The Blue Guitar

By Lisa Peattie

MIT Professor Emerita Lisa Peattie explores the art and politics of protest around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lisa Peattie
• Release date: Feb 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311623683

Lisa Peattie

Her grandfather, Robert E. Park, was an American urban sociologist who worked with Booker T Washington (with whom he shared a fascination with cities and the theory of cities) at the Tuskegee Institute. Together they searched for “The Man Farthest Down”. He later taught at the University of Chicago on the theory of urban ecology. Her father, Robert Redfield, an anthropologist also at the University of Chicago, had an interest in tracing connections – between archeology, anthropological linguistics, physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, and ethnology in a synthesis of disciplines and between village cultures in his fieldwork. She was brought up partly in Mexico, in Morelos and Yucatán, where her parents were conducting fieldwork. She began her anthropological life in 1948 with the Fox Project, which began as a summer of fieldwork for six Chicago graduate students, at Meskwaki Settlement in Iowa, and which, with the encouragement of Sol Tax, became a decade-long effort to redefine anthropology not as pure science, but as part of the human and moral landscape, in what he called “action anthropology”, and which was later to reappear in her urban planning work as “advocacy planning”. In 1943 she married Roderick Elia Peattie. She published two children’s books with him: "The Law" and “The City”, which began her lifelong study of cities. In 1962 Lisa and Roderick Peattie were hired by the Harvard–MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, under a contract with the Venezuelan government, as project anthropologist and architect respectively, to help plan the city of Guayana, near the junction of the Orinoco and the Caroni rivers in the interior of Venezuela. They were the only members of the team to live on the site; the rest of the design team worked on the project from the capitol, Caracas, 660 km away. She observed directly the effects of the then-new profession of Urban Planning as it was experienced by the planned-upon population; she reported this radicalizing experience in her first popular book: “The View from the Barrio”. Roderick Peattie died in Venezuela, in a car accident in 1963. Lisa Peattie returned to the United States, where she taught urban planning at MIT until her retirement. In 1966 she, with other faculty and students of M.I.T. and Harvard, organized Urban Planning Aid. This organization was to offer assistance to local residents against highway construction, and housing problems. It took an active part in the urban renewal fights and the Freeway and expressway revolts of the 1960s and 1970s.In the course of these anti-development struggles, she began a study and critique of conventional economic theory, which was strongly pro-development. She has inspired activists in such widely varied subjects as poverty and conviviality. She also was involved in the Homeless Empowerment Project, and in the creation of “Spare Change News”, a street newspaper whose mission is "to present, by our own example, that homeless and economically disadvantaged people, with the proper resources, empowerment, opportunity, and encouragement are capable of creating change for ourselves in society." She also became involved in the fight against nuclear arms.

Book preview

PLAYING THE BLUE GUITAR

This book reports on a personal voyage of discovery. When I got to be sixty, I took early retirement from a university teaching job in order to work in the peace movement. I wanted to change the world. But I knew that I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to coordinate a meeting, to organize a demonstration, to ask for money, to set up a press conference: these were skills I would have to learn. But I also knew that I needed in a deeper and more general sense an understanding of how to change the world. What does a social movement move and how does it do it? So I tried to learn from the experiences of others. When I was in England I slept under plastic at Greenham Common among the other women of the peace camp outside the missile base. Then I went to Wales to talk with Welsh nationalists. On a visit to Australia I tried to learn something about the movement for aboriginal land rights. As a visiting professor in Los Angeles, I interviewed Gay activists. On a trip to Tokyo, I met with some of the young radicals whose fierce opposition has so far made it impossible for the airport construction to complete more than one runway. Meanwhile, of course, being irrevocably professorial, I read a lot. I read not only about the particular movements I was trying to understand as examples of attempts to change the world but about the theory of social movements in general.

Although there is rather a lot of such academic theorizing about social movements, I found it less than helpful in my search for understanding. A basic difficulty was that the social movements in the literature seemed to have little resemblance to the world I was experiencing, whether in the Greenham Common peace encampment or door-to-door canvassing in Los Angeles.

