138: Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology

Published in 1977, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought examines the idea of autonomous technology as a "convenient receptacle for a host of  contemporary anxieties." Using literary and political writings from a wide range of historical moments, he shows how autonomous technology has been associated with fears about a loss of human agency and self-governance, both at the individual and the societal level, to machines of our own creation.  Technology therefore has a politics, and if humans are to regain control and autonomy, we need to dismantle technologies, learn how they work, and rebuild them so that they serve human needs rather than their own dominance and reproduction.

Winner argues that while technology has been central to political thought for some 200 years, the 20th century proliferation of technologies and their integration in everyday life has made technology into a "vast, diverse, ubiquitous totality that stands at the center of our modern culture."  This diversity makes the word "technology" so complex as to be meaningless, or at least illegible, with the result that technology itself becomes a rather terrifying black box, appearing to usurp political power and move forward of its own volition.  In modernity, the complexity of technology requires a new ruling class, engineers, to interface with it, and an environment conducive to its operations, with which architects and engineers happily comply.  Technology also requires a particular social order to fulfill its operational requirements - which is to say that technology creates a particular form of technological politics, where the claim that "man controls technology" looks more irrational than the opposite.

137: Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Rhodes is a novelist, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb is, as most reviewers have noted, a readable, and at times engrossing, epic (or as Hacker calls it, an “Atomiad.”)  It traces the development of the atomic bomb from the early 1900s, when physicists were just beginning to suspect the existence of an atom (though he locates belief in the “atom” as “an invisible layer of eternal, elemental substance” in ancient Greeks Leucippus and Democritus) through Los Alamos and WWII, and on to the development and testing of the “Super” or hydrogen bomb in the 1950s.  Various reviewers put their own political slants on Rhodes’ thesis, but Broad, I think, captures it most fairly: since 1945, when the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, science has for the first time become powerful enough to challenge the state.  Critically, unlike technological determinists, Rhodes sees that though atomic technology has changed the way politics is enacted, the relationship between politics and technology is a two-way street – which means, following Bohr, that a peaceful, unified, global system is just as possible in the Nuclear Age as the current system of warring states.

118: Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that far from being a passive act, consumption, whether as use of an object or space, “ways of operating,” or art/ “ways of making” (combination, selection, cut-and-inversion), is a kind of spatial production.   

Building on (but rejecting) Foucault, Bourdieu, Kant, and others, de Certeau conceives of the physical world as divided into two classes: those with power and capital who are in control of space and production, and those with neither, but who exercise their agency by taking advantage of opportunities and consuming creatively.  The powerful side of things is also the scientific, the rational; this side creates static places of power, characterized by rational utopian uniformity, legibility, clarity, strategy, and centralized control.  The weak consumers take advantage of cracks in the rational system of these places; dependent on time, these peripatetic storytellers (walking and narration are inseparable) combine the fixed elements of the city/story with memories and inventions triggered by circumstance and audience to subvert the rational powers and create something new.

117: Doreen Massey's For Space

Massey's For Space is an attempt to develop a theory of subjectivity/ agency through a postmodern conception of space as geographical, temporal, and relational.  Because of Cresswell, I expected Massey’s construction of “the spatial” as relational flows, especially in counterpoint to Harvey’s construction of place as nodes where the flows of capital get stuck.   

But I didn’t expect her to be so tightly bound with high postmodern thinkers.  Massey draws a great deal from Laclau & Mouffe’s radical democracy and Deleuze’s reconfiguration of subjects from nodes to trajectories; I guess this is what happens when you shift focus from bodies to space as the field where bodies interact.  Of particular interest to me is her search for agency/ construction of radical subjectivity as uniquely spatial, outwardlooking and aware of its own relational constitution.  Space, rather than time, makes agency possible.   

