Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Foucault Tourism

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Today to Cockatoo Island: penal colony within the convict colony, industrial reformatory, factory, shipyard, UNESCO World Heritage site and now a venue for the 18th Sydney Biennale. The extraordinary bricolage of colonial punishment, industrial production and knowledge economy cultural production makes for one of those slightly dizzying jet laggy experiences you have only while traveling.

My British forebears did know how and where to build prisons, you have to give them that. The island is isolated in the middle of Sydney harbor, with the prison itself located on top of a steep cliff. Recent excavations have uncovered minute solitary confinement cells, which have a distinctly contemporary look in this Abu Ghraib era. The officials built themselves sandstone residences with a Georgian feel but placed at the highest point to give them a panoptic viewpoint. Grain silos dug into the rock still have chain rings, to which the excavating prisoners were linked while working. The prison was created right at the end of the transportation era in 1849–convicts were not sent to New South Wales after 1850, although they went to Western Australia as late as 1868.

As has often been pointed out, these colonial punishments add a totally different complexion to the idea that European jurisprudence had moved from physical punishment to mental discipline by the early nineteenth century. My view has been that revolutionary action in Europe won workers there a certain (if limited) reprieve from punishment; but colonial punishment intensified in the later nineteenth century as imperialism abandoned all pretension of colonial self-government in favor of direct rule from the metropole. That did not preclude the disciplinary formation of colonized subjects, as the reformatories attest.

In 2000, a group of Aboriginal people occupied the island and claimed it as sovereign territory. You can still see their murals, using the Aboriginal flag as a motif. Using the colonial doctrine of terra nullius, Isabell Coe and others asserted that Britain had never formally claimed the island, a claim rejected by the courts as “inconceivable.” Really? A deserted island on the edge of the harbor? Regardless, Coe created a tent embassy on the island and asserted sovereignty. The occupation of occupied indigenous land and the counterclaim to sovereignty was a powerful performative act.

This, then, is no ordinary post-industrial site to hold an art exhibition. The artists whose work was shown here seemed to be aware of the challenges and many rose to the occasion. I liked Jonathan Jones’s simple approach:

Jones mixed typically British crockery with sea-shells that might be found in an Aboriginal midden in what is now New South Wales. The intermingling is simple but effective.

A more complex approach was taken by Lebanese artist Khaled Sabsabi in his installation “Nonabel.” You enter a darkened air-raid shelter and see the reflection of a young boy in water projected onto the circular walls. All of a sudden, the image changes dramatically and a montage of Arabic calligraphy and sound installation made me jump, although the phrase being used in the piece apparently means: “if you destroy the image of violence, it will disappear.”

Khaled Sabsabi “Nonabel”

Finally Alec Finlay brought the location of imperial domination up to date with his sound and sculpture installation. To quote his description:

Finlay takes the fluctuations of the stock market and represents them as the ‘buzz’ of Australian honey-bees (recorded by sound-artist Chris Watson), broadcast from 10 multi-storied wooden hives. Each hive stack bears the acronym of a major stock exchange – New York, Toronto, Sao Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Sydney – and produces a stream of audio, a buzzing that varies in density and volume in accordance with economic activity.

It was a remarkable sound, rising and falling with the market activity.

Alec Finlay “Swarm ASX”

What made it all the more powerful–although I suspect unintentionally–was that I came upon this piece in the Convict Precinct, just after reading a sign placed by the Sydney Harbor Trust. It described how, when the prison was first established, the prisoners were confined in wooden boxes at night. Is this what the favorite corporate slogan “thinking outside the box” actually means? That if you don’t produce useful ideas, we’ll put you in a box? Bees are said to form colonies. Others describe them as democracies or societies. Finlay also makes nests for “unproductive” wild bees out of books about bees. It’s layered symbolism like this that does important imaginative work, as we would do well to remember in our messaging and imaging in directly political contexts.

