r
THE REPRODUCTION OF CAPITALISM AND CULTURAL
PRODUCTION IN THE JUNCTION
LIZA KIM JACKSON
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN
PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTERS OF ARTS
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
YORK UNIVERSITY
TORONTO, ONTARIO
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This study develops a practice of knowledge production on how capitalism is reproduced on the local level, taking the Toronto neighborhood known as the Junction as a case study. The dominant capitalist process that currently organizes public space in the Junction is gentrification. Gentrification is argued to be a hegemonic force characterized by bourgeois values that originate historically in Europe that are exerted over a complex set of class and historical relationships and identities found in the
Junction. In response to the abstracting of our relationalities under capitalism, I have focused on using arts based research methodology to invite a cross-section of neighbourhood members into a dialogical engagement. The knowledge gained from dialogue has laid the basis for creative interventions into public space to challenge the capitalist process of gentrification. Creating social possibility for individuals to politicize their daily lives and contest capitalism is the ultimate goal of this work.
IV Acknowledgements
The research for this thesis involved many people giving of their time, energy, knowledge, creative inspiration and life experience, as well as offering their support.
I have to thank my sister Wren Jackson for first bringing me to the Junction, a neighborhood in which she saw great potential, and where she opened her coffee shop
Cool Hand of a Girl. Through the ups and downs of working and living together she has given her support, and has been of great assistance in contributing her valued opinion on the various projects that have comprised this study. As a knowledgeable gallerist and artist, she has also been of great technical assistance in staging projects. Her presence and conversation have also given me comfort and strength.
My partner Craig Flint has also patiently listened and engaged me in discussion on many aspects of the work, and through his astute understanding has contributed many materials to my project.
I have to thank the Taiaiako'n Historical Preservation Society (Rastia'ta'nonrha and
Laurie Waters) for sharing so much knowledge, and taking me into their work on Snake
Mound. The A la c.Art group for all the great time spent, and more to come: we have great work ahead of us. And the Monday Art Group at Evangeline Residence and the wonderful and challenging space we share, and Nancy Halifax for all the support and great discussion and inspiration we share.
v A special thanks goes to Lynda Solowynsky, who has been a friend, collaborator and inspiration. She has introduced me to many people, broadening this project immeasurably.
She has given of herself to the work of fighting the injustices of the system and contributed so much to my understanding of knowledge processes. This project wouldn't have been the same without her.
Also, Michael Ricks who has an amazing mind and is always eager to share it with me.
His voice in the project transcends the moments where he is quoted directly, Voja Jurisic for all the free printing, great conversation, and eager support of my work, and Michael
Ryan for the great service of copy editing for which I am supremely grateful.
Also great thanks to Anna M. Agathangelou, Deborah Barndt and Alberto Guevara, my supervisors for Interdisciplinary Studies, who have provided me with great materials, discussion and feedback with which to engage, and who have been supportive all along the way.
Thanks to York University Graduate Scholarship and to SSHRC for funding my work: it has been amazing to be able to focus full time on being in community and developing projects that will hopefully continue on into the future.
Kim Jackson May 15,2011
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract iv
Acknowledgement v
List of Images ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Establishing a Context: Applying Theory in the Junction
Questions of History in the Junction 7 Boundaries drawn on a map/ Junction Identity constructed 10 The Land Grab 15 Inhabitation/Erasure 18 The current historical environment 23
Defining "community" 33
Understanding "Capitalist Relations" 38 The Bourgeoisie 45 Gentrification 54 Ideology and Performance theory 59 Border Gnoseology 62
Chapter 2: Methodology in Action: Hybrid Approaches and Challenging Boundaries
Method as a critical space 69
Methodology: formal aspects Feminist research 75 Dialogical Performance 78 Anti-colonial 83 Dialogical Art 86
Relationalitv/positionalitv/embedded practices: artists are the shock troops of gentrification 89 Embedded Positionality 90 Who are the participants? 98 Thick Presencing/Witnessing 101 Chapter 3: Arts Practice as Public Sphere: How we come together
Capitalism and Culture in the Junction: The exhibit 104 Space 107 A conversation at work: materials, processes, ideas.... 110 Knowledge Production 123
Contesting Capitalism: in the realm of the everyday (really?) Performance, language, art and agency within capitalism 133
Conclusion 141
Appendix A 146
Bibliography 147 List of images
1. Map of the Junction from the West Toronto Junction Historical Society 2. Poster from WTJHS archives 3. Historical mural on Dundas West 4. Historical mural on Dundas West 5. Photographic exploration of ideological landscapes, Kim Jackson (2009) 6. Photographic exploration of ideological landscape, Kim Jackson (2009) 7. Photographic exploration of ideological landscape, Kim Jackson (2009) 8. Sticker campaign by Strobusphere members in response to Starbucks opening in the Junction 9. Sticker project in response to economic crisis by neighborhood member Michael Ricks (2009) 10. From: I am the foundation of corporate capitalism...{2010) Lynda Solowynsky and Kim Jackson 11. From: I am the foundation of corporate capitalism... (2011) Lynda Solowynsky and Kim Jackson 12. Speak Your Peace 13. Speak Your Peace 14. RAWA postcard front 15. RAWA postcard back 16. Marlene (Bluebird) Stickings, Dream Catcher 17. Poem (2011) 18. Richard Joos, White Pine 19. Kim Jackson, Dirt Standard (2009) 20. I'm Sold, Let's Face It (ongoing) 21. Snake Mound (2011) 22. Naomi KnafF and Raul C. Andres, It should be so simple, video loop (20 sec) 23. The Quilt (2009-11) by Monday Art Group and the Gathering Space at Evangeline 24. The Brazen Serpent (2011) Michael Ricks 25. The Quilt (2009-11) Monday Art Group 26. Let's Face It (ongoing detail) I'm Sold 27. The Brazen Serpent (2011, detail) Michael Ricks 28. Detail from Misery (2011), Kim Jackson 29. Voja Jurisic Detail from Wall of Winnings (2011) 30. Hope Doll Coin Project (2009) Donna Husiak 31. Misery (2011) Kim Jackson 32. Misery's Obituary
ix Introduction
"The individual's life manifests the contradictions and stresses of an epoch."
(Maria Mies 1983, 135)
Concern is a very mild word for the feeling I have about the growing extent to which capitalism frames our lives and thinking in the Canadian context, and increasingly throughout the world. It is more an embodied anxiety and frustration that has led me to feel that an examination of the impact of capitalism on the web of relations in which individuals form communities and how we are implicated in its reproduction, is an urgent necessity. Born in 1963, my youth was spent during the tail end of an era during which the post-war culture of capitalist suburbia and forms of colonial domination were being popularly contested. In contrast, capitalism now appears naturalized to the extent that, except during its periodic crises, it has been by and large beyond discussion. While we are now grasping for words in the face of capitalism's onslaught, our lives lived within its structures generate knowledge. My own historical background has led me to the view that capitalism cannot be fully understood by an academically disciplined approach alone: the inclusion of the embodied and experiential knowledge of those surviving in it is vital to realizing its full impact on us as ethical and living beings. Having grown up in poverty, the daughter of a single mother on welfare, and within a family that continues to live under the duress of mental dispositions that make functioning within capitalism extremely challenging, I cannot regard capitalism from a neutral perspective as simply an historical
1 epoch. Living within capitalism has been a trauma for my family and for many members of the communities that have been vital to me. We cannot but resist a system that fails to recognize or valorize our lives and knowledge, but produces a toxic and repressive social experience in which we are spectators on the absurdly extreme wealth of others beside extreme and broad-scale suffering both near and far. Situated closer to the suffering experienced within capitalism, I can only foresee my survival in the context of cultures of resistance.
Economics can be understood as a system of relations performed in the course of our daily lives in relation to each other, other species and the land by which humans produce the items necessary for our survival. Capitalism is an historically specific form of economics under which this web of productive relations takes on a specific character. In an effort to understand the character of the capitalist relations in which we live locally I have developed a project that engages the embodied and experiential knowledge of people from the community I live in, the West Toronto neighborhood known as "the Junction."
Being a typical North American urban neighborhood, its lack of exceptionality provides a good case study that has application beyond its own location: with a persistent gentrification process underway the public discourse as to what forms of social relations are validated and dominant and which are subject to invalidation and rejection reflects the action of a hegemonic voice. But it is also a neighborhood with a complex history of
Aboriginal inhabitation, as well as colonialism and its attendant capitalist development, including a working class history of which residues remain. And like any other community, it is in constant flux as individuals come and go in the context of globalized economic migrations. The multiple forces exercised on the local site, or what could be conceived of as multiple fractures in the social space, give rise to the possibility of a critical examination of capitalist relations from the perspective of the local experience.
As knowledge-producing entities we are positioned in history, on land (or space) and in relation to each other. Our knowledge is not absolute, discrete and individual but generated and communicated socially by our bodies' proximity to each other and the land.
Knowledge is both necessary to and productive of life. The integral nature of knowledge production creates the conditions of the power/knowledge dynamic and its heightened value as a commodity in the postmodern world.
If disciplined knowledge production is understood in academic terms as rational and abstract, then the embodied and experiential knowledge can be understood as outside, as accepting of irrationality in some moments and/or as contestational to hegemonic forms in others. But it is not merely a question of embodied vs. hegemonic knowledge forms but of the power relation between them: Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999, 45) comments that
"colonized peoples share a language of colonization, share knowledge about their colonizers, and in terms of a political project, share the same struggle for decolonization.
It also means that colonizers, too, share a language and knowledge of colonization."
Walter D. Mignolo (2000) offers the analytical framework of "border gnoseology," which is a modern and complex decolonizing understanding of knowledge production that sees
3 different knowledge forms as integrated within subjects in both dynamic and contradictory ways. Along with other theorists, including Bourdieu and Foucault,
Mignolo comments on the close ties between knowledge, language and power; therefore, to open up the field of knowledge it is necessary to also open up the field of language and communication. Art language facilitates this openness. Art language does not demand resolution or rationality, but is more potent the more contradictory it is. I therefore feel it is particularly well-suited to an examination of capitalist relations in the community setting.
The core practice of the research has involved working with people on creative projects and participating as neighbors and friends in a mutual daily life. Marx comments that knowledge is produced by material existence and in turn is productive.1 As such, knowledge production through a dialogic methodology should intervene in this cycle of reproduction, transforming the way relations are expressed in the future. I haven't taken dialogic to mean strictly a speech act, but to mean working together in material and psycho-emotional ways to extend the project beyond the realm of people's opinions on things to our embodied and active material relations.
1 "The mode of production of material life determines the social, political, and intellectual life process in general." Cited in Bertell Oilman, Alienation, pg. 5
4 While this project fits easily within the history of "community arts practice," I will use the term "community arts" interchangeably with the term "social art,"2 which is my preferred term of reference. I do this as a way to address the problematics of the term
"community" and its implication of false or forced consensus of identification3 and to enliven in the possibilities for "agonism," or conflict which arise out of power asymmetry within the social context.
Daily life in the Junction is very much a routine capitalist affair, with cultural events generally taking the forms of consumer activities and spectacular festivals. Opportunities for people in the neighborhood to interact on alternative levels of sociality are slim. As such, part of this project involves the development of a public sphere where we can turn from the daily crush of our lives and face each other in a discursive, self-created, engaged and content-oriented way that strives to connect meaning to people and place. This has occurred throughout the project, and reaches its culmination in an exhibit of art works
2 See Scottish Group "New Social Art School." "It all started with a group of skateboarders and an artist interrogating political decision-making behind some barriers erectcd on a favorite skate spot in the city-centre of Aberdeen. The group, which became known as Aberdeen Street Skaters, made action, artwork and PR, communicated and associated with the city council, and effectively made changes. It was an example of successful collaborative arts practice rooted in the reality of a local community. This cooperation with non-professional artists presented a broad but meaningful method of collaborative arts practice. It made great sense to continue working with a variety of people in an open environment for collective, informal learning in various artistic projects." http://www.newsocialartschool.org/index.html
3 see Claire Bishops' critique in 'The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents." In Artforum, February2006:179-185. While I do not agree with her critique, I do feel she raises important points that would be productive to address, but are too lengthy to go into here.
5 under the title: "Capitalism and Culture in the Junction." The intention is to create a focal point where the content can be activated as a discursive and aesthetic space.
In the work of knowledge production, democratization of relationships and the creation of a discursive public sphere in which'to share embodied and experiential knowledge about our lives lived in capitalism, the question of agency is central. Our goal is always to transform the present in order to participate in consciousness raising (through sharing and participation) with the goal of moving towards broader and ongoing social participation and change.
6 Chapter 1: Establishing a Context: Applying Theory in the Junction
In this first chapter, I will attempt to build an historical and theoretical basis for the social art practice I have developed in the Junction. I move in a multidisciplinary way from the broad view of a critical history as it manifests in the Junction, through a social and economic analysis and its application to the Junction, and end with a discussion of knowledge production.
Questions of History in the Junction
It was a revelation to me to find out that the first immigrant to Canada on my grandfather's side arrivedfrom Belfast under the auspices of the Hudson's Bay Company in the early 1800's. It is a family rumor that he was the illegitimate son of King George
III (the "crazy" one) and that he was sent to Canada as a 'remittance man' so as not to make trouble for the Royals. He went to work for the Hudson's Bay Company in northern
Manitoba in the fur trade. He apparently married an Aboriginal woman from the Five
Nations of whom nothing is known (In her place in the family tree is a question mark).
They eventually moved to Brockville and set up a trade in goods.
My grandmother's family, the Shaw's, emigratedfrom Scotland (land of capitalist theory) to New England in the early 1600's. They were preachers, dignitaries, and military people: Settlers through and through. One of my ancestors fought in the War of
7 Independence on the side of the Loyalists. They eventually moved to Montreal becoming bastions of Anglo hegemony. It is written in family documents that my senile great grandmother wanted to march down Sherbrooke Street with her catheter in one hand and the union jack in the other.
This information tied me a lot closer to what I was researching, but in a different way than I had anticipated. It was like cold water being poured over me, as when I found out that my father's son by his first wife, my half brother, was a known white supremacist and dealer of Nazi "antiques. " Something inside me shiftedforever: I didn 't feel like the same person that I thought I was. This knowledge was at first disorienting andfinally reorienting. To look unflinchingly at who I really am, feels very different from making up who I want to be... (Kim Jackson, field notes, 2009)
"You have to know who you are before you speak.."
(paraphrase, aboriginal audience member from Rates of Exchange video night during
Capitalism and Culture in the Junction)
Basing my project on an examination of the reproduction of capitalism in a local site is an attempt to get deep into the network of relations between land, people, creatures, history and how a local site is understood in the public space. Public space is both the landscape and the language that operates through and around it. Public space is not defined by who has access to it, only by who is in it. We all exist in the public space, but for the most part
8 it is private interests of individuals and corporations that control that space: public space is a power structure (Razack 2002, 128). Most neighborhoods consist of many parallel historical realities alongside present inhabitation of people and creatures: untold stories and below-the-radar interactions and economies existing in contrast to hegemonic forms of history and neighborhood identity.
Over the past year, many of the buildings on Dundas West in the Junction have been undergoing city-sponsored refurbishment, freshly sandblasted brick greatly heightening their historic presence. Having celebrated its 100th anniversary two years prior to this writing, the Junction is a neighborhood that constructs its identity through its history, an identity that is enlivened by local organizations, business owners and residents. There are vague notions that circulate about the neighborhood having been dry for awhile as a result of a temperance movement, of the stench of the huge slaughterhouse that used to occupy the north west portion of the area, and of the name "Junction" referring to the historical role of the railway and yards in the boom and bust cycles of the neighborhood.
In later years, the Junction was characterized as a problem neighborhood in the press and in need of gentrification. It seems that the promotion of the Junction as an historical neighborhood has been a rehabilitative effort whose aim is to attract business and to give cache to the housing market, the motors of gentrification.
These populist forms of history are created in very specific ways and operate for specific purposes (Zinn 1970, 7). History in its broadest sense, however, is written, conveyed and
9 experienced as a complex of dynamics asserted by multitudes of actors and forces over time. Different formulations of history exist in tight relation as they speak to and against each other (Zinn 1970, 35-41). This historical complex occurs on and through the land: the current social dynamics of the Junction can only really be understood through contextualizing the discourse around the identity of the Junction in its twin histories of colonialism and capitalist expansion. Methods of history become tools of ideology: methods and ideologies are inscribed on the landscape as the landscape is organized according to history's project.
The dominant and populist history in the Junction supports the creation of Canada as an extension of European capitalism exercised through Britain's colonial will to take hold of the land and remake it in its own industrialized image. A colonial will that persists with
Canadian resistance to recognizing First Nations claims of an historical relationship to the land and cultural, political and epistemological autonomy. While the Junction describes itself as "located at the intersection of two Indian trails," the First Nations histoiy is largely subject to erasure by the mechanisms of colonial history as perpetuated in the local site and its current historical methodologies and dominant narratives.
Boundaries Drawn On a Map/ Junction Identity Constructed
In the ideological construction of "the Junction" as a neighborhood, absences in the landscape speak as loud as what is present. The identity of the Junction is based on the brief period starting in 1888 with the legal formation of the town and spanning the period
10 up to the point when it was incorporated into Toronto 20 years later. This identity is largely perpetuated by the West Toronto Junction Historical Society (WTJHS), which has amassed an archive of old maps and newspapers, as well as an oral history library that exult this 20-year period:
"Our boundaries are determined by the political unit of West Toronto Junction, so it was a town and it had defined limits, and it morphed in 1908 into a city because of its population of 10,000. So we have a map from 1908 that defines that, actually it's from 1909 when we amalgamated with the city, they defined those boundaries. There were three villages that amalgamated to become a town so it was their boundaries, then the town got ambitious and created some territory to the West that never got settled before the amalgamation, the stuff West of Runnymede." (Gib Goodfellow, West Toronto Junction Historical Society, personal interview, 2009)
Boundaries of the former City of West Toronto as annexed by the City of Toronto in 1909 >C
Annette Library: Home of the WTJHS
11 The history of the Junction is popularly conveyed through WTJHS publications and through their frequent dramatized walking tours during which, members dress in period costumes to portray prominent historical figures and point out old buildings and the streets named after these historical figures (an historical strategy used by many neighborhood societies). The WTJHS claims that the dating of their historical frame from the formation of town status, and the specific boundaries defined at that time, are the reasons why there is no First Nations' history included (Goodfellow, 2009). It is, however, the case that that there are many other details gathered in the archive that predate incorporation or that relate to lands outside the official boundaries, clearly indicating an understanding that larger historical flows and forces are integral to making sense of locally defined historical narratives. The exclusion of First Nations histories allows the Junction to erase its own colonial identity and simplify the history to an entertaining consumable for the local market, a history that is conveniently also the story of capitalist development.
Daniel Webster Clandenan is described by the WTJHS as "the 'founding father' of the municipality..." (Fancher and Miles 1999,12). He was a land speculator who saw a great potential for profit in the area due to the ongoing development of rail lines. Together with his uncle, he formed "Clendenan and Laws" to buy up property, so they could subdivide it, and then sell it off. Clendenan was able to cash in on his investments as the railway brought with it new industry (Heintzman Piano factory, a motorcar company and various
12 others) and propelled the immigration of a class of "surplus labour," which settled along both sides of the tracks north of Dundas. Dundas West itself became a site of commercial concentration, again drawing more businesses and labourers to the neighborhood. The railway running through the Junction and the offer of tax breaks enabled Clendenan to negotiate a relocation of the Toronto Stockyards from downtown Toronto, greatly adding to the industrial base of the neighborhood which Clendenan was always trying to build.
While a growing bourgeois class of land speculators, industrialists, corporations and banks established themselves as a financial and cultural elite, the working class struggled:
"Earnings for workers were veiy low and only a fraction of labourers were organized for collective bargaining. Girls worked in stores and offices for as little as three dollars a week. Most of the railway employees had effective organizations, however, called brotherhoods, which insisted upon and obtained pretty fair remuneration for the labour of its members, all of who were skilled workers. Unorganized groups of CPR workers, however, did not fare so well. In 1894 the CPR was paying its section men - the workmen responsible for keeping the right-of-way in good order- $1.25 per day of 10 hours, 47.50 per week of 60 hours. But even that was too much for CPR executives and an order went forth to lop five cents a day from the pay of every section man" (Fancher and Miles 1999, 37).
Land speculation and industrial development secured the Junction as a site of class differentiation between the owners of industry who built themselves grand mansions south of Dundas West, many of which still exist in the neighborhood, and the labour army that lived in smaller homes to the north. These two sectors became wedded in the roller coaster ride of capitalist reproduction "which takes the form of a decennial cycle
(interrupted by smaller oscillations) of periods of average activity, production at high
13 pressure, crisis and stagnation, [and] depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population." (Marx 1971, 785).
If the Junction imagined itself as a potential economic centre that would continuously expand outward, this hope was eventually crushed. As the different branches of capital ebbed and flowed in the course of these cycles, the neighborhood went through a series of
"boom times" followed by economic crises. When finally the railway line closed its
Junction station, many jobs were lost and working people were shuffled into the "reserve army of the unemployed," at the same time becoming a "social blight" that affected property values. A temperance movement was born in the Junction in an attempt to moralize the neighborhood, but served ultimately to extend the economic depression, while failing to achieve its objective of "cleaning up" the neighborhood. With the subsequent closing of the slaughterhouse (which itself was a blight, as it smelled bad and the working culture around it was perceived as "rough"), the marginal aspect of the neighborhood was exacerbated, again depressing property values. The fate of the
Junction as a struggling neighborhood was sealed, which, at the same time however, provided new basis for capitalist opportunity.
While the Junction was annexed to the City of Toronto in 1908, effectively voiding any political significance of these short-lived boundaries (1888-1908), this remains the historical period and process that now defines the public face of the Junction's identity.
14 These boundaries now delineate allowable historical content, and clearly they do not enable the taking up of contemporary and critical historical methodologies that may be more dynamic and inclusive. Rather, they reflect and promote a colonial mindset that tends to naturalize settler presence by fixing history to a specific space and time, thereby excluding the larger story of Europeans relatively short-lived relationship to the North
American geography and the complex history of the contact period. Limiting the boundaries in such a way makes it near impossible for WTJHS audience members to experience history in a complex, dynamic, responsible way, reducing history primarily to entertaining anecdotes about iconic white men.
The Land Grab
It is the case that much of the specific history of the First Nations in Toronto is written over. The "official" history of the Junction is a mechanism for the erasure of both the moment of colonization and the preceding history.
The moment of colonization is also the moment that capitalism forced its dynamics onto land, the people and other species, intervening and transforming all relationships forthwith. The colonial process is described by Marx as a process of "primitive accumulation." The acquisition of land by the colonialists was achieved by acts of naked violence where processes of corruption were followed by force (Marx 1971, 873-7).
