Quote: Revolutionary Transitions

Too much of revolutionary thought does not even pose the problem of transition, paying attention only to the overture and neglecting all the acts of the drama that must follow. Defeating the ruling powers, destroying the ancien régime, smashing the state machine -- even overthrowing capital, patriarchy, and white supremacy -- is not enough. That might be sufficient, perhaps, if one were to believe that the formation of the multitude was already achieved, that we were all already somehow not only purified of the hierarchies and corruptions of contemporary society but also capable of managing the multiplicity of the common and cooperating with one another freely and equally -- in short, that democratic society was already complete. If that were the case, then, yes, maybe the insurrectional event destroying the structures of power would be sufficient and the perfect human society already existing beneath the yoke of oppression would spontaneously flourish. But human nature as it is now is far from perfect. We are all entangled and complicit in the identities, hierarchies, and corruptions of the current forms of power. Revolution requires not merely emancipation, as we said earlier, but liberation; not just an event of destruction but also a long and sustained process of transformation, creating a new humanity. This is the problem of transition: how to extend the event of insurrection in a process of liberation and transformation.

-- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Commonwealth, pp. 361-2)

Review: Science Fiction and Empire

[Patricia Kerslake. Science Fiction and Empire. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007.]

I'm deep in end-of-term mode at the moment, with one big paper and a few smaller things to finish before it's done, and then book edits to deal with immediately after that. But I'm stealing a few minutes to do a quick review as I haven't blogged in awhile.

The final paper that I'm writing this semester is looking at science fiction and other utopian and speculative forms through a postcolonial lens, with the intent of seeing if I can say anything about a role for speculative fiction in catalyzing anti- and postcolonial possibility in the cultural imaginations of those of us who are passive beneficiaries of empire. I'm quite cautious about making any but the most modest claims about this, but I'm starting from Edward Said's observation in Culture and Imperialism that "the enterprise of empire depends on the idea of having an empire ... and all kinds of preparations are made for it within a culture" (11, emphasis in original). The idea is that if preparations are made for empire (and Said was quite concerned with literary preparations in particular) then perhaps there is some role for analagous preparations in moving beyond empire. Not sure exactly what I'm going to say about that yet, but I read this book (somewhat selectively but intensively) as part of that work.

The book contains some quite useful ideas and engages with a range of texts that in some senses is quite broad -- it includes many classics of the genre from the U.S. and the U.K. -- but in other senses is somewhat narrow -- it pays no attention whatsoever to the emergence of explicitly postcolonial science fiction or science fiction from formerly (or currently) colonized peoples. This tendency to focus on cultural production from the heart of the empire is not exactly unknown in postcolonial studies -- just look at Said, for instance -- but it is still a little disappointing. In any case, the book begins by looking at the role of the Other in science fiction, goes into some of the mechanisms through which empire is used in the genre, and then goes quasi-chronologically through several key moments, starting with sf from the classic imperial age and on through some very contemporary writers with different ways of relating to empire. There is definitely material in here that I'll use -- maybe some of the stuff on the Other, definitely the sense of sf being complicated and ambivalent in relation to empire but its potential as a tool for working through ideas and legacies of empire, probably some of the details of how that has worked at different moments.

I was unsurprised but disappointed that there was not a more materially grounded exploration of how exactly ideas in literature might have an impact upon a culture. Based on the readings in the course that I'm writing this paper for, it seems quite common for postcolonial literary scholars to be sure that their texts of interest are not only shaped by societies steeped in empire but go on to shape those societies in turn, but nobody quite spells out how that works in a convincing way.

Also, as useful as this book's literary insights are, and as keen as its grasp of some aspects of historical empire, there were also a few politically dubious things that only showed up later in the book. I suppose an earlier clue was the complete absence of any recognition that colonial histories do not just include the formerly colonized (or neo-colonized) so-called Third World but also still actively colonized indigenous peoples in settler societies. But the last chapter of the book said some pretty awful things about empire as social phenomenon (as opposed to literary phenomenon) that boiled down to erasing the contemporary realities of empire and colonization, completely for indigenous peoples and almost completely around Iraq and Afghanistan and other contemporary Western exertions of imperial power outside the borders claimed by settler states. As well, she presents some half-baked and largely unsupported ideas about empire as a transhistorical and psychological essence of humanity -- I may be exaggerating slightly, but it frames it in a way that downplays the role of social organization and implicitly reassures those of us who are complicit in it that, well, it's just what humans do, and whatchagonnado.

