The Next Dada Utopian Visioning Peace orchestra: constitutional theory and the Aspirational.

• Author: Matsuda, Mari
• Position: McGill Law Journal Annual Lecture

1. I Made An Orchestra II. There Are Two Kinds of People A. The Personal is die Political B. The Tool in Your Hand III. Art and Constitutional Theory: Who Is This Constitution For? IV. The Imperative of Big Change V. The Utopian Constitution VI. Art as a Right VII. Problematizing Art as a Right VIII. Make Your Revolution with Art in Your Hand IX. A Constitution of Aspiration Appendix: Manifesto of Radical Intersubjective Collectivity and Imagined Possibility I. I Made An Orchestra

   Someone is trying to make music somewhere, with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum. --Elizabeth Alexander (1)

   But there are many other things that are still lying around the house, endeavoring to be developed historically. --Ernst Bloch (2)

   I made an orchestra out of objects from the waste stream: household items relegated to the trash bin, pieces of buildings left in the junk yard, scraps of wood and metal, a broken guitar, a sewing machine, glass lamp shades, and a library card file drawer. The goal was to transform so-called post-consumer waste into instruments that could play Bach. (3)

   Along the way I met people who were not afraid of odd, creative endeavors and I invited them to join the orchestra as musicians. (4) I recruited Professor Charles Lawrence, a critical race theorist, to conduct our public performance. (5) A poet in the audience penned a poem about the experience, valorizing the struggling instruments that she said "gave complaint." (6) "It is hard," the instruments seemed to say, "but we will do it, we will transcend our declared status and send beauty into the world."

   A young filmmaker volunteered to make a short video of the performance and the manifesto reading that went along with it. (7) Would you like to see it?

   This lecture includes the first showing of this video, the world premiere, right here at McGill. The filmmaker, Chris Kahunahana, is an Indigenous Hawaiian who is making his first feature film. (8)

   Mesdames et Messieurs, may I present the Next Dada Utopian Visioning Peace Orchestra and Manifesto of Radical Intersubjective Collectivity and Imagined Possibility.

   [At this point, the lecture stopped for a video of the performance. The video is available online. (9)]

2. There Are Two Kinds of People

   There are two kinds of people in the world when it comes to the Next Dada Utopian Visioning Peace Orchestra:

   1. The ones who say "Cool!", and;

   2. The ones who say "Why?"

   Actually, there is probably a third group of negative, doubting haters, but we will not address them in this lecture. I will use the rest of my time to answer the "why" and to suggest that idiosyncratic Utopian gestures are relevant to constitutional theory, law, and justice.

   1. The Personalis the Political

      A basic tenet of feminism, "the personal is the political," (10) is the first part of the "why". Feminists start with the experience of women in order to ground theory in the lived reality of a group whose perspective and insight is cordoned off and called irrelevant by the gatekeepers of received wisdom. (11) As a feminist, therefore, I do not discount my own experience.

      I am the daughter and granddaughter of makers. (12) All my life, I have known people who use their hands, who use tools to grow food, to make, to fix, to transform discards into useful things. I heard laughing stories about the pages of the Sears catalog used as toilet paper, and the fabric from old rice bags turned into underwear. My mother grew up on a sugar plantation where anything bought came at a high price from the company store, and therefore, almost nothing was bought.

      My father lost seven jobs for his politics during the McCarthy era, but we never went hungry because Dad could fix things and people would pay for repairs. (13) He had tool boxes, and voltmeters, and oscilloscopes. He taught me to respect tools, and to always, when taking something apart, have a container for the little pieces so I could find them when I needed to put the thing back together.

      My father's mother was a working-class painter. (14) For her, the only good thing about the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans was that she had time to paint. She died before I was born, but I have always had her paintings to tell me who she was: she loved the soft-edged landscapes of Jean-Francois Millet, and the images of bodies bent in toil. She read Karl Marx. She valorized labour, and there are often figures at work in the paintings she left. (15)

      When I was a law student, the building next to mine caught fire and I had to evacuate in a hurry. I grabbed my grandmother's painting and ran, and in that instance I learned what object I would protect without thinking.

