The Workhouse:
Room 3 or The Dreamhouse
A three-day workshop by Avery Gordon and Ines Schaber
30 September 17:00- 20:00,
1 October 11:00 – 18:00
2 October 12:00 – 17:00
Casa del Lago, Parque Chapultepec
Required and further readings, program and bios
The Workhouse:
Room 3 or The Dreamhouse
A workshop led by Avery Gordon and Ines Schaber and organized by Pip Day and el instituto for Spatial
Practices in Revolution, the second series of public events in the ongoing research project “Not I: The
Performative Speech Act and the Sovereign Subject.” Held at Casa del Lago, Parque Chapultepec, México
DF.
The Workhouse is the name for a series of activities and projects called rooms organized by Ines Schaber
and Avery Gordon. Overall, The Workhouse’s activities are broadly concerned with the cultivation of
ways of living and working independently/autonomously of, or outside of, or in opposition to, or as an
alternative to, or alongside of but not entirely inside of the dominant terms of social order. The traditional
workhouses, first developed in the late 16th century and reaching their peak in the 19th century, were
prisons where people, mostly poor, who refused to work or stay put or behave like “good” workers and
obedient social subjects were confined, punished, and corrected. By contrast, our Workhouse activities
are designed to provide a hospitable space for the critical and imaginative thinking/practices of “bad”
workers, idlers, strikers, collaborators, runaways, and other individuals who do not want and need
conventional “correction” and “re-education.”
Room 3 or The Dreamhouse is focused on thinking through for oneself and with others working,
sharing, directing, following, building, making, distributing, exchanging, behaving, etc. in a context in
which their dominant organization is unsustainable and unlivable for too many, and in a (the same)
context in which many of us are already doing it better and more equitably, even if without enough
support. The centerpiece of the workshop will be a group participatory exercise in which participants will
be asked to answer in common the question--what is your dream workhouse?—and to create a model in
words or images or drawings or sounds of it.
We begin on Friday evening with a public event, an interactive screening of the film La Commune 1871,
that we hope will provoke a first thoughtful encounter on the relationship between politics, work and life.
On Saturday morning, we will facilitate a discussion of a small number of readings that will help prepare
the group for the making of your desired workhouse, which will occupy us on Saturday afternoon. The
presentation of the workhouse models and realizations will take place on Sunday, along with a concluding
discussion.
Schedule
Friday evening, 17:00 – 20:00, Casa del Lago, Parque Chapultepec
A Provocation: An Interactive Screening of La Commune 1871(2000), dir. Peter Watkins, 375 minutes with
accompanying map by Karl Marx. Barricade food will be provided.
Saturday morning, 11:00 – 18:00, Casa del Lago, Parque Chapultepec
Seminar discussion of the following readings. *Please select and bring five (5) quotations or passages
from the readings that were important to you and that you would like to discuss. Two supplemental
reading lists from recent courses taught by Gordon and Schaber are listed below.
Readings:
Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth Century France, trans. John Drury.
Temple University Press (1981): Author’s Preface; Chapter 1 (“The Gate of Hell”).
Jacques Rancière, Preface to the new Indian edition of The Nights of Labor (2009). Posted online by
Hydrarchy.
There has been no greater preoccupation in utopian thought and practice (of almost all varieties)
than creating worlds or societies where exploitative, soul-deadening, appropriative work is replaced
with something more meaningful and where greed-based economies are replaced with shared ones
(common/commun-istic or not). What kind of work constitutes something more meaningful has
been widely contested. Rancière’s magnificent book provides a context for and a link with Peter
Watkins’s film on the Paris Commune and poses this somewhat mischevious question. What,
Rancière asks, should we make of those emblematic 19th century militant French workers who
more than anything else wanted to write poetry (or paint romantic landscapes) and not work?
Ines Schaber, “Preface” to Obtuse, Flitting and Nevertheless There: Image Archives Put into Practice (2011),
Goldsmith’s College University of London Dissertation.
Schaber’s chapter addresses how an artist finds an archival practice after the critique of the archive
has been definitively made.
Avery Gordon, “Some Meditations on the Utopian” in Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and
People. Paradigm Press (2004).
Gordon’s chapter tries to find a language or a vocabulary for the utopian that avoids some
lingering problems in part produced by Marx and Engels and might be helpful for all those who
“carry on regardless” as Raymond Williams put it.
Tiqqun, Comment faire? (How is it to be done?) (2001). All available online at:
http://www.bloom0101.org/translations.html.
In An Essay on Liberation (1969), Herbert Marcuse wrote: “The young militants know or sense that
what is at stake is simply their life, the life of human beings which has become a plaything in the
hands of politicians and managers and generals. The rebels want to take it out of these hands and
make it worth living.” Tiqqun and Comité Invisible could be said to be the heirs to these earlier
rebels. How to go on human strike, to do something other than consume, produce, be a subject?
