Refurnishing the Fund: On Phil Christman's "Midwest Futures"

Phil Christman | Midwest Futures | Belt Publishing | April 7 2020 | 150 Pages

Somewhere inside the Guggenheim Museum, there’s an interesting quote plastered on the wall. “Our current form of urban life has necessitated the organization, abstraction, and automation of vast territories,” it reads, the bold, blocky letters of the font contributing not a little bit to the snootily prophetic air of the words. “The more we extend our demands for consumption, entertainment, comfort, and capital, the more the countryside becomes a hyperorganized realm of production...more and more orthogonal and Cartesian—a futurism without manifesto.”

I remember snapping a picture of the quote with my phone a few months ago, before I’d even cracked the spine of Phil Christman’s Midwest Futures. Something about the quote’s description of the contemporary countryside struck home for me, while the rarefied artspeak of the text—its hip deployment of “Cartesian”; its shoutout to the aimless accelerationism of a “futurism without manifesto”—was naturally eye-catching, as academic logorrhea tends to be. I felt, despite the quote’s shotgun approach to theorizing, that maybe I’d stumbled on some sort of interpretative skeleton key, an entrée into the sublime boundlessness of the American Midwest.

The show the quote was a part of, Rem Koolhaas’s Countryside, The Future, has been thoroughly eviscerated in the press, and not without good reason. At once aimless, high-handedly vatic, and self-servingly snobby, the show seems designed to mimic the experience of being lectured at in a foreign language by a snowy-haired academic in trendy Persol glasses. Its run mercifully truncated with the arrival, stateside, of the coronavirus, Countryside, The Future was a messy jumble of theoretical buzzwords, pastose graphics, and wonky dioramas—a frustratingly arcane Gesamtkunstwerk designed, it seemed, to mystify rather than inform.

I kept thinking about the show’s air of refractory postmodern bricolage as I read Midwest Futures. In a way, I was trying to figure out why the quote I’d photographed had struck me in the first place. I realized it wasn’t so much that it said anything earth-shatteringly incisive; instead, its structure aped my own wonted way of describing the Midwest, a habitual stance Christman, in his book, diagnosed with ease. After all, Midwest Futures—an engrossing meatloaf of a text comprised, among other things, of a tour of land-use policy in the Midwest, a discussion and critique of literary representations of Midwestern loneliness, and an investigation of the region’s troubled history with race—posits at the very start the Midwest’s status as “a conceptual magpie’s next, made from scraps of everything.”

Overall, Midwest Futures is probably best understood as an attempt to rewrite the significance of the Midwest, showing how the nebulous region—a fundamentally middling place, where nothing of import seems ever to have occurred—has in fact, since its inception, served as a testing ground for many of America’s most pervasive, and pervasively invidious, ideologies. The history of these developments, Christman suggests, has been swallowed up by the region’s (perceived) pudding-like blandness. Christman’s summation of the phenomenological state of the Midwest is clever, crisp, and engaging—it is, he writes, a place perpetually delayed, perennially othered, and subjected endlessly to temporal reframings, a region that exists in the minds of its inhabitants “as a huge blur, one that they lob descriptions at rather than describing.”

Christman’s vision of the Midwestern soul is complex and theory-drenched, but never less than human. Drawing on Mark Fisher’s concept of hauntology—a sort of inverted nostalgia, obsessed with lost futures—Christman describes “the sense of disappointment that grips so many [Midwesterners], the nostalgia for a moment that we can’t quite pinpoint, the feeling not that things once were definitely better but that they were once understood to be on the verge, at least, of getting better.” What Christman doesn’t necessarily drive home is the highly exploitable nature of this state of mind—the combination of a sense of decline with an inherent uncertainty about the precise nature of that decline, allowing one’s sense of the past to be easily rewritten. In other words, the appeal of Trumpian demagoguery might lie not so much in the way it assuages the feelings of a population that misses the good ol’ days, as it does in its resolving of a latent uncertainty about the very existence of those good ol’ days. 

What Christman does especially well is foregrounding the way this constitutional fuzziness—the ambient non-ness of the Midwest—trends toward the elision of complex histories of exploitation. The baroque magnificence of coastal exploitation—the way, for instance, the Brooklyn Bridge was built, literally, on the bones of immigrant laborers—is of course a matter of national myth, so much so that the Midwest seems to get a hall pass in terms of its racial dynamics, despite the fact the region has its own tangled history of wanton segregation, sundown towns, and Klan activity. The legacy of this muted interpretation of Midwestern race history is, of course, dangerous and a thing to be obviously corrected, but the swiftness and clarity of Christman’s analysis is still impressive. As Christman suggests, for instance, the way we tend to talk about the prevalent Whiteness of the Midwest—wryly dismissive, with “a roll of the eyes and a shake of the head”—“risks turning this long dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, which can be changed, into a metaphysical fact that can’t.”

