We of the grassroots American left are heirs to the global anti-systemic movements of the 1960s and ’70s. The twin hallmarks of New Left politics, a critique of institutions and the valorization of horizontal structures, are in our political DNA. Sadly, that’s left us unable to advance an affirmative theory of the state for a half century and counting. Outside of the most banal ideas, the left has largely abandoned claims to government. The right, by contrast, for all its demonization of the public sector, has had no such problem. If the left is to successfully retool its relationship to government—an urgent task under the auspices of Trump 2.0—we need to reinvigorate our imaginations regarding government and what it can do. Robby Herbst takes us back to the late years of idealistic Big Government, when imaginative, publicly supported initiatives were possible, despite their imperfection. Shall cultural workers embrace the messy reality of public services and make those demands of government in 2025? Do we have any other choice?

– Dan S. Wang

, 1973. Courtesy of ​​Ohio History Connection.

What did American liberalism look like? I mean classic, big government, “we can change the world” kind of liberalism? What did it look like, not where we recognize it most, i.e. in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s time, but at its zenith under Lyndon Baines Johnson, when the administration tackled the dual issues of poverty and racialized inequality?

Do you know? Is there a picture in your brain?

If not, you are excused. Between neoliberalism, massively regressive tax cuts, old and new illiberalism, and over a century of virulent anti-communism, liberalism doesn’t hold much of a footprint in people’s minds. And then there’s the 1960s New Left, which didn’t comfort LBJ, our ultimate big lib, at all.

Does the word liberal read as a smear to you? It’s been that way for a long time, and is anybody coming to defend it? As Trump moves to mop up the remnants of what was known as a Great Society,

 now is a good time to take a look at liberalism and ask, what was it?

A decade ago I started looking at Lyndon Johnson’s legislative achievements during his presidency from 1963 to 1969. For me, at that time, “participation” had meant being a member of a theater troupe, an art collective, or a scrappy anarchist media project. At best these relationships could get me a free slice of pizza, and they were often ephemeral; here today, gone tomorrow. I’d been drawn to LBJ because of a reference to his liberal Model Cities program in a book on participatory strategies in the arts, Claire Bishop’s 

, which included a diagram labeled “A Ladder of Citizen Participation.” The diagram was conceived by an aggrieved government employee named Sherry Arnstein in 1969.


Sherry R. Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” 

Journal of the American Planning Association

Arnstein had been an employee of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as an administrator of its Model Cities program. She believed the quality of a given Model Cities program could be judged on a spectrum ranging from manipulation and abuse of citizens by the government, at the bottom rung, to total citizen control, at the ladder’s peak. For Arnstein, citizen and community control was an end point for a federal program whose concept was to enfranchise the disenfranchised. Citizen control meant tangible power for democratic subjects managing their destinies, together. Art and grassroots politics was one thing, but up until reading about this I had never heard of a government program that sought to fund grassroots participation, much less experimental models for community engagement.

The spark for Johnson’s Model Cities started from a philanthropic initiative called Gray Areas, supported by the liberal Ford Foundation, that ran from 1959 to 1965. Gray Areas sought to develop social equity in America by financing what today we might call “change makers.” The privately funded Gray Areas program developed into the federal programs of Job Corps, Head Start, and Volunteers in Service to America. Other less durable projects Gray Areas sponsored look like social practice artworks today—such as a geodesic dome in Manhattan’s Lower East Side organized by a gang that would become New York City’s CHARAS organization, and a people’s architectural bureau of Harlem.

Johnson, in his first State of the Union address given in January 1964, declared a War on Poverty. That year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the lesser-known Economic Opportunity Act to “eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty in this nation by opening to everyone the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.”

In 1965 the Watts Rebellion happened and, partially in response, Johnson created the Department of Housing and Urban Development as a Cabinet-level agency. HUD oversaw Model Cities.

In 1966 Congress passed the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act, formalizing and directing the transformative power of the nation’s riches toward pockets of urban poverty. The act created the Model Cities program and mandated “maximum feasible citizen participation” in the development and conceptualization of each city’s model program. The meaning of this so-called feasible participation would become a political football as the nature of actual community involvement came into focus.

