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At such a conjuncture, in which de jure wins have produced new monstrosities, our own quintessential forms of protest might be the strategies and gestures that move ordinary people to disrupt their routines and take action against the ruling class. The riot, the encampment, and the blockade: Occupy, Ferguson, Standing Rock, the Oakland dockworkers, Stop Cop City. Place matters too. It was in unemployment offices, soup kitchens, and flophouses that Communist Party members organized what became the Unemployed Councils of the 1930s. Now, Joshua Clover observes the freeway and port shutdowns as central sites of circulation struggles, indicating how capital is moving and where it is vulnerable.
To that list we might add the courts. Prison abolitionist organizing has clarified that any understanding of “criminal law,” or even the legal system writ large, must start with the arc of the policeman’s baton, the disproportionate budget of the local jail, and the flow of money from the corporation to the university and the police foundation and back. Each of these institutions can be disrupted, and the long relational chains that legal processes depend on offer many nodes of contact. Disruption happens through protest, but also through building relationships, solidarity, and organization.
For a city of mirrored skyscrapers, of fifteen-lane highways, of five million people and building ever faster, Atlanta is run like a small town, or a bloated feudal palace, royal families overseeing serfs sitting in traffic. For almost a century, a not-so-secret compact has governed the city town council–style, bequeathing positions in the power structure along dynastic lines. The roles at the table are fixed: mayor, city council, Chamber of Commerce, Coca-Cola, the police, the local news, and, uniquely and importantly in Atlanta, miscellaneous magnates of a Black business class. The biracial, bipartisan, business-friendly, media-savvy, moderate, managerial tradition the group perfected during the golden age of American capital is called the Atlanta Way.
This coalition steered the city through the tumultuous 20th century, holding things together with the blossoming optimism of economic growth. Desegregation happened in Atlanta unevenly, incompletely, but relatively uneventfully—which does not mean without shocking drama, racist recrimination, or moments of lurid violence. But compared with Montgomery or Memphis, the city was never bloodied in Civil Rights struggle. Even Martin Luther King Jr., its most famous martyr, was assassinated elsewhere. Jim Crow, white flight, gentrification all happened under a top-down, lockstep, synchronized city administration depressurizing the national conflict compromise by compromise: a golf course here, a swimming pool there, neighborhoods blockbusted one at a time.
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On a Tuesday in early September, the city council hosts a public meeting over Zoom where Atlantans speak on the record for seventeen hours. At least two-thirds object to the police academy plans. Neighbors hate the snap-crackle-pop of gunshots from the firing range the APF has already built on the property, and just imagine how much louder and more frequent this will be when the police move the whole arsenal over. A public school teacher asks why the police department let their last training center collapse. What are their priorities? DSA members pose the decision as an existential question, not only for Atlanta, but for America. The old ultimatum of socialism or barbarism has been reframed by young organizers as care or cops. They accuse the city council of divesting from public services, sowing poverty and desperation, and then swelling the ranks of the police to keep it under control.
The following day, the city council votes ten to four to approve the lease of the land to the Atlanta Police Foundation anyway. The mayor makes a statement: It “will give us physical space to ensure that our officers and firefighters are receiving 21st-century training, rooted in respect and regard for the communities they serve.” We blink past the obvious hypocrisy, drawn instead to that watchword training, deceptively neutral, the ostensible justification of a million liberal reforms, because who could argue against training? The police after all are like dogs: best when they obey. But obey what?
We stay overnight in New York, which feels like Cop City already. Military men in bulletproof pants march in formation through Penn Station, intimidating weary people waiting for trains: no benches, no sitting on the floor. The TSA beeps our belongings. We shuffle along an endless line to fly from one concrete desolation to another, fart carbon into the ozone, and return to our cruel city to defend the damaged landscape we’ve been doomed to love.
We take off into the morning. Manhattan grubs greedily into the sky. Container ships queue up out into the ocean, minuscule on the roof of the gleaming deep. Babylon sprawls: Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC. The view from the air turns industry into entomology. We watch aloof, above, transfixed, as out the window something almost glorious rusts and crumbles into landfill, and colorless cube metastasizes over green world.
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“In prison, time is The Enemy,” wrote Dick Hebert, the undercover journalist, of the day he spent entirely indoors at the Atlanta prison farm. “It is slow-footed. It wants filling, and many of its prisoners find sleep the only recourse.” Is this also what happens, we wonder idly, tracing the curve of the sky with our finger, when the world outside becomes prison? Is our Jungle Cruise society, are their Mad Max fantasies, is our Disney world the collective dream of a culture of inmates?
