Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

The rhythm of the global movement

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The new wave of global protest is inventing public space in global cities. Global capital likes space to be isomorphic and consistent–like a McDonalds hamburger, it should look, taste and feel the same wherever you actually happen to find yourself. In this world-view, there is no such thing as public space in global cities. The global precariat–meaning precarious workers, or everyone who doesn’t benefit from capital investment– is inventing it. It’s a globally mediated combination of certain sounds and certain actions. The “movement” is about learning how that goes and what to do about it.

Since 2011 we’ve seen a wave of efforts to reimagine bodies, spaces and lives resistant to, or outside of, the flows of finance capital. The first tactic was “take the squares,” a specific effort to reinvent the space of circulation into one of belonging. It flowed from Tahrir to Sol, Syntagma, Zuccotti, St Paul’s, Pershing and many more. Zuccotti was the exception that proved the rule, a fragment of striated space in the frictionless smooth zones of hyperpoliced finance capital’s capital. Otherwise these spaces were well-known locations in historic centers of power. As such, they were in many cases all too easy for determined police to retake with the obvious exception of Tahrir. Indeed, since the revolution, the military regime has isolated the revolution “in” Tahrir, that is to say, the conceptual space of the movement.

So when we say that the movement is about “bodies in space,” we’re saying a set of interrelated things that we’re learning to understand as we go along:

  1. That the body is any body, not one (un)marked by codes of ethnicity, race, gender, able-ism, sexual orientation etc.
  2. That this body “moves,” both literally in the ways that it can depending on its age, capacities and desires, and also conceptually in that it refuses to stay in its “place,” the place allocated to it by authority.
  3. That this movement, which is also a refusal to “move on” as the police want us to do, invents mediated public space that did not previously exist, whether by occupying, marching, dancing, or displaying.
  4. That this movement is not any movement whatever but has a rhythm, one that is altogether different to the metronomic beat of capital’s 1-2-3-4.
  5. That this rhythm reclaims and invents the time that gives the new public space dimension.
  6. That these interactions are disseminated globally by video/photo/MP3 using social media and that this mediation is constitutive of resistant global space.
  7. It is unlimited/illimité/ilimitado.

In this video from Montréal that everyone loves, you can see this process at work. Filmed two days ago, edited yesterday, a global talking point today:

What if you don’t happen to have a thousand people available? Since 2008, the Spanish anti-capitalist activist collective flo6x8 have been reterritorializing the “any space whatever” of global capital. They use Spanish regional music and dance to disrupt its smooth flow with rhythms and sounds that cannot help but recall their North African origin.

Yesterday they intervened at a branch of Bankia, the nationalized amalgam of savings banks (thanks to Matthew Bain for pointing this one out to me).  Bankia announced that the 11 billion euro bail out they need is more like 19 billion. While this sum may seem minimal to those of us accustomed to the staggering amounts handed over to US and UK banks, in Spain, caught as it is between falling revenues due to the crisis and European Union-mandated austerity, this is a real number.  flo6x8 adapt a flamenco to lament this and to draw bank customers into their dance:

Here, just for fun, is an action from February this year in Barcelona, where the bank customers really get into it:

OWS is starting to work in this frame. It’s important to point out that the Spanish actions have roots in the long anti-fascist struggle and the depth of Spain’s financial crisis since 2008. Canadian organizers have been pointing out that their student strike is the result of two years hard work and the historical situation of Quebec.

The “New York” that is imagined as the epicenter of neo-liberal finance capital has visualized itself outside of historical space and time since its neo-liberal reinvention in the 1980s. Activist movements have been localized and divided. So OWS was, as many have pointed out, enabled in considerable part by the global experience and diversity of its activists. We still have much to learn.

Starting today, OWS is holding Summer Disobedience School at a variety of locations in Manhattan, combining non-violent direct action training with skill shares and teach-ins.

I’m going to go even though I don’t do many of the disruptive direct actions because what the rhythm of the movement from Montreal to Mexico City is teaching me is simply that we have a lot to learn.

Montreal: ça ira!

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In the face of continued inadequate media coverage, let’s keep the focus on Montreal. As numerous tweets had it last night, this has gone far beyond a dispute over student tuition fees, as important as that issue has become. It is now a contest over sovereignty: do the people set the boundaries of the force of law or their “representatives” in the state parliament?

Such questions resonate in Quebec because of the long campaign for autonomy from Anglophone Canada and the history of state repression in the 1970s. Yet they clearly have a global impact in the present crisis in which neoliberal technocracy is struggling to maintain the hegemony of its assertion that there is no alternative to austerity and authority. Montreal is now the focus of this global dispute.

For those catching up with the Montreal strike, this video offers a history:

The loi d’exception, the law of exception, known as Loi 78 gave exceptional powers to the state. The May 22 march of over 250,000 people in a city of about 3 million people was an extraordinary statement of refusal to consent to this domination.

May 22 March. Credit: Justin Ling

The next night saw the first implementation of the law. Demonstrators were kettled in the street, using the orange nets first implemented in London. There were 518 arrests Wednesday night in Montreal and another 150 in Quebec City. Protestors were issued with desk tickets carrying fines of $634. The New York Times mentions this briefly on Friday without a reference to Law 78.