On the page, movements appeared as orderly and bounded and to be organized around defined goals. On the ground they seemed more serendipitous, disorderly, subject to opportunistic alliances and furious confrontations about issues that—if one thought of a movement as unified around a single purpose—were quite diversionary. But if movements seemed on the ground to be less orderly and less programmatically unified than they appeared in the books, they were also more energetic and energizing, more creative, more fun.

Seen at the ground level a social movement was not organization for social change; it was not an entity at all. A movement seemed to be simply various groups of people more or less aware of each other interacting passionately and creatively with the complex history of which they were part.

The staging of protest could be seen as a kind of dramatic art, no less gorgeous for being out of the control of any single author or director. Movements themselves seemed most like a kind of untidy theatre of improvisation or collective story-telling. Only as stories were movements unified by purpose and characterized by plots with heroes and villains; out there was a world of uncertain struggle and coping in which the effort to re-define the meaning of things was as much reality as the struggles over budgets, rules, and territory.

Once I saw the world of social movements in this way, the rest of the social scenery began to look different to me too. The official institutions did not seem quite so substantial. Where one might have thought there was coherent policy and powerful bureaucracy there appeared to be struggles for legitimacy, acting at cross purposes, trying to put the best spin on events.

The system could be seen as a kind of theatre itself. I came to see the world of institutions as a world of presentation and enactment, no less theatrical than the movements that threaten their control of the stage and script.

In the chapters that follow, I try to show what it is like in the world of social movement action by using each of the movements I have been exploring to bring out a particular point. Airport protests show how purposes emerge from action. Welsh nationalism shows how problematic it is to organize around collective identity since both boundaries of the collectivity and the meaning of identity shift with circumstances. Gay politics shows the importance of some degree of extremism in making a space for those closer to the mainstream. The Australian aboriginal rights movement seemed to me to be a perfect illustration of the way in which movement symbolism is able to make one group’s struggle that of many others. The dilemmas of the peace movement are an acute version of the movement problem of working against existing forces that, at the same time, are needed for support.

Each of these paradoxes can be found everywhere through the world of social movement activity. But it seemed helpful to focus on each in a particular context.

Nor are these points, taken together, all that could be said about the problems of social movement activity. But I think they do help in understanding what goes on, and in seeing certain failures as inherent in the nature of the terrain of struggle.

Finally, I try to say something of what I think I learned about social protest as dramatic art. To say that social protests are dramatic productions, theatrical in nature, is not to render them less consequential than real politics. In a world of presentation and enactment they are real politics. They are politics adapted to a terrain of struggle where what is at issue is not simply rules and resources but the agenda of collective life and the meaning of what we do. I have the deepest respect for those who practice with skill and integrity this most difficult of arts. Their work deserves closer attention and better review than it usually gets — (Police estimated that 75,000 demonstrators…)

The material world is real. But our beliefs and feelings about the material are equally real. It is perfectly reasonable to have a politics which enacts, dramatizes, prefigures because the world to be shaped is one which consists of facts-as-interpreted.

I would like to take as our motto for the inquiry into social movements a little poem by Wallace Stevens.

They said,

You have a blue guitar You do not play things as they are. The man replied Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.

What is the nature of the blue guitar? How does it change things as they are?

What do we mean by things as they are, anyway?

CHAPTER ONE:

A MOVEMENT IS NOT A THING

For scholarly people who write about trying to change the world, the unit of analysis is generally the social movement. There are histories of the peace movement and the civil rights movement and of the gay liberation movement: there are discussions of how a category of new social movements differ from older social movements; there are theories of what circumstances bring social movements into being. There is a huge literature of this sort.

I will make no attempt to do a proper review of this literature. [1] It would make me act more scholarly than I feel or want to be. But I will review in a rather general way the major issues that appear in the social movement literature. Then I will call attention to some serious problems that arise in the concept of social movement itself, in using it as the unit of analysis.

It is a simplification but perhaps a helpful one to point out that in the social movement literature there is a kind of great trans-Atlantic divide between the Europeans and the Americans. The difference does not seem to lie so much in the movements themselves as in the mental set of the analysts.