15 The Junction sits on the disputed boundary of a corrupt land deal brokered between negotiators for George Graves Simcoe and the Mississauga. Simcoe quickly identified the site that is now Toronto as a potential site for the capital of Lower Canada and as a strategic site in the war with the US. He sought to take possession of the land by having his representatives "negotiate" the "Toronto Purchase" with the Mississauga. In what was a modus operandi for colonialists, agreements were claimed, despite the fact that the
Mississauga and Simcoe's negotiators had different understandings of what was being discussed:
"Although these discussions were later characterized as the 'sale' of Toronto, and the £1,700 worth of presents were later characterized wrongly a payment for the Toronto Purchase, in actual fact, nothing was sold at that Council in 1787." The Mississauga had understood these presents as "reward to the Mississaugas for their loyalty to the British during the American Revolution" (Toronto Purchase, 5).
In a developing culture of land grabs "problems developed over the haphazard and often fraudulent way in which settlers acquired land from the Indians" (Toronto Purchase, 5).
Subterfuge in the negotiations was resorted to in a constant changing and manipulating of the boundaries, which had never been marked on paper and were only asserted through military intimidation by the British and by settlers who chased the Mississauga off lands the settlers presumed to own. In 1805, The Chiefs who were called together to affirm the
1787 "agreement" were presented with surveyed maps of the land purchase that differed from their understanding, however they weren't able to contest it, as the Chiefs who had
16 been present at the original meeting had all died. Furthermore, the Toronto Islands (then still a peninsula) was never considered by the Mississauga to have been part of the
"agreement," but it was nevertheless appropriated within the boundaries. Considering the original granting of "presents" as reward for their loyalty (and not payment for the land), the 10 shilling payment for the lands at the 1805 meeting was accepted with the presumption that an official sum would soon be settled on. However, no further payment was made (Toronto Purchase, 10).
Capitulation on the part of the Mississauga came through a weakening of their power structures due to epidemics, war and increasingly limited access to land necessary for subsistence. Having succumbed to the colonialists, the Mississauga then hoped for some remuneration for their loss, an expectation that only reached some satisfaction in the courts more than 200 years later, in 2010 (Toronto Purchase). Meanwhile the Six Nations maintains a traditional connection to these same lands to which they have never ceded their rights.
The Toronto Purchase is a significant historical moment for the Junction (as well as
Toronto as a whole); it is the event that paves the way for the development of the area, with the "purchase" of the land from the Mississauga by the British Crown asserting relations of private property over the collective inhabitation of Turtle Island. It is the defining step in the settler's perception of their entitlement: land was given as grants to members of the military, the clergy and to important businessmen in the colonial scene.
17 Agriculture and industry was developed and land subdivided into smaller parcels for sale.
The land was carved up, forest resources exploited, rivers were covered and the grid of city streets laid over them: "Urban design, in fact, is a site of important attempts to enclose human and social behavior in forms and patterns compatible with the accumulation process and the profit motive" (De Angelis 2004, 79).
Inhabitation/Erasure
"The Iroquois built their summer longhouses just like this, by placing four logs in a rectangle shape. When more people came to live in the longhouse, they just rolled the logs back to make the longhouse bigger"(Rastia 'ta 'non.ha (Seneca Wolf Clan) in conversation).
Scant information exists within the Junction by which you could gain a fuller comprehension of the history of Aboriginal inhabitation of the land prior to the moment of primitive accumulation when the land was transferred to British control. While the
Annette Library collection is mainly dedicated to the same type of information as elsewhere (notable Englishmen, buildings, business and development), they do have some documentation of the Toronto Purchase, of the village Taiaiako'n, and there is even a document created as a testimonial by a resident about an Aboriginal grave that was discovered in the area:
"A few years ago when Olympus Ave. was being constructed the skeletons (sic) of eight or ten Indians were discovered. The bodies had been wrapped in a red clay not found in the district and so are thought to have been those of important
18 members of the tribe. They were found with their feet towards a large tree—an Algonquin burial custom - and may have been part of a raiding party during the time the Iroquois were in possession of the district or may have been members of the Mississauga community of Toronto. Their teeth were worn short so it is concluded that they were Indians past middle life." (appendix A, Toronto Public Library)
The author, Kenneth R. Rose, goes on to precisely describe where a stone marking had been placed at the location where the graves were discovered. When I went to see, it was no longer there. At the present time, there is nothing marking this seemingly important grave site. The document authored by Rose also describes the Carrying Place Trail, recounts Denonville's campaigns against the Seneca in 1687 and the Mississauga move into the area, stating that there was evidence of "at least four villages having occupied the
Baby Point site." More recently, the grave of a Seneca woman dated around the 17th century was dug up near the village of Taiaiako'n, in Baby Point. Because of the duress of development, her remains were moved to a nearby location, in what was a controversial decision by the Six Nations Council (Nagam 2009).
The Seneca village of Taiaiako'n is marked by a plaque that recognizes the village only in passing. Taiaiako'n, which had been a very important site along the trade routes of the
Six Nations, was on the Toronto Carrying Place trail that ran north to what became known as Lake Simcoe. After the campaign against the Seneca by de Denonville in the late 1600's, a village was established on the other side of the Humber by the Mississauga.
Indeed, there are a significant number of burial sites around the Junction, which is criss crossed by historical trails and trade routes.
19 Through work I have been doing with the Six Nations based group, Taiaiako'n Historical
Preservation Society (THPS), I have also learned of the asserted existence of 57 ancient
Iroquois burial mounds in High Park, which is actually a "mound city." These mounds date back 3000-5000 years. Six Nations oral traditions, a sporadic but consistent practice of visiting the ancestors throughout the contact period and some initial independent archeological tests all support the assertion that they are burial mounds (I will discuss the mounds further in Chapter 3).4
It is known that Davenport Road and Dundas West running through the Junction was part of a major trade route that ultimately ran from Montreal to Detroit, traversing through the settlements of Ganatsekywagon in the East to Taiaiako'n in the West:
"The ancient trail that converted gradually into a road is, without question, the oldest and longest route in Ontario. Within the City of Toronto the central portion is called Davenport, while its eastern extension has many names but most commonly is called Kingston Road. Westward from the Humber River, it also has many names; the most commonly used one is Dundas Street because it was joined
4 This claim has been highly contentious among Aboriginal groups, archeologists and the city; therefore the main request of the THPS is for an unobtrusive archeological study of the site with their involvement. This request is in accord with the 2010 recommendations of the Ontario Ministry of Tourism and Culture document: "Engaging Aboriginal Communities in Archaeology" (http://www.mtc.gov.on.ca/en/publications/AbEngageBulletin.pdf). Much of the discussion around the asserted existence of the Burial Mounds has been born out of by colonial and neo-colonial conditions in which these very fragmented discussions take place, mostly as volleys between lawyers, the city, the press, various citizens, the THPS and various Aboriginal representatives. While in the long term these discussions might be productive, at the moment they are very conflictual; nevertheless, the Aboriginal history of Toronto has become a point of discussion in the public sphere.
20 by the built route from Fort York to the Humber crossing of Davenport. The aboriginal names have been lost, but an Ojibwa language expert states that one could be reconstructed since Indian names actually describe what is named."5
Clearly the Toronto area was a significant economic base of many First Nations over the millennia, the Humber River area having existed as a key area of settlement and trade.
The colonials appropriated these sites and trails for themselves, laying their roads over the trails and developing communities on sites that were once inhabited by First Nations and thereby enclosing them: "those who overthrow regimes often take as one of their first tasks the physical destruction of symbols - and the latent power possessed by these markers - of those they have displaced" (Levinson 1998,12).
"And wherever was found an Indian path, it was pursued. In surveying and laying out the concessions and lots, pains were taken to secure a frontage as far as possible on these water ways and Indian trails... .When the settlers took up their abode on the lots remote from the water paths would be formed to the nearest point on the water. These were irregular according as natural obstacles, as hills or streams or marshes barred the way.. .The first settlers in York in 1793 found an Indian trail along the front from the mouth of the Humber to the mouth of the Don. Following these rivers to their sources Indian paths were found connecting them with the headwaters of the Holland River. Immediately after the advent of Simcoe steps were taken by him to open roads in different directions. The ways along the shore were widened and made passable between the garrison by the old fort and the Government grounds.. ..Dundas Street. Governor Simcoe conceived the idea of making for Upper Canada two great roads, one to traverse the province from east to west from Lower Canada to Lake Huron, the other from north to south... They were designed for the double purpose of commerce and of forming a military high-way" (Canniff, WM (1878). Illustrated Historical Atlas County of York, Toronto. X).
5 see: Designating Davenport - Preserving Ontario's Oldest Road at: http://www.tollkeeperscottage.ca/html/DesignatingDavenportPhamlet.PDF
21 Even if information regarding First Nations history is in need of further documentation, it is a vital part of the history of this land and could take up conceptual space in whatever form it can manifest (oral histories, stories, documented history, plaques, public interventions for instance). Even the noting of current absences of knowledge is of significance.
Westernized historical processes don't just selectively exclude information, they also work against First Nations historical epistemology. As Hele (2005,149) contends:
"Aboriginal Concepts of history maintain that it is a fluid motion bound by neither time nor space. A basic tool used to teach these conceptualizations is the medicine wheel; its center remains fixed as the wheel turns, with history flowing around in a circle...The past, present, and future reside together, yet they come before and after on another as the whirlwind spins history." The practice of the WTJHS reifies historical knowledge through its archival methodology, while aboriginal knowledge is constructed on "teachings around the belief that at certain places there is a sacred ambiance that can and does empower human consciousness and spirituality" (Battiste and Youngblood 2000, 66-7). Aboriginal knowledge is a form of responsibility and is transmitted personally in contrast to Western forms of knowledge where the written word enforces it's supremacy over human contact and oral tradition (Battiste and Youngblood 2000, Taylor 2003).
The fact that the acknowledged presence of "Indian trails" does not lead to any more information in the historical practice of the WTJHS can only be because the history of
22 First Nations has been relegated to a "subaltern" epistemology. No land or historical process is an island comprehensible within itself. Therefore, in my own consideration of the Junction as a "neighborhood," I have regarded the landscape as fluid over time and
First Nations history as a layer over which the WTJHS fitfully imposes its own version. I consider Six Nations sites that are just outside the official boundaries, as defined by the
WTJHS, as key sites through which we here in the Junction can understand our history and gain an awareness of the problems that our specific history generates for us in the present.
The Current Historical Environment
Conceptual boundaries take effect in time, space and consciousness. They define the limited portal through which history can be experienced. They are applied to the ancient past, and are then in effect projected forward into the future growth of the neighborhood.
The processes by which these boundaries come into being are capitalist. In the case of the
Junction, all the decisions to become a village, a town, a city are described as being more or less profitable for the landowners, civic workers and industrialists, and as being motivated by the flow of trade and the exigencies of military control. And now the identity that has been built around these processes continues with the current gentrification of the Junction, which deploys the identical rhetoric of land speculation based on business growth as that used to sell off lots in the early years of the village development. This patterning turns in on itself: the settler consciousness of self still dreaming of cheap land and big profits, while mistaking the mirror image of itself for reality, and with the history presented as entertaining anecdotes of the men who have had power (military, business, banking, church and politics) and who continue to impress the ideologies they symbolize on the landscape.
2. Poster from the WTJHS archives 3-4. Historical murals on Dundas West
Throughout this research, photographing everyday environmental signs of history has shifted my view of the landscape from a place of subjective "dwelling" to one of purposeful looking. Photographing plaques, architecture, flags and street names has been an important ongoing methodology. These symbols comprise the most public form of the
24 history that we live within, an historical ambience if you will, such that if you lived in the neighborhood you may not know who the street names refer to, but you would understand that they were British (Keele St, High Park, Gilmour, Maveaty etc.) and that they probably refer to 'important' people of some design. The street names immediately draws a connection to Britain and to the historical moment of colonization: naming the land is one of the mechanisms of conquest and an affirmation of ownership. Dundas Street, for example, is named for Right Hon. Henry Dundas Viscount Melville who served as
Secretary of State for the Colonies in Britain, as well as War Secretary. Even though there is no evidence that he ever set foot in Canada, the symbol of the power that he represents has extended across this city and well beyond: an archipelago on the west coast of Canada is also named after him, and a highway in Hong Kong, a shire in Australia, a suburb of
Sydney and a monument in Rome are all dedicated to him.
Many of the major streets in the Junction are named after people who were granted land in the settlement phase of the area, with the streets marking former boundaries of land ownership. These properties were given to wealthy businessmen and military people;
John Scarlett, one of the early recipients of a large land grant in the Junction, "was well connected in England; a man of enlightened views and fine personal presence" (Scadding
1873, 374). In the papers that John Scarlett left upon his death was found a receipt for a slave he had apparently purchased.6 Many streets were also named for businessmen and
6 see: http://www.ogilviefamilytree.eom/p7.htm#i335
25 politicians during the Junction's graduation to town status: Gilmour was a noteworthy doctor and politician, Clendenan was the land speculator and mayor; Keele was a land speculator, racetrack owner and politician; Heinztman was a piano manufacturer;
Rowntree had a grocery store; Laws was Clendenan's uncle and business partner, and the list goes on.
That colonialism works to organize women, the working class and non-white people into mutually coordinated positions of subordination is exemplified by the many streets in the
Junction named for women (Elizabeth, Annette, Maria, etc.) whose identities have been forgotten as these street were accorded their first names. Gib Goodfellow commented that it was fair to assume that they were women that Clandenan wanted to impress or the wives of prominent men in the politics of the area (interview 2009). Jane and Annette were said to be the wives of a prominent developer, Canavan and his lawyer, respectively
(Miles and Fancher 1999,77). Colonial women were considered the moral backbone and key to bringing order and purity to colonial society (McCLintock 1995, 24), but they were not considered political agents: they are to be flattered but not empowered. Nevertheless, the fact that there are streets named after bourgeois women represents a further extension of a geography of personalized references to a bourgeois British male elite: "The other,
Edenic side to frontier landscapes then becomes recognizable as a forcible reiteration, a constant rehearsal of what it took to 'fit in'" (Grant 2003,101).
26 There are two streets just outside the northern boundary of the Junction named for First
Nations with history in this area: "Cayuga" and "Seneca," both member bands of the Six
Nations. They are relatively newer streets in a working class, industrial part of the neighborhood and they are very short. The Cayuga and Seneca do have a connection to lands that include West Toronto, however, there is no specific village site or trail there that lends an overwhelming reason to mark these specific places. These street names lack the important location and historical connectivity that say Clendenan Street has as marking the historical boundary of his property. Rather, these street names seem to hover in a convenient disconnection to history and land. Dundas West and Davenport would be obvious streets to properly commemorate Aboriginal history.
5. Photographic exploration of ideological landscapes, Kim Jackson (2009).
The process of claiming land by naming was also applied to areas of the landscape that had Aboriginal names: "Simcoe, who disliked Aboriginal names, introduced several
English names in Upper Canada, including Lake Simcoe after his father, Captain John
Simcoe. On learning of a victory by the Duke of York in Flanders, Simcoe changed
27 Toronto's name to York on August 26th, 1793, to honor the duke - George Ill's son
Frederick Augustus." They renamed the Tkaronto River ("where there are trees standing in the water") after the Humber River in Britain (Rayburn, 1994).
Street names, monuments and historical plaques comprise a "constant reminder of the power of empire" (Coutou 2006, 8). The plaques that include Aboriginal historical details only do so in reference to contact with settlers or settler epistemology and do not mark independent Aboriginal sites or historical moments in Aboriginal terms or epistemological frameworks (Solnit 2007, 40). As was mentioned, the Baby Point plaque marking the ancient Seneca and Mohawk village site, Taiaiako'n, only mentions the village in passing. The Toronto Carrying Place plaque is dedicated to details of the trail route and again to its importance to Etienne Brule, the French and the fur traders. In fact, it only states that the trail was "important" to and "used by" First Nations: however, neglects to note that it was created by them. The Toronto Carrying Place trail was one of the important landmarks of First Nations relation to the land stretching across southern
Ontario northward. The claiming of this route for European possession becomes an important symbolic gesture of possession. No plaque exists in the Junction to mark First
Nations history: even the famed meeting place of two Indian trails goes unmarked.
The one historical plaque that actually exists in the Junction is in Baird Park, and commemorates the importance of the railway and former mayor Clendenan. The motif of the train is repeated throughout the neighborhood in the Christmas lights in the shape of a
28 locomotive that get put up every year, in the mural that is painted on the train platform/stage on Dundas St. that was built for the centennial celebration and in another mural that faces the No Frills parking lot, picturing a sepia train driving through historical memory. And there's the street banner that pictures train tacks plunging into the foreground. The train represents the industrialization of the landscape. With its attendant prosperity, land price increases and good business all-around, it is the symbol of the economic motor of Junction history. While street names represent colonial possession, trains represent modernity, industry, trade in goods: they represent capitalism. The railway is also a strong signifier of colonial domination of Aboriginal lands and peoples, a
"civilizing" force against "barbarism" (Yazzie 2000, 39-40).
History also works on a more passive, bodily (phenomenological) level in the grid of the streets that are first conceived as lines on a paper and then overlaid on the undulating land, transforming it from a flowing ecology into a regimented ordering of patterned human activity. Grant comments that "These prospective social geographies found visual form in the gridded plans of new settlements and the panoramic views of colonial townships ... with their socially indeterminate, leisurely promenading folks, and their native presences carefully sidelined as picturesque coulisses" (2003, 107). Rivers are covered over to maximize the profit margin gained from land speculation, and to maintain a consistency of patterning, forests are cut down and trees replanted in rows along the roadways. Houses are built as discreet units, side by side in neat rows, a Utopia of capitalist order that the colonial city could perfect.
29 6. Photographic exploration of ideological landscape, Kim Jackson (2009).
The modern gridded city provides greater opportunities for social control, for military and police access, for census takers and tax collectors, than the barrio, medina, the medieval European city or the First Nations nomadic and semi-permanent communal settlements, potential "breeding grounds" of underground economies and insurgency.
These patterned environments arise out of the dwelling space of capitalist relations and, in turn, pattern our relationships in the present and impose on the future. These grid patterns of colonial development overlaid First Nations patterns, like a palimpsest, explicitly erasing the original from the land and replacing it with the mark of the new owner.
30 Our adherence to such order is expressed and again reinforced by the multitude of
Canadian flags that hang not just outside of schools, fire halls, police stations and parks,
but throughout the neighborhood, sometimes on several houses per block, and often
flying from car antennae as well.
7. Photographic exploration of ideological landscape, Kim Jackson (2009).
Is this an anxiety of identity? A grasping at ownership? An attempt to fix place and define
space? Canadian flags express an allegiance to this order: they are also a colonial symbol
that indicates an historical relation to the land as the imposition of the European concept
of private property. The culture of property ownership that was foreign to this land prior
31 to settlement is one of the most dramatic marks on the landscape and the fundamental character of the settler mode of dwelling as possession:
"By the late 1700's...A new white property owning subject emerged into history and possessiveness became embedded in everyday discourse as 'a firm belief that the best in life was the expansion of self through property and property began and ended with possession of one's body.' Within the realm of intra-subjectivity possession can mean control over one's being, ideas, one's mind, one's feelings and one's body or within inter-subjectivity it can mean the act or fact of possessing something that is beyond the subject and in other contexts it can refer to a state of being possessed by another. Within the law possession can refer to holding or occupying territory with or without actual ownership or a thing possessed such as property or wealth and it can also refer to territorial domination of a state" (Moreton-Robinson 2008, 83).
Colonial possession is totalizing; it could not tolerate the First Nations' relationship to the land according to which ownership was inconceivable (Finkel 2006; Dickason 1997).
The neighborhood in which we now live is the reified material structure of all these past capitalist processes and serves to reinforce the reproduction of capitalist relations. Not only has land speculation become the driving economic and ideological force still operating in dominant fashion in the Junction, but the carving up of the land into discrete private lots (not large enough to provide subsistence, but to guarantee that people will live in alienated relations to production) and the neighborhood into bourgeois areas and working-class or immigrant areas creates the environmental basis for social atomization and alienation that marks the neighborhood. First Nations people are subsumed however painfully into this dominant set of relations, while at the same time some still contest the
32 enclosure of their lands by visiting their ancestors and practicing rituals regardless of legal proscriptions.
Perhaps the mental and physical boundaries of the Junction are a restaging of the colonial frontier, which served as the edge of order to the European psyche, beyond which, as
McCLintock (1995,24-8) suggests, the colonials could not know themselves. The capitalist system is based on lack of history, even more so on a prevention of history. This is the requirement of history in order for it to function within colonial and capitalist objectives: to disconnect people from the land and from the product of their labour, to lead them to view the land as existing to be transformed into market commodities and not for the mutual sustenance of communities and to view of people as labour costs and not as multi-dimensional sites of knowledge production and "dwelling."
Defining "Community"
One day Marlene and I were waiting for the bus on Keele at Dundas. We were on our way to Snake Mound to feast in celebration of the new gathering space we built by rolling logs into a circle with an opening or "door" to the east. It's a corner densely populated by pigeons. In front of us on the street, just out from the curb, was a pigeon that had been freshly killed by an oncoming car. I was transfixed by its red and feathered splatter when
I noticed that a group of pigeons kept trying to go out onto the road towards the dead pigeon. One in particular was insistent, disregarding the oncoming traffic that was
33 swerving around it and its mates as they gently prodded the dead pigeon with their beaks.
I found out later that pigeons mate for life. As we waited for the bus, we watched the pigeons mourn their deadfriend. Then the bus finally came. It rolled over the body of the pigeon and scattered its people.
The Junction has one set of geographic boundaries according to the WTJHS, while the
Junction BIA restricts its boundaries to Dundas West between Indian Grove and
Runnymede. The newly minted Junction Residents Association has just carved out a new set of boundaries from the train tracks north of Dundas, down to Annette, and from
Runnymead over to Keele: conveniently excluding the areas of the Junction which are not so gentrifiable. The train tracks also form an historical division in the neighborhood, and certainly north of the tracks is solidly working class. Pellham Park and the Junction
Triangle fall within the WTJHS's map. However, they barely register as part of the
Junction, whose core has become Dundas West. As for electoral boundaries, the Junction is cut in two on the north-south axis, between High-Park and Parkdale-Roncesvales. To complicate these layered geographical perceptions of the Junction, there is the Six
Nations and Mississauga relation to this specific land; the Six Nations Clan Mothers consider the protection of their traditional sites in High Park (which falls into the civic electoral boundary of the Junction) as their hereditary duty.
Urban neighborhoods are like sieves, with many outside forces acting in the local space, with people coming and going, working and living and variously finding "community" or
34 experiencing alienation and exclusion. Community also extends out from specific geographies to the globalized world through the Internet, and the various "on-line" communities, which reinforce certain aspects of chosen identities not necessarily accessible in the local site. Strictly defining community by geography is clearly complicated.
