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Sacrifice zones and community: global capital and the case of the Flint Water Crisis

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Sacrifice zones and community: global capital and the case of the Flint Water Crisis

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Sacrifice Zones and Community:
Global Capital and the Case of the Flint Water Crisis

by

James Beckwourth Milner

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

May 2020

Copyright ©2020 James Beckwourth Milner

ii
This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Ñacuñan Sáez, for imparting his love of
theory and the open exploration of ideas, and to that of Dr. Matthew Hilton-Watson, who
delivered on his promise to help me read Derrida in the original French. These invaluable gifts
made this work possible.

iii
Acknowledgements
First, I must thank Dr. G. Thomas Goodnight for his support, for his faith in me, for his
challenges to my thinking, and for his provocations to think strategically about my place in the
academy. Dr. Goodnight has become a dear friend over the course of the project and my
graduate career, and his role in its success is immeasurable.
Dr. Henry Jenkins gave me a chance to follow my passion those many years ago, and has
here yet again. I thank him for being there when I needed him, too many times to count.
I thank Dr. Ann Crigler for the incredibly insightful and thought-provoking questions
during my defense. Her extraordinary engagement with the substance of the work was deeply
validating.
Dr. Sandra Ball-Rokeach was a part of the project before the onset of the Flint Water
Crisis. But the orientation toward community comes directly from working with her. I deeply
appreciate all of the opportunities, advice, and support she has given me over the past several
years.
Thank you to Dr. Peter Monge for helping me through some tough times. He was a life
saver when my family needed it most.
This work could not have been completed without the assistance of Anne Marie
Campian, whose boundless positivity and precise interpretation of bureaucratic mandates
helped me navigate some very obscure avenues of academic work.

iv
The late Dr. Stephen O’Leary helped me to come to terms with the value and reality of
academic work. His voice will be sorely missed.
I thank my waiting room team—Dr. Katherine Elder, Dr. Addison Shockley, and Lydia
Shockley—for helping me through my darkest hour. I thank Dr. Diana Lee for the all of the talks
on the way off of campus, and for her infinite support and encouragement.
I thank Dr. William McAllister for giving me back my brain.
This project was of Flint. My Flint connections run deep, but none run deeper than those
with my crew. Too many to mention in extension, the following people were essential in
keeping me grounded and connected in Flint during the Crisis: Shawn Jones, Timothy Craig,
Damon Jackson, James Pilot, Matthew Gist, Charlotte Smith, Cheyenne Pilot, and Orchid Pilot.
Infinite thanks are due to my constant conversation partners, Dr. Addison Shockley and
Sean Self. Dr. Shockley and I went through this process together, and his insights and advice
were indispensable. Sean grew from a veritable stranger to a much loved and adored son-in-
law and trusted friend and confidant over the course of my graduate career. I was very lucky to
have had access to him and his creativity and analysis.
This would have been impossible without the support of my family. My mother Trudy
Moore and aunt Prudy Labar, and sisters Ain and Erinn, were always there for me. In particular,
my father, Dr. J. Victor Milner, was the voice of experience and insight so often as to frustrate
hyperbole.

v
Finally, to those closest to me, whose lives were upturned by my decision to follow this
dream: Alesondra Lenox and Margaret-Melissa Lenox, Norville, Mani, and George. We faced
many challenges and setbacks. But we also persevered, and have triumphed in ways not
thought possible before. We did this together. The power of learning to live together with one
another as a continuous, never-ending process, at the heart of the project as a whole, emanates
from these personal connections and relationships.

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Table of Contents

Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…………...ii
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..iii
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…...ix
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Flint Water Crisis as a Discursive Event………………………………………...1
“Now They Say it Got Lead and Stink in it”: Master Narratives and Histories of the Flint
Water Crisis.........................................................................................................................4
Sacrifice Zones, Colonialism, and the Development of Global Capital: Environmental and
Economic Injustice, Sacrificed Places, and their People…………………………..…………………...23
Colonialism, the Industrial Revolution, and the birth of a sacrifice zone……………24
Paracolonialism and sacrifice zones………………………………………………………………….34
Dossier, Sketchbook, and Notepad: The Plan of the Dissertation………………………………….41

Chapter 2: A Post-Industrial, Paracolonial Sacrifice Zone: Stories and Histories of Flint,
Michigan…………………………………………………..………………………………………………………………….52
Flint as a Labor Resource: Industrialization and its Discontents…………………………………...55
Paracolonial labor and the history of a sacrifice zone…………………………………….…55
Hard times, community, and community education………………………………………...71
Flint, Michigan as a Post-Industrial Sacrifice Zone: An Accident Which Was No
Accident……………………………………………………………………..………………………………………………..79
Accidental rhetoric, the “normal” accident, and the rhetoric of crisis……………….80
The rhetoric of crisis, contingency, and the form of inquiry………………………………88

vii
Chapter 3: Community and Communication in Hard Times………………………………………………..……98
Flint, Equality, and Society: On Wrongs Which Found the Political……………………………….99
Communities of the wronged?...........................................................................100
Aristotle, the state, and the good life…………………………………………………..…………106
“The oligarch sees oligarchy, and the democrat democracy.”…………………………111
A Theory of Communication for Hard Times: Georges Bataille and the Limits of (The
Pursuit of) Knowledge………………………………..………………………………………………………………121
Jean-Luc Nancy, Singularity, and the Fundamental Wrong of Society………………………...134
Giorgio Agamben and Radical Inclusion: “The Coming Community” in Flint?................141

Chapter 4: Narrative in Crisis…………………………………………………………………………………………………150
The Cycle of Guilt and Victimage: The Sacrifices of Flint, Michigan…………………………….151
Technical (Un)Reason: Expert, Regulatory, and Advisory Narratives…………………………..159
Big Stories: National and Local News Media Coverage and Federal and State
Government Discourse…………………………………………………….……………………………………..…168

Chapter 5: Flint and its Narratives: Voices from Subcity………………………………………………………..183
Hometown Research, Critical Ethnography, and the Search for the Everyday in the Chaos
of Crisis………………………………………………………………….……………….………………………………….184
The Voice of the People? The Voices of People. The “Measurement” of Dissensus and
the Present Study……………………………………………………………………………..………………………..194
Dissensus, Recognition, and Community: A Window into a Local Discourse of Crisis….200

Chapter 6: Conclusions: Sacrifice, Resilience, and Community: Flint, Michigan as Model or
Warning………………………………………………………………………………………..……………………………215
The “Invisible Hand” of Community in a Post-Industrial Sacrifice Zone……………………...217
Limitations of the Study……………………………………………………………………………………………..221
Lessons Learned and Lessons Unlearned…………………………………………………………………...224

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Psyma, nonknowledge, and accidental rhetoric………………………………..…………….226
Blame, guilt, sacrifice, redemption: The war is over, and we all lost……………….230
On Giving Voice to the Voiceless: When The Subaltern Speak, Can Anyone Listen?.....232
References…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….237
Appendices…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….267
Appendix A: Timeline of the Flint Water Crisis…………………..……………………………………….267
Appendix B: Note on Composition………………………………………………………………………………279

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Abstract
When a municipal water supply is poisoned, no one is spared. As a post-industrial sacrifice
zone, Flint, Michigan was already facing hard times. Its economic depression led directly to its
being placed in austerity measures. As lead was discovered in its water supply, government
actors sought to quell fears without addressing the material conditions which underlay the
lead-in-water problem. News media, at first as silent as politicians, followed in ideological lock-
step with those politicians, with variation only according to which individual upon whom to lay
all blame, and whom to sacrifice for the greater good of society. A rhetorical crisis appears
here, one which serves to frustrate the simple cycle of sacrifice, guilt, and redemption which
underlies this assumption that society profits, in any way, from, pain, suffering, misery, and
death. Drawn together by a shared sense of having been wronged, everyday people living in
Flint longed for and therefore created spaces of discourse in which those wrongs could be
addressed. This “drawing together” of beings sharing a world and its common stresses is
referred to as community in this study. To get beyond a simple opposition between the big
stories of government and news discourse and the small stories of struggle, resistance, and
resilience coming from those on the ground in Flint, the aim of the project was to suspend the
need for a certain, definite causal explanation for the Flint Water Crisis. This suspension was
facilitated by the deployment of the concept of nonknowledge, introduced by interwar and
post-war French intellectual Georges Bataille. Nonknowledge is the threshold between what is
known and what is unknown. Remaining open to a crisis frame means preserving this sense of
contingency, the idea of the possibility of impossibility. If this means that no final answers are
ever reached, so be it.

1

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Flint Water Crisis as a Discursive Event
On April 21, 2014, the plant supervisor of the Flint, Michigan water treatment plant
flipped the switch to change the municipal water source of the city from Lake Huron, piped pre-
treated from nearby Detroit, to the local, official backup water source, the Flint River. The plant
supervisor had warned that “If water is distributed from this plant in the next couple of weeks,
it will be against my direction” (Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016, p. 7). He knew it was the wrong
thing to do at the time (J. Victor Milner, personal communication, October 21, 2017). He was
aware, as the state emergency management team apparently was not, that his aging facility
had not been equipped to fully treat a municipal water supply for many years. He was aware
that anti-corrosive agents were not being used in the treatment of this water, and that failure
to do so would lead to serious issues down the line. And still, he flipped the switch. Why? It was
because his local knowledge and expertise was overridden by the cost-cutting and financial
concerns of a state of austerity rather than that knowledge and expertise being directed and
applied to benefit residents of the city. And these decisions, based on austerity rather than on
expertise, were made as if what was, at the time, not known, and not knowable, could not
possibly come into play and begin to have effects.
The significance of this moment is both easy to miss and easy to overstate.
Undoubtedly, this episode marks the incontrovertible beginnings of the flow of highly corrosive
water through Flint’s aging municipal water system. As such, this date marks the official
beginning of what would come to be called the “Flint Water Crisis.” What happens just after
this point in the city—from discolored water, rashes, and hair loss to deaths from an outbreak

2

of Legionnaire’s disease and spikes in blood lead levels of residents, and in particular Flint’s
children—indeed, in a very real and causal way, all stem from this act and this moment.
However, to begin the story here is to misrepresent this moment as a motor or cause
rather than an epiphenomenon, the product of an array of decisions, actors, resources, and
forces mobilized in the past—sometimes in the very distant past. An historical perspective is
useful in laying the groundwork for any study which seeks to gain any understanding of such a
complex and dynamic event. But history is fraught with power and symbolic violence. When
authority is what is at issue in the story, the authority to tell the story inevitably eludes those
on the ground who are most directly affected by the events occurring.
The goal of this dissertation is to open inquiry toward other ways of understanding this
crisis, perspectives not so limited by time and not so restricted to unary human agency. Its
central argument is that rhetorical crises, opened up or revealed by material-physical
conditions in a given location during extraordinary events or durations, frustrate narrative
closure due to their complex relation to what is known, what is not known, and what has
remained or must remain unknowable about those conditions, events, and durations.
The chapter first retells a press-based narrative that tells the story of the Flint Water
Crisis in a linear and simplified recounting of events of limited duration and purview. The
narrative authority, compact history and received historiography of these narratives are
brought into question. Master narratives arrive on the scene of events to orient and pacify
publics by taming unruly realities, subsuming singular and contingent happenings into received
and pre-established packages. Second, the chapter develops a dialectical position, attempting

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to understand Flint as the source of singular narratives. Orientalism is brought to bear on
sacrifice zones, and the concept of “paracolonialism” is developed as a part of the broader
context, missed by the press narratives in the first part of this chapter. This lends extended
context and questions to Flint and areas of crisis during times of globalization. Finally, this
introductory chapter lays out a path through the 4 chapters, constituting the grounds for richer
inquiries into what happened during, before, and after the Flint Water Crisis. The contingencies
of communicative infrastructure, vulnerabilities of civic institutions, and the discursive
necessities of community are anticipated as concepts informing dissertation chapters that
expose rhetorical crises as existential distress and bare life. Being wronged and nonknowledge
are essayed to be aspects of community coming into between during times of distress brought
about by events that should have never happened.
To begin this opening of perspectives, this introduction aims to establish a series of
narrative understandings of the Flint Water Crisis, from a number of perspectives. Wikipedia
“Flint water crisis,” 2019), regional independent news source The Bridge Magazine (Bridge
Magazine Staff, 2016), and Detroit-based journalist Anna Clark (Clark, 2018) each offer an
account of events on the ground, and these versions are considered and amalgamated into a
master narrative of the Crisis. The authority of this blended master narrative unravels as it fails
to account for the historical factors considered in the rest of the chapter. This disjuncture
between official accounts of the Crisis and the play of antecedent factors which established
Flint as the place where the Crisis would happen and become an international discursive event
is the basis for the multilevel analysis of Flint’s history and its discourse during the Crisis that
make up the body of the present work.

4

“Now They Say it Got Lead and Stink in it”: Master Narratives and Histories of the Flint Water
Crisis.
Released in 1999 on his Black on Both Sides album, the song “New World Water” by
musician-activist Yasiin Bey (known at the time of release as Mos Def) is an eerily prescient
critique and analysis of the trend Bey saw toward the increasing destruction and capitalization
of the global water system. The title for this section is taken from a line from that song: “Used
to have minerals and zinc in it/Now they say it got lead and stink in it.” Bey makes this
prophetic description decades before the onset of the Flint Water Crisis. Yet this line, and many
other lyrics in the song, ring familiar to those acquainted with the circumstances surrounding
Flint’s water problems and the responses to catastrophic problems by those in power and those
on the ground. But of course, Bey could not have known that the details he described would
come to pass in such precise material terms in Flint. Bathing with bottled water (Smith, 2015c;
Wheeler, 2017), non-potability of water from sinks and faucets (Smith, 2015a; Wheeler, 2017),
and secretive regulatory bodies more concerned with prospective panics than with preventing
harm (Smith, 2015a; Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016b), are all found both in “New World Water”
and in the Flint Water Crisis. But in many ways his foretelling of events indicates not so much
Bey’s prescience, although this prescience is important to note. More importantly, it seems to
demonstrate the material and institutional nature of the problem, not bound simply by locality
or personality. He sings of a grander schema in which geohistory and epistemology collapse into
the void of a rhetorical crisis. It becomes impossible to determine if Bey’s critique prefigures
Flint, or if, instead, the Flint Water Crisis existed as a set of material-physical-economic
conditions already in 1999 when the song was released. Any history expansive enough to

5

capture the Crisis, therefore, would have to come to terms with these unsettled and
unsettlingpreliminary conditions. Unfortunately, a longitudinal, global approach remains a path
not taken in the master narratives and histories of the Crisis.
In any case, establishing what happened on the ground according to authoritative
sources is a useful exercise, since the dissertation’s ultimate goal is to trace the effects of what
people did not know, and could not know, about “what happened.” Thus, this blended version
of a master narrative (ordering events relevant to the Flint Water Crisis) assembles pertinent
pieces from various accounts. The Wikipedia page covering the events (“Flint water crisis”,
2019), like that covering the similar crisis in Washington D.C., is both a rich source of
information and sources on the one hand, and a center of dispute and disagreement on the
other. Journalist Anna Clark (2018) offers a more unified perspective, but at the cost of some of
the complexity and nuance of the story. For its part, the Bridge Magazine staff (2016d) provides
a fairly comprehensive read of events up to the point of publication. But, events continued and
continue even to the day of this writing, so an account which stops in time for a 2016
publication is necessarily incomplete.
The lesson learned by pointing out these limitations is not to find pitfalls to avoid in
constructing my own, more perfect authoritative version. Instead, what one should find is that
any story, any narrative, and any history emanate from a limited purview and limited
perspective. What is not known, and what cannot be known, have effects just as does what is
known. So the authority of a history or a story cannot come from its ability to explain events
with perfect parsimony and causal reasoning, since there are always factors acting in a hard

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core of reality which escape simple explanations based on the full presence of all that is
relevant. So, joining the chorus of others who have told this tale before, I offer my version of
the events of the Flint Water Crisis not to have the final word on “what happened.” Quite the
contrary, the goal is to open a conversation among my sources, my audience, and myself about
what it means that no one seems to be able to decide, once and for all, “what happened,” and
therefore what to do about it.
The switch of water sources made in Flint in April 2014 brought with it a cavalcade of
upheaval to the lives of its residents, and many along boundary lines in areas like nearby Burton
to the immediate east. To understand why the switch was made, and why its changes brought
with them so much tragedy, requires a great deal of latitude in understanding the factors
involved. Still, at its most basic level, the switch was ordered by emergency manager Darnell
Earley as part of a cost-cutting measure to keep the city solvent. Earley had been appointed by
Governor Bill Snyder as part of a series of emergency managers tasked with righting the city’s
financial boat (“Flint water crisis,” 2019).
1
Flint had been getting its water from the Great Lakes
Water Authority (GLWA), a company based in Detroit with a pipeline running to Lake Huron to
the northeast. But Earley and other managers felt that the GLWA was overcharging Flint for
water. A new group, the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA), formed, and announced it was to
build its own pipeline to Lake Huron. So the promise of saving money with proposed lower
rates for Flint outweighed any other concerns (“Flint water crisis,” 2019).

1
Flint, like Detroit, Benton Harbor, and Pontiac, were cities in Michigan singled out as economically failing by the
Snyder administration. Emergency financial managers were appointed and made a series of controversial, radical
moves to cut costs and bring in revenue (Pratt, 2014). In Benton Harbor, for example, the emergency manager
authorized the sale of public land for commercial development as part of the city’s supposed fiscal responsibility
(Smith, 2012). In Flint, emergency manager Ed Kurtz attempted to raise cash by selling the city’s Santa Claus
display (Miller, 2013).

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But there was a real problem with this plan—the KWA pipeline was at least two years
from being finished. So Snyder’s team looked to the backup source for the city’s water needs,
the local Flint River. But in the rush to cut costs, proper corrosion controls were not put in place
in the city’s water treatment plant. And the corrosive water began leaching lead and other
contaminants from service lines into the municipal water supply (“Flint water crisis,” 2019).
Initially, residents reported discoloration and foul odor of water coming from their taps,
and from hydrants and other public sources. Rashes began to be reported, but officials balked
at the existence of the problem. High lead levels were later found in various areas of the city,
beginning in 2014, but these were downplayed as anecdotal. It was the scholarship of two
researchers in particular, Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech and Mona Hanna-Attisha of Flint’s city
hospital, Hurley Medical Center, which finally broke through the phalanx of denials and brought
a spotlight to the plight of Flint’s residents.
In the aftermath, the Oversight Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives held a
series of hearings concerning the causes of the crisis and the assessment of responsibility (U.S.
House Oversight Committee, February 3, 2016; U.S. House Oversight Committee, March, 2016;
U.S. House Oversight Committee, March 17, 2016). This hearing was heated, but largely stalled
on questions of ultimate responsibility. This disjuncture fractured overwhelmingly along party
lines. Republican chairman Jason Chaffetz determined that Governor Snyder was not
implicated, for example, but regional EPA director Susan Hedman was forced to resign in
disgrace (“Flint water crisis,” 2019). Ranking member Elijah Cummings came to nearly the
opposite conclusions in his assessment (U.S. House Oversight Committee, March 17, 2016). The

8

Michigan Civil Rights Commission, a state executive-level office, for its part ascribed primary
blame not to any individual, but instead to institutional and structural racism (Michigan Civil
Rights Commission, 2017).
Currently, lead service lines are in the process of being replaced. City politics seem to be
impeding progress, however, as disputes over contracts have stalled the work with many lines
not replaced, and still more lawns and streets with lingering damage (Derringer, 2016; Scott,
2017). Lead levels are now below federal action levels, and both the states of emergency
precipitated by the Crisis and the financial “emergency” which lost it its sovereignty have been
declared over (“Flint water crisis,” 2019).
But why did this happen in Flint? What is it about this area, this region, these people,
this infrastructure, this economy, which set the conditions for something like this to occur so
forcefully? To get at this part of the story, one has to reckon with the state of Flint’s economy,
and economic conditions in the Midwest and northeast of the country more broadly, in what
was once the heart of U.S. manufacturing.
Flint had been the central hub of General Motors’ manufacturing arm, and it and its
suburbs had enjoyed levels of prosperity and personal wealth unheard of for manual laborers.
But the fortunes of the auto industry, and therefore the region, turned sour in the 1970’s, due
to a number of factors ranging from the 1973-74 OPEC oil embargo to issues with quality and
fuel efficiency. Capital precipitously left the area in the early 1980’s, first in the form of plant
shutdowns and massive layoffs by GM, and later by disinvestment in a dwindling and
increasingly poor population. Crime was rampant, schools closed and became overcrowded and

9

dysfunctional, and blocks and neighborhood emptied out of residents and fell victim to arson
and vandalism (Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016d).
This degradation of the city led to millions in lost property values for residents. As basic
services such as police, fire, and education became strained by budget cutbacks and personnel
shortages, property values dived still lower. In addition to the overall poverty in the area,
leading to a lack of income tax revenue for the city, the lower property values meant that city
services dependent on property tax millage, like the Flint Public Library, faced steep and painful
shortfalls and budget under runs (Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016d). There was also the issue of
severe cutbacks to state revenue sharing agreements with cities in Michigan. This had become
a tactic of Republican administrations across the country looking to rwecover revenue lost to
growth-oriented tax cuts and incentives. Not only were property values lower, but, far more
significantly for less affluent cities and their service providers, the revenue sharing payments
had a stabilizing effect of on the ability of cities like Flint, Detroit, Pontiac, and Benton Harbor to
keep themselves solvent while providing its residents with the basic trappings of the developed
world: schools, hospitals, security, emergency services like fire and police, etc. So losing the
lion’s share of these funds crippled the poorest (also the blackest) cities in the state, including
Flint (Clark, 2018). Certainly, the city was poor, and certainly, the city had been prone to
corruption and mismanagement.
2
But it is important not to take as a fait accompli that Flint
was bankrupt without asking why it might be so.

2
Two mayors in particular during the lead-up to these events have had noted issues with corruption while in
office. Woodrow Stanley, who was recalled in 2003 under a cloud of missing funds, was succeeded by local
businessman Don Williamson in that same year. But Williamson ballooned the city’s budget deficit, and resigned in
2009 facing his own recall election (Carmody, 2019).

10

It is also essential to add to this story the state of Flint’s water system and local
treatment facilities. The Flint River had long been the city’s water source, before industrial
pollution led to the shift to the Detroit source. But a 2003 study by the state of Michigan had
found that, assuming corrosion controls were in place, the Flint River could still function as a
viable backup municipal water source (Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016d). As far as the state was
concerned, the Flint River posed no foreseeable issues should it be needed at some future date.
But the treatment facilities in Flint were dilapidated from disuse. Water came to Flint via a
pipeline, and the water that was piped in was already treated. So there was little for the
treatment plant to do, and this was the case for nearly five decades (Bridge Magazine Staff,
2016). Forcing a facility in such disrepair back into production in such a short time frame left
open manifold chances for error and malfunction.
Such was the scene onto which actors like Earley, Hedman, and Snyder, as well as local
city council members and Dayne Walling, then newly elected mayor of Flint, came to play out
their roles: an aging, disused facility, in a zone of economic depression and capital
abandonment, rife with infrastructure distress and decay. When Earley made his decision to
switch to the KWA, and by extension to use the Flint River in the interim, it was against a
backdrop of pre-existing sacrifices and hard times. Emergency financial management—
austerity, in other words—offered itself as a solution to financial insolvency, but its managers
were draconian in their approach, and authoritarian in their manner of dealing with local
officials. Thus, when he later refused to switch the water back to the Detroit source following
the surfacing of evidence, Earley faced the opposition, futile though it was, of Flint’s city
council, who voted overwhelmingly to switch back (Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016d). The state’s

11

rationale for moving Flint away from Detroit water had been the high rates charged by the
GLWA. It was argued that the city could save millions of dollars over time if it switch to a source
with a lower base rate. The fact that the water would need to be treated was noted, but it was
understood at the time that Flint had adequate facilities to handle the change (Bridge Magazine
Staff, 2016).
Once the water was switched, residents began to notice discoloration of the water
coming from taps and fire hydrants. Boil water advisories were issues several times in the first
few months following the switch. Residents began complaining of rashes and hair loss,
connecting it to the foul-looking and –smelling water (Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016d). Lead was
not a concern at this point—being odorless and colorless, it was not yet on the radar as a
problem. But something was clearly wrong with the water—many residents could see and smell
this for themselves, and were vocal with their complaints, at gatherings in public spaces and on
social media.
Still, state officials balked at these reports. One such test, conducted by lead-in-water
expert Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech in the home of Flint resident Lee-Anne Walters,
registered 107 parts per billion for lead particulates (Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016d). The federal
action level, established by the EPA, is 1 part per billion. Walters took her results to the regional
EPA office in Chicago, where her story was met with great concern by her point of contact,
manager Miguel Del Toral. But when Del Toral took his report to his boss, regional director
Susan Hedman, he was chastised for making much ado about anecdotal results, and was
censured and later lost his job over the incident (Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016d).

12

The growing number of positive tests for lead in Flint’s water may not have made
headway into regulatory or government priorities, but residents themselves were scared,
uncertain, and looking for answers. This precarity and uncertainty on the party of residents was
met with rigid, dogmatic certainty on the part of its emergency manager. Darnell Earley made a
decision, in January 2015, to refuse the offer of GLWA made at the same time to reconnect Flint
to its pipeline and restore (pre-treated) water service (Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016d). This
decision ended up exacerbating the problem, since lead builds up in the body over time, and its
effects, also longitudinal, become more intense with higher levels in the body (Needleman &
Bellinger, 1991; Rosen, 1995).
It wasn’t until the results of two studies were released in October 2015 that official
action began to be taken. Marc Edwards, and local pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha,
released results confirming with scientific accuracy and gravitas what had been long suspected
by residents and long denied by those in power: Flint’s lead-in-water problem was city-wide
and gravely hazardous (Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016d). Hanna-Attisha led a press conference at
which she demonstrated the severity of the problem for Flint’s children by mixing formula using
water she knew was tainted with lead, emphasizing that lead is as invisible as it is damaging to
human development (Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016d).
Still, it wasn’t until months after these findings were released to the public as verified
and accurate reports of material reality in Flint that official action was taken. The Michigan
Department of Environmental Quality, through its spokesman Brad Wurfel, continued to offer
denials and reassurances of safety, despite this verified evidence to the contrary. It wasn’t until

13

a new administration was sworn in to Flint’s mayor’s office, that current mayor Karen Weaver
issues a state of emergency for the city due to the lead in the water in December 2015, shortly
after being sworn in. This led to a cascade of emergency declarations, first that of Governor
Snyder’s office, and then President Obama’s federal declaration of a state of emergency for
Flint. This released resources, including the National Guard and emergency funding, which
helped Flint bridge the financial and personnel gaps opened by the damage caused by the
corrosive river water (Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016d).
The damage done to the city and its residents was extensive. Hanna-Attisha’s report
advised that all children in the city be treated as if they were lead poisoned. This argument
extended naturally to the population of the entire affected area, which included some of Flint’s
nearby suburbs as well as the city proper (Clark, 2018). Lead poisoning causes permanent
neurological and other physical damage, so its effects can only be mitigated, never completely
reversed (Bellinger & Needleman, 1991). As pipes were replaced, the city streets were torn up.
Because the city was still facing austerity measures should it lose its tenuous new grasp on
financial solvency, and due to local, internal fights over contracts, the work was uneven, and
parts of the city still have lead service lines and extensive road damage (Clark, 2018). But
perhaps the greatest damage done was to public trust: city residents had little reason to trust
government officials who had lied to them and denied the reality of their situation (Clark,
2018).
Such is one telling of the events of the Flint Water Crisis. It was composed of three
separate accounts, each emphasizing different parts of the story. None of them are wrong to do

14

this. What emerges, finally, from an historical look at events is a labyrinth of possible
antecedents and causal linkages, with no universally acceptable way of adjudicating among the
various takes. This undecidability was felt on the ground as well, but it also affected the
contemporary news media accounts, which struggled to understand and explain what was
going on to publics both local and national.
One of the earliest news items of note once the Crisis had begun came from Mlive.com,
a regional news organization into which the only local newspaper, the Flint Journal, had been
incorporated to supplement a reduction from a daily print edition to only three print editions
per week (Fonger, 2009). It reported that coliform bacteria had been discovered in the water
post-switch. Two things stood out about the reporting at this time. First, nothing serious was
suspected officially or unofficially at that point: coliform bacteria are mostly harmless, perhaps
causing diarrhea but few other issues. And second, it was noted in the article that two
scientists, one from the MDEQ and one from Michigan State University, warned presciently that
the presence of coliform bacteria can indicate instabilities and problems with the water system
that might need to be addressed (Fonger, 2014). But it is only in hindsight that coliform bacteria
were a sign, in any real sense, that anything was wrong.
National reports, coming as they did after the emergency declarations, had the benefit
of hindsight. But this was also their major weakness. First reports from Fox News (“Michigan
governor…,” 2016) and MSNBC (Ortiz, 2016) shifted focus to align with party loyalties and feed
grand narratives of blame and political causality. Since the problems had finally emerged as a
reality for the country at large with President Obama’s formal emergency declaration, it was up

15

to experts to explain who was to blame and what actions to take. But experts differ, as do the
news organizations seeking out those experts. And so Governor Snyder looked both more and
less guilty, depending on whose expert opinion was consulted. The story on Fox News played
up the actions of Governor Snyder since the story broke (“Michigan governor…,” 2016), while
the MSNBC version (Ortiz, 2016) asked openly whether Snyder was implicated in anything
nefarious. After the House Oversight Committee hearing (Examining Federal Administration,
2016), both sides claimed victory, with Fox News blaming Susan Hedman and EPA director Gina
McCarthy (“Republicans hammer…,” 2016) and MSNBC accusing Governor Snyder and ending
with a quote from McCarthy which served to deflect her culpability, in which McCarthy stated
“We actually didn’t understand or know the full extent of the problem until July of last year”
(Chuck, 2016, para. 20). Different details are known, and different parts of material reality are
unknowable, for different observers.
Rachel Maddow’s took her MSNBC show to Flint to broadcast a special program on the
Crisis (Maddow, 2016). Maddow attempted to shed light on the human plight of Flint’s
residents and the burdens and costs they were facing. She used a town-hall format, with
residents of Flint making up the audience of her show. But Maddow’s show leans rather left of
center in the U.S. political spectrum, as does her network. And the audience of her show was
mainly sympathetic to this leaning. So its format encouraged the laying of blame squarely on
Governor Snyder’s doorstep. And while a consensus of sorts was reached and a list of demands
generated and publicly shared, having already decided in retrospect that Snyder’s decision was
the primary motor for the Crisis biased its search for the material reality and truth of the
situation on the ground with residents.

16

The two Time magazine feature articles on Flint’s water problems (Sanburn, 2016, 2017)
raised awareness of the situation in Flint, and highlighted the travails of everyday residents as
they struggled to cope with the drastic and damaging changes to their life world. The image on
the cover which contained the first of these articles (Sanburn, 2016) became iconic: an African-
American infant boy whose forehead and face were covered in a strange red rash. This image
circulated as a watchword in Twitter and Facebook for months after publication. The second
article (Sanburn, 2017), a follow-up, looked more to the present concerns and future needs of
residents than the causes or factors bringing about their plight. But both were significant in the
breadth of their reach in spreading word about Flint’s problems, even if the coverage was not
as in-depth as it would have needed to be to adequately explain what was going on to a public
heavy with nonknowledge about the subject.
Nonknowledge is the threshold between what is known and what is unknown. To
understand the depth at which the concept of nonknowledge to be grasped in order for it to
have much to offer, it is crucial to remember that included in “what is unknown” is not just that
for which knowledge is incomplete or partial, from a point of view of the possibility of
immanent or absolute knowledge. It also includes that which cannot be known, whether
because of the limits of human ability or through the inaccessibility of an object to be known to
direct human observation and analysis.
The concept of nonknowledge deployed in this dissertation is derived from the work of
inter-war and post-war French writer and intellectual Georges Bataille (2001). The concept is
developed in greater detail in Chapter 3, but for the time being, Bataille provides the following

17

formula to encapsulate the time and experience of nonknowledge: “I know nothing, but the
suffering that I have from knowing nothing, becoming an object of knowledge, gives me the
response at the very instant that I despaired of finding it” (Bataille, 2001, p. 164, emphasis
added). The concept flows from a series of lectures in Bataille’s “Socratic College,” an
unfinished project based on Socrates’ twin maxims of knowledge from the Platonic dialogues.
First, from the Apology (21d), Socrates states “what I do not know I do not think I know,”
commonly understood to mean “I know only, that I know nothing.” Second, with multiple
references in the dialogues, including the Protagoras (343b passim), the Phaedrus (229e
passim), and the Laws (II.923a passim), comes its complement, the edict “know thyself” posted
before the Delphic oracle. In the instant that self-knowledge becomes an awareness of absolute
ignorance, nonknowledge is born.
For the purposes of this introduction, the above definition of nonknowledge as the
threshold between the known and the unknown, the painful passage or instantaneous moment
from knowing to not knowing, seeks to highlight the dangers and pitfalls of certainty in the face
of unstable relations to objects of knowledge by remaining in the “instant” of nonknowledge
about the Crisis. If the story of the Flint Water Crisis is multiple, and each of these versions of
history has merit, then it must be asked whether or not certainty and immanent or absolute
knowledge have a value in a crisis which plunges the discursive field into a void where there is
no stable ground and nothing is guaranteed. Does anyone have the narrative authority and
grasp of relevant history and social forces necessary to comprehend the Flint Water Crisis? And
if not, then what takes the place of narrative authority in such a void?

18

In the vortex of information generated by a rhetorical crisis, narratives come to serve as
sources of support and explanation in a vast field of nonknowledge, doubt, and suspicion. But
narrative closure is incompatible with the rhetoric of crises. The contingent nature of the
conditions on the ground, the knowledge of experts and lay people of those conditions, and the
relative agency and power to act upon those conditions, renders any stable narrative unable to
explain events as they occur and after the fact. In this vein, the following section explores the
limits of narrative authority, and questions its value. It offers an alternative approach that
attempts to preserve the contingency associated with every crisis, one that pays attention to
durations and time periods of a different order and in a different register than the master
histories assembled in the previous section. If narrative authority seems to guarantee
oversimplification and subjugation of singular events and people in a crisis, what might the
narratives of a crisis look like freed from this authority? How might such freedom be won?
In Wikipedia (“Flint Water Crisis,” 2019), the focus is on a forensic determination of a
‘first’ cause, rather than a comprehensive look at the history and prehistory of the Crisis that
might shed light on why it happened rather than on simply what happened or how it happened.
The timeline which follows repeats this pattern, starting with emergency manager Darnell
Earley’s decision to move Flint to the proposed Karegnondi Water Authority pipeline. While this
decision was important, and the article is right to point out that the city council also voted in
support of this move, this choice of initial episode misses any discussion of what emergency
managers were doing in Flint in the first place. Earley was one of the first officials charged of
wrongdoing in connection to the Crisis—initially in connection to financial misdeeds (Carmody,

19

2018), but later in connection to the water switch and decisions made in their own right (Khan,
2019). It makes the story complete to localize blame on Earley.
But a complete and coherent story is not necessarily accurate or useful. Instead, if one is
interested in coming to terms with the uncertainty of living under threats like these—austerity,
racism, and poverty as much as lead-in-water—the drive is to open up new avenues of inquiry
rather than to close off discussion and debate. A comportment to nonknowledge, rather than
to the immanence of knowledge, requires an openness to the possibility that what we
understand and know about the world and its workings are flawed, and that what is necessary
is coming to terms with our own fundamental ignorance rather than succumbing to a
dangerously comfortable dogmatic set of norms. This means looking beyond a simple search for
“the answer,” and instead orienting one’s effort toward generating ever better questions to
spur discovery and progress.
Epochal events are not felt as such in the moment. It is never clear at the time whether
or not the events have brought about a fundamental change in the world, in life, or in society.
Even when, as for example the interwar and World War II periods, dark times reign, the valence
and outcomes of events are so uncertain as to be useless in determining how history will record
what happens. Whether or not Flint becomes epochal in the fight for environmental justice, or
for civil rights, or for the rights of the poor and disadvantaged, is not for this dissertation to say
or speculate. It may remain simply one episode among many in the long history of sacrifice that
defines human society and interaction.

20

The episodic and the epochal are related intimately. An episode encapsulates moments
in an event which connect to form a clearer picture of the situation on the ground in all its
complexity than any participating observer could hope to capture. It is a bounded section of
time, but more than that, the beginning and the end of the episode are punctuations which
make visible the unseen flow of time the passage of which goes unnoticed by people living in
zones characterized by stability and security of life. These interruptions mark of a section of
world history during which life is far from normal, and which can only be repaired or
recuperated from, and never fully restored to a previous status quo.
Similarly, the epochal event (for a privileged example, the Industrial Revolution) makes
both naïve conservative refusal and ahistorical advocacy for a return to a previous state of
grace established plays in political language games but, ultimately, irrelevant and futile as
practical enterprises. What is epochal manifests as irreversible shifts in the foundations of
society and history. It is this shared irreversibility which characterizes both episodes and epochs
as irruptions of change in a present which seems timeless and ahistorical to those safe and
secure in their life world.
Appendix A contains a timeline of events leading up to and through the Flint Water
Crisis. Like any timeline, it represents a series of decisions and lacunae designed to tell a
particular story, highlighting certain events as “key” or “central” while relegating others to
minor or excluded status. A timeline has the benefit of hindsight. In the moment, the value of
information is never as clear as it is in retrospect. The press, as an institution, seeks to explain
what is of value to know in the moment. But when facts are not yet known, and a situation

21

presents itself riddled with hidden and indecipherable signs, the press often fails in this mission,
and instead interprets nonknowledge as non-news.
Epideictic rhetoric seeks to mete out praise and blame according to knowledge of the
present moment. Prescriptive rhetoric, by contrast, looks not to explain the relative value of
present actions, but to use knowledge of the present to advise future action. Forensic rhetoric,
the third major register of rhetorical analysis, looks over past and present knowledge to come
to conclusions on how the present moment came to be. Whatever their temporality, causality is
the usual frame for each of these rhetorics. For everything a cause, and for each cause an effect
or chain of effects. Whether reading time forward, in reverse, or in the present, causality is the
foundation for all of these ways of explaining and relating to the world and material reality.
The Flint Water Crisis, like all crises, demands another frame. Here, causality fails to
explain both what happened and how it happened. Was there negligence? Was it criminal? On
whose part? Did the crisis start when the water was switched, or before? How much longer
before—at the point of a 2003 Michigan state water survey evaluating the Flint River as a water
source, during the period of shrinking state-local revenue sharing payments made to Flint, or
even before that? Which emergency managers were the problem—or, more broadly, is
emergency management (austerity) a problem? Why was the Flint River water polluted? Why is
Flint a majority-minority city? Why should a crisis like this erupt with such an apparently racial
charge? This flurry of questions is as arbitrary as it is incomplete. It is arbitrary, because it is
necessarily incomplete. The rhetoric of crises needs us to consider more than just causes and

22

effects. We need also to try to comprehend what was not known, what was not knowable, and
the effects of these forms of nonknowledge on material reality and its indeterminacy.
This section tried to present a comprehensive picture of the Flint Water Crisis. This was
done as an exercise in futility. History can be useful, but only if we are willing to be open to
hidden causal linkages and eddies of effects from the distant (and not-so-distant) past.
Ossifying a story into history to close discussion and limit discourse is an act of hegemonic-
imperial power; it can only be performed by the victors of history’s wars. Preserving as much as
possible which is relevant to the telling of the story, no matter how uncomfortable such activity
makes the hegemons it confronts, is an act of resistance to hegemony.
So, if this section covered the story as it has been covered in mainstream discourse, the
rest of this introduction will try to add nuance and layers of meaning to that packaged story in
an attempt to explode its limits and reveal as much of the profoundly complicated and
contingent nature of the rhetoric of the Crisis as possible. The goal will be to frustrate
straightforward and narrow attempts to read the rhetoric of the crisis in relation to immanent
causality or factors of certain effects. Forensic rhetoric, epideictic rhetoric, and prescriptive
rhetoric are far less applicable in crisis. In its place, the dissertation offers a dialectical read
through documents and discourse, offering a dynamic sense of the contingency and uncertainty
on the ground both in its choice of objects of study and in its approach to understanding the
meaning of those objects in relation to one another and to the people who used them as
equipment for living through the Crisis. The next section begins this complication by looking to
the distant, colonial past as a potential starting point or waypoint on the development of global

23

capitalism which, it is argued here, established the preconditions for the Flint Water Crisis to
have occurred in the present moment.
Sacrifice Zones, Colonialism, and the Development of Global Capital: Environmental and
Economic Injustice, Sacrificed Places, and their People
A sacrifice zone
3
has a history. It is not sacrificed arbitrarily; rather, it is chosen on the
basis of the profitability of its sacrifice. These choices are made by those from without the zone
in question, for the benefit of those from without that zone. Historical-material forces and
relations of power shape a land and its people into a place and its population. Flint was shaped

3
Peter C. Little (2017) gives an origin for the term “sacrifice zone” intimately related to environmental concerns,
especially those issues raised by nuclear testing and nuclear waste:

A term stemming from cold war policy and rhetoric, ‘sacrifice zone’ has been deployed by U.S.
government and military officials to describe and mark territories forever alienated in the wake of nuclear
testing, production, and waste management. The National Sacrifice Zone, as it was best known, became
an iconic term meshing patriotic symbolism and moral-cultural justification, and ultimately provided
ideological justification for destruction and reconfiguration of spaces, from entire regions, landscapes,
and ecosystems, to townships. This spatial and sociocultural sacrifice, it was claimed, was a necessary step
in sustaining democracy, freedom, and ‘the American way’ of life. The expression ‘sacrifice zone’ is now
deployed to justify macroscale resource extraction. (p. 1)

Little stresses the necessity of sacrifice of the exception at the bottom for the benefit and preservation of the good
life for the rest of U.S. society. It is important to note that sacrifice zones are motivated; the good of the society as
a whole is argued to inevitably and categorically outweigh the sacrifice of exceptions.

Shelby Elizabeth Doyle (2015) traces both a longer history of the term in its agrarian origins and its extension
beyond the U.S. government’s use of the term in relation to areas compromised by nuclear testing or nuclear
waste: “The term sacrifice zone derives from the study of traditional agricultural practices where cultivators
deliberately degraded one area to increase productivity in another area. The term has been appropriated into
political and economic discourse and used to describe areas degraded by modern industrial societies in the pursuit
of economic gain” (p. 667). It is primarily in this sense of sacrifice for industry and capital interests that the term is
deployed within this study.

The notion of a sacrifice zone was popularized by journalists Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco (2012) in their book Days
of Destruction, Days of Revolt, a study of regions of the country negatively affected by the advance of capital
interests. They define “sacrifice zone” as “those areas in the country that have been offered up for exploitation in
the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement” (Hedges & Sacco, 2012, p. xi). The resistance and
resilience of the people they study mirrors, in many ways, the responses of people in Flint assembled and analyzed
in Chapter 5 below.

24

by forces stretching back into the global colonial past. Even as it benefitted from those forces,
and grew into a prosperous small city by the middle of the twentieth century, the seeds for its
ultimate material-economic demise, which demise laid the groundwork for the Crisis, were
already sown and well into maturity.
If the previous section could not account for the history of the Flint Water Crisis
beginning the duration under study with the water switch, this section takes a broader view of
antecedent forces. Colonialism, industrialization, and the development of global capitalism—
three interdependent developments in history—led to vast harm to both the environments of
the places it sacrificed and to the local economies of those zones. It is impossible to situate Flint
and its pre-existing circumstances without reference to these developments, both in general
and as they relate to Flint. This contextualization of Flint’s situation is the task of the present
section.
Colonialism, the Industrial Revolution, and the birth of a sacrifice zone.
What are the preconditions for a region to be sacrificed at a later point? What types of
areas are sacrificed, and for what purposes? If the Flint Water Crisis is a case where a city’s
population had its water supply sacrificed to austerity, then what characteristics of Flint, its
history, and its people led to this? If the limitations of the previous section demonstrated key
problems with arresting the Crisis into an ossified and authoritative history, the goal here is to
start much earlier in history, to try to explain how Flint came to be a sacrifice zone at the
current moment of global history. Getting to the bottom of the issue is impossible, but digging
deeper and broadening the range of possible antecedents is important in expanding the

25

conversation and improving its ability to cope with a fluid material reality. The argument
therefore begins with a discussion of the globe’s colonial past, and continues through its
outgrowth, the Industrial Revolution. The choice was not arbitrary, nor was it deliberate.
Instead, colonialism suggested itself as a starting point immediately in considering the role of
austerity, Flint’s poverty and pre-existing infrastructure issues, and race as potential motors for
explanation of the Crisis.
Edward Said’s (1979) landmark study of colonialism Orientalism made many important
observations about the nature and interconnection of the institutions of colonialism—to state
this so plainly underemphasizes the foundational and epochal character of his work. Perhaps
none of his prescient findings are more remarkable, even today, than his insistence that
colonialism was far more than simply an economic or political-economic relation among states,
nations, and geographic regions. Indeed, the state-sponsored and military-backed operations of
colonial powers around the world constituted a major motor for much of history, and were the
basis for all global liberalism and the spread of capitalism around the world. However, Said
noted that what kept these regimes in place was not military might, economic power, or open
oppression or violence. Rather, it was the discourse of colonialism which, in the end, justified
and reinforced all military and political action. Said labeled this discursive formation
“Orientalism”:
Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism
can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—
dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by
teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for
dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (Said, 1979, p. 3).

