Even the dead are not safe

“What should we make of the regularity with which the panicked charge of molestation and seduction of children appears on the scene? Or which more difficult questions does it occlude? Those committed to reason assure us panics only obliquely bear historical meaning: to begin with, they aren’t significantly true. As panics are illogical, the argument goes, they should not determine reality. They are characterized as a flight from knowledge rather than as revealing a logic or secret, constituting an unaccountable break from our drive to know. This has led to a robust literature in sociology and sexuality studies that, with a cool bedside manner, treats panics like freak weather events, to be avoided and deplored but not afforded the causal weight to overturn any of the deep structures of the world.

This is the advice drawn on, for example, by James Kirchick in a recent article for New York Magazine, which narrates the current panic as one in a long line of such episodes. He says the grooming panic is an “increasingly desperate” attempt to both explain and turn back the liberal settlement that had been won by gays and lesbians, as well as the “increased visibility” of trans people. In the past, anti-gay moral panics harmonized with the repressive struts of the anticommunist security state to become “fatally effective;” now, because of widespread acceptance and anticommunism’s retirement from the national vocation, this latest panic, he argues, should represent nothing so much to fear.

But the pattern this type of panic exhibits might be better accounted for as the inverted apprehension of a real social event or disruption. Given the role that the image of the child plays in securing psychic integrity for adult subjects, whose human capacities and attributes are constantly being stretched, inflated, stripped away, and sold back in parts to meet the demands of the endless expansion of production, when this image of the child comes into crisis it may be a sign that the relations that make and remake capitalist society are in crisis, too.

LL: You often say that you’re practicing “history from below” — we’ll come back to it at the end of our conversation. The term “below” hits me in the context of the slave ship and its hold. It is of course crucial that we always insist on the absolute horror of the life and death conditions in the hold and on the death of over 1.8 million African people during the Middle Passage. Yet, it’s also important to not describe the people who are prisoners of it as passive bodies. Could you tell us about what I believe you call yourself the cultural production that happens in it.

MK: My study of the slave ship is literally a “history from below” — a history of those down below, on the lower deck, in that dark dungeon of despair. I felt it was important to show the horror of the lower deck as concretely as I could, that is, to show real, suffering human beings rather than abstractions such as mortality rates, for example. If we want to wrestle with the legacy of the slave trade, it crucial that we understood what it actually meant in human terms.

The pervasive horror makes it all the more remarkable that enslaved people were able, under such extreme circumstances, to be creative. When 15 to 20 different ethnic or national groups of people, many of whom could not understand or speak the languages of the others, were forced together aboard the vessel, the problem of communication presented itself on the lower deck. Slave traders consciously mixed different language groups to try to limit cooperation and collective resistance. But new kinds of communication nonetheless emerged from below: the enslaved sang new songs, danced new dances, invented new words, and spoke new, usually pidgin languages. New music was especially important as a ship made entirely of wood could be used as a percussive instrument: drummers could drum anywhere. [...]

LL: Going further, there is also what we may call “political organizing” that happens from the hold to the deck of the ship, and many revolts of people who are not yet enslaved. Could you please tell us about them?

‘All right,’ Jacob says, and starts to tug on the server, which seems to be stuck in the rack. I wonder if the chloride ooze has become an adhesive.

‘Use the heel of your hand,’ Martin instructs, ‘it’s not a titty. You gotta grab it like you mean it, really man-handle that thing.’

Jacob curses, and I watch as he ‘man-handles’ the server until it is loose enough, and together we lift the hefty asset onto a specialised cart for decommissioning.

‘Not too shabby, Jakey,’ Martin says, firmly smacking his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll make a man out of you in no time.’

Data centre discourse is rife with masculine bravado and sexual innuendo. One of the first things I noticed when I embarked on my investigation of the cloud’s workforce was the scarcity of individuals who don’t identify as men. From data centre to data centre, misogynistic and homophobic language was as ambient as the whir of fans in server racks. Historians of information technology tell us that computing professions were not always so dominated by men. In fact, women were once at the forefront of programming in the US and the UK, before being relegated to clerical positions, while men were elevated via a process called ‘professionalisation’, where technical skills were codified in specific ways to standardise expertise and sideline (or better manage) undesirables.According to an industry survey, data centres are particularly hostile workplaces for women, who make up less than 10 per cent of data centre workers. While the factors behind this disparity are the subject of ongoing research, ethnographic accounts help to illuminate the qualitative factors and textures of everyday life in data centres that push women out and keep men at the centre. In the US ‘wild west’, modular data centres parked like trailers on backlots operate as a foundry for manhood. As data centres guzzle water to keep cool (even while water resources dwindle to record lows), men work to keep their microclouds afloat. Through their labour, they prove and assert their masculine identity, policing their neophytes to do the same.

