intermission

I heard a story about an all-too-familiar argument between a professor and a graduate student. Student is fluent in his language area, can conduct his interviews effectively, and certainly is intelligent, but is resistant to reading theory. The professor chides and cajoles, hoping to pique student's interest. The power dynamics of this office are being kept carefully concealed in the walls and drawers. Prof knows from experience that little will come of a forced, disaffected first tromp through a theoretical text, so no open threats grace the table. Anyway prof is worried he might have forgotten them at the bottom of a drawer in his last move. Finally, cleverly, professor brings student around through a proverbial ordering of the situation. He says: "If you're sure you want to do it without any theory I suppose you can just write it like a journalist."
And everything was put in perspective. Prof may have played on student's haughtiness instead of his dedication to scholarship, but everyone is happy with the results. Readings were assigned, understood, and absorbed into student's work. It reads no longer like a report or a news feed, but takes on weight in the corners of the pages. Strange etchings appear in watermark, zags cut the paper like novelty papyrus, fibers are drudged together like felt to all-but-obscure some of the footnotes. The pages feel to thicken and sag heavy with every turn. It would make a much better blanket than newspaper, to capture warmth and block the wind, but it has lost its function as a fire starter. This tome will not light until a house is burning down around it. We wonder if it burned at all, or instead was muted first to dust.

NO EVENING CLASSES

i definitely cannot sign up for evening classes on TR next quarter. I think I've made it to Beatty three times this quarter - definitely not twice a week. How can an unemployed uni kid have anything but time to kill? (how can i possibly be so busy??)
I wonder if moving to a bubble school would be as depressing as it was my freshman year. Sometimes I'm jealous of all the students who grumble at any thought of interrupting their perpetual movement between drinking and reading. You know, all of us who've left home in another state in order to study. nomads fashioning social tee-pees in town just to keep from going crazy. tee-pees, lean-tos, disaster relief zones (we do seem to cross paths with the red cross a lot)

Sanctuary - Security

Imminent dangers are a loose bundle of tropes consistently deployed to index the public recreation center and mark its territory apart from other kinds of public space. The liberalist conception of uplifting and liberating centers is predicated on the imminent danger and violence of the streets. They are last bastions within under-determined and otherwise-determined streets, parks, and yards: unbounded and unsupervised corridors - full of bullets and black holes - where "anything can happen." The public out there is ready for you with a knife. "If you don't buy their drugs they think you're insulting them." If you stop for too long you are looking to be had. "They're crazy, they're stupid, and they can't drive." The spaces themselves are for something and against something and, while those exact things have undergone shifts and conjugations - while the very same spaces are threatened by infiltration and subversion at any time - centers offer public Sanctuary and public Security. From the public.
The Neoliberalization of public space does not account for the public. It does not factor the public or solve for the public or make attempts to locate public opinion. The Neoliberalization of public space solves along the affective axis for place-making and drive-by cohesion. Community Development Corporations illustrate street scenes and order business owners and landlords to redecorate. A decades-old family-owned Korean restaurant is demolished for its insufficiency as a gateway to the university district. It is replaced by a three-story Buffalo Wild Wings franchise assembled of tinted glass and flat-screen TVs. Buckeye Donuts (the most-popular venue on campus) is ordered to make its windows smaller and replace its neon sign because it just doesn't flow with the neighborhood. Repaving the streets takes so long that locally-owned businesses shut their doors. A similar process just took place in the Short North (led by Community Properties of Ohio). The city's focus has shifted from treating neighborhoods with liberal injections of resources and federal welfare to the allocation of federal funds to these very CDCs. Such CDCs are intent on edging undesirables out of neighborhoods by their pocketbooks and police records. They're kept out through affective place-making techniques that grab you by the brain stem like you're a pet with a shock collar inside an invisible fence.
Centers share attributes with the bygone fortress urbanism of massive windowless downtown shopping malls. They are enclosures to wall in the subjects who consent to the determinations of the indoor environment. Shopping malls are for shopping, you may be asked to leave if you are disturbing others' shopping experience. Strolling under the arbor of a recreation center one consents to recreate, at least to observe the rules (of dress, behavior, association). Of course these things always slide, but built into the space is a tacit agreement between center and occupant - sanctuary for selectivity or security for determination. As liberal institutions like rec centers and publicly funded fortress malls are being dismantled (physically and discursively), new centers are being constructed exclusively as "community assets" and "investments" in affluent neighborhoods, while city-wide, centralized institutions are regularly failing and struggling to serve their constituents. Examples of new fortress-centers are slim-to-none. The only one I've found is illustrative of the material conditions necessary for the proliferation of recreation space within a neoliberal state.
Sderot is a town in Israel that lies less than 1 Km from the Israeli-recognized border with Gaza. Rockets fall there often enough that children are rarely allowed to play in the street. Bullets and black holes and blind rockets fall. Everyone is at risk in an outdoor environment that circulates imminent, unpredictable danger. Holdovers holdover. I'm reminded of my unusual admission to the usually-locked lounge of Thompson Rec Center when the employee thought I needed "to lay low for a while." Watch this video made during the construction of the Sderot Secure Recreation Center. It's filled with reverberations of the welfare-state lingo once common in the US. Specifically, that our children will grow up healthy in the midst of the impossible violence owned by urban incorrigibles or terrorists. I'm using the example just to show the the extremes necessary for the production of a fortress-center in this day and age, but several other comments made in the video can be extrapolated upon to illuminate interesting facets of Neoliberalism and defended public spaces.

