Self-enclosure of the commons close to us (part 5 of 4)

Just as I was wrapping up my little series on the way insurance as an instrument of governmentality insinuates itself into local decisions, I ran across an article by David Bollier about Ivan Illich and the commons, which provides another way of talking about what we do when we act as good, well-governed subjects. What follows depends completely on Bollier's piece, and I need to go to the source, but the ideas connect too closely with what I was just writing on governmentality for me to wait.  No way I'll be able to do justice to Illich or Bollier.  

For Illich, the commons was "that part of the environment which lay beyond [people's] own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households" (Bollier quoting Illich). Classic examples include the organization of pre-modern communities in Britain, where manorial tenants shared grazing rights.  Another key idea for Illich was the vernacular domain, which is "the realm of everyday life in which people create and negotiate their own sense of things – how they learn about the world, how they find meaning and spirituality, how they manage the resources they love and depend upon" (Bollier). It is importantly a non-market domain.  

I see the commons as the informal spaces where people are allowed to be active and engage in the work of the vernacular domain. I think of spaces where friends, associates and I have been able to engage in creative and communal activities.  For instance, the HotHouse in Chicago opening up for panel discussions on a Saturday afternoon. One of my favorites was the space Stuart McCarrell had in Wicker Park.  He owned a building at the corner of Damen and North, the Lodge Hall, where he had the offices for his engineering company but also housed an independent press and provided storage for artist associates. For a time my friend Warren lent me a key to the building, and I was able to go there late at night to woodshed and write music.  I went up to the open top floor, which was filled with stage sets and costumes from independent theatre and dance productions over the years.  The building was old, and it breathed.  You  had to love its location--it backed on the El, the building across the El housed the Busy Bee, a venerable Polish restaurant, and across the street were the Coyote Building and the Flatiron Building.  These buildings served as locations for a beautiful temporary commons, the Around the Coyote festival. Every imaginable space was opened up for artists to show their work and throw together experimental projects and temporary installations, and you wandered from one space into the next and then the next. It seemed endless in a good way. A deep well.  

Downtown Presbyterian Church's art studios have some quality of the commons.  And we have in our best times embraced the church as commons, and let space all over the building be used for concerts, performances, exhibits, discussions, and planning. Churches have a long history of being a commons, with open doors and offering sanctuary. The commons quality has been contested for sure.  Notably during the 80s when the Sanctuary movement would have opened churches to refugees from conflict in Central America.  My understanding is that a former minister of DPC, Rev. Hogan Yancey, was forced out for sympathy to these ideas.

Historically, the commons such as land where all members of a village shared grazing rights gives way with modernism to enclosure, through which common land and resources are split up, each parcel or piece established as the property of an individual. Ownership documented in a legal deed, rights defined by contract. What was a common resource became one person's capital. And the owner of that capital would need insurance to protect their ownership and rights.   

The insurance negotiations at DPC would have us in effect enclose the art studios, remove any trace of the commons. What is interesting to me is that the process entices us to do it to ourselves.  The impulse is already there among (like a reverse Spirit of God)--the impulse for clarity, for good business-like practices, for modeling responsible subjecthood. It is not imposed, but comes about through a collaboration within this disciplinary system, within this risk dispositif. We experience a kind of solidarity within the disciplinary system--we are being responsible together--at the same time we truncate other forms of solidarity. 

When one thinks of enclosure of the commons, you think of elites seizing resources, but I believe there has always been this element of action upon the self.  Nietzsche saw human potential arising from "imposing a form on onself" (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals).  While Bollier says "Enclosure is not an abstraction. It's the great, unacknowledged scourge of our time," and I don't disagree with that--I mourn the loss of these spaces--it's important to recognize the extent to which most of us collaborate in the process. 

Stuart McCarrell died in 2001, not long after I was the beneficiary of his radicalism as second nature. I'm sure that the Lodge Hall got sold on his death and has been converted into private residences. I don't know where I would go to practice today. But to honor Stuart, let me give you one of his poems.  Stu was best known in Chicago as first a buddy to Nelson Algren and then a champion for his work. (Algren is a story for another time, but everyone should at least read Chicago: City on the Make, and a good source for information is the doc by Dennis Mueller, Ilko Davidov, and Mark Blottner, Nelson Algren: The End is Nothing, The Road is All.)     

Nelson Algren

I gave the city what it needed:
compassion, humor, rage.
I saw her suffering, struggling,
dancing on a noisy, smoky stage.
But the decades grew greedy, dark--
the battles seemed vain.
Cruelty, callousness ruled
and mocked at the pain. 
I turned a wry joke here,
a lusty one there,
to ease the anguish
and tame the terror.
So now, to their taste,
each reader can choose
soft flecks of laughter, 
or hard midnight news.

Stuart McCarrell, from Voices, Insistent Voices (Xenia Press)

David Bollier. (2013)  "Ivan Illich and the Contemporary Commons Movement."  https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-08-05/ivan-illich-and-the-contemporary-commons-movement/

Insurance telling us who we are (part 4 of 4)

I've been writing on risk and insurance to get to a story about some events at my church that show in its granularity the way Foucauldian discipline operates, and provide some view on its detail as experience. 