The Model Cities Program encouraged community stakeholders to co-organize, articulate problems, and generate solutions to address the crisis of poverty in a wealthy society. The thought was that the urban riots of that era could be curtailed by giving alienated communities tax dollars to innovate in spending. Poor folks would be granted a buy-in to the liberal order, rather than held at its margins, and empowered to come up with innovative methods to solve urban problems. From 1967 to 1968, organized, and organizing, communities collaborated in writing a city’s Community Action Plan for HUD. These plans looked like a constellation of what we now understand as urban nonprofits and community organizations working in the fields of housing, social services, education, transportation, health, and the arts.

There were meant to be 46 model cities splitting among them $2 billion when Johnson’s bill was first proposed. But by the time the bill became law, there were 150 cities splitting only $900 million, a massive funding shortfall to go with a greatly enlarged map. The deficit is pinned on Johnson’s unwillingness to raise taxes on a nation he was trying to hold, despite his desire to richly fund the increasingly unpopular War in Vietnam. So when the Community Action Plans went live in 1969, the projects the citizenry had dreamt up were deeply underfinanced. And this would be the case until 1974 when the law’s vestment ended and President Richard Nixon let Model Cities die. 

That most of the underfunded Model Cities lifespan occurred under the rule of a hostile administration points to the doomed nature of the initiative. Yet there is something immanent to a program called Model Cities regardless, and the word “model” has two meanings to consider: The first is an ideal prototype to be appreciated, like the clothes on a runway model. The second is a model run in a laboratory, an experiment to learn from, successful or otherwise. So when I ask what American liberalism looked like, those two meanings hold the answer.

Model Cities built stuff, delivered services, and activated urban populations. But unlike the monumental public works of FDR, the top models of the program are less known and were more customized and local. For example, the program supported the construction of community centers. There were several architecturally significant public housing projects in the Bronx. A community called Soul City got off the ground in North Carolina. It was spearheaded by the Nixon-friendly figure Floyd McKissick as a multiracial community branded with an “uplift” concept of Black self-determination. In Los Angeles, in the Greater Watts Model Neighborhood, a full ten percent of all Model Cities monies went to community arts organizations.

  These organizations are central to what we now think of as the LA expression of the Black Arts Movement. Those funds also seeded a public housing project known as the Guy Miller Homes. Developed by grantee Studio Watts Workshop, it housed the elderly and sponsored an art gallery and residency center for memorable community arts experiments.

Detroit’s Model Neighborhoods supported the city’s Mobile Swimming Pool program. At its peak, a fleet of five trucks comprised the pool initiative, which continued beyond the Model Cities era. These trucks carted around specially designed decked trailer tanks. When filled with 25,000 gallons of fire hydrant water, they made an up-to-five-foot-deep tub. These pools were staffed by lifeguards, some trained and paid from the Model Cities budget. During the swim seasons people could find a truck by tuning into Channel 2, WJBK at 12:30 p.m. The mobile pools were a part of an armada of mobile amenities cruising the Motor City, including a skate-mobile, a movie-mobile, and a puppet-mobile (though it’s unclear whether these amenities were supported by Model Cities or not).

, Detroit, Michigan. Sunday, July 28, 1974, page 63. © Detroit Free Press, USA Today Network via Imagn Images.


These emblematic models are the eye-catching exceptions to a frequently pragmatic legislation meant to seed money to poor and often racialized communities. For example, in Detroit, the Citizen’s Urban Opportunity Fund (CUOF) was set up by request of Detroit’s primary Model Cities manager for two reasons. The first reason was to receive and distribute cash to organizational grantees of the Model Cities program. These programs included institutions supporting job training, health care, tenants’ rights, and primary school education.

