Converting Nonsite to Site

CONVERTING NONSITE TO SITE
Robert Kocik

For all designs, see:

http://nonsitecollective.org/node/778
http://nonsitecollective.org/node/779
http://nonsitecollective.org/node/780
http://nonsitecollective.org/node/781

I’ve been reflecting on Nonsite---as a direct result of being roiled by watching the DNC on TV (the progressive party of the most promising nation on the planet, if elected, will, hopefully, hang on to the middle-class, have a world-class educational system (just like a real country), get a health care system that is a good as the systems in poorer countries, hopefully slightly curb cozening and privateering, equal pay for same job---the whole list of basic ‘givens’ yet to be achieved---whereas progressive parties (once upon a time) ran on platforms calling for abolition of the presidential veto, disbanding of Congress, rule by referendum, cooperative organization of prisons, confronting the Framers’ distrust of direct participation by the people in making fundamental law, and so on.) And though the DNC has never before been this poised to undercut the empty sense of promise.

The more I think about it the more I feel that the Nonsite Collective runs on aesthetics---and that this specialty is precisely its disability. The most pervasive medium (the sensory---the fact that we are not only acutely influenced by but formed by everything we see, hear, touch, taste) is the medium currently the most disavowed and disowned. What a ‘thing’ to own. We own it. With regard to being positioned and provisioned for accomplishing our collective aims, we’re resoundingly sub underdog. (The Nonsite Draft Proposal [see nonsitecollective.org/draft_proposal] defines our aesthetic aim as actively placing aesthetic practice in relation to catastrophic forms of social organization---like DNC VS RNC?)

The Collective, by means of exceeding innovation, replaces the current political creed that assumes values are more electable than issues with the proposition that aesthetics are more direct, more penetrant and effective, faster acting than politics.

Doesn’t it?

Last Spring I mentioned to Rob that the Draft Proposal for the Nonsite Collective can be read as architectural specification (that is, beyond the simple reading of his structural metaphors as literal---“building a shared vocabulary”, “constructed response”, “framework”, “self-organizing”, “conversion of non-site to site”). In addition to the content of the Draft Proposal, the Collective’s activity over the last year can also be interpreted as further design specification.

The Draft Proposal’s challenge to architecture (as its opposite, as a veiled negative) is manifold. How build a building that remains visible? How build a building that remains abstract? How build a building that remains metaphoric (or most potent---a building that goes against its own realization by magnifying---not using up---potential)? How build a building that is not pigheaded...that is not inherently (as establishment, as intractable, as wasteful) working against us? How build a building that is our continual legibility?

Last night I finally got around to drawing the first traces of a possible buildable nonbuilding that stems from Nonsite purpose. First traces are a matter of roughing out volumes that correspond to intangibles. To say the least, many issues arose. I’ll make an attempt, below, to recount what came up for me as I worked on the drawings. Clearly a collective would best be designed collectively (as the Draft Proposal states: conversion of the non-site, beginning with itself). It is in this light that I offer these initial traces. If only as a metaphor for others, I’d hope that this process of architectural conversion (of nonsite to site) might become an exhilarating means for revealing our collective potential.

Some preliminary Nonsite functions in their corresponding spaces, along with qualities to be built into the building:

AN ENTRANCE OF UNDEFINABLE FUNCTION. By definition, such a space, architecturally, can’t exist. Such a space is not a void...but in need of being furnished so as to allow a flourishing in the re-uses of such space---of no known function in order to arrive at unknown functions.

WORDING. An area or aperture or hollow or auricle to return to for the generation of language that is action. An entraining center. Searching for terms that touch the controls of the aspects of natural and social selection in question. Weaker words require actions subsequent to themselves (are not poetry, are politic). If our theory or theoria is too feeble to form a practice it turns into a type of self-loathing.

OVERALL ECOLOGY. No separation of internal and external energy-generation-and-conservation (as an architecturally determined ecology). Not wasting (material, time, energy) but using all wastes that are generated. The underlying wound of conscience for our day is, in a word, ‘use’. We’re really hurting---already spiritually extinct, ecologically. Reverse the current neoliberal ecology by unleashing infinite abundance of aesthetics to treat scarcity of natural resource.

