Deep Roots Break Bricks, Pt. 2

A continuation of the introduction to Confluence Studio’s co-edited series with John Kim (see original post here), Deep Roots Break Bricks look towards the interconnected social ecologies of rural and urban creativities and social formations in Minnesota, primarily over the last seven years. This time period is bookended by the state murder of Jamar Clark in North Minneapolis, the beginnings of the resistance at the Standing Rock Reservation, and the state murder of George Floyd in South Minneapolis, the neighborhood that Confluence Studio calls home. 

Where the first installment of the Studio and Kim’s introduction to the series focused on publics, formations, and their attitudes, this second installment looks towards the tools that have been necessary to help form and maintain those attitudes, namely an expanded idea of publication and what the Studio refers to as Social Tools.

The Beyond Repair motto | all photos courtesy Sam Gould

Sam Gould (SG): Earlier we talked about this idea of “critical downtime,” and how so much of the last seven years of creative political practices in so-called Minnesota, and the publics that have been formed across differences, have kind of pollinated each other—despite, and at times because of, friction. But how? How are they seeded, how are they energized? How are they maintained? 

The three of us have discussed this at length. Publication as not a noun, but a verb. Publication as the act of public making. It's active. And then this other idea of social tools— broadly defined tools, engineered in a similar way to publication. Tools that are there to energize and support ideas that help grow and maintain a public. Maybe we can start with that? Thinking over this time span of these seven years? Because I think that's kind of the glue that holds a lot of these divergent publics together—whether that's John and your cabin, people showing up and coming in and out all the time, or when I had the space in the market (Transmission; a publication space of Beyond Repair). Transmission was a space for people to go through. It had tools, machines that could help people make things and move them around, but it was a sticky space. Gravity was different. You slowed down a little. Which gets back to our discussion about People's Time. 

Top to bottom: John Kim and Morgan Adamson helping to construct Transmission, the exterior of Transmission, the interior of Transmission

Duaba Unenra (DU): When I was young, in some way, I was introduced to this idea of publication through my family. I got to know this brother who is a professor at Grambling State University in Louisiana. Dr. Owens. He's a Professor of Journalism and Communication Studies. And one of the things that we talked about a lot was the way that the Black press here in the United States—and by corollary, the Black press as it manifests globally—was instrumental in the formation of Black collective consciousness. It had me thinking about the practice that I have as a culture worker and artist, and how it really kind of set me on a path to where I became more and more open to publishing. Seeing culture, social practice art, things like that. And how the Black press had to come together to foster a Black consciousness. A sense of collectivity was an essential part of us getting back some level of autonomy and freedom from the plantation state, whose own consciousness was imposed on us by force. The Black press following abolition helped reestablish this consciousness away from plantation consciousness.

The other thing that I brought into our conversations then was this idea of “maybe we don't have clear enemies.” But the struggle—if the struggle was about consciousness, then it also means that the components of consciousness that we're struggling within are people's attention and people's imagination. And you know, Sam and I, we talk a lot about the ways that people are disciplined by different social processes into a certain consciousness, and certain social habits and ways of being. 

So what really animated me on the abstract and the practical level, when we started to talk about publication as we do, was that it is both about fostering a discourse and its effects. It could be through having a print shop. It could be through taking a bunch of rich ass kids down the Mississippi River on a raft. It could be organizing thousands of folks from across the country to come and fight an oil pipeline. But by being part of the conversation, part of the discourse, and being engaged with people for a sustained period of time, you are also fostering a new social habitus. And that runs counter to the plantation society that we live in. 

It’s a parallel world, a parallel conversation. And based on your encounter with the conversation, you behave in real space differently. Ultimately, you're trying to embody the discourse. Even folks who think they're apolitical, who think that the way society is set up is fine—they're embodying a certain discourse too. Even not being willing to engage with the roots of that discourse, through generations and generations of oppression–that brings you into it through your silence. 

If I had to define publication, I would call it the act of cultivating. Cultivating through conversation and social engagement. A specific consciousness and social practice. The act of cultivating a culture. There's a material aspect to culture, and that's what makes all of our different approaches to publication different. But the purpose of the social actions or the physical actions we engage in is to foster that discourse… I don't know what the Latin of publishing and publication is, but whatever that is, is what everybody is moving towards. I think there's something that's beyond publication, which is culture. Culture is the point where your social practice and your discourse become embodied. 