And second, the CUOF was set up as a fund to be tapped by Detroit’s citizens to access cash grants or loans to address immediate needs. Its head, Ralph H. Richardson, interpreted this mandate and structured the organization to work as a “G.I. Bill” for the ghetto. For its single year in operation, the $250,000 fund distributed American tax dollars to, among other things, pay for an asthmatic’s air filter, provide rental assistance for a single mother, cover tuition and fees for college students, spot union dues, pay for home repairs, provide down payments on homes, and even grant cash so a guy could buy a suit for a job or a mom could hire a babysitter for when she was out on a job interview. Someone was able to buy a car to drive to work. A year into the program Richardson was taken to task by the new Nixon-appointed Model Cities manager and asked to defend himself as a Black “Santa Claus.” The implications made in the city’s newspapers are clear, that a Black man handing out cash to other Black folks shouldn’t be trusted. Richardson opined defensively, “The plan was to stress new, imaginative approaches to old problems. The prospect that some money might be wasted was not to be an obstacle.”

This revanchism regarding who could receive money from the federal government and how they might spend it is evident in another racialized scandal documented sensationally in Detroit’s newspapers at the time. In August of 1970, the Detroit Free Press reported that Detroit city and the State of Michigan would close a Black Muslim summer camp in Milford, in the countryside north of Detroit. The Brothers Unlimited sleepaway camp had received an operating grant of $12,000. Among charges of not providing adequate and appropriate care for the campers, reportedly the camp had children doing military exercises in the middle of the night, trained them in combat, and had instructed campers “not to associate with white people.”

The controversies surrounding the funding of a veritable Black Santa or a Black Muslim summer “training” camp in Detroit with our tax dollars are emblematic of the program’s model as a social laboratory. These are instances where localized solutions were sought for specific communities. Seen from different contexts, however, they might be perceived as threatening, ill-informed, or unworthy of sanction by the federal government. Philosopher Michel Foucault used the term governmentality to describe how a ruler structures policy to conform to what a society deems permissible according to its self-conception.

 In this way a leader’s law forms what they conceive of as allowable within their social contract. In Model Cities’ initial development during the Johnson administration, money was earmarked to CUOF and Brothers Unlimited because his administration was seeking to empower, and directly enrich, marginalized subjects through participation in democratic processes. Liberal democracy itself was the reason. When the Nixon administration came to power, their conception of how persons and groups marginalized by society should benefit from participating in society changed. Archived notes stored in the Detroit Public Library indicate that the highest offices in D.C. acted to end a citizen-administered cash granting program in Detroit’s inner city. Nixon had other ideas of how Model Cities dollars should be put to use. Those involved giving mayors cash to distribute and making grants contingent on partnerships with business and banks.

, 1974. Courtesy of ​​Ohio History Connection.

The Nixon administration’s approach to Detroit’s Model Cities echoes a pattern seen elsewhere. In the program’s initial liberal stage, cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco had been working through what could be characterized as 

 processes of how to administer Model Cities locally. In each city, locally influential grassroots organizations tried to gain representative status to essentially control Model Cities implementation in their neighborhoods. Organized poor people were hoping to super-charge the program’s effectiveness in this way. In Black North Philadelphia this was the Area Wide Council (AWC), and in San Francisco’s multiethnic working class Mission District it was the Mission Coalition Organization (MCO). These coalition organizations were developed as networks of lower-income neighborhood stakeholders, working to counteract the ravages of bureaucratic urban redevelopment. Though each organization had leftists to their flanks antagonizing them, the organizations themselves were challenges to the then-dominant white power structure of their cities. In both instances, agreements were in development as to how these coalitions could run their Model Neighborhood when Nixon’s approach trickled down to the cities. The power of AWC and MCO was compromised and the meaning of “citizen participation” was brought to heel by the propertied and powerful of Philly and San Francisco.

Even before its funding ran out in 1974, Model Cities was deemed a failure. It was dogged by charges of fraud. Whole programs were forced to close due to allegations of corruption and misallocation of funds. 

 was the title of a 1969 book written by liberal wonk Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a lightning rod in the discourse of welfare and safety nets, and later a U.S. senator from New York. In the book Moynihan reflects on Johnson’s War on Poverty, a war Moynihan helped to shape while working with LBJ as an appointee of his and Kennedy’s administrations. Moynihan’s later criticism of Model Cities circled around the program’s democratic nature (there was too much of it) and the supposed fuzziness of the social science applied to the problem. Moynihan found himself migrating to the Nixon administration and served as Nixon’s Counselor to the President, a step towards becoming a policy hero to neoliberals who sought to engineer (or manipulate) the urban poor, rather than empower them. Nixon’s anti-poverty programs initiated a federal turn towards the bureaucratic, hierarchical, and private-public partnerships benefiting capital first and the poor last. The aim of these programs would be to structure federal expenditures around capital’s goals rather than humanist values.