it gets poppin

**draft**

"It gets poppin in here once the weather gets cold, don't it, Mr. D?"

"Man. It gets crackin, is what. I wish it got poppin; it gets crackin."

We're laughing now. I know what he means: popping is too tame a word to use for the tension outside the custodial closet that I hide my bike in. The center lobby/game room is packed with the 13+ crowd. It's like a bar with no booze inspired by a highschool cafeteria without food: There's more space between the people here, but less to insulate one from another. I remember the boxing coach's words as I hoist my bike down the front stairs. "You be careful now, y'hear? They're crazy, they're stupid, and they can't drive!"

After months of regular attendance, this is the first time I've noticed the outside coming into this space. For the first time I feel the weight of peoples' eyes on me - in a moment I'm transmuted from "that boxer" or "Mr. Alex" into "that white guy." Feels like lots of these new faces brought the cold in with them.

But this still isn't about me. It's about new angles in big bare rooms, and seein how much torque we can put on these big bare walls.

chapter outline

This paper addresses a number of newspaper stories, identified by topic, as simulacra behaving much like regional or group-specific variations on a traditional folktale.¹ As my material, I take not hot-button controversial issues, but stories which feel mundane and incontestable alongside Somali pirates and healthcare reform. This bares my object, a public funeral eulogy, as one of several expressive culture (folk) forms employed to report the effects of localized conflicts as part of a natural order. I examine newspaper stories topical to the closure of public recreation centers in American cities and towns. My analysis will present clues with which to load ostensibly unbiased, objective, and meaningless newspaper stories with bias, objectives, and meaning.

We regret to inform you...

As the story goes, an immovable budget crisis racks the metropolis. City services are cut across the board. Officials do everything they can, but some recreation centers, like some employees of other city services, won't pull through. The department is suffering from underemployment and lack of funds. Loved ones and mourners share their loss. City officials regret to inform us. Visitors will be redirected to the closest other center, but it will be too far to walk for seniors and children. Local nonprofits and faith-based organizations might absorb some of the runoff, but their capacity and selection of programs cannot match the center's. Everyone is sorry for the kids, and scared of what they will do out in the open, at-risk and unsupervised.

It is not difficult to see the funeral eulogy skeleton, especially glancing back and forth among variations of the article. Most variation is built into the skeleton: the date, city, names (of the center and the speakers), the center's activities, age, the size of the city deficit and amount of money to be saved by closing the center(s). All of this works like Mad-Libs² or Clue:³ filling in the blank and answering the who, what, when,where, why, and how - not to solve a crime, but for the purpose of indexing an event.

The center is remembered fondly; sometimes upcoming plans for the center are reminiscent of a funeral eulogist's mention of the deceased's unfinished business. Occasionally reporters appear to have spent a fair amount of time talking to center employees as well as visitors young and old. Just like a person who has passed away, a center is a multiplicity that will never be replaced. A funeral eulogy reports not on an active killer or conflict, but for the passive deceased. Likewise, these stories report in memoriam on the passive buildings closing; budget cuts are analogous to natural causes.

At first blush, it appears that meaning has been stripped from center closings reports - an invested reader asks who to blame, where the money has gone, which city projects made the cut, and so on⁴ - and the stripped event is appended to any number of grand narratives.⁵ So much, however, is at stake in defining opposing sides and competing interests in urban and local politics that, to be categorized as objective, newspapers tell tales of conflict as if they were events epiphenomenal to or divorced from local power struggles.