At the heart of Christman’s text is the metaphor of the fund. Though we’re used to considering the Midwest in terms of a sense of place—or, more specifically, its lack of a sense of place—Christman demonstrates how, from its inception, the Midwest has been persistently effaced as a unique geographical region and circumscribed for capitalistic purposes. Far from a unique, inhabited, and human geography, the Midwest, he contends, has been consistently treated as an inherently divisible and exploitable resource—that is, a fund, to be drawn on endlessly and recklessly. Of course, that all feels like an apt, even obvious description of the modern Midwest. It brings to mind not only Koolhaas’s characterization, in Countryside, The Future, of the contemporary countryside as “a hyperorganized realm of production,” but also the disappearance of place-based loyalty wrought by the financialization of the economy, which places a company’s duties to its shareholders over its duties to its imminent and material community.

A masterstroke of Midwest Futures is how Christman projects this phenomenon backwards, carefully sussing out the damage wrought by the fund theory of the Midwest over its long history. It’s a story that begins, unsurprisingly, with the U.S. Public Lands Survey of 1785, which started off dividing the seemingly endless]  scroll of land that would become the modern Midwest into regular plats. The architect of the survey, that ever-present jack-of-all-trades Thomas Jefferson, harbored a utopian vision for the carved-up land, believing “the competition between small farms would generate a hardy, self-sufficient people, ready for self-government.” And yet, as Christman shows, this idealistic hypothesis was done away with nearly at the start of wide-scale settling, with an emphasis instead placed on corporate settlement. The real effect of Jefferson’s grid, Christman writes, was to make “the country into square after square of liquidity, to be bulk-purchased and dedicated to this activity or that one, en masse, as capital dictate[d].”

The “vast visual repetition” of the Midwest thus becomes a signifier of capitalism’s longstanding stranglehold on the region—traces of dehumanized production models are threaded into the landscape, worked into the very soil of the place. Space becomes an archive of exploitation. And yet, some of Christman’s most potent observations derive from another dimension entirely, locating in the region’s overriding sense of temporal dysphoria both a symptom, and source, of exploitation. In order for Native Americans to be systematically removed from the Midwest, Christman writes, “their still-thriving present [had to be] made to look like an irrecoverable past.” Encroaching capitalism, he adds, “did to natives of the modern-day Midwest what capitalism always does: it created a pace of change that only owners and managers of capital could live with.”

Capitalism’s ability to slue our perception of time, to torque, compress, or expand it to fit the needs of production finds bountiful evidence in Midwest Futures. Christman shows, for instance, how the American adoption of futures contracts (essentially financial agreements to trade a given asset for a set price at a specific time in the future began in Chicago, necessitated by the city’s famously precarious climate and the need to ensure, if the river froze early and goods couldn’t be transported to market, that farmers wouldn’t face a glutted market and dangerously low prices come spring. Christman’s arguments produce interesting insights about the nature of capitalism, among them the sense of necessity after the fact that often powers capitalist developments. The transcontinental railroads, for instance, “were a vision willed into reality by speculators, a massive, unwieldy idea made profitable by a combination of old-fashioned corruption and a dreamlike conviction of their eventual profitability.”

The tendency to move away from a lived sense of time and place produces some of the worst effects of capitalism, as a nascent thread in the book suggests. Christman’s careful delineations in this matter often have the hard ring of an inescapable logic, as when he shows how the standardization of shipping timetables created by the rise of the railroad caused visualizations of the future “to straighten out like a highway, instead of bending and meandering like a walking trail.” Participation in this system, as he shows, meant a greater payoff for those who could fill the train cars, and as a result farmers began to standardize their crops, growing only those things that would sell in any market, at any time. The move from technological advancement to crop standardization and, in turn, toward the monoculturization of space is clearly drawn and concerning, suggesting a rampant and snowballing process at play, the political implications of which are clear. Since capitalism is able to latch more viciously into the spongy flesh of a nebulous non-space like the Midwest, it’s only in a rabid insistence on place that we can hope to avoid the worst of its depredations.

It’s no surprise then that Christman’s solution amounts to a turn toward geographical realism. “This historical moment invites us to begin a long transformation of the Midwest from fund to place,” he writes, “from a speculator’s toy to a crowded but ultimately accommodating home for whoever needs it.” The book may get a tad teary-eyed at the end, sweeping upward, hawk-like, into the clouds of anodyne prophesying[9] , but the sweetness of it all, after so much hefty argument, feels earned. “Every human is so many other humans,” Christman writes in the book’s conclusion, “and you feel that in the Midwest, wandering through those squares, among those people who, on paper, could have been you.” The metaphysical fungibility of the Midwest bleeds, as the qualities of a place will tend to do, into its inhabitants, so that in the end, as Christman writes, you begin to “feel deja vu in your own subjectivity.” What he ultimately finds in the region isn’t simply a mass of unrestrained space, but a retreat for difference, and a site of resolution—one whose very nebulousness makes this so.