Those problems aside, for the issues that are the actual focus of the book's scholarship, it seems quite good. I'm sure I will make considerable use of it. On a more frustrating note, it also made me want to just set all of this school stuff aside and read some novels, and that's not going to happen for awhile. (How can I have never read any Kim Stanley Robinson? That's just not right!)

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Quote: Knowledge Production in Movements

All we have just said ... however has also been reached via a series of different routes through the discussions internal to the movements of the multitude in the last few decades. One of these routes took off from the crisis of the industrial workers' movements and their scientific knowledges in the 1960s. Intellectuals within and outside the factories struggled to appropriate the process of knowledge production from the party hierarchy, developing a method of 'co-research' to construct together with workers alternative knowledges from below that are completely internal to the situation and intervene in the current power relations. Another route has been forged by professors and students who take their work outside the universities both to put their expertise at the service of social movements and to enrich their research by learning from the movements and participating in the production of knowledge developed there. Such militant research is conceived not as community service -- as a sacrifice of scholarly value to meet a moral obligation -- but as superior in scholarly terms because it opens a greater power of knowledge production. A third route, which has developed primarily among the globalization movements in recent years, adopts the methods of 'co-research' developed experimentally in the factories and applies them to the entire terrain of biolpolitical production. In social centres and nomad universities, on Web sites and in movement journals, extraordinarily advanced forms of militant knowledge production have developed that are completely embedded in the circuits of social practices.

-- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, p. 127 (references in original)

Madeleine Parent, Rest In Peace

I am very sad to report that I just learned (via an email, so I have no link) of the death of Madeleine Parent at the age of 93. My condolences to her family and friends.

Madeleine was a long-time radical participant in struggles for justice and liberation. She was involved in Canada's first student movement at McGill University in the years before the Second World War. She was a tireless labour and feminist organizer over the course of decades. I met her in the course of doing oral history interviews with long-time Canadian activists. Her account of her central role in the titanic and victorious strike by mainly women workers at the Dominion Textile Company in 1946 is at the heart of one of the chapters of my book Gender and Sexuality: Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists (forthcoming from Fernwood Publishing later in 2012 along with a companion volume called Resisting the State -- see here if you want to know more).

Madeleine was a persistent thorn in the side of quasi-fascist Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, whose harassment of her included charges of seditious conspiracy that were kept alive for years by corrupt courts in the province. She became a central fixture of the independent leftist labour scene in the country and was a core organizer for a small but tenacious independent Canadian trade union central that waged a number of ideologically important strikes in the '60s and '70s and pushed both the larger trade union centrals and the U.S.-based international unions in more progressive directions. Her involvement in the women's movement was similarly important and longstanding. A government-funded women's conference in the early 1970s was convened to consider the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. It was poised to recommend a state-affiliated body to oversee the implementation of the report, but she and a small group of radical women at the conference felt this was not enough so they stayed up late into the night strategizing and mobilizing and were successful in moving the bulk of conference participants towards a call for an independent, national coalition of women's organizations. This eventually became the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), the most important national-level body for feminist struggles in Canada for many years. Parent was a consistent and radical voice at NAC and at its Quebec equivalent, the Fédération des femmes du Québec, and she played a role in brokering the more active inclusion of groups of women of colour in both of those sites in the 1990s.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Madeleine in the early 2000s. She was frail already by that point, but she spoke very firmly and with a kind of deliberation and care no doubt bred of so many years of radical involvement. I went away and transcribed her interview and sent it to her for approval. And I waited. And I waited. Every few months for a couple of years, I called her on the phone and asked patiently and politely if she had had a chance to go through the transcript. She always answered with similar patience and also, I always felt, with a glint of amusement, saying that she had not had a chance to do so but she would do it soon. Finally, not long after I moved to Sudbury, I called her and she had a different response. She decided that what would work would be for me to make another trip to Montreal and we could go over it together. I knew I wanted to be able to include her story in whatever I did with my interviews, so I agreed and made a whirlwind trip back to Montreal.