POTLUCK. Time of day carryovers. Spaces that allow an assembly to survive its own event---to pass from one time of day to another aided by the ability to pass from one type of space into another. (For example Peace On A is the best show in town because it is both formal and informal, can pass from evening to early morning. Its limitation is that it can’t pass from one space to another, or convert its existing space into another type.) THE WITHIN. Stillness. That which all uses come from. The most important commons.

IT’S ACTUALLY A LARGE EAR. Just as in hearing the ear converts air wave to percussion (ossicle/earth) to fluid (in the cochlea) to fire (synaptic firings) to immaterial (our understanding), the Nonsite building would be the experiencing of all elements.

OVERFACILLITATION. WORLD REPLACEMENT. Perhaps as a response to all the disability discussion---detailing an architectural function involved in extremes of enabling. Rob has said “unanticipated care”. I’ve said “missing civic services” and “extraorganopoieia” (coming up with new organs and organizations). To invent and implement the agencies of the world we’d rather be living in. B. Fuller has said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.” I come from a wildcat town---the number one rule in going out on strike: you’re responsible for running the society you stop.

MAKING A LIVING BY COMMONING. The Draft Proposal states that “the commons is disappearing before our very eyes”. A ‘commons’ was always based on subsistence (hunting, fishing, foraging, housing). Ecology is inseparable from economy. Aesthetics, if it is to be a complete ecology, is best not left as separable from economics. Still, as far as I can tell, commoners never inhabited the land to merely subsist...they subsisted to show their gratitude---to celebrate (they were notorious for their disinterest in forming a workforce or infantry...whereas even ‘free’ Americans fall in line rather readily). My architectural ruminations on Nonsite have essentially lead me to a reconsideration of ‘commons’---the translation of ‘commons’ into several contemporary, sorely necessary senses. They hang the man and flog the woman That steal the goose from off the common But let the greater villan loose That steals the common from the goose (English folk song, circa 1764)

NONSITE AS A FOUNTAINING OF NOVEL COMMONS---ALL ABOUT NONCATASTROPHIC ORGANIZATION---SHALL WE SAY ‘SALUBRIOUS’ ORGANIZATION, OR FORTUNATE OR BENIFICENT ORGANIZATION, OR ARE WE ALREADY REFERRING TO IT SIMPLY AS AESTHETIC ORGANIZATION (BY CONTRASTING AESTHETICS WITH CATASTROPHE)?

Taking it step by step...as adding to Nonsite curricula:

Anyone can carve out a commune or overlay a community. But a commons? A shared, outdoor resource...how could this be built? Of course the definition of a commons can be extended to include any heritable public good...but, to be precise, a commons is/was a piece of land owned by one person yet open to others for purposes of subsistence. Strolling, for example, though perhaps the exercise of a traditional right, is not a matter of livelihood. Thus a park is not a commons. A wildlife refuge is a commons...but for flora and fauna alone.

USA was never not privatized. The Virginia Company came before Virginia.

America, from the time the Europeans arrived, never knew a commons. Commons, in any capacity that might have been carried out in the New World, was systematically and permanently eliminated during the English Civil War---say, from the beheading of Charles I to the (belated?) beheading of Cromwell’s disinterred cadaver. In fact the closing of the commons in England was a key mechanism for the shipping of indentured settlers to America. The only force on earth that could have kept the commons open was Antinomian (anarchic religion)...and it fought and failed to do so. The only force on earth that could have stopped the Atlantic slave trade before it began was also Antinomian. The Antinomians were the most potent force of dissent because they linked unowned land with unowned spirit---and could only, by extension, link unowned spirit with ownership of one’s own labor and one’s own person. (Just as, today---if we want to consider the air we breath as a commons, failing to link environmental issues with private business, with doctrinaire colonization of spirit, with ideological captivation of mind, or worker insecurity, or lobbying...is ludicrous. No commons exists as such without dependence on every other area that can also be considered common and inalienable. Once, for example, biodiversity is separated from money-as-commons, culture-as commons, language-as-commons, neither side of the equation can any longer function as a commons. It’s a wreck. Free Market can’t be a commons because its use is based on maximized individual advantage. Thompkins Square Park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side was not a commons when it was entirely squatted because it excluded other use. Commons are not strictly definable as finite public goods and resources in need of management...because the infinite is in fact our most precious commons---a nondepletable resource which can be used to replenish us (as perishable).