Many protestors took to the streets on Thursday night wearing their tickets.

Demonstrator wearing his fine summons for illegal assembly

Montreal responded by holding a much larger demonstration on Thursday night. Heard on the manif (march) Thursday night: “si la révolution nous suit c’est parce qu’elle nous appuie”/ “if the revolution is following us it’s because it supports us.” This is not (just) a tuition strike any more. The song of the march went:

Illégal, tu me fais faire des bêtises dans les rues d’Montréal….quand le peuple se lève, rien ne peut l’arrêter

Or:

Illegal, you make me do stupid things in the streets of Montreal…when the people rise up, nothing can stop them

Estimates suggested about 1500 people were marching in three separate groups that converged downtown.

Marching in Montreal--illegally

Many performed cacerolazo, a banging of pots and pans as a protest that was carried out not only by protestors in the street–who were risking arrest–but by many others from steps, balconies and sidewalks. A musician has made a song out of the sound already: Guillaume Chartain’s casserole song. These sympathizers extended still further the anti-government coalition and the action took place in parts of the city remote from the downtown demonstrations.

The casserole protest aka cacerola

There were other carnivalesque elements, designed to deter the police from making arrests, like the Plus Brigades in NY. Here’s the AnarchoPanda making his/her rounds:

The police seemed uncertain as to what to do. At one point they started tweeting, apparently to warn people of imminent arrest:

Using the #manifencours like the protestors, the SPVM proclaimed that a siren would be sounded as a sign of escalation. In the end, having already made over 2500 arrests during the course of the protests, the police made a token 4 arrests last night. As I mentioned earlier, there is still a popular state of exception–the mass repetition of events, whether technically legal or criminalized. To have enacted Loi 78 last night, the police would have needed to arrest about 2500 people and they seem to have backed down from that.

This could mark a critical turning point. If the demonstrators can maintain their numbers, and the police continue to show reluctance to mass arrest, Loi 78 falls by default. What outcome do the protestors then want? If elections are called it is by no means certain that the right lose, as Wisconsin Democrats are nervously seeing now. Although Gov. Walker faces a recall election, polls show the race essentially tied.

Meanwhile, the Canadian movement is energizing others worldwide. There was a solidarity rally in Paris for the second day in a row.

A rally in Paris in solidarité

They get it in London finally. Small solidarity events are taking place daily in New York, with a larger event being planned for next week.

As the French Revolution chant used to go:

Ça ira! Ça ira! Ça ira!

Here we go! here we go! Here we go!

 

 

Public Intellectuals: wrong on debt, wrong on climate.

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Like many NYC residents, I get a lot of magazines and journals in which the self-styled public intellectuals get to hold forth on the state of the world. As these people get a great deal of access to the media, we hear much insistence on their importance. Today I read two leading articles from either side of the Atlantic that made me question whether we do in fact still need or want such public intellectuals. In addressing two of the main themes of the moment, student debt and climate change, these pieces both decide that their subjects have been overblown on grounds that are clearly tendentious. Another journalism is possible–I would say necessary.

Writing in the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, Harvard grad (1976) and president of Harvard Crimson, doesn’t see too much to do about student debt. Over at the London Review of Books, Malcolm Bull of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, agonizes over climate change ethics. Both are worryingly wrong, albeit from very different political perspectives. Lemann tends to quote Obama, Bull prefers Lenin. Both stress a highly partial account of their topic to get to their conclusions.

Nicholas Lemann: Mr One Percent

 

Lemann contrasts the “apocalypse mode” of writing on student debt with the good sense of Obama, speaking at UNC:

“In today’s economy, there’s no greater predictor of individual success than a good education. Right now, the unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the national average. The incomes of folks with a college degree are twice as high as those who don’t have a high-school diploma.” These figures communicate the over-all reality of the situation better than do the anecdotes about heavily indebted graduates who can’t find jobs.

In fact, Obama is being cute with his stats here. While it’s unsurprisingly true that college graduates over the age of 25 have better employment than high-school dropouts, it’s also true that

Thirty five percent of unemployed college graduates and those with advanced degrees have been without a job for more than a year, the same rate as unemployed high school dropouts.

And here’s the real kicker. According to a recent study by Northeastern University of Labor Department reports:

about 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 were jobless or underemployed last year.

So what Obama said is true but it’s highly selective with the truth. I wonder how many of those unemployed graduates are part of the one million people who owe over $100,000 in student debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?

He continues to err when he suggests that

Research libraries and philosophy departments can’t possibly make money; they require subsidies from business schools and biomedical-research labs, but that drives tuition higher than it would be if universities dropped their money-losing functions.

As Chris Newfield and others have shown, humanities programs tend to be net profit makers for universities because their tuition charges easily cover their costs. Science labs, run on national grants, are loss makers because their overheads are not fully covered by those grants. A report from the University of California showed that UC lost $720 million on overheads when “winning” $3.5 billion in science grants–in a year when the system had an $813 million shortfall. In other words, almost all the budget crisis in California was due to underfunded science labs.

Lemann ices the cake by concluding:

Where higher education is actually underpriced is in the top-tier schools. That may sound offensive, but price is determined by what people are willing to pay, and the top twenty-five or so schools in the country could charge even more than they do.