In some ways I treasure this second visit with her even more than the first. We began by going over the transcript. She had already looked at it in detail and she knew where she wanted to add things and make changes. We took care of that piece of business within an hour or two. Yet she was still eager for me to stay and talk. She made us lunch, which she was still able to do at that point but only very slowly and with great care. And she talked. She knew I was now living in Sudbury, so she talked about her visits to the city in the 1960s during the great struggles between the United Steel Workers and the Mine Mill union. The latter was an independent and very left-wing union at that time, and in earlier years it had organized all of the mines in Sudbury. The Steel Workers raided them repeatedly in the '60s, and Mine Mill counter-raided (with the eventual equilibrium of Inco's workers going with Steel and Falconbridge's staying with Mine Mill). Too few of Mine Mill's organizers were francophone, and that in a city that is 30-40% francophone, so Madeleine agreed to come and lend a hand. I also remember her talking about going on the first Quebecois delegation to post-revolution China -- two of the other participants in the delegation included then-intellectual and future Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and future Senator Jacque Hebert. She gave a long, humorous account of the trip, in which Trudeau and Hebert tried their best to ignore her existence -- they wrote her out of the book they later published about the voyage -- while she, as the one with the most solidly established leftist credentials, was the member of the delegation treated most seriously by their Chinese hosts, which meant that Trudeau and Hebert couldn't help but depend on her at some moments. Alas, I did not have a recorder running for these stories, but I will always treasure my opportunity to hear them.

We didn't keep in touch much after that, but I've occasionally heard snippets of how she's doing via my partner, who by chance happened to develop professional connections with a couple of the women who were, for awhile, part of the informal feminist circle of care-provision for Madeleine. (One of those women is also the daughter of the man who was Madeleine's lawyer in the long-ago seditious conspiracy case.) I knew Madeleine's health had been deteriorating over a number of years and that various aspects of her circumstances had become difficult, but I knew few details. And now, after a long and full life, I am sorry to hear that she is gone. Not many young activists know her name, I suspect, but she was truly an inspirational figure in the 20th century social movements of northern Turtle Island, and her life has much to teach us.

Along with my own work that talks about some of her involvement in movements, you might also be interested in checking out this collection of material about her from 2005, this biography of her late husband and co-organizer published in 1980, and also Judy Rebick's oral history of the Canadian women's movement, which included material from an interview with Madeleine about some of her feminist involvement.

Quote: Revolutionary Listening

Now there's the real question: Can we all get along long enough to make a revolution? Perhaps, but history tells us that it will mean taking leadership from some very radical women of color, and if that's the case I'm not holding my breath. What the old-guard male militants really need to do is give up the mic for a moment, listen to the victims of democracy sing their dreams of a new world, and take notes on how to fight for the freedom of all.

-- Robin D.G. Kelley (Freedom Dreams p. 156, emphasis in original)

Review: Bodies and Pleasures

[Ladelle McWhorter. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.]

Those of us on the left are often not very good at talking about the living of life at the individual level. There are a number of different ways that it is done badly among us, by different people or at different times. From some, you see a refusal to think about it at all, and a focus that is entirely on change at the social level, as if the collectives that can create such change are not made up of people and our practices or as if our politics should have no bearing on our lives outside of meetings and actions. From others, there is a focus on lifestyle choices that ends up patrolling in-group/out-group boundaries (often in quite racist ways) and/or that imports a very asocial, individualistic moralism into our groups and communities and movements in ways that are divisive and that form the basis of usually-silent but highly destructive hierarchical purity politics. And of course there is lots that is loving and communicative and accepting and supportive in how we live our lives and relate to each other as well, but even that is often similarly detached from really thinking through how we act beyond the level of "be kind to each other."

Bodies and Pleasures is an account of Ladelle McWhorter's reading of the work of Michel Foucault in the context of both her own experiences of sexual regulation and the evolution of her understanding of the social world. As such, I experienced it as important in two overlapping but distinct areas. One relates to her account of her struggles against sexual normalization. Our lives are very, very different in a lot of ways, but there were moments in reading those parts of the book when I felt that jolt of recognition you feel when you read something you've experienced but never put into words before. The other area of importance of this book is that it offers some conceptual tools that might -- might -- be useful for those of us involved in movements and committed to social change as we think about everyday practices of living, particularly if we want a critical approach that is not already three-quarters of the way down the path to lifestylism, moralism, or privilege-based exclusion.