Our church, Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville (DPC), has taken otherwise unused space and turned it over to artists to use as studio space.  We have done this for about 25 years.  Over the years, the character of the program has evolved and shifted--initially a member asked to use space, the church said yes, and then he asked if some friends could join him, and received another yes.  Most of the artists today are people whose primary relationship with the church is their use of this space, and our new minister is exploring new possibilities in this relationship. 

What I want to discuss is the nature of the relationship between the church, a group of individuals, and these artists, and the pressures on what that should be which come from the risk dispositif--the collection of "discursive, administrative, technical, legal, institutional and material elements" through which social phenomena are governed (Lupton 2013 p 240). 

To me, the artists are members of our community, sharing the space with us to engage in work and exploration that will intersect with the work and exploration of the congregation in ways we cannot foresee.  To some extent this view is shared by others, as evidenced by the way DPC includes the artists on its website.  

To others, these artists are tenants who happen to have an extremely good deal--we don't charge rent, just ask a small contribution towards the cost of utilities.  But some members of our congregation and staff refer to this payment as rent. That word matters. It describes a specific relationship between a landowner and a tenant, governed by contract and defined by a transaction.  Tenants have defined rights under law.  They are reducible to the rights and obligations of tenancy. 

Defining the artists as tenants--not community members, artists, or program contributors--involves creating firm organizational boundaries. The inside of the organization is defined as people we pay--staff--and people we consider part of the worshipping congregation--formal members, regular church attenders, or regular contributors. We often have very involved conversations about the member roll, a formal way of defining the organizational boundary. I have very little patience for this exercise, due to my sense that organizational boundaries will always be fluid, and my desire to cultivate that fluidity as something potentially creative and generative. 

The artists are outside the cleanly defined formal boundary. That definition leaves them as building users. What they are doing with the space doesn't matter. We simply have a transactional relationship.  Because of financial pressures on the church, we seldom let people just use the space, but get building use fees, or rent, in exchange.    

For a long time we have sustained a tension between treating the artists as community members, colleagues, brothers and sisters or as transactional building users. On balance we have probably actually favored the more personal relationship.  But then enter insurance. 

We have an old, precious building.  It is very vulnerable to damage and it is easy to imagine a conflagration consuming the whole thing.  The annual insurance renewal process is fraught.  Sometimes the price goes up a lot.  Sometimes carriers decide they no longer want to work with churches.  We are nothing but risk.  The building could burn down.  People could get injured on old, narrow steps. There could be abuse of children under our care or harassment of women.  Each year, very responsible members and staff work with an insurance agent to get the renewal done. 

For a long time the insurance companies did not worry much about the artists, and just chalked it up as one of a bunch of activities we had going on in the building.  In recent years the current carrier has taken more interest in this.  The carrier felt they needed a very clear understanding of the church's relationship with the artists, and that it really needed to be defined contractually. 

From the perspective of governmentality, what jumps out at you is that the insurance company is entering into the question of relationships within this community. In order to be acceptable to the insurance company, it is required that our relationships take certain forms that are recognizable to the company, that are visible actuarially.  Like the Chicago city officials who insisted that the residents of the Bloomingdale Arts Building could not combine as a coop but had to be coming from the position of individual property owners contractually tied together for specific and limited shared services.

In this case, the insurance carrier could not deal (transact) with a non-contractual, communal relationship between the church and the artists.  It cannot imagine community and fluidity. It demands the depersonalization of the relationship. What is more it defines our identity to each other as parties to a contract, or dismisses the relationship as illegitimate. It impinges on an intimate part of our interpersonal experience.   

Why did the church let the insurance company dictate our relationships? To a great extent what you saw was people of good conscious striving to act responsibly. They wanted to bring sound business-like decisions to the benefit of the church.  This was not a matter of ideology--the people involved were not self-consciously trying to promote a neo-liberal agenda, and in other situations the very individuals involved would resist effects of those systemic forces. But they all knew intuitively what responsible adult behavior looked like.  It looked like showing the insurance company that we could conduct our business properly.  It looked like making sure all the right insurance was in place and not letting it lapse. 

In this encounter with the insurance company, certain relationships and identities had validity.  The insurance company didn't really define them. The models existed before the encounter. A valid subject is the kind of person we would do business with.  We all want to be the kind of person someone wants to do business with. 

But the insurance company is not teaching us this.  We are all well acculturated.  The insurance company is reminding us of what we know.  As Deborah Lupton puts it, "risk dispositifs contribute to the configuring of a particular type of subject: the autonomous, self-regulating moral agent who voluntarily takes up governmental imperatives." (2013, p. 143)  

The insurance company had us over a barrel, but there was an alternative--we could go without insurance.  In some ways the promise of insurance is empty.  If a bad fire starts, this church will probably be destroyed.  No insurance payout is likely to cover the costs to rebuild this historic monument or replace it with a building worth the bother.  And if there is the slightest slip-up on the part of the policy holder (the church) we may get nothing--the insurance company will not pay out reflexively. 