How to start again? Another provocation, angry and pushy.
Saturday afternoon, Casa del Lago, Parque Chapultepec
Group creation of your desired dream workhouse
Sunday 12:00 – 17:00, Casa del Lago, Parque Chapultepec
Group presentations of the dream workhouse designs and final discussion
Biographical Statements:
Avery Gordon is Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara and Visiting
Faculty Fellow at the Center for Research Architecture, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths
College, University of London. She is the author of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
2nd ed. (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People
(Paradigm Publishers 2004) and other books and articles. Her work focuses on radical thought and
practice and over the last several years, she has been writing about imprisonment, war and other forms of
dispossession and how to eliminate them. Recent scholarly publications have appeared in South Atlantic
Quarterly, Race & Class, PMLA, and other collections. Since 1997, Gordon has co-hosted a weekly public
affairs radio program, “No Alibis,” on KCSB 91.9 FM Santa Barbara. She is also the Keeper of the
Hawthorne Archives which, among other things, records the living history of the arrival and existence of
a group of runaways, secessionists and in-differents who form autonomous zones and settlements, and
have receded from living as obedient (and also resistant or resisting) subjects.
Ines Schaber is an artist and writer who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Her work focuses on
questions of visibility and the matter of the back side of things (being) made visible, questioning the
status of the things that remain hidden, or are kept invisible. Within this field of questions, the role of
photography is central. In her installations, she provokes a gaze and produces a sight, which constantly
insists on and questions the presence of things that are absent. Her work interrogates how photography,
as artistic, popular and mass media medium, defines, fixates or stashes away things and contents. In
recent years, her work has also addressed questions of the archive. Within in this context, she has
produced culture is our business (2004), picture mining (2006), Dear Jadwa (2009), and together with Stefan
Pente Unnamed Series (2008-12). Her work has been shown, among other places, at Werkleitz Biennale in
Halle, Kunstwerke Berlin, Brussels Biennial, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Belfast Exposed and Storefront for
art+architecture. Currently, Schaber collaborates with Avery Gordon on the long-term project The
Workhouse.
Soc 233 Problems in Radical Thought
Spring 2011
Professor Avery F. Gordon
Tuesday 2:00 – 4:50 pm
Social Science and Media Studies (SSMS) 3017
Soc 233 explores problems in radical thinking and practice. We pay special attention to the forms—in
writing, in political practice and in living—radical ideas take and to the perennial problem of adequately
connecting theory and action. Each quarter texts are selected to highlight works of theoretical originality
and power and/or models of sustained concrete research. Overall the goal of the seminar is to provide a
congenial and stimulating environment for learning and for enabling graduate students to pursue their
own research and writing. This quarter the seminar is focused on a set of problems and issues associated
with utopianism and various forms of running away, disengagement, and autonomous settlement.
1. March 29
introduction and a warm-up exercise
It is the task of the radical critic to illuminate what is repressed and excluded by the basic mechanisms of a given social order.
It is the task of the politically engaged radical critic to side with the excluded and repressed: to develop insights gained in
confrontation with injustice, to nourish cultures of resistance, and to help define the means with which society can be rendered
adequate to the full breadth of human potentialities. Chuck Morse
Ruthie Wilson Gilmore. “Scholar activists in the mix.” Progress in Human Geography 29(2):177—182, 2005.
(pdf)
Avery F. Gordon, “exercised” in Keeping Good Time.
Louis-g Effacé, “Ask about an autonomous university: 5 exam questions about life.” Online at Occupy
Everything or Evacuate: http://occupyeverything.com/features/ask-about-an-autonomous-university-5exam-questions-for-life/.
2. April 5
the (marxist) problem with the utopian and starting otherwise
Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic…mish-mash….To make a science of socialism, it had first to be
placed upon a real basis. Frederick Engels
Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Part I: [Utopian Socialism]. Available online at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1948), Chapter III: Socialist and
Communist Literature. Available online at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/.
Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation. Beacon Press, 1969, Preface, Introduction, Chapter IV
“Solidarity.” Available online at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/8342210/Herbert-Marcuse-An-Essay-onLiberation-1969.