In volume 1 of his History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that the commonsense idea that we live in a sexually repressive culture is only true in a very narrow and specific sense, and that in fact in the last 150 years there has been a great proliferation of spaces and ways and compulsions to talk about sexuality. This proliferation of talk has been part of the emergence of selves that are in large part defined by sexuality, of sexual subjects, in a way that did not exist before, and also part of the emergence of a complex of relations and practices through which such selves are administered. A distinct sphere of life labelled "sexuality" has emerged out of previously disparate and unconnected sensations, practices, impulses, and ideas. It is one instance among a number in which norms have been created, and individuals are assessed relative to those norms and disciplined to better fit those norms, as part of producing and controlling populations. A central aspect of this has been the production over that period of "the homosexual" as a defined and subjugated type of human being -- that is not the only axis along which such sexual regulation operates, but it is an important one.

McWhorter first read that particular work of Foucault's in her early 20s, in the early 1980s, and it spoke profoundly to her. Throughout her early life, in many different ways, in many different spaces, she had faced individuals in positions of power and broader social arrangements that pressured her to confess to being a particular type of sexual entity -- the type labelled "homosexual" -- and thereby to become knowable and known as a particular kind of not-quite-human being, as someone who in so many moments would have their complexity and ethical fullness and even basic freedom denied because of that status. She knew keenly before she had the language to express it what it meant to be pinned to that category, so she resisted as best she could being sorted, being labelled, being subjected to the particular forms of oppressive social regulation. This was never about doubt or hesitation about her sexual and romantic relationships with women, but rather a keen and deeply felt objection to the ways in which that forced her production as a certain kind of subject.

She charts the course of her resistance over different phases of her life, as well as the growing depth and sophistication of her understanding of Foucault. She discusses what it means to try and understand the world genealogically, in Foucault's sense -- to constantly call into question and seek the historical and social roots of every category, and so have no solid, simple, humanist place for the knowing subject. She engages with some of the key criticisms that have been levelled at Foucault's work over the years, in particular the assertions that his analysis leaves us with no ground for making moral judgements, no way to exert agency, and no way to ground political collectivity. I don't think she settles all of those questions once and for all, but she successfully shows that his work cannot just be dismissed on those grounds. She addresses modes of resistance, again with reference to her own journey. She talks about the body -- one of the key elements in her title, and one of the key elements in her understanding of Foucault's thoughts about resistance. She also talks about the other element of each, pleasure, and about some specific practices of what she describes as "self-overcoming" grounded in bodies and pleasures.

The useful stuff in her account of her struggles against sexual normalization takes a couple of different forms. I've mentioned before that one way to periodize my life would be to distinguish between the time before counter-normative sexual and relationship practices were even imaginable for me, versus after they became imaginable and gradually became more a part of my lived practices along a couple of distinct axes. The moments of recognition that I experienced in reading this book apply more directly to the later period, but I don't feel particularly inclined to elaborate on that at this point. The perhaps more distant but interesting relevance is to the earlier period, where my practices, desires, and imagination were thoroughly normative along every axis. Even so, I felt the pressure to become known in sexual terms as oppressive. Partly, given my intense shame around sexuality, this was around being pinned to being a sexual subject at all, never mind that it was a thoroughly privileged sexual subject at that point. More interestingly, I now recognized, it was resistance to being pinned to a particular version of masculinity that I desperately, urgently wanted no part of. It's not that I've ever had even any inkling of myself as doing gender in any way other than masculinity, but at that point in my life, based on my observation of the media and the people around me, I understood (even if I would have been unable to articulate) masculine desire for women as having a necessary connection to ways of doing masculinity that were about treating women and subordinate men badly. I felt that being known as a (thoroughly normative and privileged) sexual subject would have pinned me to gender in a way that repelled me. (Though I'm sure it worked the other way too -- part of why I wanted no part of that particular way of doing gender was because it was, by definition to me at that point, the only way of doing gender I had ever encountered which experienced and acted on desire, given that my understanding at the time was that no women and only bad men felt/acted on sexual desire, and that was shameful.)