The Non-Human Hunger Games

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In jet-lagged mode, you are always susceptible to odd feelings of paranoia. So it may not be totally advisable to watch The Hunger Games on the plane. Or perhaps it was. After all, its construct of a media-dominated society controlling dissent by spectacle is far from paranoid. On his legendary blog K-Punk, Mark Fisher compares the London Olympics to the Hunger Games:

The function of the Hunger Games is to suppress antagonism, via spectacle and terror. In the same way, London 2012– preceded and accompanied by the authoritarian lockdown and militarisation of the city– is being held up as the antidote to all discontent. The feelgood Olympics, we are being assured, will do everything from making good the damage done by last year’s riots to seeing off the “threat” of Scottish independence.

It would be interesting to discuss what the right parallel would be in the U. S. to suppress Occupy: is counterinsurgency and the endless threat of terror the Hunger Games? Or is politics, wildly divorced as it is from any actual needs that most people have, our version?

Here in Sydney where I have now arrived, I went like a good tourist first to the once legendary Acquarium. It’s been rebuilt to accomodate a zoo made into spectacle called Wildlife Sydney. Breathlessly promising “interactive adventure [and] encounter,” while advertising that the most dangerous animals in the world are found in Australia, it seems that  the real and present threat of the degenerating biosphere is transformed into bio-entertainment. Of course, what I’m seeing here is not about Australia, which I barely know, but the kind of spectacle that is so commonplace in the U. S. that I don’t usually even notice it. Think Sea World, and other marine “parks,” where the dolphins routinely commit suicide by drowning themselves.

As is all too common in zoos, the animals here are palpably distressed to be contained in small spaces designed so that they will be visible at all times. A wombat ran from one side to another of its small “outback” space, clearly looking to get out, as did a small nocturnal marsupial, whose name I can’t remember. The wallabies just sat, as if stunned to be so restrained. It’s not an interactive space for the non-humans, that’s for sure.

The star of this sad little show is Rex the crocodile, whose 25 foot long bulk extends all the way across his pool. In his case, it is clear that he is being held in prison. He was first captured after attacking domestic animals. Taken to a crocodile farm to breed, he responded by attacking female crocodiles brought to him (described as his “girlfriends”). So he was carted off to the Wildlife Spectacle as one guaranteed dangerous exhibit, fed a chicken a day. When they gave him a turkey for Christmas, he responded by splattering it all over not only his enclosure but the whole space. I would call that sending a message, wouldn’t you?

Zoos were created as a visible example of the “conquest of nature” as Hegelian naturalists and colonizers were happy to call it in the nineteenth century. With the rise of modern environmental consciousness, they changed their mission to preserving species that are otherwise being threatened with extinction. As there are up to 100,000 species becoming extinct a year, zoos are going to be very busy places in the decades ahead. Perhaps that’s why Wildlife Sydney never uses the word “zoo” anywhere.

I don’t want, however, to suggest that Australia is particularly to blame here. In fact, the front pages of Australia’s newspapers are full of discussions of the carbon tax that the Labor government has installed. I don’t know enough to say how good a policy it is, but at the very least the need to try and offset the damage done to life is being recognized. The damage to the ozone layer is a fact of daily life here, where hats and sunblock are year round necessities.

Of course, as a character points out in The Hunger Games, we could all stop watching the Olympics, going to zoos, or indeed the movies. But how would we occupy ourselves then?

 

In transit

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Occupy 2012 is on its way to Australia, a 22 hour flight with all the attendant joys of getting to airports and so on. Some kind of service will be resumed as soon as I can, Internet access permitting. Over the course of the dog days, I’ll be building a set of page archives for the site to facilitate its use.

See you from the other side!

No pasaran!

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Let’s take heart from some remarkable examples of resistance to mafia capitalism from around the world. Long radical traditions have given these movements a capacity to resist. The Occupy project, so young it is not even a year old, can learn and benefit from these experiences and measure the extent of the challenge, even as we are inspired.