26

In representing the oppressed as inferior, stunted culturally, subhuman, etc., a paternalist and
exploitative relation between colonial power and satellite colony viciously cycled among
economics, politics, and, especially, communication. Colonialism spread not merely and not
primarily through ships carrying invaders or merchants extracting goods, but instead through
the ideas of racial superiority and a Eurocentric perspective of the globe that spurred the rise of
colonialism and gave it its motivational center. In other words, as much as colonialism has
always been an economic, political, and military force, the properly discursive dimension of
colonialism is the key to understanding how such a structure could persist for so long, and why
its effects and forms dominate the world to this day.
Still, some key traits of the economic and political-military system need to be noted. As
a capitalist economy grows, the resources it demands to foster ever-increasing profit margins
grow as well. Early capitalist economies in Europe were not any more successful at establishing
isolated, self-sufficient nations as one could expect to be in the current global situation. But
“uncharted territory” in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and everywhere else on the globe came to
fill the need for resources without the associated drain of supporting a people to produce those
resources beyond (or even, in some cases, in order to support) bare life.
In the first stages, locals were enslaved and used as a captive labor force, or simply killed
off en masse, especially when slave labor was resisted or otherwise unsuccessful as a strategy
for repurposing the original inhabitants of the colonized land. Space needed to be made for
emigrants from the mother country to settle and tame the “savage land,” and that meant that
families, clans, peoples, cultures, and civilizations needed to be torn apart. The colonial regimes

27

set up enclaves from the mother country, and organized countryside and coastal areas into
cities which facilitated the extraction of resources, both natural and human, for export to other
areas of the colonial network, near and far to the colony. Revolts and rebellions were frequent,
and were brutally suppressed, with people treated the same cruel way that animals in the
colonies were treated.
This overt violence and hostility toward the others whose land was being forcibly
occupied was justified in the name of racial and nationalistic superiority, over the natives
certainly, but also, much more impactfully, over the other competing colonial powers in
Europe. The work of this process of justification and exception was carried out in literature, in
official government documentation and edicts, in imagery and art, in the marketing and sales of
goods (including human beings), in religious tracts and speech—in short, anywhere the
message of superiority over the natural world, over things and objects, and over the other
could be found and reappropriated for the purpose of funding, staffing, and executing the
bloody and expensive enterprise of colonial occupation.
As time progressed, so the early experiments in mercantilism became full-fledged
colonial enterprises on a global scale. Resources previously unheard of or only scarcely
available, especially metals and fuel material such as coal, were made accessible to a seemingly
infinite degree by the well-established system of colonial outposts and transportation
networks. In the United States, vast resources within the borders of the country gave the
country an edge over her European competitors. But as the Industrial Revolution progressed,
the laws of technological advancement which have been extensively studied were just as valid,

28

but at a much slower overall rate, being at a much earlier point on the graph of exponential
growth. Thus, expansionism and the doctrine of manifest destiny forcibly appropriated
neighboring land from Mexico, and the territory of the U.S. stretched across the coal wealth of
Kentucky, the oil fields of Texas, and the vast gold stores in California, among myriad other
valuable resources, all providing fuel for rapid technological growth at different points in the
country’s history (Haynes, 2010).
In the later stages of the Industrial Revolution in the U.S., the transformations of cities
and landscapes were multiple, rapid, and indelible; first by trains, then roads, then highways,
then superhighways, places and the communication infrastructures with connect them
underwent sudden, often violent change. Since resources could be extracted ever more rapidly
with new technologies of mining and surveying, resources would often be completely removed
from geographic regions. As resources dried up in an area, populations plummeted, often
leaving ghost towns which once supported a gold, coal, or copper mine. As much as it is true
that Flint itself was damaged by many of these developments—for example, the coming of a
major interstate exchange spelled the death knell for longtime African-American
neighborhoods in its path—the coming of the automobile industry, coinciding with the
availability of gasoline and the development of assembly line manufacturing around the turn of
the twentieth century, meant that Flint would have a remarkably stable source of labor for
most of its history. However, the city’s reliance on GM and the automobile industry for base of
support would prove quite costly when, in a move that parallels a coal company moving on
from a town when its mine is no longer producing, the Flint area was systematically abandoned

29

by the corporation during a period of restructuring, outsourcing, and downsizing in the early
1980’s following a massive shift away from U.S. dominance in the global automobile market
4
.
What characterizes a place or geographic region as a sacrifice zone is that it once had
great value to capitalist enterprises or government entities (and, since capital is entwined with
government, invariably a mixture of the two), but no longer. The process of extracting material
value from the land and its people, in the form of biotic, physical-chemical, and especially
energy resources necessary for production, leaves the land with irreparable environmental
damage, and leaves the people’s connection to each other and the spaces and places they
inhabit (or inhabited) frayed or outright broken. Once marked by capital for location of a node
in its global production network, the seeds are planted of its later conversion into a sacrifice
zone. Such was the case with the immense wealth of the coalfields in Harlan County, Kentucky
(sometimes known as “Bloody Harlan”) which saw rapid development of the area with the
influx of vast sums of capital, but, due to inequality of distribution of that wealth, produced a
tense, stratified zone often prone to violence (Cressey, 1949).
A sacrifice zone need not be a city or country in toto; in fact, most urban centers
maintain small sacrifice zones within their borders as a way of managing security and
redevelopment resources in a way that benefits capital investment in the city rather than
investment in its people or its community institutions. So Los Angeles has Watts, Compton, and

4
Labor unions made major concessions as the U.S. auto industry shrank following the 1973 OPEC oil embargo and
escalating defects in U.S.-made vehicles versus a much more reliable set of (particularly) Japanese products (Serrin,
1981). In an effort to restore profitability, GM and other automakers moved toward a model where parts were
made just in time, and the manufacture of these parts were outsourced to other firms and other geographic zones
(Holusha, 1981a). Reagan-era deregulation, including the relaxing of safety and environmental protections, was
designed to free up the industry to streamline itself and improve their bottom line (Holusha, 1981b). But the
positive social-economic effects of deregulation, at least in the auto industry, never seemed to materialize for
workers, their families, or the body politic.

30

other mainly race-coded areas which have been openly ignored by city planners and capital
investors alike; Chicago has its South Side, again mostly African-American, known infamously as
“Chiraq” (Moore, 2016); Boston has its Chinatown, known locally as “The Combat Zone” (Wolfe,
2014); and Flint, for its part, sacrificed its two longtime spaces for African-American
homeowners, Floral Park and St. John’s, for interstate development (Highsmith, 2015), and
currently sacrifices a drug corridor, also on the city’s predominantly African-American North
side, named one of the twenty-five most dangerous neighborhoods in the country by the FBI
(Brush, 2013). St. John’s had already been an environmental disaster area with the close
proximity of several GM factories belching waste and blocking out the sun in the neighborhood
(Highsmith, 2015).
Capital is driven by innovation, in terms of techniques of production, in terms of the
discovery, extraction, and deployment of resources, and, above all, in terms of the technical
mechanisms of the functioning of capital itself that have allowed the accumulation of unheard
of sums of material wealth in the hands of a few individual and corporate actors. As it ushers in
the new with myriad forces of creative destruction, capital sacrifices the old at the altar of
progress. In the wake of the development of global capitalism—and one sees this no less in
urban and suburban centers in the United States than in the former European colonies
scattered across the continents—one finds fractured peoples and communities: poverty, crime,
unemployment, homelessness, deep-seated racial and ethnic divisions, violence; these
features, along with many others, are key markers of the diminished status of the sacrifice
zones of the world, and they are all features held in common by spaces and places where
capital once found value to be extracted.

31

The reasons for abandoning a region of the world vary. In some cases, resources in the
area were no longer in abundant supply, or were completely exhausted. Such was the case with
California’s gold industry. In others, cheaper, better, or more efficient areas are located in the
interests of continuing the increase of capital profit. This is the case with the massive wave of
outsourcing during President Ronald Reagan’s overhaul of regulatory policy. Sometimes the
rising costs of doing business in the region lead capital to seek greener pastures in new
territory, whether in monetary terms directly or in terms of human or other associated costs
such as those dealing with a workforce riddled with unrest and prone to riots and strikes, or
with a ruined environment that makes continued habitation or labor precarious.
Flint’s case is a combination of these three variations, as, one could easily show, most
sacrifice zones are. For Flint, the first and third are combined, in the sense that the resource
that capital sought in Flint was its labor force. As unionization took hold, and racial tensions
began to flare into open violence and rioting in the region and in the city itself (Robinson,
2005), GM’s discomfort with its home base in Michigan grew. Reagan’s deregulation, which
allowed them to move their operations elsewhere without penalty or much restriction
(Holusha, 1981b), merely gave GM the escape route it had been seeking for a very long time.
And since several GM factories had been built within city limits, in the region of the St. John’s
neighborhood on the city’s north side and very near the Flint River, toxic smoke, industrial
runoff into the river, and GM’s improper disposal of other toxic materials used in production
left the area scarred (Highsmith, 2015). There are stories from 1960’s Flint of river fires, owing
to the altered chemical composition of the water, and of emergency room visits for anyone
who happened to fall into the river (Michael Madden, personal communication, November 29,

32

2018). And although efforts were made to clean up the river, these were never completely
successful, so the Flint River remains corrosive and polluted today due in part to GM’s
irresponsibility beginning early on in its industrial development.
In the vacuum left by the flight of capital from a sacrifice zone, sacrifice is doubled by
the actions of the state. The politics of austerity
5
are directed at areas now bereft of the
economic institutions needed to sustain its people’s continued access to the trappings of
modernity. It mandates that people living in sacrifice zones accept further sacrifices of their
access to the “good things in life.” The exception is the rule: even bare life becomes precarious.
Corners are cut, pennies are pinched, taxes and strictures on people’s activities are imposed
and increased, the area’s assets are sold off, and strict regulations on local sovereignty are put
into place
6
, all in a brute force attempt to make an accountant’s columns line up. Some people
are fortunate enough to be able to flee a decaying area; many cannot afford to do so, or are
unwilling because of longstanding ties to the communities where they have lived for decades,
some for generations. Whatever the reasons for their staying, those who remain behind in a
sacrifice zone during periods of austerity face existential crises on an everyday basis.

5
Michael Burton (2016) characterizes the process where “governments tried to reduce their debt through fiscal
consolidation, cutting spending and increasing taxes, a process dubbed by opponents as ‘austerity’” (p. 1). A global
political phenomenon, several studies have traced the (mostly) ill effects of these policies on lower-class and
disadvantaged members of U.S. society (see for example Posner & Sommerfeld, 2012; McGahey, 2013; Miller &
Hokenstad, 2014).
6
Emergency financial management grew out of the Great Recession, with a series of municipal bankruptcies and
other threats to fiscal security in local zones leading to a series of state takeovers of local jurisdictions, and the
appointment of emergency managers to govern in the stead of mayors and city councils (Kasdan, 2014). In Pontiac,
Michigan in particular, a suburb of Detroit once home to the Detroit Lions football team, the appointed EM sold off
massive public property holdings in order to bring about fiscal solvency, but these moves have left the city emptied
out and vacant (Kasdan, 2016). This pattern is repeated not just across Michigan, but in sacrifice zones all over the
United States. One of the hardest hit areas, and also one of the largest, Jefferson County, Alabama, is buried under
$4 billion in debt after years of corruption and mismanagement (Stampfler, 2013).

33

As much as a sacrifice zone is a geographic region, it is also, always, a place. Being a
place gives a geographic zone more than simply a distribution of resources, spaces, structures,
and pathways—a place is a location with specific historical, biotic, and narrative relations that
determine a value for that region beyond whatever value as a sacrificed region that society has
seen fit to designate there. These connections and relationships, these stories and the people
who tell them to each other, look to the future in order to correct the sins of the past. Just as
the Chernobyl site has become a lush, vibrant area of natural growth and renewal, if altered in
its basic composition from what lived there previously, so beings who live in sacrifice zones of
all kinds embody a vital spirit which looks for a fresh start and a chance to build a better place
out of the damaged region and breathe new life into it. Lessons are learned from the sacrifice—
more than can be said for society, which simply repeats the pattern of damage and creative
destruction in another area, ruining it in turn—and alternatives are sought for continuing to live
under the new conditions. Sacrifice zones are a locus for alternative narratives, means, and
goals of living, surviving, and thriving.
Orientalism, the discourse of colonialism studied by Said (1979), manipulated the values
of language, of imagery, and of ideas and concepts to favor the perpetuation and expansion of
notions of Western superiority and mastery over the rest of the globe. Global capitalism was
the direct inheritor of this hegemonic impulse, taking up the task of sacrificing zones of the
world for the profit of the global center in the West. Power radiates outward from the center,
and it does this discursively and in terms of a perspective on the world which sees only
potential for profit, and not the damage left in the wake of those pursuits. But colonialism,
properly speaking, was of a particular historical duration, one which does not stretch far

34

enough to include Flint. Why include this? The colonial past still has material effects today, but
it is more than this. The discursive form of colonialism, Orientalism, formed a model for
packaging hegemony which has merely adapted to new material conditions. The next section
advances the term “paracolonial” to describe material-discursive relations of power which
mimic the superior-inferior model of economic-sacrificial hegemony deployed in true
colonialism, but outside of conditions of conquest or cultural-nationalistic dominance.
Paracolonialism and sacrifice zones.
How do people stay buoyant enough to deal with each other and the nonstop waves of
adversity which sacrifice inevitably brings with it, such as scarcity or disease? This question is
both pointed and general; it is both a search for solutions and, ultimately, criticism of the
representatives of the people in question for whom apparently this question never came up. In
this case, a people were overruled by (il)legal fiat and not allowed to even ask themselves this
question. Due to activation of Michigan’s emergency management law, which allowed the state
to take over city operations due to its financial instability, the citizens of Flint were deprived of
any sense or practical means of self-rule. Mayor Dayne Walling had his powers taken away as
he was taking office, and the Flint City Council, residents’ other democratically elected leaders,
were rendered powerless as well. In their place, a dictator from the state replaced these duly
elected representatives of Flint’s people, and a authoritarian-technocratic manager made all
decisions in the stead of city government or local expertise. Flint’s limited sovereignty was
overridden by the state, and authoritarianism was substituted for democracy. This was done in
the name of “fiscal responsibility,” which is the euphemism and rebranding in the U.S. of the
politics of austerity.

35

Colonial arrangements are much the same—limited sovereignty is granted of colonies,
but only insofar as the colonial machine functions correctly and wealth flows from colony to
mother country. At such a time that the colony is not productive, diminishes in its productivity,
or becomes unruly in terms of relations with locals, its limited sovereignty is superseded by an
authoritarian representative of the mother country, who rules with an iron fist until the colony
is profitable again.
I call “paracolonization” any relationship of dependency of a geographic region upon an
economic power for the sake of wealth extraction which shares with colonialism both the
unidirectionality of the flows of wealth (always outward from the region) and the paternalism
and sense of superiority on the part of representatives of that economic power over the people
in the region. Using this definition, it is clear that while Flint’s case is not directly colonial, it
shares major features of its case with a colonial one, enough to be able to be considered in
much the same light (“paracolonial”).
Sacrifice zones are precisely the regions which paracolonial relations first build up, and
then abandon and leave damaged or destroyed, in the quest of economic powers to find novel
sources of wealth in a relatively saturated global marketplace. In Flint’s case, the wealth was its
labor force, and the region was developed for the sole purpose of establishing the labor force
necessary to make a burgeoning automobile industry profitable. Flint had a small population
prior to the headquartering of Buick within city limits in 1908, which exploded with the birth of
the auto industry, increasing over tenfold in just thirty years (Ihlder, 1916; U.S. Bureau of the
Census, 1998). But because the city had been so small, and was not developed with housing for

36

GM laborers in mind, housing became an issue early which would recur throughout Flint’s
history.
As early as the coming of the auto industry, zones of sacrifice were developed in the
city, like the shanty-towns which ringed the city in the suburbs of present day Burton and Flint
Township, where the basic services of the day were not available to those living in makeshift
shacks, and which stood in stark contrast to the GM developments like Mott Park with indoor
plumbing and running water (Findlay, 1938). As the auto industry fluctuated in its intensity, so
too did Flint’s labor market, causing a series of shocks to its tax base and its housing markets.
This was only exacerbated by racialized practices developed in the 1930’s and continued in the
1950’s by the Federal Housing Administration
7
(FHA).
The FHA was designed to help residents become homeowners, by providing them with
long-term, low interest mortgages to help them purchase and maintain property. But because
these policies were developed at a time when the prevailing view was that of segregation and
racial inferiority and unsuitability of non-Whites, these policies contained language which,
sometimes quite explicitly, determined that the presence of African-American and non-White
people in a neighborhood, of itself, was a reason for denying loans (Highsmith, 2015). So, Flint’s
population exploded for the sake of staffing GM’s burgeoning system of factories, but the basic
needs of those, mainly imported, people were not met, at the time or ever, by the city’s
government, its civic leaders, or any representative of General Motors.
In nation-states at the highest levels of development, paracolonialism manifests itself
through relations of power akin to colonial national-centrism but located instead within

7
See for example Gotham, 2000; Kimble, 2007; Miller, 2013.

37

corporations and other structures of capital which themselves organize and maneuver state,
local, and global (along with private) systems of domination and resource extraction. These
powers, subordinated to corporate capital gains, radiate outward from the corporate center,
and unleash waves of creative destruction on people, on geographies and places, on resources,
and on the environment. The lessons of Flint and Detroit (General Motors) and now the lessons
to be learned from Amazon’s departure from Seattle show and will show that corporate capital
has no place it wishes to call its own. Instead, the very fluidity of an organization which can
build up an area from nothing, only to leave that development to rot mere decades later, is
what makes global capital the force that it is.
Every development is already a sacrifice zone; the sacrifice of a place may be
contraindicated by a number of factors, but as long as a place depends on capital development
for its existence, subsistence, and affluence, the paracolonial Sword of Damocles remains ever-
present and ever-threatening. Because these developments were never built to last, but
instead were a temporary measure for extracting the maximum resources and capital from the
relations established among people, places, and corporate capital, sacrifice zones are designed
to collapse on themselves once their value for capital wealth is gone rather than to foster social
bonds strong enough to weather shocks to the system. As planned obsolescence was
introduced in the 1930’s as a solution to dropping sales, so too the principle was applied, and
was being applied already, in terms of the places that capital chose to call home for a time.
When a location is first designated as a sacrifice zone, it is often hidden from public
view, both in terms of its existence as a geographic region—the space finds itself curiously
erased in the public eye—and also in terms of its status as sacrificed, which, barring the

38

occasional explicit printed sign, shows no trace of its sacrifice on the surface. Indeed, what
characterizes the industrial and nuclear waste zones sacrificed to the march of capital most
particularly is that, when the zone is first established, it is indistinguishable from a “normal”
region. The invisibility of the sacrifice, and in particular of the material effects of that prior
sacrifice on the region and its people, leaves the true boundaries, or even existence, of a given
sacrifice zone unmarked and unknowable.
One “sign” of this invisibility is the nonknowledge which dominates causal or world-
historical determinations of the origin and moment of sacrifice. As was the case in Flint during
the first years of the Crisis (2014-2015), the debate was not what the problem was, nor was it
what to do about the problem. Instead, the question was whether or not there was a problem,
to which most voices, on the ground in Flint and in state administrative and regulatory bodies,
either replied in the negative or focused attention on factors not linked to lead in the water. So,
discolored water coming from faucets and fire hydrants was a sign of a problem, but lead is
colorless and odorless. Nonknowledge is born from certainty as much as from uncertainty, and
what those concerned could not know combined with what they could readily see and observe
to portray the situation on the ground as other than critical.
Sacrifice is invisible, and a sacrifice zone is not ordinarily labeled or marked as such in an
explicit fashion. However, in a pattern that is never violated, public health concerns surface,
emigration from the region becomes rampant, and the tax base erodes. The sacrifice initiates a
vicious cycle whereby the economy and population spiral downwards together, each
accelerating the other’s decline. These signs, then, appear later, those of crime, poverty, and
homelessness.

39

Thus, gradually, over time, what appears is not the fact of sacrifice, but the brute facts
of destitution and decay which that sacrifice inevitable causes in a sacrifice zone. All of this
population change, economic downturn, and failing infrastructure is duly noted by urban
planners, who use their way with numbers to describe regions in stark terms of desirability and
undesirability, blight, and overall success and failure of residential and commercial zones and
aggregates. Andrew R. Highsmith (2015) provides an excellent snapshot of this approach pre-
Water Crisis, since his study was concluding and he was leaving the area just as the first signs
were appearing here that something might be wrong, in 2014. However, an event may
interrupt the passing into numbers of this slow decline and fade, and have the potential to
prompt explicit discussion of that sacrifice in the exploration of why such an event happened,
what such an event means, and how to deal with the aftermath of that event.
Barbara Biesecker (2010), in the mode of Alain Badiou, claims that in “evental rhetoric”
(p. 19), an event precipitates an encounter in which a status quo, which is taken for granted as
an accepted modus vivendi, runs up against a void which threatens that way of life. The event
forces into view those parts of a modus vivendi which are incompatible with the life or well-
being of those living in a specific part the world. The Flint Water Crisis (ca. 2014-2017 and
continuing) represents such an event, one which unsettles, among much else, something as
fundamental as the availability of potable water for an entire city, but which ranges in scope to
reveal failures of federal, state, and local governments, technical, regulatory, and advisory
bodies, and national, regional, and local media to tell this story and to do justice to the reality
of the situation on the ground in Flint. This event was a motor for inquiry, research, and
speculation: locals in need of information (equipment) for living needed to come together to

40

help each other in attending to this need (and other needs); experts (local, state, federal, and
even independent) weighed in with research and assessment; and local, state, and federal
government bodies began inquiries into the causes of and responsibility for the failures the
Crisis represents. What reigns in any case in a rhetorical crisis such as this one is a state where
knowledge is not simply lacking, but actually impossible to attain or rely upon.
It may seem that the situation in which Flint finds itself currently, the “Flint Water
Crisis,” would provide a significant break in the pattern, one that would seem to make Flint a
special case deserving of individual attention and care. Nothing could be further from the case.
As residents have known for much longer than this popular image has circulated, Flint was
sacrificed to the march of profit and globalizing capitalism long before the water source was
switched, long before the city was indebted enough to activate an emergency manager law,
and, I would argue, even before its years as a boomtown. To get to this part of the story, it
would be necessary to understand how industrialization necessitates a colonial (or at least
“paracolonial,” in all the ambiguity and uncertainty of the term) division of labor and wealth in
which the basic terms and relations of selling labor power are curiously rearranged—which is to
say, wealth is divided from the labor which produces and distributes the products of that labor.
Labor is fluid, mobile, multidirectional, local and provisional; wealth flows only out of the
colony.
The rhetoric of events demands a flexible frame of reference. It demands a longitudinal,
historical, perspective, one which is adaptable enough and sensitive to the contingent nature of
material conditions. It needs this flexibility to be able to begin to account for factors unseen

41

and unknown (or unknowable) which, like lead in water, have profound material effects. This
introduction has first aimed to expose the folly of dominant-hegemonic accounts to reckon
with the questions which are begged by simply locating the origin of the Crisis in a water switch
or in a city nearing bankruptcy. This section sought to complicate this story by trying to account
for the effects of the distant, colonial past on the development of Flint as a product of the
Industrial Revolution. It argued that, while not strictly colonial, the relations which pertained
between Flint and its corporate founders and backers were similarly paracolonial, in that labor
was extracted from the region at the expense of its people, its environment, and its
infrastructure.
Profit demanded sacrifice, and labor was imported in droves for that sacrifice. So the
preconditions for the Crisis—Flint’s economic woes—are, as will be explored further in Chapter
2, a direct outgrowth of paracolonial relations which created and shaped Flint as a
manufacturing base, and would eventually lead to hard times as the utility and profitability of
Flint lessened with events in labor relations, industry, and global finance. Flint’s paracolonial
past (and post-paracolonial present?) must be taken into account whenever there is a desire to
question why Flint should have needed so desperately to save money that risks to the city’s
water system would have been incurred for the sake of cost savings.

Dossier, Sketchbook, and Notepad: The Plan of the Dissertation
The dissertation has as its focus the questioning of narrative authority, compact history
and received historiography, and master narratives designed to pacify publics and make crises

42

disappear rather than address and attempt to solve real-material issues during hard times. This
introduction has paved the way for a deeper discussion of what happened during, before, and
after the Flint Water Crisis. But more detail is needed to attempt to expose some of the
inherent conflict which arise during a rhetorical crisis, when nonknowledge dominates in a
vacuum of information above a void of existential distress and bare life.
As a whole, the corpus considered in Chapters 4 and 5 is composed of a variety of
materials. It forms a sort of dossier more than a record. News media sources—national sources
such as MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN, and more local or regional sources such as Mlive.com and
Michigan Radio—were scraped manually from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine,
concentrated on dates culled from a working timeline based on the timeline in Appendix A.
These were assembled by date and scanned for content related to the Crisis, and are analyhzed
further in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 uses a wider variety of materials, including Facebook posts and
group pages, Twitter posts, and letters from Flint residents published in local-regional news
sources. As a whole, they represent two sides of a single discursive coin, since both halves of
the corpus coexisted and interacted throughout the duration of the Crisis. But the mutual
dissonance of these master and petite narratives, as revealed in the analysis of Chapters 4 and
5, reveals much about the vertigo which ensues in the midst of a rhetorical crisis, where trust is
broken and reliable information is hard to come by.
No methodology suffices to fully capture a rhetorical event. If an event can be said to
have a totality, it can only be as an impossible aggregate of perspectives, explanations,
rationales, and language games. Instead, any rhetorical event fractures the ability of any
observer to capture what has occurred. To deal with such a dilemma requires preliminary

43

theoretical moves designed to focus on the parts of the story that inform the research
questions being advanced. Decisions must be made, and realities faced. These decisions shape
the course of the research: they help determine what counts (and what does not count) as
data, they prefigure the rules by which all data is analyzed, and they are ultimately the basis for
any reasonable metric by which the value of the results of the research are to be judged. These
theoretical decisions form the basis for the research as such, without which ‘data’ has no
provenance and no explanatory power. This is not to reduce the data to the subjective
observations of the researcher; it merely indicates the degree to which theory informs all parts
of the research process, and underscores the importance of making judicious decisions about
where to look and what to look for when looking there.
In this case, the wide variety of possible points of attack forced me to consider the
necessity of a mixed-methods approach. A single method, however well developed and applied,
would have run a very stark risk of duplicating the monolithic quality of the narratives of the
Flint Water Crisis that was the very object of the study as such. In other words, any single
method would have missed the fundamental interplay among language games and discursive
spaces that generates a rhetorical event of crisis proportions. In place of a “photographic” or
complete record, then, the approach here is one of a sketchbook, composed of multiple points
of attack.
Government discourse is different from social media discourse, which again is different
than letters written by people from Flint. But each of these examples works within a larger
relational network of areas of discourse, and it is these relations among grand narratives and
petite narratives across their various manifestations that the present study sought to

44

comprehend. To try to (re)capture the dynamism that such an event exhibits, it was imperative
to match this energy with a more active and fluid approach to data gathering and analysis.
A large part of the methodology of the present study involved the deployment of
discourse analysis to reconstruct themes, tropes, topics, and valences from among the vast
available landscape of writing, speeches, news articles and audiovisual features, social media
posts, pages, and hashtags, and geolocal media sources from individuals and groups within city
limits. The goal was to try to analyze the corpus to establish, first, the dominant master
narratives and their general circulation; and second, smaller narratives which run counter to
those received master narratives, and which serve as irruptions of a Real which goes
unacknowledged in the dominant narratives connected to the Crisis. No attempt was made
here to find a “true” or definitive meaning of the materials. The dialectical approach employed
in this study proceeded more as a journey through the materials, taking notes as the analysis
unfolded which informed the direction of the inquiry and had intrinsic explanatory value
themselves.
Lyotard’s (1983) concept of the differend informed the direction that this analysis took.
He cautions that a wrong is caused when phrases from one domain of discourse are understood
and processed by the rules of the language game of another domain. This differend between
language games takes the form of a wrong since such conflicts are always resolved by recourse
to dominant areas of discourse, such as law, politics, or economics. So, in an attempt to
preserve the integrity of each form of discourse under analysis, every effort was made to
understand that piece of data on its own terms, in its own context, and not with direct
comparative reference to other areas of the corpus. Thus, while themes and tropes emerged

45

out of the analysis that had a more or less general pertinence and purview, it was never my
goal to draw up a vast account or tally of context-free items like words, images, or phrases,
instead taking the situation and rhetorical emergence of each form of discourse into account
for material from each domain.
In the spirit of allowing each domain of discourse its own space for communication, the
specific method of discourse analysis employed varied in each case. Both because of their scope
and their volume, captures from journalism websites were rarely scanned for language, and
were grouped according to date and assessed for topics presented rather than language
deployed. Because they often represented conversations, government documents were
sometimes treated differently, and analyzed on their own terms as pieces of communication.
Thus, for example, the specific language of House and Senate Democrats in escalating
the story became important to note in specific terms of words used and valence attached to
those words. Social media were also approached as conversations, but given the specific
affordances of searchability, hashtags, and reposts, and an understanding of how Facebook and
Twitter operate from a user’s perspective, unique methods needed to be devised in each case
to account for the differences in the media and the communication they allow for. Finally, the
letters, being fewer in number and complete in themselves, were analyzed as objects and as
efforts at communication. Letters from people who come from a sacrifice zone about which
little is known or understood, and for which much assistance and support is needed if it is to
regain a footing in the developed world, need special treatment, owing both to their rarity and
their struggle to be heard and understood.

46

Complementing these efforts at discourse analysis was an ethnography, though one
which was nontraditional in a number of senses (see Chapter 5). First, opposing itself to the
aims of traditional ethnography to capture the exotic and distinct in the everyday life of the
other, the present study takes a critical stance, seeing ethnography not as a chance to capture
and comprehend the other as such, but instead to understand the aims of those with whom
research is carried out in an attempt to further their emancipation. Second, my position as a
researcher is bound up in my identity as a longtime resident of Flint, and as someone who deals
with the everyday experiences of living in a sacrifice zone during a crisis of this sort. I am thus
not a researcher “gone native,” but instead am a native who turned to research to try to
explain his own life-world.
This introduction has presented a set of background material which recasts the Flint
Water Crisis as a systemic, historical problem. As a post-industrial sacrifice zone, Flint was
already facing hard times. Its economic depression led directly to its being placed in austerity
measures. And yet, when asking what may have led to that state, most accounts of this Crisis go
mute. Anna Clark (2018) offers a loss of revenue sharing agreements between the state and
cities as a reason for Flint's pre-existing economic depression. But what made Flint, and other
cities like Detroit, Pontiac, and Benton Harbor, so dependent on state funds? Why were
property tax values so low in these cities? If these cities once flourished under the reign of
industrial capital, what happened to that capital? If the answers to these questions presented
here are wide-ranging, leading from colonialism through the Industrial Revolution and finally to
globalization, it is because to answer them provisionally, in terms of Flint’s local history or any
one predominant factor, would do a disservice to the comportment to nonknowledge

47

advocated by this study. If it would be a goal of a quest for immanent knowledge to determine
the one true factor or root cause of the Flint Water Crisis, the goal here is toward
nonknowledge: that is, the goal here is to trouble any pat determination of cause, guilt, or
blame, and instead to call into question the very process by which causes, blame, responsibility,
and guilt are assessed and addressed in communication.
Both the argument and the problematic of this dissertation can be summed up in the
following brief formula: the root cause of the Flint Water Crisis is epistemology. There is much
to unpack in this statement. First, it is important to understand the necessity of taking umbrage
with the term “root cause” even as deploying it here is just as necessary. A study of this type
traditionally would try to answer its questions with reference to such stable terminology. A
major difference here is the requirement that this term be heard somewhat ironically or
paradoxically, in the sense of the statement: “I don’t believe in root causes, but if there is one,
then it is…” Second, “epistemology” refers not to knowledge directly, but instead to the
comportment of beings to knowledge. It describes and undergirds the relations between a
knower and what that person knows, does not know, and cannot know (or have known). And if
“epistemology” is a problem, it therefore must be understood that this term refers to a certain
(status quo) configuration of epistemological relations among beings in the system of
knowledge. The argument here is that a fundamental non-relation to nonknowledge costs
society and its members great, recurring sacrifices leaving permanent scars on people, on
peoples, and on places. But this damage, these wrongs, foster relations among those wronged
that build resilience and help overcome the challenges of traditional communication

48

infrastructures which have broken down over time, due to a catastrophic event, or, as in this
case, both at once.
The mixture of methods and perspectives was assembled with an eye to capture
dynamics and interplay over pure form or content. No attempt has been made here to tell a
“complete” story, either of the events occurring during, prior to, or since the Flint Water Crisis,
nor of the telling of that story through various media. This stance tends to multiply the gaps in a
collection like the one assembled for this study, but no corpus could be complete enough to
capture any event. Instead, one is always left with fragments and traces, whether in the midst
of the event or in its aftermath. The best that one can do in such a circumstance is to try to
preserve the context and situation of each communication and to try to understand it on its
own terms and in relation to that with which (and those with whom) it communicates. The
dialectical reading of the assembled materials is designed to avoid the pitfalls of making any
one source (or select set of sources) preeminent or predominant in the understanding of how
this story has been told. A level playing field allows each area of discourse to shine both on its
own and in a constellation of other areas. This method has the apparent disadvantage of
diffusion. And yet, this is not a result of unwillingness to organize and hierarchize this body of
communication as much as it results from an acceptance of the fundamental impossibility of
that task. For those living through the Crisis, all was fragmentary and disorganized. If this study
sought to understand the effects of nonknowledge on the Crisis, it was important not to lose
sight of the reflexive necessity of foregoing any attempt at completeness or omniscience. The
corpus was selected, and methods of analysis chosen, based on remaining in a crisis frame,
instead of stepping outside to judge from afar.

49

Chapter 2 establishes the theoretical and local-historical frame of Flint as a city and as a
place, and of its residents in relation to Flint and to each other as it has faced waves of hard
times. It both takes an historical look at the development of Flint as an industrial center and
tries to paint a contemporary picture of Flint in both its deterioration and its resilience. This
longitudinal perspective is essential where the goal is to answer questions of the form “Why
Flint?” and “Why now?” Flint must be understood in its singularity if the experience of the city
and its people during the Crisis is to be adequately assessed and analyzed. This experience of
hard times, and of crisis, comes to be “normalized” even as their accidental (and spectacular)
nature and rhetoric are generally recognized.
In Chapter 3, the theoretical core of the study is presented. The heart of the thinking
here stems from the work of Georges Bataille, in particular his concept of nonknowledge (2001)
and its relation to the dark times of the interwar and World War II period in which Bataille did
most of his writing. This foundation is coupled with Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2013/1996) “relational
ontology,” an active notion of being which is only determined in relation with other beings, and
never monadically. Combined with Giorgio Agamben’s (1990, 1993) radically inclusive “coming
community,” the chapter constructs a model to appreciate and analyze the local dynamism and
branding of community in Flint. The history of Flint is a history of wrongs, but it is just as much,
and for that very reason, a history of working together to overcome adversity and build
resilience.
Chapters 4 and 5 apply this frame to a documentary record. This record was not
complete, and instead sought to simulate the fragmentary nature of Flint’s residents access to
information during (and after) the Crisis. Chapter 4 tackles “big stories,” grand or master

50

narratives which aimed at control as much as or more than information or debate. A series of
pas de deux between major political figures and major news outlets limited the discourse to
whom to blame, and questions of why it had happened, how to fix it, and how to keep similar
events from happening again in Flint or elsewhere were largely drowned out. The discourse in
Chapter 5 provides a local, if partial remedy to this phalanx of master narratives. Coming from
Flint residents in the form of Facebook posts and groups, tweets, and letters, these voices
ranged a wide gamut, from resistance to resilience. They represent dissensus, which is to say
that these voices refuse consensus, but remain in constant and defining relation to one another
in community nonetheless.
It would be tempting to simply pit master narratives against their petite counterparts.
This would resolve narratives into a macro- or micro-level. But what is needed is a meso-level of
narrative, a level of interconnection between macro and micro. In other words, one could
simply read the master narratives in Chapter 4 as “separate but equal” from the smaller, more
fragmentary discourse analyzed in Chapter 5. But, as distasteful as this phrase and concept is in
law, so it is distasteful here. Petite narratives do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in concert
with each other and with master narratives in an intermingled discursive field. In order to
appreciate this discourse, with its complicated and shifting set of interconnections and
relations, while also retaining its dynamism, this sense of connection must be preserved.
Chapter 2 supplies the historical “material” of Flint’s hard times and its effects on people’s
connections there, and the dire conditions on the ground before the official start of the Crisis.
However, it also establishes the promise of the good life for which Flint, and many cities like it,
were (and are still) beacons of hope. Chapter 3 provides the theoretical “glue” that links hard

51

times to relation and connection, and establishes a frame with which to read the materials of
both Chapters 4 and 5, big and small. It involves observing and following connections—
personal, narrative, geohistorical, material, and discursive—and allowing them to multiply
rather than closing down pathways. In doing so, the goal was to preserve the contingency of
the Crisis and its rhetoric. This frame demands that, in the swirling vortex of crisis, received
narratives be inspected and critiqued. It demands that the voices of people be heard on their
own terms, with their own geohistory and their own narratives, critiques, and cries of
recognition, rather than as the voices of “people on the street.” This enables us to track psyma,
the unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) proliferation of questions society with which has
yet to come to terms. The goal of the dissertation is to open inquiry when master narratives
obscure both nonknowledge and the possibility of reaching toward that nonknowledge.
This first chapter has introduced doubt and uncertainty back into the calculus of
causality, agency, and responsibility absent in the grand narrative accounts and histories. It has
urged for the adoption of a perspective based on a search for nonknowledge and with attention
to contingency, rather than one based on a quest for complete, immanent knowledge and
paying attention only to what is definite and fully present before the eye of the observer. But to
see more clearly how this applies to the Flint Water Crisis specifically in Chapter 2, and what
can be learned from the (perhaps unexpected) application of the “foreign” theories of
communication and community presented in Chapter 3 to the Crisis, it is crucial to understand
Flint as a place with a singular geohistory and role in relation to its world and to world history.
The next chapter takes up this task.

52

Chapter 2: A Post-Industrial, Paracolonial Sacrifice Zone: Stories and Histories of Flint,
Michigan
Flint is located about 60 miles north of Michigan’s largest city, Detroit. Being located in
such proximity to a major metropolitan center meant that Flint was incorporated into Great
Lakes shipping routes, and enjoyed a type of runoff of people seeking a better life, whether
immigrants or migrants from within the country. Flint’s ethnic and racial diversity owes a great
deal to this proximity, despite years of Jim Crow regulations and policies designed to keep
‘outsiders’ in their places. The Flint River runs through the city, and extends from the north to
the southwest, passing through downtown. The Flint city Riverfront area was developed with
modernist architecture, and structures exist there for exploration of the area, fishing, concerts,
gatherings, and other activities. A Flint River kayaking club exists, and remains active in
navigating the river. Along the path of the river in the northern and western suburban areas
surrounding Flint proper, road signs are common and prominent urging the protection of the
Flint River watershed.
In its earliest days, the river must have provided inhabitants of the area with ample
fresh water and opportunities for trapping and fishing, probably one reason why this area was
settled in the first place. A local, plentiful water source was necessary not just for basic life, but
also for the growth of the bicycle and auto industries, which put Flint River water to use in their
manufacturing processes. But after decades of industrial waste and environmental neglect, the
river became corrosive, even flammable during some periods of its history, notably in the
1960’s (Michael Madden, personal communication, November 29, 2018). As a child growing up
in Flint in the 1980’s, I heard and retold numerous stories about shopping carts, cars, and
corpses, among much else, having been dredged up from the river. Dumping a body in the Flint

53

River became a grim local trope in stories circulating during the 1980’s and 90’s, a period which
saw violent crime rates spike in the city.
Flint is not foreign territory for me; on the contrary, it is my hometown, the place I most
identify as the place where I belong. I grew up there in a working-class neighborhood. Flint was
a place best known at the time (and perhaps even still) for Michael Moore’s (1989) film Roger &
Me. The documentary presented graphic visual evidence of economic ruin. At the same time, it
was the work of a relative outsider (Moore was raised in the nearby suburb of Davison, which
was, like other suburbs of Flint, in many ways spared the dire economic conditions that Moore
depicts with such a graphic quality). Further distancing it from the actual conditions within the
city, its depiction of Flint was uniformly bleak, as if hard times hit all equally, and only the
responses to hard times by people living there were singular.
To be sure, crime rates are high in Flint by any metric
8
, and waves of emigrants have
fled rampant unemployment and decaying city infrastructure. This emigration pattern has left it
a shell of its former self, once an industrial boomtown flush with capital investment and with a
wide (and diverse) middle class. But if Flint has a popular image, it is as a cautionary tale of the
decay that follows from too great a reliance on a single industry. As industry’s role wanes in the
economy and infrastructure of the post-industrial sacrifice zone, discontent rises and its people
are exposed to the threat of bare life, albeit in an uneven way. This story is told in places all
over the country, and so in this light Flint would be left as one sign among many.

8
2018 saw a total of 1,404 violent crimes in a city of approximately 100,000 people (Federal Bureau of
Investigation, 2019). Still, this is down from a much higher peak of over 1,700 violent crimes in 2012, due in large
part to community and neighborhood efforts coordinated at a city, county, and state level (Daniels, 2018).

54

The purpose of this chapter is to complicate the narratives of Flint, its history, and its
people which have come to dominate both the general discourse about the city and the
particular discourse surrounding the Flint Water Crisis. Flint’s story and history is one of
sacrifice, that of its people and that of its environment. Industry made Flint what it is, in each
part of its life cycle, from capital support and infrastructure investment to exodus and
divestment in the area and its labor force. Flint’s status as post-industrial, which is to say, once
an industrial center but no longer, is important to note. But Flint’s construction, from the
ground up, as a paracolonial sacrifice zone strip-mined for labor, is a critical dimension to
consider in understanding the singularity of Flint and the shared sense of wrongs felt by its
people throughout its history.
By examining in detail the layers of Flint’s development and geohistorical specificity, this
chapter lays the groundwork for understanding how the theoretical model presented in
Chapter 3 helps to explore the vortex of discourse that dominates the case of the Flint Water
Crisis. Accidental rhetoric, combined with the concept of the “normal” accident, help to situate
Flint and its discourse within a frame of perennial and long-lasting hard times. A sacrifice zone
like Flint has as its “normal” the exceptional case of having being wronged and abandoned. The
chapter is not a comprehensive history or story by any means, nor is such an attempt made. In
its place, the goal is to situate the conditions on the ground in Flint during the Crisis as a
product of Flint’s singular placehood and geohistory.

55

Flint as a Labor Resource: Industrialization and its Discontents
If this chapter aims to establish the fundamental elements of Flint’s singular geohistory
that are most relevant to understanding and analyzing the rhetorical crisis exposed by the Flint
Water Crisis, then the purpose of this section is to lay out precisely what made Flint the
working-class, manufacturing center that it became. The emphasis here is on labor, and on
Flint’s construction as a nexus for a growing labor force. But, it is just as important to note, this
story of labor is also the story of poor working conditions, of insufficient and unsafe housing, of
racism, sexism, and discrimination, and of the eventual devaluation of that labor pool and the
city it supported. The city’s deterioration was inherent in the way it was developed and
administered, and so it becomes essential to take these durations in Flint’s history into account
in any study of the Flint Water crisis that seeks to go beyond what is known for certain to be
involved.
Paracolonial labor and the history of a sacrifice zone.
The story of Flint is a complex one, far more complex than a brief history could explain
or contain. For his part, Andrew Highsmith’s erudite scholarship on Flint’s geohistory for his
dissertation at the University of Texas at San Antonio represents a far more nuanced and
detailed picture of Flint’s development and redevelopment than I could hope to reproduce
here. Highsmith’s book, Demolition Means Progress (2015), is focused on segregation and race
far more than any other social factor, but the history he shares also provides a basis for
understanding how the Flint Water Crisis came to be, why it happened in Flint among other
places, why it happened as opposed to not happening, and why it unfolded in the way it did and

56

not some other way. The perspective of this dissertation is not limited to a single lens, of race
or any other factor. In its place, the singularity of Flint is emphasized, and the role of factors
particular to Flint, its geohistory, its communication infrastructure, and its people are taken into
account in an attempt to expand inquiry, on this crisis and on all such rhetorical crises, beyond
the known and the certain, and to cross the threshold of the known into the unknown in such a
way as to open new lines of questioning and new dimensions of analysis. This section uses an
examination of Flint’s historical development as the basis for its argument that paracolonial
relations, which made Flint a sort of “gold mine” for labor power, came at the expense of its
eventual demise into a post-industrial sacrifice zone.
In many areas, rural, urban and suburban, the United States now resembles a
developing nation rather than the epitome of development, with income determining these
patterns of segregation.
9
In this checkered and pock-marked landscape, sacrifice zones appear
as regions where a developed status quo does not pertain, if it ever did. In order to understand
this complicated economic-geographic landscape, inquiry must learn to consider questions,
problems, and solutions which address not only both sides of this divide, but indeed far more
importantly which address this divide itself directly, head-on.
It may seem quite a stretch to claim that a city in a developed country like the U.S. could
be viewed in terms of colonial relationships, but this is much stronger than just a metaphor.
Flint owes its development to powers from outside which visited the area and built it up along

9
There is a growing body of literature on the topic of “income segregation,” an effect of income inequality
whereby geographic zones become stratified according to affluence. Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff (2011)
note that this phenomenon is more pronounced for African-Americans than for Whites. Later studies (Owens,
2015; Wichowsky, 2019; Yavas, 2019) have explored the concept further, including a debate on the growth or
decline of income segregation over time, and its effects on education and health opportunites for residents.

57

lines that suited corporate profit and the political and social goals of state leaders. The Great
Migrations were grand social experiments, mixing Northern and Southern poor folk from every
race and ethnicity into a grand pool of labor
10
. Class and race divisions persisted despite this
mixing due to express social engineering designed to accomplish this result.
So, labor was imported from destitute areas of the country, and redistributed into
relatively empty spaces. These “blank slate” geographic zones could be engineered to produce
goods while preserving social stratification and a functioning racist and classist status quo. This
may not be directly colonial, but its proximity to that relationship is what I am trying to
motivate calling “paracolonial,” in the sense that other than the mass importation of labor to
specific areas under development, the extraction of wealth from an area with no sense of debt
to that area is the same in either case. If one understands the wealth of Southern (and
Northern) U.S. rural areas to be their untapped labor power, in the form of un- and
underemployed poor folk in need of basic sustenance, this colonial/paracolonial relationship
becomes much easier to see and understand literally rather than metaphorically.
If Flint is “paracolonial” in its origin, then one may ask what status its residents have in
broader U.S. society. Or, to be more direct, what one must notice about this description of the

10
There have been three great migrations of African-American and other disadvantaged labor power in the U.S.,
between the North on the one hand, and the South and West on the other. The first took place in the first two
decades of the twentieth century, but was concentrated in the periods 1916-1919 and 1924-1925, when during
which periods nearly a half million African Americans migrated north (Barnes, 2012). These had been rural workers
in the South, mainly sharecroppers, but they began to take industrial and skilled positions when they migrated.
However, this didn’t lead to affluence, and segregation, both enforced by law and economics and occurring more
passively in terms of relationship and association patterns and a need for cultural affinity, left cities across the
North divided by race and class (Brooms, 2013). A second period of migration took place from 1940 to 1970, when
1.5 million southern Blacks left for points north, east, Midwest, and west, to places like New York City, Los Angeles,
San Francisco, and Detroit each decade during the period (Gerardo, 2009). Finally, a Return Migration brought
migrants from the North, East, and West who had been by hard times in the 1970s to the South, in a reverse of the
pattern that had pertained in the previous two migrations (Curtis, 2018).

