Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Graduating to the Mad Men future

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Like many in higher education, I have spent most of this week in graduation ceremonies of various sorts. Like all “traditional” rituals, such events are patently invented and everyone knows it. Perhaps it was just me, but the usual evocations of the future that dominate the endless rhetoric of these gatherings seemed more than usually trite this year.

At the events I attended were graduates who had been with me at Liberty Plaza, 60 Wall Street, Washington Square Park and the other locations of Occupy. We’d marched together on October 15, November 17, March 1 and most recently on May Day. None of this intruded, of course, and I would not expect it to have done so. Platform speakers this year seemed mesmerized by Facebook and Twitter, so I expect there will be jokes about Occupy Graduation in 2017 or so.

These grumbles in the back of my mind were given some shape when I watched Slavoj Zizek give a talk called “Signs from the Future” on YouTube (it’s over an hour long so I didn’t embed it). Zizek makes a similar kind of joke imagining OWS activists meeting for lunch in ten years time–on break from their jobs on Wall Street. He was warning against this possibility and arguing for the global social movements as a space in which

one should learn the art to recognize, from an engaged subjective position, elements which are here, in our space, but whose time is the emancipated future.

This is the move that many of us call “prefiguration,” a working out of the future to come in the complex temporalities of the present. Zizek describes it as theological, drawing on Pascal’s notion of the “hidden God.” There’s a long history here, which is fine, except that as soon as there is theology, there tend to be accusations of heresy and before you know it internal divisions of the kind that you can find all over the Internet if you want.

I was more interested by his switch to media as a form of prefiguration. Like everyone else, Zizek is appalled by the current state of Hollywood “cinema” and realizes that narrative in particular has shifted to television. None of his TV examples (The Wire, The Simpsons and 24) are very current, however, and are perhaps sufficiently well ripened even for inclusion in a commencement speech.

Sitting through these events, I wondered to myself how you could use the current hit Mad Men as a cultural symptom in the manner of Zizek: which is to say, in a non-disciplinary, perhaps undisciplined fashion (for proper readings of Mad Men, see the Kritik blog series).

Don Draper

For the first four series Mad Men was really the  Don Draper Show, in which the children of the Sixties asked themselves whether their distant, unavailable fathers maybe had more going on than they knew. Now it seems to have decided they didn’t and Don is just a Dad, sharing the stories of his first wife, once a terrible secret, as a minor plot device.

What we have instead is an ensemble drama, aka soap opera, in which the writing time and again circles around letting the upheavals of the 1960s into the narrative, only to move in a different direction.This is after all a spectacle about the spectacle, in which selling ads is both the subject of the program, and its real raison d’être. The entertainment machine, as Dana Polan calls it, knows its place in the military-industrial-entertainment complex.

The first episode of the current fifth series began with a civil rights direct action that a rival firm of ad executives literally poured water onto. The story quickly turned into a business success for “our” firm, Sterling Cooper Draper Campbell, leading to the hiring of an African-American woman as a secretary. As the show passes through 1965, race has only appeared again once, this time literally around the cash nexus.

Dawn and Peggy

Peggy has the new secretary Dawn stay over at her house and visibly wonders whether it’s safe to leave her handbag, which happens to have a good deal of cash from Roger Sterling in it, in the room with Dawn.

Such moments allow the presumed white viewer to have their racist frisson and disavow it at once. We “get” what Peggy is thinking, without any spoken dialogue indicating it, because “we” get how white racism works. That understanding is then at once disavowed both by Peggy herself in the plot and by the viewer. In this way, Mad Men presents long-term political struggles as minor plot moments for the well-versed TV viewer.

The fully explored pleasures in Mad Men are not really the smoking, sex and drinking that provide many plot points, so much as the repeated pleasure of the sale. In this period at least, there are an apparently endless stream of American manufacturing companies making money and looking for advertising. Cars and airlines are the jewels in this crown but the show invests most time this season in a protracted “get” of Heinz Baked Beans. New things are everywhere, from LPs to acid, and money flows as a result. Literally in the background of one episode, a newscaster talks about Vietnam.

Perhaps the real question to ask, then, is why so many seem to expect and hope that Mad Men will “deal” with the radical side of the Sixties. Bear in mind that for all the attention, this is a very niche show: 3.5 million watched the première but it’s down to 2.2 or so now and over half the viewing audience is over 49. The show works because the majority audience know how things turn out in the wider context and have become used to celebrating such victories as civil rights that are now part of almost any evocation of the “future.” That is, as so many commencement speeches will have had it, “we” triumphed over past adversities and so we will again.

More than this rather simple pay-off, I think there’s an investment (and yes, I’m using these terms on purpose) both in mass media as potentially significant cultural forms and in our own skills as readers of those forms.

For all the intricacy and subtlety of television drama narrative in shows like The Wire, The Sopranos and indeed Mad Men, it’s noticeable how often they deal with the past or institutions that have fallen from past glory, such as Baltimore or the Mafia. Mad Men‘s cleverness is to sell you a version of history in which the good things are still happening, albeit offstage to the central business of the show, which is indeed business.

 

Climate and the Commons

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Huni: once one island, now two

Occupy Theory has decided to set up weekly themed assemblies. Like Barcelona, only with about 39,900 fewer people: so come along, Sunday at noon in Washington Square Park. So I’m supposed to come up with some discussion ideas on climate and the commons, and thought I might try them out here. They have to be short so it can go on one side of paper. Please comment! Too depressing? Not depressing enough? Clear? not so much? what else should be here? FB, email, carrier pigeon, even here on the blog.

Ideas and Actions

1. In the seventeenth century, English revolutionaries declared “the earth a common treasury for all.” Climate change is the polite name for the one percent robbing the commons. The overdeveloped world as a whole is the “one percent” in relation to the dominated world.