In Moscow, where even the mainstream media refer to Putin’s regime as a “mafia state,” the anarchist feminist punk band Pussy Riot responded to the “charges” in their show trial with defiance.

Pussy Riot in court

Wearing the No Pasaran! (they shall not pass) T-shirt with a slogan from the Spanish Civil War in Putin’s KGB courts is a powerful gesture.

It was a slogan against Franco’s fascists, made famous by Dolores Ibárurri, La Pasionaria, during the 1936 defense of Madrid (above). It became the chorus to a song with music by Hans Eisler.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, wearing the shirt, said to the “court”

This is a trial of the whole government system of Russia, which so likes to show its harshness toward the individual, its indifference to his honour and dignity…Even though we are behind bars, we are freer than those people.

By “those people,” Tolokonnikova was referring to the prosecutors and other functionaries who are, like latter-day Stalinists, totally dependent on the good will of the all-powerful leader. What’s particularly courageous about these statements is that Putin has been signaling a wish for leniency. If that now happens, Pussy Riot win a total victory. If it compels the regime to imprison the women for what they rightly describe as “opposition art,” then Putin loses again from the storm of negative publicity.

From the other side of the world come images of the on-going student resistance in Chile. Remember that Chile was the first test-case for neo-liberalism, imposed by the military after toppling the democratic left government of Salvador Allende in a US-backed coup in 1973. General Pinochet implemented Chicago-school neo-liberalism to the letter and it was the disaster we have come to expect. One of the areas least changed since those days is education, where fees are routinely charged across the system, even for the poorest.

After months of resistance, the students still have great energy. Today, according to the Santiago Times,

A group of high school students briefly occupied the central offices of the far-right Independent Democratic Union Party (UDI) in Santiago on Tuesday morning, accusing the party of being “complicit in the robbery of municipal money that should go to education.”

This action carries a possible three-year jail sentence under the Hinzpeter law, criminalizing occupying private or public property. There were widespread clashes with police during the demonstration continuing the call for free public higher education. Here are some photographs taken by Julia Antivilo, feminist performance artist, Mapuche Indian activist and artist. Remember these are high school students.

Water cannon in the streets, Santiago. Credit: Julia Antivilo

The water cannon were not just deployed for effect.

Credit: Julia Antivilo

In this picture, you can see how young these demonstrators are but the government has responded with stern law-and-order threats.

The combination of principle from young people met with violence by the state is bringing the population as a whole to support their cause. From the popular assemblies in Montréal comes this statement:

As Popular Autonomous Neighbourhood Assemblies (French: Assemblées populaires autonomes de quartiers) formed after the imposition of emergency legislation, we openly give our support to student associations who decide to continue to strike in opposition to the increase to tuition fees, and who continue to disobey this emergency law.  To force students back to class, as is supposed to happen starting August 13, is nothing more than an attack on students’ right to collectively organize.  For this reason, we offer our support to students on strike: we will organize demonstrations and we will be present on picket lines.

From all this we learn that repression works at first, but if people organize, the resistance becomes stronger and wider. Next, look at the historical perspective. In post-Soviet Russia, Pussy Riot cite the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. Quebec has been militant in regards to separatism and public services since the 1970s. Chile’s democratic revolution ran from 1970-73 and that repression is still being undone.

We’ve barely even begun this. Look at the kids. No pasaran!

The Learning To Come: the now future

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There are things going on. Learning is changing even as the debt apparatus tries to commodify the entire process into what it probably wants to call something like education capital. In the quiet of summer, some events emerge to show us what is to come (à venir) and that the future (avenir) is now. The àvenir is the future to come. It is Montréal. It is Free University. It is the Interference Archive. It is now.