58

situation is that it explains why Flint could be routinely sacrificed at the altar of progress. If
Flint’s residents are not full citizens of the U.S., deserving of equal protection under the law, it
is because they are only (para)colonial in relation to that social order. Flint serves its purpose,
but the U.S. owes no debt to it. Instead, it is Flint which must pay off whatever debts are
heaped upon it, and it is Flint’s residents who inevitably bear this cost most directly.
11

As the Flint Water Crisis Report (Michigan Civil Rights Commission, 2017) goes to great
lengths to show, Flint was built for a segregated population, really populations, defined both by
race and by class. As the industrial centers built up, the city was zoned along Jim Crow lines that
enforced the social separation of upper and lower class blacks and whites into four remarkably
unequal groups, with the distribution as one would expect in accordance with the racist social
policies dominant in the first half of the 20
th
century. The globe was colonized and stratified
along lines beneficial to the growth and spread of markets. At the same time, and by the same
stroke, the spread of those markets within the borders of the motherland reproduced those
same stratifications (populations) within national limits with effects similar to those on the
colonial citizenry.
In many ways, Flint was built from the ground up as an ideal city. It was first established
because of its location midway between established trading centers at Detroit in the south and
Saginaw in the north. Jacob Smith, a fur trader who was on good terms both with the local
Ojibwa tribes native to the area and with the U.S. government, established the first settlement

11
In the case of the Water Crisis, the health costs are incalculable, and the economic costs are often hidden behind
adaptations to living without clean running water that might not be apparent at first, such as gas costs to and from
water distribution centers.

59

of Whites at the Grand Traverse
12
of the Flint River in 1816 (Crawford, 2012). Its location along
a river made the land communal and contested ground for trappers and hunters, but once the
strategic value of the land was grasped by early civic planners, negotiations for the land were
opened by the U.S. government with the Ojibwa who had been the longtime inhabitants of the
area. This established Flint, which incorporated in 1855, as a key trading center in the area
(Crawford, 2012).
With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, the area’s vast timber resources
supported a vigorous lumber industry. Flint grew up with the Industrial Revolution, and had
been envisioned as an industrial center for most of its history. This helped its population grow
steadily from incorporation, when the major industries were lumber and carriages, toward the
turn of the century and the coming of the automobile (Highsmith, 2015). In other words, part of
Flint’s makeup had always been as a local nexus for migrant labor to fuel the growth of global
industry.
In 1900, the population of Flint was a modest 13,103. This population was
overwhelmingly White, Protestant, and native to the region (from Michigan or from bordering
states like Ohio, Wisconsin, or Indiana). This basic homogeneous makeup remained true for
decades, to the tune of nearly 80 percent of the 1930 population of 156,492. This new
population did include fifteen percent of residents who had migrated from the South in the
First Great Migration (1910-1930) to fill the explosion of vacancies in the expanding factory
developments in the North, such as with GM’s 1904 origin story and rapid growth. But in this

12
There is now a street running north-south in Flint officially named Grand Traverse Street, but invariably called by
locals simply “Grand Traverse.” As a resident of Flint for nearly forty years, I felt the need to check if it was a
“street” or an “avenue.”

60

1930’s Flint, African-Americans made up just 3.6%, Hispanics and Asians approximately 1%, and
only 14% were foreign-born people, nearly all of these from Anglophone countries like England,
Scotland and English-speaking parts of Canada (Highsmith, 2015).
Michigan occupied a central place in the development and spread of the automobile
industry. Flint was the birthplace of General Motors, and its headquarters was located there for
a short time (GM moved its headquarters to Detroit to the south, joining Ford and Chrysler).
Rapid increases in infrastructure to support automobiles drove demand to a fever pitch, in the
United States and around the world, and this brought rapid increases in the jobs available in the
new factories to build all of those vehicles. Labor shortages were common, although not
consistent: the Great Depression and World War II both notably frustrated the industry’s
attempts at expansion, and the auto industry operated more cycles of boom and bust than
steady progress toward a stable status quo. This meant that labor needs fluctuated wildly over
the course of the first half of the twentieth century, and continued to be fairly unstable into the
rest of the century and into the current moment.
But while tides were rising, a great deal of labor power was needed quickly. The areas
where the factories were being built, as the twentieth century progressed, moved further and
further away from metropolitan centers, and instead began developing in unincorporated land
outside of city limits. This meant that labor needed to be brought to the factories instead of
being able to hire locally.
This pattern, of labor shortages and factory sprawl, contributed to waves of poor
migrants from rural areas in the South, some sharecroppers or former slaves, others from rural

61

subcultures such as those in Appalachia. What these migrants had in common was a desire for a
better life for themselves and their families than what they had been able to achieve where
they came from. The job opportunities, in the steel industry, the coal industry, the auto
industry and all other areas of industrial production, were opening faster than they could be
filled with nearby labor pools, and so places like Allentown and Bethlehem in Pennsylvania,
Harlan County in Kentucky, and Flint and Detroit in Michigan, boomed as their industries did.
It is safe to say that the automobile industry has been both a key index and a primary
motor for industrialization and modernization. As an index, its cycles of boom and bust
13
, its
sacrifice of its workers’ lives and safety
14
, and its persistent pattern of environmental damage
15

suggest that progress makes for an uneven and unsteady path for society to travel. And as a
motor, one might mention the vast intrication of such modern infrastructure staples as paved
roads, traffic lights, and interstate highways into everyday life and its basic function. The circle,
virtuous or vicious, established in World War II between automobile manufacturers and U.S.
military production (Flink, 1990; Clarke, 2007), is another important way in which the

13
The automobile industry has gone through several cycles of expansion and contraction over its history. It had a
meteoric rise, but, as would happen several times over the course of its development, economic conditions, in the
1920’s and 1970’s, and global factors such as World War II and the 1973 OPEC oil embargo would negatively
impact its ability to provide stable economic ground for its paracolonial territories (see Flink, 1990; Clarke, 2007).
14
In the auto factories of the 1930’s, there were few if any safety precautions in place. Basic requirements for the
protection of the workers, like fire escapes and exit doors, were left out of factory designs. Workers worked
extremely long hours with no overtime compensation. Child labor was rampant, and worker deaths were
becoming a regular occurrence (Dawes, 2014). This led to the development of unions to try to guarantee these
basic protections to workers in auto factories (Fine, 1969).
15
Industrial development harms sacrificed environments along a number of dimensions. McCarthy (2007) isolates
the four most important of these dimensions, the points at which the mode of production affects the world in
which goods are produced: “raw material extraction, manufacturing, consumer use, and disposal“ (p. xiii). In Flint,
the Flint River was the site of industrial dumping by General Motors for decades, leading to its designation s a
Superfund site (Carmody, 2016; Craven & Tynes, 2016)

62

automotive industry pushed forward the more general project of progress as a key driver of
that progress.
The 1920’s saw a rise in the prominence of the auto industry globally, but also ushered
in a concentration of production in the hands of a few corporate players, namely Ford, GM,
and, to a lesser degree of prominence, Chrysler. In 1925, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., head of GM,
introduced the concept of planned obsolescence as a way to continue to drive sales of durable
goods. However, although the concept was put into practice by 1928, the Great Depression
changed the marketplace considerably, and Ford’s more reliable 1927 Model A was the
strongest seller in the early 1930’s (Beetz, 2003).
The 1930’s and 40’s brought more changes to corporate production practices, with both
the rise of unionization and wartime production needs which leveraged the materiel, labor, and
factories themselves in favor of the war effort (“Automobile industry,” 2008). The role of Flint,
and specifically its GM workforce, in this push toward unionization and collective bargaining
agreements between corporations and their workforces, should not be understated. Historian
Sidney Fine called the 1936-1937 Flint Sit Down Strike “[…] all in all, the most significant
American labor conflict in the twentieth century” (Fine, 1969, p. 341). Significantly, Fine recalls,
in a chapter he titled “The Sit-Down Community,” a great spirit of cooperation among striking
workers and members of the larger population against the unjust and sometimes violent tactics
of GM and its representatives in the city. This spirit of cooperation among workers would be
the basis for the subsequent formation of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union. Fine (1969)

63

cites a cascade effect of the strike on labor agreements stemming from Flint’s struggle, most
notably very shortly thereafter in the steel industry.
The Great Migration came in two major waves, each bringing with them an influx of new
workers to remedy shortfalls in existing labor pools in industrializing zones and reducing
unemployment rates in rural zones which were the source for this new labor pool. One can see
this pattern readily in Flint, where the population shifted over time from nearly all people
coming from the immediate region before the coming of industry to people coming from all
over the country, and particularly from Southern states.
16
But, at least in terms of its being an
area which organized itself around factories using industrial production methods requiring little
skills to produce goods of reliable quality and consistency, there are a host of other towns and
cities where this pattern of labor migration took hold and forever altered the environment and
life world there.
However, cities like Flint, or like Endicott, New York, were organized around not an
expansion of industry, but their birth as industrial centers capable of extraordinary levels of
production. In Flint’s case, the headquartering of Buick there shortly after the turn of the
twentieth century caused a population explosion that inscribed a new normal for the area. As
General Motors was formed, it was only headquartered in Flint briefly before moving to Detroit
to join Ford. Still, Flint is considered to be the birthplace of GM, and with good reason. As the
birthplace of IBM, Endicott, New York shares many of the same traits of a sacrifice zone that

16
This shift is quite apparent in the language used to describe ordinary things in Flint. In neighboring Wisconsin,
one can get a refreshing drink of water on the go from a nearby “bubbler.” The same was true in Flint before the
migrations. After the migrations, it has become proper instead to take a drink from a “water fountain,” as is more
common in Southern states (Michael Madden, personal communication, November 29, 2018).

64

Flint does—toxic industrial waste has led to a higher incidence of many health issues there than
average, and rapid job loss due to relocation, changes in production, and an overhaul of IBM’s
business model overall have left it a fractured and damaged community (Chittum, 2004).
So too, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania was once home to the company that would become
U.S. Steel, one of the mightiest monopolies in the history of capitalism. But as steel production
became more automated, the low skill, high paying jobs that had attracted migrants to the area
dried up, and while many who were able left in the New Great Migration, existing
socioeconomic distress left many unable to leave and unable to provide for themselves while
staying behind (Robertson, 2001). Flint, then, is representative of other areas remade by
industrial capital, but, more tellingly, is a case, like Endicott or Bethlehem, where one can trace
the effects, from a zero-industrial state to a post-industrial state, of the birth and development
of global industrial capital in its search for profit and the labor to produce that profit. In
examining Flint in a moment of acute crisis, it becomes possible to tease out certain structural
and rhetorical complexities which get hidden from view under ordinary circumstances of a
stable status quo.
The Great Depression caused some emigration from Flint for laid off workers, but the
city rebounded in the postwar period, as labor shortages helped to drive a relaxing of some
discriminatory hiring practices that had prevented African-Americans and other minorities from
doing anything but grueling foundry work, or demeaning custodial work in GM’s factories. If not
exactly welcomed into the GM labor force, of necessity the 1940’s and 50’s saw the first
opportunities for women, African-Americans, Latinx people, and other oppressed groups to
have an opportunity to work some of the higher-paying and less hazardous or humiliating jobs

65

that the local labor market in Flint had to offer. This period, coinciding with the beginning of the
Second Great Migration (1941-1970), saw an explosion in Flint’s African-American population,
from around 6,000 in 1940 to nearly 35,000 in 1960 (Highsmith, 2015).
In the 1950’s, because of collective bargaining agreements negotiated with corporate
automakers by the U.A.W., wages and benefits catapulted auto workers in urban centers like
Flint, Detroit, and elsewhere into the middle class of the richest country in the world at that
time (Fine, 1969). This general (though by no means universal or equal) level of personal wealth
supported chains of local grocery stores (such as Hamady) and drug stores (like Perry Drugs),
local movie theaters, and restaurants, all of whom catered to the special blend of middle-class
and working-class values and tastes which define Flint’s “culture” (in the biological sense of a
medium in which these values and tastes grow and blend). Flint’s prosperity was based on its
relationship with GM, but it depended even more on the protections that the U.A.W. offered
workers in dealing with management. The brutality of the events of the Sit Down Strike show
the depths to which automakers would have and have in fact sunk to preserve profit margins at
the expense of wronging their workforce.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the U.S. “Big Three” (GM first, then Chrysler, and finally Ford)
dominated the global automobile marketplace. Throughout this time, they all operated on the
principle of planned obsolescence (Beetz, 2003). Meanwhile, in Japan, the auto industry was
beginning to arrange itself along different principles. Built to last and to be reliable, Toyota cars
were produced in factories by teams with input on the production process and the final
product. These high-quality automobiles stood in stark contrast to much of what U.S.

66

automakers were producing at the time. When the 1973 OPEC Oil Embargo struck, Japanese
makers like Toyota were able to offer more fuel-efficient vehicles that met newly established
fuel standards (“Automotive industry,” 2015). A burgeoning environmental movement also
contributed to the need for smaller, more fuel-efficient, and more reliable vehicles. Japanese
quality and U.S. defects came to define much of the 1970’s and 80’s in the global automobile
industry. In 1977, there were more recalls of parts than cars built in the U.S. U.S. automakers
lost $1.8 billion in 1980 alone (Beetz, 2003).
Thus, Flint also became a locus for the New Great Migration (1970-2000), where
Northerners moved South and West seeking the employment that had dried up where they
resided in the North. The New Great Migration, in Flint’s case at least, was disproportionately
White. In 1970, there were 138,065 White people living in Flint, and 54,237 African-Americans.
By the close of the decade, the White population had declined significantly (nearly 65%) to
89,470, while the Black population had actually increased to 66,164, meaning that over 40% of
the city’s residents were African-American by 1980 (Highsmith, 2015).
The 1980’s and 1990’s saw steady population declines, as recession, corporate
downsizing, and excessively high rates of crime, poverty, and unemployment combined to push
many residents past the point where they could continue living in the city. By the time of the
2010 census, there were only 97.810 residents, less than half of the population at its maximum
in the postwar period. This population was overwhelmingly African-American (53.9%), with
Whites making up the largest minority in the city (39.9%). The mix included a small proportion

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of Asians and Native Americans, around 2% for both groups combined (“Flint city, Michigan,”
2019).
Interestingly, census data also reveals a high proportion of residents identifying with
two or more races, 4.3% of Flint’s population in 2010 (“Flint city, Michigan,” 2019). But often,
mixed-race people will identify with one race or the other alone, and can be miscounted or
undercounted as a category unto themselves. Census data also misses the ethnic Lebanese,
Palestinian, and other immigrants and children of immigrants from the Middle East who would
be counted as “Caucasian” by census takers. Far from its founding as a homogeneous
community of White, English-speaking Protestants, despite (or, as I am arguing here, because
of) decades of racist, racial, and racializing policies, institutions, and ideologies at work to
preserve this homogeneity, Flint’s population has defied this whitewashing and instead become
more cosmopolitan today than most major metropolises.
Segregation exists formally as a set of attitudes, beliefs, and strategies designed to
uphold a social status quo in which one group both dominates others and also, at the same
time and with the same set of actions, delimits and restricts how members of the other group
are sorted, what the other groups can do collectively and in terms of individual volition, and
what value those groups have to society. These are ideas, but ideas made into acts, acts which
have material effects and leave material traces. Neighborhoods, parks, schools, grocery stores
and shopping areas, red light districts and high crime areas, areas of destitution and areas of
ostentatious expenditure—spaces are everywhere inscribed with pervasive ideologies of
separatism and superiority, and are readable over time as the chronicle of both everyday

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struggles to exist for the unfortunate, and a vain struggle to maintain an unequal and unjust
status quo because of individual benefits for the more fortunate.
But as these struggles interact in these spaces over time, and as forces intercede in the
interest of stability or increased profit, a complicated tapestry is produced, one full of local
meaning and local memories, one which, if it is not shared in the sense of “the same for all,” it
is shared in the sense that it is produced in common by all those who struggle to find
themselves at home in this place, regardless of race, class, ethnicity, gender, or any other
identity marker. This search for the common with others with whom one shares a place is
precisely, I would argue, what “community” means at bottom.
So, the fact that GM was based in Flint for much of their histories is important, but on its
own it does not say much. Neither does the fact that Flint was one of the most segregated cities
in the country, of itself, speak much to the situation that Flint finds itself in today. But waves of
labor shortages and layoffs, timed with waves of boom and bust in the auto industry, sent a
series of shockwaves through Flint’s housing markets which were riddled with Jim Crow
policies. A series of housing crises, industrial pollution of the Flint River and neighborhoods
surrounding plants in the city, a pattern of failed redevelopment planning, new models of
industrial production, first suburban development of factories, and then just-in-time
production, and insidious incentives extorted from city government to maximize corporate
profits, such as the sweetheart deal GM had for a cheap water supply, all worked together with
conditions on the ground in Flint to produce a city whose property and income tax bases had

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fallen below the point at which basic services could be like police and firefighters could be
covered.
Crime, vandalism, home abandonment, arson and house fires, including an arson ring
which lasted two decades (“Insurer: Flint,” 2013) further deteriorated the area, exacerbating
the very problem of property value that had been at the heart of so much of Flint’s troubles
over the years. But this leads in a circle, because property value and race are very intimately
linked, as Highsmith (2015) and the Flint Water Crisis Report (2017) both go to great lengths to
demonstrate. This closure on race should not be taken for an indication of a “central” or “key”
role of that concept in the Flint Water Crisis. As I say, my goal is not to find the most significant
piece of the puzzle. Instead, what I try to assemble here are enough of the necessary pieces for
understanding how a region comes to be ritually sacrificed, how people there cope and react,
and how society and its institutions process these routinely exceptional events.
It’s an easy claim that the state of Michigan viewed Flint as a target for emergency
management because of the high concentration of African-Americans there, as if this type of
sacrifice were typically (or ever) consciously racist. Instead, Flint, like Detroit, Benton Harbor,
and Pontiac, the four cities put under emergency management and not coincidentally the four
cities in Michigan with the highest African-American populations are majority-minority now and
are economically impoverished now because of a series of prior sacrifices and wrongs. For Flint,
the Water Crisis was both a time of pervasive uncertainty (as far as daily life, bare life was
concerned) and confirmation of longtime suspicions as to whether the state had their best
interests at heart, or perhaps have ever had the interests of people like those in Flint at heart.

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A key characteristic of the racial geographies of the United States is the deployment of a
system of zones and districts for the purpose of sorting and hierarchizing residents according to
their productivity or potential value to the market economy which forms the backbone of both
corporate and government assessment of people living in those zones. Zones group people,
structures, environments, and infrastructures together, but this creation of commons is really
an aftereffect of the real purpose of these zones and districts, which is to atomize society and
set each against the other in a Hobbesian war of all against all.
From the point of view of scarcity—the only point of view that makes sense in a
capitalist mindset—resources must be distributed so as to maximize their value for society. The
twin limits of this valuation take the form of expenditure without limits as an exception at the
top, and dropping below the necessities of bare life as the exception on the bottom. Labor
becomes a individual decision—one always chooses to be unemployed—and once people come
to be defined by that labor, as a worker in an industrial-capitalist economy, workers are already
implicated in a chain of significations that links these workers, qua workers, into populations
abstracted from any lived experiences or singularity which they might shape the way they
comport themselves in the world and with others in the world.
This section has detailed the singular role of Flint in the development of General Motors
and, by extension, of the automobile industry and the Industrial Revolution generally. Perhaps
predictably, the focus here was on labor history, and in particular the paracolonial character of
labor relations that made Flint (possible) as a sacrifice zone. In many ways, the struggle over
labor relations and working conditions played out during the Flint Sit-Down Strike, along with

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the housing shortages and infrastructure woes of the growing city and its suburbs, are
emblematic of a general trend in such sacrifice zones across the country. The Great Migrations
saw waves of laborers and their families imported from rural areas in the South, along with
first- and later-generation immigrants and their families looking to make their fortunes in areas
outside more established ethnic centers in places like New York City, San Francisco, and Los
Angeles. This admixture of backgrounds and personal narratives and histories has a strong
element of conflict. But shared adversity demands dialogue for survival. And through decades
of hard times, Flint and its people have shared much adversity. So the city and its residents
have had much opportunity to refine the mechanisms by which communication can bridge the
void between the opposition and conflict of more tribal or identity-based groupings toward a
community of beings sharing both their adversity and their equipment for living.
Hard times, community, and community education.
Myths of strong and unified communities in a shared past that fall into disunity and
disorder in a precarious present translate well into stark visual depictions of urban decay. In the
late 1980’s, satirist and filmmaker Michael Moore captured images of Flint as a ruined city
facing the void of hard times and released them to a nationwide audience in his film Roger &
Me (1989). The city he remembered
17
was dying, Moore’s film argued, as a direct result of the
actions of GM chairman Roger Smith to outsource production internationally. But his images,
while documentary in nature, oversimplify the complex history and dynamics of this small city,
the automobile industry more broadly, and capitalism at the most general level. But the effects
of hard times are more complex than Moore was willing or able to examine or show. And the

17
Moore was born in Flint, but moved when very young to nearby Davison, Michigan (“Moore, Michael,” 2005).

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effects of hard times in Flint were experienced in waves over its history, not merely in a single
moment in the tenure of one CEO. But this pre-existing condition of hard times creates both the
need and the opportunity for relationships to be forged and connections to be made to meet
basic necessities and keep bare life at bay. Hard times are a crucible of community. Flint,
plagued for decades with hard times, responded with a working vision and model of
community, first through its innovative community education program, and later toward a local
“branding” of community which developed on its basis but beyond its bounds.
Hard times can be very easy to show in a visual record. But documentary films can be
misleading, and misrepresent or overstate the slice of reality which has been captured. To be
sure, Michael Moore’s Roger & Me captured real images and real interactions. But the lack of
nuance in his uniform picture of destitution in the city says much more about Moore than Flint
itself. Moore’s lack of acknowledgement of the real situation on the ground as a resident of
Flint at the time is at the heart of two national images which Moore captures in his film: Money
magazine’s designation of Flint as the lowest-ranked city in its “Best Places to Live” in 1987
(Eisenberg & Englander, 1987) and, that same year, Flint becoming the “murder capital” of the
country, with higher violent crime rates than any other city, including Los Angeles, Detroit, and
Chicago (Johansen et al., 2015). As far as the latter, the story that a much smaller city such as
Flint had significantly higher rates of violent crime, including murder and assault, than large
metropolitan areas where crime appeared and appears endemic, but which seems to elude the
suburban cities and smaller urban areas of the country. Flint was a shocking case to the
contrary—violent crime peaked again in 2010 (Brush, 2011)—so the “murder capital” brand

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lasted long after the spike in crime had ended. Violent crime in Flint has by no means
disappeared, but the levels relative to population have dropped since that brand was applied.
As for the former, the Money list’s ratings of Flint, along with four other struggling
Michigan cities (Muskegon, Saginaw, Benton Harbor, and Jackson), were based on “their high
crime rates, weak economies and relatively few arts and leisure activities” (Eisenberg &
Englander, 1987, para. 12). It is no surprise that Money magazine would judge worth solely in
economic terms, but it represented yet another in a long string of public tarnishes to the city’s
image. Furthermore, these three seemingly separate factors are intimately interrelated: weak
economies cause funding for public spaces and activities to dry up, and also leave unemployed
people with nothing to do with their time. Crime fills in all of these gaps in the social fabric,
when community does not. The connections and relationships among people which form the
basis and “work” of community are only strengthened when in use; this is to suggest that hard
times both require and foster a sense of community among those going through those hard
times.
However, Flint’s early history suggests that, following (or at least agreeing with) the
conception of community advanced by John Dewey (2007/1927), what was understood and
sought after as community was quite different than this open and inclusive concept. A group
defined by membership based on similarity or sameness is a fairly common basic concept of
community, and indeed is the sense in which the term is deployed most often if one considers
that “similarity” and “sameness” are far too complicated as concepts to be left unanalyzed. But
if community means that a “we” is formed in common by relation to other beings, then a pre-

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existing relation of identity is one possible basis for that commonality. It would be hard to
imagine another historical starting point, as this was Aristotle’s requirement for the coherence
and stability of a polity as well (see Chapter 3).
John Dewey’s (2007/1927) project was to build a “great community” in the United
States. His greater educational themes of self-betterment and the building of individual
capacity to better perform in society are focused in this piece toward a preparation for a true
democracy, one which leaves behind accounts of individuals as uniformly competent to judge
and act in their own best interests. His desire and plan was to shore up the lowest ranks of
society so that all would be on capable footing to compete and participate fully in democracy.
Of particular interest was the building of knowledge and understanding of science and
technology: “For most men, save the scientific workers, science is a mystery in the hands of
initiates, who have become adepts in virtue of following ritualistic ceremonies from which the
profane herd is excluded” (Dewey, 2007/1927, p. 336). Like Beard, Dewey saw and experienced
in his lifetime vast technological advances, wonderful and horrific, which brought about equally
expansive shifts in social patterns and methods of cohesion. Older theory had assumed a
fundamental unity based on a commonality of nation, of ethnicity, of belief, or other stable
marker of belonging. Dewey and others saw a loss of this primary community as cities
flourished and social alienation became normalized.
Dewey’s influence on the concept of community in the United States has been far-
reaching. The sense that Dewey gives the term, of a democratic unity, carried a great deal of
currency at the time, and it continues to exert its influence. For example, J. Michael Hogan
(1998) offers the following definition of community, which his contributors and he all agree has

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been “lost” (p. xii): “that repository of shared purpose, values, and traditions which historically
has defined the American character” (p. xii). What is perhaps most problematic about this
definition is not the implied advocacy for the continuation of the teleological, traditional, or
historical exclusion of groups and their values from the “American character.” This is a major
concern. Instead, the greater issue is the activation of the grand narrative of a lost Paradise of
community, one which was possessed immanently in a mythic past and which must be brought
(back) to material reality at any expense. This narrative has animated much of the historical
discussion on community, but little progress can be made on a subject where each arguer
begins with a presupposition of their own values and traditions as those which have been lost
and must be recovered.
This is not to suggest that the divide between the Continent and the U.S. on the subject
of community is too wide to bridge. Even a brief survey reveals a great deal of diversity on this
topic. Scott Greer (2007/1955), for instance, offered a definition of community which begins to
get at the sense of relation, mutual support, and inclusion which animates the Continental
discussion of community presented in this study: “When a territorially defined group, like the
village, is a true functional group for all its members and when it manifests a powerful primary
dimension, we call it a community” (Greer, 2007/1955, p. 63) The reference to territory is, as
has been established in subsequent discussion of the term “community,” been ruled
unnecessary and limiting, but there is much of value in this accounting of the concept. When
Greer refers to a “true functional group,” what he means is that the needs of the members of
the group are met by others in the group functioning to produce whatever fills those needs.
The “primary” dimension identifies the close interpersonal contact and relationships among

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members of the group. They know each other directly (“primary”) instead of through others
(“secondary”). Evidence is presented in Chapter 4 of the (hyper)active discourse which came
out of Flint during the height of the Crisis. But this evidence also shows a high degree of primary
relations among local activists, service providers, volunteers, protesters, and other people who
spoke out about the problems with water. And with the city left largely on its own from 2014-
2016, the evidence also shows a remarkable interdependence and resilient network of support
that spread across the city, if not uniform or complete in any way.
Dewey’s sense of community, one based on homogeneity, defined the development of
the suburbs of Flint (as in many metropolitan areas in the U.S.), and remains imprinted there in
the term “gated community,” used both literally and metaphorically to mark out a bordered
and closed space of dwelling. Community was first understood in Flint by exclusion of others
and the formation of a homogeneous population. The turn taken next in the understanding of
community in Flint, community education, makes sense as both an outgrowth of this
segregation and as one point of departure for developing an antidote to it.
The idea was relatively simple, at least at first: school buildings needed to be heated and
maintained all day and all night, but school lasted only a few hours of the day. Frank J. Manley,
whose inspiration brought the ideas of John Dewey and other progressive thinkers of education
into a practical model, thought that it would be more efficient to use the school buildings for
other social activities in which members of the communities surrounding each school building
would be invited to participate. Manley, and his funder, automobile mogul and Flint civic fixture
Charles S. Mott, believed idleness among youth was leading to the rise in crime in the city, and
decided to intervene with classes for adults and families to help stem this tide. The schools

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opened in the evenings, and offered classes on square dancing and sewing, on citizenship and
on cooking; in addition, there were story times, puppet shows, and traffic safety classes
(Michael Madden, personal communication, November 29, 2018). Also, particularly, there were
athletic activities, since Manley had formerly been a coach and physical education teacher,
notably tapped by President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his Presidential Commission on Fitness in
the 1940’s.
Manley’s vision of community, as being the support and connection that people need to
help themselves and improve their stations, was remarkably open in its conception, and recalls
Giorgio Agamben’s principle of community being defined by radical non-exclusion: according to
Manley, the operating principle was that “the community school…serves people of all types in
any given neighborhood—the young and old, rich or poor, all denominations, all colors and
creeds—in fact, everybody. It is not hampered by racial, religious, political or other barriers
which divide people” (Manley, F., quoted in Decker, 1999, p.7). In practice, the pre-existing
segregation of Flint’s neighborhoods, and therefore of the schools that serviced those
neighborhoods, made this more of a stated ideal than a practical reality in the case of schools
on the ground. Moreover, Mott and Manley’s vision was tainted by their belief in racial
separatism (Mott, 1956), and the community school model most often served to perpetuate
racial division by specifically tracking the programs offered.
The vocational Better Tomorrow for the Urban Child (BTU) program, for example, was
specifically designed to provide African-American students with a practical, manual education
rather than one that developed their intellectual capacities. In the 1960’s, children were sorted

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via race-tainted indices like IQ test scores and standardized test scores into BTU, for the lowest
performers (predominantly African-American), and the Talented Child program, which was
designed to nurture the intellectual development of those students, nearly always White,
judged capable enough to benefit from this attention (Highsmith, 2015).
Still, even with these mixed intentions, the community school model took off in Flint, in
part because of the drive and charisma of Manley and the deep pockets and desire to invest in
Flint that Mott contributed to the program. Mott Foundation funding supported the Flint
Community Schools in large part until well into the 1970’s (“Model use,” 1968). And based on
the fame that community education brought to Flint and its neighborhoods, “community”
became something of a brand within the city and its closest environs: not only are the public
schools still labeled “community schools,” long after Mott’s support and the formal model have
fallen away, but there are also many churches labeled “community churches,” and a local
theater troupe called the Flint Community Players. That this is a phenomenon specific to Flint,
and not mid-Michigan more broadly, is indicated by the lack of such branding even in nearby
Fenton, MI, just twenty miles away (Michael Madden, personal communication, November 29,
2018).
Looking at Flint’s past is an important exercise in situating the Flint Water Crisis within a
set of pre-existing conditions of paracolonial labor relations within an industrial and
post0industrial frame. Understanding its history of hard times, and the response of community
to remedy the stresses generated by those hard times, helps to explain why Flint became a site
of resilience rather than resignation. But to understand the Flint Water Crisis as more than

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merely an accident, and instead as the product of a vortex of decisions, institutions, agents, and
historical forces, requires a better understanding of the nature of accidents, crises, and their
rhetoric. The next section takes up this task.
Flint, Michigan as a Post-Industrial Sacrifice Zone: An Accident Which Was No Accident
U.S. Historian Charles A. Beard, writing in 1930, made a prescient observation which
serves to help understand the complex origin of Flint’s crisis within endemic tendencies of
technological progression itself. As he noted, “[t]echnology brings new perils in its train: failing
aircraft, the pollution of streams, and dangerous explosives. It makes possible new forms of law
violation: safe blowing, machinegun banditry, wiretapping, and submarine smuggling” (Beard &
Beard, 1930, p. 7). As the economy and production shifted from a manual and craft basis to an
automated and industrial basis, novel forms of problems, unheard of and unforeseeable, arose
to complicate any argument of unequivocal progress brought about by the Industrial
Revolution.
New technologies, like municipal water distribution systems, tap water, and flush toilets
made life more convenient for their users in many ways. Technologies like these were prized
not only for their use value, but also for their prestige, often sought for status even when
cumbersome or otherwise counter-indicated by circumstances on the ground. These new
systems, like global capitalism and colonialism, drew together disparate areas of the globe and
of individuals societies in a way that was previously impossible. Interdependent relations
became the norm among cities and towns, state and federal government, corporations and
entrepreneurs, and scientists and engineers (and the spaces and people to train them). But

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with this new interdependence and reliance on technology came problems related to, as Beard
notes explicitly in the section above, such problems as pollution and machine failure which
were new threats to living, for which U.S. society happily traded its pre-modern footing.
Technology, and with it the interdependent relationships that use, maintain, innovate,
and produce it, had become firmly ensconced in the communication infrastructures of the
manufactured and planned dwelling spaces and business zones of the new, industrialized
world. But this adaptation came at the cost of massive threats. Some of these are immediate
and existential like transportation accidents, nuclear bombs and meltdowns, and advanced
military technology. Others, more insidious like global warming, damage to ecosystems, and the
production and distribution of toxic by-products, are threats to health and life which are a
much slower burn and harder to pin on any specific or originary cause. What emerges in this
realm of uncertainty and indeterminacy is a landscape riddled with zones of sacrifice, victims of
accidents and events which erupt in the “normal” course of technological development. These
wrongs have been brought about by decisions made in a society which has made these sacrifice
zones exceptions to the ordinary rules of valuation and investment promised to those within
the status quo. This status quo, in no way a stable zone, is instead marked out at each event by
wrongs and exceptions such as these.
Accidental rhetoric, the “normal” accident, and the rhetoric of crisis.
The analysis performed by Thomas A. Farrell and G. Thomas Goodnight (1981) of a
nuclear explosion and its aftermath near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania provides a basis for
understanding how Beard’s warnings about the unintended consequences of technological
advances come to a head in the rhetoric that surrounds accidents. The Three Mile Island

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nuclear accident was a case where, despite (or, really, because of) the best assurances and
actions of experts and technicians, events spiraled out of control and beyond the scope of
technical reason to overdetermine and subsume into regular order. This was a wrong on a
massive scale, and in a number of senses, wreaked upon an unsuspecting and unprepared
populace.
However, as Charles Perrow (1981) observed about the same case, it is not as if better
technical reason, expertise, and more and better safeguards would have solved the issues that
caused the accident and prevented this series of wrongs from happening. In fact, Perrow called
such accidents “normal,” in the sense that they are inevitable outcomes of increased
technological complexity and interrelation of systems rather than exceptional and unique cases
of failure. He explains:
The normal accident has four noteworthy characteristics: signals which provide
warnings only in retrospect, making prevention difficult; multiple design and equipment
failures, which are unavoidable since nothing is perfect; some operator error, which
may be gross since operators are not perfect either, but generally is not even
considered error until the logic of the accident is finally understood; and “negative
synergy,” wherein the sum of equipment, design, and operator errors is far greater than
the consequences of each singly. (Perrow, 1981, p. 17)

However, the concept of a “normal accident” brings with it the idea of a status quo which has
incorporated accident and catastrophe into its regular function.
While this perspective is helpful, it is also important to note that an accident can only be
“normal” if two properties hold about the situation. First, the event must be time-bound, and
not be ongoing or represent a permanent change in the functioning of the life world in which it
occurs. And second, just as importantly and in a related way, people and places affected by a
“normal accident” need to have the ability to recover from the event, whether that means

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being able to repair damage done to the zones and people affected, or failing recovery of the
sacrifice zone and its populations, having a place where affected people can relocate, and, what
this further mandates, the means and resources for this flight and relocation. In a sacrifice
zone, where wrongs are committed on a routine basis and as a constitutive element of their
valuation, the concept of recovering a place to a stable configuration borders on the absurd.
The idea that complexity breeds accidents on a regular basis is clearly an important
observation. However, in the case of Flint what one finds is that while the description of normal
accidents as the result of “negative synergy where complex, unanticipated, unperceived, and
incomprehensible interactions of off-standard components (equipment, design, and operator
actions) threaten disaster” (Perrow, 1981, p. 25, emphasis added) is quite apt on the one hand,
the extreme deprivation of the people of Flint pre-Crisis, along with the decay and atrophy of
key infrastructural systems which also predate the onset of the Crisis, make recovery of the
area and its people far more difficult but the only viable alternative, with relocation both next
to impossible and, further, ill advised (how to move a population of 100,000 residents
elsewhere? and if one could do this next-to-impossible task, is leaving Flint a ghost town a value
for anyone involved?).
Farrell and Goodnight (1981) point up the particularly rhetorical character of events
Perrow describes as “normal” failures of the system to account for its own complexity. The
term they give to this area of rhetoric, “accidental rhetoric,” penetrates all aspects of accidents
and, I would argue, the case of Flint, an accident which was no accident: according to Farrell
and Goodnight (1981), accidental rhetoric is contingent, but real and material, and not
indeterminate for that: it is “discourse that could not realistically have been other than it was”

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(p. 274). They determine that a rhetorical crisis is inevitable whenever “discourse fails to fulfill
ordinary epistemological and axiological expectations” (Farrell & Goodnight, 1981, p. 272). The
necessity of the Flint Water Crisis was established not at the point in time at which the water
source was switched, not at the point at which the final decision to switch was made by
emergency manager Darnell Earley, and not even, where the timeline of regional online news
source The Bridge Magazine (Bridge Staff, 2016) starts, in 2004, during Flint’s first bout of
austerity measures where the Flint River was explored by the state of Michigan as a municipal
water source. Instead, one could very easily make the case for any of these episodes, or a host
of others from the time of Jacob Smith’s founding of Flint
18
or even before. Instead, what
accidental rhetoric magnifies and tries to come to terms with in situations like this is precisely
the indeterminacy endemic to any rhetorical crisis like this one (or, really, any event worthy of
the name) in terms of its relation to knowledge and certainty.
Every crisis, in that it exceeds society’s ability to subsume the events into its regular
function or status quo while the crisis is occurring, precipitates a properly “rhetorical crisis.” In
a rhetorical crisis, not only can the real-material problem not be immediately solved using tools
and systems available to society’s regulatory bodies, but, because of this inability,
communication fractures. Knowledge and certainty give way to indeterminacy and uncertainty
in discovering and interpreting signs and in making judgments based on those observations of
reality. Experts war with experts, lay folk are overloaded with information of dubious value and
with a questionable sense of audience, and, in the case of Flint’s U.S. House of Representatives

18
A trader who built relationships with both U.S. government officials and Native American tribes in the area, it
was Jacob Smith who brokered the deal among the local interest to found a permanent settlement of Whites near
the grand traverse of the Flint River (Crawford, 2012).

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Oversight Committee hearings (Examining Federal Administration, 2016), government officials
point fingers and shift blame in a bureaucratic game of hide and seek. In this maze of
nonknowledge, expertise can sometimes be more of a liability than an asset, and unreason
based on limited knowledge can overwhelm reason based on a hesitant nonknowledge.
Accidental rhetoric covers a series of moments of failure and rupture in a mode of
critique. It comprises, first, the failure to recognize signs of stress and distress in key moments
or episodes, and the failure to read those signs to determine an appropriate and well-
considered course of action. Second, compounding the first, is the failure to communicate
those episodes to concerned publics, whether through a total lack of communication,
communication within an inappropriate language game or set of language games,
miscommunication, or communication of misinformation. Third, ruptures in material
communication infrastructure, like corrosive water leaching lead out of old service lines and
pipes in Flint’s water system, which threaten acceptable levels of inconvenience, uncertainty,
and hazard in a zone which, otherwise, was supposed to be capable of providing its residents
with not just bare life, but the good life.
In large part, the Flint Water Crisis was a crisis of information. This does not mean that
there was not information available—it actually is meant to indicate the contrary, namely that
there was so much information, and of such varying quality and credibility, that it was a
challenge to vet each new report, rumor, and story. This crisis in information, material itself,
had further material consequences, in terms of how people in Flint adapted their daily routines
to live under a constant and omnipresent yet amorphous threat. Nonknowledge reigns in a
rhetorical crisis, and the certainty with which the state pursued its false claims of full

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knowledge appear in retrospect, but also appeared at the time to Flint residents, as hollow and
suspicious.
This is especially true when a rhetorical crisis erupts in a sacrifice zone, and already
scarce resources of time and material must be stretched and adapted to new and urgent
necessities. Understanding the dynamic on the ground during the Flint Water Crisis requires
first coming to terms with the effect lasting hard times have had on people’s relationships to
each other, to local authorities, to state government, and to federal agencies and government
bodies, and, very basically, to society and the groups of people that make it up. Community ties
form among the wronged and dispossessed, illuminating paths through treacherous areas of
their life world. But these bonds, while often forged for support, often form more complicated
and manifold manifestations than a simple “community of the wronged.” Instead, identity,
politics, and class often intrude on the scene and co-opt these community ties for their own
narrative ends. Who counts as a community member comes to define what that community is,
and the fact of community members sharing common wrongs, even those existential ruptures
in the life world emanating from a rhetorical crisis, is often overridden by other affiliations and
markers of self.
The rhetoric of a crisis in a sacrifice zone is always at least double. Narrative splits at the
points and moments of personal impact upon those involved. The Flint Water Crisis turned the
suffering of affected people into a pair of mutually reinforcing binaries: a life-altering event/a
spectacle and a cause/a cause célèbre. In other words, “It’s happening to me”/”Have you heard
what happened?” and “We need to act”/”What can we do to help?” In each case, the source

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material, valence, moral-ethical valuation, and audience characterize narrative in a different
domain, for those directly affected by the event and those not directly affected.
A real-material crisis is always already also a properly rhetorical crisis, in that the powers
of rhetoric to describe, to prescribe, and to value are diminished by the dominance of
nonknowledge over knowledge, and of contingency over certainty. This is nowhere more
evident than in the discourse available at “ground zero” in a catastrophe, which is organized by
a chaotic amalgam of grand and petite narratives which helped people in Flint make meaning of
the information that flooded in. Grand narratives from the national press and government
actors centered on re-establishing control and security, whatever particulars got attached to
this matrix. Petite narratives focused on wrongs, resistance, and critique, ranging from rumor
and innuendo to experience and scientific research. Their intersection is where the rhetoric of
the crisis, and the rhetorical crisis, are concentrated.
Those at “ground zero” of a crisis experience this divide and this rhetorical chaos
firsthand. However, there are those who are not wronged directly, and who are merely
concerned with the situation on the ground to a greater or lesser degree, and invested in its
outcome only as a spectator, theorist, or judge. Master narratives, which are simply big stories
which seek explanation of events and their entry into rhetoric, try to reassure those with whom
they circulate that the event has a defined and definable meaning, that the situation is being
properly addressed and corrected, and that there remains hope that the system, structures,
and people involved in the event are well-functioning, and are working as designed to stabilize
moments of rupture in the regular function of society. This regulatory function of master

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narratives sutures the ruptures introduced by a rhetorical crisis with knowledge or its substitute
which reassures all involved of the well-functioning of communication in addressing any issues
and solving any problems. Whether or not this discourse translates into changes in reality, its
purpose is to seem as if it is working.
A part of each of these functions, master narratives also seek to assess responsibility for
the event and its handling, to mete out blame and to determine guilty parties, to determine the
scope and magnitude of the event relative to the status quo which it interrupts, and to try to
answer causal questions relating to why the event occurs and unfolds in the way that it does.
These master narratives come to define the situation for much of the world, since the language
games in which they participate are closed to non-experts and nonprofessionals—only
journalists and politicians have license to tell such stories, and only they know the rules by
which they must play to achieve consistency with the overall narrative domain.
When a rhetorical crisis erupts in an area already sacrificed—already left without fully
functional economic, civic, and communication infrastructures by years of neglect following the
turmoil in housing and labor markets that growth and shrinkage in GM and its area factories
represented
19
—the networks by which stories travel will also have begun to disintegrate. A lack
of shared knowledge of events of local significance, persisting for an extended duration,
produces a breakdown in the very fabric of knowing. Master narratives determine the stories
told to the world regarding a zone where residents are without the ability to represent

19
Michigan is ranked last in the country, earning a D grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2009
(VanHulle, 2016). The cost to repair the neglected systems is estimated in the billions of dollars, due to the
complexity and intrication of the road, bridge, water, and sewer systems in dire need of upgrade and rehabilitation
(Nystrom, 2016).

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themselves. On the other hand, a nexus of narratives exists among those who are themselves
wronged by the situation they find themselves in. Questions swarm in a vortex. Answering
these questions requires asking more, better questions. But finding a reliable foundation for
knowledge is impossible during a rhetorical crisis. The exceptional nature of the material and
discursive conditions that attach themselves during an accident, even one which might be said
to have been “expected” or “normal” as a crisis of some sort if not as the Flint Water Crisis,
requires a different eye. Accidental rhetoric can be used to explain the nature and effects of the
conflict between technical reason and social reason on the response to accidents of human
origin. A related concept, the rhetoric of crisis, seeks to understand and situate the discourse
that emerges out of those accidents in reference to nonknowledge.
The rhetoric of crisis, contingency, and the form of inquiry.
During a crisis, there is much that is not known, much that cannot be known at the time
(or perhaps ever), and much that is believed to be known which is not knowledge.
Understanding the contingent nature of knowledge in a crisis, one which is vertigo-inducing in
the instability of its foundations, requires a focus on capturing the perspective from the
moment when the known becomes the unknown, when knowledge fails and and the knower no
longer knows. This perspective leads to more questions than answers, but this is its value, not a
flaw or defect. Opening inquiry further is often more important than closing off debate on a
final determination. The Flint Water Crisis is no exception to this.
There were three points at which the rhetoric surrounding these events was unable to
compensate for what was not known and not knowable from any frame of reference at the
time. First was the impossibility of locating and focusing blame due to governmental factors: (a)

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poor state government transparency; (b) a lack of political will to ask useful questions and to
demand responses to those questions; and (c) fractured and haphazard chains of command and
administrative roles and responsibilities. Second, the pre-existing status of Flint’s residents as
sacer
20
renders all discussion of recovery through redemption inapplicable, but this status is
only revealed in an event of crisis or systemic failure. Third, the invisible, permanent effects of
lead poisoning on human bodies were not at the time, and are not now, knowable in any real
sense, scientific or otherwise; Flint is a test case for lead poisoning, not a site for the
deployment of existing remedies. Together, these three impossibilities form a nexus of
nonknowledge which erodes the closure of master narratives of this event.
The cycle of sacrifice, guilt, and redemption which inevitably unfolds in a society like
ours more often than not pre-empts any real intervention into sacrifice zones and the lives of
their people. Along with a recognition of tragedy or disaster in the case of Flint comes a certain
fatalism, inherited from Greek notions of tragedy, which points to events as always already in
motion. As pre-actualized potential, the outcomes may have been avoided if things had gone
differently, but, tragically, so the story goes, the hubris of individuals and the blindness of
institutions left the path narrow and focused on a telos of redemption through loss. In this
perspective, it is not that people have been wronged by these events, in a mode of suggesting
that things could have always gone otherwise; rather, systemic and structural necessities make
these types of events commonplace, even “normal,” and so, for the well-functioning of society

20
This is a term form the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. It indicates one who “may be killed and yet
not sacrificed” (Agamben, 1998, p. 8). In terms of Flint, this means first that its people are subject to the law
beyond the law, and may be put to death or have their lives risked without it therefore requiring redress as a
willing sacrifice made for the betterment of society in general. But it also means that Flint, as a geographic zone, is
subject to being “killed” (environmentally, economically, in terms of population, etc.) without society owing Flint a
debt for this sacrifice.