2. Capitalism began with the enclosure of the commons and continues to expand today through the fossil fuel and mining industries. All these actions were and are thefts from the commons. To stop climate change, we have to stop neoliberal capitalism. It is a political choice, not an argument as to who is right or wrong about data.

3. What we call the climate and the economy are both complex systems with real effects. Since the beginning of the industrial era, what we call climate has become the product of the economy. This includes temperature, rainfall, sea levels, drought, ice melt, species extinction, flooding, and other variations in formerly stable conditions.

4. There are no longer such things as nature or the environment. You can argue if there ever were but human action in the industrial era has transformed everything that there is, from the rocks to the air: it is real in the sense that it exists and artificial in the sense that humans made it. What we also now know is that it will do so until it is made to desist.

It’s a Good Thing

1. The response to the neo-liberal destruction of the commons will open a new age of leisure for all. Automated production powered by renewable energy can sustain our needs, including modern conveniences and medicines, without the built-in obsolescence, waste and endless debt-slavery of the current system.

2. For half a millennium, priests, colonizers, industrialists and moralizers of all stripes have been bemoaning the laziness of the common people, while extolling the leisure required by the monk, the scholar and the aristocrat. Reclaiming the commons opens the contemplative life to all those who might want it and ends the necessity of pointless labor.

Another World Is Necessary

1. Agriculture and non-nomadic settlement became possible during a geologically brief window that we are now closing. You can measure it: 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere allowed for the climate our parents remember. Right now we’re at 393 or so. The International Energy Authority says that we’ve already used all the extra fossil fuels that will take us up to 450 parts per million at which point no one really knows what will happen. It has to stop.

2. The Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan flooded last year for the simple reason that there is now more water in the Western Pacific than there used to be thanks to climate change. High sea-level events like tsunamis and hurricanes multiply small sea-level rises by factors of up to 10,000. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced this in Delhi. No Western media reported it.

3. Conservative estimates predict that such sea-level rise will mean 33 million people in the U.S. will have to move, part of 250 million worldwide. That’s one in ten of the current U. S. population. Live in New York? That’s you. And me.

4. Flooding is first affecting the island cultures of the Pacific (see the island of Huni above, divided in two). Indigenous peoples have created the least emissions and are paying the highest price. One-third of the world’s existing spoken languages are found in this region. Capitalism is stealing our cultural commons as well as the air, sea and land. It’s ours and we want it back.

A Tale of Two Cities: NYC and Cairo

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As Occupy activists shake the May Day dust off their feet, the real discussion and decisions over “what next?” are beginning. The calls for global actions are becoming less rhetorical, more substantive. There’s a new form of Occupy emerging, as long assemblies and meetings gather to discuss strategy, tactics and goals in the context of the ongoing global social movements. While the Occupy strategy is of necessity intensely local, its reactivation of the popular claim to public space in conjunction with the European crisis and the continuing Arab revolutions has set in motion the possibility of a globalized countervisuality.

Here’s two report backs from discussions about the movement in New York and in Cairo and how they might relate or interact.

Yesterday, Occupy Theory called an assembly in Washington Square Park on the first hot day of summer. About twenty-five people came and others were drawn into the circle of the discussion as it carried on: unlike the heavily-policed Zuccotti, you can sit down in WSP and no-one seems to mind. It’s the hippy park, after all.

Facilitated by Marina Sitrin, the discussion at first reviewed how people were feeling in general about the movement. There was some expression of unhappiness with May Day’s direct actions, and there were some feelings that without Liberty Plaza, the movement is without direction. Against that, there was a sense that this is a different moment to last September and that horizontalism needs to be reconfigured, that we need to learn from Greece, Spain and Egypt.

A particular turning point was David Graeber’s observation that the real question going forward might be preparing for another, perhaps still more serious collapse of global capitalism. Sure enough, today we’ve seen a wave of nervousness concerning the Grexit–the Greek exit from the euro. That is to say, it’s not so much a question of formulating “demands” in this time of rapidly accelerating change as deciding what principles might guide our choices. There was a stress on developing mutual aid as a form of direct action, in addition to the idea of horizontal learning as direct action.

It was decided to hold a set of thematic assemblies on the Spanish model on successive Sundays. The first one next week will be on climate change and the commons, I’m pleased to say–more on this soon.

Today at the CUNY Graduate Center, an activist from Cairo named only as Mohammed shared his experience of the revolution. As always, you’re struck by the difference in scale at first. Going to a march with hundreds of thousands, seeing people carrying materials to build barricades, or using motorbikes to deliver Molotov cocktails are obviously not daily events in New York. As the discussion continued, I began to see how such distinctions could obscure some important interactions and interfaces of the global movement.

Mohammed mentioned that Tahrir had been designed to be accessible to colonial troops by the British, which also enabled the popular takeover in January 2011. He also suggested that even under the dictatorship there was a certain subcultural street life that was independent, such as the football Ultras whose experience in fighting the police was so crucial in the revolution.

I wonder if there’s a certain fluidity built into the colonial city that paradoxically allows for at least the possibility of the “classic” revolution? Whereas the dispersed, neoliberal, hyperpoliced urban environment requires that (re)claiming public space be the first step towards establishing the possibility of social change? So what is unique about the post-2011 movements is that these challenges to the established sense of authority have coincided, interacted and produced a new sense of the counter-global.

Indeed, as different as Cairo’s revolution was, Mohammed expressed a familiar frustration about the difficulty in sustaining their struggle against a very unified enemy prepared to use whatever violence is (from their point of view) necessary and the move into a “war of positions.” Periods of intense activity are followed by quieter times. Guerrilla art actions have emerged, like women artists holding discussions about sexual harassment in subway cars when denied official space. I don’t think that Occupy and the Egyptian revolution are the “same,” of course, but that, despite the differences in intensity, the different struggles against neoliberalism are paradoxically becoming similar.