Massey is trying to find a way to move beyond Modernism, which (she says) falsely annihilates space through time, and beyond the extremes of Postmodernism, which falsely annihilates time through space, and to articulate depth with breadth.  Yes, connecting depth with breadth is the project of all cultural theory, but her solution – to focus on space-time as the product of relations/ interactions between heterogeneous elements dissolves binaries like global/ local, place/space, space/time, and thereby makes space for agency.  She does a better job of situating potential agents within an uneven power grid than do Laclau & Mouffe/ other radical democracy theorists, but I do wonder if she’s falsely assuming that everyone would take freedom if given the space to do so - in which case she’s more of a product of the Enlightenment than she cares to admit.  (Not a bad thing to think that all people are fundamentally equal on some level; I’m just sayin…)   

Anyway.  I like that space and social relations are mutually constitutive – the concept is very useful for talking about transportation-based social movements.  She’s also got a nice discussion of how local movements might articulate into larger global struggles that looks a lot like how (radical) transportation movements, by their nature, have to grow.  And she clearly reads.  A lot.

Originally published on 6.17.12.

116: Doreen Massey's Space, Place, and Gender

Doreen Massey's Space, Place, and Gender is a collection of articles from the late 1970s to the 1990s, all of which attempt to formulate concepts of space and place in terms of social relations, class and gender in particular.  Her basic arguments, many of which she develops later in For Space, have to do with the development of a decentered, relational, temporal/process-based, postmodern concept of space, and the mutually constitutive relationship between space and social relations/ inequalities.  She sees

"space-time as a configuration of social relationships within which the specifically spatial may be conceived of as an inherently dynamic simultaneity.  Moreover, since social relations are inevitably and everywhere imbued with power and meaning and symbolism, this view of the spatial is an ever-shifting social geometry of power and signification.” (3)

104: Don Mitchell's Cultural Geography

Don Mitchell's Cultural Geography: An Introduction is a critical introduction to cultural geography intended for graduate (or advanced undergraduate) students.  By "critical," Mitchell means a) he takes a normative position (here, informed by Marxism and materialism) and makes an argument, and b) he invites his readers to question, argue, and struggle with both the points he makes and the arguments behind them, because this kind of intellectual engagement will help us learn.  by "introduction to cultural geography," he means that the book explores the "struggles" that make "culture," both "to show how they get worked out in particular spaces and places - in particular landscapes - and to show how struggles over 'culture' are a key determinant, day in and day out, in the ways that we live our lives - and in what therefore constitutes significant cultural difference."  Culture, in Mitchell's formulation, is a relational process and is always political; the production of cultural space is thus the production of particular geometries of power that give shape and meaning to our lives.

56: Leo Marx' Machine in the Garden

Leo Marx' The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America is an American Studies classic.  Written in 1964, the book uses a myth-and-symbol strategy to examine the "pastoral ideal" as a "powerful metaphor of contradiction" between nature and technology/history.  Marx is also very keen to determine what, if anything, makes American culture exceptional.  After analyzing many, many canonical writers - Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, and Jefferson, but also Shakespeare (The Tempest), D.H. Lawrence, and others - he concludes that American culture is neither totally pastoral and nostalgic nor purely technological and Progress-driven, but a dialectical combination of the two, on a symbolic level.  Thus art, in the broad sense of human ingenuity, shapes the landscape.  And American culture, according to myth-and-symbol, can be accessed through art.

Marx also argues that symbolic landscapes are always part myth, part reality, and that Americans have a tendency to mix the two, which means that an interdisciplinary American Studies approach that merges history and literature is the perfect way to study American culture and American exceptionalism.  While he does stick to the canon, uses "we" uncritically in reference to American culture, and really does seem to think that literature can speak for all of America, his argument that the American landscape is both technologically and culturally constructed, and that it is at once pastoral and industrial, rings true in landscape studies today.  Further, he, like many other post-war Americans, is very much concerned with the apparent technological domination of the landscape, and he issues a veiled solution to this problem that plays on the double meaning of symbol as both artistic and political representation: "the machine's sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimately belongs not to art but to politics." Well then.  If anyone tries to argue that Leo Marx was pro-American exceptionalism, I might suggest they read his book more closely.

