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)
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