SG: If we're going to continue this Latin / Greek theme, I would hope that where it leads us is the Demos. It goes from public, as in publication, to demos—-a specific body, a public, that is there to work considerately towards a common end. So, that successful publication, which to me means engaging across the divide, is to figure out whether there can be some path forward bridging the two. It’s about the desire to create that demos through the act of cultivating a public.

John Kim (JK): I've worked with the media in a variety of forms, so when you're talking about publication's role as a tool that aided the formation of a Black collective consciousness in the United States, it made me think about the media. Naturally, it's not just print publications, like newspapers, that do what you’re describing. When media are electrified, they can have a role in an expanded sense. They can amplify those messages to a wider audience, at a faster pace. 

Given the context for our conversation, the media project that came to my mind is Radio Free 3, a station for the Stop Line 3 movement. Duaba was speaking about the necessity of the formation of a liberated Black consciousness after slavery, and publication's role in this. In a comparable way, the absence that this radio station was responding to was a sense of solidarity and mutuality across the different Line 3 camps. The Line 3 movement was spatially distributed across Minnesota, roughly 300 miles, and some were getting a sense that there was a growing competitiveness and divisiveness between the camps that wasn’t productive. This isn’t to say that movements shouldn’t have differences or schools of thought, but that the manner in which this competitiveness was taking shape was divisive, which wasn’t helpful for a movement with the objective of stopping the pipeline. An idea for the radio station was to imaginatively connect the different Line 3 camps across this spatial expanse to create a sense of solidarity and shared connection—to create opportunities to share stories and create conversations in a way that smoothed over some of this divisiveness. This was the intention for the station, though I’m not sure how successful it was in the short term. At the time, the urgency of the movement was such that few people had the time to create original content for the radio station. However, it was easy to source radio content, because in an age of social media, everybody's creating content. Everybody's recording everything. The movement was so well-documented, and it continues to be. Rebroadcasting what people were already recording at different pressure points and times of resistance, with the right framing, could offer opportunities for opening these dialogues. 

SG: There's a really big difference when you have all of these different stories being told from different places and the context of those places. Collecting them both illustrates differences and commonalities in a way that can produce solidarity. And then, having them broadcast from a camp where there is a kind of contingent object—a practical art object radio tower saying, “Hey, we've collected these stories, we're one of many in this storytelling process”—creates a vision of that bridge I was talking about earlier.

JK: Yeah, during the active phase of the resistance camp and even after the completion of the pipeline, the station was contacted by people from around the world who were interested in contributing content. People started turning the station onto other frontline radio projects around the world from Uganda (Sankara Future Dub) to Palestine (Radio Alhara) and beyond. Radio Free 3 rebroadcast content originating from these very different locations around the world and provided a collective context for these different narratives of resistance, which seemed valuable. There’s conversations now about how to conceptualize a global radio station that can be a platform, or as we’ve been talking about it here, a publication for frontline activists around the world. I think this is a really provocative idea in precisely the ways in which both of you were talking about—-that the role or the function of publications or media or mediated publications is to help to create new publics, and to help solidify collective consciousness around shared beliefs, practices, and knowledge. If such a radio station ever launches, it could be a powerful way of moving forward frontline resistance on both local and global levels.

DU: One of the things you said earlier was that there was a lot of difference making and division that was happening across camps. It made me think about how when we did the People’s Assembly at the Third Precinct we were in a similar context inside of the city. As there were many different forces that showed up to the Uprising, there were subsequently many separate discourses that were happening around shaping a narrative of those events. Everybody had different takes and perspectives on what should be done and what was right. 

[Confluence Studio’s] position, in that regard, was that there were very few spaces for meaning making. So when you were talking, it made me think about how part of the act of publication, I think, is to do some intentional meaning making. But not in a way so as to dismiss difference, and not to pave over or snuff out certain forms of difference that run counter to the political objectives that the people who run the publication source or publication process have. Literally, the act of publication fosters some kind of space where people can come together and say, “Well, I saw the mountain from this side, and you saw it from that side.”

Members of the Million Artist Movement sing for Emory Douglas, founding Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, at the opening of the Beyond Repair platform Transmission.

SG: Publication is the process of bringing disparate ideas together—not to stir them into this indecipherable goo, right? To actually have different pockets that allow space to illustrate valid, though possibly divergent, perspectives. And, furthermore, to allow that act to present itself as even more valid, because we agree to be in that space of divergent discourse together. And that space is the space of shared agreement that allows for difference.