33: D'Emilio & Freedman's Intimate Matters

This one got a bit technical... oops ;)

John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman's Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America has the modest goals of surveying the history of American sexuality from the colonial era to the present AND rewriting both American history and sexuality in the process.  The authors draw on mostly secondary sources  to make three main arguments: that political movements to change sexuality usually occur in the context of larger economic, social, and political upheavals; that gender inequality and sexual politics are inseparable, and that sexual politics develop out of both real and symbolic (or representational) issues.  They are also keep to connect individual sexuality with larger cultural constructions of it, and to show that struggles over empowerment and oppression outside the bedroom are often connected to those same struggles within it.

The authors divide their history of US sexuality into four periods, and trace continuities and ruptures within and among them.  (No, don't worry, they don't tell a story of slow but steady progress.)  These are:

23: Edwin Layton's Revolt of the Engineers

Revolt of the Engineers lives in the depths of library storage, which is unfortunate because it's a rather interesting study of a failed social movement among early 20th-century engineers.  Also, it was written in 1971, and the political and ideological struggles of that era seem clearly to have influenced Layton's thinking.  And maybe it's just me, but I find reading about a social movement from one era through the eyes of another to be rather illuminating.

Layton argues that professionalization and progressive organizing efforts among engineers in the early 20th century may not have led to large, lasting social change either within the profession or in American society, but the engineers' efforts were still an important cross-pollination between technology and culture.

To support this claim, Layton traces a chronological history of the rise and fall of different professional engineering organizations and their relationship to the broader social reform movement in turn-of-the-century America.  One of his more entertaining examples is the career of Henry Gantt, whose appropriately-named Gantt charts are still in use today, at least among my undergrad Civil Engineering students.

Henry Gantt was a talented follower of Frederick Taylor, the guy who devised all those time and motion studies to make Ford's assembly lines faster and more efficient.  (Harry Bravermann and Tim Cresswell both do cool - and very different - treatments of Taylor and his impact.)  Like Taylor, Gantt thought scientific management was the best thing ever, and he developed his Gantt chart as a visual project management tool to help users maintain top-down scientific control over an entire process.  Also like Taylor, Gantt thought that scientific management principles could and should be applied in areas beyond the confines of business, especially government and education.  But Gantt, who liked to carefully chart out arms production and ship production processes in his office during WWI, went a step further.  With the right visualization tools (heh) and a firm commitment to scientific management principles, Gantt thought that engineers could potentially plan not just individual industries but the whole economy, from defense production, education, and government to automobile manufacturing, city development, and social services.  And because scientific management efficiently allocated resources and talent, letting the engineers run society would be perfectly efficiently and perfectly just.  Democracy and scientific management would finally become synonymous!

Now, the problem with this scheme, as Layton points out, is that it's not a democracy but a technocracy, where the engineers in their central planning offices get to design sociotechnical systems, but all citizens can do is conform to them.  Incidentally, this kind of thinking also plagued engineering's professional societies, where infighting over power and prestige kept engineers from making any serious progress toward social goals.  Layton concludes here, with the decline of a movement that could have had a huge impact on society, particularly during the Great Depression. 

Yet I think that if self-serving politics hindered engineers from effecting large-scale social reform or a mass seizure of political power, they helped them spread scientific management ideas in more conservative arenas like business, and manufacturing in particular.  Here, stripped of its revolutionary potential, scientific management could be used to further exploit the labor of assembly-line and sweatshop workers by speeding the pace of production and thus lowering per-unit labor costs.  Layton doesn't dwell on this particular legacy, but his frustration with his subjects' deflation of their movement is clear.  The implications for the time in which he was writing seem pretty clear, too.

15: Agee & Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

After days of pounding through historians, sociologists, and geographers, poring over the iconic images and arresting prose of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men makes me feel alive again.  (Hey, I was an English major for a reason!) 