Before cracking down at the border and raiding northern factories, explain 400% rise in the price of tortillas.

So, use must be more care than use (in order to be use-without-using).

Nonsite is expansion of the inalienable. (A long way to go!)

So, the commons never made it to America (with the exception of the Roanoke Colony in North Carolina---not Raleigh’s lost colonies of the 16th C. but the Tuscarora/Black/Poor White coalition and the Dismal Swamp refuges of the 17th (...or, unless we also include catastrophic commoning exceptions like the theocratic Mormon/Paiute alliance in the Utah Territory).

The fact that the commons never made it to America has two obvious corollaries: in America land was never land of the free; and the English language has never been the speech of a free people.

Nonsite is not a commune because it is not enclosed---not a circumscribed self-sustaining sanctuary that looks after itself alone. Nonsite is exterventionist. It is greater-good-directed. Yet, as Humberto Manturana points out---autopoiesis requires a closed system. This is the first biological rule of self-organization---outside of which there is no entity, no environmentally effective agent---only diffusion. This requisite closure is what I’m calling, in this context, ‘architecture’.

If the collective is a group of contingent cooperators (if there are no abusers or freeloaders) then regulation isn’t necessary. This operational feature, a Nonsite imperative, is also an architectural problematic.

Jointly owned is still owned.

Think of ownership as completely nonexistent.

Just a few miles from where I’m writing these notes, casino profits are allowing the Shakopee Sioux to buy back their ancestral lands which, in some places, fall within existing city limits. The Oneida Nation is trying to make an independent territory by placing 17000 acres of central NY State into a federal trust.

And when that which is common for some is not common for others...? It is very easy to get thrown out of a park...just use it nonrecreationally. Functional commons (like public transportation, public restrooms, like tap-water) are for private citizens not well-off enough to avoid their use. Is a taxi a temporary one-person commons? What of exclusive high-end purely recreational use of a commons---like pontoon-airplaning into remote sanctuaries to bag elk? Has the forest gone from peasant stronghold to rich reserve?

Commons of nature and commons of nurture?

“Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds.” Thomas Paine.

I guess my property lines don’t converge to a dot as I approach the earth’s core.

Now we have carbon credits for cleaning the unownable air.

Why won’t we break stride, break appetite?

The State of Alaska dispenses a Citizen’s Dividend for profits on its oil investments. There are countless unexplored citizen dividends which Nonsite might what to turn up.

The electro-magnetic spectrum! Who profits from...pays back. Let’s write the regulation! Let’s get out ahead of the buccaneering, the venture privateering. That would be collective.

Because early biomedical research is funded by government (us) and then given away to private interests, we’re paying twice when we buy the medicine. Once again, who’s going to write our yet unwritten rights? Happiness is a value, not an issue.

Who fails to treat a resource as (not only finite but) miraculous, disgraces the common. Sublimity of the stem of a tree rising to crown and sending roots into ground revolving around a sun---any deadening of our sense of awe (the staggering improbability of the real) disregards the aesthetic commons (the combined marvel of environment and our perceiving of its wonder).

The high-end dot com bust brought an end to the web as shared-subsistence-preserve for all.

As a minimum, Nonsite could function as a privateering alert (cases in which we’re paying many times the common cost for a public service while losing civic say in oversight---like, ‘protection’...think ‘military contracting’---paying for services we’ve already been taxed for and should, in fact, perhaps be paid for receiving at the point of service---think being paid for hospital stay!