I don’t think even the Ivies are making that kind of an argument. All this is supposed to lend force to Lemann’s support for the continuation of “lower” student loan interest at 3.4%. In fact, all that is lower is the rate of extortion, because the Federal Reserve loans money at a steady 0.1% at present. It only costs the government notional dollars that it might have extracted from students. Let’s think instead about the cost of unlevied taxation on capital gains, all subject to ceiling of 15% tax and realize the absurdity of this argument.

More puzzling is the lengthy discussion of climate justice in the LRB by Malcolm Bull. Bull appears to want to make a Left case for being a climate skeptic, although his piece takes a carefully weighted path. His LRB editor got the tone right with the headline: “Must we save the world?” There’s a very English cleverness and irony there that serves to wash over some worrying positions.

At the outset Bull asks of global warming: “Are humans causing it? Almost certainly.” Almost? There’s no reputable source that holds otherwise any more, even if there are well-funded climate skeptics at the Heartland Institute and elsewhere to give the illusion of debate. In the US alone, 15,000 temperature records were set this March. Bull asserts that warming is being offset by the “the protective effect of sulphate aerosols.” That sounds nice doesn’t it? These aerosols, which Bull speculates “could in theory be pumped into the atmosphere indefinitely for the sole purpose of reducing global warming,” are very toxic. You’ll know them better as things like sulfur dioxide, a by-product of burning coal that are well-known to cause asthma, emphysema, bronchitis and other respiratory conditions with potentially fatal effects. So perhaps not such a good idea after all.

This is the tendency of the writing here: not transparently refutable but taking a path of most resistance to climate change analysis. Bull concentrates solely on temperature increase as the index of climate change, while most in the field now look at parts per million of carbon dioxide, changing pH levels in the sea, ice melt, desertification and so on.

This tactic causes much of the analysis in the piece to be off target. There is an extensive discussion of the ethical relationship between present emissions policy and the future. This misses the point that climate change is now, it’s already happening and it’s too late to reverse, as Bill McKibben graphically puts it in his book Eaarth:

We’re not going to get back the planet we used to have, the one on which our civilization developed. We’re like the guy who ate steak for dinner every night and let his cholesterol top 30 and had the heart attack. Now he dines on Lipitor and walks on the treadmill, but half his heart is dead tissue.

Or if you think that’s corny how about this: according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2009

changes in surface temperature, rainfall and sea level are largely irreversible for more than a thousand years after carbon dioxide levels are completely stopped.

Writing in 2012, Bull prefers to put it this way:

As for rises in sea level, the 2007 IPCC projections range from 18 to 59 centimetres – which is not enough to submerge anywhere other than the lowest-lying areas.

Which is to say, Pacific islands, Manhattan, Pakistan, Florida, Holland and other low-lying areas: too bad. And to ignore how sea level rise affects the salinity of the soil, the magnitude of storms.

Flooding in Koror, Palau--"move on, nothing to see here"

In the end, I don’t think such outcomes are Bull’s central concern. Like some others, he worries most about the political future:

what climate change most conspicuously undermines is not the nation-state but democracy, for it requires supranational institutions at a time when there is no supranational democracy, and allows that at a national level the interests of future generations might take precedence over those of the current one.

This is the carbon dictatorship theory–that in order to control what is now out of control extraordinary measures will be required and they could only be dictatorial.

I would say that the global social movements have shown a very different set of possibilities. It is just as conceivable that a move away from the high consumption, fossil-fuel driven, debt accumulating permanent crisis might occur. Such a scenario would make it imaginable that carbon debt be taken as seriously as bond market debt. Direct democracies might be thought of as our last best hope, which could certainly do no worse than any of the current social systems. If we’re going to get from here to there, then quite frankly, we’re going to need a different kind of intellectual to help us think how to do it.

 

 

The Media and the State of Exception

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You won’t be reading this in the mainstream media but there are social movements challenging the status quo from Canada to Mexico–the North American Free Trade Association is kicking back. In Mexico, the media are directly the target of the movement. In Canada, you’ll get a completely different story depending on whether you’re Francophone or Anglophone. And in the US, silence reigns.

On the way back into my building last night after the solidarity march, I met a neighbor who asked me why I was all dressed in red. So I explained and she was genuinely surprised: a New York Times-reading, PBS-watching liberal with literally no idea this had happened. This morning I checked the online media and there was no mention of events in Quebec in either the Times or the London Guardian, which I tend to think of as more progressive. There was a video deep down on Le Monde‘s website.

So is this a classic case of what Noam Chomsky called “manufacturing consent”? There’s a good deal of that certainly. At the same time, media professionals are consciously following their own sense of what makes news. Underneath these familiar, if frustrating, patterns, something else can be glimpsed–the possibility that this is in fact turning into an exception to the “business as usual” relation between media, elites, and people.

Clearly, media outlets want to cover things as “news,” what’s exceptional from the everyday. Once things become “normal,” even if they are protests at what is taken to be normal, they drop back into the blur of the everyday. So even if journalists believe themselves to be doing a good job of representing the “news,” social movements are going to find it difficult to feature without “victories.”