The European intellectuals are shaped by a broadly Marxist tradition that in the United States has been seen as either cranky or exotic but in Europe has been much more respectable. In the Marxist-shaped intellectual tradition, the interests around which movements coalesced were those of classes, the pre-eminent movement was the labor movement, and what was at stake was nothing less than the shaping of society through struggle. Now, as the historical role of the labor movement seems to decline, as evolving class structure seems less and less to be that predicted in the nineteenth century and as non-economic issues like feminism and ecology have come to the fore, the Europeans have moved to adapt this train of thought to an altered terrain. Perhaps women may be looked at as a sort of oppressed class. Perhaps struggles over housing and urban services represent the twentieth century form of struggles over the renumeration of labor, this time via the social wage. But the major contribution of European re-thinking has been the theory of New Social Movements [2] that in effect tries to preserve the broad scale of the traditional style of analysis while adapting it to changing circumstances. It is argued that the spread of controls over private life (the colonization of the lifespace) [3] creates a new terrain for resistance and struggle, as also that society-wide issues like militarism or the use of the environment have burst the boundaries of old-fashioned class struggle. New Social Movement theory breaks decisively with the Marxist tradition in its focus on identity and on the social construction of meaning. But the questions asked are still broad ones. Particular movements are looked at as manifestations of and as clues to the great underlying societal trends.

On the other side of the Atlantic there tends to be less use of grand theory for making sense of particular movements, but rather a concern with the circumstances leading to the emergence of one or another mobilization around some issue, whether racial segregation, fluoridation of drinking water, or sex education in the schools. There are a variety of theories, both supply and demand versions, that do not so much compete as supplement each other. Deprivation theories arose as a response to an earlier sociological tradition that saw protest mobilization as essentially irrational crowd behavior. [4] They see social movements as arising out of need. For example, Reagan’s buildup of the nuclear arsenal, particularly as combined with bellicose Cold War rhetoric, terrified those who could understand what was happening and led them to join together in a vast peace movement that tried to outlaw nuclear testing, keep from stationing missiles in Europe, and generally check the further building of the baroque arsenal. Breakdown theories call attention to the constraints on mobilization; it is argued that there was just as much arms buildup and imperiling of survival under Kennedy, but Kennedy, unlike Reagan, incorporated the arms-limitation faction in government in advisory roles; and thus drew their oppositional sting; when Reagan left them outside, they went into opposition. Political space/visibility theories look at the world in which movements take shape as one of multiple issues and causes competing with each other for public attention. The space taken by the peace movement in the early days of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was subsequently pre-empted by the Vietnam War and the opposition to that; the ending of that war, in turn, was an important part of the conditions that made the nuclear Freeze movement possible. [5] Similarly, it is argued that Reagan’s bellicose rhetoric and his enough shovels civil defense man gave visibility to a process that was equally dangerous although relatively unnoticed before. Resource mobilization theories see movements as arising not so much out of need as out of capacity. Grievances are always with us, it is argued: what counts is capacity to act on them. The grand-daddy of resource mobilization theories is, of course, the Marxist analysis that sees the massing of workers in factories as a precondition for labor militancy. Similarly, John D’Emilio, writing on the emergence of Gay politics, [6] sees as a precondition the wartime population movements that shifted Gays and lesbians out of their communities into the military and into the war-booming cities, making possible the Gay bars that were the substrate of much Gay collective sense. Similarly, Parkins’ Middle Class Radicalism [7] sees the growing social category of teachers and social service providers as a natural social base within which a peace movement could take root; the involvement of scientists becomes another resource.

A framing approach to movements tries to join social structure and social resources with elements of motivation and aspiration. Movement organizers are seen as shaping meaning into specific issue frames or more encompassing master frames of collective meaning for action. [8]

These theories are very helpful in explaining the rise and fall of social mobilization over time. What made it possible for Gays to parade pridefully after so many years in the closet? Whatever happened to the Freeze movement? We need theories that help us to make sense of all this. Or we want to make comparisons: How was the peace movement in the United States like that in Europe and in what ways different? How is the feminist movement of the 80s like the women’s movement in the latter half of the 19th century?