As has been noted, the creation of defined boundaries by those who assume authority
(politicians, residents, historians) operates as an exclusionary measure. What falls within these boundaries is subject to cleansing through ideological means. Suddenly the rallying cry against prostitution, for instance, as a neighborhood scourge is extended to donut shops, massage parlors and working-class bars, which are viewed disparagingly according to the bourgeois desire for neighborhood "improvement." Sherene Razack (2002, 6). importantly comments that "white, respectable space" is confirmed by the marking of
"degenerate" spaces, and that "a special analysis can help us to see the operation of all the systems as they mutually constitute each other" Elizabeth Povinelli (Povinelli 2006,
204)provides a more nuanced idea of how space is constructed by adding a temporal biological dimension:
"A biopolitical fracture may indeed have separated bare life from sovereign life, casting the exception into a social and psychic camp. But once separated in this way, a certain meatiness, a certain benign brutality, becomes available for politics, certain relations of capital become possible, acceptable, and event inevitable.. .the temporality of life for many at the edge of liberal capital's promise is the temporality of diarrhea—slow, debilitating, and blurred. The uneven speed with which people die, the distribution of violence attached to these deaths, or the
35 slowness of their decay, all present different temporalities for how power is invested through local biospaces."
The "bio-political fracture" described by Povinelli is evidenced in the dominant ideology of the "successful" body within capitalism which is projected in the Junction through the private businesses on the main shopping drag. The large number of alternative health practices: chiropractors, massage therapy, pilates, yoga, health spas and esthetician shops, health food and furniture stores, point to the promotion of a "lifestyle." Many of these businesses target women and are a continuation of the colonial conception of women's role as the moral backbone of society, expressed now through a concern with health and fitness. The incoming Starbucks isn't just a business, it is a symbol that emphasizes one aspect of the Junction which is in constant development, it is the introduction of expensive coffee for the bourgeois while the affordable coffee from the donut shops is considered unsightly and backward. Some people ask why not object to WalMart, and, indeed, WalMart in is a worse corporate offender on many fronts than Starbucks, however, WalMart serves the poor in some ways, while Starbucks only pushes them out of the market altogether. WalMart hires immigrants and older women and provides cheap commodities that enable the lower classes to participate in capitalist consumerism, or even just to acquire some of the necessities of life. The poorer you are, the more industrialized your material reality, and consequently the less your bodily reality is nourished or aestheticized.
36 8. Sticker campaign by Strobusphere members in response to Starbucks opening in the Junction
In searching for a new way to understand our relation to the Junction, Mark Dallas (2010) offered that we are comprised of many "overlapping spheres with fuzzy edges" that radiate "out from the High Park-Junction area" (Strobusphere website, 2010). This definition includes geography, identity and the flux of daily practices, as people inhabit the geography. The Heideggerian concept of "dwelling" offers another insight:
"Dwelling, involves a lack of distance between people and things, a lack of casual curiosity, and engagement which is neither conceptualized nor articulated, and which arises through using the world rather than through scrutiny. Our immediate world is characterized by its inconspicuous familiarity - not by its to-be-looked- at-ness. So it is impossible to begin to look at traces of past human presence without seeing them from the first as bound up with human social action and
37 subjectivity. The structures which we excavate have not simply been affected by discontinuous human actions, they are both the outcome and the site of generation of human projects, and are meaningless if divorced from the structure of dwelling" (Thomas 1993, 28-9).
Dwelling involves power in its formulation of space: one group's dwelling can create the conditions of omission, forgetting, silence, repression and erasure, as well as processes of overlaying forms of memory. These processes are rarely complete. Fragments of places and narratives exist in isolated spaces, operating in chance counter to hegemonic forms of dwelling. Chance encounters with fragments do not often make enough impact to contest the everyday lived historical continuum, but suturing these fragments together may work towards producing a more complex and connected form of experiencing the local historical narratives existent in the land. Bender (1993, 3) comments that "the landscape is never inert, people engage with it, re-work it, appropriate and contest it. It is part of the way in which identities are created and disputed, whether as individual, groups, or nation states. Operating therefore at the juncture of history and politics, social relations and cultural perceptions..."
Understanding "Capitalist Relations"
My mother had run away from her "bourgeois " Westmount family reality to the west coast of Canada in the 1950's to join in on the beatnik and later hippy movements. My sister and I were never close to her family, they were alien and a bit scary in comparison to our life of idealism-imbued poverty. I couldn 't understand why on earth I couldn 't have my elbows on the dinner table; the arbitrariness of the rule, and the quiet
38 condemnation that accompanied its enforcement baffled and intimidated me. They weren't supportive to us when my father left and my mother went on welfare: they didn 't try to know my sister and I. They were upper-crust Anglo's who seemed to hide behind their car fetishes and pearl necklaces.
Economics is simply an abstract numerical language that signifies actual relations among humans and societies, and between humans and the land. Capitalism is the name that describes the current nature of these relations. Capitalism and the so-called modern science of economics go hand in hand in their numerical abstraction of human relations.
Marx (1978), however, in his discussion on the commodity form and his equations on value and surplus value, was able to prove that the application of numerical discipline to human life constitutes a violence against humans where they are separated from the specific nature of their own life labour by the market systems of value. In order to break with the distanced and abstracted economic discourse that takes place in the hegemonic sphere, I propose to refocus our attention to the very visceral reality of our interdependent modes of survival as human societies and the embodied labour processes that produce life
(McQuaig 1995, 8).
Capitalism marks an historical shift where people's access to land and resources was severed by a movement of enclosures and coincidental marketization of land relations in
16th century Britain (Marx 1976, Perleman 2000, Wood 2002,100). As a result of this severing of people from their means of subsistence, people were left with no recourse but
39 to sell their labour on the market. Once individuals and communities are prevented from directly accessing the means of subsistence, the state becomes key in mediating their relationship to those with capital, the wealthy industrialists, small business owners or governments who "provide" employment.
In the current neo-liberal period, the Canadian media has consistently reported statistics that indicate the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Canadian capitalists tout the ideological notion of a "free market," when in reality the market is tightly controlled by the owning class and the governments and legal system that caters to (and shares) their interests. With the levers of taxation, interest and unemployment rates, they manipulate the economy in such a way that money flows towards the corporate and banking elites and their political allies, who put much effort into swaying the government in their favour, not stopping short of outright threats. Toronto journalist Linda McQuaig (1995) has written about how the Canadian tax system strongly favors the wealthiest Canadians, who in many cases pay no tax, while working and poor Canadians carry a large part of the tax burden. McQuaig (1995, 38). describes how the different economic sectors of
Canadian society have distinctly opposing stakes and interests in how the economy is run.
What is good for the elite bond holding class, high interest rates for example, is actually drastically bad for the labouring classes. Increased profits result from minimized wages and even loss of jobs Furthermore, increased deficits are conveniently blamed on government social services spending, which has, since the 1980's, been consistently subject to funding cuts. According to McQuaig (1995, 23), deficits are historically the
40 result of increased interest rates, a move by the Bank of Canada which protects the profits of the elite, while it guts the social infrastructure and shifts the emphasis of accumulation to the private sector: "free trade, deregulation, government downsizing, inflation control, even the imposition of a goods and services tax." The Bank of Canada considers unemployment a necessary factor in keeping inflation down and thereby lowering working peoples' wage expectations - a form of psychological warfare. Of the massive profits generated through people's labour, their pay consists of only what is allowed to
"trickle" down, while they are held captive through union-busting rhetoric and policy and a consistent rate of unemployment that serves to keep people feeling lucky to have a job
(Marx 1976, ;McQuaig 1995).
As capital goes global, Canada's participation as a promoter of such economic strategies is not minor. Former Bank of Canada chairman John W. Crow worked for the World
Bank, cutting his teeth on Latin American restraint programs. Paul Martin instigated the
G20 and now lectures throughout the world on economic restraint and "balancing budgets" (see Klein, 2010). Economic restraint is in fact another form of "primitive accumulation," which demands that every resource and service should be privatized, and the role of government in redistributing wealth limited.
Despite Marx having clearly explained the nature and history of capitalism, it remains popularly misunderstood. In Canada, capitalism is promoted as interchangeable with democracy. If Marx's theories of surplus labour and surplus value are taken as accurate,
41 and the motor of capitalism is fuelled by the exploitation of labour for profit, then this is inherently contradictory with democracy.
While Marx analyzed profit as resulting from the stolen surplus labour of the working class, many theorists no longer agree that the proletariat is the revolutionary class. Today, we see massive profits resulting from abstract market relations of futures, sub-prime mortgage games, exchange markets and digital economies. Lingering forms of industrial labour, classically attached to the union movement, are now less visible in Canada, and have been substantially weakened by consistent anti-union attacks. While those of us on the margins have never had job security, the government has continued to jeopardize the economic security of the working class and the working poor in Canada. The government has suggested that working people must be more adaptable in a new and tougher globalized economic climate. "Service" or information forms of labour have become more visible, but at the same time are not viewed as productive of profits in the way commodity labour has been. Theorists including Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (2000,
280) have suggested that late capitalism is characterized by a turn to "informatisation," a dominance of the information, technology and service industries These sectors may have exploded in the Euro/American economies, however, they remain dependent on Third
World industrialized labour, as the Third World experiences a brutal renewed phase of the primitive accumulation that has been continuous since colonization. In other words, computer-based industries, including banking, are only possible based on mining and
42 manufacturing in the developing nations, and the world economy continues to be underpinned by primary resources and labour (Kester, 1993).
9. Sticker project in response to economic crisis by Michael Ricks (2009)
Canada was bom as a nation-state out of the imperial project, which operated on the basis of the ideologies and methods of capitalist accumulation, expansion and exploitation. This imperial project is continued in a contemporary form with Free Trade, the WTO and
G8/20 organizations. Under this new form of capitalist expansion, the worst of the traditional forms of class exploitation under capitalist industrialization have been shipped abroad, to China, Latin America and India primarily. Our markets are full of commodities that are created under conditions of child labour, militarized, disciplinarian settings, extreme impoverishment of workers and, in places such as Afghanistan, war. The
43 Canadian state has politically, militarily and economically aligned itself with the US, the most forceful advocate of capitalist ideology in the world today.
At the same time, Canada is often characterized in the media as being characterized as having a 'traditional' interest in protecting certain sectors under special conditions from the vagaries of market life. People in poverty could collect welfare, general access to medical services and various other supports. Importantly a social safety net redistributes the wealth gathered by the state from the people. But these "social safety" nets have never constituted a solution to the problem of inequality: they may have helped stave off the worst aspects of capitalism, while achieving their main purpose, which is protecting
Capitalism (Finkel 2006, 3). Much of Marx's Capital I (1978) is dedicated to discussing the attempts by capitalists at "humanizing" capitalism. However, structural reforms aimed at solving the problem of capitalist exploitation and disenfranchisement would mean the end of capitalism.
It is the case today that before we do or become anything, we must perform as capitalists, those of us who are not part of the wealthy elite must sell our labour (or some other aspect of ourselves) to buy what we need on the market. Those who live "off the grid" in Canada can only do so at the expense of being incredibly socially isolated, in threat of legal intervention and subject to profound insecurity. Self-subsistence has become a luxury boutique market. Buying the raw materials to produce your own necessities is often more
44 expensive, and hand production is extremely time consuming in a very time-pressurized society. Capitalism is totalizing and does not tolerate alternate modes of survival.
The "Bourgeoisie"
Kara T says, "Starbucks in the Junction-YES BRING IT ON! While politically I may not support Starbucks, I'm sick and tired of the bums, vagrants, prostitutes, mentally ill freak show people who maraud the Junction Streets and expose themselves indecently in front of children (yes I recently had to explain why some nut job lady was pulling down her pants in the middle of the sidewalk to my kid - not easy). They can't afford Starbucks. So please Starbucks come to the Junction. Corner of Keele and Dundas where Galaxy donuts is-please" (The Junctioneer blog, June 10,2010).
When my sister opened her coffee shop, Cool Hand of a Girl, on Dundas West, I went to work for her. Many people who came into the shop were very appreciative and excited that something was "happening" here that was "positive. " Everyday I heard more and more comments about how this neighborhood needed to change, to get some decent businesses. The deeper meaning in many of these comments was that the area needed to be "cleaned up " ofprostitutes and drug addicts and that the arrival of good businesses could achieve that.
Many of the women from Evangeline women's shelter next door became our customers and some people commented that they didn't like the cigarette smoke that drifted in from
45 outside where women would sit sometimes. My sister eventually sold the business and the new owner took the table out front away to prevent the women from Evangeline from sitting there. Later the BIA installed benches outside of businesses on Dundas West. They didn 't put one in front of Evangeline where the women could hang out, they put one in front of Cool Hand. The women started using this bench, so the owner had it removed. My introduction to the Junction was to a gentrification battleground; a low-grade war of uncomfortable presences that look side long, and hurry away. Or all to often speak out openly with disdain.
The capitalist process that dominates the public sphere in the Junction is that of gentrification. Within the various notions that comprise gentrification are a very specific set of values attached to very specific actions and relations to power that are distinctly bourgeois. While the bourgeois cannot be said to have caused capitalism, they certainly are the ascendant class within capitalist history. The bourgeois consists of those well positioned to take advantage of the marketization of economic relations, and therefore valorize the market above all else (Wood 2002,119). Bourgeois values and language also originate in the European Enlightenment and have their most profound expression in
Canada with the colonial project and the liberal "civilizing mission" (Mignolo 2000, 55).
Private property, institutional education, moralism, cleanliness, accumulation, professionalism, health and status, and the primacy of the individual are all key aspects of bourgeois value system. It is this bourgeois ideology that gives content to the social
46 "good" as the normative standard of Canadian politics and culture. At its most elemental, this idea of the "social good" valorizes business relations above all others.
Increasingly the business paradigm has overtaken both social services, where users are now considered "clients," as well as in the arts, where the artist is no longer allowed to be
"poor" and "starving," but must be a successful entrepreneur. We are even admonished these days to "vote with our dollars" (Kern 2011, We don't want, 16). This "good" is put forward without any regard for the complex of effects on a community of the structural advance of the business paradigm into all of our relations. It is not a far leap to regarding the neighborhoods impediments to business as an "evil," and these impediments are the embodied signs of the inability to adapt to capitalism's exigencies.
While many may dispute the use of the term "bourgeois" as no longer relevant, I use it here in order to maintain a conceptual continuum across history. It appears to me that even many pre-capitalist structures carry through to today: the super rich who have multiple mansions across the world can be seen to operate as a new aristocracy. Rather than ordained by God, they are considered to be ordained both by "luck" and special talents. Povinelli (2006, 185) comments that:
"...scholars of the Enlightenment, in all of its divergent forms, often argue that contests over the meaning and direction of social revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries spawned a new form of human being from the ashes of aristocratic society: the parvenu, i.e., the self-made man. Aristocratic trappings might have remained in the self-stylizations of titles and manners that the emergent bourgeois society adopted...And yet, underneath these restoration costumes and Utopian visions emerged a decisive new presupposition, an
47 expectation that the course of a man's life should be determined by his life, the life he made, rather than from his placement before his birth in a genealogical, or any other socially defined grid."
Certainly bourgeois ideology also greatly affects those who are not economically bourgeois, as it is the hegemonic system by which we are all judged and within which we form our aspirations or rebellions. There is also the question of class mobility, a phenomenon that in particular captures the imagination of those in the Americas. What I primarily observe in the Junction is a strong upper/middle class population, which is involved in contesting the space by deploying a normalizing and historical bourgeois value system and identity and is key to the reproduction of capitalism in the local site.
Marx defined the bourgeoisie as the owners of the means of production (Marx & Engels
1985, 80; Mignolo 2002, 77). Nevertheless, some of the most ardent promoters of the bourgeois cause were not necessarily owners of the means of production, but themselves worked for capital; Adam Smith was a theorist and worked under capital, but owned no factory like most of the major theorists of political economics, promoters of free trade and capitalism. Oilman (1993, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/critique_ ideology .php) suggests that "Marx was willing to devote approximately half of his major work to how the political economists and others of his day understood and misunderstood capitalism, because how they thought.. .was an integral part of how capitalism worked"
(my emphasis). The question is not ultimately the nature of a discourse, but as Marx
([1859] in Kamenka 1983, 160) points out, how that discourse is shaped by our material relations. By extension the popularity of theories, such as those by Foucault, which have
48 not taken up the relation between material production and theorization, prevent those theories from really being motors of social transformation. To deny the material nature of our relationships is a statement of bourgeois interest and privileged distancing that permeates the theory itself. It is symptomatic of the class position of academics in relation to the economic structure that material understandings are relegated to a Marxist
"experiment" which is roundly purported to have "failed." While certainly we must depart critically from Marx's racist perception that capitalism was a necessary stage towards socialism as a justification for British Imperialism in India ([1853] in Kamenka 1983,
335), he remains the most important foundational theorist of capitalism itself, even giving us an important piece of the colonial puzzle with his theory of primitive accumulation.
His theories confront us with a frank and rational description of how capitalism is not a road to freedom as it purports, but is a continuation of class exploitation in a new historical and pernicious form.
Understanding that the bourgeoisie emerged through the long historical process of the rise of capitalism, the modern nature/problematic of this class is informed by the ideologic shifts regarding the rights of the individual that occurred during the French
Revolution (McQuaig 1995,6). Under cover of a call for universal emancipation, the bourgeoisie took the opportunity to restructure society: the bourgeois-led Jacobins allied themselves with the Parisian working classes during the course of a long fight to unseat the monarchial system. However, when it came to consolidating power, they turned their back step by step on the working class, while ascending themselves to dominance (Wood 2002,120; Clark 1999,21). This betrayal took the form of banning workers' organizations (which had played a key role in fighting the revolution) and of revoking general enfranchisement and delimiting the vote according to various standards of property ownership (Marx 1976, 397) (a similar process of limiting enfranchisement happened in England). The delimiting of enfranchisement constitutes another act of
(violent) enclosure and was necessary to the bourgeoisie if it was to gain the power it needed to have legal rights over other people and their productive capacities: ".. .he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production's sake. In this way he spurs on the development of society's productive forces, and the creation of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society"
(Marx 1976, 739).
"I don't exploit you, I pay you" (my former boss in the Junction).
Marx (1976, 739) points out that "except as capital personified, the capitalist has no historical value, and no right to that historical existence." Rather the capitalists must fabricate the appearance of their natural domination as a class with ideological methods
(Lichtman 1998,121-2). To this end, the bourgeois economists must obscure the origins of surplus value in the surplus labour of the worker (Marx 1976, 651) and propose a narrative that is self-elevating and that reverts to fetishism as a way to reify notions that cap the possibility of a epistemological process developed to the full capacity to the historic awareness: "All the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist,
50 all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all capitalism's illusions about freedom, all the apologetic tricks of vulgar economics, have as their basis the form of appearance discussed about, which makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed presents to the eye the precise opposite of that relation" (Marx 1976, 680).
In a contemporary context, class has become much more complex in the sense that
"almost all of the population has been transformed into employees of capital" including the super rich (Braverman 1974, 404). Class mobility also confuses our traditional understanding of the class system as fixed. In Europe it is something you are born into, whereas in North America one of the core values is economic mobility, and many do. But many have cross-class experiences as well (myself for instance). Braverman explains how many sectors that are not strictly bourgeois have nevertheless taken on bourgeois values, beliefs, aspirations and performance, whether in pragmatic alliance with capitalist objectives or in misapprehension of their relationship to the means of production. This class is generally characterized by Braverman (1974,405) as a management class that "by a process of selection within the capitalist class and chiefly from its own ranks." The role of this class is to represent the capitalist class "on the spot, and in representing it to supervise and organize the labors of the working population" (Braverman 1974,405).
Braverman also points out that once they reach a certain level employees will be receiving bonuses or commissions, melding their interests to the success of the employer and giving them in effect a percentage of the surplus value created: "the position of such functionaries may best be judged by their relation to the power and wealth that commands
51 them from above, and to the mass of labor beneath them which they in turn help to control, command, and organize" (Braverman 1974,405). And clearly the division of one's pay into salary, bonus and stock options creates a huge divide from those who work strictly for an hourly wage, as recent economic events starkly highlighted.
One of the foundational values of the bourgeois ideology is the primacy of the individual:
"The play of distinctions that seem visible in liberal discourses.. .are projected out of a set of relatively stable discourses and practices that measure the world of a life, and a society, relative to its capacity to constitute and vest sovereignty in the individual. "I" must be the citation and the site of enunciation and address. What do I want, desire, and aspire to? With whom do I wish to share, not merely the materials and rights that I have accumulated as I have passed through the world, but the narratives of who I think I am, what I discover that I am, that I am desiring to be?" (Povinelli 2006,183)
Bourgeois identity is not simply formed by the amount of ownership one has, but importantly takes the form of conspicuous and targeted social and material consumption.
The new businesses that open and are valorized in the gentrification discourse indicate an intense culture of self-interest: a mirroring of property values, lifestyle and the individual as the site of success (Junction BIA website 2010, Kern 2011) as representing the
"bourgeois" performed identity and class interest.
The contemporary "bourgeois" condition of straddling both wage labour (creators of value) and investment in the financial structure based on forms of ownership carries with it a specific form of alienation. As this class has command over others (and themselves), it exists in a heightened state of contradiction between self-interest and ethics. While they
52 identify strongly with their own sense of freedom of choice, their self expression as professionals, and most noticeably through a regulation of the body with health and fitness, they are also in direct opposition to, and invested in, the exploitation of the traditionally defined working class, not only as a measure of their own financial security and distinction, but also in their freedom to consume those commodities that will make them able to represent themselves as (and actually be) economically viable individuals
(McClintock 1995; Marx 1976, 740-1). This site of consumption and class identity continues a dialectical relationship to the sites of commodity production, the always
"hidden abode of labour," facilitated by their distant locations primarily (but by no means exclusively) in Asia, Latin America and India (Marx 1976, 702). Povinelli (2006,223) puts forward the important questions as to "how the white metropolis was able to exfoliate from its ideological commitment to wealth and freedom the actual conditions of colonial totalitarianism, rape and genocide."
Many people do not come in direct contact with industrial forms of labour or poverty and therefore, do not seem to feel connected to this sector. The bourgeoisie is concerned rather with the culture of market exchanges, prioritizing social engagements that contribute to their mutually beneficial accelerated activity and accumulation on the level of status and work security or advancement. I have, on several occasions, heard teachers from the Junction comment that they are relieved to be working in schools where there aren't too many "underprivileged" kids. The social structure is organized so that in order to exercise one's bourgeois privilege one must deploy distancing mechanisms such as
53 judgmentalism, physical distance and bigotry: "The self-regulating bourgeois subject had to be spatially separated from the degeneracy, abnormalcy, and excess that would weaken both him and the bourgeois state. Bodies that crossed "the frontier of bourgeois order" were segregated, not for the purpose of punishment, but for moral regulation" (Razack
2002,11). Whether a neighborhood perceives the marginal classes as merely unsightly or wishes them gone, there is an instrumentalization of relations according to a motive of capital accumulation promoted by association of people within their class.