Nominally, James Agee and Walker Evans' book is a study of three (white) sharecropping families in rural Alabama in summer 1936, the Ricketts, the Gudgers, and the Woods.  But as James Agee argues in the book's opening pages, it is much, much more than that.  It is a full, thorough, truthful account of their subjects in both narrative and photographic form; a conversation, albeit limited by the asynchronous nature of their chosen medium, among the families, the writer and photographer, and the reader; an indictment of the capitalist system that abuses those lowest in its hierarchy; a study of the humanity of the poor; and - let's be honest - a way to make a little money for Agee and Evans, too.

Both photos and narrative touch on all of these themes in depth, but the most central one, I think, is the humanity - both unique to them and common to all people - of the tenant families themselves.  And, possibly because they lived with George and Annie Mae Gudger for the four weeks of their study, or because this couple was closest to their own age but occupying such a different part of the socioeconomic hierarchy, both Agee and Evans express this theme best with respect to George Gudger.

Since Evans' image of Gudger comes first in the book, he gets to speak first here.

I'm not the best at reading images, but I will say this: from the distance of nearly 80 years, this image is very much the image of the depression: the gritty black-and-white exposure, the half-clean shirt and overalls, the rough background, the eyes looking directly into the camera in a mixture of strength, frustration, and despair.  It is the stuff that American ideology is made of: the depression may have beaten America down, but the people are determined, and we will win!  But there are so many different emotions playing out at once in Gudger's face, and the tight framing of the photo accentuates not the poverty of his surroundings, but him: in creating this portrait, Evans has allowed a single man to express the way he feels about how his life is turning out, and simultaneously created something that speaks to many, many people who've been there.

Agee, no less poetic, describes Gudger in this way:


George Gudger is a human being, a man, not like any other human being so much as he is like himself…. [S]omehow a much more important, and dignified, and true fact about him than I could conceivably invent, though I were an illimitably better artist than I am, is that fact that he is exactly, down to the last inch and instant, who, what, were, when and why he is.  He is in those terms living, right now, in flesh and blood and breathing, in an actual part of a world in which also, quite as irrelevant to imagination, you and I are living.  Granted that beside that fact it is a small thing, and granted also that it is essentially and finally a hopeless one, to try merely to reproduce and communicate his living as nearly exactly as possible, nevertheless I can think of no worthier and many worse subjects of attempt. 

Like Evans, Agee describes Gudger as both a "human being, a man" and "himself;" he belongs simultaneously to his own day to day life and to the world of "you and I;" he is at once irreplicable and reproducible.

This theme, by the way, ties in nicely with the title of the book; the second half of the verse that begins "let us now praise famous men," which Agee intentionally leaves out, only to append at the end, is "and our fathers that begat us" - irreplicable but reproducible men in their own right.

13: Michael Denning's The Cultural Front

Michael Denning's The Cultural Front, for all its weighty historical detail and analysis, centers around a single theme: that the 1930s amalgamation of labor and cultural interests into a "Popular Front" might be little-known now, but it resulted in a "laboring of culture" that is still reverberating, at least in left-leaning circles, today.
What Denning means by "laboring of culture" is the tricky part, because he sees labor and culture as dialectically related parts, which means that each shapes the other and that they're therefore as difficult to separate as a codependent high school couple.  So he spends the first half of the book tracing their conjoined public appearances, including the shared language of the "labor movement," the "proletariat," and the "work," "toil," and "struggle" of labor activists and artists; the "proletarianization" of the culture industries, as children of working-class parents increasingly work as singers, artists, novelists, actors, cartoonists and make mass culture more like working-class culture; and the "social democratic" labor politics that influenced (and was influenced by) everything from textile strikes to fiction to dinner-table conversation.

The result of all this cross-pollination between labor movements, the people in the working-class, and cultural production, Denning argues, was a mass movement to permanently connect American labor with American culture.  That way, American culture could represent and be represented by the people, and Leftist and communist social visions could be realized. 

And lest his readers think he's making all of this up, Denning spends the whole second half of the book proving it by analyzing products of this labor-culture combo: John Dos Passos' U.S.A, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Billie Holiday's love songs, experimental musical theater, gangster films, and something he calls the "ghetto pastoral," of which A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is probably the best-known example.  By thoroughly examining each of these cultural productions formally (er, he spends a good 50 pages talking about metaphors and narrative structures in the Dos Passos section alone) and simultaneously situating them in their cultural and historical context, Denning shows that yes, in the 1930s, labor and culture were thoroughly intertwined.