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as a whole, degenerate parts must be sloughed off to make way for new growth. The Flint
Water Crisis, in this view, is not a series of wrongs, it is a series of signs of progress.
The possibility of impossibility implies that things not only could always have gone
otherwise, but that, at each moment and in each situation, the only way forward is through a
thicket of wrong moves, detours, dead ends, and pitfalls which thwart the efficient delineation
of what should be done from the consequences of those acts. A rhetorical event is composed of
a series of thresholds of possible and impossible predicates, lived experiences, and outcomes.
What makes a rhetorical event an event is that, at the time, beforehand, and often forever
after, what happened—what went right and what went wrong—are impossible to localize, once
and for all, because it is impossible to make a complete record of any event in all of its
contingency. What makes a rhetorical event rhetorical is that, as in the relational ontology of
Jean-Luc Nancy (see Chapter 3), material beings communicate with each other and affect each
other in relating with each other, and that it is on this terrain that those beings experience the
event. What makes the Flint Water Crisis a properly rhetorical crisis, therefore, is that the
contingency of events extended even to the communication infrastructure itself, feeding back
on the Crisis and frustrating the ability of interested parties to adequately address or assess
what was happening.
Forensic rhetoric operates in more stable terrain, using the perspective of hindsight and
knowledge of the actualization of what were mere potentials at the time. Megan Foley (2012)
notes that in order for a potential to really be potential, it needs to be possible that it is
impossible, and may not come about:

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By this definition, bia, or force, makes a body do or become something that it is
incapable of doing or being on its own. Bia makes a body do something it cannot do and
become something it cannot be. Bia thus appears as the possibility of impossibility—the
actualization of the impossible itself. (pp. 175-176)
Bia is the force of violence that impels a body to act against its nature. It violates Aristotelian
noncontradiction
21
materially as much as ideally. The possibility of impossibility—in other
words, contingency—is the foundation of rhetoric, because what separates rhetoric from
violence is a thin veil of diminished power. In both, an attempt is made to impose will and
eradicate contingency through force, whether through force of persuasion or bodily-physical
force of pain or death. One acknowledges that language and communication in general
certainly carry with them a great deal of force, but that
Due to the asymmetry between bia’s necessary-but-impossible compulsion and
rhetoric’s possible-and-impossible dunamis, rhetoric’s force entails a lack of force that
will always lag behind the zero-degree necessity of violence that acts upon the
completely impossible. Compelling but not compulsory, rhetorical force approaches the
limit of bia asymptotically. (Foley, 2012, p. 180)
In other words, violence or force (bia) is the force of necessity, and compels the suspension of
potentials into an actualization which forces a change in beings which runs, according to
Aristotle, counter to their nature. Bia manifests as damage or harm done to bodies and to
material life and beings, since it makes its mark as a bodily interruption of regularly functioning
life. Bia and societal wrongs go hand in hand, since a society’s regular functioning running
contrary to the “nature” of its beings, given a suitable precision with what is understood by a
being’s “nature,” could be posed as a definition of those subjects of the society being wronged
by that society. Flint’s citizens were wronged by these material interruptions, directly and

21
“It is impossible that the same thing belong and not belong to the same thing at the same time and in the same
respect” (Metaphysics, 1005b19-20).

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indirectly, and the rhetorical crisis, the uncertainty of communication which faced them at each
moment during the Crisis, was a direct result, and also another source, of the instability
introduced by the irruptions of bia into everyday life.
In Flint, bia operated in at least two senses. First, the water, tainted with lead, bacteria,
and chemical by-products, produced effects in the people and bodies who drank it, who bathed
in it and who bathed their children in it, who washed their dishes with it—who used it as
anyone in this country uses their tap water. But the necessity of water for bare life meant that
this violence took place daily, minute-by-minute, for over two years, and in some places in the
city continues to be a threat as of this writing. But, a form of bia more fundamental even than
that was the politics of austerity which brought emergency management to Flint and made an
exception of the city’s limited sovereignty.
Here too, necessity is the watchword, though not as an exceptional case of dropping
below bare life as with the former sense, but in terms of a declaration by the government of
the state of Michigan that Flint’s finances necessitated radical and totalitarian remedies. Bia in
this sense restricts or countermands residents’ ability to participate as full citizens, but also
appropriates city assets and resources in an attempt to balance the books of “failing” cities
short-term at the cost of their longer-term viability as developed (“First World”) centers. The
question then becomes, how do bodies and people cope with and adapt to this violent change?
What mechanisms are open to them to address the wrongs being visited upon them, learn how
to survive in the perilous situation they find themselves in, and overcome the obstacles being
placed in the regular function of their lives?

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Rhetoric, particularly the rhetoric of crises, preserves the contingency of its subject
matter within its own indeterminacy. In other words, persuasion, explanations, and narratives
may always fail completely, or actions may be taken counter to what the rhetor intended to
make actual through her or his rhetoric. The possibility of impossibility which rhetoric (in
Foley’s terms, peitho or persuasion) requires in order to differentiate itself from pure force of
coercion (bia) and establish itself as a means of resolving differences among members of a
group which does not reduce itself to a tyranny, whether of the majority or a minority. If
rhetoric has a place in adjudicating amongst the various players in this Crisis, and also of
providing remedies and adaptations for living through it, it is only because its force is muted,
and its power must be accepted as legitimate—that is, limited—before it can have any effect.
The figure for the situation produced by the rhetoric of any accident is psyma.
22
Psyma
are questions which bring to light, and are brought to light by, novel forms of necessity which
are not knowable, are not measurable, cannot be expected or anticipated, and which, above all,
are not tolerable or livable for those experiencing the accident as it occurs. The sheer

22
David S. Moon (2014) defines psyma simply as “asking multiple rhetorical questions” (p. 133). But psyma is more
than that. A series of questions may be psyma, or it may be erotema, or interrogation. For Moon, the difference
hinges on whether or not the questions are answered: “erotema, i.e. the rhetorical question (actually, of psyma,
asking multiple rhetorical questions and anthypophora, immediately answering the question)” (Moon, 2014, p.
133). But reaching back toward the origin of these terms, Henry Peacham (1577) offers a more detailed account of
the defining differences between erotema of the one hand and psyma on the other:

Pysma [sic], when we aske often times together, and use many questions in one place, whereby we do
make the oratio sharp & vehemit [sic], and it differeth from Erotema, or interrogation, for as muche as
interrogation maye well be answered with one word, either granting or denying, but not this without
many” (Peacham, 1577, n.p.).

In other words, it is not the existence of answers in the rhetoric, but instead the possibility of definite and direct
answers to the questions, that defines erotema. And the impossibility of that same immanent and simple response
to the questions generated, the requirement that the questions cannot be answered “without many” words,
defines psyma in a particular relation to questioning. If erotema is an interrogation for specific returns or results,
then psyma is an exploration moving the rhetoric away from simple closure on immanent knowledge.

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indeterminacy of any accident—whether it be the scope, the causes, the solutions to the
problems, or the aftereffects and lasting damage—produce psyma, and with it a generative
matrix of concerns, narratives, and perspectives which can be brought to bear on what is
known, measured and measurable, what can be foreseen, and what it is possible to live through
or survive.
Psyma are born in the gap between two spheres of rhetoric. In this case, on the one
hand, the reassurances and closure of the master narratives are sutured to the situation on the
ground and promise a remedy to the situation and a return to normalcy. That these master
narratives shifted over time—first from denials of anything other than normalcy, later to
obfuscation and easy blame, then toward acknowledgment of an “emergency,” and finally on a
sense of resolution with the myth of completed lead service line replacement
23
—complicates
the psyma which come out of this rhetorical crisis. On the other hand, vernaculars of resistance
and survival circulate through often frayed and broken channels on the ground in Flint,
challenging the preexistence of a “normal” status quo there and attempting to answer
existential, immediate questions in a field fraught with nonknowledge and misinformation.
The necessity of bia in the Flint case manifests itself both in terms of the poisons in the
water and their necessary effects on bodies and in terms of the imposed necessity of austerity
and the concomitant damage to the municipality, its sovereignty and its integrity. A biopolitics
emerges around issues relating to both the exceptional case of the effects of lead on bodies,
little of which is currently known and for which Flint will inevitably become a laboratory for

23
As of April 2019, there still remained around 2,500 lead service lines still to be replaced (Ahmad, 2019).
Completion of the replacement is now mandated by Michigan’s water rules (“Get the lead out,” 2018). But a lack
of adequate records of properties with lead lines, unexpected excavation issues, weather, and dwindling funding
(Derringer, 2016) mean that this mandate might be very difficult to fulfill in the near future.

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study, and also around the exceptional loss of limited sovereignty for Flint and other urban
centers in Flint hurt by the state’s economic policies and then forced to submit to totalitarian
rule by the selfsame state government partly responsible for the difficult financial situation
those cities found themselves in.
24
Because these necessities did not (and still do not) admit of
a clear path forward, the questions that swarm around this “accident” are ultimately
irresolvable, and must be navigated and negotiated in a process which, like Foley’s (2012)
characterization of peitho, leaves open possibilities rather than closing down contingency into
actualization for the brute sake of closure. To close off this crisis, which has revealed more
fundamental wrongs than simply tainting a municipal water supply with lead, is to short-circuit
the productivity of psyma. Psyma leads us toward observations and understandings of the
situation which go beyond the pat resignation to the inevitability of “unfortunate” occurrences
in the march of progress and technological advance.
A crisis generates more questions than answers. Understanding that there is a problem,
understanding what should be done to solve the problem, and assessing whom is responsible
for doing so, all require an eye to the situation that values and preserves the contingency
inherent in the vortex surrounding an event like the Flint Water Crisis. Lead in a city’s water

24
According to Summer Minnick, with the Michigan Municipal League, revenue sharing began as a concession by
local governments not to collect their own sales taxes. Instead, the state agreed to “share” sales tax revenues
gathered by the state with local municipalities, partly through a constitutional portioning, and partly through
discretionary amounts levied by the state legislature (Graham, 2011). But revenue sharing, both discretionary and
constitutional, has been on the decline since at least the year 2000: amounts dropped 42% in total, with a 63% loss
in discretionary sharing and an 11% loss in constitutional sharing between 2000 and 2017. This trend increas3ed
over the previous decade, with drops of 49% total, 72% discretionary, and 15% constitutional between 2011 and
2017 (Pratt, 2018). Between 2000 and 2014, the Michigan Municipal League estimates Michigan cities lost out on
over $6 billion in revenue sharing due to cuts (Wallace, 2017). For his part, then-mayor Dayne Walling called
openly for increases to municipal revenue sharing, citing its loss as a major reason for the difficulty of his job in a
State of the City speech just a month before the water switch (Carmody, 2014). Governor Gretchen Whitmer has
called for a 3% increase in revenue sharing to Michigan cities in her 2020 budget. But even per her report, this
would amount to just a $40 million increase statewide (“Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s…,” 2019), a drop in the
bucket compared to what cities have been denied for decades.

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supply is not normal. Still, in Flint, it has become “normal” for exceptional events to mar the
security and well-0being of the city and its residents. Accidents are not accidental, but rather
the outcomes of sacrifices made long before which present themselves in times of extreme
stress. Hard times strain rhetoric’s ability to address and remedy social issues; “accidents”
which interrupt the thready rhythm that keeps a struggling city afloat plunge communication
infrastructures into a void, where basic information and material needs are no longer met
without great difficulty, or are not met at all. This void requires inquiry to set as its goal not
secure knowledge and a finite chain of questions with a compact teleology. Instead, the psyma
generated by peeking into this void with the perspective of nonknowledge open outward, with
a goal of expanding inquiry past any limit.
If Roger & Me (1989) showed Flint during hard times, what it did not capture or
communicate was Flint’s strong underlying and resultant sense of resilience and community.
U.S. notions like Dewey’s often seek refuge in a mythic past of better times and more coherent
cultural and national values. But in Flint, community needed and needs to be made real and
serviceable to the demands of people facing perennial hard times. Community education began
as a program to fight delinquency, but it quickly grew into a mechanism for drawing people
together from across the city, across generations and races, for basic information and
recreation opportunities. Flint was developed as a kind of paracolonial labor camp, and its
infrastructure never developed as much as its population grew during the boom years. In
response to these needs, which were being met neither by government nor by capital interests,
Flint and its people developed their own, native sense of community, and used these
relationships and connections to negotiate life under hard times.

97

As the Flint Water Crisis unfolded, unstable material conditions revealed a vortex of
discourse and information. This “normal” accident, of the type that Flint has faced throughout
its long history of hard times, demands an analysis that pays attention to the contingency of the
rhetoric and knowledge involved. The violence of bia, visited on the life world in periods of
rapid upheaval and technological overhaul, generates psyma as people struggle to deal with an
unyielding stream of unexpected problems and crises. These questions, explored more fully in
Chapter 5, activate relationships among members of Flint’s life world as people search for the
basic equipment for living that crisis denies them. Chapter 5 gives evidence of the nature and
use of these relationships and this sense of community. But a theoretical framework is
necessary if the true value of Flint’s “community” is to be understood and appreciated.
The next chapter looks at a set of Continental conversations on community, a vision very
foreign to the U.S. academy but, in relation to community as understood and practiced in Flint,
much closer to home than might be expected. This chapter sought to highlight the stories and
histories of Flint during hard times, and emphasize the special character of the rhetoric that
applies to the Flint Water Crisis. The material reality of a persistent void of hard times are to be
understood as having produced a novel understanding and practice of community, one which,
as the next chapter will explore, can best be explained and analyzed with reference to an
equally novel theoretical treatment of the subject of community.

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Chapter 3: Community and Communication in Hard Times
What benefit does sacrifice have? Might sacrifice be more than an aberration in a stable
status quo? What if the state, society, and the globalizing economy were all complicit in the
regular, planned sacrifice of part of its body politic to advance the good life for a select few of
its members, labeled “citizens?” If this were the case, then the hard times in which Flint found
itself prior to the Flint Water Crisis, the hard times which persist to this writing, and, again, the
hard times which laid the material and infrastructural foundation for lead to leach into the
city’s water system, these hard times would have a global significance. If Flint, once a beacon of
hope for job seekers and for union labor across the country, was built to be sacrificed, as the
previous chapter argued, then nowhere in the world, the developed world or anywhere else, is
likely to be sacrosanct. And if these hard times persist, they nonetheless show an unexpected
way forward, past the hollow promises of global capital’s messianic return and toward a mutual
relation in community which breeds the resilience and resourcefulness necessary to navigate
the vortex which has loomed at the center of Flint’s fortunes.
People in Flint were wronged together during the Flint Water Crisis, regardless of any
markers of identity. People in Flint have also been wronged together by the retreat of capital
investment in the area. But the wrongs of global capitalism begin with turning singular beings
relating to one another into individuals. This fundamental wrong is, however, inescapable, since
the colonial past, and its globalizing outgrowth in the present day, relied on this wrong. But as
they visited it across the globe, they drew disparate civilizations and peoples into relation with
one another. Global capitalism continues this work by individualizing the globe. But Flint has
hope to offer, in that hard times and crisis have led to s strong, inclusive sense of community.

99

Flint, Equality, and Society: On Wrongs Which Found the Political
What draws people together? What is the basis upon which a political space, in which
the good life can be pursued by all its citizens, could be well-founded? On what foundation
could a community be based that would address all of the wrongs visited upon all of its
members? If the previous chapter examined historical and contemporary features of Flint, its
life world, and its discourse, and motivated a relationship between the hard times Flint has
faced and its native sense of community, the purpose of this section is to theorize the political
effects of these hard times and crises in Flint’s history and present them as a series of wrongs
visited upon Flint, its environment, and its people.
To view these events and conditions as wrongs frames them in such a way as to include
a wide spectrum of members, from all walks of life, since having been wronged does not
implicitly require people to have been wronged in the same way or to the same extent by the
same event. In an uneven landscape of development, events hit harder the further down the
social hierarchy. But in a sacrifice zone, even the best off are sacrificed. The necessity of living
together, the urgency of crisis, and, above all, the fact that all there have been wronged mean
that communities can and must form in order to redress those wrongs in a political space
which, often, must be carved out during the crisis. Adversity, shared in common if not in the
same way or to the same extent, occasions critique, resistance, and the relationships that form
community.

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Communities of the wronged?
It would certainly be possible to define a group of people in reference to wrongs
committed against them as a group. This group might even be justly called a community,
sharing those wrongs in common among members of the group. In particular reference to the
Flint Water Crisis, the compounding wrongs of polluting the water supply, denying and covering
up evidence, and delaying remedies to the dire situation on the ground form a nexus of wrongs
that define affected residents along these lines, with these shared wrongs in common despite
differences in other markers of identity, like race and class. The potential for dialogue and an
equality based on the experience of hard times and of crisis is precisely what undergirds the
relationships formed in community through a series of wrongs visited in common on the people
of Flint.
It would be incorrect to claim that all communities are formed by wrongs committed
against people who then become their members. Certainly, the concept of community is large
enough to include any “common” which may be held by anyone. But this does not therefore
mean, as many U.S. scholars assume
25
, that this common which is shared must mean a
sameness among the members. In fact, the difference between a community, as a group of
people bound by something shared, and a group bound and defined by sameness, is very large.
Sharing a wrong can happen with the same wrong, but it can also be an empathic connection
made between people wronged in very different ways. This sharing, based on multiplying
difference rather than grinding down to the same, leads the concept of community away from

25
For example, see David W. Minar and Scott Greer (2007), eds., The Concept of Community: Readings with
Interpretations and J. Michael Hogan, (1998) ,ed., Rhetoric and Community: Studies in Unity and Fragmentation.

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exclusive markers of belonging. It is this sense of radical inclusivity, acceptance of anyone
whomsoever, with all of their predicates, that Giorgio Agamben (1993) describes as “the
coming community.”
So there are communities, like certain religious and spiritual communities, which are
united along lines of shared beliefs, morals, ethics, and other ways of comporting oneself in the
world, which are apparently not formed by wrongs.
26
And certainly most fascists, who co-opt
the idea of community to describe their whitewashed visions of a unified society, were not
wronged, although interestingly their narratives always include race war or anti-nationalist
villains who are the source of the troubles of the world.
27
Finally, the narrow sense in which we
in the U.S. speak of “the African-American community” or “the LGBTQ+ community” is very
obviously based not on any particular or identifiable wrongs, but instead on identity markers
with a specific political content and referring to a certain group of people in terms of their
existence statistically as a population.
Still, my argument is more forceful than simply that being wronged forms communities
among those wronged. In each case above, wrongs form part of the very fabric of the definition
of the group. The settlement and colonization which makes up the better part of the early
history of the United States, and even Christopher Columbus’s fateful voyage, were spurred by
religious persecution, with religious communities fleeing to the colonies to practice their ways

26
In the United States, religious groups like the Mennonites, the Amish, and the Quakers defined themselves as
communities apart from broader society. However, each saw in the promise of religious freedom the chance to
practice the tenets of their faith without fear of persecution, as they had faced both in their mother countries and
in other adopted homes in Europe and Russia (see for example Corfield, 2011; Kraybill et al., 2013; MacGregor,
2017).
27
Philippe-Joseph Salazar (2018) isolates a “community of discourse”(p. 136) within the alt-right, one that allows
members to express fellowship through shared communication norms and topoi. This common discourse, Salazar
argues, is what defines the alt-right as such, and not any specific content or unifying action or wrong.

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of life away from the violence and prejudice that plagued them in their mother countries.
28
In
this way, what set each Protestant sect apart from Catholicism, and what separates each
Protestant sect from each other, generates a matrix of differences which, with religion being
such a fundamental part of life, drives a wedge between groups of people living together, and
invariably led the dominant group to wrong the others.
29

As for fascists, the necessity of their using the narrative of having been wronged was
emphasized above. This is because something must be shared by members of the group to
define it as such, rigidify its boundaries, and close off its thresholds, and race or nation does not
suffice on its own. They each need to be tied to a narrative of purity, where the “we” of the
group excludes exceptions to the empty, cult of personality ‘ideology.’ Those who share my
race but not my brand are labeled “traitors.” Those who share my nation but not my fascism
are “unpatriotic” “invaders.”
30
In both cases, the rigid (and ultimately arbitrary) definition of an
inside and an outside which characterizes fascist “community” allows for a fluid redefinition of
the wrongs (and the wrongdoers) according to the whims of its leadership at any moment.

28
This characterizes the Puritans, for example, and also Catholics fleeing persecution during the Protestant
Reformation. Interestingly, though these communities themselves faced persecution at the hands of ideologues,
still this did not lead to their own religious tolerance, and they often clashed with those, like Native Americans and
other Christian sects, which clashed with their views (Neal & Corrigan, 2010).
29
One sees this even in the grand narrative of the Hebrew bible, where the Israelites were formed out of shared
suffering and escape from brutal slavery, and united by a series of acts and events which shaped their essence as a
religious and ethnic community resilient enough to withstand even the heinous mortal attacks of interwar and
World War II Nazism.
30
Cinzia Spinzi (2016) isolates foundational metaphors of inclusion and exclusion running throughout British and
Italian 1930’s Fascist discourse. These metaphors included those of the nation as a living organism, and of people
as animals, and set the stage for the open dehumanization and empty political unity that was to follow. Mark
Neocleous (2009), writing about the USA Patriot Act and the nature of the war on terror, emphasizes that the
formula, from Carl Schmitt, that the “sovereign is he who decides upon the exception,” is ultimately fascist in
origin, in its definition of an inside by virtue of an excluded outside that nevertheless emanates from within the
state, no less than by Schmitt’s actual allegiance to Nazism. In this regard, the Patriot Act’s logic of exclusion is of a
piece with that of fascism’s: “This is why the Patriot Act and key speeches have sought to affirm the inclusion
within the nation of its loyal Muslim-Arabic subjects against the need to exclude those who lack the required
loyalty” (Neocleous, 2009, p. 24).

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And it is precisely the empty solidity of fascist beliefs which appeals to the
disadvantaged people they target, the certainty that, once the villains are vanquished and order
is restored, they will finally be able to share in the wealth they feel they deserve. But the
wrongdoers, and therefore the wrongs, are the materiel and motor of the fascist narrative
which founds its community.
As far as the usage of “community” in identity-based ways, it must be noted that the
two examples I listed above (African American and LGBTQ+) contain, in the identity marker
which defines them, a manifold host of wrongs committed by society for much of recorded
history. There are also at least two ways this type of community differs from the fascist
facsimile. First, these wrongs are real, not conspiracy theories or outright lies. And second, the
thresholds of these communities are not closed. One can see this in the growing trend of
including “and allies” when such a community is mentioned or referenced. The allies of the
LGBTQ+ community are those who share the sense that LGBTQ+ people have been wronged,
despite the fact that they cannot actually be wronged themselves in those exact ways (being an
ally means that, strictly speaking, one is not LGBTQ+). But one imagines members of each of
these identity communities as allies of other communities, forming a framework of inclusive,
communicative networks rather than a cutthroat, zero-sum competition for supremacy (the
fascist model).
It would be improper to compare the wrongs faced by each community or any single
members or subgroups to each other, to find out who was “more” wronged. Such a comparison
would be fruitless and counterproductive, since what is being compared is precisely the

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experience of a loss of humanity itself on the part of a living human being. If, in fact, one has
that experience, what results is a rupture in one’s ability to communicate the depths of one’s
own despair or to find pathways out of dark times that come from being, for a time or for a
lifetime, less than human.
When society wrongs its members, and bare life is threatened, precisely what is lost is
one’s ability to comport oneself in that human society in a functional way. One sees this directly
in the comportment of some of Flint’s residents, who were confrontational and physically
aggressive in meetings with officials and often lost the ability to be heard by those officials as a
result (Michael Madden, personal communication, November 29, 2018). So the comparison of
wrongs is not only futile, it is actually impossible, since these wrongs bring with them the loss of
the sanctity of bare life and its concomitant promise of the good (human) life. Those wronged
by society are not given license to deploy such human concepts as magnitude, degree, quantity,
and quality, whose measures and very ability to measure and comprehend their world are
voided as unreasonable, nonsensical, arbitrary, ignorant, or careless.
This dissertation has collected artifacts of communication deploying both grand
narratives and petite narratives, narratives connecting themselves both to big stories of the
universe and small stories of the life world connected to the Flint Water Crisis. A sacrifice zone
is, always, simultaneously of the broader society which produces it as by-product and excluded
from that society in terms of the equality of its people and the limited sovereignty that comes
with being an individual in society and that coming with being a locality in a federal state

105

system.
31
The purpose of assembling these materials was not to hear what any of them had to
say on their own, but instead to trace the interplay between the various levels of
communication surrounding a crisis event in an economic-corporate sacrifice zone, and to see
how life adapts and goes on there in the face of radical, forceful changes to the life world
caused by wrongs committed by society at large.
Flint is one such sacrifice zone; each case is singular, and each case tells its own story, in
its own way and in its own time. Each sacrifice zone tells of disruptive events, dubious
decisions, material, machine, and infrastructure failure, conflicting versions of events and
lessons learned, fingers pointed and blame assessed. But how these arrange themselves and
play themselves out in each particular rhetorical crisis sheds light on what happens to rhetoric
more generally when not just a speaker, not just a word, but the entire communication
infrastructure is placed under exceptional stress.
In this light, the rhetorical crisis that played (and continues to play) itself out with the
Flint Water Crisis helps to make visible what happens when one has ‘equipment failure’ in the
very equipment for living that keeps the threat of the loss of bare life at bay for developed
zones of the globe. How do people critique and resist both the material conditions and the
narratives which attempt to circumscribe their singular efforts, struggles, and hardships into a
status quo master narrative of intervention, repair, and reintegration into the global capitalist
economic system?

31
According to Shelby Elizabeth Doyle (2015), “sacrifice zone” as a concept has its origins in traditional agricultural
practices where deliberate harm was made to one area to boost productivity in other targeted areas. As it evolved,
“[t]he term has been appropriated into political and economic discourse and used to describe areas degraded by
modern industrial societies in the pursuit of economic gain” (Doyle, 2015, p. 668).

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Resistance and critique are necessary, since global capital forms the very system which,
most consistently, is the basis for the Crisis itself. Being wronged is not an invitation to make
things right, and for people living in a sacrifice zone, such an invitation is structurally unlikely.
The exclusion of the zone from developed society generally precipitates exclusion of local
officials and ordinary people from deliberations, assessments, and decisions. However, shared
wrongs form an opportunity, if not an invitation, to critique and resist by forming communities
around that shared sense of being wronged and, from that sharing, around the common urge
to see equality prevail over inequality, justice over injustice, fairness over inequity.
Aristotle, the state, and the good life.
A life-world within a stable status quo which takes it beyond the necessities of bare life,
one with the prospects and resources to build toward the future of its inhabitants, is very
different from the life-world of a community under stress, distinct fundamentally from that of a
sacrifice zone. A space for community development, of primary importance in defining the
citizen as such, and generated by and fostered by political engagement and involvement in the
decision-making apparatus of the state, was formulated very early in the Western tradition by
Aristotle. The good life was both to be secured and exercised through political engagement of
the citizens of the state.
Aristotle was the first social scientist of the Western world. His method, which he
followed religiously throughout his texts and which he refined as his studies ranged over an
encyclopedic range of topics, involved the application of a meticulous process of analysis to
empirical observations and observations of reason. In this, his method prefigures all scientific
methods which would come after it, and, what is even more significant, his development of a

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methodology to justify and found his observations made his writings and thought singular and
profoundly influential in the world which was to come.
In many ways, Aristotle’s Politics reads like an instruction manual for how to compose a
state constitution such as that of the United States, and of course this is no accident. His
writings figured heavily in the designs of the founders of the Unites States, as did those of his
teacher Plato. Between the ideal of Plato’s Republic and the practical analysis of statecraft in
the Politics, the framers of the U.S. Constitution found much to inspire them as they attempted
to establish a stable (and profitable) union.
32

Jacques Rancière carves out a space in Aristotle’s Politics for a redefinition of politics
along critical lines which reconsider the basic terms and values which Aristotle places on certain
parts of the state over others, and, therefore, on certain subjects of the state, over others.
Rancière’s outlook refigures the subject of politics as those people who are uncounted because
uncountable, rather than those who find themselves and their interests represented in existing
state function. For Rancière, controversy between those for whom the state operates, a
“common” of a represented (and dominant) subject position, and those whom the state
sacrifices, forgets, or leaves uncounted, a “common” formed by a shared sense of wrong, is the
very space of politics itself.

32
John E. Rexine (1976) highlights the classical training and education of the framers of the Constitution and the
founders of the United States as being pivotal in their vision and execution of establishing the nation. According to
Rexine, at least Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero would have been universally studied and well known by men like
Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Eran Shalev (2009) further notes that not only the founders, but also
educated colonial society more broadly, were very invested in the classics, which saw widespread distribution as
books became more available.

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The conflict between language games of the counted and the uncounted, the citizen and
the non-citizen, the virtuous and those without virtue, in other words between those who share
in the “common good” of the state—those for whom it forms a community—and those who do
not so share, and who instead sacrifice all that they have and all that they are so that the state
and the society it supports might function against their own interests. But to understand the
wrinkles which Rancière introduces into Aristotle’s analysis, it would be helpful to review three
key questions from the Politics: 1.) What is the state for?; 2.) For whom does the state provide
this good?; and, a question which Rancière does not fully explore but which forms the basis for
a great deal of Giorgio Agamben’s critique: 3.) Who must be excluded from participation in the
state, and why?
For Aristotle, the purpose of the state is to provide its citizens with not just life—“bare
life,” in Agamben’s (1998) terms
33
—but the good life:
The final association, formed of several villages, is the state. For all practical purposes
the process is now complete; self-sufficiency has been reached, and while the state
came about as a means of securing life itself, it continues in being able to secure the
good life. […] Moreover the aim and the end is perfection; and self-sufficiency is both
end and perfection. (Aristotle, trans. 1962, 1252b27)

Aristotle insists that this distinction between life and the good life, and the resultant division of
living beings within a geographic zone according to one’s ability to embody that distinction, is
what the state is designed to do, however it is composed in particular: “The state is an

33
Agamben (1998) defines bare life in just this way, in opposition to the good (political) life: “The
fundamental categorical pair in Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political
existence, zoē/bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who, in
language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in
relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion” (p. 8).

109

association intended to enable its members, in their households and in the kinships, to live well;
its purpose is a perfect and self-sufficient life” (Aristotle, trans. 1962, 1280b29).
Aristotle regards necessity with disdain, and for him, the state assumes bare life for its
members and provides them the added value of the leisure and prestige of a citizen, the time
and self-sufficiency to determine their own purposes and their own ends with the support of
that state. Aristotle’s notion of justice is bound up in this distinction between bare life and the
good life, in the sense that what is just provides for the common good, the good of the
community as a whole, and not just one of its parts: “In the state, the good aimed at is justice;
and that means what is for the benefit of the whole community” (Aristotle, trans. 1962,
1282b14). What this means in practice is that the constitutions of states, however they may
vary due to geography, population, history, culture, size, and resources, must aim at the
common good of all the citizenry.
To fail to do so leads to deviations from Aristotle’s models of the three types of state,
monarchy, aristocracy, and polity, which are just associations of free people, toward tyranny,
oligarchy, and democracy
34
:
It is clear then that those constitutions which aim at the common good are right, as
being in accord with absolute justice; while those which aim only at the good of the
rulers are wrong. They are all deviations from the right constitutions. They are like the
rule of master over slave, whereas the state is an association of free men. (Aristotle,
trans. 1962, 1279a16)

34
For Aristotle, as for Plato and many Greek thinkers of the pre-Christian era, “democracy” was something of a bad
word. We think of it as rule by the people, but demos actually refers to the common people, people excluded from
Greek states by property-based or heredity-based access to government because they had no wealth and no
prestige. So for Aristotle, “democracy” is more like our “populism” than the system of voting and holding office
which dominates forms of government today.

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The good life is the aim of the state, and providing that good life for those most able to
appreciate it and flourish in its bounty (the “common good”) is the end for the sake of which
Aristotle’s well-functioning state operates.
In our modern U.S. representative democracy, the question of virtue is not broached
directly. Each citizen is assumed equal under the law, by which is meant that each citizen has
the same basic rights, afforded by the Constitution, and access to the same systems of recourse
for acts violating these rights. Aristotle’s principle of the best state, by contrast, requires a
distributive equality, equality for and among those who are equal in virtue as opposed to all
those living in the state. The highest good, he judged, is to provide the good life for the most
virtuous, since only the virtuous would be able to appreciate the good life and benefit fully
from its provision.
The idea that there is a fundamental level on which all are equal is, for Aristotle, a
product of democratic (common, low, poor) thinking:
Democracy arose from the idea that those who are equal in any respect are equal
absolutely. All are alike free, therefore they claim that they are all equal absolutely.
Oligarchy arose from the assumption that those who are unequal in some one respect
are completely unequal: being unequal in wealth they assume themselves to be unequal
absolutely. (Aristotle, trans. 1962, 1301a25)

For Aristotle, both democracy and oligarchy unjustly expand a notion of (in)equality beyond its
limits to stretch over the whole of the state.
Democracy, Aristotle argues, advances on the foundation that there is some sense in
which the brute fact of having being free in common implies a need for equality in all matters,

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while oligarchy pushes superiority in wealth for some to an argument for superiority in all
things for those people of means. Thus, while oligarchy is ordinarily understood as “rule by the
few,” Aristotle quickly points out that the wealthy are always the few, and oligarchy is always
rule by the wealthy: “It inevitably follows that where men rule because of the possession of
wealth, whether their number be large or small, that is oligarchy, and when the poor rule, that
is democracy” (Aristotle, trans. 1962, 1279b26). This difference in interest and stake in the state
functions further to determine who counts as a citizen, and in whom will be trusted power and
sovereignty: “To allow everyone to decide, and on all matters, is democratic; for such equality is
what common people seek” (Aristotle, trans. 1962, 1298a11). On the other hand, “[…] where
only some deliberate about all matters, the principle is oligarchic” (Aristotle, trans. 1962,
1298a33).
“The oligarch sees oligarchy, and the democrat democracy.”
Both the democratic and oligarchic concepts of equality are flawed and unjust on their
own, and yet, for Aristotle, the solution is not to remedy the deficiencies of these concepts of
equality separately, nor to resolve these differences directly. Instead, his practical statecraft
advises to simply allow the state to pull in the directions of both of these tendencies, and allow
both concepts of equality to operate simultaneously:
A definitive feature of the well-mixed democracy and oligarchy is that it is possible to
describe the same constitution either as democracy or as oligarchy. It is clearly the very
excellence of the blending that creates this impression in those who thus describe it.
(Aristotle, trans. 1962, 1294b14)

112

Rancière is also quick to point out this strange prescription as notable and essential to
Aristotle’s argument:
Aristotle argues [in Book IV of the Politics] that there should appear to be elements of
both types of regime (oligarchy and democracy) and yet at the same time of neither, a
good polity being one in which the oligarch sees oligarchy and the democrat democracy.
(Rancière, 1995, p. 42)

Thus, in this country, we see competing, just claims to the levers of power from
members of the voting public and from the corporate interests of capital, and the resolution of
these conflicts is often messy politically. In a sacrifice zone, the boon from corporate interests is
diminished, often reduced to nothing. In Flint, the financial fate of General Motors no longer
has much economic impact on the area. But the oligarchs can still see oligarchy there, and
when wealth (or its lack) is the sole measure used to judge a zone, one can see the hand of
oligarchy directing power over the democrats (the common, poor folk).
Rancière asserts a space within this conflict for politics to re-emerge in terms of a
“common good” both distinct from and founded on Aristotle’s notion. For Aristotle, what was
important was securing the good life, by which he meant the life that we were uniquely,
humanly capable of leading as zoōn politikon (“the political animal”). In Aristotle’s cosmology,
however, there was not space for everyone. So, slaves and slavery, a long discussion of which
opens the Politics (Book I, sections iii-vii), are the first excluded group, but are by no means the
last. Also made exceptions to citizenry are women, non-Greeks, and “mechanical” workers or
wage laborers. While Aristotle envisions a quite progressive political space, it is carved out only
by creating a rigid barrier to entry.

113

The paradox at the heart of Aristotle’s polis is that to make equals equal, slaves must be
jettisoned from the social order, to return only as an appendage of their owners and not as
complete human beings (for example, from U.S. history, 3/5, which automatically tallied onto
the slave owner’s vote). Some have more virtue than others, and, being better able to live the
good life, society should provide more for these superior beings. Thus, oligarchy for the
oligarchs and democracy for the democrats works only upon the sacrifice of slaves, non-
citizens, women, and all those judged by the social order as having less virtue.
But if, contrary to Aristotle but following his argument, one attempts to consider those
systematically excluded groups as the subject of politics, rather than its exception, then politics
becomes a space where this paradox can be resolved in a real communicative space:
The ‘normal’ evolution of society, then, presents itself in the form of the progression
from a government of birth to a government of wealth. Politics exists as a deviation
from this normal order of things. […] Politics exists insofar as the people is not identified
with a race or a population, or the poor with a particular disadvantaged sector, or the
proletariat with a group of industrial workers, etc., but insofar as these latter are
identified with subjects that inscribe, in the form of a supplement to every count of the
parts of society, a specific figure of the count of the uncounted or of the part of those
without part. (Rancière, 2010, p. 43)

For Rancière, a productive concept of politics can come not from representation of one’s
interests—which inevitably leads to a diminishing of the singularity of the political being into
identity markers and population memberships—but, instead, from the struggle to find oneself
and one’s voice in a political space.
Like Aristotle’s zoon politikon, what defines Rancière’s political subject is both a certain
potential to act in view of a common good and a space in which to encounter other such

114

subjects and communicate who one is and what one desires in concert with those other
subjects:
This is the definition of a struggle for equality which can never be merely a demand
upon the other, nor a pressure put upon him [sic], but always simultaneously a proof
given to oneself. This is what ‘emancipation’ means. It means escaping from a minority.
But nobody escapes from the social minority save by their own efforts. The
emancipation of the workers is not a matter of making labour the founding principle of a
new society, but rather of the workers emerging from their minority status and proving
that they truly belong to the society, that they truly communicate with all in a common
space; that they are not merely creatures of needs, of complaint and protest, but
creatures of discourse and reason, that they are capable of opposing reason with reason
and of giving their action a demonstrative form. (Rancière, 1995, p. 48)

Though sometimes unruly and lacking in the skills at the language games being played in
unfamiliar situations, the wronged assert themselves through connections to each other as they
reach out toward a wider world to bring recognition and to restore and preserve the dignity of
being a political subject in the pinnacle of developed society.
Aristotle limited this potential to a certain, small subset of the population; for Rancière,
quite the contrary, it is the very act of exclusion from politics as usual (what he calls “la
politique,” distinct from “le politique,” or the redefinition of what counts as political which he is
trying to motivate), the wrongs which society visits upon the people in a state of exception,
which gives the subject the potential to speak and to act in critique of an oppressive and
exclusionary system of governance:
The “all” of the community named by democracy is an empty, supplementary part that
separates the community out from the sum of the parts of the social body. This initial
separation founds politics as the action of supplementary subjects, inscribed as a
surplus in relation to every count of the parts of society. (Rancière, 2010, p. 41)

115

For Rancière, beyond any identity markers or population-level characteristics that any
given people may share or differ on, what drives the struggle for emancipation and defines the
political subject as such is their having their interests reduced to consensus and univocality by a
rigid hierarchical social order and its regulatory police apparatus:
The essence of the police lies in a partition of the sensible that is characterized by the
absence of void and of supplement: society here is made up of groups tied to specific
modes of doing, to places in which these occupations are exercised, and to modes of
being corresponding to these occupations and these places. […] It is this exclusion of
what ‘is not’ that constitutes the police-principle at the core of statist practices. The
essence of politics consists in disturbing this arrangement by supplementing it with a
part of those without part, identified with the whole of the community. (Rancière, 2010,
p. 44)

Rancière, rightly in my view, determines this violence of exclusion and forceful eradication of
difference to be the fundamental wrong which the police function of society visits upon people
living under its rule.
And it is precisely the notion of equality, from the point of view of the excluded political
subject, around which this wrong revolves and through which it must be resolved: “In place of
saying that all police deny equality, we will say that all police does wrong to equality. We will
say then that politics is the scene upon which the verification of equality should take the form
of a treatment of a wrong.” (Rancière, 1998, p. 113, translation mine) Politics, for Rancière,
comes to mean the activation of the community, defined as those who have been wronged by
being made exceptions by statist, economic, and other police practices, toward a struggle for
equality and emancipation. And this shared wrong draws that community together so that
community, so defined, not only pays deference to internal differences, but even is defined

116

purely in terms of relations among those differences and the common search for solutions and
redress to the wrongs of each and all.
Rancière’s use of the term “emancipation” brings to mind the emancipatory politics and
rhetoric of the 19
th
century, where the path to freedom took a specific path through the
abolition of slavery and the aim of universal suffrage (Carter, 2002). However, formal legal
guarantees and Constitutional rights do not, of themselves and on their own, produce
emancipated subjects. The challenge of inclusion, of inviting those made exceptions by law into
the body politic, has been a steady motor of violence (both material and symbolic), and
continues to be a source of strife for societies worldwide.
Into this challenge, Rancière’s political subject asserts a place where there is not place,
and an account for what is not counted.
There is politics because there is a cause of the other, a difference of the citizenry with
itself. We note here everywhere the effect of forgetting this difference. It is consensus
which identifies the political subject ‘people’ with the population decomposed and
recomposed in their groups, bearers of such an interest or such an identity, and the
political citizen as subject of law, itself tending to be assimilated toward the economic
subject, microcosm of the grand circulation and the incessant exchange of rights and of
capacities, of good merchants and the common Good. (Rancière, 1998, p. 217-218,
translation mine)

Emancipation from master narratives which arouse suspicion and trepidation requires
communicative labor, because, as Rancière points out, the function of a master narrative is to
rework the subject into a pure economic quantum. This communicative labor embodies the
struggle to form, strengthen, share, and maintain relationships despite the resistance and
challenges introduced by the normal function of society under a regime of global capitalism.

117

My focus here is on the precisely heterogeneous
35
and open-ended communication
work which forms the basis for the communicative infrastructure of those people whom society
has wronged, which communicative work is deployed in a twin struggle for emancipation and
for recognition. It is true that those who have been wronged assemble themselves in many
inventive ways to achieve a vast variety of ends, and that these formations often relate to their
identities as workers and as consumers, among many other dimensions. However, society’s
wrongs cannot all be translated into the worker’s struggle, and so the wronged are not the
multitude.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2004) analysis of the multitude is limited and
oversimplified, staying as it does on a singularly economic level that misses the sense of
desœuvrement
36
so important to Maurice Blanchot’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s conceptions of
community (see 2.3). The very fact that Hardt and Negri define “multitude” as a “class concept”
(p. 102) indicates the degree to which their findings are preconditioned by an assumption that
humans are best described in economic terms. But, as Nancy and Blanchot both point out, this
Marxist assumption leaves any sense of community or “multitude” locked into the logic of
global capitalism, and gives no indication as to what people are outside of their role as laborer
or capitalist (i.e. “desœuvrée”).
But what is interesting is that, although these thinkers disagree so fundamentally about
how to conceive of this group of people, still there is general agreement between them at the
level of a fundamental critique of consensus and univocality, and the requirement that people

35
See the next section for more on the precise meaning Bataille gives to this term.
36
The next section explores the meaning of this untranslatable term in more detail.

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be thought of not as atomistic individuals, but as singularities defined by their contingent
relation to others in the world rather than according to stable markers of identity. “The
multitude is composed of a set of singularities—and by singularity here we mean a social
subject whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness, a difference that remains different.”
(Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 99) This is why it is unfortunate that the Marxist assumption of the
central role of labor power reinscribes this issue as one where those who do not labor are
systematically excluded.
Again, Hardt and Negri insist on work as the fundamental marker of entry into the
multitude: “One initial approach is to conceive of the multitude as all those who work under
the rule of capital and thus potentially as the class of those who refuse the rule of capital.”
(Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 108). This exclusionary practice has the effect of rendering the concept
unproductive when looking at a situation in which many people do not or cannot work, do not
work outside the home, or “hustle” at the margins or outside of the capitalist-industrial system
(such as drug dealers and sex workers, but also barterers, non-professional auto mechanics,
and those who work odd jobs).
37

37
Variously termed “shadow economy” (Barnes, 2009; Goel et al., 2019) or “informal economy” (Barnes, 2009;
Gerry, 1987; Williams & Martinez-Perez, 2014), these nonwage workers have made up varying proportions of the
total economy throughout U.S. history. Taylor Barnes (2009) reported the size of the informal economy at $1
trillion and increasing. According to Chris Gerry (1987), “informal economy” originally referred, in the social
science literature of the 1970s, to strategies of those in the developing world to adapt to harsh economic terrain.
But this terminology and concept began to be applied to developed countries where similar counter-economic
forces proliferated global recession of the 1970s and 1980s. Rajeev K. Goel, James W. Saunoris, and Friedrich
Schneider (2019) note that the shadow economy was larger during times of upheaval—during World War II, for
example—but was most closely related to trade openness and a larger government, both of which factors were
most likely to reduce the footprint of the informal economy. Colin C. Williams and Alvaro Martinez-Perez (2014)
determined that although price was sometimes a factor in choosing the informal alternatives, it was not the
primary factor in a majority of cases, and was not a factor at all in over a quarter of the cases. Instead, quality,
speed, and availability of products and services, along with dimensions of social connection and local-economic
redistribution, were more likely to predict the use of the informal economy.