The more general utility of this book for making choices about everyday practices of living has to do with the way she builds towards talking about the two elements in her title, bodies and pleasures. For her, the significant thing about bodies is understanding them as Foucault does, not as the Cartesian correspondent of "mind" but as a united whole that is capable of developing new capacities over time in response to disciplinary pressures. This capacity of bodies is the basis for the various social technologies through which disciplinary power, often in conjunction with judicious applications of pain, has been applied over the last 200 years develop capacities that are in some sense "useful" to various institutions, and that ensure the docility of those of us who are thus disciplined -- it has made us good workers, good soldiers, good consumers, and so on. However, she argues that this same capacity in bodies can be turned in more liberatory directions. That is, through how we live our own lives, we can cultivate new capacities in our bodies through deliberate, disciplinary choices that are based not in cultivating pain but in cultivating capacity for pleasures, and that are directed not towards some external end but are purely directed towards expanding our range of possibilities. Pleasures may or may not have content that we currently understand as sexual, but they are deliberately oriented differently from dominant ways of pursuing sexual desire. She gives, as examples of disciplines of pleasure, gardening and dancing from her own life, and of sadomasochistic sexual practices, hallucinogenic drugs, and the writing of philosophy from Foucault's life, and illustrates the ways in which each of these have functioned as practices of self-overcoming, of change that changes self while the relations and practices around self remain the same but that change self in ways that will (or at least might) lead that self to be an origin point of challenge and changes in those surrounding relations and practices. The examples she gives are meant not to be taken up directly but as illustrations, and she encourages those who wish to experiment with such ways of being to find their own disciplines of pleasure.

This sounds like it could easily become very self-involved and even narcissistic, and I'm not at all convinced that it is guaranteed to avoid those pitfalls. Nonetheless, it is based on the idea that deliberate cultivation of self in this manner can be a path towards us being other than we have been socially produced to be; towards us overcoming those limits into which we have been trained but which are not (or are no longer) about avoiding direct, tragic consequences; towards us challenging those relations and practices which oppressively discipline us. The idea, I think, is that the non-utilitarian grounding in pleasure will provide both the energy to motivate us and the source for logics of acting that differ from the discplinary (and capitalist) logics which permeate our lives today. To me, this resonates strongly with John Holloway's idea of creating cracks in capitalism, as it provides an answer as to where the non-capitalist logics that are to shape those cracks are to come from. McWhorter admits that there is nothing sure about what will come from following ethical disciplines of pleasure, though I think she's right that there is at least a reasonable chance that following such disciplines will, sooner or later, bring you up against normalizing disciplines and therefore carry you into struggles to create change. I think what for me makes her analysis worth taking seriously is the fact that it applies to areas of life that we make decisions about, that we enact practices in, regardless of whether we do so with political intent, so it is at least worth seeing if there are ways that we can take up her ideas that are consonant with our other political commitments. In retrospect, certain ways that I have related to writing and certain ways that I have related to sexuality could, in complicated and contradictory ways, be understood as disciplines of pleasure that have contributed to change in self.

There are a few other things to be wary of in McWhorter's analysis. For instance, she doesn't really deal with the ways in which some of what Foucault has to say in History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 is quite Orientalist. And she doesn't really deal with the fact that experiencing the moment of confession and consequent sexual identificaiton and classificaiton as the originary moment one's oppression is premised, more or less, on being white -- which isn't to say that racialized people don't experience that moment in all sorts of horrible ways, but because of the unchosen visibility that is inherent to most forms of racial oppression it is highly unlikely that it will be experienced as the first moment of oppression in the same way. And I think the examples she gives of how disciplines of pleasure lead her towards more collective political involvement -- she uses the Foucauldian term "governmentality" -- deserve more attention. She is quite right in arguing that we shouldn't just dismiss her conventional-seeming participation in legislatively oriented efforts to oppose attacks on queer lives in the Southern state in which she lives and works, given that they are very much relevant to the space that ordinary people have to survive and thrive there, but I think attaching her sophisticated understanding of power to an equally sophisticated understanding of movements and what they are and what they can do would be very useful.