Of course, mass culture is not super communist or particularly pro-Labor today; if anything, the profusion of reality TV shows, re-released remakes of Spiderman movies, auto-tuned pop music, and baby animal YouTube videos that populate mass culture serve more to distract us than to incite us to revolution.  But lest this decoupling of labor and culture prove that the Popular Front didn't have as much impact on American culture as Denning claims, he closes his book with this quote from cultural theorist Fredric Jameson:


history progresses by failure rather than by success…. It would be better to think of Lenin or Brecht (to pick a few illustrious names at random) as failures – that is, as actors and agents constrained by their own ideological limits and those of their moment of history – than as triumphant examples and models in some hagiographic or celebratory sense.

In other words, while the movement failed to permanently connect labor and culture, the people in it were both ordinary and extraordinary: they were totally human, but we are still trying to figure out the full implications of the things they produced, the ideas they had, and the politics they espoused.  And hey, maybe the most successful movements are those that show us how ordinary humans can create history.

12: Stephen Daniels' Fields of Vision

Fields of Vision is a book about the relationship between landscape imagery and national identity in England and the United States. This is not exactly a topic that excites me, though to his credit, Daniels does manage to make a bunch of 18th- and 19th-century landscape paintings a lot more interesting than I thought they were.  He also (thankfully) goes beyond painting to include a landscape architect, a printmaker, and a building.  And his theoretical argument, that over time, certain landscape imagery can become a repository for so many different people's interpretations of national identity that it becomes a symbol for the nation - well, that sounds cultural studies-y enough for me.

Daniels' first example, St. Paul's Cathedral, made the most sense to me.  After the Great Fire in 1666 destroyed an older cathedral, London commissioned Christopher Wren to design and build a new one.  Legend has it that when Wren was to place the first stone for the new cathedral in 1675, the laborer they sent out to find a stone came back with a piece of gravestone that was inscribed with a single word: RESURGAM, "I rise again."  This same word was written above the South transept of the rapidly-built new Cathedral along with a phoenix; in a mere 35 years, London, Christlike, had risen from the ashes in the form of St. Paul's.

Over the centuries, St. Paul's took on a variety of uses and meanings.  In 1789, the King went in State to St Paul's for a Thanksgiving service - the first official royal visit in 75 years - and the Cathedral and its surroundings were a blaze of lights; St. Paul's had been transformed into a symbol of monarchical power and English strength and solidarity in the wake of the French Revolution.  And throughout the 19th-century, as the British empire grew, panoramas from (and of) the Cathedral's dome situated it at the center of London and at the center of empire; it became a symbol of both British power abroad and Little England at home.

By World War II, St. Paul's was such a treasured symbolic landscape that Churchill ordered it to be saved at all costs; during the Blitz in 1940, while the rest of the Cathedral's neighborhood went up in flames, an Allied Watch of firefighters did indeed save it - they minimized the damage, anyway.  And the most famous image of the Blitz is a photograph published in the Daily Mail, which shows St. Paul's rising, phoenixlike, above the smoke.

Though he couldn't have made the comparison (this book was published in 1993), this beautiful image reminds me of another incredibly powerful landscape image - the photograph of the twin towers right before they fell.  This photograph, like that one, makes a strong case for the relationship between landscape imagery and national identity, both in the heart of the viewer and in the political and cultural ferment that developed in response to it.

7: James Miller's Democracy is in the Streets

What with the dance lessons on Saturdays and working on Sundays, it's kinda hard to get a lot of reading done on the weekends.  I did manage to get through a book on Saturday and another today, though!