If we draw on performance theory, we can see bourgeois values and social relations as something we enact in relation to each other in a network of dominant relations rather than a fixed identity. While we may have "agency" to transform our relationality in the moment, we also act within a matrix of historical social pressures. I don't believe that shifting one's relations happens without a mutual contact, and that one has to make oneself available not just to polite, but to material interaction, in order to become educated toward such a shift. Such a shift will always work against the agenda of accumulation and will therefore be made at an expense to bourgeois status. Within the ever segregating and parallel universes of the Junction there is small opportunity or will for such interaction.
Gentrification
It is a trend in the Junction that low income families are being displaced from the neighborhood, while families with incomes of $100,000 or more are the fastest growing
54 population overall (Page 1 of 2 Social Profile #4 - Neighbourhoods Income & Poverty
Junction Area (90)). While it is well documented in Junction history that this has been an area affordable to low-income people, this economic state is considered one of
"depression" and "abandonment," oddly echoing the colonial imaginary of discovery of a wild and empty land ripe for the taking (Junction Residents Association website-history,
2010). Gentrification works by a complex of mechanisms: erasure, displacement, ideological imposition and domination of public space. Erasure and distortion of history mean that what culture did exist during this period of "economic depression" is not included, or valued, and does not provide an ongoing social basis for the identity of the community (Lawrence 2002, 24). Rather, the historic episodes briefly articulated above cement a gentrification dialectic as the core reproductive narrative of the Junction, rifting the community into myriad overlapping historic and economic borders.
Gentrification is a process of increasing market activity and culture in a neighborhood, and this occurs through two processes defined by Marx: primitive accumulation and reproduction. Marx (1976, 711) states that "whatever the social form of the production process, it has to be continuous, it must periodically repeat the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal, every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction." The point of reproduction is the "normalization" of constant accumulation (De Angelis 2004, 67, 82), providing for the acquisition of surplus value for re-investment in further and more diverse production,
55 as well as the siphoning off of some portion of that money for the capitalist's consumption. This occurs in the Junction primarily through land speculation and small business expansion.
De Angelis (2004) points out, that a continual processes of "primitive accumulation" occurs beyond the point of original violent expropriation, suggesting that forms of violence subtend ongoing capitalist relations: "If we conceive social contestation as a continuous element of capitalist relations of production, capital must continuously engage in strategies of primitive accumulation to recreate the 'basis' of accumulation itself' (69-
70). Primitive accumulation is a transformative moment or a conflicted border between capitalized space and relations and a "commons" or a movement of "counter-enclosures," a space and or set of relations where society is not subject to separation, where connectivity between labour, nature and the social can be achieved (De Angelis 2004,
61).
The force of this "primitive" accumulation is felt in the public face of the Junction, which is comprised of the neighborhood organizations, the businesses themselves and the online and print journals made by and for Junction residents, as well as much commentary by
Toronto media on the Junction:
"Thanks to a determined public relations campaign by an active local business association, and such well-attended creative shindigs as the annual Junction Arts Festival, the area's once-poor image is ebbing, giving way to an under-the-radar type of cool. Thanks to its cheaper rents and slightly cheaper—although rapidly
56 rising—real estate values, it's also the new home of burgeoning numbers of young families and transplanted downtowners who have been priced out of the core." (Toronto Life website, real estate, 2008)
The language of gentrification is unbearably repetitive throughout the discourse, even at times verging on hysterical: "the reinvention of the Junction continues, and for the community, it can't happen fast enough" (Geneau, 2009). Or, as a local business owner comments in the online journal Dead Sexy Magazine (2010), "At a certain point in time, people thought The Junction was too shitty to even wreck; it wasn't even worth demolishing." This particular article goes on to ask people what's "sexy about the
Junction," to which the obvious response is this or that new business is what's "sexy in the Junction," a ridiculous and incredibly bland form of neighborhood fetishism.
New developments such as the Options for Homes, a 643-suite condominium tower north of Dundas West brings hope to the "bourgeois" class that the neighborhood will
"improve" and a new base of consumers will increase accumulation.
"Some see The Junction as the next big "hip place to live." The area previously housed the Ontario Stockyards (meat-packing plants). The site is now the location of a large block of warehouse-style retail outlets, including Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Future Shop and Rona, along with several smaller stores, and the name "Stockyards" has evolved to describe this new shopping area. Immediately surrounding the retail core, new residential developments, primarily mid- to upscale- townhouses, are helping to revitalize this neighborhood."7
7 http://www.mvhood.ca/section/view/?fnode=l 14
57 The two main Junction blogs represent business owners and predominantly concern themselves with development focusing on family, health and business.
Gentrification is a process of capital accumulation: capital must grow, property prices must increase, trade must increase, more shops must open, more buildings must be built, more transactions must occur as reproduction spirals outward (Marx 1967, 727). As mentioned, gentrification with its increase in merchant activity is connected to the larger scale industrial and corporate capital, and in many important ways it reproduces capitalist relations on the level of community. Small business activity replicates the capitalist-wage labourer dynamic and intensifies marginality: small businesses seek capitalist profits under the huge pressure of corporate competition, succumbing to the pressures of the universalization of labour by paying minimum wage to their employees, often with no benefits, little possibility of advancement and no union, with fewer employees making organizing impossible. From my personal experience, I can say that employee abuse is common in small business. Gentrification is a movement of the "bourgeois" class whose primary interest is protecting their own entitlement to a share in surplus value. As another
Junction business owner comments: "My wife J. R. and I no longer wanted to work for
"the man," we wanted to be "the man"" (Dead Sexy Magazine, 2010)
This growing force automatically affects people who are not considered part of a growth process, i.e., cannot effectively participate in this particular consumer dynamic implying a transposition from a division of labour to a division in consumption. Socialization,
58 which is vital to individual and community health, is increasingly promoted as consumerism, making it more difficult for those without extra money. What goes undeveloped are opportunities for socialization based on material exchange outside of the
business ethic that dominates the landscape.
Ideology/Performance Theory
Bourgeois values and gentrification are executed through ideological mechanisms.
Eagleton (in Zizek 1994,219) comments that "ideology is not primarily a matter of
'ideas' it is a structure that imposes itself upon us without necessarily having to pass
through consciousness at all. Viewed psychologically, it is less a system of articulated doctrines than a set of images, symbols and occasionally concepts which we 'live' at an unconscious level." Questions abound as to how to understand "agency" within the web of ideology; to what extent are we conditioned and made passive through ideology? Is ideology primarily a function of the domination of one class over another? The interplay between subjectivity and hegemonic culture (or by competing ideologic formations in the individual) is considered a site of conflict negotiated by the individual.
Ideology is meant, not as an over-determining structure, but as a dynamic in which it is often the case that people(s) act in a manner which is not consistent with his/her beliefs, but is either according to a set of possibilities or as a "result of the coercive quality of everyday life and of the routines that sustain it" (Zizek 1994,175). It is in fact this point of schism between belief and action that I see as one of the major characteristics of the
59 relationship of individuals to the capitalist structure. A disconnect or deception which is endemic to the reproduction of capitalist relations, from individual to corporate and governmental. It could be defined as "corruption" (Negri and Hart 2000, 389) or "not quite lying" (Gray 2007, 104-5) or "we know, but we don't know" (Zizek 1989, 2-30).
This disconnect can happen when we are being convinced to extend the war in
Afghanistan, when we justify taking a fourth luxury flight this year, when we work at the
Tar Sands thereby participating in environmental catastrophe or when we shop at the
GAP. In fact the normative versions of our lives under capitalism are so rife with ethical problems that if we were to take them into full account we would most likely be immobilized on every level of existence.
Current performance theory can be worked in concert with the above understanding of ideology, dovetailing as well with Marx's idea of reproduction. While we normally understand 'performance' to be an exceptional and spectacular space of the arts (or business, or sports), Jon McKenzie (2001, 160) in Perform or Else, posits it as the modern condition where "individuals work and live only to enact performances dictated by others, performances normalized according to the dictates of expediency and efficiency." This pressure to perform, what McKenzie (2001,157) refers to (via
Heidegger) as an inauthentic "challenging forth," where humans present themselves with a task (to perform) so overwhelming that they risk missing "the authentic call, the call of truth as poesies, "the call to a more primal truth." This understanding of performance is very much linked by McKenzie to the culture of technology and its prioritizing of
60 efficiency, cost effectiveness, expedience. I further connect these priorities to bourgeois values and gentrification, which are anchored in the industrial revolution and the alienation of labour through primitive accumulation. This "challenging forth" to perform fuels the reproduction of capitalist relations as a hegemonic form of bourgeois values.
Diane Taylor (2003, 2-3) makes a crucial point by linking performance with knowledge:
"Performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated, or... twice-behaved behavior...Civic obedience, resistance, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity, for example, are rehearsed and performed daily in the public sphere. To understand these as performance suggests that performance also functions as an epistemology. Embodied practices, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing."
Performance theory claims the possibility of transgressive performance: the liminal space of the present where multiple forces (subjective, ideological, creative, contingent) provide an opportunity to interrupt reproduction, reiteration and the "challenging forth" to perform, with a fresh/transformative performance that destabilizes "those very significations through exorbitant hyperbolic repetitions that give rise to political resignifications" (McKenzie 2001,168). We are perceived as having a "choice" to not participate or to contest in big or small ways. The question becomes how to understand agency against the coercive conditions of daily life. When thinking about performance theory, we need remember that not conforming for many comes at great cost; so bound up is our daily lives in capitalist relations that infringing on these in any significant way can result in life-threatening forms of socio/economic excommunication.
61 Border Gnoseology
I would like to conclude this chapter by drawing into a single epistemological frame all of the themes discussed here, from the broad view of history, through ideologic constructions of the neighborhood, the analysis of Canadian capitalism to ideology and performance theory. How knowledge about capitalism is generated, what forms and formulations it takes, and how it is shared are key problems that I am addressing in the arts-based research practice that I will discuss in the following chapters.
Hegel's understanding of consciousness as always "partial" creates the conditions for dialectical relations between diverse systems of partial knowledge. Rather than falling into a hopeless relativism, we see that it is the conflict between these systems that unleashes an agonistic creative potential and provides for mutual challenging of knowledge forms as a part of everyday life (Zizek 1994, 184).
Dialectics does not necessarily result in expanded or unified knowledge processes, however, as more often than not strategies of knowledge repression operating through power structures such as colonization, racism, classism and so on are deployed by an elite class in order to maintain dominance or "hegemony" (Gramsci 1971,12-13). The partial knowledge of the elite is universalized, while knowledge generated from sites outside the elite class is not validated. The "othered" body is "subalternized" by white/bourgeois
62 European capitalism (Mignolo 2000,4). One of the most powerful othering mechanisms we witness severs the terrain of the university/academia from the terrain of the street
(Mignolo 2000,19).
For example, First Nations knowledge has been under attack in Canada, and remains a
"marginal," "alternative" or "subaltern" form. This relates both to Aboriginal accounts of colonial history, much more violent and immoral than what Canadian history would tell, and their own pre-contact histories and knowledge forms. Mignolo (2000,226) states that
. .moving away from the idea that language is a fact (i.e., a system of syntactic, semantic, and phonetic rules), and moving toward the idea that speech and writing are strategies for orienting and manipulating social domains of interaction." Attacks on knowledge are backed up by material attacks on Aboriginal livelihoods.
Communities that experience repression have a greater will to develop broader forms of knowledge than those who do the repressing:
"the situation of oppressed groups and classes, who need to get some view of the social system as a whole, and of their own place within it, simply to be able to realize their own partial, particular interests., .certain groups and classes need to inscribe their own condition within a wider context if they are to change that condition; and in doing so the will find themselves challenging the consciousness of those who have an interest in blocking this emancipatory knowledge" (Zizek 1989, 182).
63 At the other end, those who seek dominance are dependent on ignorance as a means to enforce their control. The form of knowing about the people you repress and the system of repression in which you participate must remain distanced and abstracted. Moreton and Robinson (2008, 85) contend that "repression operates as a defense mechanism to protect one's perception of self and reality from an overwhelming trauma that may threaten in order to maintain one's self image. Repressing the history of Native American dispossession works to protect the possessive white self from ontological disturbance."
According to Michael Taussig (1999, 7) "at the core of power is public secrecy."
However, this secret is not really an unknown: "knowing what not to know lies at the heart of a vast range of social powers and knowledge's intertwined with those powers, such that the clumsy hybrid of power/knowledge comes at last into meaningful focus, it being not that knowledge is power but rather that active not-knowing makes it so"
(Taussig 1999, 6-7). In response, Taussig (1999, 52) proposes that an act of "defacement" can puncture this purposeful denial of power with an act of representation that makes the pacificity of the "unknown" shudder with an "excess of visibility."
Walter D. Mignolo's (2000) theory of "border gnoseolgy" specifically addresses the relationship between "subalternized" and "official" knowledge forms. Mignolo looks at knowledge through the lens of "coloniality" which replaces "modernity" as an historical descriptive that includes loci outside of Europe. "Subaltern" knowledge forms are important as a force that complicates epistemology by contesting and "infecting" the power structure that the Eurocentric (and I would say bourgeois) knowledge form
64 struggles to maintain: "...by looking at the emergence of new loci of enunciation, by describing them as "border gnosis" and by arguing that "border gnosis" is the subaltern reason striving to bring to the foreground the force and creativity of knowledges subalternized during a long process of colonization of the planet, which was at the same time the process in which modernity and the modern Reason were constructed" (2000,
13).
Mignolo's (2000) theory works on a post-colonial problem that exists between dominant and dominated nations, as well as dominated nations within nation states. In a Canadian context, his theories can be applied directly to First Nations experience, as well as to the experience of non-imperial immigrant communities as they relate to persistent knowledge structures from the British and French colonial establishment.
Mignolo (2000, 82) refers to the contemporary power structure of knowledge systems around the world as the "dominant world system," whereby the US and Europe form the center of knowledge which being delinked "from the place of origin and their expansion to become a global patrimony" refutes the universality of knowledge, connecting knowledge forms to local space, language and history. The divide between the universality of Western knowledge systems and "local histories" is called the "colonial difference." These two forms of knowledge/power come into conflict and are negotiated in the local site. This means that in the Junction, as a location of colonial, immigrant and
65 class history, we have many "borders" bisecting the land and the social body across which border knowledge is generated between the universalized and the local.
Mignolo (2000, 21,176) considers racial domination to be a more fundamental oppression than class: "nobody is cast out because he or she is poor. He or she becomes poor because he or she has been cast out." This understanding doesn't include the generational and traditional European working class and poor who are cast out because of their poverty and "low class" which originates often in pre-modera class structures, structures that prevent access to aristocratic cultural connections and manners. Anne
McClintock (1995) has adequately described the racialization of the poor in the Imperial context, and I feel that much of Mignolo's theory can be extended beyond its post- colonial reference to include class in relation to the hegemonic bourgeois cultural forces.
The workings of class, race, colonialism and capitalism are intertwined: without implying a uniformity of experience, we can acknowledge the creation of a complex intersection of experiences on the individual and social body.
Mignolo (2000) closely connects forms of knowledge with the embodied languages by which they are carried and expressed. "Languaging" is the term Mignolo (2000, 253-4) proposes for the dynamic process of communication that happens before and beyond official forms of speech, language and ideation:
".. .language is not an object, something that human beings have, but an ongoing process that only exists in languaging ... Languaging, however, locates interaction among individuals, among human beings instead of in preexisting
66 ideas. It is precisely at the intersection between person, self, humans, living organisms -or what have you—where languaging is located as the condition of the possibility of language."
The process of languaging works against the universality of official knowledge forms, however, this does not mean that they are absolutely opposed. Rather languaging and official language are involved in a fraught integration where they "infect" each other.
Border thinking both orients itself towards critique of modernity from "the perspective of modernity itself," while at the same time "it marks the irreducible difference of border thinking as a critique from the colonial difference" (Mignolo 2000, 87). It is important to remember that: "Alternatives to modern epistemology can hardly come only from modern
(Western) epistemology itself." (Mignolo 2000,9). Rather, it is at this "conflictive intersection" of history, life, language and knowledge that new knowledge is generated; knowledge that challenges the universality and dominance of Western bourgeois knowledge/language forms.
That many of us speak from a border location, a site of subjection to the universalization of bourgeois capitalist ideology, within which we must also survive, the hegemonic language is forced up on us. But at the same time, we carry with us knowledge/language from other positions outside of the colonial/capitalism nexus, which complicates our enactment of capitalism, or infects it with other forms of social knowledge. In as much as bourgeois colonial capitalism in its neo-liberal form is the ideological language of
67 •
Canada, it is just that, an abstract imposition with which we struggle as individuals and
communities as we engage in processes of languaging and subjectivization.
I consider the Junction such a site and have often commented that people seem to live in
parallel realities, where the marginalized parts of the community practice one form of
community very disconnected from the rhetoric of middle-class inhabitants. First Nations
people are visibly present but structurally invisible in the neighborhood in terms of their
specific historic relation to the land and settler society, whose entitlement dominates the
social understanding. But parallel realities do not indicate the lack of a relation; they are
the mark of a very specific relationship to power. For me, these parallel realities occur
within the historical borders of capitalism and colonialism: "...one should expect that
new forms of rationality, emerging from subaltern experiences, will not only have an
impact in philosophy and social thought but in the reorganization of society. Thinking
from subaltern experiences should contribute to both self-understanding and public
policy, creating the condition for precluding subalternity" (Mignolo 2000, 111). Taking
the Junction as a specific loci of enunciation, I move forward with the project of
deciphering capitalism through our daily experience of living it in geographic proximity
to each other, and by using an arts-based methodology to explore language and public
space.
68 Chapter 2: Methodology in Action: Hybrid Approaches and Challenging Boundaries
Method as a Critical Space
"The "truths " are, of course, subjective and shifting, and there are no assurances
that our own telling is more accurate or truthful than another's telling, but to
engage in naming and telling (whether visually or verbally), and even in the
contradictions of that act, is in itself a process filled with pedagogical
potential ...Naming ourselves in the world involves a mapping, locating ourselves
in time and space, in a historical and cultural context, putting ourselves in a
bigger picture, seeing ourselves as part of a longer journey. Naming also invokes
telling: To name is not only to declare who we are but to make sense of our lives.
Telling our own stories affirms our power to write our own histories and our
participation in making our history" (Barndt 2001, 38).
"Method" refers to the means or set of practices deployed to achieve an end, which in an academic context is supposed to be a "truth," a provable and repeatable outcome. In this sense, "method" belongs to Euro-centric forms of knowledge production (Denzin and
Lincoln 2005,2) epitomized by the sciences and the "bourgeois" white males that have historically dominated academic discipline. This ideal of method can also be understood as a "performance paradigm," as discussed by Jon McKenzie(2001, 55-62): the pressure to achieve a measurable outcome, to create a marketable nugget of knowledge and to aspire to efficiency towards the achievement of a stated goal or outcome. Method, as
69 understood within Euro-centric academia, justifies hierarchical modes of classifying knowledge according to the demands of capitalism and coloniality. The demographics of academia have shifted significantly and contestational voices are more frequent, yet the classist basis of academia and its reproduction as a capitalist institution persists, with even greater pressures to perform within a neo-liberal economic environment. The contradictory forces of the deconstruction of power/knowledge and neo-liberal economic pressure create a particularly tense research environment.
While Marx attempted to put forward his methodology and theoretical understanding of capitalism as the "science" of "historical materialism," this position has been roundly criticized as having led to false understandings of history and social movements in its narrow focus on labor as a revolutionary class and its uptake of Enlightenment ideals of social progress. In many places Marx's ideas are said to be the source of an oppressive current in the historical realization of socialist ideas, such as in the former Soviet Union.1
With their narrow scope of practice, I don't believe that methodologies based on scientific inquiry and formulations, socialist or otherwise, operating as performance paradigms can solve social problems of inequality, simply because these practices are among the major forms of the reproduction of social domination (alongside legal systems and organized
1 In his book Black Mass John Gray (2007) characterizes Marxism as thinly disguised millenarianism. British critique George Monbiot also critiques Marx in his Manifesto for a New World Order.
70 religion) (Battiste and Youngblood 2000,23; Todd 1992, 77). Power asymmetries involve both overt and subtle, widespread, social, psychological, political and economic strategies that are irrational and violent at root. Sherene Razack (2002, 7) states that racist structures
"come into being and are sustained through a wide number of practices, both material and symbolic." Addressing the study of racial hierarchies, Razack (2002) suggests that
"nothing less than the tools of history, sociology, geography, education, and law, among other domains of knowledge" is demanded. Shifting emphasis to the economic hierarchies with which racial hierarchies are intertwined, I would add to the academic artillery proposed by Razack, that we also need to extend beyond academically sanctioned forms of knowledge to change the relations by which knowledge is generated and valorized, as a means to transforming hierarchies.
Academic forms of knowledge and the structure they are produced from, and thereby reproduce, exist in a complex and fraught relationship to street knowledge. In the course of doing this work, I have felt a conflict between myself as an academic researcher and the participants. As endemic to the social structure, this dynamic is at play at the outset regardless of the researcher's perspective and intention, and therefore, its negative impacts have to be continually acknowledged and worked through. Typically the researcher comes out of their work with "material" which they then use to advance their careers, upholding relations of colonial and economic dominance, while the research
"participants" remain in the same socio/economic position (Tuhiwai Smith 1999; Mies
1983; Savage 2003,). In several areas of my work, I am engaged with people who
71 experience extreme exploitation and neglect because of their disenfranchised position, people who are well aware that they are fodder for the careers of others: Lynda
Solowynsky (2010) titled our collaborative audio/video work I am the foundation of corporate capitalism, I fell between the cracks and now exist there (2010) (screened at
Capitalism and Culture in the Junction). Lynda's title is a pointed critique on the relationship between academics and social work professionals and the "people" who are objects of study or "programs." In the piece Lynda says: "Another study? Fuck off!", a blunt comment on the money that is thrown at academics, when it could be redistributed to the communities they study. Resisting the reproduction of the academic/public relationship becomes essential to disrupting performance/reproduction of capitalist relations.
I am proposing that the integration of the theoretical and historical material presented in
Chapter 1, with an understanding of border gnoseology as arising out of located bodily experience, can form the basis of a critical intervention that can be extended into the public sphere in the Junction through a "social arts" practice. The objective of this methodological starting point is the generation of a shared consciousness which speaks about and is contestational to capitalism: 1) As capitalism is reproduced through our inter-relations, this project focuses on those relationships, rooted in a geographic space and developed through the work, as the creative material; 2) This project looks for lived experience and expressions of ground level knowledge on capitalism to find an accessible way of contesting it within the broad scope of the "community" as understood
72 geographically; 3) This project works towards dialogic, dialectic and agonistic basis
within the "community" based on communication across the complex web of "borders" that fracture social and physical space, thereby complicating a social understanding of that space.