In Foucauldian terms, a gambit of Model Cities engages the question of who and how someone in our society is allowed to waste federal tax dollars. A letter to the editor of the 

 published in 1971 by John Blaine, then secretary of The Meeting at Watts Towers, a network of community arts organizations in South LA, discusses this tension while pointing to the 

  It also considers the texture of the revanchist state in action during the Nixon administration:

“The $500 million contract awarded to Canoga Park’s Rocketdyne by NASA rated only Page 24 in a recent edition. The contract, for '36 engines by 1978' will enable Rocketdyne to provide '2,000 more jobs in a gradual buildup of the program,' and 'additional jobs at plants of subcontractors.'

“But when the Los Angeles Model Cities Agency received $26 million to distribute in East Los Angeles and the Greater Watts Model Cities Neighborhoods, it was played up on Page 1, giving further coverage inside, and generally trumpeted, to what purpose? The Model Cities funds, here since late April, are supposed to have a positive effect on the lives of literally tens of thousands of low-income people in these communities. Yet almost none of the Model Cities funds have as of yet begun to filter through the red tape to the people who need those funds.

“My point is this: By playing up the relatively small amount of government funds being used in low-income communities; the 

 makes it seem that a whole lot is being done for poor people in Los Angeles when this is not actually true. By playing down the middle-class welfare schemes which the whole space racket represents, you help to keep the pressure on government to provide more meaningless jobs for aerospace engineers and technicians.“

, the book that introduced me to Model Cities, Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation is presented as a foil. For art historian Bishop, the ladder is a misleading evaluative tool for participatory art. She contends that analyzing art with a grade of better-or-worse misses the point. For Bishop, art’s goal isn’t to prefigure utopian paradigms, as a pragmatic politician or technocrat might see fit. Rather she asks artists to create situations that embody the complex realities of society itself, as problems to be encountered, and engaged. And while The Ladder of Citizen Participation serves as an antagonist for Bishop’s argument, she never explains what Model Cities was, or what it meant to do. Nor does she ask us to consider its affect, rather than its effect, as she asks us to do for art. But if a federal program’s values are organized around building subjectivities, rather than strictly solutions, isn’t that a kind of participatory art? So then, can we appreciate the conflict over a government-funded Black militant summer camp as a successful artwork? An artwork where the terrain of a citizen’s relationship to the constructs of both blackness and whiteness are worked out? In a post-Cagean world, and certainly in our Trumpian world, isn’t law really a kind of performance score we’re all obliged to play when liberals concede that even horseshit can be an arbiter of political or judicial reality?

This gets to a deeper point about what American liberalism looked like. Model Cities was an underfunded ambitious mess of initiatives that sought to intervene at the bio-social level rather than just through physical infrastructure. While its programs hoped to find methods of effective change, Model Cities was also generated to create an affective relationship with democracy, almost as a cultural policy. For the American right this was a bold-faced welfare giveaway of the sludgiest kind. For the American left it simply propped up a racist, militarist, capitalist social organism. As for the liberal middle, they were left holding a policy bag, with nothing to show for it other than their own moral clarity, budget items, and constitutional ambitions of a more equitable society.

Unfortunately American politics is not art, but apparently a war fought and intensified in four-year cycles. Taking power in January 2025, the Trump administration revoked LBJ’s Equal Employment Opportunity executive order, and it’s gunning for much of America’s social architecture. His administration stands at the far right and sees anybody to his close or distant left as the enemy. From his point of view on the see-saw, there is no middle, only leftists. For Trump, those who see the world as anything other than cold hard business are fools, crooks, or liars. In this worldview the winners are allowed to give out money as they want, fail as they want, commit crimes as they want, and structure government policy to conform to the society they want. We have seen and will see failures and waste with Trump, but it will be attributed to the kind of failures Silicon Valley likes: innovative and disruptive as entrepreneurs, not citizens, are encouraged to be. We are told that these are the right folks to waste our money.