Avery Gordon, “Some Meditations on the Utopian” in Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and
People. Paradigm Press, 2004. (pdf)
Les Sentiers de l’utopie (2011), dir. Isabelle Fremeaux et John Jordan. (In-class viewing)
3. April 12
beyond hope: everyday life politics, poetic knowledge and autonomous zones
realism demands not only that we give up waiting for "the Revolution" but also that we give up wanting it…. in most
cases the best and most radical tactic will be … to withdraw from the area of simulation, to disappear. Hakim Bey
‘Quiet encroachment’ describes the silent, protracted but pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and
powerful in order to survive and improve their lives. Asef Bayat
Asef Bayat. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Stanford University Press (2009),
Chapters 1 and 3. (Book ordered or Xerox)
Avery F. Gordon, “’something more powerful than skepticism’” in Keeping Good Time. (pdf)
Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press, 2002: “Preface,” “’When
History Sleeps’: A Beginning,” “’When History Wakes’: A New Beginning,” “Keeping it (Sur)real:
Dreams of the Marvelous.” (Xerox)
Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1985, 1991). Available online at:
http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html.
4. April 19
runaways, deserters, pirates, and bandits
From a European perspective, marronage appeared to be ‘the chronic plague’ of New World plantation societies. Richard
Price
It is said that the history of peoples who have a history is the history of class struggle. It might be said, with at least as much
truthfulness, that the history of peoples without history is the history of their struggle against the State. Pierre Clastres
Richard Price, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. John Hopkins University Press,
1979, Introduction. (Xerox)
Miguel Acosta Saignes, “Life in a Venezuelan Cumbe” in Richard Price, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave
Communities in the Americas. John Hopkins University Press, 1979: pp. 64-73. (Xerox) (Optional)
Cedric Robinson, Black Movements in America. Routledge, 1997: “Marronage in North America” (pp. 11-19;
24-25; 39-44). (pdf)
John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. Oxford University
Press, 1999: Chapter 2 (“On the Run”); Chapter 3 (“Whither Thou Goest”); pp. 89-92 (Clandestine Slave
Economy); Chapter 5 (“Where to go”). (Optional) (Library Reserve)
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University
Press, 2009: Preface (ix-xiii); Chapter 1, 9, TBA. (Book ordered)
Peter Lamborn Wilson. Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes. Autonomedia (1995).
Chapters II, VI, VIII, IX. (Xerox)
5. April 26
beyond protest: the call for something else and the human strike
The young militants know or sense that what is at stake is simply their life, the life of human beings which has become a
plaything in the hands of politicians and managers and generals. The rebels want to take it out of these hands and make it
worth living. Herbert Marcuse
All at once, as if born of some underground region of civilization, appeared a whole counter-world of subjectivities that no
longer wanted to consume, that no longer wanted to produce, that no longer even wanted to be subjectivities….Then
came twenty years of foolishness, vulgarity, isolation and desolation….. We are starting again. Done with passive resistance,
inner exile, conflict by subtraction, survival…. How is it to be done? Tiqqun
Tiqqun, Comment faire? (How is it to be done?) (2001)
Comité invisible (The Invisible Committee), CALL (2004) and The Coming Insurrection (2008).
All available online at: http://www.bloom0101.org/translations.html.
6. May 3
nonparticipation: the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement
Facilitated by Maryam Griffin
The BDS campaign represents a recognition that neither governments nor the United Nations are prepared or able to uphold
Palestinian rights. Richard Falk
Mazen Qumsiyeh. Popular Resistance in Palestine. Pluto Press, 2011. Intro and chapter 13.
Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS (and optional perusal of the website). Available at:
http://www.bdsmovement.net/call
Adam Horowitz & Philip Weiss. “The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement.” The Nation
Magazine, June 2010.
Naomi Klein. “Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction.” The Nation Magazine, January 2009.
How Now BDS? Media, Politics and Queer Activism video. Available at:
http://blip.tv/file/4886218?utm_source=player_embedded
Jason Ritchie. “How Do You Say ‘Come out of the Closet’ in Arabic?” GLQ 16:4. Duke University Press,
2010.
Richard Falk. “UN Will Be Judged on Whether It Upholds Palestinian Rights.” The Electronic Intifada. Nov.
5, 2010.
Richard Falk. “The Palestinian Legitimacy War.” AlJazeera.net. Dec. 24, 2010.
John Berger. “Undefeated Despair.” Available at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflictvision_reflections/palestine_3176.jsp.
Edward Said. "Dignity, Solidarity and the Penal Colony" in The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Alexander
Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair, eds. AK Press, 2003.