In Boston, a man hunts for heat with his ears. In Iceland, a man puts out fires so that the youth of his community may have a chance at something besides bus tours. Amid the storm of the century, a man in Puerto Rico opens the doors of his fortress to the public, granting sanctuary like a pastor in a parish. In the Arizona desert, a man teaches his young pupil how to lift a server and, by extension, how to be a man. From the tropics to the Arctic, the cloud thrums. Heat blooms in the wake of computation. And it is men, not refrigeration alone, that can purge it, so that data can flow, and digital capitalism can proceed, uninterrupted.

As these tales from data centre workplaces reveal, there is more to cloud stewardship than the racking and stacking of servers, disentangling cables, swapping out floor tiles, or decommissioning old servers. Data centres are multisensory locales, where heat can be heard. They are the building blocks used to assemble dreams of communal prosperity for Icelandic youth and Puerto Rican families. They are workshops for a technical brand of masculinity. They are all these things and more but, most importantly, they are not staffed by automatons or sedentary button-pushers on spinning chairs.

Goetic magic found its restoration among the repertoire of the modern occultist after Aleister Crowley’s own edited 1904 edition of the grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon, based on a manuscript he had stolen from his Golden Dawn mentor, McGregor Mathers. Among Crowley’s additions, he coined a pernicious misrepresentation of the demons of the Goetia as psychological personifications of the magician’s interior darkness that must be chained, bound, and chastised to enact the magician’s will. This invented view still holds currency among practicing magicians and, indeed, seems to predominate the depiction of the demons in most media representations, which lean heavily on their existence as personifications of characters’ sins or vices.

Since the start of the new millenium, however, a movement among occult scholars to re-examine these infamous tomes as the material culture of a once-living tradition—rather than merely as satanic instruction manuals—has made major headway in our understanding of the grimoires. Foundational to this movement was the publication of restored manuscripts of The Lesser Key of Solomon (2001) and other rare historical grimoires by Joseph H. Peterson. This was followed notably by an exhaustive comparative analysis of The Goetia of Dr. Rudd by Stephen Skinner in 2007, and a commentary edition of The Grimorium Verum published by Jake Stratton-Kent in 2009.

What drew Stratton-Kent to the The Grimorium Verum in particular is both the magic book’s exclusive detailed instructions for the creation of the ritual equipment for conjuring (lacking in most other sources) and its unique rural tone, which regards the demons, not as antagonistic fiends to be cajoled, but rather as venerable spirits worthy of trading favors and forging pacts.

...

“It’s been many, many years since students focused first on religious readings of the novel,” said Hester Blum, professor of English at Penn State and a past president of the Melville Society. Along with its environmental themes, Blum said that her students today “are most blown away by how queer the novel is, and how funny. They can’t believe the incessant dick jokes and are more committed to Ishmael’s marriage to Queequeg than he is.” Moby-Dick may be messy and wild, but this has allowed it to, uh, penetrate deeply into our society.

[...]

Whaling reduced an entire species to near extinction, and its human toll was far greater than could ever be accounted on the walls of a small chapel. Millions of people were pushed past the limit of exhaustion as whale oil greased cotton-spinning machines and lit up the factory floor, accelerating industrial production and lengthening the working day, and driving an intensified demand for cotton, for the labor of enslaved people, and for the seizure of indigenous land. Whale oil extraction set the stage and the pattern for the expansion of the fossil fuel industry, and for the key position it occupies in global capitalism today.

[...]

C. L. R. James wrestled with the fact that the ship’s crew — the protagonists in the title of his 1953 book Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways — are not just unable but also unwilling to revolt against Ahab. His quest instead becomes their own. Ever fascinated by the dynamics between leaders and masses, James writes that Melville’s experience working at sea let him observe “how men rationalized their subservience to tyranny,” as well as how tyrants adhered people to their purposes.

Reading Moby-Dick in the era of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, James sees Ahab as “the most dangerous and destructive social type that has ever appeared in Western Civilization.” He argues that Melville’s genius was an almost-prophetic creative process, prefiguring twentieth-century totalitarians by perceiving both the disruptive world changes that would produce them and the disasters that would follow in their wake. For James, the core of Moby-Dick revolves around the key question of “how the society of free individualism would give birth to totalitarianism and be unable to defend itself against it.”