In the discussion, these possibilities were drawn out. If there was a focus on the place of neighborhood and local actions from the Occupy side, that is because the more public space is reclaimed as popular space, the greater the sense of disruption to neoliberal business as usual. Then the idea emerged to link Cairo and Tokyo activists over the moving of the IMF meeting in October from the former to the latter–or as it was wittily put, “from revolution to radiation.” It seems that neoliberalist functionaries are running out of places to congregate, that the reclamation of public space has rendered all global cities with Occupies (that is, most of them) so politically toxic that the bankers prefer real toxins.

 

Student debt: stage one accomplished

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With a rash of recent publications in the mainstream media, it’s clear that the first stage of the Occupy Student Debt campaign has been accomplished: to raise awareness and make this a national issue. Now it’s time to start working on promoting the solutions to debt that the media still shy away from: Jubilee, free public higher education and transparent private sector financing.

I’m going to give three examples of student debt becoming more visible, two of which are personal in the Occupy tradition of representing yourself first and foremost. My awareness of student debt was raised when Ruth Gilmore, as president of the American Studies Association, challenged us to find out more about how our students worked (for money) and their levels of debt. My eyes were opened to the crisis around me.

Even before OWS, I had crafted what I’d now call a community agreement with my students, stressing attendance and participation, week-long “due dates” on assignments, giving credit for collaborative projects, having no cumulative assessments and so on. I think it has proved very successful, judging from the evaluations. Nonetheless, let’s be clear: debt is  an educational crisis, one in which the experience of financing is the dominant one of “college,” not learning. I’m close to a point where I can’t envisage how to do this ethically at all.

These stories were the starting point for the TEDx talk I gave a few weeks ago. Here’s the video, which you’re welcome to use although the quality of the sound and images is not quite as high as I would have hoped.

The next item across the media transom is an essay by Thomas Franks in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine (paywall). Franks tells the now familiar story of student debt for the mainstream liberal audience of Harper’s. Then he gives it a twist. He quotes an anecdote from David Graeber, in which Graeber describes how one of his former students is now working as an escort on Wall Street to pay back her student debt. She’s literally getting screwed by the system. Franks ends the piece with a quote from what remains the most accessed post in my writing project:

I used to say that in academia one at least did very little harm. Now I feel like a pimp for loan sharks.

What’s interesting about this citation is that when I used the line at an NYU faculty meeting, Andrew Ross, who’s been a lion-hearted organizer of Occupy Student Debt, took care to point out he didn’t quite want to go that far. Whereas I tend to go for it, Andrew looks to sustaining coalitions–so this is no knock on him. That was a few weeks ago. Now this quote is good enough to go into public libraries all over the country.

And if you have a Facebook you’ll know that the New York Times today published a long anecdotal article on student debt in their “please give us a Pulitzer Prize” format. The piece is fine at the level of showing how difficult it has become for many people to afford college. It’s strong on the J-School 101 theme “personalize the story” with wholesome, middle-class white kids from Ohio being used to illustrate the ongoing disaster that student debt has become.

It’s weak on analysis and deficient on political context. For example, it’s true that 3% of borrowers owe more than $100,000 as the Times says: would it not be more compelling to spell that out? One million people owe more than $100K. There’s a strange formulation about debt patterns at private schools, which range, they say from:

under $10,000 at elite schools like Princeton and Williams College, which have plenty of wealthy students and enormous endowments, to nearly $50,000 at some private colleges with less affluent students and less financial aid.

Anyone who knows anything about student debt knows that students at Ivy Leagues and elite schools can be just as way over their heads as people at other private institutions. I could give you stories from each of my own classes–see the TEDx above.

Even more bizarrely a federal official is quoted as suggesting that student debt is like the mortgage crisis:

Mr. Date likened excessive student borrowing to risky mortgages. And as with the housing bubble before the economic collapse, the extraordinary growth in student loans has caught many by surprise.

While student debt can and does ruin lives, it is almost impossible to default on in a permanent fashion. Lenders can and do take money from unemployment benefit and Social Security. There are no bankruptcy provisions for student debt and you can’t be foreclosed on. Default and delinquency rates are up, yes–but the lenders are doing so well out of the interest rates that they won’t ever really lose money.

It’s on solutions that the piece really falls down. It seems to suggest only that the costs of college be made clearer to applicants and that students need to make choices compatible with their resources not their aspirations. There’s a bit of a suggestion that states might want to raise their support for their higher education institutions and some thought from the Republican governor of Ohio that the universities are to blame for wanting to be good in all areas. Funny, I thought that was the point of a university.

Nowhere is there a discussion about activist calls for debt abolition, a Jubilee, free public higher education, a return to education as a top priority in private schools, private school accountability and the other goals of the Occupy Student Debt movement. Now we have to move quickly to advance that agenda so that pious lamentations about student debt don’t become an election year formula, crowding solutions out of public discussion.

 

How to organize dual power: 12M

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Five Reasons to Occupy

In New York, the General Assembly has been in effect suspended for some time because Facilitation has withdrawn its support for a process that had become increasingly dysfunctional. As we look at the impressive mobilizations across Spain today for 12M (European style dates), it might be worth taking a look at the ways in which they have structured the events. I’m looking only at a few public documents, of course, and I have not been part of any discussions.

But whatever they’re doing, it seems to be working. There’s a sense of a real dual-power structure in Spain and above all in Greece, where the elections have confounded the austerity consensus.

