The banality of this particular evil glazes over the continued emaciation of public education. Several authors have addressed this process (see Giroux’s Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education), as well as discussed models for attempting to stem this trend. While CUNY continues to struggle for funding, both for its students and its large number of precariously contracted educators, the learning experience becomes increasingly denigrated – classroom sizes balloon, facilities erode, teachers exhaust. Commoditizing education (prioritizing its exchange-value over its use-value) inevitably impoverishes public institutions, no matter how skilled CUNY’s Chancellor (with his $500k salary) is at branding. A for-profit space reduces its occupants to their potential output, rendering experience marginal or impossible. By this, I mean to convey the mutual exclusivity of the concepts output and experience. Experience is something that only occurs in the present (one can remember a past experience, but the experience occurred in a present). Output, on the other hand, is something that cannot have a present (if I say ‘I have an output’, it denotes either something that is done or something that will be done).

While Marx, Bachelard, Thompson, Lefebvre, Harvey and others have variously mapped out the contours of privatized space and time, I want to zoom in on a relatively new type of space that might amuse such venerable thinkers. The last ten years have seen the rise of commercial spaces specifically designed to facilitate the illumination, ideas, creativity, and productivity of their occupiers known as co-work spaces. Sometimes referred to as shared-work spaces, these are increasingly popular urban alternatives to traditional offices, with their abrasive lighting and tepid aromas. Co-work spaces tend to be marketed to free-lancers – some of the occupations that members boast of holding include social entrepreneur, innovation consultant, content maker, talent buyer, experience designer, and creative (yes, used as a noun).

These spaces are meant to be an antidote to the supposed creativity-stifling office environment, while at the same time foster a level of focus that cannot be achieved at a busy coffee shop. These commercial creativity spaces, much like commercial exercising spaces, are subscription-based, and depending on the amenities provided (some of them have “chill zones” and rooftop gardens) can cost from $800/month to $130/month, with most offering a daily rate of $30. Their websites are dripping with perfunctory marketing language, from the slightly cultish: “Where you work can change the way you work. The way you work can change how you live. Work better, Live better…” to DIY rustication: “We built this place with our hands, using reclaimed lumber and materials and taking the time to do it right. There is a wall made out of windows to make the workspace quiet, while keeping the studio open and airy. There is a wood-fired stove to cozy up to in the winter…There’s an oven for nachos, Delonghi coffeemaker for your rocket fuel… Right now, we’re engineering a solar-powered battery recharge station, just for the hell of it.” And one Brooklyn co-work space proudly asserts that it would like “to change the world for the better.”

Such market-based solutions to cultivating creative ideas may be better at generating output in comparison to publicly-held thinking spaces such as libraries or parks, but can an experience of creativity actually be designed?

While most of the vocations that seem to be attracted to co-work spaces sound like fabricated portable lifestyles, which is perfectly fine, I recently learned that Experience Designer is a quite real and rather handsomely compensated vocation.* An experience designer is charged with ensuring that your experience of a company’s website or app is as optimal and pleasant as possible. Or in their own words, experience design is “focused on creating positive human outcomes.”

While this new vocation might reduce the time we spend on the phone with cable or internet companies, it’s hard to imagine that the DMV or Post Office have ever consulted an experience designer. Such public institutions often generate palpable experiences of misery, precisely because the human experience is not planned. The idea of designing an experience seems, indeed, rather counterintuitive. Are planned experiences genuinely experiences, or just the output of a plan? As the above self-descriptions suggest, co-work spaces are meticulously designed. They are designed to inspire creativity. While there are certainly some spaces that are more conducive to concentration than others, the idea that such spaces can be commoditized inspires more panic than creativity.

To my knowledge, public schools do not regularly employ experience designers. However, the increasing neoliberalization of education and the ideology that DeVos has thus far espoused suggest that this day may not be far off. While it can be more functionally pleasant to interact with FedEx than the USPS, the increasing privatization of space normalizes the idea that every experience should be for-profit, should be designed to grow wealth, and perhaps this is a sentiment we should not entwine with education.

The idea that knowledge production has ever been ‘pure’ and ideology-free is a bit of mythology. The Enlightenment was financed by those seeking more efficient means of growing wealth (see some of Mary Poovey’s work), and its educational traditions bear this mark. Public elementary education developed with the onset of the Industrial Revolution to both instill time-discipline and discourage the idleness of children whose parents spent twelve hours of the day in a factory, and elementary education still bears these marks. But, I would rather have a miserable experience at the DMV than pay for the pleasure of having my creativity designed.

*Disclosure: The building I used to live in was bought by an Experience Designer for Google, after which I no longer generated enough wealth to continue living there. So, it’s conceivable that I’m bitter.