The various creative forms through which the project is expressed all lead to opportunities for knowledge production, valorization and exchange. I am the foundation of corporate capitalism...(2010) brings Lynda's voice out of her subjective experience and into our relationship, and from the space we share it travels into public space through our mutual understanding of the necessity of her story. Her narrative is about discrimination on the basis of bodily experience, mental health, and poverty - of the tyranny of language and institutional abuse, of corruption, and the impact of all this
"lived experience" on her body and soul. This work has entered both academic and community spaces: Capitalism and Culture in the Junction, York University and twice at
McMaster. Lynda has also screened it for a "lived experience" caucus she is on for a federal research study on mental health and homelessness.
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10. Video stills: I am the foundation of corporate capitalism... (2010) Lynda Solowynsky and Kim Jackson
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11. Video stills: I am the foundation of corporate capitalism...(2011) Lynda Solowynsky and Kim Jackson
In accord with Mignolo (2000), I am treating knowledge as a process, not as discrete facts or analysis that can be judged true or false. Knowledge is considered open ended and full of questions and contradictions in the moments that make up day-to-day relations across space. The objective is to reflect the research participant "not something static and homogenous but an historical, dynamic and contradictory entity" (Mies 1983, 125). The focus of the thesis project, therefore, is not on what knowledge is created, but what knowledge is practiced and how. This opens up the epistemological process as to what forms are valued as knowledge, and who benefits from the research? (Tuhiwai Smith
1999, 173; Mies 1983, 118). As a result of this thinking, I have approached the research with an open and hybridized methodology, which is as much of a response to the demands of those participating, as it is based on texts that have guided this work. The primary methodologies from academic sources which I bring to the work are those that openly engage the critiques that originate in the communities that are typically subjected to academic research: I work with an embedded social participatory model, employing dialogic performance/art-based research that includes decolonizing, feminist activist, and
74 anti-poverty perspectives. The histories of each of these methodologies have directly addressed problems of the power imbalance involved in research, and make an effort to redress these issues in practice.
Methodology: Formal Practices
Feminist Methodology
Engaging the research participants as owners of their own knowledge, which is valued in the context of the project, is the basis of dialogic interactions which are transformative for all involved. For feminist scholar, Maria Mies (1983), a recognition of inter- subjectivity is key for the researcher to overcome the power imbalance with participants.
Based on her own experience as a woman, the feminist researcher should identify with oppression under patriarchy, while at the same time recognizing her privilege as an academic. I likewise identify with the project participants through my own experiences as a woman, as well as my experience with poverty and the close connections I have to a community of working-class friends who supported and schooled me in life as a young adult. Simultaneously I negotiate social and intimate tensions around my privilege as an academic with people who don't see my participation in academia as particularly useful to them, but only as situating me in a realm beyond their access and certainly with limited time for hanging out.
75 Maria Mies (1983, 123) characterizes inter-subjectivity as "conscious partiality," which is
"different from mere subjectivism or simple empathy. On the basis of a limited identification it creates a critical and dialectical distance between the researcher and their
'objects'. It enables the correction of distortions of perception on both sides and widens the consciousness of both, the researcher and the 'researched.'" One of the ways Mies
(1983, 121). discusses achieving conscious partiality is for the researcher to "deliberately and courageously integrate their repressed, unconscious female subjectivity, i.e., their own experience of oppression and discrimination into the research process." Breaking down the barriers between researcher and subject, academic life and street life, objective and subjective spaces, is extremely important to challenging the abusive impact of academic power in the research field, however, the structures that support exploitation and abuse across class, race and historical lines is always the context we operate within. It is, therefore, always a choice for some to "identify" through their own experience with forms of marginalization, while for others it is a permanent condition. Likewise, those with privilege can choose to exit sites of oppression when they've had enough. This, also, will be an ever-present tension in the work.
For example in my collaboration with Lynda Solowynsky I have been able to develop an
understanding of my own family history of mental health trauma. Members of my family
have been situated and identify as beyond the diagnoses of "depression," "alcoholism,"
"mood disorder" and "sociopathology" because of their bourgeois frame. When Lynda comments in the audio piece, I am the foundation... (2010), that some of us are
76 stigmatized by mental health labels while others in the same condition are viewed as
"normal," this connects directly with my own experience, and thereby brings us into
relation across a paradigm of difference in our experience of mental health regimes.
The conversations we have about our experiences with mental health reinforces and
expands our understanding of the complex of privilege and of how mental health stigma
is used against the disenfranchised and forms the basis for perceiving the necessity for
action. The mutual knowledge created in the course of our conversation creates the
imperative to 'witness' and to become an ally in the face of the stigmatization that she
endures in contrast to the repression of mental trouble in my own family. Once the
knowledge has been shared and valorized, what can be said to be real is changed, our relationship is changed, what is seen as necessary action is clarified and new problems have come to light. Mies (1983,125) states that "If we apply this principle to the study of
women, it means that we have to start fighting against women's exploitation and
oppression in order to be able to understand the extent, the dimensions, the forms and causes of this patriarchal system." Mies (1983,125) goes on to state that research should be transformative: "Participation in social actions and struggles, and the integration of research into these processes, further implies that the change of the status quo becomes the starting point for a scientific quest. The motto for this approach could be: 'If you want to know a thing, you must change it.'" Repressed knowledge is released in the course of
fighting oppression revealing the very existence of structural power asymmetries in their various characteristics as they manifest in our daily lives and interactions.
77 Dialogic Performance
Given that I am seeking to research and engage across issues of identity and difference,
Dwight Conquergood's (2003,407) proposal of "dialogic performance" offers a methodology that can challenge colonial and class dynamics: "This performative stance struggles to bring together different voices, world views, value systems, and beliefs so that they can have a conversation with one another. The aim of dialogical performance is to bring self and others together so that they can question, debate, and challenge one another." All of the participants have different perspectives on a common theme: capitalism. In dialogue, we can complicate our own understandings and experiences either by reinforcing each other, or through an experience of alterity. The essential gesture of dialogue is a willingness both to listen and speak; acceptance of knowledge sharing is a tacit agreement. That we speak from a variety of experiences, from the personal to the analytical, allows us to make connections within our own contexts, as well as with those with whom we dialogue, inviting inter-subjective relationality. As Conquergood (2003,
408) suggests: "It is a kind of performance that resists conclusions, it is intensely committed to keeping the dialogue between performer and text open and ongoing." This idea of on-goingness requires a commitment to creating a space within the neighbourhood for such dialogues to continue to unfold and to intersect with other sites of discourse and dialogue, thereby projecting knowledge sharing onto the level of an hegemonic contestation within an ever-widening social sphere.
78 The interactive audio performance work Speak Your Piece serves as a somewhat literal formal example of dialogic methodology. This work stems from my own frustration at living day to day with no recognition in the social interactions that I have in the Junction that Canada is at war in Afghanistan (and now Libya). I decided to do a performance piece in which I sat in two coffee shops over a four-day period, with posters I had made that posed questions about the war and a microphone and recorder that allowed people to engage in a recorded conversation with me about the war. About fifteen people representing different gender, race, age, class and experiential demographics participated.
I took all of the audio files and edited them together into a conversation, and then played it outdoors on Dundas West over a two-day period. During the performance, I again had a live mic where people who were passing by could again contribute to the conversation.
12. Speak Your Piece, installation at Coffeetime 13. Speak Your Piece, public performance on Dundas W.
"My son was born in August 30, 2001. My parents were visiting us in our one-
bedroom apartment and, uh, I got up, I guess it was 12 days after my son was born,
and my father said, oh, we 're at war, and Ijust remember feeling really, Ifelt bad that
79 while he was being born, this is what was happening the minute that he came into life
and that I could do nothing about it...how they work and how they think, how they
work and how they think.... why they are there?...But you know what? Ideology
trumps reality every time... how they work and how they think.... ideology trumps
reality ...why they are there?...I think over the last few years, watching the news and
seeing Canadian, uh, soldiers coming home in coffins, I've been pretty upset by that
and questioning why our government has sent our young men and women over there,
and what we are actually doing? I mean we keep hearing stories on the war on
terrorism, um, I lived in the Middle East, as I told you before, I lived in Israel for a
few years and I've seen bombed out buses, you know, and I was in a military unit
where we had to respond to terrorist attacks, terrorism is when a bus comes along
Dundas Street and blows up with 50 people on it, that's terrorism, and we don 7 have
that here, thank god, we don't have that... "(excerpt from Speak Your Piece, 2010)
Speak Your Piece documents a discourse that took place, as well as proposing a model for a dialogic public sphere which does not seek to promote one message or ideology, but taps into the visceral and knowledgeable responses to the fact of being at war by people who share space in the Junction. Speak Your Piece also addresses our material connection to Afghan people in the form of the war by offering the possibility of establishing a peaceful connection to Afghan people through the Revolutionary Association of the
Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). Project participant Michael Ricks designed a postcard that accompanies the installation with information about RAWA and how to support
80 them. RAWA is a grassroots organization that operates underground schools and does work in refugee camps. They are a powerful voice both against the occupation and against the Karzai government, Taliban, warlords and A1 Qaeda. Connecting our voices and knowledge to the women of Afghanistan is the minutest gesture towards sidestepping the
Canadian government's investment in war, as well as modeling an alternative approach based on connecting materially to grassroots groups that have been doing progressive work on the ground for decades.
SUPPORT A REVOLUTION IN LEARNING
14-15. RAWA card that accompanies Speak Your Piece (2010), designed by Michael Ricks.
While Conquergood (2003,409) imagines the dialogic process as taking place in a rather intimate psychic space, as "finding a moral center," and consisting of a "co-operative
81 enterprise between two voices.. .that can speak simultaneously and interactively," Akeel
Bilgrami (2002) and Chantal MoufFe (2002) consider broader political levels of dialogue.
Mouffe acknowledges "the role of power relations in society" focusing instead on the
"primary reality of strife in social life and the impossibility of finding rational, impartial solutions to political issues" as the ground for an unsolvable antagonism. MoufFe (2002,
90) goes on to discuss the fact that recognizing adversarial relationships is key to a healthy democracy where there is consensus on the principles of equality but debate as to how these are to be realized. "Agonism" is the term that Mouffe (2002) applies to such recognized adversarial relations. Bilgrami (2002,46,49) suggests that individuals within debates will experience both affirmation of their knowledge and thinking and "infirm desires" which are inner conflicts with one's own ideological position. These individual moments are dynamic and speak to the complex and shifting social positions that we inhabit as individuals and socialities, especially in urban settings made more complex by globalization. I think all of these thinkers' ideas relate very much to Mignolo's idea of border gnoseology and the "double thinking" that characterizes lived experience across social fissures. As post-modern subjects, many of us embody and inhabit multiple locations, and these can operate as dynamic internal tensions which can result in very challenging forms of knowledge production in the dialogical setting, both for the individual within contexts of relationality and on the level of hegemony.
82 Anti-colonial
I have already extensively discussed how colonialism and capitalism are intertwined
historical processes, and that it is essential to an understanding of our current relationality
that we delve into the nature of the relationships constructed during that period of
Canadian history. Exploring border gnoseology means that "our goals are not salvation
but decolonization, and transformations of the rigidity of epistemic and territorial
frontiers established and controlled by the coloniality of power in the process of building
the modern/colonial world system"(Mignolo 2000, 12). In a neighbourhood where the
colonial history is made invisible, bringing Aboriginal historical discourse into the public
sphere on a consistent and active basis is a small step. This has been done through working with the Taiaiako'n Historical Preservation Society (THPS), where my role has been to inform Junction neighbourhood members of fact of an Aboriginal history in the
Junction and to introduce them to the work being done in High Park to protect the mounds. Through the integration of Junction neighbourhood members with Taiaiako'n
Historical Preservation Society members and supporters, knowledge is shared. Often we gather at Snake Mound, sitting in a circle that we created out of logs, which we now call
"the meeting place." Stories are shared and discussions take place with those who show up. Spirits are also felt and spoken to by those who have connections or sensitivities. This interactivity acts to reveal a border across which we strain to relate in the present. This border that cuts across the land and through our consciousness challenges our ability to speak to one another. Taking on the challenges of integrating Aboriginal histories into our broader understanding is not supported socially, but is a choice we make as individuals: dominant culture seeks to continue to repress this locus of knowledge in space and time. Drawing on repressed knowledge to speak is difficult. Confronted with the blank looks and silences of settlers and immigrants when they are first confronted with this knowledge causes a kind of dysphoria of belief, a palpable destabilization of the ground as it was understood till then. It is a sudden collision of parallel realities, behind which the force of a violently repressed history lies.
This knowledge process has been taken up by a group of people from the Junction who have formed the Friends of Snake Mound and have undertaken to work with the
Taiaiako'n Historic Preservation Society (THPS) for the protection of Snake Mound and other mounds in High Park. Through this work, the historical process will again spiral the present together with the past towards a future with more knowledge to draw from. As
Snake Mound is rehabilitated and the recent media frenzy about the Mounds dies down, history starts to take material and psychic shape before our very eyes.
Mignolo's proposes the term "coeval" by which he means that we need to observe the current asymmetries of knowledge in contrast to an equality that is actual. Rather than treating subaltern knowledge as an alternative to the Western Enlightenment knowledge tradition (or academic knowledge as superior to street or lived experience knowledge forms), it means recognizing that Western forms of knowledge are more power structures than they are knowledge forms unique to Western culture (Tuhiwai Smith 1999, 44;
Mignolo 2000, 8-9; Povinelli 2006,200-01). This critique of Western knowledge is well
84 developed in the anti-colonial research methodology developed by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
(1999). Smith (1999, 44, 14) concurs with Mignolo (2000) on the fluid and hybrid nature of knowledge across cultures, as well as concurring that what is known as "Western" knowledge is actually comprised of "multiple traditions of knowledge" which have been appropriated into a power structure of Western dominance: "I would argue the 'we', indigenous peoples, people 'of color', the Other, however we are named, have a presence in the Western imagination, in its fiber and texture, in its sense of itself, in its language, in its silences and shadows, its margins and intersection." As such, the broadest scope of knowledge is developed across society as a whole, and not by one sector about the other.
Again the Western ideologic exultation of the individual, in this case Western culture itself as the subject, denies the real interconnected nature of both knowledge and survival.
Smith (1999, 170-1) goes on to note that research based on the Western positivist position has "entrapped" the people it claims knowledge about, by framing "knowledge" generated by the Western academic tradition as absolute. Rather, she asserts that knowledge is not something that can be instilled from outside:
"I believe that our survival as peoples has come from our knowledge of our contexts, our environment, not from some active beneficence of our Earth Mother. We had to know to survive. We had to work out ways of knowing, we had to predict, to learn and reflect, we had to preserve and protect, we had to defend and attack, we had to be mobile, we had to have social systems which enabled us to do these things. We still have to do these things" (Smithl999, 12-13).
85 Reinvesting in historical processes by exploring social relationships across the colonial experience, and grounding this process in the land, is important in the attempt to relieve the ongoing brutal and genocidal forces of capitalism, and to undermine the integrity of hegemonic Canadian society and politics in its local effects through community institutions, attitudes, beliefs and practices. Kempf (2009,14) comments that "where anti- colonialism is a tool used to invoke resistance for the colonized, it is a tool used to invoke accountability for the colonizer. In both cases, it serves to reveal and challenge the assumptions, silences, and common sense of dominant relations." While historical processes have opened up in many areas of the culture, the historical practices of local communities in Toronto seem stuck in a rigidly colonial view. Wynn (1992, 212) states that "the challenge, for those who would make sense of places, is surely to confront their complexity in ways that can heighten understanding instead of simply adding to our store of factual knowledge" (Toronto is contested land, and this must be taken into account in generating historical processes that do not become simply ameliorative.
Dialogic Art
Knowledge is expressed through language or the process of "languaging" described by
Mignolo (2000,253-4) as: the moment before power/knowledge language structures such as grammar and official language rules are confronted, when knowledge is just "a possibility of language." According to Mignolo (2002), this is a particularly ripe and creative site, a site of emergence. Diverting away from official knowledge/language
86 forms into art language may preserve both the richness of this moment and the possibility of agonism. As capitalism has intervened in our social understandings and relationships to such a great extent, I feel that art should be naturally drawn to creating language forms that examine and intervene in the nature of this relationality. However, it is true that art language itself is commodified under capitalism. Kester (2004, 90) suggests that "an alternative approach would require us to locate the moment of indeterminateness, of open-ended and libratory possibility, not in the perpetually changing form of the artwork qua object, but in the very process of communication that the artwork catalyzes." Dialogic art shifts the emphasis from the object as the discrete bearer of meaning to the set of relations that subtend and support that artwork that creates the moment out of which meaning is generated.
The disconnected and violent nature of our relationships under capitalism would mean that this new dialogic art language needs to engage, not just with the "abject" image or object, but also with "abject" relations. Social confrontation and conflict are unavoidable in creating public space for working through the social, political and philosophic questions that face us, especially on the ethical front. Everything in capitalist society steers the individual away from staying present for difficult relationships, commodifying relationships as "contacts": the ability to work through relational conflict comes from a perceived responsibility to do so. If we fall back on the privileges of working from our bourgeois desire and universalized identity, there is no demand to stick with anything difficult, such as relationships affected by the trauma of oppression (Hingley 2000). For
87 me, the openness, free association and transgressive potential of art language is most suited to the task of a mounting a cultural challenge to capitalism that does not seek a seamless integration of diverse bodies and knowledges.
Grant Kester (2004), in his book Conversation Pieces, introduces the German art collective WochenKlauser, which in expanding art language to include social relations and their contexts follows a path forged in the Western art tradition by Joseph Beuys:
"Artists' competence in finding creative solutions, traditionally utilized in shaping materials, can just as well be applied in all areas of society: in ecology, education and city planning. There are problems everywhere that cannot be solved using conventional approaches and are thus suitable subjects for artistic projects. Theoretically, there is no difference between artists who do their best to paint pictures and those who do their best to solve social problems with clearly fixed boundaries." (WochenKlausur, 2010)
In 1994, WochenKlausur did a project called "Shelter For Drug-Addicted Women" which entailed the organization of a series of "boat colloquies" to allow health workers, politicians, journalists, sex workers and activists to dialogue. They spent days out on the lake discussing issues and came up with a proposed solution, the creation of a shelter for drug-addicted women. Pushing at the edges of what defines art in this way is a direct response to the limitations of capitalist knowledge structures and a very incisive comment on both art and society and the spaces it permits for people to co-create the world they inhabit (Kester 2004, 99-101). While contemporary Western art language has become increasingly elitist and self referential, WochenKlausur works to bring art language into
88 daily life: "Does the work of art leave us to wander, skeptical and disoriented, through the modern forest of signs, or can the assault on conventional knowledge catalyze new forms of understanding and agency?" (Kester 2004, 82). Considering the web of relations that we consciously engage in as a creative space introduces the ability to problematize society on a level we have access to as community members, and the creation of an experimental language with which to engage the issues we face.
Relationalitv/Positionalitv/Embedded Practices: Artists Are the Shock Troops of
Gentrification
Both my parents come from bourgeois backgrounds, but in the 60 's it wasn 't so uncool to be poor; actually it was uncool to be rich, and they both rejected their inherited status.
My father left soon after I was born to pursue drug experiences and personal freedoms.
We grew up with mom on welfare. Moving a lot meant we went to a different school every year: free school, no school, commune school... having abandoned their middle-class upbringing to become involved in the counter-culture in various of its forms of contestation to the post-war suburban ideal that was laid out for them, they both experienced downward mobility, and I, therefore, was brought up below the poverty line.
Trying to survive with scant resources and the persistent idealist influences of my upbringing led me to rely heavily on people I met along the way, with whom I formed social bonds and who taught me how to survive in a world where we did not easily find a
89 place. I have seen how experiential anguish transforms into a desire to bond that is knowledge generating. Survival is knowledge about how to face the material and psychic challenges that are given to us by capitalism as we live it in the historical period which is ours.
Embedded Positionality
Primarily, I work from an embedded, insider/outsider position in community. My introduction to the Junction was initially as an employee at the coffee shop that my sister opened in 2006; I moved here a year later. Much of my understanding of the neighbourhood has been informed in simple daily relationships and interactions with a cross section of the inhabitants from the more bourgeois-minded to the precariously housed women at Evangeline Women's Residence next door. While the conversations in which I participated remained ambient, many of the relationships became solidified through working together on neighbourhood projects, such as The Community Feast
Project} Through these projects, I have developed a loose network of solid connections with a diverse group in the Junction, which is ever-expanding as we each circulate and bring more people into relation, conversation and action.
2 A community-wide seasonal potluck, two of which took place at Cool Hand of a Girl: the first on the occasion of Christmas and the second for the closing of the Gathering Space community arts project that was happening there. The second two Feasts took place at Evangeline, providing an opportunity for the community to come and visit and share space and a meal with the women living there. All events were attended by a broad social cross section of neighborhood members.
90 I define my embedded position as based on a relationship of neighbourliness (Savage
2003, 342), not just in spirit but purely in the fact that we share bodily space, which indicates our mutual (or divergent) interest in the landscape and sociality of the
'community.' As stated, capitalism is based on inter-relationships: from those we consciously choose, to those that are a fact of our daily socialities, such as relations of class. As we reproduce capitalism in our daily relationalities, our bodily proximity does raise ethical questions about the nature of our mutual sustenance and caring (or lack thereof). Again, refusing to recognize interdependence beyond one's "habitus" is to deploy illusions of individualism that can only be justified based purely on bigoted ideologies that further extend to the denial of the globalized economic realities (that extend into the local) attached to our individual ability to survive.
Adopting a positionality of "neighbour" is both culturally retroactive and in opposition to current urban social trends:
. .the whole notion of the welfare state was that the "community," as represented by the state, was to take the place of local communities in caring for those who required health or social services. How, however, were members of a community as abstract as that of a nation, province, or large city to relate to a system of caring that most experienced only as taxpayers and consumers? When it came to issues such as housing and daycare, those who could afford to provide these services for themselves were often easily swayed by conservatives who argued that they should not have to pay for these services for others. Since "others" were no longer necessarily their neighbors (or perhaps they were the neighbors they didn't know in the new urban and suburban agglomerations), it was not always easy to identify with the recipients of social assistance" (Finkel 2006, 335).
91 This distancing is true for the bourgeois people I know in the community, but not so much among the people who experience economic disenfranchisement, who's sociality is much more a part of their ethics of survival and much less a leisure pastime. Sharing resources among the poor in the community is a hugely significant way of relating. This is exemplified by Misery, an elderly woman from Evangeline with whom I established a friendship. Misery had developed an extensive gifting economy, where she acted as the focal point in a network of people unknown to each other but participating in constant flow of consciously chosen, sometimes repaired, mailed or delivered items that she hoped would "help you on your way in life."
