the CHICAGO mix (over, etc. Garrett now sells their mix as the say, the St. Paul Mix) because CHICAGO GARRETT MIX®, and G.H. Cretors, had more of a cosmopolitan ring to it. which you can find at any supermarket, According to precedent established by the packages their mix as simply THE MIX™. Supreme Court, the word CHICAGO, ‘because of ’ CandyLand’s use of it in its Obviously CandyLand does not own the trademark, has come to signal a certain mix itself, they do not own all caramel level of quality of product. It is ‘because corn and all cheese corn mixed together of ’ Brenda Lamb’s act of registration on this planet. And that’s all the mix and continual use of the mark that really is, we’re talking about a pretty basic CHICAGO, as a tabula rasa of a symbol, physical ontology here. Any idiot can never before officially claimed, has come to make the mix. As an American, it is your represent a certain kind of quality. God given right to eat flavored popcorn and for that corn to go into your mouth And, according to the legal mechanisms hole and into your gut in any order or of copyright and trademark law, this is fashion that you damn well please. You because Brenda Lamb set CHICAGO traded your time for money and money MIX® free to the public. In Common As for flavored corn and now you own it Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (2010), and can consume it in the privacy of your Lewis Hyde demonstrates the early logic own home and, in some states, can legally and power of patents. He explains that, shoot someone that comes onto your in the eighteenth century, a man named property to take it. But, after all that, to Chester Moor Hall invented a method call your mix that you just defended with for making flawless and flareless telescope your life the Chicago Mix, is to encroach lenses. He intended to keep this discovery on someone else’s property. It is stealing. a secret so he tasked separate contractors to And you are breaking the law. make the glass, not realizing that the opti- cians would eventually figure out what he his doesn’t seem to make sense or feel had discovered and apply the knowledge to T just. But there it is, the settlement their own practices. This new technique for documents, right there in ones and making achromatic lenses became common zeros on my personal computer, stating that knowledge among instrument makers from CandyLand, Inc. of St. Paul, Minnesota, then onward, though the trade secret was is the sole proprietor of the words never published or shared with the public. CHICAGO MIX®. How can someone that A second man named John Dollond came does not live in Chicago or did not invent along in 1758 and rediscovered the tech- the Chicago Mix own the word Chicago? nique and obtained an official patent for How can anyone own the word Chicago? this discovery. The opticians continued to How can anyone own words at all? make lenses with the patented technique, however, and eventually Dollond’s son To CandyLand, the CHICAGO in took one of them to court. The opticians CHICAGO MIX® is a signal that denotes argued the invalidity of the patent because quality. It does not necessarily refer to Dollond had not invented the technique, the Chicago as we know it or picture it which had been in use for many years in our brains. Brenda Lamb, President prior. The Dollonds won the suit and Lord executor of exclusion to this right. To deny Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of England or violate this right, what we arbitrarily call at the time, explained that a patent was “stealing”, is to destroy private property. a contract between the inventor and the public. Hyde writes: “The commercial very hardcore philosopher so far (all advantage which the inventor gains is his E men of course, because only men could reward, not for having made the invention, humor so futile a contest as meta- but for having disclosed it to the public so physics, as if rules were a natural part of that when the limited period of his patent play, as if the social contract was anything has expired, the public gains free use of the but the very words that constitute it) has new idea.” Property belongs to those who some theory of property. Most agree that claim it publicly as such. it is a creature of law but the problem of cosmology lingers. Where did property But this ‘setting free’ to the public is come from? When does something go judicial pageantry. It is a theatre of words from not being property to being property? performed by the state. As in the case of Locke writes that property is a kind of new Dollond, where the perfected lenses were element that comes from the alchemy of already in actual use, patent or no, so too mixing labor and land. was the Chicago Mix already in the public and had been consumed publicly for years. Let’s call this new element—the thing that The inventions existed, but the words—and happens when a person mixes their labor the designation of ownership—weren’t yet with a thing—the Chicago Mix. The Chi- public. They were out there, but they were cago Mix comes to exist through the value not yet property. Someone had to make it added to it by labor. The Chicago Mix is so by enforcing exclusive use. both the fruits of the labor and the right to those fruits exclusively and in perpetuity. The whole point of private property is to If a man owns himself then he must also have exclusive and inalienable rights to own the fruits of his labor: “[Man] has use it. To have property is to have a thing removed the item from the common state that you have complete dominion over that nature has placed it in, and through and this inherently requires the practice this labour the item has had annexed to it and enforcement of exclusion. Property something that excludes the common right is a delicate concept, a failure to enforce of other men: for this labour is unques- exclusion is a miscarriage of privacy. How tionably the property of the labourer, so no can something be mine—be private—if it other man can have a right to anything the is