Further Reading:

Aggarwal, Ujju, Edwin Mayorga, and Donna Nevel. 2012. Slow violence and neoliberal education reform: Reflections on a school closure. Peace and Conflict 18 (2): 156-64.

Giroux, Henry A. 2014. Neoliberalism’s war on higher education. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

McClennen, Sophia A. 2009. Neoliberalism and the crisis of intellectual engagement. Works and Days 27 : 459-70.

Poovey, Mary. 2010. Financing enlightenment, part one. In This is enlightenment., eds. Clifford Siskin, William Warner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dock Street is a hypothetical artifact. The street appears on Queens city planning maps throughout the 19^th century, and was begun in 1891, but the construction of the street was never completed. That is, it never actually materially agreed with the planning maps. At the time Dock Street was mapped into the grid, the area over which the street was to pass was still in the East River. Over the course of thirty years, beginning in 1852, more than a million cubic yards of dirt were migrated to make the Hunters Point that we see today, with its naïve gloss towers creeping out of the former tidewaters, but Dock Street was never more than a cartographic phantasm.

Dock Street was a plan, an idea, and it had a discursive existence as such, but does its failure to pass through the aperture of material experience mean that Dock Street is unreal? Material evidence of an artifact or structure doesn’t necessarily translate into a meaningful existence, and lack of material existence doesn’t preclude meaningful resonance. Anthropology has long wrestled with the reality of its categories (is there such a thing as a ‘Linear Pottery Culture’ or is this a retrojection of contemporary knowledge production), but less frequently are the categories of ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ directly questioned. Is reality negotiable, political, subjective, objective? Dock street does not fit comfortably into either category: real or unreal. It is an unrealized future with a real past. It is hypothetical.

Serendipitously, this was precisely the class of artifacts my doctoral research had been directing me toward. It’s no fun to explain at parties after you say you’re an archaeologist, but I examine the material culture of projections (temperatures specifically). When you look at the weather app on your phone and it says the temperature will be 75°F tomorrow – numbers like this are the artifacts I study. It gets only slightly more complicated when the projection is for 10,000 years ago and is produced by an accelerator mass spectrometer, or for fifty years in the future and is produced by a computational model processing teraflops of accumulated global climate data. My interest in this subject is in the material construction of such cultural artifacts as 0.52 +/- 0.28°C, but more pointedly in the social impact of privileging a probabilistic knowledge that is subservient to the construction of trends, patterns, predictions, and models.

The vigor with which I’ve attempted to assail normative and naturalized knowledge has been inspired by the likes of Haraway, Butler, Stengers, Barad, and Poovey. Thus, contemplating the violence that dominant methods of knowledge production had wrought, I momentarily admired the 1m x 1m test trench I’d just opened up over Dock Street. The excavation of projected realities that never materialize seemed the most deviant application of archaeological knowledge I could hope to pursue.

But then November 8, 2016 happened, and my project of problematizing the scientific production of knowledge (indeed, questioning the historical bifurcation of ‘the real’ and ‘the unreal’ as mutually exclusive categories of phenomena) has begun to feel like a dangerous pursuit. A fact-based reality seems in desperate need of defending given the dubious sources of information upon which the current administration relies for its support. Prior to this semester I even delighted in telling students that I don’t much care for facts (this was meant to reassure them that I had no intention of asking them to memorize the provenience and cranial morphology of Australopithecus boisei). Is this sort of language now irreparably damaged?

Operating on the idea that every measurement or observation is a political act, my work has interrogated the entwined histories of quantification and capitalism. By de-naturalizing capitalist epistemologies, my hope had been to undermine the reification of contemporary inequalities. However, perhaps dominant forms of knowledge production have already ceded control of reality? Anthropocentric climate change or the unconstitutionality of the president’s campaign proposals are both realities that most expert knowledge producers agree upon, yet these realities seem increasingly powerless (see a recent acknowledgement of the continued prescience of the Frankfurt School).

My aim over the next month as guest blogger is to explore the contours of knowledge production and curation in a world where the concept of reality has grown politically tenuous. How are evidence and belief constructed? Can we filter a viable reality out of the crushing onslaught of information? Or are we doomed to be consumed by Nick Land’s hyperstitional demons?

“Hyperstitions by their very existence as ideas function causally to bring about their own reality… Capitalism incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of intensity, turning mundane economic ‘speculation’ into an effective world-historical force… Exulting in capitalism’s permanent ‘crisis mode,’ hyperstition accelerates the tendencies towards chaos and dissolution by invoking irrational and monstrous forces (Land 2011).”

Further Reading:

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hunters Point Archaeological Assessment, 1988

Land, Nick. 2011. Fanged noumena: Collected writings 1987-2007. Falmouth: Urbanomic.

Poovey, Mary. 1998. A history of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stengers, Isabelle. 2010. Cosmopolitics Vol. 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.