It’s intriguing that the newest student-led social movement in Mexico is directed precisely against media bias, in the anxiety that media collusion is helping the chances of the PRI to return to power, over a decade after the long-term single party was voted out. Even the Wall Street Journal has noticed:

“The protest movement has already achieved the impossible: forcing Televisa to cover an insurrection by young people,” political analyst Sergio Aguayo wrote on Mexico’s Animal Politico website.

Students drove the PRI candidate out of a university, leading to allegations that they were not really students. 131 students posted their identities to Facebook and as a result the Twitter hashtag is #yosoy132, “I am 132.” The movement’s goal is free elections and equality of information, which would be a social revolution. 50,000 marched in Mexico City this past weekend. Can social media lead a challenge to entrenched broadcast media and political power in the Americas, as well as in North Africa?

Montreal raises the bar still higher. Anglophone media have treated Loi 78 as normal legislation, or at best a Special Law, meaning that the protests against it are not significant. The Francophone media has quite correctly called it a “loi d’exception,” a law of exception. Such a law is, as many emphasized during the second Bush administration, a law that suspends the normal operations of law in order to defend the force of law. That is, those in power see the existing legislation as insufficient to enforce consent and pass a law giving them exceptional powers. The paradox here is that the law of exception reveals the force at work in the “normal” law at the point when people cease to consent to obey it.

The particular force of the Montreal law is that it undercuts the one space of exception left to the dominated. Standard law does not expect or provide for the repeated defiance of a particular piece of legislation. Thus New York public-private spaces were open 24-7 as a hedge against the private owner closing the space for their own purposes. It had not been considered that a group of private citizens might choose to occupy the space 24-7. It was, after a duration of time, intolerable to city authorities, who realized that their ability to enforce consent was being challenged. The evictions were done as sheer force with the flimsiest of justifications.

In Montreal, the repetition has been of the right to strike and the right to march. As the strike continued towards 100 days and the nightly marches reached into the 20s, a form of panic seems to have set in among state government. After the initial outcry, they fell back on the strategy of claiming that the law was in fact “normal” because other cities like New York and London had similar laws. Despite their penchant for violence, the Montreal police do not so far seem inclined to use their new powers. Talk of negotiations has surfaced at once.

It matters a good deal how this ends. If the students agree to some deal that leaves the law of exception in place, the state will have gained notable, if formal, new powers. It will also set a precedent that other cities like New York might look at with interest. That is, it will be said that the law brought about an end to the crisis. Canadian conservatives are claiming that this is now a movement “about nothing” and the law is perfectly reasonable in the main.  A media narrative of the power of the exception is in the making.

On the other hand, the Montreal movement currently has dual power. Unlike, exceptionally, many other such movements globally, it has not yet chosen to exercise that power except in calling for an end to the neo-liberal policies of the Quebec administration. Should they take exception at the way their self-evident mandate is received, that might change. Normally, in North American societies, that doesn’t happen. Whatever this is, it isn’t normal.

So-so-so-solidarité: austerity vs. education

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Ceci n'est pas un riot/This Is Not A Riot

From Spain to Canada, the U.K. and U.S., student debt and education funding has become the defining issue of austerity. States have responded with violence and by accusing activists of being violent, a wonderfully Orwellian twist. Above, Canadian artist Max Liboiron visualizes the Red Square protests with the title “This Is Not A Riot.”  Sadly a fully representative scene would have to show charging riot police. The recent police violence changes how we think of Canada, formerly thought of as a more humane version of the US–see below.

The passing of Loi 78 does not seem to have deterred many of those involved. A new website “Arrest me, somebody/Arrêtez-moi quelqu’un” borrows from the 99% meme:

Céline Magontier

Text reads: ” I disobey Bill 78″

Clémence Boisvenue

“I don’t listen to my parents, much less Bill 78.” By identifying themselves and indicating their intent to disobey, these people are technically already in breach of 78.

One student union CLASSE (Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante) has already indicated that they will not abide by Loi 78 and made a public declaration to that effect yesterday in Montreal.

However, the mainstream student unions did supply a route plan to the police and the march was therefore permitted: and enormous.

Montreal May 22--red everywhere!

Without playing the numbers game, this presence makes it clear that Loi 78 is not going to end the strike or undermine its support.

The contest between education and austerity maps the boundaries of the latter. On Tuesday, educators from kindergarten to university levels in Spain went on strike to protest cuts and tuition increases–student fees have been increased by 50%. Conservative provinces controlled by the ruling Popular Party have implemented the cuts, while other regions struggle to minimize the impact. So when you read pieces about the euro worrying about the budget deficits in the Spanish regions, this is the real agenda: austerity vs. education. Of course, austerity affects other areas of life as well but it’s here that transatlantic resistance has been mobilized and it’s here that the issue will be decided.

So in NYC, where education is in a mess from K-16, a day of solidarity efforts and perhaps a realization that, at least for the present, the centre of the global movement is Montreal. It was an object lesson, though, in why past left tactics don’t work in the new climate and the still-vibrant sense of possibility generated by Occupy.

At 2pm a handful of people gathered for a traditional picket of the Quebec government offices in Rockefeller Plaza. Police compelled protestors to march in a small circle in the street behind barricades, while a sentorian-voiced RCP organizer bellowed slogans. It was totally depressing, relieved only by the excitement of three Quebecois teenagers on a trip to New York.