Democracia Real Ya, the prime movers of the M15 occupations a year ago, has recently registered as an association, causing some strong dissent among its supporters. Its themes for M12M15 as outlined above nonetheless seem to have been adopted quite widely. The basic themes were elaborated by the Assembly in Barcelona into six themes for discussion:

1. Not one more euro to rescue banks. Citizens’ debt audit. We will not pay illegitimate debt created by those who caused the crisis.

2. Education and health financing and public management, free and of quality. Do not cut public spending, no to the privatization of public services. No repayment.

3. Fair distribution of work and wealth. No to precaritization. No to retirement at 67. Withdrawal of the Labor Reform. Valorization of reproductive, domestic and care labor.

4. Guaranteed right of access to decent housing. Retroactive payment in kind. Spaces for affordable socializing housing. Promotion of housing cooperatives.

5. Tax reform to redistribute wealth fairly, which we all, men and women, produce together. Universal basic income for all people.

6. Defense of the rights to assembly, demonstrate, strike, unionize and all civil liberties including the right to control one’s own body.

These might be said to be principles more than demands, as there is no chance that the current Spanish government will implement them.

The Assembly has created a set of levels of organization for the discussion in the General Assembly that are more detailed than those normally used in New York.

Facilitation (3 people): Responsible for the dynamics of the assembly.

Containment (6 people): Responsible for managing the people who want to speak to the assembly urgently, questions of process, and specific incidents

Take the floor (6 people): Organize one aisle and recognize speaking order evenly across the space. We suggest carrying an identification poster.

Meeting minutes (2 or 3 people):  will be taken into Castilian and Catalan. After the assembly, minutes to be pooled and scanned to get a summary to post on the web. Will seek to record the sound of the assembly to complete the written record.

Timing of interventions (1 person): Controls speaking time with a stopwatch and will signal the speaker to remind them when 1 minute remains (requires sign).

Collection of information (2 people): Charged with collecting and sorting the names of the collectives that want to participate in block 3B and explain the dynamics of this block. This information will be passed to the communicators with facilitation. Will be next to the calendar or poster information to fill in the days during interventions.

Communicators with facilitation (2 persons): Gather information and communicate with facilitators.

That’s a team of 23 people to run the assembly. It’s true that for the most part, Occupy in the US has had no need of such complex structures, as we have not had the numbers. It also shows what the challenges would be to get from where we are now to such a place.

After the People’s Assembly on May Day, which I would guess was about 700 people, Marisa Holmes and others publicly (FB status=public, right?) expressed frustration that the Assembly had lost the opportunity to hold the kind of focused discussions envisaged in Madrid, Barcelona and other Spanish cities. If that Assembly had been able to issue a set of six articulated principles like those formulated by Barcelona, that would have been very interesting.

Because although New York’s movement is much smaller in numbers, it benefits from what you might call global media sensory ratios. Marshall McLuhan suggested that cultures have sensory ratios by which they determine the relative priority of the senses, so that in some cultures hearing is central, whereas in others it might be vision. Of course, all the senses are in fact mixed together so it’s somewhat arbitrary how these ratios are defined.

By global media sensory ratios, I mean something much simpler: how much media “noise”/”spectacle” does an event have to cause to be noticed worldwide? Here events in New York have a very low threshold, whereas a similar event in Spain has to be, as we’ve seen, about ten times the size, and one in a dominated nation like Indonesia larger still. On the other hand, if it suits, a small protest like yesterday’s in Moscow, can make global headlines–in this case, to keep pressure on the BRIC nations.

In Madrid, the gathering has been substantial throughout the day and has met the threshold for coverage as the lead item on the BBC News website at 19.00 Eastern. No sign of the events whatsoever on the New York Times front page, or even on its World page. Moscow’s protest is right there on page one.

Puerta del Sol in the morning

By midnight in Madrid, the time the permit for the rally officially expired, the crowd was immense–full details in El Pais here. No sign of anyone leaving and no sign of a police effort to evict the Indignados. It’ll be interesting to see whether they try and establish an overnight camp or not. If they do, and succeed, that would be a direct assertion of the movement’s power over government edict. It’s clear at any rate that they could do so–the question is whether to risk violence.

Sol around midnight

Around the same time, efforts to form a new government in Greece had to be abandoned because Syriza stood by its principles on refusing the Troika’s conditions and would not join in a coalition. So the 12M organizing is working–on a transnational basis so far but there are bound to be repercussions in Spain if Greece renegotiates its deal or simply defaults. One year in and things are just beginning to get interesting.

Why M15 Matters

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Indignation is not enough! Build the 99% republic!

Austerity is a form of political repression by means of the economy. Across Europe, people have begun to reject the notion that the fiscal crisis caused by the banks should be solved by cuts in social services and redistribution of wealth to the rich, whether that be rich nations or rich individuals. Ireland and Greece have decisions to make in the weeks ahead. Much may turn on whether the protests in Spain and worldwide planned for the anniversary of the May 15 movement continue to give momentum to anti-austerity.

We were told that a Greek election that did not endorse austerity would be a market disaster. In fact, the euro is stable at around $1.29, making it still a strong currency as evidenced by the unrelenting hordes of Franco-German euro-laden shoppers in New York. Stock market traders punished the Greek market, driving it down about 8%, but left global prices only mildly diminished.

Today, European Union figures show that austerity does not work, even as a debt reduction policy. Spain’s budget deficit will actually rise to 6.4% of GDP this year compared with a previous forecast of 5.9%.  The Portuguese deficit will be 4.7% (was 4.5%), while Greece goes from worst to worst with its deficit predicted to be 7.3% (was 7%). Given these self-evident failures, also clear in the US economy, we have to conclude that the stakes in austerity are political: keeping the populations of the EU periphery in deprivation so that the global one percent can continue to flourish without restraint.

