Chicago is often cited as a major hub of radical cultural production: "America’s Arts Activist Capital" as Bert Stabler recently declared in Proximity's stepchild publication Con(temporary) Art Guide/Chicago. This grouping of cultural workers composing "America's Arts Activist Capital" have frequently been exported and described as a phenomenon of thriving radical and critical cultural activity—resisting the banal commercial modes of creative production. But too often the imagined and expressed political positioning of this "arts-activist" scene becomes less explicit and watered down in the attempt to encapsulate a complex history of discursive thought and production. There are usually good reasons for the simplification of a sometimes aggressive discourse, but in doing so we're missing a collective opportunity to do some work, imagining, analyzing, and critiquing. In this text I oscillate between what I believe and is happening in Chicago, and what I hope can and will be developed more. I'll do a little analyzing and imagining and attempt to make explicit what I think most of you already know. What is going on here in Chicago is an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian counter-public that is rejecting normative modes of creative work and resisting blindly participating in predetermined facilities for cultural production and commodification. It is a deliberate separating from the mainstream and market-driven venues and it attempts to re-imagine alternative social and cultural spaces. Via InCUBATE, Abigail Satinsky writes: "It's better to say that the current infrastructures for supporting and cultivating emerging forms of art practice just aren't cutting it these days… governmental support for the arts is minimal at best and private support is dictated by the values and priorities of granting foundations, innovative and potentially controversial work is compromised in order to fit within categories deemed ‘fundable.'"1 The formation of the frequently discussed Chicago artists/groups/spaces is not a series of accidents or phenomena. Like any grouping of people, this one is formed around a shared philosophy and desire. Each of us who participate in a radical cultural sphere, through our experience or analysis, arrives at and orbits around a belief, desire, or philosophy: that our world should be better, should be fundamentally different, more ethical and honest. Through these desires or philosophies we develop discourses, articulations and expressions. We shoot up flares to see who responds and listens, and we respond to others'. Soon it becomes a formation, a network of similar producers creating a support system for one another, "…a functioning ecosystem in which we are one site among many in which a set of questions are debated and contextualized."2 After some work it becomes, through its willingness to welcome new participants, a counter-public. It is public because it is a "space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself" 3 and differs from a group by its openness and output. It addresses strangers, invites new participants, welcomes more discourse (the purpose of this text). This is key. A completely hermetic group circulating texts and ideas, no matter what their political tendency, is worthless in addressing the complicated and messy problems of pluralism or rupturing the smooth hegemonic surface of the normative and capitalist public sphere. It is a counter-public in its attempt to express oppositional formations and articulations through its separation from the spectacle, while it simultaneously attempts to build alternative communities that disrupt the oppressive tendencies of capitalism while researching new ways of living. So what's the point? Why must we do it ourselves? Who gets to participate? Must we operate autonomously? Who are our allies? We're subsumed; we're in over our heads. Our bodies, our minds, our relations, our food, our schooling, hell—the whole fucking planet, are manipulated, bought, sold, but above all, drowning. It is a glossy world where everything is a commodity, our bodies and minds included. Everything is objectified, and our human-ness diminishes. To be oppressed or objectified is to be only partially human and "to surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognize its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity."4 It is our existential desire to become fully human, but this will never happen in a stranglehold of capital relations. This is what is at stake, and if we want to change it we have to do it ourselves. There will be no cooperation. In a moment when reason and human value appear to have vanished, we must find ways to "reconnect the head to the body… [and] emphasis must be placed, above all, on the reconstruction of a collective dialogue capable of producing innovative practices." 5 This isn't so simple. In order for an honest collective dialogue to be elaborated a few things must happen. First, it must take place, so much as possible, in the absence of capitalism, hierarchy or service. When a participant has something to gain in another's oppression (exploitation) or brings to the table an agenda, content is compromised. Within oppressive institutions discourse necessarily arches its back to fit the frames of reproducing that institution's conveyed mission. This is not to say there are no pockets of resistance within universities, or there are no radical curators, but these institutions necessarily have their limit. Participants must be humans first, as opposed to citizens, employees, party-members, bosses, representatives, etc. This means taking seriously individual as well as collective desires and how one's actions affect human pluralism.6 This will lead us to "establish our own questions and problematics, while setting up experimental spaces to deal with them."7 This explains, in part, the development of Chicago's art-activist counter-public; it is at once political, visceral and existential. Second, in tandem with the previous, it is essential to do our best to avoid mediation of content and expression. We must wipe clean the lines of communication, from mouth to ear, from expression to reception. This is essential in a searching for an authentic desire and analysis, but it is also fundamental to its amplified expression. In addressing a stranger, communicating a desire, or making public a dissensual articulation, the channels of communication must be free of contaminants. When messaging gets shifted, simplified, or altered, the culminating progress of a discourse is compromised; its complexity and authenticity are reduced and misread by its recipient. A couple things are likely in this moment: one, a recipient misunderstands or misinterprets content (because they have been lied to), leading to the information's misuse, or two; they reject it upon recognition of a mediator's agenda. The discourse and content can be recovered through documents and ephemera, but in the attempt to expand a counter-public of cultural workers who share a radical anti-capitalist perspective and cultural practice it will be too late. Counter-publics seep out from their many cores in attempts to fulfill their desire to find one another, to coalesce, to form something powerful enough to collapse an overshadowing opposition. When the steady growth flying around the nuclei (the focal desire, philosophy, discourse) of these counter-publics are dissipated or disrupted, their momentum and potential are lost. Here we arrive at the danger of working with institutions with an agenda. I'm traversing difficult territory here, I know, as each situation holds its own difficult decisions and politics regarding participation. Sometimes it is necessary to utilize public venues to make visible one's research and reach out to new potential collaborators. What is important is the reception of content, and with validation and visibility often comes simpler (usually mediated) communication or exporting of discourse. This leaves radical expressions wide open for misinterpretation, misuse and cooptation. AREA Chicago editor Daniel Tucker articulates this idea clearly in warning us to not "mistake subculture for politics [or] rely on codes, symbols and aesthetics associated with culture with a clear in/out crowd. This easily reduces movements to niche markets, ideal for targeted marketing."8 This begins to happen when subcultures are categorized as such, often by outside critics and institutions. We have seen this happen over and over again since the 60s counter-cultural and revolutionary movements, and it presents the anxiety of expanding a political discourse (counter-publics) where the fear of compromising radicality becomes warranted. We are more than aware of a deliberate capitalist attempt to commodify dissent (à la No Logo, Chicago's own The Baffler and Ann Elizabeth Moore), which leaves us with murky waters to wade. I'm getting a little off track here, but only a little. One of the roles of the cultural worker now “is a double process of research and expression," 9 and if our radical research is not expressed honestly and clearly, our work is rendered inoperative for our purposes. It is here that the conduit through which we exchange thought becomes fundamental. So what are the possibilities of counter-publics? In discussing the collaborative research project Continental Drift10 aimed at “making sense of what is taking place around us" Brian Holmes states: “…The importance of this kind of project is to use it as a moment of experimentation, not just in the quest for the perfect theory or the perfect procedure, but cosmologically, to rearrange the stars above your head. Such events don't often happen, the only solution is do-it-yourself." 11 I have no idea what one should do in this climate as an artist, citizen, or human; and I suspect I share this sentiment with a lot of people. To some degree, we all probably do what seems right or natural based on our experience. This is the reason I am writing this text, it is also the reason I spend a great deal of my small amount of free time reading arduous theory that may or may not be relevant. We all want to make the world legible so we can understand how to be more effective actors in it—how we can make it more livable for others and ourselves. But as Holmes articulates, we learn from experimentation too, informed by our politics and experiences. We set up experiments, see if they work, and along the way we try and bring others into the conversation. We learn from each other's experiences and thoughts. It is a sustained process that aims to understand “how the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation."12 But we must do this together, and this is one value in what I've tried to describe as a counter-public—its necessity to address the stranger in order to be inclusive and expansive, so that it might become more powerful in expressing a desire for another world. It would be naïve to suggest that the counter-public that has formed here in Chicago can do this alone, that any actions we take do not have to exist as part of a multi-scale network of projects. Part of our project as cultural workers is to inquire, as Satinsky eloquently postulates, “How do we bridge scales? How do we operate locally, within our own network and simultaneously puncture its borders?"13 AREA is a great example of how one might begin to take on this project on a local level, networking various leftist niches throughout the city, helping to perpetuate consciousness and pedagogical expressions across disciplines and hyper-specific groups. But we must continue to find ways to connect with other hubs and expand our reach, to allow our peripheries to congeal as they necessarily intersect with others. We need collective development of “…arguments so strong that they merge with feelings, in order to reshape reality."14 It is here we will find our counter-publics growing. Perhaps this is the most important task for the counter-public in a collective research experiment. "Many people I know are afraid to lose their radicality, and its real commitments, through a confrontation with the mainstream. I don't mind saying that's my problem too […] Only by pursuing a radical critique on the intellectual, social, affective, sexual and psychic levels can you find any way to break through the soft consensus of normality and discover something worth living for. And only by confronting those discoveries with the mainstream ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving and acting can you escape the trap of marginality and deepen your own breakthroughs and intuitions, by making them publicly real." 15 by Heath Schultz