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Society’s wrongs are both beyond and foundational for economics. The community
formed by those whom society has wronged work together within the experience of a negative
that multiplies the possible responses to those stresses and exclusionary social formations,
institutions, and practices. These novel, inventive, creative discoveries of ways of living and of
living together in the face of diminished or limited capacities and facilities for living the good
life which accidental rhetoric exacerbates with its introduction of new forms of uncertainty,
doubt, and mistrust. These lived and communicated responses to struggle form the backbone
of the work of emancipation from which communities of the wronged carve their daily lives.
What was important to recognize in a study like this one was that those local responses
to crisis were designed to usher in a return to a state where bare life was not threatened, while
master narratives were designed, quite the contrary, to restore the appearance of normalcy
through the device of a successful resolution of the issue. Locals must live with this crisis and its
aftermath for the rest of their lives, but the story of culpability (of EPA Director Susan Hedman
or of Governor Rick Snyder) and the onset of lead service line replacement served to cap the
story nationally and politically. No crisis goes to waste, and if the story of continuing problems
and permanent trauma is not told on a national or world stage, then the “successful resolution”
has been “achieved” in the official narrative. Hegemony is bolstered by a repaired crisis.
The narrative goals and framework of people on the ground in a crisis are quite different
than those of power. Nancy (1999/1986) deployed Blanchot’s term “desœuvrement” as a way
of trying to understand the work of community as a sort of “unwork,” or an unproductive
expenditure which had, as its only goals, a) its own maintenance and b) the protection of the

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power to accomplish nothing. To put Blanchot’s concept in Dr. Hanna-Attisha’s terms and frame
of reference, the resilience the people, spaces, and communication infrastructure generally
showed during the Crisis is an example of desœuvrement: not motivated by getting things
accomplished, people were more invested in handling the daily struggles involved in lacking
clean, safe tap water with less that fully functional equipment for living, and this focus (and
lack) was both common and defining for all members of Flint’s various communities.
If the Flint Water Crisis is an example of a community of people wronged by societal
forces, really market forces, and working together to respond to those wrongs with resilience,
then what Nancy has to offer our understanding of this situation is that community is not only
tempered and tested by such events; more than that, events of societal wrong are what found
both market economics and the sense and concept of a “community of all,” because what they
lay bare is the fundamental fact of people’s living with each other which characterizes the
world in which we find ourselves today.
If Flint was made an exception, and its sovereignty usurped, by technocrats under the
employ of the state of Michigan, this process of sacrifice and exclusion, this unending and
unyielding series of wrongs, is nonetheless not itself exceptional, but instead is an integral part
of the way modern society functions: the exception has become the rule, and zones must be
sacrificed regularly, via “normal accidents,” to perpetuate the state of exception that places
capital gain above all other concerns. And if community is strong in Flint, it may be precisely
because its people have lived as sacer
38
for so long. Because being able to be killed without that
death therefore being a sacrifice cuts across all economic, ethnic, racial, gendered, and sexual

38
See note 18.

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lines in any such zone. In a state where equality depends on perspective—where an oligarch
can accomplish oligarchy even as a democrat accomplishes democracy—exceptions like Flint,
where “normal” accidents are the rule and hard times are never far away, become test cases
for an emancipatory aim that seeks to go beyond formal or theoretical guarantees of equality
and justice toward a more lived and experienced vision of community, one formed and tested in
the discourse of wrongs. But to see how this discourse might be fraught given the hard times
that Flint faced and faces, it becomes necessary to look for a theory of communication that
does as little violence as possible to the contingency and void on the ground in a rhetorical
crisis. The next section aims to use thinking from the dark times of World War II-era France to
found a theory of communication that takes this rhetorical contingency and uncertainty into
account.
A Theory of Communication for Hard Times: Georges Bataille and the Limits of (The Pursuit
of) Knowledge
An epistemological, and therefore a rhetorical, crisis results from the scientific
orientation toward methodological and operational purity. In this orientation, the binary
efficient and inefficient reigns over the pair true and false, and also over that of just and unjust.
In this (properly modern) field opened by the twin legitimation strategies of emancipation and
self-justification, the value of knowledge is determined in its greatest part by its contribution to
human progress. However, this legitimation is shaky, because the sciences which generate
legitimate knowledge are, inherently and by construction, their own greatest critics.
Ouroborous is the operative figure here: in order to complete itself, the snake begins to eat its

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own tail, putting under suspicion (and therefore erasure) its own history and foundations. The
suspicion of one’s own ability to observe the world is as old as René Descartes at least, and runs
through Western history and philosophy. And, in an economy focused on the production of
surplus capital, this foundational suspicion is the source of material wrongs, social and
environmental, as the world and its people and resources become the field for a series of social
experiments in control and extraction.
For Descartes (2008/1641), all that could be known for certain was the existence of the
doubting self. No other position of the self, and no other relation to the world, survived
Descartes’ reversion to what he termed “first philosophy,” or a state of relation to the world
which he argued was prior to any phenomenalism or idealism. Plato, for his part, in numerous
texts including the Phaedo, Cratylus, and Parmenides, used Socrates as a voice to argue for the
pre-eminence of Ideas (or the Forms) over the sensational-material world (reality), given the
perfection of the Ideas and the imperfection he observed everywhere in reality. The allegory of
the cave in his Republic makes a summary judgment of everyday reality as a misleading system
of shadows cast by a true sun located elsewhere.
Marx critiques Hegel for much the same privileging of ideas over reality, and his
dialectical materialism was in many ways born of his inversion of his avid reading of Hegel as a
young man. But the theme of doubting one’s senses or one’s own apprehension or observation
of reality for a grander, often more perfect ideal form of that reality is a persistent one in
Western metaphysics. This theme runs through modern science as a search for solid
foundations to accompany a basic method rooted in a belief in the fallibility of the individual

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scientist and a mode of questioning which seeks to establish truth through series of tests and
filters which refine raw observation into scientific evidence.
The curiosity of the sciences into their own foundations, their search for a well-founded
originary position from which to certify knowledge, is not a quest for nonknowledge.
Mathematics and logic, for their part, are locked in a vertigo-inducing dance of founding each
other (see Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, Gödel, 1986). And yet, finding this lack of
solid ground, each branch of thought proceeded as if the ground were solid enough upon which
to found a society of technology and progress such as ours. Jacques Derrida is well known for
critiquing what he called “mathesis,”
39
a gradual mathematization of all thought and all
comportment to the world which he saw spreading through philosophy, particularly and
virulently in the analytic thought inherited from Bertrand Russell, and into other areas of
thinking.
But, decades before that analysis, Georges Bataille had already critiqued the scientific
orientation for its ignoring the needs of the search for true knowledge and its acceptance of
what he termed “subordinate tasks”:
Scientific work is more than servile, crippled. The needs to which it responds are
foreign to knowledge. They are:
1. The curiosity of those who do crossword puzzles: a discovery fails to provoke interest,
the search for truth supposes a “pleasure of not knowing” (Claude Bernard): scientific

39
See for example Jacques Derrida (1987; 1989; 2004). The project of a “mathesis universalis,” a way of
comprehending the universe with logic and formal reasoning, comes from Leibniz and Descartes. It is taken up
much later, around the turn of the twentieth century, by phenomenologist Edmund Husserl as an attempt to reach
the universal through a supposed transparency of formal logic. It is precisely a critique of this universalism of
language and thought which begins Derrida’s career in his Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction
(1989), his first publication originally released in 1962.

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truths fundamentally only have value when new; we measure the novelty of old
discoveries after centuries;
2. The needs of the collector (to accumulate and organize curiosities);
3. Love of work, intense output;
4. The taste for a rigorous honesty;
5. The worries of an academic (career, honor, money).
At its origin, often enough, a desire for sovereign knowledge, to go as far as one
can go, a desire so quickly born, nullifies itself, by accepting subordinate tasks. […]
Science is practiced by men in whom the desire to know is dead. (Bataille, 2001, p. 82)

For Bataille, any quest for knowledge which exhausts itself before it has reached the limit of
what is knowable is “servile, crippled.” He bids us to accept what makes us uneasy about not
knowing as precisely that which gives us access to everything worth knowing: “To specify what I
mean by nonknowledge: that which results from every proposition when we are looking to go
to the fundamental depths of its content, and which makes us uneasy” (Bataille, 2001, p. 112).
If Jean-François Lyotard’s (1979) assessment of the postmodern condition serves to
establish the eroded dominance of two traditional ways of legitimating what is known, then
Bataille provides the complement in locating a new legitimation for knowledge in terms of what
is not knowable (nonknowledge). Nonknowledge provides the quest for knowledge with both a
limit and a goal (telos). This limit and this goal are both impossible to reach, but, for Bataille,
should be understood as a comportment to the search for knowledge which knows no servility
to any other end (progress, either for humankind or for science itself) and is not crippled by its
own pedestrianism and novelty-seeking. Nonknowledge as a limit and a goal, both unreachable,
gives value and meaning to any search for knowledge which, for whatever reason, seeks to
avoid the pat sterility of the scientific orientation, one whose seams show through in this (and
any) rhetorical-material crisis.

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This autocritique, inherited from Western metaphysics, is the discourse of a privileged
elite, and there are necessarily those who are excluded from these language games. Jacques
Rancière (2007/1983) makes a pointed analysis of the double bind in which these excluded
people find themselves. For those marked by exception, participation is impossible because
there is no time or chance to learn the necessary games to participate. Assuming this time were
to be found, the excepted are interdicted from participation because these games always form
a second skin for those born outside of privilege, and where this shows—in other words where
the play of language within the rules set forth by scientific discourse is not fully grasped—the
resulting lacunae in “valid” reasoning result in loss of standing within the group and a
diminished efficacy of voice.
These people outside of scientific-technical discourse, whom I hesitate to name
“members” of “communities” or “a community,” possess their own language games with rules
which differ in ways large and small from the games which reign in the big stories explaining the
universe away. Because they do not produce a ‘reliable,’ ‘valid,’ or ‘consistent’ ‘set of data’ as
are valued in scientific and political language games, these alternatives, and any who seek to
cite them or use them in their work, are often dismissed as being more “quotidian” in nature.
But Lyotard’s (1979) important observation is that it is the relation of the storyteller herself or
himself to the origin of the story and the audience, in the explicit expression and thematization
of how that story came to the storyteller, which gives access to a more practical way to
circulate knowledge. In the midst of a rhetorical crisis, the origin of a story or piece of
information matters. Mistrust of grand narratives of the Flint Water Crisis, justifiable given not

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just the events of the Crisis, but the years of sacrifice and wrongs taking place prior to those
events,
40
led to widespread dissemination of conflicting and contradictory information.
The academy, for its part, has, in its mainstream and elite aspects, denied the necessity
of dealing with these types of language games—and for the reasons Rancière (2007/1983)
points out, in helping to preserve a clear rule of hierarchy by suppressing the ability of those
who have already been denied access to the preserves of elites to use the tools of those elites
to achieve a closer approximation to lived equality.
The search for ways to make academic meaning out of the argument and narratives of
everyday people is not without a measure of success. One such project, that of Luc Boltanski, is
to recover the terms of the struggle of common people for their own emancipation through a
process of careful observation and recording of local argument and communication. His aim is
to understand better how to translate this everyday critique, what he calls “ordinary critique,”
into terms which better allow for participation in the social mechanisms through which
emancipatory aims might be reached. In a cogent and clear passage, Boltanski (2011) lays out
not only his own program of critical inquiry, but also sketches an outline of any such theory
deserving the name:

40
Just 20% of Michigan residents trust state government “most of the time,” and only half trust their local
governments as much (Power, 2016). Percentages of “low” or “very low” trust in Michigan state government’s
ability to carry out its basic functions is also low by function: public health rated at 80% low or very low trust, and
care of the environment was rated at 75%, in a Center for Michigan report. Services for low income residents was
also not a trusted function, rating 76%, and, getting to the heart of the foundation of Flint’s issues, 68% of
residents polled had low or very low trust in the state’s ability to foster economic growth (Roelofs, 2017). Part of
this mistrust is based on the abuses of emergency management, an affront to local sovereignty in its very nature
and definition (Power, 2106). An influx of dark money into Michigan political campaigns, along with partisan
gerrymandering, also contributes to a lack of trust (Roelofs, 2017). Michigan earned an “F” grade for transparency
in a 2015 Center for Public Integrity rating (Power, 2016). Current Governor Gretchen Whitmer, for her part, has
made some strides toward addressing these issues of mistrust. However, as she acknowledges, “I think we all know
that once you lost someone’s trust, it’s very hard to earn it back” (Lawler, 2019, para. 2).

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Unlike ‘traditional theory’, ‘critical theory’ possesses the objective of reflexivity. It can or
even must […] grasp the discontents of actors, explicitly consider them in the very
labour of theorization, in such a way as to alter their relationship to social reality and,
thereby, that social reality itself, in the direction of emancipation. As a consequence the
kind of critique they make possible must enable the disclosure of aspects of reality in an
immediate relationship with the preoccupations of actors—that is, also with ordinary
critiques.
Critical theories feed off these ordinary critiques, even if they develop them differently,
reformulate them, and are destined to return to them, since their aim is to render
reality unacceptable […] [Critical theories…] must provide themselves with normative
supports that are sufficiently autonomous of the particular moral corpuses formed from
already identified religious or political approaches, and identified with as such by
specific groups whose critical stances they arm. […] But, on the other hand, they must
try to meet these ordinary critiques as if they derived from them and were merely
unveiling them to themselves, by inducing actors to acknowledge what they already
knew but, in a sense, without knowing it; to realize what this reality consists in and,
through this revelation, to take their distance from this reality, as if it was possible to
exit from it—remove themselves from it—in such a way as to conceive of the possibility
of actions intended to change it. (Boltanski, 2011, p. 5)

Thus, critique is linked to a struggle for emancipation, and the theorist’s own place is
that of interpreter of or intermediary for what Boltanski labels “ordinary critiques” rather than
vanguard champion of oppressed people’s interests. Both the wronged and those theorists who
try to understand and amplify their struggle aim to render unacceptable a status quo reality in
which wrongs continue, and to work together to offer alternatives to that reality which move
society further toward equality, justice, and fairness for all. This goal is that of promoting a
society in which the wrongs committed against its members are fully accounted for. This means
both that wrongs would be minimized in their scope and number, and that those wronged
would be given a forum to address those wrongs. Drawn together by a shared sense of having
been wronged, everyday people living in Flint longed for and therefore created spaces of

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discourse in which those wrongs could be addressed. This “drawing together” is both the work
and the being of what I am calling community in this study.
When communication infrastructures are strained, restrained and constrained by
economic, cultural, political, and social forces, their ability to generate and sustain effective
zones of civic and social engagement becomes severely diminished. A theory of communication
which seeks only to understand the successes of communication, judging these successes in
terms of positive effects and the measurable vitality of communication infrastructures, would
be likely to miss what was going on under conditions of hard or dark times to the degree that
such regions could be discarded entirely as systemically dysfunctional, incapable of successful
communication in any real or persistent sense. Such a theoretical move would repeat the real
world situation these urban centers find themselves in, sacrifice zones where crumbling
infrastructures are “strip mined,” via a combination of corruption and systematic neglect, for
whatever is of value before being left behind to rot. What is needed is an alternative or
complement to pragmatism to describe these situations: a communication theory for hard
times. In hard times, certainty and immanent knowledge fail. Openness to nonknowledge and
its effects on communication and on material reality is a potential remedy to this failure.
Georges Bataille’s (1986/1957) theory of communication is one potential alternative,
and attempts to take account of both the everyday and the monumental failures of
communication, in addition to its ecstatic and elusive successes. However, it was formed and
initially developed (1988/1954; 2011/1944) during the dark times of the interwar period and
World War II in occupied France. Many intellectuals had fled the continent, for the United

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States and elsewhere. But Bataille stayed in war-torn France to attempt to communicate his
experience of those dark times, even as he knew, as a fact of daily reality, that at any moment
he could have been silenced forever. The theory of communication which results from this
thinking is therefore catastrophic, apocalyptic, in which “no communication between us can
abolish our fundamental difference” based on our essential character as “discontinuous beings”
(Bataille, 1986/1957, 12). While it is understandable in his case that discontinuity is
emphasized, given the general disconnect in global communication which prevailed at the time
and which was the precondition for those dark times, we must make a distinction between dark
times and hard times, and modulate this theory with a more practical take on the conditions
under which communication fails or succeeds given communication infrastructures which are
not paralyzed or destroyed, but decayed, neglected, or dysfunctional.
Dark times are global in scope, and they are characterized by the danger that the world
as such may come to an end. Hard times, by contrast, are profoundly regional, even local, and
coexist with better times in other locations, or in other zones within the same location.
Therefore, the communication infrastructures of sacrifice zones like Flint are likely to be
multiple, and their strength and vitality are likely to vary by the specific characteristics of given
neighborhoods and other regions.
In France, after World War I, the word “communauté” became co-opted by two warring
ideological factions. On the one hand, fascists used it to label their top-down, conformist
relation to an empty, identity-based ideal subscribed to by a hierarchy of followers. On the
other, and equally as damaging to the currency of the term, Marxists of every stripe began to

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use the term to make their utopic visions of universal workers’ liberation from domination
seem more concrete and realizable. Opposed to both of these views was Bataille’s notion that
community, far from springing from a need for unity and univocality, as fascists and Marxists
both presuppose, is instead called for by a lack or failing on the part of individuals to be
complete in themselves: “I repeat, for Bataille, the interrogation: why ‘community’? The
response is given clearly enough: ‘At the base of each being [être], there exists a principle of
insufficiency...’ (principle of incompleteness).” (Blanchot, 1984, p. 15) What Blanchot
emphasizes here is that, in the dark times during which Bataille theorizes and considers
community as a subject of inquiry, community provides the subject with not homogeneity, but
instead with connection despite (or even because of) heterogeneity.
Bataille (1985) draws a distinction between the homogeneous part of society and the
heterogeneous part. Market forces and politics are part of the latter, since they both tie people
together for a good which is beyond each individual to possess or achieve. They make a
common out of people living in society (capital, equality), and exclude (or except) that which
cannot be assimilated into this ‘harmonious’ order. If the homogeneous part of society works
for the good of society itself, writ large, and not the individual, the heterogeneous part is
characterized on the other hand by individuals’ insistence on working on their own behalf, for
themselves.
Flint is, and has been for a long time, at the crossroads of these two general ways of
relating to others. Its institutions have crumbled along with the buildings which house them
(notably, for example, the city’s police force and station, but not the county jail located

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downtown). The city has faced bankruptcy, either real or imminent, on numerous occasions,
and had been placed under emergency management for financial issues prior to the period
during the Crisis, from 2003-2004. As Bataille points out relative to the rise of fascism in 1930’s
Europe, when homogeneous forces are not enough to contain the outbursts of heterogeneity
which periodically erupt from their exception, a space is opened for these repressed forces to
rise under the head of a new king.
Maurice Blanchot was a contemporary of Georges Bataille, a fellow French intellectual
and a close friend. Like Bataille, Blanchot had suffered the horrors of German occupation
firsthand. Unlike Bataille, Blanchot lived through May ’68, and was able to theorize at least a
potential alternative use of these homogeneous forces, on condition that they do nothing.
Blanchot points to a way out of this double bind, between juridical and economic order on the
one hand and chaos and disorder (or, what is perhaps worse, purely arbitrary order) on the
other. His concept of desœuvrement, like the “with” of Nancy’s ontology, points toward relation
itself as the way out of determination of people either in terms of the identity of those people
or groups of people (or populations), or on the other hand in terms of a collective will which
supersedes each and all.
Blanchot describes how it is precisely powerlessness, not an inability to do anything but
an ability to do nothing, which characterizes the properly political action of any notion of “the
people,” set apart from the social forces and hierarchal institutions which ritually co-opt this
concept and infuse it with a will which is not that of “the people,” whose “will,” if it can be
considered such, is precisely to evacuate and eradicate its will:

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The presence of the people? There has already been abuse in recourse to this
complacent word. Or even, it must be heard, not as a group of social forces, ready for
particular political decisions, but in its instinctive refusal to assume any power, in its
absolute mistrust of becoming confounded with a power to whom it delegates, thus in
its declaration of inability. […] The difficulty of being committees of action without
action, or of circles of friends who disavow their prior friendship to call toward
friendship (camaraderie without precondition) which conveys the exigency of being
there, not as person or subject, but as those who manifest an anonymous and
impersonal fraternality. The presence of ‘the people’ in its unlimited ability which, so as
not to limit itself, accepts to do nothing […] (Blanchot, 1984, p. 54-5).

While this notion may seem abstract, Blanchot was specifically describing the events of May ’68
as a privileged example, and the connection to the situation in Flint is that residents there,
many of whom may have been angry and frustrated with government, did not organize that
into demands of a broader sort.
It is impossible to delimit a discursive field as diverse and unpredictable as that which
sprung forth during this rhetorical crisis. Still, calls for an end to emergency management in the
state in general, or the tightening of regulatory rules on lead danger levels, were neither
dominant nor notable within the material from Flint residents gathered for this study. Instead,
their demands were overwhelmingly for everyday, practical need fulfillment, the basic things
like bottled water, help paying skyrocketing city water bills, compensation for time lost, and
advice and instruction on how to stay safe using (or avoiding) tap water. The people of Flint had
immediate needs of reproduction of their means of survival, and had neither time nor explicit
desire for “political” action or production of effects using government or regulatory
mechanisms (la politique, in Rancière’s terms). The struggle for emancipation here takes the
form of demands for the basic human right to safe water. This struggle is one taken up by the

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city’s residents as a whole, to a person—not a population, but a group of singular beings
relating to each other over the wrongs being done to them.
Georges Bataille’s critique of science may seem abstract, and disconnected from the
Flint Water Crisis. But it was born in similar times—the dark times of World War II-era France—
and it was motivated by a similar sense of wrongs that the current study assesses society visits
upon its members. The threat of fascism was real, palpable, material for Bataille and for
Blanchot. And so his quest to unseat knowledge from its perennial throne, and to instead
substitute an impossible quest for absolute nonknowledge, was an attempt to counteract or
remedy these tendencies which were so destructive and so threatening to life and the world.
What Bataille contributes to a theory of communication for hard times is that it is surprising to
find people making connections to each other and forming relationships with each other.
Communication requires giving up one’s certainty, giving in to the nonknowledge of the other.
So communication can, and often does, fail. These failures, however, are greater than the
servile successes of pedestrian science, since connections are formed and relationships are
nurtured in the process of the attempt. It is important to pay attention to these connections as
they form in relation to nonknowledge, and even as they do nothing for those who connect and
relate. But it is not enough to simply describe or observe the contingent, fraught nature of
communication in hard times. More than just noting that relations are both difficult and
necessary, the real value of these connections is the very constitution of those beings relating
to each other and with each other in the world.

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Jean-Luc Nancy, Singularity, and the Fundamental Wrong of Society
If Rancière provides a formula to understand justice as a particular relationship between
society and wronged subjects, precisely how are these subjects wronged by society?
Contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, writing in the wake of poststructural
thinkers like Jacques Derrida, provides a way to understand this not simply in terms of the
everyday acts and events of injustice which constitute daily life—these are very important—but
also, far more fundamentally, as a constitutive relationship between society and its subjects,
who are interpellated
41
as individuals. For Nancy, global capitalism is a force which both divides
people and draws them together. There is much violence in these relations, and this violence is
largely predicated on exploitative practices within global capitalism rather than among beings
as they are. Instead, Nancy posits that being with each other is the most fundamental level on
which beings exist in the world. Thus, treating singular, relational beings as atomized
individuals, which interpellation founds society and global capitalism as such, is a fundamental
wrong which society visits upon all of its members.
Nancy gives this term a particularly negative valence, and uses the disjuncture between
a world of individuals tied together by markets, the world of global liberalism, and the real
world, one in which people come together into communities which form around singular events
of injustice, loss, or celebration, and in which the singularity of each of those people comes into
the world:

41
This is an Althusserian term, indicating a determinate positioning of the subject in relation to society, its
institutions, and their physical-material embodiments. His use of the term was oriented mostly toward what he
called institutional state apparatuses (ISAs—see Althusser, 2014), but the basic concept is applicable to
interpersonal relations as well as institutional ones. See for example James R. Martel (2015) on the political power
of personal resistance to interpellation.

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It concerns our age’s preoccupation with the common character of our existence, in
which we are not first and foremost distinct atoms but rather we exist in accordance
with the relation, ensemble, and sharing [partage] in which discrete entities (individuals,
persons) serve only as facets or punctuations. This very simple and very essential
condition of being escapes us insofar as the evidence of what is given [sa donnée] is
concealed with the stripping away [dérobement] of all the foundations and totems that
could have been passed off as guarantees of a common being or rather, at the very
least, as guarantees of our existence in common. The common should be understood at
once as the banal—that is, the element of a primordial equality irreducible to any effect
of distinction—and, indistinguishably, as shared, in other words, that which only takes
place in, through, and as relation. (Nancy, 2016, p.1, French terms in original)

The way in which a person is hailed, as an individual rather than as a singularity in relation with
a universe and a life-world made up of and connected to other beings in the world, is itself the
source of the most fundamental wrong society has to offer. But it is also, by the same token,
that which draws humanity, for the first time, into a global commonality or community, that of
planet-wide relations between beings. Community is often linked to a mythic, immanent past.
Individuation causes dehumanization—this is its wrong—but it also allows for and requires
relations among every being. The form that these relations take under the sway of a market
economy is less than ideal, but the dissonance between the real, singular nature of beings and
their projection
42
as individuals resolves itself in interrelation among these beings outside of
market conditions. But where and how, exactly, can one find space outside of market
conditions under the hegemony of capital formations?
One answer may lie in reclaiming the humanity lost as an individual in relating to others
as the singularity that really is. Society has no use for singularity, which cannot be exchanged

42
This term is as used in the mathematical subfield of analysis. It refers to the reduction of a function of larger
dimension or domain to a more limited number of dimensions or a restricted domain. It has the effect of distortion
and misapprehension, since, for example, a circle in two dimensions projects to a line segment in one.

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and which has no relative value. Individuals, by contrast, are valuable sources of capital, as
laborers and consumers. But in order to profit from a person as an individual, that person’s
singular relation to the world in which they live must be stripped away, and difference ground
down to allow the cog to fit into place. Markets demand regularity; people must be normalized
into individuals with generalized attributes so that they may be mined for their resources more
efficiently. This process erodes the connections that people form in real spaces and places
among each other, as singularity defined by kairotic, ephemeral, lived relationships gives way to
individuality hemmed in and defined by market relations instead of real human relations.
Thus, the everyday wrongs people face, whether racial microaggressions or the Flint
Water Crisis, are precipitated, perpetuated, and supported first and foremost by society’s
unjust determination of its subjects as individuals rather than the singular beings which connect
to help form the world. Community is the space formed by these wrongs, both everyday and
foundational.
Community necessarily takes place in that which Blanchot has named desœuvrement.
Prior to or beyond work, that which withdraws from work, that which has nothing more
to do either with production, or with achievement, but which encounters
fragmentation, suspense. Community is made of the interruptions of singularities, or of
the suspense that are singular beings. (Nancy, 1999/1986, p. 78-79, my translation)
If markets need people to be interpellated as individuals, the better to profit from them unto
their death, community binds together those upon whom injustice is visited, and becomes a

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common space, or set of spaces held in common, to voice resistance to these wrongs, and from
which to demand redress for them.
If relation is at the heart of community, then this relation is not a result or an
accomplishment, either in itself or as a process toward an end. Instead, the tenuousness of
relation, and the frailty of human communication in connecting people together, make the
maintenance of relation the “unwork” which community promises to ‘produce’: “Unworking
[desœuvrement] is that through which the work does not belong to the order of the achieved,
or the unachieved; it lacks nothing while being nothing accomplished” (Nancy, 2016, p.8).
This work which is not work not because nothing is done, but on the contrary all is done
for nothing, for no result or no accomplishment beyond the fact of connection and relation that
this “unwork” engenders. “The movement [from a societal or political community to a
community of lovers] has been prepared in advance through the motif of the people’s
‘impotent power’ (57/33). The word ‘impotent’ has been privileged in order to designate the
‘instinctive refusal to accept any power’ (54/31) shown by the people of May ‘68. As a refusal of
power, this impotence is not a failure but rather ‘accepts doing nothing” (Nancy, 2016, p.34). In
Flint, residents’ actions and reactions were focused on practical, everyday matters, more so
even than was the case prior to the Water Crisis when residents simply struggled to get by
under “ordinary” circumstances.
What their concerted efforts produced was not a remedy, nor final solutions to
problems, but working strategies and sets of tactics, negotiated as spaces and resources were
adapted to fill pressing needs and only ever provisional and ad hoc. One didn’t find “proper”

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equipment for living, but Flint’s people, of necessity, made do with the tools available, and
supplemented those tools with the “unwork” of relation, negotiation, and communication
amongst themselves to find strategies which would work for everyday needs, always for the
time being. Nancy describes this comportment to each other in relation to each other and to
their precarity or finitude as the common, produced under a regime of globalizing capitalism:
I then tried to suggest that the common is the sharing of finitude. The latter is not
opposed to infinity but provides its measure—that the infinite is opened in the passion
of the relation (‘the communication of passions’ is Bataille’s expression for naming that
for which ‘the sacred’ is ‘a name that is perhaps purely pedantic’). What is
communicated is not a common substance but the very fact of being in relation, the
‘contagion’ which is another name for ‘communication,’ through which nothing is
transmitted other than precisely the fact that there is transmission, passage, and
sharing. (Nancy, 2016, p.9)

Communication is the fact of relation. And community is the latent network of relations among
singular beings, suspended under “normal” conditions of status quo where wrongs are not felt
or not experienced, which comes into being as people relate to each other in abnormal times of
crisis. Communication is not the transmission of a common meaning, any more than community
is the possession of a common trait. Instead, communication and community are both founded
on a very active sense of relation, and a similarly active sense of a being in relation to each
other which fills in the gaps left by the rigid boundaries between beings under “normal,”
market conditions.
Capitalism, as it has developed into a global and globalizing force, has unwittingly united
the world into what remains a mostly fictitious whole:

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On one side and on the other of the gap of the world hollowed out under the name of
‘globalization’, it is indeed community which is separated from and affronted by itself.
Formerly, communities could be thought distinct and autonomous without looking for
their assumption in a generic humanity. But when the world stopped becoming worldly
and when man [sic] stopped becoming human (it is in this sense also that he [sic]
becomes ‘the last man’), when ‘the’ community starts to stammer a strange uniqueness
(as if there must not be but one and as if there must be a unique essence in common),
then ‘the’ community understands that it is that which is gaping [béante]—openly
gaping on its absent unity and essence—and that it affronts this break in itself. (Nancy,
2001, p. 17, my translation)

Yet this fiction has a certain materiality, and this materiality consists in the fundamental fact of
“with” which has characterized capitalism for as long as it has had a colonial or mercantilist
form:
Because if the ‘common’ is the ‘with’, the ‘with’ designates the space without
omnipotence and without omnipresence. In the ‘with’, there cannot be but forces which
affront themselves because of their mutual play and presences which go away because
they are always becoming something other than pure presences (given objects, subjects
comforted by their certitude, world of inertia and entropy). (Nancy, 2001, p. 18, my
translation)

And what I call a “fiction” is nonetheless enforced in reality by a number of forces. If
communism failed to unite a global proletariat in a common struggle for emancipation, it may
have been because capitalism had already accomplished this unity as it spread to include the
entire globe:
So community, far from being that which society has broken or lost, is that which comes
to us [nous arrive]—question, wait, event, imperative—beginning from [à partir de]
society. […] That which, of community, is ‘lost’—the immanence and intimacy of a
communion—is lost in only this sense that such a ‘loss’ is constitutive of ‘community’
itself. (Nancy, 1999/1986, p. 34-35, my translation)

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But this unity is a fractured unity. It comprises hundreds of languages, cultures, ethnicities,
traditions, beliefs, and a range of other predicates. But what makes the idea of a “community of
all” or a common global community possible is not whether or not it is or can be a fait accompli.
Instead, for Nancy, what counts is that people are now, and are now aware of, being in a
world with each other, and that all of the differences that keep a One from emerging from a
“multitude” are actually not an impediment to progress toward community. Rather,
communicating and negotiating those differences to redress the wrongs of society and
capitalism is precisely the “(un)work” of community: “In a way, then, community does not form
itself. It exists only in the infinite, unfigurable tension of one toward the other” (Nancy, 2016,
p.40). And again, Nancy stresses that relation itself is behind every concept of community, and
understanding relation is the key to comprehending what community is or can be: “What
remains undecided as the heart or law of the community is nothing other than the relation
without relation, the impossibility of deciding if there is a relation, or else of giving sense to this
inevitable word (and in this way, similar to the name of God).” (Nancy, 2016, p.52). Relation
itself becomes, for Nancy, the precondition and measure of community and of living together
successfully. And if these relations are doomed to failure under market conditions, then the
hope at the bottom of this Pandora’s box is that, now related to one another globally, a real
common may emerge which has, as its only antecedents, an openness to belonging, a
willingness to relation, and the vulnerability necessary to communicate.
Nancy’s nuanced critique of global capitalism, which makes possible a general
acknowledgement and acceptance of a fundamental state of being with each other in a global

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whole, also emphasizes the atomizing violence of that social-economic formation upon the
people who live under its yoke. People are not individuals. Individuals are formed violently, for
the purpose of better fitting people into profit-making machines. And this formation does a
fundamental wrong to each person in the world, no matter their station, class, status, or
markers of identity. Is there a way out? Blanchot suggests the power of doing nothing, but
during a crisis, this is too expensive a luxury. Something must be done. But if the relations and
relationships formed under the stress of hard times and crisis, and above all under the constant
violence of global capitalism, are to have real and lasting remedies for those on the ground,
then what is required is a relation without reserve, a “being with” without limits. A community
founded on wrongs is, at least potentially, a community which is radically inclusive, excluding
no person on any principle or trait. The next section takes up this “coming community.”
Giorgio Agamben and Radical Inclusion: “The Coming Community” in Flint?
To accept anyone with all of their predicates is to accept that person without exception.
This is the logic of any, of community. Exception has the particular form for Italian philosopher
Giorgio Agamben (1995) of designating both the excluded sacer at the lowest strata of society
and also those who except themselves from the social order as such and place themselves in a
position of superiority and exteriority to society, according to the same logic and as part of the
same operation or process. A community has an inside and an outside. If we are to follow
Agamben’s (1990) determination that any community must accept any member whatsoever,
this means to accept that, as a fundamental feature of any community, inclusion is not based
on markers of identity. Such markers are not stable. But to get at what is most novel in

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Agamben’s formulation of “the coming community,” this radical inclusion not only defines the
community, but also the members themselves as singular beings. Acceptance of a being with all
of its predicates, in other words accepting it as one would accept “anyone,” refocuses
community from sameness and commonality of predicates toward belonging and the
commonality of that belonging.
If community must exist beyond any vision of identity, however complicated or
intersectional, then it must have a fundamental non-relation to exclusion. What is meant here
is that one may be included or not, but one is never excluded on any principle. To have such a
principle would define two populations, those which obey that principle and those which do
not, and thus would collapse back into the standard hierarchical organization of society that
community seeks to escape.
The only way out of this conundrum, far from fascism, tribalism, or communism, is a
sense of community founded on a principle which is always in effect: a community is always
open to those wronged by society in any way. In other words, community is formed not from
markers of inclusion, but instead from the common, shared fact of being wronged by society’s
status quo.
There is no one who does not belong in that “group,” because it is defined in such a way
as to include anyone at all, simply on the basis of their own, singular, sense of belonging:
What could be the politics of any singularity, that is, of a being whose community is
mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist)
nor by the simple absence of conditions (a negative community, such as that recently
proposed in France by Maurice Blanchot), but by belonging itself? (Agamben, 1993, p.
85, translation modified)

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A community defined by belonging, as an acts or series of acts and as a relation between being
beings living together, is one which excludes no one on principle. If we consider the
dehumanization inherent in individualization and market economics to be a factor not just for
the subaltern classes, but even and especially so for the ruling class. As a result of having
become creatures of pure capital, their dehumanization is more complete. So, a “community of
the wronged” is available to all, even to those who would view it as an open existential threat.
Anyone can always belong to it, because one need only acknowledge society’s wrongs and their
harms to do so.
This does not mean that wrongs are shared or common. Instead, taking a cue from
Nancy, these wrongs might be called “singular,” in the sense that they are particular for each
being in time and space. Still, there is space in Agamben’s conception of community for sharing
in common. But instead of sharing a predicate (African-American, resident of Flint, working-
class, etc.), what is shared is sharing. Taking Blanchot’s assumption of the fundamentality of the
ability to do nothing in another direction, for Agamben it is not the lack of demands and
accomplishments on the part of the “people” which defines a community able to survive
despite facing constant opposition from the social order; instead it is the lack of required
predicates and a common, shared sense of belonging which defines his “coming community”:
Any is the thing with all its properties, none of which, however, constitutes difference.
In-difference with respect to properties is what individuates and disseminates
singularities, makes them lovable (quodlibetable). Just as the right human word is
neither the appropriation of what is common (language) nor the communication of
what is proper, so too the human face is neither the individuation of a generic facies nor
the universalization of singular traits: it is any face, in which what belongs to common
nature and what is proper are absolutely indifferent. (Agamben, 1993, p. 19, translation
modified)

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This belonging without reserve, this indifference to predicates and properties of identity which
individuate people in favor of an acceptance of anyone whomsoever, is itself what Agamben
isolates as the only “requirement” of his coming community. And in the case of the Flint Water
Crisis, although adaptations differed, no one was spared harm or the threat of harm because of
social standing, wealth, ethnicity, or any other stable marker of identity. Wrongs differed, but
all were wronged. People in Flint shared the fact of having been wronged even if the particular
wrongs were singular rather than common.
This interplay between what is common and shared on the one hand, and what is
singular on the other, is related for Agamben through the concept of a threshold. A threshold is
neither inside nor outside. In no way is it a limit. Instead, a threshold is the coming into
existence of an outside which defines the singularity as such and (and as) its relation to an
exterior world. The threshold is the figure of Agamben’s coming community:
Any is the figure of pure singularity. Any singularity has no identity, it is not determinate
with respect to a concept, but neither is it simply indeterminate; rather it is determined
only through its relation to an idea, that is, to the totality of possibilities. Through this
relation, as Kant said, singularity borders all possibility and thus receives its omnimoda
determination not from its participation in a determinate concept or some actual
property (being red, Italian, Communist), but only by means of this bordering. […] In
Kantian terms this means that what is in question is not a limit (Schranke) that knows no
exteriority, but a threshold (Grenze), that is, a point of contact with an external space
that must remain empty. Any adds to singularity only an emptiness, only a threshold:
Any is a singularity plus an empty space, a singularity that is finite and, nonetheless,
indeterminable according to a concept. But a singularity plus an empty space can only
be a pure exteriority, a pure exposure. Any, in this sense, is the event of an outside.
(Agamben, 1993, p. 67, translation modified)

And the case of the voices from Flint gathered in this study, who were not united, but worked
together in a shared set of living and communicative spaces and places in their struggle for bare

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life, seems to support at least some version of both Blanchot’s and Agamben’s “communities”
in terms of its own native expression of that concept.
Because it falls so far below standards for U.S. society, the loss of water security (of
access therefore to bare life) was a dire threat that, in itself, forms less a political demand than
an existential need, and people in Flint did not seek to accomplish anything, seeking only the
continuation of their lives in a restored zone of water security. But because lead-tainted water
flowed into the homes of the well-off and the working class, of Blacks, Whites, and Latinx
people, of the old and the young, the specific details of how people dealt with what was
happening to them was not consistent—not at all—but the water presented common problems
shared by all, regardless of any predicates. And accepting the need to relate to others
regardless of station, identity, or any other predicates in order to survive in the life world, a
state of existence in place in Flint long before the Flint Water Crisis or emergency management,
is an act of love, the founding act of love for Agamben’s coming community: “Singularity
exposed as such is any, that is, lovable. […] The lover wants the loved one with all of its
predicates, its being such as it is.” (Agamben, 1993, p. 2, translation modified)
Agamben’s figure of the lover recalls the central figure of Marguerite Duras’s (1982)
novel La maladie de la mort (The Malady of Death) which figures so heavily in the second half
of Blanchot’s (1984) La communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community). This similarity
would seem to indicate that, however one defines community in terms of radical inclusivity,
one finds at bottom the open-ended maintenance of relations of anyone to anyone else
regardless of who they are. Reinforcing this conjuncture of thinking on community, this also

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echoes Nancy’s ontology, founded on with, on relation without precondition and without
reserve.
For Agamben, it is precisely language which is the medium of this with: “Language […]
transforms singularities into members of a class, whose meaning is defined by a common
property (the condition of belonging ϵ).” (Agamben, 1993, p. 9, translation modified) But this
belonging is threatened if access to language, to communication, to connection to the common
linguistic reality which forms the basis for the life world, is lost. And, in an era when
communication itself has been turned into a mere commodity, the effect of linguistic
alienation, and thus separation from this fundamental sense of belonging, is lost with that
access.
Whereas under the old regime the estrangement of the communicative essence of
humans took the form of a presupposition that served as a common foundation, in the
society of the spectacle it is this very communicativity, this generic essence itself (i.e.
language), that is separated in an autonomous sphere. What hampers communication is
communicability itself; humans are separated by what unites them. Journalists and
mediacrats are the new priests of this alienation from human linguistic nature.
(Agamben, 1993, p. 82)

Those who are not able to speak, to be heard, to be understood and to understand, are
doomed to be silenced and excluded from the social order. They continue to speak, amongst
and to themselves, but in fractured, fractious ways, provisional and conditioned by the
tenuousness of uncertain circumstances, situations, and events.
And this fundamental wrong of society, this linguistic (and therefore total) alienation, is
what is held in common across and against all predicates: “Even more than economic necessity

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and technological development, what drives the nations of the earth toward a single common
destiny is the alienation from linguistic being, the uprooting of all peoples from their vital
dwelling in language.” (Agamben, 1993, p. 83) What happens in a rhetorical crisis such as this
one is that the fact of one’s being thrown into a maelstrom of linguistic and informational
uncertainty leaves everyone, experts and lay folk, the powerful and the powerless, rich and
poor, at a loss to predict the best course of action, to know what to do, or even to determine
what in fact is occurring on the ground.
And what one finds in such a situation is that the only way forward is together,
accepting others such as they are for the sake of brute survival:
The any in question here relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to a
common property (to a concept, for example: being red, being French, being Muslim),
but only in its being such as it is. Singularity is thus freed from the false dilemma that
obliges knowledge to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the
intelligibility of the universal. (Agamben, 1993, p. 1, translation modified)

The Flint Water Crisis, like any such series of catastrophic episodes, exposes a fact of relation
which remains hidden from view under “normal” circumstances of status quo uneventfulness:
that we can now only relate to one another fully if we admit that we have no common language
left in which to speak save our own shared sense of having been wronged.
GM was the source of Flint’s prosperity, and was, by the same stroke and with the same
mechanisms, a primary source of its troubles. The seemingly permanent hard times in which
the city’s residents live is a direct result of this longstanding relationship between corporation

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and city. But these hard times led to a thematization and exploration of community, which in
turn lends the city strength to cope with this hardship.
In hard times, certainty and immanent knowledge fail. Openness to nonknowledge and
its effects on communication and on material reality is a potential remedy to this failure. The
main beneficiaries of a drive for immanent knowledge and certainty are market forces. People
are forced to determine themselves as individuals on the market, instead of as singular beings
defined by their actively being with each other in the life world. This fundamental wrong of
society, hailing and entrapping singular beings as individuals, has as a result and a remedy the
formation of communities of radical inclusion, necessarily sharing only effects or a sense of
having been wronged. The intrication of the concept of community into Flint’s communication
infrastructure is therefore no accident; this intrication has always been a response to and an
attempt at redress of societal wrongs.
Hard times are a crucible of community. If this is too strong an argument, then at least it
is true that, given a shared sense of wrongs, like the Flint Water Crisis, or a crumbling local
economy, or decayed and dysfunctional city infrastructure, or any number of conditions held in
common by people in Flint, community has both a reason to exist and a medium in which to
grow: mutual support and communication to negotiate the void left by retreating capital and its
entourage. If markets separate us into individuals, then they also expose a truth about our
being that is far more fundamental—that all beings live in community with one another, on a
global level. And if this truth is borne out on the ground in some measure in Flint, it should
neither be a surprise that it happened there, nor that that its theory comes from a foreign place

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rather than closer to home. Flint is a sacrifice zone, and as such, it is mostly forgotten or
ignored. The theory presented here, born of a strong abreaction to fascism and its spread
through interwar and post-World War II Europe, is itself mostly forgotten or ignored as well.
Community itself, as a concept, is undertheorized and tends to drag with it unnecessary
or unhealthy connotations (e.g. the “Gemeinschaft” of the Nazis). The goal here was not to
have the final say on this concept. Rather, this vision of community as formed as a group of
radical inclusion based on having been wronged was operational. In Chapters 4 and 5,
communication data from various sources is arranged into a dynamic system, designed to
preserve the contingency of the vortex of crisis. Chapter 4 looks at big stories of the Crisis, from
national news sources, government, and the testimony of experts. On its own, it paints a
picture of a war between two master narratives of blame. But, in Chapter 5, local perspectives
trouble this pat summary of the issues on the ground, allowing a dialectical read through these
materials in relation to the big stories. This dialectical reading of discourse focuses on the
nature of and reactions to wrongs committed. Its emphasis is in showing how the notions of
community, connection, and relation presented in this chapter played out in the
communication data gathered from the duration of the Flint Water Crisis.

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Chapter 4: Narrative in Crisis
Communication in a sacrifice zone is difficult, but necessary. This difficulty, due to
wrongs visited on people by society, is the “resistance” that does the work of forming and
sustaining community to combat this difficulty and these wrongs. But from without, it is much
easier to simplify events and conditions on the ground into grand narratives of control and
mastery over the situation. A drama is seen to unfold. The scene or setting is limited and
restricted, marked off from the everyday world. Actors are designated to play particular, pre-
ordained roles. Heroes and villains are cast, and play out their actions on the stage. And the
story is told with a clear moral lesson.
Chapter 5 looks at the other side of these master narratives, the small stories and
counter-narratives which complicate this dramatic view of the Flint Water Crisis. The materials
assembled and analyzed here, by contrast, conflict not in their certainty, nor in their authority.
Instead, which actors play which roles is the only dispute. Was Governor Snyder a villain who
intended harm, or a hero who stepped in as soon as he knew something was wrong? Was it a
regulatory failure at the state level, or the federal level? But aside from whom to blame, little
differed among various national news accounts and government sources. This phalanx of the
narrative of scapegoating blame overshadowed the real conditions on the ground, and the
demands and needs of people there. Narrative’s function of providing meaning to events was
put in crisis by this dramatistic ritual of scapegoating and sacrifice.