Yesterday in New York, OWS activists were pleasantly surprised to see that it was not in fact the usual suspects who turned up for the launch of NYC solidarity actions for the M15 events. A spontaneous orientation about Occupy was held. There are actions all weekend, including a Granny Peace Brigade and a Stroller March for Mother’s Day. Doing exams or stressed out by too many protests? Head to the May 15 rally in Times Square at 6pm, organizers request.

In Spain, unemployment is predicted to rise to over 25% next year. Another bank has had to be bailed out. More banks are in trouble. So every effort at state level goes into restraining popular protest. Events begin tomorrow in Madrid with marches setting out from four cardinal points to their destination in Puerta del Sol.

As you can see from the poster, the plan is to hold assemblies in the squares from May 12 to May 15 on topics ranging from the economy to feminism, health, water and migration. While the camp has been permitted in Barcelona, in Madrid riot police are set to contest the streets. The conservative government does not want its population discussing such matters.

In Greece, the election has failed to produce a pro-austerity coalition and Syriza failed to create an anti-austerity formation. A second round of elections in June now appears likely, with Syriza today predicted to win with 24% over the conservative New Democracy, down to 17%. Greeks appear to have gone on tax strike since the election, according to the Guardian, with public revenues  falling from an average €40m per day to less than €25m. And the E.U. has withheld one billion euros of its “aid” to the bondholders of Europe in order to punish Greek voters for having the temerity to have an opinion about their own lives. Somehow this seems unlikely to swing people to a pro-austerity position.

In Ireland, there is a referendum on March 31 on the fiscal treaty, which is in effect a vote on austerity. While opinion polls in April had a yes vote ahead, 20% were not decided. If anti-austerity continues to grow, Greece and Ireland can take the electoral lead if Spain can push the political agenda. There’s going to be a media downplay of the events in the U.S., so it’s up to us to use social media, blogs, and our presence in the streets to make this known. Go to an action as well: Tome la calle!

From Debt to Land: via the Farm and the Forest

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Yesterday, I talked with friends about whether it might be possible to do for climate and food justice what David Graeber and others like Occupy Student Debt have done so powerfully with debt–transform it from a guilt-inducing issue to a mobilizing one. In Debt Graeber both refuses to accept that the modern has priority and more simply still talks about a one-word term that has resonance for all of us.

As I write a major university is evicting people who wanted to farm disused land: and I wondered if land might be that word for the set of issues around food, climate, animals, and so on? This is just the beginnings of an idea but here’s my train of thought, FWIW.

Quick background: in Albany, CA, Occupy the Farm took over some land owned by the University of California at Berkeley on Earth Day (April 22) and began to cultivate it as a local farm. Although you might want to see the name as a shortening of “occupy this land in order to make a farm.”

Occupy the Farm

Lesley Haddock, one of the occupiers, specifies:

Since taking over this land, the university has chopped up the original 104-acre plot and sold piece after piece to be developed. Now only 10 acres remain. That remaining plot has been transferred from the College of Natural Resources to U.C. Berkeley Capital Projects, the branch of the university responsible for securing development plans. Five of the remaining acres are already fated to be paved over for a high-end senior complex.

The occupiers have cleared and tilled the land and planted thousands of pre-prepared seedlings on about five acres of the plot. It’s a really beautiful action. The University is using the law and the police to get them out.

It’s easy to see that there is a direct link from debt to land here. UC needs to raise money because the state has cut its funding due to the Republican refusal to raise any form of taxation. Tuition is about as high as it can go, so the privatizing logic goes that it’s time to asset strip.

The land at Gill Tract happens to be Class One soil, perfect for farming. To put that in perspective, compare the urban farmers in Brooklyn, many of whom have to cultivate in planters because the soil is too contaminated, or plant sunflowers to help clean the soil of heavy metals. Even so, such land sells for about $180,000 a square foot, according to the NY Times. While the buildings that UC wants to create could in theory go anywhere, and good urban farmland like this is very scarce, it becomes highly valuable when it converts from land to “real estate.” One rumor has it that there are plans to build a Whole Foods on the site.

Now the cycle of escalating force has begun. First the UC police turned off the water. Today they locked the fence, so people are passing water and food for occupier/farmers over the fence.

Water over the fence at Gill Tract

All this reminded me Hardt and Negri’s reference to the Charter of the Forest in Peter Linebaugh’s Magna Carta Manifesto. So I looked it up and it is very intriguing. Magna Carta is so known because it was linked in 1217 to the Charter of the Forest. According to the British Library,

The Charter of the Forest, 1217

The Charter of the Forest restored the traditional rights of the people, where the land had once been held in common, and restrained landowners from inflicting harsh punishments on them. It granted free men access to the forest (though at this time only about 10 per cent of the population was free).

 

Free men could enjoy such rights as pannage (pasture for their pigs), estover (collecting firewood), agistment (grazing), or turbary (cutting of turf for fuel).

As Linebaugh puts it, the Charter defined the limits to the privatization of the commons. Against the conservative view of the commons as a disaster waiting to happen (because everyone would use them to the maximum), he cites a definition from 1598 that stresses that the common is

a Communitate, of communitie, participation or fellowship.

You might begin to think about this defense of (limited) rights as defining a long period of land use rights from the eleventh century to the eighteenth in which there were two notable attempts to scale them back

The first was back by King John, leading to the Charters of 1217 and then King Charles attempted to revive and extend his feudal rights in the 1630s, leading to the English Revolution. The Diggers and other radicals claimed that they were defending “Anglo-Saxon liberties” against tyranny and you could see the 1649 Digger slogan “the earth a common treasury for all” as being in the spirit of the Charter.