The AVENIR piece above is the work and concept of a young group of Quebecois artists, who call themselves Ecole de la Montagne Rouge, the School of (the) Red Mountain. Their name evokes both the legendary Black Mountain art school and the Mountain, as the most radical faction of the French Revolution were known. EDLMR articulate a philosophy of radical learning:

We and thousands of other students across Quebec believe that education is a right, not a privilege reserved for the well-off. The tuition increase jeopardizes access to higher learning for our generation and future generations. Sensing that an unlimited general strike is looming, many protest movements and pressure tactics are being organized across Quebec. This is an opportunity for all students to show solidarity, defend our points of view and get involved so that we can create a balance of power in relations with the government. Our victory depends on the daily efforts made by each and every one of you.

They are in New York on Thursday, hosted by the fab Interference Archive. EDLMR produce conventional art work like these posters:

While those of a certain age will recognize the graphics of 1968 here, that was nearly fifty years ago. They are new to many younger people and in any event continue to have a striking visual and political impact.

EDLMR have also created Red Squared, an online project.

The site has everything from film to graphics, documentation of demonstrations, music and art. Check this out for example. Be sure to find the project on The Social Contract.

The event is hosted by the Interference Archive, whose importance is described by Cindy Milstein:

If we’re committed to making a better future, that also means saving, remembering, and scrutinizing our past (and present-day) struggles to get there, and doing so outside those hierarchical and privatized institutions that either don’t want us to remember — because that can be mighty subversive — or only allow certain privileged individuals access to that knowledge.

No new archives, no new learning. In an era obsessively dominated with memorials to trauma, how great to have an archive of the àvenir. Interference Archive works with OWS and Quebec. By the way, they could use some help.

Today, the next iteration of the fab Free University of New York City was also announced. The first major event was on May Day in Madison Square Park and there have been meetings throughout the summer, intertwined with All In The Red and other solidarity actions for Montréal. Now the Free U is calling for a full week of actions from September 18-22, following S17. You can propose an idea, or help or both. Do it.

The future is now, now is the future, it is come, it is to come.

 

 

Montréal’s Long Hot Summer

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While the world watches the Olympics and the US roasts in endless heat, Montréal is marking day 175 in the student strike and gearing up for a decisive few weeks. At the start of August, Liberal prime minister Jean Charest called an early election for September 4. While his official platform rests on his climate-disaster $80 billion package of forestry and mining expansion, Charest will also be judged on the student strike.

For students and their allies, the elections mark a time of decision. Some student leaders, like Leo Bureau Blouin, have joined the Parti Quebecois to protest the Law 78. There’s a risk of being co-opted here, clearly. Meanwhile the CLASSE meets on August 11-12 to decide on its next steps,  and how to continue the strikes. There’s an action on August 8th to gather people.

From August 13-17, there’s a key test of the strength of student opinion, as students are supposed to return to class. On August 22, there is a national demonstration, optimistically billed as the largest demonstration in history:

And just for once even faculty are not breaking ranks. The newly formed “Profs Contre la Hausse” (Profs against the Hike) have issued a hard-hitting manifesto, in classic Francophone style, which was published today.

It begins (I’m using their translation):

We do not see ourselves as mere agents of the reproduction of the social order, and especially as not officers of the repression with which Quebec’s state power has decided to contemptuously attack the student community.

The document outlines the absurdities of the new Law that prevents “gatherings” within 50 metres of a class and requires faculty to inform on their students, amongst other provisions that are rightly characterized as “Orwellian.” They conclude with some paragraphs that would probably get about 25 signatures where I teach. They have over 2000:

We refuse to contribute to the production of a world characterised by the war of all against all, by market logic, by mutual surveillance, by informants, self-censorship, and fear.

We reject the idea that respecting the contract between an academic institution and a student, legitimizes the violence exercised by the state against collective political rights – rights to associate, to express one’s opinion freely, to make collective decisions, to strike, and to demonstrate.

We reaffirm that decisions taken in a democratic way, by associations whose legitimacy is recognized by the law, are themselves legitimate.We respect the strike vote of the students. We recognize their right to protest at their educational institutions and to interrupt the activities which are carried out there as the only means by which they have bargaining power.