Today Model Cities is uncelebrated as an experiment because the program failed the test of America’s perceived understanding of itself. Given the option to build a truly “Great Society,” the country continues to choose a punitive path towards an ever-shrinking concept of federalized public wealth. We’re a big nation with a small idea of what we can do together, other than arm ourselves and the world, build jails, and buy and sell stuff. Model Cities pointed towards a kind of liberalism that is unfamiliar to us because its terms of affective subjectivities lie in a terrain beyond the pale of the rigid and gray society that elections have sadly demonstrated many of us think is best. Art, in Bishop’s 

, is a terrain where gray-suited participants experience as-if situations aiming to put this reality into relief. In our current political equation, where the dominating ideology aims to eliminate its opposition rather than deal with them as humans, one wonders how old school centrist liberalism, much less meaningful encounters masquerading as politics (or vice versa), can even exist. Even more so today, the broad agonistic idea behind “participation” in the deeply liberal conceptions of art itself is called into question as leftists and liberals alike ask, “Is this the time for radicalism?”

Robby Herbst is an interdisciplinary writer and artist who uses and investigates avant-garde paradigms to expand cultural imagination. Recent projects include 

, created for LABOR at MOCA (LA), as well as 

Compassion and Self Deception: A Guide To LA’s Moral Crisis

 (created in relationship with the Los Angeles Poverty Department), also presented by MOCA. His essay “The Deschool Primer, The Portola Network, Avant-garde Art, and the Education of the Cybernetic Body” was published in 2024 by the journal

. He instigated the Llano Del Rio Collective and co-founded the 

. He recently relocated from Los Angeles to New York where he has found himself in the garden and teaching theory, drawing, and theories of social change.

Website

Robby Herbst

The Model Cities Program encouraged community stakeholders to co-organize, articulate problems, and generate solutions to address the crisis of poverty in a wealthy society.

No Privacy, No Public

What Was Liberalism: Affective Policy in the Art of Citizen Participation

 is A Blade of Grass’s outlet to collaborate with practitioners and learn through their perspectives. While we understand that our communities have long been in a state of crisis, the inauguration of the current political administration accelerated these crises with a strategy to overwhelm constituents. With the ground shifting rapidly throughout the first half of 2025, our conversation with artist and writer Dan S. Wang reminded us that moments like this are not new to communities and elders who have long engaged political struggle.

As guest editor of this year’s issue of 

, Dan brings a rich history of organizing with artist collaborators and collectives and contributing to social movements throughout the Midwest and beyond. Dan has produced work with artist groups Compass, Madison Mutual Drift, and Red76, and he was a founding member of Chicago experimental space Mess Hall. Dan’s recent residency and exhibition 

 at Dartmouth College explored political memory, revolutionary strategy, and leftist failure. In 2022, Dan co-edited with Anthony Romero and Daniel Tucker the book 

Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic

, a collection of interviews, critical essays, and artist portfolios that—in their words—“offers a framework to help us make sense of the interlocked crises of the unfolding present and asks with critical optimism what can happen in this time of transition.”

 contributions that will continue to unfold throughout the rest of the year.

At the quarter mark of the 21st century, more than two decades after the Patriot Act and now at the dawn of ubiquitous AI, privacy is nothing but a bad joke and our encrypted browsers won’t save us.

Which is not to say that the public sphere is healthy. In the United States, between Clintonian neoliberalism and Trump’s crony capitalism, everything “public” has been heavily degraded, disfigured, shut down, or shut out. Most public services are on life support. Public sector workers are the go-to punching bag for conservatives. Public education has one defender for every hundred critics. Public lands will be sold to real estate vultures for a song if the Republicans get their way. And public expression? Forget it. Circulation is so uneven and attention so fleeting that any given public gesture, message, or display might as well be private—in which case, refer to the bad joke above.