The Marxist historian Christopher Hill used to suggest that when the Diggers called for people to abstain from waged labor and instead till the common land, it was a call for a general strike. There were explicit calls for workers to take “holidays” during the English Commonwealth (1649-1660) that led to the Chartist call for a Grand National Holiday, or general strike, in 1839. Enclosure–the private occupation of common lands– has long been understood as a key moment in the agricultural and industrial revolutions alike. The larger farms produced more food, while the displaced tenants became factory workers.

So it’s perhaps less surprising than it might seem that during the 1999 global justice protests in London, banners were again seen with “the earth a common treasury for all.” Perhaps where the Earth, the global, the environment, ecology and so on have failed to become real abstractions that motivate social movements, land might do it. Just a thought.

 

On Hardt and Negri’s “Declaration”

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So Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have published a Declaration regarding the global social movements of 2011 and their implications. If you’ve followed their trilogy from Empire to Commonwealth, there are not too many surprises here but, as ever, some great formulations. Perhaps most usefully they can serve as the lightning rod for the debate over parties and leadership (they’re against) and in starting a new discussion over “commoning.”

Declaration is above all a voicing of support for the social movements and their encampments as offering a clear articulation of the current situation and the beginnings of a way to get past the crisis. It will not be without its detractors within and without the movements but the support is surely welcome.

In the manner of Derrida in Limited Inc., one might start with the inside matter (which is in fact the last page of the Kindle): “Copyright…All rights reserved.” For a project about commoning, wouldn’t a copyleft or Creative Commons license be more appropriate? OK, it’s only 99 cents on Amazon but you have to have a Kindle-friendly device: why not just put out a free PDF? So this post will give a fairly extensive summary of the pamphlet as a form of copylefting.

This isn’t just a cheap shot, I hope. In an early formulation that they return to often, Hardt and Negri (HN) quote Ralph Ellison’s invisible man:

“Who knows,” Ellison’s narrator concludes, “but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Today, too, those in struggle communicate on the lower frequencies, but, unlike in Ellison’s time, no one speaks for them. The lower frequencies are open airwaves for all. And some messages can be heard only by those in struggle.

This eloquently speaks to the sense that the social movements articulate in murmurs that cannot be heard by self-declared elites and in media that are not known to them.

To explore these frequencies HN use four main figures:

the indebted, the mediatized, the securitized, and the represented.

Debt: here HN nicely note that

[t]he social safety net has passed from a system of welfare to one of debtfare.

They suggest that the indebted suffer from an “unhappy consciousness” but, contrary to Hegel, this is a

nondialectical form, because debt is not a negative that can enrich you if you rebel.

They see debt as an end to the “illusions that surround the dialectic,” a phrase that will no doubt get them into trouble in certain quarters, because the indebted “cannot be redeemed, only destroyed.” Perhaps they have ventured here where even David Graeber feared to tread, but it would not have hurt them to acknowledge Graeber’s work in more than an endnote bibliographic reference.

The Mediatized

Given the opening formula, this section is disappointing, sometimes very much so. Time and again, people appear as mere dupes of the media, “hypnotized,” “stifled,” “absorbed,” “fragmented and dispersed.” The theory of the military-industrial-entertainment complex seems more useful as a means of exploring these effects than this lament, to use their own term, for lost reality.

By contrast, “living information” is said to be gained by physical proximity based on a study of an Olivetti factory in the 1960s by Romano Alquati. Thus, at the encampments

the participants experienced the power of creating new political affects through being together.

While that seems clearly true, there’s a hint of Romantic nostalgia in the evocation of the letter over the email and the distaste for social media. Entirely absent here, despite the inclusion of the “image” in their biopolitical production, is any mention of the role of photography and moving image distribution. From the al-Jazeera feeds of Tunisia and Tahrir to the Livestreaming of Occupy, web-disseminated video has indeed created a new way of being together without which it’s hard to understand the formation of global affinities that we’ve witnessed over the past 18 months.

The Securitized

This is a strange usage because it means the production of fear as politics, the “state of emergency” and mass surveillance, rather than referring to the financial securities that caused the crash. Again, HN cite Foucault to support the notion that the prison begins as soon as you leave the house, with no reference questions of digital privacy and surveillance that have recently created waves of activism.

After all, if 2011 began this phase of the global social movements, it did so in part because hackers from Anonymous allowed Tunisian activists to liaise undetected and to evade Ben Ali’s digital surveillance. At the time of writing, Twitter has intervened in support of an OWS activist, Malcolm Harris, whose tweets have been subpoenaed, arguing that they remain his property.

While I completely agree with the substantial focus on the US incarceration crisis that follows, it’s again odd not to see this described in terms of Angela Y. Davis’s notion of the prison-industrial complex, although she is cited later on in relation to prison abolition.

The Represented

The apparent elisions in the preceding figures become clear when we reach this section, which is at the heart of HN’s analysis:

The represented gathers together the figures of the indebted, the mediatized, and the securitized, and at the same time, epitomizes the end result of their subordination and corruption.

The power of wealth, the media and the security apparatus have made representative democracy into the present-day ancien régime, corrupt and incapable of being reformed, leaving the represented with “no access to effective political action.”

The second chapter, “Rebellion against the Crisis,” both seeks to create a theoretical apparatus for, and to give approval to, the rebellions against neoliberalism. The chapter theorizes that

Real communication among singularities in networks … requires an encampment.

By which is meant that the indebted become singular (as opposed to individual) by refusing debt, and learning to communicate outside the mediatized environment, a process that causes them to set aside fear. The encampment becomes the form of the real communication that results. At this point

subjectivities capable of democratic action will begin to emerge.

For HN this is a constituent process, as well as the destituent refusal of the encampments. Words like “must” and “required” get used in relation to this constituent issue, which sounds like another form of saying that there must be demands. At the same time, “constituent action” calls into being “autonomous temporality,” in which the slowness of the assemblies mingles with the acceleration of social change to create an “alternative.”