Events are instead incorporated by readers into popularized struggles, often rounded up to become homogenized with national or international issues,⁶ not withstanding varying popular conceptions of globalization. City operators have skirted a great deal of criticism thanks to stylized accounts of "what's going on" that produce a contextual lack for local events - an evental meaninglessness which can cast struggle and conflict as the steady, plodding advance of real events and statistics.⁷

Casting this conflict as event steadies our typically gun-shy, business-first local powers against organized confrontation and boat-rocking. The report of a heartfelt apology from a mayor under pressure probably does as much for their popularity as a plan to keep centers open. It definitely doesn't hurt their popularity as much as if s\he were to favor the centers' funding over that of other civil services like fire and police. As well it does not call publicly-funded development projects, let alone the dogma of development, into question.⁸ I believe the contrary, that by displacing the folk form of a eulogy onto the dissolution of what remains of American welfare⁹ projects, subjects more or less actively build fluency in Neoliberal discourses of society, welfare and development.¹⁰

In Society Must Be Defended Michele Foucault shows how state management of the life and death of its subjects correlates with the transition from a system of sovereign power to one of power over life. The change in the relationship between state and subject can be partly characterized as the change from a state which lets its subjects live or makes them die (this is the sovereign right), to one which makes its subjects live or lets them die.¹¹ With respect to recreation centers, media outlets eulogize their closure, more combative sources criticise or blame public officials; none, however, are capable of identifying the closure of a center as an effect of an economic discourse which claims the status of science. The city is relinquished of the responsibility to make neighborhoods live, and global economic failures preclude any sustained accusation of budgetary malfeasance.

Centers once imagined to be solutions to social ailments are perceived as state-sponsored philanthropic organizations. While cities rush to pull plugs on municipally-owned services and properties in favor of investing in non-profits and CDCs,¹² the very effects of Neoliberal development as a scientific discourse are styled as natural responses to economic conditions. That is, centers are closing and changing, in part, to fall in with a Neoliberal conception of the subject as entrepreneur, in whom the city invests for maximum return.¹³ The Department of Parks and Recreation in Columbus, at least, advertises itself and its centers as a services, not investments.

In the city of Columbus, the 2008/9 tale included a unique variation, that the centers to be closed would continue to be maintained. This meant, in practice, that the lawns would be mowed, the utilities left on, and the security cameras recording. Alien to a funeral eulogy, the second life of empty centers stands out of the frame. The appointment of non-profit organizations into leadership positions at select centers contests the form of funeral eulogy. This raises the question: If the centers themselves are not dying, what is?

Centers are opening nationwide, ostensibly more often than they are closing. Reports hail their arrival enthusiastically - most articles are likely solicited by the organizations opening the centers and shopped to local papers. There are several key differences in operating procedures reported on, as well there are a number of utterances which I feel are key to understanding what is passing on in the funeral eulogy, what is being replaced, and what kinds of discursive shifts are making these changes possible. Newspaper articles reporting the tale as a funeral eulogy fashion the effects of conflicts into natural events; they are brought to bear when set next to the seeming proliferation of recreation facilities. More centers means that the funeral eulogies in the news are not of a natural order.

Most centers (re)opening appear to be sponsored by private non-profit entities, faith-based groups and occasionally businesses with a stake in the community. One center opening in Memphis, TN is being sponsored by the director of a private prison company. Most of the others target children, the disabled, or the elderly - their target is most often a demographic, not a neighborhood. Town-gown partnerships are common as well.

Centers opening are billed as assets to the neighborhood - investments in the area's future. Neoliberal economic discourse makes possible neighborhood assets and investments where it undermines public services. Although their closure occasionally provokes touching eulogies or righteous outcries, no newsworthy responses has been able to identify the closures as effects of a conflict.

The centers, themselves, have little to do with this process. Centers in Columbus are supposed to reopen, after the city effectively bullied its constituencies into voting for a tax hike, but under qualitatively different conditions. For example, comprehensive pricing schemes are being designed to minimize losses, refashioning ostensibly free spaces as pay-to-play environments. Some new and forthcoming centers shamelessly advertise their space for rent to business functions and private parties, calling to mind a sweaty convention center.

Nonprofits are being asked to continue supervising select centers. Some nonprofits no doubt operate centers more effectively and passionately than city employees did, but charities' mission statements and priorities most often are not coterminous with the biopolitical mission to serve communities.

As unbiased, objective harbingers of the real into everyday homes and laptops, modern media utters the facts we see, and with which we disbelieve our own landscapes and affectual responses to everyday intensities. I have rewritten the closure and (re)opening of recreation centers as effects of an economic science - part of an effort to imagine that process as an effect of a conflict. I have suggested a measure of objectivity as a power-laden and productive category - a style which evacuates effects of conflict as meaningless events more or less salient to society recited.¹⁴ Furthermore, by studying the uniformity of far-flung statements, I have rewritten it working toward the rule that underpins a series of displaced utterances. Loading a tale with meaning is not a ploy to garner sympathy, it is akin to an attack on the discourse that makes the closure possible.¹⁵

1The simple skeleton fleshed out differently depending on contexts of time and place as in tale-type and motif indexes.