None of that matters. To be a responsible person means to understand risk, take it seriously, and work within the techniques provided as responses.  We are considered "covered" if the policy is in force, even though we don't really know what will happen.  This is part of the self-regulation. 

What will DPC do?  We have drafted contracts, and I'll finalize them in the coming weeks and get them signed.  We will still not call the artists tenants, and we will do everything we can to make sure our conversations are about our human concerns.  Their work, the exhibits they want to do, the church's worship life and mission outreach, updates about spouses, kids, family and loves, the challenges of day jobs.  

Deborah Lupton (2013). Risk (Second edition).  Routledge.

What comes out of allowing for a little over-complication

I was going to title this post "Someone who overcomplicates everything makes an arguably self-justifying case for doing so."  That impulse tells a lot. 

I tend to see myself as someone who gravitates towards complexity, often in ways that I or others find problematic.  It seems like the world more often needs the people who can quickly break things down into very simple pieces, rather than those who see the richness of the experience. Higher education administrators are certainly looking for let us say clarity.  From a critical perspective, you could say that this tendency, this character of "good management" is part of the habitus of the current social order, that allows unspoken values to have definitive, locked in control of actions in an organization.  That is, part of the vehicle through which governmentality acts.

I did a webinar yesterday with a colleague, a smart, experienced, witty, thoughtful man. Our paths crossed years ago briefly, and it was a pleasure to do some work with him.  We were asked by a participant about what assumptions one uses about revenues and expenses.  On one level this is a tough question because different institutions face different contexts--they have different sources of revenue, different spending issues. Nevertheless there are some answers.  Everyone needs to have some way to talk about what enrollment might be in the future, and in most cases there are places to go for some leading indicators.

My colleague talked at one point about activity drivers for costs.  This idea from management accounting is that behind any activity, something drives costs.  For instance, if you manufacture something, the number of units will determine how much materials you need, how many workers on the line.  Theoretically simple--it gets a little complicated, which is part of the fun of operations management.  You have fixed, periodic and continuous costs on a production line, and you can do math to calculate each and bring them together. 

This example is pretty simple conceptually.  Any enterprise, particularly a bureaucracy, has a lot of activities removed from the production line, or the classroom. Administrative and support activities, overhead. Budget people have been thinking about the drivers for these activities for a long time, and at this point there are some basic starting points--you use things like the number of staff, students, accounts, or square feet--and my colleague made that point and gave the example of a registrar's office where you use number of students as the activity driver. 

The registrar's office does a number of critical things.  They register students for courses.  They receive and record grades.  They issue transcripts.  They maintain the systems through which instructors are assigned to classes, and I think in most cases manage the schedule of classes and classrooms.  They also do some more arcane things that are critical to having a good record of student performance, such as deciding on course numbering conventions and coding courses for things like instructional method, prerequisites, and whether it fulfills specific curricular requirements.  Since it depends on student records, they work on systems to track student progress, which are critical to other units like advising and financial aid. 

All of this activity is related to the number of students.  If you're a little older, you remember standing in line to register.  More students, longer lines, more staff needed at the other end.  Pretty simple. A school with more students will have a bigger registrar's office.

But wait. I was working on identifying critical metrics for administrative functions at Portland State, and started with number of students.  Thing was, the registrar--again, an experienced and effective administrator--pointed out problems with this.  Thanks to automation, their staff can handle more students with zero to little marginal additional effort.  And if enrollment goes down, their effort does not go down.  There is some step function, but it's at a pretty dramatic level, maybe a 25% or 50% change in enrollment.  The registrar made the case that what consumed staff resources was developing, implementing and maintaining their core systems, and helping on projects, something the office was asked to do frequently. The registrar argued that the function is essentially a fixed cost, and any effort to incrementally decrease ran into that problem.  

At the end of the day I was determined to have some metric to frame budget conversations for every function, and we didn't come with anything better than number of students. Within the framework of simplicity-privileging values, this was wasted effort. To me, the results of this side trip into alternatives shows the problem with a cut to the chase approach. The back and forth on my arguably heavy-handed question brought out much more about the economics and operations of this unit, at least for me, and the emphasis the registrar put on systems and projects rather than transactions is very important. 

I don't know if the registrar felt the discussion was useful and felt their perspective was given real voice, but I have no doubt that direct imposition of the simple metric would have had the effect of erasing the registrar as a voice.  The registrar would see this metric as a pure imposition, with no validity--not that the validity of it was very high in the end.  But for me, what is more important is that it would have undercut this person's person-ness in their organizational experience.  Someone else would speak about their work as if they did not exist and would not open the process to their experiential and cognitive contributions.  It would be dehumanizing.  

The dehumanizing effects of experience within organizations, these supremely human manifestations, are the result of many small actions like this which accrue profusely and quickly acquire heavy phenomenological weight.

This does connect back to the Pandora's Box problem or non-problem.