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The Cycle of Guilt and Victimage: The Sacrifices of Flint, Michigan
Big stories paint set narratives with stock plots and characters. In the case of the Flint
Water Crisis, grand narratives focused on blame and guilt in an attempt to recover normalcy
through ritual sacrifice of individuals, of institutions, and of places. Kenneth Burke’s analysis of
tragedy, though literary in nature, sheds a great deal of light on the human tragedy that is the
Flint Water Crisis. He speaks of a cycle whereby a victim is ritually laden with guilt and then
sacrificed for the benefit of society in general. Of particular value is his notion that tragedy
exceeds the law, and cannot be bound by any ordinary functioning of a social machine:
“Tragedy is a complex kind of trial by jury in which the author symbolically charges himself [sic]
or his [sic] characters with transgressions not necessarily considered transgressions in law, and
metes out condemnation and penance by tests far deeper than any that could be codified in
law:” (Burke, 1965/1954, p. 195) In the Flint Water Crisis, there is no law that can compensate
for the lead poisoning of thousands of residents. Strictly speaking, the acts that led to this event
were not in themselves illegal, and in fact were in nearly all cases legitimated by laws and
practices of the state in place prior to the events themselves.
If the Flint Water Crisis is an example of a tragedy, it is because people struggled to live
despite massive injustice in city and state governance. But Burke’s (1965/1954) analysis also
contains a sense of Rancière’s (1998) emancipatory insight about being wronged as the uniting
state of people here, putting them in solidarity with anyone who has been wronged by any
society or government. Burke highlights the sense of purpose that accompanies any tragic
event or narrative:

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Tragedy […] particularly concerns the complexities of ethics and psychology because of
the close connection between tragedy and purpose. We might almost lay it down as a
rule of thumb: Where someone is straining to do something, look for evidence of the
tragic mechanism. (Burke, 1965/1954, p. 195)

It is difficult not to hear this “rule of thumb” in the same register as the struggle for equality
that animates Rancière’s text.
Burke’s (1965/1954) analysis of the tragic contains the following counterintuitive
insight, especially puzzling in light of the present case: “For the tragic symbol is the device par
excellence for recommending a cause. How could one better picture an issue in an appealing
light than by showing that people were willing to be destroyed on behalf of it?” (Burke,
1965/1954, p. 196) In light of the Flint Water Crisis, a question immediately arises: people have
been destroyed, but were they willing victims? And if they were not—one would be hard
pressed to argue otherwise—then how would this affect the redemptive quality of their
sacrifice? In other words, if it recommends a cause to sacrifice a willing victim, then if a victim is
coerced or forced to be sacrificed, does this have the opposite effect? Perhaps. But what is
important to note here is that the “normal” course of tragedy required that the victim be
willing, so it would be expected that if this regular order were disrupted, it might disrupt the
entire cycle of guilt, victimage and redemption. And there can be no doubt, given even the
small sampling of records of protest collected and analyzed in Chapter 4, neither Flint as an
entity nor its residents as living beings were willing to be victims in this case.
In describing literary tragedy, Burke (1966) seems uncannily to also describe the
situation in Flint. It is difficult not to hear the echoes of a community sacrificed for the sake of

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the “higher” register of moneyed interests in the following passage about Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus:
Take some pervasive unresolved tension typical of a given social order (or of life in
general). While maintaining the ‘thought’ of it in its overall importance, reduce it to
terms of personal conflict […]. Feature some prominent figure who, though possessing
admirable qualities, carries this conflict to excess. Put him [sic] in a situation that points
up this conflict. Surround him [sic] with a cluster of characters whose relations to him
and to one another help motivate and accentuate his excesses. So arrange the plot so
that, after a logically motivated turn, his [sic] excesses lead inevitably to his [sic]
downfall. Finally, suggest that his [sic] misfortune will be followed by a promise of
general peace. (Burke, 1966, p. 94)

In the big stories of the Crisis, agonism replaced real observation and analysis. One can see, on
the left and the right of the political spectrum, an attempt to co-opt this tragic narrative by
posing different figures as the “featured” person in the event: notably, Governor Snyder on the
left, and EPA Director Susan Hedman on the right.
What is far more interesting here, however, is to place Flint itself in the featured role. In
this case, its suitability as a sacrificial victim is conditioned, in the economic terms in which the
Water Crisis’s origin is best understood, as the original sin of poverty. The “general peace”
promised is a return to the First World, where clean, safe water is a guarantee of the state and
not the province of an elite or a subset of the general population. Flint was sacrificed because
the excesses of its debt—echoing Nietzsche’s critique in the second essay of the Genealogy of
Morals—were transmuted into its guilt.
Burke (1967/1941) links the formation a solid identity to the process of scapegoating in
a way that seems to indicate a certain negative relationship between the “normal” acts of

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victimage and scapegoating on the one hand, and the formation of a community or other social
formation without hierarchical divisions and order, and without inclusion requirements based
on identity markers, that Nancy, Blanchot, Agamben and Bataille all call for, each in his own
way:
Even if one would symbolically form a rôle by becoming ‘most thoroughly and efficiently
himself,’ he must slough off ingredients that are irrelevant to this purpose (ingredients
that are ‘impure,’ if only in the chemical sense.) […] Since the symbolic transformation
involves a sloughing off, you may expect to find some variant of killing in the work. (I
treat indictment, vituperation, vindictiveness against a ‘villain,’ etc., as attenuated
aspects of this same function.) So we get to the ‘scapegoat,’ the ‘representative’ or
‘vessel’ of certain unwanted evils, the sacrificial animal upon whose back the burden of
these evils is ritualistically loaded. (Burke, 1967/1941, p. 38-40)

In a line of argument that closely follows Agamben’s logic of the exception, the pure society is
formed by “sloughing off” elements of itself deemed impure.
This link that Burke points out rather uncritically is of the utmost importance for
understanding the present case. Flint is both the “impure” which must be “sloughed off” from
general U.S. society as backwards and destitute and also the site where, for the EPA, the MDEQ,
and those indicted by Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette’s investigation know full well, a
great number of falls have been taken in a sloughing off of the impure members of these
bureaucratic organizations.
Taking this analysis further, and linked more closely to the Continental critique of
hierarchy and inequality as constantly in a process of regulation of populations, Burke sees an
intimate link between hierarchy on the one hand, and guilt and victimage on the other. In a

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curious but very clearly argued passage, Burke (1965/1954) explains the cycle of guilt and
victimage as a regulatory function of hierarchical societies:
Basically, the [Christian] pattern proclaims a principle of absolute ‘guilt,’ matched by a
principle that is designed for the corresponding absolute cancellation of that guilt. And
this cancellation is contrived by victimage, by the choice of a sacrificial offering that is
correspondingly absolute in the perfection of its fitness. […] In brief, given ‘original sin,’
(tribal, or ‘inherited’ guilt), it follows, by the ultimate logic of symbols, that the
compensatory sacrifice of a ritually perfect victim would be the corresponding ‘norm.’
Hence, insofar as the religious pattern (of ‘original sin’ and sacrificial redeemer) is
adequate to the ‘cathartic’ needs of a human hierarchy […] it would follow that the
promoting of social cohesion through victimage is ‘normal’ and ‘natural.’ (Burke,
1965/1954, p. 283-284)

For Burke, as for Perrow (1981), sacrifice, labeled accident or embodied in a scapegoat, is actual
an integral part of the normal function of society’s status quo. But the status quo which is
maintained is that of the regular function of capital, not of human society itself in terms of
relations among beings, or in terms of institutions for everyday living, such as infrastructure or
environmental (life world) concerns.
Rancière’s (1998) critique explodes this normalizing view of hierarchy and inequality as
counterproductive to emancipatory ends. For Rancière, victimage always results from and
furthers unequal relations among members of society. In his terms, anything which serves the
preservation of hierarchy is part of the police function of society, which he contrasts with the
struggle for emancipation characterized by people’s demands for equal status in that society. In
other words, the cycle of guilt and victimage, as Burke rightly points out, buttresses hierarchical
organizations of people in society, and is a major stumbling block to any real advancement of
the emancipatory aims of people, such as people in Flint. Because Flint’s people are victims,

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they are not allowed to be speaking subjects within political discourse. Hierarchy is preserved
at the cost of their health and lives, and while this may be “normal,” it is certainly not just.
While it is useful to think of the Flint Water Crisis as a tragedy, in Burke’s terms, the
lessons learned and value to be gained from experiencing this tragedy have nothing at all to do
with the preservation of the regular, normal function of society in and through “normal
accidents.” Scapegoating serves a purpose, but that purpose is not progressive or constructive.
Instead, it serves to give society an alibi for its wrongs and an immanent resolution of its
pressing problems. In the Flint Water Crisis, scapegoating substituted for discourse, analysis,
and debate for much of the popular news media covering the story.
Scapegoating dominated the major news media outlets. The overall goal of the
selection, capture, and analysis of major news organizations and government documents was
not to present a complete picture of the news coverage and political discourse surrounding the
Flint Water Crisis. Quite the contrary, the design of the study was focused much more narrowly
on “taking a peek” into those narrative domains at key moments in time, during episodes
outlined in Appendix A, and not to gather a whole-cloth record of all discourse on the topic over
the entire trajectory of events. It sufficed to confirm trends and patterns from small slices of
time in narrowly defined domains of discourse to get a sense of how pervasive and unified
major news coverage was during the height of the Crisis.
Thus, key decisions limited the scope of the corpus in an attempt to capture moments in
the same fragmentary and serendipitous way that someone looking for these materials during
the Crisis, had they had significance at the time, would have faced in gathering them. Thus,

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limitations such as access to a full range of documents were less important than getting a slice
of discourse during key moments.
Dates from the timeline (see Appendix A) were selected for their significance, and each
date was given a “halo” of 1-3 days during which captures would be made. The Internet
Archive’s Wayback Machine was used to generate PDF copies of web pages on those key dates.
For government discourse, FDSys and Govinfo handled federal documents, and local and state
government and agency websites made available some documents as well, although these
were limited given the very low compliance of Michigan government with accountability and
record-keeping of their activities.
Large corporate news outlets were chosen partly for their currency within the national
news industry, balance of bias or leaning, and also for convenience. The cable news networks
selected were MSNBC, CNN, and FOX News; the national newspapers included the Wall Street
Journal, the Washington Post, and USA Today, The New York Times had extensive coverage of
the events, and was an initial choice, but since their archive has been behind a pay wall for
longer than the onset of the Crisis, I was unable to capture those stories using the same
method.
The main page of each site on each date was accessed first. If it contained no stories on
the Crisis, this was noted. If it contained a story, the place on the page was noted, the page was
captured to PDF, and the link to the story or stories were followed and those pages saved as
well. The result was a corpus of documents on three-day haloes around important moments
within the episodes of the Crisis.

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The Wayback Machine is a wonderful tool for research. It allowed me to simulate a
snapshot overview of moments in time significant to the current study in a fraction of the time
it would have taken to assemble print resources (or even individual digital resources). However,
I acknowledge that this method is not without its difficulties, and I feel the need to address
them before incorporating these “data” into my findings.
First, the Wayback Machine does not capture the full Internet. Its crawlers only gather
the resources they are told to, and much of what is online at any given time, whether it was
originally deep Web or not, is lost in the process of “preservation”. However, I use the term
“full Internet” here as if it had any meaning whatsoever, which it does not. The Internet is not
capturable, not because profit motives get in the way (the case of Google) or issues of
selectivity (the Internet Archive), but precisely because, qua Internet, its frontiers are ever-
expanding. Selection must be made; the Wayback Machine is therefore an adequate solution to
gathering Internet data.
But what of the further abuse of using this Internet data to try to capture the media and
political discourse in general at various moments in time? Surely a trip to the Wayback Machine
cannot successfully substitute for carefully recording the discursive “data” in situ? Well, in fact,
the argument here is that it can be such a substitute, given the understanding that the study
was not seeking to produce a general or overall picture. Rather, what was sought were
ruptures, irruptions of brute reality that thwart attempts to assemble these moments into big
stories, the better to file them away and never deal with their problematics. So if any are found,
it is enough to suggest that the phenomenon of rupture described here exists, without needing

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to show it as a “population-level” phenomenon. In that the current study is trying to find the
Real behind the population, it is inappropriate and unnecessary to suggest that the data need
to be “representative”; they merely need to be genuine discursive “data”, which the Wayback
Machine’s subset of the broader media landscape provided. A big picture of big stories was all
that was required.
This rough sketch tells a complex series of tales, a web of narrative undermined by a
certain non-relation to nonknowledge in favor of full, immanent knowledge of the situation and
its remedies. This battle between what was known and what was not knowable played out
among the various experts weighing in on what was going on and what to do. And this complex
set of narratives was as much a controlling force in that situation as it was a material product of
that situation. As the next section goes to show, the technical rhetoric of experts was most
often used to ignore material reality and conditions. In its place, fictions and omissions paved
the way for a broad range of injustices happening on top of the lead-in-water issues relating to
the Crisis. Technical reason, designed to understand and explain material phenomena, became
technical unreason, determined to cover up unsightly features of reality that failed to match
broader, non-scientific (political-economic) master narratives.
Technical (Un)Reason: Expert, Regulatory, and Advisory Narratives
When a municipal water supply is poisoned, no one is spared. This is true despite the
fact that lead levels in water in homes, hospitals, and other buildings varied wildly, due to
differences in construction, composition of service lines, budget for filtration, and a host of

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other contributing factors. The scarcity of the exceptions
43
confirms the rule that those living in
Flint, and in some outlying areas on the city limits, shared in their common sense of having
been wronged. The switch to Flint River water was supported by solid science. In itself, the fact
that the river was the city’s backup water source, and would be relied upon for a transitional
period between the GLWA and the KWA, was not judged by anyone to be a problem. This
judgment was the result of a 2004 study performed by the Michigan Department of
Environmental Quality, along with the U.S. Geological Survey and the Flint Water Utilities
Department. The study determined that, if proper corrosion controls were maintained in the
treatment of Flint River water, the Flint River provided a safe and adequate alternative should if
it become necessary to use it (Bridge Magazine Staff, 2016). But this expert determination was
misinterpreted or misunderstood by emergency manager Darnell Earley, and the necessary
component of corrosion controls were not used (Williams & Smith, 2015). The disconnect
between the intent and conclusions of the expert science of the report and its use as a political-
economic tool to cut corners and save money was pronounced, and had material effects on the
ground. Where technical reason is overridden by political will, the knowledge and
recommendations of experts are ignored even as they are apparently consulted and relied
upon.
Expert testimony is supposed to settle disputes over real-material conditions and
phenomena. But expert knowledge needs experts for interpretation and analysis; when non-

43
The use of lead service lines was inconsistent in the city. Some parts, especially on the city’s traditionally African-
American North side, had higher concentrations of lead-in-water than other areas. Some residents have had
minimal or no ill effects, and had service lines made of other, safer materials (Smith, 2015d). This added to the
problem of service line removal when it was revealed that the city did not have adequate records of where the
lead lines were located, and tracing the history of water service lines in the city became a project which required
the help of the local campus of the University of Michigan (Carmody, 2016; Smith, 2016a).

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experts encounter this discourse, there is an inevitable effect of their nonknowledge of the field
in question on their interpretations. Interpretations by non-experts is most often
misinterpretation. But this was not the only effect of political will on the situation in Flint.
Hanna-Attisha needed population-level data of the children in Flint to determine the extent and
causes of the problems she was seeing in her young patients. But when she approached the
state’s health service, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Sevies (MDHHS), for
access to this data, her requests stalled, and then were denied (Hanna-Attisha, 2018). The
reason for this denial was revealed to her only later. Hanna-Attisha reports that a 2015 MDHHS
analysis found a spike in the blood-lead levels in the summer of 2014, coinciding with the
switch of water sources. Hanna-Attisha sought other, less direct means of getting the data,
instead looking to the office of Representative Dan Kildee, Flint’s Congressman in the U.S.
House, to request (and successfully obtain) the necessary data (Hanna-Attisha, 2018). Here, the
position of expert was used by MDHHS officials to actively cover up a life-threatening issue,
denying other experts the tools they need to conduct their necessary work.
The misrepresentation of reality by expert officials and regulatory bodies in the state
was not limited to those other experts who might puncture their phalanx of silence and report
the true and dire conditions to the world. The people in Flint were fed misrepresentations and
outright lies about the safety and condition of the water. The spokesman for the Michigan
Department of Environmental Quality, Brad Wurfel, time and again issued statements designed
to quell independent inquiry and local resistance to the narrative of normalcy that the state had
been advancing since residents noticed issues and became concerned about their safety.
Wurfel famously responded to the July 2015 leaking of memos from whistleblower and former

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regional EPA official Miguel Del Toral on lead in Flint’s water with a claim that “anyone who is
concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax” (Smith, 2015, para. 4). The
disconnect between the assurances of Wurfel and the MDEQ and the growing body of local test
reporting based in sound science meant that residents had even less reason to trust that their
state government had their best interests at heart.
Even as late as Hanna-Attisha’s press conference, coming on the heels of that of Marc
Edwards a few weeks earlier, Wurfel continued his denials, to the point of directing a
dismissive—and misogynist—criticism of the doctor and her message at the press conference.
He claimed that the water controversy was becoming “near hysteria” before once again making
the false assurance that “Flint's drinking water is safe in that it's meeting federal and state
standards” (Flint Water Advisory Task Force, 2016, p. 18). Where the state needed to nurse
weak connections between its messages and messengers and the people of Flint, it simply
exacerbated mistrust by offering residents only the denial of the reality they were facing.
Where communication is used to bring people together to understand and respond to
reality, rhetoric is not likely to be in crisis. But this communication must be open to the
possibility on the part of those communicating that their own narrative is not correct, either in
part or in full. It demands a willingness to hear other sides of the story and other versions of the
narrative and of material conditions. It means taking these differences into account in any
attempt to communicate with other people. And it was a certain unwillingness to be wrong, an
unwillingness, that is, to allow one’s narrative to change to respond to events and people on
the ground, that short-circuited any rhetorical solution to meet the needs of the people living

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through the Crisis in Flint. The stubborn desire and demand for immanent knowledge inevitably
bring about and exacerbate rhetorical crisis. Nowhere was this exacerbation of crisis more
evident than in Wurfel’s “expert” communication.
Facts on the ground were in dispute. Scientists disagreed with scientists, and the fates
Flint’s residents hung in the balance, far beyond their input or control. But not only was the
status of Flint’s material reality being debated: up for debate, vigorous debate, locally and
abroad, was just whom to blame, whom to address to remedy the situation, or even which
sources to trust for information about just what the situation was. But whose voices are to
count in such a debate? Who is included in the public sphere where these issues were to be
settled? In times of debate over the material conditions of reality, society traditionally looks to
experts. While in former configurations of function, these experts may have been from a hunter
class, or a warrior class, or a priest class, modernity looks to experts who are masters of any
one of a vast array of atomic technical vernaculars. Their reason stands in for the truth, and
provides an alibi in case the remedy is ineffective or even harmful. Technical reason was
characterized by Farrell and Goodnight (1981) as a dialectical counterpart to social reason, the
latter being that way of understanding and explaining the life world with a view to public
knowledge and comprehension. Technical reason, quite the contrary, was described as
discourse and perspectives so limited in its understanding of the problem and its antecedents
that its adherents often, as in the case of Three Mile Island, have their expertise outstripped by
the very systems they build and supposedly control. A reliance on technical reason, at the
expense of a translation of this reason and work into social reason, is the foundation of modern
life.

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There had been some attention brought to the situation by cases such as that of Lee-
Anne Walters, whose lead water levels measured 108 parts per billion (ppb) when she reached
out for help with her children’s strange symptoms, whose hair was starting to fall out and who
were developing rashes (Smith, 2015a). Walters reported the findings to the regional EPA office
in Chicago, where her story reached the desk of regulations manager Miguel Del Toral. A series
of memos, both internal to his EPA office and shared with members of local and state
government, revealed that her case was indeed cause for concern, according to Del Toral, and
should have been actionable already in that form. The memo of June 24, 2015 went into great
detail about the source of Walters’ lead-in-water levels, citing the lack of corrosion controls as
the cause both of the prior violations over TTHM (Total Trihalomethanes) levels in city water
and the current violation in Walters’ home over lead (United States Environmental Protection
Agency – Region 5, 2015). However, as an individual case, Walters’s experience was being
explained away by state agencies like the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality
(MDEQ) in terms of internal plumbing (absurd, since Walters had previously had PVC pipes
installed in her home) and the involvement and supposed manipulation of Virginia Tech lead-in-
water research specialist and reputed activist and maverick Marc Edwards (a personal
assessment which, at least for Dr. Hanna-Attisha, rang quite untrue
44
).

44
In her book (Hanna-Attisha, 2018), she relates many points of contact with Marc Edwards, including her
apprehensive first approach while she was in the preliminary stages of examining and analyzing her initial study
data. She was warned insistently not to see or communicate with Edwards by her close friend and former EPA
scientist and engineer Elin, whose story of the 1999-2004 Washington, D.C. Water Crisis was a motor for Hanna-
Attisha’s decision to climb the uphill battle she faced to advocate for Flint’s children. Hanna-Attisha decided to
meet with Edwards, but was warned again not to share findings. Eventually, though, the two bonded at least as
scientists, with Edwards providing advice on key factors for the legitimacy of her study, such as of the need for
peer review in a study of this magnitude, and the need to consider seasonal variation in blood lead levels, since
weather affects the rate of lead leaching.

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Edwards, a professor of civil engineering at Virginia Tech University, had previously
studied the Washington D.C. Water Crisis, where sections of the city had test reporting of high
levels of lead in city water (“Lead Contamination in Washington, D.C. …” 2019). When he came
to Flint, his reputation as an activist preceded him. And while he had the clout of a major
research university behind him, and the status of a leading expert on lead-in-water, he found it
difficult to connect that expertise either to a large pool of data or a receptive audience for his
warnings.
But unlike Edwards and his research team, Hanna-Attisha gained access to population-
level data of blood lead levels in Flint’s children, owing to her capacity as head of Pediatric
Residency at Hurley Hospital, a city hospital servicing most of Flint’s (disproportionately
disadvantaged) young people. And it is not on the level of the individual case that institutions of
technical reason like the MDEQ make their claims or cast their gaze, but on populations, on
trends, and on averages. In Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha’s (2018) documentation of her struggles
and memoir of her experience What the Eyes Don’t See, she stresses that one attitude that
needed to be changed was a move from the individual-level assessment of lead levels found in
homes toward a population-level assessment of the effects of lead-tainted water on the city’s
people as a whole. The study that Hanna-Attisha and her research team published (Hanna-
Attisha et al., 2016) detailing the case on a clinical level was the result of the application of
sound scientific and research principles, and it needed to be so in order to overcome the
resistance and sometimes hostility from state agents from the MDEQ and MDHHS.

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It is difficult to overstate the significance of Hanna-Attisha’s role as mediator between
the institutions of technical reason which were forming a phalanx against any action being
taken on the one hand and the people (particularly the children) of Flint and their experiences
and needs during and after the Crisis. But it is important to note as well here that what
facilitates this dialogue between the individual struggles of Flint’s people and its children, and
the striking data that told a story of a situation where every child in the city of nearly 100,000
people need to be medically treated as if they had been poisoned with lead for a period of
years, is Hanna-Attisha’s role as a translator. Her ability to translate her technical reason, useful
for dealing with the state and federal agencies, into social reason, useful for people living
through the Crisis in real time, was an essential factor in catalyzing forces to bring to bear on
Flint’s situation. This ability to bridge the chasm between technical and social reason could be
seen not just in terms of dialogue with her young patients, but, far more fundamentally, in
terms of her very actions of advocacy themselves. In other words, Hanna-Attisha’s activism
45

and struggle are themselves as much expressions of her understanding of the need for social
reason to turn her science into real action as her dialogue with Flint mayor Karen Weaver over
bathing in city water in March 2016 (City of Flint, 2016) or, once she was aware of the problems
with the water, her insistence on breastfeeding with her pregnant and nursing patients (Hanna-
Attisha, 2018).

45
Hanna-Attisha (2018) recalls a strong personal history of activist engagement, including creating an
environmental health undergraduate major for herself at the University of Michigan and seeking out an
appointment in Flint precisely for the difficulties it was having. In 2011, when she started the job as Director, both
Flint and the pediatric residency program she was inheriting were in bad shape. Believing that it is impossible to
administer effective health care without understanding a broad range of factors in a person’s life, she founded and
heads the Community Pediatrics program at Hurley Medical Center, where she challenges residents to get to know
Flint and its circumstances to provide better care tailored to the needs of its communities.

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If material reality and solid, peer-reviewed science was on the side of experts on the
ground in Flint, this brute force of technical reason was still not enough to overcome technical-
hegemonic narratives of dismissal. And these dismissals of the singularity and particular
significance, valence, and archaeology of the case of Flint continued beyond the Crisis in its
acute form. First there is the matter of the overt negligence of Governor Snyder in reference to
what he knew was going on in Flint prior to taking any formal action in the case. His emails
during the period in question, which he released in a flood to the press, reveal prior knowledge
of both the existence and severity of the Flint Water Crisis in early 2015 (Bridge Magazine Staff,
2016c; Smith, 2016b; “Snyder releases emails…,” 2016). This was well before he followed Flint
mayor Karen Weaver’s emergency declaration with one at the state level in 2016 (“Michigan
governor…, 2016). State experts were aware of the scale of the problem, and decided to sweep
it under the rug, lie to residents, and hope things smoothed themselves over. The position of
“expert,” at the MDEQ, MDHHS, and other executive level offices, was used against itself and its
scientific foundation to misrepresent reality to better suit government.
Expert analysis, research, and testimony are indispensable in a crisis. Solid, reliable
evidence is hard to come by in the knowledge vortex of a crisis. Experts are expected to offer
their best advice on how to proceed in a situation, or on what has in fact happened on the
ground. But in the case of the Flint Water Crisis, expertise was distributed in such a way as to
generate internal conflicts. The state’s expert data and advice conflicted with that of Drs.
Edwards and Hanna-Attisha. At the regional EPA office in Chicago, Miguel Del Toral’s
recommendations were stifled in favor of treating Lee-Anne Walters’ situation as an isolated
case. Testimony was dismissed, set against other testimony and evidence, called anecdotal, or

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was claimed to be false or falsified if it conflicted with the master narratives in place at the
time. The role of government is to gather and deploy the best expertise when it has a problem
to solve. The role of the press is to communicate the results of that expertise in a way that the
public can understand. When rhetoric is well-functioning, technical reason finds optimal
solutions, and social reason translates those solutions into a form that the public can
understand, appreciate, and use. But in this case, technical unreason took over for technical
reason. Data was modified to fit a narrative, and not the other way around. And as the next
section goes to show, this narrative phalanx didn’t stop at experts.
Big Stories: National and Local News Media Coverage and Federal and State Government
Discourse
Big stories (grand or master narratives, in other words) attempt to reinstall rogue
rhetorical events into a normal order of communicative business, a stable and secure status
quo, and an order of explanation and representation which characterizes their hegemonic
recession into a backdrop for narrative rather than being fully defined, detailed stories in
themselves. Rather, local events are first abstracted, and then situated into an order of
explanation and causality in order to cause the least disruption in the status quo. The specificity
and singularity of a rhetorical crisis, qualities which both defy any attempt at reduction and
define the gravity of the situation the rhetoric of the crisis is trying to capture, are removed
from their context and sutured onto broader narratives which overwhelm that specificity and
that singularity of the event. The wider historical and causal scope of the current study had no

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place in mainstream media discourse, as received knowledge ossified into sound-bites and was
broadcast ad infinitum.
If events in Flint took place for those who lived through them on the ground in a
profoundly direct and local way, the master narratives never sought to explain these local
situations and consequences to the people of Flint themselves. Rather, their function was to
reassure other locales and their residents that things were under control and being taken care
of, or were not due to other regular actors on the scene. Their role was to instill and foment
empathy and caring in the audiences. These audiences, external to the material conditions in
Flint, were led to understand that this event was singular and controllable. Big stories
attempted to fill in with complete knowledge of, if not what was happening or how it
happened, then why it happened and who was to blame. Thus, the overall story arc of the
grand narrative in the popular news media under scrutiny here was not, perhaps a more
accurate description of the situation surrounding the Crisis, a canary in a coalmine whose
‘death’ caused multiple ruptures long since fractured to show to the surface. Instead,
peculiarities are noted (such as Flint as a “majority-minority city”), these peculiarities are linked
to broader, established patterns (to follow the example, the charges of systemic racism and
implicit bias levied by the Michigan Civil Rights Council, 2017), and the appropriate (traditional,
habitual) remedy is applied, whether the problem is alleviated or not.
The primary function of master narratives, the big stories that politicians and corporate
journalists tell, is mostly a police function, in Rancière’s terms. In helping with establishing,
preserving, and enforcing a status quo, these stories give structure to ‘random’ or uncontrolled

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forces, acts and actors, and events (heterogeneous elements of society, as Bataille, 1985, would
characterize these, and not random). The stories they tell teach lessons to those not involved,
and the structure and nature of these lessons is always such that events, no matter how much
foundations are shaken by them, get resolved into reassurances and guarantees that society is
up to the task of managing any such crisis with no harm to members outside the sacrifice zone.
The timeline in Appendix A consists of 9 episodes
46
over a period of seven years, from
2011 to 2017. Events in the Crisis were grouped according to periods of time where material
and discursive events lead to changes on the ground in Flint, and which had aftereffects leading
to the next set of events. So, the water switch on April 25, 2014, the event which opened this
study, is placed at the center of Episode 1, along with the appointment of Darnell Earley as
emergency manager and his decision to make the switch before that moment, and the first
signs of trouble with the water after. Episode 2, running from January of 2015 until August of
that year, was characterized by suspicious symptoms and official denials. In Episode 3, taking
place during September and October of 2015, saw scientists weigh with their studies of lead in
Flint, but the denials also continued. Episode 4 covers the period in October and November of
2015 during which, having acknowledged a problem, official actors began to step in and provide

46
Critical sociologist Anthony Giddens offers the following definition of an episode: “’Episodes’ refer to processes
of social change that have a definite direction and form, and in which definite structural transformations occur”
(Giddens, 1981). The episodes below obey this definition to a point. Each represents a duration of time in which
events came to pass which would have a specific effect on what would come to pass in Flint during the Crisis. Each
encapsulates changes made to the situation on the ground which would prove to be fateful as the timeline
proceeded. And each episode left the terrain in Flint transformed, and laid the foundation for the next set of
events.
However, as a major argument of this dissertation, the notions of “definite” direction, form, and structural
transformation become problematic if preserving the contingency of the Crisis, its unfolding events, and its
discourse and responses are at issue. This is why the episodes here begin in the negative, and move through zero,
before reaching the “first” episode. Locating the beginning of a story as long in the making as the Flint Water Crisis
will always be arbitrary, and this numbering is meant to reflect just how far in the past (namely, negative infinity)
one could reasonably look for antecedents to the Crisis.

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some relief, in terms of water and filters, but also, more substantially, in the form of switching
back to GLWD (Detroit) water from Lake Huron. The emergency declarations, by the city, state,
and federal governments in succession,. Form the substance of Episode 5, running from
December of 2015 until January of 2016. In the aftermath of this attention, both political
parties looked for a scapegoat—this search makes up the contents of Episode 6, which unfolds
over the course of 2016 as a whole. Finally, Episode 7 (December 2016 – June 2017) concerns
the recovery period, a period which ends in the timeline in 2017 but which, in fact, continues as
of this writing.
However, the linearity of this summary belies the nature of the events, and so a final
feature of the timeline must be emphasized. Episode 1 begins most accounts of the Crisis. But
the timeline in Appendix A begins earlier than that, in 2011, with the appointment of Michael
Brown, the first of several emergency managers of Flint during what would become the Crisis.
This episode is labeled “Episode -1.” This label is meant to imply that once could go further back
in time, and, with justification, connect events of a further past as directly antecedent to the
Crisis. This is, in fact, what was argued in Chapter 2. But, more broadly, it suggests that an
episodic view must be both expansive and mobile to be able to capture the fleeting nature of
the connection between events in a crisis.
If one asks how the national press discussed the discovery of lead in Flint’s water supply,
it must be stressed that the story of Flint does not become featured national news until January
of 2016, well after signs led independent investigators to prove the contamination of the city’s
water in October of 2015. The national popular news media did not begin to cover this story in

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earnest until early January 2016, coinciding with Governor Snyder’s emergency declaration for
Flint on January 5. At this point in the narrative, neither MSNBC nor FOX News, the two
websites covering the story at that time (both on January 6), have enough information to draw
any firm conclusions or make any concerted calls for action. The two stories (“Michigan
governor…,” 2016; Ortiz, 2016) appear to be based on the same two early AP reports (Kaloub,
2016; “The latest: Snyder…,” 2016), so the review of facts in the case are much the same—first
the switch to Flint River water for “cost-cutting,” then reports of discoloration and bad odor of
water, followed by the discovery of elevated levels in children, and then the switch back to
GLWA (Detroit) water in October 2015. Both articles also make a point of emphasizing that a
U.S. attorney was dispatched to investigate, and speculated as to whether or not the
investigation was criminal in nature.
In neither case of this early reporting were any details established about the nature or
extent of the lead exposure, nor was there any mention of the number of residents or children
affected which would become a trope in the political and media discourse to follow these early
versions of events. Lead had already been established as having tainted Flint’s water supply
when both Marc Edwards and Mona Hanna-Attisha produced their findings in October 2015,
the acts which in major part prompted the switch back to the city’s prior source for water.
The story here is all told quickly, in retrospect and with few details or explanation, and
so there is no news of the “discovery” of lead in the water as such in the national press, at least
not in a featured way. Later, in the February 1 issue of Time magazine, Josh Sanburn (2016)
would cover the story of the discovery of lead in much more detail for its national audience. But

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this forensic discussion came even later than the first national appearances of the story during
the key episodes of the crisis, and coincided more closely with the onset of Congressional
debate on the topic, which begins in earnest only on February 2, over two weeks after
President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency. It looked backward and provided an
overview rather than offering much of anything particular about the situation on the ground in
Flint at the time of its publication.
By this time, what was being circulated in the latest headlines was already old news:
Flint had long since switched back to water sourced through Detroit, in October 2015, after
warnings from Edwards and a press conference held by Hanna-Attisha. And even at this late
point, the jury remained out on assessing responsibility and causality, while locally in Flint a
general malaise with local, state, and federal government which had simmered over decades of
willful neglect of the city’s needs had erupted into a full-blown crisis of faith and trust in
government in general
47
, and such assessments formed a large part of the discourse on
Facebook and at local meetings and gatherings designed to navigate both the (mis)information
overload and the precariousness of life under the circumstances in which Flint’s residents found
themselves.
Local and regional coverage was much more extensive than on the national scene.
However, Flint is a limited media market, what some in the field of journalism are now calling a
“news desert.” Few local mass outlets for news for and about the city remain in its borders. The
story, however, is picked up as early as August 14, 2014, when the Flint Journal, the last
remaining local newspaper which merged with digital regional news service MLive and now

47
See note 36.

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lacks a print edition, carried a story on a series of boil water advisories in the city, along with
coliform bacteria found in the water (Fonger, 2014). The story was quick to point out, in a very
prescient way, that according to experts interviewed from Michigan State University and the
state’s Department of Environmental Quality, coliform bacteria indicated a weakness in the
water distribution system that needed to be addressed. They warned that while not a serious
problem in itself, the appearance of coliform could be a sign of impending dangers down the
road.
Nonknowledge here presents itself in the form of a positive sign indicating only that the
real, underlying issues with Flint’s municipal water distribution system were not yet known, and
the potential damage or harm could neither be anticipated nor assessed at this point. As more
such signs appear over the course of the year leading up to the production of scientific proof of
a link between blood lead levels in children and the use of Flint’s water—lead in water is
invisible, and its effects on the body and brain are most often invisible as well—regional
coverage from the Flint Journal and its partners at MLive, the Detroit Free Press, ABC-12, the
last remaining local television station in the city, and the regional online Bridge Magazine,
struggled mightily to negotiate the competing narratives from state experts and local residents
over the safety of the water, the nature (and even existence) of the problem, and what actions
did or did not need to be taken. Part of what makes this an accident is the very uncertainty of
determining if something was actually wrong, and this uncertainty played itself out across the
various local and regional outlets available to Flint’s residents.

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When events happen locally, there is usually not much stake in providing coverage for
these events on a broader level than that of the local press. The ordinary or normal eruptions of
news provide people information and perspective on the life world, but topics like local politics,
crime, weather, and other happenings lack currency and comprehensibility with any audience
not familiar with the area in its singularity. Still, all news, even that of the grandest narratives of
world history, happens locally, and is broadcast from a locality toward a broader audience.
In the case of the Flint Water Crisis, the unfolding episodes (see Appendix A) formed
narratives which painted a fragmentary picture of failure, mismanagement, ineffective
communication, and threats to bare life and the sustainability of a city and sacrifice zone. But
this was what the situation looked like to observers who had no access to local media or local
coverage of the events. Did the newspapers, magazines, and television stations cover things
differently for people living within the sacrifice zone?
As a communication infrastructure decays, long-standing institutions lose their ability to
connect people with each other and with the information and deliberative spaces to navigate
the treacherous waters of a life-threatening event such as the Flint Water Crisis. Thus, Flint’s
last remaining newspaper, the Flint Journal, ended its publication of printed newspapers, and
merged with the regional online news organization MLive to provide local coverage on their
state-wide website. And there were only two local channels left available to provide coverage,
ABC-12 and FOX-66; the latter simply repeated news broadcast on a Detroit Fox affiliate.
The concept of a news desert has been advanced in the field of journalism to describe
zones where no one tells the stories of local people, and where press institutions have been

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disproportionally affected by massive shifts in the business models of corporate and smaller
news organizations. Flint fits the pattern of a news desert very well, with the resultant effect
that as rapid changes took place on the ground—from the onset of emergency management,
through the water switch, the series of health issues immediately following the switch, the
discovery and demonstration of the effects of lead leaching from service pipes, and the search
for remedies and adaptations—there was no central space of common set of basic stories
about the situation to draw the community together and give it a sense of being on the same
page as to what the problems were and what to do about them. News sources conflicted as
news streamed in from everywhere but local reporters. In an age when the evaluation of
information lags the access to information, and in a maelstrom of conflicting and contradictory
“facts” and “evidence,” the stabilizing role of a local press, in adjudicating amongst that
information for the sake of what residents need to hear and know about and in relating that
information to he lived experiences of their local audiences, is lost irreparably.
Regionally, the story was known in Detroit, where the local Free Press had been running
a series of stories covering residents’ complaints about the water, and this spurred some
ministers from Detroit to assist residents in whatever ways they could, and these ministers
recorded their journeys on social media. But this regional coverage was often very spotty, or
even dangerously misleading.
Detroit’s WDIV-4 carried a story about bathing in Flint River water, a public service
message relaying the information contained in a mayoral press release. However, the original
release, located on the City of Flint’s WWW press release feed, contained a full and detailed

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conversation between Mayor Karen Weaver and Dr. Hanna-Attisha, and listed several
precautions to take in bathing in Flint city water including recommendations on temperature,
open wounds, and bathing small children. These nuances were lost in the Channel 4 story,
which simply declared in its headline that Flint water was safe to bathe in. Without the
responsibility to residents that comes with a station being local, this lapse, which may have
caused harm to people living here and relying on that news for information on how to survive,
was the rule rather than the exception given Flint’s paucity of local news sources.
If one looks at discourse on the right, which began with denials of the existence of any
problems, then shifted to blame the reaction of regulatory bodies and rather than any actions
taken by state officials, it becomes clear that, in fitting with the broader story the right tells of
the inevitable failures of “big government,” the lesson to be learned is that bodies like the EPA
need reform and restructuring, but that shrinking the size of government and enabling industry
to take the lead on such matters will assure a well-functioning system. If, on the other hand,
one looks at the stories which dominate the left of the political spectrum, the protagonist is
inevitably not “big government,” but instead a single person, Governor Snyder, as sole architect
of the Flint Water Crisis. However, in most cases, the specificity of the case of Flint is lost, and
the example becomes an excuse to rail against the Republican mantra of small government,
claiming that the case of Flint is a direct consequence of these policies as carried out by the
Snyder administration. But in both cases, an extraordinary situation is turned into a tame
workhorse for old debates.

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In an era of increased political polarization and corporate concentration of media
production, the fact that the major news sources follow this discourse in lock-step should come
as no surprise. But the disruption in narrative completeness and continuity that emanates from
a rhetorical crisis meant that, as the Crisis unfolded, media outlets were not always certain of
the valence to give to their stories. The confusion that erupts in the media discourse at key
moments in the Crisis testifies to the impossibility of capturing any event, while it happens or
forensically, without losing much of the detail and meaning of the event along with what is
irretrievably lost in the process of capture.
Thus, national news media were late to the story, coming nearly two years after the
switch of water sources and first signs of trouble, and only in response to a federal declaration
of a state of emergency by the full chain of executives leading up to President Obama. When
the story began to be covered, it was not yet integrated into broader narratives of government
neglect or regulatory error, and instead the stories hesitate to make clear attempts to ascribe
blame, responsibility, or even causality to any agents or factors involved. Instead, outlets like
MSNBC and FOX News first cover the story as an uncertainty in progress, and this unsettles
their typical mode of molding the stories they cover to fit the comfortable narratives, liberal or
conservative, which (their leadership seem to believe) their audiences expect.
Later, following the federal emergency declaration in January 2016, and after politicians
such as Harry Reid (Flint, Michigan Water Crisis, 2016a, 2016b), Barbara Boxer (Flint, Michigan
Water Crisis and Aliso, 2016), John Cornyn (Flint, Michigan Water Crisis, 2016c), and Ted Cruz
(Energy Policy Modernization, 2016) had weighed in and established each party’s position on

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and use of the issue of the Crisis, these media outlets followed suit. They forced and enforced
their narratives into conformity with those partisan political positions. This ideological division
of narrative and media persists throughout the national treatment of the story, right through
the Congressional Oversight Committee hearings (Examining Federal Administration, 2016),
where Democrats blame the Snyder administration and his drive for smaller government,
making a plea for increased government readiness for such crises, and Republicans for their
part blame Susan Hedman and the EPA, citing inefficient regulation and calling for a review and
overhaul of regulatory bodies. But in both cases, the story is misappropriated for a pre-existing
debate having nothing directly to do with facts on the ground in Flint.
Just as uncertainty in telling the story was only mastered at the cost of violence to the
situation and experiences of people living through the Crisis in Flint, so too was violence done
to the knowledge, and nonknowledge, of facts on the ground. As an example of the changing
requirements of big stories to overwhelm details and singularity and integrate these events into
the regular function of a “normal accident,” the rhetoric of the Democrats in attempting to
bring attention to the Crisis is telling in the changes it needed to make to bring the urgent
action the situation on the ground had demanded for nearly two years already.
When Representative Dan Kildee (D-Flint) first brought the topic to the House floor in
October of 2015, he described his hometown of Flint as a city that “hovers right around 100,000
citizens” where “water delivered to Flint schoolchildren has lead levels far above the actionable
level under the EPA lead and copper rule” (Water Problems, 2015, p. H6931). But when, after
President Obama’s emergency declaration in January of 2016 (Fieldstadt, 2016), the topic is

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taken up in the Senate by Minority Leader Harry Reid, this language firms up in a matter of
days, from February 2 to February 4, removing all doubt and uncertainty from the earlier
“nearly 100,000 people who are residents of the city of Flint, MI, have been poisoned” and
“[a]bout 9,000 of those poisoned are children under the age of 6 years” (Flint, Michigan Water
Crisis, 2016a, p. S454, emphasis added) and becoming a city of exactly “100,000 people”, of
whom precisely “9,000 children” “have been poisoned” (Flint, Michigan Water Crisis, 2016b, p.
S635).
The need to provide certainty flies in the face of what occurs in a crisis, where certainty
is never assured and all that can be done is to act on the basis of the best information and
reasoning available, and it is not advisable (or even possible) to wait for perfect knowledge and
complete assurance of the efficacy of the solutions proposed. But the hedging and
approximation necessary to stay true to the unseen and unknowable nature of the lead
poisoning and its effects opened a counterplay by Republican leadership which allowed them to
disavow the urgency of the situation and the necessity for action and offered them a chance to
“wait and see” if local and state authorities would take care of the problem themselves, if
indeed there were a problem. Many of them, like Ted Cruz and John Cornyn (both senators
from Texas), explicitly claimed state and local authorities had jurisdiction in this case, and that
the federal intervention demanded by President Obama and Congressional Democrats, and
especially by Representative Kildee, was not indicated or required (Energy Policy
Modernization, 2016).

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In a rhetorical crisis, as in Lyotard’s postmodern condition, the legitimation of
knowledge, the determination of what counts as knowledge and of the value and meaning of
that knowledge, is also in crisis. The function of grand narratives is to reassure their audiences
that, in the final analysis (and there must be a final analysis), the structures of knowledge that
found the hegemonic social formations which grand narratives buttress and configure are
sound, reliable, and up to the task of restoring full function of the global capital-societal
machine to all areas. But when this machine has sacrificed a zone for its development in a
previous mode and epoch of its existence, that zone is already below the threshold for
development which this hegemonic social order seeks to “restore.”
Flint was already an example of the failure of global capital development, before the
Water Crisis. What the Water Crisis lays bare, as a properly rhetorical crisis, is the inability of
grand narratives to represent a sacrifice zone without committing a sin of omission about how
far back the story goes. If Flint’s issues were caused by Darnell Earley deciding to switch water
sources—where the history begins in the big stories of the Crisis—then the problem that
society must set right has to do with water. But if the problem were a “normal accident” which
was the ‘natural’ outgrowth of the development of global capital out of the glowing embers of
colonialism, then (at least the present form of) global capitalism itself must be indicted along
with all the rest. Autocritique is always a bridge too far for master narratives, and so, in order to
assuage an increasingly outraged public, politicians and journalists alike personalized and
(over)simplified events and conditions to suit broader party goals.

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But what of those inside Flint? Were there privileged vantage points from which
residents could cut through both the obscuring narrative battles and their own nonknowledge
and find actionable truth to use as equipment for living? Or was the material-rhetorical void
encomapssing the Flint Water Crisis just as difficult to navigate for those inside is center as for
those in the periphery? The next chapter puts this one in perspective by assembling a series of
narratives on a much smaller scale. If master narratives are characterized by their appeals to
authority and certainty, even as competing master narratives conflict and interfere with each
other, then the petite narratives collected and examined next have neither of those. In place of
a consensus version of events, they present dissensus, and record a side of the Flint Water
Crisis mired in the vertigo of nonknowledge.