DU: Exactly. Or shared understanding that allows us to not work together, because we have a shared understanding that we're not compatible based on our discourse, and to see that as fine because of those base agreements. 

SG: Publication is not about capture. Publication is always permeable. You can always walk inside and out of it. Right? You can always come in with your own individual or collective opinion, and either stay or leave. The act of publication attempts to provide context, not capture or consensus.

DU: And you know, the social media landscape is part of why everything is so fragmented, because the algorithm directs you to the person that is most unlike you, in terms of discourse, and to the people that will most likely echo you.There's no in-between the binary. And the people who are powering those platforms have, I would say, a much more violent intent towards the planet that we live on. So the other part of publication is about fostering meaning making. It's also about attempting to redirect people's attention, and holding space for people to reclaim their attention from the sources that cause it to fragment. 

Because there was—-we all had an abundance of time, even amidst the urgency of the uprising and the pandemic. It just wasn't always perceptible. To us, it was like—-if we had to choose between I'm just gonna sit here for five hours and stare at this checkpoint, or I'm going to sit at the checkpoint, and I'm going to talk for five hours and make an article—it seemed that the creation of your own discourse was less important, in that moment, then sitting there and just being in the mess.

SG: That's another thing that I've been thinking about that I also see as part of publication. For me, publication, at its heart, is completely dematerialized, but it has the ability to materialize. It starts in a totally dematerialized fashion. I think the uprising is a prime example of that point. We could have been producing all of these material forms to create context for what we were doing. Instead, what felt most organic and most authentic was simply to show up and to cross paths in a space that was centralized and very visible—the heart of the neighborhood, and a site, for those who live here, that even in absence, contains a shared history. And that brought lots of other people into the mix. In and out, depending on how much time they could emotionally, financially, or psychically afford. But it was a place that people knew they could show up to. That's the core, radical bedrock of publication for me, because it’s a space of meaning making—like you said, Duaba, and not dictating. Publication exposes a divide and then offers an idea of ways that one might bridge that divide, simply by being there. Pick up those offerings, put them down. It compels you to make a choice to be engaged or disengaged, but not necessarily to have to choose between agreement or disagreement. It’s something beyond the binaries we’ve become far too accustomed to.

JK: By design, there are increasingly fewer public spaces where we can encounter difference, or encounter other people in ways that can open up these kinds of conversations, these public spheres that can lead to mutualism and social solidarity inclusive of a diversity from a range of voices. In addition to a declining number of public spaces, there are increasingly fewer venues that enable us to encounter difference that allow for solidarity to emerge, all because of the way in which big tech has captured the space of publication with machine learning and algorithmic personalization, which customizes online content in a way that reinforces pre-existing beliefs and desires. This is driven, of course, by a commercial, capitalist imperative to expand captive audiences by presenting people with opinions and perspectives that they are likely to read. So that's why it's important to take over spaces like Robert's Lot, or put up a radio station that fills the airwaves in ways that can cut across the commercialization and consolidation of mainstream media—to create public spaces where people might stumble across these experiences in a time when it's difficult to engage. I recognize this as both an underlying problem and a possibility.

Confluence Studio’s Newsroom for Neighbors

SG: If we're thinking about historical antecedents outside of what we consider media—even in our lifetimes, our time wasn't as captured as it is now. Our ability to go in and out of spaces that were either multivalent or indecipherable is less available now. 

To go back to the expansion of this idea of publication to its furthest, most authentic, and logical conception of spaces where we might find shared and simultaneously divergent meaning, I think back to this book that John and I have talked about a number of times—the one about clouds and the elements, being the original media [The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media by John Durham Peters]. It’s that space of common understanding that I’m talking about.

DU: In the back of my head, you know, I'm hearing big Uncle Marx be like, “No, everything starts from a material basis!” And now we're talking about atmosphere literally being media! 

SG: Reversing Marxism—-saying all that’s solid melting into air is exactly what we're looking for? I’m down. Let’s get back to the beginning!

DU: How did you two come to your practice of publication? I think that question and your responses to it could also be important, because—-we're from like generations. Overlapping, but we’re from different generations. And then most of the people that we three work with are from a completely different generation, generally much younger. I think what defines the difference between the generations is not the time in which we were born, but the extent to which publication became commercialized in the ways we deal with it now—so deeply embedded in everything. And so the level of consolidation—the monopolization of airwaves, attention, algorithms, and the actual tools—to engage in publication have become much more locked away for each generation that comes after us. And in some ways, their generation is defined by the extent to which they can engage in the act of publication without it being recuperated and co-opted.