We would not know how to teach in contravention of these principles.

It is the last sentence that resonates: these educators have reached their limit, the place beyond which they cannot consider themselves still defined by learning rather than police functions. Let us hope their example is contagious.

Remember September 17

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September 17, also known as S17, is the next major day of action in the OWS calendar. When I referred to it the other day, I had some inquiries as to what I meant. So, with all due allowance for the fact that I speak for no-one but myself, here’s why you should keep September 17 free.

It’s one year of Occupy Wall Street. A year in which we changed the political vocabulary with the phrase “We are the 99%” and the concept of Occupy. A year of consolidating and organizing the vision that another world is possible, outside the atrophied structures of all-money-all-the-time “politics” as usual.

Did we “win”? If you go back to the materials of the time, everyone kept saying the same thing: there are no demands. So “winning” or “losing” cannot be measured by the accomplishment of this or that benchmark. The original call spoke of being encamped downtown for  “a few months.” Perhaps we fell a couple of weeks short but the park was the most intense time in many people’s lives and should not be measured by the calendar.

So this year once again there will be a call to assemble in New York on September 17. As S17 is a Monday, there will be major events on the preceding weekend and in the week afterwards. As it happens, S17 is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. But the NYSE is open, as are most financial institutions.

What exactly is going to happen and what the messages will be are being determined by the usual working groups. There’s a widespread sense that S17 should be the beginning of a new phase of the movement, such as the Strike Debt campaign that I am working with. No one wants to repeat the post-May Day hangover, where we’d organized for months only to not be sure why afterwards.

The reasons to be there are very clear.

  • If anything, the above is more true than it was a year ago.
  • Montreal is still on permanent unlimited strike.
  • Austerity is a palpable disaster, inducing double-dip recessions worldwide.
  • Spain, Greece, Ireland–solidarity with the IMF colonies
  • Capitalism is killing the planet: Greenland and the Arctic are melting, there is a drought in half of all U. S. counties, there are floods in China.
  • No bankers are in jail, even though they have been caught money laundering, fixing interest rates, losing clients’ money and other crimes above and beyond their incompetence and greed.
  • Tens of millions are so in debt that they have become part of the Invisible Army of debt defaulters and strikers.
  • 50 million people have no health insurance in the supposedly richest country in the world.
  • Politics is so obviously for sale to the highest bidder, it has become more brazen than organized crime.
  • {put your own reason(s) here}

If none of that is enough, I guarantee you’ll have a lot of fun, meet some great people and feel better about yourself.

September 17. New York City. Try and come. See you there.

Dis/Occupy the Olympics

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Oscar Pistorius runs in his Olympic 400 metres heat

The orgy of nationalism and sentimentality known as the Olympics has been very much not in my mind. The notoriously awful NBC coverage reduces excitement to boredom–they even showed ads during the middle distance races. There was a moment today, though, for those of us dis/abled or otherwise differently embodied folks, when Oscar Pistorius of South Africa ran in a 400 metres heat. As most people surely know, Pistorius is a double amputee and runs on J-blades. He not only participated but finished second, putting him in the semi-finals.

His charming pleasure in this accomplishment contrasted with the usual Gold! obsession of the Anglophone media. It reminds me that different modes of embodiment  and body presentation continue to have to struggle for acceptance. One of the aspects of the Occupy movement that I love is its attachment and embrace of all forms of self-actualization. Pistorius’s lesson for us is that it’s not just an end to medical debt that we call for: we want everyone to be able to get what they need, whether that’s a signing school for the Deaf, gender reassignment surgery, prosthetics, insulin, whatever: regardless of income.