[...]

But what politics can emerge from despair? For Ishmael, journeys in pursuit of “those far mysteries we dream of” result in either “barren mazes” or a stove boat. The opening meditation on the human desire to draw close to water contrasts with the final curtain’s descent on Ishmael, adrift in the ocean, clinging to life atop his drowned lover’s empty coffin. Escape — as Melville himself once did in the Marquesas Islands — or the simple act of survival may be the best that any one person can hope for.

But what about all people? The catastrophes are upon us: all-consuming wildfires and rising tides, a resurgence of hard-right authoritarian political movements, and brutal inequalities that predated and have been compounded by an unrelenting pandemic. Billionaires race to rocket off-planet to avoid the fate to which they would condemn the rest of us (although, as Melville would have noted with some jouissance, so far they have mostly edged into space). Greater disasters loom, and we brace for each successive stormfront, afraid of losing power in a literal and figurative sense.

History of early modern maritime labor or the literature which emerged in the wake of it tends toward the masculinist which is not really a current of critique that appears in this. Reading sodomy out of the naval tradition is nothing new (what is new is that it can be read approvingly in public), but reading women, or if we’re willing, femininity disarticulated from womanhood, into it is still the sort of thing that scholars would call a “possible avenue for future research”.

In the economic realm the US and Europe have applied sanctions that were never previously considered. The freezing of Russia’s central bank reserves means crossing the Rubicon. It brings conflict to the heart of the international monetary system. If the central bank reserves of a G20 member entrusted to the accounts of another G20 central bank are not sacrosanct, nothing in the financial world is. We are at financial war.

This is made all the more emphatic by the decision to apply the most draconian financial sanctions to a violator of international law not in retrospect but in the middle of an ongoing conflict in an attempt to cripple the aggressor-state. It is the difference between punishing an assailant for their attack and intervening in a fight to wrestle the assailant to the ground.

The latter is clearly the more committed position. It changes your relationship to the person on whose behalf you intervene and the person whom you seek to immobilise. Unlike in a court judgement you surrender the idea of a higher authority. It may be the right thing to do but it is a far more dangerous and indeterminate situation. Any claim to neutrality disappears. As the person intervening you must expect not only to dish out coercion, you must expect to get hurt yourself and the assailant has little reason not to up the ante.

Putin underscored that logic on Sunday with his nuclear saber rattling. That is not aimed at Ukraine. It is aimed at Europe and the US who have, from Russia’s point of view, made themselves party to the conflict.

And then on Monday the news of the sanctions began to impact the Russian economy. On top of the uncertainty of the battlefield we must now add a roiling economic and financial crisis in Russia, a country at war. The Russian authorities began to shut off the flow of capital out of the country. Western investors are declaring their desire to pull out, but they are now de facto trapped. Russia is answering our economic war with an economic war of its own.

“In a detailed study of the eighteenth-century Amsterdam marine-insurance market, Frank Spooner distinguishes between ‘structural risks’ and ‘event uncertainties’ which informed policies and premiums negotiated by merchants and insurance brokers. The first incorporated perils of the sea (shipwreck stranding, collision, predation, war and insurrection), technological improvements in shipbuilding and geopolitical considerations, including that surrounding jurisdiction over coastal waters and climatic differences between marketplaces. The second referred to the proverbial unforeseen circumstances ranging from extreme weather to declarations of war, from bankruptcies to protracted lawsuits. For Spooner, these ‘changing realities of human ecology’ combined with commercial considerations of profitability shaped by distance and time to produce a market for insurance premised on the ‘formes informes of events whether unstable of ‘ chaotic’ in themselves of composed of a few elements in mutual contradiction and disharmony’. The sea - and coastal areas in particular - simultaneously acted as a threat to property and an opportunity to profit from risk, as an indispensable sphere of trade and a treacherous obstacle to efficient, fast and reliable movement. Such terraqueous interdependence encouraged innovation and integration across the burgeoning financial sector: ‘As a market, Amsterdam was not necessarily perfect in the sense that it always cleared, but dealers were able to combine packages of credit, freight, and insurance which strengthened the opportunities for risk-aversion.’