SG: In all of those generations, it’s also that media is a space for you to see yourself. It's a mirror of sorts, and the distortion in that mirror—or at least the optics. The lens. That lens has narrowed and become so individualistic, far less communal. It was much wider in the past. So for me, my initial understanding of how publication works was the opposite. Non-individualistic. It was a mechanism of belonging.

JK: Yeah. In the US, revolutionary movements often are followed by counter-revolutionary, reactionary forces, and the rise of more deeply conservative and restrictive developments that respond to that originary revolutionary moment. Like Sam, I came of age during the early popularization of the Internet. This was before the first wave dot com boom. At the time, the mass media were dominated by three main stations. CBS, NBC, and ABC.

SG: Sometimes Fox. But that was the beginning of Fox. 

JK: Yeah, and the beginning of the end. The early Internet (the early 1990s) created exhilarating opportunities for alternative publications, and public making that could exist as an alternative to this very repressive mass media environment that was dominating the stories that could be told—and by extension, the ways in which we see and understand ourselves and the world through the media. But what we've seen over the last 20 years is this very strong reactionary force, fueled by big tech, that has made the field of publication repressive, conservative, dominating, dystopian. The twentieth century was marked by the concentration of control over the production and distribution of the media. By contrast, twenty-first century media is marked not simply by a return of domination over production and distribution but, and now more invasively, control over the individual through machine learning, algorithmic personalization, and behavioral modification. Direct control over the individual, by big tech. 

So whereas we can talk about publication as a form of public making that has anarchic possibilities for alternative consciousness formation, we also should acknowledge that for generations that have grown up with the rise of social media, they often don’t have an awareness of an Internet separate from Facebook. Meta and Instagram, Google. They don't understand that you can exercise control over the means of production and distribution and seize the media as a tool for publication making that exists outside of these dominated channels. Or, put more pessimistically, they may recognize that they can exercise power over the means of production and distribution (TikTok), but they do so in a way that is lock-step with the dominated, commercial ways in which they already exist. This behavioral control at the level of the individual and creativity is terrifying. The media has become a much more repressive and controlling space than we could ever have imagined. 

A screening at Minnehaha Learning Park for the (Infra)Structures Series

SG: When we were first starting to use the Internet, we were seeing it as an extension of material forms. A zine or a newspaper or poster.

JK: Yeah, the first thing I made on the Internet was a zine.

SG: When I first encountered it, the Internet felt like a computer derivation of analog communication. So for me, it’s all personal. It’s publication in an objective sense, and publication in an intimate dematerialized sense. That’s what I've been seeking since I was really little. And it's coming out of a space of dislocation, and feeling like, “Okay, I need to find where my home is.” 

That started by looking towards books and records, because that felt like a space of comfort, which then provided knowledge. And then this idea of like, “Oh, there are all of these people making these things. Who are these people? Why are they doing this? I want to be part of that, because it makes me feel good.” With this came the recognition that there need to be carriers for these things. A record store, or a bookstore, a person's basement, or a tape deck in a car, or a boombox. All of these things that people made were communal. We hadn't yet reached the technological stage of individualizing culture. Distribution, constantly. 

So I'm always engaging ideas in a communal fashion, based on how I originally began to really find them, or at least when they began to make sense to me—when they were so evidently part of something much larger. I bring all this up because I can’t divorce it from how I think about sharing ideas or making meaning. Within all of this, it became clear that the spaces themselves were part of creating things. Being across from other people, at least at some portion of the process, was essential. 

I think about expanding on these very elemental emotional and psychological feelings towards some sort of practice, however inarticulate, that might have been at the time. And along with that, there's this burgeoning Internet where I'm becoming pen pals with people all over the world, who are starting to think about similar ways of artmaking that are very much centered around creating space that forms publics. Bringing people together, thinking about conviviality. Thinking about how we support one another in an emotional, critical, and public way to create meaning. You had a somewhat similar experience too, John?

JK: In the 80s and early 90s, I was into dial-up bulletin boards. When I was in grade school, I was trading software with folks in Sweden. That evolved into making early Internet zines, other online publications, and eventually working on a few dot coms during the first 90s boom.

