The Next Dada Utopian Visioning Peace Orchestra: Constitutional Theory and the Aspirational

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. Along the way I met people who were not afraid of odd, creative endeavors and I invited them to join the orchestra as musicians. I recruited Professor Charles Lawrence, a critical race theorist, to conduct our public performance. A poet in the audience penned a poem about the experience, valorizing the struggling instruments that she said “gave complaint.” “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. 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. Mesdames et Messieurs, may I present the Next Dada Utopian Visioning Peace Orchestra and Manifesto of Radical Intersubjective Collectivity and Imagined Possibility. There are two kinds of people in the world when it comes to the Next Dada Utopian Visioning Peace Orchestra: 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. A basic tenet of feminism, “the personal is the political,” 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. As a feminist, therefore, I do not discount my own experience. I am the daughter and granddaughter of makers. 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. 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. 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-François 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. When I was a law student, the building next …