The alternative takes the form of “counterpowers” and here it’s great to see a strong stress on anthropogenic climate change and planetary degradation set into historical context. Following Peter Linebaugh, HN stress that the Magna Carta, root of Anglophone doctrines of “liberty,” was accompanied by a Charter of the Forest that allowed for sustainable living. In the present, a key question becomes the “transforming of the public into the common,” which they discuss briefly in a variety of contexts including water, banks and communications. They acknowledge the paradox that in such contexts

we set out aiming for the common but find ourselves back under the control of the state.

Following the experience of social movements in Latin America, they suggest we should attempt rather to remain external and

force the mechanisms of government to become processes of governance.

This is a form of organization HN call “federalist,” meaning not a pyramid but a horizontal and plural set of organizing mechanisms, of which the 2011 encampments were an example. In this way, a democratic affect can be generated by the very process of direct democracy.

In sum, HN call for a new “commoning” in which the commoner works on the common. I like the recuperation of commoner, which, in the UK at least, is often used in somewhat derogatory fashion. I like the making of the common into a verb, something that is performed and learned through doing. They close with a salutary warning: it will not be through

ideology or centralized political leadership

that this commoning will be accomplished. To the contrary, they argue, what they call the “traditional Left” (meaning vanguard and social democratic parties alike, I presume) is a significant obstacle:

What a tragic lack of political imagination to think that leaders and centralized structures are the only way to organize effective political projects!

For that, the brickbats will fall on their heads and those of us interested in developing and expanding horizontal direct democracies should thank them. Perhaps a similarly direct approach throughout would have given Declaration a more rousing feel than it currently has, at least on first read. There’s plenty of material for substantive discussion and useful categorization of the past year here. By the very argument of the project, the next steps won’t be found in a pamphlet but in the sometimes arduous, sometimes exhilarating process of commoning.

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry and Politics in Five Pieces

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Like many of you I’m sure, I was sent a link detailing the ridiculous prosecution of a poet in California for his alleged part in closing a branch of US Bank on the UC Davis campus after the notorious pepper spray incident. On the Poetry Foundation site, I discovered a set of fascinating meditations by poets about the interface of their work and Occupy. I don’t know much about poetry and these poets in particular–perhaps they are very famous, perhaps not–but I thought the project was really interesting.

First, a note on the scandal. At the request of UC Davis, the district attorney in the area has brought charges against Joshua Clover and eleven students, blaming them for the bank closure. If convicted, the students face serious jail time and fines, and UC Davis will have passed the buck from the suit brought against them by the bank. You can and should sign the petition here.

On the blog section of the Poetry Foundation website, Thom Donovan has recently been soliciting responses to a set of questions about how the Occupy movement has influenced the work of poets. The replies are very intriguing and very different (let me reiterate my ignorance of the relative standing of these poets: I decided against doing Google research and to just react to the writing).

I

To my

great relief–

the world

Anne Boyer

II.

In more or less familiar vein, I started with Brian Ang‘s call for a militant poetry:

By militancy, I mean activism that thinks toward the furthest limits in challenging the social text for the emancipation of humanity in its entirety, and executes actions as necessary toward this goal, often requiring strikes, occupations, and riots.

The somewhat surprising last word of this paragraph indicates how different the sensibility of the Oakland Commune can be to that of (most of) OWS. Also writing from the context of Oakland, David Buuck recalls how

Marx’s “the senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians…” comes alive in the affective experience of bodies socially entangled in struggle, even if only over a single city block.

His example is this video of a contest between OO and the police:

So far, you might think, this poetic response to Occupy is not so distinct to the “mainstream” of Occupy. And that in itself is interesting–that there’s a poetry journal called ARMED CELL (their caps). This identification was not unnoticed by Ang, who became concerned that the

emphasis on immediate praxis made more palpable the radicality-diminishing consequences of unrigorous rejection of knowledges’ political potentials.  This led to the development of “Anti-Community Poetics.”

 

III

In New York, Anelise Chen recalls a very different reaction–a refusal to write at all:

An unexpected consequence of the resurrection: while the occupations were happening, I found it almost impossible to write. Something inside me had come to life, but it did not want to be at a desk.

Chen identifies a strong sense of contradiction in the movement between thinking and doing, which was certainly palpable during the encampment.

That tension is one of the reasons I started this project, to make myself engage in writing, even if the day-to-day requirement to do so has meant that I have not had time to think much about how I’m doing that writing. So I suppose I do it without thinking too much about how I’m doing it, as Chen suggests.

IV

The piece I felt most affinity with, perhaps because she writes under the sign of a certain optimism, was by Jeanine Webb. It’s perhaps the most “poetic” of the posts and as a non-poet, I like passages like this about the collective work of the movement:

We thought a lot about these words: “underwater,” “connectivity,” “surplus value,” “conditions,” “spectacle,” “default,” “visceral,” “crisis,” “friendship.”

If I were to make a similar list about the keywords in this project, I think there would be: “duration,” “performance,” “time,” “debt,” “militant research,” “crisis,” “love,” “dis/ability,” “visuality.” There’s a lot of intersection.

Webb’s post is full of fun links, like this one to a Cut-up Collaborative poem on the Occupy Spring.

Check out the entire piece–this is a Surrealism for the Internet era. Or the link to Lisa Robertson’s essay The Cabins, where she describes life during Occupy:

I read Vila-Matas and Pierre Hadot in a low-rent stone house on the edge of fields in central France. I heat with wood. My neighbours are poor and are out ploughing or threshing til midnight. Everybody knows how to make something, and how to fix what they have. In a certain way capitalism has already left; the countryside’s emptied out, house prices keep dropping, no one can get a mortgage, the cars are old.