This gifting economy is different than the charity-minded way of giving characteristic of the bourgeois. It is based on an acknowledgement of mutual necessity, which is an accurate perception of sociality and supports the relationality of neighbour. In the bourgeois setting, acknowledging a "need" is actually taboo, operating as one of the secreting mechanisms of capitalism described in Marx's analysis of the "hidden abodes" of labour. Misery's ethics is a form of knowledge, of border gnoseolgy: living within capitalism and subject to its discipline without practicing it is a powerful border terrain where she is constantly negotiating non-capitalist relations with those who are, to a vastly larger degree, integrated within capitalism.
While everyone I work with knows about my thesis project, many do not contribute directly in the ways I have laid out. It is the case, however, that everyone contributes to
92 the knowledge process but often knowledge happens in ways that we collaborators do not always understand. Much of my time with people, particularly the women I know from the bi-weekly art group at Mainstay Housing (non-profit housing for "mental health consumer/survivors"), a la c.Art group, is spent one-on-one, talking, helping with computer tasks, cleaning when needed, organizing papers, listening, eating, laughing, doing laundry, hanging out, walking the dog, taking pictures, going down to Snake
Mound, going to demos, talking on the corner. As I have approached the relationships as coeval, I do not demand knowledge, but allow knowledge to flow and develop in whatever activities are mutually decided upon. I bring the possibility of making art into the relationship, and they bring the possibilities of the forms of sociality that are interesting and beneficial to them: what happens falls somewhere in between. There is also the powerful mutual benefit of sharing time in art group, where we get to explore our own creative expression, and laugh, drink tea and commune. In my own life of high- pressure academic challenges, I look forward to this time as deeply relaxing and socially therapeutic. Fundamentally, there is just a lot of love, appreciation and acceptance that grows in that space. We have been meeting for just over a year now, and the process continues to grow, as does our creative engagement. Where in the beginning few people made art, now every week we produce. We have visited the Art Gallery of Ontario together and have done presentations on different artists. Importantly, we are learning art language for ourselves, but this takes time. As Kester (2004, 173-4) contends
"of particular importance is the commitment...to sustained involvement over time with a specific community in order to deepen knowledge and build trust...The potential for abuse.. .is often lessened when artists have a deeper sense of
93 identification with a specific community or receive their primary validation from the community rather than the art world [or academia].. .The process of dialogical interaction.. .requires a reciprocal openness, a willingness to accept the transformative effects of difference, on the part of both the artist and his or her collaborators" (my emphasis).
The space we create is both nurturing and critical. While we may be laughing and joking a lot, we are also able to discuss issues and our lives in ways that are personally and politically affirming. This is a two-way exchange.
While organizing the final exhibit, I experienced a huge "challenge to perform," and in many ways this feeling took me away from vital aspects of the work I do weekly, specifically the socialities I have developed around the Monday Art Group and a la c.Art.
More specifically, it reduced all my relationships to what was demanded by the exhibit in that moment, and after the exhibit I was so exhausted that I had to retreat, a retreat that I struggled to maintain through the completion the written form of the project. The fieldwork does not end however. As a neighbour these are permanent relations I am now answerable to.
Those who helped me out also became wrapped up in the "challenge to perform" of the exhibit. In accord with McKenzie's (2001) understanding of the "power of performance," this operated in both socially production and unproductive ways. Social worker and photographer Ben Ng, commented that being involved in Speak Your Piece, THPS and
Capitalism and Culture in the Junction has reignited his activist intentionality and
94 supported his efforts to engage in confrontations in his own field of work that he felt were ethically and politically necessary (interview February, 2011). a la c.Art group member
Marlene, while commenting that I was "always busy," attended many of the events around the exhibit. For Marlene to enter the gallery space and join a circle of people discussing capitalism and art was unusual. During the exhibit she gifted me with a dream catcher assemblage she had worked on at art group, and to performance artist and project participant, I'm Sold she gave a poem, both of which were integrated into the exhibit.
Q.hU LAU M jrpflb UHW J FR-FI/O *-***• '
JA-
•f ' I
16. Marlene (Bluebird) Stickings, Dream Catcher 17. Poem (2010-11) (poem text page 104)
At the same time, she has commented that I am involved in "a lot of groups" and has asked when will I find the time to hang out, since I am so busy. We had been going for walks and doing photography, a practice that had been put on hold. Women that I work with from these two locations are on a different temporal plane as they are often on fixed income or unemployed for the moment. Marlene does not have a phone or internet, so our
95 relationship takes place in presence only: each time I see her, I need to say right then
when I will see her next. The rigor of the demands on my time and productivity as an academic causes a real tension with those whose time is structured differently. Capitalist conditioning and performance paradigm causes a division of our bodies in space and time and upsets potential for sociality.
In assessing the nature of my positionality one might easily classify me as somewhat akin to Gramsci's (1971) "organic intellectual." However, it is useful to consider his idea of how revolutionary knowledge is produced against Mignolo's (2000) schema of border gnoseology. Gramsci (1971, 324) considers "working to produce elites of intellectuals of a new type which arise directly out of the masses, but remain in contact with them to become, as it were the whalebone in the corset" as a necessity for a progressive mass movement. Gramsci (1971, 324) characterizes undeveloped knowledge or "common sense" thus:
"We are all conformists of some conformism or other, always man-in-the-mass or collective man... When one's conception of the world is not critical and coherent but disjointed and episodic, one belongs simultaneously to a multiplicity of mass human groups. The personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over."
Here Gramsci critiques what Walter D. Mignolo might consider a particularly ripe area for knowledge production; the clash of culture and time which creates the conditions for double thinking and border gnoseology. Lacking Mignolo's analysis of coloniality, which
96 situates knowledge production in space and time, Gramsci is prone to universalizing and de-historicizing the knowledge process, and is therefore able to condemn some knowledge as "stone-age" while valorizing others as "advanced science." Gramsci (1971,
324) goes on to characterize the intellectual as someone who can: "criticize one's own conception" and "therefore to make it a coherent unity and to raise it to the level reached by the most advanced thought in the world." Gramsci aims for a disciplinarian approach which exists outside the fragmented reality of peoples daily lives. In the course of the project however, there have been several instances where my being an "intellectual" has been critiqued, where people I work with refute the language of the intellectual and claim the right to their own expression. Marlene has commented that she understands the discussions about "capitalism" that have taken place, but she would never use "those words," as they do not come from inside her. In another instance, I was characterized as
"bougie" (bourgeois), which was defined for me as "showing off with your laptops and long word." My role here within the dialogical process is to engage this critique - it is an agonistic moment. Also, to understand that the women I work with do know who they are and understand the system they are directly subject to. Where Gramsci treats
"philosophy" as a pure pursuit, Mignolo treats it as a space of power: the critique and infecting of this space by multiple voices, and multiple tensions within single voices, is the messy process of knowledge production. At the same time, whenever I call or show up for art group, these same women are happy to see me and we hug. Likewise, when they show up to Capitalism and Culture in the Junction, I am thrilled to see them and we
97 hug. This neighbourly intimacy and friendship forms the basis that makes frank critique and conversation possible.
Who Are the Participants?
I have made reference along the way to how participants were brought into the project, and overall I would describe the process of inclusion as organic. As was mentioned, I got to know many people in the Junction when working at my sister's coffee shop. The location of the shop meant that our customers were from a mixture of class backgrounds.
Spatial divisions in the Junction play a role: if the shop had been located on the other side of Keele, it is quite likely I would not have met Misery, for instance. Within the flux of encounters with a diverse spectrum of people, I have prioritized building relationships with what I perceived as the most vulnerable section of that social spectrum: women who are economically marginalized. Those who are increasingly dominating the Junction have plenty of voice through online journals, neighbourhood organizations and sheer economic power.
The open-ended inclusivity and multi-faceted nature of the project makes quantifying the demographics difficult. And then there is the question of what characteristics we pick out as significant to observe, in terms of the danger of assuming the power to define and thereby re-inscribing power imbalances by naming. If our intention is to understand the range of experience represented by the project, this can only be done superficially using categories of gender, race, class and so on. At the same time we want to understand, in
98 line with the thesis of the project, what historical borders exist for those involved, and
history has to a certain extent problematized our identities according to these categories.
While many people were invited into the project, I have also taken the project into other social sites such as Snake Mound, which is an indigenous cultural site and therefore has a different demographic composition than other sites in the project. Evangeline and a la c.Art group are both sites of feminized poverty, and therefore consist of higher percentages of women of colour and Aboriginal women (in line with general poverty trends that affect women of colour disproportionately). These sites also have a high percentage of women living with disabilities, both visible physical and mental health issues. In all the projects sites, there is a high percentage of gay and lesbian participation, as well as parental participation, both single and coupled.
The Capitalism and Culture exhibition tried to bring aspects of all these sites of identification together, while it also represents the participation of a core group of
Junction residents.
In the broadest conception of the project, the oldest person participating would be in his
70's, and the youngest person in her 20's. More women than men participated, and while the majority of people were from a European immigrant heritage, there have been
Aboriginal people involved in all areas, as well as Black women both from Canada and born in the Caribbean or Africa, and several people of Asian and South East Asian
99 heritage, with a fewer number of people from Latin American origin. As much as one
quarter of the people involved are recent immigrants, the other five eighths born in
Canada or settler, and one eighth Aboriginal. As for economic positioning, more of the
people involved in the project are either on fixed income or working class, and those who do have bourgeois aspirations or backgrounds have experienced some traumatic disconnect from capitalism that brings them into the conversation more readily.
The Neighbourhood Profiles that are put together by the City of Toronto according to census statistics give a picture of the social trends in the Junction. According to the 2006 census, the Junction the populations of Aboriginal people and those who identify as a
"visible" minority is lower than the Toronto average. However, the percentage of the
population of "immigrants," and "recent immigrants" is comparable to the rest of the
Toronto (City of Toronto 2006, 1). According to the 2001 figures, the Aboriginal population in the Junction was higher than the Toronto average, while the various categories of immigrants were all lower. Within the Junction, visible minorities generally increased from 1996 to 2001 and are now on the decline overall. At the same time, households that earn over $100,000 are the fastest growing sector of the Junction, increasing from 15.6% to 22.1%, with all other categories of income either staying the same or dropping (City of Toronto, 2006). English as a dominant language also increased by 10% between 2001 and 2006, as the home language among those living in the Junction. These statistics are in accord with the general movement of gentrification in which rental rates increase, more homes are privately owned and the economically
100 disenfranchised, (Aboriginals, those on fixed or low income and visible minorities) are moved out. The statistics in regards to visible minorities vs. immigrant populations seem
to imply that European immigrants are economically more viable in a gentrifying environment that are immigrants of colour. English, of course, is not just an "official language" of Canada, but according to Mignolo (2000) is also the dominant language of
European knowledge paradigms. It is therefore a concern for me to exchange knowledge with these communities who are targets of gentrification to generate knowledge about capitalism.
Thick Presencing/Witnessing
In Evangeline Women's Residence, there is much that women cannot speak about because of the consequences and the generally inhibiting situation they are in at the shelter. Not only is it possible to get kicked out of the shelter, but you also have no privacy and do not know who can be trusted. At Mainstay (housing for mental health consumer/survivors), it is the same: if you cause problems with your neighbours, they can complain or rally other neighbours against you; the women live in constant tension around the pressures of surviving in poverty with no real support that confronts the structural nature of their oppression.3 As such, personal histories are not for everyone desirable subjects of conversation, because they can bring people down and put them in
While the location is unique it is really not different than any other social sites where people are trying to offset oppression. The intense pressures of surviving capitalism are always there, stifling direct communication and waiting to curtail and undo whatever liberated space we manage to create.
101 touch with depression and trauma ("I don't want to remember" Solowynsky 2010), especially when there is no concrete relief, when the dangers are always present, causing daily anxiety. Witnessing, on the other hand, is very powerful in these contexts; nodding,
hearing, understanding, and affirming experience and simply working towards building
as safe a space as possible.
During this research I have thought often of Maria Abramovic's (2010) piece "The Artist is Present," in which she sits in the gallery available for viewers to sit with her. She doesn't speak with those who sit with her, but she creates a space of availability and presence. In contrast to Abromivic's sitting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I am here in the Junction. In my own project, I have also tried to create a space of social availability to the streams of knowledge that are flowing all around us continuously. Not only do you become hyper-attuned and hyper-aware of social experience, but you also become a witness to the complex of social, political and economic violence that structures our sociality under Canadian capitalism.
I ran into R. in the line up at No Frills, a middle-aged white guy with a shaved head. I often see him lugging two-fours of Canadian from the liquor store on his bike. He didn't recognize me at first, but because he's often jovial and relating to those within his sphere, we started to chat. Then I reminded him we had met before outside the Church that is now a condo: he had shown me the pigeon skulls, which he said were the feast scraps from the
Peregrines that lived in the bell tower. "Oh yeah," he says, "They just removed the cross
102 from the front of the church, " he continues in a tone that reveals his disapproval. He's a
Protestant. He tells me he prefers the simple interior, and that religion is not about money and decoration. I ask him how he's doing, and right away he tells me he hates his job washing dishes at Wayne Gretsky's restaurant. He says the head chef yells at him all day,
"But what can you do? You have to pay the rent. " He tells me that he was laid off ten years ago and couldn 't find another job for a long time so he's got to keep the one he has.
I ask him what he was doing before, and he says he was a printer. I ask him if computerization of the print industry put him out of work, and he gets excited and says,
"Exactly right! The shop got closed down, and there was no other jobs in printing, but what are you going to do? You have to pay the rent."
In this brief encounter in a No Frills checkout line, R has brought into our social awareness the presence of the larger realities of an ecology in the neighbourhood, the risks of downward mobility due to job obsolescence, the shift from a spiritual priority in the neighbourhood to one of property development and gentrification, the coercion and abuse of labour...depression and powerlessness in capitalism. In this conversation, I connect with R's conflicted experiences within capitalism which, for me constitute knowledge about surviving within capitalism.
Instead of the ethnological term "thick description," collaborator and community artist
Nancy Halifax and I tossed around the phrase "thick presencing" as a way to describe a
103 multi-sensual and psychic registration by the body of interactive details in the moment: a kind of active or embodied witnessing.
Thick description places importance on journaling the ethnographic field experience in extreme detail as a disciplined way to avoid blanket, over-determined and overly subjective interpretations of behaviors by researchers faced with cultures that are complex and unknown. Thick description produces a more informational text that challenges interpretation as a process that can arrive at abstract theoretical understandings (Geertz
2003). Thick presencing, on the other hand, shifts the point of emphasis from the journaling and interpretive processes, from making the incoherent, coherent, and treating ethnographic experience as a "text" to the moment of being in the present with others without withdrawing into thinking what this means in an analytical context. It refers to the affective moment of shared space where there is very little distance but rather a collapsing of space between people, such that psychic and emotional currents flow. It refers to feeling the full weight of the inescapability of that moment. Sensing the overwhelming crush of life, the tensions of human presence in the confusing matrix of history, the tentativeness of communication, the desire for (or fear of) touch and the tearing of separation are all symptoms of being thickly present. Where witnessing implies a distanced view, thick presencing acknowledges the social attachments, which constitute our inter-relationality. Coining the term "thick presencing" is an attempt at recognizing the (loss of) self in direct relation in the moment; the inscription of knowledge on the body instead of the page.
104 The friendship I had developed with Misery, an elderly white woman who stayed at
Evangeline Residence periodically, "thick presencing" took on a traumatic intensity.
Misery died in March 2010 as a result of multiple levels of bodily disenfranchisement
(Povinelli's slow death). Being present with her while she suffered neglect caused by the institutions where she sought housing and health care was extremely sobering. I watched her life become unlivable, and I think I watched her give up trying, with the knowledge that it was no longer possible to continue on in the manner she had been existing.
Misery refused to be housed, and the older she got the more difficult this was for the shelter workers to manage. They wanted to house her permanently but that would require her to reveal her identity, which she refused to do. She rarely complained but would sometimes say to me, "You don't know how God has cursed me." One day when I was visiting her at Florence Booth, one of the workers chased after me when we were leaving to grab a coffee and asked me if I knew if Misery had family. Misery was very upset by this intrusion and insisted that the social worker should just do her job and not meddle in her business. Misery told me that she wouldn't be housed before she was ready.4
4 Project participant Ben Ng, who is a social worker working with homeless people, commented to me that he is not allowed to support the chosen lives of those living outside, but must work towards housing them.
105 Misery had become less mobile after her surgery, and the shelter workers were nervous about her using stairs. At certain times during the day everyone must leave the shelter. At other times women are not allowed in their rooms. After a series of falls these restrictions made her recuperation tough. She was also incontinent, and the leg brace she had to wear gave her sores and made it impossible for her to change her Depends. The shelter staff refused to help her, so more often than not she was unclean. This caused her great anguish. After a while, she told me that she didn't care anymore if she smelt like urine, it was their problem. She wore their lack of care on her body.
When I went to the emergency with her after one fall, the doctors gave her very cursory treatment. He told her she should get home care, so she leaned over to me and asked,
"Should I tell him." I said yes. So, she told the doctor she was in a shelter, and he just shrugged and left. Everyday Misery was phoning doctors to try to get a note so she could go to stay at the Sherbourne Health recuperation facility, but she just kept getting tangled in a web of bureaucracy, becoming more and more despondent.
Eventually, she fell again and ended up at Sunnybrook. My sister and I went to see her. At last she was resting in bed and clean for the first time in a while. I could see her let go: she could barely speak from exhaustion and she wasn't sleeping too well. It had become impossible for her to keep living.. .there was nothing for her ...
106 I was there when the hospital brushed her off without proper diagnosis and treatment for her fractured knee. I took her back to the shelter where she was also not tended to properly. I answered the phone when she called to tell me she had fallen again. I felt my own complicity with the social boundaries that prevented me from intervening in her situation to share resources that I have with her. I felt my own dubious powerlessness, especially when I was polite with doctors and shelter workers. This is atomization: the transference of ethics to the institution (what Povinelli (2006) calls the "minimum of care") and the disempowering of people in community to care for those around them. In
Misery's situation, those who work in shelters and hospitals can refuse to help her change her Depends and then accuse her of being a health risk, or send her out onto the street with a fractured knee, because there is no one to protest. Society itself has no (?) voice to say it should be different, because she is "homeless" it is permitted. Thick presencing is being in this hard place. Again, we are not talking about different choices that some of us can make about how we build "community" for ourselves, we are talking about "the uneven speed with which people die, and the distribution of violence attached to these deaths" (Povinelli 2006, 204).
Being thickly present in the ways that I have described is frustrated by the academic demands of executing a thesis project. Academia draws you deeper and deeper into its world of teaching, writing and conferencing. Being a "professional artist" who gets paid for her work in community creates a rift that is experienced and known, even when not overtly articulated. Razack (2002, 14) observes that: . .women of the First World can know themselves as autonomous, competent, and good through their interactions with Third World peoples and their efforts to "help" them. Their development activities fix the natives, confining them to their environment and mode of thought and making them available to be assisted into modernity... The identity-making processes at work in journeys from respectable to degenerate space are multiple and gendered. The processes described above do not show what the spaces might mean to the subordinate person in the encounter, for example."
This dynamic is reinforced by bourgeois-minded people in the neighbourhood who characterize me and the work I do as "generous." It seems to be inconceivable that I would have mutually interesting relationships with people across class lines, as relationships across class lines are not viable within capitalism. The suspicion of relationships across class lines makes the meaning of the work remote to those invested in social relationships that operate according to bourgeois necessities, as does any reference to my own insecure past. As someone whose experience and identity lies across the border between disenfranchised and bourgeois, I have a certain view into how the bourgeois-minded do and do not interact with those viewed as "marginalized." I see who is invited where, and who is not. Without speaking, there are tacit lines not to be crossed.
These lines are maintained through silence - this silence is the background roar heard when thickly present.
108 Chapter 3: Arts Practice as Public Sphere: How We Come Together
CAN you hear my desperate voice of woes? Can you see me below your up raised Nose? No way your hands are going to slap the table When my mind and soul in life Are quite able To breath in strength
Marlene (Bluebird) Stickings (a la c.Art group member)
Capitalism and Culture in the Junction: The Exhibit
The knowledge generated in our daily lives as individuals and in relation to each other, the land and other species must move out of the private sphere of dialogue and into a public realm, or civic space, in order to truly function as knowledge and bring forward productive social conflicts. While many forms of knowledge circulate within subcultures, such as forms of knowledge held by women who have experience with "homelessness," it is only in conversing in broader social forums that these forms of knowledge can be activated politically. In order for a discourse on the reproduction of capitalism in the
Junction to take place the language must take form and occupy space. Towards this end, a selection of the works produced over the course of the project were gathered together for
104 display under the title Capitalism and Culture in the Junction. The exhibit opened in the
Junction February 3, 2011.
This exhibit was the culmination of one-and-a-half years of creative and dialogical work in the Junction, during which I engaged in a diverse array of projects and socialities. The intention of the art exhibit was to manifest the conversations in a public space, so as to further engage the wider Junction neighbourhood in the discussion I have been having in the course of the research work, and to complicate the Junction's idea of itself in the face of the gentrification processes to which we are subject. The exhibit takes the form of a
"public sphere," emphasizing communication and dialogue outside of any particular neighbourhood interest group, and therefore attempts to create a space of "commons" where market forces are not intervening on our sociality. Shifting from notions of promoting autological art works or theses, to a shared space of free association, conversation and social bonding. While I advertized the exhibit Toronto-wide, it was directed to the local people in whose midst the work had been done. The established gallery circuit in Toronto (as in the West generally) is, for the most part, frequented by those who have facility with art language: the upper-middle and educated classes. It is hoped that placing the exhibit in the context from which the art arose will break through some of those patterns of art consumption, with the objective of having the audience demographic reflect the makers, their socialities and their geographical location.
105 The works in the exhibit addressed a range of issues: women and homelessness, the war in Afghanistan, alternate housing, the Ancient Iroquoian burial mounds in High Park, alternate emotional and material economies, the psychic angst of living in an unethical economic system, the G8/20 over-policing, notions of luck and extreme wealth, gentrification in the Junction, the complexity of identity within the community, difference and sameness, the commodification of our faces/identities, the relationship between greed and lack, the symbologies of capitalism, use value vs. exchange value, the synthetic nature of the image versus the ground of material existence, native plant and bird ecology, and writing and storytelling as resistance. Within each of these specific works a more nuanced and complex language/knowledge dialectic operates than is suggested by these characterizations. The form of works vary from R. Joos's accomplished watercolours of trees and birds to the ethnographic presentation of documentation of the events that have taken place at Snake Mound over the past year. I have also included pieces that I have done as an independent artist. Along with the installed art objects, there was a program of events: a video night, a workshop on the art of selling handmade crafts and art objects, storytelling, creative writing and Let's Face It, I'm Sold's interactive workshop on identity.
106 iSr rs
18. (top) Richard Joos, White 20. I'm Sold, Let's Face It 21. (top) Snake Mound (2011) Pine (ongoing) 22. Naomi Knaff and Raul C. 19. (below)Kim Jackson, Dirt Andres, It should be so simple, Standard (2009) video loop (20 sec)
Space
I paid market value for a bright storefront at 3109 Dundas St. West: $1500 for two weeks.