Free University Washington Square Park

At five, we gathered in Washington Square Park for Free University. A crowd of about one hundred arrived in a warm, conversational mood. The Free University had about five classes on offer but the crowd spontaneously split into two groups: one focused primarily on the events in Canada and the other on issues of counterinsurgency, debt and violence. After a while both groups ended up in a free-flowing discussion about what next for Occupy, with some stringent self-criticism as well as some affirmation. Free University has hit a nerve, supplying the need for an open exchange of ideas that used to be the hallmark of Liberty Plaza. If it’s not yet drawing in many new people, it is allowing those who have been involved for a long time to discuss and rethink our strategies.

Unlimited Strike/Grève Illimitée

At 8.30, the time that the students hold their marches in Montreal, a few hundred people left Washington Square Park on a wildcat march up Broadway across town on 13th around and about a bit and into Union Square.

A qui la rue? A nous la rue!

Traffic was terrible anyway so I’m not sure how disruptive it was but it was fun and a morale-booster. There was even some dancing in the street.

A-Anti-Anticapitalista!

Some victories have been accomplished–Cooper Union students have fought off efforts to introduce tuition at their historically free institution, at least for two years. Like the Quebecois, they understood that it’s the moment when tuition is introduced that is the one serious opportunity to defeat it. For the moment, we say:

Avec nous, dans la rue!

On est plus de cinquante!

In short, it seems that it’s Montreal’s turn to shift the dynamics: solidarité!

 

Sovereigns to Students: Debt Enforcement as Law

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Occupy Montreal! 5 21 12

A qui la rue? A nous la rue? Or as we say down here: Whose streets? Our streets! As ever it sounds better in French, smarter even. Tomorrow is the 100th day of the student strike in Quebec that has now been the subject of the state of exception Loi 78. In a way, we can be grateful for this resort to violence because it clearly reveals that the use of state-sanctioned force in defense of debt extends from sovereigns to students.

The student resistance is remarkable both for its foresight into the disaster of student debt and its fortitude against police violence. There were 308 arrests yesterday and tonight’s action is just getting underway.

The acceleration of this repression has come in synchronization with the increased drumbeat against Greece. Increasingly, it is said by “sources” that Greece must leave the euro, perhaps even the European Union, should it dare to consider debt abolition. Such discourse seeks to transform the moral discourse of debt into sovereign enforcement. It relies on the absurdity that Greece should cut its social services in order to borrow more money to repay debts incurred at the suggestion of the very bankers who now cry foul. Canadian students are now subject to this violence in advance–they are being compelled to accept future debt at the cost of present violence.

Perhaps we have not fully recognized the value of this struggle until now. Making up for lost time, there has been an impressive rallying of solidarity actions in the past few days.In New York tomorrow, there is a rally at the Quebec government offices at Rockefeller Plaza (access from 48th St) at 2pm. This will be followed by a march leaving from Washington Square Park at 8pm.

The Free University group happened to be meeting yesterday evening and it was quickly decided to hold a Pop-Up Free University tomorrow in the time in-between. So there’s banner and sign-making at 5pm in Washington Square Park and teach-ins, open forums, skill-shares and other events from 6-8pm.

First and foremost, there’s the opportunity to learn more about what’s happening in Quebec.

I’m leading a discussion for Occupy Student Debt on the connections between the student debt crisis and the state of exception. We’ll reflect on how student debt has metamorphosed from an issue of personal responsibility and morality, discussed only in private, into a matter for the exercise of the supreme force of law. Loi 78 gives the Quebec state the power to claim all actions that question debt feudalism.

In this action, Quebec has highlighted the close proximity of debt and state violence, as  David Graeber has pointed out:

Modern money is based on government debt and governments borrow money in order to finance wars.

This apparatus has been vastly expanded since the end of the Cold War to no very good effect internationally. Even in the Counterinsurgency New York Times, there has been a more-or-less open recognition recently that the war in Afghanistan is an expensive and pointless failure. It was in Chicago that it is “working,” insofar as it has exercised overwhelming force against public protest.

Chicago 5 19 12. Credit: Sarah Bennet.

Quite rightly, Occupy Theory will be holding an open forum on these counterinsurgency tactics tomorrow.

What alternative could there be to the regime of permanent debt, consumerism and anxiety? OWS Sustainability have a number of skill shares happening at Washington Square Park that suggest some possibilities. There’s one on how to create a worker’s cooperative, not as the “solution” but as part of what they’re calling the “transition economy” from the present disaster to something more offering more possibilities to people, and less destructive to non-human life. Then we can learn about permaculture, sustainable forms of culture that are not subject to the market requirements of built-in obsolescence.

Debt claims to be morality but is always violent in theory and in practice. The pattern that is emerging tells us that the creditors are worried. Show them they should be–attend, like, tweet, support the Quebec strike, the solidarity rallies and your own local debtors.

 

Going viral, going unmentioned: global Occupy

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After May Day, there was some internal discussion in OWS as to both the success of the actions and the press coverage. If the goal of May Day was to give a boost to actions worldwide, it’s beginning to look as if it succeeded (without claiming that OWS or Occupy “caused” any non-Occupy events). It feels like something is happening, there’s a new wave of actions and certainly a new wave of repression. Media is another matter.