also someone else’s? If someone else uses labour is joined to—at least where there is it as they please? Or is using it now? And enough, and as good, left in common for ‘use’ here means more than mere use, it others” (Locke pg 11). implies every possible action the prop- erty owner could take in relation to the Labor transforms things, it’s like a magic property. This right of action is non-trans- power. It is a transfer of energy from ferable: singular to each and every object something to someone, and the power over of property. Essential to the very idea of that thing is sustained absolutely, though ‘private property’ is the unambiguousness not necessarily forever. And it is specifically of a specific holder of this right—and, this mix, labor and resource, that makes PAGE 6 PAGE implicitly, the holder must also be the sole something into private property. But this is THE EGGSISTENTIALIST a tautology: we are assuming the existence them Someone else has my chair, and they of property to begin with because we are catch the thief and I get it back. It would assuming a common state that encompassess seem the chair is still my property. Then all potential property, which implies that someone comes to my house and kills me there are only ever transfers and exchanges of and takes my chair, or perhaps doesn’t kill property, all things being game, with the only me but takes it and gets away with it, and ineligibility for property-hood being to have starts referring to it as their chair. Is it still the capacity to own, to have personhood. my chair? What if they just kill me and don’t take my chair, then whose chair is it? What if none of that ever happens and one The question from day I just throw it away and never speak of it again, then whose chair is it? the start is then not The paradox of Theseus’s Ship asks a what is property? but similar question about the nature of growth and change: If all the parts of whose property is it? Theseus’s ship are replaced one by one over time until one day it is an entirely new ship, is it still the ship of Theseus? The word property implies ownership, it Philosophers are not businessmen though implies a despot, whether that property and they do not realize the question is private or not. We cannot define what they are asking is not one of ontology property is by using the word property. but of ownership. When they ask Is it It seems like we cannot use words at all: still the same ship? what they are really something that is not property cannot asking is Is it still his ship? The question speak its own name. assumes that its ownership is inherent to a thing’s nature, that all things are So we can’t begin there. And when we owned by someone, and úποκείμενον do, we end up with a kind of privatized (hypokeimenon) is a matter of material language. And we end up with business provenance. My chair does not have a reporting like the following in the consciousness of me, but I am conscious Sun-Times: “It may be news to you that of the chair. It is an object of my Poppycock and Fiddlefaddle have married consciousness: from the start it is an Krunchers, and now they’re all in the chips.” object of mine. But property is not an If everything is property and it is, at all object—a thing in the world—it is a way times, simply a matter of ownership, then of being conscious of something. (And anything can be property, including words. we are always conscious of something, whether it be a bar of soap or thought Especially words! Property only exists in itself, to have consciousness at all—to language. If I never say that something is Be—is to behold something in your mine, is it really mine? For example: If I consciousness.) From the start, we have a have a chair and say This is my chair and no beholder and a beheld, and the boundaries one can sit in it, and someone asks to sit in of that relationship are TBD. There is a it and I allow them for a little while, the separation from oneself and the objects in chair is certainly still mine. Then someone the world and this gash is only deepened tries to steal my chair. I call the police, tell by language. To name something is to style. All of Supreme’s equity in the mar- also say all the things it is not and cannot ketplace is based on brand activity and not be. And these symbols—the sound of the necessarily the exclusive use of their name. space between us and everything—come to have value in themselves. Let’s then think of property as a verb. Property is domination, the execution There is a rhetorical device called a merism of dominion in perpetuity. There is no that best demonstrates the airy depth of post-domination. Property is an act, both these symbols. A merism, derived from the in that it is perpetually happening—partic- Greek word for dividing or partition, is a ipating in an active expression of its state synecdoche in which totality is expressed as property—and in that it is a pose, it is by singular and contrasting parts, when a way of acting. Controlling the definition two words are used to refer to an entirety. of property is a way of controlling ways Common merisms are ‘nook and cranny’ of acting and living in the world. Private as in I looked in every nook and cranny and property is a creature of society subject it couldn’t find it, and ‘hook, line and sinker’ its whims and at the disposal of its courts. as in He ate it all up! Hook, line and sinker. It is not a natural right or even a natural In Genesis, the Tree of the Knowledge of thing, it is a civil right, an action deemed Good and Evil is a liberally stylized English appropriate and stewarded by the state. translation of the Tree of the Knowledge of Everything. We can’t say what we Hobbes wrote that the existence of proper- mean when we mean everything, because ty depends upon the existence of an unam- everything is not objectifiable. Totality can biguous strongest power in the realm and only ever be grasped in a transitive sense, that power treats it, one’s property, as such, and never represented by name. We come