“In London, too, the convergence of maritime traders, investors, shipowners and creditors generated the conditions for the further development of transnational marine insurance. The unique perils attached to seaborne trade could be more readily mitigated through the immediate availability in the City of transnational networks of commercial, political and navigation intelligence, as well as the financial-computational instruments used to underwrite such risk. A quantitative intensification of commercial activity in and around the London Exchange and its adjacent coffee houses eventually produced a qualitative shift in the course of the eighteenth century toward new, cheaper, more stable and diversified mechanisms of marine insurance involving premiums, secondary markets, and probability-driven loss assessment. Lives sacrificed at or through the sea raised distinctive challenges to the evolution of marine insurance in London and other English slaving cities. Although seaborne human cargo had given rise to the notion of ‘life insurance’ in the course of the European Renaissance, the development of human trafficking on an industrial scale across the Atlantic posed the problem of calculating not just the insurance value of slaves as property (including the ‘inherent vice’ of death during transit), but also the risk of bondspeople rebelling as enslaved humans. This tension between property and personhood temporarily resolved itself during the late eighteenth century in the figure of ‘general average’, summarised in John Weskett’s authoritative 1783 insurance manual in these terms:

Ships and merchandizes from England to the coast of Africa, and at and from thence to our colonies in the West Indies, &c. are usually insured with the following clause policy, viz. ‘Free from loss of average, by trading in boats, and also from average occasioned by insurrection of slaves, under 10 per cent.

“English marine insurance thus came to interpret slave insurrection as a natural peril of the sea, while all the time calculation the threshold of compensation for such human acts of rebellion as being ‘under 10 per cent’ of the vessel’s general average. The seemingly irresolvable tension that emerged here was between the naturalisation of enslaved Africans as commodities prone, like other goods, to ‘despoilation’ (and therefore uninsurable), and the valorisation of their human agency as potential rebels (insured under the ‘excess clause’ beyond 10 per cent of general average). In England, the insurance of bondspeople was abolished with the slave trade in 1807 (at least for captives transported on British vessels), but firms like Lloyd’s and other marine-insurance businesses plainly profited in their origins from the calculus of death that accompanied the transatlantic slave trade. Legal notions of general average or inherent vice still in use today were, moreover shaped by such responses to the peculiar risks and opportunities thrown up by the sea.

Tonight I tried to imagine what life would be like in the future--personal[ly] that is. For on the broad highway of Tomorrow, despite craggy hills and unforeseen gullies, I am certain that mankind will take the high road to a socialist future.

My certitude for this broad future has never matched my certitude for my personal fortunes. I have not been endowed either with the ability to apply that certitude or indeed to experience its harbingers. Perhaps dialectically this is why: my very certitude and commitment has overshadowed in the eyes of some of my personal interest in people. To those with whom I share this broad vision this seeming weakness has been resented or more kindly, if not resented--rejected. Whereas this characteristic has impinged on personal relationships, it has nevertheless served as a liberating force making and shaping the being that I have become. I, in turn, have rejected any tendency to reduce this result: even perhaps to stifle its evocation.

Evocation is a mutual emotion. To evoke a response of togetherness--in all things (maturity tells me this is probably impossible in a single relationship) and remembering human limitations--there must be togetherness. Togetherness also is not an abstraction, its inner laws and contradictions must be studied.

Yet another characteristic may be strength of character and a tendency to fight weakness, not to openly sympathize with it. Is it because a lurking fear exists that capitulation to manifested weakness in others (even when not self-imposed) may in turn impinge on what I regard as essentially impermissible?

In the strongest I have witnessed impermissible weaknesses. I do not exclude myself but I have never been able to condone personal weaknesses and therein perhaps is another antagonistic contradiction. Fundamentally regarding the impermissibility of personal weakness, not entirely lacking in my own share of these, I seek to counter my own (and others) with a harshness that is also impermissible in close human relationships.

For most of my adult years this has been the essence of my approach, the raison d'etre of my function. I find I have been praised for a single-mindedness of purpose--and this is true enough; only my sincerest friends have observed the one-sidedness of my existence--something (again the characteristic rears its head) I have hardly allowed myself to admit--far less to fully examine.

Perhaps a third reason (happily I do not publicly avow or practice this characteristic) at root has been a ‘protective’ one--a general personal injury. Those who truly know me know this--and I have often known even as I strike back, the verbal flows from which I flee are nourished in an identical soil.