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Chapter 5: Flint and its Narratives: Voices from Subcity
The big stories (or grand narratives) assembled and analyzed in the previous chapter set
up the Flint Water Crisis with both an individual scapegoat and a party line slogan, whatever
the specific contents of these two elements happened to be at any point during the duration of
the event. The story and stories in Flint were mobilized and deployed in such a way as to form a
phalanx of individual blame and government failure that overshadows the real conditions on
the ground, and the historical-material preconditions for the Crisis. Crisis is messy. But the
grand narratives told about Flint during and about the Flint Water Crisis were not messy.
Instead, consensus was reached on either side of the practical-political fence, and coverage and
treatment of events were shaped by those narratives, rather than the reverse.
This chapter, by contrast, is messy. It looks at the communication from voices on the
ground during the Crisis. What emerges from looking at this material on its own is a picture of a
people struggling to cope with a series of wrongs, compounded by a lack of recognition of the
wrongs committed. But put into play with the corpus of the previous chapter, the need for
dissensus to prevail over consensus becomes apparent. If the last chapter told of stories
dictating consensus, this chapter complicates this picture by deploying stories and
communication which refuses to cohere into a unified consensus voice. To accomplish this
while doing the least violence to the sanctity and singularity of these voices required a research
outlook which respected each voice as a person and as a fellow resident of Flint.

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Hometown Research, Critical Ethnography, and the Search for the Everyday in the Chaos of
Crisis
Mainstream academic research seeks to explain and understand phenomena. As a rule,
intervention in the object of study is frowned upon. Movements have emerged running counter
to this mainstream attitude toward the object of research. Variously labeled (and variously
defined) as community-based participatory research (CBPR), participatory action research
(PAR), or simply action research (AR)
48
which seek to involve the researcher more directly in the
struggles of their research subject for those peoples’ emancipatory aims. They address both the
comportment toward the research subjects, which treats them less as objects of study and
more as people with needs and goals, and the purposes of research, which is less to provide an
abstract understanding than to provide tools for practical change. But it can be all too tempting
to simply adopt the struggles of another, without understanding the power dynamics which
make these interactions fraught and treacherous. Researching closer to home, in one’s own
habitat, makes these power dynamics more transparent and apparent to the researcher,
because the researcher has a pre-existing understanding and relationship to that habitat.
Hometown research may be one solution to the hazards of the interests and goals of the
researcher, however well meaning, overtaking the needs and singularity of those studied.
John Edward Campbell’s (2004) study of online gay male communities informs my
understanding of how to position myself as a researcher deploying ethnographic methods in a

48
On the general aims and principles of CBPR, see Clawson et al., 2007; Park, 1993; Stoecker, 1999; and Strand et
al. On conflicts between those emancipatory aims and the realities of doing academic research, see for example
Cancian, 1993; Dempsey, 2008; Dennison & Stillman, 2012; Nyden & Wiewel, 1992; and Stoecker, 2004. Phaedra
Pezzullo (2003; 2010; 2013; 2016) and Danielle Endres (Endres & Senda-Cook, 2011; Endres, 2012) are two
examples of academics doing environmental justice work in an activist, community-based mode.

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domain with deeply rooted connections to the subject of my research. Topically, its findings are
not directly relevant here. But it bears a methodological lesson of the utmost importance for
dealing with people in Flint as a researcher and as a resident of Flint. Between two worlds, what
is the place of researchers who try to study phenomena where they live? Campbell draws a
distinction between ethnography in its traditional mode and his particular status as “native
gone academic”:
Two significant differences distinguish me from the traditional image of the
ethnographer as epitomized by Malinowski. First, I entered IRC not as a researcher but
as a gay man trying to expand my social networks. […] The second important distinction
between the traditional image of the ethnographer and myself is that I never actually
left the field. (Campbell, 2004, p. 25)

What is most significant about this diversion from the ethnographic stance for my study is that
it aligns almost exactly with my own position researching Flint as a native and researcher at
once.
I live in Flint, and would live here even if I were not a researcher. While this does not
completely erode the power differentials that exist between researcher and subject that
inhere, regardless of the intent of any party to have things otherwise, it helps me remember my
place both as a researcher who is looking for knowledge about Flint and the broader
significance of its case, and as a resident who struggles with the Water Crisis as a lived set of
experiences of my own. The important thing to note here is that while studying people in situ,
the lessons learned both from critical ethnography and Campbell’s blurring of the lines
between researcher and subject are that one can never be too careful about respecting the
integrity and dignity of the people we study, and that the effects of invasions of the type caused

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by research can best be mitigated by a making a concerted effort to reduce the distance
between researcher and researched.
Renato Rosaldo (1993) restored to ethnography the understanding that the researcher
has a particular position and perspective which affects the observations made. This is neither to
give oneself over to relativism entirely, nor is it to try to accord the ethnographer a special
position at an Archimedean point above the world. Instead, it acknowledges that
ethnographers are humans first and foremost, with their singular sets of experiences,
prejudices, and understandings of the world: “The ethnographer, as a positioned subject,
grasps certain human phenomena better than others. He or she occupies a position or
structural location and observes with a particular angle of vision.” (Rosaldo, 1993, p. 19).
Working on this project of the collection, arrangement, preservation, and analysis of
resources archived during Flint’s struggles with its Water Crisis affords me a space for
expressing my own interests in an area in which I have found myself invested for most of my
life. A traditional ethnographer studies the subject of research with a troubling sense of both
detachment and exoticized spectacle. My relationship with the objects of my study, both the
Flint Water Crisis as an event and Flint, Michigan as a place and locus of community, is neither
detached nor spectacularizing. Instead, my intimate relationship with Flint as a my hometown
and longtime place of residence gives my perspective a sense of attachment to the material,

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and personal, everyday, lived experience with both Flint and its Crisis, along with much of its
modern history
49
.
I collected these records in the interest of trying to come to terms with my own
experience by placing what I know into play with the concerns, knowledges, interests, and
issues that other Flint residents expressed during these impossibly trying times. I fully
acknowledge that by positioning myself as an interested party, my interpretation is just that—
my perspective on this event and its rhetorics. Still, the project contributes much to an
understanding not only of this crisis, Flint itself, or the sense of community that has grown
there over the years, but also to the analysis of the rhetorics of both sacrifice zones and crisis
events as lines of inquiry more broadly. Indeed, its major contribution to inquiry in these
subfields of communication may be its suggestion that the best (or only effective) way to
capture the rhetorics of events such as this one is with a native relationship to the subject.
Observation of their own life world makes researchers more capable of observing and capturing
the everyday stuff of that life without making the subject exotic (and missing its nuances and
context) with “thick” description. In the end, my comportment to this subject was that of a
resident of Flint who wanted to understand better how it is that people have learned to live
together in the city in ways that produce a pervasive sense of community there.
In some ways, the project of hometown research is allied with other efforts at bridging
the gap between theory and praxis, and between academics and the people they study. The
primary similarity is in the emancipatory aim of the research. Our shared desire is that a better,

49
I was born in Massachusetts in 1976, in Boston, but my family moved to Flint before my first birthday. It was my
father’s hometown. I grew up there until I left for college. I have lived in Flint for most of my life, leaving only to
pursue educational opportunities, and never staying away for more than three or four years.

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closer understanding of conditions on the ground could help foster more effective interventions
and redress for wrongs committed and injustice meted out. One such project within the field of
rhetoric is “rhetorical field methods,” so named in its attempt to combine rhetorical analysis
with classical ethnography to produce a living, breathing rhetoric of the moment.
In a passage which reveals that there is more to be thought through in this project, the
following description is offered of the aim of participant observation in rhetorical field
methods: “Participant observation allows critics to experience rhetorical action as it unfolds”
(Middleton, Senda-Cook & Endres, 2011, p. 390, emphasis added). What sets rhetorical field
methods apart from other, more static ways of looking at communication rhetorically is the
position of the researcher in situ, placing herself within the space and among the people
studied:
Rhetorical field methods, we argue, refers both to the rhetorical intervention into
rhetorical spaces and action in which we engage when we describe and interpret
insights gained through in situ rhetorical study (like CR this descriptive and interpretive
practice aims to contribute to emancipatory practice), and to rhetorical field methods
[sic] focus on the processual forms of rhetorical action that are accessible only through
participatory methods (and that are flattened when those forms of rhetorics action are
reduced to exclusively textual representations) (Conquergood, 2002). (Middleton,
Senda-Cook & Endres, 2011, p. 387)

At this point, the project outlined by Middleton, Senda-Cook and Endres aligns very well with
both the emancipatory aims of the present study and its desire to capture communication data
of a more direct nature than simple written or second-hand textual data collection could
accomplish. However, the sticking point is the insistence here on “in situ” methods of

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ethnography which, curiously, remain uncritical even as critical rhetoric (CR) is deployed and
the emancipatory potential of research is apparently understood full well.
There is a double blind spot here. First, while the researcher certainly has an experience
of the situation, the rhetorics that are observed are often so different than what the researcher
herself or himself is accustomed to that the resulting experience is fractured and partial, but
experienced in the totalizing view of traditional ethnography and Western metaphysics as a
unity with common, if sometimes nonsensical features. This is the aim of the “thick description”
Clifford Geertz (1977) advocated. Sherry B. Ortner (1995) calls a necessary rejection of the
search for thickness and holism “ethnographic refusal,” (p. 174), and this important perspective
must be taken into account in any ethnography which seeks to be emancipatory rather than
oppressive in effect.
Second, and related to the first, researchers, by their action and very presence in the
rhetorical situation, alter the power relations that inhere between members of groups wronged
by society. This insight is what founds critical ethnography as a reformist field of inquiry.
Without acknowledging the researcher’s effects on the power dynamics of the situations they
insert themselves into, the data will often be irreparably colored by prejudice and bias,
unwittingly or no, and, far more importantly from an ethical perspective, the researchers will
have visited yet another wrong upon the people they study.
Using a related strategy to insert herself into the context and struggles of her research
subjects, Phaedra A. Pezzulo (2001) deploys Thomas A. Farrell’s concept of “critical
interruption” in relation to the emancipatory struggle of a community in trying to define the

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terms of its own status between two dominant narratives. She analyzes how their discourse
moves between the two stories in an attempt to differently determine the boundaries of
legitimacy, and reinscribe a place for a more accurate rendition of conditions on the ground and
residents’ feelings about the state of the environment in their town. This resonates quite
strongly with the present study, where the interplay between master and petite narratives
carved out a space for tracing these “critical interruptions” of the dominant narratives
surrounding the Flint Water Crisis made by those who were most directly affected by the event.
The dissertation itself, as well, represents another critical interruption, given my status
as native gone researcher in relation to this project. The present study is bound up in an
essentially (auto-)ethnographic project in which my own hometown of Flint, Michigan is my
domain of research, and where my topic, the rhetorical crisis surrounding the lead-tainted
water supply, affected me personally, in my daily struggle to find water, information, and other
essential equipment for living in a time of uncertainty.
This was especially a struggle in an area which seems to be perpetually in hard times.
Still, Pezzulo’s insistence on direct intervention in the world and struggles of her research
subjects is troubling, for much the same reasons pointed out about the insistence on in situ
methods above: almost by definition, academics working in areas of social justice are working
with less fortunate and disadvantaged people relative to themselves. In the case of hometown
research, by contrast, the struggle was already joined prior to coming to academia, so the pre-
existing familiarity with the situation, spaces, and people diminishes risks of overrunning that
struggle with one’s own strategies and methods rather than taking note of those strategies and

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methods already being deployed. This familiarity with the issues in Flint, prior and current, led
to an urgent need to be as sensitive as possible to the people whose lives were most directly
impacted by the Flint Water Crisis and the rhetorical crisis it exposed and exacerbated.
Flint had always been a location for and topic of research for this dissertation. The
original plan had been to study community and neighborhood belonging, based on personal
observations of racial-ethnic harmony there. Once the Crisis overshadowed any other topic of
study in Flint, my attention turned naturally to that issue and its related analysis. Once this
focus had been established, the plan had been to use a communication game to gather data
from residents. This game, tentatively called “The Voice of the Emperor,” would have used a
focus group setting to give participants a chance to “speak back” to major voices in the Crisis.
Cards were to have been used to prompt one participant, the “voice of the Emperor,” to role-
play a discussion between themselves and the other participants, who were to have treated
this “voice” as if the “Emperor”—Governor Snyder, Mayor Walling, MDEQ spokesman Brad
Wurfel, etc.—were present in front of them. The goals were a) to offer a space in which
residents could raise their voices and be heard, and b) to give residents a chance to think
through the issues from the other side, while role-playing the “Emperors” in the game.
A fateful meeting with members of the team at the University Outreach department of
the University of Michigan-Flint gave me pause in my plans. Paula Nas, Director of University
Outreach, agreed to a meeting on very short notice to discuss the project and the possibility
that the department might be able to offer some assistance in making “The Voice of the
Emperor” a reality. A phone conversation, with little self-introduction beyond “researcher from

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USC,” led to a generous gift of valuable time and advice. She brought with her Sara McDonnell,
Program Manager, and David Mérot, Senior Project Manager, and the team was initially wary of
my motives as researcher. University Outreach has made several strong connections with
various community organizations active in the area, with some organizations even using space
in the building that houses the department. So, at first, as “USC researcher,” they were hesitant
to allow an outsider access to those intimate community connections.
Where in situ research is done, by definition, as an outsider, hometown research has the
benefit of offering a bridge across the chasm between outsider and insider, between researcher
and native. Nas, Mérot, and McDonnell were all reluctant to open the relations they had
fostered with community groups until it was revealed that this researcher was also a native.
Once it became clear to them that my connections to the city were a matter of extensive
personal history and investment, the team noticeably warmed and reconsidered their earlier
hesitations. But, when the game and its structure were discussed, and the possibility of locating
participants for the focus groups was broached, a warning was issued that altered the
trajectory of the project. Trauma was mentioned as a possible hazard in rehashing old speech
with participants still in the midst of grappling with these issues in a daily, lived way. Certain
phrases, like “relax” or “it’s just a few IQ points,” may have been triggering for some
participants, and the city at the time was living through a mass trauma based on its history no
less than on contemporary events.
While it may have provided an opportunity for some to speak to major figures in the
Crisis by proxy, and provide the study with valuable data about people’s responses to these

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statements, the risk of harm to participants was revealed then as too great to be worth
pursuing the game. Facebook, Twitter, and a search for letters replaced the generation of
original data. These sources still provide access to the communication of people on the ground,
and often contained much the same discussion as would likely have happened in the focus
groups. But, being of the moment rather than recalled, trauma is not an issue, at least not as a
result of conducting research on this communication after the fact. Refiguring the study away
from the game did not change the focus of the study corpus on the relations between local and
nonlocal communication on the Crisis. It represented an acknowledgement that hometown
research requires the judgment to know when a topic or an intervention is too intimate or too
traumatic to deploy, even on familiar ground.
Hometown research has the emancipatory aims of more established forms of
community-based research. But rather than adopting the exotic misfortunes of those far from
the researcher, both in terms of geography and social-class status, hometown research aims to
bridge the gap by staying local, and applying local knowledge and familiarity to the approach to
and methods of doing research toward those emancipatory aims. Too often, peoples’ voices
become homogenized, and their internal differences smoothed over to tell a coherent
narrative. Master narratives must be coherent, but petite narratives, the kind under study in
this chapter, need not, and, more often than not, in fact need a certain incoherence or
incompleteness to accurately represent those studied, or to allow those disparate voices to
recognize themselves in the study. The next section deploys the concept of dissensus to help
navigate these differences without doing violence to their singularity.

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The Voice of the People? The Voices of People. The “Measurement” of Dissensus and the
Present Study
It is quite tempting as an analyst or critic to speak for those who are, under ordinary
circumstances, restricted in their ability to communicate in official-technical discourse. Because
the lay people researchers study are not trained or expert in the research being conducted or
the conclusions being drawn, there is a great danger of misunderstandings on both sides of the
research, in the aims of the research and the role of the participants. There is a tendency to
oversimplify, and present a group of singular beings as a population of individuals whose
interests, aims, and characteristics primarily cohere and form a sort of consensus vision of
those people.
One of the primary lessons of biopolitical analysis is the suspicion of population-level
images of people as being measures of control. Rancière (1998) suggests that society’s police
function, by which he means the systems of political economy and governance which maintain
and help to establish and normalize hierarchy and preservation of status quo relations between
different classes of people, works in order to establish a consensus and a sense of normalcy
which overwhelms any discourse and actors which seek to question the just nature of this
system of organization of people. This counter-discourse, which term makes things sound both
more simple and more organized than they really are, Rancière labels emancipation (Rancière,
1998).
Rather than attempting to deliver a unified voice out of the group of people formed
when considering society’s various wrongs—in other words, rather than trying to form a

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counter-consensus account of the uncounted—the very differences which form the foundation
for this “group,” if it even makes sense to call it such, call for an alternative to consensus, which
Rancière labels dissensus:
The essence of politics is dissensus. Dissensus is not a confrontation between interests
or opinions. It is the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself.
Political demonstration makes visible that which had no reason to be seen; it places one
world in another […]. Political argumentation is at one and the same time the
demonstration of a possible world in which the argument could count as an argument,
one that is addressed by a subject qualified to argue, over an identified object, to an
addressee who is required to see the object and hear the argument that he [sic]
‘normally’ has no reason to see or to hear. It is the construction of a paradoxical world
that puts together two separate worlds. (Rancière, 2010, p. 46-47)

What defines a member of the group wronged by society is the assertion of an injustice in the
ordinary order of things, and the further assertion of a need for redress those wrongs to bring
that ordinary world into a state of greater justice, fairness, and equality, those three beacons of
emancipation which define what counts as political for society’s exceptions and victims of
sacrifice. And in these terms, politics becomes precisely that difficult conversation between the
abstract world of populations, capital, and markets—the status quo world of society’s
unyielding march of progress and production—and the life world of those people living
together in a material-symbolic matrix of connection where those populations, capital
formations, and markets oppress and damage the life world in mortal and irreparable ways.
If politics is to concern emancipation—that is, if the political subject is defined in
relation to justice, fairness, and equality—then a key to understanding that subject is to realize
that these three contentious terms are to be understood the way that subject means them, and
not the way a mainstream view of those concepts would take that meaning. Randall A. Lake

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(1983) makes an incisive observation about the nature of audience in Native American protest
rhetoric, namely that the subject addressed by such rhetoric is most often the affected people
themselves, and is not primarily aimed at “speaking truth to power” in the sense of directing
rhetoric at those in dominant positions in an attempt to change their minds about the situation
on the ground:
The claim implies that militant Indian rhetoric is more appropriately viewed from a
perspective which examines its significance for Indians themselves. This essay argues for
this alternative perspective. The claim is that the judgments of failure so often leveled at
Native American protest rhetoric are problematic because they misanalyze this
rhetoric’s primary audience. (Lake, 1983, p. 128)

Part of the emancipatory aim of the current project, therefore, needed to include this
orientation toward understanding the rhetoric of those local to this crisis, on the ground in
Flint, in and on their own terms.
Exactly analogous to the haloed dates used in the Wayback Machine searches for media
(see Chapter 4), Facebook and Twitter were searched using the publicly accessible search
engine. Episodes from the timeline (see Appendix A) were used to affix start and end dates for
each search. A decision was made early not to use iterative searches with a cluster of search
terms, since the richness and variety contained simply in the #FlintWaterCrisis hashtag on both
social media platforms provided enough raw communication data to suffice for my purpose.
Again, the goal here was in no way to capture a total picture.
It is, in fact, my argument that no such “total picture” is possible or imaginable without
doing extreme violence to the contingency of the events that unfolded, and of the decisions

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and judgments made on behalf of the residents of Flint. So, because the hashtag organized a
large amount of data, it was enough to capture moments of conversation and connection
between residents and among interested parties in the crisis (and thus players within the
chaotic language games of the rhetorical crisis).
More powerful search tools are certainly available to researchers, and it would certainly
be valid to ask why choose not to use a more powerful API-based search through Facebook and
Twitter to capture a more detailed set of data. The rationale here was that, had a person been
aware that events were taking place from the perspective of an embedded researcher, and had
been paying attention to these conversations as they unfolded, such a person would have done
so, of necessity, through their own private feeds. To simulate the incompleteness of a private
feed with an API is nearly impossible, and is not really the goal of a search like that. But the goal
here was different. I wanted to use my embeddedness within networks of people in Flint as a
longtime resident as the basis for a view on the Crisis based on the uncertain threshold of
knowledge of those who, like me, dealt with the Flint Water Crisis as an existential threat to
bare life.
There were a large number of Facebook groups active during the Crisis, but their activity
was sporadic, and many were only active during portions of the study period. These pages and
groups were often ephemeral, so much so that finding even a small portion of them proved
difficult. While my own personal feed contained some references, my best source for
information regarding which groups might prove the most advantageous to include was
Michael Madden, librarian and local historian at the Flint Public Library. I took the groups he

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chose to recommend to me very seriously, since in both of his positions at the library, the Flint
Water Crisis posed a particular challenge, and the strength of his recollection and impressions
of those exceptionally uncertain times was invaluable. He recommended both Facebook groups
like Flint Strong as well as pages from community organizations, like Flint Neighborhoods
United and the Neighborhood Engagement Hub, where comments and posts formed another
source of voices from people in Flint.
Not exactly knowing where to begin to look for something as ephemeral as letters
written by Flint children, a simple Google search seemed a logical start. The results were mixed,
as one might expect, although this beginning did provide me with a few leads on where to turn
next. The best source of actual printed examples of letters was news stories. Of course, the
famous case of the letter of Amariyanna “Mari” Copeny, known popularly as “Little Miss Flint,”
reaching the desk of President Obama and prompting him to visit the city was well covered, and
complete text of that letter, and a great deal of commentary and context, were readily
available.
But the search proved fruitful in another way as well. Early on in the research process, I
had reached out to a local activist group named Flint Rising. They had left literature on my front
door relating to their work helping to give voice to the concerns of Flint’s distressed residents,
so I had been aware of their work as aligning with the aims of the research game that was
originally a part of this project. I had tried previously to contact the leaders of the organization,
but nothing came of it, and the communication lapsed. A news article called the group back to

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mind, and led me to try again, unsuccessfully unfortunately, to reach out to their leadership for
their help in this project.
Flint Rising had staged an action where they had gathered over 1,000 letters, written by
Flint residents (including children) and addressed to Governor Snyder, with the heading “You
Owe Me:” on each piece of paper. A news story on MLive (May, 2017) detailed the action, in
which the letters were hand-delivered to Governor Snyder’s office, with each letter rolled into
an empty plastic water bottle. This story also contained images of over 30 of the letters, which
(along with select others from related news stories) formed the basis for the corpus of letters
examined in the study.
It would be unjust for myself as researcher to speak for the people of Flint in their place,
and unjust to characterize them as a population with a consensus narrative or perspective on
the Crisis. It would be unfair to the perspective of people on the ground during the Crisis to take
a position at an Archimedean point in order to judge what was known, what was not known,
and what was not knowable. Fairness to the subjects of the research, not just the Flint Water
Crisis, Flint itself, or its people, demanded that contingency and indeterminacy rule over
immanence and totalizing views or narratives. And to impose consensus where it does not
pertain would be an exploitation of unavoidable inequality between researcher and researched,
unequal in terms of access to information, training and expertise, time to devote to study, and
the amplification of voice that come with academic credentials. Justice, fairness, and equality
are not just watchwords for an abstract political emancipation. Instead, they form the very
backbone of the ethical comportment of the current study. The next section tries to assemble a

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rough picture of the dissensus of the Flint Water Crisis; rough of necessity, since dissensus is
inherently too complex to contain. It looks at attempts at recognition by those on the ground of
their plights and the wrongs they faced. And it makes the argument that it is only in preserving
the internal conflicts between these voices and these perspectives that justice, fairness, and
equality can be respected in hearing and amplifying their voices.
Dissensus, Recognition, and Community: A Window into a Local Discourse of Crisis
Into the void of locally produced and validated information, Facebook and Twitter gave
residents a chance to discuss and deliberate the terms of their struggle, relay vital information
about safety and self-care, share knowledge of available resources, aid, and assistance, and
connect to a wider diaspora of Flint natives and their networks to try to break through the
silence that blanketed the story for much of the country during the early part of the Crisis
(2014-2015). Three broad themes emerged from the study of these voices. The first line of
analysis revolved around dissensus, or the registration of dissent and critique in refusal of
consensus narratives of response or responsibility. The next took up recognition, or the sense
that people’s voices were being heard and that Flint’s struggle was being understood and
addressed properly. Finally, voices from Flint were voices of community and connection, and
captured the relations of people working together against a common set of wrongs.
Dissensus exists in the interstices between grand narratives. It is composed of small
stories which complicate and frustrate the power of grand narratives to control the discourse.
One unexpected feature of the petite narratives on Twitter was the close relationship of timing
between those petite narratives of critique and anger and the contours of the story being told

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to a broader market. So, a tweet from user MI News Place appears in August 2014, just months
after the switch was made, highlighting a story in the Flint Journal about a boil water advisory
to get rid of coliform bacteria: “Tests positive for total coliform again in water-boil area on
Flint's west side http://ift.tt/VEcv64 From Flint Journal #Flint” (MI News Place, August 19,
2014). This tweet, which in connection to available news stories at the time about coliform
being a sign of water system weakness, is an early portent of what is to come in the rest of the
Crisis. Yet, because the state of nonknowledge is such that what the issues are and even
whether there is a real issue are both very much in question, this tweet is not liked by anyone
and is also never retweeted. Nonknowledge renders other, more stable knowledge and
information incomplete and insufficient to address the problems that erupt during a crisis.
This story about coliform bacteria, previously mentioned in Chapter 4 and tweeted
about in this early alarm call, was based on uncertainty. Experts felt that something might be
going wrong, but the signs were not definite, so they were not able to say for certain that a
problem existed or what that problem was. Unable to use nonknowledge productively to react
preemptively, what was lost on regulators, on the press, and on legislators were the
contingency of the moment and the need to keep alert for what was not known (and what
could not be known) as much as what was coming to be known about the situation.
Nonknowledge is difficult to appreciate, because it is usually experienced as an absence
rather than as a presence. A lack of knowledge, or an inability to have known something, before
the fact only surfaces as other ruptures appear as epiphenomena after the fact. The birth of the
#FlintWaterCrisis hashtag reveals much about the nature of rhetorical crises. Prior to January

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2015, the story on Twitter was largely business as usual. The mayor tweeted about service
partnerships, Flint’s diaspora tweeted about visits and memories, and water was not
mentioned in any sustained way. It was not the water source switch itself that precipitated the
birth of the hashtag. Its first appearance was on Facebook, as the text accompanying a video,
posted by resident Holly Baker on January 7, which was shared by another resident, Jay
Rowland. In the video, which was shared over 1,000 times, Baker warns of the effects of
potentially toxic water pumped into public spaces, such as those with pools and hot tubs like
the YMCA. Rowland’s post is simply a share of the video, headed by “#flintwatercrisis”
(Rowland, January 8, 2015).
But the hashtag did not pick up traction because of material conditions. Instead, it was a
properly rhetorical disconnect which led activist Nayyirah Shariff to tweet and post to Facebook
about her frustration at a town hall meeting where people were, according to her telling, not
getting the answers they were looking for about the discolored, malodorous, and possibly toxic
water: “More than half of the people have left the meeting. They walked out frustrated without
the answers they were looking for. #FlintWaterCrisis” (Shariff, January 21, 2015). She included
the hashtag as a rallying cry, and it got picked up a short time later by other users. Within a few
days, user Gia Carroll tweeted about water distribution efforts using the hashtag (Carroll,
January 26, 2015). That same day, user and resident Maegan Wilson tweeted the hashtag with
no other text or images (Wilson, January 26, 2015). Users on Facebook like resident Dean
Paxton explicitly thought of sharing and using the hashtag as a way to “let our voice grow
strong and stronger each day.” He continues forcefully and prophetically: “Let it become
impossible to ignore us” (Paxton, March 25, 2015). The act, as much rhetorical as political, of

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organizing online activity and giving it a stable locus and center in the hashtag was both an
explicit and implicit rallying cry for Flint residents. However, it would not remain that way for
long.
The role of Twitter in the Crisis was as a stage from which to broadcast resistance and
anger. Early on, it was also used as a sort of clearinghouse for information, but this role quickly
diminished as the #FlintWaterCrisis hashtag organized mainly vitriol and protest. Twitter users
shared information for the purposes of sharing outrage. A Portland, Oregon-based freelance
journalist, Mike Bivins, posted a number of tweets in mid-2015 which were a mixture of
researched information and speculation about the causes of the problems, who was to blame,
and what was to be done. Bivins states as knowledge what was then only speculation: that
Governor Snyder knew about the issue with lead in Flint’s water and chose to do nothing. But
this was nonknowledge, and not knowledge, at this point, and so his tweets served more to
focus suspicion rather than get to the bottom of the causes of the Crisis and the necessary
remedies: “@stephenclark @onetoughnerd what about the #Flintwatercrisis? #Flint has lead
poisoned water. but I'm sure you already knew that.” (Bivins, September 17, 2015). And again,
later, it is certainty that drives Bivins’ discourse, and not the inherent uncertainty in making
statements like the following forceful, insistent claim: “The governor of Michigan knew #Flint's
water was tainted before the lead warning was issued. #Conspiracy #FlintWaterCrisis.
@onetoughnerd” (Bivins, September 29, 2015). This may have turned out to be true. But at the
time of Bivins’ reporting, this was nonknowledge, and needed to be treated as such. Bivins also
uses emotes in a series of short tweets on September 17 with no body text that point
accusatory “fingers” at three Twitter handles: @MayorWalling (Mayor Dayne Walling),

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@RepDanKildee (Dan Kildee, D-Flint) and @onetoughnerd (Governor Bill Snyder). His insistence
on his version of reality, while seemingly quite accurate in retrospect, was a biased one, like
that of the mainstream media outlets covered in Chapter 3. Epideictic and forensic rhetoric take
over from the contingent and ephemeral rhetoric of crisis in his discourse, and therefore his
information and his accusations is only useful or resonant in how well it feeds grand narratives
already in place.
The length of a tweet, however, does not allow one to go into much detail, and so these
posts, while inflammatory and accusatory, lacked the development required to really make a
strong case one way or the other. It seemed to suffice to register anger and to connect this to
on-ground events rather than trying to offer a complete explanation. This is a common feature
of petite narratives: they are fragmentary, because in order not to be so, they would need to
link up more narrowly and tightly to the master narratives they seek to complicate or critique.
By and large, Twitter was used as a space for protest, for criticism, for outrage and frustration,
and for expressions of resistance and a refusal to accept the terms under which the Crisis
unfolded and to which residents were supposed to accede.
Twitter’s discourse was overwhelmingly critical of government officials, regulatory
oversight bodies, and decisions made (or not made) by the state on the part of Flint’s people.
Much of this criticism was directed at individuals, as in the case of Mike Bivins above.
Interestingly, early in the Crisis, Flint mayor Dayne Walling was the source of early ire and the
subject of a meme with a picture of a resident pointing an accusing finger at him with the
caption “Made ya look, ya dirty crook!” (Rhonda, March 29, 2015). Later, this individual ire

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would be directed at Governor Snyder and his administration. There was also some open
hostility shown toward individuals like Governor Snyder. A tweet by a now former Flint resident
from the last quarter of 2015, once Hanna-Attisha had forced the issue with her October press
conference, argued that Snyder was “one heaping turd [he’d] love to flush down lead infested
Flint city plumbing,” adding, “Though surely he’d clog it” (Burnham, December 24, 2015).
Another Michigan resident asked accusingly, “Wouldn’t you like to see Snyder removed from
office due to criminal incompetence?” (Rosemurgy, December 18, 2015). One tweet from early
2016 even called for Snyder to be tortured, specifically waterboarded: “Rick Snyder: hold him
down and waterboard him with water from Flint?” ((((Lefty))), January 7, 2016). This quickly
took off as a theme and is repeated even as currently as of the year of this writing. But the fact
that frustration took an individual turn is telling of a fundamental need to blame someone for a
situation like this in order to incorporate these events into a normal course of guilt and
redemption.
One recurrent source of anger and frustration was the residents’ rising water bills. As
each change was made to the water system, rates for the city’s water customers rose to make
up for costs incurred (Wilkinson, 2016). Even as it became clear that the water was unsafe,
residents paid ever higher bills for lead-tainted water. So, one angry resident tweeted in early
2015, claiming that if water rates increased again, “@MayorWalling can pay that shit” (Jacob,
March 18, 2015). The Flint Rising “You Owe Me” campaign included several letters along this
line:
• “3+ years water bills and service fees”

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• “You know the community need and deserves the right not to pay these high prices
and can not [sic] use water expect [sic] sewage”
• “All water bills should be 100% reimbursed”
• “First of all, why am I paying for water I can’t use?” (May, 2017)

Thus, even as late as that action in 2017, the fact that residents had been forced to pay extra
for poison to run through the pipes in their homes was a matter of urgent concern in a city
where 41.2% of the population lives in poverty (“Flint city, Michigan,” 2019).
Twitter’s discourse exploded in January 2016, and continued to be extremely active
through the Congressional Oversight Committee hearings in February and March. However, as
the Crisis progressed, local users like Nayyirah Shariff got drowned out in the use of the hashtag
by celebrities, political groups, comedy groups, and other Twitter superusers. Actors like Matt
Damon and other public figures like Reverend Jesse Jackson registered their support. A meme
of demands of “Flint residents” circulated widely as a result of Rachel Maddow’s town hall in
the city. The story gets linked to places outside of Flint, with multiple mentions made of “other
Flints” and of Flint being the “tip of the iceberg.” As in the mainstream media discourse it came
to use as a foundation in 2016, as the story went national and international, the field of
discourse on Twitter became cluttered with debate linked to grand narratives of blame and
causality, and voices from Flint receded from the hashtag they helped create and grow.
Even as the hashtag trended and drew attention to Flint, memes reduced Flint to toxic
water and little else, and the pattern of negative media coverage was a constant threat. As
noted in Chapter 2, Flint’s popular image has been tarnished by a string of negative events and
particularly by the way press has covered those events. Flint’s Facebook groups, like FLINT

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STRONG and Neighborhoods Without Borders, have as explicit parts of their missions the
fomenting of pride and self-respect for Flint’s residents, and the improvement of the city’s
image and reality:
“FLINT STRONG is all about being POSITIVE about Flint and being involved in POSITIVE
acts for Flint.” (FLINT STRONG, 2019)
We are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, grandmothers and grandfathers,
business people and pastors, educators and students, administrators and workers
coming together in a grassroots and community effort to eliminate systemic racism by
understanding both African American history in Flint and historic problem of White
Power and Privilege. We are working to change the narrative of a racial hierarchy in our
community. (Neighborhoods Without Borders, 2019)

The Flint Water Crisis certainly threatened to be yet another in a long chain of negative events
showing Flint and its citizens in a poor light. And yet, the efforts of the abovementioned groups,
along with individuals using the hashtag in their private posts, reflected not resignation, but
pride in the city and its resilience despite decades of being sacrificed. Residents like these
seemed to be looking to be recognized as full citizens, deserving of respect and not derision.
Residents’ quest for recognition took a confrontational turn during one action designed
to garner attention for the plight of the city. Nayyirah Shariff’s Flint Rising organization
conducted an action which gave 1,145 of Flint’s residents a chance to write a “message in a
bottle” to Governor Snyder. These were delivered to the governor’s office on the 1,145
th
day of
the Crisis, as calculated from the date of the switch. This “You Owe Me” campaign, some of
which was captured in news stories around the time of the action, revealed much about the
concerns of residents and their demands. Several demands included monetary items—gas,

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medical and water bills, relocation costs, sleep aids, and even Governor Snyder’s salary were
mentioned in letters shown in a contemporary news article—but time was also mentioned
consistently in the letters, as well as health, apologies, and even the simplest demand for clean
water:
• “My Times [sic]”
• “You owe me for poisoning us in the county jail. It took a court order to get clean
water.”
• “Restoration of my previously good health […] Restoration of my faith in
government”
• “Money for medicines needed for rashes spent […] Having to spend time away from
work […] being stressed and depressed”
• “Hair loss […] moving to another State”
• “Free health care unlit [sic] it’s over; Arrest the people respansable [sic]”
• “Water bill refund for loss of use”
• “Gas; money” (May, 2017)

One letter writer demanded “the truth of what’s really in the water & testing appropriately”
(May, 2017). While one demand (“free water for life,” May, 2017) may have been a bit
unrealistic, no demands were out of bounds for those who felt wronged at multiple turns by
multiple agents in the Crisis, including the ostensible target here of Governor Snyder. The
demands ranged from very specific requests, such as those for reimbursement, to complicated
demands for time, for health, and for clean water which cannot be as easily discharged. Even
with only the small selection assembled before the camera in May’s (2017) MLive article, a
picture emerges of people whose daily lives were shattered. For those people, wronged for so
long and wronged yet again, the demands cover a wide gamut of emotional and political
responses to those wrongs.

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It is certainly the case that the phrasing of each letter with a leading “you owe me:” may
have curtailed other means of communication between residents and Governor Snyder. And
the mildly hostile act of delivering over a thousand letters in individual plastic water bottles
may have reduced the productivity of the act by making it less likely that those letters would be
read at their destination. However, it is nonetheless true the Flint Rising action captured a
moment in what Boltanski (2011) would call “ordinary critiques” (p. 4 passim). Residents were
given an opportunity, albeit a limited and circumscribed one, in which their voices could be
recognized as important and meaningful. It gave some residents a chance to enter the debate
on what remained mostly their own terms.
Shariff would later tweet multiple times a meme of the demands of Flint’s residents
which were the result of Rachel Maddow’s “Flint Town Hall” event (Maddow, 2016). Maddow
and her reporting were a fixture and reference point on Twitter, and the outcomes of her event
in Flint were captured in an infographic of demands from Flint (Mac, 2016, January 27; One
Love Global, 2016, January 27; Shariff, 2016, January 26). These demands, and the style of
Maddow’s intervention, meshed extremely well with Flint Rising’s stated goals of gathering the
demands of Flint’s residents, wronged by the state’s actions, and delivering those demands to
those in a position to make required changes and responses. Maddow’s town hall, coming just
after the national break in the news story, may have been an inspiration for the later, more
locally driven Flint Rising “You owe me” action. Shariff tweeted the list of demands that came
out of Maddow’s town hall event multiple times, giving it sanction (see for example Shariff,
January 19, 2016; Shariff, January 26, 2016). What both Maddow’s town hall and the “You owe
me” action have in common is that both created a space for residents to speak directly to those

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in power, and to express their needs as demands rather than as requests for privilege to be
extended. Both actions gave people in the Flint area a chance at recognition in a public arena
where action might be taken on their behalf.
If one goal of residents’ communication was to gain the recognition due any U.S. citizen,
it had as both a goal and a basis the building and maintenance of relations among beings living
in Flint. Facebook served to unite the people of Flint along the lines of their physical-material
social networks to solve everyday problems. So, Facebook was a locus of information on where
to find free water, how to get assistance paying water bills, where to get free hair care, and
how to meet other everyday needs exacerbated by the Crisis. Many of the conversations on
Facebook showed the resilience of Flint’s people in finding novel solutions to the unique
problems they faced, and moreover in their willingness and desire to share this creative
equipment for living with others facing the same issues. If community shows itself in
connection and support among those who share a common struggle, then community was alive
and well in the virtual spaces of Facebook.
Facebook is, in large part, a medium of memes and meme sharing. Many of the memes
appearing on both Facebook and Twitter were emblematic of the anger and frustration with
master narratives and explanations which circulated at the time in other channels. Still, on
Facebook, the atmosphere was largely one of information-sharing and support (see above)
rather than open anger or outrage. Private citizens, searching for information, would often
share their findings. On Facebook, this was often in the mode of resource-sharing (places to get
water, hair care, etc.).

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The #FlintWaterCrisis hashtag organized conversations on both Facebook and Twitter,
and amounted to both a brand and a rallying cry for residents and allies seeking recognition and
justice. The continued use of the hashtag as of this writing testifies to the continuing nature of
any crisis, since determining when all has been resolved depends upon the point of view used
to judge the success of that resolution. In cases where the crisis involves a sacrifice zone, the
adjudication always falls to the disfavor of those excluded. This, in fact, is what Agamben (1998)
means by “homo sacer”: a being (human, animal, community) may be killed—being silenced is
symbolic death—without it therefore being a sacrifice, the excluded being having been made
an exception from the social order a priori, in the very definition of that social order.
Other voices found their way into the discourse through alternative methods. One such
avenue open to residents was letter writing. One young resident took it upon herself to use this
medium to draw attention to the struggles of people here, and ask for help from those in
positions of power who might be able to do something. In her March 2016 letter to President
Obama, Amariyanna “Mari” Copeny establishes herself as a voice for Flint‘s children, “doing
[her] best to march in protest and speak out for all the kids who live here in Flint” (Nelson,
2016, para. 3). It is important to note that she speaks for “all” the children in approaching
Obama. Copeny realizes that her letter is more than just the action of a concerned individual,
but, appearing as it did on a national and world stage, her letter had an extra level of duty to
the people and children of Flint which she openly acknowledges and for which she takes
responsibility. She was also humble about her civic activities, which have been extensive and
included many protests, one outside the Democratic presidential debate held in Flint in 2016
(Nelson, 2016).

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This dedication to activism and to using her voice to affect change in her hometown
displays an intrication of Copeny into a wider sense of community in Flint, one which seeks to
engage citizens in the workings of their own life world and which seeks to raise awareness and
foment political action and attitudes on the part of Flint’s residents. Copeny was clearly a bit
intimidated by the prospect of writing to the President, since she wrote that she expected him
to be too busy, and asks to meet with either him or with Michelle Obama, knowing that the
First Lady might be more flexible. But the magnitude of her act, and her sense of responsibility
to Flint and its children, spurs her short letter and gets the President’s attention, who replied
on April 25 to inform Copeny that he plans to visit in May. Obama replied that “there is no
more important title than citizen” (Nelson, 2016, para. 8). The community organizer in him
recognizes her community spirit and activism, and rewards it with a personal response and visit
to her beleaguered hometown.
Copeny would go on to start several campaigns, first to pay for disadvantaged children
to see the movie Black Panther, then to solicit people outside Flint to write letters of
encouragement and support to Flint children (“Dear Flint Kids” [@DearFlintKids], 2019). The
experience inspired her to want to run for President in the year 2044 (Copeny, 2018, August
22). As a singular figure, Copeny is important as a voice which reached beyond Flint’s borders to
bring attention and awareness to the issues she and her fellow residents were facing. But as an
emblem of the resilience and resourcefulness of residents in Flint, and particularly of an
engaged and activist youth, Copeny’s case is far more telling of the sense of community which
courses throughout Flint’s life world.

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Copeny’s struggle to find not just her own voice, and not just the voices of her fellow
citizens, but also to activate or reactivate a sense of civic pride and community engagement
was mirrored by other actors, particular some of Flint’s community organizations. So, Flint
Neighborhoods United has three tenets of its mission which are worth quoting at length given
how well they line up with foregoing discussions of community in this study:
The group has three goals. They are:
1. Improve communication among and between stakeholders at all levels.
2. Create and maintain an environment that supports safe and healthy neighborhoods
3. Re-establish a city-wide sense of community with a shared responsibility. (Flint
Neighborhoods United, 2019)

These three interlocking aims of the group reflect an understanding of community that is very
much in line with both Blanchot’s (1984) sense of desœuvrement and Agamben’s (1990, 1993)
conception of the coming community.
The goals here revolve around the establishment and maintenance of connections and a
communication infrastructure up to the task of uniting the people of Flint into an all-inclusive,
“city-wide” community. Rather than having a specific outcome or set of outcomes within city
politics or civic life as their purpose, Flint Neighborhoods United seeks instead to provide the
backdrop and substrate for a sort of community ”carrier wave” capable of drawing together
Flint’s disparate populations into a unified and active community proper. And the design of
their intervention is such that, if successful, what will be “produced” is not the outcome of
“work” or “labor,” but instead would provide residents with the communication (community)

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infrastructure required to maintain their sense of connection and civic pride through
interaction and communication with others in the city.
Communication on the ground during a crisis is difficult. It is difficult to know what to
say, what to believe, and to whom one can speak to redress wrongs. If there is no “voice of
Flint” during the Flint Water Crisis, perhaps it is because the desire for recognition and the need
to express resistance are singular, forged of a personal set of wrongs. Everyone is wronged, but
each is wronged as a singular being, and so is wronged in a singular way. To try to create
consensus out of singularity does violence to those voices whose narratives do not fit the
master or grand narratives which circumscribe and interpellate them. Like the interpellation of
singular beings as individuals, the fundamental wrong of society discussed in Chapter 3, and as
its corollary, consensus is a tool of control, not democracy. Justice, fairness, and equality
demand respecting dissensus. And only by respecting dissensus can discussions on crises like
the Flint Water Crisis move past simple blame and scapegoating to address the real-material-
historical causes of the wrongs committed.