[1]Abigail Satinsky. Making-do: a Pragmatist Approach. Published in Artist-Run Chicago Digest. Threewalls / Greenlantern press. Available online at http://incubate-chicago.org/writingresources

[2]Satinsky. Making do. On InCUBATE's place within Chicago's cultural community. Making up this “ecosystem” is Backstory Café, Experimental Station, Mess Hall, He Said/She Said. Etc.

[3]Michael Warner. Publics and Counterpublics. p 67. Available online at http://a.aaaarg.org/

[4]Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. p 36. Available online at http://www.marxists.org/subject/education/freire/pedagogy/

[5]Felix Guatarri. Remaking Social Practices. Available online at http://a.aaaarg.org/

[6]This is precisely what capitalism does not do. Those at the top of the power structure, in the desire for a more complete freedom, achieve it at the expense of those they exploit. They neglect to take seriously the consequences of their actions or the needs of the oppressed. Nor do they address the ethical obligation to our shared existence.

[7]Brian Holmes. Articulating the Cracks in World Power.

Available online at http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/

[8] Daniel Tucker. Getting to know your city and the social movements that call it home. Available online at http://www.joaap.org/contents.html

[9] Brian Holmes. Financial Crimes. Address for the exhibition Democracy in America. Available online at http://brianholmes.wordpress.com

[10] In collaboration with 16 Beaver, in many ways an inspiration for the ideas in this text. For more on Continental Drift see http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/ and http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift

[11] Holmes. Articulating the Cracks in World Power.

[12] Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. p 33.

[13] Satinsky. Making Do.

[14] Holmes. Articulating the Cracks in World Power.

[15] Brian Holmes. Financial Crimes.