The cultural saliency of radical democracy: Moments from the aids quilt

Cultural Geographies (formerly Ecumene)

Volumn 4, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 27-45

  Brown, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AIDS; CITIZENSHIP; CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE; MEMORIAL QUILT; PUBLIC COMMEMORATION; RESEARCH METHODS;

NORTH AMERICA;

EID: 0030867572     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/147447409700400103     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and socialist strategy (London, Verso, 1985); C. Mouffe, ‘Rawls: political philosophy without politics, in D. Rasmussen, ed., Universalism versus communitarianism: contemporary debates in ethics (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press), 1990, pp. 217-36; ‘Citizenship and community’, in Miami Theory Collective, eds., Community at loose ends (Minneapolis, Univ. of Minnesota, 1991); ‘Feminism, citizenship, and radical democratic politics’, in J. Butler and J. Scott, eds, Feminists theorize the political (New York, Routledge, 1992), pp. 369-84; C. Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of radical democracy: pluralism, citizenship, community (London, Verso, 1992); The return of the political (London, Verso, 1993); ‘Post Marxism, democracy, identity’, Society and space 13 (1995), pp. 259-65; ‘Radical democracy or liberal democracy?’, in D. Trend, ed., Radical democracy: identity, citizenship and the state (London, Routledge, 1996), pp. 19-26.
2. e.g., Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, pp. 180, 181; Mouffe, The Return, p. 20; Mouffe, Dimensions, p. 6; see also W. Magnusson, ‘Decentering the state or looking for politics’, in W. Carroll, ed., Organizing dissent: contemporary social movements in theory and practice (Toronto, Garamond, 1992), pp. 69-80; S. Marston, ‘The private goes public: citizenship and the new spaces of civil society’, Political Geography 14 (1994), pp. 194-98.
3. See e.g., Mouffe, The return; J. Shklar, American citizenship: the quest for inclusion (Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ. Press, 1991); M. Walzer, ‘Citizenship’, in T. Ball, J. Farr and R. Hanson, eds, Political innovation and conceptual change (New York, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 211-19; I. M. Young, Justice and the politics of difference (Princeton, NJ, Princeton Univ. Press, 1990); Trend, Radical democracy. Geographers in particular have emphasized this angle recently; see S. Marston and L. Staeheli, ‘Empowering political struggle: spaces and scales of resistance’, Political Geography 13 (1994), pp. 387-91.
4. Mouffe, ‘Post Marxism’, p. 262.
5. C. Schmitt, The concept of the political, trans. G. Schwab (New Brunswick, NJ, Princeton, Univ. Press, 1976).
6. It is interesting that Mouffe does not seem to notice how Schmitt's essentializing practice has implicitly spread into her own work through her borrowing his definition of the political. She seems to pay more attention to his second stated goal of finding a less substantive, more empirically flexible definition of politics.
7. See Schmitt The concept, p. 30. In Mouffe's own words, ‘Political life concerns collective, public action; it aims at the construction of a “we” in a context of diversity and conflict. But to construct a “we” it must be distinguished from a “them”, and that means establishing a frontier, defining an “enemy”. Therefore, while politics aims at constructing a political community and creating a unity, a final unity can never be realized since there will permanently be a “constitutive outside”, an exterior to the community that makes its existance possible. Antagonistic forces will never disappear and politics is characterized by conflict and division’ T (he return, p. 69).
8. see The return, pp. 117-34; ‘Radical democracy’, p. 24. On the conflictual nature of modern democracy, see C. Lefort, Democracy and political theory (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1986).
9. In a recent essay Doreen Massey prods her to ‘think radical democracy spatially’, Society and Space 13 (1995), pp. 283-8. Massey is particularly interested in focusing on the mutually constitutive relations between place, power, and identity. She makes the more general point, however, that political theory has typically been a rather ‘aspatial enterprise’, which is what is specifically taken up here.
10. Harvey Milk was San Francisco's first openly gay city supervisor, who was assassinated by fellow supervisor Dan White in 1978.
11. C. Ruskin, The Quilt: stories from the NAMES Project (New York, Pocket Books, 1988); J. BArown, promise to remember: the NAMES Project Book of Letters (New York, Avon, 1992).
12. The NAMES Project started in Canada in 1988. The Canadian Quilt was shown in Vancouver first in July 1989 at the city's art gallery. Several volunteers at that first display helped form a steering committee in the autumn of 1991 to bring the Quilt back to Vancouver by May 1993.
13. L. Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust: the makings of an AIDS activist (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1989).