On Friday, there was a very substantial demonstration in the northern mining town of Calama, Chile, demanding a greater share of the revenues produced by the copper mined there. The town was blocked by barricades and there was a communal cacerolazo, the banging of pots and pans with spoons and forks.

Calama

Yesterday I saw barricades all the way along Union Square and University Place for some kind of march and there were needless to say cops everywhere. It turned out it was for the annual Union Square Dance Parade and some intrepid Occupy folks had got in on the event. Video by Randolfe Wicker:

In Chicago last night after the highly dubious arrest of three protestors as “terrorists,” a peaceful marcher named Jack from OWS was run over by a police van. There are many pictures on the #nonato twitter feed of injured people.

Today what even the Chicago Tribune, no leftist paper, called “a massive anti-war protest” culminated in a return of medals by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that had many in the audience in tears.

Frankfurt 5 19

In Frankfurt yesterday, 20,000 protested the austerity regime after police mass arrested over 400 people on Friday. Note signs in Greek, German and English in this one photo, evidence that participants see themselves as part of a global movement now, even in Germany, anchor of the European austerity policy.

Montreal--"Crime: To Have an Opinion"

In Montréal, police used their new law against last night’s student demonstration, declaring it illegal as of 9pm and following up with 69 arrests. Student websites have closed to be replaced with anonymized sites that formally advise people not to attend the events that they list. The Quebec Liberal Party and the state Education Ministry websites were down for much of the day: it was inaccessible when I tried to access it. Who do we know that might have done such a thing? Hint: think Guy Fawkes.

Tonight, reports of concussion grenades and mass panic from the Montreal Gazette.

So here in New York a day of intense discussion and action following all this. The Occupy Theory Climate Assembly was a wide-ranging discussion that provided an interesting snapshot of the current state of the movement–it will be discussed at greater length another time.

Eagle in Washington Square Park for Occupy Theory

There was an eagle there, though, which must be some kind of a sign, right?

It turned into a discussion with Direct Action of how to call attention to the weekend-long series of dramatic events.

Soft circle in Times Sq. Credit: Lisa Sabater

OWS met at Fox News, the Military Recruiting Station in Times Square and at the nearby police station, soft linked arms and mic checked a statement, which read in part:

We are all Chicago, / we are thousands in the streets! / We will not be terrorized into silence / as we protest the illegitimate power / of financial and military elites / from the G-8 and NATO.

 

Mic Check! / We are all Montreal, / we are thousands in the streets! /we refuse the draconian emergecy law / invoked by the government; / we will continue to rise up / and strike against tuition-hikes. / Free education is a right!

 

Mic Check! / We are all Frankfurt, / we are thousands in the streets! /We stand against the globalization of austerity /and the punishment of the people / for the crimes of the bankers. / Another world is possible, / and she is on her way!

On Tuesday May 22 in New York there is a rally at 2 pm in support of Montreal on the 100th day of the Quebec Student Strike, outside Quebec government offices, 1 Rockefeller Plaza.

There will be a pop-up Free University in Washington Square Park from 5-8pm, with discussions on the situation in Canada, historical precedents and what it means for the movement.

At 8pm, March Against Repressive Anti-Protest Laws Worldwide leaves from Washington Square Park.

How much of this will appear in mainstream media outside the towns in which it has happened? If recent history is anything to go by, relatively little. Even OWS media advisory people felt that there was no new story on May Day without huge numbers of protestors (although I would argue that 50,000 people is an event) or arrests. Perhaps a truly global movement might merit a mention? Let’s get on it.

 

Civilians in the Red Square

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One of the Plus Brigades tactics taught to people at OWS Spring Training was “civilians.” It means breaking up the mass of demonstrators and disappearing into the New York city foot traffic, only to recongregate later at an arranged spot. It’s a good way to get onto Wall Street for example. In light of the on-going militarization of North American cities and the right to assembly, it begins to take on other meanings. It can be resistant simply to claim civilian status, to act like a civilian, to demand that law enforcement treat this as peacetime.

I had been wondering if Occupy’s tactic as a whole might be “civilians,” a returning into the social fabric with challenges to its normalizing operations punctuated by resurgences on selected days–the next “day” is targeted in New York as September 17, the one year anniversary.

Red Square of solidarity hangs over a union in Montréal

What has happened in Chicago and Montréal makes it clear that “civilians” is every bit as much about resisting the militarization of everyday life. In Chicago three activists have been arrested for alleged terrorism offenses: based on the presence of a home-brew kit. Supposedly the bottles indicated preparations for Molotov cocktails. As might my recycling. Now those arrested are subject to the full panoply of anti-terrorism legislation. As the day has gone on, the police have dramatically amplified their charges, while defense lawyers are suggesting yet another operation co-ordinated by police informants.

Anti-NATO demonstrators at the statue for the Haymarket Martyrs of 1886

In Montréal the hasty legislation passed through Québec’s parliament yesterday was a veritable State of Emergency. Known as Bill 78, it’s extraordinary. In addition to ending the academic year forthwith and requiring students to return early next semester (what happens to those trying to graduate I wonder?), the law then criminalizes protest in a new way:

any gathering of 50 or more people must submit their plans to the police eight hours ahead of time and must agree to any changes to the gathering’s trajectory, start time, etc. Any failure to comply will be met with a fine of up to $5,000 for every participant, $35,000 for someone representing a ‘leadership’ position, or $125,000 if a union – labour or student – is deemed to be in charge. The participation of any university staff (either support staff or professors) in any student demonstration (even one that follows the police’s trajectory and instructions) is equally punishable by these fines.