Fearing the perpetuation of this one-sidedness in personal relation, I persist in it, fearing the disappointment of non-togetherness. Knowing that evocation of a different approach means change, on my part, I have no certitude that change will strengthen togetherness. But this certitude is related not only to faith in the future--which is not blind but scientific; one needs to apply the same scientific inquiry to all phenomena. And if one resists that inquiry, can it be because no one knows that the application of that very science will reveal an uneven development, or that one fears to admit failure, or even that one’s own limitations will stand naked and bare? Is it that in so examining the very characteristic will be proven a migratory patterning the repeated violation of it? Or even that it will be found that one is no bargain?

Penchant that I have for introspective discussion, I seem to have wound up where I began I bore no one but myself. I have admitted nothing, but sought to analyze all this for self-understanding; I find I have deluded myself--conscious though I ever am that delusion is unrealistic, can never replace togetherness or evoke happiness--nor sympathetic friendship or understanding.

And as I become too aware of this state to even try to change--I realize I not only have become lethargic in these matters (a state not to be emulated!) but positively without nerve. All weavers know of tangled skeins. The bad thought then become “threads to deceive.” Sometimes they can be untangled and sometimes they serve as webs. How I believe in the Loom of Language! - and in the Family of Man!

One [factor overlooked by Case and Deaton] is debt. Contemporary social science has confirmed the folk wisdom of the postwar generation’s great debt movie, It’s a Wonderful Life: debt takes a unique psychological toll compared to other forms of financial insecurity, and American’s total household debt has doubled in the twenty-first century. [...] Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, fifty million Americans have seen their credit card debt worsen, tracking surging unemployment and the increased financial burden on caregivers. Meanwhile the word “debt” does not appear in the index of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. [...]

In deemphasizing the material facts of debt and exploitation in favor of a convenient story about the decline of the workplace community, the traditional family, and religion, Case and Deaton explicitly situate themselves in an intellectual tradition that long predates this decade’s white-working-class elegies--one that helped to usher in our present nightmare. Throughout Deaths of Despair, as well as in their promotional interviews, Case and Deaton lean heavily on the authority of the fin-de-siècle French sociologist Emile Durkheim to fill the gaps in their own argument. “There is no simple theory of suicide,” they concede at one point, but they hold up “Durkheim’s view,” a “milestone of sociology,” as the definitive account of the “social causes” that complement individual idiosyncrasies in leading to suicide. [...]

With the publication of his monograph Suicide in 1897, Durkheim hoped to provide empirical evidence for his theory that both the intensity of nineteenth-century class struggle and rising suicide rates were being caused by the decay of the institutions and belief systems that had once allowed people to embrace their positions in an unequal society--the whole ideological apparatus of feudalist Europe. [...] One of Durkheim’s first champions in the US was the Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo. [...] Mayo pressed the analogy between suicide and class struggle even more strongly than Durkheim had. Striking, unionization, absenteeism, anxiety, and alcohol abuse were all just different faces of the same pathology, Mayo argued: the unwitting destruction of workers’ traditional ways of life by industrial capitalism.

Tani Barlow: Could an adequate Marxist Feminism, in your view, address the question of who did putting out labor and if you concur then how would we document and analyze evidence? And how would that evidence shape how we imagine labor as such (e.g., wage labor does not equal masculinity)? How would this help us to reimagine historically how laboring families worked?

Jairus Banaji: As I noted, women and children were a key productive base of the putting-out system in Europe, especially after the more powerful merchants who had “one foot in the town and the other in the country” (Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, Volume 2) harnessed their labor to production for international markets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But of course, each sector was specific in the way it was organized and the way jobs were allocated and so there’s little point in generalizing. (The only invariable feature here is the ubiquity of merchant’s capital. The silk industry of Lyon has attracted some fine work at this level and shows how complex these patterns could be. Daryl Hafter shows that women’s work was crucial for silk production in Lyon, providing most of the important auxiliary work for the silk looms, thus contesting the idea that it was simply a tag for unskilled labor.  She argues that “It was the women’s labor that made possible the ‘effective resistance’ of traditional silk artisans both to factories and to rural cottage industry, “allowing the industry to survive into the 19th century.”

On the other hand, although some form of the putting-out system was widespread outside Europe in countries like China and India and in the Islamic world, we know almost nothing about its actual extent and internal organization.  The “Company weavers” of Bengal studied by Hameeda Hossain were organized into weaving villages subject to the control of European capital. They sustained a cotton textile industry where piece-goods exports reached half a million pounds sterling by the 1770s. But women are largely invisible in this story, doubtless because here, unlike the jute industry, women were ritually barred from touching the loom. Short of archival sources it’s hard to see how we can make any of this more ‘visible’.  [Daryl M. Hafter, Women at Work in Preindustrial France, 2007 and Hameeda Hossain, The Company Weavers of Bengal, 1988].