All of these questions demand that we deal with social movements as entities, as Things. When we see social movements as entities, we have to see them as bounded. We see them as being bounded in time, as having each a beginning and an end. We see them as bounded in social space; their components are sets of organizations—Greenpeace, the Audubon Society, Earth First, or CORE, SNCC, and SCLC. We identify each of these entities by its purpose: the Ecological Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, Pro-Life and Pro-Choice. Using such bounded entities as our units of analysis, we can fairly readily make comparisons and generalizations. Like a nurse in a hospital ward reading the condition of her patients by the data on blood pressure and temperature provided in their charts, we will appraise the vigor of our various movements via some relatively simple indicators: mentions in the media, attendance at demonstrations, organizational affiliates.

There is nothing wrong with this so far as it goes, and for some kinds of questions it seems to be the only way to go. But for other questions, it is not helpful at all. If we mean by whatever happened to the Freeze movement? Why did it not go on from success to success but rather dropped out of sight? The social movement theories are quite helpful indeed. But if we mean by the question more literally, what happened to it? These theories are on altogether the wrong level. To answer this question, we would have to trace the evolution of the organizations that formed during the Freeze to pursue its objectives (and many of these persist in my own peace-movement environment although with re-focused objectives) of the persons who played a part of the movement at that time—and Randy Forsberg has certainly gotten herself an institutional base and is pursuing new strategies—and of the analytic and organizing ideas that were part of the Freeze intellectual world.

To someone who sees the true and proper units of analysis as being Things called movements this sort of enquiry is not particularly exciting. The movement was extremely alive, and now it is dead. what we have here is a post-mortem.

But we might take a much more slippery and provisional view of the phenomena. We might see what has been identified as movement as a provisional, essentially unbounded, coalescence of miscellaneous groups, forces and ideas. In this view, there is no Constitution, no roll of members, no program that is definitive. A social movement displays its form over time like a piece of music, and its components are heterogeneous: themes and ideas, organizations, persons for whom the movement is a real and continuing set of ideas grounding action, and persons whose attachment is partial and transitory.

Indeed, there is in academic theorizing a beginning on this approach in micromobilization theory, dealing with what happens in such encounters as meetings and demonstrations, and in the broader attempt by Gamson and others to link the emergence of collective identities and the framing of issues to what goes on at the level of organizational activity. [9]

This view is much more helpful in understanding the movement world as it appears to the organizer. Abbie Hoffman, living underground as Barry Freed in the Thousand Islands section of the St. Lawrence River, decided that he was the only person in the area with the skill to defeat a scheme by the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge the river for winter navigation and oil tankers. In the Sixties, as Abbie Hoffman, he had specialized brilliantly in the politics of outrageous confrontation. Now he set out to build a coalition around saving the river involving local sportsmen and the ecology-focused liberals, service clubs, veterans, groups, summer people and locals. He knew how to do things with dash, starting with a zippy name for the movement—Save the River—and involving river cruises for potential allies in an antique paddle wheeler, rowdy dances, and a River Appreciation Day. But he also taught amateurs to read and de-mystify the Corps` reports, campaigned in the newspapers and in leaflets, collected petitions and ran hearings. The enterprise defeated an enormously powerful body that had never before lost to community action. That community and its action was created. Abbie Hoffman had created a local movement, one with national connection. [10]

He had not created the materials; he used what was there. Environmentalism was in the intellectual atmosphere. The river rats had their valued way of life. The policy standing of toxic waste hazards was there to be appealed to. He brought them together.

The view of social movements as provisional groupings of elements also helps us to understand how themes and goals can emerge out of interest and action. The Things of social movement theory are collective enterprises directed at particular purposes. But in the great airport controversies described in the next chapter we will see how, rather than action being directed at purposes, we can see purpose emerging from action. In Germany, in Japan, in the United States groups of residents began to protest against large airports because of the noise, the land-taking affecting them personally. But finding it impossible to oppose publicly a project of consummate importance to the progress of the whole society simply on the basis of its inconvenience to a relatively small group, the airport opponents were shortly led to question the very validity of the idea of progress. Fighting the airport, in case after case, has become a metaphor for modern Luddism—and in so doing, has tapped into a deep anti-modernist strain of questioning the value of economic growth and of progress as so interpreted, and has become a terrain