Over a three-part rolling release, this year’s edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. By addressing this condition directly and obliquely, the hope is that the conversations, essays, process notes, and other contributions amount to a genealogy of “private” and “public” while grappling with a world in which it is no longer possible to hide, and yet in which the spaces of mutual visibility and common communication continue to fracture and shrink.

The wish is to create forms of social engagement untethered to the outdated dichotomy, but that can realistically contend with inherited systems and distributions of power that were built on those presumptions of public versus private. If this edition of 

makes strides toward that end it will have been a success, all the more so as a project completed under a totalitarian regime on the ascent. It must be said, the events of 2025 and beyond—today, yesterday, any day you are reading this—temper our plans and expectations. Whatever adjustments we make as the year unfolds will stand as a record of this time. Progress is the hope, survival the goal.

This editorial platform was created in collaboration with curator and writer Risa Puleo, who served as an advisor and thought partner to A Blade of Grass in 2024. 

 is guest edited by Dan S. Wang with support from ABoG Program Directors Allie Linn and Lee Heinemann with Executive Director Lu Zhang. ABoG’s board is ashley sparks, Elissa Blount Moorhead, Diya Vij, Gregory Sale, Michael Premo, and Michael Quattrone. Rebekah Kirkman copyedited these contributions and Team designed the identity and interface for 

Instagram

Dan S. Wang

Over a three-part rolling release, this edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. 

No Privacy, No Public 

On nearly every front, the current occupant sows disorder as executive policy. The stock liberal counter argument for a return to normal is a complete shambles. At this point in the devolution of empire, we can only suffer one kind of disorder versus another; all but the political elites admit it. That said, the way forward is hardly clear. Resistance can 

 be experimental. Thus, with a shuddering energy, kimi malka hanauer delivers for us a text that formally exemplifies the very “ungovernability” they advocate as a tenet of intellectual and political engagement, from detached scholarly research to the particulars of managing one’s physical functionality.

Before you access this text, please contribute to mutual aid efforts in support of those enduring the ongoing U.S.-funded Zionist genocide in Palestine. Several suggested efforts are included below. Contributing to mutual aid is one of the many necessary ways to directly support Palestinian liberation and self-determination in the face of genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, brutal occupation, torture, terror, manufactured famine, and mass systemic extermination perpetrated by the Zionist state and its imperial allies.



 updates fundraisers created by groups and individuals in Gaza and those in direct contact with them.

 feeds warm meals to displaced people in Gaza.

 is a donations-based initiative led by Palestinians in the diaspora working to supply aid to displaced families in Gaza. 

 is a group of volunteers with loved ones in Gaza raising mutual aid to support basic needs.

 is a collaboration between Jane Shi, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Alice Wong raising funds to get as many eSims as possible into Gaza.

If you are not able to donate directly, please share the efforts with your networks. After you’ve donated and/or shared, 

please feel free to continue to the article.

“You cannot build an order on the basis of that which is unstable.”

The other day, Kameelah Janan Rasheed opened a workshop

 with a quote from Clarice Lispector: “I want to write to you like someone learning.”

 I’ve learned so much from Kameelah, and the insistence on writing and making from the purview of a 

 is one such example. Following those words, I write to you today as a learner, but also as someone who has not slept. Every few months, I experience a cycle of insomnia that usually lasts for about two months. That’s about half of the year, every year, for the past several.

It’s often from this state that I do my best to get through the demands of my day as a teacher, maker, family and community member. Over the past few years, alongside my abiding sleeplessness, I have found reprieve in an embrace of the 

and by extension, in uncovering with loved ones, mentors, and friends what it might mean to be ungovernable 

 This ongoing process has manifested, in part,

through the ground of the nomadic education project Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry’s (CLPP)

 aggregating print and digital resource library.

It feels ironic writing about ungovernability while my soulbodymind refuses to cooperate, but maybe that is the state of being that is needed. In a society structured and perpetually reproduced by repeated episodes of original violence,

 to seem unstable—in this case, chronically without enough sleep—is a sound and just response. If, as scholar Nikita Shepard puts it, “the ungovernable cannot be appropriated back into state logics of control,”

 what might this bodily refusal—ungovernability internalized—make possible through its persistent defiance?