Extend the list of basic rights and services (far beyond the DNC platform) which are currently available only by privilege, or not available at all.

If aesthetics is a commons, shouldn’t artists who make money off their work pay into the Citizen’s Dividend Fund? Are our generous spirits and good consciences already voluntarily taking care of it? Hardly.

Either we’re not well-off enough to help others, or we’ve been trained to feel all’s fair outside our one-person communes.

Your health is part of MY rights! Part of the inheritance I share.

Hold me in trust!

Commons: that without which we dry up. We die. I just returned from the dead. I’m looking at someone else’s SUV parked on the street next to the same oak tree, having completely forgotten that I’d no longer know anyone. Commons: that which dries up without us.

As the definition of commons has been extended to include the environment, survival at this point in time requires a corresponding extension in aesthetics.

Nonsite: myriad provisional commons.

(I’m sure Nonsite can survive without a formal equivalent (a site), but I’m not at all sure that it can...thrive.)

(Architecture as fear of sabotage by concretization of function...very real superstition.)

The role of art is not healing but the more potent act of celebration.

Enclosed art kills.

Nonsite is perhaps that slice of society most intently practicing language as commons. (Beginning with itself)---and nothing is as revealing of human nature as behavior within a commons (see Game Theory. See Grab Theory. See Gain Theory.)

To be a commons, must the phenomenon be depletable-though-renewable. Is language depletable-though-renewable? When we say nothing when we speak? When we don’t mean what we say? When there is, all of a sudden, meaning? When language is all the action that’s required to renew us?

Architecture appreciates the pun on ‘collective’--- collective is not only the associating of diverse people and farflung interests, but the necessary gathering of energy---for organizing itself in relation to those catastrophic forms of organization it intends to engage.

Do we have any adversaries? Had America been founded on 17th C. maroon communities instead of the plantation, founding father, indentured servant and slavery model, we’d be living in an equitable, racially relaxed America. Not to forget---that which harmonized the Native American/Black/European Poor encampment...was founding-father society as common oppressor. Is the ancestral model for Nonsite activity the maroon militia? Can the Dismal Swamp be built...the place where none who’d wish us harm dare enter? Are we that fightin’ mad? Or is that us out there too?

Architecture: that which, without which, we’re only working against ourselves. That which, with which, we’re working for ourselves as that out there. Collective.

Soup Line Think Tank. Unofficial Settlement.

We’re up against the Discretionary Budget---we’re definitely up against that (57% for National Defense—see the National Priorities Project). The Discretionary Budget is NotUs. That’s them. US as not us. Load yr muskets! We’re a warrior nation (above all else) in need of fighting against our own abuses. Nonsite: the perfect place for our phenomenally asymmetrical struggles. We haven’t got a ghost of a chance. (Personally, I like the odds.)

(I imagine the talk Rob delivered at Orono as a call for coalitioning of our nearest and most cantankerous of kin.)

Even our very organization is our own worst adversary.

We’re the new breakaway tobacco plantation proletariat (aren’t we?)

The remedy for commercialism is subsistence (as throwing a party).

An activism on the order of a regenerative art. As Thom says, we’re deluded if we think there’s time for rehearsal.

Why work when you could exercise?

Most of us bit the anti-state ideology bait. Big deficits are preferable because they prove big government bloated. So why do Republicans spend like mad as they pursue privatized security deep into political unpopularity? No more oversight. No more commons. We’re paying interest on our own money. How about a building for thinking this through.

Resistance is a matter of flowing ahead of the disasters and eroding them beforehand.

I just read an article about a certain Judge Michael A. Cicconetti who sentenced a man who had called a cop a pig to standing on a streetcorner next to a pig while wearing a sign that read: THIS IS NOT A POLICEOFFICER.

Anyone can meditate while they’re meditating. Only a poor martial art doesn’t fully engage the forces without.

Conscience is commons. Consciousness is commons. Subjectivity is the most populous commons in our country. I can build this condition, but only as an improvement on its nonsitedness. As light on itself that is itself.