I had considered many different possibilities, including people's apartments, unfinished storefronts or hanging the work in several of the local businesses. Each site, however, would have changed the meaning of the work and the discursive operations of the public sphere. I chose a space with the resonance of a typical gallery space, a 'white cube' with finished walls and track lighting. I chose this space because I wanted to test the illusion that the white cube implies: that power dynamics can be suspended allowing the formal and philosophical mechanics of the art works to be revealed. I wanted works, such as the
Quilt or Misery, which come from the margins of expression in terms of form and
107 content, to be presented as precious, to be supported by what bourgeois artists and academics allow themselves; the blank slate on which to inscribe their revelations. To reframe those projects as inside the discourse of art and philosophy, not forever in marginal spaces and speaking only to those who know. Conversely, my intention was to contextualize those "finer" art pieces within the "social art" projects, to compromise their formal and modernist dominance of the space by putting them in dialogue with the "low," hopefully challenging what is expected in a formal art space.
Mounting the show in an empty storefront with the resonance of a vacated business would contribute a pertinent layer to the exhibit, but it would also situate the artworks within a social reality which some of the people I work with often feel they cannot escape: the constant threat of a downward slide. Re-inscribing forms of oppression is an ever-real danger when working in community; thus we face the challenge of how to reveal those contradictions. The asymmetry in the material level of our relations threatens our ability to create a public sphere and liberate our language.
The owner of 3109 Dundas St. West, Jake Koseleci, is a real estate agent and art collector.
Originally he had offered to barter art for rent, but because this was not an exhibit of art objects per se (even though some of the works were for sale through the artists), bartering on this level was not a possibility. While bartering may be perceived as an alternate form of exchange to capitalism, in this instance it reinforced the capitalist discipline and relationality of labouring to bring objects as the only carriers of value to market. In a
108 mirroring of the capitalist economy, those who do socially useful work, or work as/with marginalized people, experience multiple forms of economic jeopardy. We are taxed proportionally more and receive an ever-diminishing amount of economic distribution.
The work we do is not recognized as use value within the limited understanding of value that is derived solely through currency exchange. Within the capitalist context, this work becomes impossible, a privilege accorded to those who can afford extra time, resources and funds to mount an exhibit such as this, which can bring no economic gain.
Within the power dynamics of the white cube, having paid the commercial rate of rent, I was trying to create a "temporary liberated zone," or "commons:" a site where capitalist relations are a challenged in the sociality of the space. A de-marketized space where ideas are free and participation welcome, where the divisions between audience and creator, between professional and customer, are broken down.
I promoted the exhibit at a la c.Art and Monday Art Group, and some women did come down for events. The venue being at the western end of the Junction made it difficult to access, as there is a class boundary that starts at Keele St., with the sociality becoming progressively more bourgeois the further west you go (until you reach Runnymede). To overcome this spatial divide, I had to organize outings and sometimes rides to bring women to the space. It is here that I received the chiding from a member of a la c.Art group for being "bougie," sitting there with a laptop in the gallery with my "bougie" friends, a critique that exposed the mechanics of the white cube space and my complicity
109 with its reproduction in the Junction. This is an important aspect of the discussion about culture and capitalism in the context of social arts projects.
Conversations at Work: Materials, Processes, Ideas...
Marlene (from a la c.Art group) attended quite a few of the workshop events. She came to
Norman Perrin's storytelling workshop and to the video screening where there was quite a discussion afterwards. On the way home, I asked her what she thought and she told me it was too soon to say. The next afternoon, she came by during the end of I 'm Sold's workshop. She brought me her dream catcher assemblage and gave it to me in congratulations. I was moved beyond words and didn't know how to respond. It is a unique object, and I know the struggle, thought andfeeling that went into making it. We added it to the exhibition. Then she went downstairs and came back up with a poem (see above). She handed it to I'm Sold, who read it to herself, and then asked if she could sing it to the group. It was an amazing moment: as a song, the poem was so moving I got goose bumps. We had started out Let's Face It speaking about how we share breath, and
Marlenes 's poem ends with the line: "breathing in strength. " It was a touchstone moment for those of us who were there. Then Marlene and I'm Sold sang the poem together.
Marlene's tender, wavering voice cariying so much sensitivity andfeeling, with I'm
Sold's deep, rich and resonant blues/soul vocal.
Another young poet in the room then read us his poem about growing up strong with Jah and resisting gangster life. Marlene took his poem and sang a few lines, then she sang a
110 line of her poem, and back again, thus weaving the two poems together. 1 couldn't really believe the tenuous moment of bonding, knowledge sharing/production and creative community that was unfolding, and Marlenes's gifts to us that night.
It has also been my intention from the start to establish a conversation amongst the works through subject, form and aesthetics. Despite selecting a space that resonates as a 'white cube' and therefore references a modernist Western art paradigm, I am ultimately hoping to create a space which does not center modernism or post-modernism, but opens the creative field up to languages that relate back to the makers and their identification and location as the origins of expression (Todd 1992, 75). Each piece juxtaposing with the others, and expressing some angle of thought, experience, information or feeling about living in capitalism. Looking also at the language of aesthetics and how the various pieces will rework and redefine the discussion through divergent formal strategies and materials.
An important level of discussion amongst the works occurs across a spectrum of access to materials and art discourse, such as the Quilt, which is made out of diverse scraps of wool donated to the art group, containing disciplined knitting and crocheting, as well as the undisciplined. The Quilt is the result of all the knitting and crocheting we have done over the past two years at the Monday Art Group at Evangeline Women's Residence. We stitched together our various experiments and test patterns into one glorious explosion of colour, and now it exists as both an honoring of the creative and life vitality of the women who come to the group and as a document of the time we have spent together working, chatting and drinking tea. It is also an exercise in experimentation and self-revelation for
111 women who may view art traditionally and see following patterns as the necessary approach. The Quilt is accompanied by quotes from women in the Monday Art Group and from the report on women and homelessness (Street Health, 2008) which have been stenciled onto colourful fabric scraps, as well as by proposed banner designs and other artwork produced by the group. Balls of wool, knitting needles and crochet hooks scattered across the table invite people to sit and work with wool as a way to contribute to the quilt, stitching members of the Junction community together with the women from
Evangeline. Thus, the Quilt takes on performative, archiving and relational dimensions.
23. The Quilt (2009-11) by Monday Art Group and the Gathering Space at Evangeline
112 The frayed edges and makeshift wording on loudly coloured fabrics, and the clash of wool patterns, colours and textures, is juxtaposed with the cleanly executed minimal conceptual work of Michael Ricks: The Brazen Serpent and Suppressed Action Painting that consists of gold paint, a manufactured black cross with a machine-cut dollar sign crucified on it, back grounded by a wall mural of reversed letters dusted in charcoal.
The Quilt is made up of spontaneous gestures and is a document of the past, present and future of a group process of women under economic duress. The Brazen Serpent (made under a different but connected condition of economic duress) is the work of a skilled and male autological artist: "For me the criteria has always been is the individual present in their work? So that's very much the way that art manifests itself. I'm particularly drawn to the autographic, the self that makes the mark, knowing itself in the act of making. Its not narcissism: it's a form of self-cognition in and through media"
(Ricks 2010). While the formal difference in processes and conditions of creation of these two works is evident, Ricks acknowledges the importance of the social function of the work: "there should be a tangible self-affirmation, the fact that I made this and this is good, this works, and the goodness isn't just in narcissistic self-mirroring in the object, but in the sense that this has utility not only for myself but for others, that it shares that usefulness" (Ricks 2010).
113 24. The Brazen Serpent (2011) Michael Ricks 25. The Quilt (2009-11) Monday Art Group
While I have tried to create a conversation between works, in several ways this was
achieved by a formal interplay between artists and methods during the course of the
show. While Michael Ricks was installing his work The Brazen Serpent, he was using
charcoal dust to stencil words on the wall. At the same time, I'm Sold was problem-
solving the performative aspect of her installation piece Let's Face It. It turned out that
charcoal dust was the perfect medium (rather than paint) for revealing the white wax on
white paper self-portraits that were an interactive part of her installation. So the
charcoal dust as a formal element carried from Michael Ricks piece into the hands of participants in I'm Sold's project as a medium of self-revelation. From revealing the
reversed text of the word "image" to revealing the beginning of a neighbourhood self- portrait, our faces (not mere images but existing in actuality) drawn by ourselves while
114 looking in the mirror: image-making.. .and the word image, in a primal substance of
burnt organic matter: charcoal.
26. Let's Face It (ongoing detail) I'm Sold 27. The Brazen Serpent (2011, detail) Michael Ricks
Another example of this transference of formal strategies occurred with Voja Jurisic, who contributed his Wall of Winnings, a huge chart with all his winning 6/49 tickets alongside his lotto wheel, his system of predicting winning numbers. Accompanying the installation was a printed excerpt from an interview that we had done together explaining how he came to develop his system. When Voja came to the opening and saw the piece Misery, which consisted of "just a few" of the objects she had gifted me during our friendship, including a pair of slippers, tacked or nailed directly to the wall, he told me he wanted to add something to his installation. Jurisic's strongest self-identification is not with his
115 ability to win the lotto, which is just a "hobby," but with the work (which he does not hesitate to refer to as "charity") that he does in the community. If he wins big, he plans to open an orphanage (he himself was homeless during his youth in the former Yugoslavia).
The object he wanted to add was a dirty pink child's sandal. This sandal came from a project he worked on with a friend to collect donations of shoes to send to Haiti - this was prior to the earthquake. He told me that he kept this one shoe: "To remind me of what is important in life." When I dropped by his office to pick it up , he immediately leapt out of his chair, grabbed the sandal and gave it to me. I asked him if he wanted me to write an explanation, and he shrugged it off, saying, "No, it's not necessary." So I added the little sandal to his installation as an enigmatic object with a personal meaning. The little shoe resonating quietly with the lavender slippers Misery had given to me, which was nailed to the wall just opposite.
28. Detail from Misery (2011), Kim Jackson 29. Detail from Wall of Winnings (2011) Voja Jurisic
116 These inconsequential objects have circulated in the material world prior to being included as symbolic objects in the context of the exhibit. Their status as art objects is insecure. They had exchange value and then use value before being transformed into symbolic objects in an art context, and have now been returned to their place as personally symbolic objects in the lives of Voja and myself as we commemorate ideas we have gained through our interactions with people in life. In this way, they have been initiated into a sacralized, enchanted place of meaning.
Common language as a material also shifted context and meaning from one point to another during the exhibit. During the artist talk that was scheduled during the exhibition,
Ben Ng suggested that some form of "currency" had compelled me to do this work, stating that even work done for reasons outside of the monetary system was based on some form of exchange, whether that be moral or the need for community or whatever. I agreed, and pointed to Donna Husiak's (2009) piece Hope Doll Project with Coins, commenting that this work demonstrates the shifting of the abstract and empty object of currency, the coin, which simply facilitates exchange, to an object that represents an emotional need in relation to others.
117 30. Hope Doll Coin Project (2009) Donna Husiak
Hope was a form of currency that Donna was trying to generate with this piece, the
performative aspect of which involved her giving the coins away to people she new and family members.1 In the video Misery's Coin Collection, currency becomes a mode of travel: Misery shows her coins to the camera, commenting on geographic and historical details of their various countries of origin. This dovetailed further with N. H. Egan's
(2009) comment in her video Southern Cross about growing up under the South African apartheid regime: "I think one has to form one's own currency, a sort of currency of acts of goodwill... sort of exchange of kindnesses and generosity, and put some colour and some life and some air....it's strange growing up and developing your understanding of the world in such a dramatically wrong society, growing up in a family that really bought
1 Hope is a word that speaks to a social possibility that has an important place in both Monday Art Group and d la cArt group. It is doubly ironic that Donna seeks to sell this piece for actual money, sort of nullifying the "hope" that was it's original form... what does "hope" become when you have to buy it? However, this also speaks to the significant tension between pragmatic life and the privilege of art; Bourdieu comments that eschewing payment for art is the highest expression of privilege.
118 into the who apartheid system, and trying to shake off your conditioning...to see the world with clearer eyes"2. In all the above instances, currency has shifted away from our understanding of it as money, towards circulations of social need, psychic desire, geographic curiosity, ethical expressions and even political transformation. In all instances, these forms of currency define a relationality as expressed in language and point to the truth of what money represents according to Marx (1976, 932) "a relation among persons."
The intention of the dialogic process is to invest in these generative and alternative forms of currency and to chip away at the ideologic contexts that bring "othering" mechanisms into play. This intentionality is exemplified in the work Misery. In this work, I tried to approach the knowledge that had been generated in the course of our friendship. As explained, my class-based professional and academic interest prevented me from intervening into her situation, while as a neighbour and friend I grieved. Upon her death,
I found out from others who new her that Misery had been "homeless" for over 20 years.
In fact, no one new who she really was: she had lived without a single piece of identification all that time. I had been very struck by the gift-giving economy that she had generated in her life as her main mode of sociality. Over time, our friendship developed and she came to have quite an impact on me both intellectually and socially. I wanted to
2 Southern Cross, video, 12 min. 2009. Made in the context of the MoneyProject, a collective project that makes videos on the topic of money, and screened at the video night Rates of Exchange that happened during Capitalism and Culture in the Junction.
119 include what I had learned from her in my project. However, the situation of someone as socially excluded as she was from the public sphere (a social exclusion which she also maintained for reasons unknown) made it impossible to create a representation of our relationship in which she would or could participate.
Part of the reason that I wished to do a project about what I learned from Misery is that those who witnessed our relationship were only able to perceive it as my being
"generous" to her, when it was more often the other way around. The social condition makes not just her personal voice impossible, but also makes her social creativity and connectivity invisible. Working from the theoretical framework of border gnoseology means not contributing to dominant ideological distortions that impact the local site, but looking to these important instances of social unease as unique and important sites of potential knowledge production that need to be engaged as part of a challenge to the dominant forms of knowledge that organize us socially. But at the same time, when trying to make a representation, all kinds of pitfalls exist given the absence of any established approaches to understanding: romanticism, one-sidedness, the lack of her voice in the work, the audience's possible preconceived notions of what 'homelessness' means, or the distortion of her voice through my portrayal.
Misery didn't give in to the dominant notions of individualism that fuel capitalism, but was a living example of the interconnectivity of people. Although she admired individual achievement, her regular comments on the acts of kindness she encountered, either
120 towards her or others, led me to believe that she admired generosity and social availability more. Her own constant gift-giving indicates to me that she strived with whatever means she had to exist this way herself. As a homeless woman who continually gave to others who were often not homeless or without a paycheck (as she was), she developed her own social currency, operating on a use-value economy and asserting a social philosophy based on her own understanding of mutual survival. For me she exemplifies Gramsci's (1971, 323-4) proposition that everyone is a philosopher and his question: "is it better to work out consciously and critically one's own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labours of one's own brain, choose one's sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one's own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one's personality?" Misery did not accept her designated role as either a victim (although she had suffered) nor a beneficiary of charity, rather she told me many times that she felt those who worked the shelters where she stayed should keep out of her business and just do their jobs. In this sense, she was engaged through and through in the performance of a counter-narrative in the social sphere. As Trinh T. Minh-ha (1991, 228) observes, there is knowledge in every action.
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32. Misery's Obituary
31. Misery (2011) Kim Jackson
The artwork, Misery, turned out to be a memorial, and indeed included a rare photo of
her, which had been given to me by the organizers of her funeral. Around the photo I
tacked "just a few of the many gifts" that she had given me, along with her obituary and a
$5 bill that I had given her so she could buy coffee at the hospital, which I found in her coat pocked when she died. As Misery was an icon to many in the Junction, this memorial became part of local history and knowledge.
122 I can access this work as a friend and neighbour in a manner that would be more difficult as a professional artist/researcher maintaining a distanced relationship. These personal forms of relating release forms of knowledge that are buried by professional relations.
Bringing the personal into the public sphere of the exhibit brought that knowledge out.
Many people visiting the exhibit commented specifically on the piece as particularly moving. And perhaps memorializing a woman who was homeless in such an exhibition is a transgression of where and how the stories of homeless women are generally circulated in the dominant culture.
While I contend that these operations all constitute knowledge process, the question remains as to whether they constitute a "counter-discourse" to power, an important point which I will address later in the discussion.
Knowledge Production
Today at Snake Mound a guy stopped by the fence and talked to those of us gathered there to watch over the site. I recognized him from the Roncesvales area where he would walk his dog, an English Bull Terrier. He acknowledged Rastia 'ta 'non. ha with "hello brother. " Then went on to tell us he had stopped by to see the progress on the fence as it seemed to be taking the Parks Board a long time to finish it. He told us he has "always known that this was a burial ground." He identified himself as Metis, and said that his father had, had his tongue cut off in residential schools for speaking his language. He continued on that "the whole park is a burial ground, " and that he had found arrowheads
123 andjewelry at Snake Mound which he turned over to the Metis Cultural Centre. He said he's been watching over Snake Mound for years. After he left I turned to Rastia 'ta 'non. ha and asked if he had ever met this guy before, and he said "no, never" (field notes, July
16, 2011).
While Marx gives us a foundational analysis of the mechanics of capitalism, his rational language, narrow view of productive labour and place in history does not provide an entry point for most people. Nor is his system of thinking or approach to language able to contain the multiplicity of experience and knowledge about capitalism or the diversity of non-Western human economies and therefore expression. Within the Western context
Gramsci sought to open up the field of discussion to hegemonic struggles that involved many social categories outside of labour, however his knowledge paradigm remains somewhat universalizing. Gramsci's (1971, 324) description of the individual in a state of common sense as having a "strangely composite" character may be more clearly applicable to his Italian context than in the "multi-cultural" social space that is Toronto where it appears programmatic in its call for the transformation of a raw common sense into a unified philosophy. Border gnoseolgy, on the other hand, embraces these disruptions of continuity and considers the "fractured" state of "languaging" and knowing to be an historical condition ripe for challenging of dominant knowledge systems. To take this discussion a bit further, languaging, as the moment before the subject's knowledge is filtered into power systems of official speech, is integral to border gnoseology (Mignolo
2000, 252-3), which Gramsci (1971) might call "intuition." Furthermore, dialogic
124 practice suggests that a level of self-knowledge and self-critique arises out of conversation. But a prior condition to the actions of self-critique would be the assumption of the right to speak at all: many of us need first to gain the sense of entitlement to self- expression. In a society which constantly subjects us to critiques that reflect capitalist discipline, we must first overcome the sense of not being legitimate subjects in order to take the step of offering what we do know, and thus entering the dynamic process of thinking socially. Subjectivation requires that the field of knowledge open up to different modes of expression, whether "common sense" or "philosophical," or what is more likely, to fluctuate across a spectrum of possible expressions of knowledge forms.
Cree/Metis/White artist Loretta Todd (1992, 75) comments: "I seek to explore the "to and fro movement" between the Fourth and First Worlds, as I express self and culture."
Challenging how knowledge is currently organized comes before applying a new regime on top of the old. Mignolo's (2000) concept of "languaging" is very useful when examining knowledge production in this way. In the context of the project I have found many instances where individuals have reached deeper into a sense of their selves, to meld their personal experience with philosophical understanding in order to express something that is essential to them, something before capitalist discipline sets in. Micheal
Ricks demonstrates languaging in his observation:
"The thing that I felt critical was not to lose touch with either my own humanity or with others, that that was the struggle, that we're living in a period in which we were being asked to do things, both to ourselves and to other people, that was not in essence humane, or the right way of behaving. Are we going to value people according to their function, rather than their innate worth as human beings, as
125 persons? We commodified human beings in a way that hadn't been done before, and I think we're going to suffer the effects of that in the near future. I do think there's great hope for human beings who want to become human again: for the ones who don't, they're going to be trying very hard to put us all back into the same globalization box, the same IMF-World Bank box. But the system itself is veiled in such a way that it can't function in the way it has: it has to be reconfigured from a human standpoint." (Ricks 2010)
The substantive position taken by Ricks is on the "innate worth" of people. This is not a philosophical position to be critiqued, but a sense of self he developed when he became homeless himself for a period of time, when his own "innate worth" was under question.
Languaging here is an expressive gesture occurring outside of official knowledge/language structures and in the realm of the relational, with its proclamation of love for humanity against capitalist instrumentalization, placing us in an ethical bind. I don't know if Ricks' comment would qualify as "philosophy" for Gramsci, but it is accessible and relates directly to fundamental human needs and experience in the face of the hegemonic capitalist organization of our relationality. In fact, capitalist discipline is such a blunt and narrow conception of humanity that most of life falls necessarily outside of its conditioning despite being subject to it. In some ways we are stuck reaffirming the simplest need that capitalism denies us: care.
In examining the processes of knowledge production I have deduced that actually you cannot stop knowledge from being produced, but rather, it takes motivation to stop and pay attention as it arises. We cannot rely on the power structure to define for us what knowledge is. In this project knowledge production really means knowledge recognition
126 through dialogue, and sharing space, followed by a materialization and documentation process that solidifies pieces of that knowledge in some form of a public sphere. As such,
I consider the problem to be more formal and structural in nature: how to concretize knowledge that is lived and embodied by those I am in dialogue with so that it can enter onto the level of a public discourse? How can we deploy this knowledge as a way to stake claim to space and to shift conceptions of capitalism, class and community?
Through art making and shared space, knowledge can become fluid, and the presentation of aesthetic and symbolic creative language becomes a conduit for discussion, triggering a conscious relationship to knowledge in the individual or among people. Therefore the materialization of experiential forms of knowledge is transformative and is key to challenging social hierarchies.
Working with the THPS is a case in point. Our work together is very quotidian: bringing community members down to Snake Mound, exchanging ideas with people who gather there, learning about our histories and how to participate in the caretaking of the sacred site, sharing food, ceremony and song. We discuss the information that is being uncovered about the Mounds and the latest events in our work to protect them, and in the course of these conversations power is revealed and each of us have our "common sense" challenged. Importantly, we encounter each other across historical, colonial boundaries, and the colonial difference emerges in our work together. We are put in a situation of having to perform double thinking as we exist in this fractured space. We are reminded regularly by THPS Director Laurie Waters that this land belongs to no one, and belongs to
127 all of us: "our ceremony involves using our land, ok, this is our land, this is everybody's land, everybody who is here, this is his land as well as our land" (Waters in Snake Mound,
1:18, 2010). While we may take on this conception of our relation to the land, it is in direct contravention to what is practiced hegemonically by the society we live in, and is a personal contradiction for those among us who own property. If we accept the aboriginal philosophy that this land is "everyone's", then we are also challenged with a responsibility to protect it. The relationship with the land is a binding relationship
(Battiste and Youngblood 2000,45), which again contravenes the capitalist notion of personal freedom that permits individuals to choose their commitments.