Ungovernability is an embrace of divergent and embodied modes of being and relating within the inherently unassimilable edges, cracks, and borderlands of imperial and colonial rule. Ungovernability is where imperial and colonial technologies of so-called law and order—partition, extraction, dispossession, and genocide—break down, leak out, or crack open, even if only temporarily.

 Ungovernability is not only the deterioration of dominating imperial orders, but the lifeworlds that persist within their perpetual rupture: the 

, and so much more. On a much smaller scale, ungovernability is a refusal of the continued order of the day, and in this state, my mindbodysoul too finds itself consistently unable to satisfy its extractive demands.

While “ungovernable study” has operated as a loose pedagogical frame for CLPP’s work, we have not yet given language to the various principles it emerges through.

 In part, this is because the pull toward ungovernability elicits another kind of approach—one intentionally grounded in instability, tension, movement, and, thus, a commitment to continuous enactments, rather than static definitions: How might we persistently reach toward ungovernability as relational and tactile forms of study that evade capture and co-optation? And how might our study be interwoven with the seemingly unproductive, unreasonable, and unassimilable actions and inactions that touch the impulse of revolution?

In foregrounding study as a relational and everyday practice, the CLPP digital and print resource library

 has been a fruitful ground for sharpening these questions in concert with other projects and practitioners. In concrete terms, it exists in a sometimes elusive and discreet print-based form, as well as a publicly accessible digital format designed by Jayce Nguyen for smartphones and other interfaces.

 These iterations are meant to embolden library users to decentralize and adapt the figurative stacks across disparate contexts. The digital library’s mutual aid “paywall” requires library users to contribute to and share mutual aid initiatives in support of those enduring the ongoing U.S.-funded Zionist genocide in Palestine. The paywall acts as a humble reminder that our persistent reaches toward shared study, especially as practiced from within the imperial core, cannot be separated from the violent forces that shape our worlds. Rather, they must be actively interwoven with pragmatic action and material redistribution.

The library aggregates resources through a combination of open calls, invitations, and projects that shift its stacks, often responding to current events and community inquiries in real time. These changes produce an unstable collection, where one must browse through seemingly disorganized materials to arrive at any desired text. Across the various library themes, ungovernability has surfaced through the intentional gathering of materials that ground and potentialize pre-partition and pre-bordered lifeworlds, as well as those that persist, negate, and seep through the cracks of the imperial present. This intention—to look to the 

—has been limited by the predominant use of the English language, itself a vehicle of partition and rulership, which scholar Ella Habiba Shohat has referred to as the “alphabet of dispossession.”

 Through this paradoxical ground, in looking backward and forward together with materials typically divided into separate systems of knowledge—the cultural, the sacred, the scientific, the historic—the library aims to negate myths of so-called progress that structure imperial and colonial education.

Scholars Nour Joudah, Randa M. Wahbe, Tareq Radi, and Dina Omar, the primary coauthors of the “Palestine and Praxis: Scholars for Palestinian Freedom” pledge that circulated in May 2021, offer a potent reflection on the “progressive narrative of linear time” and the intellectual and embodied tradition from which their statement draws:

Against the progressive narrative of linear time, spectacles of terror rupture past as present to return us to our inaugural moment of loss and reinscribe the terms of our alienation from each other, our land, and ourselves. Where dispossession is ongoing, linear narratives elide our elders’ legacy and our children’s potential.

I write these words as the U.S.-backed Zionist state continues its genocidal campaign in Palestine—the latest reenactment of the original violence of the Nakba—which has persisted through a settler-colonial regime of everyday theft, expulsion, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, brutal occupation, siege, starvation, torture, sexual violence, humiliation, and manufactured famine.

 As many scholars and organizations have intricately asserted, this campaign of mass destruction cannot be separated from the epistemicide

 of Palestinian culture, history, and knowledge waged by the Zionist state and its allies since its very conception.

While supposedly operating in the name of a highly mythologized and exceptional “Jewish nation,” Zionism depends on constant and destructive erasure in order to sustain its ideology. The Zionist epistemicide of Palestine also coincides with the erasure, dislocation, and weaponization of the “intricate landscape of belonging” of Jewish lifeways that precede Zionist destruction.