Pistorius has had to compete not only against his fellow athletes but the extraordinary assumption that running on prostheses might somehow be an advantage. The myth of the Terminator cyborg is perhaps to blame here. Vivian Sobchack long ago dismissed the enhancement fantasy from her own experience with a prosthetic limb. Pistorius himself put it like this:

I think often there’s a lot of debate about the advantages, but there’s not much said about the disadvantages. If this was such an amazing piece of equipment that’s been around for 14 years, then how come thousands of other Paralympic athletes aren’t breaking world records and challenging even a 45- or a 48- or a 49-second 400m?

Here then is the crux: in common with people of color, women and people of non-normative sexualities, the dis/abled are both assumed to be inferior but suspect for any effort that is made to make them/us equal. Pistorius cannot simply be a good runner who lacks lower limbs. He must be a “crippled” runner made into a superhero by his device.

I’m deaf, or technically hard-of-hearing because I can decipher sound using lip-reading and an electronic device. Being deaf is still assumed to be a personal failing by mainstream normative culture, who celebrate the occasional exception like the fabulous Marlee Matlin, but presume deafness to indicate stupidity as a rule.

Marlee Matlin in The L-Word

Consequently, the 50 million people with hearing loss in this country are a totally ineffective lobby because we are unwilling to identify ourselves. Signing Deaf people, who defend Deaf culture vigorously, are the exception we should learn from.

For example, an odd editorial in the New York Times presented hard-of-hearing people yesterday as being at a disadvantage in noisy spaces because their devices amplify all noise, making it unbearably loud. This was true for analog hearing aids, but digital devices all use a compression curve and most that cost as much those the article cited (about $3000) will have a setting for noisy spaces that eliminates background noise. So I find myself at an advantage compared to my “hearing” middle-aged friends in such spaces.

The issue here is in fact one of insurance. If you have good insurance, as I do through New York State (thanks to my partner Kathleen), devices are covered. If not, you have to pay for them, and for hearing tests, and they are very expensive. So although hearing is considered the indispensable attribute of the human, because of music and spoken language, hearing aids are part only of what is known sneeringly as “Cadillac” plans. All politicians now agree such luxuries must be dispensed with. Prosthetic devices like those used by Pistorius and myself will be for those who can afford them. Some have disparaged Occupy as being “medieval” but what could be more medieval than that? Free universal health care is not a demand. It’s a right.

 

Disappearing Like Ice: The Middle Class

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The artists Ligorano and Reese have made a new ice sculpture project to confront delegates at the Democratic and Republican conventions. About 2000 pounds of ice will be carved to read: MIDDLE CLASS. Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, it will melt away, leaving only memories. It’s a combination of earth, language and performance art, creating a striking hybrid. For whereas land and environmental art has tended to create permanent forms out of rock, earth and water, this piece is time-based, like performance. In the tradition of language work, it relies for its impact on the material form of language but here the words are transitory and ephemeral, like conversation rather than print.

One of the oddities of the United States to an outsider is the insistence that there is no such thing as class here, only a “middle class” that covers almost everyone. Any attempt to point out that government policy over the past three decades has enormously benefited the wealthiest, those now known as the one percent, is nonetheless immediately described as class war.

There is a way to make sense of the “middle class.” We might describe it as the assemblage of all those people able to improve their lives by debt financing. That would extend from the lowly store credit card via student loans to the mortgages that made the “American dream” of home ownership possible. Excluded from the debt middle class would be those at the bottom unable to qualify for credit, except at places like Pay Day loan sharks or pawn shops. At the top, there are those who use debt to make more money, whose personal well-being is not at risk.

As we all know, this middle class is indeed in dire danger. Student loans now total an absurd $1 trillion, while outstanding credit card debt is not far behind at $800 billion. As secured loans, mortgages were supposed to be the smartest investment a person could make. Today, some ten million homes have been foreclosed or are in the process of foreclosure. So what would be left of “America” if the middle class disappeared, as Ligorano and Reese suggest? The melting will leave us drowning in debt.