      With this inheritance of art making in my family, I might have become an artist. In the first metal-working class I took in college, the department chair (16) said: "You have talent. Have you considered changing your major?"

      Instead, another inheritance called. My father and his parents were Marxist internationalists. (17) They believed in a specific ideology that envisioned a better world, and defined a good life as one spent working for that world. In my limited imagination as a temperamentally cautious, straight-A student in the seventies, my version of this vision was becoming a people's lawyer, someone who could use the rules and rhetoric of the system to change it and fight it. Art was the unserious, self-indulgent path; law the hard-edged tool to wield against empire.

      I walked away from art, and for forty years, carried regret. An art professor said I had talent, and I did nothing with it. This may happen to you: one day you might wake up and realize you are not going to live forever. The marriage I had made with the law--or more specifically to the intellectual work of deconstructing the subordinating, hegemonic functions of the law--suddenly felt unsatisfying. The small regret from closing a door on a promising romance with art grew to a heavy, saddening load. My possible talent lay in the graveyard of life's unfulfilled intentions, waiting for my body to expire and join it.

      Luckily, a sabbatical appeared, and I became a full-time B.F.A. student. (18) A bit before this, I had stumbled upon a Dada exhibition at the National Gallery. (19) For the first time, reading the manifestos and background notes, I realized that Dada was not nihilism and absurdity--the vague legacy I had gleaned from urinals on gallery walls. Dada was despair, it was a cri de coeur for a generation that had watched so many peers--fellow art students, classmates--march off to senseless slaughter in the First World War. The radical refusal to conform to anyone's conception of what art is was a part of a larger refusal, a rejection of the entire project of modernity and its lie of rationality. It was a refusal of bloated young bodies lying in blood, mud, and mustard gas. It was a refusal of anyone's paltry effort to explain why it all made sense.

      One of the classes I teach is peacemaking. When I ask students what World War I was about, they have a hard time explaining it. The reasons offered, by world leaders then and by historians after the fact are muddled, (20) which is why you might be fruitlessly searching your well-educated brain right now to see what you have filed for "causes of World War I." Imagine living in that time, when an unexplainable war was killing so many of your friends.

      Of course, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that unexplainable war is, in fact, what life looks like to people in some regions of our world right now. They are holding broken bodies of loved ones killed in conflicts they did not create, and for which no one has offered a good case of necessity. The pain of loss cuts. The pain of loss unexplained

      is a second wound, and I proclaim here outrage that this is happening as I speak.

      This outrage was part of the artistic toolkit of the Dada crew, and I came to see the original Dadaists as among my many teachers. For anyone who thinks a peace orchestra is ridiculous, the retort was given in Zurich, before I was born. (21) My task was not to explain, but to refuse false explanation.

   2. The Tool in Your Hand

      A word about tools: making large-scale art requires space, equipment, and help. I had these thing because I was working in a university. I came to see how the university is a functioning model of a collective, communal space for mutual encouragement of art and knowledge. Perhaps I already knew this, but I learned it in the body when I had to move something bigger than myself and I could call out the studio door, and anyone in hearing distance would come to my aid because we were all artists, and artists help artists. I used MIG welders, table saws, and hydraulic lifts that I could not afford to purchase and maintain on my own, deeply grateful for the investment my community had made in the art department. I amassed a precious collection of second-hand tools that gave me great joy just by sitting, well-honed, in a handmade tool holder, waiting for use.

      I learned, as the socialist artist William Morris tried to tell us years ago, that holding the right tool in your hand to make a pleasing object will complete your soul and bring you back to the defining joy of human life on planet Earth. (22) We make things, we create beauty, we always have. Tool in hand, I was infinitely happy, making art, all day, every day, for the nine months of my sabbatical year. My fellow sculpture BFA students were all women--strong, optimistic women who were not afraid of fire or power tools. What does their choice of maker culture have to do with constitutional theory?

3. Art and Constitutional Theory: Who Is This Constitution For?

   Whoever does not hope for the unhoped-for will not find it. --Ernst Bloch (23)

   Some people think a constitution is a pact that allows us to live together without killing one another. It keeps us at bay from one another, by creating a state apparatus to mediate our life together in a limited space with...