thus securing it as such. Is it, then, that the instead to take the symbols at face value, ultimate authority over all property is the two or three things, that become potential state, or is it that property is the state? objects of property. To name something Either way we have not yet found a be- is to rip it from totality, the totality of ginning that doesn’t begin with all things experience, and to make it your own. To in the world being game as property, and name something is to take it. again we find ourselves in a world where Let’s call this name/symbol/object mix the the words CHICAGO MIX can be and Chicago Mix. As with Dollond and the are private property. opticians, it is not the inventor that is the here is one thing, though, which we true owner of the Mix, but the namer. The agreed earlier on that cannot be prop- Chicago Mix can only exist as property T erty, and that is a person. Personhood when officially named as such. And at is essential to property ownership, it is the what point do words become means of difference between being at the table and production and stop being real words that being on the menu. So is Chicago a person humans use to communicate? In addition or a menu item? If a corporation can be a to pumping out nonsense words in fits of person, how can Chicago not be a person? corporate dada, there are some brands, like Because it does not own itself? Who, then, Supreme, that are unable to register their owns Chicago? If it’s all just totally up for trademark, it’s aesthetic being a direct rip-

PAGE 8 PAGE grabs, is Brenda Lamb just getting herself off of Barbara Kruger’s signature design a slice of the pie while she can? Why does THE EGGSISTENTIALIST it feel like, as a Chicagoan, or as any- Native and settler, allowing access to a body, that Garrett’s is the rightful owner? kind of Chicago that was more than just Garrett is an historic Chicago brand after an inhospitable hell hole of wind and snow. all, and there is an undeniable sense that Let’s call this relationship, the relations Chicago has a kind of sovereignty in mat- between the natives and the traders and ters of the mix. the fruits of their labor, the Chicago Mix. Of approximately 370 treaties made Did Candyland steal the CHICAGO between the federal government and MIX®? One can only steal property that Native American tribes, Chicago was is categorically private, thus stealing is involved in five of those, which accounted entirely an artifice of property. If a man for most of the land that is now the takes a cookie from his wife’s cookie jar in Midwest. The Treaty of Chicago in 1833 the kitchen, is that stealing? If a mother marked the tribes’ final cessation and the catches her child taking a cookie from the founding of Chicago. A treaty starts to jar before dinner, which is not allowed, sound like a fancy name for a patent. is that stealing? If someone else’s child, a friend over for the evening, takes a cookie How is it that we can be so flippantly from the jar before dinner, is that stealing? relative about a concept so incremental If the child of the person who once lived in to the structure of our society? Property the woman’s house before it was foreclosed is literally a matter of freedom or not and before she purchased it from the bank, freedom (death, prison, slavery, etc). We came to her house and took a cookie, is can say that Garrett Popcorn is stealing— that stealing? breaking the Law!—when it uses the words CHICAGO MIX to sell popcorn, Let’s think back to before the Chicago and taking thousands of thousands of Mix ever existed, in any form. Who miles of land from people that have lived owns it then? Before anyone invented a on it before you is something else entirely. commercial popcorn machine, who owned Because how can one steal something the Chicago Mix? Before there was ever from someone who lacks a conception— Chicago, who owned the Chicago Mix? or rather, an acceptance—of the state of consciousness that is property? To have Chicago could never have become the city taken that land, as a participant in the that it is today, or even the city that it was state, is to have said that there was no life when it was officially founded in 1833, there, no owners, no persons. Because to without the trade routes and portages live is to have and to have is to live. and roads and resources that the Native Americans, namely the Potawatomi, And we are all so profoundly implicated Ottawa, and Chippewa, had built and in this nightmare that is private property. secured before ceding it all in treaties. We all live here. If you are reading this Most Chicago highways directly emulate you probably live in the United States and trade routes and trails established by probably live in Chicago. Whether you Native Americans well before the 19th are an Illinois resident, born and raised, or century. Trade, and any viable life in the a college student passing through, or an region, became possible for settlers only immigrant, so-called illegal or otherwise, by intermarriage within the region’s tribes. we all live here. We are all complicit. Your These wives served as liaisons between house and your street and your tap water and your commute and the air that you breathe and the corn you eat and the river you dye green on Saint Patrick’s Day: does all this stuff belong to you?

It seems to me that Brenda Lamb just sort of figured if you can’t beat them, sue them. She did, in a way, release the Chicago Mix to the people. She made it one less thing a giant corporation doesn’t own. She saw it all as the game it was: a zero sum game where zero is less of an empty oval symbol and more of an actual infinite kind of nothingness, a black hole of nothingness that can hold the same but opposite amount of all of everything— let’s call this everything/nothing mix the Chicago Mix—and we are racing into the black hole to see who can own the Mix first. Or, at the very least, own the most along the way.

An Eggsistentialist Production

Designed by Sophia Brown Produced by Alan Epstein