SG: My analog would be tape trading, which is similar to sharing software, but I was sharing the material version. Grateful Dead bootlegs. That it was totally non-commodified was important, if naive. It was a way to see people and get a sense of being part of a larger community that was about supporting culture, not creating value for a brand. I say naïve simply because we all know how much that’s changed. However goofy it sounds, I put a lot of weight into 1980s Dead bootlegs. The distribution forces you into a space of recognition and shared agreement with others. You don’t have to like one another or have the same ideas, or even like the music for the same reasons, but if you don’t want to abide by those simple agreements, that’s your chance to step away.

JK: When I was in college, I was involved in programming one of these early online social games that were text-based. Multiplayer text adventure games. Ironically, we created a simulation of the college that we were attending at the time. It was pretty formative for me in the way I understood the power of the Internet at the time. Everybody would create their own text-based avatar, and you could define yourself as anything. You could then interact with other people through the game as your avatar. The possibilities of that, at the time, seemed so real and positive. You could represent yourself in any way that you choose, with or without a race, any gender, or you could define a new one too. 

You could do that because there were no visual cues. The environment was text-based. At the time, that seemed like a really positive space for opening up encounters between people who might overly define themselves according to those visual characteristics or cues, in ways that prevent them from having a conversation or interactions with another person. At the time, media commentators wrote about this as the creation of a true town hall. Of course, since then the very opposite of this has happened on the Internet, in that it's led to a reinforcement of social and racial characteristics by which we define ourselves.

SG: During the rise of this particular time peroid in the history of the Internet that we experienced, a point we found to be kind of utopian, a parallel utopia was taking shape, but a utopia that we would consider a dystopia. There was a huge rise in white supremacist identitarian politics. After decades of having to go underground due to changing social codes and actual laws, white supremacists were able to find a safe space in droves.  

JK: Yeah, Yahoo provided us with an index to find and join that group.

SG: Which not to say that, therefore, the Internet is bad. It's saying that publics exist outside of the idea of politics based on value. Publics are spaces of power, but power without narrative. 

JK: Yeah, and unfortunately, what Facebook, Google and other big tech companies have discovered is that it’s easier to extract value from people by providing them with ways to gravitate to and hang out with others who have similar backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. It is more challenging to bring people together that are different.

DU: If it was easy, we'd have revolutions every day!

Darrin Carr helping lead a Naloxone training at Minnehaha Learning Park

SG: We would have abolished money already. So how have we found these ideas in the city, but then more broadly, in Minnesota? How do we tie it back? Getting back to our earlier conversation, I think what has energized and supported the last almost decade of social and political space here in Minnesota, has been these dematerialized spaces of publication that then, at times, find form. But those are almost like carrier pigeons from one space to the next. Do you know what I mean? The form is an after effect.

DU: I was thinking about the work that we've been doing with Confluence. We started off at Roberts lot, which is just a few blocks up from where the Uprising was catalyzed. From there we moved down the road to where the Uprising hit its apex. Now we're right down the alleyway from the Third Precinct, and one of the many relationships that we've ran with from Roberts lot is with Baba Douglas [Ewart]. I've always known Baba Douglas to engage with us and the things that we do. But I think when we hosted that People's Assembly in the parking lot of the Precinct and invited Baba Douglas to literally set the tone with Mankwe [Ndosi], I think that invitation opened up Baba Douglas to the possibilities of like, “Oh, here's the remains of this civil service building. It can't be used as it was.” I'm pretty sure there was some kind of acoustic calculus that was going through his head at the time.

So now, the next phase of this engagement and publication with Baba Douglas is that we're going to turn that derelict civil service building into a musical instrument. So, going back to what you were saying earlier about the material being a medium. I wouldn't have considered that as a body of work. But we were always engaged, whether we were at Roberts or down at the alleyway. We weren't thinking about this time in this particular corridor along Lake Street in Minneapolis as a site of publication, a site in flux, a site of competition between different discourses, or as what forms of social life popped up in the spaces that got opened up by the fires of the Uprising. We were always looking at it like, “What can we do here? What can we do there that will foster a new discourse that's more in alignment with the world that we want?” Just continuing to invite people into those conversations and discourses, it expanded. It expanded the possibilities for what could be overwritten onto those open spaces, and beyond what we could imagine.