 This landscape includes the pre-partition commons shared by Palestinian Muslims, Christians, and Jews, as well as of diverse traditions that manifested during various periods around the globe.

  For me, this, in part, is also where ungovernability is intimately rooted: in my ongoing attempts at tracing generations of familial lifeworlds that manifested in the historic commons of Jerusalem, Palestine, I found the cultural practices of my Sephardic elders imperially dislocated and generationally ruptured precisely because of their unassimilability into prevailing colonial orders. What were once normative cultural entanglements, in this case, of Sephardic and Palestinian lifeways, are reproduced as imperial impossibilities, threats to apartheid’s law and order. Here, ungovernability emerges as a disavowed relational and cultural inheritance, made palpable in fragments through the rehearsal of shared study.

Time and time again, we witness institutions rehearsing their adherence to genocidal orders as they silence demands for even merely acknowledging, and much less rightfully mourning Palestinian martyrs assassinated by the Zionist state and its allies. Despite empire’s repeated attempts to erase and upend acts of refusal, divestment, and remembrance, the global masses hear Palestine’s reverberations, gathering in ungovernable relations that unsettle colonial and imperial claims of domination over an otherwise shared earth. Here, ungovernability should not be mistaken for a superficial vision of tolerance or plurality, but rather, as unresolved attempts at coalitional practices that disorder imperial and colonial impositions of where we each belong and thereby under what conditions we live and die. These are the logics that violently subjugate the majority for the seeming safety of the few. But, that so-called safety is dwindling

  and Zionism marches toward its inevitable collapse.

The CLPP library collection is meant to be a facilitative tool for the provisional practice of ungovernable relations. This past May, when artist Lizania Cruz

 invited me to facilitate a session of A.I.R. Gallery’s Unforgettables Reading / Working Group,

 I gathered a new library section around the theme, “on threats to order.” We began our discussion with the 2018 text “The idea of a borderless world,” where scholar Achille Mbembe critically applies conceptions of a borderless world toward the “redistribution of the earth.” In the modern state, Mbembe explains, the modes of capture on which sovereignty depends—capture of a people and a territory, the imposition of borders, and the violent enforcement entailed—must be reconciled with versions of so-called freedom and security that are claimed as its basis.

“The carceral landscapes of our world,” Mbembe writes, are “the antithesis of movement, of freedom of movement.” Thus, a main function of the state is to craft and maintain conceptions of order and stability that reconcile the inherent contradiction between so-called freedom and security on the one hand, and mass irreparable multimodal violence on the other. As enemies of the state and of so-called freedom, the 

 amounts to all those (peoples, histories, practices, lifeways, languages, etc.) that destabilize statist myths of order and stability.

an attempt at transgressing imperially- and colonially-prescribed borders. Rather, ungovernability is a call toward inhabiting the structural and disavowed transgressions that already form the imperial grounds on which we dwell and the fragmented interior worlds which we carry. It's here—in the tenacity of unchosen embodiments of instability, movement in perpetual excess, speech implausibly out of bounds, ruptured lifeways in perpetual denial—where we might denaturalize empire’s vision of totalizing control. It’s here

where we might prepare a ground for other worlds to grow.

Inherent and not always by choice, ungovernability emerges as bodily defiance.

 It manifests against the day’s order. An irreconcilable grief. An absence of all that cannot be stolen back. The demand to make ourselves imaginable, thinkable, speakable. Ungovernability is not a tragic tale. It is a story of what we allow to be possible. It is a question of what we are willing to leave behind. 

This is where ungovernability in and as study begins.

 It is in our bodies’ unwillingness to forget. It is in writing like a learner. It is in the unworkable vacuum of a good night’s rest.

Thank you to Dan S. Wang, Anna Cho-Son, Rebekah Kirkman, and Allie Linn for your editorial stewardship of this text.

kimi malka hanauer

Inherent and not always by choice, ungovernability emerges as bodily defiance. It manifests against the day’s order. An irreconcilable grief. An absence of all that cannot be stolen back. The demand to make ourselves imaginable, thinkable, speakable.