Indeed, according to Rosemary Crompton, the construction of ‘skills’ and the status of occupations were ‘decisively influenced by gender’ (Crompton, “Class theory and gender”, 1989). This could work in complex ways. Henry Ford, for example, deliberately refused to hire women for assembly-line work “so that he could denigrate the manhood of employees who could not keep up with the line.” In other words, the assembly-line was coded as a site of masculinity.  Competition between male workers in terms of effort standards (speed and intensity) has a strong resonance of masculine bravado, e.g. in contemporary, massive automated warehouses where job performance is electronically tracked through the entire shift and workers are “directly controlled by computers.” There’s an outstanding field study of this by Christopher Shane Elliott.  [Elliott, “Manufacturing rate busters: computer control and social relations in the labour process,” 2016]. This is partly how we should understand the ideologically constructed but commonplace contrast between domestic and industrial labor.  The former is naturalized as a realm of use-values and quintessentially female while only the latter counts in terms of the production of value.

As long as both Marxists and feminists accept this division, then both Marxism and feminism fail to see the precise sense in which both male dominance and women’s oppression are rooted in capitalism.  Marx couldn’t make up his mind whether the individual consumption of the male wage-laborer was productive or unproductive!  The Italian Marxist feminists of the 1970s who came from a workerist or ‘Autonomist’ political background took the decisive step of characterizing women’s labor in the home as directly productive of value insofar as this was living labor being objectified in the commodity labor power. Leopoldina Fortunati argued that what appears as an exchange between male workers and women is an exchange between women and capital mediated through the male worker. But here the ‘form of appearance’ (simple circulation) is both objective (given the way reproduction is structured under capitalism it has to appear this way) and mystifying. It is part of the mysticism of the wage form that it hides the unity of the necessary labor performed in the home with that performed in the factory. [Fortunati, The arcane of reproduction: Housework, prostitution, labor and capital, 1995] The same point was made by socialist feminists like Rohini Hensman way back in the 1970s. [Hensman, “Wage-labour: the production and sale of the commodity labour-power”, orig. 1977]

Many scholars of post-institutionalization have focused on the ambivalent character of the net results. Anne Parsons, author of From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945, argues that a “plethora of civil rights and freedoms” were gained by deinstitutionalized disabled people, but the “legal changes ultimately did not provide the right to adequate medical and social services in their communities…. As people who had been released from state mental hospitals struggled to find housing and employment, more ended up in jail.” As the debate over deinstitutionalization was originally taking place, the fear that inadequate ‘community’ alternatives would replace the state institutions was, to be fair, a concern harbored by some people, including most notably many families of the institutionalized. While such concerns would at least partially prove founded, it is important to recognize that blame lies not with the activists or advocates who pushed for deinstitutionalization, but rather with the various ruling agencies and state bodies that negligently ‘dumped’ their former charges into communities bereft of adequate supports or infrastructures. [...]

Deinstitutionalization was certainly a ‘freedom’ struggle, but it ultimately proved to be a one-sided, negative sort of freedom. It was a freedom from state internment (of a particular kind), but it did not simultaneously engender a freedom to access the resources and supports necessary to engage in a truly emancipated, integral, and self-actualizing development of one’s life-potential. A positive freedom would involve meaningful, socially valued, and unalienated labor accommodated to one’s abilities and interests, unconditional access to the education of one’s choosing, universal and comprehensive health care, and decent standards of living on par with an expansive notion of social needs. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of the abolition of racial slavery in the U.S., abolition is not necessarily coterminous with emancipation. Put differently, abolition must comprise both a process of deconstruction and reconstruction.

During the nineteenth century, urinal design shifted from a kind of primitive communism of the open trough or slab without drainage, to an individuating architecture of partitioned spaces, enameled basin and a drain for making the urine and its offensive ammoniacal vapors, disappear. George Jennings design for what he called “Monkey Closets” popularized this new architecture. His urinals were first installed at the Crystal Palace at the world’s fair of 1851, and were the highlight of the fair for many contemporaries. His designs were installed throughout Europe and imitated by municipal authorities and other plumbing companies around the world.