SG: That’s the point, always the point. Publication is precognitive in that it’s about creating space to know what you don’t know you know, which gets back to this idea of social tools. It's not about imposing our ideas on space, but being the engineers that maintain a tool so that many people can come and place their ideas within that context, to see what comes of it. 

DU: We never set out to be a service-providing crew of people. And we didn't set out to be community organizers. Our utility that we offer to the community to redistribute the means of publication is that we have a printing press. Baba Douglas, his means of publication is musicality. And now we're in cooperation, to distribute those two utilities at a site that has been one of oppression, that we're now overwriting so that we can reclaim it as a site of liberation, one that fosters a different way of social life. Our intentionality has always been that the more people we engage in our specific approach to publication, the more utilities will begin to come online. It forms a kind of commons, but we don't know what the aims of the commons will be. We just know that we need to have our own means of publication to help figure that out. 

When I think about the through line, the applications of the theory we've been talking about, what comes up for me is that we're still in the early stages of the work, by design. I think we gave ourselves a 10 to 15 year timeline to really see through the overriding process of helping materialize a critical public for this corridor. And we are moving at people's time, and it is intimidating to move at that pace because of the speed of capital.

SG: Yeah, and the question always seems to come back to, “Am I achieving anything?”

DU: What we know is, shit can get burned down really quick. And they can build it up really quick…

SG:… but we're still here.

DU: Exactly. So you don't need to know what the future will be and don't need to control the outcome of it. We just need to continue to engage in the process and see what comes of it.

SG: John, how would you relate the Palisades camp from the cabin? I think they're kind of similar. And they provide very similar possible outcomes, or at least potentialities.

JK: Yeah. As background, I've had this cabin for about ten years. It’s in rural Wisconsin, an hour to the East of the Twin Cities. Before the pandemic, it was often a sort of social center or cooperative space for gathering and collectivity. Art making, shared cooking, music making. Oftentimes, there'd be more organized activities that would create opportunities to bring different groups of people together into that space, whether it was a film residency and screening program, the collective building of a brick oven, or just hanging out—-critical downtime.

SG: It’s always resisted decipherability, no matter how any one of us has attempted to formalize it. It always finds a way to be like, “Nope!” It’s slippery, it's very slippery. And I think that's really important. 

JK: I think about the challenges to doing the work up in Palisade, Minnesota at the Welcome Water Protectors Center. I'm a part of a group, including Shanai Matteson and others, who have been trying to reimagine the Center as an educational space to foreground Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices in the stewardship and defense of water and land. I think the similarity with the cabin is that we’ve been imagining creative ways to encourage people to come and be a part of the space, despite the fact that it is quite rural, and at a challenging distance to get people to travel. We're still in the middle of brainstorming different kinds of cultural programming and events that can happen. We’re still thinking about what are the practices, what are the activities, what are the tools that we can share in that space that will bring people together, in order to learn from that space, its history, its culture, decolonization, and its role within the Stop Line 3 movement, in a way that builds on the momentum initiated during the active phase of pipeline resistance. Going back to the question of tools, because the camp was such a hub of activity around the resistance movement, there are a wide range of tools for publication that are available there. A risograph, screenprinting facilities, a recording booth.

SG: Thinking about the spaces that we've talked about, and then something like a makerspace, I keep coming back to potentiality. For me, a makerspace can never latch on to a political impulse. No matter if people desire it. 

JK: Though there are examples of ways in which makerspaces have been adopted by different movements for political ends. The example that comes immediately to my mind is Cooperation Jackson. They’ve launched a makerspace, because they believe that Black liberation is going to require self-sufficiency in the face of governmental neglect and climate change. Their makerspace is a tool for building other tools that they need as a way to control the means of production.

SG: So the Cooperation Jackson makerspace cannot simply be contextualized as a makerspace. There’s too much associative narrative for it to be simply a makerspace, and therefore it resists legibility. It’s slippery by design. Because in Jackson, you start a makerspace—it will invariably have multiple contexts and is therefore somewhat illegible. It’s many things. 

DU: So I'm part of a makerspace that would consider itself depoliticized. And so what is it really? Like, we all pay in, and we all capitalize on the acquisition of these different tools. Some people use it more than others. It doesn't matter. There's just like a mutuality and a spirit of generosity that's there.

SG: Which is inherently political. Even with a lack of clear political intent.