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Chapter 6: Conclusions: Sacrifice, Resilience, and Community: Flint, Michigan as Model or
Warning
On June 8, 1953, a massive tornado struck the then-unincorporated area of Beecher,
Michigan, a very close suburb of Flint to the city’s immediate north. The storm remains the
deadliest in the state’s recorded history, and is still the tenth-deadliest tornado on record in the
U.S. as a whole (“10 deadliest US tornadoes”, 2019). The storm left 116 people dead and
injured 900 more. Property damage was extensive, and near total in places—193 homes were
destroyed, leaving over 800 families homeless (McDermott, 1954). The Beecher Tornado was
the source of a massive crisis, straining the resources of the small residential area to recover. By
some estimates, the damage to property and infrastructure would cost upwards of $10,000,000
to repair (“Storm dead now 109…,” 1953).
But what was remarkable about this crisis in light of the focus of this study was not the
material crisis itself, or any of its qualities. Instead, it was the response of Flint’s residents to
this nearby tragedy that makes manifest a certain tendency toward a community response
toward crisis. The outpouring of support from Flint’s residents was tremendous, and took
multiple forms at multiple levels of intervention. Most spectacularly, an initiative called
“Operation Tornado” conducted a “building bee” over the weekend of August 29-30, 1953,
during which the goal was to build 193 homes using volunteers supervised by skilled tradesmen
who would donate their time and expertise to the effort (“Building bee…,” 1953). Six thousand
people volunteered from the city, from across the state, from the nearby region (from
Cleveland, Ohio), and even some from as far away as Tacoma, Washington, offering up nearly

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80,000 man-hours of labor to get a roof on around 80 homes and leave only minor work on
nearly 100 more (Sperling, 1953). Food, and the labor to prepare and deliver that food, was
donated in massive amounts to support the building bee workforce. Lumber and other building
materials were for the most part donated or sold at cost by local mills and supply houses.
(“Operation Tornado expenses…,” 1953). The city was recognized for its efforts during
Operation Tornado, winning a 1953 All-America Cities award from the National Municipal
League and Look magazine. The award recognized cities “’where improvements and reforms
were the result of citizen action’” (“’Operation Tornado,’ community…,” 1954), and Flint’s
citizens, responding to the crisis which unfolded after the disastrous tornado struck, came
together to take care of each other in a massive way during the building bee.
But what is spectacular and what is significant are often quite different. This is especially
true of a crisis situation. Operation Tornado was a monumental and singular achievement, but
it neither instituted nor exhausted the community spirit enlivened by the tornado crisis.
Teenagers volunteered their time at hospitals the day after the storm, and had drives to collect
clothing and other necessary articles for relief victims. Homes were opened to storm victims,
and some vacant apartments and homes were filled rent-free on a temporary basis (Clever,
1953). The manager of a local hotel, the Durand, provided coffee and sandwiches to workers; a
local trucking company offered as many trucks as were needed for the work; boy scouts
volunteered their time to help with recovery; and a local ham radio operator, Esther Stuewe,
operated a clearinghouse for messages related to the storm and its aftermath (“Helping
hand…,” 1953). A second building bee was independently organized and implemented using a
second set of volunteer labor and donated materials, helping to build or finish around 45 more

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homes two weekends after Operation Tornado’s success (“Bigger force…,” 1953). A fund set up
to help with relief, operated by a company called Red Feather, amassed a staggering $938,175
from donors large and small, corporate and individual, including a donation from GM of
$100,000 given as soon as the fund was opened the day after the tornado struck. The fund was
so well financed, in fact, that it was the subject of scrutiny and controversy, with allegations
that its total far surpassed local needs (“A final…,” 1954).
The “Invisible Hand” of Community in a Post-Industrial Sacrifice Zone
This story is not a story of devastation and a painful aftermath. Instead, it is another
story, emblematic though not extraordinary, of people in Flint responding to adversity and crisis
in community with each other. During the Flint Sit-Down Strike, Fine (1969) notes the
overwhelming support given by local residents to striking workers who faced violence and
deprivation of basic services like food and water. Local businesses and individuals alike chipped
in to make sure that the strikers had their basic needs met, and could continue their historic
battle for better working conditions.
Whence this community spirit? It has been the argument of this dissertation that it is
adversity and crisis itself which lays the foundation for these connections to be made, for them
to be activated in times of stress or need, and for them to strengthen as they are pushed to
their limits, rather than breaking under the pressure of new situations. If this “spirit” is stronger
in Flint than in other places—if people in Flint work with each other in community more often
than is done elsewhere—it is because Flint was designed, built, and developed as an industrial

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sacrifice zone where existential stresses and shocks are a part of “normal” social-economic
function.
Two things divide people and bring them together, simultaneously, at all times,
inevitably, irrevocably: society and the market. In the economy of the French language, this
sense of division and sharing is given a unified term, partager. Atomizing people into
individuals, violently arranging those newly forged (and constantly reconfigured) individuals
into hierarchies of bewildering complexity and cruelty, just as violently enforcing demands
placed upon people living in these twin yokes (“know your place!”, “produce!”), and connecting
these atoms into shifting molecules with the aim of producing nothing other than capital—this
is the global, globalizing inheritance of modernity.
Adam Smith (1776) described the workings of capital markets as unions of rational
actors working in their own best economic interests. He imagined that an “invisible hand”
(Smith, 1776, p. 35) united those interests into a complete and harmonious system of actors
which produces, quite on its own, an effervescent surplus of wealth:
As every individual, therefore, endeavors as much as he can both to employ his capital
in the support of domestick industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may
be of the greatest value, every individual necessarily labors to render the annual
revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to
promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the
support of domestick to that of foreign industry he intends only his own security ; and
by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value,
he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible
hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest
he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to
promote it. (Smith, 1776, p. 35, emphasis added)

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Society as a whole benefits from this “hand,” so the argument goes, since all actors participate
and are rewarded at appropriate levels via mechanisms of the labor market. Versions of this
argument remain hegemonic in global economic discourse, despite the utter fracturing of such
a limited and idealized vision of humanity as a system of individuals has been widespread in
other disciplines, and certainly has much less currency outside the U.S. academy. But Smith’s
“invisible hand” is the basic rationale for supply-side economics, neoliberalism, and a host of
capitalist economic models in which society as a whole is argued to benefit from the
concentration of wealth by a few.
Something like an “invisible hand” does exist. But if it is a hand, it is neither society’s
hand acting upon itself, nor a harmonious concert of individual ends. Smith’s “invisible hand” is
precisely what this study has been trying to determine as “community.” It is connection; it is
being-with. The “invisible hand of community” is precisely the bonds of mutual interest and
value that globalizing capital markets impose upon everyone and everything, everywhere, and
at all times. And if it activates under times of extreme stress and crisis to preserve itself and its
material preconditions, then this invisible hand of community, under “normal” circumstances,
produces value for the owners of the means of production as a by-product of its own necessary
function. Viewed as an “invisible hand,” community gives meaning and personal, experiential
connection and a basic piece of communication infrastructure to people implicated in a violent
means of production. People operating under those means of production are always vulnerable
to danger and oriented toward their own death. And the very precariousness of the
reproduction of its workforce has become one of the greatest assets and sources of profit for
this means of production. Capitalism is a machine which transmutes love into money, with the

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by-product of death. And this love is relation, the relations of all beings everywhere with each
other.
It has been argued here that crisis is a crucible in which community relations are forged
and tempered. Global capitalism exploits these relations to produce flows of profit. But as
markets are designed and redesigned to take advantage of real-material relations, these
relations themselves are sundered and reconfigured. Different strata of society are affected in
different ways by these shocks, but all are damaged. For some, a myth of self-sufficiency and
individuality is buttressed by a middle-class-or-better status quo, itself resting on the exclusion
of the least from the social order. For the least, those in the sacrifice zones of the globe, wild
fluctuations in labor markets, prices of consumer goods, property values, or other “normal”
economic shocks are devastating, threatening bare life.
A being’s relations are what make it singular. But a being may not be aware of its
relations. Crisis brings relations into relief. What a grand narrative would dictate would be the
response of people in crisis and what their real response might encompass are quite likely to be
quite different. Comparing the material of Chapters 4 and 5 above would indicate this. But, like
neuropathways which, once opened, remain latent and ready to be reactivated, community
relations, as a way of comporting oneself to others in the life world, affect everyday
interactions among those who share a crisis. It is the argument here that in the case of Flint, it
has been its status as industrial sacrifice zone, from its founding, which precipitated the series
of “normal” accidents which dot its history with wrongs against its residents. Future studies of
other such industrial sacrifice zones would be necessary to make any further generalization.

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Limitations of the Study
While the present study attempted to gather glimpses of communication which took
place by and among Flint’s residents during the Crisis, its goal was never to compile a total or
representative image of the voices of those people. The reasons for this are primarily two. First,
limited research time and resources forced me to make hard choices about what to try to
include and what to leave to one side. But second, and far more fundamentally, it is in the very
nature of a rhetorical crisis for its communication output to exceed any actor’s ability to
process all of it. Even assuming an Archimedean point existed in reference to events on the
ground, accessing an omniscient perspective would only serve to complicate understanding the
issues involved, since it is the very relation to nonknowledge and uncertainty which produces
the experience of the event as a crisis proper.
So, the Flint Public Library partnered with National Public Radio to produce recordings
for their StoryCorps project. These local voices both predate the Flint Water Crisis and serve as
a partial record of experiences during that time. These recordings are publicly available, and
would have provided more material for Chapter 5 above. However, the time to search through
and listen to these recordings proved elusive, and they were finally not incorporated into the
study.

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So, too, were leads not followed in conversation with local historian Michael Madden at
the Flint Public Library. When I asked him about letter campaigns, he gave me the names of
several local ministers who might have had information or materials I could have used. Again,
owing to time constraints, the legwork and coordination required to meet with these people
and discuss my research interests was prohibitive, but clearly would have been time well spent,
just as time with the StoryCorps project would have proven invaluable in fleshing out voices
from Flint for including in the study.
There are stories missing from this account that were known about to the researcher,
but not pursued. However, stories are missing for more reasons than just time or neglect. As a
researcher with a particular agenda and theoretical bent, my view on any materials I scanned,
however thoroughly, would of necessity miss or gloss over details not apparently germane to
the study. This would be a cause for concern if my goals here were not to try to capture
ephemeral moments of communication from within a swirling vortex of confusion,
misinformation, official and unofficial statements and versions of events, and the chaos and
disruption of material events on the ground in Flint during the Crisis. But I took it as my job here
to try to account for uncertainty and nonknowledge, and to experience psyma along with
residents as I recalled and recounted their versions of events. So, my own screen of research
interest almost certainly caused me to miss everyday interactions which would have
complicated or troubled my conclusions about what was talked about and said in Flint. The
mundane goes unnoticed because we who dwell in the mundane are habituated to it, and
because if it becomes exoticized in the view of a “colonial” researcher, it is no longer mundane,
but perverse, pathological, and exceptional. Toeing the line between allowing myself the

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comfort of acquaintance with the situation on the ground to know what to skip on the one
hand, and trying to pay attention to details in their contingency and their everydayness and
make reference to them in that light of uncertainty and nonknowledge on the other, proved
very difficult at times, and stories were missed because my interests were limited, however
necessarily, by an agenda.
In addition to the communication resources known about but not pursued, and those
missed by the lens of research, there are the stories from those who, for various reasons, are
perennially uncounted even in situations like this one where taking account of the unaccounted
is specifically thematized as a goal of those laboring to survive the Crisis. Thus Flint’s homeless
population was largely neglected both in terms of aid and in terms of stories told about and
involving their lives. So too was the small but significant population of migrant workers, often
non-native speakers of English whose information needs are different, and who were
insufficiently served both before and during the Crisis.
The stories of these people are missing from this account because they are missing from
nearly every account, and gathering these stories is a monumental task of coordination,
patience, and time which would have proved too costly to include in a study like this, and would
require a full study in its own right simply to learn the most effective methods to connect with
these people. Similarly missing are the stories of the disabled, who often lack accessibility
solutions to keep them participating in community activities.
Finally, in this category of missing stories are those who fall on the short end of the
digital divide. This study relied in large part on electronically accessible material, from the

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WWW and social media, to which access, familiarity, and ease of use are not evenly distributed,
especially in a place like Flint. A more complicated picture might have emerged had more print,
oral, and interpersonal material been included as a focus.
Most importantly, however, are the versions of events lost to both time and
contingency. In other words, in a fundamental state of nonknowledge, what pertains is neither
knowledge nor its pure absence, but instead an uncertain zone in which one not only is not
certain of what one does not know, but is also fundamentally uncertain about knowing what
one does think one knows. Nonknowledge is, at base, incompatible with both hindsight, which
seeks to recover lost knowledge and restore the story’s completeness, and prediction, which
seeks to extrapolate from the known into a stable region of possibility and probability.
I have tried here to capture this uncertainty, but such a project is doomed to failure:
psyma is of the moment, and as the state of knowledge (and nonknowledge) fluctuate over
time and with the course of events, the questions being generated at any given time are
fragmentary at best, and misleadingly incomplete at worst. Staying true to nonknowledge and
uncertainty means acknowledging that much is always necessarily missing from a study of this
type. My own position as resident of Flint and research helped to mitigate this, as my personal
networks kept me in the loop in an important sense. But my goal here was explanation as much
as chronicling voices, and this perspective, while productive of critique and theory, had the
potential to do violence to the contingency of the Crisis.
Lessons Learned and Lessons Unlearned

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In a typical master narrative frame, a tragedy leads to one or more moral lessons.
Patterns of behavior, latent before the tragic event, come into full relief as destructive or
wrongful in their intent or effects, and these patterns of behavior are recognized, categorized,
and analyzed to determine the best way to avoid them in the future. However, this static,
macro-level view of what lessons can be learned from a crisis like that which happened in Flint
takes as its starting point a forensic perspective, certain in the immanence of its material-
discursive inputs. If, instead, one pays attention to the intricate chains of connection among
beings, events, and material conditions, one preserves the contingency of the event with an
accidental rhetoric which is attenuated to the chaotic nature of crisis. The lessons learned in
this frame may become far more wide-ranging than the limited prescriptions based only on
what is known to analysts at the time of analysis.
For example, the result of the House Oversight Committee hearings (Examining Federal
Administration, 2016) left Democrats and Republicans bitterly divided over whom to blame, but
simply solidified and completed the narratives of the failures of “small” government and
regulatory failure which were and remain bulwarks of each side’s party identity. The lessons
learned were already “known.” But from the point of view of determining antecedent acts,
actors, and events, a more important lesson emerges from the crisis perspective of the current
study. Because, in the case of Flint, factors stretching far back into history were seen to relate
intimately to the city’s contemporary plight, it may well be that a more “universal” or
connected view of people, of events, of beings in general, would encourage greater
understanding of crises as they happen in their moment.

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The lesson of greatest importance here is an “unlesson.” To push inquiry beyond pat
grand narratives designed for control rather than their truth value or value for people, it has
been necessary here to refuse immanent knowledge as a goal. Replacing this dangerous
teleology was an acknowledgement of and an attunement to the effects and movements of
nonknowledge, as much as and simultaneously with a desire for building knowledge and
understanding. With Socrates, this dissertation knows that it knows nothing, but is compelled
to know itself nonetheless.
Psyma, nonknowledge, and accidental rhetoric.
Two series of questions emerge under one heading: why Flint? If this question seems
innocuous in this form, it is only because the economy of the interrogative word belies its inner
fracture and complexity. Two lines leading out from this most important, but also most fruitless
question trace the path of psyma which begin to get at the heart of what needs to be asked
about a crisis situation like the Flint Water Crisis.
Questions, once answered, may be considered closed. But psyma refuse closure, and
always open onto further inquiry and questions of ever greater depth and complexity. Psyma
are generated faster than they may be answered, and thus have the effect of being very
difficult to answer, if not unanswerable, in their complexity and proliferation. The two psyma
presented below encapsulate the spirit of inquiry in this study. On the one hand, they represent
an analytic framework and orientation found throughout the dissertation. These are the
questions, asked in various ways, which make up the bulk of what was presented here. On the
other hand, though intimately related to the first, they are the end result and major finding of

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the study. What gives these questions their force is precisely their placement at the end of a
series of challenges to status quo thinking about crisis and and to grand narratives of control. If
they remain open, and if these psyma are themselves incomplete, it is because this is in the
nature of any inquiry open to its own potential futility.
Why Flint (I)?—What material conditions set up the Crisis? What decisions, made on the
basis of what information, had what effect on the situation on the ground for which people In
Flint? What antecedent conditions or events prefigured or overdetermined the course of the
Crisis?
This series of questions centers on Flint’s singularity as a scene for something like the
Flint Water Crisis to occur. It would be here, for example, that emergency management would
be discussed, although in a far more comprehensive and historical mode than the simple blame
of Darnell Earley for being the manager at the moment of the switch. But the scope of this
study suggests that these antecedents may stretch further back in time, span more geography,
and have more mechanisms than have typically been taken into account, and perhaps more
than are known to us. And to continue to fail to take a wider view of crisis, but also of its
opposite, of a “stable” status quo built on sacrifice elsewhere, is to doom society to double
down on its past wrongs even as the space for genuine inquiry is always left open by the psyma
which crises generate.
It would be incorrect to claim, for example, that global capitalism in itself, or colonialism
in itself, led directly to the Flint Water Crisis. But it would also be incorrect to deny the role of
both of them in the founding of Flint and its sacrifices at the altar of progress. The Snyder

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administration, and Susan Hedman’s regional EPA office, covered up knowledge and delayed
assistance to Flint’s residents, compounding wrongs and making a horrible situation much
worse. But to arrest the discussion at their persons, to blame them and be convinced that the
problems that led to the Flint Water Crisis had been taken care of, is dangerously naïve, even if
ending discussion there is a mainstream move.
The goal of analyzing this psyma is to get at a resolution which remains open to new
inputs and new sources of inspiration and connection. What would be desirable for society is
that, in crisis, lessons are learned (and unlearned) that tend to prevent recurrence and mitigate
current damage and harm. But phantom causes, such as individuals and their decisions, mask
more complex interconnections of causal factors, some known, some unknown, still others
unknowable. In order for society to properly learn its lessons from “tragedies,” “disasters,” and
the like, the discussion needs to be open to the possibility that a provisional answer and set of
responses is all that can ever be made.
This psyma stretches back into the distant past, and ranges across the globe. It is local, it
is regional, it is state-wide, it is national, it is global. It is historical, and it is contemporary. It
suggests that looking at a projection to any one of these levels, and any specific point in time,
will lead to a distortion and a misread of why this happened in Flint. And it suggests that it is of
the utmost importance, in getting the answer to this version of “why Flint?” which tries to
understand why lead became a problem in Flint’s water supply, that these questions must be
allowed to range across time and space even as they center on a very local and time-bound
event.

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Why Flint (II)?—What was different about Flint that led to the story breaking nationally?
Did people on the ground act differently than people in a similar situation in Washington DC?
Were there mechanisms or connections, pre-existing the Crisis, which allowed for voices to get
out and have an effect? If the expertise of Marc Edwards was based on his experience in DC,
and if Mona Hanna-Attisha was aided by a friend who had worked on that earlier Crisis, why
was this expertise effective in Flint where it had not been in DC?
The previous psyma dealt with the taint in Flint’s water supply as a singular, historical,
contextual event. It asked, if such an issue could occur anywhere, why Flint was made into a
scene of crisis. The other side to this coin is, of course, why was the response in Flint such that
national attention was brought to the case? Why did Flint fare better than Washington, D.C.,
where a similar water crisis went largely under the radar, and was covered up by local and EPA
officials in terms eerily similar to those proffered in the case of Flint by the EPA, the MDEQ, and
other regulatory bodies (“Lead contamination in Washington, D.C.,” 2019)?
If Flint is singular because of its positioning as a paracolonial, post-industrial sacrifice
zone, and this singularity laid the foundation for the ruptures of the Crisis, then Flint is also
singular in its response to crisis. Earlier, it was argued that perennial crisis, born of sacrifice,
tended to engender a vital and active sense and spirit of community in Flint. One case study
does not provide enough evidence to conclude that this is a general pattern. But, one avenue to
begin to pursue this direction of the central question “why Flint?” should certainly include the
dense interconnections among people living in the city, and among those who still identify with
the city as expatriated residents.

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Community may be both an antidote to the ravages of sacrifice and crisis and a response
to the wrongs and damage that ensue because of crisis and sacrifice. And it may help to explain
the difference between two cases, Flint and Washington, D.C., where the expertise was largely
the same, and the stonewall response by regulators was also virtually the same, but the end
result, of action and resistance rather than simple cover-up and inaction, was so vastly
different.
Blame, guilt, sacrifice, redemption: The war is over, and we all lost.
A news story from early 2016 aired on a local Chicago television station about the
potential for a similar threat to emerge in that city’s water supply (Brackett & Thometz, 2016).
The story reported that, like Flint, most of Chicago’s service lines are made of lead. It listed a
number of precautions that residents could take, from using filters and getting their water
tested, to using cold water for drinking and flushing (running water for 3-5 minutes) prior to use
after a prolonged period of disuse, or after a disruption due to water main construction. After
these tips—which included a rather extravagant recommendation to simply replace one’s
service lines oneself, at a cost of $10-20,000—an interview with the city’s water commissioner,
Thomas Powers, gave Powers a chance to explain why Chicago’s situation was different than
from Flint’s and to reassure Chicagoans that their water was safe to drink. Powers stressed
again and again in the short piece that the anti-corrosive coating which the city employed was
designed to lock lead in the service lines, and that this kept lead from leaching into the system.
But when pressed on the simple question of safety—“is the water safe?”—Powers hesitates,
and then, a bit exasperated, insists that lead levels are within the standards mandated by the

231

EPA. But this is dissatisfying, for the interviewer and presumably for the audience. Dodging
questions and ducking direct inquiry has only led to a recurrence and multiplication of issues
like lead in water.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, “[n]o safe blood lead level in children has
been identified” (Centers for Disease Control, 2019, para. 5). What this means in relation to the
current standards is that, regardless of compliance, children are at risk whenever lead levels are
nonzero
50
. Regulations change over time with new information and new research. But they
change in relation not just to science and understanding, but, far more often, in relation to
economics and financial considerations. According to that same CDC article (2019), an
investment of $80 billion would be enough to ensure all children born in 2018 or later could be
free of any negative effects of lead poisoning. But unless and until this issue, and other issues of
environmental degradation, affect more than the agreed-upon sacrifice zones of the poor and
the left-behind, it remains unlikely that such an investment would find the political-economic
will to become reality. For its part, Michigan instituted new state-wide rules designed to be a
“tougher” standard for test reporting. But, for reasons just noted, the action level was merely
reduced from 15ppb to 12ppb, ignoring that this would in no way have changed what
happened on the ground in Flint. That 12ppb is far from zero means that children remain just as
much at risk as before the “tougher” standard, with the added danger of a false reassurance of
safety.

50
Lead service lines have been used in cities like Flint and Chicago for decades. In that time, it is highly likely that
minute amounts of lead have been leaching into water supplies for a very long time, long enough to affect
generations of children. Might there be some connection between the violence and crime rampant in inner cities
of the U.S., high concentrations of lead service lines there, and the diminished impulse control, hyperactivity,
decreased attention, and conduct disorders associated with lead poisoning (“Integrated Science Assessment…,”
2019)?

232

Will this cycle repeat itself? It already is doing so. Newark, another “majority-minority”
city, has had recent reports of excessively high levels of lead in drinking water in a number of
schools and homes (Scutti, 2019). The pattern of industrial sacrifice, economic depression, and
crumbling infrastructure leading to crisis is hauntingly familiar in light of the materials collected
here. And so one must ask, years after the Flint Water Crisis began, whether society has learned
anything at all from the voices and experiences of people in Flint. Do these local, singular lives
matter? Do their experiences have a broader social significance? And, finally, can their voices
escape their local confines to bring recognition and connection to people searching for justice,
fairness, and equity in a sacrifice zone?
On Giving Voice to the Voiceless: When The Subaltern Speak, Can Anyone Listen?
Can the subaltern speak? Gayatri Spivak (1994/1988) replied in the negative, with an
emphatic resignation to the power of Europe to shape what counts as a voice, and what
remains uncounted (or unaccounted for). The irony of this move was not lost on her, who in a
later interview (Balibar & Spivak, 2016) acknowledged that her own status both inside and
outside of that European elite class might easily be considered a form of subaltern speech, and
that her critique even contained colonizing speech as well, speaking against speaking for brown
women, but in doing so speaking on their behalf and in their stead. But the field of postcolonial
studies as a whole struggles with its status of “betweenness”: between the global North and
South, between Western metaphysics and local-regional-cultural ‘other’ lines of thought,
between the material comfort and security of citizenship and academic employment in Europe
and the U.S. and the poverty and strife of those in whose name postcolonial scholars try to

233

speak. Acknowledging the tenuous and hazy character of these states of being between, I
remain unconvinced by her answer, and, in the end, so was she.
To answer this question, finally, in either a positive or negative direction, is to close off
the very discussion that needs to continue, always. In other words, the question of subaltern
speech which Spivak opens, and not her answer, is her contribution, and what remains to be
done is to open this question up to new lines of inquiry, and new situations. This is what the
extension of a postcolonial lens to the sacrifice zone of Flint was intended to do.
All that is to be done is to reframe the question, to ask it in different ways and in
relation to different contexts and material conditions, and to refuse the temptation of closure
and immanent knowledge which would arrest this fundamental line of inquiry and ossify the
asking of its questions into a set of dogmatic answers. In the end, if a primary element of the
study has been a relation to nonknowledge that attempts to factor in the unknown and
unknowable into its inquiry, then this refusal of immanent knowledge and a final answer, and a
continuous return to the origins of the questions and the situations of their posing, may be the
ultimate contribution of this study.
This dissertation refuses to answer questions of blame and responsibility in any
definitive way. Rather, the material assembled here tends toward dissolution of pat grand
narratives and simple determinations of guilt, blame, or responsibility. Its goal was to introduce
openings into a closed system of discourse which manipulated the telling of the story toward
pre-existing and non-local ideological conflicts. Rather than countering a grand narrative with
another definite narrative, trails were followed here which were usually left unexplored in

234

other accounts of the Crisis. Looking elsewhere than had been done previously, with no
preconceptions of what might be found, the study left the confines of grand narratives to
explore a deeper system of relations among locals and their life world. Neither substituting
petite narratives for grand narratives, nor forcing grand narratives to submit to petite
narratives (nor the reverse), the dialectical presentation of material was designed to
reassemble a system of discourse, of narrative, and of lived experience that preserved the crisis
frame in which it came to be.
To this end, the voices of Flint residents were examined against a backdrop of grand
narratives emanating from media, regulatory, and government entities which sought to
determine the meaning and scope of the Crisis. The resistance of people on the ground
generated enough heat for the nation to begin to take notice, and it was important to see this
emerge in the face of the national discourse which mined locals for resources while
oversimplifying their stories and fitting them into pre-existing narrative molds. It was for this
reason that little is read out of these voices as an overall statement—it was more important to
preserve the dissensus that becomes more prominent in the hard times of crisis than it was to
find a “voice of the People of Flint” to communicate.
A study like this one required a certain comportment to the research subject—in this
case, the city of Flint as an entity, but also the residents of Flint, current and historical, as (a)
singular people. It was required that any project of allowing people in Flint to speak would
mandate leaving any such communication tied to its original context, and understood in terms
of its occasioning as much as its content. In other words, content analysis, discourse analysis,

235

and other machinery to process large amounts of text or speech were to be avoided. In their
place, a form of close reading tied these messages and letters into a “whole” without
wholeness, connected by dissensus rather than any attempted consensus. Concepts like “the
masses,” “the multitude,” and “the People,” well-meaning though they may sometimes be, all
tend to represent a unity where what pertains is more at a universe of singularities.
It may be seen as a weakness of the study that, rather than coming to a resolution on
any of its central questions, those questions multiplied without ever receiving more than a
provisional treatment and a hasty, hesitant answer. But I would suggest that it is in fact the
major contribution of this study that to proceed in such a fashion—to acknowledge the role of
nonknowledge, and to use that acknowledgement to open new lines of inquiry without ever
closing any down—is to get to the heart of what can be learned from a crisis and situation like
this one. In the end, certainty of the capability of Flint’s water treatment plant on the part of
emergency managers led to its fateful, ill-advised use. Certainty that Lee-Anne Walters’ home
was anecdotal rather than representative led to Miguel Del Toral’s punishment rather than an
emergency response. And certainty about the primary blame of Governor Snyder or EPA
Director Susan Hedman obscures both historical and economic antecedents to the crisis that
have nothing to do with either individual. Certainty is the enemy when the goal is gaining
understanding in conditions of contingency and crisis.
Remaining open to a crisis frame means preserving this sense of contingency, the idea
of the possibility of impossibility. If this means that no final answers are ever reached, so be it.
Along with Spivak, we can ask our fundamental questions over and over again, in different ways

236

and related to new vistas and perspectives on the world. Final answers are an illusion, a
gimmick for a game show. All answers worth considering leave open the possibility that
something important has been missed, that perhaps a new key will unlock the door in a new
way. And all questions worth asking have, as a key element of their lines of inquiry, an
impossibility of any teleological or eschatological resolution. Any question worth asking is worth
asking repeatedly, in variation, indefinitely.

237

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267

Appendix A
Timeline of the Flint Water Crisis
Overview
EPISODE -1: FIRST STIRRINGS (2011-2012)
Emergency management is first implemented in Flint, and the Flint River is studied as a
municipal water source.
EPISODE 0: DECISIONS, DECISIONS (2013)
Karegnondi Water Authority is chosen over Great Lakes Water Authority [Detroit], with the Flint
River to be used as temporary water source.
EPISODE 1: GROUND ZERO AND BUBBLING PROBLEMS (2014-Jan 2015)
Darnell Earley orders the switch to be made, which is followed by boil water advisories, an E.
coli outbreak, and a Legionnaire’s outbreak. GM stops using Flint water.
EPISODE 2: SYMPTOMS AND THE LIES DESIGNED TO CURE THE DISEASE (JAN-AUG 2015)
Multiple tests, including those done by Marc Edwards of Lee-Anne Walter’s tap water, find
extremely elevated levels of lead. The EPA is contacted, and alarm bells are raised by Miguel
Del Toral, only to be downplayed by regional EPA Director Susan Hedman. The MDEQ also
downplays any potential threat, telling residents to “relax,” and the MDHHS revises a report to
move the city out of the action area.

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EPISODE 3: SCIENTISTS TESTIFY (SEP-OCT 2015)
Independently, Marc Edwards and Mona Hanna-Attisha confirm city-wide elevated lead levels,
conclusively arguing the connection to the water. MDEQ chief Dan Wyant falsely claims that
corrosion controls were used in Flint’s case.
EPISODE 4: FIRST RESPONSE (OCT-NOV 2015)
Filters and bottled water are distributed by the state and community and charity organizations.
Flint switches back to water from Detroit’s system.
EPISODE 5: EMERGENCY (DEC 2015- JAN 2016)
Mayor Weaver, then Governor Snyder, then President Obama declare states of emergency.
Snyder apologizes to Flint residents, and releases his emails.
EPISODE 6: HINDSIGHT IS 0/20 (JAN-AUG 2016)
The House Oversight Committee hearings, State of Michigan found “fundamentally
accountable” by Governor-appointed panel, and the first charges, specifically evidence
tampering.
EPISODE 7: BLAME, BAND-AIDS, AND OTHER MEEK REPLIES TO FLINT’S PEOPLE (DEC 2016-
present)
House finds individuals at EPA to blame, an individual blame is assessed by Michigan Attorney
General Bill Schuette for people at MDEQ and MDHHS. Congress, after much harangue, passes
a comprehensive water bill including aid for Flint. Lead service lines begin to be replaced.

269

EPISODE -1: FIRST STIRRINGS
2011
29/11/2011 – Michael Brown appointed EM of Flint (Brush et al., 2015)

2012
8/8/2012 – Ed Kurtz appointed second EM as Brown steps down; Kurtz served as EM during the
2002-2004 financial crisis (Brush et al., 2015)
20/12/2012 – MI Treasury meets with Flint officials to discuss Flint water source (Brush et al.,
2015)

EPISODE 0: DECISIONS, DECISIONS
2013
25/3/2013 - Flint City Council votes (with no power) for KWA (Brush et al., 2015)
16/4/2013 – Kurtz signs agreement to join KWA (Brush et al., 2015)
17/4/2013 – Detroit notifies of end of water contract in one year, 1.5 years before Flint can
connect to KWA (Brush et al., 2015)

270

26/6/2013 – Kurtz hires engineering firm Lockwood, Andrews & Newman Inc. to plan switch to
Flint River water as municipal water source; contract is for $171K (Brush et al., 2015)
28/6/2013 – KWA breaks ground (Brush et al., 2015)
30/6/2013 – Kurtz resigns as EM (Brush et al., 2015)
8/7/2013 – Brown returns as EM (Brush et al., 2015)
11/9/2013 – Brown resigns as EM for second time (Brush et al., 2015)

EPISODE 1: GROUND ZERO AND BUBBLING PROBLEMS
2014
10/1/2014 – Darnell Earley becomes fourth EM during the crisis (Brush et al., 2015)
7/3/2014 – Earley rejects offer from Detroit to continue buying municipal water (Brush et al.,
2015)
9/4/2014 – State EPA approves Flint River Water for municipal use (Brush et al., 2015)
25/4/2014 – Flint switches to Flint River water as its municipal source (Brush et al., 2015)
1/6/2014 – Flint residents begin complaining of water, that it was making them sick (Brush et
al., 2015)
14/4/2014 – Flint water tests positive for E. coli; boil water issued two days later (Brush et al.,
2015)

271

13/10/2014 – GM engine plant refuses to use Flint water, citing potential corrosion of parts due
to excess chlorine treatment (Brush et al., 2015)

2015
2/1/2015 – Flint found to be in violation of Safe Drinking Water Acts due to elevated levels of a
byproduct of treatment for E. coli, TTHM (Brush et al., 2015); Flint issues advisory of high TTHM
levels, water deemed safe to drink, sick and elderly may be at risk (Lurie, 2016)
6/1/2015 – Mayor Dayne Walling reports that Flint water is safe to drink (Brush et al., 2015)
7/1/2015 – State building in Flint begins using water coolers next to water fountains. “An email
from the Department of Technology, Management, and Budget reads, ‘DTMB is in the process
of providing a water cooler on each occupied floor, positioned near the water fountain, so you
can choose which water to drink.’” (Lurie, 2016)
9/1/2015 – UM-Flint finds samples of campus water high in lead (Brush et al., 2015)
11/1/2015 Earley refuses to return to Detroit water source in opposition to request of Flint City
Council (Brush et al., 2015) (12/1/2017 according to Lurie)
13/1/2015 – Earley resigns and Jerry Ambrose takes over as EM (Brush et al., 2015)

272

EPISODE 2: SYMPTOMS AND THE LIES DESIGNED TO CURE THE DISEASE
21/1/2015 – Town hall where residents complain of symptoms such as rashes, hair loss, vision
and memory problems
3/2/2015 – Snyder awards $2M to Flint for water system improvements: “In a memo to Snyder,
state officials write, ‘It’s clear the nature of the threat was communicated poorly. It’s also clear
that folks in Flint are concerned about other aspects of their water—taste, smell, and color
being among the top complaints.’” (Lurie, 2016)
25/2/2015 – Lee-Anne Walters is discovered to have lead levels of 104 ppb in her Flint home
(Brush et al., 2015) (Lurie has this on 18/2/2015)
25/2/2015 – Walters makes contact with Miguel Del Toral at EPA’s Midwest water division,
telling him Flint is not treating its water for corrosion, and that Flint has been pre-flushing pipes
before drawing test water
27/2/2015 – Del Toral contacts others at EPA and notifies MDEQ. (Lurie, 2016) EPA is told by
the MDEQ that Flint is treating the water correctly; later it was revealed that Flint was not
treating for corrosion (Brush et al., 2015)
3/3/2015 – Follow-up test of Walters’ water finds 400 ppb, pre-flushing as usual; MDEQ blames
the home’s plumbing (Lurie, 2016)
23/3/2015 – By a 7-1 vote, powerless Flint City Council attempts to reconnect to Detroit for
water supply (Brush et al., 2015)

273

4/2015 – Lee-Anne Walters discovers her son has lead poisoning (Brush et al., 2015)
6/4/2015 – City Council Vice President Wantwaz Davis accuses Snyder and Ambrose of
attempted “genocide” in a Facebook post, interviewed later in Flint Journal
24/4/2015 – Del Toral sends memo to head of EPA water division citing the lack of corrosion
prevention a “major concern” (Lurie, 2016)
28/4/2015 – Marc Edwards (of Virginia Tech University) conducts tests of Walters water and
finds 13,200 ppb, twice the level classified as hazardous waste; he does not pre-flush (Lurie,
2016)
29/4/2015 – Financial emergency declared over; Ambrose leaves; “Receivership Transition
Advisory Board” takes over (Brush et al., 2015)
6/5/2015 – EPA identifies two more homes with high levels of lead (Lurie, 2016)
23/6/2015 – Judge rejects lawsuit to force switch back to Detroit water filed by the Coalition for
Clean Water, a group of pastors and others (Brush et al., 2015)
1/7/2015 – Susan Hedman, EPA Midwest director, downplays Del Toral’s concerns. MDEQ tells
Snyder that Walters is an isolated case, and the Michigan Dept of Health and Human Services
(MHHS) claims seasonal fluctuations in lead levels are expected. (Lurie, 2016)
10/7/2015 – Brad Wurfel, spokesman for MDEQ, tells people worried about lead level s in
drinking water to “relax” in response to EPA memo (Brush et al., 2015)

274

22/7/2015 – Snyder’s chief of staff to MHHS: “I’m frustrated by the water issue in Flint…These
folks are scared and worried about the health impacts and they are basically getting blown off
by us.” (Lurie, 2016)
20/8/2015 – State revises report to invalidate two samples high in lead, keeping the city out of
actionable zone (Brush et al., 2015)

EPISODE 3: SCIENTISTS TESTIFY
19/9/2015 – Va Tech study finds widespread high levels of lead across the city (Brush et al.,
2015) (Mother Jones has this on 15/9/2015)
24/9/2015 – Flint pediatricians report finding high levels of lead in children, speculating it was
coming from the water (Brush et al., 2015) Mona Hanna-Attisha is the name of the researcher,
who was rebuked by Wurfel, calling her study “unfortunate” and referencing “hysteria” (Lurie,
2016)
25/9/2015 – Flint issues lead warning: drink and cook only with cold water, but water still
complies with standards
29/9/2015 – Snyder pledges to take action in response to lead levels, for the first time
acknowledging the problem (“A timeline...”, 2017)
1/10/2015 – Genesee Co. declares public health emergency linked to lead levels in Flint (Brush
et al., 2015)

275

2/10/2015 – MDEQ Director Dan Wyant claims corrosion controls were used in Flint water
treatment (Brush et al., 2015) Snyder press release: “The water leaving Flint’s drinking water
system is safe to drink, but some families with lead plumbing in their homes or service
connections could experience higher levels of lead in the water that comes out of their
faucets.” (Lurie, 2016)

EPISODE 4: FIRST RESPONSE
6/10/2015 – 20000 water filters disbursed by state, 4000 additional by United Way and
Genesee Co. Health Dept. (Brush et al., 2015)
8/10/2015 – Lead found in drinking fountain water at three Flint schools. Snyder announces
that Flint will revert to getting water from Detroit.
16/10/2015 – Flint reconnects to Detroit water system (Brush et al., 2015)
19/10/2015 – Wyant says a “mistake” was made, namely that a federal protocol was followed
in error (Lurie, 2016)
3/10/2015 – Walling loses in re-election bid to Karen Weaver (Brush et al., 2015)
13/10/2015 – Flint residents file class action lawsuit against state and Flint city officials (Brush
et al., 2015)
16/11/2015 – Class action lawsuit filed against government officials, including Snyder and
Wyant (Lurie, 2016)

276

EPISODE 5: EMERGENCY
15/12/2015 – Weaver declares state of emergency in Flint (Brush et al., 2015)
29/12/2015 – Snyder’s appointed independent task force finds MDEQ culpable; Wyant and
Wurfel resign (Lurie, 2016)

2016
5/1/2016 – Snyder declares state of emergency for Genesee Co.; US Attorney’s Office launches
investigation into officials’ handling of the crisis (Lurie, 2016)
7/1/2016 – Chief state medical executive recommends using only bottles or filtered water
(Lurie, 2016)
12/1/2016 – Snyder uses National Guard to distribute water and filters. (Lurie, 2016)
13/1/2016 – Snyder announces a spike in Legionnaire’s disease, which killed 10. (Lurie, 2016)
15/1/2016 – Michigan AG Bill Schuette begins independent investigation (“A timeline...”, 2017)
16/1/2016 – Obama declares state of emergency (Lurie, 2016)
17/1/2016 – Both Democrat candidates discuss Flint during debate; Clinton claims there would
have been action based on race and class, and Sanders calls for Snyder’s resignation. (Lurie,
2016)

277

19/1/2016 – Snyder apologizes in State of the State (Lurie, 2016)
20/1/2016 – Snyder releases his emails (Lurie, 2016)

EPISODE 6: HINDSIGHT IS 0/20
21/1/2016 – Hedman resigns. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy launches investigation into
handling of the crisis. Obama pledges aid (Lurie, 2016)
22/1/2016 – Snyder denies environmental racism (Lurie, 2016)
3/2/2016 – Congressional Oversight Hearing 1
15/3/2016 – Congressional Oversight Hearing 2
17/3/2016 – Congressional Oversight Hearing 3
23/3/2016 – Governor-appointed panel finds state “fundamentally accountable” because of
oversight and regulatory decisions (“A timeline...”, 2017)
20/4/2016 – Three officials (2 state, 1 local) charged with evidence tampering
14/8/2016 – Federal emergency declaration for water ends (“A timeline...”, 2017)

EPISODE 7: BLAME, BAND-AIDS, AND OTHER MEEK REPLIES TO FLINT’S PEOPLE

278

10/12/2016 – Congress passes water bill, includes $170M for Flint’s lead issue (“A timeline...”,
2017)
16/12/2016 – Congress closes oversight investigation, blaming state officials and the EPA (“A
timeline...”, 2017)
20/12/2016 – Schuette charges Earley and Ambrose with 20-year felonies for not protecting
residents’ health; also charged related to bonds for water system changes (“A timeline...”,
2017)

2017
17/2/2017 – MCRC report finds systemic racism at the core of the Flint crisis (“A timeline...”,
2017)
16/3/2017 – Snyder announces toughest regulations for lead levels (“A timeline...”, 2017)
28/3/2017 – 18,000 homes to have water lines replaced (“A timeline...”, 2017)
14/6/2017 – MHHS director Nick Lyon charged with involuntary manslaughter over
Legionnaire’s deaths (“A timeline...”, 2017)

279

Appendix B
Note on Composition
Sometimes, writing tasks can be fairly straightforward. This is usually the case with
reports on factual information, or summary work. When controversy presents itself—whether
in terms of the substance of discussion or the most effective way to communicate the topic—
writing becomes very complicated, and simple solutions are hard to come by for overcoming
the myriad directions toward which the work pulls the writer.
Any dissertation should be more complicated than a straightforward report, because
the task is not to package knowledge, but to create or advance it. So it should come as no
surprise that this project, too, was overwhelming in its scope and minutiae, and the process of
writing often bogged down in the sheer number of possibilities open to me as its composer for
tasks to tackle and to try to accomplish.
I decided, as my final semester of study approached, that I needed to motivate myself in
a way that would drive the work toward completion while giving me a chance to focus less on
that completed work and more on the tasks in front of me at the moment. I have always been
motivated by video games—I have been playing them since I was 4, and they form the better
part of my exercise routine and also constitute my reward system for challenging tasks. Games
provide both a rigid structure and an open space to play within, and my being has adapted to
include them as a fundamental substrate of everyday life. With hard deadlines looming, it was
only natural that it occurred to me to make a game out of finishing my dissertation.

280

Thus, my dissertation card game was born. I first divided the broad task areas of the
dissertation into four. The process was of design was fairly organic, as I knew I needed to use
the four suits in the deck somehow, and Writing and Revision were an obvious pair for one
color. I chose them to be black to align with my desire to work on revising my thesis with the
Queen of Spades, so Revision was assigned to spades and (new) Writing to clubs. The other side
of dissertation work, research, was subdivided into Data Production and Data Analysis to fit the
model, and assigned to diamonds and hearts, respectively. Again, there was some meaning in
this assignment: diamonds reminded me of mining (e.g. for data), and the analysis of data
seems to me to be at the “heart” of any project of this kind.
It was left to assign meaning to the symbols on the cards, the numbers or letters and
emblems. I decided that ten times the number of the card in minutes (e.g. 50 minutes for a five-
card) made sense, so that the biggest card (a ten) would entail an hour and forty minutes of
work. For the royal cards, a separate system was devised to highlight pressing tasks. In a
separate log file (kept in Microsoft Excel), each royal card was assigned a specific, narrow task.
Each royal card counted for 30 minutes. I then reflected on adding a joker, and decided that
allowing myself 30 minutes down a “rabbit hole” each shuffle of the deck might help me stay
open to new avenues or pathways to connect the work together and draw it to a conclusion.
At this point, each card had a meaning, and the structure of the game materials seemed
sound. What remained was to put it into play with the work itself. My first layouts were three
cards, but given the variety of durations called for by a new shuffle, this seemed unsatisfactory
in getting things going the way they needed to progress. So I decided that, in most cases, five

281

cards was a reasonable layout for a day’s work. Countdown timers were set at the beginning of
the work day for each of the four (or five) task areas. Play progressed as work got done.
Markers were used on the cards to keep track of partial progress (I used pennies and nickels).
At the end of the day, a tally was made of minutes worked, cards completed, and royal tasks
accomplished.
What I found was that, while progress was slow at first, it was also much steadier than it
had been unassisted. The record of the log shows that as time went on and the game became
more familiar (and more developed), my work days became much longer, and my progress was
much more consistent. Convenience rules were added which made sense, and this helped keep
motivation levels high throughout the process of playing and working. For example, I realized
that partial progress on a card could be recorded with another, lower-level card—if I made 40
minutes worth of progress on the nine of spades, I decided to fish through the remaining deck
for a four or three of spades to mark and value the work I had done. I also allowed for
simultaneous timers, when appropriate, as when a new writing (clubs) task involved analyzing
one or more objects (hearts). The small innovations to the rules helped me to stay buoyant and
worked to boost my sense of accomplishment, however small the boost was.
The game also allowed me to build in days off of work without the guilt that comes with
taking time off from a pressing project. Because I could see the progress I made before in the
log, and I could also tell that my work was slowing down, knowing when to take time to
recharge and when to press on and produce more fervently became a more “objective” matter.

282

I could feel confident, from my own recorded history, that I would bounce back stronger than
ever. And I could see, just as directly, the work that I had done to earn that time off.
Games don’t motivate everyone. That this game helped me, in a significant way, to
complete this work may have more to do with my personal love of games and their reward
systems and spaces for creativity than with this game being a well-designed model for work-
play. Still, in the chaos of writing about chaos, it helped me arrange and present scattered
thoughts and stray bits of narrative into a (hopefully) coherent argument about sacrifice and
community. In a project where no pathways are obvious, and nothing seemed particularly right
or wrong to do, the introduction of alea (with a bit of auto-agon) moved the project forward,
even as the direction it was moving in and the end toward which it was headed remained
unclear.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Milner, James Beckwourth (author)

Core Title Sacrifice zones and community: global capital and the case of the Flint Water Crisis

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 04/24/2020

Defense Date 03/09/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag community,Flint Water Crisis,Georges Bataille,nonknowledge,OAI-PMH Harvest,rhetorical crisis,sacrifice zones

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Goodnight, Gerald Thomas (committee chair), Crigler, Ann (committee member), Jenkins, Henry III (committee member)

Creator Email james.b.milner@gmail.com,jbmilner@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-289250

Unique identifier UC11674917

Identifier etd-MilnerJame-8311.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-289250 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MilnerJame-8311.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

Rights Milner, James Beckwourth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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