7. May 10
the dream of doing and holding things in common
Marx could never have presumed that capitalism paves the way to human liberation had he looked at its history from the
viewpoint of women. Silvia Federici
We whose names are subscribed, do in the name of all the poor oppressed people in England, declare unto you that call your
selves lords of Manors, and Lords of the Land . . . That the Earth was not made purposefully for you, to be Lords of it,
and we to be your Slaves, Servants, and Beggers; but it was made to be a common Livelihood to all, without respect of
persons: And that your buying and selling of Land and the Fruits of it, one to another is The cursed thing, and was
brought in by War; which hath, and still does establish murder and theft…..Gerrard Winstanley (1649)
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation. Automedia, 2004:
Introduction; pp. 21-36; 61-82. (Book ordered)
Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. University of California Press,
2008: Chapter 1 (Introduction), 2, 11 (Optional), 12 (Conclusion). (Book ordered)
Massimo De Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. Pluto Press, 2007: Chapter
1 (“The beginning of history), Chapters 16, 17. (pdf)
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth. Harvard University Press, 2009: Preface, 1.1, 1.3, 4.3,
De Corpore 2: Metropolis (optional), 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3. (Xerox)
8. May 17
the dream of
goldenspacesgreendesertsweaponspiledinthesunwomenaffirmintriumph
There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied…
You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But Remember. Make an effort to remember. Or,
failing that, invent. Monique Wittig
Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères, trans. David Le Vay. Beacon Press, 1969. (Book to be purchased)
Born in Flames (1983) dir. Lizzie Borden. (In-class screening)
Kaisa Lassinaro, Born in Flames (2010, self-published) (In-class presentation)
Ann Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106(3): 459-468 (2007) (pdf).
9. May 24
the problem of the economy again
What new forms of misreading will affect this contradiction when the discourse of laborers in love with the night of
intellectuals encounters the discourse of intellectuals in love with the toilsome and glorious days of the laboring people?
Jacques Rancière
Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster. Telos Press, 1973: pp. 17-33; 106-109.
(Xerox)
Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth Century France, trans. John Drury.
Temple University Press (1981): Author’s Preface, xxxi-xxxvii; Chapter 1 (“The Gate of Hell”). (Xerox)
J.K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 2006: Introduction, pp. 1-8;
Chapter 3 (“Constructing a Language of Economic Diversity”) (Xerox)
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. Activities and materials online at:
http://www.labofii.net/. See also A User’s Guide to the Impossible (pdf)
10. May 31
Conclusion
Ines Schaber
„Hey, Work!“
A series of three workshops at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Copenhagen, 2009/10
The series of workshops focuses on our notions of work and how we deal with them as visual artists. We
will discuss the issue in relation to our own work as well as look at how other artists, writers,
photographers and filmmakers have pictured and problematized the issue in the past.
Bibliography, Material
Week 1: Introduction: Histories and our Makings
Primary Material
Photography: Lewis Hine, Kids at Work, New York: Clarion, 1994
Film: Harun Faroki, Workers leaving the Factory, in: Harun Farocki, 20 Filme 19692005, Berlin, 2009
Art: Ina Wudke: A Portrait of the Artist as a Worker (rmx.), 11 Min, DVD, 2006
Visit: Workers’ Museum Copenhagen
Secondary Material
Bernd und Hilla Becher, Industriearchitektur des 19. Jahrhunderts, München: Prestel,
1971
Hine, Lewis W.: Men at work : photographic studies of modern men and machines. New York: Dover, 1977.
Dorothea Lange. Exhibition Catalog. Museum of Modern Art. New York: New York, 1968.
Anne Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs & Reports from
the Field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs – Images as History: Mathew
Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989.
David Goldblatt, On The Mines, Cape Town: C. Struik, 1973.
Week 2: Picturing Work
Primary Material
Art: Allan Sekula, Fish Story
Film: Allan Sekula: Working at the light table, (http://www.atelier-calder.com/v_allan_sekula.html)
Text: Allan Sekula, „The Traffic in Photographs.“ Art Journal, Vol. 41, No 1,
Photography and the Scholar/ Critique, Spring 1981, pp. 15-25 and
Allan Sekula, ‘Photography between Labour and Capital’, in: Mining Photographs and
other Pictures 1948-1968. Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design and the University College of Cape Breton Press, 1983, pp. 193-268.
Followed by a close reading of Sekula’s work by Avery Gordon
Secondary Material
Allan Sekula, Performance under Working Conditions, Vienna: Generali Foundation,
2003
Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams, San Francisco: Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts, 2011
Martha Rosler, In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography), originally
published in MarthaRosler: 3 Works, Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design, 1981. Reprinted in Richard Bolton (ed.), The Contest of Meaning: Critical
Histories of Photography, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989
Sharon Lockhart, Lunch Break, St. Louis: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2010
Sharon Lockart, Teatro Amazonas, Rotterdam: NAi Publ., 1999
John Berger and Jean Mohr, The seventh man, London: Verso, 2010
Week 3: A Work of Art?
Text: Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Art: Atget, e.g. Laure Beaumont-Maillet (publisher), Paris: Gingko Press, 2007
August Sander, esp. People of the 20th Century, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002
Dadaism
Surrealism
Films: Dziga Vertow, Man with a Movie Camera, 1929, 68 minutes
Sergey Eisenstein, Strike, 1925, 82 minutes
G. W. Pabst, Three Penny Opera, 1931, 113 minutes
Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator, 1940, 124 minutes