So my entire class last semester would have had me liable for draconian fines, given that we attended OWS actions (by consensus and in ways determined by group members). They’re not finished though. You can’t cover your face with a mask, scarf or hood–in Canada, with its mild winter climate.

Passages like this make it truly State of Exception legislation, a new low for North American civil liberties post-Cold War:

Anyone who, by act or omission, helps or, by encouragement, advice, consent, authorization or command, induces a person to commit an offence under this act is guilty

You could be accused of giving advice for teaching radical texts, be accused of omission for not reporting an activist student to the police–this is truly unpleasant catch-all legislation.

The overreaction stems from the anxiety that anti-austerity is on the move. Counterinsurgency doctrine holds that the first element of defeating insurgency is to quarantine it and then cut it out for fear of contagion. So it’s not the hundreds of activists in Chicago, or even the thousands in Montréal, that are causing the panic–it’s the idea that this might go viral from Athens to Paris, Chicago, Montréal, Frankfurt–and then where next? This is Contagion: The Reality Show only it’s not funny.

So civilians, yes: people with civil rights, who should be presumed to be acting as civilians not insurgents, who have the right to assembly, free speech and self-presentation. These are very fundamental propositions and for those of you who have been standing back from the movement for any of the usual reasons, now is the time to get back involved. Like it or not, this involves you now.

In New York, there’s a meeting in solidarity with Montréal on Sunday at 3pm in Union Square by the Gandhi statue. Hope to see you there.

 

 

 

Horizontal learning: a report back

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One last word from higher education before it’s time for Summer Disobedience camp and other fun activities. Throughout the course of 2012 so far, I’ve been engaged in a variety of endeavors to promote horizontal learning. Always in my mind as I participate in these projects is Augosto Boal’s concept of “thinking as action.” How’s it going?

In January, I posted about the way in which a group of us had set about trying to render a “class” into a workgroup. We set three forms of activity: actions, close readings of selected writings, and thematic weeks. We later added a guest visitor to that agenda. Of the three, clearly actions are most distinct from standard higher education practice, except perhaps in performance practice or tactical media classes, which are hardly standard fields. Perhaps as a result, the weeks where we went on the March 1 education march or May Day events felt most compelling.

The sense of liberation that we had during actions highlighted the constraints of our modern seminar room, a windowless chunk of carpeted square footage dominated by an imposing computer console containing a thoroughly mediocre machine. It wasn’t until we had a meeting outside during the freakishly warm March in New York that we realized that this alienating effect was exaggerated by the way the room made us form a very wide circle: close circles work much better. Sometimes it’s the little things that make the difference.

One of the most effective choices we made was to have students work in small writing groups. Although the groups were chosen randomly, they came to have very different sensibilities. Each group determined how they would approach the action days, how they would work on a final project (collaboratively or not) and also formed discussion groups within the formal meetings. Increasingly, these groups became the engine room of the project as a whole. That is, after all, what people pay for at the Ivies (that and the one percent networking).

Meeting time was allocated according to a consensed agenda, based on a proposal drawn up by two facilitators. Every group member did this at least once, most twice. Everyone reported some reluctance to do it and then a strong sense of empowerment having carried it out. While the agendas varied notably week by week, as the Spring wore on, it was clear that there was more and more desire to spend time in the smaller groups, so much so that it was hard to get people to stop work and report back to the collective.

So lots of positives. Let’s note also that trying to functional horizontally in a vertical institution is complicated. Some participants felt that they benefited from what I, as the instructor of record, had to say and wished for more of that. I responded that I in turn felt my comments were far more effective once I had a strong sense of where people were with the material and so the usefulness of my interventions was in fact a consequence of the way we were working. We did agree during that discussion, however, to be sure to begin meetings with a conversation about the terms we were going to use that day.

As time wore on and the other non-horizontal classes were gearing up for term papers, the anxiety level notably increased and people stopped referring to their projects and started talking about finals. It took a lot of one-on-one and group interventions to stop the panic. Normally what this means is that people then like my class but write their thesis/dissertation on a topic from a seminar where a long research paper was required. In this instance, I don’t think that will happen (although it’s not an issue for me) because of the wider context in which Occupy and the political are so central.

More pointedly, can there be horizontality when one person is being paid to attend/teach and the others are (mostly) paying to attend/for credits? To pose the question is to answer it: not perfectly, no. In prefiguring a different approach, you can perhaps take steps in the right direction. It helped I think that we had discussed and agreed on the syllabus, so that we didn’t seem to have a week where the topics and materials weren’t of interest. It helped more, again, that many of the group were also active participants in the movement so felt that they had equal standing. There were one or two who felt unsure about this but did feel able to say so.

Now the school year is over. The group has reconstituted itself as an affinity group and we meet in Washington Square Park weekly for discussion, reading, walks and actions. I’m particularly pleased that it’s not just the usual suspects: the most skeptical person in the group is still active. Where does this go? I have no idea. I’m not worried about it either.