2'Mad-Libs' is a party game in which the parts of speech are used to choose words which will occupy key places in a story. The audience chooses words before hearing the story, then the story is told with those chosen words incorporated into predetermined spots.

3A whodunnit party game in which players must uncover the who, what, and how of a murder.

4Some papers, especially alternative newspapers like The Other Paper more thoroughly investigate the cause of death than mainstream news outlets. Perhaps this is the folk form of a police report.

5Read the comments section of any internet newspaper story for widely varying recitations of societal narratives.

6See web-based reader feedback on newspaper websites, for example.

7 As de Certeau put it: "Once constituted in secret, the real now jabbers away....Never...have the gods' ministers made them speak so continuously, in such detail and so injunctively as the producers of revelations and rules do today in the name of topicality. Our orthodoxy is made up of narrations of 'what's going on'. Statistical debates are our theological wars. The combatants no longer bear ideas as offensive or defensive arms. They move forward camouflaged as facts , data and events." (de Certeau in Ward 124)

8A notable exception is Columbus' The Other Paper's article challenging the city budget on the whole as unfair and hypocritical. (Teter, Lyndsey. Rich Man, Poor Man. 19 December 2008).

9This is a problematic term. I expect a more extended look into the first crystallizations of recreation centers will point to centers' use as welfare, a form of economic control, with a population as its primary target. Many American community centers, however, were focused first on individuals' political capacities - characteristic of disciplinary society. (Foucualt...why can't u remember which book is which...)

10 The Neoliberal bent most clearly the forfeiture of any mind for the public good in post-Keynsian economic theories,

most notably those originating from Friedman and the notorious Chicago School of Economics . As noted by folklorist

Kelly Feltault, Neoliberal economics employ a "discourse that conflates economic growth with human security

"

(Feltault 95)

11Foucault, M. 2003. Society must be defended: lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, transl. D. Macey, pp. 239-263. New York: Picador (chapt. 11, pp. 239-263)

12Community Development Corporations, like Campus Partners in the campus area or Community Properties of Ohio in the Short North and Weinland Park, make use of the city's allocation of federal funds to, in effect, homogenize and gentrify neighborhoods by buying project-based housing from the city (with people living in it) and designing place-making schemes including gateways and cohesive street planning.

13For example, the Columbus cut funding to Davis Discovery Center (like a rec center downtown for the arts) shortly after city council voted to declare the city "Independent Art Capitol of the World." A flock of new investments into private arts-based nonprofits, however, are still flowing.

14"Quotation...is the ultimate weapon for making one believe. Because it plays upon what the other is assumed to believe, it is the means by which 'reality' is instituted. To quote the other on one's own behalf is thus to make believable the simulacra produced in a particular place. Opinion 'polls' have become the most elementary and the most passive procedure for doing this." (de Certeau in Ward 127

15I'm working toward an "insurrection of subjugated knowledges" that I hope will be "capable of opposition and of struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse." In a word: genealogy (Foucault 1980d. p 83)

abstract

Outline of a Practice of Theory: Everyday Land, Labor and
(Social)Capital in a Public Recreation Center

Public recreation centers are boring to look at, smelly to be in,  overdetermined, puritanical, masculinist and expensive to maintain.
What's more, most programs cost money, which leaves us wondering
exactly what makes them public to begin with. Many centers are also
immensely popular places for young people and young adults to
socialize after school and on Saturday afternoons, often a rec center
is an everyday stop for young people on their ways home from school.
In early 2009, 11 public recreation centers in Columbus, Ohio closed for "lack of funds." This project has been under way for as long, not only to find

ways of advocating for public space, but also to investigate what
everyday lives are produced in a recreation center. My operating

assumptions are that we're missing effective modes of introducing the
value of these facilities into political machines, and that that has
more to do with the shift from Reformist to Neo-Liberal
styles of urban governmentality than it has to do with any budget
crisis.
My work is presented as a critical introduction to a series of
original short stories and interviews inspired by extensive fieldwork,

organizing efforts, conversations with public officials and many hours spent in select centers.  The inversion of Bourdieu's title speaks more to my impatience with disciplinary canon than it does to my gown's theoretical underpinnings. I draw more inspiration from Donna Haraway and Kathleen Stewart, both of whom embrace storytelling in their critical theoretical work to produce a "contact zone for analysis" (Stewart, 2008).