This is, after all, the ultimate effect of the police. They knit together the prison and military into one inescapable complex. They stalk and corral and control the poor, confine them to suffocating ghettos, convert whole cities into open-air prisons, and stand at attention at borders, real and imaginary, with ever greater guns. It is so clear above the mid-Atlantic. The military has become the police, the police mimic the movies, the movies are all for children, and the children have no future. Time, The Enemy, drags everlastingly on. Can we, how do we, how dare we wish to abolish history?
We look to the forest as we descend upon Atlanta. Wispy ghosts of smoke plume lazily into the sky.
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Hundreds of people come to speak at this meeting: lawyers, neighbors, Black and white, community organizers, old Democratic women, militants from the forest dressed up in business casual. Long lines out the building down the block. Chants resonate through the linoleum atrium, loud and unified enough to almost make you believe in democracy, even if the city council meeting begins two hours late today, and the bailiffs pass around a clipboard with far fewer spaces to sign up to speak than there are people in line. The police forbid the people waiting to speak from eating and drinking. The speeches last fourteen hours, dignified and gracious and civil, and overwhelmingly against Cop City. At five in the morning, the city council votes to approve the funding anyway. The assembled public jeers as the council members file out of the chamber. The sun is already rising when everyone goes home.
If I had to make my own analogy, I’d say grieving is like being a lemon that someone has taken a zester to. “Ouch,” says the lemon. The lemon’s skin is raw. But the air grows a bit more fragrant and life appears fresh and vivid amid the pain.
The more meaningful your life is, the less happy it’s possible to be. That’s what I’ve been thinking lately. The more you occupy yourself with the Big Stuff—the tragic, the political, Life and Death and Truth—the less whimsical you can be, the less frivolous. Of course, that’s not how I felt when my life was simpler. Before I was carrying this weight around. Before my entire life changed. When my life was simple, I craved tragedy. I didn’t want happiness, I wanted sadness I could sublimate. I wanted things to happen that would give my life purpose and direction. This is not what my husband would say. He would say, “Duty to others is a relief. Your life should not be your own.” His love language is acts of service. Also, he has not yet suffered the death of a parent. Now that my mother is dead and my baby is born I know that hard stuff is actually hard.
What placed postmodernism more in the service of the corporation than of society at large was that it was client facing, not user facing: it established cultural conditions in which a corporate officer could choose to believe they were, Medici-like, acquiring a work of art with all its useful cultural connotations of wealth and taste, but without encountering the structural tensions between architectural avant-gardes and establishment patrons that were a risky feature of mid-twentieth-century patronage. Because they were designed for appearances from distances, the buildings of postmodernism were generally not places for a public, for a deep and inhabitable threshold between interior and exterior; they were not places that would require a literal and perhaps figurative negotiation between public good and private interest. The facade was now a pictorial membrane, to be looked at but never freely crossed.
And what of the era’s other strangely serene presiding figure, Reagan himself? As early as February 1989 the architectural historian Mary McLeod could write architectural history in real time by interrogating in the journal Assemblage what was already received wisdom:
“Postmodern architecture is the architecture of Reaganism.” Among many leftist architects and critics, this kind of statement has become a cliché. The proud historical nostalgia, the fabricated traditions, the pandering to a nouveau-riche clientele, the populist rhetoric that often sounds more paternalistic than democratic, the abandonment of any social vision — all seem related in some way to the conservative turn in American politics.
Postmodern architects were self-consciously attempting to make history by remaking history, and at speed: to retroactively de-radicalize modern design into just another in a long secession of formal styles, and to instrumentalize historicist associations to add the suggestion of gravity and authority to new structures that were materially flimsy and significantly unconcerned with their users’ experiences. Like Reaganism, architectural postmodernism can be understood as a delivery system for a powerful affect. Its genius was in enlisting a compelling combination of explicit optimism and tacit pessimism — even nuke-’em nihilism. “There was something at once exhilarating and resigned in this rediscovery of history,” noted McLeod of postmodern architects’ radical retrograde; “it suggested that the present was no better than the past, that aesthetic and political choices might be arbitrary.” Today these two attitudes — of insistent cheer and the putative realism of the would-be world-weary — align all too clearly with Reagan’s deployment of retrograde aesthetics and affective nostalgias in the service of a revolutionary unmaking of American governance. Postmodern architecture as the architecture of Reaganism: perhaps this is that rare cliché that has only become ever more searingly true over time.