DU: A lack of clear politics is still political. I'm sure that people use it for their own political purposes. I do. So I do think it's a site of publication. And I also think that like, 3Ms factory is a makerspace. It has its own politics, and it is a site of publication. But what defines or what makes those kinds of spaces possible? There needs to be a spirit of mutuality. And in order for that to take place, people have to feel like they also have something worthy of sharing with others.

In in general, at a regular old makerspace, there's an understanding of an acceptance and an invitation to be different and to think differently. And so, to circle back to the beginning,  the Black newspaper, it empowers the demos to engage in further publication. It’s cyclical And so fostering a Black consciousness and a sense of empowerment gives people a new way of imagining their capacities and what they have to offer. It gives them new avenues to fulfill dreams, and to bring those out into the street. And so I think that kind of necessitates the work be slow, at people's time, because it takes varying levels of time for people to hear the call, and to accept it and embody it in a way where they come out onto the street with something that they want to share.

So ultimately, what we may have is a makerspace. Yeah, we don't need to call it a makerspace, but it is a makerspace in the sense that it's all of these different utilities that have been gathered in one place as a commons. And it's been gathered together by an impulse to engage in mutuality amongst folks who want to form a public together. 

SG: The Uprising and the lingering effects of the pandemic remain such a defining moment for folks in the neighborhood. I think it is really important to consider how specific those effects are compared to people outside the neighborhood. Even just a few blocks away, the effects vary widely. Both events changed structures, and that made it more difficult to get to that organic spot that we just described. Now people are like, “Oh, yeah, well, I'm gonna ease in and out of this. Pick this thing up here, get involved over there.” It's made everything very determinative. Like you have to make a choice to be part of this thing that, I’d argue, sustains you. There's an inertia that we have to get beyond. So at this point, thinking about the last seven years that have then been upended by the Uprising and the pandemic, how do we both learn from and move towards a third part of this narrative of mutuality, in this space of so-called Minnesota?

DU: For me, there is a need to resist  inertia. And the inertia is to engage in a practice of mutuality. It's not to achieve a certain political objective, because we haven't had enough engagement and formation of publics to really have a political objective. I would say that for post-tribalized people like us, like we have to reform a demos that has a collective politic. That's where the difference between the work that we're doing here in the city and the work that John is doing up in Palisades with Akiing, is a little different. There is an impulse and enough cohesion—a sense of sovereignty and collective—amongst Indigenous people that I think they can act in those ways. The core grounding of that politic is in a sense of mutuality, or willingness to defend one another, protect one another, care for one another, love one another, live with one another. And folks down here who have been de-tribalizing, or were imported to work in the industrial labor system—we’ve been stripped of that and have had to fight to recreate that core mutuality. That’s the inertia—to create culture, rather than to just like, protest every fucking thing. Because you can protest something, but without a solution, a viable solution, or the willingness to experiment towards something different, it’s just venting.

SG: Yeah, and protest is always in response to power’s motivations. To protest is always about responding to a move that power takes, and therefore you're placing yourself in a highly manipulative relationship.

DU: Exactly. As opposed to when you go on strike, where you suggest you have an alternative, and you can implement it by force if necessary.

SG: So the need is to continue to create these spaces of recognition and these social tools, these acts of publication that we've been discussing. These non-manipulative spaces, because they’re malleable and illegible. It’s all work that goes towards forming that demos.

JK: Something I was thinking about in response to your last question is that one of the aftermaths of the pandemic has been a heightened individuation of our lives, through a subjection to forms of power that seek to isolate. We are still coming out of a deeply difficult time that compelled us to be focused on ourselves or our families, and our immediate concerns during. (Even though the Uprising and the Stop Line 3 movement simultaneously challenge this narrative, because for some the pandemic was a time of deep social experimentation, collective formation, and experimentation.) 

It’s incredibly important for us to recognize that the pandemic accelerated how the commercial media have already been working us over, since about the 1950s, through the enhancement of control over collective power precisely by individuating us, isolating us, and keeping us docile and domesticated in the solitary confinement of our living rooms, in front of televisions and now computers. This was an intentional and reactionary power mobilized against us to prevent us from getting together in the streets and mobilizing collectively. So my final thought in response to your question, Sam, is that publication, in the manner in which we’ve been talking about it, becomes all the more important as a critical response to the formations of power and capital that have contributed to our contemporary condition of individuation and isolation. This is especially true coming out of the pandemic. We need to strive to create more opportunities for publication.