In any case, I think this book is worth reading and it contains ideas that are worth taking up, given that it deals with levels of practice that those of us who identify with movements normally don't do a good job of thinking about, and given that the critical but open-ended character of her answers seem at least potentially resistant to the risks of lifestyleism, moralism, and exclusion. Is any of what she says certain? Definitely not. But it feels worth experimenting with to me.


[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Quote: Utopias

In the meantime, to adapt Mrs Thatcher's famous dictum, there is no alternative to Utopia, and late capitalism seems to have no natural enemies (the religious fundamentalisms which resist American or Western imperialisms having by no means endorsed anti-capitalist positions). Yet it is not only the invincible universality of capitalism which is at issue: tirelessly undoing all the social gains made since the inception of the socialist and communist movements, repealing all the welfare measures, the safety net, the right to unionization, industrial and ecological regulatory laws, offering to privatize pensions and indeed to dismantle whatever stands in the way of the free market all over the world. What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency is irreversible, but that the historical alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socioeconomic system is conceivable, let alone practically available. The Utopians not only offer to conceive of such systems; Utopian form is itself a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality, to the point where one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet.

-- Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, p. xii

Local Food and Co-operatives

I wrote the following article for the monthly newsletter of a Sudbury organization called reThink Green. I did this as part of my placement at another local organization called Eat Local Sudbury, which is an element of my current detour through graduate school.

Local Food and Co-operatives
By Scott Neigh

It manages to be both obvious and difficult to wrap our minds around: In order to have a greener impact on the planet, we have to think about doing things differently far beyond the kinds of individual choices that are more green or less green but that leave the shape of our lives and communities otherwise unchanged. For instance, choosing to take public transit rather than drive on an individual occasion is certainly a positive thing, but a shift towards sustainable transportation that is sufficient in its reach and equitable in its consequences means going beyond encouraging more people to make that choice under current conditions. It also means thinking about what we need to do socially to make it more possible and more reasonable for more people to choose to take transit more of the time, probably in ways that will end up making our lives and our communities work differently than they do now.

I want to make the case that one kind of difference that can foster greener outcomes is supporting local co-operatives, which means embracing a different kind of relationship to the organizations in our community than those demanded by regular businesses. At the moment, I’m working with an organization called Eat Local Sudbury (ELS), which is organized as a co-op and is currently figuring out how to bring its ways of doing things more in line with the strengths of that particular organizational form. This means that what I have to say is largely focused on talking about the work that ELS does. However, 2012 is also the International Year of the Co-operative (see www.canada2012.coop), so it also seems like a good opportunity for people concerned with the environment to think a little more broadly about how co-ops can be part of building communities that are sustainable.

ELS has a storefront at 176 Larch Street where you can buy food that has been produced locally, in many cases using green methods. Many people who are concerned with their impacts on the earth are already aware of the benefits of eating locally. The closer food is produced to where it gets eaten, the less fossil fuel it requires to get it from farm to table, which is good for the environment. The money paid for local food is more likely to go to support producers who have smaller operations and who are part of our communities, rather than huge businesses. When food is local, it is often possible to have a much better idea of how it was produced in terms of processes, environmental impacts, and the wellbeing of the animals and people involved. More of the money spent on local food stays in the community, as the producers in turn pay workers and buy supplies closer to home.

The benefits of buying local food are many, but those of you who shop at ELS already know that a commitment to eating locally means making some changes in how we relate to buying food. Given how busy our lives are and the ever-increasing pressures to work more and more to make ends meet, it is no wonder that the pull of supermarket buying is so strong – one-stop shopping to get whatever we need, and if the food we buy comes from 3000 km away and we don’t really know what happened to it before it got to us, well, we’re too busy to do too much about it.

An outlet that focuses on local food, in contrast, cannot have everything and cannot be a one-stop solution. ELS is working all the time to expand the range of products that it offers, but there are lots of foods that are simply not produced near Sudbury or even in Ontario, or that are available only at certain times of year. Moreover, dealing with small, local producers rather than massive, transcontinental supply chains means that not everything will be available all of the time. Our local environment has rhythms, people’s work has rhythms, and to buy locally we need to recognize that our buying and eating need to have some rhythms too. Eating local means making changes in our lives beyond picking X over Y.