14. D. Crimp, ‘Mourning and militancy’, October 51 (1989), pp. 3-18. Crimp draws on Freud's 1937 essay ‘Mourning and melancholia’, which can be found in J. Rickman, ed., A general selection from the works of Sigmund Freud (Toronto, Clarke Urwin, 1953), pp. 142-62.
15. See e.g. the letters collected in Brown, Promise.
16. Mohr is an avid liberal. He is uncomfortable locating politics outside the public sphere of the state. R. Mohr, Gay ideas: outing and other controversies (Boston, Beacon, 1993), esp. pp. 49-53.
17. M. Brown, ‘The work of city politics: citizenship through employment in the local response to AIDS’, Environment and Planning A 26 (1994), p. 877.
18. P. S. Hawkins ‘Naming names: the art of memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt’, Critical Inquiry 19 (1993), p. 772.
19. M. Sturken, ‘Conversations with the dead: bearing witness in the AIDS Memorial Quilt’, Socialist Review 92 (1992), p. 66.
20. Crimp, ‘Mourning and militancy’, pp. 8-9
21. Each organization was given approximately $1000 Canadian from the display's proceeds.
22. For examples of the ways geographers are analyzing the politics of public spaces, see D. Mitchell, ‘Public space and the city’, Urban Geography 17 (1996), pp. 127-31.
23. Popular local imagery of the Vancouver 1986 World Expo is complicated and contradictory a straightforward reading of hegemonized mass culture will not do. D. Ley and C. Olds, ‘Landscape as spectacle: worlds fairs and the culture of heroic consumption’, Society and Space 6 (1988), pp. 191-212.
24. In 1990, for example, the hall and the surrounding Plaza of Nations were rented by the Gay Games Committee and renamed ‘Celebration Centre’. The hall housed an artisans’ market by day and parties for athletes and visitors by night. The spatial and organizational connections are more direct than the text implies. The executive directior of AIDS Vancouver at the time had been the director of the Gay Games.
25. Visitors to the Quilt from the West End and downtown would often walk through Yaletown to get to the display hall; many were visibly overcome by grief.
26. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, pp. 165, 175, 188.
27. J. Weinberg, ‘The Quilt: activism and remembrance’, Art in America 80 (1992), pp. 1-3.
28. Hawkins, ‘Naming names’, p. 755.
29. ‘Buddying’ describes the relationship between a volunteer and a person living with AIDS. The woman speaking is an AIDS Vancouver volunteer, and she is referring to her client.
30. Sturken, ‘Conversations’, p. 69.
31. Indeed, Sturken (‘Conversations’) states explicitly, ‘one could argue that through its construction of an enemy, the quilt is inevitably an accusation and hence an object of anger’, p. 77.
32. Cindy Patton contrasts discourses within immunology and virology. Her work makes the virus-as-enemy reading startlingly clear through the espionage and warfare tropes used to explain the workings of HIV in the body by scientists. ‘What science knows about AIDS: formations of AIDS knowledges’, Inventing AIDS (New York, Routledge, 1992), pp. 51-73.
33. M. Brown, Replacing citizenship: AIDS activism and radical democracy (New York, Guilford, 1997).
34. Massey, ‘Thinking’, p. 284.
35. Vancouver Affiliate of the NAMES Project, Volunteer Handbook to the 1993 Display of the Canadian AIDS Memorial Quilt (The NAMES Project, 304-1107 Homer St, Vancouver, BC, V6B 2Y1), p. 3.
36. J. Bodnar, Remaking America: public memory, commemoration, and patriotism in the twentieth century (New Brunswick, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 245.
37. C. Blair, M. Jeppeson and E. Pucci, ‘Public memorializing in postmodernity: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as prototype’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991), pp. 263-88; Hawkins, ‘Naming names’.
38. J. C. Scruggs and J. L. Swerdlow, To heal a nation: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (New York, Harper & Row, 1985).
39. Hawkins, ‘Naming names’.
40. Blatir,a,l ‘Public memorializing’.
41. The distinction is made between ‘both-and’ interpretations and what the authors see as the more modernist ‘either-or’ approach to the possibility of architectural interpretations. For discussions of how multiple authorship, textuality and contradictory codings signal the postmodern movement in architecture, see C. Jencks, What is postmodernism? (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1986).
42. Blatir al., ‘Public memorializing’, p. 281.
43. One reviewer questioned my use of these messages, asking, Is it entirely appropriate to use the entries [on the signature panel]? While powerful, could it be seen as invasive ? Or are these public statements? This question ignores the reason the Quilt display was held in a public space of civil society and not some more secluded, private location. Its public, voluntary collection of strangers allowed for a visibility of mourning, grief and remembrance that has been almost impossible during the AIDS crisis. That visibility in public space is the entire point behind ‘naming names’ through the Quilt.
44. J. K. Froman, After you say goodbye: when someone you love dies of AIDS (San Francisco, Chronicle, 1992), p. 3.