Likewise Webb herself riffs on the place of the square as a form:

For my part squares began to proliferate in my own work. Plazas, gatherings, architecture, riot cops, books and book blocs. But also literal squares: square text ornaments and poems in textual blocs. Then, long lines in advancing and receding waves. I began to collage, longing for immediate energies of cutting and pasting and for collaboration,* read Apollinaire again, looked at radical political images of the past, read histories, played a million songs on repeat, thinking of the mashup, thinking of aggregation and interplay, of how to represent the collective, but thinking most viscerally of friends, who I had danced with months before, many who were other poets, being beaten, pepper-sprayed and arrested.

I don’t write like this at all but I like the run-on sentences, the aggregation of terms and ideas, the sense of flow from past time–it feels like now but it has such obvious echoes of other thens. To my delight, she then intersects the formal square with the public square and anti-debt politics:

public squares again have begun to hum with energy, and today small red squares made of felt are proliferating on the thoroughways and quartiers and liens of Quebec, on the breasts of thousands of students and their supporters striking and rioting against crippling student debt and fees and cuts to bursaries. Like little safety-pinned echoes of Malevich, the symbol, they say, is a reference to the phrase “carrément dans la rouge”/”squarely in debt” which refers to their state of emergency, their invisible enmirement under weight. These bright squares cover the squares.

That “squarely in the red/debt” badge is a lovely metonym of the crisis. It’s what a lay person would call poetic.

V

On the Christmas of my death when
I swam by myself in the peeling
blue of the pool, and
the pines addressed me, saying:
take me to the riot

Ana Božičević

Free/libre/open university: the new direct action

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Last night was the debrief for the fabulous May Day Free University of New York. Everyone had clearly had a great time and wanted there to be more such events. It was also the beginning of a realization that a free/libre/open university can be a new form of direct action in the crisis of neo-liberal education.

Horizontal Pedagogy Workshop at Free U. May Day

In the software movement, distinctions between free, libre and open source have become standard. “Free” implies here freedom of use and not necessarily free of charge. “Libre,” the French for “free” is used to imply without cost. “Open” means that the source code is available to all, so that they can hack it to their own ends.

The Free University was an amalgam of free/libre and open. It was free in that anyone could attend or participate and there was an open call to offer classes. It was free because no supervision over content or method of engagement was practiced. It was free of charge to attendees. Costs were incurred nonetheless, ranging from web hosting to paper for signs and the food that was provided, defrayed by the Occupy movement and all those who donated funds to the May Day appeal. Yesterday, organizers announced that a “how to do a Free University” kit was being made to be posted online, so it was open in that sense.

The University did require a great deal of donated time, labor and expertise. For  some of those who are exploited members of what is becoming known as the New Academic Majority–adjuncts, staff, contingent labor and graduate students–there was some ambivalence about being asked for yet more free labor. People recalled that the original Free University had collapsed in disputes over money and a contingent from Occupy University cautioned over the difficulties they had had in organizing.

Yet hundreds turned out on May Day, over sixty classes and events were held, and afterwards the mostly grad student organizers  clearly felt that their contribution was worthwhile.The question might be not so much how to sustain the Free University but why has the desire for such a project become so powerful within and without the Occupy movement?

Education has become a vast source of revenue but also a mass generator of debt. As a result, as one organizer put it yesterday, in events like the Free University, education is a form of direct action. In the outsourced “high talent service industry” (to quote NYU President John Sexton) that education has become, any free/libre/open provision creates a dual power system. It is being sustained for the time being on dual purposed donated time and resources because the very size of the edu-factory means it cannot be duplicated. At this first stage of the new direct action education, it is most important to sustain the actions.

Let’s review briefly how recent changes in education have produced this strong sense of need from K-12 to PhD.

Recent education “reform” at K-12 level has extensively benefited private corporations, such as the UK-based Pearson. The company has £2.5 bn of revenues in education and turns a handy £493 million profit on them, up 9% in a recession. Recently, there were controversies over a Pearson-designed English and Math grade-school standardized tests for 8th graders that contained unanswerable questions. While these questions were invalidated, it’s harder to measure the unsettling effect caused and these days, test scores are critical for students and teachers alike. Most recently, trainee teachers have refused to submit to a Pearson evaluation forcing them to edit hours of teaching down to ten minutes, skills that have nothing whatsoever to do with education.

At higher education level, the difficulties in the Cal State system with simultaneously rising tuition and decreasing places are exemplary of the new bottlenecks in gaining even employment-driven qualifications. In a desperate move, students have begun a hunger strike in support of their call for a tuition freeze. The devil is in the details. One striker

a sophomore majoring in deaf studies, said she is taking only one required class this semester because she was unable to enroll in any others.

While this might seem like a marginal field, the reporter did not mention that Cal State Northridge, where the student is enrolled, is the U. S. center for A.S.L. and Deaf Studies. Interpreters and Deaf culture literate administrators have made mainstreaming of Deaf students and workers possible. If you can’t take Deaf Studies at more than a course a semester even at CSN, the field will wither, closing avenues of access, employment and opportunity for Deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing people alike.

For people who make it through higher education with advanced degrees, hoping for a career in teaching, even the pool of adjunct teaching is now drying up, leaving very few options.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported today that over 30,000 PhD graduates are now claiming food stamps, while nearly 300,000 do so with Master’s degrees. Need we add once again that there is now one trillion dollars in student debt?

In short, the tuition-driven, privatized and outsourced model of higher education is as broken as the neo-liberal economics on which it is based. Perhaps the desire for the Free University is the first sign of a widespread rejection of both concepts. In any event, let a thousand Free/libre/open universities bloom!