A-Anti-Antigonick

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As predicted, Greece is having its Antigone revolution in refusing to abide by the Law in favor of kinship. For the majority who voted for Syriza and other anti-memorandum parties, mutual aid outweighs obligations to creditors. In the first days of this project, you may recall, I was very taken with a reworking of the Antigone legend in the context of the global social movements by Italian performance group Motus. The proper treatment of the dead body was later visualized by the Egyptian video collective Mosireen. And so when the chant “A-Anti-Anticapitalista” became the subject of a later post, I rewrote it in my head in my geeky way to go “A-Anti-Antigone.” Amazon knows that I am interested in Antigone now and when Ann Carson’s new book Antigonick was published this week, they told me. And this was uncanny because I am known as Nick to my friends.

Actually, what the book, a reworked translation of Antigone, is called is open to question. The cover says:

  ANTIGO              NICK

But the inside front page and Library of Congress listing have Antigonick. You won’t notice that at first because you will be admiring the beauty of the book.

The text was hand-inked on the page, in black and red ink [so red in quotes does not now indicate a hyperlink] then photographed–it’s a bit smudgy sometimes but very striking.

Bianca Scott has produced overlay color drawings that intersperse the text on translucent paper. The only book I can remember seeing like this recently was by the artist Cai Guo Qiang and indeed this one was printed in China (no further details are given). Without being unkind, there’s a story about labor, costs and outsourcing there that might interest Antigonick.

Then you notice that this is not at all a literal translation. It begins wonderfully (Carson’s caps):

[ENTER ANTIGONE AND ISMENE] ANTIGONE: WE
BEGIN IN THE DARK AND BIRTH IS THE DEATH OF
US. ISMENE: WHO SAID THAT ANTIGONE: HEGEL
ISMENE:SOUNDS MORE LIKE BECKETT ANTIGONE: HE
WAS PARAPHRASING HEGEL ISMENE: I DON’T THINK
SO

Carson reminds us that a legend is always a question of how you tell it. And that this is a play, a text to be performed. In the list of characters we find:

Nick  a mute part [always onstage, he measures things.]

We’ll come back to him in a minute. The references to Beckett and Hegel tell us that we can’t hear Antigone as if we were ancient Greeks. This is a modern drama now. Isn’t it just.

KREON TO ANTIGONE :YOU KNEW IT WAS AGAINST
THE LAW ANTIGONE:
                 WELL IF YOU CALL THAT LAW

By the unspoken convention (Nick’s measures), words in red have so far indicated the names of characters. It’s not too much to say that the LAW is a character in Antigone. Or it could also be “just” an emphasis. Or it could be an emphasis on the just, over the law.

Such undecidability is of course contrary to Hegel, who held that

in a drama [spiritual powers] enter in their simple and fundamental character and they oppose one another.

It might be thought that the drama of Oedipus was a (literally) classic example. But it depends. In a review in the New York Review of Books (paywall), Peter Green points out that it was held that Oedipus’s father Laius was attracted to:

Pelops’ son Chrysippus, and carried him off in the first (but by no means the last) homosexual abduction known to Greek myth. Pelops cursed Laius; and the latter’s death at the hands of his son, who then unwittingly married his mother Jocasta, was the working out of this curse.

In this version, the Oedipus complex is more complicated and less decidable than it’s usually allowed to be. Again, as Judith Butler has emphasized, when Antigone talks of her brother, she could be describing Oedipus because they share the same mother. The Oedipus complex was always already queer.

And that LAW thing isn’t just the law of the father. Today Alex Tsiras of Syriza said of Greece “we are going directly to hell,” meaning a living death underground. Which is what happened to Antigone. As Carson reminds us, the myth has power today because it still affects us. She uses words like ANARCHY where the standard translation uses “unruly.” She talks of the “state of exception.” How to measure that?

In the nick. In the nick of time. By Nick.

Eurydike, Creon’s wife, mother of Haimon who Antigone was to marry, has famously few lines in Sophocles. One speech, five lines.

Carson has her speak much longer, with a riff on Virginia Woolf. Then she asks a question about Antigone [the spacing isn’t right in the quote, the lines are alternately indented but WordPress won’t allow that measure, sorry]:

BUT HOW CAN SHE DENY
THE
RULE
TO
WHICH
SHE
IS
AN
EXCEPTION                                               IS SHE
AUTOIMMUNE. NO SHE IS NOT.    HAVE YOU HEARD
THE EXPRESSION    THE NICK OF TIME WHAT IS A
NICK

What indeed? The OED gives us an astonishingly long entry. It refers to a notch, a cut, a groove, whether in a machine, a tool, wood or an animal. It can refer to the vagina, as in various Jacobean dramas cited by OED. Then it is also the precise moment, later the nick of time. It is essential, what is aimed at. You can also go to the nick, a jail or prison, and be beset by Old Nick, the devil.

At the end of the play, NICK still on stage MEASURING. Measuring the collapse of autoimmunity, the collapse of debt’s capital, the capitals of debt.

Like in Beckett, who crops up here, Imagination Dead Imagine:

No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda. No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault.

 

Measuring, counting the debt in the living tomb that is the Troika’s Greece, there we find A-Anti-Antigonick. An odd creature.