The group is unified around one issue, Snake Mound, but now must deal with the complexities of the sociality, all the different understandings that arise and our diverse historical positionings. Rastia'ta'non:ha sees and hears the ancestors and will refer to them as being "content" now that we have done a proper ceremony. I do not have direct access to this knowledge, and there is no real way for me to unify around it, rather it becomes part of my experience of border gnoseology, where dominant knowledge systems are undermined by embodied and geographically-specific knowledge forms. In my own way, I see this knowledge as counter to modernism, post-modernism and capitalism: it becomes part of my understanding about the limits of capitalism as a system that can fully integrate socialities and histories. The existence of Ancient Iroquoian burial mounds in High Park is no simple thing: the shock to people's consciousness and sense of the real is a formidable challenge to the effectiveness of knowledge systems.
128 The impact of visiting Snake Mound on one Junctionite (a relatively recent immigrant from Great Britain) brought on a complication of identity such that when it came to naming the political/cultural action group we are attempting to form here, his suggestion was "Guests of Taiaiako'n." Instead of seeing himself as entitled to occupation of the land, he has engaged in a critique of the position offered him and has instead understood himself in relation to an Aboriginal-centred understanding of history. Because of the specific attachments that this name would generate, we ended up settling on
"Strobusphere," which refers to the white pine (Strobus Pinus in latin), the species that used to forest this area before it was logged for shipbuilding by Lord Simcoe's associates.
The white pine is also considered the 'tree of peace' by the people of the Six Nations.
The name represents a dialectic in which we identify ourselves with the land, not as the bounded by lines that demark the neighbourhood, but as a challenging to historic, social and geographic flux. This complication brings into the "realm of the sensible" the influence of Aboriginal conceptions of land, and specifically those that we learn about in the course of our working with the THPS. With the naming of the group an inter- subjective recognition is unfolding where we are reformulating our identities in relation to the knowledge that is shared.
As has been demonstrated in the discussion of my friendship and art making experiment with Misery, one-on-one relationships have been a very fruitful site of knowledge production. I will elaborate further on the knowledge process in which I have engaged by
129 speaking again about one of my most significant collaborative relationships, that being
with Lynda Solowynsky. Lynda and I are neighbours first, who became friends, and then
co-conspirators, as we work together in on a range of issues we perceive in the
neighbourhood where we live. Our work together involves both discussion and
information sharing as well as physical contact, such as comforting each other with hugs
and massages, helping to do menial tasks, going places together, experiencing our bodies
together, eating, making art, listening, gifting, being present and fighting... In this sense,
we are accessible to each other. As such, we are involved in a mutual identity formation
whose base of power is not the outside structure where the bourgeois gaze may objectify
our bodies as either stigmatized and "other" or invisible and "normalized." Our base of
power is what takes place in the site of knowledge that we build between us and in our immediate environment. It is an attempt to exercise an egalitarian epistemological process within our intimate relation, which resists our objectification and is based in a recognition of the material basis of our existence.
Over the course of our working together, Lynda has constantly challenged me to hear and recognize the psychic and physical costs of the condition of institutional poverty to her mind, soul, and body. Lynda self-defines as a "warrior," and yet her statement is that "she cannot be a warrior alone." We are not just inter-subjective, we are inter-relational. I respond with art-making strategies to challenges Lynda presents out of her lived experience, work, wisdom and storytelling drive. Together we have worked on many
130 creative projects: conceptual, expressionistic and relational in nature. Through an art- making process that involves self-representation, the relationship of the art-makers to their body changes. The "othered" body moves out of the social silences of neglect and symptom and becomes a site of expressed language and knowledge.
In the audio/video work we produced together, I am the foundation of corporate capitalism, I fell between the cracks and now exist there (2010), I utilized media technology as a tool for documenting and reproducing voice, to amplify statements and record transgressvie performance in order to take up and infect public space with our presence. Lynda's voice in the work is directly embodied: the content is her direct understanding and affective communication of her experience. Her voice is complex. She presents philosophical challenges and a profound understanding of the power and manipulation of language as it is used against her. Lynda's challenge is to actually change our relationships, not just to think or talk about it: the process of production must mirror the kinds of relationships we desire.
The logic of the piece relates to readings I have been doing on performance which tell us that structures such as poverty and forms of institutionalization are constructed by the repetitive iterations, or reiterations, of gestures, thoughts, speech and action in daily life.
We collectively perform the society into existence, and as individuals our actions are
131 nuanced across a spectrum that ranges from being in accord with the demands of this performance, to being conflicted or disinterested (Taylor 2003, 28). It seems to me that
"reiteration" as a concept relates closely to Marx's notion of the "reproduction" of capitalism. Both these terms describe the moment in capitalism we seek to interrupt and infuse with an embodied sensibility. The structure of this piece is meant to hover between these tensions of performance/reproduction, between the disembodied and repetitive mechanics of oppression and the transgressive/antagonistic voice that breaks through. As a result of not being listened to, Lynda's voice necessarily becomes repetitive and reiterative in itself.
I am the foundation... seeks to shift the location of the power to define from the institutions that Foucault (1980) tells us sanction knowledge to the voice of the one who articulates their "lived experience." This piece is not about victimhood, although our conditioning might persuade us to read it that way. It is about the location of critique in the body of the one who knows. Lynda's life is about performing critique, an approach she takes at great social risks to herself, risks which are again inscribed into her body.
132 Contesting Capitalism: In the Realm of the Everyday (really?)
Performance, Language, Art and Agency Within Capitalism
"We all know deep down what's going on here doesn't represent what we really want, or what we truly believe, and there are bigger issues at play here, and we 're not being told the truth about what they are, and they play into other countries influence, and influence of money, like you said, yeah, and people are just not valued in any way, and I think it is horrible that money is more important than human life." (Kelli Kieley 2010, Speak Your
Piece).
"There's a huge disconnect, I mean I can't really watch the news that often, or you turn on the radio in the car, you know, It's a crazy making world we live in, it really is, it's crazy making, it's so disconnectedfrom the reality on the ground...as Canadians I think we 're humane people but the government and the media keep us very disconnected from the ugly reality of war that's going on over there. I guess we don't want to be upset by these things, we have our bills to pay, our kids to raise, and you focus on your micro- reality" (Shawn Goldman 2010, Speak Your Piece).
These comments describe a hegemonic dialectic where the particular position of the ruling elite is unsuccessful in its attempt to universalize its ideologic position. Ideology is revealed in its bluntest form as an assertion of lies, and as a denial of experienced reality and firm ethical positions on the part of the participants. The desire to reclaim our reality
133 is fervent, and the rejection of the corruption that we witness around us is un-categorical: a revolution (fast, slow or colourful), in the sense of a complete change in ruling principles, is perceived as necessary. But at the same time, Zizek (2002, 68) warns that:
"The first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul-de-sac of debilitating impossibility: What can one do against global capital?), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space - it will be an act within the hegemonic ideological coordinates even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) - they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit."
Kelly Kieley concurs with Zizek (2002) that facing global capital is debilitating, but at the same time she has asserted repeatedly that absorbing negative information without any action is "too depressing" (personal conversation). Certainly, the "ideologic coordinates" in community are much different than in a left-wing academic setting. Working from broadly applied social theory to distanced actions, such as boycotting, is different than working through your own geographic location of bodily proximity in language forms that you developed and that relate back to your daily life. Hopefully, (infirm) desire is stimulated in this process as an answer to debilitating depression and as opposed to the unwieldy moral pressures that one can take on in response to the overwhelming ethical compromise in which we exist in Canada as a "first world" nation. Extending out to the global frame by supporting the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan from the local moment of having contributed your thoughts and feelings in the artwork
134 Speak Your Piece, is about rooting action in local experiences, expressions, and socialities. "Ideologic co-ordinates" are thusly "shifted" within what is perceived as possible within community, while social and material supports are made real on local and global levels.
As an example, I used to go to High Park as a leisure activity, and it always felt like a false space of forced relaxation meant to offset the regime of capitalist urban existence.
However, since working with the THPS, I have a very different and meaningful connectivity to the park based on living history in the present and a social necessity.
Through this connectivity with both current social reality and historical participation I feel grounded in my position as a participant in history, my position as based on a settler background is no longer obfuscated but comes to the fore and is activated, allowing a dynamic process to be initiated, whereby problems of history can be worked on. As a result, being in the park feels completely different. In fact, being in the Junction feels completely different now that I can access the historical processes that we live instead of being relegated to the alienated capitalist discipline of daily life. Likewise, since Speak
Your Piece, I now have conversations regularly with people in the neighbourhood about
Canadian involvement in the war and no longer see the Junction as a vacuum outside of discussion.3
3 If when I go to a la c.Art group, I run into Jimmy the maintenance man who participated in Speak Your Piece at Coffeetime, instead of exchanging pleasantries, he now shares with me his latest understanding of the war in Afghanistan, and of international politics.
135 While asserting our presence, challenging knowledge structures, and creating a public sphere in which to engage in dialogic knowledge production does engender something, is that something actually a counter-discourse to capitalism? Zizek (2002,68) suggests that:
"[m]ore than ever, one should bear in mind Walter Benjamin's reminder that it is not enough to ask how a certain theory (or art) declares itself with regard to social struggles - one should also ask how it effectively functions in these very struggles." Zizek (2002) raises an important point, however, I would take the question out of the context of "social struggle" and place it in daily life by asking: how does a certain theory (or art) effectively function in daily life? Instead of thinking of "struggle" as a space separate from daily life, or a discrete activity shared with other people in the know, I am locating an examination of capitalism within the context of a geographic space where bodies share proximity so as to think about our relationships with each other, the land and other species as we perform and contest capitalism. Social and or political struggle can be as elite a social formation as being an academic is: it takes up time and resources on top of the demands of daily life, you often have to travel downtown for meetings or demos, and "radicals" often speak a cultivated language, which can be alienating. To see our immediate environment and our relationships to each other as politicized seems to remove the extra step one must take away from oneself into "radicalism," and this, I propose, is potentially more productive of agency. Connecting our cultural production and political work to what can be found in our immediate environment and through our daily lives, beginning with the
136 material that is generated by people's common sense (rather than theoretical understandings) is what makes the work accessible.
This idea is taken up formally in the artwork Misery, where objects from daily life become symbolic of her subjectivization within the dominant political economy. Misery was part of daily life here in the Junction and the emphasis of the artwork is a description of the friendship she generated (with me) as a creative force. The work itself offers a minimum of technical or conceptual processing, but attempts to remain as close to a frank portrayal of the situation as possible, in order to let the content of the relationship resonate as much as it can. Living within capitalism challenges and conditions our relationality, therefore the artwork hopes to intervene and examine this site. Misery offered what I think is an emotionally powerful and philosophically developed solution of sorts to her condition of disenfranchisement, and this is what the piece seeks to portray. One might contest the art status of a collection of items not subject to any material or conceptual manipulations: the work in fact could be seen as purely ethnographic.4 However, its placement among art objects determines it to be within an art discourse and implies that Misery's creativity in her life and the objects collected have a discursive potential within art. Thus, Misery raises questions about the social function of art and its relation to the everyday. The work blurs the lines between our daily lives and
4 Misery does, however, work within contemporary art strategies of presenting clothing and everyday objects as artwork: William Pope L (2000) made a conceptual piece out of underwear collected from secondhand stores. Christian Boltanski's work Reserve, about the Holocaust 1990 also works with clothing.
137 the objects that have passed through it, and the production of artwork. The polysemic
nature of art language turns the question back onto Misery's life itself, framing her life as full of creative and questioning language. Dialogue thus flows from the relationship between Misery and I to the audience, among the materials and among the artworks in the exhibit, and then articulates in the memory of the viewer who may have known Misery or may have lived in the same geographic space as her, without having encountered her. The hope is to create a more accessible art experience that will also be dialogical and pedagogical for all involved (in line with the project's research objectives). When we share dialogue, there is mutual support for each of us to take up the ideas and material realities that we generate as solutions to feeling disempowered and disenfranchised.
This leads us into the serious discussion about whether community arts will lead to the amelioration of social ills without challenging society to undertake political change. There is a danger of falling into the problematic areas of self-provisioning (instead of requiring redistribution on the part of the state apparatus), and even into George Bush's idea that
"faith-based" groups should do the social work in community so that capital itself is free to circulate and accumulate without being wasted on social safety nets. The creation of
"commons" and self-provisioning, the green solution of urban gardening and bartering, on their own, as practices that upset capitalist relations and develop relations of the future, do not, on their own, confront capital. Zizek's (2002) comments above outline the real danger of misconceiving the actual potential of this work to totally change the system, to constitute a revolution of any stripe or to go beyond the "certain limit" imposed by
138 capitalism. The truth is that you cannot fight capitalism without addressing it directly and the question is how to get beyond forms of social resistance that can be recuperated by capitalism?
Clearly "surviving within" and "contesting" are dialectical dynamics. Performance theory understands these twinned gestures as underpinned by a structure of force:
"While the performance stratum generates an archive of knowledge-forms, it is also enveloped by an emergent diagram of power-forces, forces that are not stratified into discourses and practices but instead consist of affective strategies, micro-arrangements of normativities and mutations. Normative relations of force, forces of law and order, are what construct and seal together the heterogeneous forms of performatives and performances" (McKenzie 2001, 177).
We do ourselves no favour by ignoring the historical violence on which capitalism is based and on which it depends for its continuance. I think the crux of the problem is outlined by Agamben (1998), who identifies the essential violent power in the state of exception by which states justify their right to rule. This suggests that real threat of change will inevitably be met with a reversion to this inherent violence from the state in its assumed right to protect itself (Agamben 1998, 25-8). There is no way, even in a non violent practice, that the state will not ultimately react to social movements against capitalism with violence and disruption, as the events of the G8/20 in Toronto in the summer of 2010 should illustrate. In the context of the project to protect Snake Mound, the police very quickly turned on us, threatening those of us working to protect the site with arrest and thereby bringing this state force into play. The lack of motivation on the
139 part of the government bodies involved and the continued destruction of the mound by cyclists at one point caused Red Power United and AIM Ontario to threaten a sit-in on the site until the powers that be come to the table. In a ridiculous escalation the Parks Board made a counter-threat to "bulldoze" the site. This underlying constant threat of violence compromises all our notions of ideology and hegemony as sites of empowered contestation.
Currently, the project develops our participation in hegemonic struggle by developing common bonds and knowledge and then taking up public space with critique, whether aesthetic, communitarian or rhetorical. In order to contest capitalism, however, we need to confront the capitalists directly. Unless our "social art" operates in dialogue with multiple levels of the political structure from the electoral to the grassroots, and even underground, as well as internationally, our struggles will be limited and ameliorative. Forming materially symmetrical and coeval relationships which spiral outward from our locally understood, and inter-subjective, senses of self and "community" to connect, dialogue and to take action across the political spectrum is what this project offers as an investigation into how to contest capitalism.
The pragmatics of our lives and the infection of our relationality within capitalism means that our struggles must be rooted here, in our mutual performative relationalities, by which capitalism is reproduced among us. Beyond the various philosophical "turns," that mark contemporary western thought such as the linguistic and ethical turns, I propose a
140 turn to each other, a turn that recognizes our mutual dependence, both in surviving capitalism and in contesting it. The turn to each other would mean accepting what Smith
(1999, 186) describes as:
. .the real-life 'dirtiness' of political projects, or what Fanon and other anti- colonial writers would regard as the violence entailed in struggles for freedom. The end result cannot be predetermined. The means to the end involves human agency in ways which are complex and contradictory. The notion of strategic positioning as a deliberate practice is partially an attempt to contain the unevenness and unpredictability, under stress, of people engaged in emancipatory struggles."
Yet, as a Monday Art Group participant comments: "Nothing is perfect." Social arts does not shy away from imperfection, discord and contradiction but brings these dynamics into play as only one, but very important part of a multifaceted and accessible resistance. The bonding and knowledge sharing that arises out of a space where such "imperfections," discord, agonism and infirm desires can be exercised, works towards a basis that may enable us to withstand the violence of the state and of capitalism.
Conclusion
On a recent trip to Montreal, I spent time with friends arguing about whether there is an
"outside" to capitalism, and the question that is suggested: can capitalism be contested?
This debate convinced me that shifting the terms of the discussion to include possible
"outsides" is key to generating contestational practices. Zizek (2002) calls this "shifting the ideological coordinates." Rancier discusses it in terms of "entering the realm of the sensible" (2004, )As Rorty (in Zizek 1994, 231-2) says: "nothing politically useful
141 happens until people begin saying things never said before - thereby permitting us to visualize new practices, as opposed to analyzing old ones."5 Mignolo (2002, 75) points out that if we submit to the conception of a "lack" of an outside, then we submit to both the macro-narrative of modernity and the logo-centrism of capitalist ideology: "the assumption that once something new emerges, everything preceding it vanishes... work[ing] toward an image of capitalism as a totality that erased all other existing economic alternatives from the face of the earth." The geopolitics of Euro-centrism intertwines Western epistemology with capitalism which then organizes thought and dwelling on the land. Thus, Mignolo's suggestion of shifting the "locus of enunciation" is perhaps an initial step in looking for an outside to capitalism, a place from which to change the ideological coordinates. Thus, if we cannot presently see an outside from our location in the Junction, in the heartland of capitalism, maybe we should be looking harder or working harder at creating and articulating one.
In Canada, the most significant problem we face in changing the ideological coordinates of the debate is our fundamental misapprehension of the nature of capitalism and its confused relationship to 'democracy.' This misapprehension can only be punctured through dialogic practice, whereby people are allowed to inhabit, generate and challenge knowledge processes from the locations of their bodily experiences in relation to those around them, the land, animals and history: the web of interdependence that enables our
142 survival. As Linda Tuhuwai Smith (1999) suggests, knowledge is tested by how it facilitates survival. This knowledge demands to be valued in a public sphere beyond subcultures at the margins, where people are constantly generating and sharing knowledge about survival within capitalism as they are subject to the downward pressure on wages and social service budget cuts. This knowledge production must start to signify the empowerment and agency of people who are subject to othering mechanisms by capitalist discipline, and the bourgeois performance of class bigotry, and this recognition must be demanded from those who hold fast to the public sphere: media, government, academics, the professions and other hegemonic forces.
Mignolo (2002) gives a frame to thinking outside capitalism from his vantage point of a colonial critique by recognizing the twin histories of colonialism and capitalism, and by critiquing "Euro-centric" critiques of both colonialism and capitalism, which exclude the contributions of the "barbarians" to modernity (both positively with knowledge and negatively by having their bodies sacrificed to its brutal productive capacities). Thinking through and shifting the philosophical landscape from the position of the erased, excluded, exploited and subjected is the missing variable in the equation. Prasad (1992,
81) suggests that "the whole question of giving or taking away a voice. ..belongs in the discursive realm of cultural justice," however, it is our voices that lie outside capitalism and capitalism that relies on our silences. Mignolo (2002, 76) suggests, rather, "thinking the tensions between capitalism and other economic organizations as well as the alternatives to capitalism from subaltern perspectives." Mignolo's (2002) border
143 gnoseology acknowledges the generation of a unique form of knowledge arising from specific sites of colonial and capitalist fracturing of our daily lives and the multiple borders across land, among peoples and within individuals. The neighbourhood, as a site, a logos, is organized by capitalist relations to the land and among humans and animals.
Our dwelling or performance of daily life on the land reproduces and/or contests capitalism.
I have said that I believe that being present to the multiple levels of sociality and the bodily proximity that we share in the Junction will provide the knowledge we need to engage in a revolution in consciousness. Ongoing work that contributes to a more complex framing as to who is here and what structures we participate in reproducing/re iterating opens up a dialogical public sphere or commons from which to develop border gnoseology as "...the multiplication of epistemic energies in diverse local histories
(different spaces and moments in the history of capitalism., .and its unavoidable obscure companion, the history of colonialism (still to be written...)" (Mignolo 2000, 39). We need to reveal (and challenge) our places in the world, from the traces left by the impact of the world economy here in the Junction to the Aboriginal and environmental history that subtends the regimes of our daily life. Thus the goal has been to open up a space where the possibility exists for individuals and groups to transgress the performance of bourgeois values, values that structure space, time and identity, and conditions who is welcome and whose knowledge is valid and to investigate the possibilities of agency from our positionality of being caught in the web of power as it is manifested here in the
144 Junction. In the end agency is not equal to the bourgeois individualist notion of "free will," but the ability to act ethically. Building an understanding of our mutual psychic and material inter-dependence means challenging the bourgeois competitive individualism that drives capitalism. Recognizing our inter-dependence makes possible a recognition and strengthening of the collective, a necessity in the face of the inevitable increase in disciplinary repression we face the harder we push back against capitalist structures.
The increasingly global character of capitalism dictates that we acknowledge the specific bonds we have to communities beyond our own localized understandings, which in turn, advances the potential integration of 'outside' voices. Making global connections will inevitably ground practice in multiple levels of knowledge generation, material connection and active collaboration that can be characterized as at a minimum working toward contestation and the realization of an outside. It is by directly addressing capitalism in all manners of dialogical performance that the complexities we face will become evident in a public sphere where we can wrestle the problems through new stages of critique and contestation.
Finally, capitalism is a disease of human relationality. Ultimately it is not by our voices alone that we can contest capitalism. Capitalism threatens the survival of the many on the level of the material, therefore the most significant work to contest capitalism is on the level of our material interdependence, to acknowledge and heal the ruptures in our ability to care in very real ways for those in whose presence we exist both locally and globally.
145 Appendix A
-11- - Baby point - fort was called Fort Rouille after the French Minister of Marine but locally it was called Fort Tororito. After the fall of Quebec to the English the fort was burned by the French in 1759.
THE PALISADES BURIAL GROUND
The Indians buried their der.d in the ground placing around • them food, weapons and other articles that might be useful in a future life. It was the habit of tho Iroquoinn Indians to have a Feast of the Dead every ten or twelve years. At this time tho bodies of those who had beea buriod at differont points were disinterred and brought to a common burial ground. Many gifts were presented to the dead and the whole nation went into mourning although the ocoasion was enlivened by athletic contests.
The more nomadic Algonquins did not assemble their dead in this way.
A few years ago when Olympus Ave. was being constructed tho skeltons of eight or ten Indians wero discovered. The bodies had been wrapped in a red clay not found in the district and so are thought to liave^ beisn those of important m^abers .of the tribe. They were found with their feet towards n large tree- an Algonquin burial custom - and may have been part of a raiding party during the time tho Iroquois wero in possession of the distriot or may have been members of the Mississaga community of Toronto. Their teeth were worn short so it is concluded that they wore Indians past middle life.
On the south side of Olympus Ave, facing Harcroft Road is an arch with the word "Harcroft" over it. Beneath it is a small stone marking the place where the remains were found and were again buried.
Note: Mr. Rose now lives at the very gates of tho Bird Sanctuary and within a minuted walk of tho site of the Old Indian Burying Ground. Could you persuade him to conduct a lit.tle tour throurii theso historic places?
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