There are other aspects of ensuring there is local food on your table that are less visible. Any food that you buy not only has to be produced by someone and sold by someone, but it also has to get between the producer and the seller. Industrial agriculture has large-scale distribution systems that span continents already in place. Yet the infrastructure to get food from the farmer down the road to your table is still developing. In fact, it is one of the priorities of a newly-formed provincial network of local food co-ops to figure out how best to support the growth of robust local food distribution systems – how to fill in the “missing middle,” to use one of the buzzwords. Though it is not usually visible to people who want local produce, local meats, or local processed food, doing this means making new connections, building new relationships, and figuring out new ways of doing things. That is, it is another way that having greener impacts requires making changes and doing work that is social.

Eat Local Sudbury

My role at ELS is to contribute to a process of organizational development which, in part, involves shifting how we do things to be more in line with the fact that we are a co-operative. As the work has unfolded, it has become clearer and clearer that the way we need to think about it is “different food in different ways” or even “better food in better ways.” The co-operative form offers advantages that will allow the local food system in Sudbury to grow and thrive in the years to come.

Despite the fact that many Canadians are members of co-operatives, whether it is their community credit union or a retail giant like Mountain Equipment Co-op – as well as, of course, ELS – many of us do not really know what they are or how they work. While different co-ops can look and operate very differently, all are enterprises that are owned and democratically controlled by the people whose participation as consumers, producers, or workers, or some combination, make the organization a reality. There are co-ops that engage in almost every kind of activity, not just retail and financial services but also childcare, agriculture, manufacturing, and much more.

Rather than being legally obligated to focus entirely on maximizing profit for shareholders, co-ops are organized around meeting the shared needs of members. Rather than being controlled by whoever has dollars to sink into an organization, co-ops are governed on a one member/one vote basis. The guiding principles of co-operatives mandate attention to social and community needs. Their democratic, member-controlled structure allows for a kind of responsiveness to the needs of the ordinary people who constitute them and the communities that nurture them that massive businesses simply cannot match.

The key to a vibrant co-operative, particularly a smaller one, is a mobilized and engaged membership. Though co-ops have to navigate many of the same pressures as for-profit businesses, their commitments to organizational democracy, to the wellbeing of members, and to strengthening community mean that active participation by members – or member-owners, as they are sometimes called – plays a much more significant role in shaping co-ops and driving them forward than the relationship between a consumer and a business.

Within those broad parameters, different co-operatives can do their work in many different ways. Currently, ELS is organized as a hybrid of a producer co-op and a consumer co-op – a joint, co-operative venture between those who produce food locally and those who wish to buy local food. In the coming months, we want to get people talking about what it might look like to get member-owners more actively involved in making decisions, promoting local food, engaging the broader community, and bringing ELS to life, in a way that fulfills the co-operative goals of democracy, support of members, and strengthening community. We envision an organization that is community controlled, community supported, and not dependent on grant funding for survival. We imagine building a dynamic, responsive local food distribution system that is networked with such systems elsewhere in Ontario, and we imagine turning more and more people on to the advantages – personal, environmental, community – of eating local food.

If you aren’t an ELS member, I encourage you to become one. If you haven’t bought food at our store, or you haven’t done so recently, I encourage you to come in and take a look. And if you are a member, I encourage you to become part of the conversations that will shape ELS’ co-operative future. ELS members are invited to come to the Environmental Resource Centre (176 Larch Street, back entrance) from 1-3pm on Saturday, March 3 or 7-9pm on Thursday, March 8 to learn about co-ops, to offer your input as ELS changes, and to start thinking about how you can be a part of those changes.

Scott is a Sudbury-based writer, a parent, and an activist, who is currently working at ELS as a placement student from Laurentian University. If you have questions or suggestions, you can reach him at eatlocalcooperative@gmail.com.

Review: Exile and Pride

[Eli Clare. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation. Ten-year anniversary edition. Cambridge MA: South End Press, 2009.]

I often feel that describing the pieces that I write in response to books as "reviews" is a bit inaccurate because I only occasionally relate to the books in question in the ways that a review is, traditionally, supposed to. What I write tend to be more reactions or reflections or responses, or just meanderings. Nonetheless, I inevitably end up deciding just to sit with that unease -- to accept that the label "review" doesn't always quite fit the way it is normatively intended and to trouble and loosen it by taking it on anyway. In the case of this book, I'm afraid that what I write will be more of a moderately reflective fanboy "squee" than a proper review.