I had high hopes for Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, and thankfully it didn't disappoint, but it was not at all what I expected.  Most of the stuff I've read about social movements so far has been heavy on the Marxism, or staunchly materialist, or at least incredibly modest about the roles individual people play in creating social change.  Clay Carson's In Struggle, for instance, is a critical history of SNCC that slowly and carefully maps out every person, event, and location Carson could get his hands on.  Reading through Carson's slow accumulation of thousands of tiny pieces of evidence, you get a sense of both the magnitude of the Civil Rights movement and the incredible ordinariness of the people who were coordinating it through SNCC.  And really, that's what I want in a history of a social movement: the creation of a big picture through close attention to details, so that I can see exactly how social change happened and how, precisely, the movement grew, acted, and fell apart.

James Miller is not Clay Carson.  And this book is definitely not that book.

Like In Struggle, Democracy is in the Streets is a history of "the Movement" from the perspective of a single organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).  Also like In Struggle, it stretches the political and cultural ferment of the 1960s back to the late 1950s and forward to the early 1970s, so that we can see the truly original origins on one end and make sure it's really dead on the other.  But where Carson is carefully constructing a large body of evidence to support his critical interpretation of SNCC, Miller is telling a story, capturing a moment, making the Sixties come alive.  His history thus reads like a novel, with main characters - Tom Hayden, Sharon Jeffrey, Dick Flacks, Al Haber, and the rest of the early members of SDS - psychological analysis, anecdotes, and plenty of drama and foreshadowing throughout.  Seriously: he spends the first 20 pages or so talking about how Tom Hayden was destined for greatness even as a freshman newspaper editor at the University of Michigan.  And the book follows a classic narrative arc, from the first time Al Haber laid eyes on Tom Hayden, to the Port Huron summit where the Port Huron Statement was drafted, to SDS' rise to power, and finally to the (anti)climactic Chicago 1968 riots, when Hayden, shouting into the megaphone in front of thousands of people in Grant Park, suddenly realized that the Movement's philosophical underpinnings had been lost, and this mass protest could never become the "participatory democracy" SDS had envisioned at Port Huron.  And he disappeared, silenced.

Miller is writing as someone who was there - he was a member of SDS in the late 1960s, and he was at Chicago in 1968 and at the last SDS meeting in 1969 - and he is writing for a reader who was there, too.  But even though I obviously wasn't there (my parents hadn't even met yet), Miller's excitement is infectious, and while his novelistic strategy may not lead to the most factual telling of events, his characters do come alive, as do the issues that animate them.

In particular, one of Miller's central questions concerns the legacy of the Sixties.  As Tom Hayden put it in 1977, "We ended a war, toppled two Presidents, desegregated the South, broke other barriers of discrimination.  How could we accomplish so much and have so little in the end?"  In other words, for all the short-term success of the Movement, why are we not living out long-term social change?  

Miller's answer to this question is complex, so I'm probably missing a few pieces, but it goes something like this.  In 1961, the SDS students gathered in Port Huron and drafted the Port Huron Statement, a theoretically-informed document that itself informed the Movement, at least before 1965, with its universal respect for human freedom and its call for "participatory democracy" (rather than the closed institutional system we call democracy in the United States.)  But after 1965, the escalation in Vietnam swelled protest participation and turned the earlier theoretically-informed movement into a mass movement.  This could have been awesome, but while all of these people were united in their protest of the war and in their critique of the American political system, they were not necessarily united on what true democracy might look like.  And frankly, SDS had no idea either.  And so the movement (was) fragmented, and the 70s became the decade of increasingly individualized pursuits of pleasurable consumption.

The analysis applied to the Movement in this book feels very similar to the analysis applied to more recent movements, like Occupy: having a complaint is great,  but you need to have a plan for change if you want the change to actually happen; and furthermore, refusing or being unable to unite behind a single program makes it easy for powerful opposing forces to divide and conquer the individual people in the protest.

Really, though, is there only one effective way to protest power, even still - by putting an ideologically unified mass of bodies in the streets?

