This is going to be the first in a series of posts about risk and some related topics like insurance. I would say that may not sound fascinating just wait until you read it, but really it probably is just something that occupies unused space in my brain and won't be so fascinating.
I want to start with one story. My friend Laura Weathered developed an artist live-work space in Chicago called the Bloomingdale Arts Building. Her initial vision was to set it up as a co-op for low-and moderate-income artists, and she started down this path. People applied to be part of the project, and they went through co-op training. This was going to be hard work for the people involved, because it would more collective and mutually-responsible than simply renting a studio or an apartment. But they all knew what they were signing on for and were aligned with the mutualist goals.
Going through the permitting process, she ran into a roadblock with the City. They would provide subsidized loans, but only to the owners of individual units, not to the building as a whole, so they moved ahead with the project as condos. The City financing was critical to make it affordable for the people the project was going to serve.
Laura was operating from and within a left-wing context, so she immediately saw an ideological character of the decision. The city government, while dominated by the Democratic party, was fundamentally conservative, as any leftist knew who had either battled the cops in Grant Park or knew the stories.
The project was successfully completed. The cooperative character of it survived to some extent--the people in the complex had relationships with each other, and it had a cooperative feel when you were there. But disputes that came up over the years would have probably been handled differently if it had been fully collectivized.
The point of this story is to question the ideological character of the decision on condos versus the coop form. That decision certainly curtailed the degree to which the project could develop a collective organization, but it is not clear that the decision was ideological, reflecting a desire of the City officials to promote a certain political order.
In the minds of the City officials, it is likely that it struck them as simply more practical to approve Bloomingdale as a condo project rather than a coop. Individualized liability created clearer accountability for the loans. They would know who was responsible for paying back what. If a coop owed them money, they would have less understanding of who they were dealing with. If the coop was not operating particularly functionally, it would make it even harder to resolve the dispute. exacerbate the City's challenges. I'm sure the City officials saw condos as cleaner.
However, the choice of condo over coop was not neutral. The effect was to keep the people in the mode of individual economic agents, entrepreneurs, consistent with neo-liberal governance. The effect was also to kill in the crib the potential manifestation of a cooperative entity that would form a mutually responsible alternative to the individual entrepreneur of the self. This is a perfect example of Foucauldian disciplinary power. An unspoken pattern of thought--an episteme--prevails that guides the official's decision about how to finance this project.
I'm telling this story because it is an example of the disciplinary tool functioning in a specific decision. It seem to be the case that the person making the decision would not have consciously been trying to promote an ideology or accrue power, but is simply trying to be competent. The pursuit of competence is what makes the disciplinary wheel go round. I'm going to get back to this phenomenon in talking about insurance.
Huebner, Jeff. (2001.) "A City Without Art." The Chicago Reader, Nov. 1, 2001 https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/a-city-without-art/
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