Exile and Pride is a memoir by activist, author, and poet Eli Clare, who moves through the world as a white transguy (formerly lesbian) with cerebral palsy. It is short and accessible, but incredibly politically complex; easy to read, but dense and at times difficult, if that makes any sense at all. It is, in ways that resonate with and take-up longstanding traditions of theorizing used especially powerfully by some radical women of colour, a powerful example of critically theorizing the social world by starting from self.

The book jumps back and forth through time, weaving together Clare's childhood in rural Oregon, his contemporary life in urban queer left contexts, and the journey in between. Contrary to the advice in the book about writing memoir that I reviewed back in December, Clare's immense writing talent and thoughtful choices in this book illustrate that you do not have to excise the complexity that is a feature of all of our lives in order to arrive at a telling of and reflections on life that are compelling and readable. The book also exhibits great honesty and, in so doing, takes both personal and political risk -- for instance, his refusal to be cowed by the right-wing use of oppressive and just plain wrong queer-because-of-abuse narratives into refusing to probe the ways in which his awful history of sexual abuse as a child does intersect, in much more subtle and complex ways than anti-queer narratives allow, with his queer ways of being as an adult.

More generally, he relates to experience in ways that I would find difficult but that are key to the power of this genre of theorizing. He talks about strength and weakness, transcendence and frailty, other people's foolishness and his own foolishness, pleasure and pain. He also uses experience as data, as a starting point for narrative, as a starting point for analysis, as metaphor, as source of rhetorical device, and as guide to making judgments that shape knowledge production. Perhaps most importantly, it is treated not as distinct from the social world but as tightly integrated into it. As well, he relates self and social to place much more thoroughly and effectively than many lefty writers.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of how this book is written is the way that it creates a complex analysis for the reader without anything even vaguely resembling the kind of difficult, obscure writing found in the work of so many university-based theorists (ahem, ahem). I think this is because critical memoir allows for the deployment of what you might called "show" complexity (or modelled complexity) rather than "tell" complexity (or abstracted complexity). The latter requires drawing out and naming the complexity of the world -- telling it, in the sense of the binary posed in many instructional books about writing between telling and showing. This leads to things like coining new words, and to taking up various complicated and inaccessible rhetorical strategies. While there are times that such approaches are warranted, and things they can do that other approaches cannot, I think there is scope and power in "show" complexity that is left untapped by many, many people interested in writing about the social world. Modelled complexity uses much the same technique as fiction and literary nonfiction writers to represent the immense complexity of the social world not through taking it apart and naming it but through conjuring the whole in ways that channel the reader's identification to this or that specific aspect. It depends on mobilizing our everyday experience of a complex world as a resource for writing that complexity, and for writing about that complexity. Exile and Pride is a great example of this approach.

I am, as you can no doubt tell, a fan. I recommend this book highly.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Long Quote: History

So long as one operates within the discourse of 'history' produced at the institutional site of the university, it is not possible simply to walk out of the deep collusion between 'history' and the modernizing narrative(s) of citizenship, bourgeois public and private, and the nation-state. 'History' as a knowledge system is firmly embedded in institutional practices that invoke the nation-state at every step -- witness the organization and politics of teaching, recruitment, promotions, and publication in history departments, politics that survive the occasional brave and heroic attempts by individual historians to liberate 'history' from the metanarrative of the nation state. One only has to ask, for instance: Why is history a compulsory part of education of the modern person in all countries today, including those that did quite comfortably without it until as late as the eighteenth century? Why should children all over the world today have to come to terms with a subject called 'history' when we know that this compulsion is neither natural nor ancient?

It does not take much imagination to see that the reason for this lies in what European imperialism and third-world nationalisms have achieved together: the universalization of the nation-state as the most desirable form of political community. Nation-states have the capacity to enforce their truth games, and universities, their critical distance notwithstanding, are part of the battery of institutions complicit in this process. "Economics" and "history" are the knowledge forms that correspond to the two major institutions that the rise (and later universalization) of the bourgeois order has given to the world -- the capitalist mode of production and the nation-state ('history' speaking to the figure of the citizen). A critical historian has no choice but to negotiate this knowledge.

-- Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, p. 41