The disappearing ice sheet in Greenland NB this is surface melt, not total melting

Melting ice is of course also suggestive of the palpably accelerated pace of human-caused climate change. This Northern summer has seen unprecedented ice melt across the Arctic and Greenland, prompting only an unsightly squabble among nation states as to who gets the mineral rights to the newly exposed land and sea bed. Neither political party has anything of substance to say about the planetary disaster, for fear of alienating Big Oil. Perhaps the very melting of the art work recognizes that its message will not be seen, let alone heard.

Let’s propose an alternative ending: the melted water should be collected, refrozen and carved to read: “We Are The 99%. S17. Join us.”

 

Hands On

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A group of us had fun today trying to dream up some new images for the movement using the words “imagine” and “resistance.” We came to think about hands, as a symbol for the movement and as a means for its enactment. It’s a hands on process and that tells us something–about how we have reclaimed the hand as a tool but also about why the movement unfolds organically, rather than virally.

From the facilitation question “if you can hear me, clap once,” to the standard-Occupy issue notebook, it’s all about hands. 

The discussion began with the role of graffiti in the Syrian uprising. People simply wrote their names, a reclamation of the self that is fundamental to graffiti. Autocratic regimes arrogate to themselves even the power of the name. And, as Banksy puts it:

The interface of the hand with the wall produces a form of reclaimed public space, even though walls are designed to exclude and mark the limits of property.

Using stencils, Banksy has been able to expose the separation strategy of the military-industrial complex with this piece on the Israel-Palestine separation wall. The real Palestinian boy on the foreground confronts his graffiiti-ed counterpart and the illusion of open space.

On the other hand, as it were, graffiti artists operate in secret, concealing their identity. They are answerable to their audience, of course, in terms of reception but not directly. The reclamation of the self through Occupy was clearly different in that it was face to face but related in that it was a conversation of hands and eyes. There were the famous gestures of the GA and other meetings. I think here more of the hand-held video cameras, the clinking of the casseroles, painting signs, chalking, gardening, writing, cooking, knitting, and other hand-driven actions of Occupy.

In feudal law, and indeed in marriage, we give our hands to others. In the British navy, ordinary sailors were known as “hands,” as in the command “all hands on deck.” From there, it became a way of describing industrial and plantation workers (meaning slaves) as early as the seventeenth century.

We reclaim not these hands but the hand of the artist visible in her work, the hand offered in applause, the hand noted for its craft or skill and so on. For all our digital communications, this is an artisanal movement, passed on from person to person, hand to hand. It’s a touchy group, meaning that people touch, not that they are short-tempered. Without a “party” to join or other mass form of adhesion, Occupy is a manual process.

I’m reminded of 19th century craft anarchism and socialism of the William Morris variety here. While his pursuit of hand-made high quality materials (above) later seemed wildly out of touch with “ornament is a crime” varieties of modernism, I see people looking again at E. P. Thompson’s classic biography of Morris–here’s a quote to whet the appetite:

In the next few years a rash of Anarchism was to appear in one major city after another. It took all sorts of shapes and colours: there was the sober group around Kropotkin and Edward Carpenter, which published Freedom; there was the studious and restrained old friend of Morris, the tailor, James Tochatti … who (after 1893) edited Liberty; there was the old Autonomie Club, in Windmill Street, where foreign refugees hatched real conspiracies: the Jewish Anarchist Club in Rathbone Place; the Christian Anarchists, the Associated Anarchists, the Collectivist Anarchists, Socialist Anarchists, the followers of Albert Tarn and those of Benjamin Tucker. Papers published, on blue paper, red paper, and toilet paper, ranged from the Anarchist, Commonweal, Alarm and Sheffield Anarchist, to the Firebrand, Revenge, British Nihilist and Dan Chatterton’s Atheistic Communistic Scorcher.

Now there’s a reading list to conjure with! And a forgotten set of histories to remember and fit into our sense of what this movement might be. Let’s give ourselves a big hand.