George Mariscal - Brown Eyed Children of the Sun

George Mariscal’s Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun responds to critiques of the Chicano Movement (the Movimiento) as a failed, regressively nationalist social movement by reconstructing it in terms of postmodern discourse.  Using Raymond Williams’ claim that ideology and material practice/ discourse are mutually constitutive, and Foucault’s claim that “overlapping ideologies and discourses produce figures, practices, and languages functioning under a generalized rubric,” Mariscal analyzes a variety of texts, including images, poetry, speeches, student essays, newspaper articles and writings by both English- and Spanish-speaking activists to “map the complex ideological field that was the Chicano Movement of the Viet Nam war era” in terms that he hopes will help 21^st century Chicano/a activists form their own context-dependent identities and social movements.  (23, 21)  Because he is interested in the relationship between discourse and ideology in the Movimiento and in constructing a Foucauldian “archaeology” rather than a chronological historical narrative, Mariscal refuses to develop a linear narrative or to reify the Chicano Movement around a single ideology, group, or even defining feature.   Instead, he analyzes primarily written and visual texts by both participants and contemporary observers  to complicate key movement concepts and symbols (or people) such as nationalism, race, Che Guevara, Cesar Chavez, Aztlan, and UCSD.  The end result of this discourse analysis is a conception of the Movimiento as a fragmented ideological fabric whose participants are themselves fragmented, multiple, and heterogeneous.   

Hasan Kwame Jeffries - Bloody Lowndes

Jeffries’ Bloody Lowndes, which both chronicles and contextualizes the Lowndes County freedom struggle of the late 1960s, uses a combination of interviews, archival sources, periodicals and histories to argue – against the canonical view that black militancy destroyed the civil rights movement – that black militancy and separatist ideology, at least in Lowndes County, was a necessary ingredient for the success of the freedom rights (vs. voting rights) struggle.  Although he argues that his thesis holds for the Black Civil Rights struggle as a whole, he centers it around a painstakingly constructed microhistory of Lowndes County, beginning with post-Civil War separatist efforts to build black churches, landholding collectives, and schools; moving through the “Lowndes  Diaspora” and the formation of a strong, geographically diverse social network (whose Detroit arm provided critical fundraising for the LCFO and other local organizations); detailing the interconnections between this local network and SNCC’s unique combination of intensive local activism and political and media know-how; and tracing the eventual corruption and failure of the movement to the departure of SNCC and the integration of its main activists into the local political machine.  Bloody Lowndes shows how the development of Lowndes County’s black community into a strong, grassroots network, in combination with the organizing skills of experienced activists from SNCC, constituted the seeds for a radical democratic revolution.

Lewis Mumford - The City in History

 Mumford is such a lovely writer, and it's easy to think that what he lacks in primary research he more than makes up for in thought-provoking speculation.  He's a utopian thinker who advocates a balance between humans and their environment in the form of decentered, thoughtful, federated social structures. He also writes a lot about the relationship between space and technology.  This book is a ginormous grand narrative of "the city" in Western civilization, from the very dawn of time to the present, so here are just a few of my notes:

In an era shaped by white flight, deindustrialization/ suburbanization, not to mention the fear of nuclear war, Mumford calls for a return to city building instead of destruction.  He argues that cities serve two main purposes: religion and the state.  Biology is a (distant?) third, though really cities are for the people, so people should come first.  The shrine and the citadel are its two dominant structures, carried over from villages.  The city exists to nurture human biological and cultural reproduction, not to use technology to tame whole populations into submission.  The city is the stand-in for society, and he is very adamant that spatial forms and social forms interconnect.  Also, space and the built environment are articulated with technology; humans shouldn’t be afraid of their own inventions or let a few wackos use technology to control them.  The city should be humanity, magnified; communality, nurturing, love.  I sense Hardt & Negri here, where a surplus of love and community lead to a radical democracy, and also the dread fear of totalitarianism and technology, which apparently went hand-in-hand in WWII, what with the Nazis and all.  

inefficiency makes people grouchy

In sum, according to these visions, water should return to the height from which it falls, motive power or force should not be wasted, machine theories should address mechanical practice, workers should do as they are told, struggle should yield better-adapted forms of life, people should control themselves, and inhumane practices should be inefficient.

Alexander, Jennifer Karns.  The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, p 164.